The Descent of Monsters (The Tensorate Series) Read online

  I hear something breaking. It is almost here.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  [1162.07.24]

  That could have gone a lot worse. But it could also have gone a lot better.

  We launched our grand break-in during the second sun-cycle. Mokoya’s network whispered to her of a clandestine meeting between Gu and Minister Sonami at that time, so we knew he wouldn’t be in. Rider took me to his mansion in the White Quarter, skipping across Chengbee in jumps through places they were familiar with—a secluded park here, the upper floor of an inn there. Bless the fortunes, they had been inside Gu’s mansion several times before, so instead of folding us into one of his oversized fishponds (what is it with wealthy Tensors and making their houses look like water farms?) or an open furnace, we landed safely in Gu’s office. A locked room, full of expensive hardwood furniture, every surface stacked with scrolls and books. We swept up everything that bore the insignia of the Rewar Teng institute, filling two unused chests we found.

  Rider was nervous through it all, constantly checking that no one was coming to clean this spotless, obsessively tidied, locked room. Or to investigate the soft noises of chests being shifted across the floor. We were there barely ten minutes before they said, “We have what we want. We should go.”

  I didn’t want to. My gut burned with the feeling that we had missed something, and my gut has never led me wrong. I was staring hard at one particular bookshelf—I don’t know what it was, but I wanted to inspect it more closely. It looked perfectly ordinary, and the journals lining its shelves proclaimed themselves to be annual reports of the Tensorate Society of Demographic Studies. But the longer I stared at it, the more convinced I became that it was hiding something.

  But just as I was about to touch it, we heard voices, and Rider yanked us, boxes and all, out of the room.

  I was furious to find myself on the roof of an abandoned building. I was just on the verge of a breakthrough. I was about to discover something important and they stopped me. I shouted at them. In hindsight: ill conceived. But my blood was boiling, and the stress of the past few days put stupid thoughts in my head and stupid words in my mouth. I accused them of being a coward. I asked if they were trying to sabotage my investigation.

  I don’t quite remember what they said over the rushing anger in my head, but I think it was something like “Your investigation? It’s not your sibling who’s missing.”

  We returned to the Grand Monastery in a thick fog of silence. There were a few raised eyebrows, but nobody bothered to ask what had happened (or none dared to). Instead, all attention was on the treasures we had stolen.

  The spoils of our adventure burst with monthly reports from the secret laboratory that ran beneath the institute. In those thin scrolls, written in an impeccable hand (same hand: a single report-writer?), were details of everything we wanted to know. Experiments, materials, and results.

  I would very much have liked to look through these documents myself. But Rider had other ideas, pointedly cutting me out of all the discussions. They took charge of what we’d brought back, and only allowed other Machinists to touch them. I got the hint after my questions were pointedly ignored for the second or third time. I’m used to this. Truly. It’s the same shit that weak-willed Tensors used to pull on me. Why did I think these people would be any more welcoming of an outsider?

  Thus, a secondhand summary of what they found from reading the documents:

  The institute kept a stable of more than sixty children, unethically sourced from all over the Protectorate.

  Most of them were pairs of twins, but a significant chunk were children who were half of a pair.

  No names. Why bother, when you could just assign them numbers?

  They were between three and ten years of age, thereabouts. Unless I understood it wrongly, they were kept in some kind of frozen state and thawed in batches to be experimented on.

  Guess we now know what they used those rows and rows of pods for.

  We were right. The bastards were trying to breed, or train, someone who could change the course of the future on command.

  So. We now know what happened in those caverns, from day to day. But it does nothing for the questions I came here to answer:

  What happened on the day the beast escaped? Are these children still alive? Where are they now? How did they get out when the other Tensors didn’t?

  Did the children foresee what was about to happen and have their minders evacuate them early?

  Did they cause the disaster?

  When I am finally judged at the gates of Hell, I will tell them that I tried my best to reconcile with Rider, and it’s not my fault it didn’t happen. I carefully asked if they recognized any of the children in the journals. Maybe one of them would be their twin?

  They said, “How could I know someone I have spent no time with from a handful of sentences written by someone who does not see them as human?”

  Fair answer, but I can tell when I’m being scolded. I’m not an idiot.

  Later, Cai Yuan-ning came by with a bottle of rice wine and sat by me while I contemplated the night-cycle moon. She asked what happened between Rider and me. I told her. I shrugged. “They’re right,” I said. “Who am I to intrude? I have no stake in this investigation.”

  She looked strangely at me. “You’re joking, right?”

  I shrugged again. I’d thrown away the life I’d known to pursue this investigation, only to be told that I had no business being here.

  “They’re wrong,” Yuan-ning said. “After the release of the official Tensorate report, I lost all hope. I thought Yuanfang was doomed never to have justice. But then you showed up. A Tensor, trying to help. I would never have expected it.”

  We drank the wine. “Now we are blood sisters,” she said.

  I sit here writing in the waning moonlight, belly warmed with wine and mind slowed with its thick heat. Soon, the sun will rise for the second night-cycle. And then it will set again, and then it will rise again, and then it will be a new day, and time will go on. And still the mystery of Rewar Teng remains unsolved. Out there is a child with Rider’s face and peculiar health condition, hidden away in the dark like a dirty secret. I wonder what they’re thinking. I wonder what they’re feeling.

  I wonder if we’ll ever get to meet.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  [Undated]

  How long can a person go without proper sleep before they shatter into a husk of murderous animal emotion? Three days? Two weeks? How much shorter if those sleepless nights are speared through with gravesent nightmares? I feel like death, and I can’t tell if it’s because my head is infested with ghosts, or if it’s because my body is breaking down.

  Yes, another night, another fucking fever dream. This investigation will never let me rest.

  This dream was vivid. Different. I was a child, stumbling through a strange house that I was supposed to call a home. This alien edifice of hardwood and stone, smelling of unknown perfumes, the marble flooring cold against my feet. In the dark, the hulking shapes of furniture and statuary took on a sinister cast. I was terrified, but I did not want to go back to my new room and lie alone and still with my thoughts. I missed the bare dirt and attap roofs of the houses I was used to. Their airy interiors filled with laughter. Fear and longing filled me like seawater.

  I guess I was looking for something. I don’t remember. I stumbled into one of the reading rooms, drawn to it by some unknown force. Its darkness was interrupted by a box, brightly lit from above by an unseen source. The cabinet that contained the puppet. I remember it: a carved and painted rendition of one of the old Kuanjin gods. My father had it commissioned from a master craftsman in Chengbee. I hated that thing, its bloodred face and fathomless eyes and uncannily detailed robes.

  It lifted its head and looked at me. It said my name: Sariman. The name given by the ones who birthed me, not the ones who stole me. I walked over, powered by the burning need to know what it had to say. My curiosity has always been
stronger than my dread.

  I looked into its hollow eyes. It was bigger and heavier than I remember, and its long black beard was missing. Without that goatish feature, the puppet looked much younger, like an egg-faced child.

  “Sariman,” it said. “Sariman, you were right.”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “What your instincts were telling you. And you know how you can find me.” It gestured to the room outside its box. “You know this place.”

  “My parents’ home?”

  “No. Look closer.”

  And then I realized that I was not in my parents’ house but in another place I’d been before. The Gardens of Tranquility: the cloistered, verdant compound where the Minister of Justice worked and lived. This was Sanao Sonami’s home.

  I woke with sweat clinging to my skin and anxiety clinging to my mind. It was still dark, not yet a new day. I couldn’t sleep, and pain refused to leave my gut and my chest. I went outside and found one of the Grand Monastery’s quiet gardens, except that Rider was in it, contemplating the last moon of the day.

  I approached them cautiously. I regretted our earlier dust-up, which my anxiety told me was foolish and petty, but the air between us still held a fathomless chill.

  They didn’t say anything to me, so I asked them, “How deeply do you think Sanao Sonami was involved with all this?”

  They looked startled, like I had slapped them. “Sonami? Why would she be involved?”

  “She tried to suppress my investigation. That’s why I broke from the Tensorate.”

  Rider looked troubled and stayed quiet for several uncomfortable heartbeats. “I don’t know Sonami’s reasons for doing things,” they said finally. “But she has supported the Machinist movement since its inception. Whatever her intentions were with your investigation, there must be bigger things at play.”

  I was so stung by this patronizing dismissal, I nearly blurted, “What could be bigger than finding your twin?” It was only good sense and my survival instincts that kept my mouth shut.

  Silence tightened its grip over us. Rider looked so tired. Discouraged. Like the world had finally worn them to the bone. As I scrambled for something to say that wouldn’t offend them, they told me, “I’d like to have a quiet moment alone, if you please.”

  I realized I’d interrupted them in the middle of something private. Keenly aware of the fragility of our relations, I turned and left.

  As I reached the boundaries of earshot, I heard them whispering to themselves, “I will find you. I won’t give up.”

  In hindsight, I should have told the truth. I should have confessed why I suspected Sonami knew where the missing children were. I should have told Rider about my dream, about the puppet in my adoptive parents’ house, telling me secrets. But I was a coward. I didn’t want them judging me, thinking of me as an unhinged country bumpkin.

  So, I said nothing. I left them to whatever personal anguish they were wallowing in. I felt guilt as I walked away. But I was too chickenshit to do the right thing.

  It’s been some time since then, but instead of fading away like normal, the sense of the dream has been growing inside me. It’s no longer just in my head. It’s in my heart, in my chest, in my limbs, like a spreading fire. It’s telling me I have to do something.

  I have to do something.

  * * *

  Well. I did do something.

  I went back to Gu Shimau’s house. I was going to go it alone, brave the night guards and the high possibility of being caught. I wrote a letter to Kayan just in case I died. I fully believed I was going to the grave. But the dream wouldn’t let me rest.

  I was sneaking out of the Grand Monastery when Yuan-ning tapped me on the shoulder. Somehow, she was awake, and somehow, she had cottoned on to what I was doing. She said she’d woken to a bone-deep discomfort.

  I told her what I planned. “Let me go with you,” she said. “This is our blood-sister connection. I knew you were getting into trouble.” Which is total bullshit, superstitious nonsense, but I let her follow me down the mountain anyway.

  When we got to the city, she stopped one of the night-soil carts and asked the driver where we could find Old Choo. The driver was a friend of the old man’s and told us which house he might be at. Thank the fortunes, it was close by, and we found him quickly. So, here I am, scribbling these notes in a terrible jerky hand while breathing in the smell of the cart’s fresh cargo. Old Choo will take us to my destination, and I’m going to break in—alone. I’m not putting these people in any more trouble. They can keep watch while I return to that room and find what the hell it is we missed.

  Yuan-ning is explaining that her brother helped Old Choo’s grandson when he took a bad fall but the family couldn’t afford a doctor’s fees. See, generosity will buy you more than a lifetime’s worth of gratitude. I’ve told Yuan-ning that if she survives and I don’t, nothing else matters except getting this book, with all its writings and letters and documents, into Kayan’s hands. I’m sure she can manage.

  I think we’re here—

  * * *

  I was right. I am vindicated, again.

  I managed to get into Gu Shimau’s office. The mansion was crawling with guards, and not just the usual sellswords and ready louts. Tensors, by the look of it, and defected pugilists. Did he figure out what we’d taken? Or maybe he was just paranoid. Thank the fortunes for their blessings, which I do not deserve, because convenient distractions—small sounds, a bird taking flight, a stone in the shoe—distracted the guards at the right moments. I survived the journey to the office undetected.

  I went back to the shelf that had drawn my attention. Pulled out every deadweight journal, one by one. Behind one particularly fat tome I discovered a hidden mechanism. When I pulled the lever, it revealed a hidden compartment. Buried in the wall was a single, narrow shelf, and on that shelf were boxes, and in those boxes was all the damning evidence I need. Private correspondence between Gu and the minister.

  This was it. This was what the dream-puppet wanted me to see.

  Sanao Sonami was in this from the beginning. She was the one who directed what was going on in that secret laboratory. Gu Shimau might have run the day-to-day operations, but she was the one he answered to. She knew everything.

  There was too much to read it all. In hindsight, I should have nabbed the whole damn box for evidence, but I didn’t. I just took one particularly relevant letter.

  There’s one mystery I can solve. I know where one of the children is.

  * * *

  My dear Sonami:

  I am so pleased to hear the child is settling down in your place. Treat her well and keep her away from sunlight, and she should give you no problems. Or fewer problems, at any rate. Anyway, you’re the expert; who am I to give you advice on child-minding? You raised those two brats, didn’t you?

  You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve found a buyer for the last sixteen subjects. They’ll fetch a fair good price, but I know you don’t care about money. Well, there’s that. The last sentence in a book thirty years in the writing. It might be crass to say the experiment succeeded beyond our mad hopes, given what happened at the institute, but we got what we wanted. If the cost has to be a few dozen ordinary lives . . . Well. No one changes history without sacrifice.

  I’m sure you have grand plans for your new pet. Don’t forget all the things I’ve done for you.

  Gu

  Chapter Twenty-three

  So, this is how it ends. Alone, in the dirt, full of graceless revelations and unanswered questions. Death spirals through my veins; already my legs are pewter-weight and I can barely hold anything. Soon, the poison will claim my heart and it will all be over.

  After I escaped Gu Shimau’s place, I decided to go straight to the Gardens of Tranquility. I knew now that the dream I had was a message. There was no logic to it, just a sense of truth in my heart. And it had not yet led me astray. I knew deeply and intimately that I was being led to the Gardens by someone I couldn�
��t see. Whoever was trapped there—this child who Sonami had taken custody of—wanted me to come to them.

  I met resistance in the form of Yuan-ning’s practicality. She suggested we go back to the Grand Monastery instead and tell them what we found—but I wanted to barrel ahead. I always want to barrel ahead. This served me well in my career, and now it has been my downfall. I wanted to return to the Grand Monastery with my prize in hand, to show all of them they had been wrong. What an idiotic notion that was. I should have listened to Yuan-ning.

  In any case, I did not, so Old Choo drove us to the Gardens. I told the two of them, Yuan-ning and Old Choo, to give me an hour. Somehow, I knew it would be dangerous to get them any more involved. We arranged to meet in the copse of trees in the far west of the Gardens, close by the pig’s trail where the night soil carts leave.

  I got into the mansion without incident. I knew I would. I’d already understood what was going on, see. These piles upon piles of coincidence, it wasn’t the fortunes blessing me. It was the doing of this child. That’s why Gu said they succeeded. That’s why Sanao Sonami sequestered them in the depths of her home like a pearl. They had what they wanted: made a prophet who could influence the shape of the world. And now I planned to steal this precious thing away.

  I let their influence guide me, slipping through small gaps in the Gardens’ security, this way and that in the labyrinthine complex. I had only been inside the Gardens once before, but who needs familiarity when you are being led by a prophet? I would creep down the perfumed corridors, passing by carved arches and decorative wood lattices, until I reached a point where I had to decide which way to go. And I would just know. I’ve often wondered what it’s like being one of those fish or birds that travel thousands of li to the place of their birth while not knowing roads or directions or the names of places. At least I die with that question answered.