“HOW DO I KNOW I can trust you?”

Lady Han’s remaining eye, the one not curtained behind an embroidered patch, speared Akeha like an insect. The leader of the Machinists wore an eastern suit of jacket and pants, its sun-red fabric the brightest splash in a cavern cut out of raw granite. Between them, Yongcheow’s scrolls lay isolated on a silver tray.

“I came of my own will,” Akeha said.

“But for what purpose? The Protector’s son, showing up at this precise point in time . . . it’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?”

She’d had her subordinates seize him when they arrived at the hideout, almost spent from the long, steep journey from Waiyi to the caves. Yongcheow, sweat-glazed, had to stammer that he was a comrade, not a prisoner.

The other man was a reassuring weight in the periphery. “Perhaps it is the will of the Almighty,” Akeha said.

“I have less tolerance for jokes than you think.” She leaned on the table separating them.

Akeha had some memories of Lady Han, a cloud of impressions blurred by the stretch of intervening years. She had been close to Mother once, a beloved concubine, perhaps more. Akeha had been a child then; by the time he returned to the Great High Palace years later, she was gone. The missing eye was new.

He lifted his hands, blank palms out. “It was not a joke. I have no other explanation for you.”

Her eye narrowed suspiciously.

“I have fled the consequences of my mother’s rule for ten years. I was happy to live that way, in ignorance, as long as it didn’t affect me. But this week, something changed.” He shot a quick look at Yongcheow. “What else would you call it? Coincidence? It feels like more than that.”

“The accidental rebel? The heaven-sent rebel? Neither sounds plausible to me.”

He shrugged. What else could he offer?

Her guards shifted around them. Surrounded. He knew that he would walk away from this meeting a member of the movement, or not at all.

“All right,” said Lady Han. “Prove it.” She swept from the table, paced a small circle, and turned back to Akeha. “I have a task for you.”

“Name it.”

“Return to the Protectorate and kill the prophet.”

It took two heartbeats to confirm he hadn’t misheard. His skin cooled. “What?”

“She’s your sister, isn’t she? You can get close enough. Surprise her. She won’t expect it.”

Akeha’s tongue stumbled over syllables. “She has nothing to do with—”

“She’s a prophet,” Lady Han said. “She sees things no one should know.” A damning finger pointed to the scroll. “One prophecy, and over two hundred people dead or vanished. It has to stop.”

“She has no control over what she sees,” Akeha hissed.

“Exactly. The only way to stop her is to kill her. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Kill her, and your mother gets no more insights into our plans.”

Akeha’s chest crumpled like parchment fed to a flame. “You would see her killed for this?”

Yongcheow could not hold his tongue. “She’s done nothing! If we’re going to murder innocents, how are we any better than the Protectorate?”

Lady Han’s head snapped in his direction. “Silence. We don’t kill lightly.” She turned back to Akeha. “One life could save countless others.”

“You don’t know that,” Yongcheow said. “This is indefensible.”

“If you want an assassin, find someone else,” Akeha said through clenched teeth. “If this is the price for joining your movement, I choose death.”

She stalked toward him. Akeha snapped into fighting mode, crisp in the Slack, even as his thoughts jumped in electric lines: Mokoya must be warned. He might die, but Yongcheow had the gun. He could strike, inflict maximum damage, give Yongcheow the chance to—

Lady Han stood before him. A diminutive woman with the force of a thunderstorm. His mind capsized, thoughts of resistance and murder scattering like spilled beans. She surveyed the riot of emotion snared upon his face. A smile blossomed across hers.

“A man of morals,” she said. “Not what I expected of a smuggler.”

He let her words and meaning sink through him. “You asked me to murder my own sister,” he said, enunciating every syllable sharply.

“You come from a bloodline stained with remorseless familicides. I had to make sure of what you are.”

A muscle seized in his jaw. He had little patience for those who used his sister’s life as a plaything, a bargaining chip. He said, “If you wanted my loyalty, there were better ways of earning it.”

She laughed and thumbed his chin, as though she considered herself a kindly aunt. “Don’t think I’ll go easy on you,” she said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “I will watch you very carefully, Sanao Akeha.”

He breathed out as his heart rate rappelled down to normal. But his hands remained clenched in knuckled determination. “And I will do the same.”

* * *

Their safe house in Waiyi was a gap-toothed cottage, cushioned by dirt rows once home to broad beans and pumpkins, now a forest of weeds. The sun had fallen. Yongcheow’s gait remained stiff as they walked the stony, serpentine path toward its silhouette. One of Lady Han’s guards had been a doctor, and his wounds had been made whole, but the pain lingered, as pain usually did.

“I’ve never met her,” he admitted. “Lady Han. I’d heard her described as remarkable, but . . .”

“There must have been a reason Mother liked her,” Akeha said. The fist of emotions in his chest had yet to ease open. The swift calculation he’d seen in Lady Han had left quite an impression. “And it would take more than courage to stand against the Protector.”

“What do you think she would have done if you’d agreed?”

“I don’t know.” Unlikely that she would have grieved Mokoya’s death.

Beside them, Tempeh snuffled in the tangled grass. The raptor had determinedly followed them into Waiyi, and Akeha had given up on chasing it away. Freed from the painful confines of Protectorate control, the creature had decided what it wanted.

“What you said to Lady Han. About the will of the Almighty. Did you mean that?”

The warm, damp evening air was a blessing. “It felt like the right thing to say.”

Yongcheow hesitated. “I don’t know how else to put it, but . . . look. To be Obedient is to live with constant ridicule. People call you superstitious, uneducated, backward. Behind your back and to your face. I don’t care what you believe, but don’t say those things just to make fun of them.”

“I wasn’t.” Akeha looked at his feet. “The past few days . . . I don’t know how to explain them. I—” He sucked in another gift of air. “I have a lot to think about.”

Tempeh ran ahead of them toward the house. Five yields away, it stopped, head alert, feathers erect along its spine. Akeha stopped Yongcheow.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Akeha gestured for silence. Within the house the Slack hung in a way that sent a frisson through him. A familiar presence waited.

Tempeh stood by the door and rumbled.

His heart a burr in his chest, Akeha pushed the door open.

At the dining table a figure, robe-clad, stood and pulled its gray hood back. Her eyes fixed on his, shining. “Keha.”

Mokoya.

She looked exactly the same. She looked entirely different. The years had changed her face, but she was still his sister, his twin. The same cheekbones, the same hooded eyes, the same crooked mouth. She had not painted her face. She was still dressed as a nun. And her hair clung to her scalp like a penitent’s or mourner’s.

“So it’s true,” she said. “You’ve joined the Machinists.”

He stepped into the house, Yongcheow behind him. The door clicked shut. His lips, out of practice, struggled to form her name. What came out instead was “What are you doing here?”

She stepped toward him, hands held up to touch his face. “Keha.”

His chest was full; his heart was empty. “How did you find me?”

“I saw you.”

He broke away from her, turning so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “You dreamed this?”

“A week ago.”

A week ago. A black snake of fear coiled. He looked at her and saw that under her cloak, she still wore the box that collected her visions, her dreams. Everything she prophesied, the Tensorate collected and studied. A week ago. A torrent of words broke through: “What else did you see? What else do they know?”

“Who?” She followed his line of sight. “Keha—no. No! I destroyed that vision. You can do that, you know. I don’t hand everything over to Mother. If she’d hurt you, I—” She couldn’t complete the thought.

Akeha tightened his lips. Mokoya gave the impression she was made of glass, bright and clear and brilliant, and one blow away from shattering. She did not need to know about the grave they’d left in the forest.

“Your friends are safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t betray them to Mother.”

The snake within him struck. “But you let her have the one with the attack on the palace. The one that started the purges.”

He saw the shudder that went through her. “I had to! I had to. They were carrying explosives, Keha. Hundreds would have died, many of them innocents, if I’d done nothing. How could I have predicted what she would do with it?”

“She’s Mother. What did you think she would do with it? Pardon everyone involved? Say oh, it’s nothing, there’s nothing to worry about?”

“Keha, I—”

“No, she’s right.” Yongcheow’s interruption was fueled by a core of panic. “Unwarranted as it is, your mother’s retaliation would have been worse if they’d succeeded. If they’d blown up a whole section of the Great High Palace, she’d have had people executed in the street.”

Mokoya swallowed audibly. Memories crashed to the surface: his sister as a child, shaking and weeping in dark beds after a vision ripped through her. She’d done nothing to deserve this.

Twelve years apart, and the first thing he did was upset her. Where were the tender words he had imagined would burst forth when they saw each other again, older and wiser and settled in their places in the world? “Moko.” He brushed his palm against her cheek. She flinched, and something in him broke, but then she leaned into his touch. He waited until he could speak without shaking. “Why are you here?”

She took his hand, grasped it between hers. “I want you to come home.”

He shook his head. “Moko, I—”

“I’m pregnant.”

He stopped, stunned. “What?”

A smile crept across the pale trench of her face. “The child won’t be along for months, but—Thennjay and I have been trying for a while, and finally—”

“Congratulations,” he said, softly, in wonder.

“Come back,” she said, pressing into his hand. “Come back to the monastery. Thennjay can give you asylum. You’ll be safe. Mother can’t do anything. Please, Keha.” Her voice cracked, equal parts hope and sorrow. “Come home. I don’t want to raise a child who’s never met you.”

Akeha’s hand shook in hers. He imagined her child listening to their mother’s stories, trying to conjure up an uncle they knew only through words. His resolve softened, began to melt. It was tempting, so tempting, to say yes, to be forgiven, to return, to shape a glorious, shining future—

He turned away, terrified. There was Yongcheow, in a corner, struggling to keep his expression neutral. No matter what Akeha chose, he would still be here. He couldn’t return to the capital. And the spider-grasp of the Protectorate would continue to ensnare Machinists, out here and everywhere. That would still happen.

No. He turned to her. “I can’t.” Her mouth moved to register protests, and he said, “Moko, listen. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You have to go back.”

“Keha—”

“Go back home, Moko. You have a new family coming. Focus on your future. Forget about me.”

“Forget?”

He held her face in his hands. “What you and Thennjay are doing in the monastery—that’s important. Someone has to fight Mother from within. But that was never going to be me.”

Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.

“My place is out here. You understand, don’t you?”

She trembled, as angry as she was devastated. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I know.” And, great Slack, did he know. Deep in the pit of his belly, reaching up to suffocate him on the longest nights. He crushed her in a hug. “I know, Moko. I’ve missed you too.”

He let her cry herself empty on his shoulder. And later, when she had gone, as he crumpled against a solid surface struggling for sense and air, he let Yongcheow hold him, until he, too, was empty.

Much later, in the dark where they lay together in bed, skin to skin, Yongcheow asked, “Why didn’t you go with her?”

Akeha found Yongcheow’s hand and curled fingers against fingers. “Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”