THENNJAY MET THEM ON the steps of the monastery. “Akeha,” he said.

That rolling thunder voice had not been changed by the seasons. It was deeper, perhaps. Roughened, chafed by the weight of the world around him. But it still bore the same magnetism, the same compelling gravity that enveloped the listener in its orbit. Or maybe Akeha was comparing the present to an unreliable past. He stood in front of a man who had, for the past eighteen years, existed as little more than a voice over the talker and generous, looping script on parchment. Thennjay was no longer the lithe boy he’d once met and barely remembered. The years had broadened his chest, added heft to his leonine features. His beard flowed as freely as his abbot’s robes.

He stood waiting, tall and glorious even in his grief, and Akeha could not find it in himself to approach the man. He stopped several yields away, an ocean of missed opportunities and wasted futures roiling between them.

It was Thennjay who closed the gap, arms enveloping Akeha in a great embrace, one wrapped around his back, one cradling his head. In that rush of warmth and scent, all the anxiety and fear that had built in him finally came unbound, bursting within his chest like overripe fruit. He gripped Thennjay hard around the spine, and whispered, “I am so sorry,” over and over, eighteen years of penitence spilling from the broken dam of his lips.

Yongcheow bowed graciously when Akeha introduced him. “At last we meet,” he told the Head Abbot. “I’ve heard nothing but wild stories about you.” Thennjay extracted a smile from somewhere for Yongcheow’s sake. They should have met under happier circumstances. This, too, was Akeha’s fault.

He said: “Mokoya—is she . . .”

Thennjay looked stricken.

Akeha wet his lips. “I want to see her. Please.”

“Come,” he said.

* * *

They had put Mokoya in one of the stone halls of meditation. Breaking its age-old rules, Thennjay explained, the monastery had accepted a large number of adult initiates in recent years, and some of them had been high-ranking doctors in the Tensorate. Refugees, in so many words, but now their skills had saved Mokoya’s life.

Not saved, exactly, Thennjay told him. They had tried their best, and she was still alive, but only just.

“Tell me what happened,” Akeha said.

Eien loved animals. She especially adored the monastery’s raptor pack. Every morning, at first sunrise, Mokoya would indulgently take her to feed them.

They’d done this too, when they were children.

Except that this was a time of insurrection, and the monastery was no longer a simple house of tranquility. The backyard was home to a congregation of Machinist devices in various stages of testing. Numbered among them was a gas-compression heater.

As they found out that morning, there were flaws in its design. Fatal ones.

“Eien was the closest to the explosion,” Thennjay said. “Mokoya . . . she . . .” He gestured to the stone hall they were approaching, unable to complete his sentence.

A raised bed had been installed in the middle of the hall, a fragile thing dwarfed by the vastness around it. Two doctors stood in attendance.

Akeha’s steps forward took eternity after eternity. The patient lay half smothered in white sheets. He couldn’t focus on her face, couldn’t focus on anything. There was so much wrong, so much to look at.

Mokoya was unclothed, swathed in a sarcophagus of bandages through which red seeped like ink. Her right arm was encased in a bubbling, irregular cocoon; a cocoon that looked like it was made of living flesh; a cocoon that hummed like a thousand wasps were at work within. Above it, transparent jelly clung to the right half of her face, a thick gel that masked nothing of the seething, burnt flesh beneath. A mask of ridged gristle smothered her nose and mouth, flapping wetly like fish gills.

Underneath all of that, it was still Mokoya. His sister. The person he had come into this world with—the person he could not imagine this world without—

“They’re rebuilding her arm with a lizard graft,” Thennjay said. “But her lungs are too badly burnt. There isn’t enough healthy tissue left to rebuild them, and we can’t use a graft.”

“She’s dying,” he whispered. He wanted to touch her. He was afraid to.

Mokoya’s eyes flicked open, wide and staring.

“Moko?” He felt her come alive in the Slack, tangled in the webbing of connections the doctors had woven around her. “Moko!”

Her eyes shot back and forth, then zeroed in on his face. Her reaction—recognition—preceded a panicked response, as she struggled to sit up, clawing at the living mask with her left hand. As Akeha reached for her, the doctors burst forward with overlapping calls of “Tensor Sanao—”

Mokoya pulled the mask off, gasping, barely making out the words “Keha—”

“No, no.” He held her, supporting her head, her body, terrified of making things worse. “Moko, please—”

Her skin instantly slid toward grayness. Air rattled through the ruins of her throat and lungs as she clutched at Akeha’s face with her remaining hand. Her blue lips moved, trying to form words. “You came.” A misshapen smile ghosted across her face. “I wanted to see you—I—”

I’m so glad, his twin whispered in his mind. He felt relief flood her. She only wanted to see him one last time.

Another rattle. She slumped in his arms, eyes rolling backward, mouth falling open. Akeha, arms locking up, screamed her name. He couldn’t let go, she had to wake up, she had to look at him, breathe—Mokoya—

Thennjay pulled him away and clung to him, nails digging into skin, as the doctors reattached the mask and coaxed breath back into her. “She’s alive,” Thennjay whispered, holding on, rocking slightly. “She’s alive.” He said it over and over like a prayer.

Thennjay released him only when the doctors stepped back, Mokoya’s condition stabilized. Yongcheow squeezed his arm, fingers distorting the flesh. “How can I save her?” Akeha asked. His voice echoed through the hollows of his throat. He looked at Thennjay. Looked at the doctors. “How can I help?”

Thennjay said, “You’re identical twins.”

It took half a minute for Thennjay’s meaning to register in the bedlam of his mind. Akeha filled his lungs, the withered aching things hanging exhausted in his chest. He glanced at Yongcheow for a brief, confirmatory moment. “Take whatever you need,” he said. “Do it now. I want you to save her.”

Into the silence that ensued came a cascade of sound: feet, running. A breathless acolyte tumbled into the hall, white with fear. “Venerable One,” he gasped. “Protectorate troops—what do we do?”

The acolyte was little more than a child, his voice only beginning to change in his throat. “How many?” Thennjay asked.

“A hundred, more, I’m not sure. A lot. They have weapons.”

“They’re here for me,” Akeha said.

Thennjay shot him a look, and Akeha knew he was going to confront Mother’s troops alone, to pretend that he wasn’t harboring a dangerous fugitive. “Stay here.”

“Thenn—”

“Please. Stay with Mokoya. Watch her.”

He watched Thennjay leave, broad-backed and determined. A sour tide of emotion crested and spent itself within him, nervous energy trickling down to his fingers, his calves, his feet. There were many ways this could end, none of them happy. Akeha had to do something, and only a narrow band of choices were left to him.

He looked at Yongcheow, as if to say, This is what I was afraid of. This is why I could never return.

Yongcheow’s lips charted a grim line. He knew Akeha too well. He understood what was going to happen.

One of the doctors tending to Mokoya was significantly older than the other, her eyes lined with age, if not wisdom. Akeha looked at her. “You need lung tissue,” he said. “How long will it take to extract it?”

The woman sighed. “It’s a delicate procedure. First, the donor has to be sedated—”

“How long.”

“Hours, at least.”

Hours they did not have, not now. He stroked Mokoya’s forehead, neatening the line of her hair over her cold skin.

He looked at the old doctor. “Can you harvest the tissue from a dead body?”

“Akeha,” Yongcheow whispered.

She blinked, visibly swallowing. “I—we—yes, but it has to be relatively soon after death.”

“How soon?”

The doctor shook her head; she understood the thrust of Akeha’s questioning. “Sir, I cannot—”

“Just tell me,” Akeha said. He tried to be gentle.

She could not meet his eyes. “I would guess within three hours of death, if not sooner.”

Half a sun-cycle. A narrow band, but not unreasonable. “Thank you,” he said.

“You can’t,” Yongcheow said, preempting his argument entirely. “I won’t let you.”

He wanted to say, You should have stayed away if you didn’t want to see this. Instead he cupped Yongcheow’s chin. “We got this far. It’s more than I could have asked for.”

“If you die, your sister dies too. You know that. Your mother won’t allow otherwise.”

We were born together; we die together. “Mokoya would never let the movement be sacrificed for her sake. Neither will I.”

A stubborn set of the lip. “I’ll go with you.”

“Mother will have you killed. Her only interest is in me. If you come along, she’ll use you against me.”

“I can’t just let you go.”

“You have to.”

Yongcheow gripped his arms hard, as if he could prevent Akeha leaving through sheer physical force. “Yongcheow, I want you to stay here. Look after Thennjay. And Mokoya, if the Almighty permits.” If a miracle happens. “Do this for me.”

Yongcheow mouthed the syllables of his name, unable to put strength behind them. Akeha kissed him hard, their lips issuing a commandment of desire, playing a symphony of desperation.

When their bodies parted, it felt like a continent splitting. He gripped Yongcheow’s hand, then put his hand over his heart. “His peace be with you,” he said.

Then he leaned over Mokoya and pressed his lips to her forehead. He whispered words he should have said years ago, instead of leaving it until now, when there was a good chance she wasn’t hearing them at all, her eyes dark and swollen shut. He had to go. He had to go. He pretended he wasn’t shaking as he walked away.

* * *

Eyes trailed Akeha’s pilgrimage to the front of the monastery: acolytes and senior pugilists and everyone in between, peering from windows and behind pillars. The ranks of the pious had been swelled with Thennjay’s Machinist refugees, protected thus far by the ancient codes that granted the Grand Monastery autonomy over its affairs. If they weren’t on a list before they fled here, they were safe from Mother’s grasp.

Until now.

This was how the raids always started, soldiers banging on doors suspected to conceal known Machinists. Next it would be a line of people squatting against the wall, heads down, hands tied behind their backs, soon to be sucked into the fetid underbelly of the Protectorate. Vanished. So great was the appetite of empire that it would not even spit out the bones.

He would not let that happen here.

Akeha came to the cushion of garden between the monastery and the path to the city. Thennjay was locked in verbal hostility with a woman dressed in a general’s colors. Arrayed on the steps below them were hundreds of soldiers, guns in hand. One of them scratched an itchy calf, another shifted on restless feet. Their impatience pinged on the Slack, a constellation of microtwitches.

Akeha stepped forward. “Thennjay.”

The man turned, an oceanic wash of fear and dismay overcoming him. “Leave them alone,” Akeha said to the pinch-faced general. “I’ll come with you. I want to speak to my mother.”

Thennjay rumbled. “Akeha—”

“Don’t.” He looked over the columns of waiting Protectorate troops. “Don’t get innocents killed protecting me.”

He had been running from this for long enough. It was time to put it to an end.

Akeha pulled Thennjay close and kissed him, for old times’ sake. Thennjay whispered his name once, but he let go of Akeha’s hand, let him leave with the troops. What choice did he have?