Ten Thousand Futures

The stone posts completed their turn while Lan Jue opened her medicine pack. Every blank face pointed toward Shen Yao.

Tova had been wounded before. He knew the useful kinds.

A cut told him where the edge had passed. A broken finger narrowed the work and left the rest of the hand available. Fever made demands but did not lie about them. The line in his arm behaved like a second intention. It tightened when he wanted to stop. It slept while he moved toward danger. It had begun to pulse in time with distant bells.

Lan Jue made him sit on a stone post while the others argued about leaving the field.

"Do not sit me on the toll records."

"You are sitting on the part with no writing."

"That improved the previous road."

She ignored him and cut the bandage from wrist to shoulder. The black ridge had crossed the elbow. It divided there, one thread following the inside of his upper arm, the other disappearing beneath the muscle.

Lan Jue's face gave him nothing. He had learned that this meant she disliked what she saw.

"Can you cut it out?" he asked.

"Not without destroying tissue I still need to understand."

"Can you cut the arm off?"

"I could."

He waited.

She did not continue.

"Dren would have done it already."

"Dren has one answer that has survived many different questions." Lan Jue pressed the blunt edge of her knife beside the split. "Tell me what you feel."

"Cold in the little finger. Heat at the shoulder. A strong wish to lie to you."

"About what?"

"The hand still feels like mine."

She looked up. "Does it?"

He flexed his fingers. The little finger moved late. "Mostly."

Lan Jue opened her pack. She took out two thin copper needles, a strip of waxed cloth and a glass tube no longer than Tova's thumb. The tube contained water from Hejingshui's mill channel, sealed by Luo Pei before departure.

"What is that supposed to do?"

"Remind the tissue which body fed it."

"That sounds like road work."

"It is medicine. Roads are trespassing."

She placed one needle above the split and the other near his wrist. The water in the glass tube trembled. Tova felt the route line turn toward it. Lan Jue waited until the pull became steady, then bound the tube along his forearm without letting it touch the skin.

The black ridge flattened slightly.

Pain arrived everywhere at once.

Tova leaned forward and retched between his boots. Nothing came up. He had eaten too little at the remembrance house and trusted the broth too late.

Lan Jue held the back of his coat until the spasm passed. She offered no encouragement. He appreciated her for that and resented the appreciation.

Across the field, Shen Qing had found a route between the turning posts. Xiulan copied the erased inscriptions by rubbing charcoal across thin paper. Tianhui stood near the collapsed collector, studying the clay strips without touching them. Registrar Shen knelt over the two pieces of his bronze seal.

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Tova watched him fit the halves together, fail, turn them over and try again.

"Your official is grieving," he said.

"He is working," Lan Jue replied.

"Those are not enemies."

The line in his arm pulled.

Not toward the broken seal. Beyond it.

A thin door had appeared in the air behind Shen Yao.

It was the colour of old paper, visible only when Tova looked from the corner of his eye. Through it he saw shelves, lamps, a clerk bent over a desk. The clerk had Shen Yao's shoulders and none of his face.

Tova shoved Lan Jue away and stood.

The door opened wider.

The field behind it was gone. The registrar's office occupied the other side, close enough to enter. A woman in a blue district robe lifted a page and frowned at a line of text. She did not see Shen Yao kneeling within arm's reach.

"Registrar," Tova called.

Shen Yao turned.

The route line in Tova's arm tightened. The paper door began pulling both of them toward it.

Shen Yao froze.

For one exposed instant, Tova saw desire on his face. Not ambition. Relief. A desk, records, walls that admitted their directions, other people carrying the decisions outside.

Then Shen Yao snatched up one half of his broken seal and threw it through the doorway.

The office swallowed the bronze.

The woman in blue looked up. Her eyes met his.

The door slammed shut.

The field returned. The remaining half-seal lay in Shen Yao's palm.

Tova's wound recoiled so hard the glass tube cracked against his wrist. Lan Jue caught it before the water spilled.

Shen Qing crossed the field at a run. "What happened?"

"Provincial recall route," Shen Yao said. His voice sounded scraped. "The seal break notified the office. It attempted to retrieve the authority attached to me."

"Will it try again?"

"It will."

"Can they follow?"

The registrar looked at Tova. "They already have a route."

Everyone looked at his arm.

Tova laughed because the alternative involved shouting at people who would use the shouting as information. "I am becoming popular."

Tianhui came closer. His lip had reopened from the Unclaimed Step's landing. He kept his distance from the wound.

"The line accepted the office because you and Shen Yao were both part of the debt field," he said. "It is not merely tracking Irlan."

"I had noticed the variety."

"It may open toward any obligation strong enough to use you."

Tova's humor left. "Dren."

"Dren first."

"My family."

"Possibly."

"Orasha."

Tianhui did not answer.

Tova stood very still while the field rang around them. His mother's broth remained in memory, too salty and cooling under a skin. His father complained when food lacked authority. Dren's seal cloth bound his arm. Irlan was somewhere ahead. Tianhui had chosen him once. Now every unfinished thing in his life had found a handle.

He drew the hook-blade.

Lan Jue seized his wrist. "You cut above the line now, it may reopen from the severed end."

"You do not know that."

"No. I know the wound has responded to every attempt to treat it as a simple object. I am not letting you make the largest attempt available."

Tova looked toward the place the office door had closed. "How long?"

"Until I understand more."

"That is not a length of time."

"It is the honest answer."

He wanted to hate her. She had chosen the one defense he could not strike without becoming foolish.

Shen Qing ordered the party moving. The posts were turning faster. The faceless collector's clay strips had begun lifting from the ground, drawn toward the names erased from them. Another collector might assemble if they remained.

Lan Jue finished the binding. The mill water lay along Tova's arm in its cracked tube, held by waxed cloth and two copper needles. The route line flattened beneath it but did not vanish.

They crossed the white field in pairs. Shen Qing and Xiulan led. Shen Yao walked beside Tova with the remaining half of his seal wrapped in plain cloth. Tianhui stayed at the rear, staff touching the ground now because the Unclaimed Step had left his knee shaking.

Halfway between the last rows of posts, Tova felt a door open behind his shoulder.

He did not turn.

A child began crying on the other side.

The voice was unfamiliar.

Tova kept walking. The sound sharpened behind him, no longer a general wail but a sequence: two short cries, a pause, then one. His younger brother had cried that way when fever took his hearing for a winter. Tova had learned to sleep through it because his mother needed someone rested enough to stand in the ration line.

He knew the road had stolen the rhythm from months of action rather than from the memory itself. Knowing the trick left the pain intact.

His good hand found the copper strip beneath his coat. The warning cut by his grandmother had worn smooth at the corners: DO NOT GIVE HIM EVERY DOOR. She had meant Irlan. Perhaps she had meant Tova as well. He pressed the copper until pain replaced the child's rhythm.

The route wound pulled toward it anyway.

He made it another twenty steps before the voice changed.

"Tova," the child said.

The pronunciation belonged to his youngest sister, who had lost two front teeth the summer before Orasha closed. No road should have known the air that escaped through the gap. His body turned before judgment arrived.

Tianhui's staff struck the ground in front of him.

Tova looked up. Tianhui did not say the sound was false. He did not say the family might be dead. He simply stood in the line Tova would have taken.

"Move," Tova said.

"I am staying here."

"You do not get to choose this one too."

"I am choosing where I stand."

Tova's good hand curled. For an instant he wanted to hit him again. Then the crying repeated the missing-tooth whistle too perfectly, and terror displaced anger. Real memory varied. His sister had never cried the same way twice.

He walked past Tianhui without turning. The voice followed for another hundred paces, becoming less accurate each time.