Mayanna’s cough worsened on their pilgrimage to the Rose Adept. Thakur couldn’t claim to feel any better. His bones ached and his chest burned worse with each passing cycle, yet he lay awake in the down cycles of their journey, listening to his wife’s breath rattle in her chest as she slept. In the up cycles they trudged on. He let her lean on him as they bumped up wide tunnels in the back of empty trucks, held her hand in unfamiliar cistern cities garish from the light of floating flood lamps, forged ahead on his cane as they pushed through the crowded tunnels of the upper layers and whispered to her while their guide negotiated with the coalitions of smaller sects and wild gangs that ruled in the anarchy closer to the surface, even though each touch and each whispered word made his skin and throat burn in sympathy with the acidic fire ravaging his insides.

He carried both their meagre bags as they joined the throng headed towards the gate, and held her tight as they both stepped out into the light.

So much light, and within it, a sky so vast as to make all their long journey seem no more than a single step, a grain of sand beneath their shoes against the vast backdrop of the worlds.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Mayanna whispered as they stood and gaped.

Shapes turned in the sky, vast rectangles of darkness caught in orbit between the city towers and the brilliant core of the worlds, smaller shapes, lost in the umber haze the blotted out the horizon where it curved up beyond the towers peaks. “The heavens.” He said as his eyes watered in the light. “Just like in the stories.”

She squeezed his hand and he looked down to see her own tears sparkling on her cheeks while she smiled up at him. “Our story now.” She told him.

He grinned through a growing headache and she looked away.

“I’m glad I got to see it,” she said, “Before…”

His smile faded, and it was his turn to squeeze her hand. “We’re going to meet an adept,” he told her, “one that specializes in healing.” He pulled her into a hug and she coughed weakly against his shoulder while all the foot traffic moving through the gate parted around them. “Someday we’ll be telling our grandchildren about this place, you wait and see.”

She squeezed him back, and they went on.

The Rose Adept visited him, in his cell, only a few weeks after he poisoned the Sword Adept and listened to his spirit die from the bottom of the tower.

He sat as he sat when his daughter came to visit him later, his back hunched, face to the wall while blood hardened on his cheeks and his spirit tilled the cement and seeded it with poison. She did not open the door as his daughter did, but stood on the opposite side of the bars looking in, arms crossed over her chest.

“What can I do for you?” Thakur whispered.

“The sword adept.” She said.

“Is dead.” He replied. His breath churned, like his lake once had when the poisons bubbled up from below to refill it. “I killed him.”

The Rose Adept said nothing for a moment. “You did.” She finally allowed.

Blood running from his eyes made Thakur blink and he opened them to stare at the crumbling wall of his cell while red tears ran down his cheek like droplets of fire. “Then you got your wish.”

He should have felt her behind him, in the spiritual vision he’d discovered when he gained his powers. Most people’s souls manifested in that vision as a small flame, a lick of breath that burned in their very core, but she did not. She was a void to his third eye, like a hole cut from the world, a shadow moving in a sunlit street, a shifting darkness like the void that filled her eyes.

“Things have not gone as we hoped.” She said at last.

Thakur reached up to peel away the blood crusted on his cheeks. He looked at the little ball of hardened blood in his hand before he crumbled it to powder and closed his eyes again. “How are my daughters?” He asked.

“They are fine.” The Adept replied. “They live in a balcony just below my own. I can send one of them to you, if you’d like.”

It was Thakur’s turn to prolong the silence. “There is no need.” He whispered at last. “They are safer, up above.”

She made no answer, and in the silence Thakur felt as though he could hear the cement in front of him groan from the pressure of his churning breath.

“You want something from me,” Thakur whispered eventualy, “You wouldn’t be down here otherwise, but we both had our demands.”

“There is more that you can do.” The woman told him.

“I have already done what you asked.” Blood bubbled in his throat as he answered her and he growled to clear his throat before the silence settled once more over them.

“I could threaten them.” The Rose Adept said.

“I could destroy everything you’ve built.” Thakur remained in his seat, eyes closed and back turned to her as he replied.

The bars his cell rang ever so softly as she ran her hands over them. “And still lose everything in the end.” she replied.

Thakur gave no response.

“One more favor.” The Adept said. “And you will secure everything you came here for.”

Thakur felt the sting of bloody tears behind his eyes and scrunched them tightly closed against the pain. “I came here, for her.” He whispered. “Not…” His concentration wavered and the breath knotted in the cement wall washed through his meridians like fire. It burned as it moved through his limbs and his core before he regained control and pushed it back into the aura of his Externalis Meridians, as far from his flesh and mind as he could drive it.

She’d died.

They’d only paid the Twin Lights Sect guide to bring them to the gates, yet he chose to lead them on. “I remember coming to the light for the first time. You could have knocked me over with a breath, and the headaches. By the pits, I still get them if I’m up here too long. I was lucky enough to have my ole Da’ to look out for me. No one should have to go through it for the first time alone.”

At the rose clinic he waved them goodbye and wished them good luck then called down a flying cab to take him into the sky. When they stepped inside men with skin dark as the tunnels took Anand’s ticket and whisked them away to other black men in white robes who listened to Mayanna’s breathing, prodded her ribs, asked her questions then ended by swabbing her gums and nose to perform tests. When others came to take Thakur to his own room for a similar treatment he held on to Mayanna’s hand and turned them away. “When my wife is taken care of.”

Mayanna called after the retreating medics and they stopped as she turned to him. “You should go with them.” She told him. “Your chest. You told me…”

Brown eyes looked up at him from the chair they’d given her while they did their tests, but Thakur wouldn’t meet them as he smiled and squeezed her hand a little tighter. “A little longer won’t hurt me.”

She studied him, then she put a hand on his cheek and pulled his eyes to hers. “You have gotten me here,” she told him, “you have done enough, now, go, before you make me a widow in this place.”

She smiled, and he touched the hand she’d put to his cheek. “I want to stay here, with you,” he whispered.

She shook her head, but he plowed on.

“What if it gets worse, and I’m not there.”

“They will bring you.” She told him.

“But this place is so big, how will I find you?”

“I’ll find you.” She pressed his cheek with her hand. When he still wouldn’t leave she pulled him down to kiss him.

“How can I get better while you waste away?” She asked. “Go. I don’t want to live just to find you’ve died. Who would I have to help me get home again?”

He stared into her eyes until a cough took her, then he kissed her on the forehead and straightened to follow the young man who took him to his room.

When he described the pain in his lungs to the first White Robe to interview him, he included the account of the Powder Adept and the explosive flight through the cistern that ended in a corrupted pool of sludge. The man laughed at the first telling until Thakur told him the compounds in the sludge. Then he went off to consult someone else who also came and asked him the same questions.

“Heart maybe?” The second man’s dark skin was wrinkled by age. Thick white eyebrows stood out from his forehead like fungal growths and he had a short white beard that he stroked as he listened.

“He said it might have been exposure to the compounds in the sludge.” The first man replied.

“Yes, well, that was, how long ago again young man?”

“Thirty, forty cycles?” Thakur replied.

“Forty what?” The old man asked.

When Thakur explained, the old man shook his head. “You’d be dead already, like this, Powder Cultivator, you described.” He made an incredulous face. “But if you really set off explosives at your feet, well, there are, medical consequences to stupidity you know.”

Thakur shifted in his chair and looked down at his cane. “I know.”

“Yes, well.” The old White Robe cleared his throat. “I’ve never heard of any Gunpowder Adept, so what would I really know? What’s his ticket Sugun?”

“Green.” The first man replied.

“Well, that isn’t enough for the Adept. Shame, that. Touching it to his heart might have done the job. For a green ticket though we’ll have to do more tests before we give him any medicine. Why don’t we have Bhundeli come look at him and see if it’s something spiritual. I haven’t opened my meridians, and frankly, I’m too old to try.”

“But, he’s blue ticket, sir.” Sugun replied.

“Get him anyways.” The old man replied with a wave of his hand. “He’ll like the young man’s story, and he never distinguished between tickets. It’s why he’s still a blue, and not yellow, or red.” He stood and smiled at Thakur. “Just tell him what you told us, and we’ll get you taken care of.”

Thakur did, and Bhundelli told him that he was going to look at Thakur’s spirit. “It’s your soul that animates your spirit,” he told Thakur. He was a fat man who nodded constantly whether he was listening to Thakur tell his story or speaking himself, compelling Thakur to nod in reflex as he explained. “Sometimes that connection can be, rattled, by experiences like yours, especially where adepts are concerned, or cultivation. You aren’t a cultivator by any chance mister Thakur, are you?”

Thakur nodded along with Bhundeli then realized what he’d done and shook his head.

“Good.” Bhundeli said, still nodding, “that’s very good. Most people can’t sense the spiritual realm, so they don’t know when they’ve suffered that kind of trauma,” he nodded, like some broken automaton or child’s toy, “but I have a few Meridians open,” he went on, “Extremis, to be specific, so I can feel your spirit where it touches my skin. I will have to touch you, you understand, skin to skin, for this to work. I hope you will not mind.”

Thakur shook his head this time and Bhundeli nodded and had him undo his robes from the chest down. Bhundelli shook back the sleeves of his robes, glared at Thakur’s chest, then closed his eyes and leaned in to place his palms over Thakur’s naval.

His hands were oddly warm against Thakur’s ribs.

“Now,” the white robed man intoned, “breath.”

Thakur did.

Bhundeli hissed and jerked his hands back from Thakur’s chest. He glared at Thakur’s navel again, no longer nodding, while Thakur just stared at the man.

“Did you… find anything?” Thakur asked.

Bhundeli rubbed his hands together, still eyeing Thakur as though he were something distasteful he’d found waiting for him at the dinner table. The nodding slowly started again as he began muttering to himself.

“Yes. Yes.” He nodded in thought for a moment then stood in a swirl of white robes. “I must find master Khunawal.” He muttered as he bustled out the door, he remembered Thakur at the last moment and caught himself to spin at the doorframe. “You will not go anywhere, yes?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” Thakur replied.

Bhundelli nodded and pointed a finger at him before ducking away. “I will be back, with Master Khumawal. You wait.”

Thakur rubbed his navel and looked around at the now empty room. “Where else would I go?”