Chapter 32
A long time ago, Chami shared a small loft in the heart of Er with three roommates.
She didn’t have much, but she had citizenship in the twin cities.
That was something she’d chosen well when she made that initial jump, finally at her wit’s end with the delirium that had spread through the heavens.
Try as she might to remember her thought process at the time, she can’t find those threads anymore.
It has been washed away by the heaviness of mortality, each new year eating up another memory she might have once possessed.
What she remembers is her satisfaction when she came to and registered the grumble of a factory kicking into gear beside her.
An enormous plume of steam, wafting into the alleyway, warming her hands and her feet and her back while she leaned against a bicycle.
There were more streets back then. More breathing room to run around the capital, making deliveries on wheels and traveling to see friends who lived at the far end of San.
Fewer roadblocks that had been installed by rebel groups who were avoiding palace guards; fewer illegal businesses who were making every effort to survive a tyrant king, poisoning the waterway running along their back door.
She’d felt good about the body she’d picked.
Something to call hers. That first merge was the trickiest. Their qi didn’t work as mortals’ did.
They would meld into the body and take over entirely, so they had to choose well.
Those pink eyes would follow her everywhere thereafter.
The pantheon together declared the only way to survive was to shed their heavenly qi and adopt the barest wisp of mortal qi instead, to be happy with that life and count their blessings that they hadn’t faded away immediately like some weaker members of the pantheon.
Chami kept a small mirror above her bed in the loft, taped to the ceiling.
Every morning, she looked into her reflection and reminded herself what she was living for.
She was the godling of kindness. She was needed in this world.
It didn’t matter if she no longer had blessings to offer or qi to blow into the cold, brisk air.
Each time she stepped out in the morning and closed the door behind her with a thud, it was an extravagant thing just to walk along the footpath, to touch the street signs she passed.
She indulged in buns filled with red soybeans and she laughed with the children playing outside their parents’ shopfronts.
That got harder over the years. When the loft grew too expensive to rent, even among four people.
When the family she’d intruded on lost their medicine shop to a fire, and the identity she’d invaded couldn’t find work.
For some time, Chami flitted meaninglessly through the twin cities.
She watched the wall grow higher and the palace guards multiply.
The royals changed, their kings dying one after the other, and those she came to call family passed, too, as time crept on.
Chami had never made an active effort to hide why she did not age, but nobody remarked on it either.
A small mercy, a remaining symptom of her godhood, that her appearance would always escape notice to the mortal eye, that they would see what they wanted to see.
Eventually, Chami was left utterly alone in San-Er. She saw a sign that the palace was hiring. She passed the interviews to become an attendant. She was given lodging inside the Palace of Heavens, and she enjoyed the space that she had carved out for herself, the new life that she was able to live.
But she would always miss her first loft.
She often found herself staring at the ceiling of her room in the palace—its tall pillars raising the slats high, unreachable unless she stacked one stepladder onto another—wishing that there might be some way to justify putting up a mirror without a Weisanna asking her if she was out of her mind.
She feared that one day, she would open her eyes and lose her mind indeed, forgetting who she was.
Chami stirs awake, and she can’t feel her qi again. For that brief moment before she registers her surroundings, she is relieved. It was a dream. The earthen plane has not been flooded with heavenly qi once more.
Then she sees Yilas. Her big green eyes, watery because she refuses to let her tears fall, and Chami stifles a sharp breath.
She remembers the destruction at the wall.
The building teetering, seconds from collapsing on Yilas, who couldn’t have run if she tried, because the god of wealth was under Galipei Weisanna’s control, and he was tearing apart the twin cities and everyone in his path.
“You’re awake,” Yilas says softly. “Are you comfortable?”
Chami tries to sit up. She recognizes the palace infirmary. It is empty. The windows show the dark night outside.
“I’m okay,” she rasps. “Are… you okay?”
Yilas nods. “You saved me.” She looks down. “And you could have told me.”
But Chami could not put into words the shock she felt waking that morning.
Gulping in air and registering the new qi swirling in her chest. She thought she was dying.
A heart attack, perhaps, her mortal body crumbling after the decades it spent in unnatural form.
It wasn’t until she threw herself off the bed, landing on the floorboards with her bare knees, that she accidentally grazed her skin and opened blood in her scratches.
The balance in her body leveled out. She understood then what this was: her old levels without her old senses.
Raw power, able to be retrieved with a thought, but no control, no ability to direct feeling and emotion and kindness into people, because she was trapped in a mortal body, and she was still mortal.
Chami, slowly, reaches out her hand. She sets it on Yilas’s arm.
“Would you have believed me?”
“Of course,” Yilas says without hesitation. “I would believe you if you told me you secretly possessed three heads. I would follow you to the edge of the kingdom and throw myself into the sea if only you asked. I love you. Your pain is mine.”
Oh. Chami swallows hard. She had imagined this secret going unseen forever. She would live a long and happy life with Yilas in the dark even upon old age, because no one had yet called to attention her unchanging face, so why wouldn’t she get away with it this time?
Yet Yilas weaves her hand through hers now, interlacing their fingers.
In that gesture, they share everything unspoken: Chami’s apologies for the life she has not been able to admit to, that she is forgetting year by year, and Yilas’s willingness to spend the rest of hers trying to pick each piece out of the wind.
“What has happened?” Chami asks warily. She gestures around the room. Both to indicate their presence at the palace, and the absence in the air. The qi that she can no longer control.
Yilas shakes her head. “I’m not entirely sure. I heard a ruckus outside when I went to fetch water. No one can jump in San-Er anymore. The Crescent Societies have enacted a series of sigils at the wall to stop the heretics.” Yilas stops, catching herself. Guilt colors her cheeks. “I mean—”
“You don’t have to correct yourself,” Chami says softly. “Several generations have passed since any of us saw the heavens. The term feels accurate now.”
The kingdom is drastically different from the one that Chami visited from the heavens.
How can she call herself a god again merely because she can wield bursts of qi?
She cannot influence kindness anymore. She cannot slink invisible into a room and press her forehead against a dying matriarch, bringing a blessing to her final moments.
“Matiyu is checking out of the hospital and coming to the palace to help us,” Yilas says.
“He’s friends with the cleric who’s watching the north entrance—I’d rather him escort us out of the palace than risk getting stopped.
We can stay put at his apartment in Er until this blows over and Calla gets back. ”
Chami blinks. “Matiyu was in the hospital?”
“Broken elbow. Someone shoved him with qi. He will recover, don’t worry.”
But Chami is still confused. “Where’s Calla?”
“She’s off waging a war with my brother.”
The intrusion comes from the door, and Chami jolts, squinting in the dim lighting. It’s the girl from the internet cafe, the rebel who wanted to contact Calla. Bibi. Or, as the cities have been whispering now: Buira Makusa.
“I floated, briefly, the idea that she should wait until you woke up,” Bibi says. “You would make a fine soldier against her opponents.”
Chami stiffens.
“She declined, obviously. Didn’t think you’d like that very much. What were you doing by the wall anyway?”
“None of your business.” Chami allows the slightest bit of indignation to color her voice—it doesn’t come naturally to her, like choosing the larger piece of cake or picking up a coin on the ground—but Yilas always says she wants Chami to stand up for herself.
Yilas gives her a look, though. The infirmary grows tense, and Chami sighs.
“Nothing illicit,” she answers. “An old friend said she was coming to San-Er, and I wanted to greet her so that she wasn’t left to fend for herself. It was bad timing. She won’t want to come in now, anyway, with qi blocked.”
Bibi makes a noise under her breath. She steps into the infirmary properly, and Calla’s cat is following her, circling her ankles with each step.
It seems Bibi does not believe Chami’s story…
which Chami can’t do anything about, because it is the truth.
She flits her eyes to Yilas, pleading innocence, and Yilas nods, indicating that she believes her, at least.
“What did you need, anyway?” Yilas asks Bibi, visibly prickling. “You’re supposed to be watching the Weisanna.”
Bibi reaches down to pick up Mao Mao. He curls in her arms, his face resting against the crook of her shoulder.
“I am,” she says brightly. “I’m connected to the camera feed. And anyway, the prisoners that the Crescent Societies brought in are being freed, so I’m giving that whole corridor some space.”
“The prisoners shouldn’t be freed.”
Bibi and Yilas both turn to Chami abruptly. Where Yilas appears surprised, Bibi keeps her expression neutral, her head tilting. Her overgrown bangs shift along the side of her face.
“The Crescent Societies were right to exercise caution,” Chami says. “They should continue to do so, even with a block in place. What sigil can they be using to enforce it? Godling of absence? God of barriers? It will not take much to blow those apart.”
Bibi grins, as if there is something funny about that.
“The Crescent Societies have been bastardizing sigils since they discovered them,” she says, “but in this they’re finally treating them as a language to wield. It will be fine. They are continuously repairing the sigils.”
But Bibi doesn’t understand. Yilas will not either. They are only mortal at the end of the day, and what they have seen of this world is limited to that scope.
“We’re not supposed to have such power,” Chami says, and her voice tapers into a rasp. “That was the agreement when we fled down here. We needed to understand what we were trading.”
Because other members of the pantheon were never as sensible as Chami. There have been plenty who have lost their minds over the decades. Fed up with their new role in the world. Unhappy with their lot and their luck.
Who will they become when their qi returns to them?
A beep sounds from Bibi’s belt. She glances down, and whatever comes through the pager must need her attention, because her mouth twists.
“I have to run,” she says, maneuvering Mao Mao onto one elbow so she can press the top of the pager with her free hand. “Do you need anything?”
“Of course not,” Yilas says, huffing, but Bibi doesn’t seem to take offense to her tone.
Bibi turns to go. Strolls out through the door, and as her steps are clicking away, her voice wafts back, greeting, “Hello. I’ve never seen you around.”
“Matiyu Nuwa, pleasure to meet you,” Matiyu’s voice echoes.
Yilas mutters, “Finally,” and stands. “Matiyu, get in here.”
He pokes his head into the infirmary. It hasn’t been long since Chami last saw him, but he looks thinner, tired. His arm hangs from a sling around his neck, the fabric resembling one of his shirts. He’s holding a small box in his other hand.
“Yes, I gave them the material,” he says before Chami can ask. “They wanted to charge me extra for a sling. Ridiculous.”
“We’re going,” Yilas announces. “Chami, are you all right to walk?”
Chami nods. Her legs feel weak, but not out of action. She swings them over the side of the bed, testing her strength. The floor is ice-cold on her feet.
“I was going to call the hospital in a panic if you took any longer to get here,” Yilas hisses at Matiyu. She passes him a bag that she’s prepared and Matiyu glances around, his one free hand already occupied by the small box. “And what is that?” she snaps.
“I’m only late because I got caught up negotiating with Woya. Look.”
Matiyu flips the box, opening the lid. Chami leans in. She can’t quite make sense of the tubelike object nestled inside until she sniffs, and matches the harsh scent to the black powder scattered at the bottom of the box.
“I’d forgotten what firearms looked like,” she remarks.
“It’s a pretty rudimentary hand cannon,” Matiyu says. “Obviously there aren’t enough weapons hidden away in the vaults, so the Crescents started to make their own from repurposed metal that the factories discarded. They call this one the Asp. See how the top part looks like—”
“What are you doing taking weapons from the Crescent Societies?” Yilas interrupts.
“I bought this.”
“Oh, great. Even better. There’s a weapons black market in the palace.”
“Without Kasa or August around, it’s technically just a market,” Chami observes.
Yilas gives her a dull glance to signal that she’s not helping. Chami smiles, and Yilas softens. Meanwhile, Matiyu flips the lid back onto the box.
“Better to be prepared if another divine being crashes through the wall,” he says. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Chami supposes she has no argument there. She eases onto her feet, slowly. Her body does not sway. She is steady.
“It’s better to stay inside and keep the door locked,” she says. “Let’s hope there’s no use for firearms.”