NOW
Nhika’s train was coming up on Central.
The Monkey Borough came first, the westernmost reach of the metropolis. This city never belonged to her, yet she couldn’t help but feel relief at its familiarity all the same.
That was, until she noticed the emptiness.
The Monkey Borough was a hub of commerce, and she should’ve seen autocarriages parked along the streets—commuters with their bikes and umbrellas and scarves. But, when their train tracks passed through the heart of the borough, she found empty restaurants with their outdoor seating closed off—even though it was lunchtime. Where there should’ve been crowds, there were empty streets. Where parks should’ve been full, their fountains ran dry.
And when her train finally rolled up to the Grand Terminus, in the heart of the Sheep Borough, there was only a lone smoker to greet her on the platform.
Nhika stepped off the train. Though she preferred the trolleys over the train, she’d been in the Grand Terminus many times before, mostly to solicit things—okay, always to solicit things—but this wasn’t the train station she recognized. Automatons that sold papers of collected trash were out of operation or absent, the few she saw ill maintained. Many of them were missing core components, their bronze shells or iron innards, almost like they’d been harvested. The station was also a happening tourist destination, but when she walked through its main concourse, where the floor had been tiled with a map of the city, the only passersby came from trying to catch their train. There was no line at the ticket booths and those vendors who sold street foods, sandwiches, or paper-wrapped bouquets had boarded up their stalls.
This city was unrecognizable, like she’d stepped into an alternate version of Theumas. It set her on edge, gave her a dozen new questions, but Nhika pressed on.
At least the trolleys still worked. She grabbed one toward the Theumas Medical Center. It was fitting: the last place she remembered being in Central, and now the first place she’d return to.
As they drove, familiar streets returned to her in unfamiliar ways. When they passed the Sheep Borough’s famous market hall, she found the gates closed and the windows boarded. People commuted through with purpose, not simply to loiter and haggle down market prices. All that construction that Theumas was famous for—a city that never stopped growing taller, and bigger, and faster—had halted, too. Color itself seemed to have drained from the streets, gone without outdoor vegetable displays or shining automatons or the flashy parasols of pedestrians.
Nhika realized she did recognize this atmosphere: mourning. It was the same gloom that hung over the Congmi manor during Mr. Congmi’s funeral, the emptiness of that house and the silence of its inhabitants.
She only wondered what could make an entire city mourn.
The trolley stopped in front of the Theumas Medical Center and her speculations dashed as she hopped off.
How strange it was, revisiting a building that had tried to kill her. The architects had likely designed it to look academic and regal, judging by the many carved details in the facade and the twin statues over the entrance, one woman holding an open book and the other holding a lion-headed staff. To Nhika, it looked like a very large and expensive mausoleum. So many had died within these walls. She’d almost been one of them. With a breath to steady herself, she pushed her way inside.
This was one place in Theumas that felt the same as before. Just as busy, with nurses carting patients around in wheelchairs and families loitering anxiously for news. A constant voice coming from the electronic loudspeakers called for physicians or lost patients to return to their wards—if anything, the medical center seemed busier than she’d ever seen it before.
Mimi said Trin had been in surgery, so Nhika would start with that—the post-surgical ward. Along the way, she passed by Santo’s old office—and despite everything that place had done to her, she had the urge to visit, as if she could poke her head in and find Kochin behind the desk, Trin in the waiting room chair. Antagonistic physician’s aide, stoic billionaire’s minder—and not just two bloodstains in an office hallway.
Almost like an automaton with a set command roll, she lumbered through these hallways, preprogrammed feet taking her forward. She followed signs toward post-surgery. The walls grew familiar, and it became clear where those signs led—Santo’s old research ward. Within awaited the casketlike contraption that had trapped her, the operating room that had nearly killed her and Kochin. Each step closer made her skin burn hotter and redder, like every nerve was tearing itself apart trying to keep away.
By the time she reached those telltale double doors, her body was split in half. Nhika had always listened to her body, and right now it wanted to be anywhere but here. But her mind kept her feet planted solid—told her jittery legs that this ward hadn’t killed her before and it wouldn’t kill her now. The signage above the door no longer called it the Santo Research Initiative. Rather, it had been repurposed.
She was just reaching to push open the door when someone else stepped out. At first, she hadn’t recognized him when he dressed so plainly, and when his hair wasn’t gelled back, but they both stopped and stared at each other.
“Nhika?” Andao asked.
“What are you doing here?” they said in unison.
He balked, long enough for her to add, “Mimi told me Trin was in the hospital. You know what I am, right? You know I would heal him if you asked.”
“I know. We know. But the magic comes at a cost, doesn’t it? And you can’t bring someone back from near-death without sacrifice, can you?”
“Near-death?” Nhika’s throat closed. “Is Trin near death?”
Andao shook his head. “He’s fine. The surgeons did their job. We should head home.”
“But I just got here.”
“Please, I don’t have the energy to argue this right now.”
“But, Andao—”
A blare came from outside the window before he could respond. She thought it was an autocarriage horn at first, but it didn’t cease—only crescendoed. It continued wailing, growing louder and rolling in pitch. It took her a moment to recognize it as an alarm, signaling some emergency she didn’t recognize; Theumas was hit by the occasional tsunami or earthquake, but she was far too inland to hear tsunami sirens, and earthquakes announced themselves.
Andao reacted before she did. He grabbed the arm of a passing nurse, pulled her close. Nhika was just barely able to make out the words he whispered into her ear: “The patient in bay six—don’t let any harm come to him. Understand me?”
Then he slipped a wad of chem into the nurse’s palm and grabbed Nhika by the elbow. Despite her protests, he guided her down the hall, and it clicked what Andao had done. He’d bribed a nurse.
Around them, doctors mobilized and nurses disappeared into their wards. Voices came alive over the loudspeakers, instructing workers to get to their stations and visitors to seek shelter.
“Wait a min—”
“Nhika, come with me,” Andao said, and all her questions and stubbornness dissolved under his stern voice. She staggered forward, his arm looped in hers.
“Where?” she asked. He pulled her along until they reached a pulsing line of people, all headed toward the lowest levels of the hospital.
“Safety,” Andao responded tersely. “Hospital basement.”
Nhika had never seen him so tense, not even underneath Nem’s heat. “Wh-what about Trin?”
A muscle flickered in Andao’s cheek, and his eyes darkened. “He’ll be fine,” he said, like he was convincing himself.
Something had changed about him. No, everything had changed about him—and this city, and her body, and the Congmi household. Nhika almost didn’t recognize Andao for how steely his eyes appeared, and for how he’d … he’d bribed the nurse. Andao, straight and narrow, using his money as power when Nhika had always thought he’d been the exception rather than the rule.
Andao pulled her deeper into the bowels of the hospital. They descended stairs and passed through double doors, until Nhika was sure this was a part of the medical center she wasn’t meant to see—not the mortuary cabinets, nor the exposed plumbing system, nor that graveyard of broken gurneys. Red lights painted their way to the sound of the swooping alarm. No matter how far they went underground, she couldn’t block out the noise, and Nhika felt the sudden need to curl into a ball on the floor. The only thing keeping her moving while the crowds eddied around her was Andao’s firm grip on her arm.
“What are the sirens for, Andao?” she asked, giving resistance— just to slow down a moment, understand what was going on around them. Andao continued at an uncaring pace.
“It’s just a drill,” he said. “A false alarm.”
“But what is it for?” she pressed. He didn’t answer, both of them jostled right and left by the rushing crowd. At some point, his hand slipped from her biceps to her wrist, and his grip turned painful. “Andao, please—Andao, you’re hurting me.”
Only then did he stop and look at her. Remorse broke through his expression, that cold spell lifting and clarity returning to his eyes. Still hounded by the alarms, the people around them, they stared at each other until he said, “It’s a drill for the air raids.”
“Air raids?” She’d heard of those, of course—they happened in Simbal, their northern neighbor. But never in Theumas, because to get raided, one needed … “Andao, are we going to war?”
The corner of his lip turned down. His eyes explored her with pity. “Nhika, we…” A nervous swallow, but he held her gaze. “We’re already at war.”
War.
Nhika had never experienced war before. Some might argue she was a child of it, but that didn’t mean she’d lived it. Not the way her grandmother had, bidding goodbye to her village, who’d collected enough money to fund her trip to Theumas, knowing she would never see any of them again. Not the way her parents had, growing up in Theumas during a time where every Yarongese was a liver eater.
Theumas, for as long as she’d lived, had never experienced war, either. It terrified her, that the leaders she’d trust to engineer a perfectly efficient city might not know how to handle the irrationality of the human condition.
They were sitting in long lines in the subterranean tunnels beneath the hospital now. These tunnels were once meant to cart away the newly dead out of the public view, and now they served to protect the hardly living from Daltan air raids. There were too many people down here; her lungs could taste the change in the air, waning oxygen. She was swimming with water up to her nose, waiting for someone to fish her out.
Something ruffled beside her. With a sigh, Andao doffed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a precaution—no fighter has reached the city before. Usually, our antiaircraft takes care of them over the Gaikhen Mountains.”
She hugged her legs to her chest and buried her chin in her knees. “Why didn’t you tell me when I awoke?”
Andao swallowed. “We … we were going to. We wanted to ease you into it. I suppose that’s not much of an excuse, is it?”
“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have run from the villa. Mimi must be fuming.”
Andao laughed weakly. “She’ll recover.” He leaned back, a sigh passing through his lips. “In truth, this war crept up on us almost as quickly as it did you. Our father died, we discovered our closest family friend was responsible, and you … you…” He caught her eye, faltered, swallowed his words. “It felt like we were bleeding away the ones we loved. Then war broke out, and Trin was conscripted. And I don’t think I knew true fear before then. It’s why I…”
The rest of his sentence was lost to a long exhale. Instinctually, she touched her sternum before remembering she’d given away her bone ring. His words were familiar ones, but she’d already bled away everyone she’d loved a long time ago.
“It’s why you did what you did with the nurse,” she said, more a statement than a question.
He looked sheepish. “To tell the truth, Nhika, I’ve done a great many things my father wouldn’t be proud of. It’s easy to justify it with war, for the safety of the people, the city—but no, it’s selfish. I’m selfish. Told myself I was righteous for turning down Commissioner Nem’s chem, but as soon as the man I loved was drafted, I backtracked on all my staunch values and used the entirety of my father’s empire to protect him. It’s as the commissioner said—I’m a hypocrite.”
“If I had anyone left to love, I’d do the same.”
He gave her a wan look. “I know you would. It’s why we didn’t want to tell you about the war, about Trin. You’d just come here, try to heal him. Nhika, I swear—if I’d known what it cost for you to heal, I never would’ve … I shouldn’t have let you…” He shook his head, like the words had dried up on his tongue.
Nhika shrugged. “They’re just calories. That’s all. But I know my limits.”
His gaze bored into her again—somewhat sad, somewhat conflicted. His lips parted like he wanted to tell her something, but nothing came.
“What is it?” she asked.
His gaze returned to the floor. “It’s not just calories, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“That night, in this very building, you … You don’t remember what you did?”
“I bested Santo and I healed Kochin,” she said.
He shook his head adamantly. “No, it was more than that.”
“What, Andao?” This was the truth, she realized—the answer behind all the little lies that clung like dust mites in the unreachable parts of the Congmi villa. “Tell me.”
“The truth will make you question everything. Like it’s made us question everything,” he said. “If I could unlearn it, I would. So, I’m giving you the chance to just … accept that you’re safe, and okay.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry.” His brows knit like this pained him. “Do you still want to hear it?”
It was her final chance to back out and accept this life the Congmis had crafted for her—a life she’d always wanted. A life like Trin’s, adopted by Theumas’s wealthiest family, feeling no consequences of the war her city-state had entered. But that meant her mask would never come off, and Kochin had warned her so often about masks.
“I want to know,” Nhika decided. She had a terrible feeling she knew what it was about—that little inconsistency that had been eating at her since she’d awoken. The laws of heartsoothing, the balance of calories that didn’t quite add up. They couldn’t both walk off that table. Something had happened after she’d gone under.
Andao cast a glance around, as though wary someone might be listening in. When he found no one, he said, “I wasn’t at the medical center that night when it happened. But I was there when they returned. And it was with … with your corpse.”
“But I’m not dead,” Nhika said. “I didn’t die.”
Andao stared at her, eyes growing remorseful. It struck her, as surely as Santo’s bullet—those eyes had seen her corpse. They might’ve even seen her funeral. There it was, the answer to the inconsistency: She and Kochin both couldn’t walk off that table, and they hadn’t. She’d died. She’d died, just as she planned, having passed her bone ring on to the next heartsooth.
Nhika sank against the cold wall of the tunnel. Each breath came out jagged—like she might forget how to breathe if her lungs realized they ran on stolen air, or her heart might give out if it remembered the last time it’d stopped. Her shoulder burned where Santo had shot her.
So, this was the truth, that dreadful truth the Congmis tried to save her from. It uprooted her thoughts like buildings, gouged out everything she knew. The war seemed trifling now—because what was death anymore? Nothing but a blink. If there was an afterlife, it had forsaken her, and she’d awoken months later without a hint of rot, and she was still Nhika, and … and …
And the only way she could have returned was through heartsoothing. But heartsoothing had a single rule, and it was the equivalence of calories. So, what did it mean that she’d been brought back from complete death? Who … who had given her life?
That was an answer Nhika didn’t want to know.
“I understand it’s a lot,” Andao said, placing a fortifying hand on her shoulder. “I wish … I wish there were a more palatable explanation for all this.”
So did she. The thought of herself as a corpse made her sick. Since her heartsoothing had manifested, there had never been a moment where her body hadn’t completely belonged to her. In death, it had belonged to everyone but her.
“I still have so many questions,” Nhika managed.
“Like how you’re back?”
She nodded.
“Quite honestly, we don’t know. After the night at the medical center, we mourned you. It was the first debt our family could never repay. I … I didn’t know someone like you could just die,” Andao said. “But the world moved on. Commissioner Nem won his election and delivered every promise he made during his campaign. War began. Trin was drafted, deployed to Yarong. And, well … Next thing we know, we get a call telling us he’s back on this side of the water with an injured leg and a sleeping Yarongese girl. That was only days ago.”
“Kochin. He must’ve … It must’ve been him.”
“Maybe so. We handed you off to him after the ceremonial burial. He said there were Yarongese customs you’d want. But none of us know for sure. The only one who knows is…”
“Trin,” Nhika finished. And he was in the hospital, still recovering from surgery. “What do we do now, Andao?”
“What I have been doing,” Andao said, his tone forlorn. “We wait. As painful as it is, we wait.”