1
The letter catches up to Sunai in Ghamor, where it’s always a little too cold not to hate having fingers. It comes by way of the aunty who runs the shabby hostel where he stows his ruck between jobs. She says the kid who dropped it off had Sunai’s description: middling-short, bespectacled, faint limp, long braid, old eyeliner.
The envelope isn’t signed but for a scrawl across the seam, the sigil of Leaf 36: “Cascade,” a short poem at the end of the Lay about a rain shower that becomes a waterfall that drowns a rice field and starves a village, and eons later becomes a sea. You know—consequences.
The symbolism needn’t be so obvious. Sunai hasn’t led a life that invites people to write him, let alone figure out which city-state in all the wilds they should send their letters to. Only one person would go to the trouble. He must still be nursing the delusion that Sunai will one day try another way of living—perhaps a way involving fewer professional near-death experiences, or less ill-considered sex with unscrupulous acquaintances. Ideally, a way of life that would begin with a long, agonized reckoning with his shoddy excuse for a brain.
Joke’s on him. Sunai isn’t really alive.
Yet there he perches on the edge of a thin mattress in his usual hostel room, thumb running down and up and down the sealed envelope seam. His ruck sits heavy between his booted heels, still dirty from his most recent trek across the wilds. He never stays long between jobs—just long enough to drink himself insensible and piss off another pretty man. His need to get the hell out of town has gone from pressing to urgent.
If a letter can find him, so can its sender.
Stupid, he tells himself as he stuffs the letter deep in his ruck, under his wilds gear and his battered old copy of the Lay. Stupid and selfish. No one’s coming for him. No one would bother. Sunai burns his bridges well and good.
Clearly not well enough.
“And stubborn.” Sunai shoulders the ruck. He means himself, obviously, but he means the writer too, which makes him a miserable hypocrite and irritated to boot.
What a wonderful thing, to know a sure cure for giving too much of a shit.
He drops some pricy tamarind candies in the hostel till on his way out, gives the aunty a kiss on the forehead in exchange for a cigarette, and heads for the least reputable hermit-run teahouse he can think of. He has already decided he will never see the hostel again. He expects to end the night shit-faced in a stranger’s bed or shit-faced on their bathroom floor.
Instead, Sunai wakes up aching, sober, and alone in a cramped bunk in a stranger’s salvage-rig. It must be a rig. If the haphazard construction materials of the crew quarters didn’t give it away—Sunai counts seven bunks total—the churn and thrum of the rig’s mechanical innards would, and the gentle whole-floor judder of its every step would confirm it.
Sunai swallows past dry lips and tastes a sour alchemy of alcohol, bitter chemicals, and vomit. On identifying the last, his stomach churns, and he lurches over the side of the bunk. Nothing comes up except for a vile memory of prior expulsion, and of someone’s hand in his hair—accompanied by a hand tightening just so on his ribs, and his own fingers snarled in a belt, searching lower—
None of which explains how Sunai ended up on a goddamn rig.
Practical paranoia compels him to check for his ruck, which he finds in a locker beneath his bunk, contents unmolested. Whoever brought him here did so with some semblance of decorum.
The question remains: Why?
“You’re not that good at hand jobs,” he mutters to himself as he staggers out of the crew quarters in search of a viewport.
In the hall just outside, Sunai discovers the rig has begun a six-legged climb into the Ghamori foothills, aiming northeast for the Dahani mountain range. In the distance, the near-noon sun glances off the flat angles of Ghamor.
In the historical documentaries Sunai was fed as a child, Ghamor was a stonework wonder of lustrous domes and minarets, capped with the seven grand marble shrines of its patron AI, So-Beloved. Not a trace of that old city remains. Now it’s all glass, steel, and concrete, spiking up from a blackened blast of earth that stretches a mile in every direction from Ghamor’s perimeter.
Leagues of pine barrens separate the rig from the artificial badlands that protect Ghamor from the wilds. If the rig left anytime after the crack of dawn, it’s covered an impressive amount of ground. Sunai should be grateful for the ride out of a state he had no business lingering in.
A vast sheet of red plate armor swings past Sunai’s viewport. He startles back, falters on his bad ankle, and knocks his head on the wall. Someone bangs the opposite side and swears at him to keep it down. Sunai crosses his arms tight over his chest and inches forward. Old pains flourish in every limb. If he presses his cheek to the viewport, he can just make out the full size of the ENGINE mech striding beside the rig.
She is four stories of marbled crimson-and-gold armor covering a sinuous, whirring metal frame. Her face, and the slashes of body beneath the armor, are the brooding red of blood left to pool, her mouth scarred with deep runnels across her great unsmiling lips. Luminous white lacquer fills the grooves and catches sunlight with a pitiless glint.
Her makers call her the Sovereign, she and her three nigh-identical sisters—singular and plural. Singular: Did you see the Sovereign tear that salvage-rig in two with her bare hands? Plural: Did you see the Sovereign play tug-of-war with that salvage-rig until she tore it in two?
Sunai never got to see So-Beloved as she wanted to be seen, outside of those documentaries. The ENGINE’s faces were built from the archival statues in her shrines. The archives moved when she spoke, and purportedly she liked to sing. It makes him the worst kind of heretic to behold her ruin and feel nothing but a very personal fear. He stares at the Sovereign’s thundering back and wills her to turn. He needs to see what’s in her chest. It will be the worst part of her.
The Sovereign stops at the top of a slope, as if aware of his desire. She begins to swivel at the waist. Sunai ducks away from the viewport, heart syncopated in his throat. He rubs his face, knocking his spectacles askew.
Copyright © 2023 by Emma Mieko Candon
