The Winds of Tepr

Sen's spyglass is, in her own estimation, perfect.

It is also, in everyone else's estimation, trying to eat their faces.

"Ow," Pragya says mildly, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Why does your 'improved padding' feel like being kissed by an angry crab?"

"It distributes pressure more evenly," Sen replies, delighted. She squints at the palace roof through the other spyglass, the older, inferior one. "You just have a sensitive nose."

Pragati takes the brass tube from her twin and peers through. The three of them lie belly-down on the roof of a dye-warehouse three streets away, the tiles still faintly smelling of old indigo and rain. The royal palace—no, the requisitioned senate—rears up at the end of the avenue like a stone sermon. Banners hang from its eaves: the Baekjeon-kai crest, the austere tricolor of the Republic, and freshly painted slogans promising order, bread, and other lies.

"Ah," Pragati says. "I see what went wrong. The design assumes a user whose face is… flatter."

"Excuse me," Sen says.

Pragya taps her own delicate nose. "Some of us have noble profiles. You know, angles. Contours. Your spyglass is racially biased."

"It's ergonomically optimized," Sen protests. "For the average—"

"—Seop dock rat whose head was used as an anvil," Pragati finishes. "Yes. We know your sample size."

Sen hums, unconcerned. "We can adjust the padding. That's why we test on you."

Pragya and Pragati exchange a look over the brass tube.

"Did you hear that?" Pragya murmurs. "We're test subjects."

"Like rats," Pragati agrees. "But prettier."

Sen squints into the eyepiece, tongue poking thoughtfully out between her teeth.

"Mm," she says.

The twins are sprawled at her flanks like lounging cats, one on each side, chins on fists, boots hooked over the gutter. From above they look almost indistinguishable: same brown faces, same bangs, same quick, clever eyes.

They speak like a shared thought that occasionally disagrees with itself out of boredom.

"Describe," Pragya says, poking Sen's shoulder.

"The cannon?" Pragati adds. "Or your feelings?"

"Cannons first," Pragya decrees. "Feelings later. More explosive."

Sen, oblivious, adjusts a tiny screw. "They've put them on the outer terrace," she says. "Facing the harbor. Which is cute. Very linear thinking. They expect ships."

Pragya and Pragati exchange the sort of smile that would get them arrested if anyone important saw it.

"So," Pragya says. "We are safe so long as we remain in the cellars."

"And the roofs," Pragati adds. "Everywhere but where the cannons point. Truly, this is advanced tactical insight."

Sen, still peering, nods solemnly. "Exactly."

The twins stifle laughter, shoulders shaking against the tiles.

"Careful," Pragya murmurs. "Mockery at this altitude is dangerous. You might roll off."

"We could blame gravity," Pragati says. "It's a known accomplice of pirates."

"I heard that," Sen says absently. "Gravity is not a pirate. Gravity is a republic. It drags everyone down equally."

Pragya presses a knuckle to her mouth. "Did you just invent your first rational thought?"

"By accident," Pragati says. "Do it again."

They lapse into a companionable silence. Street noise drifts up from below: hawkers with thin voices, a distant hammer, the occasional shout of "Curfew notice!" from some unfortunate clerk making their last rounds. The palace glowers over it all, smug in stone.

Pragya rolls onto her back, staring at the hazy grey sky. "Do you ever think," she asks, "that if we had stayed in Begaya, we would now be debating drainage regulations instead of artillery ranges?"

"We'd be dead of boredom," Pragati says. "And plague patients. Never forget the patients."

"We still have patients," Pragya says. "They just have more exciting germs."

Sen snorts. "Did you two go to the academy? I'm so jealous."

"Allegedly," Pragya says.

"But we poisoned the ethics lecturer with laxatives," Pragati adds. "It was a pedagogical comment."

"He kept saying the body was a temple," Pragya explains. "We disagreed. The body is a latrine that occasionally does miracles."

Sen finally looks up from the spyglass, frowning in thought. "You joke about it," she says. "But aren't you two afraid."

Pragya blinks. "Afraid of what?" she asks, tone light.

"Of being apart," Sen says bluntly. "You always say 'we.' You never say 'I.' You keep both eyes on each other even when pretending to sleep. And if someone calls one of you by the wrong name, you don't correct them unless you're together."

The words land with the soft, indiscriminate cruelty of a falling brick.

The twins freeze.

"That's a very intrusive observation," Pragya says, voice suddenly sharp.

"A gross misuse of optics," Pragati mutters.

Sen looks genuinely puzzled. "I use optics for everything," she says. "Seeing. Measuring. Noticing." Her gaze flicks between them, softer now. "You built your genius around never being separated on purpose. That's a weak wall. I see weak walls. I like fixing them."

Pragya's cheeks flush. Pragati stares very hard at the palace as if she can glare it into collapsing out of sheer embarrassment.

"We are perfectly functional individuals," Pragya says stiffly.

"Interchangeable, even," Pragati adds, then winces at her own choice of word.

Sen opens her mouth, probably to say something worse, but a shadow falls over them.

"Are you people ever not talking?" Temej grunts.

He crouches at the roof's edge like a very annoyed gargoyle. His cloak is wrapped close against the sea wind.

"The bird man," Pragya says, inclining her head.

"Perpetual disappointment," Pragati adds under her breath.

Temej ignores that. Mostly. His eye might twitch.

"What have you seen?" he asks Sen, straight to business.

"Cannons," Sen says. "Badly placed ones. Also the senate's laundry line. They have terrible socks."

Temej exhales through his nose. "I meant military movements."

Sen gestures vaguely with the spyglass. "Standard. Double patrols. Nothing that isn't in Ta's last report. They're nervous but not yet terrified." She squints. "Unless you count that one guard who keeps scratching his rear. Something is definitely wrong in that camp."

"We are not adjusting strategy to accommodate a guard's backside," Temej says. "Sen."

She hums, eyes still on the palace. "Yes?"

"Naci gave orders," Temej says. "You are to stop feeding toys to Shan Xi until she arrives. No more spiders, no more jammers, no more… whatever that thing was that set the street on fire last night."

Pragya winces at the memory. "Ah. The regrettable incident with the reverse flame-siphon."

"In my defence, it reversed," Sen says. "That's the point of research."

"The point of research is not to turn half the fish market into charcoal," Temej says flatly.

Sen finally drags her eye from the glass and actually looks at him. Her gaze is sharp, curious, utterly unawed.

"I'm not helping pirates," she says. "I'm helping us."

Temej folds his arms. "You are a subject of Naci," he says. "You owe your allegiance to the Khan and her Banners."

"I owe my allegiance to the Slump," Sen replies. "And the Slump doesn't care whose face is on the coin. Kings. Triunes. Khans. They all tax salt and ignore sewage."

Pragya and Pragati exchange a glance. This is not the airy, distracted Sen they like to poke. This Sen has pulled out the knife she usually keeps between her equations.

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"I was born in a room that flooded every time it rained," Sen continues, voice flat. "I learned to read from stolen theatre scraps. I learned math by counting how many bricks were missing from the walls that were supposed to keep the tide out. Shan Xi gives girls like me brass and powder and says, 'Break the right things." She taps her own chest with an ink-stained finger. "I am a pirate of thought. I board governments who think they're better. I steal their tools. I repaint them."

Pragya's mouth opens, then shuts. Pragati stares at her hands.

"We didn't mean—" Pragya starts.

"—when we called you a hazard to your own face—" Pragati tries.

"I am a hazard to my own face," Sen says serenely. "That's not the insult."

Temej studies her for a long heartbeat. His jaw works.

"You sound like Naci," he says grudgingly.

"Thank you," Sen says, genuinely pleased.

"It was not a compliment."

"It also was," she says.

He rubs the bridge of his nose, as if massaging away a headache the size of the city.

Temej is about to retort when Sen makes a small, sharp sound.

"Ah."

Every head swivels toward her.

"What?" Temej demands.

She is back at the spyglass, all flippancy gone. "Movement," she says. "Big movement. Palace gate."

Temej crawls forward. Sen shoves the glass into his hands, not even bothering to adjust it.

He lifts it, squints, and sees.

The main palace doors yawn open. A column of black-helmed militia marches out, formation tight, shields polished. At their head walks a woman Temej recognizes from the crude sketches on rebel pamphlets and the less crude ones in Puripal's war briefings: Baek Miju. Her stride is not fast. It is inevitable. A long sword he has never seen before rests against her hip.

Temej swears softly in Tepr.

"How many?" he asks.

"Three columns," Sen says. "Plus runners. Direction: Slump. They're not going to the barracks. They're hunting."

Pragya and Pragati share a look that contains the entire argument they would otherwise have out loud.

"Shan Xi," Pragya says.

"Has to know," Pragati finishes.

Temej lowers the glass slowly. The muscles in his jaw flex. "I should warn Puripal," he says.

"You warn the pretty boy," Pragya says, already scrambling backwards. "We'll warn the beautiful lady."

"Try not to trip on the way," Pragati adds, and then they are up and running, twin streaks of motion across the rooftop, leaping the gap to the next building like they have been doing it all their lives.

Temej doesn't answer. He is already on his feet, already calculating routes to the safehouse and back, already wondering why the air suddenly feels like kindling.

...

Lizi sits with her wrists bound, back braced against the padded wall of the carriage. The ropes bite her skin; her side aches where the bandages pull. Every bump in the cobbles sends a white-hot throb through her ribs.

Across from her, Yotaka sits straight, hands tied in front of him. His gaze is fixed on the tiny, curtained window, as if he can will it to show him anything but the inside of this moving coffin.

Between them sits Hanae. Her hair is loose now, having come undone in the struggle, a dark curtain over one eye. Blood stains her sleeve from someone else's nose. She looks like someone carved resolve into a statue.

Facing them, Baek Miju rides as if the carriage were her throne.

Her coat is unbuttoned at the throat, revealing the plain, high-collared tunic beneath. The katana rests upright beside her, scabbard against her knee, her left hand on the hilt with casual intimacy. Her face is calm. Not cold, not gloating. Simply… still.

Next to Miju, perched with the composed discomfort of someone who prefers ledgers to vehicles, sits Seo Yorin.

She is smaller than Lizi expected. Slight. Her hair is drawn back into a precise knot. Spectacles of thin smoked glass perch on her nose—not out of vanity but because she has spent so many years squinting at ink that bright light offends her. In her lap rests a leather folio and a brush case. Even here, in a rattling carriage full of enemies, she has a pen tucked behind one ear.

She has already used it. A few lines of cramped, neat script snake down a page on her knee, anchored against the jolts by her thumb.

Lizi stares at them.

"You're doing paperwork," she says.

Yorin glances up, expression mildly curious. "There is always paperwork," she replies. Her voice is soft, precise, strangely gentle for someone whose signature stains hang from half the gibbets in the city. "The state does not pause because you attempted to stab it."

"We did more than attempt," Lizi mutters.

"You made a mess in one room," Miju says. "We will clean it."

"Like you cleaned the square," Hanae says. Her voice is low. There is no tremor in it. That frightens Lizi more than if there were.

Miju's eyes flick to her, then away. "The square was the surgeon's cut," she says. "You prefer the infection."

The carriage jolts over a rut. Outside, the noise of the city ghosts by: shouted orders, the distant clatter of a cart, the susurrus of a frightened crowd watching something they are not allowed to speak about.

Yotaka clears his throat.

"If this is going to be a metaphor contest," he says quietly, "could you at least tell us whether we're dying at the end? It would help with pacing."

Miju's mouth tilts, almost imperceptibly. "I wanted to kill you in the safehouse," she says.

Lizi makes a noise that might be indignation. "Rude."

"You broke martial law," Miju continues, ignoring her. "You attacked officers. You harbour a symbol the empire would pay good silver to put back in the ground." Her gaze rests, just briefly, on Yotaka. He meets it, chin lifted. "Execution would have been clean. Effective."

"Then why didn't you?" Hanae asks.

She doesn't say: Why am I still breathing when Aram is not. But it hangs there, a ghost between her teeth.

Miju's eyes slide to Yorin.

Yorin sets down her brush and folds her hands atop the folio, as if presenting a carefully prepared thesis.

"Because they are useful," she says.

Lizi snorts. "As ornaments? Political theatre? I didn't bring my costume."

Yorin regards her with the mild interest of someone classifying an insect. "As vectors," she says. "As forces. As… actants."

"Bless you," Lizi says automatically.

Yorin tilts her head, almost amused. "Everything that exists exerts pressure," she says. "A stone in the riverbed changes the current. A whisper changes the crowd. A prince changes the shape of a war even if he never lifts a sword. The question is not whether you push. It is whether your push can be predicted, and thus, incorporated."

"You think we can be incorporated," Hanae says. There is more skepticism than question in it.

"I know you can," Yorin says. "Everyone in this city already is. Even those who claim to reject the state completely. You obey curfew often enough that we know which streets to empty first. You avoid certain alleys, so we use those for transport. You will not poison wells because your own drink from them." She spreads her fingers. "You participate. Every day you continue to breathe in these borders, you enter into a… mutual arrangement with us."

"Arrangement," Lizi repeats. "Is that what you call it when you press a boot to someone's neck until they stop wriggling? A cozy little arrangement?"

"There are always boots," Yorin says calmly. "Kings wear them. Generals wear them. Gangsters. Priests. A pirate captain wears them when she decides who eats and who swims. The difference with the Republic is that we allow the necks to decide, collectively, which direction the boots should stand."

Hanae's laugh is sharp, paper-thin. "And if they decide wrong?"

"Then we educate them," Miju says.

"Then we adjust incentives," Yorin says at the same time.

They glance at each other. The difference between them is a knife's edge.

"You see?" Lizi says. "This is why your meetings must be so efficient. One of you says 'cut their heads off,' the other says 'wean them onto propaganda,' and you shave hours off the agenda."

Yotaka looks at Yorin. "You argued to keep us alive," he says. "Why?"

A flicker of something passes over Yorin's face—interest, perhaps. "Because I dislike waste," she says. "Killing three highly mobile, highly connected agents who have already demonstrated an ability to alter our city's equilibrium would be… shortsighted."

"I'm flattered to be an agent," Lizi says. "Usually I'm just a nuisance."

Yorin ignores her. She leans forward slightly, spectacles catching a stray shaft of light.

"You are not devout monarchists," she says to Yotaka. "You are not even devout anything. You, in particular, are a boy whose dynasty failed to keep its own stomach from eating itself."

Yotaka's jaw tightens.

"You know firsthand," Yorin continues, "that a crown can be a noose turned sideways. That it draws blades like blood draws sharks. The Republic offers a different geometry. Pressure dispersed, obligation shared, power as a road rather than a throne. Given time and survival, you can be convinced that this is preferable to clinging to the memory of your father's chair."

"And if I refuse?" Yotaka asks softly.

"Then you will still live long enough to be useful," Yorin says. "As a symbol. As a reminder. As a variable in my equations. That is my compromise. Miju would have fed you to the crowd and called it closure."

Miju's fingers drum once on her sword hilt. "We do not need another royal corpse," she says. "We need order. Fear gives us that faster."

"Fear gives us brittle obedience," Yorin says. "We need consent. Or something close enough that the difference only shows at the edges."

"Consent?" Hanae's voice cuts through like a blade. "What does consent look like on the end of a rope?"

"Like silence," Yorin says. "Most people do not rebel, even when they could. They go back to work. They whisper, but they queue. That is not just fear. That is calculation. They weigh options. They decide that living under our rules is safer than dying under none." Her eyes skim over Hanae, over the ink stains and callused hands. "You, of all people, should understand the power of a choice made quietly."

"I chose wrong once," Hanae says. "I chose to believe you could be repaired from the inside. I sang for that." Her throat works. "Now you use my songs to sell executions."

"And yet," Yorin says, "your music still fills the square. The people remember that the voice that denounced the monarchy now supports the Republic. That narrative… matters." She spreads her fingers again. "I am not denying the blood. I simply insist we read the accounting correctly. If enough people continue to show up to work, to factories, to militia drills, to bread lines, then they have, in a very real sense, agreed to our rule. My job is to align their agreements with the Republic's survival."

"You kill my people," Yotaka says quietly. "My parents. My nurse. Half the Slump. How is that 'alignment'?"

Yorin's gaze does not flinch. "A rotten limb endangers the body," she says. "So do rotten myths. The idea that bloodline gives you the right to tax others forever is one such myth. The idea that border tribes can opt out of imperial obligations and still expect protection is another. We prune so the trunk doesn't crack."

Hanae looks at Miju, at Yorin, at the way the two women sit side by side in the rocking carriage: one hand on a sword, the other on a pen.

"You think you're the humane one," she says to Yorin. "You think because you count deaths instead of enjoying them, that makes you better than her."

Yorin's mouth twitches. "I do not enjoy them," she says. "I simply do not flinch when numbers demand them."

"That's worse," Lizi blurts.

They all look at her.

"At least she"—Lizi jerks her chin at Miju—"knows she's a butcher. You call yourself a diplomat. You're both bleeding us."

Yorin regards her for a moment, eyes narrowing slightly behind the smoked glass.

"I see," she says. "You are more afraid of a rational enemy than a passionate one. Understandable. The passionate one burns out quickly. The rational one… builds systems that outlive her."

The words land in the cramped space like stones.

Lizi feels something cold slide down her spine. Hanae's fingers curl into her palms. Yotaka's eyes drop to the floorboards, then lift again, steady.

"You call yourself a friend of the people," he says. "But you talk about them like gears."

"Gears are honest," Yorin says. "They do what they are built to do. The Republic is a machine. If I can design it so that most people's built-in desires—safety, food, the ability to raise children without soldiers kicking down doors—align with its functioning, then I have achieved something your father never did. Or your pirates. Or your anarchists with their printing presses that burn more paper than they change minds."

"You should try poetry," Lizi says. "Less efficient. More honest."

"I leave poetry to the dead," Yorin says.

Miju shifts, impatience flickering at the edge of her composure. "Enough philosophy," she says. "They'll stand trial. The public will see we are merciful. Then, if they step out of line, we cut them down with everyone watching. That's better theatre than immediate execution."

"See?" Lizi mutters. "At least she's straightforward."

Outside, the city's noise has thickened. The carriage slows. Voices rise, not in the usual restless murmur, but in a higher, sharper register. Shouts. A distant crack like something heavy giving way.

Miju frowns and raps on the carriage wall. "What is it?" she snaps.

No answer. The driver's voice, faint through the wood, curses at someone to move.

Then the smell hits.

Smoke. Not the thin, greasy kind from cooking fires, nor the acrid bite of factory chimneys. This is thick, rich, full of resin and lacquer and old dust: the smell of something important burning.

Yorin's nose wrinkles. She lifts the curtain with two fingers.

The sky beyond is no longer just grey.

Over the city rooftops, at the end of the avenue, the palace rears up—and its central roof is blooming fire.

Flames lick along the carved eaves, running like rabid foxes on the wind. Smoke pours from the lantern gallery, black and furious, turning the air above the senate into a churning bruise. Tiny figures scurry along the parapets, bucket lines useless against the scale of the blaze. A tower bell rings madly, then warps into a strangled clang as the heat bends its frame.

Miju's hand tightens on her sword.

The Republic's heart is on fire, and the carriage lurches to a halt.