When Kanna awakened, she was no longer in her body.

Instead, she was in the body of some kind of giant. This body, too, was strewn on a gravel floor—but instead of the blinding daylight of the sun-baked road to Suda, she was bathed with the crackling light of a dying bonfire that reflected off the walls of a cave.

Rain roared just outside a narrow threshold to the hollow, and it seemed to drown out the whole world, but this giant that Kanna inhabited was a fitful sleeper. Her half-lidded eyes snapped open at the sound of the faintest scrape.

The faint sound of a thief.

Her giant hand snatched the arm that had reached for her satchel. With a head half-full of dreams and a curious smile, she glanced over at the would-be bandit.

It was that funny-looking girl with the light-colored eyes who stared back, her boyish face a war between defiance and terror, her brown hair slick with sweat and spread on a brow that was still smeared with caked sand. Fire and smoke danced behind her, a halo made of ash and snakes, a halo for a demon.

Goda was shocked by her beauty.

Kanna was shocked by it, too, but she quickly reminded herself that she was seeing through the eyes of the giant, through a lens that was skewed with delirium and that tended all too often to paint the mundane with extraordinary colors.

Of course, the girl was not beautiful at all. Her features were simply too awkward—plain at best—and covered in a mess of dust on top of that.

Nonetheless, this girl’s imagined beauty made Goda deeply uncomfortable. Like all other discomforts, the giant swallowed it into herself and turned the flow of that serpent into solid rock, so that she fused herself into the stone cold floor of the cave and felt nothing anymore.

The girl’s defiance withered in the shine of Goda’s stare. She cowered away.

“This isn’t—I—It’s not what it looks like!” the girl said.

“What is it, then?”

“I…I just want to defend myself, I…You’re the one who threatened to beat me! What am I supposed to do with that?”

She had been reaching for the lip of Goda’s bag. There was only an old scroll inside, but the intention had been clear enough.

A steel baton.

Kanna felt Goda’s smile grow wider. The giant wanted to laugh—in relief, perhaps.

“Were you going to kill me?” she asked. “And then what? After you killed me, then what were you going to do?”

“I wasn’t going to kill you!”

“So you hadn’t thought that far ahead yet? I suppose you could have killed me and then cut off my arm, so that you could carry around the master cuff with you and avoid being shocked again. But there’s nothing around here to cut with. Maybe you could have sawed it off slowly with a rock. That would have taken hours, though.”

The shock on the young woman’s face only made another laugh build up in Kanna’s new chest, a laugh that she held back. Still, the smile of the giant widened even more, something she could not suppress.

“It’s not that easy to kill someone,” Kanna told the girl. “Not because the steel is too weak, but because your resolve is. If you’re going to kill someone, kill them. Don’t think about it first, or else the better parts of you will have time to change your mind.”

After all, Kanna knew a lot about this weakness. She had jumped out of a train because of it.

* * *

Kanna woke up.

She could not tell anymore in which delusion she had fallen. There were too many layers, too many dreams.

All she could see was a glare of light, because the sun was striking her right in the face this time. She blinked and squinted in a cloud of dust. She felt some movement against her right hand, and with narrowed eyes she turned her head to look, but her neck felt so sore that it took all her effort.

A pair of large hands were clasped against her cuff. One of those hands was holding her wrist down against the dirt, the other was turning the key.

Kanna gasped. All her senses returned at once. She smacked her palm over the latch of her bonds, her heart pounding.

“No!” she rasped. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

But even in her stupor, she could see exactly what Goda was doing: The woman was about to commit suicide.

“Imbecile!” Goda shouted the word before Kanna had the chance to say the same, and she dug her fingers under the latch even as Kanna struggled to keep it covered. “Are you trying to shock yourself to death?”

“Are you?” Kanna screamed. She found the inner strength to push herself onto her side. She was still in pain, but she welcomed it now. She had not lost her strength, so she grasped Goda’s fingers without hesitation and dug her nails deep into the skin.

Goda winced, though she didn’t pull away. It was like trying to break through the crust of a stone.

“I want the cuff!” Kanna yelled, her mind racing, her blood rushing up to her ears. She kicked her legs and bashed her arms and writhed around so that Goda lost her grip. “Can’t you see I want it? Leave it on me! It’s a part of my body now! Leave it! Leave it! I’ll bite your hand and tear into your flesh if I have to!”

It was only a second later that Kanna realized she had been shouting at Goda in the Upperlander tongue. But she didn’t care; the words were spilling out on their own, and she didn’t think they were for Goda’s sake anymore.

“Hold still!”

“Get off me!” Kanna launched herself up, and in one fluid motion she smacked Goda on the side of the neck, which made the giant recoil with a growl. “Let me go, you bastard! I want to be a slave! I want it! Can’t you see?”

“What’s going on? What is she saying?” a voice called out from a short distance away, somewhere closer to the road. Two footfalls beat against the ground, but when she looked towards the direction of the noise, the twins came to a scraping halt as soon as they had glanced at Kanna’s face.

Kanna did not know what their panicked expressions meant, but she was glad they weren’t interfering. She gnashed her teeth and shot her fist towards the giant’s face once again.

This time, Goda caught it with her hand and crushed Kanna’s knuckles with just enough force to startle her, but not quite enough to hurt her. Kanna cried out, but did not give in. She stretched up onto her knees, trying to wrench her hand free, trying to fight the giant off, but Goda would not give in, either.

They pushed against each other in a static tension, the muscles of one body adding force to the other, but neither overtaking. Their joined hands trembled with the effort of balance. She knew that Goda was holding back her strength. She knew that Goda could break her fingers at any moment if she wanted to.

But Kanna did not grow distracted. She kept her eyes locked on Goda’s furious stare.

“Hurt me,” Kanna sneered through gritted teeth, consciously switching back to Middlelander. “Hurt me if you want—but I’m not letting you steal my cuff. It’s all I have. You’re all I have. You’re not taking that away from me.”

Goda let her go. Because the balance of tension shifted so quickly, Kanna fell forward into the dirt with the force of her own momentum. She pressed her hands on the ground and looked up at Goda with hatred.

The woman was already standing up, already heading back towards the truck.

“If you don’t want me to rip that cuff off your wrist,” she said, “then you’ll wear the rope again along with it, and you’ll stay within arm’s reach of me from now on.”

“What?” Kanna jumped to her feet, even with the pain still radiating from the core of her bones. “I’m not wearing anything. You can take that rope and shove it up your—”

Goda whipped around to face Kanna again. Her eyes were alive with rage and the previous emptiness had been swallowed by fire. “You will wear what I tell you to wear. You will do what I tell you to do. You are my slave.”

The sound of the giant’s booming voice made a shudder rush through Kanna’s body, and it was almost as hot and searing as the shocks had been. All at once, she was racked with fear again.

But this time, she let herself feel the fear. She felt the fear that happened on its own, and in those seconds that seemed to drag on as she watched the giant leaving her, the fear morphed into something else. She remembered very suddenly what she had seen in that desert cavern for a second time. She remembered what it had been like on the other end of the rope.

When Goda returned, clasping the cord taut in her hands like a garrote, this didn’t alarm Kanna anymore. Nothing did.

She held her hands up to meet Goda’s grasp.

The giant looked at her with a bit of bewilderment, but did not pause, and she busied herself looping the bonds around Kanna’s joined wrists. Kanna smiled when she caught the giant’s eye again. The smile turned into a grin, then a crazed laugh. She sounded like a lunatic, she knew, like she had swallowed every drug in the Bou twins’ supply. Her voice rattled against the trees and scared some more of the birds, but she couldn’t stop.

“You won’t hurt me,” Kanna whispered, between the heaves that stuttered out of her chest beyond her control. She looked up at Goda, whose hands were still wrapped around Kanna’s wrists, and she put as much ridicule as she could in her voice. She wanted to rub it in Goda’s face. “You actually can’t hurt me, can you? Forget the cuffs, it’s me who has enslaved you.”

The water finally gushed from her eyes in earnest, but she kept them locked on Goda and she did not turn away with any shame. Goda stood before her, anchored in place like a statue, unblinking, unreadable.

“Shut up.”

* * *

The journey in the back of the truck was rougher than before, because Kanna’s hands were bound. She couldn’t brace herself anymore every time they hit a bump—and there were many. Goda had forced her to lie down, and she had stretched Kanna’s arms over her head, and she had snaked the rope over to the front seat and anchored it to something there, so that Kanna had no chance to scheme about how to free herself.

Kanna had quit trying to tug at the rope. However, she did tilt her head back, and she stared at that upside down image of the back of the giant’s head, and she hurled insults at the woman as they sped down the road. She screamed against the wind so that the giant would hear her. She called Goda blasphemous names in Middlelander—the few that she knew—and when she ran out of those, she switched to Upperlander and called her things that she had never called anyone before.

The Bou twins sat huddled in the opposite corner of the truck bed, and they stared down at her with startled gazes. They didn’t seem to know what to do. They made no move to help her or untie her, but Kanna did not blame them, because she couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t lash out at them irrationally if they did.

She felt like a caged beast. The moment Goda would let her go, she thought, she would strike one last time. She would reach for that giant’s ugly face and she would dig her fingers into those surfaceless eyes until she felt blood rolling down her hands.

The truck sped faster and the air bashed against Kanna’s face harder, and it felt like this was Goda’s own hand buffeting her against the cheek. She gritted her teeth and yelled louder and louder, to compensate for the noise, to compensate for the fact that she could barely move anymore. As the light in the sky grew fainter, her throat became raw, and her cries grew weaker, and she let herself grow limp on the bed of the truck. When it was completely dark, she shut her mouth and allowed herself to rest, so that she would have the strength to insult Goda some more later.

They rushed through the darkness without stopping for a long time. Once the light had waned enough that Kanna had to concentrate to make out the twin faces nearby, she gave up on seeing, and she closed her eyes.

She didn’t know how much time had passed when she found herself opening them again. They had pulled over to the roadside. It was the dead of night, but because her eyes were fully adjusted, she could see Goda’s face in the moonlight as the giant turned to face the back of the truck. Goda’s stare was aimed directly at the Bou twins.

“Leave,” Goda said.

The twins scrambled to grab some of the spare blankets and mats, though they left the rest of their belongings in their haste, and they stepped over Kanna and jumped out of the truck. Kanna could hear them murmuring to each other as their footfalls hit the grass. She heard them step away, but it wasn’t far, and she figured that the group had stopped to sleep.

But Kanna decided that she wouldn’t sleep anymore. Instead, she would spend her energy trying to think of a way to bust Goda’s cuff from her wrist. If I can squirm my way out of these binds, she thought, then I can tie Goda up in her sleep, and I can find a knife and saw her hand off and take the cuff off safely that way. She won’t like it, but it will free her.

Just as she was in the midst of these morbid thoughts, however, the giant stepped over the divide between them. The truck bounced around with Goda’s heavy movements and Kanna watched her intently without saying anything. The giant crouched over her, straddled Kanna’s hips, lowered some of her weight onto Kanna’s body, but not so much that Kanna felt crushed.

Kanna took in a sharp breath. Conflicting sensations broiled together in her body. Kanna felt the urge at first to resist them, but then she gave into instinct, and she felt herself relaxing just slightly into the touch. She allowed herself to feel the warmth of Goda’s thighs on either side of her.

She met Goda’s dreamy gaze. The direct moonlight coming down from the cloudless sky made the giant’s eyes look silver, and it added a bluish tint to her faint, meaningless smile. Kanna felt that she had the giant’s full attention. It made Kanna uncomfortable, even though it was still the only thing she wanted.

Goda slipped a hand into her own robes. Kanna tried to crane her neck to see, but pulled back instantly when she saw that the giant had pulled out a knife.

“Ah,” Kanna managed to croak out in a soft voice, because her throat was still on fire. She let her head fall back onto the truck bed with a smack. She bit her lip with a mix of curiosity and fear. The truth was that Goda was still so unpredictable—that reality itself had become so unpredictable—that Kanna couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was about to take her last breath.

Just in case, Kanna tilted her head back some more to expose her neck. If something was going to finally kill her, she thought, then she wanted it to be Goda’s knife in her throat.

But Goda shifted a little to reach into one of Kanna’s pockets with her free hand and Kanna felt herself twitch again with surprise. With only the thin fabric separating them, she felt the giant’s fingers lightly brushing the space between her leg and her hip as that hand rummaged around. It excited some of the nerves there—which had already awoken to Goda’s presence, Kanna realized—and she felt the edges of shame swirling up inside of her. This time, though, because she had noticed the shame, she let herself feel it. She almost liked it.

The touch didn’t last long; the giant pulled out one of the fruits that Kanna had stored in her clothes hundreds of thousands of paces earlier, when they had stood by the tree. Goda stabbed the pome with her knife, which sent sweet-smelling juice sprinkling down on Kanna’s face. She cut a piece off the flesh.

“What are you doing?” Kanna finally whispered. “What are you—”

The giant forced a piece of fruit into her mouth. Kanna immediately spit it out.

“What…the hell!” Kanna said between coughs. The resistance in the muscles of her throat had made some of the juice trickle in the wrong way. “What are you doing to me?”

“Feeding you.”

“In the middle of the night?” Kanna exclaimed, with as much strength as she could muster. When she thought about it for a second, though, she had to admit that it was as good a time as any. She actually wasn’t entirely sure when Middlelanders tended to have their meals, since she hardly ever saw Goda eat.

But she wasn’t hungry.

“This journey has been long and taxing on you. You’ll need your strength when we get to Suda, and I don’t have time to feed you while I drive. Eat it.” Goda cut up a smaller piece, as if the size had been Kanna’s objection, and she pressed it again to Kanna’s lips.

Kanna turned her head to refuse it. “If you’re going to be fasting, Giant, then I want to be empty as well. The only thing I want inside of me is you.” After the last few words slipped from her mouth without full intention, she glanced up quickly to study Goda’s face.

The giant had paused. She was staring down at Kanna with a rush of intensity. “No,” she said.

“You’re a coward.” The anger from before was returning. “Here I am, tied and helpless, and still you won’t take advantage of me, even though you want to. I know you do. Now that I know that it’s there, I can feel it faintly pressing against me through your clothes, and I know you don’t lack the desire. If we really are going to face some apocalyptic end in Suda, then at least give me what I want now before it’s too late for us.”

“That won’t solve any of your problems.”

“You’re my only problem, Goda.”

The giant was completely still again, quiet again for a long moment. “I could say the same, though I know it isn’t true. You’re a delusion. You’re a demon sent from the Goddess to tempt me on the final stretch. It hasn’t been easy. You are a very convincing hallucination.” Goda’s face was mostly blank, but something curious vibrated underneath the surface that Kanna couldn’t yet read. “A very beautiful one.”

Kanna let out a breath. Her heart pounded noticeably faster. Her mind replayed the words a few times. “Then let’s run away from this,” she whispered to the giant. “Stop torturing yourself and stop torturing me. We can find a way to get rid of the cuff. Even cutting your hand off is preferable to this life, don’t you think? The Bou twins will help us. We can take it off quickly tonight and throw it in some hole and the cuff can shock your lifeless wrist while we flee deep into the desert or into some obscure part of the Upperland. The government won’t know you escaped. They’ll think you just failed and died, like they wanted you to do.”

Goda shook her head. “Then what?”

It seemed like Goda hadn’t expected an answer, but Kanna delivered anyway: “We can live. I know it’s hard to hide who you are—since a lot of people know what you did, and certainly the soldiers and priestesses will recognize your face—but if we leave the Middleland, it will be easier. We can get married. We can live out the rest of our days as normal people.” Kanna stopped there, because her own proposal had been unexpected and it had just rushed out of her mouth with the rest of the words—but she did not disagree with it in retrospect. She hoped that it had sounded casual enough. She could pretend that marriage meant as little to her as it seemed to the Middlelanders.

Goda’s smile spread open a little. “Sometimes I do wish I was that sort of person,” she murmured. “Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if life had unfolded in a different way. But it unfolded this way. It is still unfolding—and I’m not going to fight the will of the Goddess. You call me a coward, and it’s true that I’m afraid, but I’m going to face what I have to face nonetheless. And the monster I will face is in Suda. If I don’t do this, then I will spend the rest of my natural life running from shadows and demons. Like you said yourself, it would be preferable to cut off a part of me than to live a life of torture.” She looked down at her cuff-clad wrist, at the metal that shined in the moonlight. “But it’s not my hand that has caused me to sin, so it’s not my hand that I’ll be cutting off.”

The giant leaned away, and dismounted Kanna’s hips. She tucked the fruit back into Kanna’s pocket and stepped back over to the driver’s seat without another word.

* * *

In spite of her efforts to stay awake, Kanna had been sleeping again, and a rustling sound had roused her all of a sudden. There was a scraping next, then the puff of a flash fire eating through something. A bright light erupted somewhere close by, but then it dimmed in a split second. Kanna could still see the glow after, so with a lot of effort, she pushed herself up, and she tried to wrestle with the rope so that she could half-sit with her gaze pointing over the side of the truck.

Because she was so tired, her brain struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. A flame danced near the ground, seemingly suspended over the earth, trapped in a cage of glass.

She rubbed her eyes against her arm and looked again. The smell of fuel that hit her nose helped her wake up some more.

Goda had lit an ethanol lantern, and she was sitting, leaning against the outside of the truck, her satchel resting in her lap, her hands around a steel baton.

Kanna blinked.

No, it was a scroll.

The giant untied the leather band and let the scroll fall open in front of her. Even in the dim light, Kanna could see the etchings in Old Middlelander; she could see that it was the same document that Taga had thrown on the floor of the cabin after claiming that she couldn’t read it.

“This is why you had me study Parama’s textbook, isn’t it?” Kanna murmured.

Goda tilted her head back slightly, as if she were pointing an ear closer to Kanna’s direction, as if she were a wildcat that had noticed some far-off sound. She didn’t reply, though.

“I know both Middlelander and Upperlander,” Kanna said a little louder, “so you thought I could decipher it.”

The giant let out a deep sigh, but her gaze remained forward, on the surface of the scroll. “It was one of the few possessions they allowed me to keep after my arrest—and the most dangerous. The only reason it slipped past the notice of the authorities is because soldiers are the ones who search you for contraband, and soldiers are usually too uneducated to know Old Middlelander script. I lied and said it was a religious heirloom from my higher mother. They didn’t know the difference.” She took the scroll between her hands and rolled it back up in one fluid movement; the leather seemed to naturally want to flow closed, as if it were used to being hidden. “I’m not gifted with languages. After spending all that time in the desert, I can barely even speak a word or two of Outerlander, and I’m not very smart, so even if I somehow got lucky and found an Upperlander tutor—which is extremely rare—I doubt I would learn enough in my lifetime to read this. Instead, I spent years trying to find someone who could tell me what the rest of the scroll said. Even Parama could not make sense of it. I’ve stared and stared at it many times, but it could all be gibberish and I wouldn’t know.”

To Kanna’s surprise, the giant lifted her arm up over her head, and she passed the scroll towards Kanna. Not knowing what else to do, Kanna struggled to reach over the edge of the truck, and she clasped her bound hands around the thick parchment.

“You should have it now,” Goda said. “There’s nothing I can really do with it. I think the only reason I held onto it for so long was because Taga had touched it not long before she died. It’s the same as the pendant that I took from her body. It’s just a superstitious token, a charm. The stories I told myself about it were more important than any actual use. I deluded myself.”

Kanna didn’t know what to say at first. She squeezed her fingers around the scroll and felt the layers that swirled in circles underneath. “I know what you mean.” Kanna’s tone came out with more sadness than she had intended. “I used to have tokens like that, too, until they took everything from me and I had nothing except for the clothes on my back—and then they took that, too. I thought to myself, what’s left of me? Who am I without all these things? But that didn’t last because that was just the very outer layer and the deeper layers were more terrifying still. I got used to not having any material things really quickly, so then I had no choice but to ask myself, ‘Am I the skin that I’m wearing? Well, if that’s true, then who is the I that is wearing it? Fine, then I’m the muscles. But then who is wearing the muscles? And the bone? And the marrow in the bones? Am I in the marrow, then? Or am I the brain that is thinking about the marrow? If so, which part? Could I point to it?’ I asked myself all these things for those weeks that they held me in the confinement center before you arrived to take me away. I sat alone in my cell and stared at the wall.”

Goda had pressed the back of her head to the steel of the truck. She was tilting her neck back and looking up at Kanna intently.

“I asked myself and asked myself, and I couldn’t figure out the answer, even with all that time to think,” Kanna said. “So I realized I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was; and I realized it had nothing to do with being smart or dumb at all. You just either saw the answer or you didn’t; somehow I knew I would have to go beyond my mind to find it. I also knew I couldn’t ask anyone else, because they didn’t know the answer either. Besides, they would think I was crazy just for asking.” Kanna met Goda’s gaze, and though the giant’s form had morphed again into that of a wild animal with wide, shining eyes in the dark, Kanna wasn’t afraid. “You were the one who finally answered my question. I didn’t even ask you directly at first, but you knew what I was asking anyway. Your words didn’t make sense back then, but they make more sense now.”

“Then why do you still resist me?” Goda asked. Her tone held no trace of accusation or frustration. She sounded merely curious.

“Because life has forced me to play this game with you, and so I decided that I would be your antagonist. Just because you were right about one thing doesn’t mean you’re right about everything, Giant. If there’s a chance that we can still escape, then I will take it. We still have time. We’re not in Suda yet, so I can still drag my feet and resist you.” Kanna couldn’t suppress a smile. “It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”

The giant pointed up at the scroll. “You can read.”

“I can do that, too, but I’m still an amateur. I’d rather spend my time fighting you and trying to sabotage your efforts. The risk is higher, but so are the rewards because I’m good at it.”

Goda reached over and flicked a switch on the lamp. The light died in an instant. When Goda stood up, Kanna could feel the giant dropping the lantern in the truck bed beside her, some fuel spilling out in the process and filling the air with spirits once again.

It was making Kanna feel a little drunk.

Goda leaned over the steel divide between them and she pressed a kiss to Kanna’s mouth in the dark. Kanna accepted it eagerly, leaned into it, inhaled the breath that rushed out of Goda’s nostrils.

“I’ll fight you,” Kanna said as Goda broke away.

“I know.” The giant hopped over the driver’s side door without opening it, and she climbed into the front seat to lie down.

“You might never set foot in Suda for the rest of your life. I might force you to change your mind.”

“You might.”

“I could die trying.”

“You could.”

“I’ll make myself so hard to ignore, so irresistible, such a massive temptation, that you’ll kick the Bou twins out the side of the truck while it’s in mid-motion, and you’ll tear away at my clothes with your claws, and you’ll spill all of what you have inside of me.”

Goda laughed. “Shut up.”

* * *

Because it was barely dawn when they set out again, Kanna felt exhausted before she had even opened her eyes. She looked up at the twins with irritation, as their chattering—and the plumes of cigar smoke that mixed with truck exhaust—made it hard for her to go back to sleep. The early sun painted the sky and the twins and the metal of the truck bed with many pleasant colors, but it did little to help Kanna’s bad mood.

She had dreamt about Goda the night before. They had both been naked in the dream. It had been a frustrating experience because it had ended just as things were becoming interesting, and to top it all off, now that she was awake and no longer invested in playing the role of a dream character, she realized that, in the dream, she had been Parama Shakka.

She couldn’t be certain if it had come from her imagination or if it was another taunting vision of the past. She would have to ask Goda about it later, she thought.

Kanna tried to roll over into a more comfortable position, one where the sun was not hitting her eyes, because perhaps she could curl up and fall back into the same dream.

The Bou twins noticed her moving, though. They offered her their usual naive grins.

“Oh great, you’re awake!” Noa said. “We were worried you had passed out or something. We weren’t sure what the giant did to you during the night.”

“Nothing,” Kanna said. “Always nothing. She is nothing.”

Noa scratched her head. “Ah…well, that’s good, then.”

As Kanna gave up on sleeping and tried to sit up, she found the light was too bright already, and she shielded herself from it with her bound hands. “God,” she complained, “do you people ever actually sleep? We went to bed so late last night, and yet all of you are bouncing around at the crack of dawn as if nothing happened.”

Leina stared at her. “What do you mean? We always wake up at dawn as long as we get two full sleeps.”

Kanna squinted at them with renewed annoyance. “Two sleeps? What are you talking about? I barely had even one.”

Noa made the familiar gesture of putting her hand to her mouth when she leaned towards Leina, but again, instead of whispering, she said in a loud voice, “Foreigners are different, stupid. She doesn’t sleep normal!”

“Oh, right, right!”

Kanna let out a groan so loud that she noticed Goda turning to glance at her briefly from the corner of her eye. “Don’t tell me there’s yet something else!” Kanna shouted. “Isn’t what you’ve told me enough? Why does everything have to be weird and different? Why can’t one, singular thing be predictable? Why can’t your women be women, and your food be edible, and your government collect taxes like normal instead of selling people’s chopped-up bodies for cash? Lord almighty, what is wrong with you people this time?”

A long silence spread after Kanna’s outburst.

“Uh…it’s really no big deal,” Leina said after putting out her cigar on the bed of the truck. She reached into one of the bags and pulled out some yaw. Because she began gnawing on her breakfast immediately, Kanna had to make an extra effort to parse the words: “It’s just that when we sleep at night, we wake up for about an hour in the middle, then go back to sleep. We call that time midnight, because it’s between two sleeps. That’s all.”

“Oh.” It was Kanna’s turn to be awkwardly quiet. She shifted her eyes around, her annoyance draining out of her and turning into slight embarrassment.

This at least explained why Middlelander clocks might have been different. It explained all at once why she had woken up so many times to find Goda wandering around in the middle of the night. It explained why Goda had so easily been roused when Kanna tried to escape in Karo. It also explained why the bath house had been so full and teeming with life when she had raced through it to get to the midnight train.

But then she thought about it more at length. “Your midnight is around two hours before sunrise, though,” she said. “How can that be in the middle? How does that work?”

Noa shrugged. “It works just like it sounds like it works. We don’t go to bed until it’s far past sundown, then we sleep for two hours, wake up for one, then we sleep another two.”

“Four hours of sleep?” Kanna shouted. “How do you manage that?” It was no wonder she was exhausted; she had unknowingly kept the same schedule as the Middlelanders, but hadn’t noticed because she had seen only a few clocks during the entire journey, and she could barely read them anyway.

This time, it was Leina who shrugged. She took a huge bite out of the yaw. “That’s just how it’s always been,” she said with her mouth full of poison.

* * *

As the sun began to wane and the sky began to transition again into a blood red that etched the corners of Kanna’s vision, Kanna noticed that the road had grown smoother over time. Instead of gravel, the wheels scraped against something more uniform, harder, less chaotic. That steady sound lulled her enough that her muscles grew heavy.

She tugged halfheartedly on the rope to turn herself over to her side—but of course it offered little slack in her direction, because it was anchored tightly on some point overhead, in a direction she refused to look, in the direction of the giant. She turned the other way.

She allowed herself to grow limp against the bed of the truck, and pressed her ear against the metal beneath her, and let the vibrations of the motor and the wheels silence her mind.

She had plenty of time to scheme later, she thought. She could drift off, fall out of the nightmare and into a dream, let go of the burdens that had churned in her mind all day and left her exhausted.

But just as she began to fall into that inner world, Noa’s voice exploded from the nightmare outside. The words were sharp enough that they made Kanna’s eyes snap open instantly.

“Hey, I think I see the lights of Suda coming out from behind that hill!”

---

Onto Chapter 31 >>

Kanna decided that she hated Goda after all. She had been sitting in the passenger seat in total silence, ignoring the giant, and the giant had the nerve to ignore her ignoring, so eventually she whipped around and crawled into the bed of the truck to be with the Bou twins.

Passing over the divide and into that alternate dimension wasn’t much better. They seemed happy that she had joined them, but they had been chain smoking so much that the floor of the truck was littered with cigar butts and ash, and it took Kanna a few seconds to find a clean spot to sit down.

“…and it’s so strange how the human mind works. Every time these crazy customers tell me a story, they get weirder and weirder,” Noa was saying. Kanna had been too distracted to overhear the beginning of the conversation from the front seat, but she tried to pick up the thread where it was. “Like the last time I had to do a delivery by myself, remember how I took so long? It’s because this lady had to tell me all about the tiny bit of Flower she had swallowed. She said she had seen a million snakes all over her house, and she was trying to tell me about each one.”

“Oh yeah,” Leina said. “I’ve heard that one, too. The Maharans always see snakes, because that’s what we’re taught at the temple, so it’s no wonder that was locked in her subconscious. Makes me not want to touch the stuff, to be honest. I’d rather live in the real world than deal with creepy delusions and hallucinations.”

Smoke wafted in Kanna’s direction, so she ducked her head to avoid the haze. “How about lung cancer?” Kanna said crossly. “Is that a hallucination?”

Dirty air shot out of Leina’s nostrils as she laughed and coughed. “What do you mean?”

Kanna didn’t answer. She took a deep breath of what little clean air she could manage and she tried to adjust her mood, because she figured the twins didn’t deserve her ire. She glanced at the two leather rucksacks that sat tucked in the corner of the truck bed, and she asked, “What kind of…product do you two deliver to people, anyway?”

“We told you: drugs!” Noa said, grinning with pride. “We deal illegal drugs. Our plan if we ever get caught is to each say that the other one did it, and then they won’t be able to tell who is guilty, so they’ll have to let us both go. Even if a witness saw me, I could just say it was my sister, and she could accuse me of the same.”

“Oh.” Kanna scratched the back of her head, unsure if this was a common occupation or if Noa was simply too shameless to be anything but casual about it. “Well, I’m sorry that you have to go to such lengths just to do your job, I guess.” She settled on this neutral response.

“Not really! You can make a lot more money selling stuff that’s illegal. That’s why we do it. With legal stuff, you have too much competition, so I hope they don’t relax the law.”

Kanna huffed in disbelief, but her eyes traced the sealed edges of the bags with curiosity. “What kind of drugs are they, anyway?” She couldn’t imagine that it was Flower. Even the Bou twins didn’t seem stupid enough to openly carry two large bags filled with such dangerous contraband.

Noa smirked. She reached over and undid the latch on one of the sacks, and she opened it up a crack. It was just enough for Kanna to peer inside, but not enough that the wind could slide in and blow any of the dry petals out into the open.

Kanna shook her head and shut her eyes on reflex. “Close it,” she said. “For the love of God, just close it and never show it to me again.” She rubbed her face with her hands. “We’re going to get caught. Some soldiers are going to stop us at some crossing, and they’re going to jump in the back, and they’re going to look at your stuff, and they’re going to arrest all four of us and execute Goda and add twenty years to my sentence.”

“Well, you’re certainly the optimist, aren’t you?” Leina said, laughing some more. “I mean, we don’t usually sell Flower, because it’s a little risky, but we got such a great deal on it this time, we couldn’t pass it up!”

“Yeah, guess how much we paid!” Noa added with excitement. “Guess! Guess!”

The truck rumbled along quietly for a moment as Kanna stared at the two of them with incredulity. “Um, I don’t know.” Now that she thought about it, she still wasn’t entirely sure how money worked in the Middleland. She had had such a narrow experience of the culture so far, and her tutors had been so vague about everything besides the language itself, that she couldn’t even remember the name of their currency.

But Noa leaned closer, her grin stretching wider. She put her hand to the side of her mouth, as if she were about to whisper, but instead she shouted, “Nothing! We got it for free! Can you believe that?”

Leina nodded her head in time with the bobbing of the truck over a few potholes. “That’s right! We got really lucky. In the middle of the night, we were trying to steal some supplies from the train, so we busted one of the locks open and we happened upon a whole car filled with Flower! It was crates and crates of the stuff. We had never seen so much. Of course, there was no way to haul that all back to our room, so we loaded what we could in our bags and decided that we’d get the hell out of Karo in the morning. You can get a much higher price for it in the capital.”

Kanna jerked with surprise. “The midnight train? The one that goes to the Upperland?”

“Yeah, that’s right! You were running around there last night, too, weren’t you? We had ducked into an alley, about to try our hand at making some brew with our find, when we saw you running past and we thought we’d whack that giant with our brass pot. Looking back, it was probably a stupid idea. We were drunk.”

“But why were they sending Flower to the Upperland? Do you know?”

Noa’s smile turned mysterious. “You mean you don’t know? You’re an Upperlander, after all.”

“No,” Kanna said, pursing her lips and letting out a frustrated huff. “I don’t know anything. The more I know, the less I know. So if you’re not going to tell me, then don’t tell me, but I’m sick of all of this cryptic nonsense.”

“Fine, sheesh.” Noa was looking at her warily again. “Well, it’s like this: You’ve heard of the Rava family, right? I’m sure you have. They basically monopolized your entire economy and almost ran it into the ground.”

“They did not!” Kanna snapped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You don’t have the right to say things like that if you’ve never even lived—” She stopped when she noticed that they were both staring at her, completely confused, partly recoiled, as if a sharp gust of wind had unexpectedly hit them in the face.

It had been the breath of a snake, of course. Kanna sighed and felt the serpent grow a little weaker once she had acknowledged it—but it scurried away because it was afraid of being seen directly. The tail had slipped between her fingers. She knew she would see it again some other time.

“What…does Flower have to do with the Rava family?” she mumbled, regaining some of her composure. It was difficult to ask. A part of her didn’t want to hear the Bou twins unknowingly gossiping about who she was—or who she used to be. She didn’t really know anymore.

Leina shrugged with a bit of caution after exchanging a glance with her sister. “We don’t know for sure,” she said, “but the story is that the Middleland government made a deal with your royalty to be able to invade and take over the mok fields from the Rava clan. We heard rumors that they paid your king off with Flower. It’s illegal here, of course, but that’s exactly why the Middleland government has the market cornered. What do you think the government does with all the confiscated Flower? What do you think they do with the dead bodies that carry the Flower in a safer form? It’s a huge source of income for them, along with the criminal slaves it creates. They secretly sell Flower and ground up bodies on the black market, then they arrest people for buying it on the other end.”

Kanna winced with some disgust. Goda had explained before that people ate from the bodies of those who had overdosed and died on Flower, but imagining it as some kind of commercial enterprise made it ten times worse. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would the Upperland monarchy want Flower from your government, anyway?”

“It’s valuable—certainly the most expensive plant on the continent. It’s the most potent medicine as well as the most powerful poison by far, and it’s rare because it was eradicated from Samma Valley, so now it only grows in the savage-infested Lowerland. Use your imagination. I’m sure you can figure it out.” Noa seemed to relax a little, and she let out a smooth puff of noxious smoke. “Besides, your monarchy was aching to get rid of the Ravas, anyway. That family had almost taken over the government, and by then your king was a hair away from being overthrown. He was scared for his neck.” She made a rude gesture, sliding her finger across her throat. “Without outside help, what was he going to do? Better to sit on the throne as a puppet for the Middlelanders than to have no ass to sit with at all, don’t you think? The payment of Flower was probably more of an afterthought—a gift of goodwill.”

“Yep,” Leina added, with a similarly casual look on her face that Kanna could hardly stand. “So the Ravas got charged with some made-up claim that the Middlelanders had owned their land all along and that the Ravas owed exorbitant back-taxes on it for the past one hundred years. They’re all paying for it now with their slavery—the ones who weren’t smart enough to escape, anyway. I hear the older ones are clever, but the younger ones that grew up in privilege are dumb as rocks.”

Kanna had clenched her hands into fists while she listened. Her nails were digging into her palms. She bit her own tongue.

Noa seemed to notice the tension and tilted her head. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Before she could stop herself, Kanna’s body shook with fury and she cried out, “I am Kanna Rava!”

An extended pause fell over the back of the truck, and the twins both stared at her. Their expressions were unreadable, but Kanna figured that they must have been shocked at the revelation. She could sense a smile coming from Goda’s direction, though, and she turned to find that the giant indeed looked amused at the outburst.

When she turned back, she was met with a pair of full grins.

“Sure you are!” Leina said, smacking Kanna on the shoulder. “So am I! Call me Leina Rava!”

“Oh, wait, can I join the clan, too?” Noa asked. “Do I have to learn how to brew spirits, or can I just be one of the kept daughters in Rava’s mansion?” She batted her eyes and fluffed her own hair.

Both of them laughed as if Kanna had led them on a long-form joke and had finally delivered the punchline. Kanna let out a sigh of disgust, but they didn’t seem to notice, and they didn’t bother her again when she lay down on the bed of the truck from sheer exhaustion.

Maybe it’s true that they’re just as much Kanna Rava as I am at this point.

It was her last thought before Kanna Rava fell asleep.

* * *

Kanna woke up with a startled lurch. She felt like she had been falling, so her limbs flailed around to catch her, but they only smacked against the sides of the truck.

As it turned out, it was merely the feeling of the vehicle coming to an abrupt stop that had disturbed her, but as she sat up and rubbed her eyes, the edges of a nightmare still swam in her vision. She thought she had seen Priestess Rem’s face, and it had looked pale and lifeless—so perhaps it had been Taga Murau instead. She couldn’t tell anymore.

She blinked and gazed across the bed of the truck at the messy mop of Goda’s hair that still waved a bit in the wind. She wondered how much of Kanna’s own nightmares and memories Goda had seen, in the same way that Kanna had seen hers. She felt a twinge of shame then, because now that her fury had worn off some—since the snakes always seemed less active when she would first wake up—she could see that her reaction to Goda’s story had been entirely selfish.

Kanna could not fathom what it must have been like to watch someone she loved die before her own eyes, much less by her own hand. She had been in Goda’s body and she had watched it happen as if she had been there, but she imagined that she had access to only a very small piece of the anguish—because she was not Goda Brahm, after all. Kanna had not lived at Taga’s side; she had not known all of the woman’s attributes, both good and evil; she had not fallen in love with a priestess who she could never marry or even touch.

And as soon as the vision of Taga had been over—as vivid as it had seemed at the time—it had begun to fade just like any other dream. For Goda, it was not so simple; it was a living nightmare.

The Bou twins were already hopping out of the truck, and their shaky movements broke Kanna out of her thoughts. Because they had stopped near a pond, the twins started immediately ripping their clothes off and sprinting towards the water.

“Finally! It’s afternoon already, and I was itching to wash these snakes off before it got too late!” Leina said, even though she didn’t believe in snakes and thought that they were crazed hallucinations.

Noa eagerly agreed while stepping out of her trousers, even though she had told Kanna that snakes were religious nonsense.

Goda shed her robes before dismounting the truck, and she started making her way towards the edge of the pond too, even though the giant knew full well that water did nothing to deter snakes.

After a few moments of watching three naked women trudging through the grass, all three determined to wash off invisible demons, something in Kanna’s brain decided that she also must have had those same demons. She crawled over the side of the truck bed and plopped onto the ground, and she sprinted to catch up with them so that she could also get rid of snakes that didn’t exist.

Once they were all knee-deep in the water, Kanna tried to keep her eyes from drifting towards the Bou twins’ bodies with curiosity—but she didn’t try very hard. Whenever she could sense that they weren’t looking directly at her, her gaze fell heavily below their waistlines against her will, because she could not help but wonder if they were like Goda.

She had a hard time being able to tell the difference between Goda’s weird personal quirks and what was simply part of the Middlelander culture.

Do all Middlelander women have…that? Kanna thought.

She wasn’t sure what to call it. There were two different names for two different organs that she had thought to use for what Goda had, but if she was honest with herself, it had looked like it could have been either. It had made her consider for a moment that perhaps those two separate things in her mind may have actually been the same thing all along—but she had chastised herself quickly for such a strange thought.

Of course women and men are totally different, she told herself. That’s why they have different names. It would be ridiculous if, this whole time, they were just two versions of the same thing. Then what would that make me?

The Bou twins looked more like her than like Goda, though. Kanna had glanced enough times that she decided they were both normal, and for some reason this gave her some comfort.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t been discreet enough, and though Leina was distracted with a piece of yaw that she had brought with her to rinse in the water, Kanna eventually drew Noa’s attention. The woman grinned at Kanna, and her eyes sparkled with interest.

“What’re you looking at, what’re you looking at?” she asked.

“Nothing!” Kanna couldn’t help one final glance in Goda’s direction, then she turned back to her own body and went through the motions of scrubbing invisible parasites.

Her stupid grin unfaded, Noa turned towards Goda briefly, and seemed to realize Kanna’s thoughts. “Ahhh,” Noa said, in a tone that made Kanna’s neck break into a blush that she couldn’t hide without her clothes. “So this giant is the only one of those that you’ve seen, huh? You’re an Upperlander, so I don’t blame you for being confused. I mean, I’m sure they exist in the Upperland, too, but I heard there’s a lot fewer of them and they hide themselves.”

“‘One of those’?” Kanna echoed Noa’s words, but she could still find no meaning in them.

“The government calls them ‘robust women.’ They’re bigger than normal—though not usually as huge as your monster over here—and they often get assigned to be in the military and stuff like that, because most of them are stronger than average, and most of them can’t carry any children. You might have noticed that the soldiers are more built than, say, the priestesses, right?”

Kanna paused. She thought back to all the Middlelander women she had seen. In truth, they had all looked so tall and imposing, that she hadn’t yet noticed much of the detailed variations. “So there are others like Goda?”

“Oh yeah. Like I said, she’s unusually big, but robust women make up…maybe one out of ten of us in some places, maybe two out of ten in other places?” She turned towards her sister for some apparent confirmation and Leina nodded, looking up from the dirty yaw that she was scrubbing.

“They’re more common towards the South for some reason,” Leina said. “You can’t always tell, though. It’s kind of a continuum and some are more obvious than others. We still can’t tell if our sister is one, even though she’s tall and her shoulders are kind of wide. She doesn’t have a cycle, but that doesn’t really mean anything, since some of us start really early, but some of us don’t start that until we’re deep into our twenties.”

Kanna’s face twisted against her will, as much as she was trying to be polite about a culture she did not understand at all. “What?” she said. She had never heard something so outlandish about the human body. “Are you all right? Is there a disease or something that plagued your people? Is there a germ that infected the water? Is your food contaminated with some substance?” The words slipped out before she could consider how rude they were.

But Leina laughed. “What does any of that have to do with anything? It’s just always been this way. Who knows why?” She bit into the yaw and chomped away at it happily, then said with a full mouth, “Don’t worry. We don’t hold it against you. We like the fact that foreigners are weird.”

* * *

When Kanna had finally mustered up the gall to approach Goda again, she found her standing by the side of the pond with her clothes back on. The giant was reaching up into a tree to pick some green pomes from the branches, and she was dropping them into her robes until her pockets were bulging with fruit. The sun was high overhead and fell through the thicket of leaves in spots, and there was a bird at the edge of one of the high twigs who was calling out either a mating song or an aggressive warning against the two intruders who had appeared in his midst.

Kanna scratched the back of her neck with uncertainty. “I thought you said that you were fasting,” she mumbled.

“I am. These are for you.”

“Oh.”

Goda paused her movements. “You don’t want them.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then take them.” Goda reached into her pockets with her huge hands and she pressed the fruit up against Kanna’s chest, so that Kanna had no choice but to carry them to avoid having them spill onto her feet. “I know you don’t like yaw.”

Kanna sighed. She busied herself stuffing the fruit into her own pockets. “I’m getting used to it, all right? I imagine that it will take some time, that’s all.”

“Don’t eat it,” Goda said.

“What?”

“I said, don’t eat yaw. It’s fine if you have a little bit now and then, or if you have no other choice, but once you’re settled into the Middleland, don’t make it a habit. Yaw isn’t meant for you. Middlelanders have been dependent on it for tens of thousands of years—just as the plant is dependent on us and it actually can’t grow anymore unless we cultivate it by hand—but the bitterness that you sense in it is more than just a bad taste. It is poison to foreigners. It used to be poison to us, too, but our people adapted and evolved over many eons to tolerate it. It won’t kill you, but over time it can make you sick, and it can disrupt the natural cycles of your body, and it can make it so that you’ll never have any children. Don’t eat yaw.”

Kanna stared at her, completely stunned into silence. When she had recovered her ability to speak, it took her a moment to push the words out, “You’re…you’re telling me this now? I’ve eaten it already!”

“You’ll be fine with what you ate. It’s polite to eat what strangers give to you. But I’m telling you now because we will be separated soon, and most Middlelanders don’t understand that foreigners are different. They will try to make you eat yaw every day, so you will have to find other food to eat instead of what your master provides for you.”

“What? What? How do I even do that?” Kanna took a step towards Goda in panic, and some of the fruit that was still in her hands slipped from her grasp and fell onto the ground. But after a tense pause, she shook her head and set her jaw. “No,” she said. “We’re not going to be separated, so this won’t even be an issue. We don’t have to plan for a future that won’t come.”

Goda looked at her with those empty eyes, with that typically blank stare, and this only made Kanna’s teeth clench further. “There’s nothing wrong with a creative interpretation of reality,” Goda told her, “but denial is something different. You’re in denial right now. Let it go. We will be going to Suda and we will be separated from each other.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Kanna insisted, “even if I have to fight you. I know I’ve resisted you in the past when maybe I shouldn’t have, but I don’t know what else to do now, either.”

“Surrender to me.”

“No!” Kanna kicked some of the fallen fruit in Goda’s direction and she crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re insane, Goda. Even now, I don’t know why you have this suicidal ideation, and why you’re so obsessed with just giving in to fate, but I won’t follow you off the edge of that cliff. In fact, I will do what I can to stop you from jumping over. I’ll grab you by the legs and pull as hard as I can.”

“You tried that already.”

“Fine, fine! I don’t care what happened before, but I’m not getting back into that truck no matter what you do to me! And even if you try to drag me, I’ll resist every one of those two million paces to Suda—or however long we have left to reach that hellish place!”

Goda’s expression didn’t change much, but Kanna had grown used to the small variations now, and she sensed an edge of curiosity. “You’re more than stubborn,” Goda said, studying Kanna’s face. “It’s something else. I wish I had time to find out.”

With a billowing of her robes, the giant turned around and headed back towards the road.

* * *

Goda did not answer the Bou twins when they loudly asked why Kanna was still standing by the tree with her heels dug into the ground. Kanna watched them get into the truck, and she watched Goda start it up, and she watched them peel out onto the road, leaving her behind.

Kanna braced herself for the shocks that were sure to come. She would let them happen, she decided. She couldn’t stand it anymore that she was being led around by her own urge to avoid pain. She would feel the pain, she would lean into it, she would let it fry all of her nerves—but she would not give in to Goda.

Sure enough, after what seemed like only a few seconds, the truck had slowly inched past the forty paces, and the first wince rushed through Kanna’s arm. The pain flowed into the rest of her body, popping against every piece of skin and muscle, and vibrating through all of her bones.

The truck stopped. Goda watched. Kanna clenched up on reflex, but still she would not take those two or three paces to bridge the gap.

The pain grew worse the more she resisted it. It buzzed through every particle inside her—it rose and fell like a wave of heat—and as Goda’s truck inched further, the peak grew higher and higher. Kanna balled her hands into fists and she looked between them onto the gravel with a tense mouth.

The truck rolled on; the pain exploded to another level. It was worse than it had ever been. Kanna groaned loudly and heard her own voice echo through the clearing until she had spooked the bird above her and it fluttered away.

The Bou twins averted their matching gazes—but still, Goda watched. Kanna met those eyes defiantly. She spat in Goda’s direction, hoping the wind would carry it. The pain seared through her nerves, but she would not give in. She was not yet paralyzed, so she would not give in.

Goda revved the engine loudly, as if she were about to launch down the road at full speed. It was a warning.

But then the truck rolled only a single pace. Then half a pace. Then another half.

Each time, it rolled less and less. Each time, Kanna tensed and refused to release.

Goda visibly gritted her teeth as the machine creaked along so slowly that it no longer kicked up any gravel.

Then, finally, the truck stopped altogether.

Goda lifted her hand to touch the door. It seemed as if she were about to get out, but Kanna could not be certain of what the giant was doing, because everything had become a blur.

Kanna was running.

Leaving Goda behind, she sprinted away from Suda, her feet pounding hard against the gravel, the muscles around her knees growing stiff from the swell of shocks. Somehow, she could keep running through it all, even though her body clenched more and more.

Kanna’s strides grew shorter. The hellish pulse burned even into her teeth like the roots had been set on fire. The pain had become so strong and the shock so intense, that she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep going.

She let out a scream with what little will she had left over her lungs. She was running out of breath, out of life. The pain was filling up her awareness, as much as she tried to distract herself from it with her hatred of Goda. It was only her hatred that still drove her. It was an inner fire of spite that burned from Rava Spirits.

But just as she felt that she was about to finally collapse because her blood had gone molten inside her, she heard a voice between her ears—a whisper that was somehow louder than all her screams.

Listen to your breath, it said.

Her breath hitched and her lungs seized and she couldn’t even cough. Her muscles locked and she skidded to a halt.

Try again. Listen to your breath. Don’t make yourself breathe. Don’t try to control it. Listen to the breath that happens on its own.

The words sounded familiar.

Listen to your breath…

Listen…listen…

Listen to your pain…listen to the pain that happens on its own.

Kanna stiffened even more when she heard what the voice had said. It made the pain worse. It brought her attention to the pain, and that felt worse at first. She could not remember ever having suffered so much of it before.

But then, strangely, the pain smoothed out into an amorphous buzzing. The more she brought her awareness to it, the more the sensation seemed to change. It was still painful, but her body slowly stopped resisting—and, to her astonishment, she found that she was able to keep standing, if barely so. She could not run away anymore, but she was no longer suffering the shock; she was feeling herself feeling the pain, which was different.

She didn’t know how, but it was entirely different, even though the pain was the same.

Good…, the voice said. Good…

Her inner body was dancing loosely in her skin. She felt less attached to her own flesh, so it took a lot of effort to bring her head up and glance behind her.

The truck was far away. Goda was standing next to it, motionless, waiting.

When Kanna clenched her fists tighter in anger—and in elation that she might have bested the giant—the suffering suddenly flared again, and so she reminded herself to focus on her breathing, on the pain, on the things that were happening without her control. The pain flowed through her like an energy. It was a river of warmth that reminded her that she was alive. She hated it. She loved it. She hated it. She didn’t resist it.

She surrendered to it.

Kanna fell to the ground and closed her eyes and did not fight the sensation when she realized she was dying.

Good, the voice said, because she had surrendered.

It was the voice of God.

---

Onto Chapter 30 >>

“How did you do that?” Goda’s voice grew louder. Her eyes spread open even more, and they were filled with fire.

It was Kanna’s turn to be surprised, because she had only seen that look on the giant’s face once before, and she didn’t even know what she had done to deserve it this time. Kanna reached for her with one hand, but as soon as her fingers brushed the naked skin of Goda’s jaw, the giant recoiled as if Kanna’s touch had been made of molten lead.

“Get away from me!” she shouted.

Goda pushed her back. Kanna’s spine tapped against the bark of the tree, and though it had been a painless collision, the energy of it was tense, and she could tell that Goda had held back most of her strength. The giant’s impulse had been to ram her—hard.

Kanna looked on in shock, but she did not fight it and she let Goda’s legs slither out of her grasp.

Goda’s expression twisted and changed with effort. The giant braced against the tree, and she turned her head to the side, and her whole body heaved, as if she were about to purge. Nothing came out, but she shook violently and went through the motions of an expulsion nonetheless.

The moment did not last long. A hard sigh flowed through her chest before she finally grew limp against the tree.

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said. “I…”

With one of her long arms, Goda took hold of the collar of Kanna’s robes. The instinct to fight was the first reaction to jerk through Kanna’s bones, but something about the touch made her soften her muscles, and the giant dragged Kanna until they were face to face.

Goda embraced her.

It felt like it was the first time. Every time felt like it was the first time. And just like every time before, Kanna surrendered to it. She let her head fall onto Goda’s shoulder and she let her mouth brush lightly on the woman’s neck. They sat there in silence for awhile as the sun grew brighter on the horizon. Light from the heavens sprinkled over them in earnest, giving a rainbow sheen to the sparse droplets that were still dribbling, though the rain had all but disappeared.

“I’m so sorry, Goda. I don’t know what to say.”

The vision Kanna had seen—with all its vivid imagery, with every explosive feeling that had churned in her gut—had already begun fading, loose like a fantasy, like a nightmare she had awoken from and could quickly forget.

She knew that Goda had no such luxury.

Their breathing flowed in sync. Kanna felt like she was floating in a vast ocean with steady waves that rose and fell and made her body dance softly above the depths.

After some time, after she had felt Goda’s body losing the rest of its tension, Kanna finally murmured, “What happened to us?” At first Goda said nothing in reply, and Kanna could only feel the muscles of the giant’s neck stretching with a smile. It gave her some relief. “This isn’t normal, is it? You haven’t told me a lot, but I’ve gathered this much.”

Goda shrugged. “Normal to whom? According to the Maharan religion, anyone who is able to grasp another’s serpents should be accused of using witchcraft. If there’s a rule like that in the first place, then it must be normal for some people.”

With a blush, Kanna reached up and touched Goda’s face boldly, and the giant did not flinch this time. “Are you trying to accuse me of being a witch?”

“I’ve accused you of nothing. It isn’t my business what you are. You already know.”

“I am no one,” Kanna replied. Goda laughed at this. “I’m serious. I don’t know if I’m more of a witch than Rem Murau, but I can be no one for you the same way you were no one for me. I can be that void and scare your snakes, the same way you scared all of mine. I can carry you, the same way you carried me. It doesn’t make you weak.”

“Be no one for yourself. It doesn’t work any other way.”

“You say that, but look at what just happened between us. Maybe I did have to untangle my own snakes with my own power in that cavern, but you whispered in my ear to help me on my way. And out here, I touched something in you. Even just touching helped. The snake isn’t gone, but it’s different; I can feel it. We both gave each other something that we couldn’t give our own selves from our own vantage points.”

Goda inclined her head and her lips brushed the side of Kanna’s cheek, which somehow felt more intimate to Kanna than any of their frenzied touching those other times. It made some more blood trickle up to her face.

But as she stared into the scenery that grew ever brighter, at the image of the trees and the rocks and the cliff that had emerged from the earlier shadows, she couldn’t help but remember everything she had seen in the visions. The dreams had slowly come together, had finally started to make sense.

“From my vantage point, I can see how much you’ve tortured yourself,” Kanna whispered, “worse than I’ve ever tortured my own self. You don’t deserve this punishment.” An uncomfortable, sour feeling had settled in Kanna’s stomach. She wondered how much she should say next, but soon decided that there was no point in keeping it to herself anymore. “Rem Murau gave me the cuff key, did you know that? She did it because she wanted you to die, but she didn’t want to be the one to kill you. Her sister manipulated you the same way. She set you up to sin in her place. She sacrificed you so that she wouldn’t have to face hell, but she left you with a hell on Earth to face instead.”

Goda was already shaking her head. “She had no ill intentions. She was merely ignorant and desperate. She didn’t realize what it would turn into—and, besides, the final decision was mine. She did not make me do it. I did it out of selfishness, to end my own pain, because back then I felt her suffering as if it were my own. I had never felt anything like that before. I went to the temple and begged the Goddess to take away every shred of empathy that had suddenly awakened in me, but She didn’t, and so I killed her.”

“From the moment she met you, that priestess ordered you to kill the pests in her yard and told you that it was your role as a layperson to sin for her. She trained you from the beginning to slaughter her like those rabbits. Why can’t you see that?”

The giant grew silent for a long time. “Because,” she finally said, “my eyes are different from yours. I will never see it the way you do. I felt things for her that will always blind me to anything but an image of her as the Goddess. This is how I know so much about idolatry and its dangers: I was speaking from experience.” The giant’s frame seemed to grow stiffer with some other rush of memory. “But that’s not the worst of it. I’m responsible for more than Taga’s death. I’ve created so much imbalance in this world with my actions, something I have to live with every day.”

“Tell me. If it’s worse, it’s worse.”

Goda sighed. She seemed to struggle finding the words. “Lots of things happened after that day—not just to me, but to everyone. All of it stemmed from that one moment, that one life I had taken.” Her eyes grew unfocused and she glanced up at the cliff, towards the shrine. “Before that moment, death had just been an idea to me…but then there she was, lying on the mattress, lifeless, all the blood drained from her. I had never seen a dead person before. It struck me all at once that it was I who had done it. I ran to the stream to wash the blood off before anyone could see. Maybe then it would be like it didn’t happen, I thought. Maybe I would wake up from the dream with a splash of cold water.”

Kanna thought back to the vision she had of the giant crouched over the creek, and the surface of the water that was too washed with light for her to see any reflection. She remembered the accusing voice that she had heard shouting through the forest, the voice that had cried, “Goda, what did you do?”

“Priestess Rem saw you,” Kanna whispered.

“Yes. She saw me and somehow she knew what I had done. She ran to Taga’s cabin, and so I fled without so much as putting my clothes back on. Even then, I knew that if the soldiers caught hold of me before the administrators arrived, that they would torture me in secret because I had killed a priestess. It made me cowardly. I went to my room and found the vial of Flower brew that I had made for Taga—the medicine that she had refused—and I swallowed as much as I could. I thought that it would just kill me, which it nearly did; but in the end, I didn’t hold down enough of it. I purged just like you saw me do now, and so it sent me on a journey instead.” Goda shifted uncomfortably in place, but her gaze still seemed far away. “Most people—those who survive to tell about it—see paradise on the other side of the Flower. I went to some other place. I saw things that I wouldn’t wish on the lowest of people. The Flower shows you your true self, a glimpse of what awaits you when you die—and I’m a killer, so that’s what I saw. I’ve spent the rest of my life fearing and avoiding that place, because that’s where I’m going in the end. To die means to look into the eyes of that snake; it’s the only thing that stands between me and the Goddess, but it is Hell. I can’t do it.”

Kanna was stunned into quiet. There was a milky quality to the giant’s eyes, as if she were fighting to rise up out of a dream.

“When I came back to this reality,” she said, “the temple hands had found me collapsed in my room. Because it was obvious that I had Flower in me, they misunderstood the situation. They told the story as if I had swallowed Flower and then lost my mind and killed a priestess in a crazed rampage. Samma Flower doesn’t work that way—it doesn’t make you go insane—but they were too shocked to believe that I had done it coldly and soberly, so they needed an exaggerated story to explain it. They made the plant out to be more dangerous than it really is. Flower was already illegal at the time, but thanks to this scandal, the more religious legislators grew hysterical, and the law quickly changed to require a death sentence for vessels and distributors.”

“You mean…?” Kanna grasped the edges of Goda’s opened robes and twisted them in her fingers. She felt the giant’s tension flowing into her. She looked away. “…It was you, then.”

“Yes. It was I who created this whole mess.” Goda swallowed. Kanna felt the tension ebb and flow from the giant’s neck, until it had reached a tentative balance again. “Who knows how many people have been executed for handling Flower since then? In this sense, I killed many more people when I killed Taga. I’m responsible for the deaths of thousands because of this singular decision.”

Kanna closed her eyes tightly. She pushed her face harder against Goda’s skin, and she felt that throat seizing with every one of the giant’s shaky breaths. Kanna listened to the pulse, a faint rushing sound that was quickly filling up the natural silence of the clearing.

“You can’t put all that on yourself,” Kanna said softly. “You were only sixteen. You were only trying to help someone.” But then Kanna paused, another connection surfacing abruptly. “And Taga was a vessel, wasn’t she? She would have been the first person you awakened, if she hadn’t resisted you.”

Goda nodded. “Though we can’t be certain now, she probably was. I didn’t fully realize it at the time because I had no experience, but looking back she had many of the symptoms. They had been accumulating most of her life, until she was in agony, and no one knew how to help her. I was drawn to the idea of giving her Flower brew. I don’t know how I knew, but I was certain that it would not kill her, that it would offer some relief that wasn’t physical death.”

“But she refused it. She chose her religion over her own life.”

“Yes. The Goddess would not save her, and I couldn’t save her in the end, either—so I delivered the death blow myself.” Goda caught Kanna’s gaze. Her eyes shined in the red of the morning light, like the surface of glass lightly tinted with blood. “And I’ve paid very much for trying my hand at playing God all those years ago. I’m paying for it to this day, and so is everyone else.”

Hearing that, Kanna gritted her teeth. She shook her head and pulled away, and after a bit of stumbling, she managed to rise up to her feet. “Stop it,” Kanna said, more determined this time. “You’re wrong. You’re just wrong. I haven’t lived your life, so I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to be you and to have gone through all this, but I do know that the guilt has clouded your mind.” She stooped down to grab Goda’s arm, which was heavy and limp. She pulled hard on it, trying to coax the giant to stand up with her. “Let’s get away from here. This place must be cursed. It makes you act strangely and I can’t take it anymore.”

But the giant didn’t move. Instead, she looked up at Kanna with faint amusement while Kanna tugged and tugged and grunted with effort. With one final jerk, Goda’s arm slipped from between Kanna’s fingers and Kanna fell backwards onto the ground with a thud.

Kanna slammed the earth with her hands in frustration. “God, why did you have to be this unmovable oaf?” she complained. “Why did you have to be the size and temperament of an ox? Back when I was younger and I imagined my first passionate embrace, I had always pictured someone elegant, someone refined, someone with a beautiful face and a graceful demeanor who would sweep me off my feet. Instead, I got you.”

Goda’s amused smirk only seemed to widen. “Reality has ripped you off, it’s true. Maybe you’ll have better luck with the next person.”

“The next person?” Kanna looked at Goda with disbelief. “There is no ‘next’ person. Are you too blind to see that, too? Who on Earth could I be with after all of this?”

“There’s nothing wrong with living a spiritual life, but don’t you think celibacy is a bit extreme?” Goda’s head had fallen back to rest against the tree trunk and her face had grown relaxed, which Kanna did not like.

“Stop teasing me like that, pretending that you don’t hear me. You know exactly what I’m saying. I’m not leaving your side, whether you want me there or not. Make no mistake, Porter: We will escape together. I don’t know how, but we will, even if I have to rip that cuff off your wrist with my bare hands.”

Goda let out a soft laugh. “I told you before that it wasn’t a good idea to get attached. Now you see why. I’m not going to be around for much longer.”

“You don’t know the future,” Kanna snapped.

“Maybe I don’t, but I can see some of it. There is a path carved out for us, even if it seems on the surface that we stumble through it on accident. And you—you saw it, too, didn’t you?”

Kanna grew quiet. That memory from the future that she had seen in the shrine—the vision of Goda surrounded by pounding boots while Kanna screamed at her—was still fresh enough that it made Kanna uncomfortable. “How do you know what I saw?” Goda merely stared at her with that same smile, so Kanna figured that the giant wasn’t going to elaborate, and she asked instead, “Then you know what that vision meant? Was it something that happens in Suda?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me!” Kanna demanded, pushing herself up from the ground, staggering onto her feet again, her legs wavering in the mud even as her gaze of expectation did not. “What was that? What were you doing? Why was I begging you to stop?”

“I can’t tell you.” The serenity on Goda’s face had not faded, and her tone was cryptic, closer to her usual self; this unnerved Kanna more than the words.

“What is it with you and all the mysteries, even now? Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because,” the giant said, “then you’ll try to stop me.”

* * *

The sky was wide and entirely clear when they trudged back onto the gravel of the main road, even though the wind was blowing some of the dust around and making a light haze on the path. Kanna walked in front of Goda because she didn’t want to look at her, but she could still feel the giant’s presence like a rush of energy raining down over her shoulder, stronger than before.

The feeling of connection to the giant had not worn off. It had become like a pulsing cord of heat that flowed back and forth between them, and Kanna could not shake it. She could not rip herself away. She could not numb herself to it. It was raw and uncomfortable, and she found herself wishing that she didn’t have to live with it.

Kanna approached the truck with resistance still in her. The twins were smiling and sitting on the tailgate with their legs dangling over the ground and a plume of smoke encasing them. They gave her matching grins. They sucked on their cigars and waved their hands in welcome as soon as they had seen her.

“Hey, hey! You two disappeared for a long time, there. What were you up to all alone on the other side of the cliff?” Noa asked once Kanna was close enough. Her tone was suggestive; even through the language barrier, Kanna could hear the implication clearly. “Fine, don’t explain it. I already saw anyway. Last night, I got up to do my business in the bushes, and I noticed you two wrapped around each other like a pair of kittens. It all makes sense now. To think we tried to rescue you from this brute in Karo, convinced that she was abusing you, and all along it was some twisted role play. Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Shut up,” Kanna said. She climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

“Sheesh! Kind of grumpy this morning, aren’t you?” It was Leina who was yammering next. “Did you have a nightmare or something?”

Kanna clenched her teeth. It took all her inner strength to stop herself from spinning around to yell in the woman’s face. She could handle all the misunderstandings so far—all the creative stories about Upperland culture, all of the bureaucrats shortening her name, all the lies she had told on purpose—but for some reason, she couldn’t bear to hear stories about what had happened between her and Goda. The experience had been so far beyond any words, that she doubted even telling it herself would be any closer to the truth.

The truck wriggled when Goda climbed inside of it. She busied herself with the controls as if nothing had happened. Kanna gripped her own knees to keep from reaching out and striking Goda’s handsome, hideous face—the face that was already etched with scratches that had barely had time to begin healing, the face that Kanna wanted to take between her hands and break into pieces in an embrace of affection and malice.

“So, Giant,” Noa asked, aptly changing the subject after she seemed to read the foul mood in the air, “how long do you think we have until we get to Suda?”

But Kanna was having none of it.

“We’re not going to Suda,” Kanna answered for Goda.

Noa twisted her face, raising her eyebrows in confusion. “Hah? But I thought you said that you were—”

“We’re not going to Suda!” Kanna cried, jerking her head around and staring Noa directly in the eyes. “Ride with us if you want; we’re not going to the capital if I have anything to do with it. I don’t care if I have to grab a rock and knock the giant unconscious and drive this piece of junk off a goddamn embankment, but we’re not going anywhere near that godforsaken place! It’s cursed! It’s cursed! There’s nothing but death waiting for us there!”

Noa recoiled, looking at her with speechless astonishment. The tip of her crooked cigar burned in her pause, and the ash fell into the bed of the truck.

Adding nothing to the conversation, Goda turned the truck on and pulled back onto the road. Almost as soon as they had steadied their course, Goda veered to the left and headed down what looked like another major path.

There was absolute silence for awhile, except for the rushing of the wind. Goda’s unkempt hair flew up and danced around with the hood of her robes. The truck flashed past a wooden sign on the roadside, and it was so quick that Kanna barely had time to decipher it.

Going South, it had read.

2,000,000 paces to Suda.

The wheels crunched onward against Kanna’s will.

---

Onto Chapter 29 >>

“I believe you,” Kanna said.

When she found Goda again, the woman was on the ground, slumped against a tree. She was still breathing, but every inhalation was ragged, stiff. Her hands pressed into the mud. The rain had soaked her hair and every corner of her robes—and though Kanna could only see the woman’s back, she could feel deep shudders that shook the ground, almost imperceptible earthquakes.

But Kanna could feel everything.

It seemed like she was catching sight of what the giant looked like when she was alone. For the first time, Kanna watched her with both eyes—with the one that saw divinity and the other that saw the devil—and though both images fused together, she wondered what Goda looked like underneath it all as well.

“I won’t deny it anymore. You are a killer. You told me this yourself, so you must be that.”

When Goda turned—when she finally seemed to hear Kanna’s voice—her face was partly covered by the heavy mat of her hair, but her eyes were open, and they were not empty. Her expression was complex. There were many things inside, but above all, the woman was surprised—bewildered, maybe—when she met Kanna’s gaze.

“Still, there’s something important that you’re keeping from me. I know there is.”

Goda let out a breath, something that sounded like resignation. But her gaze did not waver. “I’ve said it all. Now go.”

“Why hide from me, then? If you told me everything—if that really is everything—why are you still hiding? Why are you trying to scare me away?”

“You have the power to escape now. You have your key and you know how to drive the truck. Do yourself a favor and use it.”

“I’m not going to watch you die, Goda.”

“Then don’t watch.”

Kanna gritted her teeth and grasped a handful of Goda’s robes. She knelt down beside her, as if the tree were a muddy altar, a private shelter—even if it did not spare them from much of the rain.

“You don’t understand,” Kanna said, her knees pressing hard into the roots, dislodging some of the smaller ones as she leaned in close. “I have no choice. I will see it anyway. Everything you’ve hidden, I can see it. You told me that I was the Goddess, that I wear many masks to hide from myself. Well, I’m tired of hiding. I’ve unmasked you. I’ve seen all the bits and pieces of myself in you—I dreamed all these memories as if they happened to me—and yet I have no idea what it all means together or why I was meant to see it. That’s all I want to know. So tell me: Who am I?”

“I told you what I am.”

“I believe you,” Kanna said once more. “I believe in you…and I’m still here, Goda.”

The giant let out a huff, and though at first Kanna took it as a strange, sardonic laugh, another convulsion followed, then another. The woman’s breaths turned into hard shudders. She pressed her hands tightly to her face as she gasped into them.

Goda fell to the earth, her back against the roots this time, the rain falling directly on her half-covered face. She sunk into the slick grass and the weeds. Her head landed on a patch of moss and her hair tangled with the green. She shuddered harder, deep groans bursting out of those huge lungs, deep laughs that sounded like pain.

Kanna had no idea what she was seeing. She had no idea how to react, but her body reacted for her and she collapsed beside the giant. On instinct, she crawled through the dirt and pulled herself onto Goda’s legs and pressed her face hard to the inside of her thigh. Kanna felt the quaking of those bones against her as if they were her own. She wrapped her arms around Goda’s calf, the muscles flexing and unflexing with discomfort against her.

The ground had started moving. Kanna could feel it at first as a tiny disturbance, but as the seconds passed, she realized that the solid earth beneath her had begun to rise and fall like tiny waves, like the ripples of a pond. Convinced that she had knocked her head and not realized, she jerked her face up from the giant and she looked at the ground around them in the dim light of early dawn that had started to come down from the trees.

But the space beneath them was brighter than the weak sun leaking out from the horizon. The ground was teeming with life, flashing brightly with a multitude of colors and spirals that glowed in the twilight. Kanna held her breath. She saw the snakes dancing, coming up out of the earth. They would contract and relax against each other, and slither up through the cracks between the fallen leaves.

Her eyes had scrolled through countless lenses in order to see them, but somehow she knew that they had always been there even when she could not perceive them. They flashed brighter and moved wildly the moment she realized it. The chaos was too much. She tried to hide her face against Goda’s clothes once again—and it was then that the writhing scales of a dragon caught her eye.

Kanna froze. It was right next to her face. The huge serpent had coiled up along the giant’s hips, and its head rose up from between Goda’s legs, and it was tasting the air near Kanna, hissing with aggression and curiosity. Kanna looked away, too terrified to meet its eyes, because she realized that it had been the snake she had seen spiraling along Goda’s body in the shrine.

Goda stirred. Cautiously, Kanna glanced past the snake, over at the giant who peered at her through the weak light. Goda had lifted her head up; she had uncovered her face and let her hands drop to her sides.

“You can see it?” the woman murmured. She seemed surprised, but her eyes had narrowed as well. “Don’t look at it. It’s not your burden.”

From the corner of her eye, Kanna could sense the monster rising, more and more of its body sprouting up from the place where the giant’s legs came together. Kanna dug her fingers into Goda’s thigh. She steeled herself. She decided.

With some effort, Kanna deliberately turned her head to gaze at the side of the creature’s body, at the scales that pulsed with dancing light. The colors shifted to match the forest, and then to contrast it, before a conspicuous array of rainbows shot down its body. Kanna stared into its skin, mesmerized. She found that her thoughts slowed, that her mouth seemed to move on its own. “No,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

The snake seemed to hear her and it flashed its display faster in response, though Kanna still would not look at its face. She lost herself in the color, in every little dot, in every fiber that writhed between Goda’s legs.

Without thinking, Kanna reached.

Then she pulled back again. Her heart was pounding. She knew what she needed to do next, even though she could not believe it.

“Can I touch it?” she asked. She had grown breathless.

Goda did not answer, but when Kanna glanced back up at the giant’s face, there was no gesture of disapproval. There was merely a woman staring down with astonishment.

And so Kanna did not ask again. She reached between Goda’s legs and pressed the tips of her fingers gingerly against the serpent’s skin. The contact made her shudder. It awakened something in her, an energy that seemed to shoot through her own legs—an energy that was not unpleasant in its discomfort.

The snake slithered against her open hand and she felt the scales moving past, scraping her own skin with a faint sensation of both pleasure and pain. This made Kanna grow bolder, so with a light grip, she wrapped her hand around the thick body of the snake, and she felt its throbbing, rolling muscles; she felt the heat and power that radiated from its flesh; she felt Goda’s hitched breath when she squeezed.

The serpent slithered between her fingers and explored other places, but as it did, Kanna’s awareness of every sensation heightened. There was a familiar whining in her ears. Her body became loose in her skin as it had near the mouth of the shrine.

And then she burst through into a different world.

* * *

The giant was sprinting through a forest that was bathed in rays of light. She dashed between shadows and sun so quickly, that it pulsed against her eyes like a strobing lamp, and it blinded her sometimes, and it made her head hurt other times. The satchel around her shoulder slammed hard against her chest with every stride.

Kanna could feel that dull pain the moment she had found herself in this new body—but the pain grew as a startling noise blasted through her ears.

It was a loud scream of agony, and it was shaking its way through the forest. It rang stronger with every step. Kanna did not know if this was because the giant was running closer to the source or because the screams were growing louder. At any rate, the giant’s heart pounded almost as loudly. She clawed through branches in desperation. Kanna could feel the giant’s own pain matching those disembodied cries, as if they were her own suffering, as if the giant were carrying a splinter in her chest that dug deeper with every scream. Finally, when the noise had grown so loud that Kanna prayed the giant would cover her ears, she burst through the brush and into a clearing.

There lay a young woman pressing her face against the dirt. Goda fell to her knees. She reached for the woman, the sleeve of her long robes rustling with her panic.

But the woman pulled away. Her hands were pressed to her eyes; her face was twisted with pain; her brow was lacquered with sweat. Even still, she managed to shout at the giant:

“Don’t touch me! You know you can’t touch me!”

The woman collapsed the rest of the way onto the ground.

Kanna watched helplessly as the woman writhed and dug her fingers into the earth and breathed in the dust that flew up from her struggles. Kanna watched until the young woman had grown limp and the screaming stopped. Her cries turned into whimpers, then the whimpers into heavy breaths.

The faint sound of a distant bird filled the clearing, but otherwise a deep silence descended upon them.

A long moment passed, enough for the bird to change his song. Because the now silent woman wouldn’t move, the giant gently slipped two arms beneath her body and picked her up. There was barely a struggle, but the woman did open her eyes as she began to sway with the giant’s stride.

“It’s not your place to carry a priestess,” she murmured with little resolve. Nonetheless, she curled her head into Goda’s chest, the way Kanna had on the trip down from the cliff-side.

“I haven’t touched you,” the giant answered—and it was true. The woman was covered from head to toe in Maharan robes and wore a pair of thick gloves, and so no part of Goda’s skin had so much as grazed her.

“You know why a layperson can’t touch a priestess, don’t you, Goda?” Her voice sounded a bit muffled with her mouth lightly pressed against the giant, but Kanna could still see the very faintest of smiles emerging with her shuddering breaths. “It’s because you’ll infect me with your serpents.”

“Serpents don’t exist.”

“That’s the kind of denial I would expect from a long-necked swan like you,” the woman said, her tone a bit delirious.

As they hovered slowly through the trail, the giant’s gaze fell more intently on the priestess, and Kanna had a chance to finally notice that the woman had Priestess Rem’s face.

But she was not Rem.

Though the woman had her features, she had not her essence, and with a new context now—a new lens—it all became obvious to Kanna. She wondered how she had not realized it before: In all the dreams, in all the images from the shrine, Kanna had not been seeing the past life of Priestess Rem at all, but rather of Rem’s twin.

Taga Murau.

Once they had reached the cottage at the mouth of the trail, the giant had to swing her satchel back and stoop low to unlatch the gate of the fence. Her bare hand nearly brushed the priestess’s head in the maneuver, but Goda caught herself just in time, and she was able to step through the garden and push through the front door without further incident.

She dropped the priestess onto a bed with pure white sheets. When the priestess looked up at the giant—her hair messy and smattered against the pillows, a few drops of sweat still on her brow, a faint blush now having settled on her cheeks—the giant jerked her gaze away quickly. She busied herself searching for a chair, and when she found one, she dragged it over to the bedside and sat.

She dropped her bag onto the floor. She looked once again at the priestess, but this time with wariness. Kanna could feel the giant’s heart pounding still; she could feel the bashful warmth rising up to the giant’s face.

“We’re playing with fire, Goda,” the priestess whispered. The pain had worn off from her expression, but her breaths still came in hard, and her eyes were trained on the giant intently. “Rem told me to keep away from you, and now I’m inclined to agree with her. You know better than to try to rescue me. You feel too entitled now.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do.” Another faint smirk came to life on the woman’s face as she seemed to recover. “Even as you sit there and look at me, it’s obvious. And it’s my fault. I’ve burdened you. I shouldn’t have encouraged this friendship between us, knowing where it might have led.” When Goda refused to reply, she broke the gaze and let it wistfully fall out the window, towards the garden. “What to do, Apprentice, what to do? You’re enamored of me. This has become increasingly clear.”

The giant’s body stiffened, but there was no reaction in her voice when she said, “That’s none of your business.”

The priestess turned back to her and laughed. “So typical of you to give me such strange answers. You’re so young and yet you brush aside my stupid flirtations like an old man. How coy of you. Is that your way of trying to seduce me?” She huffed with amusement when Goda’s glance fell towards the floor. “But it’s working, you know. I like you, too.”

Kanna could feel Goda’s surprise—and conflict—when she looked back up helplessly. The giant felt naked; Kanna felt naked for her. The glance of the priestess undressed her in many ways.

“I see you have all the layers of your robes on today,” Taga said, as if she were reading Kanna’s thoughts. “That’s unusual. You tend to run a bit hot, don’t you? I’ve seen you bathing in the cold waters of the stream many times in the middle of winter, getting rid of those snakes that you don’t believe in without so much as a shudder. And back in the warmer days, I couldn’t help but notice that you have a snake of your own. But that one you were born with, weren’t you?”

Goda’s blush deepened until her throat pounded with the rushing blood. “That’s also none of your business.”

“There’s no shame in it. I already knew anyway, since your body shape is on the obvious side and your voice has gotten raspier since I met you. It’s just so strange that you would be a gardener instead of a soldier, or a porter, or something more common for your type. Everything about you is strange. It’s why I’ve grown to like you. Indulging curiosity is my secret vice, but I didn’t spend years fighting to join the priesthood only for a handsome face to be my downfall, hm?” The priestess was grinning at her as if she were only playing, but she remained motionless on the bed and watched Goda’s reaction carefully.

The giant shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I was headed down the mountainside to the valley before I heard you in the woods,” she said, changing the subject not very subtly. “That’s why I’m wearing my full robes. The wind is strong today.”

Some irritation finally flashed onto Taga Murau’s face. Having seemed to regain control of her limbs, she pushed herself up on the bed until she was sitting. She offered Goda a serious expression. “Don’t tell me you were out there hunting for Flower again. I told you to abandon that idea. I’ll have none of it.”

“Your fits are getting worse.” Kanna could feel that anguish from before rising up in the giant’s chest. It was a dull ache of panic that oozed through every muscle. “Be logical about this. Have some sense of self-preservation. I’ve watched this disease progress in you even in the months since we first met.” The giant’s words started spilling out faster, though Kanna could feel a tight restraint trying to hold back the desperation. “Rem admitted to me that in all your years no one has ever come close to a solution. It’s time for more radical measures. I can’t watch this happen to you. I can’t watch you in pain every day. I can’t watch you inch closer to….” Goda stopped. Some heat had risen to the backs of her eyes. The word on her lips was death, but she had not voiced it. “I’ve heard rumors that Flower can cure many things. It’s worth it to at least—”

“And who, I wonder, put that notion in your head in the first place?” the priestess interrupted, raising her voice. “Or is that also none of my business?”

Instead of answering, Goda reached down and undid the tie of her bag. She pulled out a leather scroll that looked familiar to Kanna and dropped it rudely onto the priestess’s lap.

Taga looked bewildered at first, but as soon as she recovered, she unrolled the cylinder with curiosity and her eyes scanned its contents. “It’s written in the Old Middlelander script. What is it?” Her voice had nearly returned to the softness of before in the midst of her confusion.

“I have no talent for languages like the rest of you do,” the giant said, “so I could only decipher the first part with some difficulty. It’s a recipe. There are three other sections, and going by the illustrations, it looks like they’re detailed instructions on how to use the product—but I can’t tell what they say. It’s gibberish.”

The priestess squinted at the text and her eyes seemed to dart between the rows of carefully-placed glyphs that were etched on the scroll. “That’s because only the first part is in Middlelander. The second part looks like it might be Upperlander tongue written in Old Middlelander script. It was a common practice before they had a script of their own. The other parts, I can’t tell what language they’re in.” But then she closed the thick scroll and threw it onto the floor with a thud, as if she had just noticed that it was on fire. “It hardly matters, anyway. This document is blasphemous. May the Holy Mother forgive me for even looking at it, the way I hope she’s forgiven me for looking at you. Where on Earth did you find it, Goda?”

“It showed up on my bed after I came back from some business at the temple a few weeks ago.”

The priestess raised an eyebrow. “‘Business’? Even asking you to show up to morning meditation is like asking you to pull out your own teeth. What might have lured you willingly to the presence of the Goddess, I wonder?”

“I was…praying.” Goda’s jaw tightened. “I had racked my mind for solutions and my mind had come up short, so I thought I’d try something else.”

Taga seemed even more taken aback, but then her gaze fell towards the scroll on the floor and she appeared to make a connection that Kanna had missed. “I see,” she murmured. “And so you think this is how the Goddess answered your prayers, do you? Well, even you know better than that, Goda. The Goddess would never encourage you to brew some ancient Flower recipe, no matter the reason. It’s against the law and against our religion. You know that, don’t you? I shouldn’t even be listening to you talk about it.”

“The seeds I planted in the woods have already blossomed,” Goda mumbled after the pause, ignoring everything the priestess had said, “but I didn’t know if it would be enough, so I was going back to the valley to find some more. In the meantime, consider it at length. The Flower is more potent in its brewed form. Going by the recipe, it should not take me long to prepare it for you and it should be easy to hold down. Maybe it will even be painless.”

Taga’s hands had fallen onto the bed. She was gripping the sheets tightly with her fingers, conflict evident on her face, but after a moment she sighed. “Look, Goda, just get out,” she said, her tone suddenly empty of emotion. “I will not blaspheme the Goddess. It is one thing to be tempted by carnal emotions and another thing entirely to entertain swallowing the Samma Flower. You’ve grown much too familiar with me. It ends now. Leave and don’t come back.”

Goda shot up to her feet so quickly that the chair almost fell over, but she did not step away from the spot. She stared down at Taga with gritted teeth. “You and your religious delusions. You’re going to die because of this nonsense you believe in!”

“Oh, and you’re my heroic savior, Apprentice Brahm? How noble of you to offer to shove a Samma blossom down my throat and send me to hell in order to save my life! For what? So that you can keep me around for your own selfish happiness?” She sat up straighter. Her eyes narrowed with fury. “Have you ever considered that maybe I don’t want to live? I’ve tolerated this torment most of my life, long before you ever showed up with your arrogance. It won’t kill me. My muscles will seize and my body will feel like it’s bursting open, but I won’t grow any closer to death because of it. If only I should be so lucky! If only this sickness could actually kill me, then maybe there is some mercy in this world! Instead, I have to watch you slaughter all the rabbits in my garden while I stand by licking my lips, begging the Goddess that I should be next!” Her voice buzzed against the walls of the cabin as she cried out with renewed pain. “You want me to live like a normal person, and you want to walk alongside me, and you want to reach out to touch me—all childish fantasies! Don’t deny it. I can see it in your face every day; your intentions are transparent. Even someone as stoic as you is not immune to youthful passion. I’m sorry. It really is my fault and it’s not fair to you—but if you ever do touch me, I only pray that it’s those inhuman hands clasped around my neck, stealing my last breath!”

Goda had stumbled backwards, nearly tripping over the chair. Eyes wide, head throbbing, Kanna could hear the blood gushing deep inside her ears. It nearly drowned out Taga’s voice.

“Why are you saying that?” Goda shouted. “I would never hurt you. Never. I love—” But the giant stopped because she was about to reveal too much.

Taga grew quiet. She stared for a long time into the giant’s face. Twin streams of tears fell from her eyes in a single, sudden burst, but that was all. She seemed to blink the rest back. She stared at Goda with a gaze of confusion, of shock—though Kanna couldn’t tell what had struck her with such force.

The silence in the cabin grew for a long moment and almost became its own entity. Kanna could feel it flowing and shifting uncomfortably against the two of them. The wind blew outside. The leaves of swaying trees crackled faintly.

“If you really feel that way about me,” Taga finally said, “then you’ll offer me what I ask. It’s the only thing I want from you. It’s the only medicine that will surely end my suffering, and I can’t deliver it myself without sinning against the Goddess. What do you care? You don’t even believe in Mother Mahara, so what kind of hell would you have to fear?”

Goda stood frozen in place, in the midst of a step back, her hand clasped to her chest. Her fingers were digging into her own skin with nervous tension, and Kanna could already feel that she didn’t know her own strength, that she was drawing blood without fully realizing. The giant was shaking her head. Kanna could sense the denial, the effort to interpret Taga’s words in some other way.

“No,” Goda said. “No. I won’t do that. You’re insane if you think I’ll do that.”

“Insane,” Taga huffed. “People have called me insane all my life because it’s only me who can feel the inside of my body breaking in half, even when it looks whole from the outside to them. But I know what I feel. It’s as real as anything else, and by now I know that it will never go away.” She turned to face the window, to look out at the expanse of trees. After awhile, she murmured once again, “Get out, Goda.” There was no energy in it, which made it sound worse to Kanna, and it seemed to startle Goda, too.

The giant shuffled quickly towards the door. The chair finally toppled over with a smack as she staggered past it, and she forgot the scroll in her rush to escape.

Soon, the giant’s body was sprinting through the woods again, those huge lungs huffing with exhaustion and pain, those long limbs crashing against tree trunks, the switches of low-lying branches whipping against her face. A wave of heat had settled in the giant’s eyes, and she took a deep breath to suck it up, so the tears still would not fall.

She ended up at the bottom of a high staircase made of stone. She gazed up at the wide open doorway of the building that lay at the summit, and Kanna could just barely see down the hallway where an image of the Goddess sat in a posture of welcome. From where Goda was standing, the Goddess looked smaller than She had looked as a tiny idol in their hosts’ house in Karo—but Kanna could tell that this time She was actually massive and simply far in the distance, far out of reach. The statue was lit from all sides by candles, and below the altar, some steam rose up from what seemed like a pool, but Kanna could not see how deep or shallow it was from the angle.

Goda spat onto the staircase and dashed back into the trail.

Just as before, the light flickering from the canopy above flashed in the giant’s eyes—in Kanna’s eyes—but the image of the forest had started to morph and change. The trees rustled. Some of the branches looked fuller. Some of the leaves began to give way to flowers. Time seemed to rush past her just as the trees did.

She heard more gasps, more screaming in the distance. At first, it was peppered throughout the experience, timed with the rising of the sun or the chirping of the birds. Eventually, it grew more frequent. The voice of Taga grew louder and louder. It grew until it was all she could hear echoing deep in her ears.

She thought she saw herself inside the cabin a few more times, or out in the priestess’s garden, or crouching in a clearing with a pot held over a fire, but those moments flashed by so quickly that she could not hold onto them. Only the screaming held on—and the suffering that Goda felt as if it were her own, the suffering that was becoming unbearable.

Kanna couldn’t tell how many days had passed, but the images before her eyes flickered faster. Eventually, it grew pitch dark.

And then her vision was flooded with blinding light.

Time seemed to stop. Kanna felt her stomach knotting.

She was in the cabin again. It was midday, and the rays streamed in warmly through the open windows. The curtains swayed back and forth with light gusts of wind.

She looked down at her hand.

It was not her own, but she didn’t feel as separate from it as she had before. She was clasping a piece of polished metal.

A knife.

On its surface, she could see just the edge of her reflection—of the giant’s reflection—the same way she had seen her own face on the side of her cuff.

The point of the knife was pressed against a patch of skin, some skin that danced with a gushing pulse beneath it, some skin near a collar that was locked with a four-sided pendant. The breathing of the throat was quick, too, like the ecstatic breaths of a tiny rabbit.

Kanna tried not to, but she had no control. Even though her hand trembled, she pushed it. Even though she could feel a sharp breath, a shudder of resistance, and pain coming from her own chest, she buried the knife into the pulse point of that neck until it had thrust all the way to the hilt.

She was careful not to brush the skin with the tips of her fingers because it was blasphemy.

The eyes of the woman beneath her had been closed, but then they opened. They stared. Kanna cried out in an agony that welled up all at once inside of her. She dropped the knife, and from the void that it left behind, blood spurted out at her and painted her hands and arms and clothes.

There was more—a weak gushing, before the pressure died and the blood began oozing, dripping from its source down the side of the bed. The white sheets were coated in bright red. The air was smeared with the scent of iron.

All the while, the woman stared. She stared without saying anything, and when she eventually closed her eyes again, Kanna collapsed onto the floor and covered her face with her soaked hands.

Those eyes, those eyes.

They were so burned into Kanna’s mind that when she snapped back into her own body, she let out a gasp that echoed through the emptiness.

* * *

Kanna screamed. She cried out and clawed at the ground and screamed in horror at the images that still played in her mind. She was grateful for the feeling of the dirt underneath her, for the feeling of her own legs kicking against the forest floor, but the burden of what she had just done still racked her with guilt. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed. She could not control it. It was like a wave that passed through her, as if the guilt were its own entity using her body to live and move.

“I killed her! I killed her!” Her mind was churning with a hundred thoughts, a hundred snakes.

But the sun had begun to blossom in earnest, and the early rays leaked in through the crook of Kanna’s arm.

She lifted her head. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand without the barest sense of decorum. She looked at Goda just in time to see a huge serpent diving into the ground and disappearing below the crust of the Earth, as if to escape from the light. The other snakes had also gone, but Kanna knew by now that they still vibrated beneath the surface, that she had merely fallen back into a state where she could not see them directly.

Instead, she could see Goda’s wide, black eyes. The giant stared at her with shock, with breaths that came quickly and seemed to jerk her whole body, to make her muscles tighten and writhe like the forms of the snakes. Her chest heaved with effort when a rasp finally emerged from her throat:

“How did you do that?”

---

Onto Chapter 28 >>

A single drop fell down from the sky. It hit the back of Kanna’s head coldly, and it broke trails through her hair on its way down the back of her neck. The water sucked the warmth out of her skin, made her muscles stiffen.

It was then that she noticed the curtain of mist that had been falling between her and Goda. The rain had been faint at first, but the longer that Kanna allowed the silence to widen, the thicker the curtain grew, until it both obscured and reflected some of the moonlight that struck the giant’s face.

Even so, she could still see the white of Goda’s clenched teeth. She could see the look of pain.

“Goda…,” Kanna whispered. Many instincts warred together inside of her. She was too shocked to move at first, but the impulse to stretch across the gap won out, and she reached through the curtain of rain towards the woman who was hiding behind it. “Look, Goda, I don’t understand. I—”

The giant stepped back.

“Just now, you said—” Kanna found herself blinking against the water, looking closely at Goda’s face, trying to determine how she might have misheard. She watched the tiny rivers trickling down from Goda’s forehead and onto her jaw. She looked closely at Goda’s mouth and tried to envision it repeating the words.

Then, there was something else that came together.

Taga Murau.

Those two words echoed in Kanna’s head above the rest, and she found that she was the one repeating them to herself aloud. She felt the familiar shape of the surname on her lips—and then she seized up with realization.

Murau?

“Priestess Rem Murau’s…sister?” Kanna blurted out. “Her twin sister?”

Goda remained motionless in the dusting of rain, in that thick mist that billowed and blew across the side of her face. She let out a sharp breath, a single convulsion that seemed to explode from her chest before it was quickly repressed, but the air blew out from between her teeth and the burst of steam made it look like she was some beast about to charge.

Still, it sounded like a sob, Kanna thought. It sounded like a sob that had been cut short—but it couldn’t have been, because it had come from the mouth of Goda Brahm.

Kanna brought her hand to her chest and clenched at her own robes with nervous tension. “Goda,” she whispered again, “I didn’t hear you right.”

The grimace on Goda’s face grew tighter. Because she was leaning back, because her chin had tilted up, she looked like some creature baring her fangs. “You heard me.”

Goda jerked her head to the side and spat onto the earth. Her robes whipped as she turned around. She disappeared into the mist again, into the dim trail that was flanked by trees and shadowed by the crag.

Kanna took off after her, but it was too dark to see where the woman had gone. She ran along the foot of the cliff, her feet digging into the moist ground, her heels kicking up the leaf litter beneath her. She listened closely past the sound of her own struggles. She listened for Goda’s strides, and before long she had spotted the giant again near the moss bed where they had lain together.

“Goda!” Kanna shouted through the loud bursts of wind that had swooped down between them. “Goda, wait!”

The woman had turned her back, but Kanna reached out to her, grabbing two fistfuls of her robes and pulling back on the cloth with all her strength. She had managed to make Goda slow down, and so she started craning her head to catch those eyes that, for once, had some overwhelming emotion in them that was too powerful to suppress.

“What you said can’t be right! It doesn’t make any sense! You accidentally killed Rem’s sister? How? Was it with Flower? Did you make Flower brew and she drank it and she died, and then they blamed it on you?”

“No.” Goda kept walking. Kanna stumbled and had to readjust her footing to not start dragging behind.

Her snakes were churning. The stories were twisting in Kanna’s mind, growing more elaborate by the second. She had to make sense of it. None of it made sense on its own.

“Then she provoked you?” Kanna asked. “She attacked you and you defended yourself, but because you’re so big you didn’t know your own strength, and you hit her too hard and you—”

“No.”

“Then you were defending someone else? She threatened someone, and so you tried to stop her, but you—” Kanna’s voice was desperate. She did not know why, but it felt like it was she who was being accused of some heinous crime. She was grasping and grasping.

And Goda wasn’t helping her to reach.

“No,” Goda said a final time. She spun around to face Kanna again, her robes twisting in Kanna’s hands. The giant’s features were covered in a slick smear of rain or sweat or something else. Her jaw had grown so tight that her neck was pulsing with tension. “Stop looking for a justification. There is none. I slit her throat. I went into her room while she was asleep and I slaughtered her in her own bed.”

The bones in Kanna’s fingers lost their warmth. She dropped the tail of Goda’s robes. Staring up at the giant in disbelief, she couldn’t stop herself from shuffling backwards on reflex, because the fear that she had fought so hard to dissolve was rising up again.

“No,” Kanna said, more firmly this time. “That can’t be true. Only a monster would—” She found very suddenly that she was uncomfortable in the giant’s stare. Her voice erupted from her much more loudly than she had intended when she cried, “You’re not like that, Goda, you’re not like that! I know you!”

Goda huffed. “You don’t know me, Kanna.”

After a long, spreading moment where the rain seemed to grow harsher, where the tiny wisps that licked Kanna’s face had started to feel like the points of a hundred needles, Kanna dared to look at her directly. The mirthless smile on the giant’s face made her chest seize with horror.

“You only know this,” Goda continued. “This is all that’s left of me: I’m a cold-blooded killer.” Her eyes were narrowed as she peered at Kanna through the haze, but her face had once again become expressionless. “Days ago, I warned you that the moment you found out, your feelings would waver. Has that not come true? Do you still want my hands on you, knowing what I’ve done? Now that you see what I am, are you still so eager to lie down with me, when I could easily kill you the moment you close your eyes?”

Goda finally approached Kanna, looming over her in the dark. The frame of the monster’s shadow blocked out part of the moon. Indeed, Kanna could not fight the urge to recoil. She stumbled, nearly slipping into the mud.

Goda laughed and leaned into another heavy step.

“Ah, yes, that’s what I thought,” she said, stalking forward to make up for the space that Kanna was putting between them. Her shoulders had stretched out into a broad silhouette. “You’re thinking back to what you did only a day ago, to the life that you spared by risking your own. Would you have done that knowing how easily I had taken a life myself? And not just one life. Many have perished because of me, one way or another. Now you question yourself, don’t you?”

Kanna opened her mouth to protest even as she stepped back—but then she noticed the thoughts that had been roiling up inside her, the snakes that had been agitated by Goda’s words.

It was true. She was questioning who Goda even was. She was questioning everything.

“There, you see? You see it now?” Goda told her. “That is what your love is worth. It was strong and burning and powerful yesterday, wasn’t it? You were willing to jump out of a train for it. And now, what is it like? What did it take for your love to turn into fear? A different story. A different image for you to project onto me, as if I’m some statue in a temple that you can paint with the colors of your thousand anxieties—something you can wrestle with instead of yourself. But this time, the story is true: They made a huge mistake when they punished me—but not because I deserve better. I should not be loose out in the world. Even this ounce of freedom is far too dangerous. I’m a killer—and I will kill more.” Because Kanna had averted her eyes to the ground, Goda grabbed her by the chin and forced their gazes to meet. “Look at me. Look. Open your eyes and stare the devil right in the face!”

But Kanna smacked Goda’s hand away, sending droplets spraying in every direction, making Goda laugh even more.

“This is your unconditional acceptance, is it?” Her tone was mocking. “Now, I’m not blaming you. Everyone has their limits. I don’t expect you to accept a murderer, especially one who kills for the self-serving reasons that I did. That would be ludicrous.”

Still not recovered from the shock, Kanna inched back further, faster. She needed space to think. She needed to understand what Goda had said, to make sense of it all. It simply couldn’t have all been true, it simply…

Some tense energy shot through Kanna’s body and stiffened her neck and altered her gaze. She saw the dark, widened eyes of the beast staring down at her—and in those bottomless voids, she caught sight of a small image. She could barely make it out at first, but then it began swirling, writhing, pulsing, rearing up with an open mouth.

It was the most hideous snake Kanna had ever seen.

She turned and ran.

She ran through the sopping earth, even though she could hear that Goda was not behind her. She ran until she was standing somewhere near the side of the road, until she had exhausted her limits, until the first twitch of hot current buzzed through her arm. It was painful, but she shook it off quickly and took a step back to ease it.

Kanna looked down at her wrist.

The rain was pelting softly. It had not been as strong as the other times, and though the clouds overhead were dark, they had left enough space for the moonlight, and so she could watch the way the tiny drops bounced off the metal of her cuff. Things were a little clearer than before.

Priestess Rem was right, she thought. The truth was that Kanna hadn’t known anything all along. She had trusted her own eyes and ears and gut over someone who had known Goda for far longer. She had even judged Rem right after she realized that the woman intended to kill Goda. But now, knowing the full reason why Rem had offered her the key, it struck Kanna that the priestess had actually shown much restraint, considering what Goda had done to her sister.

“She will hurt you the way she has hurt countless others if I don’t put a stop to it now,” Rem had told her the night Kanna had crawled out of that first cave. “She does not care about you. Her intentions are darker than you can imagine, and you are too innocent to realize what evil looks like. Don’t be fooled by that neutral face. Underneath that calm demeanor is a devil, and it is time that the world is rid of it.”

Kanna saw it now. She could see the devil that Rem had tried to show her in Goda, and indeed it seemed just as real as every other image that Kanna had constructed of the giant—and just as false as every graven image she had seen of the Goddess, too. She stared down at the cuff, and if she looked closely, she could see a dim reflection of herself. It was just a shadow projected on the metal, like the puppets behind the curtain at the bath house, like the silhouette of the monster who had not chased her.

She put her hand on the latch.

The Goddess wouldn’t blame me for this, Kanna thought. It’s not killing. It’s not killing because it’s not my fault that it’s the only way to be free. And besides, does a killer deserve to live? Who could blame me? Even Goda herself doesn’t blame me.

Kanna peered a ways down the road at the truck, and she noticed that a tarp was now draped over the back, like a makeshift tent in the storm. I could uncuff myself now, she thought, and I could take the truck and leave with the Bou twins on some other adventure. I doubt the Middlelanders would ever catch me. I doubt they would care enough to look for me. I could follow the Bou twins back up to their hometown. I could pretend I was some undocumented Outerlander and marry some cute, desperate woman and live the rest of my life out in some boring little house in some small town in the North.

Kanna’s fingers trembled against her wrist.

But if I did that, a voice inside of her whispered, I would never really know.

I would catch glimpses of it, but never hold it steady in my gaze.

I would hear others talk about it, but I would never see it.

Not with my own eyes.

“See what?” Kanna said aloud. She shouted the question into the wind, into the rain. The answer didn’t come from outside.

It was a realization that made her drop her hand from the cuff. She looked towards the shadows that surrounded the crag and the curtain of rain that shut her out of it. It was the cage that held back the devil, but she knew in that moment that it held something else, too.

Knowing for a fact that she had gone insane, she dashed back into the path of the forest. Her spirit hovered loosely in her body again; her sense of self had begun to fuse with the dirt beneath her. Her heart was pounding—but it was big, and she felt it in a chest that was not her own. She felt it pulsing together with the core of the earth.

She thought, I want to see the Goddess for myself.

And so Kanna ran back towards her demon. Surely, the voice told her, the spirit of the Goddess lay behind those bared teeth.

---

Onto Chapter 27 >>

The voice had been faint, but her mind had reacted as if she had heard her own name instead of Goda’s, and so she had opened her eyes to the void.

Kanna’s face was still pressed to the giant’s chest. It rose and fell with the waves of a deep slumber, and the outbreath filled Kanna’s nostrils, so that even the smell of the leaves and dirt around her seemed tinged with Goda’s essence.

Sleepily, she lifted her head up to gaze down at the face beneath her, at what little she could see of it in the moonlight. She regretted it a second after; she felt her chest seize up; she judged herself for her own reaction.

Kanna pressed her hand to the side of Goda’s face.

“You’re soft…,” Kanna whispered, though Goda did not stir, because she had said it so quietly that she almost couldn’t even hear herself. “All this time, I’ve barely seen more than the hard side of you. I’ve turned you into a monster.”

It was true that seeing the violence in Goda still excited the violence in Kanna, though Kanna couldn’t help but feel like there was other energy dancing between them, too. She wanted to explore this much more than the landscape of the continent.

But would they even have the time?

Kanna dipped her head down and pressed a kiss to the woman’s collar bone. She opened her mouth against Goda’s neck. She nudged her teeth lightly into the flesh and tasted the skin of that vulnerable throat that encased hard muscle and thick veins—but somehow, the giant did not even stir.

Even now, I try to provoke you, don’t I? Kanna thought. I want you to fight me as much as I want you to softly press your mouth to me. I want both. I want all of it.

A naked savage and a gardener planting flowers. A devil and a messenger of God. A woman—and maybe a bit of a man, too.

But Kanna did not know if she would ever have the chance to uncover what lay beneath all this duality, let alone the chance to let Goda uncover Kanna’s own secrets, too. They were both running out of time.

The voice called again. It had grown more urgent.

“Goda…! Goda, what did you…?”

They were Priestess Rem’s words, but it no longer sounded like her voice.

Kanna pulled away from the giant, and though the dry leaves on the ground rustled with her movements, Goda still had not arisen from her own deep slumber. The woman lay there so limply that for a short, irrational moment, Kanna imagined that her giant had died.

Kanna shook her head. Even in the low light, she could see the warm breath flowing out into the air from those huge lungs.

“Goda, what did you do? What did you do? Goda! Goda!”

The voice was screaming its accusation, but it was coming from so far away, that Kanna still had to strain to hear it. She turned her head up, past the boulders around them, past the shaking leaves, over to where the voice seemed to be coming from. She looked at the opening of the shrine high up on the crag. The moonlight didn’t reach past the threshold; the darkness inside of it looked endless.

But when Kanna stood up and gazed back down at Goda, she murmured, “Maybe you’re content to stay asleep. Maybe you can lay back and let fate destroy what little happiness I’ve discovered buried in the dirt, but you know by now that I’m never content with anything. If you won’t bring me to the answer, Giant, then I’ll find it myself and save us both.”

* * *

The path up the cliff-side was hard to navigate without Goda to lead her. Because it was dark and the trail was littered from disuse, she tripped a few times on weeds and small rocks, and she very nearly slid over the edge. As she made her way up higher, though, she grew more careful. She crouched a little and was mindful not to hurry because she could hear the pebbles dropping, echoing as they poured the long way down.

It took all her power not to fall back when the first wave of death hit her. It was like the shrine had huffed against her with a cold breath, and the sensation of her spirit-body jerked back with it, before it snapped back into her bones. She shuddered and hesitated because the feeling had turned her stomach—but she was determined. She put her head down and shuffled forward along the winding path that circled the cliff.

The waves came faster. Her spirit phased in and out of her. One step, she was inside her body as usual; the next step, she would sling forward in an agonizing separation. Soon, she began to see visions arise before her, overlaid on top of the darkness, and then overtaking it entirely.

Images flashed like memories:

She was in the giant’s body, stooping over a patch of dirt, her hands spilling worms onto the earth.

She was the giant trudging through mud.

She was picking fruit off a tree branch.

She was walking by a stream, glancing towards the water and seeing a naked young woman who looked like Priestess Rem Murau; she was turning her head away quickly with embarrassment, running off to hide in the trees.

More and more, she saw the priestess through the eyes of the giant. Sometimes the woman was sprinting along a trail just ahead, turning to look over her shoulder to smile and glance at Goda coyly. Other times she was picking flowers beside the giant in a tiny garden by the cottage. Other times—increasingly frequently—she was prone on the ground, screaming soundlessly into the dirt. The giant’s hand would reach out towards her, but the priestess would pull away.

“Don’t touch me! You know you can’t touch me!”

The voice sounded muffled to Kanna’s ears.

Switching back and forth between these fantasies and her own current reality felt unnatural. Her body resisted it. Her skin hurt for even just existing separately from the air around it. Still, she kept walking, because she felt herself inching closer to the truth with every step.

Over time, the giant had grown taller. The muscles of those forearms had grown larger.

Kanna stopped when finally one of the memories that flowed into her was happening in the clarity of the dark, with a light as faint as the space around her at first. She could barely see what was happening. The giant’s hand was reaching out into the emptiness in front of her, but that hand was shaking like the branches of a tree in the wind. It was shaking so hard that it had nearly dropped what it was grasping. Kanna couldn’t tell what the giant was holding, only that it shined a bit with what little light fell into the dark.

When Kanna stepped through that memory, none came after. She looked up and realized that the only thing that stood between her and the mouth of the shrine was a single, tall ledge.

“Goda, what did you do? No! No!”

It was not Priestess Rem. The words were the same, but it was definitely not Priestess Rem this time. Nonetheless, the voice sounded a bit familiar.

Kanna gritted her teeth and lay against the ledge, then pulled herself up with her arms. She slipped. She almost fell backwards off the cliff, but she caught herself with her feet against the wall and she kicked herself up.

She rolled over onto the ground right in front of the threshold. When she looked up at the carvings, she saw that the serpents had already grown agitated with her presence, had begun dancing and swirling against each other, had begun reproducing and pulsing with many colors.

Even though she was afraid of them, she tried not to pull her eyes away.

“You have the answers, don’t you?” she muttered, pushing herself onto her feet. “I don’t know what you are. No matter who explains it, I don’t know what you are, but you’re everywhere. You cover every inch of this world, so you should know: How do I change this reality I’ve found myself in? Tell me.”

The snakes grew excited. They writhed faster and glowed in the darkness, but Kanna could sense it was with anxiety more than pleasure. Just as she did not want to see them, it seemed that they were wary of her, wary of being seen; they badly craved for her to notice them, but at the same time, they were afraid of her, too. She could sense their fear and their excitement and their agitation as if it were her own.

They began rising from the flat facade of the shrine and hissing to each other, which startled Kanna enough that she stumbled back. She felt the precipice behind her with the back of her bare heel. Her breath cut short.

“Goda! No! What did you do? What did you do?”

The snakes shot down from the surface of the rock and into the cavern, lighting it up in brilliant bursts of multicolored light. It appeared to be an invitation. Kanna gazed up at the swan whose wings folded over the top of the threshold. Its eyes were almost entirely a deep black, but they too swirled with tiny snakes.

She swallowed again. She walked through the gateway with her head held up and she met the darkness with suppressed fear. As she did so, she stepped into yet another memory.

But in this story, she was herself—plainly and mundanely herself.

“Goda! What did you just do? Goda! Stop! What are you doing?”

The voice had been her own.

Kanna could see herself falling forward onto the ground. She didn’t know where she was or when. She was reaching in front of her with panic, but in the chaos she could not see what she was reaching for. There were feet pounding all around her. Even as she tried to claw her way through a mass of people, several pairs of hands were grabbing her by the arms and trying to pull her back.

“Goda! No! Why did you do this? Goda!” She was screaming through the crowd, fighting the grasp of a dozen hands, a dozen snakes. She screamed so loudly, she could feel her throat growing raw. “Goda!”

When she snapped back into the present again, she stumbled until her face hit the dirt of the cavern. She choked. Tears burst from her eyes. She did not know what she had seen, but she had felt the waves of her own agony, and she could not unfeel it. Something deep inside—something more intelligent than her denial—told her that she had witnessed a vision that had not yet come to pass.

It had been a memory of the future.

The agony fused quickly with her fear. She saw the flashing rainbows of light on either side of her growing more complex and she felt the serpents growing aroused from her emotions. They had begun to slither from the walls down to the floor, and they had begun to surround her.

The first of them ventured up from the ground and onto her ankle. Because her robes had slid up, she felt every inch of every scale dragging against her skin as it came to circle around her leg. It was painful. Every scrape with every spiral dug into something deeper than just her flesh. It burned at her and made her want to look away.

More of them followed. Dozens. Hundreds. They all flowed against her body as if she herself were one of them, immersed in some perverse mating ball, lost in a twist of scales and fangs. She closed her eyes tightly because she noticed that their own eyes glowed and that most of them were hideous; but when she did that, they seemed to feel free to slither across her face.

They constricted her, tighter and tighter. She felt their muscles hotly pulsing on every part of her. She wanted to scream, but the only thing that came out was a whimper that echoed in the darkness, and every time she breathed out, they only seemed to tighten more. She fought to roll over, but then they felt heavy on her chest. She tried to kick her arms and legs, but she was swimming in them.

The burden was too much. Her resistance started to wane. She knew she would die; there was no way she could survive it.

But underneath the screams that she was letting out in her mind, she heard a deep humming. It was faint at first, but it grew louder and it vibrated against the walls of the cave. Kanna could tell it was a human voice—like the tones of a song rising up from low in the throat—but it seemed to calm the snakes, because they suddenly stopped writhing so violently, and instead most of them quivered in place. Kanna could feel that deep voice rumbling through the floor, through her chest. It had calmed her somehow, too.

Listen to your breath…listen to your breath…, the voice instructed her during breaks in the hum.

It was hard to concentrate, even with the snakes having slowed their crawls, but she tried to push her attention to the one spot in the middle of her stomach that they hadn’t touched. She focused on the rising and falling of her core.

The snakes’ throbbing slowed. Their skin didn’t sear her so hotly. She opened her eyes momentarily, but the sight of all the snakes frightened her so much that she closed them again, and she held her breath hard, and the snakes grew more agitated than before.

Try again, the voice whispered. She recognized then who it was. Listen to your breath. Don’t make yourself breathe or not breathe. Don’t try to control it. Listen to the breath that happens on its own.

By then, the feeling of her heart dancing in her throat had taken up all of Kanna’s attention, but she tightened her eyes and obeyed. She felt the snakes grow still—all except for one that shuddered wildly against her chest. She could feel that its head was positioned right near her chin. She could feel its tongue flickering out and tasting the sides of her face with curiosity.

Kanna screwed her face up and hardened her body and tried to turn away from it.

You feel it, don’t you? That one that is moving the most? the voice said. That one is called Guilt. It wants to be seen first. Open your eyes now. Look at it.

Kanna jerked away further. She did not want to look.

Look at it.

With all of her willpower, Kanna turned her head slightly, until she felt the flicking tongue once again. She winced. A shiver ran through her. She forced her eyes open finally and looked at the snake.

It hissed at her, as startled as she was herself. It was so ugly—its eyes red and pulsing, its mouth open and dribbling with some venomous drool—that Kanna wanted to snap her eyes closed again instantly, but she swallowed and watched it carefully. She was certain it would lash out and strike her right in the face.

Instead, her vision wavered again. She was no longer in the cavern. She could hear a new voice.

“Goda, Goda, Goda what did you…? Goda…Gonna…Kanna, Kanna!”

* * *

“Kanna, what did you do? What did you do? Why are you acting so guilty, girl? Why are you hiding from me?”

The sun rays rained down on her from overhead, but they didn’t brighten her mood. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She was stooped in the grass, her back pressed against a boulder, her eyes peeking up so that she could watch the looming shadow that was approaching her.

Overhead, she could hear her mother snapping a switch from a young tree that had sprouted up near the rocks, and she knew exactly where those splinters would soon end up.

“I didn’t do anything!” Kanna shouted, crawling out from behind the rock. “I didn’t do anything, I promise!”

Her mother’s footsteps only grew more frantic as she stalked closer. “Then why did you run away from me as soon as you noticed me in the garden, like you didn’t expect me to be out? Where were you coming from? What’s that in your hand?”

Kanna tried to speak, but she didn’t know how to even begin answering the barrage of questions. She took the bottle she had been concealing against her chest, and she rolled it as covertly as she could into the shadow of the boulder so that her mother wouldn’t see. It made an audible glassy tink against the pebbles, and not only did this draw her mother’s attention even more, but it made Kanna give a startled jerk. She struck the bottom of the bottle with her elbow when she moved.

It rolled out into the sun. The contents were clear, but the glass played with the light like a prism, and it broke the sun into pieces, and it bathed their surroundings with a rainbow of color.

Her mother’s eyes widened. She shook her head with a disappointment that Kanna could feel in her core.

“Where did you get that? Where did you get that?” she screamed. “Answer me, Kanna Leda Rava! Answer your mother!”

The truth was that Kanna had tiptoed around her mother’s guard dogs and sneaked all the way over to her father’s house, where she had dodged the vigilant eye of his favorite wife and stolen liquor from the cabinet—but she couldn’t confess this out loud. She was ashamed to even admit to herself what she had done.

So she lied instead.

“Fay gave it to me!” she shouted, implicating her half-sister who was half her age and her father’s preferred child. Surely the girl would be spared any beating, especially since they didn’t share the same mother.

But Kanna’s own mother was too quick, and she knew with just one look at Kanna’s guilty face. “You’re lying!”

She grabbed hold of the bottle and smashed it against the rocks. Kanna barely had time to shield her face with her hands, to dodge the spray of pure spirits and shards of glass. When she looked back up again, her mother was holding the switch high over her head, and it was aimed at Kanna’s face.

“I’m sorry!” Kanna shouted. The tears came against her will. She wanted to act strong, but she couldn’t. “I just wanted to see! I just wanted to understand why Father spends all his time in the fields making this stuff! I wasn’t going to drink it! I just wanted to—”

Her mother dropped the switch on the ground. She fell down to her knees in front of Kanna, and her face became serious, and her eyes filled with a rage that Kanna realized wasn’t directed at her at all. She took Kanna by the shoulders with a pair of stiff hands.

“You are not going to end up like that man. You are not going to live here for the rest of your life in the shadow of that power-hungry bastard, living every day with a house of cards that’s teetering on the edge of collapse. If I have to turn you into a respectable woman and marry you off to some Outerlander to get you out of here, then I will.” She looked Kanna dead in the face. “As long as I’m alive, I will see to it that you don’t live the same life I was subjected to. I never want to see a drop of Rava Spirits pass your lips. I never want to see any trace of that man in you. Do you understand me?” Her hands tightened around Kanna’s shoulders. She yelled in her face, “Do you understand me?”

Kanna took a shaky breath; it was a sob that she was trying to repress. “But…I want to know him. He’s my father. He—”

“That man is barely a father. He doesn’t love you. He could never love you as much as I do. No one ever will. Don’t you know that, Kanna? And knowing that, why do you do this to me? Why are you so ungrateful? Why can’t you obey the boundaries I’ve set for you? They’re for your own good. Trust me that you can’t rely on that man. He has no affection for me or our house. He loves your brothers and sisters more than you, don’t you see?”

Kanna wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but the tears kept flowing. “Even Leda?” she asked. It was a stupid question, but she thought that she could seek some solace in the idea that her dead twin—who had never even survived the trauma of birth—might have fallen into last place instead of her.

The fingers around her shoulders loosened and fell away. The shadow that her mother cast against the ground moved, and she saw the shape of a woman standing over her and blocking the sun.

“Even her,” Kanna’s mother said. “He loves her more because she’s gone, and she was the first one born. The man only grasps at delusions. He doesn’t care about what’s right in front of him.”

Kanna pressed her face to her hands. She wished her twin had been born alive instead of her, that she had been the one to die before she had reached the outside world—then at least her father would have loved someone from her house. She shuddered against the ground, and she felt her mother trudging away, abandoning her at the side of the rock.

It was true, Kanna had stolen a life. She had been the wrong one born. She pushed her face into the earth and cried, but because the meadow had grown empty, nobody heard her.

Only some of the darkness lifted. The guilty cries from that day in the bright sun had followed her to the next vision and the next, quietly receding into the background of her mind year after year, but never fading entirely.

She grew numb to it. Soon, she felt nothing. Even after she had found the woman—the one who had made her cry—motionless in bed one day, eyes still wide open, she felt nothing.

Kanna stood by that bedside for only a flicker, for only a second worth of memory, but it was enough for her guilty cry to return because she had dared to feel an edge of relief that day. The woman had not been able to save her after all. And even if she had, Kanna would never have been grateful for all the treasures in the world that had been given to her—that she had been burdened with—by her mother, by her father.

That precious life she had taken from her twin, she had squandered it all.

Because she did not want it.

The next time Kanna heard that faint cry in her mind, she was standing in a room that was nearly dead quiet. Only the electric buzz of the yellow lamp kept her company, the lamp that hung from the strongest rafter in the ceiling of her mother’s living room, the lamp that swung like a pendulum over her head.

Kanna looked down at the rope in her hand. Her late mother’s dogs—unused to unleashed freedom and terrified of anything beyond the fence—whimpered out in the garden where she had left them, where she had stolen their slave-bonds for herself.

Kanna stared deeply into the loop that lay on the floor by her feet, made of that same rope.

She swallowed.

She reached down for it.

But then there was a knock.

Without a pause, Kanna’s oldest half-sister burst in, slamming the door so hard that Kanna thought she heard the plaster crack. Kanna jumped with a start.

“There are soldiers here!” the girl shouted. “Middlelander soldiers! Hundreds of them!”

Though she had spoken to no one in many days, somehow Kanna found her voice. “Soldiers?” she rasped, as if she had never heard the word before in her life.

“Yes! They just showed up out of nowhere and marched right onto the property. We don’t know if they’re trying to kill us or what, but they’re brandishing weapons and rolling right over the fields like they own them. Father has called an emergency meeting to figure out what to do. Get your things because we might have to leave right away!”

Kanna blinked and glanced out the window. She felt less urgency than she thought she should. “What about the dogs?”

Her father’s daughter opened her mouth to answer, but then paused when she finally noticed the scene she had walked into. Her eyes flickered around nervously, as if she were faced with a sudden burden she had not expected at all.

“Uh…ah…what on Earth were you going to do with that, Kanna?”

Kanna gave her a dark smile, a faint one. “I was going to tie myself up so I can’t run away from myself anymore,” she almost told her. Of course, even someone desperate for a good excuse would have never believed such a nonsensical lie, so instead Kanna said, “It’s not important. Could you do me a favor and take the dogs, though? I was in the middle of something.”

But when Kanna looked down at her hand again, it was too late. The moment had already passed.

She was no longer holding the rope.

* * *

Kanna gasped, her eyes snapping open. Her body immediately thrashed in unbearable convulsions, her teeth gnashing and grinding. She cried out into the emptiness of the cave, her voice echoing back to her and fueling another wave of grief. The tears were falling thickly from her eyes and she had no control over them. The pain of her guilt ran in waves up and down her body.

She had forgotten.

She had forgotten all about that distant memory in the field—and had suppressed the more recent one along with it—but when she looked back down towards the snake, her body jerking with sobs, she saw that it had grown much smaller somehow. She also saw that two other snakes had come to flank the first on either side, and she fought not to recoil from their gaze.

Those are his brothers, Shame and Judgment, the humming voice answered her unspoken question. When you look at one, you look at the others. When one of them shrinks, the others will shrink a little, too. Look closely: You’ll see that they’re all connected.

Kanna tried to focus her eyes to see this, and indeed it was hard to tell where one snake ended and another began, but she didn’t know if this was because she could hardly hold her vision steady anymore.

They had also started to retreat. They slithered painfully off her body and began disappearing into the walls. When the last of them left, Kanna took in a loud, raw breath. She tipped her head backwards, her throat fully open. She blinked her eyes and watched the shadow at the entrance of the cavern, the body that belonged to the voice that had been murmuring to her.

It was a tall silhouette, but she couldn’t see any features—except for a huge, lone snake that pulsed and slithered in endless circles up the trunk of that giant. The giant turned her head in flowing, well-practiced movements to charm the serpent, to avoid its eyes.

In time, even this snake disappeared from view. The shrine had finished telling its story. The cavern had grown pitch black.

Kanna coughed. “What…was that?” she asked as Goda finally entered the shrine and came to kneel beside her. “What are they?”

Kanna still did not know.

Goda brushed Kanna’s face lightly with the tips of her fingers, but she seemed careful not to comfort her too much. “They’re you,” she said. “Or rather, they’re what you’ve convinced yourself that you are. What you think you are doesn’t actually exist. You’re a story, Kanna Rava. These are the stories. They’re every part of your identity: every conditioned structure, every lie you’ve ever told, every thought you’ve ever held onto, every inch of your personality.”

“Why…?” Kanna could not quell the tears, the tightening of her jaw. “Why do they look like that? Why are they so terrible?”

“They’re not. They only seem that way because you’ve hidden them away, and so they’ve wreaked havoc on your life. But when you look at them, you can control them, and they become docile. If you look at them enough, they start to dissolve in the light of your awareness, and then you start to see who you really are underneath all the snakes.”

Kanna flipped herself over to get up, but she found that her strength had not yet returned. She felt weak, nauseous, just as she had at the mouth of the cavern at the monastery. She had to fight not to purge again right in front of Goda. Even just the impulse to empty herself made the Shame snake twitch inside her, and this time she could sense it more acutely than she had before. She was painfully aware of it even though she could not see it.

She breathed hard against the floor. “What am I, then?” Kanna asked, her voice breaking. “If all those snakes make up my personality and my identity and my thoughts and my mind, then aren’t they me? Why am I so hideous?”

“You’re not. The snakes are thoughts, and you are not your thoughts, so the snakes can’t be you. They merely pretend to be you. Sometimes, when you think it is your own self who is acting and speaking, it is actually they who have siphoned your conscious energy like parasites. They speak for you, they act for you. This delusion is so convincing, that you actually think they are you. Some people are so full of snakes, that it is only the snakes that ever speak. But, no, the snakes are not you. You’re actually something else entirely.”

“What?” She reached up and grabbed Goda by the legs. She dug her fingers through the fabric until she could feel the warmth of the skin beneath. “What am I, then, if I’m not this? Tell me!”

“You are nothing. You are no one. Just as I am, you are. You simply are. There is no who or what. There is no self. This is the biggest lie you have ever been told. You are only an experience, right now, in this moment. To say ‘I am’ is enough. The rest—your past, your future, your identity—is only a story.”

“No! No, that can’t be true!” Kanna didn’t know why she was shouting. Again, as she had felt when she had exited the desert shrine for the first time, there was empty space where a part of her had been, and it made her uncomfortable.

Indeed, it was nothing. A part of her had become nothing along with the shrinking of the snake.

“If I look at all of them,” Kanna began to say. She let go of Goda’s legs, but winced when her hand touched freezing stone. “If all the snakes dissolve…then what? I just disappear? I just don’t exist?”

“Oh, no. You are nothing, and the nothing does exist. But the snakes are just stories that you tell yourself. If all the snakes unravel, your false self will die and you will become a funnel for the Goddess. Even deep in the midst of a story, you will remember that the character is not really you—that you are in fact the Goddess who has been dreaming up this tale all along—and so you will surrender to your true purpose without resistance, because you will see that it is only a story and there is nothing to fear. So you see, you are just pretending to be Kanna Rava. You wear many masks, Goddess! You’re playing hide-and-seek with yourself.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! You’re speaking in riddles! You’re not full of emptiness, you’re full of bullshit!” She found the strength to push herself up onto her knees in front of Goda and she slammed her hands against the woman, but the woman’s frame did not waver. Kanna heaved and closed her eyes. She pressed her face to Goda’s chest. “Is that why you did this to yourself? To make all the snakes dissolve? To die this second kind of death?”

“Yes,” Goda said. “I could not live with myself after what I had done. It was the self that tormented me, and so I sought to unravel it and destroy it, even if I have not yet been able to collect all its fractured pieces. There are many to find. They will reveal themselves in their own time. But there’s a part that overshadows all the others, a serpent that I’ve tried hard to let go of, and yet it lives on in me. I can’t let it go.” She took in a deep sigh that seemed to fill her lungs with the nothing that surrounded them. “But for all purposes, Goda Brahm is gone. I have been No One—or nearly so—for a long time. The only time The Someone in me comes back is whenever the name of that serpent is called and it starts to reawaken.”

Kanna paused to hear the giant’s heart. She hesitated, but asked anyway, “Like when you saw Priestess Rem in the desert?”

“Yes.”

“So she is a witch after all.”

“Yes. A priestess will disguise herself with titles, but underneath all the layers of her robes, this is what she is. And in reawakening my serpent, Rem Murau has done the same to her own. We have done it to each other, because this serpent of mine has mated with hers many times, and they have birthed countless children together—children that we have both ignored and abandoned.”

Goda stood up then, leaving Kanna to slide to the ground once again. She walked with purpose towards the opening of the cave, where the moonlight was striking, where the serpents could not erupt again. Kanna tried to follow her. She writhed against the floor as she clawed her way forward. She was too proud to ask for help, even though she had never felt so broken in her life.

Goda offered nothing as Kanna struggled. It was only once Kanna had painfully dragged herself out into the dim light that Goda stooped down and picked her up—but instead of slinging her over a shoulder as she had in the desert, she carried Kanna gently in her arms.

“Why did you abandon me?” Kanna whispered, her eyes drooping. She was barely conscious of what she was saying.

Goda murmured back, but the answer made no sense: “If you try to help a chick break out of its egg, it will die before ever being born.”

And so in this way, Goda brought Kanna back down the hillside. Kanna pressed her face and hands against Goda’s chest, and she felt the duality of hard and soft, and she breathed in the giant’s scent. With every one of Goda’s steps, she felt a bit of her energy returning, until she was able to lift her head up and face the truth that loomed in the shadow above her.

The tears were still flowing; they hadn’t stopped.

“I feel better,” she admitted. She could hardly believe what she was saying. “It was like a splinter was in my skin, but so deep that I couldn’t reach it, and so numb that I hardly noticed it, even if it was doing damage every time I moved. But it was painful to take out. When I relived that memory, and became conscious of it again for the first time in so long, it became…just a story. It was like you said. It was a story and it lost its power over me, and I could cry about it without having to be the character in that memory anymore.”

When they reached the bottom of the cliff and Goda laid her down in a soft bed of leaves, she had the strength to sit up on her own. She pressed her back to one of the trees that had sparsely littered the landscape. She watched Goda standing next to her, and she turned her gaze up to meet the giant’s eyes in the weak light.

“I know now why you’ve done this,” Kanna said, “but the price that one pays is so much. What did I just give up? What part of me did I sacrifice to your Goddess? Even if this part of me was broken and wanted to disappear, it’s still precious to me. I still gave birth to it. How can I be Kanna Rava if something so important is gone?”

Goda looked down at her with full attention, with an empty expression made of infinite space, as if she were expecting something to happen. She waited.

Very suddenly, Kanna felt her stomach turn. Her throat and mouth burst open—but it was words that came rushing out, instead of the vomit that Kanna had expected:

“I lied when I talked to the temple assistant about my sister,” she confessed. “Priestess Rem told me about her own twin, and still I lied about mine. My second name did not come from my mother. It came from my sister. My twin was the first born and she died within minutes, but in our culture it’s bad luck not to name a child who makes it out of the womb, even if they die during the journey out. And so they named her Leda like my mother, but because they had lost her, they decided to name me that, too; that way, I could live for the both of us.” Kanna lowered her eyes, but not out of guilt—out of genuine sadness with no one to blame. She said, “I knew it was me who had killed her. If she had been alone, she would have lived. My presence had made her sickly; I had taken what she was owed in the womb, so she was too small to live. The first time I heard the story of her birth and death, this is what they told me: That I was lucky. That I had been the lucky one, so I should be grateful—but I never was. I didn’t even want to live, so I wasted most of the life that my sister had given up for me. I finally stopped wasting it only on the day the soldiers came for us. I don’t know what changed, but the exact moment I felt most threatened in my life, suddenly I wanted to live.”

A few last shudders ran through her. She pressed her hands to the ground to hold herself stable, and she was pleased—and half-surprised—to find that the earth was solid.

“Goda,” she whispered, on the edge of complete exhaustion, “I can only imagine. I can only imagine. If this was just one snake, then what is it like to dissolve hundreds of them? Thousands? Is this what you’ve done? What kind of suffering have you lived with that doing this to yourself was the preferable alternative?” She looked up at Goda with a question on her face, and she knew that Goda could see it even in the relative darkness.

Still, the giant did not answer. Perhaps she didn’t want to relive her own stories—or perhaps she wanted Kanna to shape the question plainly, to have the courage.

With some difficulty, Kanna finally stood up. She faced Goda squarely. She let her eyes trace over the angular features of that face, and she let her own loaded stare meet that empty gaze in return.

“Goda,” Kanna finally asked, “what did you do?”

The wind picked up. It blew through the trees around them and made the branches sway. It sent the dirt beneath Kanna’s bare feet swirling, sharp bits of rock pelting the bottoms of her legs.

In a steady voice that held no trace of desire to hide anything from anyone, Goda finally answered:

“I murdered a priestess named Taga Murau.”

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Onto Chapter 26 >>

As it turned out, the boy’s name was actually Preema—and he had a voracious appetite for both food and gossip. He sat next to Kanna on an old log, his arm slung over her shoulder, his eyes still wide and darkened from what Kanna could only imagine were the effects of Flower. With pupils that looked like the mouth of a bottomless well, Kanna couldn’t fathom how he was staring at her so intently, without squinting, with the sunlight beaming down directly on them.

“So, how did the two of you really get to know each other?” he whispered to her so that his higher mother—the one named Kahm—wouldn’t hear. The woman seemed distracted anyway. She was crouching not too far from them, on the other side of the yard, holding a wooden panel up to the hole in the fence while Goda swung against it with a hammer. “Obviously, she picked you up at the confinement center in the Outerland, but I’ve never seen her act like this with a slave. What happened? Did you break through that wall of hers with your feminine wiles? Tell me, tell me!”

He was shoveling handfuls of yaw into his mouth while he babbled at her, and though Kanna couldn’t blame him for being hungry after his long ordeal, it was making it even harder to understand what he was saying. He barely even took a pause between feedings. As soon as he would finish a plate, his lesser mother would magically appear from inside the house with some more.

“Preema, what on Earth are you whispering about? I hope you’re not asking our honored guest inappropriate questions. We didn’t teach you to be like that!” she chided him, though there was a huge grin on her face, and she didn’t seem too invested in her admonishment. She turned around without waiting for an answer and practically skipped across the yard back into the house to fetch another plate. Kanna had never seen anyone so happy to cook for someone else.

More bewildered than before, she tried her best to think of a response that wouldn’t reveal too many details that were none of the boy’s business. Kanna was only just starting to consider the fact that the situation between her and Goda was highly unusual, that Goda must have treated her differently from other slaves and that people were bound to notice eventually.

When did she start doing that? Kanna asked herself. Or did she treat me differently the whole time? The boy had brought up a good point. Kanna didn’t know how the porter typically worked with prisoners, and now that Kanna was no longer Goda’s slave and was only playing out the role—or rather, for the moment, playing the role of a slave playing the role of a wife—she wasn’t sure how to untangle all of the falsehoods.

Her tales had become as messy and intertwined as a writhing ball of snakes.

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” Kanna finally told him. She decided to change the subject. “How do you know Goda?”

“Oh, my lesser mother is good friends with this old Outerlander named Haim who owns a tavern in town. Ever since I can remember, he’s stopped by the house every week and given my mother some wine and me a bag of fruit. One day, when I was around eighteen or nineteen or something, I followed him back and he seemed happy, and so he asked me if I wanted to work for him sometimes,” Preema rambled, then stuffed a huge block of cheese into his mouth.

Kanna scratched her head. She didn’t want to be rude, but the boy seemed to be speaking in incoherent stories and Kanna couldn’t make the connections that he seemed to expect of her. She wondered if that was also an effect of the Flower.

After swallowing, he waved his hand and helped her out: “Goda knows the tavern owner, you see. She buys some of the special products in his basement. That’s how we got to know each other.”

Ah, the bootlegger, Kanna thought. Goda had mentioned him the night before, when she had told Kanna that she had traded a favor for some fuel and supplies. “So you met Goda in that tavern in the alleyway, then.” She thought it was an odd coincidence—but these sorts of connections seemed to keep surfacing, and she wondered if it wasn’t a coincidence at all that they had stopped by there recently.

But an impish smirk came over Preema’s face in reply. “Well, we didn’t exactly meet there.” He cleared his throat, then brought another handful of yaw to his face. “I introduced her to Haim and then the three of us made friends, but I first met Goda…somewhere else close by.”

Kanna tilted her head, confused once again because it seemed that he expected her to understand, and she didn’t. As he pulled his arm from around her shoulders and turned his full attention back to his plate, Kanna decided that she didn’t need to dwell on such unimportant matters anyway. Instead, she turned her gaze back up towards the gash in the fence, which was already halfway covered.

As the yard grew more insulated and the sun had wandered overhead, Goda had dropped her outer robes. Kanna busied herself watching the bronzed shoulders of the giant as they sprung back and slammed forward in turn. She watched every strike of the hammer against the nails of the fence, watched that same body that had lashed out to destroy her the night before being used to rebuild what they had broken together.

But as soon as the chore had been done, Goda picked up the last of their baggage from the ground and motioned for Kanna to follow her into the house.

“Are you sure we can’t host you and your wife for another night, Priestess?” the lesser mother asked as they brushed against her in the doorway.

“We have pressing business in Suda,” Goda said, slinging her satchel over her shoulder and only pausing slightly to reply. “Besides, it’s bad luck to linger when our purpose here has already been fulfilled.”

When they passed through the house, Kanna noticed that the Goddess had changed places yet again. This time, she was sitting atop a pedestal near the threshold at the foyer. The Goddess watched Kanna and Goda step through the front door for the first and last time; her smile remained the same as always.

Outside, they reunited with the truck, but because Goda and Kahm had pushed it out of the yard by hand earlier in the morning before they had patched the hole, Goda had not yet tried to start the engine, and Kanna couldn’t help but wonder if it would even work. Still, she climbed into the front seat without a word of speculation, and she watched the giant rummaging around in the back.

After filling the tank to capacity, until the fuel very nearly ran over the edge of the mouth, Goda slid into the driver’s side next to Kanna. She flicked through her keys—that holy pendant dangling limply among them—and then she unlocked the ignition to crank the engine.

The truck growled with life. Kanna could feel the pistons dancing beneath her more smoothly than they had been before. Perhaps the long rest had done the beast well.

Goda pulled them onto a side street, seemingly to avoid the crowds, and soon they were bouncing along the cracks in the road at a steady pace. Because the silence had continued between them—and because Kanna was not yet used to the lack of their previous flavor of tension, and because her first instinct was to fill that empty space with new conflict—Kanna found that she had the sudden urge to start an argument over what they would do once they reached Suda.

She was conscious of it this time, though, so she pushed the thought aside. She inched a bit closer to Goda. She reached over and put her hand into Goda’s lap. She was a bit surprised at her own audacity, so she turned her head with some hesitation to take in Goda’s reaction.

There was a faint smile on the giant’s face.

“So,” Kanna began, suddenly a bit tense, a bit uncomfortable. Because she wasn’t being rejected, she didn’t know how to act; she didn’t know what came next. She decided to sit with the feeling for awhile. “It seems that the boy knew you through the bootlegger. All of these small coincidences. Sometimes I forget that you had a life before you met me, that you’ve been to all these places, that you’ve gotten to know people.” Goda hadn’t made any gesture of overt response, but her body was relaxed, so Kanna leaned a little bit further against her until her head came to rest on the side of Goda’s shoulder. “What was the favor that you did for that bootlegger, anyway?”

“This,” she said.

Kanna raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“All of this.” She waved her hand briefly, as if to motion behind her towards the direction from which they had come. “I cured Preema as a favor to the bootlegger.”

“What? Wait, but you said the bootlegger owed you a favor already—and you already saw that the boy was sick before we even went to the tavern. Were you just not going to heal him if the tavern owner didn’t pay you? Did you really heal your friend just to get some fuel? I don’t understand.”

“Yes and no. There is no strict cause and effect here. It just is what it is. I cured Preema in order to get the supplies. I received the supplies in order to cure Preema. We came to that boy’s house so that I could do a favor for the bootlegger. A bootlegger owed me a favor that I had done in the future, and so we came to that house. You can tell the story any way you want.”

“Why does that sound like nonsense to me, and yet that’s exactly how it seems to have happened? All of those things sound like they could be true.” Kanna rubbed her face. “Why do you speak in riddles even now? You’re toying with me, Goda. Why would a bootlegger even care that much if some boy is ill or not?”

They rumbled onto a gravel road just outside the town and Kanna’s ears were filled with the sound of crunching pebbles for a long time. Kanna sighed and leaned more of her weight onto Goda, but she turned her head and gazed out at the landscape. The open meadows filled with grass and the thickets of trees seemed to meld and connected with each other; as they picked up speed, it all seemed to flow into one thing.

Then Kanna’s eyebrows shot up. She jerked her head towards Goda again. “That Outerland bootlegger is the boy’s father, isn’t he?”

Just by the tiny smile that had formed on Goda’s face, Kanna already knew the answer. “There are no fathers in the Middleland,” Goda said.

Kanna shook her head, thinking how odd it must have been for the boy to have a stranger love him, and dote on him, and try to protect him without having any concept available to explain why. She could only imagine how confusing it was to be a halfbreed in the Middleland.

And yet, while the boy may have been stupidly oblivious to the presence of his father, his father had been watching over him all the same. Kanna couldn’t help but feel envious. She had grown up with the exact opposite situation—with a father in name, but rarely in practice. It made Kanna reflect on what she had seen in the bath house, and all the children that were being conceived with random men who could never know for sure if…

Kanna’s meandering thoughts came to a stop. Another connection had triggered in her mind. She felt awkward all of a sudden, but she forced herself not to pull away from Goda, and she forced herself to voice the question in spite of her reservations.

“You met Preema at the Paradise bath house, is that right?” she asked. Again, she already knew the answer. It made sense, especially after what the boy had said to her with that annoying little smirk. “I’m not judging you for it or anything. If that’s your local custom, then so be it. It’s just that I have a hard time imagining you as the type of person who—”

“Ah,” Goda interrupted, pointing to some spot far ahead of them with the tip of her chin. “It seems your little friends are headed West, too. What a coincidence.”

Kanna followed Goda’s gaze and noticed two hitchhikers a little ways down the road. They were not yet too far from town, but the landscape had grown deserted enough that these were the only human figures in the distance. As their features became clearer, a small wave of embarrassment trickled up to Kanna’s face.

“They’re not my friends,” Kanna protested under her breath. Indeed, she wasn’t exactly sure what the Bou twins were to her. They had come to her rescue the night before, but they weren’t the first people with unclear motives to have helped her try to escape, and after her realization about Priestess Rem, she didn’t know if she could trust anyone else to have noble intentions. They had tried to hurt Goda, after all—and had succeeded to an extent.

And so Kanna was surprised when she found that the truck came to a stop at the side of the road. Noa and Leina grinned with relief at first, picking up their effects, until their gazes fell into the front seat and they finally seemed to notice who had swooped in beside them.

Leina stiffened with alarm and she took a step back. It was then that Kanna caught sight of the details, of the cuts and bruises that peppered the twins’ faces and matched the ones that Goda had herself. Noa in particular looked more roughed up, her lip swollen, the side of her head sporting a purple, fist-shaped mark.

“Hey, c’mon now!” Noa called out over her sister’s shoulder, once the surprise had worn off. Her eyes fearlessly locked on Goda’s stone face. She had the tone that she was arguing, even though Goda hadn’t said anything. “We did what we thought was best. The girl obviously doesn’t want to be around you. Can you blame us for wanting to liberate a slave? Me and Leina aren’t old fashioned like you porters always are. We have a sense of ethics, of chivalry. If we see an opportunity to throw a wrench in your twisted little system, then we’ll do it!”

Leina’s eyes widened and she turned around wordlessly to grab her sister by the shoulders. She pushed her back with growing urgency, but Noa slapped her hands away and kicked up some gravel as she slid closer to the truck.

“So what do you want from us, huh?” Noa shouted as Goda looked on without an ounce of reaction. “Why are you staring at us all cross-eyed like some stupid cow chomping on cud in the middle of a field? Do you want to do this or what?” She made a pair of fists and held them up over her bruised face. “We were drunk last night; that’s the only reason you got the best of us. Get out of that truck and come over here and we’ll have a real fight this time!”

All the while, Leina was standing behind Noa, waving her hands wildly and shaking her head. She was just about to reach over and make another attempt to subdue her twin, when Goda finally spoke.

“Get in.”

The words seemed to spread out through the clearing and brush away every sound and movement. Noa’s mouth snapped shut and she lowered her fists. Leina stopped dead in her tracks.

The three of them stared at each other for a long time. Kanna felt like she was disappearing in the midst of that silence. She glanced back and forth between all of them in astonishment, but when the pause had seemed to go on forever, and Noa had coughed a few times, it was clear that it was not only Kanna who felt awkward.

Goda’s face was blank. She was waiting.

“Well, all right then,” Noa said. She reached down into the grass to grab her baggage and she tossed it into the back of the truck. It took Leina a little longer, but after some hesitation, she followed suit. After all, as far as Kanna had gathered, they weren’t exactly swimming in options in the middle of that deserted road.

* * *

“Ahhh, so you’re Goda Brahm, huh?” Noa asked after she had heard Kanna say the giant’s name. Though Noa was sitting in the back with Leina, she was leaning hard over the top of the front seat, her head dangling between Goda and Kanna, the smoke from her cigar wafting in Kanna’s face before joining the whipping wind. “Well, I’ll be! Had I known who you were, I wouldn’t have beaten you within an inch of your life last night. Me and Leina are always on the side of the rebels, you see.”

“Liberate the people!” Leina shouted from further in the back.

Goda didn’t seem to mind them, but she also didn’t answer.

“Oh, c’mon,” Noa insisted, “we heard what you did back in the ancient times. You raged against the system before anyone else ever thought to! You rampaged around like a lumbering beast, squashing all of those bureaucrats under your feet. Our older sister went to work at the Samma Valley monastery last year and she told us all about the rumors she’s heard. Don’t tell us they’re not true!”

“What, you mean rumors can be exaggerated?” Leina asked, her voice filled with indignation.

“Never, never! They’re always completely accurate, or else no one would spread them around.” Noa looked at Goda with expectation and her voice became suddenly subdued, a bit more serious. She leaned in further. “So, Brahm, tell us…what really happened that day in the valley? Only you know for sure, right?”

When Goda still didn’t answer and stared straight ahead as if she hadn’t heard a thing, Noa finally shifted back to give her some room. She sighed and chewed on the end of her cigar, even though it had now nearly reduced to a nub. “Fine, fine. If it means anything, we don’t agree with your punishment. You didn’t deserve it. It’s not like you had any control over what you were doing in that state of mind. We sure as hell don’t take responsibility for what we do when we’re drunk. It’s the same thing, right?”

Kanna raised an eyebrow, looking back and forth between Noa and the giant, but again Goda said nothing in reply. She looked distracted by something else; her eyes were glued to the road and her gaze didn’t flicker even slightly towards any of the passengers.

As the silence waned, Noa seemed to take it as a deliberate brushoff and she backed up some more, until she had shifted all the way onto the flatbed beside Leina. Looking a bit defeated, she pursed her lips and flicked the butt of her cigar out onto the gravel. Kanna watched the ember bouncing in the wake of the truck and she shook her head as she noticed it joining a pile of litter on the side of the road.

“I’m not going to lie,” Kanna muttered to Goda, “I’m shocked you picked these two up.” Even at that point—even when they were asking questions that Kanna’s own ears were burning to hear answered—she had mixed feelings about their presence.

Goda shrugged. “It has nothing to do with me. You owe them, don’t you? So you’re repaying them.”

Kanna merely stared at Goda because she couldn’t find a reason to disagree, even though what Goda had said didn’t sound right, either. It was true that the twins had taken a huge risk to help Kanna the night before, but in doing so they had forced Goda into a fight. Goda never did seem to take anything personally, but in this case, it seemed a little extreme not to, even for her.

And while Kanna liked the Bou twins, she wasn’t sure if she could handle them for many hours at a stretch—especially now that there were private things between her and Goda that needed to be addressed.

Kanna turned to Noa and asked, “Where should we drop the two of you off?” She noticed that it sounded blunt the moment the words had left her mouth, but she didn’t care anymore.

Noa grinned at her. “Oh, we’ve got some special business South-West of here, along the bank of the Samma River. We’re going to a city called Suda. It’s the capital of the Middleland!”

Kanna sighed and pressed her hand to her face.

Even though no one had asked, Leina chimed in from the back of the truck, “If you must know, we’re drug smugglers and we’re taking a couple of sacks of product to the capital. That’s what we do for a living. That’s why we live such an adventurous life. We’re only telling you because the both of you are hardened criminals like us.”

“That’s right,” Noa said, “and criminals keep each other’s secrets. All of your business is safe for our ears. We keep our mouths shut no matter what happens.” She paused heavily. Again, she leaned a little closer to the front seat, though there was a small edge of hesitation this time. “So, c’mon, Goda Brahm! You can tell us: What was going on between you and that priestess at the valley, anyway? I heard that the two of you broke the Oath of No Contact—and broke it pretty damn well, if you know what I mean. Is that true? I heard you were contacting each other quite a bit by the time that she—”

The truck swerved over to the side of the road. It all happened so abruptly that Kanna had to cling to the door to keep from banging around. Before Kanna had even realized, Goda had kicked the driver’s side door open and hopped out of the truck. The giant reached into the back towards the Bou twins, and though the two of them recoiled, Goda grabbed hold of their luggage instead.

She tossed the bags into the dirt.

She walked back to the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her.

“Hey!” Noa shouted, once she had recovered from the shock. “You know how much product that is? It’s months worth of income!”

Goda’s hand fell over the speed lever. “Then get it.”

“Oh, right, so that you can drive off without us and leave us stranded?”

But after only a few moments, Noa seemed unable to watch the goods just sitting discarded on the ground, and her greed got the better of her. She nervously jumped out of the truck to rescue their contraband, but surprisingly the truck did not move at all as she reloaded the luggage into the cargo area.

Noa huffed, apparently just as confused as she was offended. She balanced her foot on the back bumper of the truck and started to swing herself over the tailgate—and that was when Goda yanked the lever.

The truck jerked forward.

Kanna heard a heavy thud smack against the pavement behind them.

Indeed, Goda drove off without waiting for Noa. She sped down the road so quickly that Leina—who had remained on the flatbed, completely bewildered—had to grab at the sides of the truck to keep from spilling out of the back.

In this way, Kanna discovered at least one thing that the giant took personally.

* * *

Since it was already evening, and the edge of the sky was growing pink again, they didn’t get very far before Goda had pulled over beside a crag that looked to be made of porous rock. When Kanna looked up at it, she could see the sides of a doorway carved into one of the higher ledges, and she wasn’t at all surprised by it.

“A shrine?” Kanna asked.

Goda nodded slowly. “It kept talking, louder and louder. It was making it hard for me to drive earlier. We might have to stay here for the night until it’s done unloading what it wants to unload.”

“Is the message for you or for me?”

“So far there has been no difference.”

Kanna turned her gaze back towards the roadway that they had left behind. She wondered how many times Goda had received a message alongside her, but had said nothing about it. What kind of nightmares had haunted her? Were they the same as the ones Kanna had seen, or were they tailored to Goda’s own specific demons?

She pressed her palm to the back of Goda’s hand and she took a hard breath to steel herself for the nonsense that she was about to offer. “I want to go into the shrine,” Kanna said. She mirrored Goda’s serious look. “Running away and avoiding it obviously doesn’t work; you have more experience than I do, and even you admit that it’s futile to evade it. Let me face it head-on. Maybe this will satisfy the Goddess.”

A complicated expression had come over Goda’s face. “You are right—but there’s more to it than that. Going into a shrine to deliberately fuse with it is not easy. Remember that even when you resisted, you found a small hell. Surrendering entirely and letting the snakes unravel on purpose is much more intense.” Goda looked past Kanna and up at the high threshold whose entrance was bathed in some of the dying light. The animals carved into the stone seemed to dance with the rays of the sun. “Ever since I accidentally discovered what they do, I’ve dragged myself in and out of more shrines than I can count—gnashing my teeth, screaming from the sensation of being ripped apart inside, crawling through the dirt to reach the light at the entrance again—just like you did on that night at the monastery. I did this hundreds of times, until there was hardly anything left of me. The only way I could bear to kill myself was a little at a time, and even this was painful. Make no mistake, it is a death, even if it’s a small one. You may still be walking and breathing, but the person who you were before does not emerge from that cavern ever again.”

Hearing that, Kanna felt a small shudder running up her spine—but she wondered if it was merely the twitching of a snake. She looked away from the shrine for the moment; something told her she would have to face it eventually, but she couldn’t be certain when.

Before she could tell Goda this, though, a loud sigh emerged from the back of the truck and puffed through the space between them. Kanna turned to see that Leina had cowered in a corner of the flatbed, her knees pressed against her chest like some unborn child, her arms wrapped around her legs.

“What in the ever living hell are you weirdos talking about?” she demanded.

The voice sounded a bit jarring because Kanna had momentarily forgotten that they had an audience in the first place, and that their words might have been nonsensical to anyone who had never experienced what they had. She tilted her head at Leina, suddenly pensive.

Everyone had different experiences in life, though, Kanna thought—so perhaps every word she had ever uttered in her life had been misunderstood in this same way.

* * *

By the time Noa had caught up to them, there was barely any sun left. When Kanna and Leina first noticed her in the distance, she was heaving and coughing and stopping by every other tree to lean and catch her breath. Kanna wondered with some amusement if the woman had sprinted most of the way there and then run out of steam at the end.

When she finally approached the group—which was now spread around a fire—she made a beeline to stand next to Goda. She gritted her teeth. She kicked some dirt in Goda’s direction.

“Who do you think you are, Porter? You could have killed me! I could have hit my head on the pavement and died in a bloody mess! The buzzards could have been picking me to pieces right now!” Noa rambled on and on with her story, but Goda merely sat and stared into the fire; and because the giant had offered her nothing, and Noa was already exhausted, the rest of her energy dissipated quickly.

She sat down by the fire with a thud. “Consider yourself lucky that I survived and none of that happened! If it had, then I really would have run over here and beaten you without an ounce of mercy, let me tell you!” She only paused for a moment, as she seemed to realize how little sense her statement had made, but before long she had shrugged and scooted over towards Leina. “So what’s for dinner?” she asked everyone.

Leina shook her head. “To hell with you, you imbecile. You don’t deserve to eat. You almost lost all of our product!”

“Me? It was that oaf who did it!”

“Well, it’s your own damn fault! Why do you always provoke people?”

But somewhere in the midst of their argument, Leina reached into the side pocket of one of their bags and produced a handful of roasted yaw. She shoved some of it into Noa’s mouth while the woman was hurling abuse at her—which shut her up quickly—and then she tossed another piece into Kanna’s lap.

Kanna touched it gingerly. She had started to grow used to the taste, but the mood to eat hadn’t struck her in awhile.

“Hey Giant,” Leina said, nodding in Goda’s direction. “Do you want some?”

This made Kanna look up, a bit surprised. She had privately been calling Goda a giant in her mind ever since that initial dream by the priestess’s cottage, but it was the first time she had heard anyone else refer to Goda that way.

Goda waved away the offer. “I’ve been fasting since sundown yesterday,” she replied.

“Oh,” Leina said, “you need to keep your stomach empty for something? Or are you really that religious?”

It was the first time Kanna had heard any of this, too, but Leina’s words made her turn and look back up at the shrine entrance at the top of the rocks. There was hardly any light, but some of it still struck the religious carvings outside, and from the angle of where she was sitting, she could barely make out the neck of what looked like a swan as well as the flowing lines of twisting serpents.

These figures always seemed to follow her. Lately, her visions were swimming with them.

“Our lesser mother used to always tell me that fasting through the morning keeps the snakes away,” Noa said, chomping on the yaw. Kanna snapped her gaze across the fire as soon as she heard. “But really I think it makes them show up more. I turn into a straight up monster when I’m hungry.”

“Snakes,” Kanna whispered. She had kept hallucinating them everywhere and Goda had mentioned them in a few of those nonsense speeches, but now Noa was talking as if they had been real. “The snakes,” Kanna said a little louder, so that the entire group could hear her. “You know them, too? What are they?”

Leina and Noa exchanged a glance, then burst out laughing seconds later.

“Oh, it’s just a superstition!” Noa said, waving her hand dismissively before reaching into the bag to fish for another pinch of yaw. “Maybe most Middlelanders like to indulge in mystical garbage, but we don’t believe in all that crap.”

Leina nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right, we’re enlightened people! We don’t take that story literally.”

“What story?” Kanna insisted. She leaned closer to the fire, aimed her stare at the twins with expectation. From the corner of her eye, she could feel Goda’s gaze upon her all of a sudden.

“The story, of course.” Noa was smirking at her. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard the story! That’s the first load of crap that they make you swallow at the temple!”

“She’s not a Middlelander, idiot. When would she have heard it?”

Noa turned to Leina at first with an offended look, but after a moment she scratched her chin to consider it. “Damn, yeah, I guess that’s true.”

So with this, Noa cleared her throat dramatically and slid herself forward until she was hovering closer to the small fire. She paid no mind to the strange face that Kanna was giving her. The flames danced in Noa’s wild eyes. The woman lifted her arms high in the air so that her fingers dangled creepily in the dark above her.

“A long time ago, back in the ancient times before the Goddess had crafted the surface of the Earth,” she began, while Leina started improvising some dramatic singing in the background to go along with the narration, “the world was just a spinning white egg in the void, empty of life, empty of spirit, empty of song!”

Kanna briefly turned to throw Goda a incredulous glance, but she found that the woman was merely stretched out on the ground, watching the twins in silence, her chin propped up on her hand. The amusement on her face was evident even in the relatively dim light.

Noa continued, “And so the Goddess used Her beautiful fingers to lovingly craft a vast paradise that covered every inch of the Earth. It was a garden filled with plants, and rocks, and animals of all kinds.”

Once again, because the word for “paradise” and “garden” were the same in Middlelander, Kanna wasn’t sure when Noa meant one or the other, so Kanna found herself mentally inserting it where it seemed to fit best. At any rate, the story may have possibly explained all at once why the words were the same in the first place.

“But not all was well, oh no!” At this point, the mood music that Leina was providing grew darker. “Not every creature in the universe was happy with what the Holy Mother had created. In that void, causing the Earth to spin every day with the breeze from his flapping wings, there was a huge swan that had always accompanied the Goddess. When the Mother grew distracted by the world of forms that She had created on the crust of the Earth, the swan descended from the heavens to be with Her and the Earth stopped spinning.”

At the mention of the swan, Kanna found herself leaning even closer to the fire, until a few temperamental embers flicked up to her face and made her recoil. Even still, she had grown interested. “Then what happened?” she asked.

“Well, the swan loved the Goddess so much that he wanted to become one with her, and he was dismayed to find that the Goddess had disappeared—but, when he looked closely, he was shocked at what he saw!”

When Noa took too long of a dramatic pause, Kanna shook her head and dug her fingers into the pile of cool Earth and ash in front of her. “What?” she said. “What did he see?”

“The Goddess had become the world! There was no longer a separation between Her and the many trees, and rocks, and animals! Because he had only cared for Her when She was as formless as the void, he couldn’t accept all of the many masks that She had come to wear, and so he landed upon Her and made love to Her body one last time before flying back up into the nothingness.”

Kanna winced. The image that the story had conjured was a little strange—but then again, it wasn’t the strangest thing she had envisioned lately.

“Ah, but you see! Her body was the Earth, and so the swan had impregnated the world! And because the crust of the Earth was like the shell of a giant egg, it split open at the seams and his countless children hatched out of the ground, and they came to cover every corner of the world with their evil! These were the snakes, and though the swan claimed that the snakes were not his children—that they had already been writhing inside the Earth the whole time, and that he had merely brought them up to the light—anyone who loves the Goddess knows better. To this day, all the people and animals have to be careful not to get tangled in those twisting knots of scales and fangs!”

“That’s why Middlelanders always take a bath every morning, and why devout Maharans are so obsessed with water,” Leina added in a flat voice, after ending the dramatic music abruptly. “It’s to wash off ‘the snakes’ that got on you the day before, since people believe they come out of the dirt, and that they can possess you if you don’t splash them off. Silly, isn’t it?”

“Water…?” Kanna murmured, some new connections snapping together in her mind. It was true. Even the first day she had been at the temple, they had soaked her the first chance they had. “The priestesses cleansed me, too.”

“That’s right,” Noa told her, nodding a bit too eagerly. “I mean, it has a dual purpose: they’re trying to bust you for using drugs, but the cleanse is also supposed to agitate ‘the snakes’ and bring them to the surface or some crap like that.” Her eyebrows flicked up. “Oh, and if you’ve ever seen the inside of a temple complex, you might have noticed the running water and the garden. We plant a lot of gardens. It’s a religious thing, too. It’s suppose to please the Goddess because we’re following her example, but even the tax offices do it, and I doubt they please her much.”

Kanna stared at Noa. The myth had confused her with its strange logic, but she couldn’t deny that it did explain a few things in a way that appeared to bypass her rational mind altogether.

“The gardens are altars in and of themselves, then,” Kanna muttered. She wondered if this meant that she had completely misunderstood the importance of Goda’s previous job. Had Goda’s occupation actually been more religious in nature? What did it really mean that she had been stripped of her position as a gardener in a monastery?

She didn’t bother asking these questions of Noa, though, because the woman had already broken into a laugh. “All of that is made up, though, of course. The Maharans borrowed the story from the pre-Maharan religions, and they borrowed it from who knows where. Those are just old customs and so there has to be a story to bring it all together, to explain why we do it. People can’t really deal with the idea of a senseless and chaotic world where things happen for no reason.”

Her heart still beating a little faster, Kanna turned her gaze back up towards the shrine. The sun had died down, though, and the ornate gateway had disappeared into the shadows.

* * *

“We’re going to sleep somewhere private, right?” Kanna asked, when she noticed that the Bou twins had claimed the back of the truck.

“‘We’?” Goda appeared to be amused, but Kanna didn’t return the look.

“You know why I’m asking. Don’t make me explain it.”

And so they found a place by the silhouette of the crag, among a few sparse trees for cover, away from the direct view of the road.

Goda lay down and stretched herself out on what looked like a patch of moss in the dim moonlight. Hardly noticing the dirt on the ground, Kanna dropped herself onto the moist earth as well, and crawled over to bury her face against the giant’s chest. She felt Goda’s half-embrace encompassing her as it had a few times before. She still wasn’t used to it yet; a blush had smoothly settled on her, though the giant couldn’t see.

“I don’t know what to say to you now,” Kanna whispered. “The words won’t make sense, even though they’ve been burning in me all night.”

“Say nothing.”

Kanna tightened her jaw, squeezed her eyes shut. “We can’t go to Suda. We just can’t. There has to be another way. Won’t the shrine tell us what to do?”

“Say nothing.”

When Kanna finally looked up, she found that Goda was gazing down at her with a faint smile. The giant tipped her head down. Her mouth brushed very briefly against Kanna’s lips, and then she let her head drop back into the leaves and she closed her eyes.

Kanna couldn’t look away, even as Goda seemed to fade into unconsciousness. The giant didn’t touch her again, so eventually Kanna laid her face back onto Goda’s breast and tried to fall asleep to the rhythm of her master’s heart.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been dreaming—or if she had been dreaming at all—when a sound from the void above awoke her.

“Goda, Goda….” The whisper seemed to flow from between the trees. “Goda….”

---

Onto Chapter 25 >>

In one rushing movement, in one blur of shoulders and arms and fingers, Kanna found herself being pulled up. The hand that had grasped her wrist held on like a vice, but the nails did not scratch her skin this time, and when she and Goda stumbled onto their feet, the motion flowed somehow better than it ever had, more gracefully in spite of the staggering—because not an ounce of Kanna had resisted.

Kanna felt herself being carried along through the door. She was too distracted to be embarrassed when she brushed her naked body against the boy who had called out to them. She didn’t know how he had transformed so quickly or how he had known to warn them or why she and Goda needed to run from the soldiers in the first place, but she followed the giant.

She matched Goda’s stride as they sprinted through the main room. The tips of her feet grazed the back of Goda’s heels once or twice. They collided with the altar on the way out the door and the Goddess teetered and smiled and seemed to instantly forgive them.

Goda led her out of the gateway of the fence and up the hill that they had rolled down the morning before. The trip up towards the sky was harder than the trip down had been; the gravel was loose. Kanna stumbled a few times in her haste and struggled to catch herself on more stable rocks, but she wasn’t afraid because when she looked up, she could see that Goda was throwing backwards glances her way every few steps.

They ended up near a thicket of small trees on the hillside. It wasn’t completely hidden from the valley below, but was discreet enough that they could sit behind some bushes, and the faint pinks and blues of the early sun did not stop them yet from blending in.

“What do you think they want?” Kanna asked, collapsing into the mess of wild grass and leaves. She was still huffing with excitement, and it made the litter beneath her scrape and itch as it passed across her skin—but she liked the discomfort of it.

Goda was peering through the branches in front of them, shaking her head, looking down at what they could see of the house. “I don’t know,” she said. “It could be anything. Maybe someone’s bothered that I stole their fuel. Maybe someone called about a foreigner dashing through the streets, and they somehow manage to trace it back to this house. Regardless, it would be smart to hide here until they’ve left.”

Then Goda lay down next to Kanna and let out a long breath, looking up at the rustling leaves of the canopy above them, at the sky that was turning gold with the first bits of dawn. Kanna closed her eyes and felt the presence of the giant beside her; she could feel her without touching her. This had been true since the beginning, but it was only after pulling away that last barrier between them that she had finally become fully conscious of it. The barrier had never existed.

Kanna remembered what had happened in the room. Now that the heat of the moment had lulled a bit—though not entirely—her mind had started to piece the experience together. It was telling her “stories,” as Goda had put it, which made her a bit wary of herself, but the story wasn’t a bad one this time. She was only curious.

Kanna opened her eyes and looked at Goda’s body stretched out along the grass. The woman’s arms were folded behind her head; her eyes were shut; she had become as much a part of the hillside as the trees and the rocks were.

And so, without thinking, Kanna reached over and grabbed the inside of Goda’s thigh. She tugged it open. Goda didn’t resist and didn’t act offended and didn’t even open her eyes. There was only one second of hesitation, and then in the growing light of the early morning, Kanna looked.

Just as it had always been, it was only a little different from what she was used to, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking at yet, or what to call it. She reached her hand down. When she touched it, and Goda reacted slightly, the difference grew a bit more obvious again.

Kanna pulled her hand back and blushed. “Why…?” She paused, not knowing how to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t sound wildly offensive. Then again, it seemed that a lot of things that would have sounded offensive in the Upperland tongue where not at all offensive in the Middleland tongue. She gave it a try: “Why is it like that?” Kanna asked.

Goda shrugged without opening her eyes, but she suddenly had an amused smirk on her face. “That’s just how it is.”

“I mean,” Kanna continued hesitantly, her thoughts inching not quite as slowly as her words, “it looks like mine, mostly. It’s just that it has…that, too. I did kind of notice it before—since you’re not exactly strict about covering yourself up—but I just assumed it was like what I have on the outside there, only bigger than normal. Everything about you is bigger, after all. But now, I have to wonder if instead, it’s what…a man has, only smaller.” Kanna paused, a bit uncomfortable; but again, she was learning to lean into the discomfort. “So, which is it?”

Goda’s smirk had spread into a grin. She opened her eyes and looked at Kanna with amusement.

“I’m serious,” Kanna said. “It doesn’t bother me or anything. It’s just that it’s only natural that I would want to know what you are, don’t you think?”

“What I am?”

Since Goda had started meeting her gaze, she couldn’t help but turn away with increasing embarrassment. She rubbed her arm and fidgeted a little against the bed of wet grass. Looking up at the sky through the treetops, she finally asked, “Are you a man or a woman?”

“Yes,” Goda replied.

Lightly irritated, Kanna found it in her to shoot Goda a wry glance. “Why do you always give me those kinds of non-answers? It’s really a simple question, you know. Clearly, you have the body of a woman…mostly, and you have the social role of a woman, as far as I can tell, and everyone else around here seems to know that you’re a woman; but now I can’t help but feel like there’s something else going on. It’s not like I ever gave the issue much attention, but maybe I should have. In Middlelander, pronouns and titles and stuff like that don’t have a gender like they do in Upperlander, so actually you could have been a man and I may have never known, if it wasn’t for the fact that Middlelander men look totally different from you.”

Goda had started chuckling, but she hadn’t moved from her spot, and she took a deep sigh of apparent enjoyment. Her breath puffed out visibly, tinted slightly by the purple light falling down upon them.

“So…,” Kanna began again. It was less uncomfortable than before, but she still felt her courage stretching slightly, and she had the feeling that she was lifting up the cover of some mysterious box to peer inside. “Are you a man or a woman?” she insisted.

“No,” Goda replied. Her expression was as impish as before.

Kanna let out a long sigh that mirrored Goda’s own and she let the back of her head fall back down into the grass. She couldn’t help but smile, even if her curiosity was only burning more than before. “I wish you would just tell me. I ask you who you are over and over, and you evade me—and fine, maybe there are things about your past that you’d rather not talk about, things you’d rather let go of—but this is different, isn’t it? Everyone has a gender. You can’t let go of that. It’s just who you are.”

“It is?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Now you’re going to tell me that you can just not have a gender? That you can just be nothing?”

Goda stretched her arms over her head, then propped herself up on her elbows. “Everyone is nothing. Not just about this, but about everything. Don’t take it too seriously. Woman, man—these are just words, just sounds that come out of your mouth. In fact, the words and sounds are totally different in Upperlander, I’m sure. You may not even have a word for what I am at all.”

“That’s exactly it,” Kanna said, rolling over to face Goda completely. “What are you, then?”

“I told you: nothing.”

“Fine, fine! But what is that nothing called? It’s a new thing that I don’t know about, so I need to learn the name for it.”

“It doesn’t need a name. If it had a name, it wouldn’t be nothing, would it? It just is what it is.”

Kanna shot across the small space between them. She was feeling abusive, like Goda deserved some smack on the face, but instead she dropped herself on top of Goda and pressed her face hard against the giant’s neck.

She had nearly given up, but after a moment, she sat up and straddled Goda’s hips and looked down at her with a steady glance. “You’re a mystery, Goda,” she murmured. She watched the sun that filtered down from the trees making spots that danced on Goda’s face. “You’ve blurred every line I can think of. No, you don’t blur lines, you brush them away with a sweep of your hand and make it look like they never existed in the first place. You make me extremely uncomfortable.”

“Good.” Goda had met her gaze again. The golds and purples and blues of the sky danced in the void of those dark eyes.

Goda was beautiful, Kanna thought. It was the first time that notion had shown up as simply and nakedly as that. It was the first time Kanna hadn’t resisted it. Even days before, when Goda had been ugly, she had been beautiful.

The giant was full of contradictions.

Kanna reached down and took one of the giant’s hands. She lost herself in running her fingertips along the chaos of scars and cuts that were now much more apparent in the light. She took a breath, because the first thoughts of the outside world had begun to trickle in.

“What do we do now?” Kanna asked. “I don’t mean about the soldiers in the house. I mean about you. If we don’t go to Suda, you’ll die—but if we go, I’ll have to spend ten years in some hard-labor job that might work me to death, and you’ll have to keep dragging criminals into the Middleland and surviving every day within an inch of your life. We’ll be separated. To be completely honest, I don’t know if I can be separated from you anymore.” Though she had already known, speaking the words aloud so frankly sent another wave of warmth up to her face. She didn’t mind it. “My cuff is unlocked, so in theory I have a choice now, even if I don’t take it. What about you? Is there a way for you to be free, too?”

Goda was quiet for a moment. Her face returned back to its usually stoic look, and she turned her gaze out towards the valley. “Yes,” she said, “but there is only one way. I will be free soon, but the freedom will come at a cost. I will die a slave.”

“How can you say that?” Kanna dropped Goda’s hand and pressed her palms to the woman’s shoulders. She gritted her teeth. “You’re not dying. Stop being so morbid about everything. How can you pretend that you know what will happen even a day from now? The world is senseless and chaotic.”

“You’re not the only one who hears whispers from the shrines,” Goda murmured, her eyes unreadable again. “For a long time now, they’ve been telling me what I have to do, and where I have to go for it to happen, but I’ve evaded them and refused to listen. Pain always follows, of course. You cannot fight destiny. It’s no coincidence that I ended up as your porter. You’ll lead me to my death.”

Kanna’s eyes widened at first at the words, but then she huffed them away. “I don’t believe in prophecies or any of that mystical nonsense. And, anyway, I can’t imagine that some voice from the shrine is telling you to commit suicide.”

“I can’t commit suicide.”

“Why, because it’s against your religion, as Parama told me? You seem to break every other rule, but I guess this one isn’t as stupid as the rest of them.”

Goda shook her head. “It’s not that. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraid of the hell I will see on the other side for what I’ve done. It’s not just petty rules that I’ve broken. You were right when you told me that I’m not a good person. I know that I have to die—everyone does—but I’ve resisted it for years because I know what I have coming to me. I’ve fought for my life, but it won’t last forever.”

“No one wants to die, Goda.”

“Exactly. I am no one, so I should want to die.”

Goda closed her eyes and let her head fall into the grass again. Kanna stared down at her, more bewildered than ever before. In truth, she had never stopped to fully consider that Goda was on her own journey, with her own destiny and her own signposts pointing her along, and that Kanna was merely a secondary character in Goda’s story, the same way Goda had been in her own.

Perhaps she had been so wrapped up in herself and her own perspective, that she had missed something important that was bubbling beneath the surface of their joined path.

It was true that Goda had not yet told Kanna what she had done to become enslaved—but in the Middleland, a “capital crime” could mean practically anything as far as Kanna knew. Considering all that had happened, she strongly suspected that it had to do with using Flower, some victimless offense that the government obsessed about. Goda had known exactly how to brew the potion, and she had immediately recognized the boy’s symptoms. Perhaps she had awakened a vessel years before and had been caught doing it.

It may have been illegal, but it was hardly something that Kanna could judge Goda for. There were worse things in the world, and if the woman had healed people, what did it really matter in the grand scheme of things how she had done it? She certainly didn’t deserve such a draconian punishment for it.

Soon enough, though, as the light grew brighter and the world grew clearer, Kanna became distracted by the present moment. She looked down at Goda’s beautiful face, at the imperfections that lined the skin, at the signs of a bruise that was forming on her jaw, at some fresh cuts that etched the side of her forehead and peeked out from Goda’s rumpled hair. Kanna reached down to touch the wounds lightly, to watch how the giant flinched a little, but didn’t make the effort to complain.

Kanna had no idea what they would do—either a day from then, or even a minute into the future. But Goda was always now.

* * *

When they both noticed that the soldiers had reappeared on the main road and were heading West towards the city, Goda signaled that it was safe to return. They ducked through the trees and took their time shuffling down the steep side of the hill just in case there were some of military women lingering behind.

The boy was waiting for them just outside the fence. To Kanna’s astonishment, he ran to them as soon as he caught sight of them, and he threw his arms around the giant’s waist.

“Goda!” he cried. He pulled away after a quick squeeze, though, seemingly coming to his polite senses. His eyes looked bright in the light of day, joyous, much different than they had looked before. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m glad you showed up! I was definitely in a bind there.”

Goda shushed him, though she matched his smile. “Keep your voice down.” She tilted her head a little to glance through the hole in the fence. “Your parents think I’m an ex-priestess and that this is my wife. It’s probably best if they keep that impression, even if they might not fully believe it.”

“Ah, that’s the story, huh?” He looked over at Kanna with curiosity. “That’s a good one. Who came up with that?”

Goda didn’t answer him. Instead, she looked down the main street at the faint shapes of the military trucks in the distance. “What did they want?” she asked.

“Oh, the soldiers? Well, turns out that somebody died after swallowing Flower last night. They keeled over right in the middle of the street! What are the chances, right?” The boy nodded at Kanna, as if expecting her to agree, but when she only stared at him with confusion, he turned back to Goda. “So the soldiers started running around, knocking on doors, trying to figure out where the Flower came from. Some busybody a few houses down told them that they had smelled Death brewing earlier in the night, and that it seemed to waft from this here yard, so those bastards came storming in. Luckily, I was out here so I saw them coming from far away. Man, you should have seen it! My mothers had to hide me in the broom closet because my eyes were still the size of saucers. It was really obvious I was on something. Never would have been able to fake that I was normal.”

He spoke so quickly that Kanna had to concentrate to understand the more colloquial phrases in Middlelander. Afterwards, a long moment of quiet passed. He seemed to be waiting for some response, but none came. Kanna was at a loss for words, completely thrown off by the story, still trying to parse the words, still trying to figure how the boy could possibly know who Goda was. Goda merely stood there in silence and watched the two of them watching each other.

Finally, a more obvious fact seemed to dawn on the boy, and this broke through the lull. “Damn, both of you are totally naked, though, aren’t you?” he cried. “I guess you didn’t have time to put any clothes on, huh? You probably should get dressed before you see my mothers again, though, or they’re going to think you’re a bunch of weirdos running around outside like Lowerland savages. They’ll notice the cuffs, too. I’ll go see if I can find something inside that you can throw on real quick.” He turned and began passing through the fence, but he paused to shoot them another glance over his shoulder. “Hey, so were the two of you about to do it in the guest room earlier? Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt. Just put like a sock or something on the doorknob next time and I’ll know to knock first.”

He disappeared, but Kanna still felt all her blood rushing to her face. She wanted to hide under something—a boulder perhaps—but instead, she settled for fixing her gaze on the ground and pretending that the boy hadn’t said anything outrageous at all.

She recovered in time for the boy to return with Goda’s robes and a new set of clothes that Kanna hadn’t seen before. They looked similar to Parama’s hand-me-down that Jaya had given her, but the fabric was a little darker in color, nearly matching the tint of Goda’s clothes.

“I found your stuff drying above the bath,” he said, handing Goda her belongings. He smiled warmly at Kanna, the way that a friend smiled at someone they hadn’t seen in a long time, which made Kanna fidget a little with discomfort. The boy hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself. “Your garments are all muddy and gross,” he said, “so you can just have one of mine. Seems that you like wearing men’s clothes, anyway.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. It had never occurred to her that there was a difference between men’s and women’s clothes in the Middleland. It was true that there were a few odd features on her robes, such as the fact that they did not open in the front, but she hadn’t really been one to dwell on the details.

And so she had been unknowingly crossdressing the whole time, it seemed.

In light of the conversation she had just had with Goda on the hillside, she found it ironic enough that she nearly broke out in a laugh. Instead, not wanting to offend the stranger who was acting so familiar with her, she suppressed the reaction and merely smiled while accepting his gift.

“Thank you, but you really didn’t have to do this,” she said politely. Nonetheless, she wasted no time in throwing it over her head and slipping it on.

“No, seriously, I did,” he said. He was looking her up and down with a twisted smirk all of a sudden. “Nothing good comes from a naked foreigner. Believe me.” He started walking back towards the house and gestured for them to follow.

Kanna jerked her head towards Goda and looked up at her with irritation. “Who the hell is this kid?” she muttered.

“No one,” Goda answered.

---

Onto Chapter 24 >>

Kanna’s eyes were open. She could see the outline of the clouds rushing overhead. She felt like she was suspended in some brilliantly gray void, because the watery mud that had broken her fall had also made her weightless against the ground.

The train rushed away, its wheels scraping along not far from her feet. All of the shocks had faded. She turned her head to look at the arm that half-floated in the mud beside her, and she felt relieved to find that the cuff was still around her wrist.

Kanna sensed the giant before she even saw her. She lifted her head to peer down towards the end of the tracks, and she saw a landscape of flickering light that made the curtain of rain around her glow with life. Emerging from that veil was Goda Brahm. Her image strobed with the landscape itself—pitch dark, then blindingly bright, then pitch dark again. Kanna wondered if it was really the lightning or if her own eyes had started to falter and revive in turn.

When Goda crouched down beside her, the look on the woman’s face held no question. It seemed that she had already accepted any reason, any explanation. It seemed that Kanna didn’t have to say anything at all.

Still, Kanna cried: “Who are you?” The effort of shouting against the blowing wind made her have to turn over and cough. Her muscles hurt when she moved, though it wasn’t from the impact of the fall: She was exhausted from running, from evading—but she managed to get up onto her knees with a forced burst of energy and she held her master’s gaze with dignity.

“Who the hell are you?” Kanna shouted again, her tone accusatory. “And how can I be so happy when I’m so miserable? Tell me!” She rammed both her hands hard against Goda’s chest and Goda’s brow flicked up in confusion. “You know why, don’t you? You know why, but you’ve never told me; you’ve kept it from me like some kind of secret. Look at you! Look at that empty face! Now I know what I’ve been seeing when I stare into your eyes, and why it terrified me: You’re happy. You don’t want anything. You sleep on top of rocks, you eat food that tastes like dirt, you have to scrounge your supplies from the garbage—but you’re happy! You’re so happy to be alive that you barely even mind if you die! What kind of a lunatic are you? How do you live like this?”

Goda merely stared at her, another crazy smile coming over her eyes. The lightning flashed again and it sent colors dancing across her face. It seemed, Kanna thought, that the giant had assumed the question was rhetorical.

It wasn’t.

Kanna slammed her palms against Goda’s chest yet again. She gritted her teeth. Her gaze didn’t waver. “How do you do this? Why are you like this? Show me! I want to know. I have to know. I can’t live the rest of my life not knowing what black magic you’ve tapped into that’s turned you into this; it would eat away at me every day!” She heaved a loud, shaky breath. She hung her head towards the ground and pressed her hands to her face. “People like you don’t deserve to be happy—not when the rest of us try and try, and grasp and grasp; not when the rest of us exhaust our spirits searching for the best life, the best food, the best pleasure, more security, more freedom, more love; not when the rest of us resist and fight against all of the evil things around us, hoping that once—just once—we’ll be able to taste an ounce of contentment. You don’t even try, Goda. You won’t even give us that. You won’t even pretend to try. That’s what I hate the most about you!” She fell forward, but she caught herself with her hands, and she pressed them against the ground as she cried. “Show me why you’re like this, you bastard!”

Then, through the grit of the mud, she felt a set of long fingers snaking down to clasp against her own.

Goda’s face was framed by the dim light of the sky, water dripping down from her hair and falling into Kanna’s eyes. “I can’t show you,” Goda whispered. Goda took her by the hand and helped lift her up out of the mud, until they had both stood up to meet the freezing rain. “But you can see for yourself.”

* * *

Instead of following the well-trodden path of the tracks, Goda took Kanna into a grove of trees that scattered through a line of empty lots, and they found a trail inside that hid them from the street. Kanna could see the shapes of buildings through the holes in the thicket as they walked, but they flashed by quickly, and the space was dark enough that she doubted anyone could see them.

At first, she hadn’t been entirely certain why Goda chose the route, but then she noticed the collection of military trucks concentrated on the main road, near the trading building that Kanna had used as a landmark. She stopped to peer through a few of the trees.

The soldiers were milling around near some twisted heap in the gravel, and in spite of her recent experience, she still couldn’t help but recoil when she saw what it was. It was a woman, very clearly dead, blood and drool trickling from her mouth as she lay motionless with her eyes still open. The air about the soldiers didn’t match the gruesome sight at all: They were standing casually, some of them flashing lights at the body, some using their knees to prop up clipboards stacked with paperwork.

Wide-eyed, Kanna turned to glance at Goda, who had also slowed down to catch a glimpse of the mess. “Is that…?” Part of her didn’t want to know, but the fact that so many soldiers had come to poke and prod at the body with such keen interest made her wonder.

“Yes, probably,” Goda said. “That’s what it looks like when they discover someone who has died from Flower. Most people can’t keep it down, but those who don’t purge often end up like this when they’re not vessels. You bleed from the inside out. Your breathing slows and eventually stops. The dead body becomes a vessel itself—a corpse vessel, it’s called—so the soldiers wrap it up and hide it so that no one will eat of it.”

“People eat the body?” Kanna shouted, appalled.

“Quiet.” Goda yanked Kanna by the hand and pulled her along, so that the scene was no longer apparent through the trees. “It is said that Flower can cure any disease. Whether that’s true or not is up to interpretation, but the important thing is that people believe it, so, yes, they siphon processed Flower from anywhere they can get it because it is safer to eat.”

After stumbling across a few gnarled roots in her effort to keep up with Goda’s strides, Kanna finally ripped her hand away from the giant’s grasp. “Stop jerking me around!” she grumbled. The rain had thinned out, but the sound of droplets splashing against the leaves above still competed with her voice, so she found herself raising it louder than intended. “I’m not your slave anymore.”

At this, Goda tilted her head. A smirk came over her face. “Is that right?”

Kanna crossed her arms, refusing to take another step, though Goda hadn’t yet tried to force her. “That’s right. I could have easily escaped and I chose not to—not because of you, but because of my own reasons.” Kanna found that her mouth was suddenly coming up with justifications for what she had done. When she had been speeding down the track, away from Goda, her reasons had seemed perfectly valid, but with some distance between her and that moment, it suddenly felt too humiliating to admit that she had leapt from a moving train car simply to be with Goda. “I spared your life this time,” she continued, “but I could easily take the cuff off at any moment. Your life is in my hands. If anything, doesn’t that make you the slave now?”

Goda stared at her in silence for a long moment, her eyes intense, her expression overcome with surprise.

Then she laughed out loud. Her shoulders quivered with uncontrolled fits and she had to press her hand against a tree trunk to keep herself steady. She laughed so hard that she started wiping the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Do you want me to prove it to you?” Kanna cried, her tone becoming so hysterical that even she herself nearly broke out into a laugh once she heard it echoing back. She didn’t know why she was saying what she was saying; she couldn’t stop herself, but for once it was like she was watching herself say these things, instead of being the one who said them.

Kanna stopped.

She looked down at her body, at her cuff-covered wrist, at everything she could see around her that excluded her own face. She pointed to herself. She felt strangely headless staring at her own finger; something had quite abruptly connected in that empty space. “Is that a snake?” Kanna blurted out. She looked up at Goda. “Is that a snake that was talking just now?”

Goda’s eyes widened again, but this time it wasn’t with surprise—it was with the closest thing to excitement Kanna had ever seen on the woman’s face. “Yes!” Goda said. “You see?”

Kanna began to nod slowly, entirely bewildered. The truth was that she didn’t see—not really—but she had started to feel an inkling. If that had been just one snake inside her that was talking through her…then how many were there?

But it still sounded like half-nonsense to her—even if it was disturbing nonsense—so she tried to put it out of her mind, and she followed Goda when the woman began trudging through the thicket once again.

“Fine,” Kanna relented as they walked, though Goda had not argued with her. “Maybe I can’t be your master, then, since I don’t even hold your key. But…now that I think about it, who does hold your key?” She realized then that she had yet to consider the other end of Goda’s leash.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I remember the innkeeper telling me that your cuff was locked, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. She told me about some engineer that everyone hated who had created these stupid things.” Kanna tugged at her own cuff, even if the gesture meant nothing anymore. “Is that your master, then? The person who made these cuffs?”

Goda did not even reply.

Kanna rolled her eyes, but decided not to push it. Instead, she fixed her focus on Goda’s movements, on what she could see of the woman’s body in the bath of moonlight that had started to break through the clouds as the rain died off. She watched the muscles of that back stretching to and fro with every stride; she lowered her gaze a bit more and watched the motion of some of the more pleasing forms and flesh.

She didn’t feel ashamed of it anymore.

“I lied,” Kanna confessed after awhile.

Goda silently stalked through the trees without turning around, and Kanna couldn’t help but wryly think to herself that the monster was distracted because she was in her natural habitat.

Kanna let out a low sigh and sped up her stride and reached out to touch Goda’s back. “I lied about a lot of things,” she said, feeling the body flex beneath her fingers. “I lied about why I jumped off the train. I jumped because of you. I don’t know what that means yet, but that’s the reason why. I also lied about how I feel. I don’t hate you. I feel something strong towards you, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s not hatred.” She drew closer, until she could smell the mud that was painted in smatterings on Goda’s skin. “You were right. It’s not just your body that I want. It’s something more dangerous than that.”

Goda stopped. She turned to glance over her shoulder at Kanna, who was now nearly pressed up against her. “We can slip out through here,” Goda said, pointing towards an exit to the trail. “We’re close enough to the house now that we probably won’t draw any notice.”

They pushed out through the trees and onto the gravel, which felt jarring against Kanna’s bare feet because she had grown used to the soft dirt of the grove. Once the house was in their sights, Kanna noticed Goda’s old satchel strewn on the ground, along with the leather scroll that they had discarded in their haste. Kanna picked them both up.

“You lied, too,” she murmured. “That first night, you told me that this was a steel baton, that you were going to beat me with it.” She turned the scroll over in her hand, but kept walking because Goda had not stopped. “What is it, anyway?”

When they reached the opening in the fence, Goda still had not answered, but she looked down at the mess of footprints that littered the floor of the entrance. Kanna couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that not all of those tracks belonged to her or Goda.

Goda pressed on. She glanced over to make sure that Kanna was nearby, and it was then that Kanna finally noticed the giant’s exhaustion. Together, they slipped quietly back into the house, where Kanna found the space to be empty of anyone’s presence; it was only the Goddess that stared at them from her new spot on an altar near the door. The faint smile on Her face had a touch of mystery. It reminded her a bit of Goda’s earlier smirk.

Goda was still smiling faintly when they passed through the threshold of their shared bedroom. Distracted with dropping the satchel and scroll on the floor near the wall, Kanna didn’t notice the strange energy at first. It was only when she stretched up again and glanced at the room that spread out in front of them that she realized it had changed.

Just as before, the room was smudged with shadow, the only light coming in from the moon and stars through the window—but something was different. When she had awoken in the room at midnight, every corner in the chamber had stood out to her as some pointed barrier that confined her from her escape. Now, she hardly noticed the walls, except as vague silhouettes at the edges of her vision, as curtains that shut out the rest of the world.

She heard Goda push the door closed behind them. She heard the latch click shut. She heard Goda’s soft breathing, because the room was in total silence, because the clock had stopped ticking, because the weights that drove the clock had already touched the floor and no one had changed them over.

Kanna slowly turned to look at the naked woman who was leaning against the door next to her. Goda’s face was empty again, unconcerned, the face of someone swimming in an eternal moment that never ended.

But there was something else, too. There was a small edge of tension in those muscles—not the tension of a creature in the midst of hesitation, not the tension of a monster holding back.

It was the posture of one about to strike.

Kanna drew in a sharp breath. Primal fear washed through her, but she did not dare recoil when Goda took hold of her throat. She met Goda’s kiss with an open mouth, even as the woman roughly took a handful of Kanna’s hair with her free hand and dug her fingers sharply into Kanna’s scalp. Goda groaned into her. Kanna felt the sound shooting into her bones through her teeth.

Still, as the giant shoved her into the wall, Kanna made a production of fighting her off—because it was her job to not make things too easy. She pushed against Goda’s chest, so that she could feel the giant leaning harder, overpowering her, drawing her in against her struggles. When Goda stooped down to kiss her again, in the midst of their increasingly messy tangle of arms that were each grasping to touch and invade and caress, Kanna bit hard into the woman’s bottom lip.

Goda pulled back and pressed her hand to her own mouth. In her eyes, there was no pain, not even the ghost of a wince. She only looked serious, her eyes locked on Kanna’s face. She was mirroring Kanna’s focused stare, a stare of desire that was free from need or expectation—only a knowing.

It made Kanna feel naked, even though her robes remained slickly against her skin. Kanna gritted her teeth and gave Goda a look of disapproval. “The bed,” Kanna told her. “The bed!”

Goda seized Kanna by her collar and dragged her across the room. She threw her onto the mattress. She took hold of the bottom of Kanna’s robes and jerked the fabric up to uncover Kanna’s legs, and the sudden rush of air made Kanna shudder. As her clothes peeled wetly from her like an outer skin, Kanna was soon left bare, vulnerable, pressed hard against Goda’s own naked body.

Goda warmed Kanna’s shivers with her mouth. She pressed her lips to Kanna’s neck, to her chest, to her belly. She straddled Kanna’s hips, but Kanna took Goda’s head in her hands and forced the woman’s face back up to hers. They kissed, and Goda’s breath flowed lightly into her. Kanna’s eyes watered with some unnameable emotion.

The energy of her body was floating up again underneath her skin, but this time she didn’t resist it. She let that feeling melt into the spaces between her and Goda. She let her hand slip down along the front of the woman’s body until it snaked between those massive legs, until she finally grasped at that forbidden place.

Goda huffed against Kanna’s lips in surprise, but she bucked hard into the touch. It was as jarring as it was arousing. Kanna swallowed a nervous breath as she was met with a slick stiffness, uncertain of what to do with this contradiction of sensations. It was warm; it was soft; and…like the rest of Goda, it was hard at the same time.

Kanna was shocked. Still, the shock was short-lived and overcome with curiosity. In those few stolen glances during Goda’s shameless baths, Kanna had noticed the small differences between them—barely. But now, as she touched Goda so directly, as she squeezed and felt Goda shudder in response, those differences swelled in her hand until they were undeniable.

Her heart sent a throbbing pulse down to the same place on her own body. Desperately, she dropped her hand and instead pressed her hips directly to Goda’s own, to match her arousal, to mirror it, to feel it grinding into her. She pulled at Goda’s hair, urging her into another kiss, their ragged breaths mingling together in the otherwise silent room as their hips began to roll against each other in a languid dance of exploration.

But Kanna didn’t have time to discover much. With a loud crack, the door to the room flung open and rammed against the wall. Kanna’s hips collapsed back onto the bed. She whipped her head on reflex, and the woman on top of her convulsed similarly with surprise.

In the middle of the threshold, eyes opened wide with panic, hands digging hard into the frame of the door, stood the boy who had been on his deathbed. He was no longer shuddering in pain. His face had regained its color. Kanna could barely even recognize him.

By contrast, he didn’t seem at all shocked with the scene in front of him. Something else had fueled his urgency: Boots pounded in the distance along with the boom of deep voices. Soon after, a loud thumping rattled what sounded like the front door of the house.

The boy glanced over his shoulder once, then turned again to scream at them, “Soldiers!”

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Onto Chapter 23 >>

The thunder that followed nearly drowned out the last edges of Goda’s words. It shook the ground and vibrated against the sides of the well, sending shock waves through Kanna’s bones, rattling her joints and making it hard for her to keep propping herself up. Even with the rain dropping into her eyes, she could not tear her gaze away from the woman who stood over her.

Lightning cracked again through the sky and the metal around Goda’s wrist gleamed more brilliantly than before. In response, Kanna pulled her own cuff tight against her chest. She could feel its oppressive edges digging through her soaked robes and into her ribs. She shook her head over and over. She couldn’t accept any of it. She shouted up through the rain at Goda, “How? How is that even possible?”

Goda looked at her for a long time. The rain had transformed into freezing pellets, water so sharp and cold that Kanna wondered if they were being showered with tiny hailstones—but Goda did not even shiver against it.

“This cuff,” Goda said, running her fingers against the metal on her arm. “It has a battery like yours. If its twin cuff is opened early—if my prisoner escapes or I let her go—then it unloads its charge all at once and I die.”

Kanna shuddered in the rain. She could barely move her jaw to speak anymore and the muscles of her face convulsed with the rest of her. “I don’t understand.” She swallowed some water that had fallen into her mouth. She furrowed her brow and shook her head again. “You’re lying! What you’re saying just isn’t possible. Why would you be a slave? Why would they send a slave to transport another slave? It’s ludicrous! It’s nonsense!”

“This was the job they gave me—transporting runaway criminals who had fled into the Outerland. It’s a job no one wants. It’s dangerous. It’s very easy to die, and if I try to escape or I tamper with my bonds or I fail to deliver on time, this cuff will end my servitude very quickly.”

“What kind of godforsaken country is this? What kind of perverse reality do you people live in?” Kanna shouted. This time she jerked her head towards the sky, as if to catch a glimpse of some deity who could answer her. Instead, another flash of lightning nearly blinded her, another crack of thunder shook the inside of her ears. “If what you say is true, that’s not a punishment, that’s a walking death sentence!”

“Yes.” Goda’s voice sounded so calm, so empty of emotion that it chilled Kanna to her core. It was like she was hearing the voice of someone who had already been stiffened by that final shock. “I was convicted of a capital crime when I was sixteen. I was too young to be legally executed, so they gave me a life sentence instead. But they’d prefer if I die. My job is designed to kill me.”

The rain made it too hard for Kanna to keep her head up anymore, so she let it hang down, and she pressed her chin against her chest. She felt the water roll in torrents from her hair, to her face, to her neck, to her shoulders, down into every crevice beneath her clothes.

Among the cacophony of thoughts that were bursting through her mind, one memory stood out among the rest. Even then, days later, bruised and numb, she could remember the words as vividly as if she were experiencing them for the first time again.

“You’re lucky, anyway,” Goda had told her the first night they met. “Your slavery is temporary. What is it, a ten-year sentence? Not everyone is quite so fortunate.”

“My father has life.”

“Better than death.”

Better than death.

Better than death.

Kanna pressed her hands to her face, and felt her tears flowing anew. They were burning hot against the contrast of the freezing rain. They began washing the numbness from her face, but she didn’t want it—she wanted to stay numb. There was a pain in her chest that she had never felt before; it was like a splinter in her heart, but it had erupted from the inside.

“You don’t have the right to judge that sort of thing from where you sit, with your hands on the other end of that rope,” Kanna had snapped at Goda that night. “People like you aren’t sympathetic to people like me.”

You don’t have the right to judge.

People like you. People like me.

From her perspective now, from the lens of that person who was coiled up in the mouth of a well in the relentless rain, she could suddenly see the irony of everything she had said to Goda before. She had insulted the woman, had judged her, had resisted her, had played the role of her master’s victim perfectly—and yet Goda Brahm was not only a slave, but she was worse off than even Kanna was.

The world wanted Goda to die. Kanna had even felt that seething hatred against Goda in the vision she had experienced as she lay in bed less than an hour before. It had terrified her. Even the priestess had….

Even the priestess.

Kanna turned her wrist over and looked at the key that Priestess Rem had given her. The woman had told her how to unlock the cuff and escape Goda. The woman had to have known what would happen next. Kanna couldn’t imagine that it was some secret that Goda would die. Even Jaya seemed to have known, and had tried to keep Goda from falling into a trap.

Priestess Rem Murau had meant to kill Goda.

No, Kanna thought quickly. That just couldn’t be true. Priestess Rem had been trying to help Kanna. Priestess Rem had been one of the few kind souls Kanna had met at the monastery, the one person who did not judge her for who she was, the one person who had been willing to lead her to sacred ground and show her the Goddess.

But she could remember Rem’s words on that last morning, just as clearly as she had remembered Goda’s words from the first night: “I am using you, Kanna. To avoid sinning against the Goddess, I am putting the choice in your hands instead of mine.”

Kanna couldn’t accept it. Everything suddenly made a lot more sense, but she still couldn’t find it in herself to accept this whole conspiracy. It was too perverse. How could Goda’s country—and her own God—have forsaken her to that degree? What crime could possibly have been so terrible that it deserved such a cruel punishment, that it warranted a mass of bureaucrats conspiring to kill her by the letter of the law?

Still, Kanna shook her head. She looked up at Goda. “I don’t believe you,” she said finally. “I can’t believe you.” But she erupted in a bone-shaking sob because she did believe it, and it made her no longer want to live in the world she had found herself in, a world where she had to kill to save herself.

She wondered if it would have been easier to kill Goda if she had just made use of that steel baton the first night—but then she remembered that the weapon didn’t exist, that Goda had made it up, that Goda’s threats had been as empty as the bottomless darkness in those black eyes.

Those eyes looked down upon Kanna now. They hovered closer than before. Goda had come to kneel against the edge of the well, her arms spread on either side of the hole like a pair of wings. Her body blocked some of the rain so that the barrage of sensation against Kanna’s skin had reduced to a trickle. The wind blew across them, but Kanna could barely hear it.

Goda had soaked up all of her awareness. Her thoughts ended. Her body felt light and numb, but her consciousness was sharp. Even the shadows on Goda seemed to throb with new colors and details that Kanna had not noticed before. There were spots and stripes that glowed on the woman’s skin, like the tribal markings of a ferocious warrior, like the etchings on the fur of a wildcat.

Light flashed again, and the colors swirled into ribbons. They danced and slithered like snakes. Kanna’s eyes widened with fear. She jerked back.

And the ledge that she had been relying on to carry her weight gave in. She shuffled to catch herself, but she wasn’t fast enough. Her arms were like dead weights in her waterlogged sleeves.

She fell.

The darkness of the pit came up to meet her. She could see it widening. It was surfaceless, like the source of the spring, like Goda’s eyes. She knew she would fall forever.

She was dying.

Then the sensation of a sharp set of claws digging into her wrist snapped her back to life. She looked up, but could only make out a show of vague shadow and flickering light. She winced as she felt her arm nearly hurled out of the socket of her shoulder.

She didn’t realize what the force meant until she had been yanked over the edge of the well.

Kanna fell into the dirt. Her mouth sucked in mud as she heaved, as she felt all her senses returning in one grand rush, as she felt the numbness dissolving. Her hands dug into the ground and the rocks below her pressed painfully into her fingers. The rain fell hard onto her back. The wind blew intolerably cold air all around her, making her teeth chatter.

She had never been so uncomfortable—but she had never been so grateful for the pain. She was alive.

Goda was lying next to her on the ground. The momentum had knocked her over as well. She was looking up at the sky, her face serene, as if she had been stretched out on a warm rock in the light of the morning sun. Goda was laughing.

Kanna stared at her with astonishment. Clearly, the woman had lost her mind.

“Are you crazy?” Kanna shouted at her. She spat out a clump of dirt. At first, Kanna thought that the feeling coursing through her had been confused anger, but as soon as the words had left her mouth, she found that she was also laughing.

They were both crazy.

She and Goda lay next to each other in the mud, in the middle of a thunder storm, and they laughed for a reason that Kanna’s mind could not directly comprehend. She felt the laugh coming from somewhere outside of her, almost as if it rose up out of the ground and into her body.

The feeling faded just as quickly as it came, though, when Goda turned to look at her and Kanna’s fearful thoughts returned. She began to pull away, but Goda took her wrist again. Kanna struggled to shake her hand away, but Goda was stronger, and she kept Kanna steady, and with two fingers she gingerly held the key and lifted it up just slightly.

Kanna thought she heard a pop.

Goda turned the lock. “You were pressing it in too hard. You can take it off now. Undo the latch and that’ll pull it open.” Goda had stopped laughing, but her smile had not faded.

Confused, Kanna did not reply, and Goda nodded her head at what Kanna refused to ask.

“Kill me,” Goda said.

Kanna ripped her wrist away from the giant’s grasp and pressed her hand to her chest once again. She stared at Goda with bewilderment. “Are you crazy?” she repeated.

“Isn’t that what you want, though? You want to be free—and for that to happen, I have to die. So kill me, Kanna Rava. You’ve won.”

Kanna froze. Even if Goda’s words were as genuine—and insane—as they seemed to be, after all of the struggle, she couldn’t believe that the woman would let her go that easily. “What?” Kanna huffed, her breath coming out visibly into the air in front of her. “I can’t kill you, I….” She tried to sit up, but found that her clothes were sticking to the ground. “Why did you chase me down if you just wanted to die? Are you completely out of your mind?”

Goda’s smile had not lost its serenity. The incongruity made Kanna more nervous than before. “What you saw when I chased you was fear. You saw the last pieces of a character named Goda Brahm,” Goda said, “and even Goda Brahm wants to live. That’s the oldest, and longest, and most constricting of all the snakes—the one that clings to survival—and even I haven’t been able to rid myself of it. The story of Goda Brahm is still one that I cannot completely let go of, and it makes me afraid of death, and so I chased you like any other animal triggered by its impending demise. But I know by now how to stifle and suppress that animal if I try hard enough—even if I’ve never been able to permanently dissolve it.” Goda, who was free from the confines of her robes, had an easier time getting up. “Kill me while that animal is sleeping. It is the will of the Goddess. I knew I would die soon, just not like this. It took me by surprise, but I must accept it nonetheless. Fate assigned me as your porter because you would be the one to kill me. It’s clear to me now.”

Kanna slid back in the mud, as if Goda were attacking her, even though the woman had made no move towards her. “What are you talking about?” Kanna screamed. “I’m not going to kill you! Even on the very first night we met, I already told you that I’m not a killer!”

“Do it fast!” Goda said, already stretching up to her feet. A rumbling had began to vibrate through the ground, but this time it was not thunder. “The train is getting ready to leave.”

Kanna’s gaze shot across the empty lot and towards the rails, and she saw that it was true. The train was already shuddering and shaking with life. A loud horn sounded through the air, and the waves bounced off the tall buildings of glass that sprouted up all around them.

Kanna bit her lip. She managed to unstick herself from the ground, to roll up onto her knees.

“I can’t…kill you,” she said.

But then, as the train began to inch forward with a brief jerk, Kanna bolted onto her feet and dashed past Goda towards the train. Her eyes locked on the freight car she had seen before. She ran for her life, even though she knew that Goda was not following her. Within moments, she had hopped onto the ledge of the moving car and had unbolted the door and had used all her strength to force it open.

It only slid open a tiny amount—but it was enough. She slipped through.

She collapsed onto the floor of the train as it rolled very slowly down the tracks. She looked up in the dark, and she could see crates stacked to the ceiling, commodities headed to the Upperland. She supposed that she had become one of those, too. In days, she would be another cog in that familiar machine once again, and this gave her a comfort that she hadn’t felt in a long time.

But still, her heart pounded in her chest. Every beat was painful. She tried to suppress what the pain meant, but she knew. She forced herself to stay. When she lifted her head to look through the crack in the door, she could see Goda strolling along next to the slowly-moving train, as if taking a pleasant summer walk.

The woman was looking at her. Kanna knew that there was no way Goda could see her in the dark train car, but somehow she felt that those eyes were piercing straight through her. Kanna felt the tears coming again, so she turned around and pressed her face to the crate behind her and clung to the wood as solidly as she could. Her small fingers slipped into the space between the panels. Her fingertips grazed against something dry and fluffy inside, but she didn’t pay attention to it much at first.

It wasn’t until the train began to speed up, until the crates began to jostle with the motion, that she opened her eyes, because she knew that Goda would be unable to keep up with the car. She turned around to finally undo the cuff. Some of the sticky leaves that had filled the crate had smudged onto her fingers, but she didn’t mind it, and under the light of another flash in the sky, she took hold of her bonds.

Then she saw the withered white flowers that coated the back of her hand. They were barely stuck with mild electric tension, and so the wind coming in from the crack in the door quickly blew most of them away.

But she could not unsee what she had seen.

They’re sending Death to the Upperland?

Kanna twisted her head around, and looked at all the crates stacked end-to-end, top-to-bottom, filling almost every corner of the car. How many crates held Flower? How many train cars filled with those crates? There was no way to tell from where she was sitting.

She didn’t even know that much Samma Flower existed on the face of the Earth. Everyone had told her it was nearly extinct.

Before she could dive deeper into her bewilderment, though, something reminded her sharply to stay awake. She was pulled from her thoughts by the nerve-burning electricity of the cuff. It pulsed through her as it always did, but this time—instead of reacting with shock and resistance—she looked down at her wrist. She sat there.

The pain had become…a feeling. Just a sensation. Not good or bad.

Could it have been that the reason those initial, mild shocks had always hurt so much was because she had resisted them? Because her muscles had always tensed up and she had always tried to run from the pain—from her own body?

No, she thought. It just couldn’t be. Pain was pain.

And indeed, as the distance from Goda grew, so did the suffering, and eventually her body did tense up to resist it, and eventually it did become intolerable. She fought with herself. She gripped the cuff latch with her hand. She knew she could not delay for much longer, or else the shocks would paralyze her and she would be unable to free herself once and for all.

To free herself. To leave Goda Brahm and to go back to the freedom of the Upperland.

Her breath hitched. A shock worse than the pain of the cuff flowed through her just then.

Because she had never been free.

She had never been free…until she had met Goda Brahm.

The train rumbled along. Kanna pressed her hand hard against the cuff, curled her fingers under the latch. She sucked in a sharp breath, a stifled sob.

In the Upperland, she had never had reason to cry. She had lived without a single need unmet. She had slept in a comfortable bed, had never gone hungry a day in her life, and had enjoyed the freedom to roam the meadows and live in the midst of a leisure that none of her countrymen could afford. Every Upperlander craved to live the way she did. She would have been crazy to want to give that up.

But she had never been happy. She had never felt happiness in her life until the instant she had lain in the mud next to Goda Brahm and stared up at the broken sky.

How is that possible? Kanna’s mind screamed as the train hurtled faster and faster.

Her muscles already seizing up, Kanna wondered if she had realized too late. She gritted her teeth. With a painful jerk, she pushed herself to the door—and with the last of her strength, she jumped shoulders-first out of the train.

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Onto Chapter 22 >>