Chapter 86: Ukai
The storm let them go like a fist unclenching.
Mist clung to everything - ropes, bark, the undersides of leaves big enough to be roofs. Lanterns hung from lines in soft chains, their glass still beaded with rain, their light the color of patient fires. The road had given up being a road a while back; now it was a bridge, then another bridge, then a platform that pretended to be a street. The trunks of the trees were not trees so much as pillars - brown columns wide enough to swallow houses - rising into a ceiling the mist was in no hurry to reveal.
The lead car eased to a stop at a carved post wearing vines and old knife marks. The Wardens stepped out first, shoulders squared, hands relaxed and not. The second car opened on the eight and on Alan, who had the decency to wince when he moved. The patch at his ribs had gone a darker color. The white-green light under his sternum kept its place, pulsing like an apology he didn’t know how to give.
A group of Ukai Wardens were there waiting - lean, wrapped in green and brown-toned coats. They bowed to the Neoshima Wardens and to the boy who stepped out small and exact among taller bodies.
Solomon let the city look at him for a heartbeat. Then the mask went on - not false, just chosen. He returned the bows the correct amount, his white sash catching lantern light, silver seamwork doing what expensive seamwork does. He turned to the eight.
"I’ll meet their Ruler," he said, voice quiet enough to make people lean in. "You’ll be summoned when I need you. Until then - don’t fall."
"Is that... official advice?" Arashi asked.
"More like... Universal" Solomon said, and the corner of his mouth almost remembered a smile. Then he let the Wardens take him along a bridge that had no railings and too much confidence, and he was gone into the mist and light.
The eight breathed in the quiet he left behind. It smelled like wet wood, clean sap, and something green that had been crushed and forgave you for it.
Alan shifted his weight and didn’t pretend it didn’t hurt. "Come on" he said. "You shouldn’t stand still on the first bridge. Ukai likes movers."
Keahi fell in beside him before anyone could argue, a silent agreement to catch him if gravity decided to try something. The rest fell into their own formation with the ease of people who had had to invent formations around worse problems.
They crossed. The bridge gave underfoot with a measured flex, the way a big animal rolls its shoulder and lets you know you’ll be fine if you behave. Through gaps in the planks the drop looked like a thought you didn’t want to complete. Mist moved like a slow river below. A long, pale bird the size of a child’s kite arrowed from one tree to another without touching anything, its tail fork catching a lantern’s blink.
"Don’t look down" Esen said, which was the same as telling Arashi to immediately lean over and judge distances.
"Hypothetically," Arashi said, peering through his lashes, "if one were to set a vantage up there- " he pointed toward a buttress branch that looked like it had been built by a god with opinions "- how many crimes would that be?"
"Several," Feris said. "Plus the one where I push you."
"Friendly fire," he mourned.
Kids ran past them barefoot, laughing, arms wide for balance, feet knowing which rope to choose without thinking. An old woman with forearms like braided cable came the other way hauling a basket bigger than Arashi, nodded as if to say "you are guests, try not to be stupid."
Homes had been grown rather than built - hollows in trunks with shutters of woven leaves, balconies that were really cradles tied into the bark. Ropes were not ropes; they were roots repurposed, polished by hands. Somewhere above, a drum tapped a pattern and another answered, calls slipping through fog like messages along nerves.
Alan walked as if he had learned the city late and loved it anyway. Every few paces his eyes flicked to the edges, to anchors, to knots - old habits relearning where safety lived.
Esen, who could be counted on to narrate the world at the worst possible time, said nothing. He kept watch without making it look like watch. The rings on his fingers clicked once and then learned to be quiet. Feris, who had jammed herself near him for the last three days like a cheerful shadow, bumped him with an elbow.
"You okay?" she asked, pitched low.
He snorted a small laugh out of duty. "It’s a high place. My jokes prefer sea level."
"That is not it," Feris said, and did not take the opening.
He didn’t look at Ichiro. He did not need to; the whole bridge had felt him not breathing. "If Raizen hadn’t stepped in," Esen said, almost to the planks, "we’d be carrying two bodies. One to Ukai. One back to Neoshima."
The sentence lay there like a tool someone had put down very carefully.
Ichiro’s profile didn’t shift. The wrong, brownish gold under his skin was an ember again, not a flame, but an ember that had not decided to mind its manners for the rest of the day. Hikari’s shoulder bumped his, just a little, the way you keep someone from wandering into a story they don’t want to finish.
Alan heard and did not pretend he hadn’t. "He should have killed me," he said, voice thin where the patch tugged his breath. "You were right to stop him. Both of those can be true."
"Convenient philosophy," Arashi muttered.
"It’s Ukai," Alan said. "We live on bridges. Two truths can stand on one plank if they mind their feet."
They reached an intersection where three huge trunks met and had decided to be neighbors. The plaza that hung between them was a net of wood and old rope and new steel knots, steady as a floor if you didn’t think about it too much. On the far side, a series of pods hung like fruit—ovals of treated wood, glass windows giving onto platforms lined with chalk scuffs.
"Vanguard," Alan said, chin tipping toward the pods. "Our HQ."
It wasn’t Lotus clean. It was used. A sparring circle sat open to air, a braided rope around its edge and a basket of chalk in the middle - half spilled, footprints making maps. Above it, a beam ran between trunks, a thin strip with softer rope strung as a guide. Two figures moved along it, blades blunt and fast, feet finding purchase where reason didn’t. From one pod, a rush of air - someone had built a wind tunnel the size of a corridor with slats that could open and close like gills. A student leaned into the gale with a spear and learned what keeping line meant when the world tried to fold you.
Lynea’s eyes brightened the way they did when she found the part of a new thing that would agree to be hers. "Everything moves," she said, pleased. "Training the body to forget the ground is stubborn."
"Gravity doesn’t forgive missteps," Alan said. "Neither do our instructors. They prefer you alive and embarrassed to dead and correct."
"Sounds like Kori" Keahi said.
"Except with more trees. And less pastries." Hikari added.
"Better views. Elegant." Arashi said, peering up into a canopy that turned mist into a ceiling.
A pair of Ukai trainees sprinted along a lower rope, clipped in with tethers that looked too thin until you saw the little counterweights that ran with them. One shouted something rude in a language Raizen didn’t know; the other laughed and almost fell and didn’t.
"Do you have a... Forge?" Raizen asked, eyes tracking the wind pod, the beams, the anchors, the knots - the city was a problem begging to be solved respectfully. "Somewhere that doesn’t mind ideas turning into metal."
Alan’s mouth moved toward a smile and stopped halfway because smiling hurt. "We have a ’Place Where You Ask Nicely’" he said. "If Ukai likes your plan, the plan happens. If Ukai doesn’t, the rope breaks."
"That’s... uh... comforting," Esen said.
"It’s honest," Alan replied.
They did not get to stay and stare. A Warden came across the plaza with the pace of someone who knew the weight of urgency and had learned to carry it without spilling.
"Ruler’s company," she said, nodding to the eight. "You’re summoned."
"Leaving already?" Feris asked, scandalized on behalf of every interesting object she hadn’t touched.
"That’s Ukai," Alan said, leaning against a post that was also a root that was also a wall. "You think you’ve only arrived, and you’re already on your way somewhere else."
They turned back across the plaza. A pair of trainees paused their bout just long enough to glance at Neoshima’s students the way dogs glance at other dogs - quick, assessing, curious, not unkind. Someone from a higher pod called a correction to a lower student’s stance and then apologized for being right. A bell - soft, wood on wood - knocked from somewhere you couldn’t see.
Back across the bridges. Lanterns swayed in the leftover breath of the storm. The mist had thinned to bands; between them, the forest dropped away in clean verticals and platforms that made a city out of refusal to touch dirt.
"Do you think they’ll like us?" Feris asked no one, everyone.
"They’ll like the part where we don’t fall," Keahi said.
"They’ll like the part where we - and you - shut up," Arashi suggested, which was brave of him.
"They’ll like that we brought their man back breathing," Hikari said, quiet.
Alan didn’t say thank you. He did put a hand against a trunk as they passed and tapped twice - once for apology, once for arrival. The bark under his palm thrummed, or maybe that was his own chest-light answering a city’s heartbeat.
At the gatepost where they’d first stopped, two Wardens waited - their faces polite in the way that means please come now. Between them, lanterns had been turned up a little; the light ran along wet rope and made it look like it remembered being sap.
Solomon would be on the far side of that light, in a room that understood height better than width, probably sitting like a grown man because he had to and like a boy because he was one. He would have listened and been listened to. He would have a shape for the day that wasn’t the shape it had when he left.
"Are we leaving already?" another Warden asked, surprised at how quickly the day had decided to be the next thing.