Kanna’s eyes were open. She could see the outline of the clouds rushing overhead. She felt like she was suspended in some brilliantly gray void, because the watery mud that had broken her fall had also made her weightless against the ground.

The train rushed away, its wheels scraping along not far from her feet. All of the shocks had faded. She turned her head to look at the arm that half-floated in the mud beside her, and she felt relieved to find that the cuff was still around her wrist.

Kanna sensed the giant before she even saw her. She lifted her head to peer down towards the end of the tracks, and she saw a landscape of flickering light that made the curtain of rain around her glow with life. Emerging from that veil was Goda Brahm. Her image strobed with the landscape itself—pitch dark, then blindingly bright, then pitch dark again. Kanna wondered if it was really the lightning or if her own eyes had started to falter and revive in turn.

When Goda crouched down beside her, the look on the woman’s face held no question. It seemed she had already accepted any reason, any explanation. It seemed that Goda did not care. It seemed that Kanna didn’t have to say anything at all.

Still, she did: “Who are you?” Kanna croaked out. The effort of shouting against the blowing wind made her have to turn over and cough. Her muscles hurt when she moved, but it wasn’t from the impact of the fall. She was exhausted from running, from evading—though with another forced burst of energy, she managed to get up onto her knees, to look up at the stooped form of the giant and to hold her master’s gaze with dignity.

“Who the hell are you?” Kanna shouted again, her tone accusatory. “And how can I be so happy when I’m so miserable? Tell me!” She rammed both her hands hard against Goda’s chest, and Goda’s brows flicked up in confusion. “You know why, don’t you? You know why, but you’ve never told me; you kept it from me like some kind of secret. Look at you! Look at that empty face! Now I know what I was seeing when I looked in your eyes, and why it terrified me: You’re happy. You don’t want anything. You sleep on top of rocks, you eat food that tastes like dirt, you have to scrounge your supplies from the garbage, the world wants to send you to Hell—but you’re happy! You’re so happy to be alive that you barely even mind if you die! What kind of a lunatic are you? How do you live like this?”

Goda merely stared at her, another crazy smile coming over her eyes. The lightning flashed again and it sent colors dancing across her face. It seemed, Kanna thought, that the giant had assumed the question was rhetorical.

It wasn’t.

Kanna slammed her palms against Goda’s chest yet again. She gritted her teeth. Her gaze didn’t waver. “How do you do this? Why are you like this? Show me! I want to know. I have to know. I can’t live the rest of my life not knowing what black magic you’ve tapped into that’s turned you into this; it would eat away at me every day!” She heaved a loud, shaky breath. She hung her head towards the ground and pressed her hands to her face. “People like you don’t deserve to be happy—not when the rest of us try and try, and grasp and grasp; not when the rest of us exhaust our spirits searching for the best life, the best food, the best pleasure, more security, more freedom, more love; not when the rest of us resist and fight against all of the evil things around us, hoping that once—just once—we’ll be able to taste an ounce of contentment. You don’t even try, Goda. You won’t even give us that. You won’t even pretend to try. That’s what I hate the most about you!” She fell forward, but she caught herself with her hands, and she pressed them against the ground as she cried. “Show me why you’re like this, you bastard!”

Then, through the grit of the mud, she felt a set of long fingers snaking down to clasp against her own. Kanna jerked her head up.

Goda’s face was framed by the light of the sky, the water dripping down from the giant’s hair and falling into Kanna’s eyes. “I can’t show you,” Goda whispered. Goda took her by the hand and helped lift her up out of the mud, until they had both stood up to meet the freezing rain. She smiled down at Kanna with a look that Kanna hadn’t seen before, a look she couldn’t interpret. “But you can see for yourself.”

* * *

Instead of following the well-trodden path of the tracks, Goda took Kanna into a grove of trees that scattered through a line of empty lots, and they found a trail inside that hid them from the street. Kanna could see the shapes of buildings through the holes in the thicket as they walked, but they flashed by quickly, and the space was dark enough that she doubted anyone could see them.

At first, she hadn’t been entirely certain why Goda chose the route, but then she noticed the collection of military trucks concentrated on the main road, near the trading building that Kanna had used as a landmark. She stopped to peer through a few of the trees.

The soldiers were milling around near some twisted heap in the gravel, and in spite of her recent experience, she still couldn’t help but recoil when she saw what it was. It was a woman, very clearly dead, blood and drool trickling from her mouth as she lay motionless with her eyes still open. The air about the soldiers didn’t match the gruesome sight at all: they were standing casually, some of them flashing lights at the body, some using their knees to prop up clipboards stacked with paperwork.

Wide-eyed, Kanna turned to glance at Goda, who had also slowed down to catch a glimpse of the mess. “Is that…?” Part of her didn’t want to know, but the fact that so many soldiers had come to poke and prod at the body with such keen interest made her wonder.

“Yes, probably,” Goda said. “That’s what it looks like when they discover someone who has died from swallowing Flower. Most people can’t keep it down, but those who don’t purge often end up like this when they’re not vessels. You bleed from the inside out. Your breathing slows and eventually stops. The dead body becomes a vessel itself, though, so the soldiers wrap it up and hide it so that no one will eat of it.”

“People eat the body?” Kanna shouted.

“Quiet.” Goda yanked Kanna by the hand and pulled her along, so that the scene was no longer apparent through the trees. “It is said that Flower can cure any disease. Whether that’s true or not is up to interpretation, but the important thing is that people believe it, so yes they siphon processed Flower from anywhere they can get it because it is safer to eat.”

After stumbling across a few gnarled roots in her effort to keep up with Goda’s strides, Kanna finally ripped her hand away from the giant’s grasp. “Stop jerking me around!” she grumbled. The rain had thinned out, but the sound of droplets splashing against the leaves above still competed with her voice, so she found herself raising it louder than intended. “I’m not your slave anymore.”

At this, Goda tilted her head. A smirk came over her face. “Is that right?”

Kanna crossed her arms, refusing to take another step, though Goda hadn’t yet tried to pull her along again. “That’s right. I could have easily escaped and I chose not to—not because of you, but because of my own reasons.” Kanna found that her mouth was suddenly coming up with justifications for what she had done. When she had been speeding down the track, away from Goda, her reasons had seemed perfectly valid, but with some distance between her and that moment, it suddenly felt too humiliating to admit that she had leapt from a moving train car simply to be with Goda. “I spared your life this time,” she continued, “but I could easily take the cuff off at any moment. Your life is in my hands. If anything, doesn’t that make you the slave now?”

Goda stared at her in silence for a long moment, her eyes intense, her expression overcome with surprise.

Then she laughed out loud. Her shoulders shook with the fits and she had to press her hand against a tree trunk to keep herself steady. She laughed so hard that she started wiping the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Do you want me to prove it to you?” Kanna cried, her tone becoming so hysterical that even she herself nearly broke out into a laugh once she heard it echoing back. She didn’t know why she was saying what she was saying; she couldn’t stop herself, but for once it was like she was watching herself think and say these things, instead of being the one who said them.

Kanna stopped.

She looked down at her body, at her cuff-covered wrist, at everything she could see around her that excluded her own face. Something had quite abruptly connected in her mind. “Is that a snake?” Kanna blurted out. She looked up at Goda. “Is that a snake that was talking just now?”

Goda’s eyes widened again, but this time it wasn’t with surprise—it was with the closest thing to excitement Kanna had ever seen on the woman’s face. “Yes!” Goda said. “You see?”

Kanna began to nod slowly, entirely bewildered. The truth was that she didn’t see—not really—but she had started to feel an inkling. If that had been just one snake inside her that was talking through her…then how many were there?

But it still sounded like half-nonsense to her—even if it was disturbing nonsense—so she tried to put it out of her mind, and she followed Goda when the woman began trudging through the thicket once again. She fixed her focus on Goda’s image, on what she could see of the woman’s body in the bath of moonlight that had started to break through the clouds as the rain died off. She watched the muscles of that back stretching to and fro with every stride; she lowered her gaze a bit more and watched the motion of some of the more pleasing forms and flesh.

She didn’t feel ashamed of it anymore.

“I lied,” Kanna said after awhile.

Goda didn’t answer and kept stalking along through the trees, and Kanna couldn’t help but wryly think to herself that the monster was distracted because she was in her natural habitat.

Kanna let out a low sigh and sped up her stride and reached out to touch Goda’s back. “I lied about a lot of things,” she said, feeling the body flex beneath her fingers. “I lied about why I jumped off the train. I jumped because of you. I don’t know what that means yet, but that’s the reason why. I also lied about how I feel. I don’t hate you. I feel something strong towards you, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s not hatred.” She drew closer, until she could smell the mud that was smattered in patches on Goda’s skin. “You were right. It’s not just your body that I want. It’s something more dangerous than that.”

Goda stopped. She turned to glance over her shoulder at Kanna, who was now nearly pressed up against her. “We can slip out through here,” Goda said, pointing towards an exit to the trail. “We’re close enough to the house now that we probably won’t draw any notice.”

They pushed out through the trees and onto the gravel, which felt jarring against Kanna’s bare feet because she had grown used to the soft dirt of the grove. Once the house was in their sights, Kanna noticed Goda’s old satchel strewn on the ground, along with the leather scroll that they had discarded in their haste. Kanna picked them both up.

“You lied, too,” she murmured. “That first night, you told me that this was a steel baton, that you were going to beat me with it.” She turned the scroll over in her hand, but kept walking because Goda had not stopped. “What is it, anyway?”

When they reached the opening in the fence, Goda still had not answered, but she looked down at the mess of footprints that littered the floor of the entrance. Kanna couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that not all of those tracks belonged to her or Goda.

But Goda pressed on. She glanced over to make sure that Kanna was nearby, and it was then that Kanna finally noticed the giant’s exhaustion. Together, they slipped quietly back into the house, where Kanna found the space to be empty of anyone’s presence; it was only the Goddess that stared at them from her new spot at an altar near the door. The faint smile on Her face seemed a touch mysterious; it reminded her a bit of Goda’s earlier smirk.

Goda was still smiling faintly when they passed through the threshold of their shared bedroom. Distracted with dropping the satchel and scroll on the floor near the wall, Kanna didn’t notice the strange energy at first. It was only when she stretched up again and glanced at the room that spread out in front of them that she realized it had changed.

Just as before, the room was smudged with shadow, the only light coming in from the moon and stars through the window—but something was different. When she had awoken in the room earlier, every corner in the chamber had stood out to her as some frame that confined her from her escape. Now, she hardly noticed the walls, except as vague silhouettes at the edges of her vision, as curtains that shut out the rest of the world.

She heard Goda push the door closed behind them. She heard the latch click shut. She heard Goda’s soft breathing, because the room was in total silence, because the clock had stopped ticking, because the weights that drove the clock had already touched the floor and no one had changed them over.

Kanna slowly turned to look at the naked woman who was leaning against the door next to her. Goda’s face was empty again, unconcerned, the face of someone swimming in an eternal moment that never ended.

But there was something else, too. There was a small edge of tension in those muscles; not the tension of a creature in the midst of hesitation, but rather the posture of one easing to strike. Kanna drew in a sharp, shallow breath. Primal fear washed through her, but by now she knew how to face it, and what it really meant.

The giant took hold of her neck and squeezed.

When Goda lashed out at her, Kanna did not waste her time acting shocked. She met Goda’s kiss with an open mouth, even as the woman dug her fingers into the back of Kanna’s head and roughly took a handful of her hair. Goda groaned into that mouth. Kanna felt the sound shooting into her bones through her teeth. She let the giant press her hard against the wall.

Still, Kanna made a production of fighting her off—because it was her job to not make things too easy. She pushed against Goda’s chest, so that she could feel the giant leaning harder, overpowering her, drawing her in against her struggles. When Goda stooped down to kiss her again, in the midst of their increasingly messy tangle of arms that were each grasping to touch and invade and caress, Kanna bit hard into the woman’s bottom lip.

Goda pulled back and pressed her hand to her own mouth. In her eyes, there was no pain, not even the ghost of a wince. She only looked serious, her eyes locked on Kanna’s face. She was mirroring Kanna’s focused stare, a stare of desire that was free from need or expectation—only a knowing.

It made Kanna feel naked, even though her robes remained slickly against her skin. Kanna gritted her teeth and gave Goda a look of disapproval. “The bed,” Kanna told her. “The bed!”

Goda jolted forward and grabbed Kanna by the neck of her robes and dragged her across the room. She threw her onto the mattress. She took hold of the bottom of Kanna’s robes and jerked the fabric up to uncover Kanna’s legs, and the sudden rush of air made Kanna shudder. She felt the confines of her clothes peeling wetly off her skin, until she was left with nothing, until there was no longer a barrier between her and Goda’s body.

Goda replaced the barrier with her mouth. She pressed it to Kanna’s neck, to her chest. She straddled Kanna’s hips to keep her still, though Kanna didn’t struggle anymore. Instead, she reached up and took Goda’s head in her hands and forced the woman’s face back up to hers. They kissed, and Goda’s breath flowed lightly into her. Kanna felt the edges of her eyes watering, but she didn’t know why.

The energy of her body was floating up again underneath her skin, but this time she didn’t resist it. She let that feeling melt into the spaces between her and Goda. She let her hand slip down along the front of the woman’s body, and she took a handful of what she found between Goda’s legs.

Goda huffed against Kanna’s lips in surprise, and this made Kanna smile.

She squeezed—not hard, just hard enough that she guessed it would make the giant writhe with discomfort, but Goda only pressed further against her. Instead, Kanna found that it was she who was taking in a nervous breath all of a sudden. She had never touched anyone like that before, and the sensation was as jarring as it was arousing.

It was warm. It was already slick with something, and that pleased her. Like the rest of Goda, it was hard and soft at the same time, which made it…different from what Kanna had there herself.

That was not completely surprising. She remembered when she had stolen a few glances during Goda’s shameless baths, that it had looked a little different, but she hadn’t thought much of it because everything about the Middlelanders was different. But touching it now, it felt different, too, much more than it had merely looked, especially now that Goda was….

Kanna shook her head. It was no time to bother with thoughts. Regardless of the shape of the skin there between them, its growing warmth aroused her just the same, and it sent the pulse of her heart throbbing down to the place that mirrored it on her own body. She reached up with her other hand and pulled at Goda’s hair, urged her into another kiss, felt their ragged breaths mingling together in the otherwise silent room.

Goda seized her roughly. It knocked the air out of Kanna’s lungs; it sent that energy beneath her skin up and out of her body, where she felt it fuse with Goda. Her nerves were racked with shock, with the beginnings of a sensation that seemed like it would either transmute into a tantalizing fire or else force her into stiff resistance again.

But she didn’t have the time to find out. With a loud crack, the door to the room flung open and rammed against the wall. Kanna felt herself collapse back into the shell of her skin. She turned her head on reflex, and she sensed the woman on top of her convulse similarly with surprise.

In the middle of the threshold, eyes opened wide with panic, hands digging hard into the frame of the door, stood the boy who had been on his deathbed. He was no longer shuddering; his face had regained its color. Kanna had barely recognized him.

He didn’t seem disturbed by what he saw in front of him. Something else was fueling his urgency. Kanna thought she could hear the sound of pounding boots in the distance along with some voices, but the thumping that boomed from the front of the house quickly overwhelmed it all. It sounded like a huge fist slamming against a door.

The boy glanced over his shoulder once, then turned again to scream at them, “Soldiers!”

---

Onto Chapter 23 >>

The thunder that followed nearly drowned out the last edges of Goda’s words. It shook the ground and vibrated against the sides of the well, sending shock waves through Kanna’s bones, rattling her joints and making it hard for her to keep propping herself up. Even with the rain dropping into her eyes, she could not tear her gaze away from the woman who stood over her.

Lightning cracked again through the sky and the metal around Goda’s wrist gleamed more brilliantly than before. In response, Kanna pulled her own cuff tight against her chest. She could feel its oppressive edges digging through her soaked robes and into her ribs. She shook her head over and over. She couldn’t accept any of it. She shouted up through the rain at Goda, “How? How is that even possible?”

Goda looked at her for a long time. The rain had transformed into freezing pellets, water so sharp and cold that Kanna wondered if they were being showered with tiny hailstones—but Goda did not even shiver against it.

“This cuff,” Goda said, running her fingers against the metal on her arm. “It has a battery like yours. If its twin cuff is opened early—if my prisoner escapes or I let her go—then it unloads its charge all at once and I die.”

Kanna shuddered in the rain. She could barely move her jaw to speak anymore and the muscles of her face convulsed with the rest of her. “I don’t understand.” She swallowed some water that had fallen into her mouth. She furrowed her brow and shook her head again. “You’re lying! What you’re saying just isn’t possible. Why would you be a slave? Why would they send a slave to transport another slave? It’s ludicrous! It’s nonsense!”

“This was the job they gave me—transporting runaway criminals who had fled into the Outerland. It’s a job no one wants. It’s dangerous. It’s very easy to die, and if I try to escape or I tamper with my bonds or I fail to deliver on time, this cuff will end my servitude very quickly.”

“What kind of godforsaken country is this? What kind of perverse reality do you people live in?” Kanna shouted. This time she jerked her head towards the sky, as if to catch a glimpse of some deity who could answer her. Instead, another flash of lightning nearly blinded her, another crack of thunder shook the inside of her ears. “If what you say is true, that’s not a punishment, that’s a walking death sentence!”

“Yes.” Goda’s voice sounded so calm, so empty of emotion that it chilled Kanna to her core. It was like she was hearing the voice of someone who had already been stiffened by that final shock. “I was convicted of a capital crime when I was sixteen. I was too young to be legally executed, so they gave me a life sentence instead. But they’d prefer if I die. My job is designed to kill me.”

The rain made it too hard for Kanna to keep her head up anymore, so she let it hang down, and she pressed her chin against her chest. She felt the water roll in torrents from her hair, to her face, to her neck, to her shoulders, down into every crevice beneath her clothes.

Among the cacophony of thoughts that were bursting through her mind, one memory stood out among the rest. Even then, days later, bruised and numb, she could remember the words as vividly as if she were experiencing them for the first time again.

“You’re lucky, anyway,” Goda had told her the first night they met. “Your slavery is temporary. What is it, a ten-year sentence? Not everyone is quite so fortunate.”

“My father has life.”

“Better than death.”

Better than death.

Better than death.

Kanna pressed her hands to her face, and felt her tears flowing anew. They were burning hot against the contrast of the freezing rain. They began washing the numbness from her face, but she didn’t want it—she wanted to stay numb. There was a pain in her chest that she had never felt before; it was like a splinter in her heart, but it had erupted from the inside.

“You don’t have the right to judge that sort of thing from where you sit, with your hands on the other end of that rope,” Kanna had snapped at Goda that night. “People like you aren’t sympathetic to people like me.”

You don’t have the right to judge.

People like you. People like me.

From her perspective now, from the lens of that person who was coiled up in the mouth of a well in the relentless rain, she could suddenly see the irony of everything she had said to Goda before. She had insulted the woman, had judged her, had resisted her, had played the role of her master’s victim perfectly—and yet Goda Brahm was not only a slave, but she was worse off than even Kanna was.

The world wanted Goda to die. Kanna had even felt that seething hatred against Goda in the vision she had experienced as she lay in bed less than an hour before. It had terrified her. Even the priestess had….

Even the priestess.

Kanna turned her wrist over and looked at the key that Priestess Rem had given her. The woman had told her how to unlock the cuff and escape Goda. The woman had to have known what would happen next. Kanna couldn’t imagine that it was some secret that Goda would die. Even Jaya seemed to have known, and had tried to keep Goda from falling into a trap.

Priestess Rem Murau had meant to kill Goda.

No, Kanna thought quickly. That just couldn’t be true. Priestess Rem had been trying to help Kanna. Priestess Rem had been one of the few kind souls Kanna had met at the monastery, the one person who did not judge her for who she was, the one person who had been willing to lead her to sacred ground and show her the Goddess.

But she could remember Rem’s words on that last morning, just as clearly as she had remembered Goda’s words from the first night: “I am using you, Kanna. To avoid sinning against the Goddess by the letter of the law, I am putting the choice in your hands instead of mine.”

Kanna couldn’t accept it. Everything suddenly made a lot more sense, but she still couldn’t find it in herself to accept this whole conspiracy. It was too perverse. How could Goda’s country—and her own God—have forsaken her to that degree? What crime could possibly have been so terrible that it deserved such a cruel punishment, that it warranted a mass of bureaucrats conspiring to kill her by the letter of the law?

Still, Kanna shook her head. She looked up at Goda. “I don’t believe you,” she said finally. “I can’t believe you.” But she erupted in a bone-shaking sob because she did believe it, and it made her no longer want to live in the world she had found herself in, a world where she had to kill to save herself.

She wondered if it would have been easier to kill Goda if she had just made use of that steel baton the first night—but then she remembered that the weapon didn’t exist, that Goda had made it up, that Goda’s threats had been as empty as the bottomless darkness in those black eyes.

Those eyes looked down upon Kanna now. They hovered closer than before. Goda had come to kneel against the edge of the well, her arms spread on either side of the hole like a pair of wings. Her body blocked some of the rain so that the barrage of sensation against Kanna’s skin had reduced to a trickle. The wind blew across them, but Kanna could barely hear it.

Her focus had arisen up out of the well and pulsed against that face above her. Goda had soaked up all of her awareness. Her thoughts ended. Her body felt light and numb, but her consciousness was sharp. Even the shadows on Goda seemed to throb with new colors and details that Kanna had not noticed before. There were spots and stripes that glowed on the woman’s skin, like the tribal markings on some savage warrior, like the etchings on the fur of a wildcat.

Light flashed again, and the colors swirled into ribbons. They danced and slithered like snakes. Kanna’s eyes widened with fear. She jerked back.

And the ledge that she had been relying on to carry her weight gave in. She shuffled to catch herself, but she wasn’t fast enough. Her arms were like dead weights in her waterlogged sleeves.

She fell.

The darkness of the pit came up to meet her. She could see it widening. It was surfaceless, like the source of the spring, like Goda’s eyes. She knew she would fall forever.

She was dying.

Then the sensation of a sharp set of claws digging into her wrist snapped her back to life. She looked up, but could only make out a show of vague shadow and flickering light. She winced as she felt her arm nearly hurled out of the socket of her shoulder.

She didn’t realize what the force meant until she had been yanked over the edge of the well.

Kanna fell into the dirt. Her mouth sucked in mud as she heaved, as she felt all her senses returning in one grand rush, as she felt the numbness dissolving. Her hands dug into the ground and the rocks below her pressed painfully into her fingers. The rain fell hard onto her back. The wind blew intolerably cold air all around her, making her teeth chatter.

She had never been so uncomfortable—but she had never been so grateful for the pain. She was alive.

Goda was lying next to her on the ground. The inertia had knocked her over as well. She was looking up at the sky, her face serene, as if she had been stretched out on a warm rock in the light of the morning sun. Goda was laughing.

Kanna stared at her with astonishment. Clearly, the woman had lost her mind.

“Are you crazy?” Kanna shouted at her. She spat out a clump of dirt. At first, Kanna thought that the feeling coursing through her had been confused anger, but as soon as the words had left her mouth, she found that she was also laughing.

They were both crazy.

She and Goda lay next to each other in the mud, in the middle of a thunder storm, and they laughed for a reason that Kanna’s mind could not directly comprehend. She felt the laugh coming from somewhere outside of her, almost as if it rose up out of the ground and into her body.

The feeling faded just as quickly as it came, though, when Goda turned to look at her and Kanna’s fearful thoughts returned. She began to pull away, but Goda took her wrist again. Kanna struggled to shake her hand away, but Goda was stronger, and she kept Kanna steady, and with two fingers she gingerly held the key and lifted it up just slightly.

Kanna thought she heard a pop.

Goda turned the lock. “You were pressing it in too hard. You can take it off now. Undo the latch and that’ll pull it open.” Goda had stopped laughing, but her smile had not faded.

Confused, Kanna did not reply, and Goda nodded her head at what Kanna refused to ask.

“Kill me,” Goda said.

Kanna ripped her wrist away from the giant’s grasp and pressed her hand to her chest once again. She stared at Goda with bewilderment. “Are you crazy?” she repeated.

“Isn’t that what you want, though? You want to be free—and for that to happen, I have to die. So kill me, Kanna Rava. You’ve won.”

Kanna froze. Even if Goda’s words were as genuine—and insane—as they seemed to be, after all of the struggle, she couldn’t believe that the woman would let her go that easily. “What?” Kanna huffed, her breath coming out visibly into the air in front of her. “I can’t kill you, I….” She tried to sit up, but found that her clothes were sticking to the ground. “Why did you chase me down if you just wanted to die? Are you completely out of your mind?”

Goda’s smile had not lost its serenity. The incongruity made Kanna more nervous than before. “What you saw when I chased you was fear. You saw the last pieces of a character named Goda Brahm,” Goda said, “and even Goda Brahm wants to live. That’s the oldest, and longest, and most constricting of all the snakes—the one that clings to survival—and even I haven’t been able to rid myself of it. The story of Goda Brahm is still one that I cannot completely let go of, and it makes me afraid of death, and so I chased you like any other animal triggered by its impending demise. But I know by now how to stifle and suppress that animal if I try hard enough—even if I’ve never been able to permanently dissolve it.” Goda, who was free from the confines of her robes, had an easier time getting up. “Kill me while that animal is sleeping. It is the will of the Goddess. I knew I would die soon, just not like this. It took me by surprise, but I must accept it nonetheless. Fate assigned me as your porter because you would be the one to kill me. It’s clear to me now.”

Kanna slid back in the mud, as if Goda were attacking her, even though the woman had made no move towards her. “What are you talking about?” Kanna screamed. “I’m not going to kill you! Even on the very first night we met, I already told you that I’m not a killer!”

“Do it fast!” Goda said, already stretching up to her feet. A rumbling had began to vibrate through the ground, but this time it was not thunder. “The train is getting ready to leave.”

Kanna’s gaze shot across the empty lot and towards the rails, and she saw that it was true. The train was already shuddering and shaking with life. A loud horn sounded through the air, and the waves bounced off the tall buildings of glass that sprouted up all around them.

Kanna bit her lip. She managed to unstick herself from the ground, to roll up onto her knees.

“I can’t…kill you,” she said.

But then, as the train began to inch forward with a brief jerk, Kanna bolted onto her feet and dashed past Goda towards the train. Her eyes locked on the freight car she had seen before. She ran for her life, even though she knew that Goda was not following her. Within moments, she had hopped onto the ledge of the moving car and had unbolted the door and had used all her strength to force it open.

It only slid open a tiny amount—but it was enough. She slipped through.

She collapsed onto the floor of the train as it rolled very slowly down the tracks. She looked up in the dark, and she could see crates stacked to the ceiling, commodities headed to the Upperland. She supposed that she had become one of those, too. In days, she would be another cog in that familiar machine once again, and this gave her a comfort that she hadn’t felt in a long time.

But still, her heart pounded in her chest. Every beat was painful. She tried to suppress what the pain meant, but she knew. She forced herself to stay. When she lifted her head to look through the crack in the door, she could see Goda strolling along next to the slowly-moving train, as if taking a pleasant summer walk.

The woman was looking at her. Kanna knew that there was no way Goda could see her in the dark train car, but somehow she felt that those eyes were piercing straight through her. Kanna felt the tears coming again, so she turned around and pressed her face to the crate behind her and clung to the wood as solidly as she could. Her small fingers slipped into the space between the panels. Her fingertips grazed against something dry and fluffy inside, but she didn’t pay attention to it much at first.

It wasn’t until the train began to speed up, until the crates began to jostle with the motion, that she opened her eyes, because she knew that Goda would be unable to keep up with the car. She turned around to finally undo the cuff. Some of the sticky leaves that had filled the crate had smudged onto her fingers, but she didn’t mind it, and under the light of another flash in the sky, she took hold of her bonds.

Then she saw the withered white flowers that coated the back of her hand. They were barely stuck with mild electric tension, and so the wind coming in from the crack in the door quickly blew most of them away.

But she could not unsee what she had seen.

They’re sending Death to the Upperland?

Kanna twisted her head around, and looked at all the crates stacked end-to-end, top-to-bottom, filling almost every corner of the car. How many crates held Flower? How many train cars filled with those crates? There was no way to tell from where she was sitting.

She didn’t even know that much Samma Flower existed on the face of the Earth. Everyone had told her it was nearly extinct.

Before she could dive deeper into her bewilderment, though, something reminded her sharply to stay awake. She was pulled from her thoughts by the nerve-burning electricity of the cuff. It pulsed through her as it always did, but this time—instead of reacting with shock and resistance—she looked down at her wrist. She sat there.

The pain had become…a feeling. Just a sensation. Not good or bad.

Could it have been that the reason those initial, mild shocks had always hurt so much was because she had resisted them? Because her muscles had always tensed up and she had always tried to run from the pain—from her own body?

No, she thought. It just couldn’t be. Pain was pain.

And indeed, as the distance from Goda grew, so did the suffering, and eventually her body did tense up to resist it, and eventually it did become intolerable. She fought with herself. She gripped the cuff latch with her hand. She knew she could not delay for much longer, or else the shocks would paralyze her and she would be unable to free herself once and for all.

To free herself. To leave Goda Brahm and to go back to the freedom of the Upperland.

Her breath hitched. A shock worse than the pain of the cuff flowed through her just then.

Because she had never been free.

She had never been free…until she had met Goda Brahm.

The train rumbled along. Kanna pressed her hand hard against the cuff, curled her fingers under the latch. She sucked in a sharp breath, a stifled sob.

In the Upperland, she had never had reason to cry. She had lived without a single need unmet. She had slept in a comfortable bed, had never gone hungry a day in her life, and had enjoyed the freedom to roam the meadows and live in the midst of a leisure that none of her countrymen could afford. Every Upperlander craved to live the way she did. She would have been crazy to want to give that up.

But she had never been happy. She had never felt happiness in her life until the instant she had lain in the mud next to Goda Brahm and stared up at the broken sky.

How is that possible? Kanna’s mind screamed as the train hurtled faster and faster.

Her muscles already seizing up, Kanna wondered if she had realized too late. She gritted her teeth. With a painful jerk, she pushed herself to the door—and with the last of her strength, she jumped shoulders-first out of the train.

---

Onto Chapter 22 >>

“Stop! Stay back!” Kanna screamed. Her voice echoed through the room, but the word cracked in her throat, and it sounded weak when it bounced back into her ears. She had stopped fumbling with the key; her fingers had stiffened with fear and she was afraid her ticket to freedom would slip from her grasp. She leaned into the door again, but her legs had seized along with her hands.

The giant sat up. The sheets slid down her chest as she crouched forward and peered through the room at Kanna. In the bright beams of moonlight that shot through the glass, Kanna could clearly see the look on Goda’s face—the gaze that had landed straight onto that silver key in Kanna’s hands, the eyes that had widened and added a bright, shining white to the bottomless darkness. The giant’s mouth was slightly parted. Her expression had lost its emptiness. It was full of something for once.

Kanna realized that it was the first time she had ever seen Goda genuinely shocked. But after only a beat to honor the confusion, Goda’s hand shot to the night table beside the bed, and she snatched the keyring that she had set there earlier in the evening. Her fingers pressed around the Maharan pendant that Kanna had seen many times before, but this time Goda’s thumb flicked against one of its sides, and the piece—which had seemed so solid before—snapped open.

There was a compartment inside. It was empty.

Goda looked up again, her eyes still pulsing with astonishment, her hand gripping the pendant in a fist so tightly that her arm was twitching. “How did you get that?” she said.

She didn’t wait for an answer. She ripped the sheets from the bed and began to stand up. Jerked into a primitive urge to flee as soon as she saw the naked woman stalking towards her, Kanna found her strength again and began pushing through the door.

“Drop it!” Goda shouted. In two long strides, she had rushed towards Kanna, a look of urgency replacing the surprise. The muscles of her neck flexed so harshly that Kanna could see the veins throbbing. “Drop it now! Now!” She reached towards Kanna’s hands.

But Kanna was shaking her head, stumbling over her own legs, looking around desperately for something to fend the giant off. She saw Goda’s satchel by the door. She grabbed it by its long strap and reached back to pop the handle of the door. She dragged the bag with her when she nearly fell backwards through the threshold.

“Don’t come any closer!” Kanna yelled. She tried to slam the door in Goda’s face, but Goda kicked it all the way open and it knocked Kanna backwards onto the ground. Kanna slid across the floor, struggling to not drop the key as she tried to undo the knot of the bag. “Stay back! I’m warning you! Stay back, stay back!”

Goda did not listen. She stooped down to emerge from the dark room like some beast stepping heavily out of a cave, but still the top of her head grazed the wood of the threshold with an unpleasant scrape. It made Kanna shudder. The bare rage that Kanna saw on the woman’s face sent her scrambling to her feet, but as soon as she did, a grating sound rang out through the hallway that made the both of them turn their heads.

Kanna found that yet another dark pair of eyes—the pupils stretched open beyond reason—had swallowed her up in an unwavering gaze. The boy was outside of his room. He was shuddering so wildly that he couldn’t walk without teetering from side to side against the walls, and his mouth was slack with the look of a man who had been stabbed in the gut. His body was ghostly pale, the bath of light from the electric hall lamps painting his skin in glowing patterns that had inexplicably begun to spin, to twirl, to writhe the more Kanna looked upon them.

Snakes. On this face, his hands, his chest. They were flowing and dancing like the ones on the wall of the cave. He was shrieking as they twisted on the surface of his skin.

Kanna screamed back at him, terrified out of her mind, and she shot through the hallway at full speed to get away. She dashed through the main room and then out the open back door without even looking over her shoulder to see what Goda had done.

It was only once she was halfway to the hole in the fence that she heard the heavy footfalls pounding in the dirt right behind her. It wasn’t Goda’s usual patient trudge this time; the woman was running.

“Stop!” Goda screamed at her. “Drop the key! You don’t know what you’re doing! Drop it!”

It was hard to sprint at full speed and unlock the cuff at the same time, so Kanna slung the satchel over her shoulder and slowed down at little to maneuver the tiny key. She knew she wouldn’t be able to run very far without ridding herself of Goda once and for all. Looking over her shoulder at the looming silhouette that grew ever closer, she jammed the key hard into the lock.

It fit.

But when she tried to turn it, it wouldn’t budge.

“Shit, shit! Goddamn this piece of shit!” Kanna cried. She jiggled the lock as she ran through the break in the fence and began pounding as fast as she could down the gravel road, because she could feel the presence of Goda gaining on her.

This time, Goda had not slowed intentionally to make Kanna feel the shocks. She was hurrying just as quickly as Kanna was, just as desperately, as if they were both running for their lives together. Seeing no choice in the matter anymore, Kanna ripped the chord that held the satchel open, and she finally reached inside for the steel baton. One good blow to the head, she thought. If I can throw it from here, even better. Goda was merely steps away.

But when her hand grazed that cylinder, it was not the cold metal she had expected. Bewildered, she pulled it out just as Goda had reached her. She looked down. It was a long scroll made of animal hide.

She lied, Kanna thought with astonishment.

Having no time to think anything else, she turned and flicked it through the air at Goda’s face. The woman caught it before it made impact. She seemed to glance down at the scroll with some concern, as if she were scanning for damage, but when Kanna resumed jostling the lock, Goda dropped it onto the ground and hastened her stride.

“Don’t open that! Let it go!” Goda’s voice was already raw. “You don’t know what you’re about to do, you imbecile!”

Kanna turned her focus back towards the path. She broke out into a full sprint again. She ran faster than she ever had in her life. She closed her mind off to anything else besides the road in front of her and paid no attention to the scenery that whipped by faster and faster. She ignored the pain in her lungs. She ignored the pain in her bare feet as her skin cut against the rocks below her and reopened her wounds from days before.

She dashed across the landscape, feeling the distance finally start to grow between her and the giant. She put every ounce of energy into her muscles, though she knew in the back of her mind that she would have to be careful to keep things balanced; she could lead Goda on a chase, but she could only stray so far before the shocks would come and leave her helpless on the ground. The best she could do for the moment, she decided, was to try to exhaust the giant and then slip out of sight.

When they reached the edge of town, Kanna’s eyes snapped towards the ground and she made note of the tracks. She ducked behind a building near the railway line and weaved through an empty alleyway that seemed like it could lead to where the Bou twins had told her the station was.

She heard Goda’s feet still beating on the ground behind her, but the falls had grown slower. She’s a giant, Kanna thought, so she’ll tire faster than me. This small sliver of hope kept her going. She emerged from behind the building and look a sharp turn behind another—one made of glass and stone—hoping to lose the monster that was pursuing her.

She sprinted through this alley, too—but this time, it wasn’t entirely devoid of life. She had to push past a few confused civilians, and she nearly knocked down an old man as he emerged from a storefront nearby. She barely noticed. She didn’t have time to check to see who she had hurt as she cut through the crowd.

It was only when she saw the familiar sign up ahead that she realized where she had unwittingly led Goda in her haste. Paradise, it read. Even in the middle of the night, there were figures that she could see hovering behind the curtain. In fact, there were more than there had been during the day.

The whining buzz that she had now come to recognize as the shrine’s call rang in her ears. No! she screamed inside her mind. No, no, no! Not now! As the feeling of her inner body began to separate again from the anchor of her bones, she knew that she was faced with a choice: She could keep running, down through a dark alley that led into some unknown place she had never been; or, she could try to slip through the bath house before the shrine overtook her, and emerge from the other side as she had earlier in the day. In her mind, she could still picture the back doorway of the main pool, the opening that let out near the tracks.

She burst through the curtain of shadow puppets. What seemed like a hundred eyes turned towards her with shock, and a garden brimming with naked women filled the whole of her vision. She dashed towards them, broke through the crowd while brushing her skin against skin. She knocked her side against one of the trees and a few fruits fell down.

Goda was yelling something behind her, but she couldn’t hear it clearly anymore. The whine in her ears came louder and louder. She jumped into the threshold that led to the pool, and the cry of the shrine grew into a powerful rumble, like the sound of a rushing waterfall pounding against her eardrums—or the sound of a runaway train.

She sprinted through the spring’s chamber, barely having time to notice that the snakes on the wall were coiling and slithering against each other. She ran through the small corridor at the back, her eyes trained on the smudge of dim moonlight that she could see at the end. Footfalls vibrated not far behind her, and they seemed to even grow in number, as if they had divided into three or four sets of legs instead of just one. Still, she didn’t look back; she pushed forward.

She took one hard step onto the ground outside—and that was when the point of her awareness suddenly ripped back. She was no longer in her body. She was up, over herself, gazing at the back of her own head.

And then she was further back still. She was in another body, pain coursing through all her muscles—the pain of exhaustion and something else still—and to her complete bewilderment, she was watching Kanna Rava running just a dozen paces ahead.

On instinct, she tensed up. For just a fraction of a second, this twitch actually seemed to ripple through the body she was in, and the legs came to a halt. “Gah!” a deep voice burst from the chest.

In that exact moment, Kanna snapped back into her own body. She was running parallel to the tracks, her bones and joints and muscles moving almost automatically. Completely flabbergasted, she turned to look behind her and saw that Goda was staring at her, pausing in the middle of the road, with a similarly astonished gaze.

But Kanna kept running, and so the creature gave chase again. They ran through the main street, past boarded up food stalls and market tents that had been tied closed—all of which slowed Kanna down, but allowed her to weave through obstacles to evade the much larger Goda. This only seemed to make the beast grow more infuriated. There were no words anymore; its grunts and growls were those of an animal. It rampaged through the path and ripped through canvas walls and even broke its way through wooden panels to claw at her.

When Kanna found herself trapped between several carts that were too heavy for her to move, she tried to duck underneath one of them, but Goda was right behind her as she stooped down.

The giant caught one of Kanna’s ankles and jerked it back until Kanna fell face-first into the dirt.

Then Goda was on top of her, straddling Kanna’s back, her breaths heaving and ragged and husky, her angry grunts moving like waves down her body and shaking through Kanna’s own ribs. It felt more like the rev of an engine than the voice of a woman.

Goda snatched Kanna by the wrist. Kanna’s struggles were useless against those inhuman hands, though her writhing did slow Goda down, and the woman tried to steady the cuff so that she could pull the key out. She took it between two fingers gingerly, as if her movements had to be precise.

Kanna craned her neck up, with the full intention to bite as hard as she could into those fingers—but then a loud crack echoed through the little street. It was followed by a metallic ringing and a cry from the monster above her.

All of a sudden, Goda was on the ground next to her. The woman was holding onto her own head with her hands. A smear of blood had appeared between those fingers.

Kanna looked up. Two silhouettes—long like a pair of shadowy towers in the skyline—hovered over her. It took her a moment to realize in the growing cloudiness that they were human, and that they stared down at her with twin smiles. One of them dropped a heavy brass pot onto the ground. “Run!” the other urged her.

Goda was already getting up. She was reaching for Kanna again, but this time two pairs of arms had snaked around the giant’s torso, and two familiar young women were grappling Goda into the dirt.

“Go!” Noa called out to her again, pushing Goda’s head down with both hands as the giant snarled and swung her arms every which way. “She’s huge! We can’t keep her back for long! Stop staring and run, kid!”

Before Kanna had even finished crawling under the cart, Goda had already begun to stand, the twins sliding off her body like a drapery of old clothes. Noa stretched up to swing her arm around Goda’s neck and Goda sent her to the ground with a punch to the face—but Leina took hold of Goda’s leg, and this gave Kanna just enough time to escape to the other side and start running again.

She could see the trading building up ahead. As the path opened up more, she followed the tracks with her eyes, searching for that sanctuary she had hoped for. The moon by then had been covered up by a veil of clouds, which had drowned the street in darkness. When she finally saw the train station, it was like a beacon of light breaking through the haze. The train was parked beside a wide loading area, but because it was so close to midnight, there was no one else wandering about. It looked ghostly and she couldn’t tell if there was anyone on the other side of those tinted windows.

She bolted towards her goal with the last of her strength. When she climbed those old stairs up to the empty platform, she felt like she had reached the top of a mountain—but she was barely a step or two on solid ground before the first wave of lightning buzzed through her arm.

“No!” she screamed, collapsing onto her knees right on the spot. She gritted her teeth. She scooted back onto the steps, even though the pain had already faded—which she knew meant that Goda had grown closer—and she wrestled with the key to try to force the lock to turn. She pressed hard against it. She pressed so hard that for a moment she was sure she would break the key in half, but instead her hand slipped and rammed against the edge of the cuff. The new gash on her thumb started bleeding immediately.

“No, no!” She slammed her wrist again and again on the steps. “Work, goddamn you! Get off me! Get off me, you goddamn piece of Middlelander bullshit! Let me go!”

But the cuff had been suspiciously silent for too long, so she knew she had to move because Goda was close. She had to find somewhere to hide where she could work the cuff off her wrist before Goda could find her. She hopped off the platform, jogging around the station building and towards the back of the train, vexed by the question of where she could even stow away without being seen. She glanced around frantically and noticed that there were some freight cars at the tail end; she wondered if she could hide among the cargo.

Of course, that would be the first place Goda would look. Worse, if she wasn’t able to get the cuff off before the train started, the distance between her and Goda would grow quite rapidly and the shocks would start pulsing in no time. She didn’t know how much electricity was stored in the cuff and how long the shocks could go on, or even if the thing would kill her before it let up. She didn’t want to find out.

She glanced up at a huge clock that ticked away above a timetable display on the platform. It was exactly 17 minutes until midnight. She had to hide somewhere else and work fast to free herself, she decided—then, in the last seconds, she could make a final dash for one of the freight cars and hop into it just as the train was leaving. Goda was fast, but there was no way that the giant could outrun a train.

Shuddering with nervous energy, Kanna snuck as quietly as she could around the tracks, looking for a suitable hiding place. She heard trudging in the distance, not too far off, and when she glanced over her shoulder, she could see a naked woman with broad shoulders standing in the light of the platform. The woman was looking to and fro, blood tricking down from the side of her face, angry scratch marks all over her chest, but she did not seem to notice Kanna cowering in the darkness.

Holding her breath, Kanna slipped behind the other side of the train. The area around her was flat, and free of bushes, devoid of anything she could easily hide behind. But then she noticed what looked like a circle of bricks arranged on a little rise not too far from the back of the train. As she neared it, she saw that the hole it enclosed was dark, but it was way too small of a place for a giant to fit.

For once, Kanna thanked the gods for making the Upperlanders small, and she crawled legs-first into the old water well. Her movements echoed enough that she realized it was deep, which made her nervous, but shortly after lowering herself in, her feet pressed into a ledge on the side of the wall. She didn’t know if it had been built that way or if the bricks had settled and popped out over time, but she was grateful again that fate was on her side. Either way, the walls were narrow enough that she could press her shoulder on one side and keep herself steady by propping her foot on the other side.

She felt for the key in the dark. She forced herself to be patient this time, to be calculating. She tried turning the key with a little bit of tension, then a bit more. She thought she could feel some of the tumblers springing loose, though she couldn’t be certain.

A light flashed overhead. A low rumble followed. She ignored what she realized seconds later was thunder, and she ignored the gush of sudden rain as well, even as it pelted uncomfortably on the back of her head like an barrage of tiny bullets.

What she couldn’t ignore, though, was the presence. She had not heard anything. There was no voice, not even the sound of breathing. She hadn’t seen any shadows because there was no light to help cast them.

But she felt the presence.

Kanna slowly looked up. She could barely make out an outline, but she wondered if maybe it was a tall, faraway tree that only seemed close because of the angle. Lightning cracked overhead once again, flickering in the sky like a pulse of broken lamplight.

It was bright enough for her to see for one flash—for one half-second—the face that stared down upon her. Even after the light disappeared, those two inhuman eyes were burned into her mind.

She thought that maybe she should let go and fall into the well. She thought that maybe this would be a more painless end, because clearly the monster standing above her was meaning to kill her. She had seen it in the eyes, in the bared teeth, in the tense muscles of that strong chest.

Goda crouched over the well and reached down towards her. Kanna could see the shape of those fingers inching closer towards her face. She recoiled to avoid them. She covered the cuff’s lock with her hand.

“Don’t touch me, Porter,” Kanna growled, her voice low, no longer frantic. It held all of her resolve. “If you reach any closer, I’ll jump down the well. I’ll kill myself. You’ll have nothing to deliver to Suda, not even a body.”

Goda’s arm stretched closer.

“Do you think I’m joking?” Kanna screamed. “Pull back or I’ll jump! I swear to God I’ll do it!”

To her half-surprise, after a long moment’s pause, Goda did pull away. She stood back up from her crouch, she stared down at Kanna. Rain fell down upon them, and in the split-second light that would flicker here and there from the sky, Kanna could see that the water had come to coat every inch of Goda’s skin, had come to soak the woman’s hair. Goda was holding onto her own cuff with her right hand.

Kanna gritted her teeth and rammed her wrist hard against the wall a few more times, her frustrated cries echoing down the barrel of the well. Her foot nearly slipped as she moved, but she shuffled and caught herself. Her stomach dropped. She felt suddenly as hollow as the pit beneath her.

She didn’t want to jump. She didn’t want to die.

She felt the tears coming against her will. They forced their way through even as she fought them, even as she tried not to show Goda her weakness yet again.

“Why?” she sobbed, her voice sounding like a hiss against the walls. “For God’s sake, why do you even care, Goda? After all of this trouble, does your job really mean that much? It’s not like you’re in my pathetic situation. You’re always free to just quit. They hardly even pay you, but still you choose to chase me around like your life depends on it.”

“It does.”

The sky cracked in half and Kanna caught sight of Goda’s now blank face in the spot of light. Thunder boomed in reply. Kanna stared up at the woman, her mind very suddenly empty of self-pity. Goda’s stoic voice had stopped the thoughts. She wasn’t sure if she had heard right at first, but then she decided that she had—and that it had made no sense.

“Stop speaking in riddles,” Kanna told her, clenching her jaw. “What is that even supposed to mean?”

“It means what I said. If I don’t take you to Suda, then I haven’t complied with the terms of my sentence. The punishment for that is immediate execution.”

Kanna coughed and turned her head and spat into the hole beneath her because the water had come into her nose. She felt the rain flowing down in fat rivers from the top of her head and into her eyes as well, so she had to blink a few times when she looked back up and tried to make sense of Goda’s face. “I…don’t understand,” she said. “Your sentence? That makes it sound like you’re…like you’re….”

When another storm of light flickered through the sky, Kanna saw that Goda had lifted up her own cuff-clad wrist. The woman nodded once, as if to confirm the thought that Kanna had refused to voice.

“I’m a slave,” Goda said.

---

Onto Chapter 21 >>

A warm glow emerged from the back doorway of the house, and it filled the disheveled yard with a flickering bath of light. It made the twisted branches of the trees look alive, like they were moving over Kanna’s head. It also made the skin of Goda’s face swim, her expression looking soft and hard in turn.

There was a shadow in the door, backlit by the candles inside. Kanna was hiding beside Goda, tucked into the corner of her master’s robes, both her hands tightened along the neck of the sack she was carrying.

They had just walked in through the hole in the fence, and Goda had stopped suddenly, and so Kanna had stopped with her. At first, Kanna hadn’t been afraid of the form in the doorway ahead of them, but then she had noticed Goda’s reaction—one that reminded her of an animal stiffly sniffing the air—and she had grown wary.

It was a new person, a person who was stepping into the yard to join the two of them, but Kanna could not see their features until they passed through a patch of moonlight.

A woman with large brown eyes and a hardened face stared at them through the dark. “Are you the priestess?” she asked. She was looking at Goda; she did not even seem to notice that Kanna was there.

It took a moment for Goda to answer, but rather than confirm the woman’s assumption, she replied just as she had earlier in the day: “What do you want?”

“I’m Kahm Marahn, Mia Marahn’s wife.” She flicked her head back, as if gesturing towards the door behind her. Kanna realize then that she hadn’t heard their host’s name the whole time they had been there. Perhaps Goda had asked while Kanna had been avoiding the house. “Is it true that you’ve come to help our son?”

“We’ve come,” Goda said. The tone made the sentence sound finished, but Kanna still emerged slightly from her place under Goda’s wing to give the woman a questioning glance.

Nonetheless, their host seemed satisfied with the answer. She turned and seemed to expect them to follow, but her movements were slow, exhausted. “There’s dinner inside,” she said. “We can eat, then discuss the…details.” Kanna could sense a resistance in her along with the resignation.

When they sat at the wooden table near the kitchen—which was decorated with a centerpiece of candles surrounding an image of the Goddess—Kahm Marahn slid over to be next to her wife. She propped her elbows onto the table; she rubbed her face with her hands.

“He’s worse now,” she said. “Much worse. I really don’t know how much longer we can keep this going. We can’t even force-feed him anymore.”

There was food already served in front of them, but no one was touching it, and though at first Kanna’s hand had hovered over her plate in desperation, she forced herself to pull back. She thought that her hunger was too ravenous and that she’d be unable to politely pick at the sausage and cheese and yaw in a way that honored the gravity of the conversation.

She dropped her hands into her own lap. Her fingers brushed Goda’s thigh accidentally on the way down, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.

“Has his breathing grown ever more shallow?” Goda asked. “Eyes dark? Veins on his forehead pulsing?”

“Yes,” their original host—the woman who was apparently named Mia—answered. Her hands were folded and resting on the tabletop, and she too had yet to touch her food. “But you knew this. You suspected that he would get worse, didn’t you, Priestess?”

“At his stage, it only gets worse. He may not survive the night.”

Kanna was taken aback by Goda’s bluntness, but she held her tongue, and she glanced at the two women to see if they had been offended. She had to force herself not to turn away once she saw their faces; their paired streams of misery washed over Kanna, and she stiffened against it because she felt that this was no time to feel a rush of empathy. It was uncomfortable; she had never felt it quite so raw before.

Kahm was gritting her teeth, wringing her hands. Her stare had fallen on the Goddess at the center of the table, but her eyes were glazed over and unfocused. When she finally replied, it was little more than a whisper, “Then…we’ll leave it to you, Priestess.” She briefly exchanged a glance with her wife, and by their mutual expression, they seemed to be coming to a silent agreement. “We’ll have nothing to do with it. We won’t watch. If anyone ever asks, we know nothing. But if this is the only thing that will save him, then we’re really out of choices. We can’t lose our son.”

The woman named Mia looked up, her jaw set, a small edge of her sorrow transforming into something harder, more determined. “What do you need from us?”

“Only silence,” Goda said. “The bigger issue here is that you must understand what this means. This could be the beginning of greater troubles for you. If he lives, it’s probably because he can carry Flower—and if anyone finds out about it, that could be the demise of your entire household.”

Kahm turned away from the image of the Goddess. “Yes,” she said. “We know.”

Goda let the woman’s words hang in the air for a long moment, but eventually she nodded with acceptance, with finality. “Then go to bed tonight like any other evening. The girl and I will make the preparations outside, and then I will cast out the demons myself. If you hear anything, ignore it. The snakes do not unravel without a fight.”

Kanna—who had become ever more distracted by the plate in front of her—jerked her gaze up towards Goda with a curious glance. The snakes, she thought. She wondered if this was yet another one of Goda’s metaphors, or if the boy had been afflicted with the same hallucinations that Kanna had seen for herself.

The sound of scraping on wood brought Kanna’s attention back to the present moment quickly, though. She looked over to see Mia Marahn’s hand clasped over the head of the Goddess. She had dragged the idol off the table. She was pressing the Goddess’s face against her chest, as if to shield Her from some blasphemous sight.

* * *

Without any explanation, Goda had allowed Kanna to eat all of the food. Once their hosts had arisen from the table and gone to bed early without touching even a single morsel, Goda had loaded everything onto Kanna’s plate and told her to come outside.

As they wandered back into the yard, Kanna lost all sense of decorum in the dark, and she shoveled handfuls of her dinner into her mouth with no discrimination. She did not savor the meat or wince at the yaw. They had become the same. She ate every edible gram she could feel against her fingers, and her plate was empty by the time Goda pushed her down to sit in the dirt.

Just as she had done in the innkeeper’s dry garden, Goda was pulling twigs off the ground and stacking them in formation. Because the air smelled wet, though, Kanna thought to look up at the sky, and she saw that the moon was obscured by clouds.

“It looks like it might rain,” Kanna said. “Maybe you should find a stove inside if we need a fire.”

“The smell is too strong to make this potion in a house. It will linger in the walls, and this may be enough to attract unwanted attention if any soldiers wander in. Out here, it will dissipate.”

Kanna set her empty plate down and noticed that she was sitting near the spot where she had dropped the pouch of Flower earlier that day. Goda had only just picked it up and stuffed it back into her robes.

“What are we making, then?” Kanna asked. She had her suspicions; she had just never imagined she’d find herself in such a situation, sitting at the back of a stranger’s house, in a strange country, next to a giant who was aiming to brew some drug she had been warned against all her life.

Goda didn’t answer at first. She was distracted, already crouching over the pit she had built and lighting some tinder beneath the wood. “The Flower on its own is hard to consume without passing through a vessel,” Goda finally said after the fire had grown enough to sustain itself. “Almost everyone vomits the raw plant before it has any effect. But there’s a way to consume it by extracting its essence into a brew with distilled spirits. It’s not ideal, but the substances that carry the purging effect will mostly evaporate away, and it leaves just the medicine…and the poison. In some ways, this makes it more dangerous, but at least he’ll be more likely to keep it down.” She reached for one of the sacks that they had been carrying around town, that they had dropped in the yard before dinner. She untied it, but Kanna could not see inside, and Goda’s hand disappeared into its mouth, until she had pulled a metal pot out from its dark gullet.

In the light of the fire, the steel of the pot looked cheap, thin.

“Where’d you get that?” Kanna asked.

“Same place I got our first round of fuel. Underneath the tavern where I left you, there’s a bootlegger who lives deep in the cellar. He lent me this as well as some other things. He owes me a few favors.”

“Underneath…?” Kanna remembered their adventure in the alleyway. She scratched her head. “But isn’t the source of the spring under that tavern? You said there was a shrine there.”

Goda smirked, rubbing the bottom of the pot against the fabric of her robes, then turning it over to flick off pieces of rust. “Why do you think I made you wait for me? The cellar is too close to the shrine. You were already acting like you could feel it when we were above ground. We didn’t have time for another one of your breakdowns.”

Kanna made a face and sat back. She was annoyed enough to cross her arms, but when she thought about it, she hadn’t been in the mood for another weird experience, either. “It’s all the same,” she muttered. “I ended up going to the shrine near the pool in the bathhouse and being tormented there.”

“That was no shrine. What you saw were just modern religious carvings over some tourist-trap pool. It’s the ancient pre-Maharan shrines that the government hides from people that have the power to torment you; you were feeling the one that’s underground.” Goda ripped a piece of fabric from one of the sacks and began wrapping it around the bare handle of the pot.

“But why is this even happening?”

“You’ve grown sensitive. That underground shrine is sealed off and it’s very far away from where you were, but still it reached you somehow. The range seems to be widening. I wonder if it will try to contact you even after we leave town.” Goda dug her hands into the mysterious bag yet again, and she pulled out a small jar of fuel. She looked over at Kanna finally. “For your sake,” she said, “I hope that’s not the case. An aggressive message from a shrine is not a pleasant thing to receive. It’s always bad news, and sometimes it’s better not to know one’s fate.”

“But it wasn’t telling me about my fate,” Kanna murmured. She hesitated for a second, not sure if she should confess what she had seen, or even if she could articulate it. “It was telling me about you.”

Kanna stared at Goda quietly, but there was no reaction. When the woman turned back towards the fire, Kanna slid closer to her, reached out to rest her hand on Goda’s back.

“I’m not sure why, but I saw another piece of your life—or I think that’s what I saw. Why would it show me that?”

Goda’s eyes were trained on the root of the flames. “Because you asked for it, whether you intended to or not. As I told you, the shrines are picky. They will only offer visions to certain people, and even then only in times of conflict—then they will offer to lead you to a solution, though the meaning of the images may not be obvious at first.”

“Conflict?”

“Yes.” Goda looked at her again. Her eyes were blank, an endless void of darkness framed by the presence of a flickering light. “You are conflicted about something. You are full of indecision. The shrine is giving you advice—but the kinds of solutions it provides are always painful. Even the few people who are accosted by messages will usually not listen to them. People rarely have the courage to follow the instructions because the path always requires surrendering a piece of the self. You already know this is painful; it’s why you won’t surrender.” Goda pulled the sack even closer, but this time she arranged it behind them, and she came to lie down propped on top of it, as if it were some kind of pillow. “We’ll wait for the fire to grow a bit cooler, then we’ll brew,” she said.

Kanna turned to stare at Goda. For awhile, she examined the features of the woman’s face; she saw things that she liked and things that she found ugly—but both of these extremes attracted her just the same.

“It was you who pulled me out of the water, wasn’t it?” Kanna asked. She was sitting close enough, so she brought her hand over and laid it lightly atop Goda’s fingers. “You stopped me from drowning.”

Goda looked down towards the dirt at their joined hands, but she didn’t comment on it. Instead, she shrugged. “The pool was shallow. It was easy. You could have brought yourself to the surface just as easily once I was back in range and the shocks had stopped.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You didn’t.”

Yes, Kanna thought then. I’m conflicted. As she lay down to join her master, and she rested her head on Goda’s shoulder, she knew what the problem was.

It was the only problem she had with Goda.

Goda was always here and now—and she wanted that here and now to last forever.

I want to stay with her, Kanna admitted to herself. She winced and pushed her face harder into Goda’s robes, until her mouth was pressed against the edges where the woman’s chest met the bones of her neck.

But I can’t.

I can’t.

I can’t.

To her shock, she felt Goda’s arm sliding out beneath her, coming up to encompass her, coming up to hold her. Kanna took in a sharp breath, but she muffled it against Goda’s skin and hoped that the woman hadn’t heard that small sound of weakness.

“Why do I feel this way about you?” Kanna murmured aloud, her voice vibrating against those solid bones beneath her. It wasn’t the first time she had asked this.

“Because you don’t know anything about me,” Goda said. “You only know the way I look and the way I smell, which is pleasing to you. But you want more. You want the story of Goda Brahm. She is not who I am—she’s only a story—but the shrine will nonetheless tell you. It appears that it wants you to know, and once you catch even a glimpse of this, a new clarity will come and you’ll almost certainly feel differently than you do now.”

Kanna reached across and grasped Goda’s hand again. She pressed it against the left side of her own chest, where the tops of her ribs peaked out from the collar of Parama’s robes. Goda’s hand felt warm. “I don’t care what your story is,” Kanna murmured. “I only want to hear it so that I can know you. I won’t judge you for it, whatever it is. I’m not Priestess Rem.”

“You’ve judged everything else you’ve seen so far. Your head is swimming with judgments for every new thing you hear about. Most of your energy is spent on resistance. You won’t make an exception for me, I promise.”

“Then you don’t know me very well, either,” Kanna said, growing annoyed. Her hand still wrapped against two of Goda’s fingers, she moved the woman’s touch lower, and she felt it brush past her ribs and onto thicker flesh. She looked straight up at Goda’s face fearlessly.

Goda did not pull away. Her gaze met Kanna’s in the dark. Her breath flowed in a warm rhythm against Kanna’s mouth.

“Maybe I don’t,” she said.

When Goda finally did get up to stoop over the fire, Kanna had closed her eyes. She lay back against the rough fabric of the bag and she watched the silhouette of Goda Brahm conjuring Death in an old steel pot.

* * *

Kanna didn’t complain when Goda made her stand by the closed door of the boy’s room. She was terrified, much too afraid to even approach. She tried her best to tap into some feeling of compassion for the boy who was lying on his deathbed and heaving barely audible gasps, but the scene was so horrific that she could barely watch. His suffering made the room seem eerie and haunted, like it was indeed infested with demons.

It reminded her of her own death, she realized—and that was when a new feeling suddenly passed through her.

I’m selfish, she thought. For just a second, she felt it flowing coldly through her bones, like a starving, needy snake that twisted and turned and gnawed around every muscle beneath her skin. It slithered through her quickly and was gone, and it left her bewildered in its wake.

She pressed a hand to her face. She remembered what Goda had told her that morning about Middleland boys and how they often didn’t survive even their own birth. She forced her gaze up to look closely at the young man. Instead of a wince, this time a warm rush came up to the bottom of her eyes.

Of course his mothers are desperate. Kanna swallowed. She wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her before. Just that morning, she had been so distracted and annoyed at the idea that Middlelanders lived so differently from how they were supposed to live—from what she was used to—that her mind had completely glossed over the fact that they only lived like this because people often died before being born. People die, she thought, and I’m simply bothered that they don’t live like Upperlanders. Who knows how many sons these women have lost before him? Am I really this self-centered? Perhaps Goda is right; I spend almost every ounce of my power on judgments and opinions.

What she felt wasn’t exactly shame. It was only empty space where her judgment used to be. She still wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was unpleasant, so she tried to shake it off and turn her attention back to the drama unfolding before her.

She watched Goda standing over the boy, watched how the woman touched his face with her bare hand. Now that the parents had turned in, it seemed that the theatrics of playing a priestess were no longer necessary.

Goda stared down at him with full attention, with a raw look of concern. She had pressed her fingers against both sides of his jaw, had pinched his mouth open. With her other hand, she was holding a vial of the Flower concoction over the boy’s lifeless face. She tipped it slowly. It dribbled into that loosely opened mouth for a few seconds with no reaction.

Then quite suddenly, the boy was not so lifeless anymore.

He screeched so loudly that Kanna jumped up in surprise, hitting the back of her head against the wall. The crack was loud, too; it echoed along with the rumble from the writhing on the bed, and even through the pain Kanna worried that they were about to wake someone up.

But she remembered then what Goda had told the boy’s parents about the noise. She rubbed her head and turned her gaze back towards the bed, and she saw that Goda had ignored everything else in the midst of her utter focus. In fact, she had climbed onto the bed, and her knee was digging against the boys chest, and she had come to press her hand hard against his nose and mouth.

“Swallow it,” Goda commanded.

The boy fought her. His chest jerked, as if he were about to heave.

“Hold it in!”

One of the boy’s arms seemed to abruptly gain some strength, and it shot up to smack Goda’s side. Goda snatched his wrist. She forced her weight on him some more. She pushed him down with both her legs and did not let up on his mouth.

Kanna watched, entranced, that familiar sensation of curiosity and fear oozing into her body. She was repulsed by her own reaction. She was repulsed when she realized that something in the boy’s gaze when he looked up at Goda had reminded her of herself.

In time, the boy’s body gave in. He swallowed Goda’s gift when it seemed he could not stand to live another second without a breath. He sunk limply into the bed and appeared to fuse into the mattress while Goda still hovered on top of him.

Kanna forced herself to look down at the messy lines of the floorboards beneath her. She did not look back up until she felt Goda’s approach, until she saw a large pair of feet padding in her direction.

Goda was wiping her hands against the front of her own robes. “It’s done,” she said, “but we won’t know what will happen for another few hours yet.”

Kanna watched as her master opened the door. “What do you mean?” She glanced back at the young man in the bed with the soaked sheets, the young man who was now gasping, taking in shallow breaths in rapid succession. Kanna realized for the first time that she was worried about what would become of him. She didn’t like it; she tried to brush the feeling off automatically, since on the surface it seemed like a new burden on top of all her other ones.

“I mean that he will either be dead,” Goda replied, stepping out of the chamber, “or we will have awakened another vessel.”

Kanna blinked and stared. She followed Goda down the hallway, struggling to keep up with the woman’s quick strides, her concern transforming quickly into outrage. “We’ll have awakened a what?” She gazed furtively over her shoulder, at the door she had left open just a crack in her haste. “Wait, wait! You knew this the whole time? You knew he was a potential…vessel, or whatever it’s called?” Kanna grabbed the back of Goda’s arm. “Tell me! What’s going on? Did you know?”

“I suspected.”

“How?”

When they had reached an unfamiliar door where Goda had stopped, Goda turned to look at her. “He has all the signs of a vessel on the verge of wakefulness. It’s not a beautiful sight—it’s similar to physical death, and indeed many of them do not survive the transformation—but he’s on the edge of cracking open. It’s obvious.”

Again, Kanna did not understand what it all meant. “But isn’t that a bad thing?” Kanna cried. “Why on Earth would you want to turn someone into a vessel? Couldn’t they get into huge trouble? Couldn’t we get in trouble for doing it? If these vessels get executed like you said, I can only imagine what happens to people who ‘awaken’ them.”

Goda shook her head. “Once they are infested with snakes, vessels don’t have a choice but to awaken. If they don’t have Flower, they’ll die.”

“And his parents know this? They asked you to do this knowing that he might be a vessel and that he’ll be persecuted for the rest of his life?”

“Even if they hadn’t asked, I would have given it to him anyway. This was why we came here, after all.”

Kanna’s face twisted; she gave Goda a look of complete incomprehension. “What are you even talking about? We came here because I accidentally crashed into their garden.”

“No,” Goda said, her gaze matching Kanna’s, her tone sounding as if everything she had said was something Kanna should have already known. “You crashed into the garden because in the future, we had come here to awaken a vessel.”

Before Kanna could fashion any kind of stuttering retort to this newest piece of nonsense, Goda had pushed against the door. A small room lined with stone on every side opened up before them. Because of the light that leaked in from the hallway, Kanna could make out a few details: a drain on the floor that seemed to lead outside, a water spigot coming out from the wall, a bucket tucked into the corner.

So this was where Goda had cleaned herself in the morning, Kanna thought.

“I touched him, so I have to wash the serpents from my robes,” Goda said, already starting to unfasten the front of her outer garments. “Go to our room and wait for me there.”

Kanna looked at her, as if to catch sight of these mythical snakes, but instead she saw flashes of skin above the collar of Goda’s shirt. She felt some heat rush up to her face, even though she had already seen Goda’s body many times, and much barer than what she was seeing then.

When she didn’t move, Goda smirked at her. “Unless you’d like for me to cleanse you, too, snake. The water is plenty cold enough.”

* * *

Kanna sat on the marital bed with her back against the headboard, her legs bent and open, her arms resting on her knees. She had tucked a pillow behind her shoulders. She appreciated the luxury of it because it felt like she had not lain on a real mattress in ages, even though she had just fled the comfort of her own bed only weeks before. From a military cot, to hard stone, to the floor of a storage shed, to the back of a truck, and then finally to a normal bed that she would share with Goda—she wasn’t sure which prospect had caused her the most discomfort. Her heart was beating faster. It competed with the ticking that droned on like a metronome through the room.

She had noticed the clock on the wall not long after she had entered the room by herself. It was mechanical, driven by a weight that inched down towards the floor with every swing of the pendulum. Middlelanders kept time with a different system of hours, but Kanna had learned about it from her tutors years before, and though it took her longer than it would have with an Upperland clock, she managed to decipher what the ticks and tocks of the dial meant.

The time was around two hours before midnight—or, rather, what the Middlelanders called “midnight,” which was a lot closer to dawn than she was comfortable with.

She knew that she’d be able to run into town fairly quickly, but to err on the safe side, she’d have to leave at least an hour early. On the other hand, she also didn’t want to leave too soon and have to loiter near the train station and risk getting caught.

She had an hour to decide how she would escape. An hour was enough.

The clock on the wall ticked and tocked. She turned away and instead stared at the door that was framed by her open legs on either side of her. She was waiting for Goda to appear in the doorway between those legs. When Goda appeared, she thought, she would look at the woman’s face one last time and then start plotting her escape.

The door creaked open just as she was thinking this, before she had time to prepare herself, before enough seconds on the clock had ticked by and lulled her into the trance she had been hoping for. Instead, she gazed up at Goda with the raw vulnerability of full awareness and surprise.

Goda was naked.

Kanna’s face burned, though she knew she should have expected this, too. What else would Goda wear if her clothes were still wet? It was just that Kanna had never seen the woman naked inside of an actual house, and for some reason this seemed unspeakably lewd. She grew only more uncomfortable when Goda closed the door behind herself, when she walked past the clock and began casting shadows against the walls in the flickering candlelight.

It was the abrupt sensation of intimacy that scared her, Kanna realized. She was alone in a room with a naked woman who was supposed to be her new wife. Even though Kanna knew that the only reason they were there was because of the stories she had spun, a small part of her still played along with the lies, and that part of her saw Goda as some eager groom wandering in shamelessly on their wedding night.

The only thing was that Goda’s face was blank as always, disinterested, not eager at all. As she approached the bed, she dropped her keys—and the pendant along with them—on top of the night table. She picked up the sheets and started peeling them off the bed with a yawn.

Kanna couldn’t take it anymore at that point. She slammed her hand on top of the quilt just as Goda was opening it. She looked up at Goda with a sneer on her face and Goda met her glance with only a light shade of curiosity.

“Why are you naked?” Kanna demanded. “Always naked. Even in a stranger’s house, you saunter around the hallways in the buff as if bathrobes don’t exist. Who are you trying to show off to? I can promise you that no one here wants to see your body.”

“Then don’t look,” Goda said. The smirk was not on her mouth, but it was in her eyes.

Kanna crossed her arms and allowed Goda to slide in next to her. In spite of every crazy thing the woman had said to her, every veiled threat that sent alarm bells ringing in her mind, Kanna’s body had seemed to not get the message at all. Even just the warm feeling of the woman beside her sent her blood rushing to unhelpful places, made her brain start losing touch with the past and the future and any plans she had laid out for herself.

Goda was now.

And Kanna had an hour to be with her. She looked at Goda’s face and saw that the woman was watching her, too. Some tense potential energy—like the violent flow of a river being pushed back—vibrated between them and through the bed, and Kanna was suddenly aware of it more than anything else in the room. She could feel it now more than she could before. She looked at the smirk that still remained on Goda’s face and realized that it held the smallest edge of effort, of resistance.

Goda had not been ignoring her, she realized. Goda had been holding back.

Kanna reached for her across the bed. She leaned hard into Goda’s body; her hand fell onto Goda’s thigh and her fingers dug into the skin; she stretched herself up until her face matched Goda’s, until her mouth brushed lightly against the side of Goda’s bottom lip.

Their gazes hadn’t broken, even with the awkward closeness. Goda looked down at her, but made no move to either encourage her or discourage her. She said nothing. Her face was blank.

“It’s not just me. I know it isn’t,” Kanna whispered against Goda’s cheek.

“It’s not.”

“Then do it. I’m right here.”

Goda stared at her for a long time, but the empty expression in her eyes did not dissolve. Eventually, she reached up and pressed her hand to Kanna’s chest—but rather than caress her, she pushed her back. It bothered Kanna how little effort it seemed to take the giant to brush her off, to send her gently back to the other side of the bed.

Then Goda turned to huff the candle out, and it was only by the moonlight coming in between the curtains of the window behind them that Kanna could see the room. Kanna gritted her teeth and clawed at the sheets with frustration. It was over. It was done. The candle had been blown out, and she would never have the chance to see it re-lit.

She looked around the room, trying to distract herself from the burning in her face and other places still. Her gaze fell towards the floor near the exit, where their few belongings were stacked together. Among them, she noticed Goda’s satchel, as she had many times before. The last ounce of her frustration fueled her enough that she lingered for awhile on the outline of the cylinder inside.

A steel baton.

She wondered again if she would find herself using it against Goda after all. She swallowed. She decided that she would leave so quietly, that she would never have to even consider a fight. In an hour’s time, she would slip out of the room with a face as stoic and emotionless as Goda Brahm’s.

So she turned her attention to the clock and waited. It ticked along as before, its pendulous tail swinging back and forth against the wall near the door. Kanna wondered if she was only hearing things, but the seconds seemed to come slower sometimes and faster other times. After awhile, it had relaxed her enough that her eyes began to droop and the tension began to diffuse from her bones as long as she didn’t look at Goda.

Before she had even realized, the room flickered and fused into the pitch darkness behind her eyelids. She had fallen asleep.

* * *

A forest formed itself overhead. Kanna was staring up through the trees and at the white light that showered down on her, and this time she wasn’t surprised at all to find herself on the wooded trail. The surprise came when she realized that she seemed to be in her own body, that she could feel the texture of the leaf litter as she dug her small feet into the ground.

She walked down the path. It was early autumn, she thought. The air seemed as if it was just starting to cool and she could smell the beginnings of fall. The forest was a little dim, a bit unsettling with the way the trees seemed to rock and loom over her, but her curiosity tugged her further into the trail.

Goda…Goda….

There was a voice that seemed to emanate from the pores of the leaves on all the branches around her. She wasn’t sure how this was happening, but she decided that it didn’t matter because it was all an illusion in her head. Though she wasn’t Goda this time, she followed the call anyway. She pushed on, deeper into the woods, straining to hear what the trees were saying to her.

Goda…Goda, what…? Goda, what did you…?

The voice had grown a bit stronger, and it sounded familiar all of a sudden. She could tell that it belonged to a woman and that the words were in the Middlelander tongue, but the murmurs dissipated eventually into the brush.

The call had led her to a river. It was at the shore that Kanna finally found what she had no idea she had been looking for.

A tall, lanky form stooped over the edge of the waters. She knew who it was without even having to stare for every long. She knew that shape, even if it looked a little younger, a bit less built, a bit more innocent and less menacing. The young woman was naked from what Kanna could tell, and she was shivering—sobbing—which immediately put Kanna on edge.

She had never seen Goda cry before. She couldn’t even fathom it.

As quietly as she tried to approach, the leaves crunched lightly beneath her, and she was sure after every step that the woman would turn around. She only wanted to have a quick look at the woman’s face, to know that it was Goda, and to see that moment of vulnerability as fully as she could.

She wanted to see the true face of Goda Brahm—the face Priestess Rem had warned her about, the face even Goda herself had told her that she didn’t want to see. It wasn’t only curiosity that fueled her; it was that force that seemed to connect her to Goda, something she felt growing stronger all the time.

When she reached the giant, she found that the water of the slow-moving creek in front of them was filled with a pinkish tint and that the sun shone too brightly on it for her to be able to catch sight of Goda’s reflection discreetly. A set of clothes were strewn along the bank.

Kanna sighed. She sucked in a breath for courage. She whispered to the back of the woman’s head, “Goda?”

But the woman carried on as if she hadn’t heard a thing. She kept erupting in sobs that she seemed to be trying to hold back. It made her body appear completely strung with tension. Her muscles seemed like they wanted to burst from her skin. The woman seemed to be looking down at her own hands.

Kanna reached out and touched her shoulder. “Goda?”

Then the woman finally turned—and Kanna recoiled. She snapped her arm back. She gasped.

It wasn’t a woman at all.

The eyes that stared back at her were jet black, even in the brilliant sun. It was like they had absorbed every ounce of light, like they belonged to some nocturnal beast who had wandered out of its cave in the middle of the day. The teeth were exposed, sharp, gritted with pain. The short hair dangled over that hostile face like a veil, and it was the only thing that softened the shock enough for Kanna to not immediately take off running.

And then she noticed the smears of dark red—almost black—that coated that creature from the bottom of its neck in a dripping trail down its chest. It was the same red that coated the beast’s hands.

It was only when the metallic smell of it reached Kanna’s nose that she fully realized what it was. She froze. The monster stretched up onto its impossibly long legs. It growled behind closed teeth and crouched over her until both the canopy and the light were blocked from her vision.

It screamed in her face. It screamed so loudly—with such rage and anguish, with a fully-opened mouth—that its breath felt like a wave of acid on her skin.

Kanna’s muscles unfroze and she took a shaky step back, the first step that jolted her towards the trail once again and sent her off in a full sprint. She ran for her life, forgetting that she was in a dream, losing that bit of wakefulness that might have quelled some fear in her.

Her chest heaved. Her heart throbbed more loudly in her ears than it ever had in her entire life. Still, it did not drown out the creature’s cries. She felt its pounding footfalls coming up behind her. Its screams bellowed in waves that accumulated in the air and seemed to burst out in a thousand tones at the same time. When she glanced over her shoulder on reflex to see how close the beast had come, she regretted it instantly.

The monster had grown taller, ever taller. It knocked trees down with the force of its thumping feet. It was crying and screaming and clawing at the skin of its own neck and chest, until it had torn its own throat out, its own breast, its own heart. Streams of blood had joined together to gush in torrents on the ground.

It followed Kanna and throatlessly screamed. It wanted her to hear. It ripped away at its own flesh until Kanna had run out of strength and she stumbled onto the ground in front of it. She looked up at the looming giant, more fear welling up inside of her than she had ever felt in her life, blood raining down in warm and cold spurts on top of her.

The monster gripped a handful of Kanna’s clothes and tore them apart with one jerk of its hand. It next reached for her body, dug its nails deep in her flesh, and the pain radiated so hotly that Kanna wished instead that she had been struck dead all at once.

Goda! The voice that had whispered before grew louder in the clearing. Goda! The screams overcame the growls of the monster as it began ripping holes into Kanna’s skin. Goda, what have you done? Goda! Goda!

She realized now whose voice it was. As her vision grew hazier, as her head fell back into the dirt and the pain from the beast’s hands morphed into a mere sensation—not good, not bad—she noticed then that they had fallen together on the trail just down from a tiny cottage.

A woman stood in the doorway, her eyes wide, her body nearly collapsing where she stood. It was the unmistakable face and voice of Priestess Rem. “Goda!” she cried. “Almighty Goddess, what has she done? Goda!”

The beast brought its hand to Kanna’s face. The forest above faded into nothing, and all Kanna could feel were the writhing snakes twisting back and forth underneath her skin. They seemed to have come up from the forest floor. They were buzzing with a hatred that burned holes through every part of her, a hatred and judgment that she somehow knew was meant for the monster—but it had come from Rem, and from the rest of the world, and even from the monster towards itself.

She could hear Rem shouting still. Other voices joined. There were thousands upon thousands of them, screaming in some hellish void, until they had all smeared together into one intolerable rumble that seemed to crack open the crust of the Earth itself—that seemed to crack open every layer of Kanna’s skin.

She felt her insides spill out through the faults.

* * *

Kanna choked. Her first conscious thought was that she couldn’t breathe. The moment she had awakened, it felt like a heavy body was pressing hard against her chest, and the weight didn’t lift until the strength slowly returned to her hands and arms and legs. When she finally took her first breath—much too sharp, much too loud—her senses raced back to her, and she turned to her side to see that Goda was still there.

She recoiled at the sight. She couldn’t help it. The woman was asleep and normal and human, but the fear had still not left Kanna’s bones and her heart was still pounding. Kanna stumbled out of the bed and hit the nearby side table, which sent it scraping hard against the wooden floor.

Goda stirred. Kanna stifled a gasp and staggered back some more. The incessant ticking in the room—the sound that seemed to grow louder, to scream for her attention—was the only thing that managed to make her tear her eyes away from the sleeping giant.

She looked at the time. A ray of moonlight hit the face of the clock exactly where her eyes had zoomed into the dial. It was forty-nine minutes until midnight.

And so Kanna bolted towards the door. She leaned against it, allowing her weight to trip the handle, to let it start swinging open. She threw Goda another furtive glance, watching in horror as the creature began to slowly roll over.

Her hand reached reflexively in her pocket for the cuff key. She couldn’t stay tied to that monster for a moment longer. She would rip off her bonds that second; she would throw the cuff on the floor and run for her life.

She grazed the key against the hole, but her hands were shaking and it was hard to keep herself steady. She jerked and jabbed against the metal in the dark, but then she froze when she heard a low grunt echoing through the chamber.

She looked up.

A pair of empty eyes stared back at her. They glowed with the eye-shine of an animal.

---

Onto Chapter 20 >>

Past the curtain, there was a burst of light. The space felt wet, like there was vapor leaking in from the corridors that flanked them on each side. The chamber they found themselves in had no candles or electric lamps, but straight ahead of them there was a wide open gash in the wall and a courtyard that spread out in the full force of the late afternoon light. It was a small garden with a tree planted at each corner and a thatch of flowery bushes in the middle, and it was surrounded by rock walls with many doorways that seemed to lead to darker places.

Noa pulled Kanna towards the courtyard, and it was only then that Kanna noticed the people passing back and forth through the chamber they were standing in, and she twisted her neck to look at them. The sunlight had made the bodies seem like mere shadows on the curtain from the outside, but now Kanna could make out some details. They came by in groups of two or three—a man and one woman, a man and two women—but most of them did not seem to notice her, and they appeared over-focused and rushed as they disappeared into the hallways around them.

Abruptly, a young man bumped into her and gasped when he appeared to notice her features. Kanna quickly matched his astonished expression, but his companion pulled him away in a hurry, and Leina stepped between Kanna and the boy so that she could no longer see his face.

“Careful,” Noa said, guiding her into the bright square. “The women around here can get ornery if you touch their special friends.”

In the light of the garden, it was harder to see the people inside the chamber behind them, but Kanna still kept her gaze trained on the movement because something about the whole thing disturbed her. She stopped in the middle of the space, even though the twins seemed to be beckoning her to cross, to enter one of the dark thresholds carved out of stone on the other side.

“What’s going on?” she whispered. She stood next to one of the trees and refused to move further, so Noa let go of her hand. “Are all these people here to bathe? Where are the pools, in those dank caverns? If that’s the case, then I’d rather stay out here.” Actually, she was starting to rethink the place entirely. She already felt a strange, invisible force tugging her away, back towards Goda’s direction.

Leina laughed and tipped her head towards a doorway. “Yes, the pools are in there, in many different rooms. Some people do come to bathe here, but not everyone does, of course,” she said. She leaned against the tree, which Kanna then noticed had low branches brimming with fruit. “It’s a discreet spot because there’s a maze of caverns and hallways, so it’s really popular for other purposes, too.”

“What purposes?” But Kanna’s mind had already begun to wander into unseemly territory, and her inklings were confirmed when Noa answered:

“What do you think?” She smirked. “It’s tradition to bathe immediately after meeting with a lady-friend, so the young men from poorer families who don’t have running water at home just come here. It’s considered low-class, though, so the wealthier families avoid it. They’re also pickier about who they allow their sons to meet up with, so you won’t find the fancy boys mingling with the kind of women who hang out here; the poorer families are a bit more open to anyone as long as they have money.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. She turned again towards the open chamber behind them. “You mean those women are paying?”

Noa shrugged. “Some of them probably, yeah—but not directly. It’s illegal to pay any money and it makes the family look bad, but people do it anyway by offering expensive gifts to the man’s mother and stuff like that. That’s why if you’re a poor family, it’s like hitting the jackpot if you have a son. You get a lot of social leverage, and if your son strikes the fancy of someone with means, then you can be set for a few years. If you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly abundant around here, so the demand totally outstrips the supply, and some of the women are desperate to have children. That’s the way it’s always been, though.”

“Yes, but isn’t that…?” Kanna stopped. She felt her chest tightening, that outrage from before returning. She was about to accuse Noa and Leina and every other Middlelander of exploiting the weak, but then she heard the voice of Goda Brahm echoing in her mind, the voice that had accused her of hypocrisy days before, when she had tried to sympathize with Parama Shakka: “You’ll pretend to yourself that what you’re feeling is compassion for the boy,” Goda had said, “when really you’re just upset about your own situation.”

She wondered if she should suspend her judgment for the moment. It was true that even with this explanation, she really had no idea what was going on.

Further, that small revelation from Noa had made her want to leave. She took a small step back, but as she did, a fruit fell down from one of the branches of the tree and landed near her feet. She glanced at it, mildly startled at first, but then when her eyes focused upon it, she noticed something strange. It oscillated from one color to another as the sunlight shined upon it; she had never seen that kind of fruit before.

Curiously, she picked it up. “Odd,” she said. “It changes colors. Why does it look like that?”

“Like what?” Noa took it from her and looked it over, but seemed unimpressed. She handed it then to Leina. “This is a fairly common fruit. It’s still a little green, but it looks normal to me.” Even as Noa said this, Kanna watched the fruit change from green to purple to a mix of both in Leina’s hand.

“You mean you don’t see it? How do you not see it?” she said.

Both Noa and Leina wore matching smiles filled with confusion, but Leina reached above them and picked another fruit from a nearby branch. She took a step towards Kanna and dropped the pair of fruits in Kanna’s robes—one in each pocket—and Kanna twitched a little because she could have sworn she felt the woman’s hand grazing her cuff key inside.

“If you like them so much, you should have some,” she said. “One for each side of you. You got married recently, right? It’ll be up to you to have the children, probably. This fruit is supposed to be good luck if you’re seeking fertility.”

“The two of us are also good luck for that kind of thing,” Noa added. “Though of course we can’t offer the same gift a man might offer. It’s a different sort of gift. It’ll relax you; your wife seems kind of stiff.” She looked upon Kanna with an enigmatic expression, a new smile that Kanna didn’t understand at first. The twins both stood in front of her under the tree—one twin on each side of her—and they watched to see her reaction. “So pick one of us to take you inside. We don’t like to share, you see.”

Kanna blinked. Oh, she thought.

Blushing, she lifted both hands up, not quite knowing how to politely decline the offer that they seemed to be making. They were both quite beautiful, but something in Kanna’s mind had fused them together with the garden, and their beauty fell into the same category as the elegant branches of the tree or the budding flowers at the center of the courtyard: they were nice to look at, but they were nothing she was eager to touch.

They were nothing like Goda.

But why? she asked herself. There was something violent that she felt towards Goda that she couldn’t feel towards the flowers or the trees or the women in front of her. That realization bothered her immediately. Physically, her new companions were not much different from her master, besides being pleasantly smaller and less intimidating. They even looked a little closer to her own age, were much kinder to her, and gave her their full attention. Four eager eyes were regarding her with something she now realized was desire. It was flattering; it was refreshing; it was something she had never experienced to that extent before. She felt that it added something to her, whereas Goda only seemed to ever want to rip things away until there was nothing left of her.

“I…have to get back to my wife,” Kanna said. She glanced over her shoulder at the open chamber behind her. Truth be told, she was a little squeamish about weaving her way through the other patrons again, especially after learning what they were up to—but the urge to go back to Goda had swelled in her strongly. It competed with her curiosity and the natural drives of her body in the face of Noa’s offer. She would be lying if she told herself that she wasn’t tempted in both directions.

Noa took her hand again. “It’s fine,” she told Kanna softly. “You can say no. We’re not pushy about that kind of stuff. If you want, we can just show you the spring and then we can leave. It’s a beautiful spot, and it’d be a shame if you never got to see it while you were here!”

Just as gently, Leina took her other hand. “It’ll only be a second. The main, unheated pool isn’t that deep inside and it’s not very popular, so there won’t be crowds. There’s even a passageway in the room that leads towards a back exit to the outside. In fact, it faces the path towards the railroad tracks, so it’ll be real easy to point out the station if we go out through there.”

Hearing that, Kanna began to lean a bit further in their direction. “Is it really that close?” They had told her before that the spring was less than a minute’s walk away from her seat in the tavern, but because she wasn’t sure where Goda had gone, she had a hard time calculating how far she could go while staying in the cuff’s range.

But two hands had begun pulling her again. This time, she did not resist by default. Her eyes fell on the grass below her momentarily, and she was astonished to see that it too was phasing through a range of colors. Soon they passed it, though, and the floor turned to stone, and then—as they slipped into the mouth of one of the corridors—natural rock shuffled beneath Kanna’s sandals.

Because the space had grown suddenly dark, her resistance returned and she wondered if she had been stupid to follow them. Her heart began to pound, but almost as quickly as her fear had come, some relief phased over her next, her emotions as fickle as the colors on the grass had been. They rounded a corner almost immediately. What they had told her was true: the spring was hardly a stroll away.

Like many of the structures Kanna had found herself in recently, the chamber reminded her of a cave, though it was lit with a vast array of candles. Small dripping sounds fell somewhere in the distance, but the only water she had noticed was at the center of the room, in a large, flooded pit that was overlooked by ornate carvings along the boundaries of the space. Once her eyes had adjusted and the twins urged her to the edge of the pool, she could see more clearly what was chiseled into the rock.

The image of a swan with spreading wings hovered on the wall over the waters. Below it, twisting snakes erupted in every direction. As soon as her eyes fell upon them, they flashed with color, before returning to the mundane shade of gray stone.

Kanna stopped dead in her tracks. “Wait, this is a shrine? But isn’t the shrine supposed to be underground?” she asked them, immediately pulling back, immediately ready to bolt out of the room. She shook her head with urgency. “Look, I have to leave now.”

The twins did not let go of her hands and merely stared at her in confusion.

“I have to leave!” she repeated. This time, she tore her hand away from Leina, but Noa seemed less eager to let go. She wasn’t holding onto Kanna violently, but it seemed to take the woman little effort to try to keep her still, which only served to enrage Kanna more.

“Is it some religious thing?” Noa asked, looking at Leina. “What do Upperlanders believe in again? They have like a bunch of gods, right?” She turned back to Kanna. “Are you afraid you’ll offend your god or something?”

“I have no god,” Kanna said, pulling against Noa’s grip, which only served to bring the woman closer. Kanna narrowed her eyes and met Noa’s bewildered expression with a scowl, jostling her own hand back and forth to work her wrist loose. Her sleeve began to slide over to expose the cuff, but she barely noticed. “I don’t believe in any religious nonsense. Maybe my mother did and my other countrymen still do, but I know better than that. I’m not about to worship and follow the orders of some deity who thinks he knows better than me about my own life. I’m not some ignorant peasant crawling through the dirt on some mountain in—” With a sharp jerk, she managed to free herself from Noa’s grip—or perhaps it was just that Noa had decided to let go—but the force of the movement sent her stumbling to the side. Her feet shifted precariously on the edge of the pool. She panicked and stumbled some more.

She fell.

“Whoa!” Leina called out to her. Both the twins grasped for her, but were a split second too late.

The smack of the water stung hard against Kanna’s spine, but once she broke through, it was the cold that stung even more. She kicked her arms and legs furiously, but it seemed to bring her no closer to the surface. When she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw two pairs of arms urgently reaching into the water for her, groping at her robes, but missing her as she floated down.

Then the hands disappeared very suddenly, as if the water had turned scalding hot. “Ah!” a pair of twin voices echoed through the space, loud enough that Kanna could hear them even under the water.

She noticed all of this at the same exact moment that a rush of pain shot through her nerves. And then she realized what was happening.

She fought the urge to scream into the water, because she didn’t want a mouthful that would drown her. She tried to fight her way to the top, but the shocks were already exhausting her, and though they were small, they now seemed to surround her from every direction in the water, instead of radiating from her arm as they usually did. She closed her eyes and then opened them again. She felt the current of the spring pushing against her side, bringing with it the current of the cuff, searing against her skin as if a huge electric hand were stroking her.

Her body spun towards the touch even as she fought it, but then the pain fell away. The shocks ended abruptly, or else she couldn’t feel them anymore. She hung suspended in the water. Through the dim medium around her, her gaze fell into the deep well of the spring, and she could see the black hole that appeared to be its source. She grew limp as it stared back at her with what seemed like a single, dark, surfaceless eye.

She fell deep into that eye—and then deeper still. The walls of the pool disappeared. The light of the cavern disappeared. Her own body beneath her disintegrated.

And when the light of the sun hit her face again, and she saw a body—dot by dot, cell by cell—forming around her, she was no longer at any spring in any shrine or in any place she had ever been. She was standing at the end of a forest trail, by a tiny cottage with a gate that came up to her waist.

* * *

Kanna looked down at a pair of huge hands that were not her own. Her legs seemed to go on forever beneath her, and they ended in a pair of bare, dirty feet that pressed into the grass. Her gaze rose up against her will, and the body she was living in pushed through the gate on its own and walked the path on the other side of the fence.

Once again, she realized, she was looking at the world from behind the giant’s eyes.

The giant pushed against the door of the cottage and let herself in. Clean rays shone in through the windows and warmly bathed the tabletop of the small kitchen that appeared before her. The giant reached into a pocket and pulled out some familiar-looking fruit that Kanna could not name. She held it over a bowl on the table, as if she were to drop it in, but a pleasant voice rang through the space and made her freeze.

“Oh, another gift from my monster?” In a chair, warming herself next to a tiny stove, the beautiful priestess from Kanna’s dream looked up at the giant with affection. “The flowers you brought me are still alive. I put them near the window to give them some sun, but I suppose that makes no difference since they’ve already been cut from their roots.” She smiled and with a metal rod poked at the twigs at the opening of the rocket stove. “Their days are numbered. Maybe I should press them into a book to keep them forever.”

“No matter what my priestess does, they won’t last forever,” the giant said.

The priestess’s expression didn’t change. “Very true. Nothing lasts forever, does it? At least we have the present moment.” She looked at the fruit in the giant’s grasp. “Now bring that over here so that I can eat something of yours again.”

The giant stared at the priestess, but did not approach at first, and seemed to wrestle with some thought that Kanna had no access to. When she finally did move, the steps were slow, and the body that Kanna found herself in felt suddenly stiff.

The priestess opened her bare palm in expectation and the giant dropped her gift softly into that hand.

“Ah, ah!” the priestess murmured in a teasing voice, as if she were chastising a child. “Be careful not to touch! Even just a slight brush of our hands will undo us both.”

There was another stretch of silence. Clearly uncomfortable, the giant shifted her weight back and forth, and it made the boards of the floor creak. “I finished what I was making for you,” she said after looking at the priestess for a long time. “Please take it now.”

“Hm, is that why you disappeared for a few days? I was starting to think you had grown cross after our argument last week and had abandoned me for good.”

The giant’s jaw tightened with an emotion Kanna couldn’t understand. “There is no argument. I can’t do what you asked of me and I won’t change my mind. Just take the medicine I made.”

“And I could say the same thing. I can’t do what you ask. You know very well that I can’t take that potion you’ve concocted. It’s against my precepts. There is only one solution to this situation and as long as you refuse me, it will never get any better.”

The giant’s hands fell to her sides. They clenched into fists. A wave of pain rushed through that body and Kanna found that she could feel it then, that the anguish had filled her, too, even though she had no idea of its source. “The answer is no.”

“Then there you have it,” said the priestess, bringing her attention back to the burning wood. “You’ve told me no and I can’t force you. Not even my orders as a clergy member extend that far, of course, so I suppose I’ll never find any relief from this. But I’m used to it. Perhaps it’s what the Goddess wants. Perhaps the suffering will be like a fire that makes me pure enough to live for eternity in Her garden.” The priestess grew quiet after that, thoughtful. Again, they merely hovered in each other’s presence and the giant refused to say anything in reply.

The giant finally turned and began trudging loudly towards the door, but a voice emerged from behind:

“Tell me, Goda, do you love me?”

A cacophony of emotions erupted, as if some sealed box filled with every kind of confusing passion had been broken. There were so many that Kanna couldn’t parse them, but she could feel a wave of heat rising up the giant’s throat. With some difficulty, the giant looked over her shoulder at the beautiful priestess, at the woman who was looking up at her with a faint smile.

Goda didn’t answer, but the priestess seemed to have heard something unspoken nonetheless.

“Then do what I ask,” the woman with Rem’s face told her. “Sin in my place, like a good layperson. This is all I want. Don’t you see? This is all you’re good for, Goda. The only things you have to offer to the world are that beautiful face…and those inhuman hands of yours.”

* * *

Kanna gasped. Her body convulsed as she expected to take a swell of water into her lungs, but instead it was only cold air that she sucked in. Her chest jerked with another freezing breath, then another. The only warmth she felt were the tears rolling from the corners of her eyes and into her ears, and the huge hand that had grasped her roughly by the face.

Goda Brahm was kneeling above her. She gazed down with a stern look that filled Kanna with renewed fear. She was forcing Kanna to look back up at her. “Wake up,” Goda muttered. “Wake the hell up and quit with the dramatics.”

As soon as Goda let her go, Kanna coughed and tried to sit up, but her inner body still felt awkward inside its shell. She realized that she was lying down on the hard stone beside the bathing pool and that her soaking wet robes clung so heavily to her that it was hard to even stretch her limbs.

“Idiot.” Goda’s words echoed through the chamber as she stood up all the way and tapped Kanna’s ribs with the tip of her boot. “If you’re already trying to kill yourself, at least wait until I’ve handed you off in Suda. It’s not my job to transport dead bodies.”

Kanna looked up at Goda with confusion, but the woman’s face was empty as always. She felt another presence nearby, though, and when she jerked her head, she saw the Bou twins sitting cross-legged on the ground, looking up at Goda like a pair of guilty schoolchildren.

“I’m sorry! We’re sorry!” Leina Bou cried. “We didn’t know she was a slave in transport. She told us she was your wife!”

“Never mind that.” Goda took Kanna by the arm and began forcing her onto her feet. “Get up. Get up.”

The threat behind her tone was so thick that Kanna obeyed on reflex. She got up as best she could, her frozen knees cracking as she finally made it to her feet.

A panicked thought flashed through her mind. She reached quickly into both her pockets to grope for the key, hoping that she hadn’t lost it in the waters. Luckily, even though her hands were numb, she was able to feel the metal against the tips of her fingers when she shoved them deep into her robes. The fruits had also not fallen out, by some miracle. She realized then that she must have only been in the water for a short moment before Goda had pulled her out.

Goda was no longer looking at her. The woman had turned and begun heading towards a hallway at the back of the chamber, and Kanna knew better than to refuse to follow. When she passed the twins, they looked up at her with apologetic expressions, and though Kanna wondered why, she did not stop until Noa reached up and grabbed her sleeve.

“The station is just across the way from the trans-continental trading office,” she whispered discreetly once Goda had neared the exit and seemed reasonably out of earshot. “That office is the tallest building in the skyline, so you can’t miss it. You can also follow the tracks, but they’re very winding and the fastest path is to just cut straight through the main road to the station.”

Leina nodded. “Best of luck. Your chances of escaping are low unless you can find a way to break off the cuff, but be careful—I hear they can zap you dead if you fiddle with them too much.”

“And remember: we didn’t tell you anything,” Noa added. “We’re just a pair of stupid tourists from the North.”

Kanna stared at them with surprise, but she pulled away quickly after Noa let go of her, and she jogged across the chamber to catch up with Goda. She was eager to break out of the grip of the shrine, and as soon as they stepped out of the tunnel that led to the back exit and emerged into the outside light, she felt like she could take in a solid breath again.

The cool air made her wet clothes all the more uncomfortable, but the feeling of freedom that came with the wide open space made up for it. They were at the back of the building, on a side that had no cramped alley to speak of. She could even see another door that seemed to lead to some room near the tavern.

Goda was over by the outside wall, picking up a pair of burlap sacks that were on the ground. She hoisted one onto her back, then handed the other to Kanna.

“Here, carry some supplies,” Goda told her. “You’ve been a complacent slave for long enough.” The woman trudged on ahead.

Kanna sighed and picked up the bag as best she could. It thumped against her legs as she dragged her feet on the ground and shifted her shoulders from side to side to carry the awkward weight. She heard some liquid sloshing in containers that jostled inside. She heard some metallic clanging. The annoyance of the chore distracted her for a few strides before she remembered that she needed to look up.

She glanced at the skyline. She had doubted at first whether she would know where to look, but the twins had been right, and the hugest tower of glass and steel was obvious among the rest of the buildings in the scenery. She saw the tracks ahead of her, too, and how they snaked through the labyrinth of buildings and eventually disappeared from her view, obscured by the city itself.

She huffed and pushed forward. The encounter with the shrine had drained her, but none of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she finally knew where to go.

* * *

Hours later, after they had ventured through twisting pathways and met with some other dubious tavern-keepers who sold black market spirits—after Goda had siphoned more fuel from a few poorly-attended vehicles and rummaged through some trash bins near restaurants to find only slightly imperfect bags of old yaw—the porter allowed Kanna to at last collapse with exhaustion on the back of a truck.

They hitched a ride with a foreigner who had taken pity on them and was heading in the same direction towards the edge of town. Kanna could barely hold herself up, and she used all her energy to resist the jostling of her body as they hit bumps in the road at uncomfortable speeds.

Goda was watching her. The light had waned to the point that there was barely any pink left in the sky, but Kanna could still see the woman’s face and she could still sense the faint amusement in it.

“You’ve just about killed me,” Kanna complained.

“You’re a slave. It only gets more tedious after you’re done with me. Get used to it.”

Kanna tried to stretch herself along the flatbed, but her arms and legs bumped against the cargo, and she thought better of it quickly because she knew that lying down would only make things harder once it was time to go. She sat up. Her stomach growled from having spent the day unattended. She reached for fruit in her pocket to see if she could silence the hunger.

Her hand brushed against the key while she was in there, but she ignored it and brought the fruit up to her mouth. Before she took a bite, though, she looked closely at the skin of the fleshy pome. She raised an eyebrow. The skin was green—just green and nothing else.

“It’s so strange,” she murmured. She turned it around in her hand. “It looked completely different before. Just like the grass in the courtyard, there were all kinds of colors, and they were changing over and over, but now it looks normal. And then later, there was that swan, and the snakes inside that pulsed with color like the ones in the caverns at the monastery, and then when I fell into the water I saw….” The memories had grown hazy since she had woken up by the edge of the pool, but now they were coming back as if she were piecing together a dream. “I saw weird things in the water. For a moment, my body completely disappeared.”

Goda reached out and picked the fruit from Kanna’s hand. She took a huge bite, her smile unfaded, and she looked at Kanna through the softening glow of the evening sun. “You don’t say,” she said. It wasn’t that she sounded like she disbelieved Kanna’s story; it was that she sounded completely unsurprised.

They hit a particularly large bump and Kanna had to fight to hold on. After it passed, she came to stare at Goda again. “You know why all of that happened, don’t you?” Kanna said. She had phrased it like a question, but she was nonetheless sure of the answer already. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. I can see that you do. You seem to know all about all this weird stuff that keeps happening, and yet you’ve told me so little, and I have this sinking feeling that there’s something huge you’ve failed to share this whole time.”

The wheels crunched underneath them and the car rumbled about, but Goda seemed to have no trouble keeping perfectly still. She looked over the body of the fruit and up at Kanna, a strange look of amusement in her dark, surfaceless eyes.

“You don’t say,” she said.

---

Onto Chapter 19 >>

Kanna sat in the driver’s seat of the motionless truck, staring out the dusty windshield and towards the back door of the house. She did not know how much time had passed. She had not gone inside again. Instead, she had contented herself with sitting stuck amongst the vines, feeling oddly comforted by the confines of the fence around her, because she found the idea of being housed with the giant too threatening to who she had become. She tried to imagine herself in an actual room with an actual bed alone with Goda. The image disturbed her as much as it pleased some more primitive side of her.

So when the shadow of the giant appeared in the doorway, she wondered if she had called it out with her own perverse thoughts. Kanna recoiled momentarily. She was able to control this display of weakness soon enough, though, and she stared straight into her master’s face with as much dignity as she could muster.

The woman’s hair was wet. Her clothes were dry.

“You bathed,” Kanna said after a moment. She had grown so used to seeing Goda sauntering around naked outside, that it hadn’t occurred to her that Goda could wash herself indoors. It seemed too mundane and civilized and out of sync with the usual ritual—but then perhaps it was only that Kanna wanted to see her body again.

Goda ignored the comment and appeared to scan the yard as she moved. Some of the sky was blocked out by the taller trees, but some of it wasn’t, and the spaces between the branches allowed spots of sun to highlight luggage that Kanna had left on the ground.

“I’m waiting here,” Kanna explained, even though Goda had not asked, “for my punishment.” She said it without thinking, but she found that she didn’t disagree with herself, either.

Goda laughed dismissively, turning away as if the comment had simply been a frivolous joke.

Kanna clasped her hands hard around the steering lever. The wheels beneath her creaked a little in response. “Well, it’s only fair, is it?” she said, following Goda’s movements with her eyes, watching to see if any of her words had changed the woman’s posture. “I stole your truck and ran it down a hill and crashed it into a fence. I deserve a punishment—and that Middlelander woman who is hosting us made it sound like it was uncouth for you to deliver it inside. Either way, I don’t want to sit in that house with you in some boring little room with a quaint little side table between our rocking chairs, pretending that we’re happily married. So I stayed out here and waited for the monster to come back out.” Kanna looked Goda dead in the face. “Punish me.”

Goda tipped her gaze up finally. “You want me to hit you.”

“Yes. That’s what I want. If you do nothing else for me, do that: treat a slave like a slave.”

Goda crossed the yard, past the luggage that Kanna had refused to bring into the house, over the jagged skid marks in the gravel, up to the open doorway of the truck. Her face was so empty and serious that Kanna had to fight not to jerk away, to take back what she had asked for. Goda raised both her hands and Kanna flinched because she saw that they were aiming for her face.

Her eyes closed on their own in an immediate reflex, so she did not realize Goda’s intention until she felt a pair of large hands pressing softly to either side of her cheeks. Her eyes snapped open in astonishment. She looked up at Goda, who was wearing a faint smile, an expression that held no judgement and no interest. Kanna could barely tolerate it.

“You have a mouth that will cause you trouble one day. It endlessly complains, and weaves elaborate lies, and asks for things that you don’t really want.”

Kanna stared into Goda’s face defiantly, even through the surprise. “You say that, but you like that mouth of mine, don’t you? You found your way inside of it last night.”

“Did I?”

“Don’t play dumb now. Are you going to tell me that was a ghost, a hallucination? I had already awoken from my dream by then. It was you, in the flesh. You taste the same way that you smell.”

Goda huffed. That exact scent that Kanna remembered from the night before became ever more intense. Then Goda lifted one of her hands and she brought it down again with a light, painless tap on Kanna’s cheek.

“There,” she murmured, her eyes still locked on Kanna’s frustrated face, her expression becoming a mocking one. “There’s your punishment.” She let Kanna go and turned around and headed off towards the hole in the fence.

“Where are you going?” Kanna called out after her; but instead of waiting for an answer, she slid down off the driver’s seat and onto the ground, avoiding the vines below as best she could, pounding her way through the chaos of the yard. She reached the other side just as the woman was disappearing around the corner.

Kanna ran up to her. She took Goda’s hand in her own and Goda glanced down at her with mild surprise. Within a few strides, though, Goda had looked away again and the gesture suddenly felt natural and their steps fell into sync.

Kanna found herself examining the skin on the back of the woman’s hand. She could see a bit of Goda’s forearm just under the sleeve as well; it bore the shallow scratches that Kanna had given her during their earlier fight. Now, with the heat of the moment dissipated, she felt a bit ashamed, as she had with the bruise she had given Goda days before—but the darker part of Kanna’s mind still felt a tinge of pride, of power.

“You were angry with me,” Kanna said. “I hadn’t seen such fire in your eyes until this morning. I won’t lie, I liked it. I like knowing that what I do can have an effect on you after all. I like seeing you squirm, even if it’s with fury. Even fury is weakness, isn’t it?”

“It’s over now. You’re talking about it still for some reason.” There wasn’t surprise in Goda’s tone, merely something akin to mild annoyance, as if Kanna was being tedious.

“You’re too simple-minded and dismissive. When will you see that I’m no passive victim and that I don’t need your forgiveness?” Kanna pressed herself against Goda’s side.

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Hearing this, something in Kanna wanted to taunt Goda more, to wave that small bit of power that she had in her pocket in the woman’s face—but she knew better than to compromise her good fortune, so she shut her mouth before she blurted anything else out.

Instead, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to be led by Goda. She pressed her cheek to the woman’s arm and felt her own skin sliding against the rough fabric of the robe sleeve, felt the heat radiating from Goda’s flesh underneath.

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” she murmured after awhile, when she sensed the texture of the ground changing beneath their feet. Something in her didn’t care, though; something in her felt inclined to surrender to Goda’s intentions as if she were being carried away by the current of a powerful stream, even as some part of her identity still shouted at her to resist every step.

She knew that there was no point in resisting for the moment. The resistance could come later. She would save her strength and push against Goda all at once.

“We’re going into the city to resupply. The journey to Suda is a long one.” Goda’s voice had begun to compete with the sounds of crunching wheels in the distance, as well as a soft din that was growing ever more distinct. “We’ve also discovered something unexpected here, and that will need to be handled.”

That was when Kanna opened her eyes and glanced up at Goda with curiosity. Before she could ask, though, she grew distracted because her eyes caught a sun glare beaming up from the ground in front of them. Twin streams of metal—rusted in some places, shining in others—flowed down from the Northern hills and cut across the path. It made Kanna squint temporarily, but as she stepped over the metal bars, she realized what they were: railroad tracks.

Kanna’s breath hitched. She could feel the weight of the key in her pocket once again. Even as she leaned harder into the woman beside her, her focus slowly leaked into the future and away from the present moment. She was to escape the grasp of Goda Brahm.

* * *

When they reached the shadow of the tall buildings, Kanna couldn’t help but tip her head up to gaze at the wide glass panels wedged in the stone. She had never seen anything like them. The structures must have been two dozen stories high, and they lined the streets and dwarfed the more traditional houses that littered the ground between them. If she peered for long enough, she could even see movement through the shining windows, and the shapes of people dressed in bureaucratic robes milling about inside. It captured her fascination enough that she bumped into a few bodies before she realized that they had wandered into a crowded street.

Strange eyes landed on her with lingering gazes, with bewildered expressions. She suddenly felt claustrophobic, and her first impulse was to move away from every person who passed by, to lower her head and make herself less obvious.

“Why are they staring at me?” she whispered.

“They’re curious,” Goda said.

“What, have they never seen a foreigner before?”

“Most of them have never seen an Upperlander, so they don’t know what they’re looking at. You’ll just have to get used to it.”

“Is this how it’s going to be everywhere we go?” Kanna tried to fight the impulse to hide her face in the folds of Goda’s robes.

“Generally, they won’t approach you or talk to you, so just ignore them.”

This was easy for Goda to say, Kanna thought. The giant stuck out to some extent among the crowd herself, but not in a manner that seemed to draw as much attention as Kanna did.

More alarmingly, this made Kanna worry about her ability to blend in when the time for escape finally came—if she could even figure out where she was supposed to go. She glanced across the span of the street and tried to pick up the thread of the train tracks again, but she could not find them anymore as the bodies had come to obscure the ground.

The space had also grown full of other distractions. Trucks began bounding down the road, honking at pedestrians that meandered too slowly, and the sides of the street were suddenly lined with booths, little storefronts manned by women who waved beckoning hands at every person who wandered by.

The smell of food wafted towards them in overwhelming bursts from outdoor ovens and stoves, and it was then that Kanna realized how inadequate Jaya’s hospitality had really been. Her eyes wandered towards a few of the food stalls and she gave the people waiting in line an envious glance.

“What are they selling over there?” she asked.

“Fried yaw,” Goda answered.

Kanna’s face twisted with disgust. She turned her gaze elsewhere. “How about in that one? What is that?”

“Roasted yaw.”

“Oh. Well, how about in—?”

“Buttered yaw on a stick.”

Kanna shook her head in disbelief, gripping a handful of Goda’s robes in frustrated reflex. “For the love of God,” she muttered, “is that all you people eat?”

“No. We have fruit sometimes. Dead animals on occasion as well.”

“Well, there’s so much of that wretched yaw everywhere I go that I’m shocked your government hasn’t figured out how to turn it into fuel yet.”

Goda smiled at this. “We tried.”

“What?”

“We already tried making fuel out of yaw, but the same chemical that makes it taste bitter to foreigners also kills the yeast that would allow it to ferment into wine that could be distilled—and so we have to steal sugary mok from your kind instead.”

Something about hearing that made Kanna feel vindicated; at least she wasn’t the only one who thought that yaw tasted worse than dirt. “That can’t be good for you, eating something that won’t rot. Doesn’t that mean that even the vermin don’t want it?”

Goda shrugged. “It does spoil eventually, just very slowly. Whether the vermin like it or not, being able to stockpile our food for so long has saved us from extinction more than once. It’s an advantage that has served us over thousands of years.”

“So that you could steal from me and my father?” Kanna snapped. The sights and sounds and smells in the air had nearly knocked Kanna out of her head completely—but there were still some triggers in her that were aching to be touched and Goda had stepped all over them again.

Goda didn’t seem to notice, though, or else she wasn’t bothered by Kanna’s anger. She merely replied, “You don’t know the worst of it, but maybe that’s good. You seem prone to tormenting yourself by taking such matters personally.”

“It is personal,” Kanna muttered, but as the murmur from the crowd grew, she doubted that Goda had heard her. So instead of arguing further, she busied herself with watching the people who flowed by, her own curiosity growing now that she had stopped being quite so offended by the stares.

She had also realized something strange that she couldn’t ignore anymore.

“Where are the men?” She twisted her head to and fro. There were a few men sprinkled about, but they were greatly outnumbered, and it took her longer to single them out in the crowd because they were so small. Even the older men with graying hair seemed to not be much bigger than Kanna herself. “I had figured that the reason I had seen so few Middlelander men was because everything with you people is sex-segregated, but now I have to wonder if they just don’t come out into the light of day at all. I’m in your native country, and still I see hardly any of them. Is there another place where they all gather?”

“It is true that most men—especially young men—work at home and don’t go out unescorted by their family members, but that’s not the only reason.”

“Oh? Then what?”

Goda shrugged again. “Most Middlelanders are women.”

“Ah, I see. Most Middlelanders are—”

Kanna fell silent as the full thought formed in her mind. It was only after she had walked a few more beats in this state of pause that she realized none of it made sense.

Still pressing herself against Goda’s side, she managed to crane her neck a bit more to examine the mob. Her eyes flicked from person to person. She began to finally notice the individual variations. Most of them had wide hips and strong thighs, while a small few were built more top-heavy like Goda. Some had lightly tanned skin like bronze, and some were darker. Some were taller and some were shorter, but they almost all towered over Kanna, and the vast majority of them indeed seemed to be women. There was no mistake; she had judged the ratio correctly the first time.

But of course Goda’s explanation couldn’t possibly be true. For every woman born, there would also have to be a man. These were the laws of nature, whether in the Middleland or anywhere else. To be able to make children, every woman would need a man to match her, after all; otherwise, everything would be thrown off balance.

“That’s preposterous,” Kanna told her finally. “What, do you sacrifice most of the men to your Goddess or something?” It was just a wild, exaggerated guess, but at that point, she didn’t know what to expect from these people, who had turned out to be little more civilized than the Lowerland savages she had heard about.

“No. It’s just that a lot of boys die before they’re born and most twins and triplets that survive are girls, so about two-thirds of adult Middlelanders are women.”

“How does that even work?” Kanna demanded. For a reason that she couldn’t understand in the heat of the moment, the whole notion had made her angry. “Why can’t anything—just one thing—be normal with you people?”

“Normal according to whom? You?” Goda glanced down at her with mild amusement, a fact that annoyed Kanna even more. “Are you the one who gets to decide who makes it out of a Middleland woman’s womb? Let me know and I’ll take you to a midwife so that you can instruct her on who opens and closes that gate from now on.”

And that was enough to silence Kanna for the time being, though she took to staring blankly out at the crowd with a sour look. It wasn’t until they neared one of the buildings of glass and stone that her mood changed. Lifting a hand to shield her gaze from the glare, she couldn’t help but stare up again in awe.

“Government offices,” Goda told her. “This town is a major import-export hub because it’s so close to the border—and that means plenty of tax people work here. Military, too.”

“You mean all these fancy buildings are just for pushing around a bunch of paper?” Kanna asked, incredulous. They had looked so beautiful on the outside, but she couldn’t imagine what kind of sterilized hell existed between those walls.

The structure immediately looked less appealing to her, but Goda was bringing her closer to it anyway. They passed a small garden just outside its massive front doors, a garden that looked overly ornate and polished with topiaries trimmed to geometric perfection. None of the plants bore any fruit, and their straight lines contrasted the sinewy trees that she had seen all over the place so far—in the forests on the sides of the road, in the garden of their newfound hosts—but she had little time to look. As soon as they had reached the front of the facade, Goda whisked her to the side, and they fell into a dark alley between two buildings.

To the right, the glass panels of the offices remained, now dim and more transparent without direct contact with the sun; but to Kanna’s left, she noticed the porous stone of an old building. It was made of rock piled on top of rock, and as Goda pulled her deeper into the corridor that the two unmatching buildings had seemed to make for them, Kanna noticed doorways appearing on her left, carved into the walls. She guessed that they were storefronts, but she was walking too fast to have time to decipher all the names on all the tags that hung over the awnings.

Besides that, a strange pulsing had begun to sound in her ears. She dismissed it at first, thinking that she may have been out of breath from keeping up with Goda’s long strides, but then the pulse turned into a high-pitched whir and she felt her heart pound with recognition. The alleyway seemed to open ahead of her like a blurry tunnel. The colorful weeds that climbed through the cracks in the rock looked suddenly much more vivid against he gray. She squeezed Goda’s hand.

“Is there…?” Kanna swallowed. She blinked. Her vision had already begun strobing slightly. “Is there a shrine nearby here?”

Goda’s head jerked back to look at her. Kanna wasn’t sure if the movement had really been so urgent or if she had only perceived it that way. At any rate, Goda looked suddenly curious. She seemed to examine Kanna’s face.

“Can you tell where it is?”

“No, I….” Kanna tried to concentrate. She looked around her, trying to pinpoint were the sensation seemed to be coming from, but as they kept moving, it began to quickly diminish. She didn’t dwell on it; she was glad to be rid of it, even if the feeling had not been nearly as strong as it had been in the caverns. “It’s gone now. It only lasted a few seconds this time.”

“We passed over it,” Goda told her. “It’s deep underground, near the source of a cold spring. The government blocked it off years ago and no one has been in there in probably decades. Strange that you can feel it from up here. You must have become more sensitive.”

“Oh perfect,” Kanna said sarcastically.

When she finally felt her body returning to normal, she noticed that they had stopped near two doors that were covered merely with curtains over their thresholds. This time, Kanna could read the signs: “Paradise,” the one on the left read in Middlelander—or at least, that’s what it seemed to say.

Kanna made a face of mild annoyance. The word in Middlelander for “paradise” was also the same as the word for “garden,” but the storefront gave no indication of being either of these things, and there was no way that she could ask Goda about the difference because there was no way to quickly make the distinction without switching to another language.

She turned to the right, half-convinced that she would see the word “hell,” but instead she found something rather mundane over the second door: “Wine and Spirits,” it said. Those words were simple enough to understand. Indeed, once she began moving again, it was because her simple companion had picked the door on the right and tugged her into the humid chamber inside.

The smell of sweet wine immediately filled her nose even as she had trouble seeing in the dim light, though her eyes began to adjust with each step away from the door. It also helped that some natural light beams flowed in from around the flapping curtain behind her, and that bright candles in the space served as beacons to show her where the tables were. In time, she noticed the bodies, the huddled groups of women that crouched in the dark—reading newspapers, playing dice, or simply arguing in loud voices.

A woman behind the front counter—as well as some patrons who were sitting alone and were less distracted—turned to stare at her as she walked by, but otherwise the energy in the room appeared too busy for anyone to take much notice of her.

Goda pulled her by the arm to an empty table and made her plop down into a chair.

“Wait here,” Goda said.

Kanna raised an eyebrow. Before she could even think to protest, she felt a rush of air from Goda’s robes as the woman began to leave, and Kanna spun around to look towards her master with confusion.

“Where are you going?” she asked for the second time that day, gripping the back of the chair with the full force of her irritation. “Hey!” She began to get up.

“Sit,” Goda said.

“I already told you, I’m not a dog!” But still Kanna paused mid-motion. She became suddenly self-conscious, because she came to notice then that she was actually bothered by the idea of Goda’s absence. Perhaps it was only that she did not want to be left alone in a room full of strangers, she reasoned.

She considered getting up to argue further, but she quickly thought better than to draw attention to herself, as she could already feel some new eyes settling on her. Either way, she knew who would probably win the scuffle.

She sat. She watched Goda walk towards yet another doorway in the back of the room and disappear around a corner that led to some place beyond Kanna’s perspective. When there was nothing left to be done about it, Kanna turned back around and pursed her lips. She crossed her arms over her chest.

She stared at the table for a long time, avoiding the glances of the other patrons, and she felt some relief once the crowd slowly eased into a louder ruckus. She felt more people showing up through the door, though she did not look at them and could only notice their presence from the rush of air that would come into the space after each customer passed through. It made Goda’s distinct presence seem all the more conspicuously absent. Even in the company of the shadows around her, she felt strangely alone.

But her relative solitude did not last long. She felt bodies hovering close to her, which she ignored at first. Some warmth came over the table, warmth that did not match the energy of the candle on top of it. It was only when the wood beneath her jostled a bit that she finally looked up to find that the seats across from her had been abruptly claimed.

Four identical eyes stared at her. They were filled with what Kanna could only interpret as mischief and they belonged to two women with matching smirks. She tried to turn away at first, but the strangers leaned further across the table, until the candle had bathed both their faces with light—and in that moment, Kanna found that she couldn’t help but offer a stare in return.

Nearly every feature of their handsome faces mirrored each other. Kanna glanced back and forth between them a few times before she realized that she was sitting across from a pair of twins.

“Can I help you?” Kanna finally asked, a bit annoyed when neither of them uttered the barest greeting.

“Ah, she talks pretty good!” the one on the left said. She gave Kanna a friendly smile. “We were wondering how fluent you were in Middlelander, you see.”

“You can just ask if you want to know. You don’t have to sit there and stare at me like I’m an animal in some zoo.”

“Right you are, right you are!” It was the other one who spoke that time. Her eyes had softened of their impish look, and her face had grown more open, more polite. “Please forgive my associate here. She has no manners. We apologize.”

Kanna still had not uncrossed her arms, but she felt herself relaxing a bit in reply. She remembered what Goda had told her—that the people were only curious—and so she tried to view them through a less defensive lens. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s just that I’m…new to the Middleland. No one has tried to talk to me yet and I’m not sure how to react.”

“Oh? Well, allow me to apologize for our countrymen as well. They’re being rude, staring at you and not properly introducing themselves.” The same woman who had spoken previously tipped her head in a short bow. “My name is Noa Bou, and this is my younger sister Leina Bou. I’m older by fourteen minutes.” The way she had said the last part made it sound like the distinction was important, even though they both appeared to be grown women around Kanna’s age, and Kanna saw little difference between them. She wondered if this had to do with that ever-present status game that permeated Middleland culture.

Regardless, Kanna cleared her throat when she realized that they were both looking at her with expectation. She hesitated, wondering how much she should reveal. “They call me Kanna,” she offered eventually. She held back on the rest; she wasn’t sure if the average person on that side of the border knew what the name “Rava” meant, but she preferred not to stir things up.

“Kanna…?” said the one on the right—the one named Leina.

The twins seemed to wait some more, which made Kanna wonder if she might have not been able to get away with such a glaring omission after all. Kanna shifted in her seat. She looked around, anxious for Goda’s return; but still not seeing any sign of her, she couldn’t come up with any reasonable plan of escape.

When the patient stares grew too awkward, Kanna sighed. She would have to lie again, clearly.

“Kanna…Brahm.” Just in case, she decided to stick to her same story, though she had to stop herself from making a twisted face of displeasure as soon as the name left her mouth. As long as she did not lose sight of her real identity, she thought, she could be a Brahm for the night, whatever that meant. “I’m here with my wife.”

“Oh, you’re married?” the one named Noa said, tilting her head. “But wait, did you say Brahm?” The twins exchanged a look between them.

Kanna felt some panic rising in her chest. She wondered if she had somehow given a wrong answer. Were they acquainted with Goda? Was that brute really more infamous than Kanna had imagined? A lot of people did seem to randomly know who Goda was—but surely there would have to be other citizens with the family name Brahm. How uncommon could it be if it was only one syllable long?

“That’s a Middlelander name,” Leina said. “You married a Middlelander? How did that happen?” Both the women leaned towards her with even more curiosity.

At first, Kanna felt a reflex to lean away in response, but again she pushed herself to stand her ground and not show any weakness. She looked closely at both their faces. In spite of the way that they encroached across the invisible line at the middle of the table, they did not seem to mean any harm by it, and she decided that they merely had poor manners. Because their eyes had also lost their initial wild look, Kanna wondered if perhaps her own fear had colored her perception earlier.

“We met at a monastery in the Outerland,” Kanna explained. That sounded about right. Lots of people went to monasteries; it would be a reasonable place to meet.

Noa made a face. “Ah, is she one of those stiff religious types that likes to go see the priestesses all the time?”

“I guess.” Technically, it was true. Goda was indeed religious, though Kanna was starting to question which religion Goda ascribed to after all, especially since her stance on most things seemed to involve disbelieving rather than believing anything in particular.

“That’s really too bad. There are a lot of fun things to do in Karo—drinking, gambling, going to the baths—but you’ll miss them all if you have some prude showing you around.”

“Baths?” This piqued Kanna’s interest, if for no other reason than the fact that she hadn’t had a chance to wash the dust off her body after the crash. She had never heard of Middlelanders having public baths, but this seemed to make sense considering their customs.

“Oh yeah, there’s one right next door. There’s a spring underground nearby here, and the water rises naturally to the surface. It’s cold, so they let it come up into some isolated pools and they heat those up for the customers. Real nice. The water’s supposed to have healing properties. It used to be a shrine or something, but now they turned it into a bathhouse.” Noa gestured to the walls around them. “Even this tavern used to be part of the same religious site, I think.”

Kanna followed the woman’s gaze and squinted through the dark at the ancient, exposed rock that enclosed the small place. “And now people drink here?” she asked. She wasn’t superstitious herself, but it did seem a bit sacrilegious.

“Yep. Crazy, huh? That’s progress for you. The further you get into the Middleland, the less use people have for all this spiritual stuff. Just about the only bathing pools people take really seriously are the ones in Samma Valley, all the way to the West. That’s where the natural hot springs are, but they’re in some temples out in the middle of nowhere near some volcano, and only the priestesses are allowed to bathe in them.”

Leina chuckled, giving Noa’s shoulder a light whack. “What’s the use of telling her all that? The baths next door are plenty fun—and more importantly, you don’t have to sell your life to the clergy and mediate for ten years and take a vow of celibacy to have a good time.”

“True enough, true enough,” Noa said, picking up a drink beside her that Kanna hadn’t noticed until then. It looked like some watered-down fruit wine, but she couldn’t be sure. From what she had seen, no one was drinking distilled spirits, but that wasn’t exactly surprising considering the shortage.

“So,” Leina began. She exchanged another quick glance with Noa, then turned back to study Kanna’s face across the flame that sat between them. “If you’re here with your wife, then where did she go?”

The question had taken Kanna completely off guard, but of course it was a normal thing to ask. Her first instinct was to reach for something vague. “Um, she’s close by.” Kanna wasn’t sure exactly where Goda had gone, but she couldn’t have wandered too far from Kanna’s cuff, so she was definitely close.

“Close? Like, how close?” Noa asked. “Is she in this room right now? Is she watching us?”

“Yeah, is she sitting right at one of these tables, hovering over you like a hawk, making sure you don’t get into trouble?” Leina added, her eyes widening. “Or is she somewhere beyond the wall, gazing at you through a peephole?”

“Where is she? Did she run off and leave you here alone?” Noa looked around, perhaps a bit too dramatically. “Oh my goodness, I don’t see your wife anywhere! Where could she be? Oh, wait, is that her?” She pointed to some random person who Kanna didn’t recognize. “Or maybe her? Is that your wife over there?” She pointed to someone else. “How about her?”

Kanna rolled her eyes at the antics, but nonetheless she found herself uncrossing her arms and glancing over the table with amusement. “No. My wife’s a lot better-looking than any of those people. Don’t you think I have good taste?”

“How about us?” Noa brazenly asked. “Are we good-looking?”

Leina smacked her companion once again, but she nonetheless seemed interested in Kanna’s answer and looked at her with expectation from across the table. Kanna raised an eyebrow, even more bewildered than before. She had no idea what kind of reply was safe to give or whether such a question was typical or not.

When she took a long time to answer, Noa laughed. “It’s okay,” she said, “you can admit that Leina’s ugly. It won’t hurt her feelings.” This time, Noa earned a punch, but they were both smiling and it was then that Kanna realized that they had deliberately come over to entertain her for whatever reason.

“You look bored,” Leina murmured, as if she had been reading Kanna’s mind. She propped her chin up on her hand. It mashed her skin against her cheekbone and jaw, and gave her otherwise chiseled features a more defenseless look. It also made that attentive stare seem less intense, cute even.

Kanna found herself blushing. “I’m…fine,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not sure where my wife went. She just told me to wait here until she comes back.”

“Oh,” Noa said, sliding back, her face taking on a knowing look. “So she’s controlling, too, huh?”

“What?”

Then Leina chimed in, nodding with agreement, “Yeah, most of the people who marry foreigners are like that—or at least the ones I know. They think that if they marry an immigrant, they can just tell their wife what to do all the time. Real sad.”

“Exactly. As if she did you some huge favor by letting you marry her.” Noa chugged some more of her wine, then tipped the cup towards Kanna with a pointed gesture. “Remember: No matter what, you’re still your own person. Just because you married someone doesn’t mean you’re their slave.”

Kanna rubbed her face slowly, trying to hide her reaction to the irony of what the woman had just said. Lying was getting easier every time she did it, but it was hard not to smile mirthlessly when someone skirted so close to the tragic truth.

“You can do whatever you want, Kanna Brahm,” Noa continued, seemingly oblivious to Kanna’s sardonic expression. “The world is yours! You don’t have to wait here all day for your presumptuous wife if you don’t want to.”

“That’s right, you’re free to explore every corner of Karo. You have as much right to it as the rest of us!”

Kanna couldn’t help but smile at them even as she waved her hands dismissively. “All right, all right,” she said, “but the two of you are being kind of excessive. She’s not controlling, she’s just…watchful.”

Noa’s smirk grew twisted. “‘Watchful’? What, are you a child or something?”

“No, but—”

“What would she do if you got up and left, then?” Leina interrupted. She tipped her head towards the curtain that covered the doorway. “For example, what if you went out there to stand in the alley and smoke with us? Would she be upset, even though that’s literally just five or ten paces away?”

“Well, I mean, she would….” Kanna scratched the back of her head. In truth, she wasn’t entirely sure what Goda would do if she got up from her seat, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that the woman would be bothered by it. That in and of itself was besides the point, though. Even if Kanna had wanted to explore the tavern full of strangers, she wasn’t sure how far within the cuff’s range Goda had wandered, and she wasn’t in the mood to find out through a shock.

She had to admit that the twins were right on some level, though, in spite of the fact that they had no idea what was really going on: Goda was indeed overbearing. Kanna’s confinement to a single chair was unjust—and what did it really matter if she moved to another place as long as she didn’t go too far?

Kanna hadn’t really answered her tablemates, but she found that Leina was nodding at her again. “So she would have a fit, huh?” Leina said. “I don’t know, that sounds pretty controlling to me.”

“It does, it does,” Noa agreed. “Maybe you should go out to the alley with us. That way, you can show her that you’re not some dog on a leash.”

Kanna gave them both a wry look. So they had been playing dumb after all, she thought. Clearly, they had overheard her comment to Goda earlier and had noticed Goda leaving her alone before they decided to swoop in. It made her wonder how many other people had watched the argument, and whether she and Goda had inadvertently made a scene in front of the patrons.

“C’mon!” Noa’s eyebrows flicked up. There was a touch of flirtation in her look. “We’re going to go outside just the same, but it would be nice to have you with us so that we don’t have to cut the conversation short.”

Leina’s smirk was equally cajoling, even though it was still friendly and offered no pressure. “Yeah, keep us company! We’re due a smoke break and the people in this city are really uptight about puffing on cigars inside, so we’re going to stand right outside the door. We just don’t want to get kicked out for smoking like we did at the train station a few weeks ago.”

Kanna began to purse her lips again at their story, but then she stopped. She felt herself suddenly growing serious before she fully realized why. “The train station…?” As it had before, the thought of her impending escape cut through all the distractions of the moment and jerked her focus into the near future. “You two know where that is?”

“Of course!” Noa said. “We’re visitors here, too, just like you, even if we’ve been to Karo a hundred times. We travel around, but we’re from Gam, the Northernmost town in the Middleland. Real small place. Just below the bordering mountain range. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

The truth was that Kanna hadn’t really heard of any towns in the Middleland until she had been arrested, but she didn’t realize that there was one so close to the treacherous mountains that separated the Upperland from the Middleland. More importantly, the twins had grown suddenly useful. “Is there a train leaving tonight?”

Leina tilted her head. “Yeah, I think so—but they only go North and then circle back. A new train comes every other night.”

It was just as Priestess Rem had told her: the midnight train would leave once every two days, and so she only had a small window of time to escape because Goda hadn’t planned on staying in Karo for long. Even through her suddenly pounding heart, Kanna felt some relief that she wouldn’t have to stall for time—that she could leave while Goda was asleep and get it all over with that very night.

“Where is the train station?” Kanna finally blurted out, no longer guarding her tone to keep herself from sounding overly eager. She just needed to know. “Could you please tell me where it is?”

Again, the twins looked at each other briefly before one of them answered: “Sure,” Noa said, her smile growing wide. “Come outside with us and we’ll tell you all about it.”

* * *

The cigar smoke was thick enough that it obscured Kanna’s vision and made it hard for her to peer out at the details of the alley. Each cloud billowed out from each tip—and from the noses and mouths of her companions—and the haze danced in front of Kanna’s face like a coy woman covered in a veil. It didn’t burn nearly as cleanly as fuel did, and it smelled a bit different from whatever Innkeeper Jaya had been smoking, but she didn’t ask what it was because a part of her was a little afraid to find out.

“Here, put your mouth on this!” Noa had offered her the cigar, but Kanna had waved it away. It was uncomfortable enough to be standing between the two of them; she didn’t think her lungs could take a direct hit.

She tried to act casual as she leaned against the wall. She wasn’t so naive that she didn’t realize that if she seemed too interested in the whereabouts of the station, then they would stretch out their answer as long as they could to keep her around. At the very least, they didn’t seem to have a problem with prying into her life, so she’d likely be peppered with questions about where she was planning on going.

Kanna cleared her throat—to try to get the taste of smoke out more than anything else—and she decided to approach the question indirectly this time. “So, you two came from the North, then?”

“Yep,” Leina said. “Where are you from?” She turned and gave Kanna a playful smile, one that made the warmth start returning to Kanna’s cheeks. Now in the relatively brighter light of the alley, she had to admit to herself that the twins were unusually attractive. They weren’t as tall as Goda—no one she had met yet had been—but they were pleasantly lanky, with long arms and legs. Their features were more conventionally handsome than Goda’s, and they lacked the rough edges of Goda’s face, and their energy came off as much lighter and carefree.

She liked them in a strange way, in a way that numbed her worries. Even through the smokescreen, she found them pleasing to look at, and a small part of her wished she could have spent a normal night out with them under different circumstances. She had never been able to experience what it was like to just wander around a city and make friends. She wondered if this was what it was like to have the luxury of being frivolous.

But those thoughts dissipated into the smoke once she noticed that they were both waiting for her answer.

Where am I from?

Kanna glanced around furtively, trying to think of a single city that she could remember in the Outerland. She couldn’t; even the name of the monastery she had stayed in escaped her. She wondered if she had ever even learned it in the first place.

“I’m from the Northern Outerland,” she began. It seemed safe enough, and she was surprised at how casual she managed to make her voice sound. “That’s why I need to know where the station is, if you could let me know. My wife and I are taking a route back to my hometown that passes through the Middleland.” She kept her face as straight and as confident as she could. She silently prayed to the gods—or to the Goddess, or to whoever was watching her—that her lie had made enough sense, even though she had no idea where exactly most of the borders on the continent were.

The reaction was something she had not expected. Both the twins laughed.

“You’re no Outerlander!” Noa said.

Kanna crossed her arms. “I am. What are you trying to say, that I don’t know where my own homeland is? I know exactly who I am, thank you very much.”

“You probably do. You’re just lying about it, is all.” Noa put her hands up placatingly when Kanna glared at her, but still her smile hadn’t faded. “It’s all right. It’s totally understandable, considering that most people around here barely know that anything exists besides the Middleland and Outerland.”

“Absolutely,” Leina said, giving Kanna a friendly tap. “But we’ve traveled around, so we know better. You’re an Upperlander, right?”

“No!” Kanna shouted on reflex.

This only made the two women laugh some more. “You look just like an Upperlander, though. Those small eyes, that fair skin, the tinge of red in your hair. I’ve only seen maybe a couple of Outerlanders that have some of your features, and they still looked real different from you. You’re a pure-blooded Upperlander if I’ve ever seen one.”

Because Kanna had looked away and become speechless, Noa reached over to lightly grasp her chin and pull her gaze back. Kanna lifted her arm up to smack the woman’s hand away, but then she stopped when the overly-earnest look on Noa’s face distracted her.

“Don’t worry. I promise we won’t tell anyone,” Noa said. “We’re not trying to inconvenience you or anything. We think you deserve to have a good time like the rest of us, even if you are a foreigner.” Before Kanna could react, Noa released her and leaned back against the wall.

“That’s right.” Leina turned to give Kanna a similar smile. She was extinguishing her cigar against the stone, leaving a black mark of soot against its ancient surface. “We’re very modern and open-minded. We don’t care where you’re from, you should be able to enjoy the pleasures that Karo has to offer!”

“That’s why you should go in there with us.” Noa gestured towards the other curtained doorway a few steps away from them, the one that had the word “Paradise”—or “Garden”—hanging over it. “It’s the perfect time of day for a dip in the baths. We were already planning on it, but it’d be more fun with some company.”

Kanna looked at the white fabric that fell over the door, and though she tried to make something out between the cracks, she could only see some warm light escaping from around the edges of the curtain. Silhouettes moved to and fro on the face of the cloth, as if it were the screen of a shadow puppet show. It did make her wonder what was behind all of that, but she knew that she didn’t have time for an adventure.

“I can’t,” Kanna said. “I have to wait for my wife.” More importantly, she had to figure out where the train station was, and it didn’t help that no one seemed keen on giving her a straight answer about it. Middlelanders could be so indirect at the most inconvenient times.

Noa shrugged at her reply. “Then wait for her. If you have to wait for your wife anyway, you might as well do it somewhere fun, right? What difference does it make if you wait for her in the crummy old tavern or in the bathhouse? They’re in the same building and barely in different chambers.”

“Yeah, that very chair you were sitting in is hardly twenty paces away from the bathing pool. If there wasn’t a wall in the way, you could walk straight to it in less than a minute. It’s so close. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid.” Kanna’s protest had been automatic, but as soon as it left her mouth, she did find herself questioning it. “It’s just that if I leave suddenly without telling her, how will she know where I went?”

“Well, how can you tell her where you are if she just ran off without letting you know where she’s gone? Why do you have to ask permission, but she can just go where she pleases? That’s a little unbalanced, don’t you think? You’ve given her way too much power in this relationship.” Noa was shaking her head slowly, mock sadness on her face. “Makes me sick when people do that to themselves.”

“You’re letting her take advantage of you,” Leina agreed, draping an arm around her shoulders. “Even slaves get treated better than this.”

Kanna looked at the curtained door with the mysterious shadows, then back at the women who wore twin expressions that seemed to coax her closer to the entrance. She took in a shallow breath. She felt the thread of curiosity tugging her towards the door, and for the first time in a long while, her curiosity had nothing to do with Goda. She had to admit that it was a welcome distraction from her circular thoughts about both her master and her situation.

And if she went with them, they could tell her about the station, and maybe even explain to her some of the hazards of traveling North through the Middleland. They seemed experienced enough.

“Well,” Kanna began to say, her eyes falling again on the doorway, “maybe for just a short while. As long as we come back quickly, she might not notice and—”

“She definitely won’t notice!” Noa bellowed, already taking Kanna by the hand.

“It’ll be the furthest thing from her mind!” Leina called out, pressing her hands lightly on Kanna’s back and scooting her towards the thin veil that separated them from paradise.

---

Onto Chapter 18 >>

Kanna looked up at the clear blue sky. She could see it through a tiny crack in the wood that had fallen on her face. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed or how she had come to roll over and turn her head up towards the heavens. Maybe it had been a reflex in her stupor—to try to glance at the Goddess, to see if death had come yet.

But there was dust caught in her throat and there was the faint smell of smoke wafting into her nostrils. There was the pain of residual shock radiating. She was still in a human body.

With less effort than she had expected, Kanna lifted half of that body up out of the rubble and felt the shattered fence pieces shedding off her like an outer skin. She winced. More than anything else, the side of her ribs hurt because it was where she had slammed against the console—and fallen hard on top of the brake lever—but at least this meant that she had accidentally tamed the runaway beast that had dragged her down the hill.

She was sitting motionless in the truck, in the middle of a weedy garden. A few trees hovered overhead, and they looked old with thick trunks. Through some miracle, Kanna had not driven straight into any of them. Instead, she had drifted into a path of tangled vines that seemed eager to consume her.

Just as she had a few times in the days before, she didn’t feel completely at one with her body. It felt awkward to move her limbs and brush off the debris and reach for the door. She did notice, though—as she jostled the handle and her sleeve fell back to remind her of the cuff—that the shocks were absent. Goda was then certainly nearby.

Her instinct was immediate upon that realization. She let go of the finicky handle and tried to lift herself up high enough to see over the driver’s side door. Her eyes fell immediately on the gash that she had blown into the fence. It let in light and dust from the outside like a wide open gateway.

Standing in the gateway was the shape of Goda Brahm. Her bare arms were covered in sweat and dirt. Her stance was stiff, like she was in the middle of a burst of motion, but had stopped momentarily. The fire of the sun was in her eyes. Kanna thought she saw smoke coming out of Goda’s nose and mouth, but she wondered if it was just the dust that had billowed up from the wreck.

As soon as Goda spotted her and their gazes had fused, the woman cut her way down the messy trail that Kanna had mowed through the yard with the truck. The footprints she pressed into the sandy dirt looked too hard and deliberate and straight compared to the zigzagging of the path slashed through the weeds.

Scared out of her mind, Kanna dashed to retreat across the seats, until her back had crashed against the passenger door. It pressed hard against a sore spot in the back of her ribs, but she didn’t care. Her hand twisted around behind her to try to open the door, but she realized suddenly that it was pressed on another section of fence and wouldn’t budge.

Goda came up to the side of the truck. She ripped open the driver’s door. Before Kanna could react, Goda reached inside and grabbed Kanna by the front of her robes and threw her out so roughly that she fell onto the ground face-first with a thud. Her clothes collected some threads of the vines on the way down and they slowed her fall slightly, but they also pricked her on the legs.

Once the wind had come back into her lungs, Kanna jerked around and looked up at the giant who was now fiddling around underneath the console. “Hey!” she croaked out, sitting straight up, the anger overriding her fear once again. “You can’t treat me like this! I don’t care who you think you are! I don’t care if you’re bigger than me, you can’t—!”

Goda turned around momentarily and lifted her boot. Kanna recoiled, but Goda was faster, and her foot landed at the dead center of Kanna’s sternum. She didn’t kick. She merely pressed the sole of her boot hard against Kanna’s chest and pushed her back into the ground. It wasn’t painful, but the gesture did nothing to stifle Kanna’s rage.

Goda turned back around and reached under the console to yank out her keys. She quickly looped the keychain onto her belt, then reached into the back of the truck to collect her outer robes. She threw these on haphazardly, not even bothering to draw them closed. After that, she walked up beside Kanna, grabbed her by the collar again without so much as breaking her stride, and began dragging the girl through the trail that led to the opening in the fence.

“What are you doing?” Kanna cried, when she found her voice again. She tried to ignore the painful scraping along her back and she reached up to ram her hands against Goda’s wrist. Goda did not even waver, did not even speak. She merely stared straight ahead and advanced to the threshold that Kanna had cracked open. “Where are you taking me? What are you doing to me? Why are we leaving the truck? Hey, hey!”

“Shut up,” Goda said. That was all she said.

Kanna looked up at the woman’s face. The face was largely blank, but it twitched with some tension. It was a tension that seemed to flow in every muscle, all the way down to the hand that was dragging Kanna roughly through the dirt. It was the tension of someone on the verge of violence.

Kanna’s stomach knotted. She felt that looming terror again, that nervous anticipation that filled her gut with both pain and arousal that she couldn’t tolerate. She reached under the sleeves of Goda’s robes and grabbed Goda’s forearm with both her hands. She dug her nails deep into the flesh until she felt Goda twitch with displeasure. “If you’re going to beat me, then beat me right here!” she shouted, intent on provoking her. “Do it! Do it, Goda! Hit me! Look at what I’ve done! Strike me already!”

She knew it was crazy. She didn’t care. She wanted Goda to hit her, to tear her to pieces. She wanted the woman to slam her into the ground and dig sharp teeth into the flesh of her neck.

But over all the shuffling and commotion, the sound of a door flinging open rang through the clearing to interrupt them. Kanna’s gaze automatically flickered in the direction of the source, and she could see from the corner of her eye that Goda had done the same.

In the midst of the struggle, Kanna hadn’t had a chance to look around, and it was only then that she noticed the back wall of the house whose garden they had invaded. There was a tall woman standing at the door, her mouth agape, her face awash with utter confusion.

“What…? What is this?” she called out to them, once her gaze had raked over the scene a few times. “Who are you people?”

Goda seemed to pause for a moment, to assess. She stared at the woman for three seconds, then at the hole in the fence. She tightened her fist against Kanna’s clothes and began trudging again towards the exit.

“Wait! Stop!” The woman dashed into the yard. “Stop! Is that an immigrant you’re carrying? I need to see your papers now, or I’m calling the authorities!”

Goda half-turned, seemingly to deal with the woman who was chasing them, but that was when the stranger stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes seemed to fall at Goda’s hips, at the space where the two sides of Goda’s robe ruffled open.

“A…priestess?” the stranger said with astonishment. She immediately began stooping slightly, lowering her head while her gaze was still turned partway up; but she stopped midway into the bow as if she were unsure.

Kanna followed the woman’s glance and noticed that she was staring at the keys on Goda’s belt. The stolen pendant—the religious symbol that Kanna had seen while trying every one of Goda’s keys, the charm that Priestess Rem had said only clergy members were allowed to wear—gleamed in the morning light as it dangled on its chain close to Goda’s crotch.

Goda’s grip on Kanna finally loosened enough that Kanna could pull away from her. The stranger was staring at the both of them with confusion—with expectation, even a touch of fear. She was waiting. Kanna looked up at Goda, trying to gather some kind of cue, but the giant’s face seemed completely unoccupied with any kind of scrambling for any explanation. She was relaxed. Her eyes were empty. She looked intensely at the stranger, but offered nothing.

This made Kanna nervous. Perhaps Goda was resolved to accept whatever would happen to them, but Kanna was in no mood to be rearrested and to miss her train home, and to have years added to her sentence for something so inane on top of that. After a few moments of deadlock, Kanna bit her lip and grabbed onto the first panicked lie that floated to the surface. She cleared some dust out of her throat. She blurted out, “I’m sorry, my…wife and I are just lost!”

Goda finally reacted. She turned to look at Kanna right away, her face incredulous. Kanna merely gave a discreet shrug in response. She had learned from Innkeeper Jaya that both foreigners and slaves carried a stigma—but that Middlelanders married foreigners sometimes. She knew there wasn’t much she could do about hiding her ethnicity, but hiding her status as a slave seemed wise considering the situation.

“Oh, the two of you are married?” The woman tilted her head, even more perplexed. She gestured with a respectfully open hand towards the general direction of Goda’s pendant. “But isn’t this person a clergy member?”

Yes, that was right, Kanna remembered suddenly. Clergy members couldn’t marry, of course.

“Uh, she was a priestess!” Kanna said quickly. “Not anymore!” She cursed herself right after, realizing that she had only dug herself deeper, and she took care to hide her cuff under her sleeve. Kanna racked her brain some more for an explanation. “She married me to absolve me of wrongdoing.”

In the temple, Rem had told her that priestesses could only marry slaves, and that the slaves were officially cleared of their criminality once the union took place, even though the priestess in question would have to leave the clergy. It sounded plausible enough, Kanna thought.

The woman looked very taken aback, though. Kanna wondered if her explanation had been ill-advised after all. Perhaps there was yet some other cultural element that Kanna was missing, or perhaps the woman was concerned then about what Kanna might have done to become a criminal in the first place.

“I was accused of stealing a sack of yaw to feed my starving younger sisters!” The sob story had started to flow and it wasn’t as hard anymore to lie. “But of course I didn’t do it. I would never dishonor the Holy Mother like that. It is better to starve my body than to offend the Goddess and end up starving my soul of her blessed spiritual milk.” When Kanna glanced up at Goda again, the edges of incredulity had turned into outright disbelief.

Still, Kanna continued, because she saw that she had captured the stranger’s complete attention at the very least. “I converted to the Cult of Mahara when I was ten years old,” she explained, “even against my family’s wishes. It has always been my dream to become like a Middlelander and join the most advanced culture on the continent! But my angry mother, who still worships the….” Kanna missed a beat because she couldn’t decide what race she should have been or what religion she was supposed to have had, but she recovered quickly: “My mother still believes in the Outerlander gods, and so she grew vindictive when I tried to convert others to the Goddess. She accused me of a crime that I didn’t commit. I had to flee for my life to a civilized country, and this priestess of the Goddess made the ultimate sacrifice to help me!”

Goda blinked. She had already been silent for awhile, but Kanna thought that maybe in some sense, she had rendered Goda speechless. Perhaps Kanna had laid it all on too thickly, but she figured that it was better to offer too much than too little of such a shameless lie.

The stranger leaned back, still confused, but seemingly processing the information at least. She scratched the side of her head. “Well, I knew that it was possible for a priestess to absolve a suspected perpetrator of sin in this way, but to be honest, I’ve never met anyone who has done that before. Tell me, do I still have to follow the rules of approach, as with any other priestess? Or does that no longer apply to a former priestess?” She took a hesitant step forward, but then she seemed distracted by the scene around her, and she appeared to notice the truck for the first time with a twinge of shock.

“Yes, it applies,” Kanna said, before it could sound like she was second-guessing herself. “Only her wife is allowed to touch her.” She decided that this was the safest bet.

The Middlelander woman still looked bewildered, even if the anger and skepticism had faded. Kanna wondered if she needed to manufacture something else to tie it all up, or if she had messed up by suspiciously answering for Goda too many times. It was then that she looked down at her dirty robes and at the jagged wheel tracks and messy footprints that represented the struggle around them.

With some effort, Kanna stood up. She dusted herself off and tried her best to smile confidently at the woman. “I can’t imagine how strange this must look to you. I’m terribly sorry. We just got into a spat, that’s all. We’re a bit…passionate when we fight.”

“She disobeyed me,” Goda said suddenly.

This appeared to be some kind of key phrase that Kanna hadn’t known to use, because a twitch of recognition immediately lit up behind the stranger’s eyes. She shook her head towards Kanna and gave her a disapproving look.

Kanna glanced back and forth between Goda and the other Middlelander in front of them. “Oh, yes!” she agreed, almost too enthusiastically. “Yes, it was awful of me. It was all my fault. My wife generously trusted me for just a few minutes to drive the truck, and I disobeyed her and I took a wrong turn and lost control. You know how silly and confused us foreigners can be. You’ll have to forgive me.” Kanna was surprised at how easily the self-deprecating words just came spilling out now that she had taken up her new persona as an apparent Outerlander—and now that her heart was pounding in her throat at the mere threat of being dragged off by authorities before she could go through with her escape plan.

The Middlelander looked over towards the hole in the fence. “If I may ask, where were you running off to in such a rush, then, Former Priestess?” The stranger seemed to be trying to piece the whole scene together, but for now she appeared to be on their side and Kanna guessed that she had abandoned the idea of calling any soldiers in.

Goda shrugged at the woman. “I was going to take her out and beat her.”

Kanna swiveled her head to face Goda. It was her turn now to look incredulous. What’s more, Goda had said it so plainly that Kanna wasn’t entirely sure if it was simply part of the story or if it was actually true.

Luckily, the stranger in their midst didn’t seem to notice Kanna’s surprise, and she accepted the explanation rather casually. “Oh yes, I see.” She turned to Goda and finally inclined her head. “I thank the Former Priestess for respecting the sanctity of our space enough to take the girl outside, but I beg you to please show her mercy. She is just an uneducated foreigner, and a beating between newlyweds brings bad luck to the whole community.”

Goda threw the woman a curt nod. “Fine. I’ll beat her after we’ve left town, then.”

The woman offered Goda a bow of thanks—not as deep as Kanna had seen between the laypeople and the priestesses at the monastery, but more awkwardly respectful than she had noticed between just about anyone else so far. “How long will the Former Priestess be visiting with us here in Karo?” Her voice sounded strangely anxious.

“A night or two at most,” Goda said. “We have an appointment to keep in Suda and we can’t afford to linger.” Goda tipped her head towards the broken section of the fence. “I will rebuild that myself while we’re in the city, and the girl will help me.”

“No, don’t worry about that right now!” the Middlelander blurted out. A wave of embarrassment came over her expression when she seemed to realize that she had been impolite, but soon enough she sighed and looked up at Goda with a pleading face. “If you wish to repay me for the damage—which my priestess is not obligated to do in any way—I have a more urgent request. Any low-class worker can fix our fence, but there is something that only a priestess can offer us.”

Goda furrowed her brow with curiosity. “What do you want?” she asked, which sounded rude to Kanna’s ears—but, then again, maybe this was a perfectly normal question for a Middlelander.

The stranger took a shaky breath and she pressed her hands to her face. “We had been praying every day. We needed a blessing badly from a priestess, but we are so far from a monastery and didn’t want to risk the trip—and here you come, barreling through the fence like a delivered gift. I don’t care whether you currently serve the clergy anymore or not. Clearly, you have arrived as an answer from the Goddess!”

For the second time in the span of a few minutes, Goda looked entirely nonplussed. The stranger took another step forward and extended a hand, but she was careful not to touch her. “Please come!” she said, looking at Kanna instead, perhaps so that it would seem that she wasn’t being insistent to the “priestess” herself. She took Kanna by the hand and turned and began leading them towards the door to the house. “Come inside! However many days you choose to stay in Karo, please know that you have lodging with me. Please don’t deny me the opportunity to make merit. You owe me nothing for this.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder, this time at Goda specifically. “But if the priestess wishes to reward my merit, if she could please follow me to my son’s bedroom, I would be most grateful.”

Goda had to duck her head to get through the door, and it was only then that Kanna realized she had never actually seen that animal inside of a house before, or any proper building for that matter. It immediately struck her that Goda did not seem to fit—and not due entirely to her stature. Rather, it seemed that there was something energetic in Goda that could not be contained by the walls.

But as soon as they stepped inside, Kanna was distracted by the smell of moist stone. Her mind applied the image of moss between the cracks of the blocks, even though she couldn’t see very well yet. The space looked dim, like a cave, but she was impressed to see some electric lights lining the sides of the walls like tiny torches. There were also some candles arranged in a circle on a low table in the center of the room, but Kanna wasn’t sure if this was for additional light, or if it was some kind of altar that she was not yet familiar with.

As her eyes adjusted, she noticed the rest of the chamber that spread before them. It was a wide sitting room with chairs and a few longer cushioned benches that could seat a few people. They were sprawled around the low table, as if the furniture pieces were enjoying a bonfire for themselves.

The woman side-stepped towards the table and took a candle, then led them down a narrow hallway that reminded Kanna again of the caverns.

“He’s been very ill for weeks,” the woman told them, “and he’s my only son. We’ve tried to send for a priestess to come here several times, but you already know how restricted their travel is and how long the waiting list is to be visited. We’ve tried every kind of medicine. We’ve brought him to doctors and to quacks. A foreigner who works at the same factory as my wife even suggested that we seek out a shaman at the Southern border who might perform…a blasphemous ceremony—but of course, that’s where I draw the line. We are devout Maharans in this house.”

She brought them to a door near the end of the hallway and took a deep breath as her hand curled over the knob. She paused. She looked down towards the floor. “I don’t know if you can do anything for him, Priestess, but if anyone can, it would be you. I know that you are holy. I can see it in you—and it is a sign that you came to me today.”

Kanna suppressed her reaction and tried to keep a neutral expression. Goda was far from holy, she thought. In fact, a real priestess had gone so far as to tell Kanna that the woman was dangerous, a beast who lacked basic empathy—and even with what little Kanna understood of her, she couldn’t say that she necessarily disagreed. If only this stranger knew about Goda. Of course, Kanna was not about to tell her.

The door to the room burst open, almost on its own, the moment the woman nudged the handle. Kanna knew that it was probably just a sudden change of pressure from the wind coming in from the outside, but it felt for a second like their very presence had huffed it open.

There was a boy lying in a bed in the middle of the room. The usual tan complexion of a Middlelander was conspicuously absent, and in its place an ashy pale color coated his skin. His eyes flicked open once he slowly appeared to take note of the noise. He glanced down the room at the three visitors in silence, but there was no sign of recognition or even curiosity on his face.

“He doesn’t have the strength to speak anymore, Priestess. You’ll have to excuse him for being disrespectful towards you.”

Kanna’s body recoiled on its own as she watched the boy, some reflex meant to protect her from contamination. She was surprised to see that Goda immediately stepped past her with no such hesitation, and she made her way through the room with the certainty of someone who had been there before. She came to hover over the boy in the bed, and the boy looked up at her with a lifeless gaze.

Goda began reaching out, but then stopped once she seemed to remember the role that she was playing, and she dipped her hand into one of the pockets of her robes to pull out a pair of gloves. Unlike those of Priestess Rem, they were not leather, but rather some fibrous material that Kanna didn’t recognize. Nonetheless, they appeared to be acceptable enough, because Goda soon pressed her gloved hand to the boy’s neck.

She squeezed his throat gently, at a spot right under his chin, and for the first time the boy seemed to twitch in reaction. He let out a low grunt that made Kanna jump back a little, but Goda stood in place and watched over him. She let him go. She was quiet for a long time.

“I’ve seen this before,” she murmured, glancing over at the boy’s mother. “It’s a spiritual disease, which is why none of your medicine has worked. He’s racked with demons. They’re agitated inside of him, wanting to burst out, but the passageways of the body are blocked and won’t let them through.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. She couldn’t help but stare in disbelief because of how casually and authoritatively Goda had delivered such nonsense.

The Middlelander woman seemed to have swallowed the tale just fine, however. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “Can you help him, Priestess?”

Goda crouched a little lower, apparently to more closely study the boy’s face. “There’s one kind of medicine that can cure this—but it will often make things worse before they get better, and so not everyone survives it. And besides that, the plant that the medicine is made from is nearly extinct. Very hard to find.” Finally, seemingly satisfied with whatever she had been looking for in his eyes, she stretched back up and pulled the gloves off her hands. “However, I will bless him, as you asked. Maybe then the Goddess will have mercy upon him and exorcise these demons Herself.”

Suppressing a breath of sorrow, the woman nodded, then followed it through into a bow. Both she and Kanna stood in the doorway and watched as Goda silently extended her hands and blessed the boy in some ancient tongue.

Once it was over, the woman stepped aside to let Goda out of the room, and she closed the door after them.

“Watch him for the next day, and if still nothing has changed—and it probably won’t—then I can speak with you of more drastic measures,” Goda murmured as the boy’s mother began to lead them back through the hallway. The old, musty air once again filled the space around them.

“If the priestess is implying what I think she’s implying,” the woman whispered, “then I beg your pardon, but I can’t cross that line.” She paused, shaking her head. “Of course, I must be mistaken, though. A priestess would never touch any plant or medicine that was unclean, let alone offer it to a layperson.”

“Why would I call anything the Goddess has created unclean? Who am I to judge this?”

The woman turned around to look at Goda, confused. “But isn’t that straddling the line of blasphemy? There are good medicines and bad medicines; wholesome things and wrong things. Every priestess I have ever met has told me that.”

Goda smiled at her. In the dim light, Kanna squinted to look more closely at her face, because for a brief moment she thought she saw a flash of compassion, and she could hardly believe what she was seeing.

“Who am I to say what are good things and what are bad things?” Goda said. “Has the Goddess not created all things? To bow down to one part of Her creation and to call it good, and then to dismiss another part of Her creation and to call it bad—is this not idolatry? Let go of your idols and worship only the Goddess, who is in all things.” She turned to glance again towards the door at the end of the hall. “If you won’t let those idols go for the sake of your own salvation, then let them go for the sake of your son, who can’t afford the rules you’ve been living by.”

The woman kept her gaze on Goda’s face. She had a look of increasing shock, a look of conflict. Finally, with that wavering uncertainty still in her eyes, she asked, “Who are you?”

“No one.”

And in that moment, Kanna was sure that the woman was about to throw them out—but instead, she took Kanna by the sleeve and led them to the threshold of another room that was closer to the common space.

“This is the guest room,” she said without looking at them. “Feel free to take your bags out of your truck and put them in here.” She began turning to leave, but then she paused in the middle of the hall. “Thank you for the blessing, Priestess. We’ll keep a close eye on him. And if the moment comes that we might need…a different sort of blessing, then I trust you will find a way to bring it to us. I trust that the Goddess has sent you here for a reason. I trust that my son will get well.”

And then she walked down the hallway without saying anything more.

* * *

Outside, as they braved the thorny weeds to unpack the truck, Kanna couldn’t stop looking at Goda. It was still early in the day, and the sun was still bright, and the rays danced wildly against the small flashes of skin that Kanna could see in the openings of Goda’s robes. The tall woman’s eyes were trained on the task at hand, however, and she seemed not to notice her companion’s constant stare.

It was only when Goda shoved the empty fuel canister into Kanna’s hands that Kanna finally caught her gaze. “The things you told that woman,” she asked, her expression still a bit astonished, “you made that all up, right? You were just playing along so that we could stay here, weren’t you?” Now that it had had some time to sink in, Kanna was second-guessing her earlier skepticism.

“No. I don’t have quite as active an imagination as you do, Kanna Rava.” Goda smiled with light amusement, but still seemed distracted with rummaging through the truck.

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “That sounds like an accusation rather than a compliment.”

“That’s because it is.” The woman turned to look at Kanna finally, one hand gripping the handle of a large bag, her other hand draped over the side of the truck. “You’re a liar. A good one, too. I was surprised at exactly how good.”

“Well, how do you expect someone else in my position to act? I’m not as apathetic about everything as you are,” Kanna said, growing immediately agitated. It may have been true that she had lied, but it was insulting nonetheless for someone with such dubious morals to point it out. “That lady could have easily called some soldiers or something like that and accused us of damaging her property, and then what would you have done? Even if we had just run away before she caught us, like you so uncreatively tried to do, how would we have gotten out of town if we abandoned the truck here?”

“Oh, there are a few ways. We might have found another truck, for example.” Goda reached over and slammed the tailgate closed.

“We might have found a truck?” Kanna asked as she began to follow Goda back to the house. “You mean we would have stolen one, right? Don’t you think in that tiny, minuscule little mind of yours that something like that would be a lot riskier than just trying to reason with one person?”

“Reason escapes most people—including you. Often, it isn’t worth the bother at all.”

Kanna grabbed Goda’s robes and dragged her heels on the dirt to slow the woman down. She pursed her lips. “Why can’t you just accept that I might have saved our skins just now?”

Goda stopped and glanced at her. “I can accept it,” she said. “But you don’t want acceptance. You want my praise and approval, is that it? Or else my condemnation? The touch of my hand; or else the sensation of my fist striking your face?” She smirked that annoying smirk. “All things that I won’t give you.”

Kanna felt her face growing warm at this, perhaps because Goda was right. She shifted her weight a little, suddenly uncomfortable under Goda’s stare. “You make it sound like I only live for reward and punishment.”

“You do. Most people do. You like both these things. They make you feel alive, give you a sense of purpose, give you something to seek or avoid. They numb you to the truth—the truth that all of the world is hollow, as is any pursuit in it. When you see this for yourself, then maybe you’ll see pleasure and pain for what they are, and you’ll be able to enjoy them as they are without using them as a distraction from the reality around you.”

“Is that why…?” Kanna couldn’t bring herself to ask.

“Yes,” Goda said. “You must face reality first. You must face me directly—as an equal who stands with the truth, not as someone seeking to escape it—and then you’ll get what you want from me.”

She turned and began to head towards the threshold of the house again, but Kanna stayed behind and stared after her. “What I want….” Even after several days, she still could not get used to Goda’s riddles. She looked down at her feet, which were pressed hard into the indentation that her heels had dug for her. “Goda?”

“What is it?” The woman didn’t pause her stride.

“You offered Death Flower to that boy’s mother, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“How would you even know where to get any?”

She half turned for a moment, then reached down the neck of her shirt into some hidden pocket. She pulled out what looked like a small leather pouch and tossed it in Kanna’s direction. Startled, Kanna had to let go of the fuel container in order to catch it. The canister fell by her feet with a hollow thud.

“What’s this?” Kanna squeezed the pouch with curiosity—but she already suspected.

Goda merely smiled at her and waited. And so Kanna untied the neck of the pouch and peered inside. She immediately tightened it closed with her hand and looked away, as if a noxious smell had emerged from it—though it hadn’t; the vision alone was noxious enough. She opened it again and looked one more time just to make sure, and then she dropped it onto the ground as if a burning coal had been in her hands. The little bag hit the fuel canister on its way down; the metal gave a muffled ring like a bell being smacked hard with a piece of felt.

“Where did you get this?” Kanna asked. “Has it been with you this whole time? Are you really this much of a hypocrite?”

“It was a gift. The young man who accosted me last night at the border dropped it discreetly into my robes when he grabbed me by the collar, so that the soldiers wouldn’t see him give it to me—but I imagine it’s not for me. Something tells me that I’m merely going to deliver it to someone else, but I don’t know who yet. This is what I was meditating about in the shrine late last night. There are seeds at the bottom as well. Those are especially hard to find, and they won’t grow around here at all.”

Kanna shook her head, overcome with even more disbelief. “I can’t believe you kept this. And I can’t believe you crossed the border with it, knowing what it might have been,” Kanna said. She looked down to see that the pouch had fallen in such a way that it grazed her foot, and so she stepped away from it. “Couldn’t we get in huge trouble if someone caught us with this?”

Goda shrugged. “I’ve done worse things.”

This made Kanna pause again, because Goda had sounded like she had meant it, even if the tone had been casual. “You just told me last night that the boy we saw will be executed for this.”

“That’s different. He’s a vessel. He ingested Flower and brought himself across the border. That’s a capital crime, and the government’s aim is to exterminate all people physically capable of doing that, because it is they who really spread the Flower around. It’s a genocide of sorts. Most people can’t tolerate the drug unprocessed, so vessels are extremely important.” Goda gestured towards the pouch on the ground. “That is maybe fifteen or twenty dry blossoms of Samma Flower—more than enough to kill most people several times over, and more than enough to face a sentence for simple possession, but not enough for capital punishment. Neither of us are vessels, after all, and without someone to process it, the Flower on its own is less useful.”

“Then why offer it to that sick boy in the house? Won’t you risk killing him?”

“Yes, without a vessel for the flower to pass through first, if he eats it, he will probably die,” Goda said, slinging her bag over her shoulder and resuming her shuffle towards the door, “but he could also live, and in the state he’s in, maybe these aren’t bad odds at all. Some things are worse than death.”

Then Goda disappeared beyond the threshold, leaving Kanna to her own thoughts. She looked down again. She stared at the canister of spirits that lay tipped over by her right foot, and the pouch of Flower that had fallen near her left, and then at the brown earth from which both of them had sprung. And then she thought, just as Goda had said, that the Goddess made all of these things.

Except that the Goddess didn’t exist.

---

Onto Chapter 17 >>

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

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

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

Kanna could not shake the taste of that mouth.

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

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

“More bureaucracy,” Kanna complained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shit, shit!” Goda said—or it seemed that this was what she had said; Kanna could still not recognize all of the expletives in Middlelander because they were always uttered so quickly and messily.

It was the meaning behind the words that disturbed her more. She had never seen anything close to urgency come over the woman’s face until just then.

“What? What is it?” Kanna grabbed the side of the door next to her as the engine groaned and the truck shifted to and fro.

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

Panicked, Kanna leaned forward automatically, though she knew this would make little difference. She felt that drop in her stomach that always came before falling. She knew that they were just on the verge of rolling all the way back down the hillside and she could feel all that potential gravity urging her towards the void behind them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Sit where I was sitting before.”

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

Goda came up behind her. The woman’s presence trickled onto her like a physical sensation that she could feel on the back of her neck. When Goda crouched down and brought her arm over, Kanna had to fight the immediate urge to pull away, even as much as she had to fight the impulse to lean back into her. Instead, she stiffened in place, felt the rush of Goda’s body heat wearing away the cold, watched the woman’s hand fiddling with some of the handles that jutted out from the console of the truck.

It took Kanna a second to realize that Goda was trying to show her something.

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

Kanna ventured to glance quickly over her shoulder, and immediately found herself staring right into Goda’s eyes. Their faces had nearly collided. Kanna leaned back only slightly. “You’re asking me to drive?” she said in disbelief.

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

With a shaky hand, Kanna reached for the lever that Goda had pointed to earlier and she wrapped her fingers lightly around it. She looked down and did nothing at first because a strange feeling had come over her. She felt like the body of the truck had flowed into the woman who stood pressed against it, and that now she was holding some vulnerable piece of Goda in her hand. It all felt inexplicably intimate.

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

“Harder!” Goda called out to her.

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

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

And so Kanna gritted her teeth and gripped the lever with both hands, and leaned forward hard with all of her weight. Just when she thought that the brakes were stuck and would never let up, they flipped down. After all that effort, the motion felt suddenly smooth, like a tension had been released and the wheels could naturally flow. The truck had grown slippery beneath her.

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

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

Kanna blushed. She didn’t know why, but for a long moment, she couldn’t turn away. She gripped the back edge of her seat and watched with fascination.

Goda glanced up at her finally, after she had applied enough forward motion that the truck seemed to be able to roll against the gravity of the incline with a bit of its own inertia. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to do much to steer since we were already facing the right direction, but every course needs at least small adjustments to stay true.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s true. The truck usually moves on my power, doesn’t it? she thought. Her name was on all of the fuel. Her family’s product had touched the inside of every engine in the Middleland, and the truck was nearly useless without Rava Spirits. That booze made a much better fuel than Goda’s brute muscle. After all, it was the fuel that had carried the truck back and forth across the continent; Goda’s will alone wouldn’t do it.

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

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

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

Her free hand came to hover over the brake lever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goda gritted her teeth and pushed onward.

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

But Goda didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the moment, they were stable, on flat ground. The solidness afforded Kanna the courage to look up.

She finally caught sight of the horizon, but her eyes didn’t linger there for long. In the expanse below them, the light of the sun reflected brightly off the metal and glass of some formations that grew up out of the earth. At first, she didn’t realize what they were, and it was only when her eyes grazed over the brick roads that criss-crossed like veins between them, and the stone fences that lined the sides of lush gardens, that she realized she was looking down at a valley filled with strange buildings.

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

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

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

In her stupor, she had shifted her weight forward too much. She felt the creak of the truck below her, and she pulled back, a bit panicked, to avoid sliding downhill into the valley. When she remembered the brakes, this eased the anxiety a bit—until she heard some crunching footsteps coming up behind her.

During her power trip, she hadn’t thought this far ahead. It hadn’t really occurred to her what Goda might do once they had reached the top. It hadn’t seemed to matter. Her time with Goda was always here and now, and her emotions always seemed to get the better of her no matter what.

Goda had never gotten emotional with her before, though. Her anger had only ever been superficial. Perhaps she had already let everything go.

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

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

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

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

At first, she felt relief wash over her, because within seconds Goda turned into a mere blur of movement behind her. But once she turned her gaze away from the place she had fled and instead looked down in the direction that she was careening, her stomach tightened with fear.

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

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

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

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

When she felt gravity’s potential pulling on her less urgently, she managed to painfully lift her head up to look out through the windshield. She was relieved to find that she was on level ground again, that she had reached the valley below.

However, she was still bounding down a dirty road, out of control, bouncing in and out of potholes, heading straight for a tall wooden fence that encircled a building. She barely had time to duck her head down and brace before she slammed right through it at full speed.

---

Onto Chapter 16 >>

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

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

There were soldiers as well, dipping down over the doors of the trucks, handing things to the people inside and receiving things in return. A bit further in the distance, as they drew closer to the light, she could see other groups of soldiers peering into the cabins of the trucks, poking and prodding at the cargo before letting people through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sheesh, no need to get so testy!” Then the woman’s gaze grew more intense, her smile wider, her voice softer. “What are you going to do, Goda? Stab me in the neck?”

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

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

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

“What in God’s name was that all about?” Kanna huffed as they neared another gaggle of soldiers that seemed to be glancing into the cabin of each truck in line. Kanna also noticed that off to the side, there was a group of three travelers pulled over, and she could sense anxiety in their postures. The soldiers were swooping into the back of their truck like a flock of vultures, clawing through the cargo as if they were searching for something.

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

“At the monastery in Samma Valley?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why was she talking to you like that?”

“She doesn’t like me.”

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

Yes, Kanna thought, of course.

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

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

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

One of the soldiers peered into the truck, and she noticed the canister by Kanna’s feet. She glanced up at Kanna curiously, to scrutinize her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, really.”

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna shook her head and crossed her arms, unsatisfied with Goda’s answer—unsatisfied with everything. “That still doesn’t explain the boy who just ran up to you. Who the hell was that and what was he going on about? Were they just the crazed ramblings of a madman drunk on Death? Do you even know him?”

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

“Why would he call you his master?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

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

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

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

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

“He’ll be executed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

“You! Stop!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why me?”

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

The giant seemed to notice the look and leaned back slightly. She awkwardly cleared her throat and Kanna could feel the rumble again in her own lungs. To her surprise, she also felt some warmth rising slowly up her face. “Fine,” the giant muttered. “If you’re ordering me, then I can’t say no.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What, is starting a fire also against your precepts?”

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

* * *

As soon as Kanna opened her eyes, the vivid images of her dream quickly began to fade from her mind, and she was met only with a black sky above her. She coughed, her mouth feeling suddenly dry. She rubbed her face with both hands and tried to move, but she found that the surreal sensation of inhabiting some other body had left her unsure of her own.

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

It had been the face of Priestess Rem.

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

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

But of course, Kanna didn’t believe in that kind of nonsense—in magic, or fortunetelling, or Goddesses, or even in snakes that could unravel a person’s identity.

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

Of the giant.

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

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

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

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

Because it was not far, Kanna lifted her robe up over her ankles, and she trudged through the leaf litter until she reached the other side of the trees. Once she was beyond the grove, her eyes fell into the core of the flame inside the den. It lit up strange writing on the walls, writing that Kanna did not recognize as standard script—but it did trigger a sensation of familiarity; now that she had practiced, she could recognize that it was something close to the Old Middlelander that Goda had forced on her.

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

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

Goda’s eyes were open.

“Take off your sandals,” Goda said.

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

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

She stared across the fire at Goda’s flickering face, but Goda’s eyes remained pointed towards the heart of the fire. They sat in silence. Absentmindedly, as if to disrupt the intensity that seemed thick in the air, Kanna grasped one of the crooked twigs and threw it into the fire. She watched it with curiosity as the flames engulfed it, but at first it did not appear to burn.

She did not look up at Goda again until the fire had begun to consume it, until she was sure that no miracle had befallen her. When she did look up, she found that Goda had lifted her head up and was gazing at Kanna across the fire with the whole of her attention. This made Kanna more uncomfortable than before.

Still, she had come in there searching for that gaze, with a question burning in her mind. She struggled to stare right back. She pressed her hands hard against her knees.

“Be honest with me,” Kanna finally asked. “Who are you?” She leaned across the fire, feeling the heat pushing uncomfortably against her chest, but she stayed because it allowed her to look closer at that stranger’s face.

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

“I am,” Goda said.

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

“Who are you?” Kanna repeated.

“No one.”

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

“I’m you.”

After this, Kanna looked away, because she could no longer meet that smoldering gaze that seemed to expect some understanding from her. She sighed and leaned back, and crossed her legs to mirror Goda’s stance. “I had a dream,” Kanna told her. “Priestess Rem was in it—and I think you were, too. I don’t know. In the dream, I think I was you.”

“Was it a nightmare?”

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

When Kanna quickly glanced at Goda again, the woman’s face had grown nearly expressionless, but there was a faint tone of surprise in her gaze, and some of the intensity of her concentration seemed to be suddenly broken. When the surprise faded, she began to stand up.

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

Kanna looked up at Goda with curiosity. “Messages?”

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

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

Outside the den, Kanna followed Goda into the pitch darkness, not questioning for even a moment that the woman knew where she was going. She reached out and grasped onto the back of Goda’s robes, as had become her habit, and this time she did not feel any hesitation in doing it.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Kanna whispered.

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

Kanna huffed and pressed her face to Goda’s back. “How do you expect me to make any sense of those weird answers?”

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

“Aren’t they the same?”

“You know enough by now to realize that they’re not, even if you may not yet realize why.” Goda slowed down slightly to step over a fallen tree and Kanna followed after feeling her movements.

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

Goda ignored her until they had almost come out of the grove, and then she turned around to face Kanna. The faint light of the stars and the moon lit up her eyes enough that Kanna could tell that they were pointed towards her, but much of the rest of the woman’s expression was obscured. The trees rustled around them.

“There’s nothing to understand.”

Kanna took a step towards her. They were on uneven ground, with Goda standing in a lower dip, so she felt a little taller than usual, even if Goda still hovered over her. This made it easier to force herself to look directly up at the woman’s face, to challenge the gaze that shined down on her.

“You’re evading,” Kanna said. “If your personal life really didn’t matter, then you would just tell me, wouldn’t you? Everyone has some kind of identity, some kind of past—even you. If you had really let go of it and risen above it as much as you pretend, then it would mean nothing to you to just tell me. What’s with all the mystery? At worst, it would just be an interesting story to pass the time on a long drive to nowhere.”

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

“Oh, so now you have preferences? I thought the great Goda Brahm cared about nothing in particular and had no personal desire or aversion about anything in particular.”

Goda tilted her head down, the shape of a smile coming over her face. “Is that what you thought?”

To Kanna’s irritation, Goda’s voice sounded amused rather than annoyed, filled with that teasing tone that seemed to dismiss Kanna’s entire point of view. Angered, she rushed hard against the front of Goda’s body on impulse, but the crash barely shook the giant in front of her. Kanna clutched onto Goda’s robes and looked up at the woman with gritted teeth.

Goda was stooping over her, and her face was close enough that Kanna could see more detail now—and could confirm the insolence of her smile—and could feel the woman’s warm breath huffing down into her own slightly-parted mouth.

“Why do you act like you’re not human?” Kanna whispered.

“I don’t,” Goda replied softly, her stare unbroken. Goda’s mouth was so close that the sound of her deep voice vibrated against Kanna’s own lips. “You just don’t realize what a human is.”

“You are human. I know you are.” Kanna pressed her hands flat against Goda’s chest, and she could feel the texture of the skin somehow, even through the cloth that separated them. “Your heart is beating. Blood flows through you. I can feel it even now. You’re human. You’re an animal. You’re made of flesh and bone and muscle. Stop acting like you’re some disembodied spirit.”

“You speak as if I can’t be all of those things at once.”

“Shut up! Just shut up!” Kanna’s gaze blurred around the edges of her vision and sharpened only on those pair of black eyes that stared down at her. She took a handful of Goda’s chest, both the hard and the soft together. “I don’t want a ghost. I want a living being. I want that flesh of yours. That’s all I want. That’s all you’re good for. Everything else about you is useless to me.”

“Stop pretending,” Goda said. Her eyes were alight again, but with a different sort of fire. Her face was close, but she wouldn’t move any closer. She only stared, and hovered like a ghost, and huffed warm, living breath onto Kanna’s face.

And so, with renewed fury, Kanna thrust her body up in a full stretch towards the source. She crashed her mouth against Goda’s lips.

That warm breath forced its way into Kanna’s mouth. She heard it flow into her throat and ears. She felt it billow into her lungs for a brief second that seemed to stretch into an eternity. The forest had fallen into silence for them. The trees no longer swayed. Kanna felt a jolt of energy run through her, a buzz that rang so profoundly in her bones that for a moment she wondered if the cuff had shocked her.

It hadn’t.

Goda pushed Kanna hard against a tree, and that breath that had come inside of her quickly gasped its way out. But Goda’s mouth was still pressed against hers, and Goda’s mouth was fully open, and more than air was now being exchanged between them. Kanna stretched up to meet Goda even as she pushed against her, even as she clawed at Goda’s chest and played through the vague motions of a resistance that Goda easily overwhelmed. The warmth of the inside of Goda’s mouth—the tongue and the teeth together—both aroused Kanna and filled her with fear.

Kanna jostled to the side, and she felt Goda’s hands propped against the bark on either side of her. Without pulling away—without even opening her eyes—Kanna took hold of one of those wrists and ripped it away. She shoved the hand between her own legs and nearly gasped again as the fingers squeezed her roughly, reflexively; she felt the heat of that hand pulsing against her, even through the fabric of the robe that still served as a barrier to the touch.

But then Goda’s frame stiffened. She jerked away. The body, the hand, the mouth—they retreated all at once and were replaced with a rush of cold air. Kanna looked at the woman with bewilderment, and Goda pressed the back of her hand to her own mouth.

“You don’t want to know who I am,” Goda said, her eyes now impenetrably blank. “You already suspect, and it scares you, so you’d rather hear stories about how I lived, stories that will distract you and comfort you and give me some kind of personality. But hearing stories will never be the same as knowing; and using my body to distract yourself will never be the same as the surrender you actually want to give me. You will always be unsatisfied because of this. No matter how many times you might use me to touch yourself, you will never find that ecstasy you seek.”

She turned around and trudged through the trees, until Kanna could only see her ghostly shadow drifting towards the shape of the truck. Kanna dropped to the ground, her back still against the wood, and she looked up at the starlit sky that peeked through the leaves above her.

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

She would be free of this torture soon enough.

---

Onto Chapter 15 >>

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

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

There was no choice. She had to do it. Three days before, her past self had resolved to escape slavery the moment she had a chance. What good would that promise have been if her present self did not honor it?

Still, without any shred of logic to justify the feeling, she wanted to see Goda. The woman’s presence was not comforting, but there was something about that empty space that hovered around Goda that made Kanna feel a strange wakefulness, a relief, as if she were being splashed in the face with cold water. She wanted to see that savage, and to be carried away in her arms—only once more, only for a moment—and then she could pick herself up and resist again.

But Goda did not come.

When Kanna could feel the metal walls of the storage shed radiating the heat of the sun, she decided that she had waited too long, and that she would do something she had never done before: she would seek out Goda. Getting up onto an unstable pair of legs, her inner body still floating faintly inside the shell of her skin, her head still pulsing and disconnected, she shuffled to the doorway and pushed that last barrier open.

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

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

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

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

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

She slammed it so hard into the air that a sharp whistling erupted in front of her and she fell forward from the snap of her muscles in the movement. She had barely taken a fraction of a second to aim, but the rock seemed to know her intention, and it delivered itself with a crack against the underside of the soldier’s ribs.

The makeshift bat fell limply from the woman’s fingers. The woman doubled over and followed it to the ground. She cried out in pain, and then she screamed something when her eyes traced the presumed path of the rock and she met Kanna’s gaze for the first time. She had an ugly bruise on her face that looked half-healed. She was saying something to Kanna, but Kanna could not hear—all that Kanna could sense was the growing empty sound of that whirring, and the rise and fall of her own breath in her ears.

Kanna’s hands were pressed into the sand. She watched as the sleeping mountain began to stir, and the soldier grew spooked, and so the soldier scuffled to her feet and ran off into the plain, until that curtain of haze hid her form and the wind swept away even her footprints.

Goda stared across the sands at Kanna. Her black eyes were fully open, fully awake, without even a trace of the murkiness of sleep. Kanna felt that she was looking at a woman who had never been drunk in her life, a woman who had never fallen asleep, a woman who had simply closed her eyes and pressed her face into the sand so that she could feel the sensation of the gravel on her skin with full awareness.

As repulsed as she was by this, Kanna shifted onto her feet and ran to her—because she had found her finally. She kicked up dirt when she slid towards her, and immediately Goda reached up and took her by the hand to pull her closer.

“We have to leave,” Goda said. “Right now.” Kanna could hear Goda’s voice clearly, even through the buzzing in her own head. In the dim background, she thought she could hear shouting, a growing shuffle of activity coming from the beastly engines nearby.

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

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

Rava Spirits, it read.

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

* * *

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

Goda kept her eyes sternly ahead, her mouth a thin, straight line that barely moved when she replied, “The truth about what?”

“Everything.” Kanna turned and looked at her, and she could feel the side of Goda’s gaze upon her. “Seeing my name on these containers of fuel…it’s not enough. I don’t believe what you said to me in the caverns. I can’t believe it. There has to be some other explanation. If what you told me is true, then my own family….” Kanna stopped. “If what you told me is true, then the pain of hearing more of it will make me sick—but I can’t bear the ignorance any longer. Tell me what you know about why this happened to me and why I’m here.”

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

Finally, Goda answered: “Last night, I showed you the truth,” she said, “and there is more to the story than even what I told you—but the story doesn’t matter. It’s just a story. That was your past, and it has no inherent meaning to it. There are deeper truths in the present that you’ll miss if you fixate on what came before.”

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

Goda stared at Kanna as strands of unruly hair from the both of them whipped around the space between them, touching lightly here and there, but never entangling fully. Goda turned her gaze back towards the road. “Over the past hundred years—since the first engine roared in the Middleland, since your great-great grandfather sold us the first drop of alcohol—we’ve grown ever more dependent on Rava’s product. Your family became powerful and used the profits to buy more and more land—and to make more and more money, to buy more and more land, and so on, ever closer to infinity—until they had nearly monopolized the entire supply of mok grain on the continent and even your countrymen could hardly eat. It was all being turned into alcohol. Your father was particularly greedy. The price soared because he knew he could charge anything and we would pay.” Goda shrugged. “Eventually, we grew tired of paying it. It’s as simple as that.”

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

“Do you want to hear the truth, or do you want to play the victim still?” Goda waited and Kanna turned away without replying, so she continued, “The Middleland absorbed your country with the specific intention to nationalize the Rava grain fields and distilleries, and your monarchy allowed it to happen, because your father had grown too disagreeable even for them. He made enemies out of everyone, thinking that he was dominating them, winning some unwinnable game by growing wealthy. He thought that money would be a good enough shield against the hatred of the masses: the Middleland, whom he had gouged; the Upperland government, which he had tried to influence with his wealth; and the Upperlanders themselves, whose lands he had ripped away from them so that he could feed the hungry mouths of countless engines instead of people.” Goda’s brow knotted, as if she were seeing something in front of her, some unpleasant mirage in the landscape. “But he was wrong,” she said. “No amount of money could balm the wounds that he and his fathers had created—because money is a delusion. It will not protect you. You can buy weapons, but you cannot buy your way out of death if the world seeks to destroy you. Money has no power on its own; it has no meaning in nature. Try paying off a tiger who has his teeth around your throat. This is what your father tried to do, and so he faced a rude awakening.”

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

“He was rebellious until the end, though. Your father set fire to his own grain fields with his own fuel before he fled, so that we would be unable to use it. This is why we had the shortage even after we had captured your property.”

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

“I don’t deny that the Middleland shares greatly in responsibility. The motors were invented in the Middleland, after all, and we are by far the first of the nations to industrialize. But in that sense, it is only natural that we’d leverage that advantage. It is only nature taking its course that our government would grow its military and then invade its weaker neighbors to gain even more resources. This is how life works.”

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

“Did I say it wasn’t?” Goda smirked, which Kanna found weird. “It’s only that your family met their consequences faster.”

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

“Yes. And equally expected.”

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

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. There has to be some way to resist. You’re a Middlelander, aren’t you? Can’t you fight against your own country’s fate?”

Goda put her hand on a lever and urged the rig to move faster. She tipped her head in the direction of the road before them. “If you stand in front of this truck,” she said, “what are the chances that you could put your hand out and stop it? What are the chances that you could push it back all the way to where it started and force it to start anew in a different direction even as it rumbles against you?”

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

“If you want to gratify your sense of self—to make yourself feel important—then go ahead and stand in front of this hurtling chunk of metal and get run over and brag about how you slowed it down for half a second,” Goda continued, “but if you actually want to make a difference, you can’t resist the natural unfolding of a beast like this; you can’t complain about what it does or where it came from. You can only jump on top of it and move with it and nudge the levers so that it starts to slowly lean in the direction that you want it to go.”

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

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

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

“Because what you want isn’t freedom. You prefer slavery.”

Kanna gave Goda an irritated look. “You keep saying things like that: that I like to be punished, that I want to be in pain, that I prefer to be a slave. Isn’t it clear to you that I’m struggling to fight those circumstances, that I push back against you every step of the way?”

“You don’t want freedom,” Goda repeated, her tone not exactly dismissive, but still annoying in how detached and casual it sounded, “because you’ve always been enslaved, even if you never called it that until now. Being a slave is part of your identity. Who would you be without it? No one at all. What you actually want is to go back to a different sort of slavery, the kind you experienced in your home country, because it is more familiar and less obvious and easier to deny. But in this world, there is no such thing as going back to anything. You can’t return to where you came from, because by the time you turn around, everything in the universe has changed.”

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Goda had stopped in front of a small, muddy lake that shone in the light like a murky mirror. She was already taking her clothes off. More layers of fabric fell before Kanna’s eyes, and as Kanna approached, the details of the smooth valleys and hard lines of Goda’s back became clearer. Because the woman was turned around and could not see her, Kanna allowed her eyes to wander as the robes slid down Goda’s waist and opened the last half of her body to the light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna looked up at her, her fingers still lightly grazing the top of the water. “How long have you been a porter?”

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

“You’re young, Goda,” Kanna said, and this time she had to fight herself to keep from looking away because Goda had turned and her expression had changed into one of attentive curiosity. “Older than me, but still young. Why did they give a job like this to you? You were only seventeen when you started, then, weren’t you? That’s crazy. I can’t even fathom that.”

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

“Did you want to do this job?”

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

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

“Most people do choose their jobs—but I never have. I go wherever the Mother tells me. That’s all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna slipped into the lake and waded towards Goda. She found that it was easy to hold herself up, the rush of the water pleasantly passing across her legs, each step a small leap that allowed her to float without gravity before drifting down to the muddy floor again. She stopped three paces short of the woman, when she felt a thick log beneath her. Testing its stability with her foot, she stepped up onto it, and though she was about to get down and continue her journey on the other side, she noticed that the higher ground had afforded her a pleasant view of Goda.

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

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

Goda laughed. “Maybe you did.”

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

“Then why did you do it?”

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

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

But it wasn’t only anxiety.

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

“Yes, I love to hate you. Everything about you is ugly—even your personality. There’s nothing redeeming about you at all.”

“And yet still you look at me.”

“Yes, I still look at you.” Kanna let out an unsteady breath and reached out before she could stop herself. She pressed her hands to Goda’s chest, where she could feel some moisture that had splashed up to coat the skin. The droplets were cool, but she could still sense the warm skin underneath. She ran her fingers down to Goda’s torso, where the texture grew harder, more muscular, less tempered by the softness that lay at the edges of Goda’s chest. But Kanna liked this, too. She traced a path lightly down until her hands grazed the waterline near Goda’s hips. She hesitated to go further, to slide her touch down to the space that she couldn’t see beneath the water, but her curiosity broke through her fear after a moment because she suddenly noticed—or thought she noticed—that Goda had leaned a bit into the touch.

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

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

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

“Yes, I had noticed.”

“Since when?”

“Since the second or third day, perhaps.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanna blurted out, though it didn’t feel like the phrase she had been looking for. There were no words in Middlelander for what she was feeling. “It’s so stupid. I don’t know why I feel this way. I’ve looked at other people before with this sort of gaze, and sometimes I’ve even found their naked bodies to be mildly pleasing to me, but….” She shook her head at her own reflection. “But it’s different with you. I’ve never been so pleased to look at someone’s body. It pleases me entirely too much. It captures the whole of my attention. I keep wanting to look. I keep wanting to touch.”

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

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

“But I don’t even like you. I can’t stand you, to be honest. I don’t even think you’re a very good person. Isn’t it wrong for me to then ignore all of that simply because I think you’re…?” Kanna stopped. She wasn’t sure what she thought of the way Goda looked. It hadn’t really been a thought at all; it had been more like a reaction. Goda wasn’t conventionally beautiful, like other women that Kanna had found attractive before, but something about the shape of Goda’s frame, the angles of her face, and even the woman’s particular smell made Kanna want to stand closer to her. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

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

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

“No. Why would it?”

Kanna made a face. “So then you find it flattering.” She found this notion also distasteful.

“I don’t. The things that make us take pleasure in one body over another are so random that it hardly warrants my feeling flattered. How silly.”

For some reason, hearing this irritated Kanna more than even Goda’s rejection had. “Don’t you take any pride in yourself at all? I’ve just paid you a huge compliment that you don’t deserve, and you won’t even accept it.”

“So you would prefer that I let some chemical reaction in your body—a reaction that you cannot help—feed some self-image of mine, even though I have no intention of satisfying you? Odd that you wouldn’t find such a situation insulting.”

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

“Your rejection is more savage than I could have imagined,” Kanna said, looking down.

“Then you have a piss-poor imagination.” Goda touched her face, pushed her chin up until they had met eyes again. She was smiling, her eyes a bit impish. “But I’m not rejecting you. That implies that your feelings are something that I can accept or reject. They are what they are. I’m merely telling you that I have no intention of having sex with my own prisoner. It’s not a good idea.”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Kanna said immediately. “How presumptuous. Now you really are flattering yourself.”

“Oh? What sort of end did you have in mind, then? What did you want to do with those feelings of yours?”

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

“Though you say that you don’t really like anything else about me,” Goda said, tilting her head and looking up at the tree line serenely, “I can’t say for sure whether it’s safe to believe you. If it really is strictly physical, then that would make it all easier, and then maybe we could resolve this tension between us right now and go on with our lives—but you might be lying, or you might be mistaken, and in the case that you like me more than you claim, indulging you would just make the situation worse. You’ll get attached. You’ll like me even more. That’s what sex can do.”

“Again, you’re presumptuous.”

“Maybe so, but it’s better not to open that box of snakes. It’s good for both of us if you hate me more than you like me. It’ll serve to discourage me as well.”

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

“What do you mean?” Kanna finally asked.

Goda laughed again. “If you’re asking that, then you’ve already guessed. You’re not imagining things, and the tension isn’t only on your end, of course. I find you nice to look at. I’m just less obvious when I look.” She pushed the tips of her fingers against Kanna’s shoulder, enough to knock her off balance, enough that Kanna fell splashing into the water.

Kanna waved her arms around in a panic automatically, as if her body had fallen into some watery abyss that she needed to fight her way out of, which made the splashing worse. Luckily, the distance to the lake floor was negligible, and so she caught her footing quickly and she only got a bit of water in her nose. Kanna coughed and looked up at Goda with distaste.

“Always a dramatic performance,” Goda said with a wild grin. She did not clap, but she nodded her head once, as if she were offering a bow.

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

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

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

Perhaps Goda’s intention had been to point to the obvious, so that the tension could finally dissolve and Kanna could find some relief. In a sense, Goda had indeed broken through some of the unspoken discomfort between them—but she had also given rise to new tension, and so Kanna did not know if she would ever find relief at all.

She looked down at Goda’s hand where it rested against the rock. She studied the thick knuckles, the cuts and scratches and translucent scars that etched the skin of her fingers. She thought about what that hand would look like touching her.

It’s stupid, Kanna reminded herself. It’s stupid. I can’t let myself get distracted. I need to remember that there’s a world outside of this and that I’m going to be running away from her—maybe even fighting her—in a day or two at the most.

But something about Goda always made her forget about what was coming next and what had come before. Something about Goda pushed her into this long, spreading, present moment that never ended. Everything about Goda was always here and now.

“What if we do what we want right now, here in the forest,” Kanna murmured, her hand coming up to lightly touch the space where Goda’s hip met her thigh, “and then never speak of it again. We can act like it never happened. It doesn’t really matter anyway, does it?”

The truth was that their connection would be cut short soon enough, even if Goda did not realize exactly how soon that would be. It’s a waste, isn’t it? Kanna thought to herself. There’s no good reason to hold ourselves back now. Kanna had never been so physically attracted to anyone in her life, and she realized that she had nothing to lose in indulging it at that point. It really didn’t mean anything. It made sense to put Goda’s body to use while she still had the chance to use it.

“Indeed, it doesn’t matter,” Goda replied, her voice soft, “but no, we can’t act like it never happened, so we won’t do it.”

“Wasn’t it you who said that the past is just made up of stories? You implied that my life in the Upperland was just a delusion and that I couldn’t hold onto that if I wanted to carry on, but now you’re giving whatever we do in here actual importance, even though this will also become the past the moment we leave. Why do you have these double standards?”

Goda smiled down at her. “So you were listening to me earlier after all.”

“And are you listening to me now? Or are you evading my question?” Kanna said crossly, already so frustrated that she could hardly keep herself from thinking about punching Goda right in the face.

The woman turned away after a moment and looked off into the distance, into the thicket of the forest. “What you want,” she said, “is a container for reality, which is very different from letting go of the past. You want to compartmentalize what has arisen between us, and you want to pretend that you can manage it and control it—that you can keep it in this forest—so that you can say that you haven’t completely surrendered to it. But you can’t do that. It’s not possible; it would only be pretending.”

“I haven’t surrendered to anything.”

“Exactly. So don’t delude yourself that sex with me would be anything short of surrender. You either surrender to it, or you don’t. You are either hot or you are cold, but don’t make yourself lukewarm; you’ll put me off my appetite.” That was when Goda finally pushed Kanna away, then jumped down from the rock.

Kanna lifted her head up and looked Goda squarely in the face, her jaw clenched. “Then make me surrender. That’s all I want from you: for you to force yourself on me. My entire life has fallen apart, and all the desires I might have had in this world have been stripped from me, except for this one perverse craving that I can’t shake: I want you to be the animal that pounces on me in the forest, and bites the back of my neck, and pushes my face into the dirt.” Her face was burning and her fingernails were digging hard into the surface of the rock, but since she had already forced herself to be much more honest than before, she decided that she would lose nothing in baring herself completely.

But Goda rejected even this. “Fool,” Goda said. “You don’t know what you’re asking for. It’s not enough to surrender your body. I won’t accept just that. The surrender would have to be so total that you would become an empty shell that only serves to have me inside of you. But you are already full of Kanna Rava, so there is not enough room for me to be inside of you as well. You cannot have both, so stop pretending. You’re too enamored with resistance and I can’t make you surrender—only you can let yourself go, and you won’t. There’s nothing to discuss.”

Kanna stared after her with a confused expression, but the face of the woman who glanced back was characteristically blank, except for an edge of aggression. “If you’re trying to turn me off by blabbering nonsense,” Kanna said, “then I’ll have you know that your plan is working.” As she said this, though, she could not tear her eyes away from Goda’s body even still, from the tension that had come over the woman’s frame, from the posture that looked like it indeed was about to launch that animal towards Kanna so that it could finally break her. Everything that Goda said had made her want the woman even more for some inexplicable reason that she couldn’t understand.

Goda did not entertain her anymore, though. She turned and headed back to her pile of discarded clothes and began to dress herself without looking at Kanna again.

The moment they stepped out of the forest a short while later, Kanna felt some of the tension drop away immediately. The air was different—less humid, more open—and though she knew that her frustration was still there beneath the surface, she could suddenly ignore it better. She stared down the long road that lay ahead of them and tried not to look at Goda directly.

* * *

“What happened to me?”

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

“Hm?” Goda murmured, and that was when Kanna realized that she had blurted out the question in the first place.

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

“What happened to me in the caverns yesterday?” she asked. It had struck her a few hours earlier that there was something different in the air, but she had quickly realized that the difference was in herself. “I’m still not the same. Something changed in me, and when I sit here now in silence, I can feel it more than when I distract myself. It’s almost like…there’s a pocket of nothing where some of me used to be. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m trying to remember which part of myself was there, but I can’t; I can just feel that it’s missing, like some habit that I’ve forgotten how to do.”

“I told you already. You began to die—not physically; a different sort of death, a letting go of your old self. Maybe that small part of you will never come back to life ever again, and that’s what you’re sensing now.” Goda stared squarely ahead at the road that was quickly growing dimmer. She flipped on the headlamps of the truck and the gravel right in front of them was suddenly flooded with light. “It’s not an accident that the shrine was built where it was. Many ancient shrines are like this—carved into caverns that have strange, magical properties. Maybe it’s some vibrating energy that comes from the rocks, or maybe it’s some fumes coming up from deep in the earth, but early Maharan shrines and even some pre-Maharan sites have this effect on certain people. They do something very similar to what the Samma Flower does. No one knows why.”

“It bothers me. The worst part is that I don’t even know what changed.” Kanna took a deep breath and looked down at her hands. It was then that she noticed that something about them looked different too, but she couldn’t tell exactly what. “I guess it’s not all bad. Just strange. Maybe it’s only my imagination, but it feels like part of a load I was carrying disappeared. I don’t know what it was, so I’m still grasping to find it.”

“The load is you,” Goda said. “Just being yourself is a burden because it traps you in old cycles and keeps you from growing beyond where you are. You cannot be the self you are now and also become the self that you were meant to be. You must change again and again, but most people resist the process at some point and get trapped, especially when change happens fast enough for them to notice, because change is the same as death, and death is not pleasant. This is why those shrines were built, and why the ancient people probably used to eat the Samma Flower in the very cave that we visited. They wanted to face death, to see life through the eyes of the Goddess instead of through the eyes of their limited selves. That is the true face of our Holy Mahara, a thing that no priestess will ever admit to you: the Goddess is actually nothing at all. She is the lack of self. She is what happens when you’ve surrendered everything and have become no one. She is not an untouchable idol in a temple; anyone who is no one can become the Goddess.”

Kanna looked at Goda in silence. As usual, what the woman said made no logical sense, but at the same time the words themselves reminded her of their conversation in the forest, and something in those words snapped together very suddenly. “But I’m still here,” Kanna whispered. “I still haven’t surrendered, and I’m still full of Kanna Rava.”

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

“You ask too much of me,” Kanna said, but the truth was that she knew that Goda had asked for nothing, that the woman wanted nothing from her—and that the woman may have even been free of desire in general.

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

She looked away, out towards the darkness that now faced them. A few lights peppered the horizon. Kanna narrowed her eyes and she thought she could see the shapes of machines. A low rumble began to travel through the air around her. “What is that out there?”

“The crossing,” Goda said. “We’re about to go over to the other side.”

---

Onto Chapter 14 >>