Kanna waited for a long time, but Goda did not come. She stared out the hazy window and up at the sky that grew ever brighter over the landscape. Her eyes closed and opened on their own as sleep took her for a few seconds at a time. For awhile, the only thing that seemed real was the inflow and outflow of her breath.
Even through the folds of her robes, she could feel the texture of the cuff key pressing against her from its place deep inside her pocket. It nagged at her with its presence, and reminded her that her passivity had come to an end.
There was no choice. She had to do it.
Three days before, her past self had resolved to escape the moment she had a chance. What good would that promise have been if her present self did not honor it?
Still, without any shred of logic to justify the feeling, she wanted to see the woman who had captured her. Goda’s presence was not comforting, but there was something about the empty space that hovered around her that made Kanna feel a strange wakefulness, as if she were being splashed in the face with cold water. Standing by the light of Goda’s lantern, she had seen things that she could not explain—and now she could not unsee them. Now she wanted answers.
But Goda did not come.
When Kanna could feel the metal walls of the storage shed radiating the heat of the sun, she decided that she had waited too long, and that she would do something she had never done before: She would seek Goda out.
Getting up onto an unstable pair of legs—her inner body still floating faintly inside the shell of her skin, her head still pulsing and disconnected—she shuffled to the doorway and pushed that last barrier open.
The sand outside blew against her more aggressively than before. It made it hard to see without getting dirt in her eyes, and so she pressed her hand to her face and kept her stare at the ground. One foot after another, she watched her toes dig into the sand, the grit falling between the soles of her feet and her sandals, grinding away at her uncalloused skin.
She moved in the direction of the garden. When she ventured to look up, her arm still hovering over her eyes, she saw that mountain of limbs and hair and dark cloth strewn on the ground right outside the fence. For just a second, her heart jerked with a reaction that she couldn’t understand; for just a second, she had thought that Goda was dead.
But the heap that made up that woman’s body was still moving. It was rising and falling with the wind-blown sand, with a deep breath that flowed from huge lungs. Kanna was so entranced by that flow, that at first she didn’t notice the figure that had stalked over in the haze.
It was a soldier. She was standing tall, bent back, as if her spine were a slingshot that was poised to strike. In her hands was a wooden post that had clearly been ripped from the fence. It was aimed at Goda’s head.
The wind grew quiet. Kanna could still feel it blowing against her face, but the noise stopped. Instead, her ears were flooded with a dull whir. Without even thinking, she reached down into the ground in front of her and felt for the biggest rock that could fit in her hand.
The air whistled when she launched it. Her shoulder nearly snapped out of its socket as she sent the rock sailing as hard as she could. Because she had not taken more than a second to aim, she almost missed entirely. The rock barely grazed the soldier’s ribs before slamming into the ground and leaving a crater near Goda’s face.
But it was enough.
Startled, the soldier stumbled to the ground in confusion, her makeshift bat landing limply beside her. She covered her head, as if expecting an onslaught of missiles—but when she traced the presumed path of the rock and she met Kanna’s gaze for the first time, her eyes narrowed.
One of those eyes had an ugly bruise that looked half-healed.
She was screaming something to Kanna, but Kanna could not hear. All that Kanna could sense was the growing empty sound of that whirring, and the rise and fall of her own breath in her ears as she pressed her hands into the sand.
The sleeping giant began to stir. From this, the soldier grew spooked again, and so she scuffled to her feet and ran off into the plain, until that curtain of haze hid her form and the wind swept away even her footprints.
Goda gazed across the sands at Kanna. Her black eyes were fully open, fully awake, without even a trace of the murkiness of sleep. Kanna felt that she was looking at a woman who had never been drunk in her life, a woman who had never fallen asleep, a woman who had simply closed her eyes and laid her face in the grit of the sand for no good reason at all.
As repulsed as she was by this, Kanna ran to her anyway—because she had found her finally—and as she slid across the dirt to where her master lay, Goda took her by the hand to pull her close.
“We have to leave,” Goda said. “Right now.”
Kanna could hear the woman’s voice clearly, even through the buzzing in her own head. In the dim background, there was shouting, too, a growing shuffle of activity coming from the beastly engines nearby.
She could hear a dozen boots against the gravel.
Oh no, Kanna thought. It seemed she had awakened much more than a giant.
They both trudged back to the storage shed and grabbed what they could carry, and then they rushed across the plain towards Goda’s truck, avoiding the shadows of the military along the way. Goda’s truck lay alone, surrounded by the empty space of the desert, and for a reason that Kanna could not understand, she felt like it had been waiting for them, like it had been impatient for their return.
Goda quickly fed the tank, then she handed the half-spent canister of fuel to Kanna and told her to hold it in the front seat of the truck. Kanna took the fuel without resistance this time—perhaps because she was in a hurry, perhaps for some other reason—but as she climbed into the rig and threw the canister on the floor, her eyes still scanned the Upperlander script instinctively.
Rava Spirits, it read.
And so she knew that she had not merely dreamt it the night before.
* * *
“I want the truth,” Kanna said.
She had not spoken for a long time because the rushing air filled her ears and she had assumed that they would not be able to hear each other in the midst of it. But as they had grown further and further from the monastery, Goda had slowed their pace and the wind didn’t seem quite as loud, even if Kanna’s hair was still blowing around violently like streamers on a flag post.
Goda kept her eyes sternly ahead, but Kanna could feel the side of the woman’s gaze upon her. “What truth?” Goda asked, as if it were not plainly obvious.
Kanna gave her an annoyed glance. “The truth about everything. Seeing my name on these containers of fuel is…not enough. I don’t believe what you said to me in the caverns. I can’t believe it. There has to be some other explanation. If what you told me is true, then my own family is responsible for….” Kanna stopped. “If what you told me is true, then hearing even more of it will make me sick—but I can’t bear the ignorance any longer. Tell me what you know about why this happened to me and why I’m here.”
Goda was quiet for a long time, long enough that Kanna’s mind began to drift, and she started to notice that the landscape was changing around them. More foliage had appeared. Greens and browns had joined the dull color of the sand, and the earth had grown more compact and visibly fertile.
Finally, Goda answered: “Last night, you saw what you needed to see, and you are right to suspect that there is more to the story than what I told you. Still, it’s only a story. Knowing the past can give you clues on how to move forward sometimes, but it’s not something to dwell on. There are deeper truths in the present that you have to face now.”
“Goda.” Kanna took hold of the side of the woman’s arm. She dug her nails through the fabric until she felt edges of flesh, until Goda slowly turned to look at her. “I need to know. I can’t just let go of something that defines my entire life before this moment.”
There was a long quiet again. Strands of unruly hair from both of them whipped around the space between them, touching lightly here and there, but never entangling fully.
When Goda shifted her gaze back towards the road, she said, “Over the past hundred years—ever since the first engine roared in the Middleland, ever since your great-great grandfather sold us the first drop of fuel—we’ve grown ever more dependent on Rava Spirits. Years ago, we used to make everything by hand, but now the spirits are used to run all of our factories. Naturally, this gave your family a lot of wealth and power, to put it mildly.”
“Fine. I knew that, to an extent. I knew we had a little more money than most people; that was never a mystery to me.”
“Ah, yes. Just a little more money than most people, right?” Goda laughed. “It’s not surprising that you can’t fathom it. No one can. You had enough grain to break any weighing scale, so it’s hard to measure your wealth. Your family used their massive profits to buy more and more land, to make more and more money, to buy more and more land—and so on, ever closer to infinity—until they had nearly monopolized the entire supply of mok grain on the continent and even your countrymen could hardly eat. It was all being turned into alcohol. Your father was particularly greedy. The price soared because he knew he could charge anything and we would pay.” Goda shrugged. “Eventually, we 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?”
Kanna forced her own mouth shut with a snap, but her glare in Goda’s direction did not lighten in the slightest.
Goda ignored it all the same.
“Yes, it’s undeniable that we’re invaders,” she continued, “there’s no nuance there: We absorbed your country with the specific aim of controlling the Rava grain fields. But we didn’t act alone in this. Your father made enemies out of everyone, thinking that he was dominating, winning some unwinnable game, as if all that money could save him. He price-fixed and scammed Middlelanders, of course, but he also ripped land away from his fellow Upperlanders so that he could feed the hungry mouths of countless engines instead of people. Needless to say, this caused a lot of unrest. It made the Upperland monarchy nervous, so they wanted to set limits, but when your father tried buying off government officials to have his way no matter what, it became clear that he had grown too dangerous. He had already poisoned your government from the inside by the time they realized, so they needed outside help to get rid of him. We were happy to strike the deal. When your father caught wind of what was happening, he actually tried to pay us off, too—but at that point, his money meant nothing. You can’t eat gold, after all. Try waving money at a hungry tiger whose teeth are clenched around your throat and see if he’ll make the trade. This is what your father tried to do, and so he faced a rude awakening.”
Kanna stared down at the canister by her feet, the canister that said Rava Spirits and that bounced lightly with every bump in the road. It spat out drops of fuel on occasion as it jostled, and she could smell it if she concentrated enough.
“He was rebellious until the end, though. Before he fled, your father set fire to his own grain fields and his own distilleries—with his own fuel—so that we would be unable to use it. This is why we have a shortage even now, when we captured your property weeks ago.”
“That’s ridiculous! Why would he do that? What kind of sense does that make?” Then Kanna paused. When she really thought about it with full lucidity, she wasn’t entirely sure that it was impossible. She didn’t know her father well enough to be able to tell if it was out of character or not. “Well, even if he did,” she said, a bit more quietly, “can you really blame him? He’s just trying to protect the family name and the honor of his own country. You people don’t deserve the fruit of Upperlander labor. You can’t just rush in and take it. You act like the Middleland is blameless in all this.”
“I don’t deny that the Middleland shares in responsibility. I don’t deny that we were driven by greed, either. The motors were invented by us, after all, and we were by far the first nation to build massive factories that needed to be fed with all this fuel. But that’s exactly why it’s only natural that we’d leverage these advantages. Considering how fast we’ve been growing, why wouldn’t our government use those same motors to invade our weaker neighbors and gain even more resources? This is how life works.”
Kanna narrowed her eyes. “Well, if it’s so ‘natural’ for you people, then why wasn’t it ‘natural’ for my family to do the same in our own way, without a military, with only profits to drive us instead of some goddamn machines?”
“Did I say it wasn’t? It’s only that your family met their consequences faster.”
“You mean to say that you think what my family was doing and what your government is doing is equally wrong?”
“Yes. And equally expected.”
Kanna hunched back in her seat, her mind swimming with confusion and outrage yet again. “Then why don’t you do anything to try to stop it?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You’re a Middlelander, aren’t you? That means you have some level of power in all this. At the very least, you could let me go. If money really is as meaningless as you just told me, then certainly a hungry tiger like you could afford that small act of justice without missing the pay, right?”
Goda smiled. “You really don’t give up.” Kanna wasn’t sure if the tone was one of mocking or else some twisted type of appreciation.
“And you give up too easily, Porter.”
The amused smirk still unfaded, Goda put her hand on a lever and urged the rig to move faster. “If you were to stand in front of a speeding truck like this,” she said, “what do you think would happen? What’s the chance that you could put one hand out and stop it dead in its tracks? When you talk about resisting, this is what you’re up against: Something with massive inertia.”
“I’m not brainless. I know that one person doesn’t make much of a difference, if that’s what you’re saying. Still, don’t you think that out of principle, you should at least try to—?”
“If you want to make yourself feel important, then go ahead and fight this hurtling chunk of metal. Get yourself run over and brag about how you slowed it down for half a second,” Goda continued, “but if you actually want to make a difference, you can’t resist the inertia of a beast like this. Don’t waste your time complaining about what it does or lamenting where it came from. You can’t push against it. You can only ride along. Then, once you learn how it works, you can nudge the levers so that it slowly leans in the direction that you want it to go. That’s all.”
Kanna crossed her arms over her chest, already sick of Goda’s endless metaphors. “Then where do I find those levers, so that I can nudge it in the direction of freedom?” she asked, though of course it was not a real question, and her tone was sarcastic.
Goda answered anyway: “If it’s freedom you want, then you hold those levers in your hands already.”
“Oh? If that’s so, then why am I not free?”
“Because what you want isn’t freedom. How would you even know what that is? You’ve been enslaved all your life, long before that cuff ever touched your wrist.”
It seemed to happen more and more that Kanna would find herself unable to respond to Goda’s 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 instantly. Under the light that was filtering from the canopy and bouncing off the golden green of the leaves, she saw a flash of the woman’s skin that quickly made her heart jolt.
Goda had stopped in front of a small, muddy lake that shone in the light like a murky mirror. She was already taking her clothes off. More layers of fabric fell before Kanna’s eyes, and as Kanna approached, the details of the smooth valleys and hard lines of Goda’s back became clearer.
Because the woman was turned around and could not see her, Kanna allowed her eyes to wander as the robes slid down Goda’s waist and opened the last half of her body to the light.
Kanna held her breath. Nearly everything about Goda confused her—the woman’s attitude towards life, the woman’s past, and especially the woman’s nonsensical words—but there was one thing that had managed to float up beyond Kanna’s mind, something that Kanna’s body seemed to understand perfectly well. She could accept it now, and so she watched Goda’s nakedness openly.
In time, Goda seemed to feel her stare, so she half-turned and smirked in Kanna’s direction. She didn’t seemed bothered; there was no judgment. She may not have even realized with what kind of gaze Kanna regarded her.
“I didn’t have time to wash as I usually do first thing in the morning,” Goda said. “If you need to do the same, then now is the time. We won’t be stopping again until after sundown.”
Kanna watched the woman wade into the pool. Goda had no hesitation, as if she had given no thoughts to any hazards beneath the surface. Because this made Kanna gain some confidence, she neared the water, feeling herself drawn in, like the very path that lay between the trees was pulling her closer to Goda.
Once she had reached the edge, Kanna crouched and touched the surface of the water with her fingers. She watched ripples etch across, but still there was no sign of clarity, and she could see nothing except for the reflection of the canopy above waving beneath her. “How did you know about this place?” Kanna murmured to Goda, who was now waist-deep in the waters.
“I’ve traveled these roads a lot since I became a porter. I know them well.”
“How long have you been doing this work?”
“About eight years. Three years of apprenticeship under a guide, and then these last five years on my own.”
“You’re young, Goda,” Kanna said, her fingers still lightly grazing the top of the water. “Older than me, but still young. Why did they give a job like this to you? You were only seventeen when you started, then, weren’t you? That’s crazy. I can’t even fathom that.”
“The age doesn’t matter. They choose a specific type of person.”
“Did you want to do this job?”
“No.” There was no pause before the answer and there was no shame in the tone.
“Then why didn’t you object? Can’t Middlelanders choose their jobs?”
“Most people do choose their jobs—but I don’t. I go wherever the Mother tells me. That’s all.”
The Mother. Kanna still wasn’t sure what the woman meant by that—if it was the Goddess that she spoke of, or the government that represented the Goddess, or both. Either way, she couldn’t understand how someone could be so open-eyed and conscious about being so blindly led.
But she did not contemplate for long. Her mind kept growing distracted. She kept seeing the shape of Goda’s body and she kept warring with herself, caught between her natural tendency to extract some strange pleasure out of what she was seeing and the touch of shame she had for looking so intently.
Goda did not say anything, but she stared back. She was standing in the water, small leaves and twigs floating close, collecting along her narrow hips as the tiny waves of the pool lapped lightly against her. Kanna’s eyes followed the distinct lines of the bottom of Goda’s torso, down to where they disappeared into the water.
Kanna wanted to get closer, but the water was between them, so she began to pull her robes over her head. She did it slowly because a feeling of hesitation was still burdening her, dragging all of her movements out. It was the usual repulsion she felt towards Goda, and residual embarrassment at making herself naked in front of the woman—but the warm feeling that surged below her belly had grown more urgent, and she wanted to explore it, to understand it.
Putting her clothes aside on a nearby rock, she felt like she was also putting the cuff key aside for the moment. Even if Goda did not know she had it, its presence had seemed to hover between them nonetheless, and Kanna felt like a barrier had fallen when she set it down.
Just for awhile, Kanna thought. Just for awhile, until we come out of the woods, maybe we can look at each other outside these roles of porter and slave.
The woods didn’t care who they were, after all. Whatever might happen in the cover of the trees didn’t mean anything.
Kanna slipped into the lake and waded towards Goda. She found that it was easy to hold herself up, the rush of the water pleasantly passing across her legs, each step a small leap that allowed her to float with less gravity before drifting down to the muddy floor again. She stopped a few 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.
She was still not as tall as Goda, but she could look more directly into her eyes, and the woman did not need to tilt her head down so much to meet Kanna’s glance. So Kanna stayed—unsure of what she was doing, unsure of what that gaze and their mutual silence even meant.
“I saved your life this morning,” Kanna said finally.
Goda laughed. “Maybe you did.”
“I know I did. That was the soldier you got into a fight with yesterday, wasn’t it? She would have broken your skull open. You might have deserved it, too.” The added height had given Kanna some confidence, so she said it in a steady voice without looking away.
“Then why did you do it?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. Before I even knew what I was doing, I had already thrown the rock. There’s no good reason for it; I don’t even like you that much, so it wasn’t worth it.” Kanna studied Goda’s face in the light that filtered down from above, and she noticed the small lines that had formed at the edges of the woman’s eyes, the faint smile in them that seemed to mock her. “Maybe I was just afraid that she would ruin you, that she would make you even uglier than you already are, and that I would have to look at that face all the way to the Middleland.”
Goda’s ghostly smile grew more obvious, and she took a step forward until she was close enough that Kanna could feel a pocket of heat rushing towards her through the cool air. Just that alone made Kanna afraid and sent her heart racing again, but she stood her ground and tried not to make her anxiety obvious.
Though it wasn’t only anxiety.
“You must be a masochist after all, then,” Goda said with amusement. “I’m so painfully ugly to look at, and yet you still look at me with such intensity. You must love to be repulsed.”
“I do love it. It fascinates me. Everything about you is terrible—even your personality. And you don’t look nearly good enough to redeem it.”
“And yet still you look at me.”
“Yes, I still look at you.”
Kanna let out an unsteady breath and reached out before she could stop herself. She pressed her hands to Goda’s chest, where she could feel some moisture that had splashed up to coat the skin. The droplets were cool, but she could still sense the warmth underneath. She ran her fingers down to Goda’s torso, where the texture grew harder, more muscular, less tempered by the softness that lay at the edges of Goda’s chest. But Kanna liked this, too. Seeing that the woman did not object, she lightly traced a downward path until her hands grazed the waterline near Goda’s hips.
She hesitated to go further, to slide her touch down to the unseen skin below the water, but her curiosity broke through her fear because she suddenly noticed—or thought she had noticed—that Goda leaned a bit into the touch.
Before she could follow through, a pair of hands appeared around her wrists. The grip was gentle; the fingers had wrapped around her forearms very slowly, and the light pressure that stopped her movements only came once Kanna’s hand had brushed against some skin beneath the water—some skin that was etched with what felt like a sparse patch of hair.
Kanna didn’t fight Goda’s grasp, which pulled her hands out of the water. Kanna stared down into her own reflection, her breaths coming hard, her chest heaving. Both her and Goda’s image rippled with the movement of the water, but she tried not to look at Goda’s expression.
“I…had hoped to God that you hadn’t noticed, because it’s embarrassing to me,” Kanna confessed, her voice ragged. “But you did notice, didn’t you? Even before just now.”
“Yes, I had noticed.”
“Since when?”
“Since the second or third day, perhaps.”
“I’m sorry,” Kanna blurted out, though it didn’t feel like the phrase she had been looking for. There were no words in Middlelander for what she was feeling. “I don’t know why I feel this way. I’ve looked at other people before with this sort of gaze, and sometimes I’ve even found their bodies to be mildly pleasing to me, but….” She shook her head at her own reflection. “It’s different with you. It does more than just please me: It captures all of my attention. I keep wanting to look. I keep wanting to touch.”
Kanna ventured to meet Goda’s eyes once again, though it was very difficult. To her surprise, the eyes that regarded her held no pity, no annoyance. Even the emptiness of her usual stare was swirling with something else this time, though Kanna could not tell what it was.
“There’s no reason to apologize.” Goda very gently let go of her wrists, and so Kanna’s hands came to fall limply at her sides, unsettling the water once again. “I can’t give you what you want, but this doesn’t mean you should be ashamed about it.”
“But I don’t even like you. I can’t stand you, to be honest. I don’t even think you’re a very good person. Isn’t it wrong for me to then ignore all of that simply because you’re…?”
Kanna stopped. In truth, she wasn’t actually sure what she thought of the way Goda looked. It hadn’t really been a thought at all; it had been more of a reaction. Goda wasn’t conventionally beautiful, like other women that Kanna had found attractive before—but something about the shape of Goda’s frame, the angles of her face, and even the woman’s particular smell always drew her in, no matter how she resisted it.
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
Goda looked amused again. “These sorts of things aren’t meant to make sense. They simply are what they are.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, though?” Kanna whispered, because even voicing it was embarrassing. “Doesn’t it bother you to know that I look at you that way, when you don’t feel the same?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
Kanna made a face. “So then you find it flattering.” This notion was equally distasteful.
“The things that make us take pleasure in one body over another are so random that it’s hardly flattery. It’s just some chemical reaction—one that neither of us can help—so what would be the point of using it to feed some self-image of mine? How silly.”
Kanna raised an eyebrow. Once again, she did not know how to answer this strange woman. Goda had waved away Kanna’s shame, but at the very same time, she had laughed away the idea that Kanna’s opinion about her could be worth anything at all.
“Are you really too arrogant to be proud of yourself? Is that even a thing that’s possible?” Kanna said, more insulted than before. “I’ve just paid you a huge compliment that you don’t deserve, and you won’t even accept it at least. If you’re going to reject me, then make fun of me like a normal person instead of telling me all of this nonsense.”
“But I’m not rejecting you.” Goda shrugged, her smile still cryptic. The woman reached up to lightly brush something from Kanna’s face, leaving the odd sensation of gritty water on Kanna’s cheek. “Your feelings are yours. They are not something I can accept or reject. I’m merely telling you that I have no intention of having sex with my own prisoner. It’s not a good idea.”
“I didn’t ask for that. Now you really are flattering yourself.”
“Oh? What sort of end did you have in mind, then? What did you want to do with those feelings that make no sense?”
Kanna’s first instinct was to contradict her, but before she could speak, she stopped herself because she knew that Goda was right. When she thought about it, even for just a few seconds, she found that she couldn’t dismiss her desire—in spite of her personal dislike for the woman, in spite of everything.
“That’s why it’s better that you hate me more than you like me,” Goda said, as if she were replying to Kanna’s thoughts. She tilted her head and looked up at the tree line serenely. “I won’t pretend it isn’t there. You’re not imagining things. But acting on it would resolve nothing. It would only make it grow—and that would be a dangerous game to play.”
Kanna huffed. “Dangerous for whom?” she asked, though she didn’t expect an answer—and she certainly didn’t expect the one that Goda gave her:
“For me.”
Kanna stared at her in silence for a long moment, not quite sure how she should interpret what the woman had just said. She hadn’t really considered Goda’s feelings, she realized. It all seemed too human. Kanna shifted awkwardly in place, the slippery surface of the log beneath her moving a bit; it was less stable than she had originally assumed.
“What do you mean?” Kanna finally asked.
Goda laughed again. “If you’re asking that, then you’ve already guessed: I’ve also been looking. I’m just less obvious when I look.” She pushed the tips of her fingers against Kanna’s shoulder, just enough to knock her off balance.
Kanna fell splashing into the water.
She waved her arms around in a panic automatically, fighting against her own waves, as if her body had fallen into some watery abyss. Luckily, the distance to the lake floor was 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.
But Goda only quietly smiled.
After they had finished bathing, they crawled lazily onto the big rocks near the edge of the lake, so that they could dry in the light of the sun that was shining down through the canopy. Goda was half-sitting, half-lying on the flat top of a boulder, her body propped up on her elbows, and Kanna had settled onto a ledge beside her. In spite of what Goda had said, Kanna had laid her head on the woman’s thigh and had watched her expression carefully to see if she would object. She had not.
They had talked for a bit about unimportant things—the weather in the Middleland, the landscape around them—but Goda did not seem very good at keeping those sorts of conversations going, and so they had quickly fallen into silence. Without the distraction of small talk, Kanna found that she couldn’t stop the thoughts that echoed in her mind.
Goda is attracted to me.
She felt her face blushing furiously against the woman’s skin. She didn’t know why she was fixating so strongly on the thought. It had pushed everything else out of her mind. For the moment, she had forgotten all about her situation, all about the cuff key, all about the world outside the small patch of forest that they found themselves in.
Her attention had narrowed, like it always did in Goda’s presence. She ran her nails lightly against the inside of the woman’s thigh, only enough to leave a faint mark. She pressed her mouth to the same spot she had touched, as if to heal the invisible wound with a soft apology.
Kanna watched for a reaction, but none came. Goda’s gaze was far away. Water streamed in droplets from the woman’s soaked hair and landed like cold pebbles on Kanna’s face. It also flowed in languid rivers down the woman’s chest, down a rising and falling stomach, down into deeper places that had been obscured by the same lake water not long before.
It was then that Kanna finally began noticing all the little things: How the woman’s skin was slightly darker in some places and slightly paler in others; how most—but not all—of the hair on the woman’s leg was light and easily dampened by the drops that fell from Kanna’s brow; how nearly every part of Goda’s body was much bigger than Kanna’s own—even some parts that Kanna would have never expected to be different—and this made the blush erupt again, because she knew she should not have been looking there.
When the shadow above her moved as the woman settled, Kanna snapped back into her right mind. She flicked her curious stare away from that forbidden place and instead she looked down at Goda’s hand where it rested against the rock.
But this was also less neutral than she had hoped: As she studied the thick knuckles, the cuts and scratches and translucent scars that etched the skin of Goda’s fingers, she thought about what that hand would look like touching her.
Kanna had never been so physically attracted to someone in her life.
“What’s really stopping us from doing what we want?” Kanna murmured, her hand coming up to lightly touch the space where Goda’s hip met her thigh. “We’re in the middle of a wilderness. We could do it right now and no one would ever know. What difference does it make if we just pretend it never happened after it’s done?”
In fact, if there was ever a time to be shameless, this was it, Kanna thought: With no one watching, they could do whatever depraved thing they wanted, and even if Kanna found it hard to look Goda in the eye afterwards, it hardly mattered anyway. Soon enough, she was never going to see her again—even if Goda did not realize exactly how soon that would be.
It’s a waste, isn’t it? Kanna thought to herself. There’s no good reason to hold ourselves back now.
“Even if we act like it never happened,” Goda replied, breaking through Kanna’s indecent calculations with a soft voice, “it will have happened. You’ll remember, I promise. So we won’t do it at all.”
“Wasn’t it you who said that the past is just made up of stories? You said that I shouldn’t dwell on it if I wanted to carry on, but now you’re giving whatever we do in here actual importance, even though this will also become the past the moment we leave. Why do you have these double-standards?”
Goda smiled down at her. “You really don’t give up.”
“Again, what is there to give up in the first place?” Kanna said crossly, too frustrated to think clearly anymore. “Now that it’s all out in the open, I’m practically serving myself to you on a silver platter, and yet you just sit there like you don’t want to break your fast. I know it’s against the rules, but that’s no reason for you of all people to hesitate. So what’s the real reason?”
The woman’s smile faded as she looked off into the distance, into the thicket of the forest. “What you want,” she said after a moment, “is a container for reality. You want to compartmentalize what has arisen between us, and you want to pretend that you can tame it and control it—that you can keep it in this forest—so that you can say that you haven’t surrendered to it.”
Kanna narrowed her eyes. “You’re delusional if you think I will ever surrender to you, Porter.”
“Exactly. So don’t delude yourself that sex with me would be anything short of surrender. You can’t give in without giving in. It would only be pretending.” She tapped Kanna’s wrist—Kanna’s cuff—with the edge of a knuckle, so that it gave off a harsh ring. “And you can’t give in as long as you wear that.” Goda finally pushed Kanna away, jumping down from the rock and landing on wet earth.
Kanna lifted her head up and looked Goda squarely in the face, her jaw clenched. “Fine. Then make me surrender. Force yourself on me. I just want to forget everything for one meaningless moment, don’t you see? My entire life has fallen apart, and all the desires I might have had in this world have been stripped from me, except for this one perverse craving that I can’t shake: I want you to be the animal that pounces on me in the forest, and bites the back of my neck, and pushes my face into the dirt.”
Her face was burning and her fingernails were digging hard into the surface of the rock, but since she had already forced herself to be much more honest than before, she decided that she would lose nothing in baring herself completely.
But Goda rejected even this. “So you’re trying to turn me into a monster and play out the role of some hapless prey yourself. Forget it. You don’t know what it is to be subdued by my hand. You won’t like it inside you, believe me. And besides, there is not enough room for me in you, anyway. You are already full of Kanna Rava.”
Confused, Kanna stared after her, but the face of the woman who glanced back was blank, except for a strange edge of uncharacteristic aggression.
“You’re angry,” Kanna realized, fascinated. She had not expected it, but it was a pleasant realization. A dark part of her wondered in that moment what nerve she could have possibly struck and how she might strike it again. She wanted to see how many times it would take to finally provoke the woman into rage.
Even as she thought this, she could not tear her eyes away from Goda’s body. She could not help but watch the tension that came over Goda’s frame—a tension that spoke of so many suppressed actions—as the woman snatched her pile of discarded clothes and headed towards the trail that let out to the road.
The would-be monster did not look back.
When they stepped out of the forest a short while later, Kanna felt some of the tension drop away. The air was different—less humid, less oppressive, more open—and though it did feel like something vulgar had happened between them after all, she was mostly able to leave it in the wilderness where it belonged.
With a touch of shame, Kanna stared down the long road that lay ahead of them. She tried not to look at Goda directly.
* * *
“What happened to me?”
Kanna had been holding the calligraphy textbook up to her face—to stave off her boredom and to ease some of her still-lingering embarrassment at Goda’s bizarre rejection—but now it had grown too dark to read. The sun was waning, turning blood-red over some mountains in the distance. Kanna was surprised that the fuel had lasted this long, though granted she had no idea what kind of energy was contained in those canisters, or how it translated into the turning of an engine.
When Goda glanced in her direction, Kanna realized that she had blurted the question out loud.
Kanna sighed. It was the first thing she had said since they had left the forest hours earlier. She still felt a little awkward meeting eyes with the woman, but all the thinking and ruminating had left her in a renewed confusion.
“What happened to me in the caverns yesterday?” she asked. It struck her that from the moment she had awoken that morning, the world felt different somehow—the sounds of the truck were less jarring; the wind was less overwhelming; even Goda’s towering body seemed less terrifying, enough that she had been happy to make shameless requests in the forest—but nothing outside of Kanna had changed at all to make her more comfortable. “Something is different in me. I’m less bothered. When I sit here now in silence, I notice it more. It’s almost like…there’s a pocket of nothing where some of me used to be, a quiet space. Something loud was bothering me, and now it’s gone. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s missing, but I don’t miss it.”
“I told you already: You began to die—but not physically. It’s a different sort of death, a letting go of your old self and its many parts. Maybe that small part of you that is missing right now has shrunk so small that you can’t sense it anymore. Maybe it has disappeared entirely and will never come back to life ever again. Time will tell. It usually takes many visits to a shrine before a serpent fully dissolves.”
Goda stared squarely ahead at the road that was quickly growing darker. The trees on either side of them had turned into little more than a dim smudge, so that it almost felt like they were riding into an empty tunnel. Goda flipped on the headlamps of the truck and the gravel in front of them flooded with light.
“What was that place?” Kanna said. “What was it really? You’ve told me some things about it, but they don’t make any sense. How can just a hole in some cliff do this to a person?”
“Shrines are placed specifically in areas that have these strange properties. Maybe it’s some vibrating energy that comes from the rocks, or maybe it’s fumes that rise up from deep in the earth, but early Maharan shrines and even some pre-Maharan sites have this effect on certain people. No one knows why.”
“The worst part is that I don’t even know what changed.” Kanna took a deep breath and looked down at her hands. Something about them looked different, too, but she couldn’t pick anything out specifically. “Like I said, I don’t miss it exactly. But I can’t help feeling like I’ve dropped something, or like I’ve forgotten to pack some baggage for this trip. What if I need it later, whatever it is?”
“This is what the shrine shows you. It strips away everything you carry with you, everything you think you need in order to be someone, and then you can experience the truth directly: That there is nothing to take with you because you are no one. It’s not an easy thing to see. This is why most people are spooked by shrines. The ancient people who built them wanted to face the death of this false self, to see life through the eyes of the Goddess instead of through the eyes of their limited identities. That is the true face of our Holy Mahara, a thing that no priestess will ever admit to you: The Goddess is actually nothing. She is the lack of self. She is what happens when you’ve surrendered everything and have become no one. She is not an untouchable idol in a temple; anyone who is no one can become the Goddess.”
Kanna looked at Goda in silence. As usual, what the woman said made no logical sense, but at the same time the words themselves reminded her of their conversation in the forest, and something in those words snapped together very suddenly.
“But I won’t surrender,” Kanna said. “I’m still full of Kanna Rava.”
Goda’s eyes gleamed with the faint light that was left in the sky. “Yes. The more you resist the destruction of Kanna Rava, the harder it will be for you to experience your true nature: the part of you that never changes, has no name, and cannot die. As long as you cling to this identity, you will also be unable to move on with your life. You will forever be the Goddess pretending to be Kanna Rava.”
“You ask too much of me.”
But Kanna knew that Goda had asked for nothing, that the woman wanted nothing from her—and that the woman may have even been free of desire in general.
She also knew now why the priestess had warned her: Goda was a dangerous person. She truly was empty and had nothing to lose; every moment with her, this became increasingly clear. Kanna had to run away or else she would not survive even being transported.
Kanna looked away, out towards the darkness that now faced them. A few lights peppered the skyline in the distance. She squinted into them, and she thought she could see the shapes of machines. A low hum rumbled through the air, droning on as they moved, growing louder every second.
“What is that on the horizon?”
“The crossing,” Goda said. “We’re about to enter the Middleland.”