Book 2 — Chapter 1 ( Juhkna )

  I pushed open the apartment door, bag of Ogi clutched in both hands. "I got the Ogi! That lady tried to—"

  The door closed behind me. I looked up and then —

  I froze.

  "Hello, Kaliah," Yashir said.

  His voice was calm. Even. Like we were simply picking up a conversation from yesterday instead of meeting again after he'd left me in a death valley. Something closed around my throat — not a hand, not a sound, just the particular pressure of too many feelings arriving at the same time with nowhere to go. Surprise. Confusion. Betrayal. A horrible, shameful flicker of relief. Fear. All of it at once, none of it sorted.

  His dark eyes met mine. His two eyes shifted into four as my vision blurred at the edges. I could feel no energy coming off him — he sat in a silence so complete it felt like he was the one generating it.

  The bag slipped from my fingers. Ogi scattered across the stone floor, the sound of it bouncing through the apartment and then gone.

  "Oh no, what happened?" Wuying's voice came from her bedroom. She stepped into the living room and found me first — my face, pale and frozen. Her brows pulled together. She tracked my gaze across the room to the man sitting at her table, hands folded, waiting.

  "Who are you?" she demanded. Her hand was already moving toward her Cell.

  I couldn't answer. My heart was hammering, my palms slick — a full physiological response I had no control over. Seeing Yashir there was like coming face to face with the Titan all over again. Every instinct my body had spent a year learning kicked in before my mind could catch up with what it was surviving.

  All I could do was stare at the man who had trained me. Who had bought me. Who had left me to die.

  The man who had, somehow, found me again.

  "Ms. Tian." Yashir's voice was soft, almost courteous, his eyes never leaving mine. "It's a pleasure. Kaliah is my ward. I've come to take her home."

  "Kaliah?" Wuying's voice pulled at me.

  I heard her. The words just weren't reaching anywhere useful.

  "Kaliah." Closer now.

  "Y-yeah?"

  "Do you know him?"

  She'd already asked. I hadn't caught the first time. My eyes were still fixed on Yashir — on that raised eyebrow, patient and expectant, waiting for me to do exactly what I was about to do. And I, for whatever reason, couldn't help but oblige.

  "Yes." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "He's… my master."

  "Guardian." He raised one finger — a quiet correction, not a reprimand, just a line he wouldn't let me cross even now. He stood, and the full height of him filled the room in a way I'd somehow forgotten. "I appreciate you looking after her, Ms. Tian. Truly." He reached into his coat, set a small disc on the table without ceremony. Payment. "But she'll be coming with me now."

  "You can't just take her—"

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  "I'd encourage you not to interfere with the IM."

  The color left Wuying's face. Whatever those letters “IM” meant to her, it was enough. Her posture changed — not defeated, just recalibrated. Still protective, but quieter about it. strangely seeing her shift made me feel a bit betrayed and yet I could still see the hurt in her face.

  "She's not property," Wuying said. Her voice held even when the rest of her didn't.

  "I agree completely." Yashir's eyes moved back to me. "Which is why I won't treat her like she is." A pause, brief and deliberate. "Whenever you're ready, Kaliah."

  I met his eyes. Held them long enough that he knew I wasn't the same child he'd pushed off a cliff.

  He saw it. A slow elevation of his eyebrow came across as a sort of pride in how I stared back at him.

  "Take your time," he said, and walked out, leaving the door slightly open behind him.

  ---

  The apartment felt different without him in it.

  Wuying crossed the room and took my hands without saying anything first. I looked down at her fingers around mine, at the roughness across her knuckles from weeks of recovery, and felt everything I'd been holding back press against the back of my throat.

  "Kaliah." Her voice was careful. "How did you get involved with the IM?"

  "What is that? I don't even know what that…" I kept looking at her hands. "He just… bought me. He saved me. Then abandoned me in that… that place."

  Wuying was quiet for a moment. "He's the reason you ended up there?"

  I didn't answer that. We both already knew.

  She let go of my hands and disappeared into her bedroom without a word. I heard her moving around — a drawer, the soft knock of something set on a hard surface — and then she came back with something small cupped in her palm.

  A pendant. Pale green jade, carved into a shape I couldn't quite make out yet, its edges still rough in places where the work wasn't finished. A thin cord had been threaded through it, knotted simply. She pressed it into my hand.

  "I've been working on it while recovering," She stopped. Started again. "It's a Spirit Jade of your titan. It's not done but I didn't want you to leave without it."

  I turned it over in my fingers. The finished parts were smooth and careful. The unfinished edges were sharp and rough, like a story without an ending.”

  "Wuying—"

  "Take it."

  Her eyes were bright. She wiped at one quickly, like I wasn't supposed to see.

  I already had.

  "Thank you," I said. And meant it in a way I didn't have words for.

  She pulled me into a hug — tight and brief. "Be safe, Kaliah." A breath. "I'll see you again."

  "You promise?"

  She held on a half second longer before she answered. "I promise."

  We both knew, probably. But some things are worth saying anyway. My childish heart needed to hear it, and she was kind enough to know that.

  ---

  I dried my face before I opened the door. Stepped over the scattered Ogi — I mouthed *sorry* back at Wuying, and she waved me off, her voice already cracking when she said she'd clean it up. I pulled the door shut before I had to watch her cry.

  The walls were thin. I could still hear her.

  Yashir was waiting in the hallway. He held up one hand — *wait* — and kept me there in the quiet while the sound of Wuying's crying came through the door between us. Neither of us spoke. He just made me listen.

  Then he lowered his hand.

  "You will have an impact on everyone you meet," he said quietly. "Never take your interactions for granted."

  He turned and walked down the hallway without looking back, unhurried, expecting me to follow.

  I did.

  Just like that, he was teaching me again. No acknowledgment of the Valley. No acknowledgment of the time between. Like we hadn't skipped a beat. Like the gap was simply whether we had both waited out on opposite sides of.

  ---

  How do you fit where you do not belong?

  It's a question as old as time, asked again and again. Its relevance never fades as we find new places where we want to belong — and others where we need to.

  Like a seed of a Laylanni bloom, dropped from five hundred feet by a passing bird, landing in a rocky valley with little light and even less hope. Even there, the seed takes root. It grows. In a place so desolate, so hostile, it survives.

  ---

  In Osmira, Laylanni were cultivated in my family's garden.

  At night, Melody would walk me to the grounds and show them to me. Their petals — glassy black — reflected the moonlight, their inner cells glowing with Arc. It was by converting that energy and refracting the light that these resilient plants flourished, even in the harshest conditions.

  Yet in the daytime, I could never find them.

  One afternoon, Tobias and I were playing tag with our cousins in the garden. I wasn't paying attention — I never was when I was having fun — and I ran straight into the gardener, knocking him into a patch of flowers.

  He looked mortified. Like his life depended on the state of that flower bed.

  "Don't worry, I won't let my parents be mean to you!" I told him firmly, puffing out my chest with the full weight of my five-year-old authority.

  I don't think he believed me. But he smiled anyway, and the tension left his face. "Thank you for your kindness, milady." He dusted himself off and returned to the flower bed. Some of the ones I'd crushed sprang right back up. He let out a quiet breath of relief as he adjusted them into place.

  Watching him work was captivating. He occasionally reached into a bag at his waist and pressed something into the soil, like he was planting new flowers. My curiosity boiled over.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, crouching beside him.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. "Ah — it's called Juhkna."

  "Jook-na?" I repeated.

  "Very close! Good job." He smiled. "It's when we use beautiful flowers to fill the gaps in a flower bed, where other flowers don't want to grow." He pulled out a pinch of seeds. "These are Laylanni seeds."

  "Oh! So you use those because they grow well in hard places?"

  "You are a very bright young lady." His eyes widened, and he chuckled softly. "Yes, exactly. But there's another reason we call this Juhkna."

  "Why?"

  "Because these flowers are made to grow with little light…" He combed gently through the bed until he found one lying withered and lifted it carefully for me to see. "When they have too much light, they shrivel and shrink like this."

  It wasn't dried out like a dead flower — just dark and saggy. Nowhere near as beautiful as it looked at night.

  I learned that day that Juhkna was about hidden beauty. And hideousness.

  The lesson?

  Something that grows where it does not belong is rarely able to see the light of day. It must stay hidden. Discreet. Even if it holds extraordinary beauty.