Kanna didn’t have time to react. A hand had already seized her, and without any will of her own, it dragged her deeper into the pitch black. When she fell down onto the ground with her back against stone, a pair of quiet breaths huffed away on either side of her—one rapid, one slower.

She had landed inside an alcove just at the bend of the wall, where the path seemed to fork into another tunnel. Kanna could no longer see the mouth of the cave from where she sat, though as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see Goda glancing around the corner. The woman muttered one of the few vulgarities that Kanna happened to know in the Middlelander tongue. This made Kanna curious, so she followed suit and peeked around the wall as well.

Instead of just one figure, this time a small gathering had accumulated at the entrance of the cave. A group of women surrounded a small cart, forcefully maneuvering it through a patch of rocks and into the dark. Their pale robes made them look like ghosts in the moonlight, and the solid sound of that metallic clacking did not match their billowing presence at all.

A hand tightened at Kanna’s collar and jerked her back behind the wall.

“Hide,” Goda warned her. “Have some sense.”

“Who are they?”

As it usually happened, everyone seemed to ignore her, and instead Parama whispered, “Do you think they saw us?”

“Can’t be certain. The light was already dimming, and I turned it off before the rest of them came, but the first one was facing our direction. She looked like the head temple assistant.”

“Oh! Temple Assistant Finn? We’re safe, then, I think. If she had any inkling that it was us, she definitely would have come running in here to give me a slap by now. She never lets anything slide the second she sees it, trust me, but she’s pretty nearsighted from doing all the temple paperwork. Maybe she mistook us for another group of assistants.”

“Maybe.”

“What now? They can’t find out that I showed you this place, Porter Goda. It’s not open to the public, and to be honest I don’t think it ever will be after what we found in it a few days ago.”

The crunching squeak of rusted wheels echoed through the cavern again. A rush of footsteps came along with it.

“Sounds like they’re coming this way,” Goda said. She pushed Kanna flat against the wall. “Be still. Try to be invisible. They’re probably carrying a light.”

Kanna gave her a dumbfounded expression—because she certainly couldn’t just make herself disappear—but the woman didn’t seem to catch her look. At first, Kanna felt the urge to push back, but the sound of the wheels advancing in the void spooked her more, and she pressed herself hard against the stone as Goda had told her.

Where they all sat, the moonlight did not reach, but Kanna could see shadows advancing along the cave wall. The vague edges of those white robes came around the bend, and slowly—amidst a noise of great effort—the first of the caravan appeared before them. Nervously, Kanna slid further back, but the ghosts did not seem to notice her in the dark, and the tiny parade began passing along without so much as a pause.

One of them carried an electric lantern that bathed the path in an eerie glow, but the light didn’t spread very far. They walked two abreast, in consistent rhythm, all six of them with their hands pressed firmly on the sides of the cart. When one of the wheels hit another snag, the entire group of temple assistants jerked along with it. Some heavy piece of cargo—a metal canister—landed hard onto the ground.

It clunked and splashed and sent a spray of cold water against Kanna’s face. It rolled so close to her feet that she had to scramble back to avoid the pair of assistants who had rushed over to fetch it, but as she retreated further into the dark, she was overwhelmed by a burst of fumes.

It was not water.

As the smell of the harsh spill burned the inside of her nose, all she could do was turn around and bury her face hard into Goda’s chest to suppress her cough. She was met with a mouthful of the woman’s scent, which mixed with the air just enough to calm her reaction.

In all the commotion, the ghosts hadn’t heard her. With one side of her face still buried in Goda’s robes, she watched the temple assistants dragging the canister into the light, where they reunited it with the rest of the cargo and carried on.

They had left behind the smell of the strange water, which lingered for just a moment after they passed. In fact, what struck Kanna the most was that it was more than a smell: It was a bitter taste that filled the back of her mouth, a taste with an edge of familiarity that she could not place because as soon as she grasped for the memory, the dry fumes had begun to dissolve.

“What on earth was that?” she whispered, once she felt certain that the assistant women had gone far enough down a different tunnel of the cavern.

“What do you think it was?” Goda said, as if it were obvious. “You should already know.”

I don’t know anything, Kanna thought, although she was too proud to voice this. Goda had been right; she was completely ignorant, and every single turn of events seemed to show her yet something else that she had missed.

Goda peeked around the corner one last time. “There’s two of them at the entrance still, probably waiting for the others.” She took Kanna by the arm and pulled her to her feet, and Parama stood up along with them, as if he were also obeying some unspoken command.

“Do we wait here until they’re all gone, then?” he asked.

“No. We can’t risk being so close to the entrance when they come back around, especially since there are others who might wander in. If they switch to a brighter light, they could easily see us.”

“What do we do, then?”

Goda appeared to contemplate this. She turned to the main hall of the cavern, and then down the tunnel they had just ducked into. “Do you think they’ll come down this path?”

“Probably not. This is where the serpents lead, to a belly in the cavern. No one has any reason to come down this tunnel except for me and Priestess Rem Murau. Even the assistants aren’t allowed there.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go.” Without turning on the lamp, Goda stepped into the pitch darkness, until all but her voice had fallen into shadows. “Hopefully, when it’s time to come back out, we won’t have those two patient midwives waiting for us.”

* * *

It wasn’t until they had rounded a corner, and even the little bit of light that had filtered in from the entrance disappeared, that Kanna realized she was afraid of the dark. She couldn’t so much as see her own hands in front of her face, so she followed the sounds of Goda’s leading footsteps entirely on faith.

Every tiny noise—every faraway drip, or even the vague echo of her own movement against the walls—put her on edge. She jumped a little when Parama began whispering again:

“Do you think it’s safe to turn on the light now? They probably can’t see it from here.” He sounded nervous.

“There’s not much juice left in it, but it can last if we keep it low.” Kanna heard Goda flip the switch. A soft halo of light rained over the ground, but it was so dim that they couldn’t see more than a few paces in either direction.

Kanna could barely make out the designs on the walls anymore. Instead, she reached out and felt the intricate indentations with her hands as they walked, surprised that the etchings continued so far into the cavern, on every surface. The deeper they went, the more faint the echoes of the ghost-women’s wheels became, until Kanna could no longer hear them at all—though, seemingly, Goda had not forgotten them so easily.

“Where were the assistants taking all of that cargo?” Goda asked without turning around.

“How am I supposed to know that? I’m just a silly temple hand, Porter Goda. Nobody ever tells me anything. I don’t even know what they were up to in here.”

“They were hoarding fuel, obviously. Where did they take it?”

“Fuel? My goodness! How dare you accuse us of that, Porter!” Parama smacked her arm, but she did not seem touched by either his outrage or his hand. “You know fuel is too impure for the temple to hoard so much of it, especially on sacred ground. What if a priestess were to touch one of the containers by mistake? Besides, do I need to remind you that there’s a shortage? It must have been something else, maybe blessed water. We should just get out of here as soon as they leave, don’t you think?”

“If you’re going to lie, then at least make up a good story. They even spilled one of the canisters. The smell was unmistakable.” Goda’s steps slowed a little, as if she were considering a different path, but she didn’t stop. “You know where they took it, don’t you?”

“Look,” Parama said with a sigh, “I didn’t expect them to be here tonight. You didn’t need to find out about this, and I’m sorry, but I’m definitely not telling a habitual thief where they store it so that you can go steal it.”

“Who said I was planning on stealing anything?”

“Who said that I thought you even had a plan, Porter Goda? You just walk around taking whatever you want like everything is already yours! It’s terrible.” Strangely enough, though, Parama was smiling at her. He adjusted his pace until he could press his shoulder against Goda’s side as they walked. “If you want to get technical, the fuel doesn’t belong to the temple, anyway. The temple can’t hoard fuel, like I said. It’s Innkeeper Jaya’s fuel, and she’s just letting us…borrow it.”

“Is that some kind of loophole in the rules?”

“What do you expect during a shortage? The generator that powers the well pump inside the temple needs to run somehow.”

Kanna stared ahead at the both of them. That smell, she thought. So the smell had been spilled fuel. Why had it seemed vaguely familiar to her then, even when the fumes had made her eyes water? She had never driven a truck before, and since the entire Rava family complex used a central generator that stood far from her mother’s house, she had never clearly understood what magic they used to make the electric lights turn on.

“So that’s what you were doing at Jaya’s house: buying favors for the temple.” Goda’s strange tone burst Kanna from her thoughts.

“Oh, don’t insult me, I’m not that cheap! That was…something else. She’s been in a bad mood ever since her wife got promoted to that fancy position in the capital. Quite prestigious for a foreigner, you know? I guess it makes her feel like the lesser wife by comparison.”

“So?”

“So, I went in to cheer her up with some of my cooking.” Parama shrugged. “Also, she’s kind of desperate to assert her status now, so she wants to hurry up and have the first child. I’ve been helping her with that lately, too.”

Kanna couldn’t see Goda’s face anymore, but she noticed a subtle shift in the way she held her shoulders. They seemed a bit stiffer. “I assumed as much, but she shouldn’t ask for those kinds of things from a slave.”

“Since when are you concerned with the law? Everyone breaks that rule, anyway. You’ve broken that rule yourself, haven’t you?”

It took Kanna a moment—but then it all connected. She stared at Parama with a horrified expression.

“Aren’t you a little too young to be a father?” Kanna blurted out before she could stop herself.

In truth, she was not sure how old this boy actually was. By Upperland standards, he was a man of normal size, but considering how huge the Middlelanders were, surely his growth had been stunted somehow. Perhaps he had been starved. At any rate, he did not seem fit to be a parent with the ditsy air about him, and with the way he leaned against Goda as if he were pretending to be too weak to stand on his own.

Parama laughed. He looked up at Goda with confusion. “What is she going on about?”

“In the Upperland, if you lie down with a woman and it results in a child,” Goda explained, “then you stick around after her baby is born and spend all your money to help raise it to adulthood. If that same woman has more children, then you have to do the same for those other children as well. I imagine it gets expensive if there are a lot of them, so it helps if you’re older and have some savings.”

“That’s not how it happens!” Kanna protested, though she wasn’t exactly sure how to correct her. What Goda had said was true on a certain level, but there was so much more to it, that Kanna didn’t know how to explain the misunderstanding.

“Oh, I see,” Parama said, ignoring Kanna’s interjection. “Well, what if there is more than one man who has been visiting the same woman? If she has a child, then how do they decide which man is supposed to spend his money on the baby? Or do they all just pool their resources? Now, that sounds more reasonable.”

“No! We actually—”

“Wait, in that case, wouldn’t the second mother just pick up the slack?” Parama continued over Kanna’s stuttering. “I can’t imagine Upperland children are so needy that they each need three parents.”

“You’re forgetting that Upperlanders only have one mother. They need the man to pretend that he’s the second mother, you see,” Goda told him. “I would think that if a woman is friends with more than one man, then they must just randomly decide. Maybe they take turns.”

Kanna opened her mouth in disbelief. “What? No, that’s completely wrong. We don’t even—”

“Ah, yes, that makes a lot more sense,” Parama said. He paused for a moment in thought. “Wait, if the man has to play the role of one of the mothers, then does that mean Upperlander men produce their own milk, or do they borrow it from the real mother?”

“Stop!” Kanna cried out. “For the love of God, now you’re just pulling things out of your imagination!”

Goda gave her a disapproving glance. “Stop getting so excited. Voices can carry far in these caves.”

“Then stop disrespecting my culture!”

“Disrespecting?” Parama asked, genuine bewilderment in his tone. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m a bit ignorant, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to fix. Porter Goda was just telling me all about it.”

“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” Kanna said with a huff. She noticed then that Parama was clinging onto Goda’s hand, and something about that bothered her even more—it seemed wrong—but she couldn’t understand why, so she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she explained, “Upperland men marry women, and then the women have children with their husbands.”

She really couldn’t fathom how this concept was so difficult. If anything, the family dynamic of her own culture was the simplest of all: One man marries one woman, and they have children—well, unless the man was rich like Kanna’s father, then he might collect a few wives and a few dozen children. Even with that added complication, it certainly made a lot more sense to her than women marrying other women only to run around with random men.

“Oh.” Parama scratched his chin in what seemed like deep thought. “Oh, yes, that makes everything clear.” The cavern became quiet for awhile as they trudged along, and Kanna thought it a little strange that the young man had been so easily satisfied with her short answer. Still, she was pleased with herself, until he glanced at her again and asked, “So what happens if a woman is already married? Does the man have to marry the woman’s wife, too?”

Kanna pressed her hands hard against her face and groaned. With gritted teeth, she whispered to Goda, “What does he even do around here?” Hopefully not anything too mentally demanding, she thought.

“You’re a scribe, aren’t you, Parama?”

Kanna tilted her head in mild confusion.

“I’m a translator,” he said, his smile widening. “They brought me in to translate some of the scripts in the ruins around here. There’s this obscure dialect of Southern Outerlander that I picked up a long time ago, and they needed it to decipher the more recent carvings, so I got lucky. Most male slaves get sent to the textile mills.”

“Ah, so the script in these caves can be deciphered,” Goda said. She brought the lantern a bit closer to the wall, and Kanna could see the etchings with some clarity again. The paint that had survived on them glowed in response to the light. “This shrine must be more recent than the ones in the open desert, then.”

“Yes. We can read the script…kind of. It’s still much older than any modern language, and to make things more complicated, it’s most closely related to an Outerlander dialect that doesn’t even have a written language anymore. Thankfully, there are plenty of drawings to help, and Head Priestess Rem is able to understand some of it, too. She’s quite a genius with that sort of thing, I must say!”

“Couldn’t they have just hired an Outerlander to translate it?” Kanna asked.

Goda huffed. “Most foreigners—Outerlanders and Upperlanders alike—can’t read and write, and they certainly don’t know the Middlelander tongue well enough to be able to translate to it. Educated foreigners like Jaya’s wife are a rarity.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “We learn how to read in the Upperland.”

“You learned how to read in the Upperland—but most Upperlanders are illiterate. I’ve never met an Upperlander besides you who can make sense of any written language, let alone one who can speak Middlelander conversationally. Did you really have no idea what was going on in your own lands?”

Newly offended, Kanna didn’t know what to say at first. After a few false starts, she finally spat, “Oh, and you understand what’s going on somehow, Porter? That’s a ridiculous thing to say when your kind doesn’t even know the first thing about us! All you’ve ever done is invade and encroach. You have no right to judge us.”

“It’s not a judgment. Your people are oppressed and starving. We may be invaders—I won’t deny that—but at least now with the Middleland taking over your government, the average Upperlander will have a chance of attaining an education and basic sustenance.”

“Keep it. We don’t need your Middlelander language, or your education, or your sustenance.”

Goda smirked. “That’s easy to say for someone who has enjoyed the privilege of all three.” Again, her tone was frustratingly neutral, as it usually was, with no trace of accusation.

Kanna said nothing, too angry to reply, and too fearful of the darkness to turn around and start walking in the opposite direction. Still, she crossed her arms and remained rebellious: As they advanced, Goda and Parama’s crunching footfalls fell into sync, but Kanna kept her feet pounding stubbornly off-rhythm.

In a short while, they reached a dead end: a small, round chamber where the geometric scripts and the serpentine ribbons had followed them. All of that chaos along the walls reached a climax in the room, the etchings growing more elaborate and surging into the floor beneath them in explosive spirals of color.

Goda dropped the lantern at the center of the space. Its waning light shined a dim perimeter around them, but what caught Kanna’s eye was the spot directly on the ground where the lamp had fallen. It was a circle drawn in the stone, bright like the yellow of the afternoon sun, with tones of blood-red nectar mixed in. Along the edges of the circle, long white petals flowed out in eight directions, each touching the boundaries of the walls, overwhelming the serpents that seemed to twist beneath them.

She felt that she should be perplexed by what she saw, but something deep inside of her knew, even though she had never laid eyes on it before.

“Death Flower.”

“Yes,” Goda said. She was looking down at the mural intently, as if she too was surprised to see it. She turned to Parama, who had wandered near one of the walls. “I can see now why you were told not to show this place to anyone.”

“It was Priestess Rem and I who first discovered this. Imagine our shock to see a Samma Flower painted on the floor of an early Maharan site. This brings the Goddess’s will into question, doesn’t it?”

Kanna turned to Parama with confusion. “Samma Flower?”

“Death Flower,” Goda answered for him. “‘Samma Flower’ is its actual name.”

“Yes, it’s named after Samma Valley,” Parama explained, “the only place in the Middleland where it grows, although it’s been nearly eradicated now. It also grows in the Lowerland, but…well, no one goes there.” He gazed down at the flower with a complicated expression. “I remember when I was young, no one ever called it ‘Death Flower.’ It was only once we started having problems with people smuggling them into the country and using them for ritual suicide that this sort of propaganda stuff spread around.”

“Suicide?”

Parama lowered himself to the floor, just at the edge of the flower, but he seemed cautious not to kneel upon the image itself–out of reverence or fearful superstition, Kanna did not know. “There’s a death cult that uses it,” he said. “Some kind of mystery religion popped up in recent years, here in the Outerland, and somehow people are bribing savages to bring them Flower from across the Southern border. No one knows how they do it, but the government has really been cracking down lately.”

Kanna felt an uncomfortable twinge in her spine, a fullness in her throat. “Why would someone want to kill themselves?” she found herself helplessly asking for the second time that day–and once again, she repressed the faint memory of her own morbid desires.

“I wouldn’t know, but it’s against the law in the Middleland. It’s against our religion, too. Killing yourself is high blasphemy to the Goddess—worse than touching the bare skin of a priestess, worse than stealing temple property, even worse than possessing Samma Flower. Nothing will send you to hell faster, except maybe doing something crazy like attacking a clergy member.”

Adding nothing, Goda had wandered away, towards one of the walls. Perhaps it was the shadows playing against her face, but her expression looked a bit darker, and her stare had grown blank.

“I can hear them,” she said.

At first, Kanna didn’t know what Goda had meant, but once she quieted her thoughts, she felt the subtle vibrations along the walls: It was the sound of a rolling cart. If she concentrated, she could even hear the temple assistants’ footfalls growing louder, but before she had the chance to grow too anxious, she also noticed Goda’s lack of urgency. The woman sat on the ground with her back pressed to the freezing stone, her expression more bored than anything else.

“We’ll wait until we hear them rolling in the direction of the exit,” Goda said, “and then we’ll give them a half hour to make sure the coast is clear. That should be enough.”

Kanna let loose a sigh of both relief and irritation. She muttered, “Why does the temple even need assistants?” It wasn’t so much a real question as a complaint, though Goda answered anyway:

“You’ve seen for yourself that there are rules the priestesses must follow. They can’t touch certain kinds of objects—like anything that can make a person drunk—and they can’t have skin-to-skin contact with any non-priestesses. This limits the kind of work they can do, so their assistants must do it for them.”

“I hardly think truck fuel will make them drunk,” Kanna said, remembering the noxious fluid that the assistants had nearly spilled on her. “No one in their right mind would drink something like that, I hope, even if you people have the weirdest rituals.”

She plopped herself down on the ground a few paces from Goda—but not too close. Parama seemed to have no such reservations, sliding along the floor until he could lay his head heavily on the huge woman’s shoulder, grasping her hand once again, relaxing into the folds of her outer robes and pulling them around him like a half-cocoon.

Kanna winced. Once again, the scene before her seemed…wrong. There was something about Parama’s posture, about the way he had thrown himself on Goda—as if he were aching to be picked up—that she instantly disliked. It was unbecoming, she thought, unmasculine.

“If they can’t touch anyone, what do the priestesses even do here, then?” Kanna asked, trying not to look at them. “When I was getting inspected, the assistant prodded me left and right, but that head priestess just lurked over her shoulder and watched. Is that all she does? Just stand there while other people work?”

“Well, of course not,” Parama answered. “Head Priestess Rem can’t get too close to the visitors, but she still does most of the clerical and translation work here. She’s very educated in ancient languages, you see, since it’s a specialty at the monastery she grew up in. In fact, that’s why they placed her here a few months ago when she was up for promotion, after Head Priestess Meyka…disappeared.”

“A disappearance?” Kanna had heard rumors of this before. “Was she taken by savages?”

“Nobody knows. She was visiting a temple near the Southern border last year, and then one cloudy morning she went to go meditate in the woods, from what they told me. When the mist cleared in the afternoon, no one could find her. It was the strangest thing. They looked everywhere, too–for months and months, but there was no trace. And…well, they had to give that up eventually. They sent the venerable Priestess Rem Murau to fill her spot this year.” He sighed wistfully, though it seemed he couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the woman’s title. “I get along with my new master all right, but I do miss Priestess Meyka. She was a lot older and gentler, and she had been here for a long time, so everyone liked her. She was a lot less overbearing than Priestess Rem, too, I have to say.” Parama glanced at Goda. “Ah, that’s right, you haven’t come here in more than half a year. You haven’t met the new priestess yet, have you? She transferred from Samma Valley Monastery, that temple complex in the ancient settlements, west of the capital.”

“I had heard.”

“Samma Valley?” Kanna asked. “Where the flower comes from?”

“That’s right. Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?” He paused in thought again, scratching his chin. “Actually, Porter Goda, didn’t you tell me once that you used to work at that same monastery? Now there’s the real coincidence!”

Goda was staring blankly at the opposite wall, even as Parama was trying to catch her gaze insistently.

“It was a long time ago.”

“So then maybe you do know Priestess Rem, after all.”

“Maybe I do.” But her tone was flat and her expression offered no trace of recognition.

Kanna felt awkward. If Parama had wandered near some kind of minefield, she couldn’t completely tell, but the air had changed all of a sudden. It was also the first time she had heard any personal information about this Goda woman.

“You used to be a porter at a monastery?” Kanna asked, trying to fill in the painful silence.

“No, you had a different job back then, right, Porter Goda?” Parama replied, because Goda had not answered. “What was it that you were involved in? Farming or something like that?”

“Horticulture.”

“Right, right. Because both your mothers did the same, you told me.”

“My higher mother was a botanist and my lower mother was a gardener, so when I went to work at the monastery, that’s where they placed me.”

Parama smiled and laid his head back down, this time against Goda’s chest. The corpse of the dead snake—the one that was still draped around Goda’s shoulders—dangled near his face. For a split second, Kanna had a strange mental image of the thing coming back to life and lashing out at him.

“You act so stiff when we talk about the past. I feel like I don’t know anything about you, even after three years.”

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

“Oh, come on now, you stingy brute,” Parama said, his soft voice growing more cajoling, “don’t you think I deserve to know about the past after putting up with you in the present? Besides, you already know everything about me. How is that fair?”

Kanna stared at them, not quite sure of the undertone that she had detected in Parama’s words or what it might have suggested. It was then that she realized that she had been sliding progressively closer to them without being entirely conscious of it. It must be because it’s cold in here, she thought. Her arm was brushing against Goda’s robe, and she looked over at Parama who was joining her in flanking the woman’s other side.

Kanna hesitated, then finally asked the obvious question: “Is this scribe your lover or something?”

Goda turned to her slowly. To Kanna’s surprise, a strange little smirk had come over the woman’s face, but in her eyes there was an edge of confusion, too. “You Upperlanders and your romantic notions,” she said dismissively—but she said nothing else after that.

* * *

When the caverns had fallen into complete silence, and they had waited in the belly for what felt like too long to Kanna, Goda finally gave them the signal to get up. By the time she picked up the lantern again, the filament had become a dull spot of light, and it did little to illuminate their way back out of the tunnel. Kanna could only make out the vague outline of the Samma Flower on the ground as they passed.

Kanna stayed close to Goda as they advanced through the hollows of the caverns, traveling directly in the wake of her flowing robes. She was irritated to find that Parama walked beside her, clinging to the back of Goda’s sleeve, smiling lightly at Kanna with too much trust—but again Kanna made no comment.

Once they emerged into the main path, which was touched by the moonlight, Kanna let out a sigh of relief because the assistants were indeed gone. She wasn’t sure what would have happened if the three of them had been caught, or even what kind of punishment she would have faced, but something about the prospect of seeing those ghostly pale rags unnerved her more than any months added to her sentence.

Goda had turned out the light after they had left the cavern, but even without its dim shine, Kanna could see everything in the moonlight as they made their way down the crag. In particular, she could see that a woman was waiting for them when they reached the bottom.

Kanna’s stomach dropped.

The stranger’s robes were jet black instead of white, which served to soothe her nerves at first, but then she recognized the face quickly after. She didn’t know why she felt such a surge of irrational panic, considering that she barely knew the woman. It may have been because of the way both Goda and the boy stiffened beside her.

“Parama,” the woman in black said, smiling pleasantly, “how is it that you’ve escaped me, only to fall into the hands of Goda Brahm?”

---

Onto Chapter 6 >>

“Don’t look back at the innkeeper’s door,” Goda said.

They were walking across the side of the yard, a space that was littered with empty pots and flower boxes filled with shriveled weeds. A fence made of dry wood encircled the garden, but it was tipped over in places and seemed to no longer serve any purpose. Some furniture was strewn about, fallen from the wind. Most of it was half-buried in the sand from what must have been months of disuse.

Kanna couldn’t fathom that they were sauntering around the grounds of what was supposed to be an inn. She had heard that the Outerland region was poor, but she had never imagined such squalor could be offered to members of the public.

Upon hearing some muffled voices coming from the cabin, Kanna tried glancing towards the entrance once again, but Goda wasted no time grasping the back of her head to stop her.

“I said don’t look. Give the woman time to rid herself of her visitor. We’re pretending we haven’t seen anything.”

Throwing Goda an annoyed glance, Kanna wriggled her head free. “What on earth are you talking about? Sometimes I wonder if you’re coming up with these random demands just to see if I’ll obey them.”

“You don’t know this culture, Rava. You can’t see the big picture yet, so you’ll have to trust what I say. If you cause the innkeeper to lose face, then she’ll be even more uncooperative, and we don’t have much of a budget to spare for different accommodations.”

“You’re telling me this? Isn’t it you who has already insulted her?” Kanna kept her eyes on Goda, but as she heard more commotion behind her and the sound of an unlatching door, she was tempted to look again.

“She knows me. I’m already aware of all the rules she breaks and I’m discreet about it, but if someone else were to see—especially an ignorant foreigner—she would worry that they would tell the priestesses.”

“Tell them what?”

Goda didn’t answer. Instead, she pressed against the small of Kanna’s back to hurry her along as they rounded the corner to the back of the house—but before the front yard was out of view, Kanna snapped her head back with the intention to disobey.

She caught a quick flash of a figure running across the sands—a delicate figure, unlike any Middlelander she had seen before. The person’s frame was small like Kanna’s own, draped in multicolored robes, and the stranger bounced with a dainty quickness that tousled the messy waves of their short hair.

Another foreigner? Kanna guessed, but she could not get a better look before Goda grasped her by her collar and sharply dragged her behind the cabin.

Kanna nearly fell over. The bucket that she was carrying slipped from her hands, spilling water across both their feet, splashing newly-formed mud onto Kanna’s ankles.

As soon as Kanna regained her footing, she shot a furious glance up at Goda. Out of some unconscious impulse, she thrust her hands out and smacked her palms hard against Goda’s chest—to push her back, to force her away—but the woman barely shuffled from the blow. It was as if Kanna had rammed with all her strength against a boulder.

“What the hell are you doing?” Goda asked.

“You can’t just yank me around, Porter!”

Kanna gnashed her teeth, and when she launched herself forward to push against Goda once more, Goda caught both her hands. The woman clenched her fingers tightly around Kanna’s wrists, and she held them steady even as Kanna tried to wrench them away. The lack of effort that it seemed to take only infuriated Kanna even more.

“Fight me, at least!” Kanna shouted up at her, trying to strike her fists against the trunk in front of her, but finding that it was futile. “Don’t just stand there like you’re a goddamn rock!”

Goda pulled Kanna up sharply by the wrists. Face to face, their breaths mingling together in the cool air, Kanna had to stretch up onto her toes just to avoid the pain of a dead hang. Goda loomed over her, eyes wide, mouth tight.

“That is what I am: a rock,” Goda muttered, so low and calm that Kanna could barely hear it over the whistle of the breeze around them. “I’m just a heavy rock that you have been tied to. Do you scream at a rock? Do you blame a rock? Do you fight a rock? Act like you have some sense and don’t waste your life resisting me. Accept your fate and you’ll at least be able to change it going forward.”

Before the tension in Kanna’s body had fully died, Goda let her go. Kanna dropped down into the sand and fell to her knees. She grasped at Goda’s robes in order to steady herself, but the fabric slipped from her fingers when Goda turned towards a steel door a few steps away and began fiddling with the lock as if nothing had happened. Seeing no other choice, Kanna rose up from the wet earth, brushing the grit from her clothes, listening instead to the silence.

“That person you saw,” Goda said as she finished breaking open the lock, “he’s a slave.”

She turned the handle and pushed her way into the shed. A gust of dusty storage room air rushed out against them, but Goda walked into it with no hesitation. It was dark. Kanna couldn’t make out every object in the room with complete clarity, but she could see that the place was lined end-to-end with wooden shelves and that there wasn’t much room as they both squeezed inside. Even still, Goda managed to crouch down to take off her shoes before pulling a match from one of her pockets. She used it to light a half-spent candle in a holder bolted near the door, beside a tiny glass window on the wall.

She closed the door. They were alone.

To distract herself from the sudden awkward feeling, Kanna peered down the rows of shelves crammed with boxes and avoided Goda’s gaze. “The innkeeper has a slave?” she asked, if only to break the silence. She had not yet met anyone in her same situation.

“No.” Goda plucked the candle from its holder and held it out, closer to a rack that had seemed to catch her interest. “Civilians ordinarily cannot keep slaves, and certainly not a low-class innkeeper like Jaya. The man you saw works at the monastery. He belongs to the head of the temple, which is currently Priestess Rem, the woman who took our money and gave you your new clothes.”

Kanna tilted her head. She tried to make out Goda’s face in the dark, but through the shadows, all she could see was the straight line of her tensed mouth. “Then why was he in her house?”

“Why, indeed.” The light wavered with Goda’s movements and painted her face with wild flickers. It was only then, seeing the edge of contempt that had come over her expression, that Kanna realized Goda was irritated. Nonetheless, the woman said nothing else and pushed past her to rummage through the contents of a box on a nearby shelf.

“Do you know him?” Kanna asked, inching towards her with curiosity.

“I’ve known him for a few years, yes. I see him when I come by here. Sometimes Jaya asks him to help her with chores, but I’ve never caught her alone with him in her cabin until now.” Seemingly unsatisfied with what she found in the box, Goda moved onto another right beside it. “This is why male slaves are normally segregated from women.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you probably don’t. Hold this.”

She offered Kanna the candle, and Kanna took the stick gingerly between two fingers, avoiding the hot wax that had started to dribble down the sides.

“Were they doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing?”

“Probably,” Goda said—but again, she didn’t elaborate.

Kanna could take a guess. She wasn’t entirely sure what the local stance was on adultery, but from what she had heard, Middlelanders took their marriages rather seriously because divorce was uncommon and there was no polygamy as far as she knew.

Either way, she couldn’t imagine that the person she had seen running off into the plain would be fraternizing with a middle-aged married woman, considering his apparent youth. He had been around Kanna’s size, and she figured that if Middlelander women were so tall, then a fully-grown man would have surely been gigantic. Perhaps he had been a foreigner after all, as she had first assumed.

It was only then that it struck her that she hadn’t actually seen a male Middlelander before. Whether it was simply a coincidence or a deliberate feature of the culture she wasn’t sure, but even the soldiers who had arrested her and the guards who had watched over her had all been women. She tried to think back to her childhood, to the bureaucrats who would visit her father or to the tutors who had come to teach her the Middlelander tongue, but she realized that they had all been women as well.

No, that couldn’t have been a coincidence, she decided.

“Why have I never seen one of your men before?” Kanna ventured to ask. “All of the Middlelanders I’ve met have only ever been women. Even at the confinement center where they held me for two weeks, every investigator who came to interrogate me was a woman, too.”

Goda looked over at her with a crooked smirk. “You expect them to leave you alone with a man?”

“Would that really be a problem? I can take care of myself.” It hadn’t occurred to her that Middlelander men might have been especially untrustworthy. She had found that the women were aggressive, so perhaps the men were beasts themselves, but she still thought that the degree of segregation was ridiculous. The fact that she had never even seen a Middlelander man, now that she thought about it, seemed increasingly strange, considering how far the culture had spread across the continent just over the course of her lifetime.

But Goda’s expression didn’t change. She was either unconvinced, or she had meant something else entirely. “You’re a criminal,” Goda said, crouching down towards a large box on a lower shelf. “It would be dangerous to leave you alone with a man. What if you took advantage of him?”

“Hah?”

In that moment, an edge of wax slithered hotly down the back of Kanna’s finger and sent a trail burning across her skin. She cried out in surprise and let go of the candlestick on reflex.

The spark went out.

In the thin light that filtered from the dusty window behind them, she could see the outline of Goda’s hand grasping the candle and storing it somewhere out of sight. “Pay better attention,” she said to Kanna. “You’ve just arrived in a world that you don’t understand.”

Kanna tried to peer at her through the dark. She wasn’t sure what Goda had meant, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with candle wax. Moments later, she heard the box jostling, and then a rustle of fabric.

When Goda relit the candle, they were both standing over a pair of sleeping mats that had been unrolled onto the floor. There was barely a hair of space between the two beds and they took up the majority of the narrow aisle, so Goda had to step all over them as she made her way out.

She slipped past Kanna and over to the next row of shelves.

“You really have slept in this dirty shack before,” Kanna said with a wry look. “You knew right where to find those.”

“I have slept here many times, yes, but that’s not what I was looking for. I usually sleep directly on the ground, but since they’re here, we might as well make use of them.”

Kanna stared after her, watching as Goda craned her neck and glanced into every aisle in turn.

“You usually sleep…on the ground?” Kanna pressed her hand to her face and let out a loud breath. “All right, I really don’t understand this. You work for the government—the Middleland government—a wealthy country that has taken over every single block of usable land in some way or another, with the exception of the savage-infested Lowerland perhaps. You can’t tell me that they can’t spare the resources to give us better accommodations. I won’t believe you.”

“Believe it. Most of our money went to the priestesses for the cleansing, and I don’t get paid again until I’ve delivered you to your new master.”

“Nonsense. Certainly they’ve given you some kind of budget. You’re simply being a miser and hoarding it for whatever reason. Otherwise, on such a slim allowance, how would they expect you to drive me halfway across the continent?”

“They don’t,” Goda said.

Kanna blinked.

Goda ignored her confusion and continued to pace through the aisles, hovering over the rows of boxes, growing further away.

At first, Kanna didn’t know how to address such a nonsensical response, but it was true that half of everything that came out of Goda’s mouth made absolutely no sense, so she thought that she’d had better get used to asking lots of stupid questions.

“What do you mean they don’t expect you to deliver me?” Kanna tried, though she knew that this couldn’t have possibly been what Goda had meant.

“I mean exactly that.”

Kanna gazed at the woman in silence, but Goda seemed unperturbed by this and continued rummaging as she had before.

“If they don’t expect you to deliver me to a master, then what on Earth is the point of all of this?” Kanna said, raising her voice. “They must want something from me if they hired some brute to drag me around and waste my time, don’t you think?”

Finally, Goda acknowledged her—though Kanna quickly regretted it. The woman’s face was still cast in shadow, but it was close enough to the flame that Kanna could see her black eyes delivering an unnerving stare.

“It still hasn’t dawned on you, Rava,” she said. Something about her tone made Kanna recoil. “They don’t care if I deliver you successfully. They don’t care even if you live or die, or if I beat you while I drag you through the desert, or if I force myself on you at night. They don’t care. Your new master is the head of a government-owned motor factory, and she doesn’t care, either. You’re just a pair of hands to pull the levers. They arrested you to comply with the law and to keep you from your inheritance. Other than that, you’re a useless foreigner, a low-level criminal. That’s why you’re being taken across the continent by a low-ranking porter who can only afford to sleep in dirt.”

Kanna shuffled back on reflex, and her shoulders crashed into one of the shelves. She felt it teetering behind her, the contents rattling, but after a moment that stretched on far too long, it managed to stabilize.

She gritted her teeth. “You speak a lot of garbage, Porter. Wasn’t it you who told me that they pay you so much that I could never afford to bribe you?”

“They do. They pay me something that you could never hope to equal—but I didn’t say that it was money.”

Goda turned away and began searching through the shelves again, as if she had decided that the conversation was done, but even then Kanna wasn’t satisfied at all.

“Stop!” Kanna cried out. “Stop that for just a second and tell me what on Earth is going on!” When Goda ignored her, Kanna shuffled down the length of the rows until she had reached one aisle short of the woman. She didn’t have the courage to go further. Something about standing too closely to Goda still unnerved her and made her feel a strange emptiness inside. “What could you possibly be looking for anyway?”

Unexpectedly, Goda answered, “Fuel.”

Some of Kanna’s tension deflated with the abrupt reply. “There’s fuel in a place like this?”

“Yes, the innkeeper sometimes keeps fuel here, and sometimes I steal it from her.”

“She lends you fuel?”

“No. I steal it. Did you not hear me?”

Kanna made a face of disbelief. She wasn’t sure why she bothered to feel indignant about everything Goda said and did, when the woman clearly had no conscience.

Instead of complaining, Kanna shrugged. “The words for ‘steal’ and ‘borrow’ are the same in the Upperlander tongue, so sometimes I confuse the two in Middlelander,” she explained.

This time, it was Goda who looked perplexed. A strange smirk had come over her face. “Then how do you know when someone has stolen something or when they’ve borrowed it?”

“I don’t know. Context, I think. I always seem to be able to tell the difference in my native tongue.”

“Is that because you’re the one who is always stealing and borrowing, so you always know which is which?” The smirk had grown.

“You really shouldn’t accuse me of that when you’ve just confessed to me that you steal from your friend.”

“It’s nothing personal. To be honest, in a different world, I wouldn’t steal from her at all,” Goda said, pulling one of the boxes from the shelf and dropping it onto the floor with a thud, “but we live in this world, and I have a job to do.”

“Fine, fine. Don’t let something like integrity get in the way of your job,” Kanna huffed.

Goda looked up at her suddenly. “If you were lost in the desert with your best friend, hungry and fighting for survival because society had brushed you aside, and even the Goddess had abandoned you, what would you do?”

“I don’t know. Starve?”

“No,” Goda told her. “You would eat your friend. I promise.”

There was another strange silence after that, a pause that Kanna didn’t know how to fill. Goda took the moment to crouch down and pull a pair of lanterns from the box. She held one of them up to the light and pressed her thumb against a switch on the side.

A spark blinked to life. The filament gave off a warm, violet-tinted shine that made Kanna squint her eyes.

“Electric lanterns,” Goda said, smiling. “Batteries are expensive and scarce, so we’ll probably only be able to use them for a few hours, but they’ll be helpful if we need to walk around during the night. We might even take them with us when we leave, if the innkeeper doesn’t notice.”

With the lanterns in one hand and the candle in the other, she pushed past Kanna and made her way back to their sleeping mats. She dropped their loot nearby on the floor.

“I’d rather not be an accomplice to such trifling crimes,” Kanna complained. “You may not have any integrity, but I do.” Still, she followed Goda past their beds and towards the exit. She made no move to put the items back herself.

Goda pulled the door open, and the brilliant white light of the sun struck Kanna directly in the face. Even the shadow of Goda’s tall frame did nothing to lessen the blow, so Kanna shielded her eyes from it with her arm—but Goda stared straight ahead, as if she were used to gazing into it nakedly.

“It’s easy to have values and morals,” Goda said without turning around, “when your integrity has never been tested.”

They shuffled out into the sand. Kanna could see then, after her eyes had adjusted, that the sun was hovering much closer to the horizon than she had remembered.

Goda pointed across the plain, towards her truck in the distance. “Let’s get the rest of our supplies and settle in. Evening comes on faster than you’d expect this time of year, and soon it will be time to meet with the priestesses.”

Kanna followed Goda out into the open sands, but as they walked, she scanned the temple complex near the cliffs. She noticed the towers that had overwhelmed her before, and this time she found that they looked squat and unassuming in the distance. From where she stood, Goda loomed much higher.

* * *

Once the light began to wane less than an hour later, they headed out towards those towers again, and they met with the women in black at the threshold. As before, Goda knelt down in front of them, but she would not follow Kanna into the temple grounds.

“Don’t touch any of the priestesses,” Goda had reminded her as she had passed, but otherwise the porter had offered no instructions.

Kanna sat on the stone floor while one of the women in white—who was merely a temple assistant, she had now been told—crouched before her and examined her face. The woman tilted Kanna’s head to and fro, and Kanna bit her tongue and tried not to be offended at all the scrutiny. She took Kanna by the wrists, looked at her palms, prodded her arms in places that appeared random to Kanna’s eyes.

Before long, the assistant looked up towards the head priestess who had been observing over her shoulder. “I see no signs of Death.”

“None yet,” Priestess Rem agreed. She caught Kanna’s glance and smiled, though it was clear that the priestess had actually been staring at Goda at first—and that the porter had quietly fixed her gaze on the stone of the threshold, as if she were meditating about some distant place.

When they allowed Kanna to leave, she stepped back through the gate to find that Goda had pulled one of the electric lanterns out from under her robes. The glow of the lamp cast down brightly on the desert floor with the color of a sunset, and it was then that Kanna noticed how much the sky had dimmed. Across from her in the distance, the heavens were a weak pink, but when she glanced behind her, the cliffs were already disappearing into shadow.

Pebbles crunched with heavy footfalls. Goda headed off into the sands without a word, so Kanna quickly shuffled after her, ever mindful of the cuff’s silent threat.

“Do we have to keep seeing these people?” Kanna complained, still irritated from all the probing.

“Yes, every evening until your three nights of quarantine are over.”

“Why do they even care if I’ve eaten Death Flower? As long as I’m not smuggling any into the Middleland, what difference does it make?”

“That’s exactly how people smuggle it in,” Goda said. “They eat massive amounts of it and then they excrete it on the other side of the border.”

“They excrete it?” She wasn’t sure what that meant in a practical sense, and she couldn’t fathom how anyone could swallow large quantities of Death and survive, when she had heard that even eating a few petals of the flower was tempting fate.

Distracted with her morbid thoughts, Kanna did not notice at first that Goda had stopped for someone, and she nearly collided with a person who was heading in their opposite direction. Unconsciously, she stumbled around to avoid them, but because the stranger was politely offering the same dance with their own scraping sandals, both of them merely shuffled in place.

“Excuse me, uh…,” Kanna began to say, but when she caught sight of the androgynous face and the faint smile, she could not summon a title to call them with.

But she recognized the robes. They were made of the exact same spirals of color she had spied on the person running out of the innkeeper’s house, even if their brilliance was dampened by the dark. Goda’s light reflected in the young man’s eyes—and then Kanna watched those eyes widen with their own realization.

He bolted away, but Goda was quicker. She slid into his path and caught him by the arm, and once she had pulled him to her, he didn’t struggle. She hunched down until her face was close to his, their eyes meeting directly, their postures tense, frozen in mid-motion.

“Why were you in her house?” Goda asked. Her voice was low, but Kanna could still hear her.

“I was polishing the silverware.”

“You were polishing something. Did she threaten you?”

“No,” he said after a pause. “I came inside willingly.”

And then Goda let him go. There was a look on her face that Kanna didn’t fully understand, but she could sense a tint of relief in it.

“You get scarier every time I see you, Porter Goda,” he said with a tiny smirk that did not match his words. “All that time in the wilderness has turned you into a monster.”

“Thanks.”

Kanna stared at the both of them, baffled. Still, as she watched them watching each other intently, it occurred to Kanna that the young man had echoed her own private sentiment. Something about the woman kept Kanna on edge, and she felt like she was constantly on the verge of giving into her instinct and taking off running in the opposite direction.

Most of all, she hated Goda’s face. She hated the blank, insolent stare, the eyes that seemed open and empty like that of an animal.

“Where is this one from?” the boy asked suddenly, breaking Kanna out of her daze once again. He had fixed his glance on Kanna and was smiling pleasantly with curiosity.

“From the North-Western corner of the continent. Her family owned almost all the fertile grain fields in the Upperland, and all of the distilleries. She’s a member of the Rava group.”

“I see, I see. So this is one of the ruthless fuel barons, huh?” He tilted his head, craning his neck to seemingly get a better look at her. “They are an…interesting-looking bunch, aren’t they? Her skin is so pale. And what an odd shape her face has. Quite exotic!”

“Should you really be talking to a stranger in that manner?” Kanna asked him, immediately offended. “And I don’t know what fuel barons you’re talking about. You must have me mistaken for someone else. My family sold wine and spirits to the world. That is all we did.”

The young man turned to Goda with a touch of confusion, and his smile began to fade. “Is it typical to deny one’s crimes in Upperlander culture? Should I just play along with her, then?” He looked at Kanna with genuine concern. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to be impolite. I can lie to you instead, if you’d prefer.”

Kanna’s eyes widened with a jolt of fury. “I’m not denying anything!” she shouted. “What is wrong with you people?”

“Oh my, she’s angry. Maybe we should start again: It’s nice to meet you. I’m Parama Shakka, a slave just like you.”

After he said that, Kanna felt no choice but to hold back her ire. A slave like me, she thought.

“Well, I’ve embarrassed myself enough, I suppose,” he said to Goda. “I really should get going to the temple.”

“You’re heading into the temple at this hour? Isn’t the work day over?”

“Sure, but I have some translations for Priestess Rem that I’ve been working on and she asked me to deliver them after nightfall. All week, we’ve been poring over the text we extracted from the cavern walls, and she’s been staying up all night studying them.” He gestured towards the expanse just East of the temple complex, and though it was too vague for Kanna to tell exactly where he was pointing, she could see some cliffs barely visible in the evening twilight, just beyond the hill that she had climbed with Goda that morning. “Wait, that’s right! You don’t know what we’ve found in there yet, do you, Porter Goda?” He grabbed a handful of Goda’s robe sleeve. “Please let me take you up to the caverns to see the serpents! They look even more brilliant at night!”

“Serpents?” Goda asked, looking as equally confused as Kanna for once. “I’m not sure what you mean, but if we can catch them and cook them up, then I won’t have to argue with Jaya about dinner.”

Kanna gaped at Goda with horror, but before she could object, the young man waved his free hand as if to dismiss the notion.

“No, no!” he said, tugging at Goda’s robes playfully, seemingly having forgotten all about his delivery. “They’re not actual serpents. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll see what I mean when we get there. I told myself I would show you as soon as I had the chance. Please come!”

“I can’t play right now,” Goda said, holding as steady as she always did, though a little smirk had shown up on her face. “I have a prisoner with me.”

“You can just bring her along. I’m sure she’s never seen something like this!” He was gazing at Goda with soft expectation, with passivity, with his eyelashes practically fluttering.

Kanna found it extremely uncomfortable to watch. He was clearly too grown for such antics—his voice well broken, his proportions mature—yet he seemed to not mind how weak it made him look to hang on Goda’s robes with that coy little smile.

To Kanna’s surprise, Goda was not bothered. In fact, his theatrics seemed to amuse her and she conceded with a sigh, “Fine, fine. But this had better not be the kind of serpent you tried to show me last time.”

At that he scoffed, smacking her arm. “As if you deserve a second chance with me after acting so indifferent!” Still, his smile grew wider as the giant in his grasp had finally budged.

Kanna made a face at them both. “What are you people talking about?”

But before Kanna could make any sense of it, the silhouette of a looming monster—being led by a pixie yanking her sleeve—floated into the desertscape, into the darkness.

* * *

As it turned out, Goda did find an actual snake on the way to the caverns. Both she and Parama chased it a few paces off their path, but quickly enough Goda dove down and seized it by the tail, then she swung it over her head and beat its face against a nearby boulder. Parama finished it off by stomping on it with his sandal-clad feet.

Once the snake was very dead, Goda draped its body over her shoulders like a limp scarf and kept walking as if nothing had happened. Kanna had no time to react. Instead, she followed along when they rejoined her, her expression frozen in stunned confusion. She felt like she had just witnessed a murder.

In time, they reached a crag that was not unlike the small cliffs that the monastery was built on. It was higher up than the one Kanna had climbed the night before to get to their shelter, but it had a gradual walking path—thankfully, Kanna thought—that seemed to twist all the way up to an entrance in the stone.

Goda’s light shined a small halo of clarity as they moved up the trail. This was how Kanna kept her bearings, though the light would flicker sometimes and it seemed a bit less bright than it had before. She worried that the batteries were already running low, and because the details on the ground escaped her, she tripped several times—but Goda somehow knew to pause whenever it happened, to allow Kanna to run into the back of her robes and catch herself.

Parama brought them to the mouth of a pitch-black cavern on a ledge. Kanna could barely see a few paces inside because the light didn’t reach, but when she groaned with exhaustion from the climb, the sound took longer than she expected to echo back.

Kanna raised an eyebrow. “How deep does this thing go?”

She could see the outline of Parama’s face as an edge of Goda’s light hit his cheek. “Deeper than anyone thinks it does,” he said. He was grinning with pride.

They entered in a single file with Parama leading—and somehow knowing his way through the dark—while Goda trudged behind him holding the light, and Kanna, who was most hesitant of all, straggled a few paces after.

With only a spot of light to guide them, they walked deeper into the unknown, the entrance growing smaller behind them. Crunching footfalls melded together, every step fusing with the next, until all Kanna could hear were a series of smeared echoes that disoriented her. Every sound seemed to bounce back from forever away. It made her head pulse with a strange discomfort.

Goda turned the dial on the light until it brightened so much that the glare made Kanna flinch, then the woman lifted it up high over her head.

The ceiling erupted in color. Out of nowhere, dancing neon spirals of bright blue and pink and orange rushed along the walls. The ribbons spread until they coated the entire arch of the cavern, and though Kanna knew it was impossible, to her eyes it seemed like they had not been revealed by the light, but had rather been birthed out of the stone the moment the light touched.

Mystified by it all, Kanna stared. The deeper they went, the more the ribbons seemed to coil and expand and diversify, until she was looking at what appeared to be entangled snakes made of infinite color, etched with infinite geometry.

And they were moving. Kanna blinked, trying to shake off the optical illusion, but no matter how many times she closed her eyes and reopened them, the snakes had begun to glow and swell in time with the pulsing feeling in her head.

“What…what is this?” she asked—but she heard only her own voice echoing back to her in the void. She could no longer even hear her companions’ footsteps.

Kanna staggered closer to one of the walls. Staring into those endless spirals had begun to nauseate her, but she could not look away. Between the tangle of glowing snakes, she finally noticed words etched into the stone. She didn’t know what language and didn’t even recognize the script, but as she pulled away, she realized that the words coated almost every inch of the walls. They seemed to shine with their own source of light, but she could only see them where Goda’s lamp struck directly.

“Goda…,” she whispered. “Porter, do you see this?”

“See what?” Goda’s voice reached her after what felt like a long time. “There’s nothing to see here.”

“How can you not see?”

But then some of the light reached that insolent face. She smirked at Kanna. “You must be losing your mind,” she said.

Parama started laughing.

With that small confirmation of her sanity, Kanna allowed herself to grow entranced. She followed the winding path of the snakes. The rest of the cavern seemed to disappear, and the more she stared, the more she noticed the intricacy of their design. Where at first she had just seen colored ribbons, she now saw tiny scales etched into the serpents, and tiny shadows where each row overlapped the other. The deeper she looked, the more she could see, until she realized that the lines that formed the snakes were themselves made of smaller snakes—and that those snakes were made of even smaller ones—forever, in seemingly endless detail.

After a while, it felt like she had been drawn up into the serpents, like she had been swallowed into that infinity to become one of them.

But before she could come back to reason and remember where she was—before she could judge herself for becoming as insane as the woman who trudged in front of her—a deafening sound knocked her out of her trance. She wasn’t sure how loud it had really been, or if she had simply perceived it as a roar because it broke her concentration.

It came from the mouth of the cave. Goda snapped around to face it. A silhouette blocked some of the moonlight, a figure posed at the entrance far behind them, eyes shining straight towards them.

And then Goda’s light went out.

---

Onto Chapter 5 >>

Tiny whirlwinds blew dust across the plain and into Kanna’s eyes. It muddied her view of the women, but as she blinked through the haze, Goda grabbed her arm and led her out of the truck. This time, she did not flinch against the touch, because she had already come to expect it.

Goda brought her towards a tall threshold made of stone. It was the only break in a waist-high fence that encased the small mob of people, who were all closely huddled in the spreading courtyard until Kanna’s presence seemed to energize them. Black robes whipped and billowed with movement as the group split apart, each of the women producing a large clay vase from under their respective folds, each of the jars ornate with swirling designs.

Kanna could not see what was hidden inside the vessels—only the beginnings of a dark pit visible under the rims—but for whatever reason, in a flash of morbid fantasy she imagined a pair of coiled snakes in each one, ready to dance at the call of a piper.

Boldly breaking through the sea of black, a pair of empty-handed women in white robes had come to flank the edges of the gateway, too. They were so close to Kanna, just on the other side, that their mere presence made her nervous, and she jumped a little when a darker figure emerged suddenly between them. This time, Kanna recognized the face: It was the stranger from before, the one with the frozen smile who had watched Kanna arrive in the truck, though her stare was no less unnerving up close.

At the sight of this woman, Goda dropped to her knees, sending up a burst of sand.

Kanna glanced around with confusion. “What’s going on?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to keep her voice low, but something in the energy of the air did not feel friendly at all.

“Give her this.” Goda reached into her robes and produced a small pouch, which she offered to Kanna with no further explanation—but even through the velvet, Kanna could feel the texture of metal coins clinking and settling when she grasped it. “Just put it on the ground in front of her. Don’t hand it to her directly. Don’t talk to her. Absolutely do not touch her or any of the other people in black.”

Perplexed—and wanting to rid herself of this unexpected tribute—Kanna did not argue. At the line of the threshold in front of her, the loose sand ended and became a hard path, so she placed the pouch gingerly on the stone, right near the robed woman’s bare feet. Just as Goda had told her, she was careful not to graze the woman’s skin, but more out of a sense of avoidance than a respect for Goda’s word.

When Kanna made safe enough room between them again, the woman picked up the bag and met Kanna’s eyes with no sign of the polite caution that a stranger usually offered.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Kanna Rava,” she said—then she turned around and disappeared back into the mob.

Hearing her own name had never made Kanna feel so uncomfortable before. “How do they know me?”

She inspected the small crowd that had formed in front of her and her eyes fell again on one of the clay vases. It had two handles that flared out from the sides like wings, and the woman who held it kept a tense grip, knuckles turned white.

There was most definitely something inside—something that was about to spill over.

Kanna shuffled back.

“Stop,” Goda said. “Go through the gateway now.”

“What?” Kanna stared at the strangers, and every single one gazed back with frozen tension, as if poised to act. A wave of impatience permeated the air, but she wasn’t sure if it belonged to the group beyond the threshold or to the woman who knelt beside her.

“Go. Cross into the sanctuary and meet them. I can’t go in with you. I have to stay outside.”

Thoughts of escape had already flooded Kanna’s mind, but she knew better than to take off running. Even though Goda had cut the rope not long before, they were still tied together by an invisible electric thread, and seeing that she had little choice, Kanna took her first hesitant step through the gate.

The group waited. Their collective posture seemed to adjust as she grew closer. It looked as if a tight coil was being slowly wound up in each of their spines.

Kanna took another step, then another. When she was a few paces beyond the threshold and both her feet were firmly on the cobblestone path of the courtyard, she threw Goda another glance of confusion over her shoulder—but she did not turn very far before she caught some movement at the corner of her eye. Kanna cried out in surprise.

They were rushing her.

As if a clock had struck the time, they had all pushed forward together. Before she could even consider fleeing, four cold hands had seized her. The two women in white yanked at her robes and wrestled her off her feet, forcing her to kneel into the ground.

“Goda!” Kanna shouted, trying with all her strength to twist out of their grips. “Goda, what’s happening?”

But her master was silent.

When the mob closed in around her, their rising shadows blocked both the sun and the open desert. They looked upon her with hunger. It was as if they were aching to tear her limb from limb. Terrified, Kanna thrashed harder, until she managed to rip herself away and hobble onto her feet—but before she could even straighten her knees, an icy punch crashed hard into her back.

It sent her straight to the ground.

Kanna gasped. Freezing water crashed into her face, into her mouth. It flowed down her hair and rushed over her ears. It muffled every sound and chilled every piece of her.

Before she could understand what was happening, or even recover from the first freezing blow, another one came. Ice cold water splashed over her head, roaring like a waterfall, distorting the voice of a woman who cried from above:

“Awaken! Be cleansed by the Goddess!”

Then another woman came to take her place. Kanna braced herself when the stranger began to tip her vessel, but it made no difference. The water was so cold that she couldn’t fathom how it wasn’t solid ice.

“Awaken to the Goddess Mahara! Be cleansed!” the woman declared, drenching her thoroughly.

Then another came, then another. And they all were saying the same things.

“Goda!” Kanna cried out towards the sky, hoping that somehow her voice would carry over the tall strangers, over the rising threshold, over to where her master knelt in the sand. “Goda! What is this? Make them stop!”

Her voice cut out when she was drowned again by a vase full of water.

“Awaken!” her assailant demanded.

“I’m awake, I’m awake!” Kanna screamed, coughing into the ground. “Can’t you see that I’m awake?”

Another rush of cold smacked the top of her head, like a watery fist had come down from the heavens. The freezing sting seeped into her nose. She spat onto the floor and noticed that some of the women near her had moved back—but otherwise, the torrent continued.

One after another, they poured the contents of their vessels upon her until her vision had grown watery and unclear, until her muscles were so shocked that she couldn’t move.

“Goda!” she cried one last time in desperation.

She heard no words in reply. Instead, above the sound of the splashing water and the shuffling feet and the twisted blessings, a laugh sounded through the clearing. The voice was husky and full of life.

She didn’t want to believe that it was Goda.

A long time passed while Kanna braced herself against nothing. The assault had stopped. The rows of feet that had surrounded her dissipated just as suddenly as they had appeared.

She stayed there on her hands and knees, the wind blowing against that slick layer of cold water on her skin. She stared at the ground, her mind free of thoughts, her heart pulsing so hard she could hear its roar in her ears. Tears fell hotly against the ground beneath her, to join the cold water that dribbled from her soaked hair. She hid her sob well, as it folded naturally into her shudders, and she didn’t want anyone to hear her.

The first sign of warmth came as a towel that fell over her shoulders. She flinched at the touch, but when she looked up, she saw that one of the women in black had stayed behind. It was the same woman who had accepted her payment for all the torture.

“Dry yourself up, child,” the woman said. “And put these on.” Though she kept her distance and seemed to avoid leaning too closely, she dropped a neatly creased set of white clothes in front of Kanna’s hands.

Kanna looked past her and towards the path that led through the courtyard, between the two towers and up to a building carved into the nearby cliffs. The other women in black were filing inside the structure with their empty clay jars, though they did not murmur to each other, and they did not seem exhausted from their effort. It was as if nothing had happened at all.

When Kanna finally glanced over her shoulder, through the stone threshold she had left behind, she found Goda still kneeling in the same place as before—but bathed in dust instead of water.

A grin had spread on her master’s face.

“Are you sure you’re awake now, Kanna Rava?”

* * *

When Kanna stepped back out through the gate, fully dressed in white, she refused to look at Goda. Her stare fixed at the ground, she sensed Goda’s movements only by watching the tall shadow on the sand as it stretched out in front of them.

In a daze, Kanna had no idea what had just happened and she didn’t know where she could go—but she decided that she was leaving anyway, so she set her jaw and shuffled faster, pushing through the shudders that came with every gust of wind.

She did not stop even when the weight of a new burden fell on her shoulders, wrapping her in a loose cocoon. It was Goda’s outer robe, rumpled and messy over her much smaller frame, but warm enough to be an improvement as it overwhelmed her with the woman’s scent. She did not find this unpleasant in itself, but the closeness made her feel awkward. She shuddered again—this time, not for the wind.

“Cold?” Goda said, her smile faint.

“What have you done to me?” Kanna asked. It was the first phrase that rose to the top of her mind, though she did not actually know what Goda’s part was in the whole onslaught. Goda took her by the arm and cut her stride short.

“Earlier today, you said you were thirsty.”

Upon hearing that, Kanna didn’t know how to respond. “Are you trying to make fun of me?”

“No—but you wanted water, so now you’ve had some. The Goddess has blessed you, yet you still complain. Why?”

Kanna ripped her arm away and gave Goda a look of disbelief. The woman’s smile did not fade, but Kanna could not make sense of her intentions.

“I asked for a drink of water, not a freezing tidal wave.”

“You’re picky.”

“I can’t imagine you brought me all the way out here just for that. What an elaborate way to humiliate someone.”

Goda huffed with amusement. “It has nothing to do with your thirst for water or your thirst for humiliation,” she said. “We’re nearly at the border, and naturally you have to face a cleanse before you cross into the Middleland. Every foreigner does.”

“A cleanse?”

“Yes, of course. How else do you expect that the temple will stamp your papers? They won’t allow an unclean person into the Middleland.”

At this, Kanna narrowed her eyes. “You’ve slept on the same filthy ground as I have and been pelted by the same dust while we were in that truck, and yet they didn’t pour ice cold water over your head. It’s discrimination. And anyway, if they wanted me to bathe, they could have just said so and I would have done it myself.”

“But it wasn’t your body that they were cleansing—it was your heart.” Goda’s expression seemed entirely serious at first, so much so that Kanna almost missed the subtle wickedness that had come over the woman’s eyes.

“You must be joking.”

“Not at all. You went through the cleanse, and now you will be quarantined for three nights. We’ll have to wait here while they observe you for signs of Death.”

“Signs of…of what? Well, clearly, I’m not dead,” Kanna protested, a bit offended that Goda seemed to imply that she might have been carrying some disease. “As far as I know, there’s only one sign of that, and if I’m speaking to you, then we can rule it out.”

“No, they can tell you’re alive. They just want to make sure you’re not carrying Death Flower in you.”

“They’re looking for drugs?”

“Oh yes. Death is extremely illegal in the Middleland. People try to smuggle it in using different methods, but we can at least tell if someone has swallowed it recently by putting them through a cleanse. Those under the influence can’t regulate their body temperature very well, and so they become ill from the cold water.”

Kanna wrinkled her brow. “I would never eat Death Flower. What kind of person do you take me for, a Lowerland savage?”

Goda laughed at this. “It’s more than just the savages who eat Flower. Otherwise, the government wouldn’t have bothered to make it illegal.” She had already begun to shuffle away towards the truck, so Kanna picked up her own pace to follow.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Goda responded without turning around, “that the only things that are illegal are things that people would actually want to do.”

“I heard that eating Death Flower is extremely risky, that it can kill you if you have too much, and you can never tell how much is enough. Why on Earth would someone want to die?” She asked this, but a part of her regretted it because she had already flirted with the answer herself in recent weeks, and it was something she preferred to forget.

“You’d be surprised,” Goda said—but she didn’t explain any more, and once they reached the truck, she opened the back tailgate, which creaked and wobbled as much as the passenger door had. She pulled a pair of empty wooden buckets down from the bed and slammed the gate closed with her knee. “Come.” She tipped her head towards a sandy mound in the distance. “There’s a wellspring on that hill. Let’s go fetch some water.”

“Oh, I think I’ve had my fill of water today.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s not for you.”

Kanna stood there for awhile, watching Goda walk off into the dusty clearing. It wasn’t that she was refusing to follow exactly, it was simply that it bothered her that Goda had assumed that she would. But as soon as the woman was far enough away, Kanna felt the early sting of warning radiating from her wrist and she remembered that they were still joined by the cuffs—so she chased after her.

When Kanna caught up, they were only a few seconds’ walk from the foot of the hill.

“Who is the water for, then?” Kanna asked once she had caught her breath.

Goda nodded in the direction of a small cabin that sat opposite the temple. Kanna hadn’t noticed it before—but, then again, she had been too distracted to take a good look at their surroundings.

“For the woman who lives in that house. It’s actually an inn, and it’s our best bet for accommodations. She doesn’t like tending to porters, though, and she hates foreigners—even though she married one—so we’ll have to appease her with something.”

Goda pressed her boot against the sand at the bottom of the hill and some of it crumbled below her feet. It was smooth and flowed almost like water, but she stepped up onto the unstable ground with little hesitation nonetheless. Once she was a few paces up the hill, she glanced briefly over her shoulder and waited for Kanna to find stable footing before she continued the march.

“We’re going to appease her with two buckets of well water?” Kanna asked. She thought this sounded odd, but it was true that they were in a desert. Perhaps water meant more in a desert than it did in the meadows of the Northern Upperlands.

“She’s lazy about climbing the hill and squeezing the pump,” Goda said. “She tends to wait until the last minute, after she’s used up every drop, and then she’s so thirsty that the trip up here is even more unpleasant.”

“It sounds like you know her rather well.”

“We’re loosely acquainted.” Goda reached a steep section and pressed one of the buckets onto the ground to ease her balance. “I’ve stayed on her property many times when I’ve come to this border crossing because I can’t stay in the monastery like many people do.”

Noticing then that Kanna struggled, she dropped one bucket into the other and with her free hand helped Kanna climb up. They stood side by side on a flatter section of the hill, and from this higher vantage point, Kanna could see the building beyond the two towers and the courtyard where she had been assaulted by the women in black.

“A monastery,” Kanna said. “Then there must be a temple here. Those were Maharan priestesses, weren’t they?”

“That they were.”

“That’s right, I remember that you stayed behind when I crossed onto the temple grounds—but why is it that I could go in and you couldn’t?”

Goda pressed a hand into the earth and climbed onward. “Let’s just say that I’m also unclean,” she told Kanna with a pained smile, “but it’s not the kind of dirt that can be cleansed with a splash of cold water.”

Before long, they had reached the top of the hill, and though the ground had turned rockier, Kanna could see a small ring of green at the center of the summit. In the middle of the weeds, there was a rusted well pump and nothing else.

Goda grasped the lever with one hand and pushed her weight into it. It gave an angry creak, but cooperated anyway, and before long Goda’s arm and the handle of the pump seemed to meld into one machine. The tunic that Goda wore beneath her outer robes had no sleeves, and the sun was still bright, so soon enough Kanna could see the sweat of the woman’s effort forming on her skin.

Goda’s shoulders flexed tightly as she pulled the lever up, and when the handle reached its peak, she drove it hard back towards the ground, as if she were about to plunge her body into the earth. She grunted softly with mild effort, a sound that seemed meant to coax the rush of water. She looked completely absorbed, completely blind to Kanna’s presence.

Kanna fought the urge to step back. It made no sense, but it felt like she was watching something private, something she shouldn’t have been seeing at all. Don’t be ridiculous, Kanna thought to herself the moment she became conscious of the images that her mind was conjuring up. She’s just pumping water. And yet Kanna couldn’t understand why something so mundane could also appear so obscene.

She slithered out of the robes that Goda had covered her in, because she had become too warm for them all of a sudden and the way they smelled had grown too distracting. The wind quickly gusted against her and cooled her down. She had averted her eyes at some point, but when she looked back up, the scene appeared to change, and instead of a woman driving her body into the earth, Kanna merely saw a woman pumping water into a bucket.

The desert is making me delirious already, Kanna thought—but it was late wintertime and the weather had been cool, with the first warmth of spring yet to show itself. What bothered Kanna more was that her body seemed unable to make up its mind: Was she cold or was she hot? Maybe I did eat Death Flower and didn’t realize it.

When the buckets were filled, Goda handed one to Kanna. Kanna nearly stumbled as she took on the burden and she had to grip the handle with both hands to keep from dropping it.

“Don’t worry,” Goda said as she passed, picking her outer robes off the ground where Kanna had left them, draping them back over her own shoulders with a sweep of her arm. “It’s a lot easier on the way down.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

Goda smiled and trudged back down the hill, the overfull bucket in her left hand putting her only slightly off balance. “To give you some work. You’re a slave after all.”

* * *

Goda knocked the door of the cabin with the side of her fist, hard enough that it made the whole thing shake. This seemed extremely rude to Kanna, but she said nothing, and she wondered if it was simply another one of the strange Middleland customs that she didn’t know about.

“Always remove your shoes before you go into any Middlelander’s house,” Goda had instructed her when they had been making their way back down the hill. “Don’t point to any of her possessions directly with your finger. Don’t call her by her given name unless she tells you to. Most of all, don’t ask about her wife or her family—you probably don’t know how to ask correctly and you’ll end up offending her.”

The way Goda had made it sound, they were already teetering on the edge of being rejected for a place to spend the night. All these extra rules had made Kanna feel a bit uneasy. She wasn’t looking forward to searching for another cave and waking up again with sand in her nostrils, so she tried to look dignified by standing up as straight as she could, even with the full bucket weighing her down.

Still, her efforts made no difference. As soon as the door finally cracked open, it slammed shut again in Goda’s face, as if it were attached to a counterweight. The breeze that rushed out made Goda’s hair fly.

Goda showed no sign of frustration—or even of surprise. She merely pounded on the wood exactly as she had before, with the same unfazed expression. After another series of insistent knocks, the door opened, but the crack was even smaller this time. Kanna could see a single eye peaking out at them. “Go away, Goda,” said a voice that seemed attached to the eye.

Then the door slammed closed.

Once again, Goda knocked as if it had been the first time she had come up on the door, as if it hadn’t been shut twice in her face already. Kanna grew frustrated herself, shifting her weight from leg to leg.

“Don’t you think we should just leave her alone, then?” she whispered to Goda. “Obviously, she hates you.”

“Don’t be silly. She just needs to make a token effort to turn me away, so that then she can tell people that I wore her down and forced her to let me in.”

The door opened yet again, enough that Kanna could see half of a woman with tan skin and a middle-aged face. Her hair was curled and it fell over her eyes and hid some of the details of her features. She looked impatient. Kanna had the distinct impression that they had interrupted something.

“Didn’t you hear me, Goda? Go away. I can’t have any more criminals staying at my inn, and that’s all you ever bring here—thieves and drug dealers and blasphemers. It’s bad for business! What are people going to think when they see that you’re always loitering at my cabin?”

Goda lifted her bucket of water. “I’ve brought you a gift.”

“As if I couldn’t go up that hill and fetch it myself anytime I want. You haven’t saved me any trouble.”

“You seem a bit more disagreeable than usual,” Goda said with a touch of curiosity. She had the tone of someone trying to diagnose a mechanical failure. She tilted her head and peered through the door, past the woman and into the house. “Ah, there’s someone in there with you. Is it your wife?”

“No. My wife is in the Middleland. She had to go across the border to fulfill her residency requirements and she can’t come back yet.”

Goda craned her neck a little more, and the woman shuffled to step in her way and block her view.

“Then she’s a citizen now, is she?”

“Well, almost. She’ll have her papers in less than a month.” Though the woman had responded, she sounded aggravated with all the small talk. “Why should you care anyway, Goda? Are you going to send her a letter of congratulations and a bouquet of flowers?”

Goda smirked and glanced down at an empty basin that was near the door. “I see that you’re out of water, so I’ll leave this here.” She dropped the bucket. “We’re not trying to cause any trouble. If you’re too embarrassed to accommodate us, then I can just take my slave out to the back, and we can spend the night in the storage room. I remember the combination on the lock.”

Before the woman could even reply, Goda began walking. Kanna glanced back and forth between Goda and the angry woman behind the door, and not knowing what else to do, she followed her master’s stride. Before she left, she tipped her head in a slight bow, but the response from the woman was simply a glare.

“I don’t owe you any favors, Goda,” the woman called after them. “Go find some hole in the desert to sleep in, and take that little outsider with you.”

Goda stopped. She did it so abruptly that Kanna nearly ran into her, nearly spilled the contents of the bucket that she was still holding.

“Don’t worry, Jaya,” Goda said, glancing over her shoulder with a neutral expression. “I won’t mention anything to the priestesses about who I saw in your cabin. The Goddess frowns upon gossip, after all.”

The woman in the crack of the door said nothing for a long moment. Her face had turned a bit pale. “Go to hell,” she said finally—then she added, “I’ll bring you the towels and linens in the evening, so don’t come looking for them inside. And don’t make a mess of the place, for God’s sake.”

With that, she slammed the door a final time, and the force sent a rush of sand skidding across Kanna’s feet.

---

Onto Chapter 4 >>

When Kanna jerked awake, she was inside a chamber that she did not recognize. The air smelled like soot. Cold rock scraped against her as she stirred, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a stone ceiling above her, which was scarred with strange markings that she could not read.

The sun struck her hotly in the face as soon as she lifted her head. It was shining against her through the mouth of the cave, and it was only then that some of the memories came rushing back. She couldn’t remember falling asleep the night before, but she could recall watching the fire wane until the last few coals had died and left her in pitch darkness.

She sat up with difficulty, her bones creaking and complaining as she forced herself up from the hard floor to glance around at the cavern.

It looked different. In the dim glow of the evening before—and through the distraction of trying to pry herself loose from the rope—she hadn’t noticed the carvings along the walls and the ceiling. Some of the weathered indentations had traces of color as if they had been painted ages before. They were arranged in neat columns, so she guessed that it was writing, but the glyphs made no sense to her. They were like the meaningless geometric shapes that she could see whenever she tightly closed her eyes.

But her eyes were fully open. And she could see that she was alone.

While the rope was still tied around her wrists, the woman who had captured her was nowhere in sight. Kanna wondered briefly if she was still dreaming, but she dismissed the thought and hobbled onto her feet.

She edged slowly to the mouth of the cave, her hands coming up to shield her face, her eyes not yet adjusted to the light after so many days of murky dungeons. When she plunged herself into the full bath of sunshine, she caught sight of movement down the side of the crag and nearly stumbled in surprise.

A few ledges down—crouched over a puddle that had been left over from the storm—was a naked woman. She was scooping up muddy water that had pooled in a crevice of the rock, and she was splashing it onto herself while the sun’s rays played brightly against her skin. Her back was wide and lean and bronzed. Her muscles tensed as she took a deep breath and pressed a handful of water to her face.

Because Kanna had never seen the woman unshrouded by shadows before, she did not realize at first who it was. Startled, she slid back. Her feet shuffled against the gravel and sent a few pebbles tumbling down, and this was when the woman seemed to finally notice her.

Goda looked up.

It was the first time that Kanna had seen her face in clear light. Her features were handsome—unfeminine, though not quite mannish. Her jaw was a bit too angular; her mouth was soft.

The woman offered no words. Kanna felt like she had interrupted some animal during a feeding. She wanted to avoid that gaze, but she fought through it and tried not to be afraid, if only because the splashing of the puddle had awakened a more insistent need in her.

“Do we have water to drink?” Kanna asked. As she said it, she realized that there were still grains of sand stuck to the sides of her teeth. Her mouth was bone dry.

“You can’t drink this.” Goda’s neck-length hair fell partly over her face, but her stare shined brightly through that curtain. The eyes were dark, only a few shades lighter than the pupils themselves, and Kanna found that they made the gaze unnervingly direct.

Kanna took another step back. “What can I drink, then?”

Goda did not answer at first, but after what seemed like a moment of contemplation, she turned away from the water. “Come,” she said. Seemingly unashamed, she stretched onto her feet and reached for a pile of clothes that were strewn nearby, but Kanna tried not to watch her as she dressed.

Even when the woman was finished and glanced up at Kanna with expectation, Kanna hesitated. The urge to take off running had still not left her, and seeing the coiled potential of the huge woman’s body had done nothing to ease her fear.

But Goda’s voice was firmer the second time: “I said come.” She slung her satchel over her shoulder, the cylinder inside visibly jostling. She stepped up towards the ledge that Kanna was perched on, and it was then that Kanna finally conceded.

She crawled her way down the crag, her elbows scraping against the rocks. It was hard to move with her hands bound. Once she had reached Goda’s side, the woman grabbed her by the arm and led her the rest of the way down to the desert floor.

As they were walking away from their refuge, Kanna glanced up towards the cavern that they had slept in the night before, morbidly curious to see how far she had dragged herself. She stopped.

“What is this place?”

It wasn’t at all the pile of boulders that she thought she had climbed in the dark.

They were ruins, carved with all manner of exotic symbols. The outside of the cave at the top was decorated with relief images of animals, and humans, and fantastical creatures that she couldn’t identify. The threshold of the cave was more angled than she had remembered, too, as if it had been sculpted into the stone with tools and intention.

It looked completely different in the light; it had transformed somehow, just as Goda’s face had.

Kanna felt a tug on her arm, but when she began following Goda again, the hand let go, and the end of Kanna’s rope dragged uselessly along the ground. They left the ruins behind and headed towards a gravel road that they had abandoned the night before, back when the storm had first begun raging—and back when Kanna had rejected their refuge to take her first chance in the darkness.

“It’s an ancient religious site,” Goda said, answering Kanna’s question all of a sudden. “The work of some long-forgotten cult.”

“You mean it’s not a Maharan shrine?” Kanna didn’t know much about the Middleland religion, but she knew that nearly all Middlelanders exclusively worshiped the same deity—a goddess called Mahara—and that the highest-status people in the country were the priestesses who ran the temples.

But she had never seen a temple before. The few Middlelanders that she had met—bureaucrats and business owners who worked with her father—had always been stingy with details, as if they were keeping some huge secret from her.

Goda was still facing away as she walked on, gravel crunching beneath her feet. She shook her head without turning around. “This site is old. It predates the spread of the Cult of Mahara to the Outerland Desert. Nobody knows what this building was for. Even the script on the walls is too ancient to be intelligible. It might be some precursor to modern Middlelander script, but it’s indecipherable to us now.”

Kanna glanced over her shoulder at the structure one last time as it began growing smaller in the distance. “You seem to know this place well.”

“I stay here sometimes on the way to the Outerland confinement center—the place you were held until last night. It’s convenient, near the road. I can stop here to pray at sundown.”

“So you’re religious.”

“You could say that,” Goda told her, though her tone was dismissive. “To be honest, I don’t believe in the Goddess. Not everyone does. But everyone worships Her all the same.”

Kanna gave her a strange look, though the woman couldn’t see it because she was still trudging ahead. Kanna had always thought that Middlelanders were weird about rules, that behind their icy smiles they were far too concerned with keeping up strict appearances, but she couldn’t fathom how that cold superficiality could extend even to matters of faith.

Lost in these thoughts, Kanna did not notice that she was falling behind. She felt a faint buzz in the bones of her right hand, a discomfort that had already become too familiar. Thirty-five, forty paces. The woman’s words from the night before echoed in her mind, so she shuffled quickly to close the growing space between them.

“Guard!” she called out to her in mild panic. It was the first label she could think of. She knew that Middlelanders were picky about how to address people, and in truth she wasn’t completely sure if “Goda” was the woman’s personal name or if it was simply a title in the Middlelander tongue that she had overheard the soldiers using to address her.

At any rate, her call had some effect. Goda turned around. “I’m not a guard,” she said, some mild annoyance in her voice. “I’m a porter.”

“All right. What do I call you, then?”

“‘Porter.’”

Kanna felt a frustrated sigh building in her chest, but she suppressed it. “Porter Goda,” she said, deciding that it sounded formal enough, “my feet are still cut up from last night. I can’t walk as briskly as you can.”

“Then don’t.” Goda’s face was blank.

“Believe me, I’d actually be happy to not follow you at all.”

“Then don’t.”

Kanna tried to stifle her irritation. She looked at the ground as she gritted her teeth. “Obviously, I have to, otherwise I’ll be shocked by this thing again.” She bent her wrist hard against the metal cuff, but it was too solid to give even a little.

“You don’t have to,” Goda said. This time, there was a faint smile. “You could just let the shock happen.”

“Are you playing with me right now?” Kanna asked. “After everything you told me yesterday?” The muscles of her arms grew tense again with the unspent rage of the night before. “I’m really tired of this abuse. You have no reason to treat me this way under the law. I know my rights, and as soon as your Middleland government finds out that you tied me up and refused me water and—”

“When did you lose your shoes?”

“What?” Kanna found that Goda was staring at her feet. She could not hold back the glare that naturally came over her face. “Don’t tell me that it’s only now that you’ve noticed my shoes are gone.”

“I didn’t say that. I asked when it was that you lost them.”

Kanna stared at her with confusion. “I don’t know! It was sometime last night when I was scrambling to get away from you. I lost them somewhere in the desert.”

Goda looked at her feet in silence for a long enough time that Kanna began shuffling to avoid whatever unspoken judgment hung in the air—but then, soon enough, Goda started down the road once again without any explanation.

“Hey!” Kanna called after her, picking up the pace, kicking up clouds of sand in spite of the growing ache at the soles of her feet. “You can act as dismissive as you want, but you don’t know what I’m capable of doing, Porter. Make no mistake, I will escape. I don’t know how yet, but I will. Even if I have to work through the fibers of this rope with my own fingernails, I will do it! Even if I have to gnaw through the metal of this torture device with my own teeth, I will be free before you even notice that I’m gone!”

When they came within view of Goda’s small truck—the one that they had ridden out into the wilderness the night before, the one that the soldiers had forced Kanna into—Goda was still ignoring her. The woman yanked on one of the rusted doors, then reached inside, rummaging underneath the seats.

Kanna opened her mouth to make some kind of objection. She wasn’t sure what to say, but she wasn’t ready to give up the impulse of resistance that was coming over her, and she had no intention of getting into the truck without a fight. “If you’re not going to listen to me or treat me like a human being, I’m not going to—”

Then she saw that the woman had turned around with a knife in her hand, and quickly she closed her mouth. Goda took a step forward at the same time that Kanna took a step back.

“Be still,” Goda said.

She did not sound amused by the dance between them, but neither did she seem too bothered as Kanna flinched away, because she was easily stronger. She took hold of the rope and kept it steady against Kanna’s squirm, and she pointed the teeth of the knife towards Kanna’s hands.

Goda cut the rope.

The binds fell away. They rained down onto Kanna’s feet in a few pieces, and their absence made her arms feel suddenly light. Even still, she kept her tightened fists pressed together for much longer than it took for her to be freed. The binds had come off so readily that she could not shake the feeling that they had been a mirage all along.

Goda reached into the truck again, producing a pair of sandals and two jars of water from some compartment beneath the seat. She thrust one of the jars into Kanna’s hands, and Kanna immediately drank, nearly choking in her desperation. She paused only when she noticed Goda stooping down, and she flinched at first when Goda gripped her by the ankle, but soon enough her fear gave way to astonishment.

The woman was washing Kanna’s feet.

When she had finished, she guided them gingerly into the sandals, stretching back up only once Kanna was standing solidly in place.

“Not quite the right size, but they’re men’s shoes, so it’s as close as we’ll get,” she mumbled, giving Kanna’s feet one last glance—and then she climbed into the roofless truck.

By the time Kanna’s surprise had begun to wear off, Goda had started the engine. It rattled uninvitingly, much too loudly for a rig that was barely larger than a pair of horses, but Kanna followed Goda inside without waiting to be called.

She slammed the door shut after herself, and the hinges wobbled so much that she wondered if they were about to fall off.

“Is this what they gave you to work with?” Kanna asked in disbelief as Goda gripped the steering handle and the truck choked forward onto the road. “The government of a wealthy nation like the Middleland?”

“It’s not always this shaky. It only really gets like this when the fuel is almost out.”

But Kanna wasn’t merely talking about the trembling engine. Until the day she had been captured, she hadn’t even seen a truck since she was a child, but she was still fairly certain that this wasn’t a mint-condition example. Either way, she decided that it was more tactful not to mention how the paint was flaking on the outside or how the leather that lined the seats was falling apart.

“They didn’t give you enough fuel?” Kanna asked instead.

“They barely rationed enough to get me to where they were holding you. I couldn’t squeeze any from the soldiers, either. There’s been a shortage lately.”

“A shortage of fuel?”

“Yes, of course,” Goda said, pushing on a lever that increased the speed. The rattling grew along with the momentum. “The government has even resorted to mixing in plant oils to keep the motors running, but impure fuel wears at engines like nothing else, so now there’s a shortage of those, too. We have a lot to thank your father for these days.”

Kanna furrowed her brow. “Do you people blame everything on my family? Is that how this works? I don’t even know what you’re talking about. We distilled spirits for generations. All we did was make people drunk and happy. That has nothing to do with this piece of junk we’re in right now.”

The last part had escaped her lips unintentionally, but when she cautiously glanced at Goda, she saw that the woman wasn’t offended. Instead, she was smiling with genuine amusement.

“If you don’t like this piece of junk, then you can always walk behind the truck instead. You can even push it for me when we run out of fuel.”

Kanna tightened her grip around the jar of water she was holding. “I can never tell if you’re serious.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she said, then she looked ahead, at the dirt road that was rushing endlessly towards them. “I’ve known you for less than a day, and everything you say seems designed to make me sound stupid and dramatic. But you’re wrong. I’m justified in how I feel. I know you’re trying to do your job, but how can you so easily forget that you’re transporting someone who has just been abandoned by her family and betrayed by her own government? Wouldn’t you also resist the situation if you had been sentenced to be a slave? Wouldn’t you want to escape?”

Goda’s smile had faded. The gravel crunched under the wheels monotonously for a few seconds while the question seemed to hang in the air. The moment Kanna was sure that the woman was ignoring her again, Goda answered:

“No.”

That was all she said.

Angered, Kanna looked away from Goda’s face and towards the empty landscape speeding by. But after some time, she began to notice that the desert hadn’t been as featureless as it seemed before. She wasn’t sure if it was because they were heading West—towards a lusher part of the continent—or if those patches of weeds and occasional flowers had been straddling the roadside the whole time.

As her gaze moved up towards the horizon, she could also see structures in the distance. Sometimes they were close enough to the road that she could make out details: the intricate carvings in the stone, the wide steps that led up to platforms at the top of squat little pyramids.

This time—perhaps because she was no longer thirsty and because she wasn’t walking on her sore feet and because the wind was whipping pleasantly against her face—she was able to let go of enough irritation to indulge a seed of curiosity.

“What is all of this?” she asked.

“All of what?” Goda’s hair was dancing around her face, but Kanna could see that her eyes were trained on the road.

“All of these buildings, these ruins. They’re empty, in the middle of the desert. Are these like the place where we spent the night?”

“Roughly. Abandoned shrines are everywhere out here, near the border of the Outerland and Middleland. This used to be a sacred place a long time ago. Nowadays, people visit the modern temples further West. Have you never taken a pilgrimage?”

“No. I don’t follow your religion and I’ve never left the Upperland. I’ve never even visited the Middleland before, so everything I’ve ever known about what lay outside my country came from people’s stories or from books.”

“Then why come to the desert? Even if you’re trying to flee soldiers, it’s just about the most dangerous place you can go if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not the best spot to take an unplanned holiday.”

Kanna stifled the scowl that was growing on her face. She wondered if the woman was just playing dumb with her for entertainment on a long, boring drive.

“When I jumped on that train to escape the soldiers, I had no idea where I was going or what I would find on the other side. What option did I have, anyway? As soon as we got word that the Upperland royalty had signed the final treaty with the Middleland, we knew what that meant: They were going to take everything and enslave us. There was no way we could have paid the generations’ worth of tributes that the Middleland demanded in back-taxes. My half-brothers and half-sisters scattered like a herd of spooked sheep, so I couldn’t rely on them. My father took his favorite wife and fled to the desert. I secretly followed him onto the train, even though he insisted that I stay behind.”

“Why would you do that? Seems like a waste of energy. You’re all but guaranteed to get caught if you’re in the company of a high-profile criminal. May as well have stayed put.”

Kanna gave her a strange look. “He is not a criminal. And besides the fact that I didn’t know where else to go, I love him, of course. He is my father, for better or for worse, even if he wanted to abandon us. Wouldn’t you do the same if your father tried to disappear on you?”

Goda shrugged. “I don’t know what all of that is like. We don’t have fathers in the Middleland.”

At that, Kanna began to tilt her head in confusion, but then an old memory came floating back. It was something that her Middlelander language tutor had mentioned years before: She had explained to Kanna that the word for “father” in the Middlelander tongue didn’t actually exist, and that it was instead borrowed from the Outerland tongue, because Middlelanders didn’t have fathers. The woman had not been a full-blooded Middlelander herself, so Kanna had dismissed the notion as a misunderstanding and had long forgotten about it.

“How on Earth do they have children, then?” Kanna had asked back then. Even in her youth, she had been skeptical of such wild stories. You couldn’t have children without a father, and the Middlelanders had reproduced like vermin mice, so they clearly had no problem there.

She couldn’t remember most of her tutor’s lengthy reply; she could only remember that it had made no sense to her at all.

“Is it true that women marry other women in the Middleland?” Kanna asked Goda. She had remembered that part, at least.

Goda let out a huff, something like the edge of a chuckle. “Who else would they marry?”

“Men?” Kanna offered, though with the way Goda’s smirk widened, she wondered if there was some third option that she was forgetting, too.

“No, no. All marriages are between women. Men don’t get married. How silly. What would a man do in a marriage, anyway?”

Kanna raised an eyebrow, taken completely aback. She had known that Middlelanders permitted marriage between women, but she hadn’t realized that the practice was so widespread. In the Upperland, it was occasionally permissible, but only between people of wealth who could flex their status over the clergy. It was hard to find a priest that would agree to such a union, even after the Middleland had begun to absorb the Upperland kingdom and infect it with strange customs.

This made Kanna start to wonder if she had been living in a bubble after all. The family breweries and distilleries had been perched far beyond the bordering mountains, isolated for hundreds of years, and her mother had never let her venture very far.

It was ironic, she thought, that she was suddenly so free to discover the far reaches of the continent only because she had been enslaved.

Well, she hadn’t been enslaved yet. She would still find some way to escape before it came to that, and in the face of this urgency, she told herself that she didn’t have time to contemplate the Middlelanders’ quirks.

But each time she tried to be quiet and focus on a plan, the contradictions kept dancing at the forefront of her mind and it was harder each time to shove them away. Finally, when she had stared enough at the rusted floor of the truck and found that the curiosity hadn’t waned, she let out a sigh of defeat.

“All right, fine,” she said, convinced that the answer would be something stupidly obvious, “if women and men don’t marry each other in the Middleland, then how do you all have so many children?”

Goda looked at her strangely for a long moment, long enough that Kanna was worried they might veer off the road. Her smirk had grown a bit crooked. “That’s why we have so many,” she replied. “Two mothers can carry more children than just one, wouldn’t you say?” She turned back to face the expanse ahead of them. “How silly.”

But it still made no sense at all to Kanna. She must have been missing something critical. She was not entirely fluent in the Middlelander tongue, so she wondered if it had to do with the language barrier after all.

Rather than try to decipher something so ridiculous, she folded her arms over the ledge of the shaky door. She rested her chin on her hands and closed her eyes as small bits of dust pelted her lightly in the face. She could have ridden forever in that nothing; she was too afraid of what she was going to find at the end of the road.

When the truck lurched to a stop and coughed a few of its last breaths a half hour later, Kanna was convinced that something went wrong. She flicked her eyes open and whipped around to face Goda.

“Did we run out of fuel?” Kanna asked.

Goda was grimacing and shaking her head, but only because her brown hair had once again fallen to drape the sides of her face and it was savagely windswept from the drive. It made her seem even more like a wild animal, like some beast about to pounce on top of Kanna and consume her with those grinning teeth.

For a reason that Kanna didn’t fully understand, this brought an uncomfortable swell to her face. She won’t touch me, Kanna told herself. If she was going to touch me…in that way, she would have already. Still, she slid back and away from Goda, out of a lingering sense of fear.

“We’re nearly out of fuel, that’s true,” Goda said, already stepping out of the truck. She stretched her long body with a grunt of effort as soon as her feet hit the ground. “But that’s not why we’ve stopped. We’re here, you see.” She pointed somewhere behind Kanna’s shoulder.

Kanna turned, and at first she had no idea what she was looking at. The tops of a pair of stone towers seemed to puncture the sky, but when she followed the lines down to the base of the structures, she noticed something queer about them both.

Gathered in the shadows of those two monoliths, a group of hooded strangers had formed. There was only one standing in the glint of the sun, where Kanna could see her face. This woman was staring directly at the both of them—an unwavering, unblinking stare that made Kanna wonder if she had spotted the bust of a statue rather than a human face.

The statue smiled.

---

Onto Chapter 3 >>

Kanna’s feet were bleeding. She couldn’t see them in the dark—and she hadn’t dared look down—but she knew that the soles of her feet had been cut open on the rocks. She imagined a trail of blood spotting on the ground behind her, leading that looming figure in the distance ever closer.

A low boom rumbled through the plain. Kanna did not realize it was thunder until she looked over her shoulder, just in time for a jagged vein of light to flash across the sky. The burst was strong enough to show the landscape for one glaring second. It allowed her to see the face of the tall woman who had been following her.

She saw only an empty pair of eyes. They glowed white like the moon, like the gleaming stare of an animal.

Kanna whipped her head forward again. She clenched her hand around the steel cuff on her wrist, but could not pull it free with all her strength. Through the pain, through the pounding of her heart in her ears, she ran full speed across the desert. She had no idea where she was going. She only knew that if she cut through the dark long enough and fast enough, that she would lose this shadow eventually.

Her feet grew numb. She ducked her head as she ran, wary of the lightning overhead, but she did not allow herself to slow her frantic kicks. Her self-made cloud of dust turned the air thick until it burned her lungs.

But then something shocked her into a standstill. It was so sudden, she nearly tripped into the sand.

At first, she was sure the shock had come down to strike her from above. It felt like a tiny lightning bolt running down the side of her body, a searing heat that started from the metal cuff around her right wrist and buzzed inside her bones—though it quickly swelled into every other part of her, too.

She winced and ignored it and tried to keep running, but with every staggering step, it grew more intense until she couldn’t swing her arms. Her legs locked up. Her heels skidded against the ground. She cried out, but her voice was drowned by the sound of thunder.

Kanna fell face-forward into the dirt. The electric shock gushed through every branching nerve. Her muscles tightened and spasmed, her fingers digging into the ground without her consent. When she sucked in a breath to let out a scream, her mouth was filled only with earth.

In no time at all, a pair of feet appeared beside her. Though the pain was suddenly gone, it had also taken most of her strength with it, and Kanna struggled to look up at the tall figure that stood above in the dark.

A rope, swinging limply like a noose, dangled down from the woman’s hand and tapped Kanna lightly on the face.

“I told you not to run,” the woman said, but Kanna felt like it was the first time she had ever heard that animal speak. “Now hold still.”

With some last reserve of energy, Kanna lifted her head. Her mouth full of sand and little else, she hawked everything she had at the tall woman’s shoes. That mix of dirt and spit coated the old leather like a gritty soup.

Kanna closed her eyes, bracing for the kick.

But it did not come.

* * *

The woman’s face was framed by the blackness of the sky. Her features were indistinct. Everything except her eyes had been smudged with the dark, and raindrops were flowing down from the back of her head, across her cheeks, down to where they dripped ice-cold into Kanna’s own eyes.

Kanna blinked. The rain was mixing harshly with the warm water at the corners of her eyelids, the water that she had been trying hard to keep from coming out. She set her jaw. She did not move her gaze away, even as the woman—whose name was Goda, Kanna now remembered—hovered over her with an indifferent stare.

They had made their way up a small crag after the torrent had started to fall, but Kanna had given up halfway to the top. She had turned herself limp, and so far the woman seemed uninterested in dragging her.

“Pouring rain in the desert,” Goda said. “Isn’t that something?” Her voice had no inflection. She was perched on the ledge of a boulder just above where Kanna lay against the gravel. She was sitting cross-legged, casual, seemingly unbothered by the sounds of struggle that came from below and the storm that raged above. “There’s no point in fighting your restraints. You already know what happens when you try to escape.”

“Shut up,” Kanna muttered, trying to pull her hands out of the knotted rope that was digging into the skin of her wrists.

“You’re still willing to risk it again, even now that you know what it’s like? Thirty-five, forty paces. That’s all you have. Forty paces of freedom at the most, then the shocks will come again. And they’ll just get worse and worse the further you run from me.”

Kanna gritted her teeth and pressed the rope hard against the edge of a rock. She sawed it back and forth, trying to see if the jagged edges would cut through the fibers. With every thrust, the metal cuff on her right forearm clacked loudly on the stone. With every thrust, she grew even more exhausted.

Goda watched her and made no move to intervene.

“If the shocks are supposed to stop me from running,” Kanna huffed, “then why did you bother to tie me up with rope?”

“For your own good. Sometimes even the shocks aren’t enough. Some people are masochists and will keep running until they pass out from the pain. It’s not a good idea. You could accidentally die.”

Goda jerked the other end of the rope suddenly, and Kanna’s hands slipped against the rough stone beneath her. She winced. A pair of shallow red pools had formed under her palms where she had skinned herself against her restraints.

“Come.” Goda tugged again at the rope, pulling it up towards the ledge, all but forcing Kanna to stand.

Kanna resisted. She rolled onto her knees, but she would not stand up. “I’m not a dog.”

The shadows of the woman’s face stretched into a smile. “If you were a dog,” Goda said, “then this rope would be around your neck. Be grateful for what you have.” She yanked on it again—hard—until Kanna felt the resistance in her arms starting to waver. “Now come up and climb the rest of the way with me. If you turn yourself into dead weight, I can guarantee that you won’t like the way I’ll carry you.”

Kanna let out a breath of resignation. With the last of her strength, she reached up and grasped the stone above her. Goda seized her arm to pull her up the rest of the way, and with a painful effort between the two of them, Kanna found herself lying on her back beside the woman.

The black sky was marred with streaks of white that rained down on them both. The water soaked every part of her, and now that the warmth of her resistance had faded, Kanna’s body was quickly overtaken with shudders.

She wanted to vomit. She leaned over to do that, but when she coughed, nothing came out.

Goda looked down at her with no shred of pity. She gestured to the mouth of a den that was formed by the boulders a few steps away. There was a light coming from inside, a light whose rays danced wildly in Kanna’s watery vision.

“Let’s go,” Goda called down to her through the noise of the growing rain. A crack of thunder echoed in the distance. “I know you don’t want to be out here. Neither do I. I already started a fire inside the hollow.”

Kanna shifted onto her elbows and knees. She forced herself to crawl towards the entrance, but the sharp pebbles that littered the ground made every forward shuffle painful.

Goda, who had already started to walk ahead of her, stopped suddenly and tightened the slack of the rope. “Get up,” she said, her voice low in her throat, just loud enough for Kanna to hear over the storm. “Get onto your feet like you have some dignity, or I really will treat you like a dog.”

When they both ducked into the shallow cave, Goda sat near the threshold and was careful to snake the rope away from the fire. She pulled the front of her robes tightly closed, hid her arms underneath the layers, then turned her gaze squarely towards the coals. Kanna collapsed at the opposite side of the fire, glancing across the flames with nervous expectation, but the woman had already begun to ignore her.

Kanna waited. With nothing to run from and no one to fight anymore, every second felt stretched. The unnerving silence tugged at her like a tensed cord about to snap. It was intolerable.

“I want you to cut me from the rope,” Kanna finally said.

“It’s fine to want things,” Goda answered, but she didn’t look up. Her dark eyes had grown blank, merely mirrors that reflected the glow of the fire.

“I won’t run away.”

“You ran once. You’ll probably try again while I’m asleep.”

Kanna looked down at her own joined hands. She ran her fingers against the single metal cuff that wrapped around her wrist, where it was tucked just under the rope. She tightened her mouth. “I’m not going to run. I just want to move my arms again. Don’t you think that goddamn electric cuff is enough to deter me? Like you already said, I know what it’s like to be shocked by it now. At first, I thought I was being struck by lightning. Why would I try to run after that?”

“If you had any sense, then you wouldn’t. But I’ll assume that you don’t.”

Kanna squeezed her hands into hard fists, so that she felt her forearms swell uncomfortably against the rope. The binds did not give. They seemed to only tighten further. Her body tensed once again with the whole of her frustration.

“Cut me loose!” she cried, and she rammed her bound hands against the floor of the cave. “Cut me loose!” Her voice wavered.

Goda glanced at her with no emotion. “Don’t get so excited. You’ll only hurt yourself.”

Kanna slammed her hands on the stone floor a few more times, but it did nothing except send the force of the blow rattling up her bones. She saw that she had smeared a bit of blood onto the ground. She stooped down and pressed her face against the crook of her arms and tried hard to suppress the tears that were threatening to fall.

“What do you want?” Kanna pleaded. She was so exhausted that the words left her mouth in barely more than a whisper.

The woman didn’t respond.

“Is it money?” Kanna asked, looking across the fire to study Goda’s face. The eyes that stared back at her held no reaction, not even a shadow of interest. “Whatever they’re paying you, we will pay more. My family will double it. Just take off the rope and unlock the cuff and turn me loose.” The beginnings of a sob cracked open in Kanna’s chest, but she held it back. “Please.”

“What they pay me is something you could never afford, even if your family toiled for a hundred years.” Goda picked up a twig that was lying by the edge of the fire and used it to shift some of the coals. “It would be better worth your while to work off your family’s debt to the Middleland than to pretend that you’re capable of bribing me.”

“We’ll get back what they stole from us,” Kanna said, clenching her teeth. “Once they realize the mistake they’ve made, your Middleland will have to free us and pay us back. You’ll regret the way you’ve treated me.”

“Wishful thinking. You’re lucky, anyway, because your slavery is temporary. What is it, a ten-year sentence? Not everyone is quite so fortunate.”

Kanna stared at the charred ground. “My father has life.”

“Better than death.”

“You don’t have the right to judge that sort of thing from where you sit, with your hands on the other end of that rope.”

“Fair enough.”

It was only then that there seemed to be a brief flicker of emotion on Goda’s face—or it may have been the fire that was making confusing shadows dance across the woman’s eyes.

At any rate, Goda’s expression quickly grew neutral again. It was empty of any lines of tension or even any lines of age. In fact, ever since they had come in from the dark, it was clear that the woman was a lot younger than Kanna had originally assumed. There couldn’t have been more than a ten-year difference between them at the most.

For some reason, this unsettled Kanna even more.

“Why do you work for the government?” Kanna blurted out into the silence. “Doesn’t someone your age have something better to do with their life?”

Goda raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have the right to judge that sort of thing with your hands on the other end of that rope,” she said, her tone flat enough that it took a second for Kanna to catch that she was mocking her.

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “Then untie me.”

For the second time, there was a ghost of a smirk on Goda’s face. “You’re too new at this to know where a mouth like that will get you. Lose those habits and gain some humility while you still have a sympathetic audience.”

Kanna rolled over onto her back. She felt the fibers of her shirt—which were waterlogged and made of sackcloth—digging uncomfortably into her skin. Her uniform was ill-suited for the weather, but the soldiers who had arrested her had made her wear it anyway.

“People like you aren’t sympathetic to people like me.”

Goda didn’t respond. There was nothing, not a bare shade of offendedness.

Kanna laid her bound hands onto her chest, and for a moment she watched her knuckles rising and falling with her ragged breath. “Middlelanders think they own the world,” she said, growing a bit bolder. “Every single one of you acts like a slimy tentacle for your Motherland, worming your way into the lives of people who never asked for your help, or your money, or your laws…,” she tensed her jaw, “or your debts.”

At this, Goda’s smirk widened. “If you think you’re going to get me to turn you loose by giving me a speech about politics, then you’re sorely mistaken.”

An uncomfortable glare of light flashed at the corner of Kanna’s eye just then. When she turned to look for its source, she saw that Goda’s left hand had emerged from underneath her robes to reach for another handful of wood. Around her wrist was a polished metal cuff that reflected the fire. It was similar to the one that the guards had clasped onto Kanna’s arm earlier that night, only thicker, with its edges more sharply defined.

Kanna stared. “Is that…how you tracked me down when I ran earlier?”

Goda gave her a blank look at first, but then she followed Kanna’s gaze and glanced down at her own wrist. “Yes,” she said. “This is the counterpart to yours. But it doesn’t tell me where you are; it only tells me how far away.”

“Does it give you an electric shock the way it did to me?”

“No. I have the master’s cuff and you have the slave’s.”

“Not surprising. I wouldn’t expect Middlelanders to play fair.”

“You’re forgetting who the prisoner is.” Goda tossed another bundle of sticks into the fire. A wave of sparks blew in Kanna’s direction. She closed her eyes against the biting heat. “It’s your first night with me, and we’ve only known each other for a few hours, so I’ve been very patient with you,” Goda said. “I’ve allowed you to run off and feel the punishment for yourself. I’ve allowed you to resist me. I’ve allowed you to insult me. But now it’s time for you to shut your mouth and accept your situation so that we can both get some sleep.”

“Or what? Are you going to beat me?”

“Yes, if you’d like.”

“Isn’t that against the law?” When the Middleland soldiers had initially arrested her, they had locked Kanna in a room and forced her to sign paperwork while they explained her rights. One of the things they had been most adamant about was that no one would beat her.

“We’re not Lowerland savages,” one of them had told her when she had cowered in a corner of the room. “We don’t abuse our prisoners.”

But now the amused look on Goda’s face unnerved her.

“You’re being transported in the dead of night, with no one except me to escort you,” Goda said. “Tell me, where exactly is the law? Do you see it anywhere? Point to it if you can find it, and I will take a look at it before I beat you.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. “My father’s brothers will find us,” she rambled, a feeling of panic coming over her. “They will track us down and they will rescue me, and then you will be dragged to the Upperland and—”

“And what?” When Kanna pulled back and did not finish, the woman nodded slowly. “There’s nowhere for you to go. Your family fortune is gone. As I understand it, by Upperland standards, you’ve had a privileged life—but all that ends now. If you want my advice, stop fighting your fate. It’s really not so bad. Even former slaves can become full citizens in the Middleland if they fit the requirements.”

“I’d rather starve to death than become a citizen of your Middleland.”

Goda shrugged. “Then starve to death.”

“Do you act this casually about everything?”

“I see criminals all the time. Do you think you’re the first one to tediously complain about everything?”

“I’m not a criminal!” With the last few ounces of effort that she had stored up, Kanna tugged hard at her restraints, letting out a frustrated groan when no amount of resistance seemed to make a difference. “I didn’t break the law!”

“You happily lived from the fruits of your father’s crime. This all comes at a price.”

“But it isn’t just.” Kanna struggled until she felt the pebbles digging into her elbows. Her fingers grasped at her bonds, though all she did was scratch herself with her own nails and draw fresh blood on accident. Thunder roared from the other side of the cavern’s threshold, but just as before, Goda paid no attention to any of it–not to Kanna’s groaning and writhing, not to the storm that overpowered it.

“We all pay a price to the Mother, Kanna Rava. Her milk may be the richest, but it’s also the costliest.” There was a sardonic smile on her face as she leaned back against the hard stone behind her. In the relative shadow, she seemed to almost fuse with it. “And if there’s one thing the Mother doesn’t tolerate, it’s tax evasion.”

“I didn’t do anything! I—”

“Shut your mouth and go to sleep.” Her tone was flat, as measured as it had been before, but her voice had grown suddenly gruff, and it echoed through the cavern with a metallic ring. Goda tipped her head towards a satchel that was propped against the wall of the cave. “In that bag,” she said, “I have a steel baton.”

She did not elaborate further, but it was enough to make Kanna recoil. “Is that a threat of some kind?”

“Yes. Of some kind.”

The fire crackled. It was the only thing that seemed to ease the otherwise stunned silence in the room.

Kanna studied the woman’s face because she wasn’t sure whether to take her seriously. She didn’t understand Middlelander people well enough to be able to tell when they were bluffing, especially when all she had to go on were a pair of eyes so barren of any clues.

But none of that really mattered, she quickly decided. This giant was at least two heads taller than she was, and those shoulders looked quite broad from what Kanna could see over the robes, so even an empty-handed beating from the woman would probably leave her half-dead.

Goda said nothing else. Instead, she rolled over onto her side and pulled her outer robes tightly around her. The other end of the rope was still wrapped around her hand. As she tugged it closer to her chest, her eyes began to slowly droop closed.

The woman’s breath steadied in time. Her body twitched once or twice, but soon enough her muscles grew slack and her lips parted as her jaw relaxed.

Kanna stared at her. Something about the situation made her even more restless than before. Something about Goda’s sleeping face outraged her. As the minutes passed and the fire waned, Kanna’s anger only grew—because her own body was abuzz with energy, with the makings of a fight that had never happened.

Briefly, she thought of testing the rope to see if Goda’s grip on it had loosened, but she didn’t know the woman well enough to be able to tell how deeply she had fallen asleep.

Kanna huffed. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the ground as she watched the fire grow ever dimmer. She looked around the room, her brain still flying with a thousand thoughts, with a thousand elaborate plans of escape.

Her eyes fell abruptly upon Goda’s satchel. When she looked closer, she could see the outline of something solid through the damp cloth—something, Kanna thought suddenly, that she could use to bring an end to the situation.

One good strike to her head. The idea bubbled to the surface of Kanna’s mind before she could censor it. One good strike to her head with all of my strength and I’ll be free.

Kanna leaned in the direction of the bag.

Won’t that…seriously injure her, though?

She slid across the floor, then stopped when she realized that she was making some noise. She jerked her head towards Goda and looked to see if the woman had stirred at all.

Goda’s eyes were closed. She was taking in long, deep breaths. And so Kanna inched closer and trained her eyes on the bag.

As she moved, she studied the shape of the bat through the cloth of the satchel. It wasn’t very long, but she imagined a solid steel club didn’t need much length to be effective. It looked thick enough.

Of course it won’t injure her, Kanna thought. It will kill her. A brief vision flashed through her mind. It only lasted half a second, but it made her stop where she was: It was an image of a spattering red pattern coating the walls of the cave.

If I strike her head, I will kill her.

Kanna had stopped just arm’s length from the satchel.

The only way to keep her from following me is to kill her.

She reached for the bag.

I will kill this woman.

Kanna hesitated. Her throat felt drier than it ever had in her life. Her fingers began to shake as she touched the fastening of the satchel.

“I…can’t,” she whispered.

But before she could pull back, a hand caught her by the wrist with a loud smack, a hand that was as warm as it was stiff.

Kanna tried to recoil on startled reflex, but the hand clenched like a vise. With shaky eyes, she followed the path carved out of the bones of that hand, down a sleeve-covered arm, down to a face that looked up at her with curiosity.

A bead of sweat ran down Kanna’s forehead.

The woman’s olive skin had turned a bit red, but she didn’t seem angry. It was some other emotion that Kanna couldn’t understand.

“This isn’t—I—,” Kanna started to say. “It’s not what it looks like!”

“What is it, then?” Goda’s voice was low and husky, little over a whisper. Her tone had no trace of accusation.

“I…I just want to defend myself, I….” Kanna swallowed hard, then felt the rage from earlier returning. “You’re the one who threatened to beat me! What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Were you going to kill me?” Goda asked softly. Kanna was horrified to see that the woman was smiling. “And then what? After you killed me, then what were you going to do?”

“I wasn’t going to kill you!”

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

Kanna stared at her with alarm.

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

Goda finally let go of her and sat up, stretching her arms over her head. Kanna fell back from the sudden loss of tension. She hit the floor hard and it made her wince.

“I’m not a killer,” Kanna whispered. She felt the heat that she had suppressed before finally rising to the back of her eyes. It teetered on the edge of spilling over.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m not a savage—and I’m not about to become one, no matter what you people think of me.” Against her will, she felt the tears finally coming out. She pressed her hands to her face and covered her eyes. “I don’t kill to get my way like you Middlelanders do.”

“Relax. No one has killed you yet.”

“And my father? My family? Our livelihood?” Kanna said, her voice wavering, a series of sobs jerking through her chest. “You people may not conquer us with weapons anymore, but your methods now are just as cruel—worse, even. You’ve destroyed my family with a stack of paperwork.”

“Your family has blood on their hands as well. This is the cycle of life.”

Kanna lowered her hands to find that Goda was looking at her with an unreadable expression. “What are you talking about? Don’t insult us. We’ve done nothing to deserve this and you know that.”

Again, Goda shrugged. “Maybe you’ve been too sheltered to appreciate the full picture of what’s going on. It’s easy to give up blame when your ignorance kept you well-fed.”

“You know nothing.”

“Maybe so—but not any less than you seem to know, Kanna Rava.” Goda was sliding down to the floor, closer to the dying flames. “Don’t tell me that you don’t at least realize that your family was producing poison for generations. It’s a poison that everyone wants, one that practically serves as blood for our society now, but it’s poison nonetheless. Don’t you ever wonder about the damage you’ve done?”

Kanna furrowed her brow. “You know nothing,” she repeated. “And if you don’t stop talking about my family like that, then–”

“What?” Goda smiled at her again from her place behind the fire. “Are you going to kill me?”

The challenge hung in the air, unanswered, its echo fading into the night. And when the flames finally died, a long silence had passed between them. Goda had drifted off to sleep and Kanna could no longer even see the outline of that cursed baton in the weak light of the embers, and so her murderous impulse had faded, too.

When she looked at Goda’s slackened body, she could only make out the shape of the woman’s face and hands, which were lying limply near the edge of the fire pit. Goda’s fingers were open, pressed against the dirty floor.

She was no longer holding the rope.

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