THE SKY TURNED GRAY and heavy as they climbed the eight hundred steps to the Great High Palace, as though the heavenly host had amassed to bear witness. Akeha had spent the journey to the palace coming to a decision and making peace with it. He realized now that there was a reason he’d returned to the city today, and not any time before. His heart and veins were ice, and his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do.

The Protector met him in an open-air courtyard just off the main audience chamber. Akeha, trailing in the general’s stiff-legged wake, was presented with a silent, heavily robed figure, hands folded behind her, gazing out at the white sprawl of the Great High Palace and the smoky tangle of Chengbee below.

“Protector, I have brought you the boy,” the general said.

“Leave us,” his mother said, without turning around.

“Yes, Protector.” The general bowed and left.

The Protector continued studying the vista of her dominion, letting silence uncoil between them. Akeha was not intimidated. He scanned the courtyard for threats, his mindeye bright and open. Before him, his mother was a furnace in the Slack, a smear of light that was almost painful to focus on. They were truly alone.

She had let him come with weapons intact. All the knives tucked in easy corners. All the contents of his pockets. Hubris on her part, or foolishness? It did not matter.

“The sun falls and returns five times a day, the flowers wilt and return once a year. But the return of a wayward child is something that happens once a lifetime.” The Protector turned around and took swaying, deliberate steps toward Akeha. “And here you are. Let me have a look at you.”

The years had treated his mother well. Akeha, like everyone else, was not privy to her real age. She was supposed to have been in her fifties when the twins were born, which would put her in her eighties now. She didn’t look it. She looked so much like Mokoya, big glassy eyes set in a broad, sharply contoured face.

It had been years since he’d stood in her presence. In that time, his life had been deformed around her and her actions. He had run from her troops. He had killed and watched others be killed. He had held the hands of dying friends, delivered bad news to grieving spouses and parents. He had seen families torn apart, watched the elderly starve, held children with all hope ripped from them.

And here she stood, radiant and triumphant, oblivious to the suffering that collected in the long shadow of her Protectorate. If his anger were poison, she would have been long dead.

The Protector clapped her hands to Akeha’s face, her face crinkling in a smile of unverifiable sincerity. “See that. What a fine young man you have grown into.”

He pulled his lips into a smile. “And I suppose you’ll tell me how proud you are.”

“Does it surprise you? There is greatness in your blood that cannot be denied.”

Should he mock her for taking credit for his successes? No, that would just play into her game. “I’m not here for a warmhearted family reunion. Tell me what you want, or let me go.”

The smile stayed on her face. “And of course, rude and ungrateful. As I have come to expect of you.” She glided away, at ease in her seat of power. “All these years . . . did you think I knew nothing of what you have been doing? You and your sister both, with your charming little rebellion. All of which I indulged. I thought, why spoil the children’s fun? But perhaps I have gone one step too far.”

When she turned back, her smile had evaporated. “Very well. If you insist on acting like a grasping merchant, then let us lay out the terms of your surrender.”

He indulged her: “What do you want?”

“Lady Han.”

Akeha scoffed. “Do you imagine that I could go out, capture her, and bring her back tied in a red silk ribbon?”

“And give Mikara that sort of pleasure?” She blinked, like a crocodile. “Of course it won’t be something so crude. You should know better that that, Akeha. Our arrangement will work this way. I will let you go. You may return to your sister and your little friends. Within you, implanted under your skin, will be a device developed by my Tensors that will send information back to us. It’s simple enough. You don’t even have to do anything.”

Akeha pretended to think about it. Then he said, “No.”

“No? Simply that?”

He nodded. “No.”

“Ah.” She laughed. “You haven’t been in the capital for many years, Akeha. You think I’m giving you a choice.”

He shrugged. “I’m making a choice.”

“Your choice is between leaving the palace alive, and not.”

“Accepting death is also a choice.”

The Protector’s face creased in mock concern. “Oh, but your sister’s also dying, isn’t she? Sonami tells me she needs a lung graft to survive. Who will be the donor if you die, I wonder?”

Sonami. The sudden mention of her name came like a blow through the chest. Wasn’t she supposed to be on their side?

He supposed it didn’t matter.

“Would you truly sacrifice Mokoya as well?” she asked.

It was pathetic how little she knew of those she called her children. What they wanted. What they would choose.

Akeha turned away from her as though deep in thought. As though seriously considering her proposal. As he turned, he put his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing the cool petals of Eien’s last gift to him. A gangrenous smile spread across his face. “You should have killed me when you could.”

“Oh?” The Protector sounded amused. So much hubris. “And when should that have been?”

He laughed, a low sound. “You should have strangled me in the crib. The spare child, wasn’t I? You should have gotten rid of me.”

His fingers, burrowing deeper, closed around cold metal. A plum-sized metal sphere. “But you didn’t. You let me grow up. You sowed the seeds of your own downfall. It’s what you deserve.”

He turned around, the sunball gleaming in his hand. His mother’s eyes widened. “Is that . . .”

“Checkmate,” he said.

He didn’t have to do it right. Just enough to set it off.

Akeha tensed.

In his hand the sunball flared to life. He hurled it forward, eyes closed, ready for his bones to dissolve in a blessing of heat and light.

The Slack contracted. The blow was so powerful he was flung off his feet. Was this what it was like to die?

And yet Akeha hit ground intact enough for it to hurt, muscle and tendon crying out at the impact of solid upon solid. The Slack flared nova-white, immense energy canceled out by immense energy.

His mother had countered the sunball.

Akeha leapt to his feet. The Protector lay crumpled a few yields away, an unmoving mound of silk and brocade. Was she dead? Had she sacrificed herself for him?

He moved toward her without thinking, bringing a knife to her throat. Not dead: his mother lay stunned, drained by her monumental expenditure of slackcraft. She looked up at him, pink-eyed, breathing shallowly, as his blade pressed into her skin.

He could just kill her. He should. Slit her throat and end this particular problem here and now. The flensing edge bit into her flesh. Blood welled up, bright against the metal.

She stared silently at him, a smile playing at her lips. Calm, almost proud.

Fury rampaged through him. He wanted her to say something. Anything. Insult him, plead with him, tell him she loved him. Explain why she’d protected both of them, instead of throwing the protective shield only around herself. Anything.

His hands shook. Red smeared over the edge of the metal.

He’d spent nearly twenty years running from her. He’d spent his entire life orbiting around her and his idea of her, distant as another galaxy. Even now, when he had her at the mercy of his blade, he wanted her to tell him what she was thinking, what she thought of him. She still had this power over him.

And then he knew. If he did the logical thing and pushed the knife all the way through her throat, if he stood by and watched while her blood emptied onto the gray flagstones and her pupils dilated into senselessness, if he gave in to his basest desires and slaughtered her right there—he could never leave. He would be trapped there forever, standing over his mother’s dead body, his life from now on defined by this moment.

She would always own him. He would never be free.

There was always a choice.

Akeha straightened up. Her curious eyes followed him.

“I held your life in my hands,” he said, his voice loud and cold as ringing metal. “I could have killed you. Your fate belonged to me.” He dropped the knife; it sang against the ground. “I choose to spare you. I release my hold over you.”

He stepped backward, putting space between them. The Protector sat up slowly, a thin line of blood marking her neck. His mother said nothing. What did the look on her face mean? Was she confused, angry, happy? Did she think he was a fool or a hero? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read her expression. Perhaps he never could.

He said, “Now I turn my back, and I walk away. Whatever you do next is your choice. It will be your choice alone.”

Akeha turned his back on his mother and began to walk.

He walked across the courtyard. Across its border and down the corridors where he had grown up. Any moment, he expected the claws of death to strike: a knife in the back, an arrow through the chest, the unbreakable grip of palace guards. Anything. Here were the ponds where he and Mokoya had spent afternoons chasing fish. There was the obelisk before which he first understood himself. With every minute, a different diorama from his past slid by, a reprise of all the opening gambits before the final moves were played. Any moment now.

Yet death still did not come. He was crossing the outer pavilions, one step after another, heading forward. There was the threshold of the Great High Palace; there were the endless stairs that would lead him away from all this. He did not slow down. He did not look back. He put one foot in front of the other, a lone figure traversing the wide spaces that had once defined him. It had begun to rain, the gray skies finally shedding their load. The drops pelted him, warm and thick on his face. He tasted air full of earth and sky. Below him Chengbee waited, growing and breathing and alive.

Akeha walked and walked and walked.