THREE WEEKS AGO
The medics spent the next morning picking through casualties. Kochin saw the trail of the arriving injured snaking up the hill toward Majora, where he tended to the wounded. Though Theuman forces had hoisted their flag above the rubble of the naval base, it was still inhospitable for a field base, too many dead and not enough buried. So, the army doctors had congregated in Majora, and because of the nature of his injuries, Kochin was at the field hospital rather than pulling the injured out of the dust, though his Daltan papers enticed him to abandon post again.
He’d stashed them underneath his mattress. They’d been crumpled and abused and stained with his blood but were still legible if he could swipe a Daltan dictionary. He itched to read them, and in his impatience, his anxiety allowed the worst possible scenario to run rampant in his imagination—that they would yield nothing, that it had been all for naught. But the hope brewing in his chest was intoxicating, sure like nothing had ever been sure before. He recognized it from a lifetime ago, the same hope that Nhika dragged into his life when she promised peace, freedom, love. He was almost hesitant to embrace it again. But he let himself appreciate it, just a little, feeling unscrupulous for his boyish excitement while he cataloged names off the ID tags of the deceased.
“I need hands! He’s bleeding again,” called the army doctor. She stooped over a newly arrived patient and Kochin narrowed his eyes to see the injury. Before she could ask again, Kochin was at her side, staring at a leg cut down to the bone that spurted arterial blood. The soldier cried out in agony, and with a start, Kochin recognized the voice: Dep Trin.
He was mottled in sweat, pupils dilated and every muscle tensed against the pain. A medic was quick to set up an IV line, but that would only help the pain, not the bleeding.
Kochin reached the bedside and clamped his hands over Trin’s wound. In the chaos, no one had noticed that they weren’t gloved, and when he soothed Trin, he found a femur fracture that had sliced the artery. His eyes met Trin’s, but there was little recognition there, just fevered distress and a slipping consciousness. Once the stupor of soothing cleared from Kochin’s head, a slew of thoughts took its place. He owed Trin and the Congmis; they’d shown him mercy when he had not deserved it. More so than that, Nhika cared for him, so Kochin could not bring her back into a world where he’d let Trin die. Without heartsooth intervention or a miracle in the surgical ward, Trin would bleed out on this bed, hours after the fighting had stopped. It was a life for a life, then—Kochin had once stolen someone from the Congmis, so it was only right that he returned one.
Sweeping his eyes across Trin’s anatomy, exposed by heartsoothing, Kochin soothed again. As the doctor and her medics clamped dressings over the wound, sopping up blood, Kochin pushed his influence inward. Trin’s body pulsed underneath his surveillance, alight with pain. Kochin could feel the nerves sparking, the muscles tense in their fascia. It was a body in calamity, unsure of how to mitigate the blood loss and trying every strategy it could conjure: a quickened heart, skin blanched of its blood, rapid breaths that barely moved air.
Morphine entered Trin’s bloodstream, eliciting a wave of nausea in Kochin. He reeled, fighting the urge to gag at the flood of bitterness on his tongue, before reorienting himself. But as it suffused through the blood, Trin relented in his convulsing, leg straightening just long enough for Kochin to source the site of injury again. He inched his influence toward where the femur shaft had snapped jaggedly in two, its needle-sharp point nicking the femoral artery. Kochin could not heal the bone like this, but the vessel was the true problem, and that was a quick fix. Fighting the mugginess of the morphine in Trin’s blood, Kochin reached up to his liver and stole just enough calories to mend. He dragged those back down, using them to scaffold tissue and seal the vessel. It was an imperfect, rushed fix that left a raised mound on the vessel, like a child had slapped putty over a hose leak. But it worked, and the spurting quelled.
Someone shouldered him away, and his hands disconnected from Trin’s leg. The change was sudden and jarring, and Kochin blinked up to find an older medic giving him a reproachful look. “Either help or step aside,” she muttered, sizing a traction splint.
Step aside it was. Kochin lingered in the background, holding his hands, slick with blood, away from his uniform. Now that the bleeding had abated, the medics were quick to realign the bone and splint the leg. No one seemed to have noticed his work, how his hands were ungloved—
Until Kochin turned, finding the Yarongese translator staring at him from across the tent. Her eyes had locked onto his hands, dipped in red.
Kochin’s throat tightened, feeling as though he’d been caught in a crime scene: hands bloody, victim still fresh at his feet. They’d both caught each other where they weren’t meant to be: her in the basement of the naval base, him with his bare hands bloody. He only wondered if she could see past his Theuman looks, find something more.
A noise from Trin drew him back to the moment. A splint had been tightened over his leg, taking pain off the bone, and Trin formed his first coherent word: “Andao,” he said, the name formed around a sob. “Andao…”
Followed by the translator’s stare, Kochin escaped to wash his hands. When he scrubbed the last of Trin’s blood out of palm lines and fingernails, he was no longer a heartsooth, simply a Theuman.
There was too much work that day for Kochin to steal time away for his papers. When the sun set, he volunteered for the first half of the night shift, a ploy to have the field hospital to himself. Sunset was late here at this time of year, but as the night fought off the last remnants of sun, the rows of cots took on a quiet serenity, especially as Kochin lit the gas lamps. Within the week, ships would come to take some of these injured back to Theumas, to a true hospital, but Kochin worried that Trin’s femur fracture could open the artery again, or else impair him if left untreated.
He passed through the rows like a specter, assessing IVs and watching rising chests for breath, until at last he came to Trin’s bed. Even in sleep, a pained grimace marred his expression, the lines at the corners of his nose sharp and brow furrowed in perturbation. Sweat, perhaps from fever or perhaps from pain, prickled at his trim hairline and Kochin checked the scrawled patient record by his bedside for some administration of anti-micromials, finding a miserly dose by IV—not enough, if sepsis were to set in.
“If you were here, you’d heal him, wouldn’t you?” Kochin said beneath his breath, summoning Nhika to the bedside.
“Yes,” she said. “As much as we were at odds, I’d heal him. And then I’d lord it over him for all eternity.”
He let out a humored scoff. “If I’m to heal him, I have no excuse not to heal everyone in here to the best of my ability.” Heartsoothing was never an art meant to be wielded selfishly, to be hoarded and distributed with partiality and preference. There were tenets to it that he’d so often foregone.
Her ghost simply waved a dismissive hand. “You’re only one man, and there are only so many chickens to be used.”
She was right, of course. Validated by that self-incepted reasoning, Kochin left the field hospital to find the Yarongese animal pens. Paying mind to the noise, he hopped the fence and opened a roost box, finding the hens asleep in rows. He stole a chick, so small and sweet that he was loath to use it in heartsoothing. It squirmed a moment and its mother roused to peck annoyedly at his hand, but he closed the roost box and enclosed the chick in his palm.
It was never easy to use animals in heartsoothing. When his mother had first taught him, when they’d learned he could not expend his own calories to fuel the art, she had placed a mouse in his palms and asked him to heal the scrapes in his knees. He’d sat for hours with the docile little creature cupped in his hands, crying not from his scrapes but from reluctance, at its big black eyes and inquisitive snout. When his mother returned, upon seeing the mouse still cradled in his hands, she’d sat down beside him to explain the cycle of life. How life sustained life, how it was no different from farming to eat, how calories were either wasted in death or spent in life. So he’d learn to rationalize it that way, calories spent now or later, and slipped the chick into his pocket. He’d served Santo this way, a bird in his pocket while he soothed patients.
Kochin ducked back into the folds of the field hospital, finding Trin still asleep on his cot. Here he looked like a slumbering bear, all muscle and tension, with an expression that made Kochin hesitant to wake him for fear of an instinctive right hook. Nonetheless, he stooped beside the bed and shook Trin by the shoulder.
Nothing. Must’ve been some morphine. Kochin shook again, more fiercely this time, until Trin sputtered awake, eyes wide as though coming from a nightmare. Before he could make a noise, Kochin raised a finger to his lips.
“Mr. Ven,” Trin said, as though he were addressing a ghost. He glanced around, measuring his surroundings—did he think himself dead, having joined Kochin in Hell?
“It’s just Kochin here.” Kochin rose from his crouch. “Or Private Ven.”
Trin’s eyes were slow to clear from the languor of morphine, and he blinked quizzically at Kochin, his question plainly readable.
“What are you—”
“I’m going to heal you,” Kochin interrupted, making space for himself at the end of Trin’s bed. “Is that okay?”
Trin’s shoulders rose in apprehension. Beneath the blanket, his splinted leg shifted and he winced, jaw gritted. Without answering, he looked at Kochin, narrowed eyes piercing a hole in Kochin’s forehead with his scrutiny. Still absorbed in doubt, he said slowly, “You were there when they found me, weren’t you?”
Kochin nodded.
“Did you soothe me then?” His eyes held suspicion.
“Yes. You would’ve died if I hadn’t,” Kochin explained. “And if you wait until you reach Theuman hospitals before realigning your leg, you may lose function of it. If it’s mistreated, you may even lose your life.”
“You’d use your heartsoothing to heal?” he asked, his words holding accusation. Did Trin know that Kochin hadn’t killed the late Mr. Congmi with heartsoothing? That it had always been meant to heal?
Kochin raised his hands away from the bedside to placate Trin. “I don’t have to. But I want you to walk away from this war as much as you do.”
The scrutiny didn’t lift. “Why?”
“Because…” Kochin felt the answer was self-evident, but apparently Trin didn’t. “Because you’re injured. And I can help you.”
“I’m not in the business of owing you any favors.”
“On the contrary, I owe you one.”
“Save your energy, Mr. Ven, and I’ll save myself for true doctors.”
“A true doctor and operating suite won’t be available until you reach Theumas, many hours or days from now. By then, any number of things may happen: Your fracture could reopen the artery, your wound could get infected, or your bone may set in misalignment, crippling the leg forever. With all due respect, Private Dep, isn’t there someone waiting for you at home?”
Trin quieted, his lips thin. Kochin knew he was thinking about Andao, the man who had launched war machines to Yarong just to keep his lover safe. Maybe, if the war hadn’t started, the two of them would’ve been thinking of marriage and a future together. He and Trin were similar in that respect, weren’t they, fighting not for a city but a someone? The only difference was that Trin’s someone was promised, safe behind walled mansions. The least Trin could do was survive long enough to see him again, whatever it took.
Trin’s eyes ran down the length of his leg. At last, he asked, his voice raspy with fatigue, “I would heal faster if you soothed me?”
Kochin nodded. “And it’ll take away the pain.”
Expression set with acceptance, Trin grunted. “Then I have no choice. I won’t die here.”
“I’m glad you could see reason,” Kochin said, then lifted the blanket off his leg. The splint kept traction against the bone, pulling it into near alignment. Kochin eyed Trin as he hovered a hand above skin, a final request for permission.
“Just … just the leg,” Trin said, hesitant. “Touch nothing else.”
With an understanding nod, Kochin began his work.
The bone wasn’t completely aligned, the ends slipping against each other—the source of the pain, no doubt. “This will hurt a bit,” Kochin warned before pulling on the ankle. Trin sucked in a shaky breath, fingers bunching the sheets, as the two halves of bone pulled apart.
Kochin dipped his influence into the anatomy and the field hospital fell away to blackness. He could see Trin still, his form turned into artwork rather than flesh and blood, the cleaved diaphysis not bone but glasswork and light. With nothing to distract him, Kochin found it easy to align the bone; as they slipped together, he felt a tightness ease from his chest, as though his own heart had socketed back into place.
Holding tension, he dipped his hand into his pocket, where it wrapped around the slumbering chick. Ensuring painlessness, he seeped energy from the chick—calcium, too—until its body grew cold in his palm and its shivering heartbeat stilled. He channeled those calories through himself, past the juncture of skin, pushing them toward the femur. Kochin blinked and matter returned to the anatomy—the matrices of bone, the rivers of marrow. Using calcium and collagen as mortar, he took to fixing the bone, building upon what existed like a potter mending cracked ceramic with wet clay. With his attention to detail, the crack was seamless, the diaphysis smooth, but he left the marrow, muscle, and frayed nerves to mend themselves. The last step was to seal the skin back up, alleviating the greatest source of pain.
Hands shaking, Kochin drew himself away with an exhale. The humidity of the night air returned to him, settling on his palms before he wiped them on his trousers. When he met Trin’s eyes, they were dark with consternation, not gratefulness. Even as Kochin stood to retrieve more IV anti-micromials, he was silent. It wasn’t until Kochin pushed the drugs into the needle port that Trin blinked out of his trance and spoke. “What are you giving me?”
“Fermicillin,” Kochin said. “In case of sepsis.”
Trin drew in his leg, still in its splint; Kochin would keep that there for appearances, so no one would question the overnight miracle. Words unspoken passed through Trin’s expression, until at last he decided, “I know why you’re really helping me.”
Kochin paused, needle still in hand. “Do you?”
“Because you know it’s what she would’ve wanted.”
Kochin’s instinct was to deny it, but the look on Trin’s face was not presumptuous, but sympathetic.
“I’m sorry,” Trin continued when Kochin didn’t reply. “It must’ve been hard to lose her like that.”
Trin had been there when Kochin walked off the operating table, chest still scarred, carrying Nhika’s limp form in his arms. He and Mimi had witnessed Kochin’s grief firsthand, how he’d collapsed to his knees and cried Nhika’s name, anguished and loud enough to shake the walls of the medical center. But, eyes wide and expressions stunned, they could not share his agony because they still had a home to return to at the end of the night. All Kochin had was a newly empty houseboat and a family a city away, who could never love him for his sins as Nhika did.
For an ephemeral moment, Kochin wanted to tell Trin how close he was to bringing her back, not because he wanted Trin to know but because he’d carried on alone for so long on this journey that a familiar face, no matter how hostile, came with relief. Perhaps Trin could understand how the anger at an unjust death could morph into such manic resolve—hadn’t they hired Nhika to find Mr. Congmi’s murderer? But this was a secret meant to die with Kochin.
“It’s all right,” he said, because there was nothing else to say between them. Not after what Kochin had done to that family. “You’re right. It’s what she would’ve wanted.”
“She soothed me once, too.”
At that, Kochin met Trin’s eye. “I didn’t know that.” Though, he shouldn’t have been surprised—Nhika’s art existed to heal.
“She used me as a template to heal Hendon.”
“I see.” Kochin set the needle aside for sanitation, watching Trin out of the corner of his eye and wondering at the reasoning behind Trin’s reminiscing.
The soldier’s next words came with grace: “Your soothing felt the same. It … it felt just like hers.”
Something cracked in Kochin’s chest. Despite himself, despite Trin’s audience, tears burned behind his eyes and he cast his gaze aside to hide them. The words were few, but their insinuation enormous—that he wasn’t alone in bearing Nhika’s memory if Trin remembered her heartsoothing, too, that there existed some truth to her ghost, that he still carried her legacy faithfully in her absence. That maybe, if he could touch as she had touched, then there was still some heartsooth left in him, after all.
“Don’t put weight on the leg,” Kochin advised, drawing a curtain of impassivity over his expression. “It’ll still require time to fully heal. If you need me, I’ll be making rounds.”
Before Trin could see the grief drowning his heart, Kochin turned away, exiting the field hospital. He left for the edge of Majora, buried the chick in dirt, and wept.
After settling emergencies among the injured, Kochin had the rest of his night shift to finally translate the papers he’d taken from the naval base. He opened the bloodstained papers in his lap; in his hand he held a Daltan dictionary borrowed from his commanders’ tent. Murmuring to himself, Kochin began translating the documents.
Daltanny had explored a great many things about the heartsooths of yore. The vivisections were the most inhumane experiments, but others came close: torture to tease out heartsooths, those who could numb themselves; asphyxiation by gas, to see if a heartsooth might be able to survive without oxygen; caustic drugs to see what might inhibit or stimulate the gift. Kochin found himself on the fence between hope and dread—hoping Daltanny had found his answers but dreading how they’d come about it. His gut told him they must’ve explored reincarnation; Daltanny was known for its infinite armies, spreading like a disease, so he trusted them to take any opportunity to create the undying soldier. But how close had they gotten?
He burned through his papers until he reached his most promising one, the one he’d risked death to grab, headlined, BLUDCARVER REINCARNE OS CADAVE?
Translated: Bloodcarver reincarnating a corpse?
This was promising. He flipped through the pages, finding a photograph of a dog. Kochin narrowed his eyes in question, trying to skim the passage for some kind of result. His attention passed by words greedily, translating what he knew and ignoring what he didn’t. There was something about a dog, and he caught the word for “healthy.” But, when he reached the end, a bold red stamp greeted him: STUDEN TERMINAEN.
“Study terminated?” he scoffed aloud, incredulous. Something had happened in this paper, something miraculous or something deeply disappointing. But why terminate it?
Kochin flipped back to the beginning, prepared to translate every word for an answer. Despite the hour, he felt no tiredness as the text came together, word by word.
This study was from eighteen years ago: an observation of a Yarongese matriarch, a fifty-two-year-old heartsooth taken from her family—a husband, a daughter, and two newborn grandchildren—and placed into internment. The strongest heartsooth of her village, their magistra and doctor, she was compelled to perform acts of her miracle for fear of violence and death. They eased her into it, healing other prisoners. Healing herself. The experiments escalated. Killing animals. Inflicting pain. Practices that conflicted so viscerally with any school of heartsoothing that it must’ve anguished her to do it. But, under the eyes of the Mother, she defiled her own art. Kochin found himself filled with repugnance, and suddenly this war seemed not premature, but overdue. What could have been if Theumas had cast aside its neutrality twenty years ago? When Yarong beseeched those mainland empires of metal and mortar to help them, their pleas befalling stubborn ears?
He translated on, a question in the back of his mind: Why had the study terminated?
Kochin reached the page with attached dog photos. Now, he saw that word, reincarne, and worked feverishly, writing through a hand cramp. 1/12/998—Subject 148 growing restless, exhibits signs of aggression … Refuses solid food … Dog cadaver provided 24 hours postmortem, no obvious signs of trauma or decay …
His eyes snapped forward in rising fervor. Reincarne … reincarne … reincarne …
They dragged back as he continued translating. Here it was, everything he’d been waiting for, searching for, fighting for. Reincarne. They’d given her a dog, asked her to bring it back. And … She’d refused on the basis of impossibility. She became incoherent, uncooperative. The researchers found incentive: her grandson. Told her to find an answer soon, as she’d need it when they placed a bullet in his head. That made her work.
Through his zeal, Kochin felt the heat of the matriarch’s pain, even as transcribed through the pragmatic Daltan text. He could imagine her wails, the anger and the helplessness. And he understood, more than he’d ever understood anything, the desperation.
She worked tirelessly on the corpse. The text noted all her failed methods: an electric pulse to the brain fizzled into silence; an artificial beat in the heart stilled without stimulation; air in the lungs did nothing to renew the body. As Kochin had done, she’d emulated life atop the body, but it was not the same. It was imperfect. What neither the Daltan soldiers nor the matriarch understood was why, but Kochin had come to understand—life did not enter a corpse spontaneously, holding the same whim with which Death stole. Life was a miracle, a beautiful eclipse of magic and biology, one that couldn’t possibly be re-created in a lab or under Daltan intimidation.
They thought the matriarch, who had once brought someone back from the brink of death, was lying to bide time. They gave her a final warning. She asked them to bring her a dog, a live dog.
Kochin’s pencil lead snapped. He cursed, grabbing a pocketknife and sharpening it hastily before continuing, his mind forgetting all tiredness in favor of mania.
She held both dogs at once, one dead and the other alive. Before their eyes, she soothed them. Before their eyes, the frisky dog wilted and tired, lapsing into death. In its place, the cadaveric dog, now ten days passed, wagged its tail.
Kochin stopped, breathless. The labeled photos showed the dog, once a corpse and now reanimated. After reading the passage, he saw now how gaunt the dog looked. Gaunt but alive—eating, breathing, panting. His hands were stiff with fatigue, the pencil dimpling his writing callus.
But the study had been terminated. Why, when she had done it? She’d discovered how to bring back the dead. Now, how did she accomplish it?
Over time, the dog grew heartier as she soothed it back to health. Its coat shone; its legs carried strength. But it had been a trained dog before its death; now it forgot simple commands: sit, stay, bark. It wandered, lost and confused. It would lie down for hours at a time without moving. The matriarch contested that it was not her soothing, but the dog’s state of decay when they’d given it to her. Kochin had prepared for that—it’s why he’d kept Nhika in such stasis.
But how had she done it? Surely, the Daltanny had documented that. As the text drew nearer to its end, Kochin’s heart rose in his throat in anticipation of disappointment.
They asked her to replicate her work. She performed it with success on a variety of animals, pigs and hens and cats. They asked her to revive a soldier. They gave her a macaque as fodder. She refused.
Impossible, she said.
Kochin’s throat closed as he translated on, each word coming with new dread. The matriarch gave her explanation, this part seemingly translated from Yarongese—an equivalent life was needed, a perfect template. Because she did not create life; she merely transferred it. Soothing them both, she overlaid them, one a template and the other a ready patient. She acted simply as a bridge, funneling energy where it already desired to go. And not even a heartsooth could turn a monkey into a man; that energy needed to first sift through the cycle of life.
Impatient and skeptical, the researchers presented her the corpse of her grandson. She’d gone into a fit of grief, but no matter how many macaques they provided her, she could not bring him back. At last, they threatened to kill the last of her line: her granddaughter, just born.
Knowing they might make good on their threat, she reached into her own chest and squeezed her heart to a stop.
The final page of the study had been stamped in bold: STUDEN TERMINAEN. Terminated, because the subject herself had died.
Kochin set down the pencil. He hoped to find a second meaning to these words, something he didn’t understand with his elementary Daltan. As he scoured the text a second time, he came to the same, harrowing conclusion. An equivalent life was needed. Finding his throat newly dry, Kochin swallowed. Whatever this meant for Daltanny, it meant the same for him.
If he wanted to bring Nhika back, another needed to die. And it would be his heartsoothing that killed them.
Hands shaking, either from the revelation or the ache of writing, he set the papers down on a desk. Kochin almost hoped that when next he picked them up, the words would’ve rearranged themselves into a more acceptable solution. He’d done horrible things in his life—killing an innocent man for Santo, rupturing the muscles of that soldier’s leg—but killing another with heartsoothing to bring Nhika back was personal. Intimate.
Despicable.
But … was there any other option?
The reality was just settling in when a pained shout from the far end of the tent called his attention. Grabbing the handle of the medic cart, he wheeled himself over to a wounded soldier, who was experiencing night terrors in her feverish state. Kochin administered brief care, too occupied to do anything but the minimum: another dose of anti-micromials and a change of sweat-soaked towels. His thoughts were elsewhere, consumed by the enormity of his decision.
Just as he’d finished documenting the anti-micromials, the rustle of clothing outside called his attention. He lifted his lantern, finding the shadow of a girl outside—that translator again, for how tall and willowy her silhouette. A breath hitched in his throat and he slipped out of the tent in pursuit, wondering if she’d been lurking long enough to see him with Trin.
When he reached the side of the tent, he found nothing but an empty clearing. Kochin panned the lantern around, but he was truly alone. It wouldn’t have surprised him if he was losing his mind.
With a sigh, Kochin took himself back inside, wrapping up the last bit of patient care and wheeling his cart back toward his desk. There, he found his Daltan dictionary still open, as he’d left it. He squinted in the darkness—beside the pencil and the dictionary, the desk was otherwise empty.
His research papers were gone.
With flaring panic, Kochin searched the desk, the floor, wondering if he’d misplaced the papers in the dark. It occurred to him a moment later—that translator, the damned girl who had been far too curious about his bare hands. He didn’t have need of those papers anymore, having already gleaned their hateful truth; he only worried someone might realize why he had them.
Another medic came in the middle of the night to relieve him. Kochin accepted only because it would be suspicious otherwise, but as he left the field hospital, his heart was a small black pit, knowing that he had left a deadly secret exposed.