YONGCHEOW WOKE AT FIRST sunrise to pray. Akeha, who’d slept on the floor, watched his slippered feet pad across the ground, pause to retrieve the prayer mat, then vanish behind a cabinet’s bulk. He drifted back to sleep with Yongcheow’s fluid supplications nestling in his ears.

Later, he woke again to a stirring in the Slack: Yongcheow pulling on fire-nature to dry freshly washed clothes. He sat up. The bed had been made, the cloth bundle reassembled. Yongcheow was half dressed, heating his tunic as it hung on a piece of string.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh. You’re awake.”

“Planning to leave before I woke?”

“No, I—” Yongcheow obscured his reaction in the flurry of putting on the tunic. “I need to get to Waiyi as fast as possible.”

Akeha knew Waiyi. A foot-of-the-mountain hamlet in the wilds, several hundred yields off the river. It was surrounded by hills and good places to hide. He did a lot of business there. “I don’t advise traveling. Your wounds need more time.”

The stiff, cautious way Yongcheow fastened his tunic was proof he also knew this. “It’s time I don’t have. I would stay longer, if I could.”

Akeha watched the man’s face and movements intently as he posed the next question: “What are you carrying that can’t wait one more day?”

“Information.” He met Akeha’s gaze head-on. “I know you looked through the bundle.” When Akeha didn’t deny this, he continued, “The information concealed on the scrolls is a matter of life and death.”

“Information the Protectorate would kill for. What is it?”

Yongcheow’s lips tightened. “Maybe . . . it might be better for you not to ask.”

Akeha folded his arms and leaned against a wooden beam.

“It involves your sister.”

Within him, Akeha’s stomach lurched into movement. “Tell me.”

A seismic sigh. “Your sister had a vision. She saw an attack on the Great High Palace by a small group of Tensors. These Tensors had connections to the Machinist movement. It’s . . . complicated, and their motives were their own. But in short, the attack failed, and now your mother is purging suspected Machinists throughout the Protectorate.”

“Purging . . .” Dread shivered through him. “Do you mean—”

“What do you think it means?”

Akeha looked to the ceiling, to where the rafters held firm. “How many dead?”

Yongcheow’s shoulders tilted. “We can’t save those in the capital. They got out, or they died. We’re trying to warn everyone else. What I’m carrying are lists. A list of known members outside the capital, and a list of Protectorate targets. Not all the people on our list are Protectorate targets. And not all the people on the Protectorate’s list are our people.” He licked his lips. “We could save innocents by warning them.”

Akeha closed his eyes and counted the stiff breaths that passed. When he opened his eyes, the world was still there. “What about the gun?”

Yongcheow remained mute for several heartbeats. Finally, he said thickly, “It was a gift. Bequeathed to me.”

“I saw Midou’s signature. He was a childhood friend.”

Yongcheow’s eyes were fixed on the air, on nothing. “He was a good man. Too good.”

Silence bloomed. Yongcheow, regaining his composure, said, “In any case, now you understand my urgency.”

Akeha said nothing. He had not been in the capital in a long time. Mother’s purges were stern, quiet things: doors pushed in at night, muffled bodies dragged from beds. Vanished. Mokoya once asked Sonami where they put all the graves. Sonami said, “Mother doesn’t leave that kind of mess.”

Yongcheow carefully tied the cloth bundle around himself, avoiding the wound. “Will you come with me?”

Akeha tightened his arms across his chest. “No Protectorate. That’s the rule.”

A medley of emotions ghosted through Yongcheow’s face: disappointment, sadness, resignation, fear. “I see. Well . . . thank you for everything, then. His peace be with you.” He stepped over the room’s threshold.

“Wait,” Akeha said.

Yongcheow swiveled as Akeha dove into a medicine cabinet. “Take these. You need to replenish your iron.”

His fingers closed loosely around Akeha’s as he accepted the elixirs. “Thank you.” His hand lingered a moment longer than necessary, skin electric against skin. Then he stepped away, out of the room.

Akeha folded onto the unyielding surface of the bed, breathing very slowly. His thoughts turned briefly to Midou. Scrub-haired, knock-kneed Midou, who took everything with the gravity of a funeral director; Midou the gunmaker, Midou the unlikely rebel, Midou who was almost certainly dead. Strange to think of those familiar bones reduced to atoms, scattered across a hillside in Chengbee.

He shut his eyes, pressed cold fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

What would Mokoya do?

* * *

The fierce, shining ribbon of the river Tiegui broadened into sluggish green flats by the time it reached Jixiang, heavy with silt and soft at the banks. Diluted clumps of merchant ships bobbed listlessly in its eddies. When Akeha caught up with him, Yongcheow was walking the gray-skied docks, trying to find a willing oar among the merchants sailing upriver with the last of the harvest.

“Don’t take the river route,” he said. “It’s too open.”

Yongcheow had showed almost no surprise at Akeha’s reappearance. “What’s the alternative?”

“There’s a path through the forest, along the buttress of the mountain range. It’s longer, and shouldn’t be traveled alone, but it’ll be harder for soldiers to find you.”

Yongcheow folded his hands behind him. “It sounds risky.”

Akeha drew and released a full breath before speaking, knowing that there would be no turning back after this. “I’ll take you.”

A small smile spread from one corner of Yongcheow’s lips to the other. “You changed your mind.”

“Come,” Akeha said irritably, “before I change it again.”