Chapter 2 ( Promises )

  The city around us was the same as it had been twenty minutes ago when I was carrying the Ogi back to Wuying. Same streets, same noise, same smell of cooking meat and river water and animals that hadn't been bathed recently enough. The afternoon light was doing the same thing it had been doing before — cutting between the buildings in long amber slabs, catching the dust kicked up by foot traffic, making everything look slightly more golden than it deserved to.

  And yet it felt completely different.

  Part of it was his size. Yashir moved through a crowd the way large things move — not around people but with the quiet expectation that people would simply redirect themselves, and they did, without seeming to notice they were doing it. A path opened ahead of him and closed behind him like water. I walked in that path and felt, for the first time since arriving in Ling?Gu, like nothing in the immediate vicinity was going to try to hurt me.

  That was the problem.

  The last time I'd felt this way I was five years old, holding my father's hand in the Listrom market while my mother stopped at every stall that sold something purple. The safety and the smallness had come as a matched set then too. I hadn't minded it at five. five-year-olds were supposed to feel small next to their parents. It was correct and appropriate and I had found it genuinely comforting.

  I was nearly eight now. I had survived Pleasant Valley. I had seen people die in front of me. I was having to learn how to adjust my energy intake so the Titan inside of me didn't completely destroy my core. In spite of these issues I had come out the other side.

  And now I was walking three inches shorter than Yashir's elbow, getting redirected by his hand on my back every time I slowed down, and feeling approximately five years old again.

  I resented it. I resented him for causing it and I resented myself for noticing, because noticing it meant admitting that it mattered, and admitting it mattered meant acknowledging that whatever version of myself I'd built in the Valley was already starting to shift just from being near him again. Like a compass that had learned to point one direction and was now being held next to a magnet.

  My eyes moved across the street ahead of us without me deciding to move them. Doorways. Gaps between stalls. The space under a cart where something could wait. New habits I’d gained from the Valley, now running underneath everything else like a river that hadn't been told the rain stopped.

  He probably has questions, I thought. And then — no. Screw that. I have questions. Starting with how he found me. I hadn't told anyone where I was. Wuying hadn't told anyone. I hadn't registered anywhere or presented papers or done anything that should have left a trail back to a third-floor apartment on a residential street in Ling?Gu. And yet he'd been sitting at the table like he'd been there for an hour, drinking tea probably, waiting for me to come home with the groceries like this was all completely normal.

  Am I upset that he found me?

  Kind of.

  But I'm also — no. I'm not glad. He's dropped me off a cliff. He's sent me into a valley that should have killed me. He's been absent for the better part of a year while I was surviving said valley and then trying to figure out how to feed a Titan embryo with purple crystals. I'm not glad about anything.

  I'm glad he's here, said some part of me, very quietly, from somewhere I couldn't immediately locate and silence.

  I told that part to shut up.

  A grandmother on a low stool outside a noodle stall caught my eye as we passed. She looked me over with the thorough disapproval of someone who had been alive long enough to find children offensive simply by existing. Not because I was foreign — she gave a kid running past her the exact same look two seconds later. She was an equal opportunity skeptic. A younger woman appeared at her elbow, probably a daughter or a neighbor, and said something soothing. The grandmother was not soothed. She fussed back at length. The kids she'd been glaring at shrieked with laughter at something unrelated and kept running, completely indifferent to her existence.

  I watched them go and felt something complicated and quiet settle in my chest. This was a city. People were living in it. A grandmother was annoyed at children. A woman was trying to keep the peace. Meat was sizzling in a stall to my left and someone inside a restaurant was laughing too loud at something and a man with a cart was arguing with a dock worker about where he was allowed to park it. Life, completely indifferent to whatever was happening inside me.

  I thought about Yashir walking these streets when I wasn't with him. Whether he saw these people the way you see people when they're yours — your city, your nation, your reason for what you do. There had to be a reason he'd chosen someone like me. There were surely Yugenese children who could have been taken instead. Children who spoke the language from birth, who understood the customs…

  My stomach lurched at the word I'd used. Taken.

  Near the dockside I could see workers moving heavy cargo between boats, their clothes much more uniform than everyone around them. Cheap and generic. They didn't have chains, but they didn't need them for me to identify what they were. I looked at my own wrists and I thought about the difference between us and couldn't find as much of one as I wanted to. My chains had always been invisible. That didn't mean they weren't there.

  I must have slowed down without noticing. Yashir's hand came to my back — one brief, steady pressure — and I moved forward again without having decided to.

  ---

  The port was everything the residential streets weren't. Louder. Worse-smelling. More honest about what it was, which was a place where things were loaded and unloaded and moved from one location to another with maximum efficiency and minimum grace. The animal pens near the dock were the primary source of the smell. Pack animals waited in clusters — smaller horned creatures with stocky builds pulling the lighter carts, and larger things handling the wagons and carriages loaded with cargo.

  I'd been calling the big ones horses in my head since I arrived in this world, which was obviously wrong but had been close enough to work as a placeholder. Watching them now, up close, I had to finally admit the placeholder wasn't holding anymore. Their hides were thick and segmented — more carapace than fur, plated the way a beetle is plated, but enormous and shimmering in a way that was almost beautiful if you could get past the scale of them. They caught the afternoon light like polished stone.

  We stopped at a crossing to let one pass with its wagon. The handler walked alongside it with the relaxed posture of someone who had been doing this long enough that a several-hundred-pound animal was simply a coworker.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "What are those called?" I asked.

  Yashir glanced down at me. Something moved across his face — brief and unplanned, a subtle smile that reached his eyes. I filed it away without comment and waited for the actual answer.

  "Generally, just pack animals. But the specific name is Strode."

  Strode. I turned it over. Short, solid, slightly aggressive-sounding in a way that felt appropriate for something that size. Better than what I'd been privately working with. I had almost settled on Gorses. Like horses but with a G. I admit it, it wasn't my best work. I was glad the real name was as satisfying as it was.

  The Strode cleared the intersection and left a trail of droppings behind it that we took care to navigate around. We crossed and made our way down the dock to where the ferries were boarding.

  The payment system turned out to be the same card system I'd seen Yashir use everywhere else — he held it to a small older gentleman that stood in front if the boarding ramp. A brief flash indicated that amps had been exchanged like with any other transaction and we were waved through. The ferry itself was wider than it looked from the dock and rocked with every shift of the river and every passenger who moved from one side to the other. I grabbed a rope on the way in to keep from stumbling sideways and pretended this had been a choice rather than a necessity.

  The inner cabin was narrow. The seats were hard wood. The portholes were small and smeared and let in more sound than light. We found seats near the center of the boat where the rocking was slightly less insistent and I watched the Ling?Gu dock begin to recede through the porthole glass. Wuying's building was somewhere back in that neighborhood. I didn't try to find it.

  The noise of the city faded to something manageable. The water moved under us, steady and indifferent. I watched it.

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  "Tsunam."

  "And that is?"

  "The seat of Yugenese intelligence."

  I nodded. Let the information sit for a moment. Watched the shoreline moving past the porthole.

  "What's the point of all of this."

  It came out quieter than I intended and flatter than a question should be, which was accurate because it wasn't really a question. It was the thing that had been building since the moment I'd seen Yashir sitting at Wuying's table — all of the frustration and confusion and the ugly complicated relief and the grief about leaving and the anger underneath all of it — pressing up through the floor of my chest and finding the nearest exit.

  Yashir looked at me. Not the way he usually looked at me — cataloguing, assessing, taking inventory. Something different. His eyes did something I hadn't seen them do before, or at least hadn't seen them do and recognized for what it was.

  They softened.

  Not dramatically. Not into warmth, exactly. Just enough that the unreadable quality in them shifted slightly toward something human.

  "I'm glad you were able to survive, Kaliah."

  The crack happened without warning. Not a breakdown — just a fracture, something giving way very quietly along a line that had been under pressure for longer than I'd admitted. I felt my nose run before I felt the tears and wiped it on my sleeve before I could think better of it. The sleeve was already dirty. It didn't matter.

  "I hoped you would," he said.

  "Why!" It came out broken, the word splitting somewhere in the middle, half fury and half something that didn't have a name yet. I looked up at him with both things on my face simultaneously and waited.

  He was quiet for a moment. The ferry rocked. Someone in the outer section of the boat laughed at something.

  "You weren't the only one." he said. "Not the only one we sent into the Valley."

  I didn't say anything. I figured he had considerably more to explain and I was willing to wait for it.

  "The Idzen Meldi is Yugen's intelligence division. We operate under the Zhoxu — the Council of Power. Because of certain things that are affecting our people, increasingly and urgently, we needed operatives capable of going places where our standard intelligence apparatus cannot function." He paused, choosing something. "We were assigned to find fifty children and cultivate them. To develop them into something the empire needed and could not produce through conventional means. The Valley was the measure — the test to determine whether the cultivation had produced what we required."

  He stopped.

  Waited.

  "Of the fifty we sent in," he said, "three came out."

  The cabin rocked gently around me. The river moved. I stared at the middle distance and felt my mind do something I hadn't experienced before — not panic, not the cold calculation that had kept me alive in the Valley, not the numb processing of shock. Just a kind of silence. Like a room after a very loud sound. My thoughts stopped moving. I felt The enormity of what I was told rock me to my very core, and yet the boat seemed to be sitting on the calmest of waters.

  Fifty children.

  Forty-seven who didn't come back.

  Children likely chosen the same way I'd been chosen — did they have anyone looking for them? Would their deaths ever be mourned? Was there no consequence, no accountability for the people who had organized it? Children, probably with histories like mine. Or worse than mine… Children who had survived enough to make them resilient but not enough for the Valley.

  I thought about running. The thought arrived fully formed and completely useless — I thought about Osmira, about the road west, about how many days on foot it would take to reach somewhere that felt like mine. I thought about Wuying's apartment and the way the afternoon light had come through the window and how I had started to understand what it felt like to have somewhere to be.

  And then I thought about how Yashir had been sitting at the table. Calm and waiting, in a city I hadn't told anyone I was in, in an apartment that wasn't registered to me, having found me in a matter of months without any help from me at all.

  He would find me again. Whatever direction I ran, however carefully, he would find me again. And if I ran this time there would be no tea and no explanation and no gentle redirection. I understood enough about what he was to understand that.

  But I also understood, sitting on that hard wooden seat with my sleeve wet and my nose still running, that knowing someone will find you if you run is not the same as choosing to stay. And I was choosing. Even if the choice was constrained, even if the walls of it were closer than I wanted to admit — I was choosing.

  I felt his arms come around me before I'd decided how I felt about it. Solid and unhurried, no performance in it, just the straightforward reality of someone who had decided this was the appropriate response and was doing it without making it into a moment. It wasn't my father's embrace — but it was anchoring in the same way that my father's had been, and my chest responded to that whether I wanted it to or not.

  A sound came out of me. Low and involuntary, the kind of sound a person makes when they've been holding something for too long and the container finally gives. It wasn't crying, exactly. It was worse than crying. It was the sound of a seven-year-old girl who had experienced two lifetimes of loss in quick succession finally running out of places to put it.

  I hated the sound. I hated that it was happening. I hated, most of all, that the person I was making it against was the same person whose decisions had put me in the Valley in the first place, and that this somehow made it neither less necessary nor less real.

  "Kaliah."

  I didn't answer. But I started working on my breathing, which I supposed was close enough.

  "Do you remember what I told you when we first met?"

  I remembered. I remembered the hotel room in Gratam, the beef stew, the way the gravity of him had filled the room before he'd said a word. I remembered him telling me he would make me strong enough that I would never have to be afraid again. I had been six years old and I had believed him because I had needed to believe something and he had been what was available.

  "I still intend to keep that promise," he said.

  The tears on my face were drying. My breathing was slower. I didn't move from where I was, which I was going to have to examine later when I had more composure available.

  "You told me you wouldn't abandon me," I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected — his stillness had gotten into me somewhere without my noticing, the way cold gets into a room when a window is left open. "And then you left me in the Valley. You said you would come get me. You didn't come. You found me after, when it was convenient for you, in an apartment where I was finally — " I stopped. Started again. "So why should I believe anything you tell me now."

  He didn't answer immediately. Outside the porthole the riverbank moved past slowly, the reeds at the water's edge bending with the current.

  "Because I'm here," he said finally. "I didn't forget you. I didn't abandon you. And I won't. Whatever you decide to believe about me, that part is true."

  Part of me catalogued it as exactly what someone would say if they needed you to stay. A well-constructed response from a man who had spent his career constructing responses that produced the outcomes he required. I was aware of this. I noted it the way you note the weather — observed and filed and not particularly actionable.

  And underneath that awareness, quieter and more honest, was the other thing.

  I want to be straight with you about something, because this moment matters and I don't want to dress it up. I'm not going to claim my reasons were noble. I'm not going to reframe what I chose as something cleaner than it was. I've had two lives and I've made choices in both of them that I can't call pure and I've long stopped trying. This is just my story. It isn't good or bad. It is what it is.

  But that afternoon on the ferry, with the Ling?Gu moving underneath me and forty-seven names I would never know hanging in the air of the cabin between us — that afternoon is part of why I became what I did. The specific weight of it. The specific way it felt to have no one else and to make peace with that fact by turning it into a decision rather than a defeat.

  I'm not asking you to agree with what I became. I just want you to understand where it started.

  I sat up and dried my face with the back of my hand.

  "As long as you keep your promise," I said, "I'll do whatever you ask of me."

  Yashir looked at me for a long moment. Whatever he found there, he kept to himself. He nodded once — not a gesture of triumph, not relief, just acknowledgment. Like a contract being witnessed.

  For twenty hours we rode east to Tsunam. Our voyage marred with a permeating silence between us. The river widened as we went, the city giving way gradually to stretches of marsh grass and then to open water that caught the late afternoon light and threw it back in pieces. I watched it through the porthole and thought about nothing in particular, which was the first time in months that had been possible.

  The water looked like it went on forever. It didn't, obviously. But it looked that way, and for the length of the ferry ride, that was enough.