A-Ka blinked.
Heishi was confused. A-Ka gestured for Heishi to put the steak down and used his own knife and fork to cut Heishi’s food into small pieces. As Heishi looked out the window, he carelessly picked up pieces the meat and put them into his mouth to chew.
“Sometimes I wonder,” A-Ka said. “You don’t speak often, so what do you spend your time thinking about instead?”
“I’m thinking about what you just told me,” Heishi said.
“In your eyes, am I also no different from a tree or a bird?” Heishi turned and stared at A-Ka. That response alone seemed to answer his question, and the fight went out of him. “All right. I get it.”
He’d always thought that to Heishi, he was different. After all, since the day he found Heishi in the ocean, they’d almost always been together. By virtue of having traveled together for so long, Heishi’s attitude toward A-Ka wasn’t like his attitude toward the others.
“Oh Son of God, the Savior of the World,” A-Ka said with faux earnestness, “I don’t hold out any wild hope that I shall be any different from the flora… I simply believe that, perhaps, there will come a day when I will die.”
At this time, Heishi finally turned the full weight of his gaze on A-Ka. He nodded. “You will die, yes.”
“I’m not entirely sure about your body’s structure. Based on who you are, are you immortal?”
Heishi thought for a second. “I don’t know.”
“If you don’t try to make a few friends, then, after I die, there will be no one to take care of you.” He continued, not without sympathy, “Or, say, I were to die of an illness, or if I were sacrificed for the greater good. I wouldn’t mind, because I would be dead, but you might be a little lonely.”
“You should take care of yourself first.” Heishi also sounded sympathetic, for some reason.
A-Ka was tempted to toss aside the table napkin and stop humoring Heishi, but he really was this obtuse when it came to human emotions. Of course he didn’t understand the chains binding people. In the end, after thinking about it, A-Ka decided that this was not a hill he wanted to die on.
Heishi’s hands were covered with steak sauce when he said, “No more. The flavor’s too strange.”
“What? There’s no way this flavor can get any better!” A-Ka exclaimed.
Heishi glanced at the steak with its hints of red. “I don’t like to eat raw things.”
A-Ka examined the steak and found it to be about medium rare. “This amount of doneness is really good, though. Why won’t you eat things that aren’t fully cooked?”
“If it’s raw, it means that there is still life left in it.”
Sometimes, A-Ka really didn’t understand the logic Heishi operated off. “If you won’t eat it, then give it to me. Don’t waste it.”
Heishi picked up a piece of steak with his fingers and fed it to A-Ka as the latter was about to get up to fetch the bill. Not to be outdone, A-Ka ate the piece of steak and even licked and sucked the sauce off Heishi’s fingers.
Suddenly, Heishi’s movements stiffened. “You…” His breathing sped up.
“Thanks! I’ll go get the bill,” A-Ka said.
Heishi’s expression was a little odd—dazed, for some reason. A-Ka waved his hand in front of Heishi’s face, feeling that this had come out of nowhere.
Heishi came back to himself, then crisply snapped his fingers for the bill.
A-Ka smiled. “You know how to do that?”
Heishi answered, “I watched Huixiong and the rest do it like this.”
When the bill came, Heishi paid for the meal.
Back on the streets outside, the crowd had grown even denser. Tens of thousands of people had flooded this single street as if they were going to attend some grand ceremony. A lilting flute melody floated through the night air; it was a famous old tune called “The Shepherd’s Spring.” The people at the festival danced and sang to the music, following the flow of the crowd as they surged toward the huge plaza in front of the church.
“Feiluo!” A-Ka shouted.
Feiluo was quite tall, and he stood out even more with Percy riding on his shoulders. Percy’s eyes were still blindfolded, so Feiluo was probably afraid that the crowd would be too much for Percy to deal with.
“A-Ka!” Percy keenly heard A-Ka’s voice, and he shouted, “Where are you?” Twisting his head around, he tried to figure out where A-Ka was, but they were very far from each other.
“Let me on your back, Heishi!” A-Ka said.
Seeing no other options, Heishi turned around and offered his back. A-Ka scrambled up as he called back, “Feiluo! You guys came!”
“Don’t come this way, A-Ka!” Feiluo answered. “There are too many people!”
And more people just kept coming. Heishi, with A-Ka still on his shoulders, was swept up by the crowd, and they were forced to move forward. When they arrived at the central plaza of the Faith of the Stars, the lights had all been extinguished. Seeing this, A-Ka cried out in surprise.
“Put me down, Heishi!” he whispered, and Heishi obeyed.
As the two of them stood at the edge of the plaza, they held hands. A second later, a vast silver river of stars flickered to life in the sky, and the crowd began to cheer loudly. There seemed to be a mysterious power taking shape outside the sacred hall: The stars traveled across the sky, forming all sorts of different images before growing dim once more.
“My dear citizens, happy Festival of Spring’s Dusk.” Moran appeared on the tall platform in front of the church, both his hands pressing down on the railings as he addressed the crowd below. “I hope that the wind blows and the sun shines, the rain falls and the thunder booms, so that all of the living beings on this land can grow and flourish. I hope that the clouds gather and scatter, just like our lives.”
Everyone around them pulled out a tiny cup and lit the candle within it. The plaza fell silent, and only Moran’s voice continued, magnetic amid the elegant background music.
“I hope that all life flourishes…”
Moran prayed in a quiet voice, and the thousands of candles in the plaza lit the faces of the people there as they lifted their heads to watch the pontiff. A-Ka glanced to his left and right. They hadn’t bought candles to attend this grand event, which was an unfortunate miscalculation.
“Hold onto me, A-Ka,” Heishi said out of nowhere.
“What?”
Heishi stretched his arm out, so A-Ka grasped it. With a whoosh, Heishi spread the black-gold wings on his back. They flew into the sky, circling once over the sacred hall, and landed gently on the railings above it.
“So beautiful!” A-Ka sighed.
As they watched from the top of this not-so-tall building, the glow of the individual candles turned into a sea of light that cradled Moran as he stood under the stars, praying in a quiet voice.
“Mhm,” Heishi agreed. He placed one leg on the railing. Without looking down at the crowd, he lowered his head to fiddle with the bracelet that he had just bought.
Moran’s voice traveled up to them from below. After listening for a while, A-Ka shifted his focus to Heishi’s bracelet, where he found that Heishi was trying very hard to inlay a piece of something black onto the material.
“Did you want to decorate it?” A-Ka asked.
Heishi grunted an affirmative, though he didn’t look up.