The Reach (Tomohiro, before)

Tomohiro, before

The passage behind the throne’s dais had a give to its seal that nobody but me had ever bothered to test, a hairline gap along the old warding-script wide enough for a knife blade. Wide enough for a person too, if he knew exactly how to fold himself around the mist rather than push through it. I went through it a little after first light, the palace still asleep around me except for the two guards at the outer gate. Rather than hide from them outright, I asked the mist already curling along the passage floor to hold the shape it had for a moment longer than it wanted to.

It thickened between us as I’d learned to thicken it a hundred times in a hundred smaller experiments, until I was simply a shape in the gray, not a man crossing a hallway.

It was a small use of the breathing, exactly the kind of thing I had built the technique to do, and it cost me nothing worth noticing. I did not think, going through, that I would ever come back through this gap the other direction, running. By the time the sun cleared the palace wall I was a long way down the passage, past the reach of anyone who might ask what I was doing awake this early, with the better part of a morning’s walk still ahead of me.

I had already worked out, with the private satisfaction I brought to everything, that the timing could not have been better if I had arranged it myself.

Katsumori’s audit convened at the second bell, always, the general’s fastidiousness about punctuality being one of the only things at court more reliable than the tide. Natsume would be in that room within the hour, answering for the project’s frozen budget to a general who had never cared for research he couldn’t march behind. Kurogane at his side, asking Tenno the one question everyone else at court was too polite to ask, and writing down the answer whether the King liked it or not.

Reika would already be there too, and Kisaragi, because a scandal this size didn’t leave anyone a spectator’s chair to sit in anymore. It would take the length of at least two of Katsumori’s careful questions before anyone thought to ask where I’d gotten to, and longer still before anyone guessed where. The passage was the only short way to the center, and I was already in it; anyone following without it would have to go the long way round by the old ridge road. A morning’s start was more than enough.

I was not afraid, walking there. I was happy, plainly and stupidly happy, the happiness of a man about to prove, in front of no one, exactly how clever he has known himself to be since he was seven years old. It did not once occur to me that an audience of nobody might be a warning rather than a gift.

Natsume had told me outright, three nights before, sitting across from me at the annex’s one good table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she never drank from: we go this far and no further. Not without Tenno’s word on it, not after everything the scandal has already cost this project’s standing, not while half the court is looking for an excuse to say we went behind their backs on purpose.

She had said it gently, in the register she used for everything with me, like she was asking a favor rather than drawing a line. I had told her yes, of course, and had meant, the whole time she was saying it, that I would do it without her.

I do not remember deciding to ignore her. One moment I was nodding, meaning it, and the next I was already three streets from the annex planning exactly how I would get into that basin alone, and neither version of me felt like a lie.

Natsume had been right about everything that had ever mattered to her. She had never once, in two years, been right about anything that mattered to me. I loved her enough by then that I let myself go on pretending those were the same kind of right.

The site was nothing dramatic to look at.

A shallow stone basin sunk into the bedrock at the valley’s true center, inside its ring of mountains, older than the capital and everything the capital had ever built over the passage’s mouth, carved with the same warding-script that sealed the passage behind the throne. Worn soft in places by however many centuries of hands had touched it before mine.

I had solved, to my complete satisfaction, every part of what the Kiri-no-Miko’s breathing practice actually was underneath its incense and its kneeling and its careful, patient silences. Four in, four held, four out, four held again, a rhythm the body could be taught like anything else. I had taught it to myself faster and more thoroughly than any Miko alive, because I had never believed there was anything else underneath it to learn.

Reika would have told me otherwise if I had ever asked her directly. I never asked her directly. I had already decided what her answer would be worth. What I was attempting was not what the Miko attempted, and it was not, either, what Natsume’s resonance work had ever needed.

Natsume’s papers, the ones I had corrected within an hour of reading them, uninvited, the very first day we met, had never needed more than two or three of the valley’s ambient waves brought into agreement at once. A modest resonance, cautious, sustainable, the kind of thing a careful researcher reaches for when she wants results she can defend to a King.

I had told her, more than once, that going further than that was possible and unnecessary, an experiment not worth the risk for a return we didn’t need. I believed that when I said it. I do not think I believed it the whole time. What I wanted, standing over that basin alone with the palace occupied elsewhere, was not agreement between two or three waves.

I wanted every wave the valley’s mist could produce brought into phase at once, all of it, deliberately, past anything the Miko’s doctrine would have called reverent and past anything Natsume’s caution would have called sound. A single, total resonance, forced rather than found.

I had a name for it, kept to myself, because saying it aloud would have meant admitting how much bigger it was than anything I’d told Natsume I intended. I called it the Resonance Disaster, to myself, a wave large enough that even a sleeping Kami would not be able to sleep through it.

I went in for four.

The first several breaths were exactly what two years of practice had promised me they would be.

Familiar, obedient, the valley’s ambient mist answering my rhythm as water answers whatever container holds it. It took the shape I gave it because I asked precisely and consistently, and had never given it reason to answer any other way.

I felt the first wave agree, and then the second, closer together than I had ever managed before. For one long, warm moment I let myself believe this was going to work as cleanly as everything else in my life had worked, because nothing yet had ever taught me differently.

The third wave did not agree the way the first two had. It arrived instead, all at once, like a held door giving way once the person pushing on the other side has been pushing harder than you ever realized. I can feel it working, I remember thinking, in the very last moment I still believed that was a true sentence.

Power moving into me on the four-count, and then past the four-count, and then past any count at all, the rhythm no longer asking so much as being met by something that had stopped waiting for my breath to finish before it answered.

I reached for the edges of it, meaning to test them exactly as I had always been able to test every working before this one, and there were no edges left to find. There was only more, arriving faster than I could ask for it.

I tried to stop it. There was nothing left in the shape of stop. Whatever plug I had imagined I could pull, if there had ever really been a plug at all and not simply my own confidence standing in for one, had already been pulled by something other than me.

I tried, instead, to steer it, as I had steered every smaller working before this one, in for four, hold for four, and for one held breath something larger and far older than any rhythm I had built agreed to move roughly where I pushed it.

Not because I had earned that. Only because my own insistence was loud enough, for that one breath, to drown out whatever the thing waking beneath the basin might have wanted instead.

It was not control. It only resembled control closely enough that I could almost go on believing the difference didn’t matter.

The mist around the basin had already begun to change, a slow gray creeping into the pale of it, spreading outward the way spilled water spreads from a cup that has been knocked rather than poured. Unhurried and total, and already far past anything I could call back. Shapes began cohering at its thickest edges. The mist was inventing bodies from nothing, not borrowing them from anything that had ever had to be born.

No animal underneath any of them. No history to get right or wrong. Only raw appetite assembling itself joint by joint, and getting every one of them wrong.

I heard them before I saw them. Boots on the ridge path above the basin, more than one set, moving too fast for anyone who thought they still had time to prevent whatever they were running toward.

I did not have room left, just then, to place who by sound alone. Only that there were people up there who had come too late for whatever they had meant to do. One of the new-cohered shapes had already turned away from me and toward them instead, because I was no longer the only warm thing left standing in reach of it. I knew, even through everything the four-count was costing me to hold, exactly whose voice had reached the ridge first.

Natsume never ran anywhere in the two years I knew her. She was running now.

In for four.

I reached further than four should have let me reach.

The connection answered, thinner than it had a breath ago and colder, aimed for the first time at something other than the working and other than myself: at the exact space between the ridge and the thing closing on it. Solid mist gathered along that reaching the way frost gathers on a cold morning, faster than thought, faster than anything I had built on purpose in two years of careful practice. It went out from me in one long unraveling blast that took the shape apart before it finished closing the distance to her.

I had not earned that. I want that said plainly, since I am done pretending otherwise even to myself.

I had spent two years solving a technical problem and calling the answer complete, and in the one moment that should have proven me wrong forever, something underneath the valley’s mist chose, instead, to meet me halfway. It hadn’t chosen to, on the strength of anything I’d earned. Only because, for the first time since I had walked into that basin already certain of my own success, I had stopped reaching for something to prove and reached instead for someone to save.

Whatever slept beneath Okiri had apparently been waiting the whole time to see whether I ever would. The cost of it landed a half-breath behind the reaching itself, and it landed on me, not on the shape I’d just unmade.

It burned. Not a memory of heat, not a metaphor for cost.

An actual fire with no flame anyone else could have pointed to, closing over the side of my face and up through my own hair strand by strand, faster than I could scream about any one part of it before the next part caught. I did not know yet, could not have known yet, that it was leaving a mark I would carry the rest of my life and turning every hair on my head white in the same instant. The ordinary black gone before I had breath left to mourn it.

I only knew that nothing had ever hurt like that, and that somewhere above me, close enough to hear now, Natsume made a sound I no longer had the breath left to answer.

She was running toward me, not away, I understood dimly, and someone behind her was pulling her back by the arm instead. I could not blame either of them for whichever they chose. I no longer had a face left worth recognizing as mine.

In for four. One push left in me, small, no longer aimed at the working or at the thing I’d already turned aside, only at the raw gray itself, bent gently away from wherever Natsume’s voice had come from.

Whether it actually held, or was only the last thing my failing breath wanted to believe of itself, I never got to learn. Somewhere past the count’s own first beat, there was no one left awake behind my eyes to notice the four had never finished.