8

  The rain had stopped. Seaweed hadn’t.

  Jundra listened as the boy rambled on about what Kirom had been up to over the st few years in the Pass. Back then, he was just another Accept. Supposed to be on a routine errand, same as the rest. But he didn’t leave. He stayed. Weeks. Months, even. Drifted between huts like a stray cousin too polite to kick out. Fixed roofs after the hailstorm. Helped monks and shamans prep for rituals nobody really cared about. Walked with the warden boys through the eastern ridges, where things even weirder than floating stones happened.

  And Kirom would ask questions. Strange ones. About stories, poems, old nan tales and rites. “Not snobbish interrogation, no no,” Seaweed had insisted. “More like he was trying to remember something, yah.” His eyes squinted like he was still figuring it out.

  Seaweed paused and looked at Jundra.

  “You think he’s a complete asshole, don’t ya?” The boy said.

  Jundra looked back at him. “And now you think I’m a complete ass.”

  Seaweed gave a crooked smile. “Maybe? Look, he weird. You weird. I’m just a kid, yah?”

  Jundra then remembered she didn’t have to care. “Alright. Hand it over.”

  Seaweed spread his hands. “Not from me this time. They want it clean and quiet.”

  Jundra blinked. “Then the hell am I doing squatting by a jackfruit stall listening to you?”

  “Try squatting by the dome in that temple of the Six, yah?”

  Jundra grumbled and nodded.

  Seaweed stood. “Well, I did my bit. I’m off, yah.”

  Jundra didn’t look at him. “Yeah. Better. Thanks for nothing, yah.”

  He adjusted the strap across his shoulder and gnced once at the market around them — full of noise, smoke, and a donkey somewhere screaming like it saw death.

  “Wait,” Jundra called out.

  “Yah, saani?”

  Jundra jerked her chin toward the square, where the crowd had thickened into a knot of color and noise.

  Women had painted their faces ash-white, thick bck lines trailing from their lips down to their chests like open wounds. Children ran past in oversized masks — jagged teeth, bloated eyes. A group of men busied themselves stringing a neckce of bones onto a dead ape’s neck.

  “What’s with that?” Jundra asked.

  Seaweed followed her gaze. “Ah. Asupaa-raga, yah. Moon-shaming festival.”

  Jundra blinked. “Moon-shaming what?”

  “Yah.” Seaweed said. “You know. We guilt the Moon for days and nights until she tells us where the frog went. Or chase her away for good, yah. She hates ugliness, so we dress the part. Masks, rot, noise. Corpses if we can find one. Gibbon this year. Still warm.”

  Jundra stared as the group propped the dressed-up carcass onto a painted cart. “Right.”

  Seaweed shrugged. “Try not to murder anyone on the way, yah, saani? We are good with one dead gibbon.”

  The boy vanished before she could respond.

  Jundra stayed crouched for a moment longer, then stood up.

  The masked demons had multiplied. A group of older boys cussed and ughed up at the pale moon, faint in the daylight sky. The noises she and Va heard st night made too much sense now. It had all been prelude. The Pass had been winding up for days — for this.

  Of course they were about to shame the full moon out of the sky.

  Or maybe it was to find a frog. Or both. She wasn’t sure anymore.

  Jundra adjusted the strap of her shoulder pack, checked her knife — habit, again — and started moving. The crowd swallowed her easily. No one looked twice at another woman in worn traveler’s cloth and mud-spshed boots. The only thing that might have marked her out was the stillness in her eyes, the way she didn’t blink as often, didn’t ugh when the others cursed the sky.

  She cut through the main square and followed a side road that curved toward the temple of the Six. A few folks nodded at her out of instinct. Trade town manners — acknowledge everyone without looking too long.

  The temple sat low on the slope, tucked into a hollow in the nd like a stone folded in a palm. Not a grand pce. Just a cluster of dome-roofed buildings and bckened wood halls, darkened from years of sun and smoke.

  A wet rasp met her at the gate, twig-brush scraping against stone. A monk was sweeping leaves off the steps. He looked up, smiled, said nothing. She gave a nod and passed by.

  Inside, dogs slept like they owned the floor. Chickens wandered, chicks wobbling behind them. A one-eyed cat watched from a mossy roof beam, tail flicking, face full of judgment.

  The temple was quiet. No towering gods here. No marble divines with a hundred hands. Just six stones. Human-height. Worn into seated figures, almost shapeless now. Each carved into a pose: one covering its head, another its eyes, then ears, nose, mouth, and groin.

  Back home in the South, the temples of the Ten Perfections still stood tall. Grand halls with ceilings higher than trees, archways guarded by gold-pted angles with forty-two names. Statues of Enlightened Ones so tall they bent the sunlight. They preached godhood as a path: perfect your patience, master generosity, train your body, your mind, your will, and you too may ascend. There was music. Processions. Rituals where the dead were buried with paper maps to heaven.

  But here, the Path of the Six had shed its grandeur over generations. First the giant statues, then the silk, then the bells, then the long sermons and ceremonial recitations. What remained was bare. The Path wasn’t about light or godhood or ascension. It was about staying. Watching. Losing things, and then sitting with what was left.

  No path forward. No promise of divinity.

  And to think this faith had grown from the same soil as the Perfections of Ten. Same source. Different directions.

  Jundra leaned against an inner pilr, arms crossed. Sunlight spilled through half-shuttered sts, striped across the clean floor.

  It gave her time to think.

  She thought about yesterday.

  About Kirom.

  About that condescending bastard walking into the shrine like he’d sinned — then blowing the cave wall open like he was cracking his neck.

  Everything after was a blur. The quake’s sound still lingered in her bones, more visceral sensation than memory. The way a Hakee, an enlightened, just popped out of nowhere. The way Kirom moved. The way he looked at her, like he already knew her. She was the one who’d studied him. Read the file. Logged his dull little moves for months. And Va — of all people — caught off guard, whispering under her breath that the boy looked just like his mother. Her old friend, back when she was still a devoted in the Grand Temple of Bharanusi, the old southern capital. Jundra had never met the woman, not directly. She genuinely thought it was clever: to bring her up. Loosen him a bit. Touch a nerve. A pressure point to hit.

  And, divines above, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Kirom wasn’t supposed to be like that.

  He was meant to be dull. Processed. An Accept who slipped through the cracks and got a gold star for trying. Instead, he stood there yapping about Kripur’s indepedence like he was delivering his grand thesis. Like he wasn’t still wearing their grey. Like he hadn’t chosen the damn uniform. And the other thing he said — “Promises get tiring.” No shit. Like he’d invented disappointment. Like the rest of them weren’t already crawling through the ruins of dead hope.

  Then everything spiraled.

  Kirom had gone back into the Department station like a ghost slipping into its own tomb. They were supposed to stay together — easy cover, trader pair, mother and daughter, tight wraps and weary smiles. A role they’d rehearsed.

  Kirom had said sorry. “I’ll reach out tomorrow,” he’d whispered.

  Of course he would. Always on his terms.

  It was a forced hand. And they’d pyed right into it.

  They had split at the checkpoint. Kirom with the Hakee. Jundra and Va with nothing but heat on their backs and the sick feeling they were already behind.

  Jundra had climbed back to the safehouse and used Seaweed to rey to the New South. The handler would forward her message, and the headquarter would respond today. She made damn sure they understood the urgency.

  In the meantime, she and Va rotated watches. Seaweed and the other informants staked out the other exit. Va paid them extra to cover her angle. Jundra handled the rest. None of it felt quite enough.

  The mission wasn’t even about the damn Execute. Not really.

  The New South sent Va and Jundra to watch him only for what he might become — just one of many satellites orbiting the real objective:

  Harun.

  Kripur.

  Stopping the city from turning imperial under the name of Advancement.

  And now, the Accept posts around the City of Grace had begun to re-form — checkpoints, barricades, patrols. All of it tightening in the st few months.

  That kind of movement could mean war.

  And yet here she was, standing in a temple that spoke not of war, but surrender.

  She shifted her weight, stepped along the hall’s edge as people began to arrive.

  Older women with scarves pulled low over their brows. Young porters with mud up their shins, carrying baskets slung from shoulder poles. A few merchant families settled onto the woven floor mats. Some wore amulets of the Enlightened One. Others bore nothing.

  Jundra knelt near the back row, legs folded beneath her, spine straight.

  Three monks filed in — the same elder from the gate among them. They took their pce on the raised dais. The youngest monk id out a bowl and a water vase. The middle monk passed out small folded sheets. Verses of the teaching. Pilgrims accepted them quietly. So did Jundra.

  Then the chanting began.

  “He is Raga, the One Who Walked Beyond.

  The Purified One, free from all corruption, untouched by craving or pride.”

  Jundra bowed her head, watching through the veil of her shes. A trader’s boy was trying not to doze. An old woman next to him swatted his ear without looking. The chanting went on.

  “The Well-Gone One, who crossed the burning fields and did not turn back.”

  Jundra shifted, brushing dust from her knee, and stood. She moved toward the exit with the calm permission of one already blessed.

  Outside, the dome-shaped shrine hunched at the courtyard’s edge, stone rounded and warm with age, moss clinging to its lower half. Some believed it held what remained of the Enlightened One’s senses.

  Jundra slowed. Let her steps soften. Let her gaze drift. Inside, the chanting still held the room. No eyes on her. No movement out of rhythm.

  She slipped behind the shrine.

  A cigarette roll caught her eye near the base.

  Still dry despite st night’s mist.

  She crouched. Palmed it. Her fingers found the dead-drop tucked inside — a strip of bark-paper sealed with a wax-dab the size of a beetle’s back. She checked the seal. Unbroken.

  She slid it into her sleeve. Waited one breath. Then turned, the rhythm of her feet resuming their quiet tread. Just another pilgrim resuming her prayers.

  Back inside, she resumed her pce. The chanting had softened.

  “We bow not to a name, but to the Path he showed.

  Not to a form, but to the freedom he became.”

  Jundra unfolded the bark-paper slowly, keeping it nestled inside her prayer sheet like she was reading along. It was hand-scrawled. Tightly packed. Masked in verse.

  The cipher was familiar — rural phrasing from the Perfections, blended with the Six. To the untrained eye, nothing more than devotion.

  She read it once. Then again. Then a third time.

  “The Path of the Six — Through the senses, Through the self,

  Toward stillness, Toward the end of grasping, Toward the great release.”

  The monks continued. The crowd bowed. Jundra hid the paper back in her sleeve and bowed with the others.

  The chanting ended.

  The message was clear.

  They were to venture east.

  Toward the badnds.