At first, Kanna had not noticed the dawn. It came as a smudge of pink and gold reflected against the clouds on either side of her, but because she was staring at the dim image of the roadside ditch whipping past, it took her awhile to wake up to the light. In time, she felt the warmth of the sun emerging on the back of her head, and when she peered into the windshield at her reflection, it looked like a halo had arisen behind her.

She was leaning away from Goda. When she had mounted the truck hours before, she had kept her distance out of social habit, because she thought that there should have been an awkward air between them. She was thrown off to find that there wasn’t. Goda’s posture was relaxed and the silence didn’t seem to carry any heaviness to it—it was only empty space, oozing between them and fusing with the landscape that spread around them.

Still, it was only proper to be embarrassed, Kanna thought, so she stayed put and tried to summon that familiar shame. Every once in awhile, as the light grew, she glanced quickly in Goda’s direction. She was trying to parse the tiny expressions on the woman’s face, to see any sign of judgment that she could use to fuel the shame, but instead Kanna’s eyes always seemed to land on that stoic mouth: the mouth that had pressed against hers; the mouth whose teeth had grazed her lips, but not taken a bite; the mouth that had nonetheless consumed some part of her—albeit a part that was less physically apparent.

Kanna still could not shake the taste of that mouth.

“How long until I’m rid of you?” It had been a private thought at first, but Kanna spoke aloud anyway and she didn’t care anymore if Goda heard.

“Maybe a week. Maybe more. It depends on the conditions of the roads as we move onward. If it gets colder and starts snowing, that’ll slow us down, but I have about two weeks maximum to deliver you, so we’re still making good time. Once we get to Suda—the capital city—I’ll pass you off to some administrators that specialize in foreigners. You won’t see me again after that. They will hand you off to your new master after the paperwork is done.”

“More bureaucracy,” Kanna complained.

Goda smirked at her. “That’s how the Mother keeps track of her many children.”

As usual, Goda ignored the strange look that Kanna gave her in response. She pulled on a lever to make the rickety truck move faster, and before long Kanna realized that they were rising up a steady incline, and that the trees on the side of the road had started to lean into the hill along with them.

“Where are we going now?” she asked. Kanna could see that the hill was about to grow steeper; it was sprouting up high enough that there was no way she could make out the horizon anymore. This unnerved her, even though she had noticed the hill from a distance some time before. It had seemed smaller back then.

“We’re going to resupply in a city called Karo. It’s close to here.”

As the truck rattled Kanna’s bones and fought its way loudly up the hill with heaving breaths, Kanna became very quiet, very still. Karo, she thought. It was the city that the priestess had told her about—the city with a train to the Upperland. Each moment, the key was growing heavier still in her pocket, her mind wandering into the near future, her heart already racing in nervous anticipation.

But a sudden jerk of her whole body snapped her attention back to the present. Because she had been holding herself tense, it was a painful jolt, and she gave Goda an irritated look.

The truck had shot forward with a sudden start. It reared back like a horse that had been spooked in the middle of the road, and Goda yanked some lever quickly to keep it from rolling back.

“Shit, shit!” Goda said—or it seemed that this was what she had said; Kanna could still not recognize all of the expletives in Middlelander because they were always uttered so quickly and messily. It was the meaning behind the words that disturbed her more. She had never seen anything close to urgency come over the woman’s face until just then.

“What? What is it?” Kanna grabbed the side of the door as they shifted to and fro.

The beast beneath them struggled. It coughed. Kanna could feel its effort as it crawled up the hill, almost as if the energy were being drawn from her own body. It chugged forward awkwardly before sliding back—then forward again, then back—in a weightless ballet that made Kanna feel like they had lost contact with the ground. The engine groaned.

Panicked, Kanna leaned forward automatically, though she knew this would make little difference. She felt that drop in her stomach that always came before falling, that tug of potential gravity, as if they were just on the verge of careening all the way back down the hillside.

But before that could happen, there was a final jerk. With the last heave of its strength, the truck pushed itself over a bump and Goda was able to ease it onto a plateau. She yanked the brakes as soon as they had reached safety. It was only then that the engine let out a long sigh, and the truck fainted from exhaustion right where it was.

There was silence. It was a noisy silence, one that pointed to the death rattle that Kanna had just felt beneath her. Once her ears had adjusted, she could abruptly hear the chirping of birds in the distance, which had been drowned out by the dying engine before.

“Well,” Goda said, the urgency having left her voice, her face having returned to its usual unaffected blankness, “we’re out of fuel. We’ll have to push it from here on in, then.” She jiggled the handle on her door and, finding that it resisted her, she finally kicked it open and jumped out.

“Push it?” Kanna asked incredulously. They had managed to stop at a flat section, but when she looked up, she could still see that they had a good portion of the hill left to conquer. Even though the steepest parts were behind them, the rest blocked out pieces of the sky like a massive tower, and she couldn’t see over to the other side of it yet. “We can’t push the truck all the way up there. It’s impossible.”

“It’s not that bad. The truck is small and we have little cargo. I’ve pushed it before.” Goda slammed the door shut and walked to the back. She reached into the bed of the truck and began rearranging the contents, lining them up in what Kanna guessed was a more balanced configuration.

While she watched, Kanna shook her head. “Fine, even if you’ve pushed it before, that was probably on flat ground, though, wasn’t it? Maybe the rest of this hill isn’t that steep, but if we trip over anything or make one single misstep, this piece of junk will come rolling back to run us over. We can’t do that; it’s too dangerous.” She furrowed her brow when she saw that Goda ignored her. She crossed her arms. “We’re not doing that. I refuse.”

“Move over.” Goda had hopped into the back of the truck and she was motioning towards the driver’s seat.

“What?”

“Sit where I was sitting before.”

Kanna was feeling argumentative. “Why?” It was only once Goda thumped towards her and leaned over the front seat that Kanna gave in and slid across to the other side. She wasn’t exactly averse to another fight between them, but they were already in a precarious position on a ledge of the hillside, and she didn’t want to rock the truck too much with a struggle.

The woman’s presence trickled over her shoulder; it felt like a rush of sparks on the back of her neck. When Goda reached, Kanna had to fight the immediate urge to pull away, even as much as she had to fight the impulse to lean towards the touch.

But Goda did not touch her. Instead, she fiddled with some of the handles that jutted out from the console of the truck. At first, Kanna stared at the dials and levers blankly, but then she noticed Goda’s look of expectation.

The woman was trying to show her something.

“You steer with this one. Pull right to go right, pull left to go left. This over here controls the brakes. Only use it if you absolutely have to—like if we’ve started to roll back—since we’ll need all the momentum we can get to move forward, and on loose dirt it probably wouldn’t stop us from sliding anyway. This one over here controls the speed, but the engine is dead, so don’t worry about it.”

Kanna flicked her glance over her shoulder and found herself staring right into Goda’s eyes. Their faces had almost collided. Kanna recoiled only slightly from the near-miss. “You’re asking me to drive?” she said in disbelief.

“No. I’m not asking.” When Goda began to stand, the cold air came in again to replace her.

“But I can’t drive! I’ve never driven anything before in my life, and now you’re telling me to guide this thing up a dangerous hill with you at the rear?”

“That’s right.”

Kanna spun all the way around and watched as Goda climbed down off the truck. “What if I mess up? What if I do something wrong and I end up running you over or something like that?”

Goda undid her outer robes and tossed them into the back, a faint smirk growing on her face. “Well, if that happens, then I guess you’d be free. Luckily, you don’t like me very much, so it would be no loss to you, would it? Maybe you should run me over on purpose.” Goda wiped the sweat off her hands and onto her clothes, then reached out to grip the tailgate. She jiggled it a few times, seemed to decide that it was stable enough, and then braced herself against it.

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “I’m not a killer.”

“So you’ve already told me,” Goda said, gazing up at her with another strange expression, “but I know you have it in you. Every person can kill if they’re desperate enough. An opportunity like this is perfect, too, because you could easily convince yourself that you did it on accident so that you don’t have to think of yourself as a killer—as a criminal, as one of those people—which is really what would bother you more than my death itself. I’m just trusting that you’re a coward.” She leaned hard into the truck and gave Kanna a nod of expectation. “All right. Release the brake.”

With a shaky hand, Kanna reached for the lever that Goda had pointed to earlier. She wrapped her fingers lightly around it. She felt the stiffness of warm steel through the sheath of animal skin that enveloped it, but she did nothing at first because a strange feeling had come over her: It felt like the body of the truck had flowed into the woman who stood pressed against it, and that now Kanna was holding some vulnerable piece of Goda in her hand.

It all felt inexplicably intimate.

But Kanna pushed on the lever. The creak of rusted metal reached her ears; nothing happened.

“Harder!” Goda called out to her.

She pushed harder and tried to jostle it loose, but the handle only budged slightly. The truck jerked in response, and this startled Kanna enough that she let go.

“Almost!” Goda said. “Push it harder! Gather all your strength and release it all at once!”

And so Kanna gritted her teeth and gripped the lever with both hands, and leaned forward hard with all her weight. Just when she thought that the brakes were stuck and would never let up, the lever let out a rusty cry. Its handle crashed down with a thud. A smooth motion came over the truck, like a tension had been released and the wheels could naturally flow, and the ground grew slippery underneath.

For one panicked moment, Kanna thought she felt the rig slide back—but then some force swooped in and the truck rolled forward. There wasn’t a pause in between. It simply switched from backward to forward inertia, and though it rolled slowly at first, Kanna could already feel it picking up speed.

She turned to look at Goda with surprise. There was a rare amount of effort on the woman’s face. Her jaw was visibly tight, the muscles of her neck taut. She had pressed most of her body—her chest, her torso, her hips—to the back of the truck, and she was pushing into it with the smooth pace of her stride.

Kanna blushed. She gripped the back edge of her seat and watched with fascination, unable to turn away at first, unable to fix her gaze on what lay ahead of her.

When Goda glanced up at her finally, after she had applied enough forward motion that the truck seemed to gain some momentum of its own, she said, “Keep your eyes on the road. You shouldn’t have to do much to steer since we were already facing the right direction, but every course needs at least small adjustments to stay true.”

Kanna glanced at the console in front of her, though she couldn’t help but wonder again if Goda was talking about the truck or something else entirely. Hesitantly, she put her hand on the stick that Goda had told her to use for steering, and—because they seemed to be rolling slightly to the left—she gave the lever a yank to the right.

The truck let out a loud creak and leaned hard in the opposite direction.

“Small adjustments!” Goda called out to her over the noise. There was a laugh in her voice. “Small!”

Kanna winced and pulled to the left, but the steering over-corrected as before. It took her a few more times—and an awkward dance with the truck—to get the wheels facing straight forward again. She held the steering lever gingerly from then on. She kept her eyes tightly on the road in front of her.

Every once in awhile, Goda’s voice boomed through the air, correcting Kanna lightly if she hadn’t noticed a mistake. “A little more to the right!” she would say when Kanna had begun drifting; or she would shout, “Not so much!” when Kanna had become overly eager again.

The hill had grown less steep and so the truck was rolling faster. It was still not much more than the pace of a brisk walk, but Kanna was able to sit back and smile to herself and pretend that she was driving a truck on her own power.

This thought grew dark quickly, though. She glanced over at the empty fuel canister that was still on the floor of the passenger side.

It’s true. The truck usually moves on my power, doesn’t it? she thought. Her name was on all of the fuel. Rava Spirits had touched the inside of every engine in the Middleland, and the truck was practically useless without it. Her family’s product made a much better fuel than Goda’s brute muscle, at any rate. After all, it was Kanna’s spirits that had carried the truck back and forth across the continent; Goda’s will alone wouldn’t have done it, no matter how strong the woman was.

Kanna looked down at her hand where it gripped the lever. She thought that maybe, for all she had gone through, she deserved to steer the thing in the direction she wanted it to go. She knew that there was no way she could steer herself to freedom—that her slavery was built into the fabric of the Middleland itself—but that small feeling of power that she felt in the driver’s seat had started to grow, to nag at her.

It wanted something. She wanted something. And it wasn’t freedom.

Kanna looked over her shoulder again at the woman who was pushing her. She watched the flexed shoulders that held the arms up, watched the long fingers and rough palms that pressed to the metal. It was as if the woman had become a servant, as if the tables had turned. Seeing the effort made Kanna smile. The smile didn’t feel good, but it was an addicting sort of displeasure. It made her feel like a criminal.

Her free hand came to hover over the brake lever.

Yes, the hill had grown a bit less steep, she thought, but she knew that she could quickly end the forward motion. She knew that she could apply the brakes and take Goda by surprise with a sudden stop. And if she released them again quickly enough and sent the truck rolling backwards, she wasn’t sure if Goda would have time to react or jump out of the way.

Some morbid part of her was curious. She wanted to see if the woman was strong enough to catch the weight, if she could act fast enough to save herself. If she did survive by some miracle of God, Kanna decided, then surely the woman deserved to live. If she didn’t, then—

Kanna shook her head. No. What kind of monster was she to be thinking these thoughts, to even consider playing games with someone’s life? She was no goddess hovering in the heavens to be able to toy with fate like that.

But then, wasn’t it Goda herself who had told her that Kanna was the Goddess, whatever that had meant? She was the Goddess, pretending to be Kanna Rava.

Again, that small sense of power swelled in her gut. It cried out for her attention and gnashed its teeth enough that she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Perhaps Goda had been right: She didn’t want freedom after all. Freedom didn’t matter if she had power. If she had power, then not only could she do what she wanted, but she could also force Goda.

“Too far to the left!” Goda called to her. When Kanna did not move, the woman shouted again, “Hey! You’re too far! Swing it to the right!” After a few more seconds of no response, Goda finally looked up and met her gaze. The woman’s eyes grew immediately blank. Even the effort seemed to fall away in her severity. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Kanna stared at her, a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any panic in the woman’s voice. Maybe the great Goda Brahm is above panic, she thought. Or maybe—just maybe—the flames of hell haven’t licked her closely enough yet.

Glancing briefly at the road again, Kanna reached for the steering lever and smoothly directed it to the right, so that they were facing truly forward again. She turned to see if there was any relief on the woman’s face, but there was none. The expression was still only serious, unamused. There were edges of irritation perhaps, though Kanna wondered if she was only projecting those things onto a nearly empty face.

Even if she wasn’t projecting anything, such a small crack of emotion didn’t satisfy her at all. Kanna’s hand seemed to move on its own, as if it belonged to some hidden beast inside of her. Without taking her eyes off the woman’s body, she yanked the steering lever all the way to the right with all her strength.

The truck jerked sharply and Goda’s stride broke to follow it. Still, she barely missed a step. It was as if she had noticed the impending twitch of Kanna’s hand before it happened, as if she had anticipated it. She looked at Kanna this time with naked annoyance, but she said nothing and kept pushing.

“Finally!” Kanna said. The voice felt like it wasn’t even her own, but nonetheless the sounds rushed out of her own lungs. “At last, you give me something! You’ve been holding out for too long, Goda. It’s fine to show me emotion, you know.” Kanna rewarded the woman by tilting the truck back into a forward march.

Goda gritted her teeth and pushed onward.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Kanna smiled—again, a smile that had no joy or mirth underneath it, but a smile nonetheless—something that had been hard to come by of late. She leaned into the strange feeling that was growing in her. It was an ugly feeling, but it was better than no feeling at all. “What is it, Goda? Do you really have nothing to say? Your head can’t be empty all the time, can it? That’s impossible.”

But Goda didn’t answer.

A few more beats of Kanna’s heart danced excitedly in her chest, but she barely noticed it. The wheels of the truck crushed loudly against the gravel. The ground had grown chalkier closer to the top, and Goda seemed to have to put more strength into the push to keep the traction going.

Kanna’s hand hovered over the brakes again. “If I pull this all of a sudden,” she called out loudly enough for Goda to hear above all the effort, “do you think the truck will slide down in all this loose dirt? Do you think it’ll fall on top of you? Do you think it’ll kill you?” After all, if the wheels were locked, then Goda wouldn’t be able to push them forward, and the only direction they could go in that terrain would be downhill.

The truck was quite small, but at the right angle—if Goda fell and one of the wheels struck her head—then Goda would probably die. Human beings were fragile like that, Kanna thought. Even a lumbering giant like the woman below her had human vulnerabilities.

Surely Goda Brahm didn’t want to die, as blasé as she acted about death. In the face of her actual demise, she would be brought to her knees like anybody else; and so, like anybody else, she could easily fall prey to someone flexing power over her, if they held her life in their hands.

Or so Kanna assumed. She was curious to see.

Kanna wrapped her fingers around the brake lever, but she didn’t hold it tight—not yet. She caressed it softly and watched as Goda watched her. The woman was paying close attention. Still, besides that tiny shade of irritation—as if Kanna had only mildly inconvenienced her—her expression remained blank.

“I’m going to kill you, Goda,” Kanna blurted out. “What do you think of that?”

Goda’s shoulders shuffled from side to side with every forward motion. It came off like a shrug. “I don’t think,” Goda finally replied.

Kanna tightened her hand against the lever in a rush of fury. She felt the impulse to pull it up even more strongly than before, so much so that she could already feel the motion getting ready to ripple through her muscles.

Instead, she made the choice to let go.

It took all of her conscious will, but she didn’t allow herself to pull the brakes. She forced her hand into her lap. She felt a wave of shame coming over her, and a feeling so thick with the taste of death, that it made her eyes well up with tears.

She blinked and a few warm trails fell down her face. “You were right,” she murmured. She didn’t know if Goda had heard her. She wasn’t even sure exactly what Goda had been right about.

When they made it to the top of the hill where there was another plateau, Goda nearly overshot it in her momentum. On the other side was an even steeper incline—one that led downhill from where they stood—and Kanna pulled the brakes on reflex to avoid rolling into it.

For the moment, they were stable, on flat ground. Her eyes didn’t linger on the surroundings for very long, though, because she had caught sight of the strange horizon ahead:

In the expanse below them, glaring sunlight reflected off giant crystalline monuments that jutted up out of the earth. At first, she didn’t realize what they were, and it was only when her eyes grazed over the brick roads that criss-crossed like veins between them—and the stone fences that lined the sides of lush gardens—that she realized she was looking down at a valley filled with huge buildings made of metal and glass.

She leaned forward in fascination, mesmerized by the geometric angles, by the bright steel that seemed to hold up floor after floor. When she looked closely, she could even see movement through the wide glass windows of some of the structures. Beside them, there were quaint, more familiar-looking stone houses peppering the landscape, but it was those tall oddities that stuck out to her the most.

Trucks rumbled through the streets amidst puffs of smoke that looked tiny in the distance, as if they were coming out from the ends of cigars. She tried to follow one of the trucks with her eyes, but she soon lost it in a crowd of dozens more. On the sides of the roads, as if cowering away from the trucks that sped down the middle paths, she could see lines of people shuffling about—lots of people.

She tilted her head and leaned further and looked closer. She realized that the streets themselves were rippling with hundreds of heads. In some places, there were seas of them. She had never seen so many people in her entire life.

In her stupor, she had shifted her weight forward too much. The truck creaked below her. She pulled back, a bit panicked, to avoid sliding downhill into the valley. When she remembered that she had already secured the brakes, this eased her mind a bit—until she heard some crunching footsteps coming up behind her.

During her power trip, she hadn’t thought this far ahead. It hadn’t really occurred to her what Goda might do once they had reached the top. It hadn’t seemed to matter, especially since the woman had never lashed out at her before.

But something about those footsteps didn’t seem quite right. Kanna swallowed and turned around.

Goda’s feet pounded heavily into the ground and she was trudging straight towards Kanna—not towards the front of the truck, but towards Kanna. It was very clear. The woman’s eyes were trained directly on her face. They were smoldering with a fury that Kanna had never witnessed before.

“I…I—I’m sorry, I…!” Kanna stuttered, jerking back. She didn’t have much space to recoil in the seat of that tiny truck. Instead, she threw her hands up, as if to guard herself from some blow that hadn’t yet come. “I’m sorry! I don’t know what came over me! Listen, be reasonable! I was just in the moment, I didn’t mean—!” But before Goda had reached her, the corner of her eye grazed that brake lever, and she found her fingers snaking around it once again.

She pushed it down. Before she could second-guess herself, she had used all her strength to release the truck’s potential. Just that small nudge was enough to send it rolling down the hill.

At first, she felt relief wash over her, because within seconds Goda had turned into a mere blur of movement. But once she turned away from the place she had been fleeing and instead looked down in the direction where she was careening, her stomach dropped.

The hill was much steeper than she had thought. She had to lean back to keep from falling forward onto the console as the truck shot down the path. It picked up more and more speed. It wobbled uncontrollably back and forth without a driver to steer.

Terrified, Kanna clawed with desperate hands at the console, but she found that she couldn’t steady her grip, and the moment she thought she had finally gained some semblance of control, the first wave of lightning pulsed through her left hand.

“Ah!” Kanna let go of the levers and automatically grabbed her own wrist. She tugged at the cuff, but it only sent the shocks faster through both her arms. “Goda!” she screamed. Of course, this time at least, she had no one to blame except herself.

No matter which direction she wanted to go in now, the momentum carried her away against her will; and the further she separated from Goda, the more painful the shocks became. She fell down into the seat and pressed her face against the old leather, the taste of dead animal skin filling her mouth. She could do nothing but lie there limply, riding the wave of her own stupidity, waiting for her fate to change.

When she felt gravity’s potential pulling on her less urgently, she managed to lift her head up to look out through the windshield of the jostling truck. She had reached level ground in the valley, but she was bounding down a dirty road, out of control, bouncing in and out of potholes, heading straight for a tall wooden fence that encircled a building.

She barely had time to duck her head down and brace before she slammed right through it at full speed.

---

Onto Chapter 16 >>

Kanna had been unable to escape the fumes. She ducked her head, and she covered her mouth with the collar of her robes, but still the smell of the exhaust from the military trucks seeped into her nostrils. With her face tilted down, even in the dim light, she could see the script painted in red on the side of the canister as it bounced between her ankles, reminding her once again that what she was inhaling was the waste of Rava Spirits.

She glanced up at Goda. The woman’s handsome face had grown a bit twisted with distaste, and when Kanna followed Goda’s gaze, she saw that they were pulling up to a small opening between a row of tanks that blocked the road. There were a few trucks ahead of them in line, small ones that looked similar to Goda’s—albeit less run-down—and which seemed to carry civilians. Kanna couldn’t make out any of their faces, but she could see their silhouettes moving like shadow puppets in front of the bright lights.

There were soldiers as well, dipping down over the doors of the trucks, handing things to the people inside and receiving things in return. Others were peering into the back cabins, poking and prodding at the cargo before letting people through.

“What are they looking for?” Kanna asked Goda.

“What do you think they’re looking for?”

Kanna shook her head and sighed as the queue moved and she saw that they would be next to face the first checkpoint. “Don’t tell me they’re looking for Death Flower—for Samma Flower. All this paranoia over one tiny little plant is ridiculous. Sure, what it does is horrendous, but I still don’t understand the obsession.”

“You don’t yet realize its power, then,” Goda murmured, her eyes still straight ahead. “Imagine what happened to you in the cave, but multiplied many hundreds of times. That’s what the flower can do if a person can ingest it successfully without poisoning themselves or purging it altogether. It can leave a person empty of beliefs and principles and morals, which makes them very hard to control. Someone who has seen the truth has nothing to lose.”

Kanna stared at the woman. She wondered if Goda was talking about herself. “I thought you said that it allows a person to see the Goddess.”

“Yes, exactly: The truth, the emptiness, the Goddess—same thing.”

“You never make any sense.” Kanna crossed her arms. “‘Truth,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘Goddess’—I may be no expert in the Middlelander tongue, but these are not synonyms.”

“You’re right,” Goda said. “You are indeed no expert. Either way, it doesn’t serve you to get caught up in the words themselves. You’ll miss what they point to. If I point to that mountain in the distance, are you going to fixate on which finger I used to point to it?”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like Goda’s attitude one bit, but before she could offer an irritated retort, Goda had pulled the truck up beside a soldier who was already leaning in their direction with a weird grin.

“Well, well! Hello there, Goda Brahm. Still not dead yet, I see!”

Kanna thought it was the strangest greeting she had ever heard, but Goda did not appear to be offended. Instead, she rummaged around in her robes and pulled out a folded stack of papers.

“This is my prisoner. She’s an Upperlander, but she’s been cleansed.” Goda shoved the papers into the woman’s hand.

“Oh, come on, don’t be so short with me,” the soldier said as she began flipping through Kanna’s documents. “We have time. I don’t mind holding up the line so that we can catch up. How’s the lovely Priestess Rem Murau doing? I heard she’s at the desert monastery now; I can’t imagine you missed her. You had to go there for the cleanse, didn’t you?” The soldier glanced down at the last sheet of paper as Goda looked on silently. “Ah, yes, here is the priestess’s personal stamp. Must have been nice seeing that familiar face after all this time, huh?”

Something about the look that the soldier was giving Goda made Kanna extremely uncomfortable. It was a twisted grin, like the woman was trying to tease out some kind of emotion. Kanna could not see Goda’s expression, since she was facing away, but she could see the back of Goda’s shoulders stiffen slightly. It gave Kanna the sudden urge to reach out and touch her, but she suppressed it.

“Are you letting us through or not?” Goda said rudely.

“Sheesh, no need to get so snippy!” Then the woman’s gaze grew more intense, her smile wider, but her voice suddenly quieter—as if she were whispering with mock intimacy, “What are you going to do, Goda? Stab me in the neck?”

Goda’s entire body jerked forward in that instant. Her arm thrust out towards the soldier, and for a split second Kanna was convinced that she was about to strike her. The soldier seemed to get that same impression, too, and her eyes widened, and she jumped back.

But instead of hitting her, Goda merely opened a hand. “Are you done?” she asked.

The soldier dropped the papers onto Goda’s palm without saying another word. Goda rolled forward into the next checkpoint.

“What in God’s name was that all about?” Kanna huffed as they neared another gaggle of soldiers that seemed to be glancing into the cabin of each truck in line.

Kanna also noticed that off to the side, there was a group of three travelers pulled over, and she could sense anxiety in their postures. The soldiers were swooping into the back of their truck like a flock of vultures, clawing through the cargo as if they were searching for something.

“She’s an acquaintance of mine,” Goda replied. “We used to work at the same place when we were younger.”

“At the monastery in Samma Valley?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why was she talking to you like that?”

“She doesn’t like me.”

“Clearly.” By now, this was no longer shocking to Kanna, but she was still confused as to how a simple gardener could have accumulated so many enemies. Maybe nine years prior, Goda had grown some poisonous herb, and other people like Priestess Rem had accidentally eaten it with unpleasant results. Or maybe…

Yes, Kanna thought, of course.

Why had this never occurred to her before? Goda seemed to know all about Death Flower, and she had even admitted to eating it before. Could this have been why Priestess Rem seemed to hate her so much?

Still, it seemed like an odd thing to hate someone for. Priestess Rem’s grudge had appeared to be much more personal, and if possessing Death were something so offensive to the priestess, then wouldn’t she have treated Parama Shakka the same way? Furthermore, Goda was not a slave—and she was clearly not imprisoned—so even if she had grown Death Flower, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would have found out about it, or else she would have surely lost her freedom.

They pulled up to the group of soldiers, the truck beneath them giving out a violent shudder, a complaint that seemed to mean that the motor wasn’t keen on all of the stopping and going—or else that they were running out of fuel, Kanna guessed.

One of the soldiers peered into the truck, and she noticed the canister on the floor. She glanced at Kanna curiously, to scrutinize her face.

“A foreigner? An Outerlander, are you?” the soldier asked. “What’s that you have there?”

“It’s a container of fuel,” Goda replied for her, but she didn’t bother to correct the woman on Kanna’s ethnicity.

Without so much as a gesture of apology, the soldier bent into the open cabin and reached down between Kanna’s feet. Kanna jerked her legs up onto the seat and gave the soldier a startled look, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.

The soldier popped open the cap at the end of the spout with her thumb and she sniffed the canister. While Kanna watched with disgust, the woman took a swig and then coughed loudly, droplets spraying on the ledge of the door until she managed to stifle it by pressing her mouth to the crook of her arm.

When she seemed to have recovered, she looked up. She cleared her throat with a booming grunt. “Yep, that’s definitely fuel.” She waved a hand after dropping the cargo into Kanna’s lap. “I’m searching the back. Stay in your seats and don’t test my patience with any nonsense.”

Kanna glared at her, but the eye contact didn’t last long because the woman climbed into the back of the truck and started shifting around random crates and containers.

“What the hell did she think would be in a fuel canister other than fuel?” Kanna whispered, snapping to the side to look at Goda with indignation.

“The excretions of a vessel, of someone who has gorged themselves on Samma Flower.”

“No, really.”

“Really.”

Kanna made a face. It was bad enough that people ran around drinking other people’s tainted urine, but it seemed that they carried it around in jugs as well. What kind of country have I been dragged into? she asked herself.

While the soldier rummaged around in the back, giving the rig an unpleasant bounce, Kanna tried to distract herself by staring off towards the group of migrants that she had seen earlier, who were now standing not too far from Goda’s side of the truck.

As she squinted over Goda’s seat and through the blazing electric lights, she could make out some of the migrants’ faces this time. They appeared to be Middlelanders—or so she assumed—because two of them were tall, lanky women with dark hair who did not appear to have Outerlander features. The third seemed to be a short young man—though Kanna could still not be sure of his gender—but when she peered into the details of his face more closely, she nearly pulled back with revulsion.

Even through the fair distance that separated them, she could see that he was staring straight at her—or at Goda—and his eyes didn’t seem right at all. They were huge, pupils spread wide like the mouth of a void in spite of the bright lights. His eyelids were strung open. The whites of his eyes gleamed at her. His whole body was shuddering, and as Kanna stared at him longer, the shudders only grew stronger.

He dashed towards them. This time, Kanna did recoil. She jerked away so strongly on reflex that her back slammed against the door beside her. Seeing this, Goda gave her a curious look, then followed her gaze and finally seemed to notice the small man who was running frantically in their direction.

Kanna stared in horror as the stranger jumped onto the side of the truck before Goda could even react. He grasped the collar of Goda’s robes and looked at her with that wide open stare, with those black holes that had replaced his eyes.

Kanna was sure that he was about to attack, that Goda was about to be forced into another fight, but instead he screamed, “Master!” His voice was desperate. “Master, is that really you? I had begged the Goddess to lead me to you before I had to go, to let me see your face even once!”

Kanna blinked. She didn’t know what to do. She sat there, frozen in place, uncertain as to whether she should run or stay put. The man was obviously insane.

Goda took a tight hold of her assailant’s hand and wrenched it away. “What are you talking about, boy?” she said, her tone one of genuine bafflement. From her vantage point, Kanna could see Goda’s face in the reflection of the glass windshield, and the woman’s eyebrows were furrowed with confusion.

All the ruckus seemed to rouse the attention of the soldier behind them. “Hey! Hey you, get back over to your truck! What are you doing over here, interrupting a search?” The soldier seemed to look at him more closely, and then her eyes widened a considerable degree as well. “We have one!” she shouted, lifting her head up to call out to the rest of her comrades. “We have a vessel currently in state! Pull him down, pull him down!”

But the young man gripped the side of Goda’s door to keep steady and he stared hard at Goda’s face. “I wasn’t going to last long here anyway, but I’m sure I’ll see you on the other side of the gate when the time comes. I know you’ll come back,” he said, very calmly, a strange serenity filling his face, a peace that seemed to point to some deep, inner silence beneath the pounding noise of boots on gravel.

He was smiling when a pack of soldiers descended upon him and ripped him away from Goda’s truck. He was smiling when they pushed him to the ground. Before long, Kanna couldn’t even see most of his body through all the commotion, but she could see that quiet, contented smile—and it made Kanna so uncomfortable that she had to turn away.

The soldier who had been searching them jumped down from the back of the truck. She waved Goda off impatiently. “Go!” she said. “You’re clear. Stop rubbernecking and leave!”

Kanna stared straight ahead. Somehow, all the content of her thoughts had dissipated, and only the image of the boy’s empty expression remained in her mind’s eye. She pressed her hands to her face and tried to shake it off, and when she looked back up again, they were already moving.

As they pulled away from the checkpoint and the lights whipped by like a flash, it felt like Kanna was being sucked into the dark void of the road in front of them. Just as Goda’s lantern had lit the way through the darkness of the caverns, the headlights of Goda’s truck lit only one small part of the road, and Kanna found it unnerving that she could see hardly anything outside this bubble of light—only the shadows of the mountains far in the distance.

“What was that?” she asked in a hushed tone, even though they had already sped far past any of the others. “What the hell is going on? Really, what is this place? Have I been pulled into some bizarre nightmare, some dream I need to wake up from? Every time I think I have the tiniest, most minuscule grasp on what’s happening around me, this world consistently goes out of its way to prove to me how wrong I am.”

“Good. Then you’re starting to see the truth: The universe is constantly changing, so you won’t do yourself any good trying to grasp onto some structure that you create in your head. Everything is infinitely strange. Get used to it.”

Kanna shook her head and crossed her arms, unsatisfied with Goda’s answer—unsatisfied with everything. “That still doesn’t explain the boy who ran up to you. Was he just a madman drunk on Death or what? Where did he come from? Do you even know him?”

“I’ve never met him before and I have no idea who he is.” The bewilderment still had not completely faded from Goda’s face, and Kanna decided that the woman was telling the truth, if for no other reason than the fact that she had no conceivable reason to be lying.

“Why would he call you his master?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Maybe he’s been your prisoner before, and he was having some psychotic flashback.”

“No. I would have remembered. They almost never allow women to transport men alone—unless the prisoner is a low-ranking foreigner, and that man was definitely a Middlelander. That’s probably how he made it this far without being caught. Most vessels are Outerlanders, so the soldiers don’t expect people like him to have eaten Flower, and they don’t require people like him to cleanse when coming back over the border.”

Kanna opened her mouth to complain once again about discrimination, but she stopped. Instead, she looked hard at Goda’s face, at the small bits of emotion that rippled through the woman’s expression.

“What’s going to happen to him?” Kanna asked, though she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.

“He’ll be executed.”

The wind whipped through Kanna’s ears and the world fell into a pulsating silence for a long while. When the military lights were so far behind them that Kanna could not see the glare on the horizon even if she turned around, the truck beneath them began to rattle again, and so Goda pulled over to the side of the road.

“She’s tired,” Goda said. “We’ll rest here until morning.” It took Kanna a moment to realize that Goda was talking about the truck, but nonetheless the comment made Kanna yawn.

The truck shook back and forth, and the sound of ringing metal echoed through the darkness as Goda climbed over her seat and jumped into the back. Kanna could not see her very well anymore now that the headlights were off, but she could hear Goda pushing crates and other items aside on the flatbed behind her, perhaps undoing the mess that the soldier had made.

“Come.” Goda motioned towards the back of the truck. “There’s another shrine nearby that I stay in sometimes, but considering what happened to you in the caverns, it’s best if we sleep here.”

She spread out the mats that she had stolen from Jaya, and just as they had done for the three nights before, they lay side by side. This time, though, it was in the cool open air, and as Kanna plopped onto her back, she could see an array of stars above her, peeking through the branches of some nearby trees that crouched over them.

We’re near a forest again, Kanna thought. The foliage on the side of the road had grown even more frequent as they had headed West. She wondered now if they had officially emerged from the desert, though it was hard to draw a hard line in the landscape, even if they had just crossed a man-made border into the Middleland.

There were other ambiguities to consider, too. Kanna ventured to glance beside her. She could only see the barest outline of Goda’s face. The woman’s eyes appeared to be closed already, her breath steady, her arms tucked behind her head. It was a pose that Kanna found to be overly-relaxed, considering that the woman was lying there, completely exposed to the elements—completely exposed to Kanna.

Maybe she trusts me now, Kanna thought. Goda hadn’t tied her up or done anything to deter her escape, though granted, by then Kanna knew not to defy the cuff. With mixed feelings, she reached down and pressed her hand to the key through the fabric of her robes, until she felt the metal growing warm. Whether Goda trusted her or not, it was true that some strange connection had materialized between them beyond the cuff, something Kanna could not understand, something Goda had lightly acknowledged earlier that day.

But Kanna knew she wouldn’t have any time to explore it. She pulled her hand away from the key. She stared at Goda’s face.

That natural impulse to touch the woman had come over Kanna again, but it was stifled by the awkwardness that still lingered—and the presence of the key which had grown heavier between them.

* * *

Kanna had a dream. She recognized that she was dreaming, and so this time she was much less afraid when she found herself standing in a strange clearing surrounded by woods, in a body that was not her own.

Her head was tilted down and she was looking at the earth beneath her, at a pair of boot-clad feet that seemed much further away than hers usually were. In her left hand there was a heavy bucket filled with soil. When she looked up, she realized that she could not control her gaze, or the tilt of her head, or any muscle in the body she inhabited.

The body moved on its own, down a path near a little fence, past a tiny cabin. The body was taking her along with it. Before it walked her into a nearby wooded trail, however, a voice rang out behind her.

“You! Stop!”

Kanna turned her head—again, without any direct control. A beautiful young woman stood in the front yard of the house, just on the other side of the fence. Light rays came down from between the trees and struck the woman’s face, giving her an angelic appearance in spite of her black robes. The woman looked very familiar, but even with the awareness that she was dreaming, Kanna’s mind was still not fully lucid, and she found that she couldn’t put a name to the person standing before her.

The woman smiled, her hands clasped in front of her, her clothes giving a strangely severe contrast to the bright greenery around them. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “You’re the apprentice, aren’t you? I have a problem with my garden that I need you to solve.”

Kanna’s new body trudged towards the woman—who she now realized was a Maharan priestess—and came to stand with just the closed gate between them. Because she had to tilt her gaze down to meet the priestess’s eyes, and the top of the fence barely reached beyond Kanna’s waist, she realized very suddenly that she was inhabiting the body of some kind of giant.

The giant spoke, and Kanna could feel the voice vibrating as if it were through her own throat: “I’m an apprentice to the horticulturist. I’m not a personal gardener. That’s the job of a temple assistant, so ask one of them.” The body began to turn.

“My my, how disrespectful!” the woman said, though in her eyes she looked amused and not offended at all. “Is that the sort of welcome that you offer a new priestess like myself? Even if I am a novice still, you probably realize that it’s not a good idea to get on my bad side.”

“It’s none of my concern which side I’m on.”

“You’re a willful one, aren’t you?” The priestess stepped forward and unlocked the gate. “Come. It’s not gardening work so much as a dirty deed that I can’t do myself because it’s against my precepts. A pair of rabbits have taken up residence and they’re eating everything remotely green in here. I need you to kill them before they start a family.”

“If it’s rabbits you want gone, then release a snake in your garden and that should take care of the problem.”

“Oh, but then I would have to deal with a snake, wouldn’t I? And it’s against my precepts to kill anything, so I would find myself in the same conundrum.”

The giant stared at the priestess. “What, so you need me to sin in your place?”

“Yes, exactly.” The woman’s eyes looked impish, still amused. “It is the role of a lay person to sin in my place, and today that will be you. I’m not asking; I’m ordering you.”

“Why me?”

“Look at those hands of yours. You could beat anyone senseless. I doubt you’d have trouble hunting down a pair of rabbits—and going by that cold, unfeeling look that you always carry around on your face, I doubt you’d be squeamish about it, either. I’ve been watching you.” She gave Kanna—or the giant—a tiny smile, an expression that Kanna would have thought a touch coquettish if it hadn’t been coming from a priestess.

The giant seemed to notice the look and leaned back. She awkwardly cleared her throat and Kanna could feel the rumble again in her own lungs. To her surprise, she also felt some warmth rising slowly up her face.

“Fine,” the giant muttered. “If you’re ordering me, then I can’t say no.”

So Kanna floated into the garden along with that huge body, and before long she could barely make sense of what was happening because the giant had caught sight of the rabbits and had given chase. The hands that hung below her grasped the tiny creatures one at a time, and with a small knife, the hands slit each of the animals’ throats. Kanna tried not to look, but she could not influence the direction of her gaze, so she had to watch it in great detail.

The giant dropped the rabbits on the priestess’s doorstep.

“What?” the priestess said. “You’re not going to skin and butcher them for me? I can’t butcher an animal. It’s against my precepts.”

The giant sat on the stoop with her knife and Kanna watched for awhile as the rabbits became meat before her very eyes. When the giant went to hand the priestess the small corpses, the priestess finally accepted them, but she offered no word of thanks.

“Come back here in the evening,” she said instead. “I want you to build me a fire in the back.”

“Why? Is starting a fire also against your precepts?”

“No.” The priestess’s smile grew ever more coy. “I’m inviting you over for dinner, of course. We’re having rabbit.”

* * *

As soon as Kanna opened her eyes, the vivid imagery of the bright forest faded, and she was met only with a black sky above her. She coughed, her throat bone dry. She rubbed her face with both hands and tried to move, but she found that the surreal sensation of inhabiting some other body had left her unsure of her own.

When she managed to sit up by pushing herself against the side of the truck, her eyes opened fully and she stared into the darkness ahead of her. Even as the memories dissolved—as they usually did for most of her dreams—the face of the young woman remained, and in her renewed lucidity, Kanna realized…

It had been the face of Priestess Rem.

There was no doubt. The woman’s features were younger, less motherly and more like a girl who had just blossomed into adulthood, but she had looked exactly like Priestess Rem.

I barely stayed near the monastery for three days, and yet this woman is haunting my dreams already, Kanna thought. She let out a long sigh and tried to shake off the residual mix of emotions that she had felt through the giant’s body. Maybe she does have magical powers after all.

But of course, Kanna didn’t believe in that kind of nonsense—in magic, or fortunetelling, or Goddesses, or mystical snakes.

Eventually, when the space around her felt real again, she thought to look beside her, and she found that the mattress that was twin to her own lay empty. A rumpled indentation was still there, in the vague shape of Goda’s tall body, but as Kanna looked around and tried to see where she might have gone, there were no further signs of the woman.

Of the giant.

Kanna stiffened where she sat. On impulse, she grabbed the edge of the border of the truck bed, and she pulled herself over the side, and she slid down the rusted metal until her feet landed onto the dirt outside. She spun around, looking in every direction.

“Goda?” she murmured. Even when she peered far past the truck, there was no one. In the darkness, she could see only the smudged gray image of the trees on the side of the road. “Goda!”

As she turned, a quick flash caught her eye between two of the trees, an orange glow that seemed to come from the heart of a fire. She shuffled down the small embankment that separated the road from the trees, and when she looked through the brush, she found that the patch of woods actually wasn’t thick at all. Maybe twenty paces ahead of her, obscured only slightly by low-hanging branches, the flat side of a stone ridge marked an end to the grove, along with the beginnings of a shallow den carved inside the rock.

Kanna could see that the walls were dancing with the flicker of warm flames, and even from where she was standing, she recognized the wide back of the woman who sat cross-legged in front of the embers.

Because it was not far, Kanna lifted her robe up over her ankles, and she trudged through the leaf litter until she reached the other side of the trees. Her eyes fell into the core of the fire inside the cavern, then up towards the clay-smeared walls. They were etched with strange writing that glared in the light. It was not in any standard script, and Kanna could not read it, but it looked frustratingly familiar, something close to the Old Middlelander writing that Goda had forced on her.

Slowly—because she was still spooked by the possibility of more snakes—she eased her way to the mouth of the den and stood behind the giant.

Goda was facing away, in a posture that reminded Kanna very much of Priestess Rem when she had run into her in the cellar of the tower. She hoped that Goda’s face wouldn’t be quite so lifeless as Rem’s had been. She craned her neck to look.

Goda’s eyes were open.

“Take off your sandals,” Goda said.

Kanna jerked back slightly. For some reason, she had been unprepared for that voice. It bounced off the walls of the small den and seemed to enter her ears with no clear source.

But Kanna obeyed and crouched down to pull off her sandals before she softly inched her way towards the warmth of the fire. Because she could not bear to sit directly next to Goda, she sat down on the other side of the flames, next to a bundle of sticks and brush that seemed to be meant for fuel.

The woman did not greet her. They sat in silence. Kanna wondered if she had interrupted some kind of meditation.

Absentmindedly, as if to disrupt the intensity that seemed thick in the air, Kanna grasped one of the bushy twigs and threw it into the flames. At first, it did not burn. It let off steam, but was not consumed. Startled, Kanna watched until the flames finally began to catch on the leaves of her offering, until she was sure that no miracle had befallen her.

When she looked up at Goda’s flickering face, the woman was watching her. It felt as uncomfortable to Kanna as staring directly into the glaring fire, but Kanna had come in there searching for that gaze, so she did not turn away. She had too many questions.

“Be honest with me,” she said, the images from her dreams flooding her mind again. “Who are you?” She leaned across the fire, feeling the heat pushing against her chest, but she stayed because it allowed her to scrutinize that stranger’s face.

For awhile, Goda said nothing and only watched Kanna through the glow. The flames seemed to frame Goda’s features, and they gave her skin the quality of being set alight. When she finally answered, she had a faint smile in those black eyes.

“I am,” Goda said.

Kanna waited for the rest of the answer, but it didn’t come. The way Goda had spoken made it sound like it was a completed sentence. Kanna shifted in place and shook her head, both because she didn’t understand and because she suspected that she was teetering on the edge of a disturbing realization.

“Who are you?” Kanna repeated.

“No one.”

“Stop.” Kanna shook her head again. “Tell me. I’m serious. Who are you?”

“I’m you.”

After this, Kanna looked away, because she could no longer meet that smoldering gaze that seemed to expect some understanding from her. She leaned back in frustration. She crossed her legs to mirror Goda’s stance.

“I had a dream,” Kanna told her. “Priestess Rem was in it—and I think you were, too. I don’t know. In the dream, I think I was you.”

“Was it a nightmare?”

“Yes.” Kanna rubbed her face with her cold hands, and this eased some of the discomfort that the heat of the fire had been burning into her. “Priestess Rem was younger. She was standing in a garden next to a cottage in a forest, and she asked me to kill two rabbits for her.”

When Kanna quickly glanced at Goda again, the woman’s face had grown nearly expressionless, but there was a faint touch of surprise, and some of the intensity of her concentration seemed to be suddenly broken.

When the surprise faded, she began to stand up.

“That was not Priestess Rem,” Goda said. She made her way to the entrance of the cavern. “We should leave here. Even though you didn’t enter the shrine at first, it sensed your presence nearby and was sending you messages in your sleep. We pulled over too close.”

“Messages?”

Goda didn’t answer. Because she seemed to have no water to waste, she dug her hands into the soil just outside the den and began throwing that onto the flames to stifle the small fire. As she did this, Kanna thought she saw a flash of color pulsing above her. When she looked up at the ceiling of the shrine as the light progressively faded, she noticed all kinds of graven images—of beasts, both realistic and mythical—but most of all she noticed the carving that floated above Goda’s head: the shape of a swan with spreading wings.

Kanna stared at it. It stared back at her with a swirling eye that seemed fueled by the last wink of light, and when that died, the swan and its brothers disappeared.

Outside the den, Kanna followed Goda into the pitch darkness, not questioning for even a moment that the woman knew where she was going. She reached out and grasped onto the back of Goda’s robes. The gesture had become her habit by now, something she did to get her bearings and keep her balance when the terrain was new.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Kanna said, pressing her face to Goda’s back, pushing herself closer to the one who led her through the dark.

“I answered you three times. Three times is more than enough.”

“How do you expect me to make any sense of those weird answers?”

“Are you really asking about who I am, then? Or are you asking about my personal life?”

“Aren’t they the same?”

Goda slowed down slightly to step over a fallen tree and Kanna followed after feeling her movements. “You know that they’re not.”

“Fine, fine! But you’re still evading my questions. And on top of that, you have the nerve to haunt my dreams while you evade them! You can imply all you want that I’m too dense to understand anything and that I’m missing the point—and maybe that’s true—but you’re missing my point, too: I’m not asking about anything important or all-encompassing, like the answers you keep giving me. I’m asking about something stupid and mundane, and so those are the answers I want, because I’m a stupid and mundane person.” Kanna let out a long breath of frustration, her eyes shut, her nails making indentations into the fabric of Goda’s clothes. “Who are you? I keep seeing bits and pieces of your story, but none of it fits together. Tell me about your life, and then maybe I can come to understand all of this.”

Goda ignored her until they had almost come out of the grove, and then she turned around to face Kanna. The trees rustled around them, letting light through only in patches. The faint shine of the stars and the moon lit up Goda’s eyes, but the rest of the woman’s expression was obscured.

That blank stare only served to make the ire from earlier that day return to Kanna’s blood, though it was wrapped in a different kind of passion this time. “Everyone has some sort of identity, some sort of past—even you! If you had really risen above it as much as you pretend, then it would mean nothing to just tell me, wouldn’t it? What’s with all the mystery? At worst, it would just be a story to pass the time on a long drive to nowhere.”

“I have no desire to serve as entertainment for you.”

“Oh, so now you have preferences? I thought the great Goda Brahm had no personal desires or aversions one way or another!”

Goda tilted her head down low to meet Kanna’s eyes. Her sardonic huff sent steam into the air—steam that filled Kanna’s nostrils—and it was only in that sudden closeness that the woman’s smirk finally became visible.

“Is that what you thought?” she said. To Kanna’s irritation, Goda’s tone was teasing, not at all touched by any of Kanna’s accusations.

“Stop!” Angered, Kanna boldly grasped the woman’s face with both hands and pulled her closer, fingers pressing into the bones, energy radiating through every nerve, until her mouth was nearly touching the source of that breath. With a surge of vulnerability that she could not fight, Kanna locked her open gaze on those black eyes, and whispered through gritted teeth, “Why do you pretend that you’re not human? Stop acting like you’re some disembodied spirit from my nightmares. I know you’ve seen something, too, or else you wouldn’t be running from me. What did you see? Have I also found my way into your dreams? Am I a monster to you the way you are to me?”

Kanna thought she saw a crack then, the barest break in the woman’s expression, another faint hint of surprise.

“I don’t want you in my dreams anymore,” Kanna said. “I want you in the flesh. Only in the flesh.”

“My flesh won’t do you any good,” Goda said. Her eyes were alight again, but with a different sort of fire. Her face was close, but to Kanna’s frustration, she would not move any closer. She only stared, and hovered like a ghost, and huffed warm, living breath.

With full intention—with a taunting insolence—Kanna brushed her lips against the corner of that mouth. The touch was light, and brief, and barely there, a mocking version of what Kanna knew the woman would not give her. It was subtle enough that both of them could have pretended it hadn’t happened at all.

Nonetheless, it was enough to provoke the giant’s fury.

Before Kanna could fight back or even let out a gasp, that warm breath flowed into her. She heard it surge through her throat and ears. She felt it billow into her lungs. A buzz rang so profoundly in her bones that for a moment she wondered if the cuff had shocked her.

It hadn’t.

Goda kissed her.

That breath invaded every inch of Kanna’s body, but more than air was now being exchanged between them, because Kanna leaned hard to meet her, to ravenously consume the monster who had foolishly slipped into the trap of Kanna’s wide-open mouth.

The burning heat of Goda’s flesh—the tongue and the teeth together—both aroused Kanna and filled her with fear once again. Wanting more of both, Kanna pulled Goda hard by the neck of her robes. They crashed against each other. They stumbled back until the woman had pressed her against the trunk of a tree. Goda leaned in deeply, propping her hands up on the bark at either side to keep steady.

But it was not enough.

Without breaking the kiss—without even opening her eyes—Kanna took hold of one of those wrists and ripped it towards her. She shoved the hand between her own legs. She gasped again as the fingers squeezed her reflexively, with just the right amount of roughness, as if the woman had sensed exactly what Kanna had asked for without words. The heat of that hand pulsed against her, even through the fabric that served as a barrier to the touch, and so Kanna scrambled to find the bottom of her own robes, to begin hiking them up in desperation.

But the second Kanna did this, Goda stiffened. The body, the hand, the mouth—they retreated all at once and were replaced with a rush of cold air. Kanna looked on with bewilderment, with mild shock at the sudden emptiness.

Goda shook her head.

“My flesh won’t do you any good,” she repeated, her eyes once again impenetrably blank. “Believe me, you don’t want to know what I am.”

Then the woman turned around and trudged through the trees, until Kanna could only see her ghostly shadow drifting away towards the dark road. Kanna dropped to the ground, her back against the trunk of the massive evergreen, and she looked up at the starlit sky that peeked through the branches above her.

She tightened her jaw. She pressed her hand to her thigh and felt the outline of the key within the pocket of her robes.

Whoever the woman was, Kanna thought, she would be free of her soon enough.

---

Onto Chapter 15 >>

Kanna waited for a long time, but Goda did not come. She stared out the hazy window and up at the sky that grew ever brighter over the landscape. Her eyes closed and opened on their own as sleep took her for a few seconds at a time. For awhile, the only thing that seemed real was the inflow and outflow of her breath.

Even through the folds of her robes, she could feel the texture of the cuff key pressing against her from its place deep inside her pocket. It nagged at her with its presence, and reminded her that her passivity had come to an end.

There was no choice. She had to do it.

Three days before, her past self had resolved to escape the moment she had a chance. What good would that promise have been if her present self did not honor it?

Still, without any shred of logic to justify the feeling, she wanted to see the woman who had captured her. Goda’s presence was not comforting, but there was something about the empty space that hovered around her that made Kanna feel a strange wakefulness, as if she were being splashed in the face with cold water. Standing by the light of Goda’s lantern, she had seen things that she could not explain—and now she could not unsee them. Now she wanted answers.

But Goda did not come.

When Kanna could feel the metal walls of the storage shed radiating the heat of the sun, she decided that she had waited too long, and that she would do something she had never done before: She would seek Goda out.

Getting up onto an unstable pair of legs—her inner body still floating faintly inside the shell of her skin, her head still pulsing and disconnected—she shuffled to the doorway and pushed that last barrier open.

The sand outside blew against her more aggressively than before. It made it hard to see without getting dirt in her eyes, and so she pressed her hand to her face and kept her stare at the ground. One foot after another, she watched her toes dig into the sand, the grit falling between the soles of her feet and her sandals, grinding away at her uncalloused skin.

She moved in the direction of the garden. When she ventured to look up, her arm still hovering over her eyes, she saw that mountain of limbs and hair and dark cloth strewn on the ground right outside the fence. For just a second, her heart jerked with a reaction that she couldn’t understand; for just a second, she had thought that Goda was dead.

But the heap that made up that woman’s body was still moving. It was rising and falling with the wind-blown sand, with a deep breath that flowed from huge lungs. Kanna was so entranced by that flow, that at first she didn’t notice the figure that had stalked over in the haze.

It was a soldier. She was standing tall, bent back, as if her spine were a slingshot that was poised to strike. In her hands was a wooden post that had clearly been ripped from the fence. It was aimed at Goda’s head.

The wind grew quiet. Kanna could still feel it blowing against her face, but the noise stopped. Instead, her ears were flooded with a dull whir. Without even thinking, she reached down into the ground in front of her and felt for the biggest rock that could fit in her hand.

The air whistled when she launched it. Her shoulder nearly snapped out of its socket when she sent the rock sailing. Because she had not taken more than a second to aim, she almost missed entirely. The rock barely grazed the soldier’s ribs before slamming into the ground and leaving a crater near Goda’s face.

But it was enough.

Startled, the soldier stumbled to the ground in confusion, her makeshift bat landing limply beside her. She covered her head, as if expecting an onslaught of missiles—but when she traced the presumed path of the rock and she met Kanna’s gaze for the first time, her eyes narrowed.

One of those eyes had an ugly bruise that looked half-healed.

She was screaming something to Kanna, but Kanna could not hear. All that Kanna could sense was the growing empty sound of that whirring, and the rise and fall of her own breath in her ears as she pressed her hands into the sand.

The sleeping giant began to stir. From this, the soldier grew spooked again, and so she scuffled to her feet and ran off into the plain, until that curtain of haze hid her form and the wind swept away even her footprints.

Goda gazed across the sands at Kanna. Her black eyes were fully open, fully awake, without even a trace of the murkiness of sleep. Kanna felt that she was looking at a woman who had never been drunk in her life, a woman who had never fallen asleep, a woman who had simply closed her eyes and laid her face in the grit of the sand for no good reason at all.

As repulsed as she was by this, Kanna ran to her anyway—because she had found her finally—and as she slid across the dirt to where her master lay, Goda took her by the hand to pull her close.

“We have to leave,” Goda said. “Right now.”

Kanna could hear the woman’s voice clearly, even through the buzzing in her own head. In the dim background, there was shouting, too, a growing shuffle of activity coming from the beastly engines nearby.

She could hear a dozen boots against the gravel.

Oh no, Kanna thought. It seemed she had awakened much more than a giant.

They both trudged back to the storage shed and grabbed what they could carry, and then they rushed across the plain towards Goda’s truck, avoiding the shadows of the military along the way. Goda’s truck lay alone, surrounded by the empty space of the desert, and for a reason that Kanna could not understand, she felt like it had been waiting for them, like it had been impatient for their return.

Goda quickly fed the tank, then she handed the half-spent canister of fuel to Kanna and told her to hold it in the front seat of the truck. Kanna took the fuel without resistance this time—perhaps because she was in a hurry, perhaps for some other reason—but as she climbed into the rig and threw the canister on the floor, her eyes still scanned the Upperlander script instinctively.

Rava Spirits, it read.

And so she knew that she had not merely dreamt it the night before.

* * *

“I want the truth,” Kanna said.

She had not spoken for a long time because the rushing air filled her ears and she had assumed that they would not be able to hear each other in the midst of it. But as they had grown further and further from the monastery, Goda had slowed their pace and the wind didn’t seem quite as loud, even if Kanna’s hair was still blowing around violently like streamers on a flag post.

Goda kept her eyes sternly ahead, but Kanna could feel the side of the woman’s gaze upon her. “What truth?” Goda asked, as if it were not plainly obvious.

Kanna gave her an annoyed glance. “The truth about everything. Seeing my name on these containers of fuel is…not enough. I don’t believe what you said to me in the caverns. I can’t believe it. There has to be some other explanation. If what you told me is true, then my own family is responsible for….” Kanna stopped. “If what you told me is true, then hearing even more of it will make me sick—but I can’t bear the ignorance any longer. Tell me what you know about why this happened to me and why I’m here.”

Goda was quiet for a long time, long enough that Kanna’s mind began to drift, and she started to notice that the landscape was changing around them. More foliage had appeared. Greens and browns had joined the dull color of the sand, and the earth had grown more compact and visibly fertile.

Finally, Goda answered: “Last night, you saw what you needed to see, and you are right to suspect that there is more to the story than what I told you. Still, it’s only a story. Knowing the past can give you clues on how to move forward sometimes, but it’s not something to dwell on. There are deeper truths in the present that you have to face now.”

“Goda.” Kanna took hold of the side of the woman’s arm. She dug her nails through the fabric until she felt edges of flesh, until Goda slowly turned to look at her. “I need to know. I can’t just let go of something that defines my entire life before this moment.”

There was a long quiet again. Strands of unruly hair from both of them whipped around the space between them, touching lightly here and there, but never entangling fully.

When Goda shifted her gaze back towards the road, she said, “Over the past hundred years—ever since the first engine roared in the Middleland, ever since your great-great grandfather sold us the first drop of fuel—we’ve grown ever more dependent on Rava Spirits. Years ago, we used to make everything by hand, but now the spirits are used to run all of our factories. Naturally, this gave your family a lot of wealth and power, to put it mildly.”

“Fine. I knew that, to an extent. I knew we had a little more money than most people; that was never a mystery to me.”

“Ah, yes. Just a little more than most people, right?” Goda laughed. “It’s not surprising that you can’t fathom it. No one can. You had enough grain to break any weighing scale, so it’s hard to measure your wealth. Your family used their massive profits to buy more and more land, to make more and more money, to buy more and more land—and so on, ever closer to infinity—until they had nearly monopolized the entire supply of mok grain on the continent and even your countrymen could hardly eat. It was all being turned into alcohol. Your father was particularly greedy. The price soared because he knew he could charge anything and we would pay.” Goda shrugged. “Eventually, we were tired of paying it. It’s as simple as that.”

“What, so you just invade a country because the people in it don’t want to give you things for cheap?” Kanna said, her voice rising, outrage already growing in her bones. “Is peaceful negotiation not part of your culture?”

“Do you want to hear the truth, or do you want to play the victim still?”

Kanna forced her own mouth shut with a snap, but her glare in Goda’s direction did not lighten in the slightest.

Goda ignored it all the same.

“Yes, it’s undeniable that we’re invaders,” she continued, “there’s no nuance there: We absorbed your country with the specific aim of controlling the Rava grain fields. But we didn’t act alone in this. Your father made enemies out of everyone, thinking that he was dominating, winning some unwinnable game, as if all that money could save him. He price-fixed and scammed Middlelanders, of course, but he also ripped land away from his fellow Upperlanders so that he could feed the hungry mouths of countless engines instead of people. Needless to say, this caused a lot of unrest. It made the Upperland monarchy nervous, so they wanted to set limits, but when your father tried buying off government officials to have his way no matter what, it became clear that he had grown too dangerous. He had already poisoned your government from the inside by the time they realized, so they needed outside help to get rid of him. We were happy to strike the deal. When your father caught wind of what was happening, he actually tried to pay us off, too—but at that point, his money meant nothing. You can’t eat gold, after all. Try waving money at a hungry tiger whose teeth are clenched around your throat and see if he’ll make the trade. This is what your father tried to do, and so he faced a rude awakening.”

Kanna stared down at the canister by her feet, the canister that said Rava Spirits and that bounced lightly with every bump in the road. It spat out drops of fuel on occasion as it jostled, and she could smell it if she concentrated enough.

“He was rebellious until the end, though. Before he fled, your father set fire to his own grain fields and his own distilleries—with his own fuel—so that we would be unable to use it. This is why we have a shortage even now, when we captured your property weeks ago.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why would he do that? What kind of sense does that make?” Then Kanna paused. When she really thought about it with full lucidity, she wasn’t entirely sure that it was impossible. She didn’t know her father well enough to be able to tell if it was out of character or not. “Well, even if he did,” she said, a bit more quietly, “can you really blame him? He’s just trying to protect the family name and the honor of his own country. You people don’t deserve the fruit of Upperlander labor. You can’t just rush in and take it. You act like the Middleland is blameless in all this.”

“I don’t deny that the Middleland shares in responsibility. I don’t deny that we were driven by greed, either. The motors were invented by us, after all, and we were by far the first nation to build massive factories that needed to be fed with all this fuel. But that’s exactly why it’s only natural that we’d leverage these advantages. Considering how fast we’ve been growing, why wouldn’t our government use those same motors to invade our weaker neighbors and gain even more resources? This is how life works.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “Well, if it’s so ‘natural’ for you people, then why wasn’t it ‘natural’ for my family to do the same in our own way, without a military, with only profits to drive us instead of some goddamn machines?”

“Did I say it wasn’t? It’s only that your family met their consequences faster.”

“You mean to say that you think what my family was doing and what your government is doing is equally wrong?”

“Yes. And equally expected.”

Kanna hunched back in her seat, her mind swimming with confusion and outrage yet again. “Then why don’t you do anything to try to stop it?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You’re a Middlelander, aren’t you? That means you have some level of power in all this. At the very least, you could let me go. If money really is as meaningless as you just told me, then certainly a hungry tiger like you could afford that small act of justice without missing the pay, right?”

Goda smiled. “You really don’t give up.” Kanna wasn’t sure if the tone was one of mocking or else some twisted type of appreciation.

“And you give up too easily, Porter.”

The amused smirk still unfaded, Goda put her hand on a lever and urged the rig to move faster. “If you were to stand in front of a speeding truck like this,” she said, “what do you think would happen? What’s the chance that you could put one hand out and stop it dead in its tracks? When you talk about resisting, this is what you’re up against: Something with massive inertia.”

“I’m not brainless. I know that one person doesn’t make much of a difference, if that’s what you’re saying. Still, don’t you think that out of principle, you should at least try to—?”

“If you want to make yourself feel important, then go ahead and fight this hurtling chunk of metal. Get yourself run over and brag about how you slowed it down for half a second,” Goda continued, “but if you actually want to make a difference, you can’t resist the inertia of a beast like this. Don’t waste your time complaining about what it does or lamenting where it came from. You can’t push against it. You can only ride along. Then, once you learn how it works, you can nudge the levers so that it slowly leans in the direction that you want it to go. That’s all.”

Kanna crossed her arms over her chest, already sick of Goda’s endless metaphors. “Then where do I find those levers, so that I can nudge it in the direction of freedom?” she asked, though of course it was not a real question, and her tone was sarcastic.

Goda answered anyway: “If it’s freedom you want, then you hold those levers in your hands already.”

“Oh? If that’s so, then why am I not free?”

“Because what you want isn’t freedom. How would you even know what that is? You’ve been enslaved all your life, long before that cuff ever touched your wrist.”

It seemed to happen more and more that Kanna would find herself unable to respond to Goda’s nonsense. Instead of replying, she huffed and leaned back and closed her eyes. She could still feel the weight of the cuff key in her pocket, shifting around with the movements of her body as it all flowed with the momentum of the truck.

Maybe Goda was half-right, then: Maybe freedom was already in her grasp—or rather, in her pocket—and she needed only to make the choice.

* * *

When they stopped on the side of a deserted road, Kanna found that they had pulled over beside a patch of evergreen trees that reached up high into the air. After having spent the past few days on the plains, where there were hardly any trees and the few that speckled the landscape weren’t much taller than she was, it comforted her to see a bird or two perched in some branches above her.

Goda leapt out of the truck and, without waiting for Kanna, pushed into the brush and disappeared into a trail. Finding herself suddenly alone, Kanna ran after her, dove into the thatch of trees without thinking, stumbled through the prickly vines and fallen logs.

She caught sight of Goda again almost instantly. Under the light that was filtering from the canopy and bouncing off the golden green of the leaves, she saw a flash of the woman’s skin that quickly made her heart jolt.

Goda had stopped in front of a small, muddy lake that shone in the light like a murky mirror. She was already taking her clothes off. More layers of fabric fell before Kanna’s eyes, and as Kanna approached, the details of the smooth valleys and hard lines of Goda’s back became clearer.

Because the woman was turned around and could not see her, Kanna allowed her eyes to wander as the robes slid down Goda’s waist and opened the last half of her body to the light.

Kanna held her breath. Nearly everything about Goda confused her—the woman’s attitude towards life, the woman’s past, and especially the woman’s nonsensical words—but there was one thing that had managed to float up beyond Kanna’s mind, something that Kanna’s body seemed to understand perfectly well. She could accept it now, and so she watched Goda’s nakedness openly.

In time, Goda seemed to feel her stare, so she half-turned and smirked in Kanna’s direction. She didn’t seemed bothered; there was no judgment. She may not have even realized with what kind of gaze Kanna regarded her.

“I didn’t have time to wash as I usually do first thing in the morning,” Goda said. “If you need to do the same, then now is the time. We won’t be stopping again until after sundown.”

Kanna watched the woman wade into the pool. Goda had no hesitation, as if she had given no thoughts to any hazards beneath the surface. Because this made Kanna gain some confidence, she neared the water, feeling herself drawn in, like the very path that lay between the trees was pulling her closer to Goda.

Once she had reached the edge, Kanna crouched and touched the surface of the water with her fingers. She watched ripples etch across, but still there was no sign of clarity, and she could see nothing except for the reflection of the canopy above waving beneath her. “How did you know about this place?” Kanna murmured to Goda, who was now waist-deep in the waters.

“I’ve traveled these roads a lot since I became a porter. I know them well.”

“How long have you been doing this work?”

“About eight years. Three years of apprenticeship under a guide, and then these last five years on my own.”

“You’re young, Goda,” Kanna said, her fingers still lightly grazing the top of the water. “Older than me, but still young. Why did they give a job like this to you? You were only seventeen when you started, then, weren’t you? That’s crazy. I can’t even fathom that.”

“The age doesn’t matter. They choose a specific type of person.”

“Did you want to do this job?”

“No.” There was no pause before the answer and there was no shame in the tone.

“Then why didn’t you object? Can’t Middlelanders choose their jobs?”

“Most people do choose their jobs—but I don’t. I go wherever the Mother tells me. That’s all.”

The Mother. Kanna still wasn’t sure what the woman meant by that—if it was the Goddess that she spoke of, or the government that represented the Goddess, or both. Either way, she couldn’t understand how someone could be so open-eyed and conscious about being so blindly led.

But she did not contemplate for long. Her mind kept growing distracted. She kept seeing the shape of Goda’s body and she kept warring with herself, caught between her natural tendency to extract some strange pleasure out of what she was seeing and the touch of shame she had for looking so intently.

Goda did not say anything, but she stared back. She was standing in the water, small leaves and twigs floating close, collecting along her narrow hips as the tiny waves of the pool lapped lightly against her. Kanna’s eyes followed the distinct lines of the bottom of Goda’s torso, down to where they disappeared into the water.

Kanna wanted to get closer, but the water was between them, so she began to pull her robes over her head. She did it slowly because a feeling of hesitation was still burdening her, dragging all of her movements out. It was the usual repulsion she felt towards Goda, and residual embarrassment at making herself naked in front of the woman—but the warm feeling that surged below her belly had grown more urgent, and she wanted to explore it, to understand it.

Putting her clothes aside on a nearby rock, she felt like she was also putting the cuff key aside for the moment. Even if Goda did not know she had it, its presence had seemed to hover between them nonetheless, and Kanna felt like a barrier had fallen when she set it down.

Just for awhile, Kanna thought. Just for awhile, until we come out of the woods, maybe we can look at each other outside these roles of porter and slave.

The woods didn’t care who they were, after all. Whatever might happen in the cover of the trees didn’t mean anything.

Kanna slipped into the lake and waded towards Goda. She found that it was easy to hold herself up, the rush of the water pleasantly passing across her legs, each step a small leap that allowed her to float with less gravity before drifting down to the muddy floor again. She stopped just short of the woman, when she felt a thick log beneath her. Testing its stability with her foot, she stepped up onto it, and though she was about to get down and continue her journey on the other side, she noticed that the higher ground had afforded her a pleasant view.

She was still not as tall as Goda, but she could look more directly into her eyes, and the woman did not need to tilt her head down so much to meet Kanna’s glance. So Kanna stayed—unsure of what she was doing, unsure of what that gaze and their mutual silence even meant.

“I saved your life this morning,” Kanna said finally.

Goda laughed. “Maybe you did.”

“I know I did. That was the soldier you got into a fight with yesterday, wasn’t it? She would have broken your skull open. You might have deserved it, too.” The added height had given Kanna some confidence, so she said it in a steady voice without looking away.

“Then why did you do it?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. Before I even knew what I was doing, I had already thrown the rock. There’s no good reason for it; I don’t even like you that much, so it wasn’t worth it.” Kanna studied Goda’s face in the light that filtered down from above, and she noticed the small lines that had formed at the edges of the woman’s eyes, the faint smile in them that seemed to mock her. “Maybe I was just afraid that she would ruin you, that she would make you even uglier than you already are, and that I would have to look at that face all the way to the Middleland.”

Goda’s ghostly smile grew more obvious, and she took a step forward until she was close enough that Kanna could feel a pocket of heat rushing towards her through the cool air. Just that alone made Kanna afraid and sent her heart racing again, but she stood her ground and tried not to make her anxiety obvious.

Though it wasn’t only anxiety.

“You must be a masochist after all, then,” Goda said with amusement. “I’m so painfully ugly to look at, and yet you still look at me with such intensity. You must love to be repulsed.”

“I do love it. It fascinates me. Everything about you is terrible—even your personality. And you don’t look nearly good enough to redeem it.”

“And yet still you look at me.”

“Yes, I still look at you.”

Kanna let out an unsteady breath and reached out before she could stop herself. She pressed her hands to Goda’s chest, where she could feel some moisture that had splashed up to coat the skin. The droplets were cool, but she could still sense the warmth underneath. She ran her fingers down to Goda’s torso, where the texture grew harder, more muscular, less tempered by the softness that lay at the edges of Goda’s chest. But Kanna liked this, too. Seeing that the woman did not object, she lightly traced a downward path until her hands grazed the waterline near Goda’s hips.

She hesitated to go further, to slide her touch down to the unseen skin below the water, but her curiosity broke through her fear because she suddenly noticed—or thought she had noticed—that Goda leaned a bit into the touch.

Before she could follow through, a pair of hands appeared around her wrists. The grip was gentle; the fingers had wrapped around her forearms very slowly, and the light pressure that stopped her movements only came once Kanna’s hand had brushed against some skin beneath the water—some skin that was etched with what felt like a sparse patch of hair.

Kanna didn’t fight Goda’s grasp, which pulled her hands out of the water. Kanna stared down into her own reflection, her breaths coming hard, her chest heaving. Both her and Goda’s image rippled with the movement of the water, but she tried not to look at Goda’s expression.

“I…had hoped to God that you hadn’t noticed, because it’s embarrassing to me,” Kanna confessed, her voice ragged. “But you did notice, didn’t you? Even before just now.”

“Yes, I had noticed.”

“Since when?”

“Since the second or third day, perhaps.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanna blurted out, though it didn’t feel like the phrase she had been looking for. There were no words in Middlelander for what she was feeling. “I don’t know why I feel this way. I’ve looked at other people before with this sort of gaze, and sometimes I’ve even found their bodies to be mildly pleasing to me, but….” She shook her head at her own reflection. “It’s different with you. It does more than just please me: It captures all of my attention. I keep wanting to look. I keep wanting to touch.”

Kanna ventured to meet Goda’s eyes once again, though it was very difficult. To her surprise, the eyes that regarded her held no pity, no annoyance. Even the emptiness of her usual stare was swirling with something else this time, though Kanna could not tell what it was.

“There’s no reason to apologize.” Goda very gently let go of her wrists, and so Kanna’s hands came to fall limply at her sides, unsettling the water once again. “I can’t give you what you want, but this doesn’t mean you should be ashamed about it.”

“But I don’t even like you. I can’t stand you, to be honest. I don’t even think you’re a very good person. Isn’t it wrong for me to then ignore all of that simply because you’re…?”

Kanna stopped. In truth, she wasn’t actually sure what she thought of the way Goda looked. It hadn’t really been a thought at all; it had been more of a reaction. Goda wasn’t conventionally beautiful, like other women that Kanna had found attractive before—but something about the shape of Goda’s frame, the angles of her face, and even the woman’s particular smell always drew her in, no matter how she resisted it.

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

Goda looked amused again. “These sorts of things aren’t meant to make sense. They simply are what they are.”

“Doesn’t it bother you, though?” Kanna whispered, because even voicing it was embarrassing. “Doesn’t it bother you to know that I look at you that way, when you don’t feel the same?”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

Kanna made a face. “So then you find it flattering.” This notion was equally distasteful.

“The things that make us take pleasure in one body over another are so random that it’s hardly flattery. It’s just some chemical reaction—one that neither of us can help—so what would be the point of using it to feed some self-image of mine? How silly.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. Once again, she did not know how to answer this strange woman. Goda had waved away Kanna’s shame, but at the very same time, she had laughed away the idea that Kanna’s opinion about her could be worth anything at all.

“Are you really too arrogant to be proud of yourself? Is that even a thing that’s possible?” Kanna said, more insulted than before. “I’ve just paid you a huge compliment that you don’t deserve, and you won’t even accept it at least. If you’re going to reject me, then make fun of me like a normal person instead of telling me all of this nonsense.”

“But I’m not rejecting you.” Goda shrugged, her smile still cryptic. The woman reached up to lightly brush something from Kanna’s face, leaving the odd sensation of gritty water on Kanna’s cheek. “Your feelings are yours. They are not something I can accept or reject. I’m merely telling you that I have no intention of having sex with my own prisoner. It’s not a good idea.”

“I didn’t ask for that. Now you really are flattering yourself.”

“Oh? What sort of end did you have in mind, then? What did you want to do with those feelings that make no sense?”

Kanna’s first instinct was to contradict her, but before she could speak, she stopped herself because she knew that Goda was right. When she thought about it, even for just a few seconds, she found that she couldn’t dismiss her desire—in spite of her personal dislike for the woman, in spite of everything.

“That’s why it’s better that you hate me more than you like me,” Goda said, as if she were replying to Kanna’s thoughts. She tilted her head and looked up at the tree line serenely. “I won’t pretend it isn’t there. You’re not imagining things. But acting on it would resolve nothing. It would only make it grow—and that would be a dangerous game to play.”

Kanna huffed. “Dangerous for whom?” she asked, though she didn’t expect an answer—and she certainly didn’t expect the one that Goda gave her:

“For me.”

Kanna stared at her in silence for a long moment, not quite sure how she should interpret what the woman had just said. She hadn’t really considered Goda’s feelings, she realized. It all seemed too human. Kanna shifted awkwardly in place, the slippery surface of the log beneath her moving a bit; it was less stable than she had originally assumed.

“What do you mean?” Kanna finally asked.

Goda laughed again. “If you’re asking that, then you’ve already guessed: I’ve also been looking. I’m just less obvious when I look.” She pushed the tips of her fingers against Kanna’s shoulder, just enough to knock her off balance.

Kanna fell splashing into the water.

She waved her arms around in a panic automatically, fighting against her own waves, as if her body had fallen into some watery abyss. Luckily, the distance to the lake floor was not far, and so she caught her footing quickly and she only got a bit of water in her nose. Kanna coughed and looked up at Goda with distaste.

But Goda only quietly smiled.

After they had finished bathing, they crawled lazily onto the big rocks near the edge of the lake, so that they could dry in the light of the sun that was shining down through the canopy. Goda was half-sitting, half-lying on the flat top of a boulder, her body propped up on her elbows, and Kanna had settled onto a ledge beside her. In spite of what Goda had said, Kanna had laid her head on the woman’s thigh and had watched her expression carefully to see if she would object. She had not.

They had talked for a bit about unimportant things—the weather in the Middleland, the landscape around them—but Goda did not seem very good at keeping those sorts of conversations going, and so they had quickly fallen into silence. Without the distraction of small talk, Kanna found that she couldn’t stop the thoughts that echoed in her mind.

Goda is attracted to me.

She felt her face blushing furiously against the woman’s skin. She didn’t know why she was fixating so strongly on the thought. It had pushed everything else out of her mind. For the moment, she had forgotten all about her situation, all about the cuff key, all about the world outside the small patch of forest that they found themselves in.

Her attention had narrowed, like it always did in Goda’s presence. She ran her nails lightly against the inside of the woman’s thigh, only enough to leave a faint mark. She pressed her mouth to the same spot she had touched, as if to heal the invisible wound with a soft apology.

Kanna watched for a reaction, but none came. Goda’s gaze was far away. Water streamed in droplets from the woman’s soaked hair and landed like cold pebbles on Kanna’s face. It also flowed in languid rivers down the woman’s chest, down a rising and falling stomach, down into deeper places that had been obscured by the same lake water not long before.

It was then that Kanna finally began noticing all the little things: How the woman’s skin was slightly darker in some places and slightly paler in others; how most—but not all—of the hair on the woman’s leg was light and easily dampened by the drops that fell from Kanna’s brow; how nearly every part of Goda’s body was much bigger than Kanna’s own—even some parts that Kanna would have never expected to be different—and this made the blush erupt again, because she knew she should not have been looking there.

When the shadow above her moved as the woman settled, Kanna snapped back into her right mind. She flicked her curious stare away from that forbidden place and instead she looked down at Goda’s hand where it rested against the rock.

But this was also less neutral than she had hoped: As she studied the thick knuckles, the cuts and scratches and translucent scars that etched the skin of Goda’s fingers, she thought about what that hand would look like touching her.

Kanna had never been so physically attracted to someone in her life.

“What’s really stopping us from doing what we want?” Kanna murmured, her hand coming up to lightly touch the space where Goda’s hip met her thigh. “We’re in the middle of a wilderness. We could do it right now and no one would ever know. What difference does it make if we just pretend it never happened after it’s done?”

In fact, if there was ever a time to be shameless, this was it, Kanna thought: With no one watching, they could do whatever depraved thing they wanted, and even if Kanna found it hard to look Goda in the eye afterwards, it hardly mattered anyway. Soon enough, she was never going to see her again—even if Goda did not realize exactly how soon that would be.

It’s a waste, isn’t it? Kanna thought to herself. There’s no good reason to hold ourselves back now.

“Even if we act like it never happened,” Goda replied, breaking through Kanna’s indecent calculations with a soft voice, “it will have happened. You’ll remember, I promise. So we won’t do it at all.”

“Wasn’t it you who said that the past is just made up of stories? You said that I shouldn’t dwell on it if I wanted to carry on, but now you’re giving whatever we do in here actual importance, even though this will also become the past the moment we leave. Why do you have these double-standards?”

Goda smiled down at her. “You really don’t give up.”

“Again, what is there to give up in the first place?” Kanna said crossly, too frustrated to think clearly anymore. “Now that it’s all out in the open, I’m practically serving myself to you on a silver platter, and yet you just sit there like you don’t want to break your fast. I know it’s against the rules, but that’s no reason for you of all people to hesitate. So what’s the real reason?”

The woman’s smile faded as she looked off into the distance, into the thicket of the forest. “What you want,” she said after a moment, “is a container for reality. You want to compartmentalize what has arisen between us, and you want to pretend that you can tame it and control it—that you can keep it in this forest—so that you can say that you haven’t surrendered to it.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “You’re delusional if you think I will ever surrender to you, Porter.”

“Exactly. So don’t delude yourself that sex with me would be anything short of surrender. You can’t give in without giving in. It would only be pretending.” She tapped Kanna’s wrist—Kanna’s cuff—with the edge of a knuckle, so that it gave off a harsh ring. “And you can’t give in as long as you wear that.” Goda finally pushed Kanna away, jumping down from the rock and landing on wet earth.

Kanna lifted her head up and looked Goda squarely in the face, her jaw clenched. “Fine. Then make me surrender. Force yourself on me. I just want to forget everything for one meaningless moment, don’t you see? My entire life has fallen apart, and all the desires I might have had in this world have been stripped from me, except for this one perverse craving that I can’t shake: I want you to be the animal that pounces on me in the forest, and bites the back of my neck, and pushes my face into the dirt.”

Her face was burning and her fingernails were digging hard into the surface of the rock, but since she had already forced herself to be much more honest than before, she decided that she would lose nothing in baring herself completely.

But Goda rejected even this. “So you’re trying to turn me into a monster and play out the role of some hapless prey yourself. Forget it. You don’t know what it is to be subdued by my hand. You won’t like it inside you, believe me. And besides, there is not enough room for me in you, anyway. You are already full of Kanna Rava.”

Confused, Kanna stared after her, but the face of the woman who glanced back was blank, except for a strange edge of uncharacteristic aggression.

“You’re angry,” Kanna realized, fascinated. She had not expected it, but it was a pleasant realization. A dark part of her wondered in that moment what nerve she could have possibly struck and how she might strike it again. She wanted to see how many times it would take to finally provoke the woman into rage.

Even as she thought this, she could not tear her eyes away from Goda’s body. She could not help but watch the tension that came over Goda’s muscles—a tension that spoke of so many suppressed actions—as the woman snatched her pile of discarded clothes and headed towards the trail that let out to the road.

The would-be monster did not look back.

When they stepped out of the forest a short while later, Kanna felt some of the tension drop away. The air was different—less humid, less oppressive, more open—and though it did feel like something vulgar had happened between them after all, she was mostly able to leave it in the wilderness where it belonged.

With a touch of shame, Kanna stared down the long road that lay ahead of them. She tried not to look at Goda directly.

* * *

“What happened to me?”

Kanna had been holding the calligraphy textbook up to her face—to stave off her boredom and to ease some of her still-lingering embarrassment at Goda’s bizarre rejection—but now it had grown too dark to read. The sun was waning, turning blood-red over some mountains in the distance. Kanna was surprised that the fuel had lasted this long, though granted she had no idea what kind of energy was contained in those canisters, or how it translated into the turning of an engine.

When Goda glanced in her direction, Kanna realized that she had blurted the question out loud.

Kanna sighed. It was the first thing she had said since they had left the forest hours earlier. She still felt a little awkward meeting eyes with the woman, but all the thinking and ruminating had left her in a renewed confusion.

“What happened to me in the caverns yesterday?” she asked. It struck her that from the moment she had awoken that morning, the world felt different somehow—the sounds of the truck were less jarring; the wind was less overwhelming; even Goda’s towering body seemed less terrifying, enough that she had been happy to make shameless requests in the forest—but nothing outside of Kanna had changed at all to make her more comfortable. “Something is different in me. I’m less bothered. When I sit here now in silence, I notice it more. It’s almost like…there’s a pocket of nothing where some of me used to be, a quiet space. Something loud was bothering me, and now it’s gone. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s missing, but I don’t miss it.”

“I told you already: You began to die—but not physically. It’s a different sort of death, a letting go of your old self and its many parts. Maybe that small part of you that is missing right now has shrunk so small that you can’t sense it anymore. Maybe it has disappeared entirely and will never come back to life ever again. Time will tell. It usually takes many visits to a shrine before a serpent fully dissolves.”

“A…serpent?” Kanna still wasn’t sure what Goda meant by this.

Goda stared squarely ahead at the road that was quickly growing darker. The trees on either side of them had turned into little more than a dim smudge, so that it almost felt like they were riding into an empty tunnel. Goda flipped on the headlamps of the truck and the gravel in front of them flooded with light.

“What was that place?” Kanna said. “What was it really? You’ve told me some things about it, but they don’t make any sense. How can just a hole in some cliff do this to a person?”

“Shrines are placed specifically in areas that have these strange properties. Maybe it’s some vibrating energy that comes from the rocks, or maybe it’s fumes that rise up from deep in the earth, but early Maharan shrines and even some pre-Maharan sites have this effect on certain people. No one knows why.”

“The worst part is that I don’t even know what changed.” Kanna took a deep breath and looked down at her hands. Something about them looked different, too, but she couldn’t pick anything out specifically. “Like I said, I don’t miss it exactly. But I can’t help feeling like I’ve dropped something, or like I’ve forgotten to pack some baggage for this trip. What if I need it later, whatever it is?”

“This is what the shrine shows you. It strips away everything you carry with you, everything you think you need in order to be someone, and then you can experience the truth directly: That there is nothing to take with you because you are no one. It’s not an easy thing to see. This is why most people are spooked by shrines. The ancient people who built them wanted to face the death of this false self, to see life through the eyes of the Goddess instead of through the eyes of their limited selves. That is the true face of our Holy Mahara, a thing that no priestess will ever admit to you: The Goddess is actually nothing. She is the lack of self. She is what happens when you’ve surrendered everything and have become no one. She is not an untouchable idol in a temple; anyone who is no one can become the Goddess.”

Kanna looked at Goda in silence. As usual, what the woman said made no logical sense, but at the same time the words themselves reminded her of their conversation in the forest, and something in those words snapped together very suddenly.

“But I won’t surrender,” Kanna said. “I’m still full of Kanna Rava.”

Goda’s eyes gleamed with the faint light that was left in the sky. “Yes. The more you resist the destruction of Kanna Rava, the harder it will be for you to experience your true nature: the part of you that never changes, has no name, and cannot die. As long as you cling to this identity, you will also be unable to move on with your life. You will forever be the Goddess pretending to be Kanna Rava.”

“You ask too much of me.”

But Kanna knew that Goda had asked for nothing, that the woman wanted nothing from her—and that the woman may have even been free of desire in general.

She also knew now why the priestess had warned her: Goda was a dangerous person. She truly was empty and had nothing to lose; every moment with her, this became increasingly clear. Kanna had to run away or else she would not survive even being transported.

Kanna looked away, out towards the darkness that now faced them. A few lights peppered the skyline in the distance. She squinted into them, and she thought she could see the shapes of machines. A low hum rumbled through the air, droning on as they moved, growing louder every second.

“What is that on the horizon?”

“The crossing,” Goda said. “We’re about to enter the Middleland.”

---

Onto Chapter 14 >>

“You’ve laid a trap for us, Priestess,” Goda said. Her tone was matter-of-fact as usual, without judgment or surprise.

“And you blame me because you walked into it?” The leather-gloved hand of Priestess Rem Murau was still pressed to Kanna’s mouth. Now that Goda’s light had emerged from inside of the cavern, Kanna could see the face that was hovering near hers, one that belonged to the woman who was standing on the ledge just beneath her.

“There is no blame, Priestess.”

The shocks had stopped. Kanna could feel Goda’s presence even before she jerked her eyes over to look. Goda carried a canister of fuel in each hand, the lantern clipped to her belt loop, and she gazed down at the both of them with a neutral expression.

Priestess Rem was reaching up to Kanna, her eyes filled with a strange mixture of emotions—but among them, there was compassion, and so Kanna took hold of that and let it warm the freezing emptiness that she felt inside.

“Don’t worry,” she murmured into Kanna’s ear, once again in the Upperlander language. “She can’t hurt you when I’m here. Just be still and say nothing. I will take care of this. You won’t be in any trouble.” She frowned and studied Kanna’s face, then brushed some of the hair out from in front of Kanna’s eyes. She looked up at Goda. “What did you do to her?”

“She does this to herself.”

“Always the same answer with you: ‘Oh, they do it to themselves.’” The priestess pulled away, and Kanna watched her climb up onto the ledge so that she was standing evenly at Goda’s side. “When will you accept that you are more than just a bystander, Goda? You are an active participant and you hurt people with your callousness.”

“Maybe,” Goda said, “but this one wants the pain. She sees that it’s a window to her truth. I’m giving her what she wants.” Putting one canister on the ground, Goda crouched and grabbed Kanna by the neck of her robes, as if to tug her onto her feet. “Sometime soon she might stop resisting and look upon her demons without fear.”

Kanna refused. She made herself limp and kept still as the priestess had asked. She looked away from Goda as the light of the lantern hit her uncomfortably in the face, and so Goda dropped her with a dead thud.

“Be careful with her!” Priestess Rem said, though Kanna was unharmed because she had barely risen off the ground in the first place. The woman looked at Kanna for a long time, as if searching for a gaping wound, but finding nothing, the priestess asked instead, “Why is she like this?”

“The energy of the cavern has shaken her up. She didn’t know about her family, about how they made themselves rich off our military, and how most of the grain was used to make fuel while people in her country starved to death. She only just found out. The shrine noticed the crack that formed in her right then and tried to break her all the way open,” Goda said. “Strange thing, though: She could see her own snakes instantly. Clearly, too. I didn’t expect that.”

“And so you just let this all happen because you didn’t expect it?”

“No. I let it happen because she has no choice: She would have to face them eventually; if not here, then in some external form. You know this.” Goda let the other canister go. With two free hands, she knelt down again and picked Kanna up by the waist with a more deliberate grip. This time, Kanna couldn’t hold back. She summoned her last ounce of will, and she screamed and kicked her feet and slapped against Goda’s chest, but Goda easily overpowered her as she always did.

The tall woman slung her over a shoulder, which made Kanna’s stomach lurch. When Goda began to stand up, the ground seemed to rush far from Kanna’s reach all at once. She felt like she was being launched backwards into the air. Before she could even try to fight the reflex, she purged the contents of her stomach over Goda’s shoulder and onto the ground. Some of it fell on Goda’s robes, but she didn’t have the strength to be ashamed. The contraction had moved through her in a wave that she could not control, and once she was done, she became just as limp as before. She pressed her face against the back of Goda’s shoulder.

Tears began pouring out of her anew. She didn’t even know why she was crying anymore. It was merely another reflex, a reaction to the emptiness inside. There was nothing to grasp around her that could fill the void.

For a long moment, no one moved.

“You’re a monster,” Kanna heard the priestess finally saying. “Even after all this time, you’re the same monster you were nine years ago. Knowing the kind of burden that this girl carries within her, you agitated those demons deliberately to watch her writhe in pain. How do you know so well that she’d be able to survive this? Knowing what kind of place this was, you still brought her here again.”

“It seems that you knew I would. You were standing outside the cavern waiting. Did you plan this all along? Have you fallen into a spiral of manipulation again, Priestess Rem?”

“There’s no manipulation necessary. You’re very predictable in your own way, Goda—or maybe it is just that I always know where you are.” She walked behind Goda and peered down at Kanna’s face with an expression that was all at once full of some hidden meaning, and yet unreadable—or else Kanna did not have the energy to read it. Kanna weakly lifted her head up to better meet the woman’s eyes. “It’s almost over,” the priestess whispered to her. “Be still, be still. The monster will be in his cage soon enough.”

Then the woman walked down to the path that led to the plain. “I’m sure you know how this goes, then,” she said, turning around to glance at Goda. “You’ve stolen from Innkeeper Jaya—and you’ve taken a restricted product, no less. There is no question that you have broken the law; here you are with the spoils of your theft. You aren’t one to fight your punishment, are you?”

“Not at all, Priestess.”

“Then pick up the fuel and let us allow the injured party to decide what she will do with you. I imagine that she will hold you until the local administrator can come in the morning.” At first, she continued to head down the gravel trail, but then she stopped suddenly. Without turning around, she asked, “Do you feel any dread, Goda? This time, do you feel something, at least?”

“There are no feelings, Priestess.”

The rocking of Goda’s stride made Kanna feel sick all over again as they descended. Priestess Rem allowed them to move ahead of her, and when they reached the dark sands below the crag, Kanna could hear a faint voice blowing messages towards her ears with every gust of wind.

“You feel sorry for her, don’t you? It’s best that you don’t. I know that you like her in some capacity, as so many of us will get attached to our captors when we have no other solid thing to grasp onto–but you must guard against this sentiment,” the voice said in Upperlander, clearly so that Goda could not understand. Still, it was loud enough that Kanna couldn’t imagine that Goda had missed it, even if she might have been unable to make sense of the words. “Resist, Kanna Rava, resist. The porter deserves what she gets. This crime may seem small to you, but it’s nothing compared to all the other crimes she has committed that have gone unpunished. She will hurt you the way she has hurt countless others if I don’t put a stop to it now. 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.”

“What incantations are you whispering back there, Priestess?” Goda called over her shoulder. She had called the woman a priestess, but because the wind was strong—and besides that, the word for “priestess” and the word for “witch” happened to sound very similar in the Middlelander tongue—Kanna had completely misheard her at first.

When they reached the yard that had already grown so familiar to Kanna, Goda stooped down and lowered her gently onto the ground. Even by the dim light of the lantern, she could see that Goda’s face held no trace of annoyance. She seemed resigned to everything. She stared down into Kanna’s eyes so directly that it made Kanna want to look away, but then the woman touched her face, and the gesture all but forced her to match the gaze.

“You are more than this,” Goda whispered to her—or so it seemed that this had been what she had said. Kanna couldn’t tell for sure because the words had been soft and the wind was still blowing. Either way, hearing this only served to build another knot in Kanna’s gut, another layer of confusion. Trust and distrust fought together inside of her, and neither seemed to gain an edge over the other.

She didn’t have long to dwell on it, though. She heard the priestess knocking on Jaya’s door, and soon enough the door burst open, and the space just outside was bathed in the light of the oil lamps from the innkeeper’s dining room table.

Unlike Goda, Jaya looked immediately cross. Her lips were tight, her hand gripped the door knob so hard that her knuckles had grown pale. “Who is it, who is it? What do you—?” Then she seemed to notice that it was the priestess who was staring back at her, and her eyes widened in embarrassed confusion. “Oh, good evening!” she said quickly. “My sincere apologies! It’s such a dark night, isn’t it? I can barely see two paces in front of me! To what do I owe the honor of such a spontaneous visit, my priestess?”

“I don’t mean to disturb you this time of night,” Priestess Rem replied, “but there is a matter that requires your urgent attention. You have been giving Porter Goda refuge all this time, and yet she thinks nothing of betraying her benefactor.” The priestess shifted so that the light from the inside began to flow against Goda as well, and she gestured towards Goda with a sweep of her arm. Under any other circumstances, it would have seemed like a personal introduction. “Look. This is the porter’s true self. She has stolen the fuel that our assistants hid for you. My deepest apologies; I had assumed that your property would be safe from thieves inside the caverns, but I was wrong. We’ll have to call the regional administrator in the morning and see that this woman is arrested.”

Jaya stared out into the night, her eyes spread open harder than usual, her gaze falling squarely in Goda and Kanna’s direction. She seemed to finally notice the two canisters of fuel. She was quiet for a long moment, but then her eyes snapped over towards Priestess Rem’s face.

“I beg your forgiveness for having worried you, my priestess, but this is all a misunderstanding,” Jaya said, very flatly, with suddenly no shred of emotion in her voice. “Goda Brahm is not stealing from me. I gave her the fuel.”

The priestess looked flabbergasted. Kanna shot a quick glance at Goda as well, only to find that the woman hovering above her was similarly in the midst of a pause. Both her eyebrows were raised and she was looking at Jaya carefully.

“She–but she…,” Priestess Rem began. It was the first time Kanna had ever heard the woman stumble over her words. The priestess cleared her throat. “I found her outside the caverns, clearly trying to make off with it stealthily in the dead of night. Was it not you who asked us to find a safe spot for the fuel during this time of crisis and thievery? Was it not you who told us to hold it for you and to keep it safe at all cost?”

The woman was saying this, but Kanna wasn’t sure how much of it was literally true, and how much of it was that face that Middlelanders always wore. At this point Kanna had surmised that the priestesses could not keep intoxicants at the temple, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Jaya was merely the middleman in whose name they could hoard fuel legally. This was what Goda had implied days before, and now it all made sense. After all, Kanna had not seen so much as a generator anywhere near Jaya’s house, and yet the garden in the temple was entirely lit with electricity.

Jaya did not disagree with the priestess. Her eyes darted back and forth across the scene in front of her, and finally she seemed to conjure up some kind of reply: “Yes, yes, of course!” she said. She met eyes with Goda. “But Goda, my dear, why did you wait until it was so late? You made yourself look like some kind of bandit in the night.” She turned to the priestess again. “I told Goda to take some earlier today. She’s leaving in the morning and I didn’t want her to end up stranded. This is all my fault, of course. It was wrong of me to have sent her to the caverns or even to have told her about where I was keeping the goods. I should have called an assistant to discreetly fetch the fuel. If anyone should be punished, it should be I. Because of this incident, I will double my tribute of fuel to the temple.” She bowed so deeply that Kanna wondered if the woman would fall over.

Priestess Rem watched the innkeeper’s gesture for a moment, and then she glanced in Goda’s direction once again. “I suppose you offered them that expensive lantern as well,” she said, “and the robes that Kanna Rava is now wearing instead of her uniform.”

“My priestess is entirely correct.”

“Well, then,” Rem said, her tone one of forced politeness that left Kanna with no doubt that the woman knew that Jaya was lying, “everything is as it should be. I would like to bless you on behalf of the Goddess for being so generous to those who don’t deserve it.”

“Thank you, priestess! It is during trying times like these that I can most use such a blessing.”

After that, Jaya seemed to be waiting, but the priestess did not make a move to leave. Because clearly it was unthinkable to close the door in her face, Jaya finally stepped outside to join the group. She shut the door after herself and the desert was filled again with darkness, touched only by the waning light of Goda’s lantern.

Jaya met eyes with Goda again. They seemed to exchange a meaningful glance that Kanna could not interpret. “Well,” Jaya said, “let’s not waste the rest of the evening away. Now that we’re all up and energized, let’s go along with our plans from before!”

Goda tilted her head. It was a subtle enough reaction that the priestess might not have caught it, but Kanna was close enough to notice, and she suddenly felt a bit relieved that she wasn’t the only one who was confused.

“Goda, my dear!” Jaya called out to her as she grew closer. She pointed towards the containers of alcohol. “Don’t you remember my suggestion earlier today? I haven’t seen you in so long and we haven’t had a chance for a nice chat the whole time you’ve been here! Let us make a fire and drink together and catch up! Bring the spirits to the garden! Bring the girl, too. The more, the merrier!” A strange, forced smile had grown on her face when she looked over at the priestess. “You’re also more than welcome to honor us with your presence tonight, Priestess Rem.”

“Innkeeper, you know very well that it’s against my precepts to attend any drunken gathering.” Because she had backed away, and she was standing outside of the radius of Goda’s light, Kanna could only see the shadow of the woman’s face anymore. “And I would encourage you to abstain yourself, if not for reasons of the spirit, than to avoid squandering such a precious resource.”

“My priestess is quite right,” Jaya said, the smile still unfaded, “but you will have to please allow me this terrible indulgence. The fires in the Upperland have died, so the shortage will be over soon and this small bit of drink will make no difference to all the motors of the world. Let us celebrate the blessings that the Goddess has showered upon us in these days.”

With that, Jaya headed in the direction of the garden and Goda scooped Kanna up again before taking hold of the two canisters of fuel. Kanna looked up over Goda’s shoulder. She could still see the shape of Priestess Rem standing in the darkness near the door. Half her face was smeared with the dim moonlight, but the other half was so obscured in shadow that Kanna could not even see the white of her eye.

Once Jaya was out of earshot–but before Goda had started moving–the priestess called out in a flat voice that was devoid of any curiosity: “How is it that you’ve survived this long, Goda?” It sounded more like a lament than a question.

Goda was not facing the woman and made no move to turn. She merely stood there, leaning forward slightly as she had been about to take her first step towards the garden. She was waiting, perhaps because it seemed by the priestess’s tone that there was more to say.

“You should be dead,” the priestess told her. Again, her voice held no overt edge of anger. At most, there was a mild sense of bewilderment, of wonder. Kanna looked up at the woman with surprise, but the woman did not respond to her stare. Instead, her gaze seemed trained on the back of Goda’s head. “Nine years, and still you have not died. How is that? I know death is what you want, and yet it escapes you. Why not give into it? Why won’t you let me help you die, Goda? It’s what’s best for everyone. The world is better off if you’re not in it.”

Kanna’s eyebrows knotted in shock. She gripped the back of Goda’s robes with her fingers, the squirming feeling of discomfort returning to her bones. By then, she knew that the priestess was trying to get Goda arrested, but she couldn’t imagine that such a small offense would warrant capital punishment, even by the unbalanced, draconian laws of the Middleland. The woman must have meant something else; perhaps it was yet another obtuse metaphor that Kanna didn’t understand.

“Maybe it is true that the world would suffer less if I was gone from it,” Goda replied, still without turning around, “but whether I am to stay or to disappear from the world, it’ll be by the will of the Goddess, not by the will of Rem.”

* * *

“You owe me, you bastard—and not just for the fuel, but for everything else. You’ve brought me a lot of trouble this week. I don’t even know how I’m going to make up for basically insulting a priestess in front of my own home.” Jaya took a swig from her cup and rubbed her face. She was sitting so close to the fire that a bead of sweat had visibly accumulated on the back of her neck, and for some reason Kanna watched it with fascination. “Good thing liquor is a universal cure for everything. It’s even a repellent for clergy members.”

Kanna had managed to crawl onto a rock and sit up. She still felt lightheaded, and her ears roared with blood so that everything—the conversation in front of her, the rumble of the trucks behind her, the whistle of the wind—sounded like she was hearing it underwater. She was regaining her senses slowly. Thoughts from before—thoughts about what she had learned in the cave—had also begun worming themselves into her brain like wiry snakes, but she tried her hardest to suppress them.

I need to rest, Kanna told herself. Even just the prospect of thinking with any kind of depth exhausted her.

“You will return everything that I have given to you—and threefold. I don’t know how you will do it, but you will,” Jaya continued. “Not only that, but you will visit my wife in the Middleland when you get there, and you will shower her with all kinds of frivolous presents, and you will tell her that they all came from me.”

Goda stared into the crackling fire without saying anything, and so Jaya reached out and took Goda’s face in her hands.

“Both your mothers would have a fit if I let you get in trouble again. I know you think they’ve disavowed you—and they have—but they are still your mothers and they are still human. Knowing that you’re alive at least gives them some comfort.” Jaya’s gaze was so intense that it made even Kanna wince. After a moment, the woman’s glance wandered slightly, off towards the far side of the fence, and this relieved some of the tension—until Kanna followed her glance and realized what she was looking at.

Just outside the garden, shrouded mostly in darkness, stood the silhouette of Priestess Rem. Kanna had lost sight of her earlier and had assumed that the woman had left.

“That priestess has it out for you,” Jaya said. “I don’t know why, but she’s trying to get you into trouble. She’s been asking about you the whole time you’ve been here, did you know that? On the first day, she came to me and told me to let her know if you did anything wrong. I don’t think she had realized yet that I’ve known you since you were a child.”

“She can ask whatever she wants.” Goda’s glance flicked briefly towards the figure of the priestess beyond the fence, but otherwise she seemed unbothered. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters, you idiot. She’s the head priestess. She could send you to hell with only a song and a prayer. She could lie and get you locked up if she wanted. I think all she’s looking for is a good enough legal justification for her own conscience. I don’t want you coming back here again anytime soon. It’s far too risky now. Promise me that after you leave tomorrow morning, you won’t show up here again unless you absolutely have to.” Jaya’s hands seemed to grow tighter against Goda’s face. “Promise me, you imbecile.”

Goda’s jaw clenched. “Fine,” she muttered.

“Good.” After kissing the side of Goda’s mouth in full view of the priestess, Jaya released her. Kanna raised both eyebrows in shock at the gesture, but she knew better than to say anything. The innkeeper reached down beside her and picked up a cup of fuel, which she offered to Goda. “Drink,” she whispered, her side-glance aimed towards the priestess. “We’ve already made her uncomfortable. If all of us are drunk, she’ll have no choice but to leave.” Jaya turned to Kanna. “This one, too. She should start drinking so that the priestess isn’t tempted to talk to her.”

Goda shook her head. “This is ninety-five percent alcohol. She’ll go blind—or worse, vomit all over me again.” She threw a smirk in Kanna’s direction and Kanna responded with a wry glance.

“Fine, fine—but you will drink.” She shoved the cup into Goda’s hand. “You will drink, if for no other reason than the fact that you’re not very much fun when you’re sober.”

Kanna watched Goda take a sip, then another. Goda winced the first few times, but afterwards there seemed to be no resistance in her. She drank the fuel as if she were drinking a glass of water.

When Kanna looked towards the entrance of the garden awhile later, it was just as Jaya had said: The priestess had disappeared.

After the fire had time to wane and the stars had moved around in the sky, Goda told Kanna to retire to the storage shed. Her speech was not slurred, but it had slowed down to a pace where Kanna did not need to make the slightest bit of effort to understand every word of the Middlelander tongue that flowed from the woman’s mouth. As Kanna stumbled past her, she could smell the fuel coming out of Goda’s pores as if the woman were a rumbling truck giving off a cloud of exhaust.

Jaya’s arm was slung over Goda’s shoulder. She looked up at Kanna with an impish smile. “Don’t worry, she’ll come join you soon enough. She’s more suggestible in this state, by the way. If you’re looking to convince her of anything, seize the opportunity.”

Goda didn’t seem to hear Jaya’s indecent statements. She was staring off into the darkness of the plain, her body loose and relaxed, her eyes unfocused with a touch of sadness. With some hesitation, Kanna left the garden and headed out to the shed on her own.

Once she had staggered inside, as if she were drunk herself, Kanna shut the door and fell face-first into her mattress. She pressed her mouth deep into the fabric and sobbed until she lost consciousness.

* * *

The door creaked. At first, when Kanna looked up, she thought that the dim twilight that fell into the room was coming from the moon, but then she realized that there were faint edges of sun coloring part of the sky. Dawn had only just emerged.

Framed by that sky, a ghost hovered in the doorway. Because it was still very dark, she could not see any details.

“Goda?” Kanna whispered, though something inside of her told her that the figure who had appeared was not her master.

“Goda is passed out drunk in the sand,” a soft voice blew in with the wind, “so I’m your master now, and I’ve come to torment you with the gift of free will.”

Kanna’s eyes widened and her pulse pounded in her throat. She wondered what kind of nightmare she had fallen into. She wondered what she needed to do to wake herself up.

The figure in black robes came into the room. Even as Kanna tried to recoil, the ghost moved faster, until it was kneeling at the foot of her bed, looming over her with an eerie presence. Kanna fought through her first paralyzed reaction, and she forced herself to sit up, to face the shadow.

She swallowed.

The face that stared back at her belonged to Priestess Rem. The woman was extending a hand in offering, her leather glove clasped into a tight fist as if she were holding a precious jewel.

“Take it,” the woman said, her breaths coming rapidly. She seemed exhausted from some effort that Kanna could not fathom. “Take it. It is rare to find Goda so soundly asleep, and it cost me a lot of trouble not to brush my skin against hers on accident, so show some respect and take the gift.”

Kanna looked at her with confusion. Not knowing what else to do with the woman’s insistent posture, she slowly reached out and opened a receptive hand. The priestess took her by the wrist, but she did not yet press the gift into her palm. Instead, she remained there for a moment, crouched, looking Kanna in the face with the intensity of someone who was waiting for a disaster to happen.

“I wish this was for other reasons,” she said. The priestess let out a sharp breath, as if she were suppressing tears of anguish. “I wish this was because I don’t believe in slavery, and I don’t believe that you deserve your fate—and while all of that is true, it’s not the real reason. However, even as this act indulges the lowest parts of me, I do believe it’s also what’s best for humankind in the end.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am using you, Kanna. To avoid sinning against the Goddess, I am putting the choice in your hands instead of mine. Your ignorance will protect you from sin, because you simply don’t know any better. It is inexcusable on my part, and I hope you can forgive what I’m doing to you, but this burden will be useful to you nonetheless.”

She dropped something into Kanna’s hand, but Kanna was too bewildered to look at it at first. The priestess stood up and gazed down at her with a set jaw, her breath growing shallow, shaky.

“You are aching to escape, I know—but you must be patient. Goda’s next stop after this will almost surely be the city of Karo, which is on the other side of the border, but not too deep into the Middleland yet. There is a midnight train that goes to the Upperland from there, every other day. If you don’t see it at the station the first evening, then that means it will arrive the next night. You should go then and only then,” she said. “You’re small; you can stow away easily. You won’t have much to return to, but you’ll be back in your home country and it will be easier to find people who are loyal enough to hide you.”

She turned towards the threshold, towards the door that had remained partly opened the whole time. As she stepped out of the shed and some of the fledgling rays of the sun hit her face, she turned back one last time. “Goda will notice very quickly, so be swift when the time comes. Do not hesitate. Fight her if you have to. Do anything you need to do to escape. You won’t have another chance like this. Make it count.”

Then she disappeared and the door rattled behind her until it clicked shut.

Her mouth agape, Kanna uncurled her hand and looked down. Among the creases of her dirty palm sat a cleanly-polished silver key.

She didn’t have to try it. She knew which void it was meant to fill.

---

Onto Chapter 13 >>

Goda glided across the desert and Kanna followed her strides much less gracefully. She didn’t know where they were going at first, but when her eyes adjusted to the darkness outside, she saw that Goda had turned straight in the direction of the caverns.

Kanna knew that in the morning, they would be heading out of the desert and into the Middleland. To be able to set out on such a journey in the first place, they would of course need fuel—but she couldn’t imagine that Goda was planning to steal from the priestesses. Even though the fuel in those caves technically belonged to Jaya, Kanna had a feeling that this would hardly make a difference to someone like Priestess Rem.

As usual, Goda was unhelpful. She explained nothing, her eyes trained on the cliffs, and she barely glanced over her shoulder when Kanna fell a little behind. As they passed by one of the military trucks—the one that had been parked close to the garden—a soldier peeked her head out the door. It was the same woman Kanna had seen the evening before, when they had been coming back to the storage room from Parama’s shack. She had a cigar stuffed in her mouth again, and the glow of her match as she lit the tip of it was the only thing that allowed Kanna to see her face.

Perhaps it had only been the dim light, but Kanna thought she saw a dark circle under the woman’s eye that hadn’t been there before.

The soldier took one look at Goda and recoiled into the truck, slamming the door behind her. Kanna raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment. By then, she had grown used to all the negative reactions that people had towards her master; she herself had them still.

Nonetheless, Kanna kept close to Goda as they walked through another patch of trucks. “Are you sure this is a smart thing to do?” she asked. “What if we get caught? Priestess Rem already knows that we’ve been in there.”

“If we get caught, then we get caught. The caverns are our best option now.”

Kanna glanced around at the machines that surrounded them, some of which were rumbling conspicuously, wasting their precious fuel. “What if you steal from the soldiers?”

She was a little surprised at her own suggestion, but it was true that she didn’t think much of the military, perhaps because they had been the ones who had driven her family out of their own lands. She wasn’t a thief herself, but if she had been, stealing from other thieves seemed to be the most reasonable strategy.

Goda shook her head without turning around. “No, I tried that already,” she said. “Earlier this evening, when you were hiding from me, I went into the back of that nearby truck and rummaged around for some spare fuel. The soldier inside the cabin heard me and confronted me. It was then I learned that only one truck is carrying extra fuel, and it’s heavily guarded. They plan to refuel in the Upperland where all the product is, so the fuel they have now is rationed and tightly locked, even for the soldiers. It would be unlikely that I would be able to siphon anything without breaking the tanks open and causing a scene.”

Kanna glanced back towards the truck that stood near the garden, and she watched it grow smaller in the distance. She could just barely see the small point of orange cigar light through the dark windows of the cabin.

Then something connected in Kanna’s mind.

“You hit that woman, didn’t you?” she asked. “The soldier. You punched her in the face. She had a bruise on her eye.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But why?”

“She didn’t like that I was looking through her things. That’s understandable—but I was in a hurry and I didn’t have time to deal with her emotions. She swung at me and she missed.”

“Then what?”

“I swung back at her and I didn’t miss.”

Kanna’s heart raced a little harder, so she crossed her arms over her chest. It was that mix of fear and curiosity together again, a response that her body had when it became aware of any edge of Goda’s power. It was the conflict between her reflex to run away…and her burning desire to witness what the woman actually looked like in a wild fury, naked of her usual restraint, charging hard with her hands clasped into fists.

The image made Kanna tense up. Her eyes shut tightly and she followed Goda only by the sound of the footfalls in front of her.

When she opened her eyes again, they were much closer to the crag where the caverns lived. Goda led her up the winding trail of the cliff and Kanna watched where she stepped to avoid slipping on the gravel. Just as before, she could only see where Goda’s lamplight shined, so she stayed close and she held her hands out so that she could catch herself on Goda if she stumbled.

“I thought that lamp had run out of batteries,” Kanna began to say—but then she remembered that Goda had found two lanterns in Jaya’s storage room that first afternoon.

“This is the other one,” Goda replied. “Hopefully it will stay alive until we’re done. There are no spare lanterns or batteries, so it’s our last resort.”

“Why don’t we just light a candle, then?”

Goda paused for a long moment, but since she was facing forward, Kanna couldn’t see her expression. “Why don’t we smoke some cigars while we carry the fuel out, too?”

It was only a few paces later that it finally dawned on Kanna, but still she huffed with irritation. “I can’t imagine that engine fuel is so flammable that we can’t even have a tiny light,” she argued, even though she actually agreed with Goda and wasn’t too keen on testing her own argument. It was just that she still couldn’t tolerate having anything in common with the woman—even a meaningless opinion.

They reached the mouth of the cavern a few minutes later, and Kanna looked down towards the plain one last time. The desert was bathed mostly in the bluish glow of the moon, but she could still see the points of a few white and orange lights among the military trucks. Small, tarp-covered huts peppered their camp here and there, and a bonfire flickered in the middle of it all. Countless soldiers crouched around the flames, laughing and shouting to one another, shadows dancing and pushing against each other in the sand. Though their human voices easily carried over the expanse, they looked more like a distant swarm of locusts from where Kanna was standing.

“How does a country with such a small homeland have such a huge military?” Kanna murmured. “I heard that a hundred years ago, you people had barely enough to even eat, and now you’re bursting out of the seams of your original borders to the point that you have to conquer everyone else.” Kanna turned to see that Goda was standing at the entrance of the cave, looking at her with a strangely amused expression.

“What we’ll find in here is the answer to your question.”

Kanna shook her head. “Engine fuel? But any of the kingdoms can use that.”

“And yet none of them use it the way we do. On its own, any technology just sits there and does nothing. It’s human intention that drives the motors more than the fuel.” Goda stepped into the cave’s mouth. The glowing lamp swung by her side, lighting the first edges of the colorful snakes on the walls.

Kanna didn’t want to go inside. The snakes unnerved her almost as much as Goda did—but she knew that wherever Goda went, she had to follow. “Human intention,” Kanna echoed as the walls of the cavern began to swallow her up. “You mean the intention of the Middlelanders? What intention is that?”

“To be evil,” Goda said. “To be selfish, like you and your father.” She turned back around to face the void and Kanna stared after her.

Distracted for a moment by the growing tangle of serpents above her and the garbled script on the walls that glowed in response to Goda’s light, Kanna did not protest at first. She felt that pressure in her head returning, and that whining pulse from the last time she had seen the snakes growing louder in her ears.

Kanna let out a breath, pressing her hands against her eyes. The snakes had become too bright. “No. I’m nothing like you people,” she said finally.

“What are you babbling about, Kanna Rava? You’re exactly like us. In fact, you may as well be one of us. It is you and your family who fed us, and now you complain that we’ve grown strong and fat and insatiable along with you. How silly.”

“You’re full of nonsense. All you ever say is nonsense.” Kanna gritted her teeth against the vibration in the air that seemed to grow only higher in pitch. It made her feel like her brains were buzzing inside of her skull. Once she felt that she could hardly take another step, a nauseating sensation came over the whole of her: She could sense an inner ghost floating in her body, one that was separate from her bones and muscle and physical frame, one that hovered loosely just underneath her skin.

“What…? What is this?”

Her body was resisting it, resisting everything—the pulse inside her, the air outside her, even just the way the wind played against her flesh as she moved. She couldn’t stand any of it. She tensed every muscle.

Suddenly, with a surge of blood through every limb, it felt like her veins were about to tear open. The ghost inside fought to burst through her skin. It could not be contained. It was ready to spill into the cavern and swell into the floor and the walls like a gushing fountain that she could barely hold back.

Astonished, she resisted even more, clenching hard to keep herself together. She stumbled as an insistent throb rushed up her spine and through her head, as if to crack it open.

Kanna’s panicked steps echoed loudly. “What’s happening? What is this, Goda? Is it the serpents?”

A hand clasped against hers. Some force pulled her forward into the darkness—and with every ounce of effort that she had left, she refused to give in to the serpents, and she allowed the hand to lead her quickly down the cavern until they had reached a fork in the path.

To the right was the tunnel where the snakes flowed—the tunnel where she and Goda and Parama had hidden themselves that first night—and to the left was the cavern where the assistants had carted off the fuel. Goda pulled her to the left, further into the void, into the path that was free from serpents.

Within moments, the feeling of conflict inside of Kanna’s body dissolved. She felt her spirit collapse within her, so that they became the same again, so that she could no longer sense any separation between herself and her other self.

And then she wondered—but only for a split second, because it brought up another wave of nausea—that perhaps the resistance between the two was always there, but she could not always feel it. She had never experienced that kind of discomfort so directly before. It had been a pain without a source, like every atom of air that surrounded her had been a threat.

She pressed herself against a wall of the cave and gasped and tried to fight the tears, but the water was already falling in thick streams from her eyes. “Goda, what was that?” she asked between heaving breaths. “What on Earth…?”

Goda was staring at her intensely. The light from the lamp made her black eyes glow. It was terrifying enough that Kanna had to fight not to look away.

“A wave of death passed through here. You were able to sense that?” There was fascination in Goda’s tone. “The cave is aroused by our presence tonight, so it tried to kill us.”

Kanna stared back at her with bewilderment. “That was real? It happened to you, too?” But she couldn’t comprehend how Goda had felt the same thing and continued to walk seemingly as if nothing had occurred at all.

Goda stared back down towards the main part of the cave, where some of the lamplight still reached, where the outline of a few of the snakes was still visible. “Whether it is real or not is hard to say,” she replied, “but yes, it happened. It seems to have passed mostly through you instead of me, so maybe you were the one meant to receive it this time.”

“You act like you’re not even surprised by all of this,” Kanna huffed. Her senses felt like they were returning to normal, even if her mind could not let go of that feeling of dread and hollowness that had emerged with the snakes.

Goda released Kanna’s hand and began advancing again down the path. “That’s because it’s not too surprising. I’ve seen it before, in other old shrines that I’ve explored, though most people don’t notice it because the shrine is picky about who it will kill, and it has its favorites. This is just a feature of these kinds of places. The first time a part of you dies, it’s unexpected, but after awhile you grow more and more used to it, so you just let it happen.”

“But I didn’t die!” Kanna pressed her hands against her own body, as if to feel whether her flesh was still there, even as she began to follow Goda once again.

“No, you didn’t. You resisted, so you survived.”

Though they appeared to agree, Kanna had no idea what the woman was talking about. Goda had made it sound as if she herself had died many times, and that it was no big deal, just a minor inconvenience when taking a stroll through a cave. Of course, that was complete nonsense, Kanna thought, just like everything else that came out of Goda’s mouth. After all, if Goda had died, then naturally she would be dead and not leading Kanna deeper into some pitch black hole.

“Is this what Death Flower does?” Kanna asked suddenly, as soon as the thought bolted through her mind.

Goda laughed. At first, Kanna thought it was a laugh of derision, a dismissive gesture—but then she heard the edge of pleasure in it. “Yes!” Goda told her, glancing behind her, a smile spread on her face. “That is exactly what it does. It works differently—it’s much more potent than any shrine—but this is essentially what it does. It kills you.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. “You’re telling me this is why people eat Flower? Why would anyone ever want to do that?” she cried. “That was the worst thing I have ever felt in my entire life! I’d rather be shocked a hundred times by the cuff than feel my soul dissolving into infinity like that for even a minute!”

“Of course. Death is many things; pleasant is not always one of them.” Goda’s strides grew longer as the cave stretched further in front of them. “But there’s more to life than pleasure.”

Kanna stared into the darkness. She shivered as she felt herself getting sucked in, but she willingly continued to follow because she had no choice, and because she had grown exhausted of resisting.

When they reached a dead end—a pit, a belly—Kanna only noticed because the echoes of their footsteps bounced back towards them quicker, and so she could tell that the walls were closing in around them. The chamber was large enough that the tiny lantern could not light up every side at once, but from what Kanna could see, there were no etchings in the stone.

“Thank goodness,” she muttered, pressing her fingers against the pores of the rock. “No snakes.”

“Actually, the snakes are here, too,” Goda told her. “They’re everywhere—even outside the caverns. It’s just that you normally can’t see them. If you see them, then you start to die.”

“Again, I’m tired of your riddles.”

“Then go back to sleep.”

As they moved deeper into the chamber, a familiar smell began to fill Kanna’s nostrils. “There’s…fuel in here,” she whispered. The smell triggered a vague memory again—one from ages before, one from her childhood—but she could not piece it together into a stable image. “Why does the smell seem familiar to me? The temple assistants spilled it in front of me the other night, but there was a time even before that. There was a time that I spilled a lot of fuel on the ground, but I can’t remember why or when. It makes no sense. I’ve never even driven a truck before.”

“Did you ever spend time near your father’s work?”

Kanna sighed. “No. Not really. My mother always thought that brewing spirits was unwholesome and she kept me away from all drugs—including the liquor my father produced. She never even let me visit the factories. It seemed like everyone in the world had tasted my father’s product except for me.” Kanna kept her eyes on the spotlight, but only saw an endless gravel floor below it. The source of the smell was still not apparent. “Even after she died about a year ago, and I was alone in the house and old enough to drink, I didn’t seek it out for some reason. Maybe I would have felt too guilty.” She paused, a bit bothered by Goda’s question. “Why do you ask?”

“Because what you’re smelling is the blood of your father’s victims.”

Kanna reached out and struck her open palm hard against Goda’s back. “You know nothing of victimhood!” she yelled, her ire rising hotly up into her head. “You’ve never had to live what I’ve lived through!” A metallic clanking rung through the space as she shuffled forward and her foot scraped against something in the dark. She nearly tripped over whatever it was, and it felt like she had knocked it over.

The smell grew instantly stronger.

Goda stopped walking then. “Look to your left. I think you’ve found them.”

“Found what?”

“Your spirits.”

But the light didn’t reach. As Goda placed the lantern on the ground nearby, Kanna could see a bit better, and she noticed that there was a crowd of large steel canisters in the middle of the space. One of them had spilled over, and as the liquid—and the smell—of pure fuel came rushing out of the spout, she crouched down quickly to stand the container upright.

There were words written on the side. At first, she was pleased to see that the script was in her native tongue, and it gave her a rush of comfort in its familiarity—but then she noticed what it said:

Rava Spirits

Kanna blinked. She turned her head slightly towards Goda in confusion, but the woman was conspicuously quiet, as if she were waiting. Kanna could no longer see Goda’s face. All the light was spent shining on the two words that made up the seal of her father’s company name on the side of the fuel canister.

Rava Spirits

Curiously, Kanna ventured to dip her fingers in the puddle of fuel close to her knees, and she brought the liquid up to her nose. She recoiled at first, because the smell was strong, but it triggered her memory again, and this time the image was a bit more solid: This time, she remembered her grandfather’s breath on the one day he had come to visit her mother’s house.

Rava Spirits

“This…this is grain alcohol,” Kanna whispered in realization. Her hand shook in front of her face. “This is a canister of distilled spirits.” She looked up at Goda again, even though she could not see her. “But why?”

“Why indeed.” Goda’s voice emerged from the dark, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. “It’s fuel, Kanna. Ethyl alcohol. Ethanol. Our trucks, our factories, our soldiers—this is like blood for them, and your father was the only producer. You should already know.”

“I don’t know anything…” Kanna pressed her hand into the puddle of alcohol again. She felt the substance seeping into the tiny cuts and scratches on her palm and making them sting. “I don’t…”

But very suddenly, she knew. Exactly because she knew, she shook her head and backed away, as if the canister of fuel had been on fire after all. She stumbled back against the dirty floor, sending gravel shooting in every direction.

“No…,” she said. “No! That can’t be true! Stop toying with me, Goda! We didn’t—!” She pulled back far enough that the light no longer touched her, and she ran straight into one of the walls of the cavern. “No, we didn’t make fuel for you wretched people! That isn’t even possible. If we did, then that means we’re the reason that you…!”

Goda laughed. It was the most horrifying sound that Kanna had ever heard. It made her feel hollow again, as if the laugh were coming from inside of her own self instead, as if it were echoing against the very core of her.

“So now you know,” Goda said.

“I don’t know anything!” Kanna shouted—but it wasn’t true. This time, for the first time, she knew. She pressed her hands hard against her face. “This can’t be real! I’m not going to help you drag cans of fuel out of this place—fuel that was made by the hand of my own father! What, so that you can use that same fuel to drive me to the place of my slavery, so that I can work in a factory powered by this poison? No! That’s too perverse for me to even comprehend!”

“Oh, you will do it.” Goda stepped into the light and stooped down to grip the handles of two of the containers. “You will do it because you’re my slave and you have no choice.”

“No! I won’t even touch that! You can’t force me!”

“I don’t need to force you. Life itself has forced you already.” Goda turned to look at her. Her eyes were smoldering with fire reflected from the light, but otherwise they were empty. “Just as your father and his father and his father greedily deprived your countrymen from the grain that would have fed them, you too will help me greedily steal this poison from the people who actually paid for it in blood. Just as your father was too blinded by money to notice that he had helped us grow strong enough to finally take him over—that he had been digging his own grave out in those fields—you too will blind yourself to what all of this means, and you will become an accomplice in your own slavery.” Goda approached her, stretching her arm out to offer one of the canisters. “Take it. Take it. This is what you must face. It is your own doing. You must live the life you’ve created.”

“No! I didn’t create any of this! It isn’t my fault! How could I have known? How could I have possibly known?”

Goda shook her head. “It’s not what you knew. It’s what you didn’t know. No one would ever do this consciously. You and your family have done this out of ignorance. But your father has yet to awaken, and probably never will. It is up to you to awaken in his place.” She offered Kanna the fuel again, more insistently this time. “Now take it. You have no choice. This fuel is yours—you’re the rightful heir to it—and you will use it to drive yourself into slavery. That is your fate.”

Kanna shuddered, a screaming breath emerging from deep inside of her. It shook the very center of every bone in her body. The presence of the snakes returned in that instant, as if her cries had been a call meant for them. Though Kanna could not see them, she sensed them pouring into the room in droves and surrounding her, their scales scraping against the walls and letting off sparks.

They set the spirit inside of her alight. Raw awareness gushed through her veins like a searing fire, until her skin was about to rip open, every particle of her flesh bursting into infinite flames. They burned from her ancestors’ fuel, the fuel that had been reaped from the grain fields, the fuel that had spilled on her feet and stung every cut on her soles.

A specter of death loomed over Kanna’s head. The reaper of the grain had come, and she realized then that it was the shadow of Goda Brahm.

Kanna ran. Rather than face it, she ran.

She didn’t know where she was or where she was going, but she only knew that she needed to run away from Goda. Her footfalls echoed loudly in the void and it only reminded her of the hollowness within. Every hole on her face oozed with warm water and made it hard to breathe and made her cough the faster she ran.

When she reached the main cavern, she thought she felt the snakes following her. She looked up to see that some of them had started to light up, even where the moonlight could not have possibly struck.

“No!” she cried out, and she pushed forward to the exit, where the first electric wave pulsed through her body.

Perhaps the cuff had been shocking her the whole time, and she had only noticed just then. It felt stronger than ever before, like the throbbing pain reached into her marrow. She fell to the ground just outside the cavern, writhing in the pain of the shock and of the emptiness that was washing over her. She writhed like the snake that Goda had crushed to death in the desert.

“No!” she cried out as her face smashed into the dirt. It was all that emerged from her mouth, but in her mind, a hundred thousand thoughts had raced to the surface. I am Kanna Rava! It’s not my fault! It’s not my father’s fault! The Middlelanders, they made us do it! I am Kanna Rava! I am—

A cold, dry hand pressed suddenly to her face. It covered her mouth, as if to silence her gently. It reeked of the tanned hide of a dead animal.

“Quiet now,” a voice whispered in Kanna’s native tongue. “The time has come for me to free you from her.”

---

Onto Chapter 12 >>

“Why did you do that?” Kanna demanded. “What if I hadn’t been able to get out from where I was? You would have been pointlessly torturing me!”

But Goda had already started walking in the direction of the temple complex. Kanna ran up behind her and reached up to grasp her shoulder. Her palm accidentally pressed against the spot where she remembered Goda’s bruise had been, but she had no compassion left, and so she didn’t feel compelled to move her hand. At any rate, the woman didn’t flinch.

“Hey! Hey, listen to me!” Kanna’s shouts grew louder. “Are you crazy or something? Why did you do that to me?”

“I looked around and couldn’t find you. I suspected you were hiding, but I knew you would appear quickly enough once I left the garden,” Goda said without turning around or even pausing her stride. “Otherwise, you did it on your own. I just stood there and allowed you to do it.”

“Bullshit!” Kanna grabbed two handfuls of Goda’s outer robes and she dragged her feet against the gravel to slow the woman down. “It was you! You pulled out of the cuff’s range, not me! Why would I do something like that to myself?”

“Because you love the shocks.” Goda glanced over her shoulder at Kanna. Her face was neutral except for that tiny, annoying smile, which made her words all the more difficult to tolerate. “They tell you where the walls of your prison are—so that you can run head-first into them. By all means, do it. Test every corner for my weakness. Break yourself up for me and I will gather all the pieces when you’re done.”

It took all of Kanna’s mental strength not to unclench her fists from the woman’s robes. She wanted to punch her in the face, the same way that she had punched Goda’s body—but she wondered if the woman’s jaw was also made of iron, and if it might break her hand entirely. Her knuckles still hurt from the night before. Even just noticing the pain again coaxed a few angry tears to the surface.

“I hate everything about you, Goda.”

“Good.”

“Good?” Kanna dug her nails into Goda’s back through the fabric of her robes. She felt a crazed laugh emerging from inside of her instead of a sob, and she didn’t know why. She held it back.

“Yes. You told me this morning that you were tired of being afraid of me,” Goda said, turning back to face the plain again. “Now you’re not afraid; you hate me instead. Isn’t that what you want?”

Kanna didn’t know how to respond. As her eyes and the inside of her nose were damp, she found that the grainy air of the desert irritated her. She pressed her face to Goda’s back and took a deep breathful of the warm air that hovered between the folds of the woman’s clothes. Her tears seeped into the cloth.

She was exhausted of everything. She followed Goda mindlessly. She closed her eyes.

“I’ve only known you for three days. Why do I feel this way about you?” Because she was in a daze, at first Kanna hadn’t realized that she had spoken aloud, that she had whispered the confession against Goda’s back.

She hoped that Goda hadn’t heard—but of course she had.

“You have been through the most intense moments of your life in the past three days. Everything you’ve ever known has been torn away from you, and so it feels as if you’ve lived many lifetimes in a matter of hours, that you’ve gone through the labor pains of your own birth over and over. And you’re projecting those intense emotions onto me, because I happen to have been the pair of cold hands that ripped you out of that womb you were living in,” Goda said. “It’s all right. I’m used to the blame. That’s the job of a porter.” Her husky voice vibrated in her body distinctly enough that Kanna could feel the words buzzing against her own lips as much as she heard them in the air.

She thought about what Goda said, but she knew that it didn’t answer her question. She had been asking about different feelings, but maybe the answer lay between the words. Maybe Goda had just dismissed her as generously as she could have.

When Kanna’s breaths became shallow and she felt the urge to taste the outside air again, she pulled back. A cloud of motor exhaust hit her in the face right away. She opened her eyes and saw that they were surrounded by a labyrinth of military trucks, and there seemed to be even more of them than there were the night before. As she squinted into the dim evening landscape, she could see that some of the rigs were hauling huge storage containers, and others carried what appeared to be farming equipment.

“Why did they come here?” Kanna asked.

“They’re stopping to rest and to get a blessing at the monastery before they head North. Now that the fires in the Upperland are under control, it seems that the government is sending soldiers up to finally collect the grain.”

“Fires?” Kanna had vague memories of smoke when she had stepped onto the train that was destined for the Outerland, but it had just been a thin taste in the air, so she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. The sky had been clear when they had stopped in the desert days later.

“There were fires burning through the grain fields. Half the planted mok that was overwintering is now pot-ash and some of the silos full of mok seed caught fire, too. It’s a mess. Many of your people will starve.”

“The mok grain is burning? But how? Are the fires anywhere near my family’s property?”

“The fire is over now, so don’t worry about it.”

Kanna sighed. She knew any further demands would be useless, so instead she looked around at the uniformed women who rushed to and fro. Some of them were tying down equipment, some were flipping through paperwork, and still others were just standing around smoking. “But why are they sending soldiers to do farm work?”

“Easy labor, I suppose,” Goda said. “For the past few decades, a lot of the resources have been funneled into the military machine. It’s how the Middleland expanded as quickly as it did. So many people are employed by the military—and they work on a contract, so they can’t just quit—that the government shuffles them around to do all sorts of menial tasks. They’re also the ones who consume most of the truck fuel.”

Kanna’s grip on Goda’s back tightened. “The fields they’re harvesting the grain from—they’re my father’s fields, aren’t they?”

“They’re not his fields anymore.”

They reached the threshold of the temple complex not long after they had both fallen silent. As the two towers loomed closer, Kanna peeked from behind Goda and noticed that there were soldiers near the gate. Most of them were kneeling on the ground—just as Goda had done the first day they had arrived—and they were placing bowls of fruit and yaw root near the gateway.

On the other side stood two priestesses, smiling down at the visitors, saying nothing. Their expressions reminded Kanna of the Goddess that she had seen in the sanctuary. Priestess Rem was not among them—and neither was anyone who might have looked like her. Now that Kanna knew about the woman’s twin, she had been a bit more careful to observe the faces of the other clergy members, though she still wasn’t sure if Rem’s sister even worked there.

Goda handed Kanna a thin stack of papers. “Here, take this to the head priestess. She’ll stamp them.”

“But I don’t see her.”

“She’s here.” Goda’s gaze fell beyond the gateway, though her eyes didn’t appear to be searching for anything in particular. “Go in and you’ll find her soon enough.” And then Goda knelt down beside the soldiers to stand in the crossfire of the priestesses’ blessings.

Kanna gave Goda a questioning glance, but the woman had already turned away. It was then that Kanna remembered what Priestess Rem had told her the day before: “I can tell where she is if she’s close enough. Call it a sixth sense.” Maybe that perception went both ways.

Kanna moved on, and she found a space in the threshold where she could respectfully squeeze past the priestesses after giving a deep bow to each of them. She wasn’t sure if the gesture was adequate, but they both offered her a smile in return. As a foreigner and a heathen, it seemed no one expected much from her.

She flowed down the path that she had walked with Priestess Rem the night before, even though everything besides the stone beneath her feet looked unfamiliar still. She had no idea how she might find her way around—but before she had come upon the space between the two towers, she noticed a low table set up near a corner of the fence. The crooked form of Assistant Finn hunched over it, stacks of paperwork spread like a makeshift tablecloth.

Kanna couldn’t help but grimace. That poor woman has been faced with a torture worse than mine perhaps, she thought. She couldn’t imagine spending years staring at tiny little smears of ink for hours per day.

In spite of her distaste for both the woman and her bureaucracy, she approached, wondering if maybe the assistant could tell her where to go, or even just stamp the papers for her and be done with it. A small man crouched near the woman as well—seemingly subjecting himself to the same smattering of words—and his face grew clearer when Kanna walked closer.

She felt ashamed to see him again. In spite of what had happened between them the night before, however, she lifted a hand in greeting because he had already caught her gaze and it was too late to escape him.

“Hello there, Slave Rava! How are you feeling tonight? It’s your last day here, isn’t it? Tomorrow morning you’ll be able to—” Parama stopped, a puzzled look on his face. “Are those my robes you’re wearing?”

Kanna looked down at her clothes, her cheeks growing automatically warm. She had somehow forgotten what she had changed into hours before, and indeed it did seem a bit awkward to walk up to someone while wearing their stolen clothes.

Or borrowed clothes. Kanna decided to rethink the last thought in her native tongue, since the term for “steal” and “borrow” were the same. It made her feel better about it.

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said when she had the courage to look up at him. “Innkeeper Jaya gave these to me today during…an emergency. I’ll bring them back to you as soon as I can change out of them.”

“No, no! Don’t worry about it!” Parama replied quickly, waving his hands around as if the notion of Kanna’s returning the clothes were preposterous. “Those are old anyway. She bought me some new ones recently, so I don’t need them. Besides, they suit you well.” He gave her a smile that she felt she didn’t deserve.

“Are you sure? After all, I’m not the only one who has stolen from you recently. If you want, you can come back with me and I’ll return both the clothes and that book that Goda took from you. I think I saw it on a shelf in the storage room this morning.”

“Oh, that? Don’t worry about it, either, Slave Rava. It was just a beginner’s guide on Old Middlelander script and it’s of no use to me anymore. I had already forgotten about it, actually.”

Kanna stared at him. She found it unfathomable that he had forgotten, considering that it had been the source of an entire altercation. “Then what on Earth possessed you to fight a giant over it?”

The corners of his eyes creased, the edges of his lips rose just slightly. “Was I fighting her?”

“Yes, of course. I saw what you did. I was there, remember? I was part of that fight.”

“But you weren’t fighting her, either, were you?”

Kanna felt her face grow warmer, so she turned away. She cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m sorry about last night, but I didn’t come here to talk about any of that. I’m supposed to get my papers stamped.” She glanced towards Assistant Finn, but the woman had been ignoring their whole conversation and offered no answer to Kanna’s implied question.

“I think I saw Priestess Rem go into the silo,” Parama said. He gestured towards one of the towers, the one that stood on the opposite side of the wide path.

Kanna gazed up at those twin stacks of stone. Silos? she thought. It hadn’t occurred to her that this was what they might have been. Perhaps it was just that the granaries on her father’s property had looked very different.

She bid farewell and followed the walkway, spotting an open threshold carved into the rock of the tower. The instant she stepped past the doorway, she was faced with a choice: a spiraling staircase to her right that seemed to lead up towards the top of the structure, and another spiral to the left that appeared to sink beneath ground level. There was a warm light—like a flickering fire—that came up from below, so she descended after only a moment’s hesitation.

As she circled down around the core of the building, the air grew slightly more damp, enough that it contrasted noticeably with the desert air that she brought with her. She came upon a pit soon enough, a small room that spread out before her. The space carried an uncomfortable silence to it. Kanna’s soft footsteps echoed even though the room was compact and the walls were smeared with dried earth.

In the middle of the chamber, facing away from her, was a figure in black robes kneeling on the ground. Three candles dripped against the floor, wax oozing untended in an ever-expanding pool near the far wall, as if the light had been long forgotten. If it was some kind of altar, Kanna thought, it must have been incomplete: It included no image of the Goddess.

She was disturbed by the scene for a reason she couldn’t quite name, but because she was impatient to stamp her papers and leave, she took the last few furtive steps down the staircase and into the room.

She was sure that the woman in the chamber was Priestess Rem. Her suspicions only grew confirmed when she sneaked close enough to look over the figure’s shoulder, and she noticed a bowl of water that lay before the woman’s knees: Many familiar features emerged in its rippling reflection—but as soon as the image came fully together, Kanna jerked away in shock.

She slipped in her panic. She fell to the ground beside the woman and the thump sent the bowl vibrating. From her new vantage point, her gaze darted up to the woman’s face, to make sure it hadn’t been a trick of the light on the water. Indeed, Priestess Rem’s eyes were glazed over, her pupils wide, her mouth agape like all consciousness had been stripped out of her. Fat streams of tears flowed out of her eyes and landed like lead weights into the water below. Drool had accumulated in the corners of her mouth, falling just the same.

Kanna shuffled to get up off the gritty floor, but the commotion seemed to have broken the priestess’s concentration—albeit greatly delayed. Seconds later, the woman’s whole body finally jerked in some kind of reaction. Her eyes blinked in rapid succession.

“Ah…?” She looked around, confused, as if Kanna had just shaken her out of a dream. “Who is…?” She peered through the dim light of the chamber, but before long, lucidity seemed to take hold and her slackened face regained its usual sharpness. “Oh! Kanna Rava? Is it time already for your papers to be stamped? I must have lost track! Sit down, sit down.” She pointed to a spot next to her on the floor and Kanna hesitantly crouched down beside her.

“Are you all right, Priestess?”

Priestess Rem either did not seem to notice or did not want to acknowledge Kanna’s disturbed expression. The most she offered was a funny glance. “Yes, of course. Why would I not be?”

“You seemed…different just now.” Then again, Kanna had only met the woman a few times. Perhaps crying and drooling into a bowl of water was the norm for her. For all she knew, every Middlelander did this once a week; she had only immersed herself in the culture for a few days yet.

“Ah, yes, well, I was in the midst of a ritual—one that must be done in private.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said, looking towards the stairwell, already feeling her legs bursting with the itch to run away again. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“No, it’s my own fault. I should have emerged long ago to the surface. I was just caught up in the moment.” She motioned for Kanna to sit all the way down. “I was fortunetelling, you see. It’s an ancient practice, but it’s not very common among the priestesses anymore. I’m out of practice myself. It took me hours to get into this state.”

“You were trying to see the future?” Fortunetelling was technically against the Upperlander religion, but people had a tendency to do it anyway, so Kanna wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the idea—even if she had always regarded it as nonsense. “Did you…see what you needed to see?” Kanna asked politely, unsure of how else to reply.

“Hmm,” the priestess murmured. She pressed her hand to her mouth and stared again into the bowl of water, this time with eyes that held an active mind. “No. I tried, but something blocked me from seeing through the eyes of the Goddess. In the past, even when partly blocked I have been able to grasp at something useful most of the time, but this time the energy wouldn’t flow at all.”

“Is it because of Goda?” Kanna asked cautiously.

“To be honest, yes. I think so. When she leaves tomorrow, maybe I will be able to reconnect. Even then, however, I will just be resting on the laurels of avoidance. The truth is that as long as I hold this rage inside of me, I will never be able to fuse fully with the Goddess, and the anger will only come up again and again. It is clear to me now how much I have been denying and repressing. In fact, when I entered the fortunetelling state, this was all the Goddess would show me: my own hatred and how it colors my fate.” She paused for a long moment, her eyes growing dark. “No, there was something else. One other thing.” The priestess looked directly at her. “It was about you. I saw your future instead of my own.”

“My future?” Unnerved by the expression in the woman’s eyes, Kanna added, “Could I ask you what you saw?” In truth, she wasn’t completely sure if she wanted to know, assuming the priestess was even clairvoyant in the first place.

“I saw…a bird. A swan.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow, a bit speechless. It was certainly not anything that she had expected. It was an eerie coincidence, too, considering that she had dreamt of the same bird only nights before.

“In my vision,” the priestess continued, “there was an egg inside of you filled with a writhing ball of snakes. The Goddess sent a white swan down from the heavens, and then the swan entered into you and forced the egg to crack open. The egg soon hatched and the snakes slithered out, so the swan crouched between your legs and ate them one by one.”

Kanna’s face twisted in confusion and embarrassment. “I don’t know what that means! How could that be my future?”

“It’s a symbol, of course. For what, I don’t know. Only you can really know that.”

“I…know nothing. I’ve never known less in my life.” The words had come tumbling out seemingly without intention, but they were nonetheless true.

When the room had fallen again into an awkward silence, the priestess extended her arm, but was careful not to touch Kanna directly, since her hands were not gloved this time. “Put the papers on the floor and I will stamp them,” she said. With her other hand, she rummaged inside her robes to produce her seal. “After that, you are free to go. You look to me like you are not influenced at all by Death.”

And you? Kanna thought. The woman’s pupils were still large and Kanna could see beads of sweat on the sides of her neck.

“Perhaps,” the priestess said suddenly, just as she had finished stamping her name, “that swan who will attack you and shatter everything inside of you…is Goda Brahm.”

* * *

Back on the other side of the gateway, Kanna tried not to appear too shaken when she met eyes with Goda Brahm. For her part, Goda didn’t seem to notice anything different, and as soon as Kanna stepped through, they began walking back into the plain.

“Priestess Rem told me all kinds of terrible things about you, you know,” Kanna said to her once they had wandered far enough away from the two priestesses at the threshold. She wasn’t sure why she was saying this, but something in her felt that it would be dishonest if she held back.

“Did she now?” Goda replied. She didn’t seem bothered or even interested. She walked into the wind, the sand pelting hard against her, but she wiped her face with the back of her hand and moved onward.

“For some reason, I didn’t believe her.” Kanna squinted from the dirt that was getting in her eyes, but she could still see the details of the woman’s neutral face. “Should I?”

Goda smiled. “Depends on what she said, I suppose. Just to be on the safe side, go ahead and believe it. It’s probably true.”

“But I don’t. I can’t. The only thing I seem to be able to believe is what I see in you directly for myself, which is nothing good—but nothing evil, either. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to see it.”

“Maybe you are.”

When they had walked back to the inn and stepped into the storage room and Goda had closed the door behind them, Kanna didn’t find the privacy quite so unnerving anymore. She felt anxious, but the fear wasn’t overwhelming; something else had replaced it. Maybe it was hate, after all.

She glanced at Goda discreetly as the woman began to take off her own robes.

“Here,” Goda said. Now half-dressed in the middle of the room, she handed Kanna a small book. Kanna recognized it as the volume that Goda had stolen the night before from Parama’s room.

Ancient Middlelander Script for Beginners, it said. It took some effort for Kanna to parse the text, since it was in a stylized form that she hadn’t encountered before. “What’s this for?” she asked.

“You said you had dabbled in calligraphy, did you not?”

Kanna tilted her head. She found it odd that Goda had been paying that much attention to her conversation with the assistant the day before. “Yes, sort of. I used to paint decorative scrolls for my tutor, but that was in Common Middlelander. This is Old Middlelander. I don’t know it.”

“Exactly. You’ll learn it, then.” Goda extended the book further until Kanna felt she had no choice but to take it.

“Why do you want me to study this, though?”

“We can say that there’s something special that you’re meant to write for me.”

Kanna furrowed her brow. “And we can also say that I don’t want to do it.” She began to put the book down.

Goda’s face was blank as always, but her stare remained fixed, intense. “You will do it.” Her voice held no threat in it, almost as if to imply that the threat was unnecessary. “Because you are my slave.”

Kanna sighed. Her hands still held the book, even as they loosely hung down over the floor, where she had intended to drop the weight. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll try, then.”

“No. You will not try. You will do it.”

* * *

In the late evening, after Kanna had studied the book and scrawled messily on a sheet of scratch paper for an hour, Goda had told her to go to bed. Her master blew out the candle, and they lay side by side in silence for many long minutes, yet Kanna still could not close her eyes. She watched the outline of Goda’s form, the rising and falling of the woman’s chest in the moonlight.

And like every other night so far, she wrestled with the burning urge to touch her—only this time, she could not reach out even discreetly. Goda was awake. The woman was staring up at the ceiling, and though Kanna tried to be inconspicuous, she sensed that Goda was watching her too, out of the corner of her eye. There was a strange air of patience in it all, as if the woman were waiting for Kanna to voice some reply to an unspoken question.

Kanna, for her part, had no such patience. Even spending their days slogging through temple bureaucracy had done nothing to break up the tension of the nights, a tension which only seemed to compound on itself every time they lay together.

She couldn’t take it anymore. After steeling herself, hands tightly gripping the sheets, she finally made her indecent request:

“I’m cold,” she rasped.

Goda turned slowly towards her. At first, Kanna was convinced that the woman hadn’t understood her at all.

But then Goda unfolded one of her arms, as if she were spreading open a single wing. Her hand fell lightly on the edge of Kanna’s mattress.

It was an invitation.

After hesitating one final time, Kanna accepted. She slid across the space between them and pressed her body to Goda’s side. She laid her head on the woman’s chest, which felt hard and soft at the same time, the way it had earlier that morning. Once she was settled, Goda’s arm came to wrap around Kanna’s shoulders in a loose embrace, and then the flows of heat naturally danced between them like spiraling currents—warm skin against skin, breath against breath.

It was through this small ounce of comfort that she was able to fall asleep.

When she awoke again, it was still dark. It seemed like only a second had gone by, but the moon had fallen out of the frame of the window, and so it must have been hours that had passed. Kanna was still lying in Goda’s bed, but it was empty and cold. Perhaps it was the discomfort of separation that had awakened her, though she hadn’t noticed any stirring before she opened her eyes.

She found her master near the door, dressed fully in her robes and fiddling with something made of metal and glass. Kanna couldn’t see what it was until a bright spark came to life in Goda’s hands and the electric lantern bathed the bottom of the woman’s face in an eerie glow.

She noticed Kanna’s gaze and replied to it with a faint smile.

“Let’s go,” she said, “back into the belly of the beast.”

---

Onto Chapter 11 >>

Kanna put one bare foot in the sand. Somehow, she had awakened with every limb intact.

She was standing at the threshold, the door half-open, her body shielded from the wind. She didn’t want to step into the outside world, to feel the sharp sand pelting her body out in the open—but she knew that she couldn’t stand there with indecision forever.

Maybe if I feel too vulnerable, she thought, I can take refuge behind a boulder. But from where she was hiding behind the door, she could no longer see a single rock. Her view was clouded by the sun rays that had lit the dust in front of her and created out of it a swirling mist.

She squeezed the edge of the door with her hand. The rough sides of the metal dug into her palms, and her swollen knuckles pulsed angrily as she flexed them, but she couldn’t help the urge to cling hard onto something. With the last bit of courage that she could muster up, she walked straight into the haze and closed the door behind her.

The finality of it was unnerving. She could hardly believe what she was doing, and some very deep-seated part of her was screeching with terror, writhing with discomfort at her nakedness. As she had feared, the wind huffed gritty sand against her bare skin as reward for her audacity.

Still, she persevered. She took another step forward. Every time the wind paused, she felt a bit of relief even as she shivered. When her eyes finally did land upon that boulder that she had promised to herself, the fear only thickened—but she pushed past this, too.

Kanna stared at Goda. In the morning light, she could see a red, fist-sized bruise that had formed on the back of the woman’s shoulder. Kanna winced with shame, but again, she pushed herself, and her feet scraped against the gravel, and soon enough this made the woman in front of her turn around.

Goda, who was holding a handful of water, tilted her head up and squinted across the space between them. She seemed to have been jolted from some kind of daze.

“I haven’t bathed,” Kanna murmured. “Not since the cleanse the other day. Do you mind if I…?”

Without saying anything, Goda slid over to the side, as if to make room for Kanna to come hover next to the bucket. It was hardly necessary, of course: Goda was the only bather and the basin was wide open on all sides, so Kanna instead took it as a gesture of token acceptance.

When Kanna crouched beside her, the woman ignored her. As Goda went back to splashing water onto her face, Kanna tried not to comment about how futile it was to take a bath with the dusty wind swirling, since she had realized by now that it was more for the ritual.

Goda was a very religious person, Priestess Rem had told her—a religious person who believed in no gods and who sinned every day with full intention. Maybe the water was meant to wash these less visible impurities away instead.

Kanna dipped a hand into the container, then jerked back for a moment because the water was cold, but eventually she was able to relax into the discomfort, and she came to mirror Goda’s movements.

Goda still did not look at her. Kanna examined her face for some twinge of anything—annoyance, amusement, even rage—but there was nothing. The corner of her eye carried only the reflected image of Kanna’s stooped form in the bright sunlight.

Kanna pressed her now freezing hand to her own face. “Look,” she said, her voice shaky. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did to you. It wasn’t right. Even if I say that you deserve it because of what your people did to my people, that would still just be a stupid excuse.” Her hand brushed against Goda’s as she reached for more water. She fought the urge to pull back. “The real reason I did it was…to provoke you.”

Goda finally lifted her gaze up. Her brow had furrowed; her eyes had narrowed. She was listening. Kanna looked back at her for a long moment, feeling awkward at the confession, but knowing that she couldn’t just leave it at that. There was a question hanging in the air.

“I’m afraid of you,” Kanna finally admitted. Her eyes had grown warm with nervous tears. She swallowed. “I’m terrified of you, all right? Every time you stand next to me, I get this sinking feeling in my stomach. It’s like you dwarf me, like you’re so much bigger. It’s like you fill up all the space around me, but…you’re made of this endless emptiness. You’re like a container with nothing in it, with no bottom and no ceiling. I get lost in it. It doesn’t make any sense.” Kanna looked down at the sand and shook her head. “You’re big, but not that big. It’s not your body; it’s something else. I don’t even know what it is, or why it exists, but I can’t fight it. I’ve already lost to you. You’re made of nothing, and so there’s nothing I can take away, no dent I can make in you. I’ve never met someone so empty in my life.”

When she glanced at Goda again, she found that the woman was watching her intently.

“I thought that maybe it bothered me because I couldn’t stand to see any shred of peace in anyone else when I have to suffer in this chaos,” Kanna continued, “but it’s more than that. It’s you. It’s personal. I want something from you, and it infuriates me because I know that you could never want anything from me. Nothing I do makes a difference, does it? You’re not bothered if I resist; you’re not pleased if I surrender; you accept me exactly as I am—and I hate it. Do you know how terrible it is to push with all your strength, but to see no result at all, not even something you feared? Maybe I do have a death wish. Maybe last night, I just wanted you to kill me already so that I wouldn’t have to look at your blank, unfeeling face all the way to the Middleland—but even when I hit you, you didn’t hit me back. You barely flinched, and I nearly broke my fingers trying to get a rise out of you. It was like punching a rock. All I have to be proud of and ashamed of is that bruise on your shoulder.”

Goda stood. Her body stretched up into the sky that hovered above them. Kanna squinted to gaze up at her, and in that second she became transfixed with the water droplets that etched Goda’s skin: Each one of them held a tiny image of the sun.

The woman started to leave without a word. The wind blew against her as she shuffled her way back, but her legs seemed to make no extra effort, her arms loose with no sign of resistance at all. Kanna sat alone staring into the bucket of water. She could see a dim version of herself staring back.

She spun around. “Wait!” she called. At once, she bolted across the space between them.

Goda turned with surprise and Kanna charged at her, a burning energy not unlike rage filling her bones. Before Kanna could falter to the cowardice that was also growing in her second by second—before she could stamp out her irrational impulse with fear and logic, before she could even feel sorry for what she was about to do—she rushed against her.

Kanna threw her arms around Goda. She pressed her face into her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut because she could not bear to see that monster’s naked body so close, but even still she felt a warmth of embarrassment rising up her neck. The louder parts of her mind were screaming at her to let go, to run away.

But through it all, she stayed put. She clung to Goda in the middle of the sandy yard, and she breathed in the woman’s scent, and she tried not to be alarmed when she felt the woman stiffen in her arms. The swell of Goda’s small breast next to her face contrasted strangely with the tenseness of the muscles of that same chest. This softness was Kanna’s only source of comfort; the rest of the woman felt hard.

Goda didn’t push her away. Instead, she waited. After the initial surprise, her body seemed to relax, and her breathing fell back into a steady rhythm, though Kanna could hear that her heart hadn’t quite slowed to a normal pace. Goda placed a hand on Kanna’s shoulder, but otherwise she offered no sign of encouragement, nor rejection, nor acknowledgement.

“I don’t want to be afraid of you,” Kanna murmured against Goda’s skin—but she was still afraid. She could feel that automatic repulsion in her gut even then, and a voice in her head that was calling for her to break free.

When the fear reached its crescendo, and she couldn’t ignore that expansion of panic anymore, she pulled away. She turned to the side and crossed her arms over her chest. She looked down at the sand instead of up at Goda’s face.

All in all, the contact had lasted seconds—but her body felt it still, as if the touch had been etched into her skin, and she wanted to go run to the bucket of water to wash the feeling off.

There was another sensation, too. Kanna saw it clearly now.

It was the other reason that she had tried to provoke Goda, a reason that was more deep-seated and vulgar, a reason that was nonetheless intimately intertwined with her fear. She found that she couldn’t voice it even then. She only hoped that Goda genuinely hadn’t realized what it was. Out of everything that floated unspoken between them like a swirling cloud of dust, Kanna couldn’t stand the thought that Goda knew, and that the woman was quietly standing there, pretending to have missed it out of a sense of pity.

Everyone else had pitied Kanna, and she accepted it—sometimes gladly, because it served to vindicate her feelings—but it wasn’t something that she would ever accept from Goda Brahm.

“Kanna,” Goda began to say. It was the first time she had called her by her bare first name, and so on reflex Kanna glanced up at her in surprise.

The look on Goda’s face was one of simple acceptance. It was that vast emptiness again, that face that wanted nothing, that face that somehow left Kanna feeling completely alone and stripped of everything she used to cover herself.

And so Kanna ran away. She ran naked across the yard and into the innkeeper’s garden, where she crouched behind a small, bushy tree that Goda must have planted years before. She cloaked herself in its shadows and masked her face in its leaves.

It was there that she hid from the woman who would not chase her.

* * *

It was there that the innkeeper found her. She seemed to have been hauling a bucket of greywater to throw onto the few living plants in the garden, when she had noticed that Kanna was ducked in the corner.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked. She glanced over her shoulder towards the storage shed. Her eyes were wide. “I never thought I’d ask this, but…did Goda try something?” Kanna shook her head and the innkeeper responded with a face of relief. “Good. I wouldn’t want to have to alter my entire opinion of that brute—it would be too much mental work.” She poured the water on some shrubs near Kanna, then stared with expectation.

At first, it seemed to Kanna that the innkeeper was waiting for the plants to unshrivel, but then she quickly realized that the woman was expecting an explanation instead.

“Uh, we got into a fight,” Kanna told her, “so I didn’t want to go back into the shed.”

The innkeeper pursed her lips with suspicion. “You took your clothes off to get into a fight? Was it a wrestling match or something?” This time, because Kanna merely offered a blank stare, the innkeeper shrugged with casual acceptance. “All right, whatever. If you need something to wear and you really don’t want to face her—which I can’t blame you for, to be honest—then go ahead and come inside. We can’t have you running around naked with all these soldiers milling about; they’ll give you a hard time.”

The innkeeper handed her the bucket, and after a moment Kanna realized what it was for. She pressed it against the front of her body and furtively trailed behind the woman as they made their way to the threshold of the inn.

It felt strange to step inside, after it had been forbidden to her for three days. She felt like a dog who had finally been let into the house and offered some semblance of human comfort. While the innkeeper crouched down to take off her own shoes, Kanna looked up to survey the room.

It was little more than a small den attached to a hallway that was lined with many doors. There was a long dining table to the right and a stove to the left, with a tall pipe that led up to the ceiling and broke through the roof. The smell of old wood permeated the space. She could tell that the house had been standing at least for decades.

Without wasting any time, the innkeeper led her to one of the first rooms. “We don’t want any of the guests to see you,” she muttered, “especially in that state. We’re a little less uptight about nudity than you Upperlanders, but we still have some standards. You don’t want to attract any unwanted interest, anyway.”

Kanna gave the woman a confused look.

The innkeeper sighed as she ushered her further into the room and closed the door behind them. “These are soldiers staying here. They’re supposed to remain celibate while working outside the Middleland, but they don’t do a very good job of it, and their isolation makes them desperate at times. Besides, you’re small and cute—like a man—so they would find you particularly interesting, I imagine.”

Kanna’s eyes widened, but she said nothing. She looked around the room, still holding the bucket tightly against her, and her gaze first fell on a side-table that held a tiny replica of the idol she had seen in the sanctuary the night before. There was a small altar in front of it, where some sticks of incense had been burned.

In addition to the table, there was also a bed, a couple of chairs, a wardrobe—but little else in the room. The innkeeper had ripped the doors of the wardrobe open and was diving into the drawers, clawing at stacks of messily-folded clothes. When she finally picked something out, she held it up against Kanna’s body and tilted her head in thought.

“Hmm,” she said, “your shoulders are a little narrower and you’re a little shorter, but the length of the arms looks just about perfect.” She took the bucket from Kanna and handed her the robes instead. “These actually belong to…a friend. He left them here a few weeks ago when I bought him a new set, and I forgot about them until now, but I don’t think he’ll mind. Lucky for you that you’re both about the same size.”

Kanna gratefully accepted the clothes and threw them on over her head. She felt a little bad because Goda had already stolen from Parama the night before, and now here she was stealing yet something else that was probably his, but her desire to cover herself up quickly overrode any hesitation.

“All right, all right,” the innkeeper said, “get on out of here.” She waved her hands at the door.

Kanna gave her a wry look and started to head towards the exit of the room, but she stopped when her hand touched the doorknob. She took in a shaky breath. A mix of dread and indecision filled her, enough that she felt a sob building in her chest.

The innkeeper watched her quietly. After a few moments passed, something in the woman’s stern expression seemed to crack. “Fine,” she muttered. “Fine, stay here for awhile and avoid Goda if you’d like—just don’t leave the room to go milling around in the common area where people can see you.” She pointed to the chair in the corner. “Have a seat. Stay there.”

And so Kanna sat. She looked over at the woman, and the woman stared right back at her awkwardly.

“So,” the innkeeper said finally. She slumped into a chair that sat tucked against the wall, on the opposite side of the room. “Today is your last day, is it? One more examination and you can leave tomorrow morning. How exciting.” But the woman’s tone didn’t sound particularly excited for her.

Kanna swallowed. “Do you know what’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, on the other side—when I get to the Middleland, and we reach the city where Porter Goda is supposed to turn me in. What kind of life will that be?”

The innkeeper shrugged. “I can’t really tell you. Every slave’s journey is different. That male scribe who works at the temple, for instance: He was very lucky. The first few months of his slavery, they had sent him to card wool at a clothes factory. But then someone figured out that he had studied an obscure tongue that was useful for working out the writing in the caverns, so they sent him to the monastery as a translator. It’s very rare for men to be allowed to live near a temple. The stars just happened to align for him.”

“What happens if you’re not so lucky, though?”

“Then you work hard. It’s a punishment, after all. You’re a woman, too, so they’ll send you to work in a factory that requires heavy lifting. You’re a lot scrawnier than a Middleland woman would be, so I imagine you’ll have a much harder time, but they won’t really care. That’s how the bureaucracy works: It’s not made to be flexible for anyone’s individual situation, and it’s not kind to foreigners at all.”

Kanna groaned and rubbed her face with her hands, but the cuff knocked uncomfortably against her cheek. She glared at it, and the polished metal glared back. “I honestly don’t know how much longer I can wear this cuff without losing my mind, though. I’m just about ready to rip it off.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” the innkeeper said with a funny look on her face—something between a grimace and a smile. “From what I hear, it will shock you to your bones if you tamper with it. Years and years ago, I used to work in the capital, and the cuff engineer who built those things had a reputation as something of a twisted genius. She tested every possible way around it—on thousands of people—and I doubt you’ll be the first to escape it.”

“Thousands? That can’t be right. Where do you even get that many people?”

The woman shrugged again. “Those were the rumors I heard. But, let me tell you, I believe them. I worked in the same building as that woman, and she’s terrible. Even Goda can’t stand her, which is saying a lot.” Jaya laughed, perhaps because she had noticed Kanna’s horrified expression. “Sad as it is, if that’s what it takes to keep the prisoners in line, I can’t argue with a method that works. We need some way of keeping order, or we’d be overrun with foreign criminals in no time.”

On impulse, Kanna opened her mouth to argue—but then she thought better of it, considering that the woman was allowing her to hide from Goda in her bedroom. She sighed and instead glanced towards a window on the far wall. She could just barely see the edge of the garden through it, and she thought she had seen a figure moving past. “Porter Goda told me that you hate foreigners,” Kanna murmured, still a bit too dazed to completely censor herself.

“I don’t hate them.” The innkeeper rolled her eyes and leaned further back into the chair. “I married one, didn’t I? It’s just that I don’t see eye to eye with most outsiders. No offense, but you carry with you strange customs into the Middleland, and I don’t think it has a positive effect on society.”

Kanna gave her an irritated glance. “Did your wife carry strange customs with her?”

“She did, a little bit—but she’s more educated than most. I won’t lie to you, though. The day I met her, when she showed up at this inn, I was a little wary of her. We may be technically in the Outerland, but I don’t like Outerlanders staying here. They make a mess of the place.” The innkeeper smiled suddenly, as if a distant memory had popped into her mind. “But my wife, she was different. She was very polite at first. She would sit at that dining room table in the main space, and she would talk to me while I cooked up the meals. She had a bit of an accent, but her grammar in the common language was impeccable, and she accepted every morsel of food I made for her without complaining about how different it was.”

Kanna couldn’t help but soften her expression a bit at the story. “That’s sweet. When did you marry?”

“Oh, some months after that, I think. She showed up a few more times to the inn, and eventually I realized that she was going out of her way to stop by before crossing the border—she works in the Middleland, but her family still lives out here in the desert, you see—and so I took her alone and asked her why she had befriended me. She didn’t tell me why. Instead, she just asked me to marry her.” The innkeeper chuckled to herself. “The clock was ticking for me, I’ll admit. Living out here, you don’t meet many prospects, so after considering it at length, I said yes and we went to go see a priestess. That was about a year ago. We still haven’t lived in the same place together yet. We’re at a bit of a deadlock on that.”

“What do you mean?”

The innkeeper shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She leaned over towards the side-table and opened the drawer, pulling out what looked like a thin cigar, though Kanna couldn’t tell what herb was stuffed in it.

“She had expected to transfer out here to the Outerland once her work contract was done and she had become a full citizen, but after we married she was promoted. She wants me to come live with her in the Middleland.” She lit the cigar between her lips and a cloud of smoke quickly began to permeate her side of the room. “But my business is here. I left the Middleland to be free, to live a quiet life in the desert. I would have to leave everything to join her in the capital city. And besides, I’m the higher wife. How would that make me look, being the higher wife and living in submission to a foreigner? My mothers would be ashamed.”

Kanna scratched the back of her head. “What does that even mean?” she finally asked. “Why is one person lower and the other higher?”

The innkeeper waved her hand, as if the question was unimportant—or perhaps too fundamental to be anything less than obvious. “Almost always, marriages happen between people of differing status. I have the higher status between us: I’m a citizen and both my mothers are Middlelanders. Since the higher wife is the one that takes the lower wife into her family, my new wife now enjoys the privileges of my family’s status. In exchange, she’s expected to make herself useful: Fixing up the house, helping me look after children, those sorts of things. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked, since the beginning of time. This is why I say foreigners don’t understand, and their customs can lead to chaos.”

“You mean you didn’t marry her because you loved her?” Kanna asked, though she had to actively stop herself again from commenting on the innkeeper’s prejudice.

The innkeeper had a bemused look on her face. “Of course I don’t love her,” she said. “I’ve barely known her for two years. I heard that you Upperlanders had an overly-romanticized view of marriage, but this is just silly. How can I love someone who doesn’t even share my culture?”

She reached over to ash her cigar on the side-table. Her hand hovered over the incense tray at first, but she seemed to quickly realize her mistake, and she flicked it instead on a dish that was right beside it. Kanna wondered briefly how sacrilegious it would have been if the innkeeper had accidentally offered the Goddess the waste of her cigar.

“Middlelanders are so cold,” Kanna murmured. Just as she was crossing her arms and adjusting in her seat, she caught some movement coming from the garden again. When she peered through the hazy glass, she saw the shape of Goda Brahm driving a shovel into the earth. The woman’s outer robes were strewn on the ground; her jaw was set; her body was flexing, and yet the movement flowed into the dirt as if the earth gave her no resistance at all.

Disturbed, Kanna looked away within seconds and found that Jaya had been following her gaze.

“Are you talking about me or about Goda?” Jaya asked. Smirking, she took a long drag from her cigar. The smoke had started to seep into Kanna’s side of the room. “She’s not cold. She just likes to keep her mind blank, so she doesn’t really notice people. Does it bother you that much that she pays you no attention?”

“Why would that bother me?” Kanna huffed. “I’m hiding from her in here, aren’t I?” Out of the corner of her eye, Kanna could still sense Goda’s movements, but she forced herself to keep her gaze across the room, at the idol on the table.

“Oh come now, even when I’ve seen you just sitting next to her, the tension is so thick I could swim in it. You’re obviously attracted to her.” Jaya laughed at the annoyed glance that Kanna threw her. She ashed her cigar once again, this time without hesitation. “You really should stop torturing yourself. And you really should stop hiding from her. She’s going to have to come with you to the temple in the evening anyway, isn’t she? You’re cuffed to her. You can’t hide for long.”

“Well, I’m sick of looking at her face. I wish she would just give her cuff to someone else for tonight at least, so that they could take me to the temple instead.”

Jaya gave her a strange look. “But she can’t. You know that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“She can’t take it off. She doesn’t have the key,” the innkeeper said, as if it were some obvious fact. “She has the key to yours—she brought your paired cuff with her from the Middleland—but she doesn’t have the key to her own, of course.”

Kanna stared at her. “The porter’s cuff is locked?”

“Why yes. They lock it before she leaves. The administrators who sent her to get you are the ones who hold her key, and they’ll only unlock her cuff once she gives you over to them. They take it off at the same time as yours. That’s how it’s done.”

“But…why?”

Jaya was quiet for a long moment. “If no one else has yet explained the situation to you,” she said finally, “and you don’t already realize, then maybe it’s better that you don’t know. If I tell you now, then you might just become even more afraid of Goda, and then you’ll never leave my room.” She was smiling, but the expression held a touch of ill humor.

Kanna uncrossed her arms and placed her hands on her thighs. She gripped her own knees with frustration. “Can’t I know anything around here?” she asked, but she wasn’t looking directly at Jaya. “Why does everything have to be a mystery?”

“Maybe you should stop worrying about everyone else’s business, and then nothing will seem mysterious.” Jaya stabbed the ash tray with the butt of her cigar. Her chair squeaked across the floor as she stood up. “How long do you plan on cowering in here, anyway? It’s late and I haven’t even started on lunch. I have so much to do.”

Kanna looked down at her own feet. “What if…I help you?”

“Help me with what?”

“What if I help you with your chores? Will you let me stay then?”

“I already told you that I can’t have people like you milling around in here so openly.”

“The guests don’t have to know.” Kanna glanced at Jaya with a pleading expression just as the woman was heading towards the door. “I’ll do something productive in your room.”

“You’re really hellbent on avoiding the porter, aren’t you? You’re even willing to play the part of a slave before your sentence has started. How ironic.”

“I know I can’t avoid her forever, but right now I can’t bring myself to face her after what I did to her, either. She can’t come in here, so at least I’ll feel safe until you make me leave.”

Jaya raised an eyebrow. “What did you do to her?”

Kanna opened her mouth, then stopped. She felt warmth returning to her face. “I guess it’s my turn to be mysterious,” she mumbled.

The innkeeper laughed. “All right, fine. Somehow I feel like you’ll be more trouble than you’re worth, but you can fold that laundry over there in the corner. I’m going to go serve the guests lunch, and then I’ll have to go up to the hill to fetch water. You have until then. I don’t want you to be here when I return.” She began to step out the door, and before she slammed it closed, she added, “Once you hear everyone leaving, wait until it’s clear, and then sneak out. Don’t linger, or you’ll be testing my generous patience.”

And then Kanna was alone. She knelt down on the floor in front of the pile of laundry and did her best to remember how her mother had folded her clothes. Her work looked a little sloppy as she stacked it next to the laundry basket, but she carried on anyway, and even when she came across a pair of underwear that clearly belonged to a man, she didn’t recoil. Parama must come here a lot, she thought to herself.

She found the monotony of the work soothing. It helped draw her attention away from the burning desire she had to look out the window. In time, she even started to yawn. She hadn’t slept very well the night before, and the drowsiness was catching up to her.

Her eyes wandered over to the bed. The quilt and pillows on top of it looked a lot more inviting than her thin sleeping mat in the storage room. There’s still some time before I have to go, Kanna thought. She could hear the guests talking on the other side of the wall. But I shouldn’t even consider a nap. If the innkeeper came in here to find me sprawled on her bed, I might end up never waking up ever again.

She dismissed the idea and went back to work. At around the same time that she had finished, she heard a swarm of boots pounding along the floor in the common room, amidst the sounds of laughter and complaining. The front door squeaked, then scraped shut.

It was quiet suddenly. The voices came muffled from outside; she could barely hear them anymore.

Kanna glanced around the room. Against her will, her eyes fell again towards the window, and she saw that Goda was kneeling in the dirt, still working in the garden. Kanna sucked in a frustrated breath.

I can’t go out there now.

But how long could she really keep hiding? Like the innkeeper had said, she would have to face Goda eventually. Was all the waiting really making it any easier? What was she going to realistically do, stay in that bedroom until she wasted away from old age?

Maybe in a hundred years, I’ll be able to look at Goda without flinching, Kanna thought. Even just the idea of having the woman gaze upon her with that blank expression felt more humiliating than kneeling on the floor and folding a stranger’s clothes in a room that smelled like incense and foul cigar smoke.

So she got onto her hands and knees, and she slid down to hide under the bed, where she quickly fell asleep.

* * *

Kanna awoke with a painful jolt. She hit her head against the bottom of the bed frame when she tried to sit up. Her brain was swimming in grogginess, so at first she didn’t realize what had jerked her awake in the first place.

And then she felt the electric pulse radiating from her wrist. It stung her with a searing pop and it heightened her awareness at the same time. It was growing in intensity by the second.

“Goda,” she coughed as she felt the waves of pain flowing through her body. She flailed her arms around in a panic, clawing at the wooden floor, until she managed to pull herself out from under the bed. “Goda!”

The room was dim because the light outside had waned, but pink rays from the setting sun danced annoyingly against her face as she scrambled to her feet, pain shooting through every limb. It took all her strength just to shuffle across the room.

“Ah!” She stumbled against the wall and leaned on it to keep from falling, her jaw clenching, her eyes screwing shut. She grabbed the cuff hard with her hand and jostled it, though of course it did not come loose.

When her eyes opened again, they landed towards the window. Across the expanse of the yard, standing in the plain beyond the garden, was Goda. Even in the growing darkness, she could see that the woman was staring in her direction. There was a faint smile on her face.

In desperation, Kanna took a shaky step towards the window. Maybe, she thought, she could get close enough to ease the pain.

Goda took a step back.

The next wave hit Kanna so intensely, she nearly collapsed. “Goda!” she shouted at the window. “Goda! Stop!”

She had no choice. She rushed through the bedroom door, gritting her teeth as her cuff pulsed its angry beat against her. When she stumbled into the outer room, a dozen eyes turned in her direction, but she was barely aware of them.

“Goda, you bastard!” She pressed herself against the wall to keep standing, and she slid as quickly as she could towards the front door. “A plague on you, Goda! A goddamn plague on you and your mother and your mother’s mother and your—”

“Where the hell did you come from, Rava?” a familiar voice screeched. “I thought you were gone!” Kanna looked over to find that Jaya was staring at her in disbelief—and so were a crowd of guests at the long kitchen table—but she also found that she couldn’t summon any embarrassment through the pain.

“Rava?” one of the guests asked. “The arsonist fuel gouger?”

Kanna didn’t respond. Her feet felt like they had turned into stones, even as she managed to drag herself to the door. She heard Jaya yelling something behind her, but the woman was speaking too quickly and she was using expletives that Kanna had not yet learned in Middlelander. When Kanna finally burst through the exit, it seemed like less than a second before it had slammed closed behind her.

She ran. With the last bit of strength she had left in her, she ran in the direction of the plain, towards where she had seen Goda standing. She fell once or twice from the shocks, but she forced herself to stand again, because each step closer to Goda’s presence made the next step easier. The pain began to drain out of her, as if a valve had started to twist closed.

By the time she had rounded the cabin and could see the woman’s face again, the pulses had stopped. Only a light buzzing remained, and Kanna wondered if that was simply her nerves adjusting to the abrupt loss of stimulation. Everything was suddenly quiet. Besides the low rumble of the trucks in the distance and the swirling of the wind, the world felt empty.

But she didn’t stop. She passed the garden and kept running with all her strength. The air whistled against her until she found herself facing that giant from only paces away. Goda stared back at her with the same faint smile, with eyes that gleamed like mirrors.

“Are you afraid of me now?” Goda asked.

Kanna’s breaths were coming raggedly. As usual, her mind was at war: She wanted to stare back into those insolent eyes with defiance, and at the same time she was disgusted by them enough to feel the urge to pull away.

So she stood tall. She clenched her fists. She insulted Goda’s ancestors in the Upperlander tongue because she didn’t know how to say it any other way.

Nonetheless, the woman seemed to understand the sentiment. She laughed.

---

Onto Chapter 10 >>

Kanna stared at the priestess, completely taken aback. “You can speak Upperland tongue?” she stammered in amazement, though even still she tried to keep her voice quiet.

“I can speak many tongues. That’s why they sent me here,” the priestess said. “But more importantly, no one else here can speak Upperlander—and certainly not Goda Brahm, so there’s no chance that she can overhear.”

“I understand, but isn’t Porter Goda near the threshold? She does remind me of an animal sometimes, but I can’t imagine that she has the ears of a wildcat.”

“She’s not at the threshold. She’s standing on the other side of the far wall of the garden, just beyond the fence. She moved. You sensed it, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?” Kanna asked, newly perplexed.

The priestess gave her an enigmatic look. “I saw you twitch—but also, I can tell where she is if she’s close enough. Call it a sixth sense.”

“Because you’re a priestess?”

“No.” She looked away from the Goddess. “Goda and I are bound together by fate in a manner which I cannot freely explain to you, because it’s in a manner that the Holy Mother disapproves of, one ill-suited for a priestess. Though I had hoped that through years of prayer, I would have been able to cut this thread that held us hostage to each other, I realize now that it isn’t true. The moment that I saw Goda’s face yesterday, every old emotion erupted in me. I had ungodly thoughts. We never know what we can tolerate until we’re tested, I suppose.”

Kanna hesitated, not sure how much was appropriate to ask. “Were the two of you…married or something like that?” she guessed.

Priestess Rem gave her a crooked smile. “Priestesses cannot marry or even leave the clergy, except under very limited circumstances. Goda also cannot marry, for different reasons—and to be frank, I would not…encourage any person to view her as a suitable partner.” She seemed to have chosen her words carefully. She was cringing. “But I didn’t ask you here to burden you with our tedious history, which is none of your business. I took you alone to ask about Goda and your present situation.”

“What do you need to know?”

“Tell me…,” the priestess began. She had a strange tone of voice; she was staring at Kanna with absolute attention. “Has Porter Goda abused you in any way?”

“Abused me…?”

“Has she beaten you? Denied you food as punishment? Has she…forced herself on you when you were alone? If she has,” the priestess said quickly, “you should accuse her now, so that we can rescue you from her.”

Kanna pulled back in surprise. At first, she really did consider implicating her temporary master. She was eager to grasp at any escape rope—any at all—even if it meant that she had to lie through her teeth. The moment she had been arrested and thrown into a cage, she had promised herself that she would do anything to break herself out.

However, her desperation was blanketed by a healthy surge of hesitation, too. She was skeptical of the priestess. The offer had been so blunt and so sudden, and she had no idea what the woman’s actual motives might have been.

Kanna finally asked, “If I accuse Porter Goda, will that set me free?”

“No. You would just go with a different porter to your assigned factory in the Middleland and complete your ten years of hard labor, while Goda would be confined for investigation.”

Kanna sighed. She had assumed as much. Even if it did not technically change her situation, though, finding a new porter could buy her time. It was something to consider.

But she also knew that she would have to be more calculating than this: Goda had not yet laid a finger on her except to restrain her, and the woman actually seemed reluctant to hit her, in spite of all the threats. Goda was also much more aloof than Kanna had expected for a slave-driver. What if the new master ended up being someone much more scrutinizing, or even cruel?

More importantly, if she was to escape back to the Upperland, she would have to make the most of her forty paces. This was not going to happen in the endless expanse of a desert without some type of civilized transport.

Kanna decided: She would have to wait for a city. It would not be wise to delay that journey.

The Goddess was still watching her from above, too—perhaps with some reassurance—so Kanna found herself shaking her head, deciding on the truth by default. “She’s tied me up and she’s offered empty threats—but no, she hasn’t beaten me. She hasn’t denied me any essentials, either, to be honest. At first I was angry with her, but then I started to see how all of this works, and now…I don’t even know who to blame.”

The priestess appeared to deflate a little as she considered this. It was only then that Kanna realized the woman had been carrying an anticipatory tension. “I see,” she said, and Kanna wasn’t sure if the woman sounded disappointed, or if it was simply her own imagination. “Well, if she hasn’t acted illegally and you won’t accuse her, then there’s little we can do for you—but I will warn you to be very cautious of this woman. She’s dangerous for many reasons. She must follow general orders from the government, but she will do her job at all costs, even if it means committing a crime.”

“What kinds of crimes?” Kanna found herself asking. She wondered now all of a sudden if she should change her answer.

“Any kind. Just about the only thing she won’t do is commit a crime against the temple, and she considers her orders to transport you to be the unquestionable commandment of the Goddess herself. She’s extremely religious, but she only fully converted to the Cult of Mahara as a teenager, so she’s obsessed with making up for her past sins and torturing herself through her work.”

Kanna stared at her with astonishment. “Past sins?” This didn’t make any sense to her, especially considering that Goda had claimed that she didn’t even believe in the Goddess.

The priestess waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter now. Blessed Mahara forgives all, though I myself falter in that respect. However, even as a priestess, I will tell you that a religious person can be most dangerous of all. Goda may follow religious restrictions, and she may wash herself every morning, and pray every evening, but there is no compassion in her heart, so it all means nothing. If she can use religion to justify hurting you, then she will.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Kanna stammered.

“Because you don’t belong here. Only criminals can be slaves in the Middleland, and you’re only a criminal through technicality, so of course I’m sympathetic. It’s my role as a priestess to offer you the infinite acceptance of the Goddess, but I’m limited in what I can do for you legally unless you accuse Goda of a crime. It’s a chore to get the bureaucracy to care about what happens to a foreign slave, but the word of a priestess will help you.”

Kanna glanced up at the Goddess again, and the motherly gaze was unchanged. “Then your word,” Kanna asked, “can’t that set me free?”

“I’m afraid not. Though I wish I could unchain you myself, even a priestess cannot free a slave before the sentence is over…generally-speaking.”

Kanna gave her a curious look. “Please tell me.”

“It’s not worth worrying about,” the priestess said to her, shaking her head. “The only way to free a slave early is for a priestess to marry the slave. It’s a serious statement that the slave is innocent of the crime, but it requires a huge sacrifice from the priestess, because she has to immediately leave the priesthood and she can never divorce her wife.” She smiled with empathy. “So you see, it would be hard to find a priestess who would choose you over the Holy Mother. It’s like we’re already married to our Goddess.”

Kanna nodded with understanding, a bit disappointed. In truth, she wasn’t sure if she would trade her ten years of servitude for a lifetime of marriage to a strange woman, anyway.

As she glanced again at the altar, her mind swimming with thoughts, she allowed herself to be distracted by the details instead of by the idol’s powerful gaze. She looked at the intricate carvings on the wood below, and the collection of offerings and amulets, and the strange script that was etched in bronze on a pair of vessels near the idol’s feet. Her eyes stopped suddenly at a design that was engraved beneath the writing. There was something uncomfortably familiar about it.

“That symbol…,” Kanna said. She stared at the eight-sided outline, and the circle that it enclosed, and the lines that passed through the center and shot out to every edge. “It’s the same one that was on a pendant I saw, one that Porter Goda has. What does it mean?”

The priestess followed the direction of Kanna’s gaze and furrowed her brow. “You mean one like this?” She reached into the neck of her robe and produced the same pendant that Kanna had seen on the keyring.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

“Are you sure? It’s usually only priestesses who will carry this.”

A vague thought that had been floating in the back of Kanna’s mind fully connected just then. “Is Porter Goda…?” Kanna stopped, unsure if she should ask. “Was Porter Goda ever a priestess? I know that she used to work at the monastery in…Samma Valley, I think?”

But the priestess seemed amused by the question. “Perhaps that was the intention of her parents when they sent her there, that she might warm up to the clergy and make them proud; but no, Goda Brahm has never been a priestess. I think if she had ever tried to be initiated, the Goddess herself would have struck her down with a bolt of lightning.”

Kanna would have laughed if the woman hadn’t said the last part so flatly. Instead, she whispered in confirmation, “That’s the pendant that I saw.” Still, some part of her regretted mentioning it.

“I think I know from where she might have stolen it, a long time ago—but it’s best if I focus on the present moment, or else even this will bring me towards ungodly thoughts.”

“Why are you so angry with Goda Brahm?” The only reason the bold question had left her mouth at all was because she was speaking in her native tongue, where she felt more comfortable and familiar.

Priestess Rem regarded her with a sad smile. “Because I am a poor example of a priestess, even if it is only today that I’ve realized it. A priestess isn’t ever supposed to hold a grudge.” She looked up at the Goddess before them. “I thought I was righteous, but I have been humbled. If I had half the honor that I pretend I have, I would defrock myself right now in front of you, and fall on the floor begging the Goddess for forgiveness.”

“But why?”

“In my heart, I have destroyed Goda Brahm a hundred times, in a hundred different ways,” she said, her smile transforming into a grimace of pain, “and a sin of the heart is just the same as a sin of the flesh.”

And so it seemed that the priestess did not want to tell her. Kanna trained her gaze on the fiery glow of a torch, though she felt the Goddess watching her from the corner of her eye. When she turned back to look at the priestess, the woman was kneeling in prayer.

Not long after, when they walked outside, the priestess stopped by a pillar near the entrance to the temple sanctuary, and she struck a small bell with a mallet. Right away, the rows of prostrated women dissipated and the garden became empty.

“If there’s anything else you want to tell me—anything at all—then tell me soon, before Goda takes you away the morning after tomorrow.” The priestess began walking down the steps of the sanctuary, and she switched back to the Middleland tongue when she said: “Just think about the open door that fate has offered you, Kanna Rava. Otherwise, you’re dismissed for tonight. You have seen the Goddess for yourself.”

* * *

At the gateway, Kanna found no one except for the assistant, who was still busy with paperwork. Kanna shuffled quickly past her, wary that she might be asked another set of annoying questions, but the woman didn’t even look up.

It was only once she came up to the threshold that she saw Goda coming around the corner of the stone fence. The priestess had been right: Goda had been wandering around—but she wasn’t alone. Walking beside her, clinging to her arm and talking to her animatedly, was Parama Shakka. Goda’s face was serious as usual, but she was nodding her head, glancing down at him with something that bordered on affection. Kanna felt her own face twitch involuntarily. She didn’t like what she was seeing at all, but she wasn’t yet sure what problem she had with it.

Maybe it was the young man’s expression, she thought. It was too trusting, too naive and unafraid, considering that he was standing next to an apparently dangerous giant. She wondered if he knew any of the things that Priestess Rem had told her.

When they both reached the gateway, Parama left Goda’s side to hand Assistant Finn a sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” the woman asked with a weary sigh. “Word that the fuel shortage is over, I hope?”

“No, not at all!” Parama said, smiling. “A messenger just came by. She had a letter from the monastery in Samma Valley. They’re asking if we know any translators who can read or write…any of these languages.” He pointed to the page while the assistant glanced over it with a displeased look.

“Again? I haven’t even heard of half these tongues,” she grumbled, “and the other half are useless for any project I can imagine, just dialects of Upperlander. What on Earth is going on out there these days? Has Priestess Rem’s replacement quit on them already?”

“Maybe they’ve discovered something new amongst the ruins?”

The assistant dropped the letter onto her stack of paperwork. “It’s not your place to be speculating about the sacred work of the priestesses,” she chided him.

Kanna found the reprimand to be hypocritical, considering that the woman had just criticized the monastery herself, but Parama didn’t seem to notice and he apologized anyway. Perhaps it’s not so much about what you say, Kanna thought, so much as who says it.

Goda turned to leave and, without exchanging a word between them, both Kanna and Parama began following her at the same time. Kanna looked at him, mildly annoyed. He was giving her a strange little smile, as if they were co-conspirators sharing some secret, but she didn’t know what that could possibly mean.

Parama shuffled ahead to Goda’s side and took a handful of her sleeve. “Porter Goda, why don’t you come by my cabin tonight? I rearranged my room since you were last here. Don’t you want to see what I’ve done with the place?”

Goda glanced down at him with a smirk. “What’s so interesting about the position of your furniture?” she asked, but still she allowed him to pull her in a new direction, until they were headed to the opposite side of the plain.

Kanna reluctantly followed.

“We can have fun, the three of us,” Parama said, giving Kanna a friendly smile. “We can make a fire and eat yaw together.”

“No, thank you,” Kanna muttered with gritted teeth. She could still taste the bitter root in her mouth, even a day later.

“That’s fine! We can do something else, then. We can do all sorts of things!”

Goda seemed amused by his enthusiasm, but Kanna was still unsettled by it all. He’s the strangest man I’ve ever met, she thought. And Priestess Rem treats him like an overgrown child. Is it even right for us to be going to his room without permission?

Certainly, she didn’t like the unspoken air that floated between him and Goda. There was a tension of some kind there, and Kanna didn’t want to even imagine what it implied.

“The priestess seemed bothered last time she saw the three of us together,” Kanna mumbled.

“Oh, that’s just because she’s old fashioned! Goda won’t do anything to me.” He grinned and looked over his shoulder at Kanna. “Trust me, I’ve tried plenty of times.”

Upon hearing that, Kanna finally couldn’t take it anymore. She pursed her lips and shook her head. “How old are you, anyway?” she blurted out. “Should you really be running around trying to seduce grown women, when you’re, what? Sixteen, seventeen?”

Parama’s eyebrows flicked up. Goda laughed. They had both turned around to look at her, and Kanna didn’t like the amused smirks that they were throwing her way. It made her feel dumb—but she had already grown used to the feeling by then.

“You’re about my age, right?” Goda said, turning to Parama. “Two or three years younger?”

“I just turned twenty-two this past year,” he said.

“Right, three years younger, then.”

They kept walking, but Kanna’s steps slowed to a shuffle as she stared at them both. She wasn’t sure which she found more disturbing: the fact that Parama was actually older than she herself was, or the fact that Goda was only twenty-five at the most.

How had the woman been through so much in such a short time? The priestess had held a grudge against Goda for at least nine years, it seemed. What could Goda have possibly done at the age of sixteen that would have warranted such hatred? And how could they have then assigned the dangerous job of a porter to a teenager?

There were so many unanswered questions—but because it was none of her business, she merely trudged on, turning her gaze to the ground, shaking her head.

When they reached Parama’s house, it looked more like a shack than a cabin. The wooden walls shook and groaned as the wind blew, and Parama had to kick the bottom of the front door to get it to slide open all the way.

“Well, here it is!” he said. He hopped onto the bed—a simple mattress on a platform of wooden slats—and patted the space next to him while looking up at Goda.

Instead of sitting down, Goda nudged Kanna to take the spot. Kanna sighed and conceded, if only because she wasn’t in the mood to witness any other advances from him towards her master. When she sat, he didn’t seem at all displeased with her, though; in fact, he looked at her with a welcoming curiosity.

“So, Slave Kanna Rava, is it?” the boy—or the man…or whatever he was—said with a strange tone of respect.

Now that Kanna thought about it, his air was much more girlish than it was boyish, anyway. Maybe he had actually been a woman this whole time and Kanna simply had misunderstood. Words in the Middlelander tongue did not have an inherent gender like they did in Upperlander, so it wasn’t always easy for her to tell.

But she certainly wasn’t about to look under his robes to find out, either.

“I know you’re not in the Middleland officially yet,” he continued, seemingly taking her silent stare as polite attention rather than rude speculation, “but how are you liking it so far outside your native country?”

Kanna glared at him. “Is that a serious question?”

“I kind of get the impression that you’ve never traveled much before. Isn’t the Outerland just beautiful?” He gave her knee a friendly smack. “The sunrise every morning tints the cliffs in such a wonderful purple hue. I could just sit there and bask in it for ages!”

Kanna had absolutely no idea how to respond. She would have lashed out at him perhaps, or called him insensitive to her predicament, had she not known that he was also enslaved. She wasn’t sure what to make of someone who seemed so ignorant and oblivious to the injustice of his own situation.

She cleared her throat and looked around the room for help. Goda had wandered into a corner and had begun ignoring the both of them in favor of the contents of a small bookshelf, so Kanna gave in with another sigh.

“How…long have you been a slave, exactly?” she asked. Maybe the boy was still in some kind of denial that he had yet to wake up from, because his trauma might still have been fresh.

“Oh, about three years now, I think. They arrested me when I was nineteen.”

Kanna made a face. Same as me, she thought. She had been nineteen for barely a single season before the Upperland government had officially dissolved and conceded authority to the Middleland. Not long after that, her family members had split up to avoid their respective punishments for years of resistance.

Besides herself and her father and his fourth wife, she wasn’t sure who else had been caught trying to hide in the desert. Of course, avoiding the Middleland had become nearly impossible at that point, as the culture had spread to nearly every part of the continent. There had been nowhere to hide, really.

Still, Kanna felt the need to resist at all cost—just as her father had resisted, and her grandfather had, and his grandfather. For hundreds of years, they had dodged the encroachment of the Middleland. But now that their lands were taken, and their connections had dissolved, and their family name was tarnished, she wasn’t even sure in whose name she was resisting anymore.

Will all the defiance that’s still left in me slowly peter away? Kanna thought to herself. Will I lose my will to fight? In three years, will I be just like this young man? Ditsy and simple-minded and amused by something as mundane as the rising sun?

The boy stared at her with that simple-minded smile, as if he were waiting for some reply. Kanna looked down at her hands and tried to swallow through the empty feeling in her gut.

“You’re older than I thought you were,” Kanna told him. “I’m sorry I made so many assumptions about you. People look and act a lot different around here, and I’m only starting to get used to it.”

Parama giggled and waved his hand. “Oh, that’s quite all right! From what I hear, grown Upperland men look beastly and hairy and old compared to the women, so I can see why you would make that mistake.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. She had never heard anything like that before, and all the men she had ever known looked quite normal to her. She decided not to comment about it, lest they end up in some racist argument.

Instead, she glanced directly at his face and studied his features again. She decided that it wasn’t so much that he looked that young physically—although he did pass for younger than he claimed—it was more that his eyes held a spotless innocence to them. She found this supremely disturbing. It was like a feminine version of Goda’s masculine indifference; she couldn’t fathom the blind acceptance that they both projected, the emptiness, the complete lack of conflict.

“Still…,” Kanna found herself saying. “Even if you were arrested at nineteen, what could you possibly have done to warrant slavery?” More importantly, how can you just accept it? she thought—but she didn’t say that part aloud.

Parama made a face. For the first time, he looked slightly troubled, and though Kanna hated herself for it, she actually found herself feeling relieved at the barest sign of his pain. She wanted to see more of it, but the better part of her overrode her morbid feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Goda looked up from a book that she had been perusing, but after she glanced briefly at Parama’s face and seemed to make some kind of snap judgment, she looked back down and continued to ignore them.

“No, no, it’s quite all right,” Parama said, scratching the back of his head. “What happened was…I was arrested for aiding and abetting a criminal. They found my sister to be in possession of a stash of Samma Flower, you see. I don’t know where she got it from, or why she had it, or even how the authorities found out about it, but since I lived with her and I hadn’t turned her in, they claimed that I knew about it and must have been helping her hide it.”

Kanna took in a sharp breath of indignation. “What? How could they just assume that about you?” she cried, in a voice a bit louder than she had intended. She tried to calm herself down, but she found the whole ordeal so ridiculous, that she couldn’t believe it. “That’s entirely unjust! What kind of country is this?”

She glanced up at Goda again and found that the woman still had her eyes glued to a book—but that there was a tiny smirk growing on her face. Indeed, it had been exactly as Goda had said: Parama’s crime was so minuscule—even nonexistent—that Kanna felt outraged for him.

Parama, for his part, shrugged. His face had returned to its usual base level of nonchalance, except for an edge of empathy, which Kanna realized with some horror was meant for her. “It’s all right,” he said, patting her on the shoulder, as if to comfort her. “Really, it’s perfectly all right. It doesn’t bother me that much anymore, to be honest. I may have no free will of my own, but I was able to do many things I had never done before, and I met a lot of great people. If I hadn’t been arrested, I probably wouldn’t have met Porter Goda, either.”

“Why are you so sure that’s a good thing?” Kanna muttered, pressing her fingers hard against her face. She fought the urge to rip herself away from Parama’s consoling hand. When she dared to look between her fingers at Goda once again, she found that the woman was gazing back at her this time with a shred of attentiveness.

I myself am not even sure, Kanna thought. I can’t really say whether or not it was a good thing that I met Goda Brahm, or that I didn’t burst her skull open with that steel baton on the first night, or that I didn’t accuse her of some false crime to Priestess Rem when I had the chance.

In truth, she could not judge; she knew almost nothing about Goda. That was the real problem: She knew nothing, but she wanted to know everything, out of some morbid curiosity that she still couldn’t understand.

And yet there seemed to be no one behind those eyes to get to know. It wasn’t that Goda was hiding some grand mystery. It was that Goda was almost certainly empty and stupid and shallow, just as the boy was. Otherwise, how could they have survived their respective situations—one, a slave, and the other banished by the clergy of her own religion?

When Goda had turned away again, Kanna felt Parama leaning suddenly close. “Do you not like Porter Goda?” he whispered, low enough that he seemed to be trying to keep Goda from hearing. The question sounded genuine.

“I don’t know,” she said, because she didn’t. Should she have liked the person who was assigned to drag her away from her old life?

“Maybe you’re afraid of her, like I was,” he murmured, his voice still soft, “but sometimes fear and curiosity come from the same place, you know?”

When he said this, Kanna didn’t know how to reply. She sat up a little straighter and gave him a look of uncertainty.

He responded with a smile. “I hope you get what you want from her.”

“What I…?”

A loud thump broke through Kanna’s words and severed the small connection she had made with Parama all at once. Kanna blinked, as if jerked awake from a trance, and she turned to the other side of the room to see that Goda had smacked the book closed in her hand. She was looking at the both of them with amusement.

“I’m taking this,” Goda announced, holding up the small tome.

Parama tilted his head. “But it’s mine.”

Goda opened her robe and glanced inside, as if she were looking for a suitable pocket. “I know. I’m taking it anyway.”

“You can’t just steal that right in front of me!” Parama shot up off the bed and took a few marching steps towards Goda. Kanna stared at him. His anger seemed to have come out of nowhere. Within seconds, he had switched from empathy to rage.

Goda looked unimpressed by the antics, but Kanna’s disapproving glare only appeared to buttress Parama’s outrage. He reached out and clasped his small hand around Goda’s wrist before she had fully dropped the loot into a pouch in her robes.

“Give it back!” he said.

Goda appeared to be taken by surprise, but her answer was typical: “No.”

“Well…I’ll make you, then!”

“How?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. He tugged at her hand futilely. “I’ll try to stop you somehow!”

“Oh, then I’ll hit you.” She didn’t sound very serious, though.

“Fine, hit me then, but I’m not letting you just take what you want from me!” He pushed two open palms against Goda’s torso and glared at her with gritted teeth, until Goda took a step back with a mixture of bewilderment and laughter on her face.

Kanna felt similarly bewildered. Just a moment before, the young man had been so complacent, to the point that it had even disturbed her; now he was trying to pick a fight with a woman who was twice his size, over one tiny book that she had pilfered from his shelf.

He pushed Goda again and tried to reach into her robes, but she grabbed him by the arm and jerked his hand away. He rammed his body into her and she pushed him back. He tried to grab her sleeves and she took him by the wrists instead. After letting out a cry of frustration, he wrestled away from her and started to run—and to Kanna’s astonishment, Goda actually chased him.

The woman pursued him into a corner, and seized him with a grunt, and pressed him against the wall with a fury so ardent that Kanna could only hope that the violence was exaggerated.

It was only then that she noticed how they grinned at each other.

“What are you even doing, boy?” Goda huffed, seemingly a bit out of breath, pinning his struggling arms to his sides and trying to stifle his half-hearted kicks with her knees.

The young man was squirming, but he had locked his gaze with Goda, and an odd, intense energy had filled the room. Parama’s eyes were no longer empty as they had been before; they were quite full…of something.

Kanna felt her heart beating wildly in her chest. For a split second, she felt the pressure of Goda’s hands on her own arms, as if it were she herself who had been pressed against the wall in the boy’s stead. She wanted to tear her eyes away, but she couldn’t. A strange feeling vibrated in her, a jolt of aliveness.

She had to do something. She didn’t know what, but some force inside of her wanted to act—or to be acted upon. Without thinking, she jumped off the bed and rushed Goda, intent on pushing her way between the two of them.

“Stop!” she cried. “Let him go!”

Again, Goda seemed taken by surprise. She lifted an arm to hold her back, but the force of Kanna’s inertia hit them both hard when they crashed together. Like usual, Goda barely moved. Kanna stumbled backwards into a nearby table, as if she had collided with a boulder at full speed. The contents on top of the pedestal shook; a few wax candles tumbled onto the floor. Kanna winced when she realized that the back of her leg had hit a sharp corner of the wood.

It had clearly been an accident—Kanna’s own fault, mostly—but still, some disproportionate fury came over her. She slammed her hands hard against Goda in retaliation, enough that it made the woman’s tall frame jerk in place. Goda took a few steps back, but she didn’t respond. She only stared down with an expression that had grown abruptly serious.

“What?” Kanna snapped. “Are you going to hit me or something?”

“No.”

The energy dissipated when Goda turned away. The woman stomped back over to the other side of the room, and it was suddenly like nothing had even happened. Internally, Kanna could not completely let go of the aggression. That strange electric buzzing still rushed through her bones.

Parama had not moved from his place against the wall. Kanna’s first instinct was to charge at Goda again, but when Parama grabbed at Kanna’s sleeve, she came to her senses soon enough.

“Stop,” he pleaded, his voice emerging as a whisper.

Kanna let out a loud huff. “I’m sorry,” she said to him.

Because the scuffle had soured the mood, it wasn’t long before Parama had explained that he was getting tired and Goda had quickly accepted his excuse. She ushered Kanna out the door and they made their way through the open plain in silence.

Kanna seethed as she shuffled through the sand, kicking up dirt that danced around in clouds before landing on the back of Goda’s robes. She was still angry, but she didn’t know why. Some deep frustration had been slowly overcoming her, and watching the struggle between Goda and Parama had triggered her into action.

She came up closer behind the woman, her hands clenched at her sides. “Why won’t you fight me?” she finally shouted. “Why will you fight him, but not me? Why will you push him, and chase him, and hit him, but you won’t even react to me?”

Goda spun to face her, the gravel billowing up all around her feet. She stopped so suddenly that Kanna nearly ran into her. “Because he’s just playing with me,” Goda said, her voice deep and severe. “You’re actually serious.”

When Goda turned and walked again, Kanna only sped up her own furious steps to keep up with the woman’s long strides. “You’re damn right I’m serious! How can I not be? Every second with you is like a hanging threat that never bears fruit! Every time I look at those looming shoulders of yours and that unfeeling, insolent face, I feel like I’m on the verge of being attacked. It makes me sick! It makes me wish that you would just tear me limb from limb already, so that I can finally rid myself of this constant fear!”

“Are you insane?” Goda said without looking at her. Hearing Goda raise her voice gave Kanna an odd satisfaction. “You actually want me to beat you?”

“No! I want you to—”

And then Kanna stopped dead in her tracks. Suddenly, she knew exactly what she wanted.

But she erased it from her mind before she could fully picture what it was. It felt too dangerous. Her chest tightened from sensing even just the surface of it. The echoes of her throbbing heart were growing ever more distracting inside her.

There were other parts of her that were throbbing, too, parts of her that burned with a strange hunger. She couldn’t understand it—but she couldn’t ignore it anymore, either. She was anxious that Goda had also figured it out.

Thankfully, Goda didn’t ask for further clarity. She only kept walking, and so with some relief, Kanna followed from a few paces behind until that intense, unnameable feeling began to fade. Still, some edges of it remained that were hard to shake off.

Once they wandered close to the inn, that low rumbling inside of her blended with a louder rumbling outside. The ground was moving beneath her feet. She lifted her eyes from the sand to find the source of that sound—but instead she found the hot, noxious breath of a monster striking her in the face.

It was the tailpipe of a truck that coughed out smoke. Many times larger than Goda’s rig, a searing heat emanated from every corner of the beast, as if the whole thing was bursting with some internal fire.

From the side of a truck that hovered over them like a building, a woman with bulky shoulders emerged. She was wearing the uniform of a soldier and she looked down at them from the open door.

“Are the two of you temple assistants or some’in?” the woman asked. Kanna had trouble understanding her regional Middlelander accent at first, and it didn’t help that the woman was chewing on a cigar.

“Nope,” Goda answered, much too casually. “Try someone else, sister.”

The soldier scratched her head and looked across the plain. “Well, someone’s gotta bring us dinner, nah?”

Kanna followed the soldier’s gaze and she saw an expanse of dozens of trucks, all just as huge as the first, some filled with cargo, and others heavily armored. All of them rumbled with life, as if they had only just pulled into the compound. She gaped at the scene, but because Goda had ignored them and kept walking, Kanna could not stare for long.

As they cut across the yard to reach their quarters, Goda muttered with irritation, “Behold, your father’s poison in action.”

Again, Kanna had no idea what she meant, but she was too exhausted to inquire any further. For all she knew, it was just another one of Goda’s riddles.

* * *

That night, Goda was even more stoic and quiet than usual. While Kanna ate her dinner, Goda ignored her and washed her own tunic in a bucket of cold water. They said absolutely nothing to each other for the rest of the evening. After Goda hung her clothes up in the storage room to dry, she crawled into bed naked and huffed out the light in silence.

For awhile, Kanna couldn’t sleep because the sounds of the soldiers making merry with Innkeeper Jaya were disturbing her. Goda appeared to not even notice them, her body still, her breaths turning steady in no time at all.

Kanna could see the entire spread of the woman’s nude back in the moonlight. She had seen it before, but never so closely, and never for so long. Even when the voices next door finally died down and the whole of the compound seemed to go to sleep, Kanna found it hard to close her eyes. Instead, she watched Goda’s body—the back of her shoulders, the sides of her torso, the edges of her hips—rising and falling with each breath.

Kanna couldn’t fathom how, in spite of it all, Goda could be so serene. Even in that moment, in the dead of night, all that Kanna could feel simmering in her own body was some rush of tight frustration. It had never left her since their fight. It had kept her awake. She tossed and turned in bed, and even as the moon moved in the sky framed by the window, she still could not overcome the feeling.

So she watched Goda calmly sleeping, and she felt the frustration grow. But something in the energy of that frustration moved through her more and more. She found herself reaching across the small distance between them.

Her fingers lightly grazed Goda’s back. It was warm. She pressed her hand fully against the muscles of those shoulders and slid her fingers along the flesh. The skin itself was surprisingly soft to the touch—young, flexible—but the meat underneath was hard and overworked.

That strange sensation was creeping back up Kanna’s legs. It spooked her enough that when Goda stirred a little, she snapped her hand back.

Goda did not awaken. She stayed relaxed, seemingly unaware, unconcerned with what was going on beside her. A mix of emotions fluttered in Kanna’s chest, but her burning frustration rose above them all as she watched Goda’s oblivious face—and then it reached a climax.

Kanna made a fist. She sprung her arm so far back that her shoulder nearly popped from its socket.

Then the sound of her knuckles slamming against taut flesh cracked through the room. She slammed them so hard against Goda’s back—with all her strength—that the force of the pain alone overwhelmed her rage.

The anger died instantly. Instead, it felt like all the blood had drained from her body.

What the hell did I just do?

Goda flipped around in bed. Before the sound of the punch had even echoed through her brain, Kanna was pinned to the ground. A hand grasped her neck, a warm breath bathing her face as hotly as the trucks outside had. Kanna stared up at her bedmate, terrified.

“Are you some kind of masochist?” Goda growled through gnashing teeth, her eyes locked with Kanna’s. “Do you have a death wish? If so, then maybe it would be less painful for you to find a patch of Samma Flower and swallow it!”

“What are you going to do, ram it down my throat? Make me swallow it?” Kanna asked insolently as soon as she had found her voice—but as she forced the words out, her throat began to hurt against Goda’s grip, and she actually began to panic. “You’re not going to do anything,” she stammered. “You won’t even fight me! You won’t even—!”

Kanna couldn’t finish. There was a wild, naked woman on top of her, she thought. Goda had pounced as soon as Kanna had hit her, but the feeling of the woman’s heavy body pressed to hers had taken much longer to register. Maybe that had been because she had resisted the sensation at first, but after the shock wore off, she found herself wanting to relax into it instead. The throbbing had returned to her bones, to her chest, to her belly. Along with it, a warm sensation spread somewhere else, at the place were Goda’s leg had fallen between both her own.

She could no longer ignore what it all meant. Her eyes widened with fear.

“Get off me! Get off me!” she cried.

But Goda had already retreated. She stared at Kanna across the small space, her eyes shining in the moonlight, her claws digging hard into the fabric of the mattress.

“Sleep,” she commanded. Kanna saw that Goda was wincing. The woman was gripping the back of her own shoulder with her hand.

I’ve hurt her, Kanna thought. She didn’t know whether she felt ashamed, or whether she thought Goda deserved it, or whether she thought the woman was going to kill her in the next five seconds.

Regardless, all the energy had drained from her in the midst of her terror. She closed her eyes and the image of Goda Brahm crouching beside her dissolved into nothing.

---

Onto Chapter 9 >>

In the morning, an uncomfortable beam of light found its way into the room, and it struck Kanna right in the face. She opened her eyes. When she looked around, she realized that the sun had come up, and that white light was leaking in through the cracks in the threshold.

The door was unblocked. The swan idol that had guarded her all night was gone, and as Kanna turned over, she noticed that Goda was also missing. She felt relief at first, as if she had awoken into a different world, as if the past day had merely been some kind of bizarre dream.

But the bed was not empty, and there was evidence of Goda’s presence still: Her outer robes—along with the rest of her clothes—were strewn about on the mat. As Kanna hovered over them, she could still pick up traces of Goda’s scent, but it was a gleam of metal in the folds of the robes that had captured her attention.

Curiously, she leaned closer. It was an eight-sided symbol etched in bronze, the face of a pendant that was buried in the rolling hills of the fabric. It might have fallen out of a pocket, she thought, but it looked more like something that belonged strung on a chain, around someone’s neck. A religious emblem? Kanna wondered.

She reached out to touch it, but the moment she disturbed the tousled clothes, the pendant slipped off the side of the mat. It was attached to a heavy iron key ring. On that same rusty loop, a set of keys were also strung.

Kanna’s breath cut out. Her eyes darted to the cuff on her wrist. Her fingers grasped at the oval-shaped opening that made up the keyhole of the cuff lock.

She did not hesitate. Grabbing the key ring with shaky hands, she shoved the first of the keys against the hole. It was far too big, so she tried the next, and then the next. Nothing fit. She looked furtively over her shoulder and towards the door every time she tried and failed. Her heart was pounding in her throat; her hands were fumbling; she dropped the set of keys more than once and the jangling sound sent her into a panic.

When she reached the last of the keys, she had grown so frustrated that she tried to force the piece inside. It resisted her. It went in, but it wouldn’t turn. She jiggled it futilely, an unexpected swell of tears coming up into her eyes. The instant she pulled it out with an angry jerk—the instant she was about to try every single key again—she was surprised by the sound of some shuffling beyond the door.

Kanna dropped the keys, as if the metal had been red-hot. She froze in place, but when the door did not open, she crept over to the tiny window on the wall. She was barely tall enough to stretch up on her toes and peer through the hazy glass, but even still the scene beyond it made her chest seize up again.

It was Goda. She was crouched not far away, over a bucket of water, bathing herself next to a boulder. Just as she had been the morning before, she was completely naked, only this time she was splashing clean water instead of the contents of a murky rain puddle.

Kanna noticed her legs. From that angle, they struck her more than any other feature. They were flexed hard into the crouch, as if Goda were hovering mid-motion, as if the woman were about to snap into an explosive leap any second. Kanna found it so disturbing that she couldn’t help but stare.

She was distracted enough that it took her a moment to parse the creaking sound that was suddenly filling her ears. She whipped her head to the left, to face the door. Kanna nearly cried out when she saw it opening, and as the bright light of the morning expanded in the threshold, she raised a hand to shield her eyes.

When the door closed again, there were spots in her vision. They painted the innkeeper who was standing in front of her, holding a familiar tray in her hands.

“What? You’re recoiling like I’m some kind of intruder,” Innkeeper Jaya said. “Or perhaps…like you’ve been caught doing something questionable.” She responded to Kanna’s look of surprise with a teasing smile. “What are you up to?”

Before Kanna could make something up, the innkeeper had already surmised from Kanna’s posture, and she stepped over to the window. She didn’t need to stretch. In fact, she hunched down slightly to look out. Her eyebrows flicked up when she seemed to catch sight of Goda.

“Ahhh,” she said, pulling back and nodding her head. “I see, I see.” She had a tone that held a complete lack of surprise. “Well, I wouldn’t even give that a try if I were you. Indeed, she’s as ferocious as she looks, and she’ll utterly undo you if it comes to that—but it won’t come to that. She’s far too stoic and hard to provoke.”

Kanna felt a blush creeping up into her face. She tried to fight it; the embarrassment felt unjustified. “I have no idea what you mean.”

The innkeeper offered her the tray, which held much the same contents as the night before—but this time, it was served with a dismissive smirk. “So you’d rather play like you haven’t looked at her like that?” she said after Kanna had gratefully accepted the food. “You may be an Upperlander, but you’re not blind, are you?”

Kanna’s fingers tightened around the tray. “I don’t understand.”

“Goda is a very handsome woman. Surely that hasn’t escaped your notice, even if she does have a dreadful personality.”

“I find her face unpleasant to look at.”

“Is that so? Then how do you look at the rest of her?”

“Similarly.”

Jaya’s smile was still laced with much skepticism, but she shrugged in superficial acceptance as she reached for the doorknob beside her. “Very well,” she said. “Goda could be hideous by Upperland standards, for all I know. We all differ in our tastes.”

“I have no taste for her.”

“So you’ve already said. No need to repeat yourself so much, my dear!” As the innkeeper slipped out the door with a laugh, the light from outside bothered Kanna a little less. She had left the entrance open a crack, and the wind was pushing some sand in from the plain, so Kanna balanced the tray on one arm and reached out to close it—but a hand appeared out of nowhere and swung the door back open.

Kanna nearly dropped her plate.

“Hey, watch it!” she said without thinking.

When she saw that it was Goda who had appeared in the threshold, she took an automatic step back. The woman was completely naked, so Kanna tried to avert her gaze, putting a hand up to shield herself from further indecency as Goda passed by.

“What are you doing running around without any clothes on?” Kanna grumbled. “Are all Middlelanders this shameless, or is it just you?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Goda shrug. “It’s not just me. We have to wash ourselves every morning. It’s a religious thing.”

As the woman rummaged through her strewn clothes, Kanna held her breath and watched, remembering the ordeal from just moments before, nervous that Goda might realize that the keys had been moved. When the woman said nothing and merely began toweling herself off before throwing on her clothes, Kanna let out a sigh and tried to relax.

But then Goda reached over and plucked the yaw root straight from Kanna’s tray. She smiled before taking a bite. “Don’t waste your time,” she said. “You’re not going to find it.”

Kanna stared at the newly-empty space on the plate below. “Find what?”

“The key.”

* * *

Outside, Goda used the greywater from her bath to drench some of the shrubs in the innkeeper’s yard. The plants were leafless, and their tangled branches looked so dry that Kanna privately thought to herself that it was a lost cause.

“I wasn’t trying to escape, you know,” Kanna said quickly as she followed Goda into the shriveled garden.

Goda didn’t look at her. “You’re lying.” Still, she didn’t seem at all angered. She had stooped down; she was prodding at the roots of the shrub with her fingers.

“Fine, I was,” Kanna admitted with a sigh. “But what else was I going to do? The keys were just sitting there. Am I supposed to ignore a glimmer of hope like that?”

“Hope is for the weak.” Goda dug her hands into the sand and started dislodging some thorny vines that had taken root nearby. “Hope keeps your focus trained on some fantasy, so that you miss what’s right in front of you.”

“Well, I had hoped that the key would be right in front of me.”

“It was,” Goda said, finally looking up at her with a cryptic smile. “That’s why you’ll never find it.”

“Your riddles are tiresome.”

But Goda didn’t reply right away. Instead, she knelt down further into the dirt and stared at the bushes in front of her. “I planted these for the innkeeper a while back,” she murmured, shaking her head, “but since I only come here every few months at the most, no one has been looking after them.”

“What are they?”

“Medicinal plants. These are native to the desert, so I thought they would be harder for Jaya to kill, but she’s a relentless murderer when it comes to this sort of thing. Even just her presence seems to weaken them.” Nonetheless, Goda’s smile seemed good-natured as she dumped some more of the water on them. As the drops rained down onto the thirsty sand, a piece of what looked like dried up husk seemed to catch Goda’s interest. She picked it up and pushed some seeds out of the withered flesh. “At least these gave fruit before they died. Maybe they can have children after all.”

Kanna watched her silently, a new feeling coming over her that she couldn’t quite name, an uncomfortable softness. She looked around the garden, at the rows of dead little trees, at the thriving cactus blooms that represented the last bits of greenery that had survived.

Then the obvious finally struck her.

“You made this garden, didn’t you?” Kanna asked.

“It was a long time ago. It was back when I used to visit more frequently.”

Kanna knelt down at her side. She stared at the shrub before them, but she couldn’t recognize what it was, or any of the other plants. “Did you avoid coming when you heard that Priestess Rem was living here?”

It was just a guess, but by Goda’s silence, Kanna wondered if she might have hit an unexpected nerve.

“It was only a matter of time until I would have to come back,” Goda mumbled, entranced by the seeds in her hand. “The prisoners that they assign me—a lot of them are Middlelanders, so I can take them to any border crossing. But you’re a foreigner. You need to be cleansed or else they won’t let you through. This is the only monastery in the Outerland that will perform it.”

Kanna rolled her eyes. “You Middlelanders and your obsession with Death Flower. You’re wasting your time with these cleanses. Just let people risk their lives if they want. What does it affect anyone if people want to get drunk on the flower, or kill themselves, or whatever it is that they do?”

Goda shook her head. Her eyes were squinting in the light, and her pupils had grown small, but Kanna could see the ring of the sun reflected in them. “Samma Flower doesn’t make people drunk. It’s nothing like that. And in spite of the name and all the rumors, it doesn’t actually kill most people if it’s processed carefully. Taken in the right way, it’s a powerful medicine, which is why some people will accept the risk.”

“Well, if it’s possible to take it safely and it doesn’t make you drunk, what’s the problem? Why is it illegal?”

“When people eat enough of it, they can see the Goddess for themselves. It makes them unruly, because they’re surprised by what they see, and She’s nothing like what the priestesses tell them. So they stop believing.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why does the government say that it kills you, then?”

“It can kill you—in high enough doses. And in order to see the Goddess, the dose is massive. You must basically poison yourself and then try to live through it. Most people can’t swallow that much raw Flower; they purge before anything happens. If someone is able to hold it down, they might find what they’re after, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll live,” she said. “But there are some people who have a tolerance to Samma Flower—the government calls them vessels—and they consume huge amounts, doses that could kill a hundred people. When they excrete the flower’s essence from their bodies, the toxins are neutralized, but the magic still remains. Other people drink these excretions and have otherworldly experiences. It’s the only safe way to have it.”

“‘Excretions’?” Kanna asked, though she already had an inkling; she just didn’t want to picture it.

“Their body fluids: blood, saliva, urine. It all remains potent for several days after the vessel has eaten Samma Flower, enough time for them to smuggle it over the border. That’s why they’re keeping us here for three days. Most vessels are foreigners, so they’re making sure you’re not one of them, and that no one will take Death from you.”

The turning of Kanna’s stomach nearly overwhelmed her disbelief. “That’s disgusting. I could never imagine what would drive someone to drink another’s body fluids, for goodness’ sake.”

“You drank from your mother’s teat, did you not?”

“That’s different, clearly.”

“Is it?” Goda’s expression was empty again, and Kanna wasn’t sure if she was teasing her or not.

But Kanna stared right back at her without flinching. She didn’t allow herself to be provoked this time. “You seem to know a lot about Death,” she prodded slowly. “If I didn’t know better, I would say that you’ve eaten the flower yourself.”

“I have.” When Kanna recoiled at the blunt confession, Goda laughed, though Kanna could not find the joke anywhere. “I hardly remember any of it, though. I was a child the first time.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. “What kind of child takes illegal drugs?”

“It was an accident. My mothers had gotten hold of some soil imported from Samma Valley—the soil is volcanic, so it’s very fertile—and they were using it to grow some herbs in the garden. A patch of Samma Flowers sprouted up without their noticing at first. The seed must have traveled with the dirt. I was milling around in the yard, back when I was stupid and wanted to eat everything, and I happened to pluck a flower and put it straight into my mouth.”

“You what?” Kanna asked, already horrified by the story. She added quickly, “Then what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Goda said, her gaze growing a bit unfocused as she seemed to piece the memory together. “I was young—maybe five or six—so it’s hazy now. I remember that the ground started to move, like it was breathing, like my breath had become the Earth’s breath. Then I passed out.” She shrugged. “When I came to, one of my mothers was holding me down and the other was trying to make me vomit. I did, and so I survived.”

Kanna leaned back on her heels until she was sitting in the dirt. “You had such a close brush with death, and yet you act so casual about it.” She paused then; she remembered Goda’s exact words. “You said the first time you ate Samma Flower, you were a child. There were other times? What was that like?”

Goda said nothing for a long moment. When she stood back onto her feet and her body was framed by the blue sky again, her gaze wandered towards the emptiness of the desert, towards some mirage that Kanna could not see. Eventually, just as Kanna thought that she might have struck another sore spot, the woman replied: “I never found the Goddess, if that’s why you’re asking. I swallowed a lot, but not enough.”

“You were willing to risk your life over and over, just to see some spirit that you don’t even believe in?”

“It was only one other time that I did it, and I didn’t care if I died then.”

Kanna looked closely at Goda’s dark eyes, and for the first time she thought she saw an edge of sadness in them. This only added to her discomfort, so she trained her own gaze back on the ground. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Goda walked towards the opening of the fence, the loose sand billowing up with each of her steps. “It was a long time ago, and after that I vowed to never do it again.”

Kanna stood and dusted herself off. When she looked up, Goda had stepped outside the barrier and was seemingly expecting her to follow. There was a thoughtful look on her face, a look of interest—and it was intense enough that Kanna felt awkward under the stare.

“Careful,” Goda said. Her tone was strange, a mix of severity and amusement, as if she were watching someone walking straight into the path of a viper. “You’re curious about Death. It shows on your face. This isn’t something you should ever advertise to others.”

The words had been so unexpected that Kanna could not even deny them properly as Goda turned away.

“Come. We’re going to fetch some more water.”

* * *

In the evening, Kanna found herself once again kneeling in front of a temple assistant. This time, there was a low table between them, and a smattering of papers covering nearly every edge of the surface. She tried to keep her stare from glazing over as the assistant explained the meaning of every paragraph on every page, but ever so often, Kanna’s gaze wandered over her shoulder towards Goda Brahm, who had stopped just short of the gateway once again.

Because Priestess Rem was not there, however, Goda had made no ceremony. Without so much as a bow, she had merely sat upon the ground, lounging against the outside of the stone fence with her elbow resting on the top ledge. They were close enough to each other that Kanna easily caught Goda’s glance. When they met eyes, there was no smile, but the ever-present neutrality on the woman’s face was what Kanna searched for; she had come to find it reassuring.

“…And on this one,” the assistant said, passing her a sheet, knocking Kanna a bit out of her daze, “you need to fill in your full name, the name of your mother, and the exact location of your birth.”

“How exact?”

The assistant looked at her with irritation. “Exact. The province in the Upperland, the town, the farm, the exact address of the house if it has one.” Her tone made it sound as if it had all been obvious somehow.

“Do I need to mention which room in the house, or that it was on my mother’s kitchen table?” Kanna was being facetious, but the assistant merely shook her head and started sifting through another stack of paperwork.

As Kanna’s pen hovered over the sheet, the assistant’s twitchy hand stopped her.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, “you don’t know how to write in Middleland script, do you?”

“Excuse me?” Kanna huffed and pulled her hand back. “I know how to write.”

“You can’t use Upperland script on a government form. It has to be written in native Middlelander.”

“I know how to write both scripts just fine, thank you. What do you think I am, some kind of ignorant peasant? You know who my father is, don’t you?” Kanna blurted out. She could hear Goda laughing behind her.

“Well, excuse me, then,” the assistant muttered. “You’re the first Upperlander I’ve met who knows how to write our language.”

Kanna rolled her eyes and confidently pressed her pen to the paper. In truth, her skills in written Middlelander actually were a bit rusty, and she found the language nonsensical half the time, but it was the principle of the thing: She was well-educated, and she wasn’t about to tolerate any further insults towards her upbringing.

Kanna slowly carved the words, biting her lip with concentration. She tried to remember how her name was transliterated into Middlelander. When she had been arrested, the guards back at the detainment center had filled out most of the forms for her and had asked only for her signature, but now she regretted not looking at the script more closely.

Still, she persevered. After methodically etching what felt like her entire life story, she handed the page to the assistant, who appeared rather impatient.

“What’s this?” she asked, tilting the page sideways. “Everything looks fancy and hard to read.”

“Oh, I learned the Middleland script in a calligraphy class. I write Upperlander the same way. My tutor always said that beauty is never frivolous when you’re—”

“Fine!” the assistant interrupted her. She pressed the paper to the table. “I can read it—barely—but please print the words next time using the plain block style.”

Kanna gave her a wry look. The assistant handed her another sheet, and Kanna racked her brain to try to remember any alternative styles of the Middlelander script—but before she had set her pen to the paper again, the woman’s hand whacked the table with exasperation.

“What are all the names here on the first line? I don’t understand. Which one is yours?”

Kanna leaned over to look. “Oh, they’re all mine,” she explained. “It’s my full name.”

“Kanna…Leda…Raba, er, Rava…Aura…Boros…of the North-Facing Mount of Eburnea?”

“Yes, that’s right. There’s more, though. I wrote the rest underneath because I ran out of space.”

The assistant rubbed her face. “All right, which ones are your real names?”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about? They’re all real. Kanna is my given name. Leda was my mother’s name, which is a first daughter’s sacred name in the Upperland. Rava is my family name. Aura was my mother’s father’s—”

But before Kanna could finish, the assistant had taken a pen and struck through every name except for “Kanna” and “Rava.” The woman ignored Kanna’s shocked expression and said brusquely, “Middlelanders only have two names.”

“I’m not a Middlelander.” Kanna leaned across the table and pressed a fist to the wood beneath her.

The assistant seemed to meet her challenge. She leaned closer as well, enough that Kanna could smell her breath when she insisted, “You’ll be living in the Middleland, and all the forms have only space for two names: your given name and your family name.”

“But I’m not a Middlelander,” Kanna repeated. “You can’t just erase my identity with the stroke of a pen!”

“All right, then,” the woman said, gesturing towards the page, re-reading the scrawl conspicuously, “you can tell me which names you want out of all of these—but it can only be two of them. Who do you want to be? ‘Kanna Rava’? Or perhaps you’d rather be ‘North-Facing Mount’? Does that suit you more?”

Kanna’s anger boiled into the back of her eyes, where it had started to transform into tears against her will. She slammed her hands on the table. She was opening her mouth again, to shout at the woman, but then a voice came trickling smoothly from behind her shoulder.

“She’s right, you know,” Goda said. “People only have two names in this culture. They really have no other way to process your paperwork. If they don’t shorten your name now, then they certainly will at some office in the Middleland, and in that case you may have no choice in what they decide to call you.”

Kanna sighed and retreated, until she was sitting flatly on the ground once again, though a single pair of angry tears had managed to spill over. They left a trail of heat on her face.

“‘Kanna Rava’ is fine,” she said finally, her tension deflating.

“Listen, I…I didn’t mean to be….” The assistant looked alarmed by Kanna’s emotions. “There’s no reason to cry, all right? I’m not trying to insult you or your culture. It’s just that this is the way things are.”

Kanna nodded in acceptance. She was staring at the table with unfocused eyes, so at first she didn’t notice the presence that had fluttered into the courtyard.

“What’s all the ruckus about, hm?” The tall figure of Priestess Rem loomed over the assistant. She was smiling the same as always, not a hint of trouble on her face. “I’m sure you don’t mean to disturb the silence of the monastery, but we are about to sound the chime to end the prayers, and the priestesses need to be able to hear it.”

Kanna’s face grew warm with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed Goda glancing up at the woman in black—though her master’s gaze did not linger for long.

“We were just wrapping up the paperwork, Priestess,” the assistant mumbled, her expression similarly laced with shame.

Priestess Rem regarded Kanna for a long moment. “Does she appear free of Death?”

“Yes. I examined her myself before we started.”

“Good. I trust your judgment, Assistant Finn. Her cleanliness is far more important than this bureaucracy.” She waved a hand. “Look, the sun is already waning. We can finish all of this tomorrow.”

“Oh?” The woman’s tone was measured in her superior’s presence, but she was clearly suppressing her annoyance. “We’re almost finished. I only need a bit more information, and then I can fill these out myself.”

The Priestess made a gesture of acceptance and waited.

“I have your mother’s name, but I need to know how many siblings you have, and all of their names as well,” the assistant said, looking over at Kanna again.

Kanna opened her mouth at first to name every one of her father’s children—but then she thought about it and asked instead, “Do my half-siblings count?”

“Your what?”

“My father had four households with four different wives. Do the children from my father’s other wives count as siblings?”

The assistant threw a confused look at Priestess Rem, but the priestess did not return it. She was observing Kanna with that same fixed smile, that same quiet patience.

“Eh, well, did either of your mothers—I mean, did your one mother,” Assistant Finn corrected herself, “have any children besides you? We consider any children from the same mother to be siblings. Men can’t have children, after all.” She had mumbled the last part.

“I…was an only child, then.”

The assistant seemed to have sensed her hesitation. “Are you sure?”

“Well….” Kanna’s shoulders slumped and she leaned her weight against the table. She looked off towards the side, at the edge of quickly-dimming twilight that hovered over the desert. “I had a twin. She died during childbirth and so they never wrote her name down anywhere, and I only knew it because my mother told me. Does she have to be listed as well?”

“No,” Finn said in a quiet voice, her expression awkward, if lightly sympathetic. Before long, she had gathered the pages that were strewn across the table and began to make notes on them. Kanna could hear the vague scratching of the pen, a sound that made her wonder what other lies of omission those papers were telling about her.

Thinking that she was being dismissed, Kanna stood, but before she could turn around to the gateway, the priestess waved her over.

“Come.” Her face looked friendly. “Let us go into the sanctuary of the temple for a moment, so that you may get to know the Goddess.”

This seemed to finally stir the giant who had been waiting beyond the threshold, and Kanna could hear the sand flowing down from the woman’s clothes as she stood up.

“My priestess,” Goda said, her tone respectful, but nonetheless laced with an edge of displeasure. “Kanna Rava is an Upperlander, and she doesn’t share our faith. We may be able to compel her to walk on temple ground because she’s a slave, but is it not the law that she may choose to keep her own religion?”

“Isn’t it said that in every word a priestess speaks, there is a seed of the law that should be obeyed?” the priestess openly chided her. Even still, the woman’s smile hadn’t changed. “And I am telling you right now, Goda, to be still—and shut your mouth. Kanna Rava can come inside and see the Goddess Mahara for herself, and then Kanna Rava can decide if she loves the Goddess the way you and I do.”

Goda’s jaw tightened, but she said nothing more. It seemed she had given in.

“Now, tell me, Goda,” the Priestess said, after glancing at the cuff on Kanna’s wrist, “how far of a space do we have to wander? Can we make it to the sanctuary without incident?”

“Probably, though I may have to walk along the outside of the fence to accommodate my priestess.”

“Then please do so, if the cuff begins to alert you. We don’t need a foreigner screaming and twitching all over the floor of the temple. It would interrupt the evening prayers.”

With that, the Priestess turned and began walking further into the grounds, as if she were expecting Kanna to follow. As Kanna shuffled after the figure in black, she glanced back towards Goda one last time, to gain some kind of clue from her expression, but the woman’s face had only turned empty again.

“It pains me to hear about your sister,” the priestess said without looking at her. “I am also a twin myself.”

Kanna tilted her head, not yet sure how to accept a Middlelander’s sympathy. “What an odd coincidence,” she murmured in reply, settling for something neutral.

“Not really. Twins and triplets are very common in the Middleland. Most of them are fraternal, but many are born identical as well. You may have noticed that a few of the assistants look alike, have you?”

Kanna reflected on this, but all of the faces she had seen on that first day had blurred together. “I’m sorry. They all look very much alike to me.”

The priestess chuckled into the back of her hand, but the more Kanna thought about it, the more this revelation actually made sense. At the very least, it made the question of how the Middlelanders had spread themselves so quickly across the continent a little less mysterious.

Kanna’s bare feet scraped against the stone as they followed the path between the towers. She looked up at the structures, and now that she saw them up close, they seemed to change shape yet again. They were less like the cylinders she had originally perceived, and more like tall, rounded humps that jutted out of the earth.

Tucked behind one of the towers, the walkway turned into a clearing surrounded by looming stone walls, and Kanna let out a breath of surprise when they entered. It was a garden, lush with greenery that didn’t match the desert in the least.

Water flowed nearby into what looked like a tiny, man-made pond. Bushes and vines adorned the barriers that encased the yard, and different plants that Kanna did not recognize lay all throughout the space. Electric lights sprouted out from the ground like flowers themselves, lighting everything in a warm, violet-tinted glow.

At the very center, there was a fountain. It sputtered with the energy of a geyser and it pattered Kanna with the cool mist of its waters as she walked past.

“What is this place?” she whispered—though a second later, she noticed the rows of kneeling priestesses in the corner, all of them with their eyes closed in prayer, and she felt some shame for breaking their peace.

“It’s the temple garden,” Priestess Rem told her. “In most monasteries, it lies close to the sanctuary. It’s where we grow all the herbs, and flowers, and fruits that please the Goddess.”

As she walked through the oasis, Kanna felt a faint twinge of pain radiating from her forearm, but it faded in a matter of seconds. She pressed her hand to the cuff on her wrist. Goda must have moved, she thought.

The priestess led her up a stone staircase. It was only half a dozen steps high, and as soon as she had climbed to the final ledge, the sanctuary lay wide open to her, not a single door closed in a corridor arched with a dozen thresholds. She could even peer down the hallway and see the form of a Goddess gazing back at her.

Kanna’s breath hitched. The idol was made entirely of gold. It shimmered in the warm lamp light of the sanctuary, and its eyes regarded Kanna with love, one hand stretched out in what seemed like a gesture of welcome. The Goddess’s other hand was pressed against her chest, holding up a breast as if offering a drink—as if offering to spill a chalice filled with her heart.

Kanna met the statue’s gaze directly, shamelessly. They stared at each other for a long time across the corridor, with the many layers of open doors between them. The force of the idol’s gaze never wavered, until Kanna could not take it anymore and had to tear her eyes away.

She had never seen anything like it before in her life.

“Come deeper inside,” Priestess Rem whispered. The woman advanced down the open hallway, but even without this encouragement, Kanna would have felt compelled. There was something drawing her in, as if some invisible force were trying to join her with the Goddess.

As she slipped further into the sanctuary, the air grew warmer, and she realized that the lights inside were from torches with searing fires. She and the priestess were the only mortals in the otherwise empty room, but Kanna didn’t find the privacy uncomfortable with the Goddess watching over them.

When they reached the foot of the altar, the priestess told her to kneel. Without a second thought, she did, and she stared in awe up at the idol. It didn’t even seem like a statue, Kanna thought. The Goddess felt fully alive. Up close, Kanna could almost sense the heat of that golden skin.

Her concentration broke only when she heard strange words hissing softly through the chamber, too softly for her to understand. She thought at first that it had been the Goddess speaking to her in some incantation, so she lifted her head to gaze at the idol’s lips.

But then she realized that the voice was human. The words were familiar, too, and the accent sounded strangely like…

“As beautiful as it is to see another soul connect with the Blessed Mother,” Priestess Rem said in Kanna’s native tongue, “I didn’t actually bring you here to convert you. I hope the Goddess can forgive me for using this sanctuary as a pretense for a private conversation.”

---

Onto Chapter 8 >>

“Rem.” Goda’s voice was husky and low, and the edges of the word were swallowed by the wind. “Priestess Rem,” she corrected herself.

The woman in the black robe had fixed her gaze on Goda, to the point that it made Kanna wonder if she had even noticed anyone else. “My dear Goda, don’t act so tense,” she said, still smiling. “I’ve already seen you twice today, and I haven’t lashed out at you yet, have I?”

Goda did not reply. Her face was emotionless—but just behind her, Parama had cowered, his posture tense with enough panic for the both of them.

“Goda Brahm.” The priestess drew closer. Her steps were so soft and deliberate that it made her seem like she was hovering more than walking. “The name tastes a bit strange to me after all this time. Then again, maybe it really hasn’t been so long. You look exactly the same.”

“It’s been nine years.”

“Has it? Then I’ve lost track. When you’re in the presence of the Goddess, time falls away. There is only one eternal moment, and you’re left without any thoughts of the past, so you forgive everything.” Her eyes traced the whole of Goda’s face. “Even the worst things.”

Kanna jumped when the priestess finally moved, but the woman did not strike out, and she merely pushed onward after she caught Parama’s gaze, as if she were expecting Kanna and Goda to make way for her. Kanna quickly shuffled to the side to avoid any touch.

Goda instead leaned in front of the young man. The movement was subtle, smooth, barely more than a shrug–but Goda’s body was massive enough that even this blocked the path of the priestess.

“Ah, still the same Goda, I see,” the woman murmured with a trace of unfriendly amusement. “Always the troublemaker, aren’t we? Step aside and let me see the boy’s beautiful face.”

But before Goda could either give in or refuse, Parama emerged from behind her and sheepishly approached his master. Priestess Rem took the sides of his face in a pair of thickly-gloved hands, her stare as stern as it was parental in its intensity. It made Kanna twist with sympathetic discomfort; had she known nothing else about them, she could have easily assumed that she was witnessing a mother about to scold her son.

“My boy,” the priestess told him, her gaze squarely meeting his, “have you brought shame to every one of your masters in this way, or is it simply that I have yet to deserve your respect? Why are you wandering alone in the middle of the night with two strange women?”

“They’re not strangers, Mistress. I’m friends with Porter Goda.”

A twitch came over the priestess’s face. It was so brief that Kanna barely caught it. “Ah, is that so? Well then, playtime is over. You’ll have dinner with us at the temple, and then you’ll go to your cabin alone and turn in for the night. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Parama fidgeted a little against her touch. “I was going to eat dinner with Porter Goda. We caught a snake.”

“A snake?” Her eyes fell on the limp, scaly rope that hung around Goda’s neck. “So I see. But a serpent is unclean for a temple worker to eat. You may not be a clergy member, but I encourage you to follow our standards nonetheless.”

Goda rudely pressed a hand to the crown of Parama’s head. Her fingers lay spread, just a hair’s touch from where the tips of the priestess’s gloves rested at the boy’s temples.

“He helped me kill it,” she said. “Are you going to deprive the boy of his fair share, Priestess?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her hands tightened against Parama’s face, and because his skin was smooth and alive, the harsh leather gloves looked strange pressed to it. “You feed your slave, Goda, and I’ll feed mine.” Her smile had not faded.

Without saying anything more, she led the young man away, and Kanna stared after them. A sense of relief washed over her as they grew smaller in the distance, but even still she could not push away her confusion.

“She must not have seen that we were coming out of that forbidden place,” Kanna mumbled, shuffling quickly to catch up with Goda, who had already started back towards the inn.

“No. She saw exactly where we came from.”

“Then why didn’t she say anything about it? That scribe made it seem like the priestess would tie us to a whipping block if she found out.”

Goda shrugged. “There could be an infinite number of reasons why. I’m not one to speculate on the thoughts of a witch.”

A bit taken aback at the bluntness of the epithet–and not sure whether to take it literally–Kanna glanced again at the two silhouettes that had just about disappeared. “Well,” Kanna said, “it doesn’t take much speculation to realize that the woman can’t stand you. What happened? Did you ruin her life or something?”

“Yes,” Goda answered without a shred of emotion in her tone.

Kanna made a face. “You’re not going to deny it, at least?”

“Why would I deny it?”

“I don’t know, maybe because then it would seem like you have an ounce of shame, like you’re a normal human being?” Kanna second-guessed herself as the words came out. With a bit of curiosity mixed in with her trepidation, she trudged faster, trying to come up along Goda’s side, to see the woman’s face, to see if she had provoked her. When Goda didn’t react, Kanna sighed. “Fine, I guess it’s none of my business.”

For all she knew—which was very little—the priestess had deserved whatever it was. Even a brute like Goda had to have reasons, Kanna figured. Still, the fact that her temporary master appeared to be so unpopular made Kanna worried about why that might have been.

“Nobody seems to like you around here—except maybe that boy, and he doesn’t exactly strike me as the best judge.”

Kanna remembered the young man’s bright face when they had first run into each other. The most disturbing thing about him was how high his spirits seemed to be in the midst of his slavery. She could hardly believe that he was in the same situation that she was in.

“What did he do?” Kanna thought to ask. “I mean, what made him a slave? You have to be a criminal to be a slave, don’t you?”

“Yes. He’s serving seven years.”

“Seven years? I can’t imagine someone as harmless as he is could have deserved that. Was he even an adult yet when they arrested him, or did he have to grow up enslaved?”

Goda huffed with amusement. “You judge so quickly. How do you know that his innocent face isn’t deceiving, and that his crime wasn’t outrageous?” She gave Kanna a twisted smirk. “For all you know of him, he could have kicked his own mother into a raging volcano.”

Kanna nearly stumbled on her next step. “Did he really do that?”

“No. There’s only one volcano in the Middleland, and it’s dormant.”

Kanna pursed her lips and gave Goda an irritated side-glance.

Before she could say anything else, though, Goda continued, “If I tell you what he did, then right away you’ll find it to be minuscule, even silly. Then, you’ll complain that he doesn’t deserve his punishment, and you’ll pretend you feel compassion for him, when really you just want another excuse to be self-righteous. That’s much too tedious for this time of night.”

“What?” Kanna said, her irritation growing. “Of course I feel compassion for him. How could I not? He’s barely started his life, and already he’s in chains.”

Goda looked unimpressed. “So you say—but the only reason you would even give his situation a second thought is because you’re in the same one. How often did you consider the plight of slaves before you were arrested?”

“Well, obviously, it wasn’t something that I had to think about. We don’t have slaves in the Upperland. We don’t treat people like that—even criminals.”

“So you say,” Goda repeated, offering a dismissive smile. “Did your father have workers?”

“Yes, of course.” Kanna wasn’t quite sure what Goda was getting at. “But we paid them. They were not enslaved.”

“How much did you pay them?”

Kanna felt her jaw tensing against her will. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “How am I supposed to know that? We paid them with food, lodging. Some of them came from far away because grain didn’t grow well where they lived, so my father gave them work and let them eat part of the harvest, from what I understand of it. That’s hard to quantify, and I had nothing to do with it.”

“And if they didn’t work, then what would become of them? Would they starve, then?”

“I…I don’t know, I wasn’t—”

“Could they leave, at least, if they wanted to? Could they go somewhere else to grow their own crops?”

“Well, my father owned all of the land in the area, so they would have to go back to where they….” Kanna stopped talking.

Goda nodded in response to her silence.

A few steps went by wordlessly. Kanna stared at her own feet as they sunk into the sand.

Then she clenched her fists. “How else do you expect society to work, then? Food has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? It’s only natural that everyone had to earn their living at my father’s property.”

“Did you?”

Kanna went silent again, but the anger still hadn’t faded. She realized then that it was a background anger that had always lingered in her. She could usually ignore it, but Goda was very good at bringing it to the surface with her stupid remarks.

“Look, just because I didn’t have to work, doesn’t mean that my life was easy or that I didn’t suffer. There are some problems in life that can’t be solved even by wealth. You must know that.”

“I didn’t say your life was easy.”

“Then why do you mock it? Why do you push back on everything I say about it?”

Goda shrugged. “Someone has to. You certainly won’t do yourself that favor on your own.”

At that, Kanna didn’t know how to respond. She gave Goda a confused look, but Goda merely stared back at her with the same mostly-unreadable expression, with eyes that held a touch of puckishness.

“I don’t like your face, you know,” Kanna said. The words had stumbled out of her mouth suddenly, but she didn’t regret them.

“Oh?” As usual, there was no interest in Goda’s voice; there was only the ghost of a smile. She was peering out across the clearing as they neared the innkeeper’s side-yard, and then she appeared to hone in on a dead vine at the fence. She grasped a handful of the spiny stems and yanked them out at the roots.

Seeing her unaffected look only made Kanna grow bolder. “Your face repulses me, to be honest. Especially when you look like that—when you claw at things and yank at things like you’re some kind of feral beast. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to look straight at you; it makes my eyes water.”

But Goda didn’t seem to be paying attention. Once they were inside the yard, she dug around through the broken flower pots, collecting dry sticks that she found along the ground, until she had a bundle tucked under her arm. They walked by a tiny tree in the sand that had clearly been dead for awhile, and when Goda noticed it, she finished kicking it over, pressing her boot on its slim trunk until it cracked so loudly that Kanna jumped back in alarm.

“What are you even doing?”

Goda let out a savage grunt. It rumbled from low in her throat, and it was so exaggerated that it startled Kanna yet again–but the wicked smile on the woman’s face did not match the sound’s aggression at all. “The feral beast is making a fire!” she said, her tone mocking, and all these contradictions only bewildered Kanna even more.

There was a pit at the center of the yard, encircled by some old broken chairs. It was there that Goda threw the twigs on a bed of leaves. She produced some lint from inside one of her pockets to use as tinder, and with the quick spark of a flint rod, she nursed a fire to life. Only once she had settled on the ground did she finally pull the serpent off her neck.

Kanna grimaced as she watched the woman peel the skin off with a knife. When Goda sliced the belly open, she paused, her eyes narrowing with intrigue.

“Huh. She was pregnant.”

At first Kanna wasn’t sure what Goda had meant, but when she came to lean closer to the woman, she could see by the light of the fire that there were indeed tiny snakes clustered in the serpent’s gut. Though she quickly realized that they were dead, for a split second she thought she had seen them squirming. She decided that it had been a trick of the flickering light.

Either way, Kanna felt her heart grow heavy. That odd feeling of dread had returned to her. “I thought snakes hatched from eggs,” she murmured over Goda’s shoulder.

“They do. But in some snakes, the eggs hatch inside the mother.” Goda grabbed a handful of the little serpents and dropped them onto a rock that sat near the edge of the fire. “I would have given these to Parama, but you can have them instead.”

Kanna looked away with disdain. “You really are an animal. Have you no compassion at all?”

“For the snakes or for Parama?”

At this, Kanna gave her a wry glance. “Both?” She sighed. She gave in and sat down next to Goda in the sand. “I’m not going to lie,” she said, “this is why I was a little shocked when that boy said that you used to be a gardener. I can’t exactly picture you prancing around a bed of flowers all day, singing to yourself and tending to the roses.”

Goda actually laughed. “You have quite the imagination.” She began cutting the naked snake into pieces, which she placed carefully at the edge of the fire along with its children. “I was a horticulturist—but just an apprentice at the time. I did grow flowers, but not a lot. I grew food for the priestesses mostly.”

“Even still, it seems a bit…soft for my impression of you. I can’t picture it at all.”

“Maybe you have the wrong impression of me, then,” Goda replied, poking at the fire with a twig. “You don’t really know me, after all, or anything about our customs here. You only have naive assumptions to go by.”

Kanna stared into the fire. “But how am I supposed to survive this strange place without making any assumptions? What am I to do instead? Should I just think nothing at all about what I see and who I meet? Walk around with the empty-headed look of a basking salamander, like you always do?”

Silence followed. Kanna grew a bit anxious that she had offended the woman, but then she mentally chastised herself for caring about that. Indeed, she was afraid of Goda—she could admit that much to herself—but she had yet to decide whether or not the fear was even rational.

When Kanna glanced over, Goda didn’t seem bothered. She was precisely giving Kanna one of those empty looks. “You say such silly things,” Goda told her, “that I can’t help but be amused. Still, you’re getting too familiar.” Her eyes grew hard even as they widened slightly with an unspoken threat. “You should probably stop.”

Kanna swallowed and looked back towards the fire. Her mouth had become dry. She brought her knees up to her chest and rested her chin atop them.

Goda’s dark eyes repulsed her—but the urge to look into them still tugged at her somehow. She turned towards the sand some paces away, where she could only see Goda’s flickering shadow.

* * *

The snake tasted like charred fish. She was convinced that there was more black carbon in it than there was flesh. Still, she was so hungry that she bit into it anyway and smacked her lips to get the grainy coal off her teeth.

Goda had cut the head off the snake. At first, Kanna thought that she was going to cook it with the rest of the body, but instead she had buried it in the sand. “It could bite,” she explained when she sat back down. Her smile was a teasing one, so Kanna didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Still, it gave her a vivid mental image, and she was so delirious from exhaustion that she couldn’t put it out of her mind.

“Such abuse!” a voice erupted from the darkness.

Kanna choked and whipped around with surprise.

There was a woman towering over her, her features partly obscured in shadow, her eyes gazing down disapprovingly at the both of them. It took Kanna a moment to recognize the innkeeper. There was a steel tray in her hand and the flames glared harshly along the metal.

“Is that really all you’re feeding her, Goda?”

“If she’s still hungry, then she can go find another one.”

“Look at that skinny thing!” At first, Kanna thought that the woman was talking about the snake, but then she noticed that the innkeeper was actually gesturing in Kanna’s direction. “Do you really think she’s cut out to hunt an animal? She’s the prey herself.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes, but said nothing. She swallowed past the urge to cough again, then she shoved another piece of the snake into her mouth.

“If it bothers you that much,” Goda said, “then why don’t you feed her?”

“Clearly, I’m going to have to.” The woman laid the tray down at Kanna’s side. On top of it, there were a few slices of hardtack bread with a small block of cheese. A tiny cut of some root that Kanna didn’t recognize sat off to the side of the plate.

Kanna looked up at the woman stupidly, her eyes welling up against her will, a swell of confusion and gratitude filling her chest.

“Just because this savage lives without dignity, doesn’t mean that you have to follow her example,” the innkeeper said to Kanna. A mildly sheepish look came over her face. “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t introduce myself before, but my name is Jaya Hadd and I’m the owner of this inn. It’s a shame you happened to…catch me at a bad time. Had I known that you were a daughter of the Rava family, I wouldn’t have been quite so harsh. You poor thing. They’ve done you such an injustice.”

“Being pitied and coddled won’t prepare her for what she’ll be facing over the next ten years,” Goda muttered, “nor will it free her from bondage.” She was staring into the fire, and it was then that Kanna noticed that Goda hadn’t touched any of the food.

“You’re always so heartless.”

“Well, if you have a heart, then let us sleep in a proper room.”

The innkeeper pursed her lips. “You know I can’t do that. I have real guests staying tonight—the kind that pay.”

“The people who own that truck?” Goda tipped her head towards the dark clearing beyond the yard. Curious, Kanna looked off in the same direction, and though she had to squint to make sense of the shapes in the dim moonlight, there was indeed a truck parked beyond the innkeeper’s cabin, one that had not been there before.

“Yes,” the innkeeper replied, “so please don’t wander in.”

“Are they the same people who brought the fuel that I saw the assistants hauling away for you?”

Kanna almost laughed, taken aback by her audacity, and though the innkeeper’s eyebrows shot up with a similar jolt of surprise, the woman seemed much more offended than amused.

“What on earth do you mean? There’s a shortage, of course. Nobody is selling fuel.”

“Then what did you do to get it?”

“Nothing, because I don’t have any.”

“You should give me some,” Goda said. That was all she said, but there seemed to be an unspoken second phrase, something that hung in the air like a threat.

“I told you,” the innkeeper muttered, her tone nearly as threatening, “that I don’t have anything. And even if I did, I would hide it from your thieving hands.”

But then, after a long silence and an unfriendly stare, the woman’s tight expression seemed to lose its tension. Something like realization came over her face. To Kanna’s surprise, the woman trudged over to Goda’s side and dropped into one of the broken chairs before the fire, slapping Goda on the shoulder and heaving a loud sigh. “My, my!” she said with exasperation. “Won’t you look at us now? How pathetic! Arguing about some noxious liquid. Addicted to the sound of rumbling motors. When our grandmothers were young, the world wasn’t like this. There was less greed.”

“There’s always been greed.”

“But never so thoroughly rewarded, don’t you think? This industrial revolution may have saved us from starvation, but it didn’t bring us any closer to the Goddess.”

Goda laughed. “You say this and yet you hoard fuel from the rest of us.”

The innkeeper sighed again and stared into the flames. “I’m sorry, Goda, but I can’t help you. My hands are tied, and you already know that this world doesn’t make room for charity.” She cleared her throat conspicuously. “Besides, I told you: I don’t have anything.”

“If I find it, I’ll steal it from you. Not all of it, but enough that it will probably inconvenience you. You should give me some now, that way you can decide how much I’ll take.”

“Fair enough, but you won’t find it—because there’s nothing to find.” She stood up again, but turned to Kanna before leaving. “And you, child of Rava: I really do wish you luck. I’m sure you’re not a vessel for Death, so your cleanse should turn out fine, but watch your back around this barbarian.”

Kanna said nothing as the woman headed back towards the house, too confused by the awkward conversation to reply, but knowing better than to complain about both women’s poor manners. Instead, one of the innkeeper’s comments rose to the top of her mind, and it seemed a reasonable change of subject.

“She talked about your ancestors,” Kanna said with mild curiosity. “Is that just a figure of speech in the Middlelander tongue, or do you actually share a grandmother with that innkeeper?”

Goda looked distracted, rearranging some of the embers in the fire. “We do,” she said, with little inflection or interest. “By coincidence, my lower mother is her higher mother’s sister.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. Though she still wasn’t sure what this business of “lower” and “higher” really meant, she could surmise the gist of it, and she wasn’t in the mood to sound ignorant again, so she didn’t ask for an explanation.

“But doesn’t that make the innkeeper your first cousin?” she asked instead.

Goda paused in thought. “Huh. So it does.” She shrugged dismissively and kept tending to the fire.

Kanna stared at her. She wasn’t sure what was worse: the fact that Goda was stealing from her own family, or the fact that they had both seemed so nonchalant about being family in the first place. She shook her head with disbelief and turned her attention back to the plate of food.

Over the course of the bizarre conversation, Kanna had already begun shoving food into her mouth without even realizing. Only a bit of cheese and some of the unknown root remained.

Kanna picked up the root. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s called yaw. It’s a tuber. All Middlelanders eat it as a staple with every meal, so you should probably get familiar with it.”

Kanna brought it closer to the fire to take a look. It was a purple-tinged white on the inside with a thin brown skin, and it didn’t seem much different from other root vegetables she had seen. She had imagined that the Middlelanders must have had a staple food; it was one of the few similarities they had with the Upperlanders, who gorged on a grain called mok every day and made spirits from it.

So she shrugged and put the root into her mouth.

When she immediately gagged and spit it out into the sand, Goda laughed at her.

* * *

Every time they stepped into the dusty old storage room, Kanna had to get used to the smell again. She stood against the wall, next to the small window, and picked at her teeth as Goda tinkered with the door lock. Some of the tiny snake bones had been particularly tenacious, and Kanna hadn’t been able to dislodge them with her tongue just yet.

“That meal was horrendous. Do you always eat snakes like this?” Kanna asked, sucking on her own teeth.

“Only if I happen to catch one.”

“Why? Are they easy to catch?”

“Not at all. They’re quite fast,” Goda said, her tone pensive for once, even though there was a strange smirk growing on her face as she headed for some crates at the far end of the shed, “but one time I was in the open desert and I discovered a snake eating her own tail. That one wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Can’t say that I’m surprised you would take advantage of such a pathetic sight.”

The smirk widened. “Oh, she wasn’t pathetic at all.” With a loud rattling, Goda pushed away the boxes, but it was too dark to see what they concealed. “She was full of theatrics. When I came upon her, I tied up her arms, and she started to put up a fight, writhing and screaming. Even when I tried to pull her up into a hollow, so that we could spend the night out of the rain, she bared her fangs and resisted me all the way to the top. It’s a miracle I didn’t get bit.”

Kanna stopped pressing her tongue against her teeth, confused by the woman’s cryptic ramblings. But as soon as realization set in, she narrowed her eyes, and though Goda’s words were followed by a harsh scraping along the floor as the woman dragged something huge out of the shadows, Kanna could hardly pay it any attention.

“If you don’t like getting bit, then don’t go hunting snakes,” Kanna said coldly.

Goda dropped her burden with a casual shrug. “Who says I don’t like getting bit?”

A torrent of warm blood rushed to Kanna’s face in reply to the woman’s playful grin, but she was quickly distracted from her embarrassment by the giant wooden sculpture that Goda had placed in front of the door. It was nearly as tall as the woman herself.

“What’s all this for?” Kanna demanded, looking away from Goda’s insolent face and at the new barrier that blocked the threshold. The carved wood was clearly more ancient than even the shed, its features so cracked and weathered that Kanna had to stare for a long moment to make out the feathered lines of its winged body. Only the details on the statue’s head remained relatively intact, perched on a long swan-neck that rose up from its spreading breastbone, the wooden eyes of a huge bird staring right back at her with an expression that looked equally as offended as she was. “What is it, a carved idol?”

“Insurance. You could probably tip it over eventually if you pushed hard enough, but it would take you awhile, and your grunting and groaning would wake me, so I would easily catch you if you tried to escape. I’m a light sleeper.”

“This is hardly necessary,” Kanna complained. “What if there’s a fire or some other emergency?”

Goda laughed. “Would you prefer that I tie you up again instead?”

And so Kanna fell silent. She looked over at the two sleeping mats that lay side by side in the aisle before them, and it reminded her of just how alone they were, how they were locked in a room together in the middle of the night with no one but a statue to witness them.

The feeling of privacy was not comforting at all. It made her chest seize up with an edge of fear. She didn’t think that Goda would do anything to her, but she was fully aware that without much of a struggle, the woman easily could do anything she wanted. Even from just their brief handful of scuffles, the difference in strength between them was alarming.

That thought brought a different sensation all of a sudden. It was very brief. It was like a pulse in Kanna’s gut—or maybe somewhere lower still—a swelling that was uncomfortable in its fullness.

Kanna tried to put it out of her mind, to not let her anxiety show. “Am I really supposed to sleep here, right next to you like that?” she asked with as steady a voice as she could manage.

“Yes,” Goda said. She gave her an amused look, as if the question had been stupid. She walked over to the bedding and knelt down onto the mat, peeling off her outer robe as she settled in.

Kanna looked away. “Can’t I sleep in one of the other aisles or something?”

“No. You’ll stay where I can see you.”

Once she had stripped down to her tunic and slacks, Goda glanced over at Kanna, who was still hesitating near the door. To Kanna’s surprise, the woman did not bound towards her yet; instead, she watched Kanna carefully, her stare alert, her expression losing its strange mix of mirth and authority.

“Look,” Goda said finally, “what you’re afraid of—I’m not going to do it. I have no interest in that sort of thing, so you can relax and go to sleep.”

“I didn’t say I was afraid of you,” Kanna snapped. She didn’t like how quickly Goda had guessed, and she certainly didn’t like what Goda was implying. Kanna hadn’t even put a shape to her fear yet, or speculated on what, exactly, she was afraid that Goda would do. “I just don’t know you that well, that’s all. In the Upperland, sleeping directly beside someone is an overly familiar gesture. Only married people do it.”

Goda patted the mattress beside her. “We’re not in the Upperland,” she said. When Kanna didn’t move, Goda started to get up. “Of course, I can just make you do it if you’d prefer a struggle first. I’m sure there’s rope in here.” She began to look around.

Kanna heaved a deep sigh and rushed forward. As if there were some kind of invisible force both pulling her and repelling her at the same time, she slipped carefully around Goda without brushing against her, and she plopped down onto her side of the aisle.

This seemed to satisfy her master well enough, and Goda stretched out on her own sleeping mat before blowing out the candle.

Kanna lay there, awake in the dark, merely inches from the woman who was already breathing deeply beside her. She could feel the heat of Goda’s body radiating through the air and bathing her skin, warming her against the drafts that trickled in from beyond the doorjamb, but nonetheless making her shudder with discomfort.

When her eyes had adjusted enough, she could see just the basic shape of Goda’s form: the side of her face, the thin cloth of her shirt that covered her back, a bare shoulder that stuck out over the sheets. She stared at that sun-bronzed skin and felt the sudden urge to reach out, to see what it felt like against her fingers, to dig her nails deep into that naked flesh and draw the blood out.

She quickly turned away.

Her heart pounded. A part of her couldn’t fathom why, and another part was hesitant to acknowledge the feeling at all. Instead, she stared up at the ceiling until her exhaustion had overwhelmed her thoughts.

* * *

That night, Kanna had a dream. She dreamt that she was standing in a winter forest near a flowing river, her bare feet digging into the snow. Stars filtered in from the tops of the trees as a weak twilight—dawn or dusk, she wasn’t sure—but all she could see in the water was the form of a white swan, which floated serenely downstream towards her. When she tried to approach with curiosity, the bird took off in flight, soaring over her head and deep into the jungle behind her.

She spun around to see where it had gone, but instead she came face-to-face with a void. There was a figure swallowed in shadows, hovering over her like a giant. Paralyzed, she could not even recoil, and she could not make out the ghost’s features until it was so close that the mist of her own gasp mingled with its hot breath, which tasted of wet earth.

It was a living ghost.

It was Goda.

There was a white flower in her hand. The center was yellow like the yolk of an egg. She seized Kanna stiffly by the neck, and before Kanna could cry out, Goda shoved the flower into Kanna’s mouth and drowned out the sound. That massive hand filled up her mouth, but then the woman pushed deeper, across Kanna’s tongue, into her throat, stretching her from the inside.

Kanna choked and yet the woman only stared and smiled and pushed deeper. Goda reached inside of her, as if Kanna were some vessel and the woman were trying to touch the very bottom.

She burst her way through Kanna’s guts and snaked her arm into the depths. She took Kanna’s womb in her fist and squeezed it, until a torrent of blood and water poured out from between Kanna’s legs.

Kanna looked down in horror. She had given birth to a serpent.

* * *

Kanna awoke crying out in pain. Her blood pounding in her head, she jerked upright in shock, pressing her hand between her legs, grasping to see what was left of her—and finding that nothing familiar was gone, even as the feeling of being torn open had not faded entirely.

Goda stirred next to her. In the dim moonlight that leaked in through the tiny window, she peered at Kanna with alarm. “What is it?” she said groggily. Her eyes traveled down to Kanna’s hand where it pressed to her groin, and she looked a bit perturbed. “Did you piss yourself or something?”

Kanna blinked a few times, still not quite free from the dream. “No,” she whispered with irritation. “Blood came out.” She tried to shake it off, but the pain had felt so real.

Goda paused. “Oh,” she said. She grabbed a rag from the bottom shelf beside her and tossed it into Kanna’s lap. “I don’t keep those supplies. We’ll ask the temple assistants in the morning.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

It was only after a few seconds of dead silence that Kanna realized exactly how Goda had misunderstood her. When she picked up the old rag and felt dirt caking between her fingers, she threw a glare at Goda’s back. She crumpled the cloth in her hand with a burst of rage.

But as she began to turn away again, her eyes took notice of Goda’s satchel, which was sitting at the foot of the woman’s bed. Even in the moonlight, she could still see the outline of the cylinder inside. A steel baton, she thought.

This time, when she imagined herself cracking it against Goda’s skull, she felt less guilty about it.

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A Note From the Author:

Enjoying it so far? If you know anybody who is into this kind of thing, feel free to spread it around. This draft of Goda’s Slave will always be available here, free to read. If you want to support me in this labor of love, consider becoming a patron on Patreon! Every bit helps!

Onto Chapter 7 >>