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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna shuffled back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were rushing her.

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

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

But her master was silent.

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

It sent her straight to the ground.

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

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

“Awaken! Be cleansed by the Goddess!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Awaken!” her assailant demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A grin had spread on her master’s face.

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

* * *

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

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

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

“Cold?” Goda said, her smile faint.

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

“Earlier today, you said you were thirsty.”

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

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

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

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

“You’re picky.”

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

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

“A cleanse?”

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

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

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

“You must be joking.”

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

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

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

“They’re looking for drugs?”

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t be silly. It’s not for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It sounds like you know her rather well.”

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

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

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

“That they were.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are you giving this to me?”

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

Then the door slammed closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then she’s a citizen now, is she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Onto Chapter 4 >>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goda looked up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this place?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So you’re religious.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Porter.’”

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

“Then don’t.” Goda’s face was blank.

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

“Then don’t.”

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

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

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

“When did you lose your shoes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be still,” Goda said.

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

Goda cut the rope.

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

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

The woman was washing Kanna’s feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A shortage of fuel?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Does it matter?”

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

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

“No.”

That was all she said.

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

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

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

“What is all of this?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The statue smiled.

---

Onto Chapter 3 >>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna closed her eyes, bracing for the kick.

But it did not come.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goda watched her and made no move to intervene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I won’t run away.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman didn’t respond.

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

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

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

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

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

“Better than death.”

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

“Fair enough.”

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

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

For some reason, this unsettled Kanna even more.

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

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

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “Then untie me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or what? Are you going to beat me?”

“Yes, if you’d like.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goda shrugged. “Then starve to death.”

“Do you act this casually about everything?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t do anything! I—”

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

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

“Yes. Of some kind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanna leaned in the direction of the bag.

Won’t that…seriously injure her, though?

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

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

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

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

If I strike her head, I will kill her.

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

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

She reached for the bag.

I will kill this woman.

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

“I…can’t,” she whispered.

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

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

A bead of sweat ran down Kanna’s forehead.

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

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

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

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

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

“I wasn’t going to kill you!”

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

Kanna stared at her with alarm.

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

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

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

“No, you’re not.”

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

“Relax. No one has killed you yet.”

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

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

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

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

“You know nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

She was no longer holding the rope.

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Onto Chapter 2 >>