Several seconds passed. Adi’s voice welled up from the glowing sphere. “Mokoya! Kanina—is that you or a ghost?”
“It’s me, Adi. I’m not dead yet.”
An annoyed noise, another expletive. “Eh, hello, I let you go by yourself doesn’t mean you can ignore me, okay? What happened to Yongcheow’s stupid machine?”
“Something,” Mokoya demurred. “An accident.” She leaned against Phoenix’s warm, patient bulk. Get to the point. “Adi, I’m coming back. I found the nest. I did it, all right? I found the naga’s nest.”
Chapter Two
THE VISION HIT MOKOYA on the way back to camp.
As usual, the warning signs came too late. Dizziness, a shot of vertigo, and frisson up the spine. Not enough time to dismount and get to stable ground before the Slack punched her into the past, soup-heavy and pungent.
The world snapped into a different form. Sunfall-sky, tang of firecracker smoke, crash of trumpets and drums. Mokoya was eight years old, brimming with anxiety as she shivered on the upper floor of an inn over a choreographed riot of color and noise. The spring procession. Chengbee. Behind her was Master Sung, Head Abbot of the Grand Monastery, and twenty pugilists he had handpicked. All of them scanned the sky, waiting for it to betray the first hint of horned head, of wings swallowing the falling sun.
Two weeks before, Mokoya had had a nightmare of celebration shredded by death. It was a desperately specific nightmare, of the sort that Mokoya had been plagued with recently. The sort that then came to pass exactly as Mokoya had seen them.
If this nightmare was like the others, it meant a naga would attack the spring procession when the sun fell. She did not want it to. She did not want to be labeled a prophet, someone who saw the future in dreams. She did not know why it was happening to her.
Beside her stood Akeha. Her twin, her anchor. In this time before they had confirmed their genders, she was his mirror, and they were indistinguishable except for her mismatched eyes. He let the sides of their hands touch, to show that he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of her.
The sky deepened rapidly to plum, then bruise-black. Sunfall.
Everything tumbled forward with terrifying speed. Darkness descended, deeper than twilight. The awning of a naga’s wings blanketed the horizon: someone’s trophy pet, frightened and angry. The crowd screamed, and the pugilists kicked off, rising in a cloud, weapons primed and humming.
But it was Akeha, bright Akeha, who moved fastest. He closed his fist over his head, and water-nature surged. An animal scream split the air. The naga’s massive body twisted, plunging in free fall. Someone grabbed her shoulder. Someone shouted, “Jump!” Mokoya leapt forward, and—
She was lying on her back, sand clotting her mouth and burning her eyes. Confusion, at first, then clarity. Her name was Sanao Mokoya, she was thirty-nine years old, and she was no longer a prophet. In exchange for grim futures, she had gained a lizard arm and a mass of scars congealed across her face and body. This was the Gusai desert. She did not fear naga. She hunted them.
Phoenix lay next to her on the sand, an obedient mound of raptor, breath disturbing the red sands. Slowly Mokoya sat up, ignoring the pain that flared through her hip. Bodily pain was a temporary condition. She knew this.
Lashed to her waist was the dream recorder she always wore, a box of intricately carved bronze bearing the heavy patina of age and the particular workmanship of the Protector’s court. Powered by slackcraft, it had been a constant presence in her life since childhood, when the adults around her had wanted records of every Slack-touched vision.
The box hummed with another successful dream capture, a satisfied sound that was almost gleeful.
Mokoya flipped its lid and extracted its contents: a palm-sized glass pearl, teardrop-shaped and freshly filled, insides swirling with opalescent colors. Not liquid, just light, an imprinted pattern in the Slack.
Once upon a time, when she still saw the future in dreams, each filled capture pearl would be taken by Tensors and analyzed over and over, every drop of meaning and context wrung from its innards.
Then the accident happened, and the gift of prophecy left her. When the Slack hit her these days, it was with moments from her past, even ones she herself had forgotten. Her dream recorder, ever faithful, caught these fragments of history in its glass droplets.
Sometimes they were useful. In Phoenix’s saddlebag, nestled amongst the thick folds of brocade, lay a dozen other capture pearls, their bellies full of slivers from happier times. Gap-toothed smiles, sticky fingers, a little girl’s hair haloed in summer light. But sometimes it was moments like these, full of things she didn’t care to remember.
Mokoya twisted the capture pearl in her hands. Up to that point in their lives, she and Akeha had been ordinary children, sold by the Protector to the Grand Monastery to repay a debt, content to live their lives in ascetic obscurity. After Mokoya had been confirmed a prophet, their lives had started the thirty-year-long process of coming apart. Why would she want to keep something like that?
She tensed the vision out of the pearl, unknotting the braids in the Slack that kept it in existence. Briefly a thought crossed her mind: she should undo the skin on her wrists and belly, and spill her blood and guts into the soft sand. Let her flesh be dissolved by the wind and her bones be bleached by the sun.
Mokoya looked at Phoenix. The raptor huffed, patiently waiting for her to move on.
With a sigh, Mokoya got to her feet. She felt calmer now, or at least numb, as though the vision had lanced through her chest and drained the abscess of nervous energy. “Come,” she said to Phoenix. “Let’s get going.”
*
“We should capture it.”
Yongcheow and Adi exchanged a glance. One was the willowy Tensor son of a magistrate, raised among silk and baubles; the other a simple Kebangilan herder woman, squat and ropy from years of hard work. But the language their eyes spoke was universal.
“You gila or what?” Adi asked with a squint.
“I’m not a madwoman,” Mokoya said, and this time her conviction was real. “I’m telling you, I saw the naga with my own two eyes. We can handle it. Why would I lie to you?”
“Because you have completely lost your mind,” Yongcheow snapped, arms hedged across his chest. The loss of his transmitter stung, and he was in no mood to play nice with his sister-in-law. Akeha had sent him with the crew to keep an eye on things, but everyone knew it was really to keep an eye on Mokoya, and the two had scratched at each other’s nerves for a dozen sun-cycles.