ONE MONTH AGO
Kochin stood on the platform of a train station he didn’t recognize. In one direction, Western Theumas. In the other, the Grand Terminus of Central. And above him, the sky was a blinding white. His memories came back to him slowly—the naval base, the research, and the … blast.
So, this was Heaven? He’d always figured he’d go to Hell.
A woman stepped up beside him. Kochin afforded her a sidelong glance—Yarongese, judging by the roundness of her features and flatness of her profile. Tall, hair past her shoulders, dark eye bags, and a glowing cigar between her fingers. Her lips parted and a puff of smoke wafted onto the platform. The two of them stood side by side in impenetrable silence, staring at the empty tracks and waiting for something, anything, to come by.
“Ask your questions,” the woman said at last. “I know you have them.”
He gave her another look, trying to place her, but her face was not one he recognized, and he remembered all the Yarongese people he’d encountered in Theumas. “Do I know you?”
“Yes. Whether you believe in me is entirely different.”
It struck him, then, exactly who this was. And She was right—Kochin had never quite decided whether he believed in the Mother. To see Her now … was this confirmation of the divine, or a delusion from his proximity to death? It must’ve been the latter, because the Mother was described as a drop of the sun, infinite love and forgiveness. Not a tired woman on a Theuman train platform, smoking away Her hallowed health. But perhaps She would be this cold to him, someone who planned on defiling Her gift.
“Go on, ask,” She said again, sounding annoyed. “The question on your mind.”
“Why weren’t you there?” he said, something cracking his voice. “She needed you all her life. I needed you for three long years. And that night in the Theumas Medical Center … where were you?”
Slowly, aggravatingly, the Mother took another long draw of the cigar. Then, again, She exhaled smoke—She had no answer for him. “I’m here now.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s all I can offer.”
“Then how do I bring her back?” If anyone knew, certainly it was Her.
“And why should I tell you that?”
“Because you took her from me.”
At that, the Mother barked out a laugh. “I didn’t take. She gave.”
Kochin opened his mouth, wanting to protest, when the whistle of a train drowned out his thoughts. Before he’d processed it, the train sped up to the platform, headed toward Western Theumas. It came to a rough stop before them.
“This one’s yours,” She said, tilting her chin forward as the doors slid open.
“I can’t die yet.”
“I never said you would.”
Kochin took a step closer before pausing. Only now did it strike him how … how tired he was. He had not stopped to breathe these last five months, and all his body wanted was rest. Maybe, if he just stopped a moment, this train would close its doors and pull away without him. Maybe if he simply sat down on this platform and closed his eyes, he could take the easy path toward Nhika.
But he remembered he wasn’t headed toward the same afterlife. The only way he’d see her again came from the papers he’d stashed against his chest. There was no easy way out.
Kochin swallowed the rest of his reservations and stepped onto the train. Before the doors closed, he turned to ask the Mother one final question.
“You gave me only half a gift and punished me for it. Why?” That was Her reputation, wasn’t it? With the Trickster Fox—cleaving off his tails just because he couldn’t fully share in Her gift. Like he had any other choice.
The Mother’s smile was derisive. “I never give half gifts, Ven Kochin.”
Before he could speak, the train doors slid closed.
Kochin opened his eyes to darkness. Slowly, meagerly, the fuzzy gray of his vision made shapes out of his surroundings, great mounds of rubble, sparking wires, frayed rebar. There was a grainy mix of blood and dust in his mouth, like swallowing bitter sand.
For a long time, Kochin lay still, working through the Mother’s visit. She was right—he wasn’t dead—but he doubted he had the energy to even lift his head. Silence reigned, backed by a distant rumble as the rest of the building collapsed around him. As he breathed, each movement of his ribs lancing pain through his chest, he felt the stiffness of the papers beneath his jacket.
So, he hadn’t lost those. A pained sigh of relief tapered through chapped lips.
In his grogginess, his influence explored his body. His pain receptors burst through him, most caustic in his chest. He checked his systems in turn—a bleed across his back to match the one in his neck, hematomas across his body, a flailing rib. And then, despite all those injuries that bled and screamed, he found the most grievous of them, one he could not feel but that hailed his soothing as flares did: an unstable fracture through a lumbar vertebra, encroaching on his spinal cord. Any wrong movement and it could paralyze him.
As soon as he felt it, he stilled again. The next breath that came from his lips was one of defeat.
This was the end, wasn’t it? He was beginning to realize the extent of the Mother’s cruelty, that She would keep him alive but immobile. That a single wrong move could paralyze him, just when he’d finally found his answers. Kochin squeezed his eyes shut, lowering his temple to the floor. He’d come so far—his two feet firmly on Yarong, the naval base sieged, the very papers he searched for against his chest, and yet … he would die here, bested by a millimeters-long crack through the wrong bone.
Any other heartsooth could fix this, just a twinge of sugar and a mote of calcium to seal the cracks. Now, more than ever, Kochin saw that he wasn’t a heartsooth, not really, because heartsooths could give and his body, down to his very bones, had grown so selfish that it veered toward self-detrimental. Nhika had told him he was a heartsooth, had given him the gift with her very last breath, but she’d been wrong. He wasn’t enough—not enough to belong in Theumas, not enough to belong in Yarong. Not even meant to save the girl who had made him feel like anything more than a bloodcarver. All he could do was lie here, too afraid to move and cursing how close he’d been.
“No,” came a voice. Blinking blood from his eyes, Kochin craned his neck to look up, expecting the Mother’s derision. Instead, it was Nhika. “You’re not giving up here, Kochin. Heal yourself.”
“I can’t,” Kochin managed, not daring to even shake his head. “I’m not like … you. I’m not a heartsooth. Despite what you thought, I never was.”
“Then what did I die for? I gave you my gift, Kochin. Do something with it.”
“I…” His excuses died on his tongue; she was right. She’d taught him her art form, the School of Sixfold. With her dying breath, she’d rewritten what his heartsoothing meant. Kochin felt her ring against his chest and squeezed his eyes shut, remembering how it was to soothe as she did. How it felt to walk through the body as though it belonged to him, to follow the blood flow along lines of influence and ride the axis of his central nervous system. In that moment, the crushing weight of darkness fell away—he was within himself, drawn first to the pain in his chest. There, he felt the grind of the broken ribs in his teeth, tasted the blood on his tongue. It was a visceral sensation, even more so than the pain, and if he reached out he felt that he could align the bone and fuse it back together.
But a flail chest was only a distracting injury. The worst one lay at the small of his back, and he took the spinal cord to get there—a jolt of electricity and he’d arrived, the fracture catching his influence like a fishhook.
Soothing this way, as Nhika had, the injury felt so accessible. Like it was begging to be healed without Kochin even having to seek it out. Like he was one with the fracture, at once the jagged bone ends and the severed capillaries and the shorn muscle fibers. It should’ve been easy to heal, reallocating a crumb of calcium, a pinch of collagen. But stimulating the processes to break down bone required energy; building up bone was the same—energy that he had only ever sourced from an external organism.
Despite that, it came freely in his blood. He could taste it on his tongue now, the sweetness of sugar, the abundance of calories to be spent. Nhika had fueled her gift from the liver, yet when he extended his fingers to his own, he found only a miserly organ, which ceded not a single calorie.
That was his Theuman part; he was almost certain of it. His Yarongese side gifted him heartsoothing, which was dynamic and magical, but Theuman anatomy was inert by nature, following only the innate instruction of its biochemistry. It resisted his influence, a constant battle, and while it yielded in many places, it remained staunch where it mattered: its capacity to give.
This time, he begged. Please, take something, anything. Anything but this dormancy, as if his body didn’t even belong to him. This defiance, stronger than the will of his influence. No matter how much he willed it, nothing gave way, and he came to the bitter conclusion that if it didn’t comply here, when his life was at stake, it never would. It almost felt incorrect to call it heartsoothing; now, when he needed it most, it was soothing nothing at all.
“I can’t do it,” Kochin said with an exhale, defeated. When he looked back up at Nhika, ready to admit failure, he found her hand extended through the suspended dust. Her bare fingers were splayed forward with the open invitation of soothing.
With every muscle and nerve combating him, Kochin strained his arm forward, his fingers shaking from the effort. Holding his breath, he curled his fingers over hers.
And she squeezed them back. His eyes flared with a surprise, breath so sharp that it hurt, as Nhika held his hand in hers. Now, she glowed, and he felt she must be real this time, not a ghost or a fragmented memory but something so corporeal as to hold him.
“Nhika, I—” The words caught in his throat, and they stayed there as the glow dimmed. As the dust settled. As Kochin saw whose hand he really held, not Nhika’s but a soldier’s.
He snatched his hand away, the motion sparking pain like firecrackers through his core. The soldier only laughed, the sound like wheezing barks through an open mouth.
Slouched forward with his arm still outstretched, the soldier wore the red-brown military coat of Daltanny. He was an older man, somewhere in his midfifties, with enough decoration on his pocket to denote a high status even though Kochin couldn’t discern Daltan ranks. A kinked length of rebar jutted from his abdomen, pinning him to the concrete, but his sedated look made Kochin wonder if he felt any pain. The realization dawned on him slowly: that this was not Nhika, that Nhika had never been here, that she was still waiting for him.
“Theuman, Daltan,” the soldier began in a thick accent. “We are the same in death.”
Kochin glanced beyond the soldier, up the stairs. He saw a sliver of moonlight paint the far wall; it grew brighter, as though breaking through clouds, illuminating more of the soldier as it did.
“I don’t want to die alone,” the soldier continued, and proffered his hand again. Kochin eyed it testily but didn’t speak. “Please. Don’t let me die alone.”
When Kochin still didn’t take his hand, the soldier’s eyes crinkled with something near acceptance and he tipped his head back against the concrete that had pinned him, murmuring something in Daltan. A prayer to the Daltan maker, perhaps? Kochin watched him, wondering how it was that they had led such different lives but had come to meet the same fate. Their deaths here were not honorable—a medic who had abandoned his post, a soldier who had hidden from the chaos until the chaos had found him. Their deaths here would entomb them in rubble, and Kochin doubted anyone would find their tags for a long, long time. Perhaps the soldier was right: Their allegiances had departed in a death like this. The only things that remained were guilt, grief, and loneliness.
“I’m a bloodcarver,” Kochin said. That was the only term a Daltan might recognize—they’d coined it, after all—and the admission came easily because there was no consequence to it here. “Do you still want to die beside me?”
“A bloodcarver,” the soldier repeated, mimicking Kochin’s Theuman pronunciation. He gave a sharp laugh, which burbled with the blood in his lungs, and added, “I did not know they remained.”
Kochin guarded himself against hostility, but instead, the soldier offered his hand again. “You can put a man to sleep, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then please, let me sleep. I want to think of my family when I die. Not pain.”
Kochin slowed his breathing, so surprised by the soldier’s request. Maybe this was one of the rare Daltan soldiers not yet indoctrinated by prejudice, or maybe prejudice had left him in the desperation of death. In any case, he was asking Kochin for heartsoothing, knowing not that Kochin was only half a heartsooth.
Kochin took the soldier’s hand, diaphoretic but cold.
“Let me think of her smile first,” the soldier requested. Kochin, too weak for words, grunted his understanding.
The soldier closed his eyes, his breath leaving him in a slow, long stream. Something played behind his lids and warm relief tugged at his lips before he tightened his fingers in Kochin’s hand, a tacit request.
Kochin quelled the overactivity of his brain into a quiet, slumbering rhythm. Let him have his dreams, if only once more. Let them be of family, of a partner at home and children at the table. Let it be painless. His fingers were still curled around the soldier’s when the breaths stopped, the pulse deadened to a standstill, and the last static impulse of the cortex tapered out into silence.
For ten long breaths, Kochin let the man have peace in death. After that, he carved.
It felt an act of depravity, stealing from someone he’d promised to relieve. But the soldier had come to accept death; Kochin had not. It was not his time yet, not when he’d finally found the answers he’d gone to war for.
He took only what he needed, leaching calcium to heal the crack in his spine and mend his leg, his ribs. Not to their former strength, but enough to get him out of this collapsed base. Anything more would be debauchery. The vehement warnings that had signaled themselves across his anatomy petered out at his soothing, the discomfort lifting with the pain. At last, Kochin felt confident enough to drag himself off the floor, feeling the weight ease from his chest as he did. The pain of bruises, scratches, and scars still remained. It reminded him that he was still human, not yet the bloodcarver of myths.
He pulled himself beside the soldier’s body, clasping his palms and dipping his head in thanks. “Mother keep you,” he said, taking the soldier’s ID tag from beneath his lapel. Then he lifted himself to his feet, staggered toward the waning swath of moonlight, and climbed his way out of the collapsed naval base.
When he reached the surface, he gulped his first breath of fresh air, though it was colored with the sulfurous scent of gunpowder. By now, the shooting had stopped as the Daltan generals emerged in surrender.
He found a newly dead body. Opened her fingers. Pressed the soldier’s ID tag in her palm. With the Daltan papers still flat against his chest, safe underneath his coat, Kochin thanked the buried soldier one more time before heading back to his station.