Asta didn’t care to have any further visits with Dean Janipan. She spent her mornings in the grand library at the temple complex, poring over picture books with simple words in an effort to develop her reading and writing skills, such as they were.
She also attended her speech therapy sessions, and enjoyed walking to the public pier of red Shakti Lake. She gave little thought to exploring the campus of Patal University or the terraced villages on that side of the plateau. She preferred to return to Shakti Lake City, even if it required a vigorous hike up the southeastern stairpath each day.
Maore Natarajan insisted that Asta stay in her home as often as she liked. Little Mathin called her Auntie Asta but treated her as his number one playmate, and threw a fit whenever it was time for her to go.
Asta also spent some evenings in the nursery, visiting with Tesame.
She felt shy when volunteering at Medical Arts until she discovered how easy it was to amuse the young patients. She drew simple cartoon stories, often by their suggestions, or helped the boys draw pictures of their own.
When she needed a respite from Medical Arts, she often took her sketchbook into the temple park to work on her nature studies. Everyone kept telling her she would need that skill the most.
One day while she was sitting in the park, Najat Gampoban strolled up the path and sat down on the bench beside her.
Asta’s heart skipped when she saw him walk toward her, and she had to take a sly, slow breath to calm herself. Najat exuded the same casual, tediously polite manner that he had when they parted the last time. She decided to use the same approach.
He tipped his head to her and bowed from his shoulders before taking the seat. Asta tipped her own head and offered him a dignified, ceremonial mudra. Her pencil caught in the pale webbing between her fingers.
She snatched the pencil to her lap as Najat said in his great rumbling voice, “Hello.”
She tipped her head again. “Hello.”
Najat’s face tightened, for just a sliver of a second, and his lips mashed together, as if some expression strained underneath but he didn’t want to reveal it. Asta realized that she had just spoken aloud to him for the first time.
He quickly relaxed his face to hide his reaction, and chose an obvious question. “Have you heard from Jayan?”
She almost shook her head, but then she corrected herself. Padir Dagarapan had sent a flier to the Natarajans, and Jayan had sent his fliers of few words to Patal University, and so she had learned of their travel updates.
“They made—made—made it to the canal leading to—to—to Orasarana. Probably further by now.”
“How are you?” Najat asked.
“Busy!” Asta smiled.
“Oh—” Najat braced his hands on his knees, as if to get up.
“Ai! Not busy now,” Asta said. She indicated her sketchbook and the park around them. “Taking a—taking a—a—a break.”
“Ah.” Najat’s eyes crinkled and he relaxed again. “I heard that you’ve made an impression over at Medical Arts.”
She blushed and fiddled with her pencil.
“Jayan will be pleased.”
Asta’s fingers stopped fiddling. She looked back up at Najat. “What are you doing today?”
“The Mahasagi is with a patient. His First and Second Hands are there, too.” Najat stretched out his long legs. “Sometimes I go with them, to observe him and learn. If I don’t go with them, I’m supposed to stay up there,” he pointed toward the Mahasagi’s annex jutting out from the temple, “and meditate. But sometimes I go for a walk or a swim instead.”
She raised her eyebrows at him and his cheeks dented in response. “I can meditate just as easily when walking or swimming as I can with my ass sitting on the floor,” he said.
Asta burst out laughing.
Najat paused. He hadn’t meant to make her laugh. He continued as if the sweet sound of it didn’t affect him. “I felt…restless today. Like I needed to be outside.”
Asta watched him as he looked off toward the library, then back to the other side of the park. He glanced at her with a taut expression.
Asta smiled, trying to stay relaxed. She lifted her sketchbook and tilted it toward him.
“May I see?” he asked, and slid to her side of the bench.
She opened the sketchbook to a different page than he expected. She pointed to the colorful dashed lines and vigorous looping squiggles on the page.
“Mathin Natarajan,” she said.
“Ah, Cayman’s boy.” Najat used his thumb to press back the crinkled edges of the paper, where Mathin’s enthusiasm had left as many wrinkles as crayon marks.
Asta nodded. “And some—some—some boys from Medical Arts. The sick—the sick ones.” She turned the pages and showed him more scribbles, and a few decent attempts at lizards and birds by the older boys. After a bit of prodding from Najat, she even showed him her own recent sketches…anything to prolong this moment, with his shoulder almost brushing her cheek and his breath warming her brow.
Asta reached out an unspoken tendril of Feeling, much more cautious than the emotional overflow of their first meeting. She discovered a wall—a thin, crystalline barrier that seemed to hover an inch off Najat’s skin, transparent to her eyes but not her inner senses. Najat cleared his throat and turned another page of the sketchbook. Asta tapped gently against the ice-hard glaze. She could sense his kana beneath it, dense and warm and sparkling, but she could not Touch through.
A sudden pressure seized Asta by the ribs. It was not from Najat. They both heard a distant voice cry out.
Asta’s breath caught as she rose from the bench, clutching the front of her tunic where the pain seared into her lungs. The sketchbook slid from her knees and bounced across the path.
Najat stood up beside her, alarmed.
She still couldn’t breathe, the pain cut her so deeply. She felt Najat’s long fingers wrap her shoulders. “Look at me,” he said. “Look!”
The shock doubled her over, making it impossible to look up. Tears dropped directly out of her eyes to the mosaic path below.
“Look at my feet,” he said. “Just look at my feet.”
She looked at his feet, and felt clarifying energy spider out from his fingers, permeating the muscles across her shoulders and back. Najat’s long, webbed toes pressed into the small gray and white tiles of the path. She realized for the first time that his feet were bare. He wore the kind of ankle cuffs that Jayan hated, except these were silver instead of gold.
She lifted her hands to the cool scales at his wrists. The scorching pain in her chest dulled to a lazy throb as they both heard a dim voice cry out again from behind the library, “Call for doctors! Boys School! Emergency!”
Asta finally looked up at Najat. He turned back from gazing in the direction of the voice and searched Asta’s eyes, squeezing her soft shoulders. “You Felt it before I did,” he said.
Someone else yelled from a corner of the park near the library, “Call for doctors!”
They needed more voices to relay the message. Najat swung Asta to the side without letting her go and shouted toward the Medical Arts building, “CALL FOR DOCTORS! TO THE BOYS SCHOOL!”
Asta’s bones rattled from the force of his booming voice. Several heads appeared on the balconies of the temple. “Call for doctors!” they yelled. More voices picked up the cry on the other side of the park, “Call for doctors!”
Asta and Najat saw a young boy emerge from behind the library, running beside the lane and still yelling for help. Najat’s hands felt solid around Asta’s shoulders. The pain in her chest disappeared as she realized that it wasn’t her own.
“Najat!” she said. He snapped to face her so immediately, and his eyes fell upon her so intensely, she thought it must be improper to address him by name. She swallowed and said, “Kumasagi…Your Eminence…” Her eyes begged him to tell her what was happening.
He spread one hand over the side of her face to smooth away matted strands of hair and clinging tears. Barely visible through the trees behind him, several doctors and aides dashed through the park toward the library. The young boy still hopped on alternating feet at the corner, acting as a beacon. “Doctors! To the Boys School!”
Najat said to Asta, “They are too late.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head. “Mahasagi doesn’t know—he is in deep with the other patient.”
Then Najat bent to pick up Asta’s splayed sketchbook, found the pencil, and thrust them both into her hands. “Come with me.” He took her arm and pulled her toward the Mahasagi’s annex. When they got there, Asta realized that he didn’t mean to go inside—he had simply chosen the shortest route to the water lane.
He turned to her and held her shoulders square. “It’s coming from the Boys School. You Felt it. Now you must clear your mind. I need you to clear your mind and clear your heart.”
Asta nodded and took a deep breath. Najat wriggled out of his silk vest and untied the deep blue sash at his waist and removed his loose pants and handed it all to Asta. Then he unclipped the silver cuffs from his ankles, threw them on top of the pile in her arms, and said, standing tall and lean in only his loincloth, “Meet me there.”
He dove into the water. Asta stared after him, suddenly reminded how often she had looked for him in the lane when the divers swam beneath the windows of the nursery. She had looked for him before she even knew him.
She watched until he disappeared with a final, sun-sparkled splash behind the landscaped garden of the library. Then she took a moment to breathe again and folded his clothes into a neat stack. She tucked the stack above her sketchbook and the ankle cuffs into a pocket of her tunic. She tried very hard to clear her mind as he had asked.
She knew where to find the Boys School. She had accompanied Jayan on his favorite walking route from the university once or twice, and he always pointed things out along the way. That route took them by the swim training venues and the Boys School bath house, and she had been impressed by the grand structure of the school itself rising against the sky behind the smaller buildings.
This time she followed Najat’s route, because the doctors and the beacon boy had also disappeared in that direction. The library stood near Amala Vengar’s wing of the nursery, with the nursery wall and water lane to separate them. Asta hurried through that juncture, then saw the Boys School loom before her, almost as tall as the temple. The lane passed directly through the center of the building, cutting through a grand archway in the ground level.
Asta stepped along the lane to the archway and entered a short tunnel, where a lone man stood comforting two young boys. He stopped Asta and whispered, “We cannot allow visitors at this time. Please come back later.”
Asta dipped Najat’s clothing toward the man. “For the Kumasagi,” she said. “I must be on hand.”
Both boys stared up at her with shiny eyes and tear-streaked cheeks. The man said, “Apologies, Saati. You will see him on the left. Please go softly.”
“Of course!” Asta shot him a look, appearing more offended than she felt. Inwardly, she thanked herself for not stuttering.
The man gave a sheepish nod and gestured through the arch.
A din of young voices met her ear as she approached the other side of the tunnel. An immense grass and dirt courtyard opened before her, split perfectly down the middle by the water lane. Chattering boys of every age, shape, and size milled across the right side of the courtyard as their elders herded them with scooping hands and low, insistent commands. “Quietly! Keep moving!”
Asta glanced up to the towering inner walls of the complex and saw several adults herding more boys along the open balconies and down the steps. They all moved in the same direction, toward the southern archways far to Asta’s right. She knew those paths must lead to the swim training venues. Asta realized that this main part of the complex—most likely the dormitory and classrooms—was being evacuated.
Within minutes the courtyard stood empty and silent, save for a limping trickle of water from an old, crack-fissured fountain to the right of the lane. Asta walked over a footbridge to the left side of the lane and saw a group of adults huddled at the far end of the yard, almost tiny at that distance.
One of the adults—a doctor—noticed Asta picking her way through the demarcated exercise and play areas, and walked out to meet her. Barren climbing gyms and exposed foot game mosaics echoed with the eerie absence of children, a silence cut only by the trickling water and the thinly pitched, wailing sobs of a single boy.
“Gampo-Saati,” the doctor greeted her midway. He knew her from her recent visits with the children at Medical Arts. “What are you doing here?”
“Pana-Saat,” she greeted him. “I was speaking—I was speaking with His Eminence when we heard the—the—the signal. He asked me to—he asked me to—to—to bring his clothes.”
“I see.” Doctor Panarajan’s height put him eye to eye with Asta, and his build was of a similar weight. She remembered meeting him for the first time in Medical Arts—she had been charmed by his straightforward manner and cheerfully dimpled face. Now his plump cheeks appeared droopy and ashen.
“What happened?” she asked him.
Doctor Panarajan exhaled a morose grunt. “A child fell from the fifth floor,” he said, pointing far above the huddled group of adults. “The fall killed him.”
Asta clutched Najat’s clothes to her chest, feeling a sudden ache again. It faded just as quickly.
“I would like to join you,” she said.
The doctor hesitated.
“Please.”
He finally nodded, knowing what she had seen among the patients in Medical Arts.
He led Asta to the others, near the balustrade of the ground-level walkway. The wailing and sobbing grew louder, but still distant, and she looked up, realizing the sound came from the fifth floor above. Two small hands clung to the rails of the banister. She could see an adult kneeling beside the hands.
The doctor whispered to her, “A friend witnessed the incident.”
They stepped onto a stonework patio accented with decorative blue tiles. The doctor tugged Asta’s arm to halt her several paces from the site of the fall, where three adults stood with bowed heads—two of them wearing medical jackets with the same green collar as Doctor Panarajan’s, and one apparently a staff member of the school. A fourth, older man stood with head up, throwing dark glances around the complex and a penetrating look at Asta. She guessed he must be the school director.
A fifth figure crouched unmoving at the feet of the others…Najat. Asta’s throat clenched and tears sprang to her eyes at the sight of him. Water drizzled down his bare limbs to soak the white cotton pants of a small boy. The boy’s limp, broken body rested in Najat’s arms, with his hair spread in moistened, pale curls against Najat’s dark chest. Asta gazed from Najat’s bent head to the closed eyes of the boy, and imagined that the boy could simply be in a nap, if he didn’t have that thin, terribly dark stream of blood connecting the corner of his mouth to the corner of his dripping chin.
“Be-maran,” Doctor Panarajan spoke quietly beside her. Untimely death.
Asta noticed subtle red streaks on Najat’s arms and a few red droplets spangling his knees, just as she also noticed the sound of someone running up from behind, and the sound of someone screaming. Najat flinched, but his eyes remained closed. Asta twirled around and blocked the boy’s mother with one hip and a firm grasp on the panicked woman’s shoulder.
“Ayal! Ayal!” The woman screamed her son’s name over and over as the doctor and Asta wrestled her back, step by step, trying to move her a reasonable distance from the Kumasagi. The school’s director left Najat’s side and approached the mother at a deliberate angle to block the boy from her sight.
Najat felt a ray of hot sunlight strike his face as the director stepped away. The sensation faded as Najat sank inward again, struggling to guard the boy’s terrified consciousness from the mother’s screams and grasping kana. Najat bubbled a massively thick shield around his own living body and the lifeless weight in his arms, so that no sights, sounds or outside emotions could disturb them. The two doctors and the school aide stepped back, pushed by an unknown, instinctive need to relieve a dull pressure in their heads.
After restabilizing himself, Najat resumed his attempts to communicate with the boy. The terrible impact had jolted the boy out of his physical body, yet he still carried physical pain as a mental projection in his disembodied state. The projection was strong, enveloping the boy’s kana in a crackling latticework of confusion and terror. Najat sensed the latticework thickening to a black crust as the boy’s mind screamed from within it.
Najat kept his own mind free of any thoughts or panic. He entered a state of meditation so deep that he lost all sense of himself, save for the clearest central core of his own kana, which opened up towards the trapped boy like a flower opening its petals to the sun.
The flower-like core produced its own light, illuminating the dark and tangled crust of the boy’s hardening fear. The calm, soft light penetrated the latticed barrier without breaking it, and glided through the boy’s confused mental screams without silencing them. The light held no consciousness or purpose of its own. It could not search out, or find, or alter the boy’s confused state. It simply emanated and expanded, clear and strong and unchanging.
Even as the light had no awareness of the boy, the boy slowly came aware to the light. Something deep inside of him—something that existed beyond pain and fear—resonated in response to the calm, clear essence that permeated his awareness. The boy’s mental screams dwindled to a whimper, then to a wisp of nothingness as his consciousness divided from the emotional constructs that had trapped him.
A fissure split the latticework. The boy spilled out of his cage in an exhausted heap, unable to remember his previous form and immediately losing any concern about it. The current landscape offered a view of black, starlit outer space above him, and a field of pale yellow grass far below. His hovering form rested somewhere between, never knowing that what glowed below him was the outer skin of Ayudena the Skyfish. The latticework crumbled and dissipated behind him, already forgotten.
A figure appeared before him, tall and semi-transparent, formed of a self-emanating, deep blue light. The boy flowed toward the figure and felt something else within that liquid blue—something that wasn’t light at all, but somehow felt brighter and more clear than anything else from any remembered realm of consciousness. The boy fell forward and grasped what couldn’t be grasped, and smelled it and tasted it and tuned to the nonexistent vibrations of it, slipping into a merged state so suddenly that he possessed no self to comprehend his own last thought: I am bliss.
The blue figure staggered backward—heavy, off balance, dimming and sparking and fizzing.
Najat’s physical body remained motionless on the hard stone patio, even as sudden beads of sweat mingled with the droplets of water on his skin. He fought to maintain the trance deep inside himself, even as his mind tugged him outward: This shouldn’t happen! I did something wrong! He had meant to shield his inner kana after using it to draw out the boy, and then stay as a guide, as a Mahasagi should—
But he had failed to protect himself. The fathomless pain pulled him back in—intensely personal, emotional, disorienting. The boy’s kana melded to him like hot wax. Najat’s ethereal body fell to one knee above the sea of sun-colored grass. Darkening shadows sucked across the horizon, until the edge of his awareness appeared stained and murky.
Several figures stepped out from the gloom, their forms solidifying to smooth gray silhouettes against the darker atmosphere. They stood before Najat without showing any concern. He knew they were devadutas, the companions of Ayudena the Skyfish. He had sensed them during his deepest meditations. Even as his inner vision blurred and faded, he comprehended five devadutas surrounding him now.
He knew that communicating with them could be very difficult.
Ideas came to him, transmitted to Najat from the devadutas as if in the place of words. One of the entities stepped closer. They knew he had committed a terrible blunder. Yet a sense of respect flowed into him from these beings, a sense that they knew something more about Najat than he himself did. They flooded his wracked ethereal body with smooth, almost tangible placidity, similar to the calm light he had emanated for the boy.
The four flanking devadutas lifted Najat to his feet, not so much with their hands, but with a transmitted urge for him to stand. His consciousness stretched wide, as a physical man might yawn and throw back his arms—but this widening gripped Najat with an incredible, pulling pain, causing more sparking and fizzing. He could not hold back his own mental screams. Every part of him felt fused, crusted, gummy.
The main devaduta thrust its shapeless hands into Najat and began sifting through the stretched membranes of light to magnetize the dispersed kana of the boy.
Najat screamed again—even as his physical body knelt silent and still on the patio. He writhed in the spongy soft, steadfast grip of the flanking devadutas. The central entity maintained its connection to the boy, accumulating the boy’s kana as it ripped apart from Najat piece by piece. Najat’s ethereal body shuddered and convulsed, even as he caught a vague sense that
:: helping ::
the devadutas were trying to communicate.
:: helping you ::
The tranquilizing placidity flooded in again. Najat rested amid the pain, trying to cooperate. His inner senses cleared again, which brought the pain into focus but also allowed him to center and stabilize himself.
:: greater ::
He struggled to understand. The central entity still hovered close, with its hands buried inside of him. The pain only seemed to grow.
:: greater. larger. ::
They needed something…they needed his help. Najat felt that sense of respect coming from them again, and it bolstered him. The flanking devadutas lightened their touch at his shoulders and arms.
:: kumasagi. you must. BE. ::
He finally understood, at which moment all understanding and attempts at thought vanished. His ethereal body dissolved in the grasp of the four flanking devadutas as his inner kana expanded, enveloping and dwarfing the devadutas instantaneously.
Without thought, without emotion, the true essence of the Kumasagi left nothing for the boy’s kana to latch onto. The boy’s consciousness merged back into itself, becoming a beautiful shakti cradled in the steady arms of the main devaduta. The five devadutas rested at the softly bright center of an immense sphere of blue light.
The landscape changed as Najat came back to his inner senses, forming back into his radiant blue ethereal body. The stars twinkled on again, and there were so many, visible to such great depths, that the black universe above him appeared blotched with silver and gray. His home world spun slowly below him, but Ayudena the Skyfish—covered in so many scales that it appeared as a field of waving, yellow grass—blocked his view of it.
Najat could sense the boy’s shakti as it rested in the arms of the central devaduta. The five devadutas relayed a single notion to Najat: This little one had not been harmed.
Najat brought a glowing blue hand to his chest—something still turned inside of him, something that wasn’t his own. The devadutas had completely extracted the boy, Najat was sure of it. He felt something else…a shimmering sphere of kana marbled with color, similar to the shaktis he had Seen and Felt so many times at the lake. He directed a questioning thought to the main entity, and received an answer. The devadutas had sensed the marbled orb while retrieving the boy, but chose to leave it alone. It was a living light, and therefore no concern of theirs.
Asta. This was a wisp of Asta’s kana, existing inside of him all this time. Najat held both hands over his ethereal chest. A flush of joy seeped over him, but his first concern was the boy.
The devadutas stepped back. Najat bowed to them, and although they did not return any bows or gestures, he felt their high regard. The devadutas held the boy’s transformed consciousness and floated down until they disappeared below the waving scales, into the Skyfish, where Najat could not follow.
He turned to see Mahasagi Tebhan hovering next to him. He Felt the Mahasagi’s stern command to return home.
Sunlight struck Najat’s face again, and he became aware of the weight in his arms. The weight decreased as his muscles flexed and his eyes fluttered open. Ayal’s head rolled away from Najat’s chest and landed at a grotesque angle, stamping his own breast with a chin print of blood. Najat gazed down at the small crumpled body and cradled it with one arm so he could use his other hand to lift the boy’s head back against the crook of his elbow.
“Ayal!” the boy’s mother cried. Najat looked up to see her standing between the school’s director and Doctor Panarajan. He reabsorbed the heavy shield and felt everything snap into focus around him—the warm stone under his bare feet, the smell of blood and water, the sun-heated breeze against his wet skin.
Nearer to Najat, but slightly off to the side, two medical aides knelt by an adult-sized white stretcher. Najat swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. He met the eyes of the nearest aide and made a lifting gesture with his full arm. The aides rushed forward and positioned the stretcher in front of Najat.
He felt the child’s bones grind together as he moved to lay the body on the stretcher. He took special care to make sure the tiny broken head and neck did not tilt again, but instead rested in a peaceful, centered pose against the rough cotton fabric.
Then Najat stood up, his own joints creaking, and stepped back as the mother rushed in.
The director approached him as he stood there in his loincloth, still streaked with water and blood, flexing his cramped hands and testing his lips with his dry tongue.
“The father is on business in the valley,” the director said. “We’ve sent a flier.”
Najat spoke with a forced croak. “I will ask…His Eminence to pay a visit…when the father returns.” He looked to the mother, who had bent herself between the hovering medical team and the calm form of her dead son, weeping so hard that it came out almost silent.
“The child is at peace,” Najat told the director.
The director nodded, but Najat knew the man had little understanding of what the boy had just endured.
“They were playing on the rail,” the director said. “We haven’t determined how they went unnoticed. We will conduct interviews…” His focus drifted inward, to his own thoughts.
“Please let the family know that we will visit,” Najat said.
“Yes, of course. And thank you…I suppose the Mahasagi was not available?”
Najat’s shoulders felt heavy. “He was not available.”
He sensed someone at his elbow and turned to see the school attendant holding an armful of towels, with Asta right beside her. Asta! Najat stepped toward her, but then stopped himself as Asta broke eye contact with him and nodded politely at the director. The director nodded in return and then left to attend to the mother.
Asta found Najat’s eyes again and held up a large cup of water. He grabbed it from her and gulped down the water until it was gone.
“Do you need more?”
He shook his head, handed back the cup, and started breathing again. The drink had cleared his head as well as his throat. He took a towel from the other woman, soaked it with water and sweat from his skin, then used that to wipe away the boy’s blood.
He handed back the towel with a nod of gratitude, then walked with Asta to the opposite side of a large climbing gym. She handed him his clothes one piece at a time and showed no alarm as he fumbled with his sash. She reached in and tucked in the ends for him. His own hands felt thick, and his shoulders increasingly leaden.
Asta’s beautiful, open face looked up at him. Her light gray eyes were rimmed in pink, but he saw no tears. “Are you alright?” he asked her.
She kept her voice low. “I’m fine. Are you alright?”
He shook his head. “I need to leave this place.”
Asta turned without question and led him to the water lane. She stopped to look through the western tunnel where she had come in, and even as Najat thought how he didn’t want to walk back that way—where they would pass near Vengar’s side of the nursery—Asta made a decision of her own and led him over the nearest bridge toward the school’s south exits.
The clamoring voices of school boys echoed from the first and second swimming pools across the wider lane outside of the school. Asta detoured down an alley between the library and the third, empty pool. Najat kept pace immediately behind her as she slipped through a gap in the low wall around the Mahasagi’s private garden.
“Gampo-Saati,” Najat said from above her left ear. His hand scooped into the crook of her elbow, slowing her headstrong march toward the Mahasagi’s annex. She had not been sure of what else to do, or where else to take him—suddenly Asta remembered that it might not be appropriate for her to enter the Kumasagi’s private quarters.
Najat’s other hand closed over her shoulder, and she realized that he was leaning on her for support. “Asta…let’s sit for a moment…”
She walked with careful balance under his weight, until they reached a stone bench that was littered with fallen tree blossoms. She brushed the crusty flowers aside and helped Najat sit down. His fingers remained around her arm.
He took a slow breath in and let a slow breath out. “The boy…Ayal. He is at peace,” he said.
Asta nodded, not sure what to say. Najat’s hand felt fluid against her skin, even as he gripped her tighter. He seemed to shimmer and blur beside her, consumed by a liquid halo of blue light, which she could somehow See, though not with her eyes.
Now Asta understood—his shield was down.
“You don’t seem well,” she said without hearing herself. A wisp of a memory snaked across her senses—a ripping sensation down her sternum—droplets of glowing blue water against dark, copper-flecked skin—
—a hut on a beach, where the waves limped to shore on a calm, sunny day—an older boy with bronze skin shaking her shoulder and then running away again—
“Thank you for your help, Gampoban-Saati,” said a gravelly voice over her shoulder. “Do you need a ride to Patal?”
Asta jumped. The Mahasagi’s Second Hand stood right next to the bench, his block-like face angled down at her from far above. Najat dropped his hand from Asta’s numb arm and slid apart from her on the bench.
Asta stood up and shuffled around Rajung’s massive arm. “Just—just—just going back to Medical Arts,” she mumbled. “I can walk. I like to walk.” She clutched her sketchbook to her chest and executed a quick bow and mudra toward Najat. “Kumasagi.”
She saw Najat press his hands together in a mudra of blessing before Rajung stepped between them and blocked her view.
Walking through the park, Asta tried to regain the vision that Rajung had startled out of her head. It was too disjointed, like the memory of a dream. It fell away in pieces until she entered the mosaic courtyard of the Medical Arts building, already forgetting that she had Felt or Seen it at all.