YEAR TWENTY-NINE

“WELL?”

The man held the device up to the lamp, squinting at the dull surface with its one engraved character, a clumsy groove. He was a heavyset Kuanjin fence with an old scar rippling across his face. Akeha did not know his name. Twenty more devices lay spread between them on unbound cloth, ready for inspection.

Sweat had gathered on the man’s lip. He tugged crudely through metal-nature and the device came alive. The warehouse’s air thickened as it dampened water-nature. The device was designed to hamper sound recorders: call it privacy baffling, or counterespionage, or whatever was convenient. Who the buyers were, Akeha did not know and did not care. His supplier was a praying mantis of a man he had met with in a narrow alley in Cinta Putri. Where he got the devices from, Akeha also did not care.

“Well?” he repeated.

The man grunted in assent and replaced the device amongst its brethren. The warehouse he chose was in a row long since abandoned, air thick with dust and choked with the smell of rotting grain. And quiet. That was the important thing.

Satisfied with his inspection, the man reached into his sleeve and tossed Akeha a small pouch. It landed in his hands with a solid metallic clunk. He looked inside and nodded.

In the distance someone screamed.

Akeha frowned. A street over, the Slack burst with flowers of activity. Tensors fighting, clumsy sledgehammer attacks that betrayed a lack of pugilistic training. He listened: shouts, in Kuanjinwei. At least three involved.

His buyer noticed. “Protectorate business,” he said.

Akeha grimly tucked the pouch away as he continued to listen, to watch the Slack. The pattern clarified: three attackers, one defender. All Tensors.

“Don’t get involved,” said the buyer. Not a warning, just advice.

“Our business is done,” Akeha said. He straightened up and walked away. Behind him, the man snorted in derision of Akeha’s judgment.

The streets were dusky and silent enough that muffled shouting echoed. This part of Jixiang, a mercantile quarter, had been abandoned in the tides of changing fortunes. Warehouses sat with gaping mouths that could swallow thieves, smugglers, the poor, the desperate. Akeha crossed spaces briskly: the fighting had subsided into a fierce glow in the Slack. All four Tensors remained alive, clustered in one of the yawning derelicts.

Akeha stayed in the shadows by the warehouse’s entrance, his footprint in the Slack light and practiced. Three soldiers woven up in the Protectorate’s padded gray faced a gasping young man in civilian dress. Blood covered half his head, seeped through the front of his tunic. The soldiers stood in a fan: two flanking, the leader confronting the bleeding man with some kind of tube weapon.

“Tell me where it is, and this can end,” said the soldier with the tube. A man. The weapon crackled as he smacked it in his hand.

“You can threaten me with pain or death. I’m not afraid. And I won’t tell you—”

The weapon sang, and electricity struck. The young man screamed and fell to his knees. Chemical burn seared the air.

In the ringing silence, the young man struggled back upright. “I won’t tell you anything.”

Akeha carried a dozen flying daggers: tucked in his belt, around his arms, on the border of his calves. He was aware of their weight, their heft, and the speed at which he could hurl them in between heartbeats. He was aware of many things at that moment.

He hadn’t been noticed. It was not too late to walk away.

But Mokoya wouldn’t, he knew.

Akeha closed his eyes, slowed his breathing.

His blow fell through water-nature. A shockwave knocked all four men flat. Akeha moved. The first soldier to stand died with a blade between the eyes, skull shattered from the force of the impact. The second was hit in the throat and collapsed, choking on flesh and gristle.

The leader surged forward, grasping at the Slack in panic. His weapon snarled with energy. Too slow. Akeha closed his hand. Water-nature responded. Like a noose, it snapped around the man’s neck. Bone disintegrated, flesh ruptured, and the man dropped like a slab of fish, blood pooling around the ruin.

Akeha exhaled. Red patterned the ground in chaotic gouts, but he remained clean. None of the soldiers moved again. The Slack settled into reservoir calm.

The wounded young man sat on the floor where he had fallen, eyes round, mouth a gaping circle. As Akeha stepped out of the shadows, he scrambled backward, terrified, whispering prayers as though faced with the devil himself.

Akeha walked up to him and wordlessly held out a hand.

The young man stared at it. Thoughts and emotions filtered visibly across his narrow face. When he reached the point of realizing death was not forthcoming, he crumpled to the ground in a heap and started to pray. Akeha had been around Katau Kebang long enough to recognize words of gratitude to the Almighty.

He allowed himself a sigh.

When the young man finished praying, he fixed his eyes on Akeha with surprising clarity. “Who are you?”

“A friend. We need to leave.”

“Who sent you?”

He scowled, already regretting his involvement. “The fortunes.”

“Was it Lady Han?”

“It was your Almighty,” Akeha snapped. “Do you want to live or not?”

The man studied Akeha’s face for a moment more, and his expression changed again. Suspicion had lodged there, along with a measure of curiosity. “You look like her.”

“What?”

“The seer. You look like her. Are you—no, it can’t be. Are you?”

Akeha took one breath in, let it out. Moved on. “You’re a Tensor, running from the Protectorate. You have something they want. I’m thinking these three goons won’t be the last they send.” He repeated, “Do you want to live or not?”

The man considered this, his brows knitted. His complexion was glazed with blood loss, and there was a telltale tremble to his limbs, an uncontrollable spasm of the fingers.

This time, when Akeha held out his hand, the young man took it.

* * *

His name was Yongcheow, and he had recently come from Chengbee. He didn’t offer more, and Akeha didn’t ask. The blood loss left him leaning his weight on Akeha. Something was wrong with one of his ankles.

The moon illuminated the streets of packed dirt before them, sides clotted with debris. The ghost quarters of Jixiang had been optimistically carved out of a hillside, then abandoned when they became too heavy a load to bear. The lights of the city proper glowed below them.

As they navigated toward the living streets of the city, Yongcheow said, “You never told me your name.”

Akeha’s vault of false names was large and easily opened. It waited. He hesitated; an abyssal heartbeat passed. “It’s Akeha.”

“So I was right then. You are Sanao Akeha. The Protector’s fugitive son.”

Akeha didn’t answer.

“Why did you save me?” Yongcheow asked.

“You looked like you were in trouble.”

“I was. But you didn’t have to step in. You don’t know me, and I presume you weren’t lying about not being sent by the Machinists.”

Akeha frowned. He knew of the Machinists; he wanted nothing to do with them or their tendrils of rebellion. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I do. It’s how I get into trouble.”

They walked farther in silence. Yongcheow’s steps had started to falter, each one heavier and slower. Akeha tightened his grip around the man’s slender waist. “Keep walking,” he said. On one hand, he was already braced to end the night burying another body. On the other, he really did not want to.

“You shouldn’t have killed those men,” Yongcheow said, breath clouding the air. His tone was gentle, not accusatory. It could have been from the blood loss.

“Would you have preferred I let them kill you?”

“Killing them wasn’t the only solution.”

“It was the least messy one.” And he did not like to be reminded of it, even if it kept the young man conscious and talking. “Sympathy for them is how you got into trouble.”

“You shouldn’t have killed them,” Yongcheow repeated, more softly.

Akeha did not respond.

As they started down the incline that would bring them into the parts of Jixiang that still lived, Yongcheow said, “Wait. Let’s go down that alley, please.”

The alley ended in a small grove of mountain dogwood, their short trunks twisted into ugly shapes. Yongcheow pulled away and stumbled magnetically toward one. Akeha followed closely, poised to catch him if something happened.

Gasping from the effort to stay focused, Yongcheow unstitched the bark of the tree where slackcraft had fused it over a hollow in the trunk. Concealed within was a cloth bundle. Unwrapped on the ground, it revealed several scrolls, a group of smaller bundles, and wooden treasure boxes. One of the boxes contained packets of powders and elixir drops. Yongcheow counted out a few of the latter and swallowed them.

Akeha studied the contents of the bundle. “Is this what they were looking for?”

Yongcheow nodded.

“And these.” Akeha pushed at the nestling scrolls. “The Machinists’ secrets?”

The man pressed a clumsy, urgent finger to Akeha’s lips, as if he hadn’t been on the constant lookout for soldiers following them. He flinched away in annoyance.

Still, in a burst of unearned trust, Yongcheow allowed Akeha to take custody of the cloth bundle. “My wounds are worse than I thought—” he began.

Akeha stopped him from finishing that thought. “I will help. But not here.” He pulled Yongcheow to his feet. “Come. We’ve delayed enough.”

Yongcheow swayed. “You’re a good person,” he said through soft lips, as Akeha held him firm.

Akeha looped an arm around him. “You’ll regret saying that.”