YONGCHEOW STAYED ON BOTH feet all the way to the eastern side of Jixiang, where the Flower Inn waited. The decorated yellow lanterns of the perfumed quarter lit the elbow-jostling street, where the passage of a bloodied man supported by another drew stares, but little comment.

Akeha wrestled his companion to the entrance of the inn, where they were met by the bulk of Ang, the inn’s doorkeeper. He looked the two over, arms crossed, and warned, “No trouble.”

“No trouble,” Akeha replied.

Akeha was a regular at the Flower Inn, and Ang had known him for years. He grunted and stepped aside.

“Send someone up with water,” Akeha said. “Two pails.”

Ang nodded.

Yongcheow barely made it up two flights of stairs and down the wooden corridor to Akeha’s room. Akeha released him onto the bed, where he remained seated, breathing very slowly. His clothes were heavy and stiff with drying blood. “Get undressed,” Akeha said. He sought out his medicine cabinet.

“Wait,” Yongcheow said. Akeha turned back, frowning. The other man pushed his hands against the hard surface of the bed to stay upright. “There’s something . . . you need to know.”

“What?”

“My confirmation, I didn’t . . . I didn’t get confirmed.” As Akeha’s frown deepened, he said, “I mean, I got confirmed, but I didn’t go to the doctors. Some—”

“I don’t care,” Akeha said.

He turned away: there was work to do. Cloths for bandages, herbs and powders for salves, bowls to mix them with. Akeha’s skill with forest-nature was self-taught and lacked the finesse to reknit a gash this deep. Needle and thread would help.

Broad-shouldered Amah was the one who brought the pails up. She glanced over at Yongcheow, his tunic off, compression bandages off, exposing a blood-thickened knife wound across the rib cage, and clucked. “Getting in trouble again?”

Akeha thanked her for the water.

“There’s still soup left over from dinner,” she said. “Do you want?”

He nodded. “Bring us two bowls later.”

The wound had to be cleaned, disinfected, pulled shut. Yongcheow leaned back, breath whistling through his teeth, as Akeha worked.

“So what is it you do?” he asked. “When you’re not rescuing people in need.”

Akeha threaded needle through flesh. “I’m a deliveryman.”

“You’re very good at killing people, for a deliveryman.”

Akeha said nothing. The work before him required focus.

“So what do you deliver? And for whom?”

“Anything. Anyone. I don’t ask. I don’t look. I do the job. It makes everything simpler.”

“Anyone?”

“No Protectorate. That’s my only rule.”

Yongcheow laughed, and Akeha halted as the man’s side shook, the torn edges of the wound shifting. “You’re a smuggler.”

Akeha waited for him to still before returning to work. Black thread drew flesh to flesh, forest-nature set it on the path to healing.

Closing the wound was the easy part. The blood loss—that was harder to fix. A skilled doctor would have had ways to replenish the lost iron; Akeha was no such thing. He pressed the thick paste he had made over the gash, equal parts nourishment and antiseptic. Then he bound it with clean cloth.

“No compression until it heals,” he said. The other man nodded.

The injuries clouding his head and legs were superficial, easier to deal with. Basic doctoring was simple; the rest was up to the fortunes.

Yongcheow’s fingers grazed his chin. Akeha froze. “Thank you,” the man whispered.

Akeha escaped the contact to prepare the strong, bitter healing brew.

His patient accepted the cup of dark liquid with a small expression of wonder. “Why did you save me?”

“We’ve discussed this.”

“You didn’t answer.”

In irritation, Akeha turned away to clean the room. “Rest now. This place is safe. Soldiers won’t find you tonight.” And it was the best they could do for now. Tomorrow was tomorrow’s affair.

* * *

Yongcheow slept easily; Akeha didn’t. In a square of moonlight by the bed, soft as winter frost, he combed through the cloth bundle that had almost cost his companion his life.

The Machinist scrolls drew his attention first. They were lightning scrolls, new technology that had filtered south only in the last few months: thin sheets shaped out of lodestone paste, Slack-imprinted with information that required a decoder to extract. Their presence told stories—Tensor involvement, money, deep organization. In Akeha’s line of work, he listened to a lot of talk. The talk about the growing Machinist rebellion in the capital said it was driven less by downtrodden farmers than by disaffected Tensors. Here was the proof, solid in his hands.

His companion, then: also one of those disaffected? The bundle told little of the man. The small wooden boxes held medicines, soaps, tools to mend broken things, money. There was a thin prayer mat, folded and rolled up. The third scroll was a copy of the Instructions, the holy edicts revered by the Obedient. An old copy, but well kept. Well loved. He looked for evidence of family, lovers, friends. Nothing.

Akeha unwrapped one of the last bundles. As he laid the cloth flat, its damning contents spilled into the light. Pearl-sized silver pellets. Blasting powder in packets, smelling of fireworks. And the main event, heavy and metallic, sitting in the middle of it all.

A gun.

Akeha had seen guns before. They were Tensors’ playthings, put together by masters of earth- and water-nature for fun. The ones he’d seen used coiled springs and slackcraft and produced just enough force to punch holes in paper cutouts. This one was no plaything. It had heft. It had scars, black on the nozzle and stark across the body. It had a slot for blasting powder.

It was a weapon.

A weapon that didn’t rely on slackcraft.

A weapon that didn’t require a Tensor to charge it.

A weapon that anybody could use.

Akeha lifted it, felt its stonelike weight, put it back down. A slip of paper caught his attention. Unfolded, it revealed a scrawl of diagrams and instructions. Akeha recognized the signature appended to it. Midou. A friend from later childhood, a relative close enough to bear some prestige, a cousin distant enough to be dispensable. The paper was speckled with red that could be inkspill or bloodstain.

He rolled up the bundle, blood racing in his veins. If this was the Machinist endgame—arming the peasant masses with deadly weapons—then his understanding of the situation was broken and hollow.

Akeha looked over his shoulder. In the dark, on his bed, Yongcheow slumbered, pallid and inscrutable. A small man, caught up in a web of things beyond his ken. Akeha had to extricate himself before he, too, got caught in it.