Kochin’s room, no matter how luxurious, smelled of death. He wondered if it was his imagination alone—scented paper lined the drawers, and pouches of aromatic tea were nestled in the furniture, yet all he could smell was the aftertaste of his failed heartsoothing attempts. The bodies of chicks and rodents themselves were disposed of before every meal, of course, but they still piled up in his mind, a growing list of evidence that he could not repeat his miracle. That had only come through the alignment of stars, an irrevocable exchange of heartsoothing that had transcended her death.
But he was coming to terms with the fact that he could stall no longer. That council of war Commissioner Nem spoke about had arrived; Kochin watched the guests come in on their ships—airplanes, dropping off and retreating. If he wanted to escape, find Nhika and steal her away from Commissioner Nem’s reach, it had to be today.
Following old habits, Kochin’s hand went to his chest for the reassurance of Nhika’s ring, but found nothing there—nothing but the welt of scar tissue beneath his shirt, just over where his heart would be.
A knock on the door snapped his thoughts apart. Kochin turned to find Commissioner Nem entering—and with an entourage of armed guards. He almost looked disappointed. “So, in the end, you have no results.”
“I can’t do it,” Kochin said.
But Commissioner Nem only shook his head. “I don’t believe that. I watched a corpse become a girl.”
“And that’s all I’ll ever have to show for it.”
“I know.” The commissioner’s expression darkened, and Kochin got the dreadful feeling he’d said the wrong thing. “Put on your gloves. It’s time to go, Kochin.”
Kochin’s muscles stiffened. “Where?”
“The stage,” Commissioner Nem replied. “The people are waiting to see my weapon.”
“You’ll have to disappoint them,” Kochin said.
“No,” Commissioner Nem replied, and there was something dangerous in the word. “I don’t think I do.”
He didn’t explain the cryptic words further, only ushered Kochin out of his room with a guard on either side. Even though it was a brusque command, Kochin followed—because this was the first time he’d been let outside of his cell since he’d gotten here, and there was now a way off this ship since so many guests had arrived. If he hadn’t known the Mother hated him, Kochin might’ve thought She was giving him an opportunity.
But through their entire walk, the guards on either side of him didn’t let up their watch, and their gloved hands rested on the knives at their belts. No good opportunity for escape came before Commissioner Nem walked him through a door: the back of a stage, its ceiling vast and lined with show lights. Just beyond the drawn red curtain, he heard the drum of conversation.
Commissioner Nem halted their entourage just before the curtain and turned to Kochin. “On the other side of that curtain sits anyone and everyone who has any say in this war. They don’t believe it can be won. I need you to show them otherwise.”
Kochin lifted his chin in indignation. “I can’t say I know what you mean, Commissioner.”
By way of explanation, Commissioner Nem palmed a holstered knife off one of his guards. “Show them what you are. Show them we have a miracle on our side.”
He offered the knife forward. Kochin didn’t take it—because he was afraid what he might do with it. Injure a commissioner or one of the guards, and he’d escape, but it would be as a fugitive of the highest degree. He would never be able to return to Nhika or his family.
“You should know better than to give me a knife,” Kochin warned—and wondered how true the threat was.
Undeterred, Commissioner Nem pressed the knife into Kochin’s palm. If Kochin had intended any malice, the thought was fleeting—because the curtains flew open as if cued, and suddenly he was facing an audience of aristocrats, their expectant glares printed into his skin: limelight on, a knife passed between Kochin and the commissioner, a theater of witnesses.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Commissioner Nem said, stepping forward. His back was exposed. Kochin knew which ribs to stab through to make it survivable. “I’ve promised a weapon. This is something more: an extinct species, last of his kind. A bloodcarver.”
The audience let out a collective gasp. Kochin’s decision wrapped around his neck like a noose, and the knife felt suddenly heavy in his fingers—because he could. He could attack the commissioner, fight off these guards, try his hand at escape. Commissioner Nem had introduced him as a bloodcarver; before this audience of dozens, he could truly become one.
As though noticing Kochin’s hesitation, Commissioner Nem stepped back, turned—such that Kochin’s gaze followed the angle of his body toward the right wing of the stage.
His gaze landed on Nhika, the delusion. A warning, maybe a sign. A part of him died to see her on this stage because if he had brought her back and still saw these wisps of her, perhaps her memory would never stop haunting him. Or perhaps this was his consolation prize: Bring her back, but never see her again except as a phantom.
Their eyes locked. He beseeched a figment of his own imagination for an answer. Yet, she gave him one, an imperceptible shake of her head and a word mouthed: No.
“Need I give you more incentive?” Commissioner Nem asked, lifting his hand in a subtle gesture. One of Commissioner Nem’s guards stepped out from behind the image of Nhika—
And wrenched her to the ground. Kochin drew in a sharp breath, feeling as though Commissioner Nem had somehow stepped into his mind, invaded his delusion. It felt impossible. It felt revolting. It felt …
Real.
Kochin met Nhika’s eyes again, a double take. She was giving him this look, somewhere between resolve and ferocity. Don’t be stupid, those eyes said. You’re not a bloodcarver.
But only when he saw the chain around her neck, his ID tags and her ring, did it click.
She was real. She was real, real, real—and she was being used as blackmail. He whipped his attention back toward the audience, a breath choking his throat, the knife in his palm now a shackle around his wrist.
Suddenly, he wasn’t on a stage, facing an auditorium of aristocrats. He was in a cage at the Butchers’ Row. All those faces before him were buyers, waiting on a show. The man standing beside him was not a commissioner, but the head Butcher. Kochin had walked so many times through their inventory, waiting for a bloodcarver to show; perhaps it was fitting he ended up on the other side of the bars.
Slowly, Kochin unsheathed the knife. Its blade sang in the spotlights. With torturous effort, he raised his arm, pulled back his sleeve, and brought the blade to his inner wrist. He pressed the edge against skin—any harder and it would draw blood.
One last time, he looked to Nhika—let her judge him, discourage him, give him some way out as she always did.
But she had disappeared. In her place, a crumpled guard. Commissioner Nem had just noticed, too, and he straightened with panic.
Before he could react, all the lights turned off.
Darkness came swiftly and with a panicked rabble from the audience. Kochin brandished the knife now as a weapon, waiting for guards to descend when something firm wrapped his wrist. He might’ve raised the knife against it—until he felt a distinct pull, influence grazing skin.
Nhika.
Time slowed in the dark. His fingers tightened over warm flesh, felt her familiar touch against his palms. Something inside yearned to soothe her—because his heartsoothing would know if it was real. His mind remembered her as an unattainable dream; his heartsoothing remembered her as she was, the way she smiled when she kissed and how her eyes pinched when she laughed. It had known her in both life and death, so it would know her in this dark; it belonged to her, after all.
She yanked him off the stage and he tumbled out of his stupor. They ran, ducking past Commissioner Nem’s rancorous commands: “She’s a bloodcarver! Find them! Get the lights on!”
When the lights came back on, Kochin and Nhika had already exited the theater through an offstage door. He wanted to slow down, revel in this small miracle: her hand in his, real enough to squeeze. His mind had gone numb, so fixated on the way the light haloed her flyaways, the way a pant passed through her half-parted lips—nothing like a corpse at all.
“Nhika, how are you—”
“Long story. I’ll tell you later,” she interjected in that practical, stern tone he’d come to expect.
Nhika turned them down a hall. Kochin yanked her back when he noticed the shadow of the commissioner’s guards, and pulled her back into the fold of a utility closet. There, surrounded by guest toiletries and spare towels, they waited in silence for the guards to clear.
At last, Nhika let out a breath—and Kochin did the same, grateful for this moment of quiet to truly appreciate her: warm and sharp and so quintessentially Nhika, like she’d never even died. It felt like he was beholding her for the first time again; at the wake, a familiar girl across the room.
“Say something. A thank-you would be appreciated,” she said, and he remembered his words.
“You’re real,” was all he could manage.
“What else would I be?” She fixed him with a teasing look. “Tell me—why is it I’m always saving you, Ven—”
Kochin leaned down and kissed his name off her lips. A breath stifled in her throat, a noise that stirred something inside him, and he leaned deeper into the kiss. How many times had he soothed blood back into her lips and imagined this moment? But his imagination had always been so torturous because their last kiss had been one of parting.
Well, now here she was, and Kochin pulled her in as if he might lose her again, kissing her the way he couldn’t on the operating table: his hands on her cheeks, her back against the wall, her hands clutching his shirt. His fingers fumbled into her hair; his influence passed between their lips. He’d soothed her body so many times before, but that had been so clinical. This feeling now—it was music plucked from each of his nerve fibers by her practiced fingers. It was a voracious hunger in his chest, like his heart had grown an appetite. It must’ve been her heartsoothing—it was the only way he could explain the elation.
At last he drew back, hardly satiated, exhaling her scent on his breath. Her chest heaved with a breathless inhale and his eyes skimmed along her clavicle, eating in the miracle that was Suonyasan Nhika—dead and back again, there to save him both times. He thought—for a moment like this, the simple privilege of seeing her alive, he’d commit every taboo, go to war, break his spine underneath Daltan concrete. He’d do it again a million times over.
He gave her a satisfied smile, skimming a tongue across his teeth—he could still taste her. “You were saying something?”
“Was I?” Nhika asked, giving him a coy look. It made him want to kiss her again. He leaned in, but she said, “I think they’ve passed.”
It took him a moment to realize she was talking about Commissioner Nem’s guards outside. Kochin remembered where he was: on a floating prison, rather than with Nhika in the privacy of a houseboat. “Clever thinking back there, with the lights.”
“The lights weren’t my doing,” she admitted. “It must’ve been Lanalay.”
“Lanalay?” He recognized the name—the translator from overseas who’d slapped him. That must’ve been why she was here, although she’d come at the worst possible time.
“Yes—she mentioned something about knowing you. And then I got caught.”
“You did have a plan, right?”
“Please. Do you think I came up here without a plan?”
Kochin gave her an unsure look. “I honestly don’t know. Did you?”
“I guess that depends on whether you can fly a plane.”
“Nhika, when in my nineteen years do you think I had time to learn to fly a plane?”
“Well, can you drive an autocarriage?”
“Yes.”
“So we’ll be fine.”
“Mother, I’m going to die today, aren’t I?”
Nhika only grinned. “Well, it’s that or face Nem again.”
“Plane it is. Lead the way.”
Furtively, Nhika tipped open the door. “It’s clear. Follow me.”
Kochin complied. All these hallways looked identical, but Nhika seemed to know where she was going. For the first time, Kochin could appreciate the luxury of the vessel. This was the kind of life that had allured him to Central when he was sixteen, having his pick of the top schools in the city: glass chandeliers and scented wallpaper. Now? He’d give anything just to get Nhika home safe with him.
They reached a heavy door, one that looked meant for crew rather than passengers. Kochin helped Nhika unlatch it and they opened it to find a guard just outside. In an instant, Kochin’s military training returned, and he stepped in front of Nhika, rounding out a solid right hook. It collapsed the man on impact.
Nhika flared her eyes at him, looking impressed, as he stooped to check for a pulse. “Have you always been able to do that?” she asked.
He gave her a humored look. “I went to war for you. Just so happens I learned some things along the way.”
When he’d ensured the guard was okay, he and Nhika continued along the outside of the airship, drawing closer to the landing platform. As they neared, they found two more guards stationed around a small transport craft. They hung back, hiding in the shadow of the hull, and gave each other a sidelong glance.
“So, how are we going to do this?” Nhika asked.
Kochin sized up the enemy. “They’re not carrying any rifles.”
“Must be the hydrogen—the balloon’s full of it,” Nhika said. “I’ve heard it’s flammable.”
“Very,” Kochin said. “But the guards closest to the commissioner were armed.”
“Those aren’t the worst odds.”
They shared a look and, with it, a thought: A gun was the only thing on this ship that might kill two heartsooths. Escape was an easier prospect than Kochin had imagined.
“We don’t have to hurt them. Just run past, get in the ship, lock the doors. They can’t shoot their way in,” Kochin told her.
“And you’ll fly the plane?”
“Sure.”
“That university education must be good for something.”
“I suppose we’re about to find out.” He gave her a resolute look. “Ready?”
“To get off this flying eyesore? Absolutely.”
Together, they raced down the stairs and toward the airship. The guards glanced up at their approach, but Kochin shouldered one out of his way with all the momentum of his sprint while Nhika ducked under the grab of the other. They both reached the aircraft at the same time, Kochin jumping into the pilot seat and Nhika at his side. They locked their doors, Nhika having the foresight to lean over her seat and lock the back doors as well, just as the guards came banging on the windows.
Meanwhile, Kochin observed the cockpit controls. He’d driven an autocarriage numerous times, but this had a dozen more dials, levers, switches. Still, he found a general intuition to all the controls. The ignition switch came easiest, painted orange and labeled, and Kochin flicked it on.
The aircraft hummed to life. Above, a fire started in the balloon and the carriage rumbled, finding slight lift. Still grounded, he tried all the controls in quick rotation—the pedals swiveled the rudder and the yoke opened and closed panels on the wings.
“Kochin,” Nhika rushed in a deliberate tone. The guards continued their barrage.
“Working on it,” he said, trying to remember which switches and buttons had initiated takeoff.
“Kochin,” Nhika said more urgently when a crack formed on her window.
“Trying,” he returned, but Nhika didn’t give him any more time. She grabbed the lever at the center of the cockpit and yanked it downward.
The aircraft jerked forward. It rattled down the runway as Kochin pulled back at the yoke. There it was—they were achieving lift, the aircraft bouncing higher and higher each time as the balloon grew hotter. Enough lift to clear the railing and last out in the ocean? Kochin couldn’t say; he only hoped.
He pulled back as far as he could. The nose of the carriage lifted upward. Nhika reached over and squeezed his arm in sheer terror.
And then they were flying. Kochin gave Nhika a breathless, hopeful look as their aircraft stayed airborne.
In the next moment, Nhika’s window shattered, glass cutting her cheeks and the culpable bullet lodging itself deep in the dashboard. He yelled her name just as his controls went slack and the plane careered back down onto the platform.
Just before they hit the ground, Kochin caught a glimpse of Commissioner Nem standing on the promenade above, aiming over the barrel of his rifle.