Archive of Our Own

1

As he emerges from the cave, the sun is rising.

He leans for a minute against the dolomite outcrop at the opening of the cave, resting his hand on the stone, tracing the crystals trapped inside with his fingers.

Then he stands up straight, turning his back on the cave, and follows the sun west.

The gauntlet and sabotons he buries in a steel lockbox under a Joshua tree at the foot of the Nibel Mountains. The cape he gives a homeless girl he encounters trying to hitch a ride outside of Rocket Town.

He keeps the gun.

Ten Months Earlier: Junon

“You want in, I’m saying, you have an in. Ground floor,” Parvel Har said as the appetizers arrived.

Deep-fried pyramids of pastry dough filled with crabmeat and cream cheese, a local specialty, were followed by grilled eel in sweet sauce. Parvel Har poured cold sake, tinted green for some reason: “mako juice,” he called it, joking around.

“There you go, a drink for our modern times.”

The man watched, expressionless, as Parvel Har used a pair of tongs to drop dry ice into the sake, making it bubble and smoke.

“I didn’t come here to socialize,” he said.

Parvel Har, for whatever reason, didn’t take the hint.

“Too bad, you could use the food,” he said, chewing. “You kind of disappear whenever you turn sideways.”

The man rubbed his face, and twitched his cape closed around his shoulders. It was cold in Junon; tule fog rolled down the side streets, and the walls in Parvel Har’s personal bar were a little damp to the touch.

He knew his body wasn’t really affected by the weather—how could it be, after all?—but he felt it, some psychic intimation of his true age. His knee annoyed him. His bones hurt. He felt old.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked.

“Like I said, I’m offering you a job. You got something else to do, now you kicked all those Deepground asses? Drink up. Eat something.” Parvel Har glanced over the man’s shoulder, jerking his head, and a server hurried to the table.

“We’re waiting over here, sweetheart,” Parvel Har said. “Take his fucking order. On or off the menu, whatever he wants. You want oysters? You want a naked body to eat the oysters off of? You name it, I got it right here for you.”

The man shifted in his chair, and Parvel Har laughed.

“That’s a hell of a face. So that one got through, eh? Just trying to give you a sense of the possibilities,” he said. “I’m trying to tell you that the entire planet is yours to enjoy, you get in with the right people.

“Some folks call me a crook. That’s rich! That son of a bitch at the WRO, that ‘commissioner,’ yeah, now there’s a crook; he’s running a con, everyone knows he used to be a Shinra guy. Me, I’m straightforward. I’m in goods and services and getting stuff from A to B. What I care about is supply chains. Supply chains, sweetheart: what the world needs today.”

“Supply chains for opiates,” the man across the table said, almost out of patience. “Supply chains for scavenged Shinra weaponry. You want my help consolidating your power.”

Parvel Har shrugged theatrically. But as the man got up from the table, he touched his arm.

“Listen. Outside, it’s bad. Don’t lie to yourself. And it’s only going to get worse.”

2

He never wants for work as he makes his way across the Western Continent. He repairs cars, picks almonds, shears sheep, and rescues a chocobo trapped in a tar pit.

Once, for about a week, he works for a village that’s been suffering attacks from bandits. After that, he acquires a certain reputation: a good bodyguard, they tell their neighbors, kind of a helping hand out here where warlords are getting fat and the WRO has little bark and no bite at all.

The village elders thank him with a crown of flowers and pay him with a measure of rice; they’d have given more, he saved their lives, but food everywhere is scarce, they’re looting crops and burning fields for fun from here to Gongaga, village kids getting dragooned or willingly joining raiding parties for lack of anything better; kids like these, they tell him, sometimes find themselves attacking their own extended families, their childhood friends.

“It’s gotta stop, Longnose,” they tell him. “Ain’t no one but you out here even trying to help.”

“Longnose?” he asks, in a voice rusty from disuse and disbelief.

“You’re handsome enough, but you can’t deny, you got a beak on you,” the oldest one says.

Eight Months Earlier: Edge

The wind swept across the tarmac, relentless. The man paid his pilot—just a kid, trying to grow a beard to make himself look older—and disembarked from the little turboprop, the smallest plane he’s ever seen.

It was a precarious place, just a patch of pavement, a way for WRO cargo and diplomatic mail carriers to touch ground. The runway, perched on a high bluff overlooking Edge, was a dicey place to land; the pilot had explained it as he fought to get the wheels to stick to the runway. The wind out here dragged hard. You could compensate, the pilot said; the problem was when the wind changed.

If you miscalculated, your plane would go over the cliff.

Standing there, the man watched heat mirages make the buildings waver in the distance. Edge looked fragile and artificial from here, like a stage set seen from behind. He thought it, too, might go over the cliff one of these days.

A figure in the distance was stalking down the runway towards him. The wind whipped at his clothes.

“Where have you been?” The strain was obvious on Reeve’s face.

“Am I a prisoner now?”

“No. No! But I don’t think it’s fair for you to just disappear, not now. Not when everyone needs you.”

Edge continued to struggle with recovery. The population, decimated by Deepground, still hadn’t returned to the levels present in the months after Geostigma had been vanquished. The streets, built so recently in the wake of Midgar, already seemed derelict.

As the man began to walk away, Reeve hung on, kept pace.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not good enough,” Reeve said.

“It has to be good enough,” the man replied.

“You have an obligation!”

At this, the man stopped. He turned to face Reeve, who took him by the arm.

“You need to think. Think of what you’ve done, what you could do, with this power you have. The world’s out of balance. The WRO could lose its footing before it can accomplish anything. You could prevent that.”

“By snuffing out your enemies?” he asked. Reeve blinked.

“By… by protecting us. By securing our—“

“By ‘power,’ you mean ‘killing,’ he said. “You should just say that.”

3

“The Royal Academy of Wutai?” he asks.

The old man slurps up the rest of his noodles, and nods.

Otilay is right on the edge of the Western Continent. Ferries run all day long, servicing three different destinations and bringing cheap mainlander labor back and forth to staff the junk shops and tourist places in the old shrine towns up and down the Wutai coast. Otilay food and architecture are all over the place, as befits a crossroads town: meat and hides come down from the Nibel Mountains, seafood comes out of the bay, and the buyers and sellers come from everywhere; the local, which just replaced its thatched roof with beautiful blue-glazed tile, serves lamb stew, and soup noodles topped with clams, and a drink made of fermented honey.

“Yep. They’re looking for help. You should go there, Longnose.”

The man, caught by surprise, makes a noise of protest.

“How…”

“Course I know who you are, everyone knows around here. You, sir, cut a figure. We all heard what you did for poor little Mogai Village, back in June. Take the ferry over, I’m sure they’ll give you work.”

“What are they doing, out there?”

“Diggin’. Looking for something, I suppose. They’re big on history over there, haven’t you noticed? All them shrines and things.”

--

It takes two hours by ferry to cross the Altai Straits. Then it’s two days’ walk to get to the excavation site.

He pitches camp on a bluff overlooking the river the man from Otilay called the Whitemane and his map calls the Naga; he drifts off to sleep picking out constellations he dredges from childhood memory.

The next morning he crosses a swaying suspension bridge, the water in the gorge roaring and frothing five hundred feet down. Steep cliffs rise around him, their crevices harboring gnarled, thousand-year-old pines.

He stops in the middle of the bridge, feeling the wind push at him, and closes his eyes, so he can hear, and smell, and feel.

4

Director Gyaltsen is tall and lean, middle-aged, with little round glasses and thick dark hair in a neat bun. Although he wears an Academy scholar’s long, heavy smock, he’s not Wutainese, and later the workers tell Longnose that Gyaltsen started out as a goatherd somewhere in the Nibel highlands, ended up getting an advanced degree back East, and now holds the Cao Cao Distinguished Chair of Archeological Sciences.

When he shakes hands, his grip is firm and friendly.

“Welcome to our little show. Must say, I’ve heard a great deal about you. Delighted you’re joining us,” he says, in flawless Eastern-accented Common.

“Sounds like you could use the help,” Longnose says. Director Gyaltsen’s smile gets a little grim.

“Let’s walk and talk,” he says. He takes Longnose by the arm and steers him towards the dig. Longnose, a little startled, decides to allow himself to be led.

“It’s an extraordinarily promising site. We’ve recently received a, well, a sudden injection of funding, I suppose I should call it; and that’s let us take the excavations down to deeper levels. We’ve found remains that indicate an ancestor of our modern chocobo had been domesticated—they were quite small to begin with, you know, about two thirds the size you’d expect nowadays. We’ve found some astonishing funerary stelae from the Nomadic Period—“

“This place is that old?” Longnose asks, surprised. Gyaltsen glances at him over the rim of his glasses.

“Oh, yes. Older than that.” Gyaltsen leads him up over a grassy knoll, and the site spreads out below them, hillsides cut away and large, neat square pits sectioned off with colored string. Longnose estimates at least twenty people are onsite. “The new funding’s changed everything. But…”

The breeze feels good on Longnose’s face. He watches workers cart rubble and sort shiny bits of chipped stone. Someone is lying on his stomach on a ladder set horizontally across the mouth of a deep, narrow pit; he’s taking pictures with his phone.

“We’ve… had some trouble,” Gyaltsen says.

“Trouble?”

“Bandits, I’m afraid. Well, we thought they were bandits. They’re something of an occupational hazard these days, as I’m sure you can imagine. But in the last—ever since our funding improved, actually—we’ve had some—some violence, actually. One of our carters was rather badly wounded.” He shakes his head, remembering. “We decided the site needed protection, and, well, your reputation precedes you, Mister Longnose.”

“Just…just Longnose,” Longnose says. “It’s… not a last name.”

“Right. I see. Well. At any rate, let’s head for the tent enclave, and I’ll introduce you to the lead archeologist and the rest of the guards.” Gyaltsen hesitates. “And Lord Rao, at some point, of course.”

“Lord Rao?” Longnose asks.

“Lord Rao,” Gyaltsen says, “Governor Rao, actually… he’s the chair of the Cultural Committee, from the Provisional Government of Wutai. Not,” he hesitates again, “one of Lord Godou’s appointments, you understand. There was a prior standing arrangement. At any rate, he came out to join us a few months ago. He’s… well. You’ll meet him soon enough.”

--

“Rule number one,” Doctor Ng says, “don’t touch anything. Rule number two…”

“Don’t touch anything,” Enki says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the dining table in the mess tent, where the staff members Gyaltsen had been able to drum up are gathered for meeting and greeting. Enki has been introduced to Longnose as one of his fellow guards, and a likely partner; he’s in his twenties, but to Longnose he looks even younger than that.

Doctor Ng shakes her head.

“That’s Rule number three. Rule number two: no civilians allowed past the outer perimeter, unless they have a royal warrant. We’re serious about that. Because, why? Because those guys don’t understand about Rule number one. Keep ‘em out. Safety first, last, and always,” says Doctor Ng.

“Yes, ma’am,” Enki says, and Ng snorts. One of the carters, an older lady in a leather apron, giggles and nudges her neighbor, a truly tiny person with big tortoiseshell glasses.

“He’s behaving so nice,” she says in a stage whisper. “You did such a good job.” The tiny lady laughs; Enki rolls his eyes.

“Please don’t give her ideas,” he says.

As the knot of people loosens, and the cooks return to their gigantic rice steamers, Enki lingers, along with the tiny woman, whose name is Anu. As Longnose inferred, she is, indeed, his mother.

“Let me show you where we sleep. You, uh, gonna be okay on night shift? Sleep during the day all right and everything?”

Longnose, thinking of a certain coffin in Nibelheim, allows as he thinks he will. The three of them crest a low hill and approach a set of long, multi-person tents laid out like barracks. Enki motions him towards the tent on the far right, and stops to undo the flap.

“As you can see, we’re all in here together. Hope you don’t snore.”

“You snore,” his mother says.

Longnose moves to an empty cot, pushes aside the mosquito net, and sets down his bedroll. Enki and Anu are watching him unpack.

“So, do you always, uh, wear the one glove? Like, to sleep in?”

Before Longnose can answer, Anu throws her arm around Enki. “My tactless son,” she says. “Don’t mind. He’s a good boy.”

“Agh,” Enki says.

--

Everyone on the shift is armed, but his co-workers don’t feel like law enforcement or military. Militia, maybe, he amends; but it wouldn’t surprise him if they all learned to shoot by hunting for their food, or doing target practice while they watched the goats for their parents.

He and Enki start on outer perimeter patrol, and change places around 2 AM with Porter and Shih, who asks Longnose to call her “Smarts.”

“Hey, keep track of your ammo, you can get reimbursed,” Porter tells him.

“Watch out for Pit Six,” Smarts says. “I think there’s a snake in there or something.”

“Welcome to the night shift, my man,” Enki says.

--

The night shift is long enough, and the nights tend to be cold enough that one of the patrols usually breaks off partway through to brew some coffee before heading back out to the pits. The teams alternate coffee duty on different nights, and leave what’s left in the pot for the other guys.

“That’s one good gun,” Enki says on the second night, as Longnose pours out the coffee—not quite warm, at this point, but strong, and very welcome.

“It earns its keep,” he says.

“You know what that gun looks like?” Enki asks.

Longnose doesn’t reply.

“Kinda looks like THE gun, doesn’t it? I saw footage from that battle.”

“Sorry to break it to you, but it’s a replica,” Longnose says.

“Yeah?”

“Won it at the Kalm Fair a year ago. Sharpshooting.” He shrugs. “Knocked a sardine can off the top of the clock tower.”

“Nice,” Enki says.

5

Anu, Enki’s mother, works in Pit 36.

It’s not bad work, as work goes; she’s got sharp eyes and good hands, so they have her working on the matrix in Layer Four, loosening the compacted earth around pot fragments with a porcupine quill. She’s been carefully instructed by Doctor Ng and her graduate students in what to look for, when and whom to call.

“If you find something, don’t,” Doctor Ng had said, breathing hard through her nose, “call Lord Rao. Call us first.”

Anu’s first job on the site was helping to excavate a chariot burial so complete that they were even able to recover pollen from the flowers that had been strewn in the grave. That, too, went to Doctor Ng first, rather than Lord Rao. She thought that was fine with her; Lord Rao makes her skin crawl.

Pit 36 is a lot less flashy than Pit 10, where the chariot had been. So far, the most interesting thing she’s dug up is an amber bird carving no longer than her finger, but that was a while ago. It’s sweaty, dirty work, and slow, slow; but she thinks something special might be down there, at a layer deeper than chariots, some point down in the roots of her own history, before they first settled in a place, before the first gods came.

She flirts with Longnose sometimes, slyly noting the rich color of his hair, the shape of his calves. “Nice legs, nice young man,” she says; and then, while Enki groans in the background: “pay no attention to this old lady.”

I am your age almost exactly, he thinks.

--

He falls into a rhythm after that. He and Enki stay up all night, sleep all morning, and join the rest of the team for dinner in the mess hall tent around six o-clock. Food tends to drift across cultural lines according to the notions of the cooks, who find themselves feeding a team whose members hail from up and down the eastern Wutai coast, with a generous sprinkling of mainlanders from as far away as Rocket Town.

Longnose, the cup in his hand forgotten, listens: to the chatter in three or four different languages, the sound of utensils and plates, the sizzle of the grills. It reminds him of another life, sitting in the commissary with his fellow Turks, surrounded by the din of conversation, cheerful, ordinary; a promise, he thinks, a fundamental promise of continuity.

Longnose soaks it in like he’s sitting in a hot bath, and finds no need to say much himself.

Anu usually joins Enki and Longnose at their table. Today she has something special the cook whipped up for a sentimental contingent from Da Nadh Village, right down at the steamy and verdant tip of the island: a plate full of steamed rice dumplings wrapped in banana leaves.

They are, Longnose discovers, delicious.

“Lord Rao? You’d think he was King Rao, the way he expects us to treat him, so important, quack quack,” says Anu’s friend Leeni.

“Now it’s jade,” Anu agrees. “He says it’s a map, but why make a map out of jade? No one understands this man! And he’s not taking any chances. Anything fancy and jade, with carvings. ‘Bring it to me! Utmost importance! I’ll have your job!’”

“Quack quack,” says Leeni.

“Can’t get fired by a duck, though,” Enki says, looking worried. “Don’t make him mad, okay?”

Jade maps, Longnose thinks.

Maps of what?

6

The night Longnose saves Enki’s life, it’s moonless and cloudy out. They’re patrolling near the edge of Pit 3B when a bullet from a gun equipped with a silencer creases Enki’s forehead.

It turns out there are four of them, well-trained and definitely here for a purpose other than casual theft. Longnose, who sees in the dark, forces Enki flat on his face onto the dirt.

“Stay down,” he says, and disappears.

Enki hears a brief scuffle, then three sharp cracks. He yelps.

“Longnose!”

He buries his face in his arms, bracing for the worst. There’s a little sound: someone reloading, he thinks. And then:

“It’s me. You all right?”

“I’m all right. Sardine cans,” Enki gasps, pulling off his shirt and wadding it up to hold against his bloody forehead. “Shiva on a pie plate, you sure know how to shoot.”

Longnose grunts. “Lost one of them in the trees."

He’s picked up his flashlight and he’s examining the fallen men. His face goes still as he takes in the matte-black tactical gear, the titanium-cased semiautos, serial numbers conveniently filed off.

It doesn’t matter; it’s definitely Shinra gear, as Longnose well remembers.

--

He goes to see Director Gyaltsen in his tent the next day.

“What are they looking for?” he asks.

Gyaltsen, visibly uncomfortable, gestures to Longnose as he pockets his phone and gets up from his desk.

“Let’s walk and talk,” he says.

Director Gyaltsen takes Longnose all the way to the graveled lot where the trucks and ATVs are parked, almost half a mile off from the main camp. He pauses in the doorway to a tiny, abandoned hut, the inhabitants long ago bought off and relocated.

“I’m sorry for the secrecy,” he says, “but it’s all rather sensitive."

Longnose waits quietly. Gyaltsen seems to be trying to decide how much to trust him.

“There is a set of scrolls," he says finally, "that turned up in the Royal Library—they’d been hidden in a post-beam, it seems; and after Meteor—there was some structural damage, cracks in the beam… at any rate, they were discovered. The best guess for a date is about thirteen hundred years old.”

Longnose makes an appreciative noise.

“The scrolls describe a place—“

“The Promised Land?” Longnose interjects, a touch of bitterness in his voice.

“No. Not that. Not that.” Judging from his face, Gyaltsen seems to know quite a bit about Shinra’s quest for the Promised Land. “The Promised Land business. Based on a mis-reading, did you know that? The Promised Land is a metaphor. A poetic description of the state of peace and ease that arises as the result of certain esoteric meditative practices of the Cetra. This is why you need properly trained scholars, for Heaven's sake...”

Longnose looks at him blearily.

“I’m getting sidetracked, my apologies,” Gyaltsen says. “No, this is not a promise; it’s a warning.”

“Go on, Director,” Longnose says. “I’m listening.”

“The scrolls describe a--well, a secret place, where something very dangerous was buried. The language is archaic; it’s not entirely clear… but it definitely refers to a hiding-place for something… something that caused a lot of death, a few thousand years ago. A weapon of some kind—not the ones created by the Planet, no, something the Cetra made. The lines are unclear. The wind that takes life. One can only imagine what that was meant to stand for.”

“A 'wind.' It doesn’t sound like an object.”

“No, it doesn’t. Magic? I can’t say. But the scroll describes how a map was made, carved in jade, to be handed down through a specific family. They made the map more to ensure that people could be kept away, apparently. It was supposed to be a deep secret, not, you know, looting instructions.” He stops, his face unhappy.

Walking back to the site, Longnose reflects that Gyaltsen never once said the name Lord Rao.

He didn’t have to, he thinks.

--

It’s not a week later when Anu, dawdling behind after dinner, asks him to take a walk out to Pit 36.

“If she proposes, marry her, she’s a great cook!” Leeni cries. Enki hides his face in his hands.

Longnose follows Anu along the planked walkway that separates Pit 35 from Pit 36. On the far side of Pit 36 is a copse of wild plum trees. She doesn’t say anything until they are almost hidden from the camp within its twisting branches.

“Enki’s head’s fine,” she says in a sudden rush.

“That’s good,” Longnose says. “Good to hear.”

“That attack was bad. They’ve all been so bad. Enki…”

She stops abruptly, and pushes a small wrapped bundle into his hands.

“What—what’s this?”

“I dug it up in Pit 36 this afternoon. Nomad layer,” she says. “It’s really old. And I think…” She stops, distressed, won’t meet his eyes.

“Anu,” Longnose says quietly, “what’s the matter?”

“I want to thank you so much,” she says. Her smile falters a little. “And then, I give you this. Kind of a terrible present,” she whispers, “but… see…” She wipes her hands on her overalls and hugs herself for a second. “I think, I have a feeling,” she says. “I’d give it to Doctor Ng, or even the Director, but… I’m afraid, Longnose.”

Longnose looks down at her gravely; then he puts the bundle in his pocket.

“I understand,” he says.

After she’s gone, as the light dwindles, he leans against a plum tree and unwraps the cloth, which he recognizes as a dish towel from the kitchen.

The disk, no bigger than his palm, is weathered pale jade, swirled with clouds and marked on both sides with a tiny, precise seal script. Longnose runs his finger along an irregular contour that staggers across the obverse face of the disk.

It looks like a coastline, or a road.

7

The thing stays in Longnose’s pocket for almost a week. He doesn’t tell Gyaltsen, or Doctor Ng. He’s taken to walking on his own after dinner; he sits under the trees by Pit 36, looking at the glyphs, studying the line that might signify a place.

He notes the few marks he recognizes, bits that resemble the ancient pictograms he'd encountered and even studied a bit, back in his Turk days, when he had a job guarding one of President Shinra’s pet scientists, a man obsessed with the Promised Land. He runs his fingers over the symbol for “wind,” the symbol for “ghost”; he looks at scattered pockmarks that could be islands, incised in the jade.

Ghost wind, he thinks.

When he sleeps, he dreams of weapons; he tests the sharp edge of a sword.

--

“I hope you will cooperate,” Rao says.

He’s a small, tidy man with bloodshot eyes; his tent, fitted out like an office, is immaculate. He'd sent the summons by messenger, and he didn't bother to introduce himself when Longnose arrived.

Longnose stares at the shot glasses, half-filled with whiskey, that Rao’s placed on the desk between them.

It’s pushing eight o-clock, and Longnose ought to be reporting for the start of his shift; Rao doesn’t seem to care about that.

“Cooperate?” Longnose asks.

“You like whiskey?” Rao asks.

“No.”

“Take it,” Rao says. It’s not a request.

Longnose shrugs, picks up the glass, sits down.

“There are some very obstructive people being tolerated on this worksite,” Rao says. “Do you understand? Do you understand ‘obstructive?’ They are bad influences. If you make friends with them, it will make things hard, very hard. I hope you understand.

“You have a very simple job. Your job is to protect. It is not your job to chat with others. It is not your job to cultivate people with mistaken ideas.” Rao drinks, and gestures at Longnose. “Drink.”

Longnose drinks. The whiskey is excellent.

“The person you need to make friends with,” Rao says, “is me. If you like your job…” he trails off delicately, and drinks again.

Anger is stirring in Longnose now, anger he hasn’t felt for a long, long time.

“What is it you want, Rao?” he asks. Rao’s eyebrows ascend.

“Lord Rao. Governor Rao. Sir to you! I oversee the department that hired the fool of a man who administers this worksite! As for what I want, it is precisely, exactly what you ought to want. You have made a terrible mistake befriending these people. But since you have…”

Rao leans back in his chair. Longnose hears the creak of the wooden legs.

“Since you have, you can be useful. I know they’re hiding things. Things have been discovered that are criminally being kept secret. Your job is to protect this operation and you can succeed at your job by disclosing such unlawful secret acts. Do you understand?”

Longnose finishes the whiskey and sets the shot glass on Rao’s desk.

“Sure,” he says.

“Your insolence demonstrates that you are very stupid,” Rao says. “There are forces at work here you can scarcely imagine.”

The thing that’s been crackling just beneath the surface of Longnose’s awareness emerges all at once, vibrating with fury.

He puts his hands on Rao’s desk, and stands up. His ears are ringing. He smells ozone: an incipient lightning strike, he thinks. He’s not sure he’s still human. Rao’s face is white.

“That’s enough,” he says; to Rao or himself, he’s not sure. “My shift is starting. Are we done here?”

“Get out of my tent,” Rao says in a feeble voice.

Six Months Earlier: Healen

“I understand,” Rufus said, “that Chaos no longer dwells within your body.”

The man twitched an eyebrow.

“You sound disappointed,” he said.

“On the other hand,” Rufus continued, “I’ve been informed that you have achieved unprecedented control over your transformations.”

The man smiled humorlessly.

“You want to see?”

“You shouldn’t deny that part of yourself,” Rufus said. “In a way, it’s a talent… a gift.”

The man, instead of answering, turned his face away.

Even though it was still quite cold, the lawns around Healen had begun to show little flowers; hyacinth and crocus bloomed on the edges of paths. Here in the south-facing conservatory, it was warm enough to grow tropical plants.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Rufus said. He held a cup and saucer out to the man. “Tea?”

“Get to the point, Rufus,” the man said.

“I’ve had a life that’s given me the opportunity to think about why I’m here,” Rufus said. “My purpose on the Planet is simple: I’m here to restore order. I use the means at my disposal to do that. You served my father for years,” Rufus said. “You had a stellar record, in fact.”

“In other words, I’d be a useful tool,” the man said.

“Is that so terrible?”

“I’m not a tool, Rufus,” the man said in a soft, dangerous voice. “And if this is a job offer, the answer is no.”

If the response bothered him, Rufus didn’t let it show; he lifted his cup to his lips and drank, and they lapsed into silence.

The man looked out the window at the pale light, the gentled world. He watched a spotted dog prowl the edge of the greensward, moving for the trees.

“Either you’re a tool, or you’re a conquerer in your own right,” Rufus said finally. “Either you serve a will whose intentions you respect, or you impose your own will. Your power makes any other alternative impossible.”

“A master, or a slave,” the man murmured.

Rufus tilted his head to one side. He’s much more intimidating than his father, the man thought, no matter how young he is; and he’s much, much smarter.

“You make it sound awful,” Rufus said. “It’s the path to order.”

“It hasn’t changed my answer,” the man said.

8

It’s seven in the morning and the rest of the night shift is fast asleep when Longnose finally makes up his mind.

He draws on his battered leather jacket, feeling the bundle, still in the left front pocket, with his fingers. He carries his work boots outside, so as not to wake Enki with his footsteps; he laces them up in the shadow of the tent’s awning. Then he walks, heading for the perimeter.

The air’s fresh and cold in his face; autumn’s near, Longnose thinks, or as close to autumn as it gets at this latitude, surrounded by evergreen trees. He follows the high ridge toward the road, watching a vast cloud of starlings wheel and turn; for a second they almost seem a single living thing, big enough to blot out the sun.

He lets the path take him back down into a shivering forest of bamboo, lets the leaves brush his face.

When he makes it to the Whitemane Gorge, the light is already coming through the trees at an oblique angle. The sound of the water is loud; it grows as he crosses the bridge, and he can’t hear the birds anymore.

Longnose halts, looking down at the water, turning the jade map over in his fingers. “Damn it,” he whispers. “I don’t know what else to do. Too many of us are fools."

Air whistles through the wooden slats of the bridge. The water beneath his feet roars; it feels like a force of its own.

"I’ve heard river gods are kind. Please... keep this safe. Keep it until we... until we learn how to be better."

Who am I talking to? he wonders, and lets the jade map drop from his fingers.

Longnose turns to go, and there, standing at the end of the suspension bridge, in an impeccable suit and blue-lensed aviator sunglasses, is Tseng of the Turks.

As he approaches, Tseng slowly and deliberately withdraws his phone from his jacket, holding it to his ear. His voice floats down the bridge on the wind.

“It’s Tseng. You requested a report regarding the jade map.”

Vincent Valentine’s fingers drift to his holstered gun.

“I’m afraid you’ve been misled,” Tseng says into the phone, as Vincent draws abreast of him. “Lord Rao… well. It’s obvious that Rao has his own reasons for suggesting… yes. No, it’s not here.” He removes his sunglasses as he talks, closing them with one hand and depositing them in his breast pocket. “If I may speak freely, I’ve always felt the evidence for its existing at all was tenuous.”

Vincent comes to a halt next to Tseng, clasps his hands behind his back, and waits.

“We’ll maintain our holding pattern,” Tseng says, “but if you really want to press on, I’d suggest you consider the alternate site Doctor Angharad mentioned in her report. Of course. I understand. Yes. I’m glad you think so, sir.” He pauses to listen, and then chuckles. “I’ll convey the sentiment to Director Gyaltsen. Perhaps if he’s lucky, they’ll have another chariot burial one of these days.”

Tseng puts away his phone, glances at Vincent.

“You’re looking well, Longnose,” he says.

Vincent just looks at him, one eyebrow up.

“It’s a shame about the map,” Tseng says. “I’m pretty sure it qualified as a Significant Cultural Property of Wutai.”

“You would have put it in Lord Godou’s hands?” Vincent asks.

Tseng is silent for a long moment.

“No,” he says finally.

“Ah,” Vincent says.

--

Reno gets them most of the way back, taking them overland in a filthy but capable six-wheeled ATV. About a mile away from their destination, he pulls over.

“I’m not actually here,” he explains. “Staying off-site. Lurking, and so forth. If you come across me on your patrol, please do not shoot me, okay?”

“Stay safe,” Tseng tells him, and briefly squeezes his shoulder. “I’ll call soon.”

Reno grins.

“Did I, or did I not say it would go down like this?”

“You did,” Tseng says.

--

The two of them walk the rest of the way in companionable silence.

It’s dusk, and the evening star is low and bright in the sky when they pass the string of prayer flags that marks the outer perimeter of the excavation site. Finally Tseng asks: “What will you do now?”

He’s quiet for a moment. He closes his eyes; in his mind’s eye he sees the gorge, the Naga playing below in its froth of whitewater. He imagines it curling around him; he imagines thriving there.

He says, “There are some very persistent bandits plaguing this area. And they haven’t finished excavating Pit 36.”

“Ah,” Tseng says.