Sister Iio stood in the center of the chamber holding a basket of red apples against her hip with the ease of someone who had run this ceremony more times than most of these kids had been alive.
"Take one apple," she said. She waited while forty-six small hands reached into the basket. "Hold it out. Stand still. Let them come to you. Don't chase." Her eyes found Karma, who was already leaning toward the nearest stall. "That means you, young man."
Karma was already gone.
He went straight for the biggest calf in the chamber, a brown-and-white bull with shoulders wider than Karma's full armspan. He planted his feet and held the apple out at the end of a perfectly straight arm and stood completely still for about four seconds, which I suspected was some kind of personal best. The calf leaned forward, took the apple, and sneezed directly on Karma's face.
Karma stood there dripping with his grin still intact.
"Thunderguts," he announced. He still hadn't wiped his face. "His name is Thunderguts."
Sister Iio looked at him. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She looked back at him.
"Traditionally we wait until the bonding is confirmed before we name them."
"Oh it's confirmed," Karma said. "Look at him. He loves me already."
The calf ate Karma's sleeve.
I took my apple and walked. A bison was a flying mount bonded to one rider for life. I told myself they were a resource. I told myself none of this was real and the apple in my hand was a prop in a story I was reading from inside.
In a middle stall on the left side of the chamber there was one smaller than the others, gray-brown with a white arrow on her forehead that matched the tattoos I would earn someday if I lived long enough. She lay with her legs tucked under her and her tail curled around her body, and she was already looking at me when I got there. Her eyes were brown and very still. I couldn't tell you how I knew she'd been watching me since I walked in. I just knew.
I knelt down next to the stall's low wall. The stone was warm from her body.
I held out the apple. She leaned right past it and pressed her nose into my palm, into the skin underneath the apple, and breathed in. The breath was long and slow. It pulled across my hand and up my wrist. The warmth of it traveled up my arm into the center of my chest and stayed there.
The apple rolled out of my hand. I didn't pick it up. Instead, I reached over and gently put my fingers on the bridge of her nose. She let me. Her fur was coarser than I'd expected, and warm under my hand. I could feel her heartbeat through the bone of her skull, slow and steady.
For the first time in six years I could not make this world feel like fiction. I couldn't do it. I tried. I told myself that she was an animal in a cartoon world, that the cartoon world wasn't real, that I wasn't really here. Her heartbeat was too steady. Her breath was too warm. She was looking at me and I was looking at her.
Mine.
She ate the apple eventually, then put her head across my legs and closed her eyes. Her head weighed about as much as the rest of me. I sat there under the weight of it and felt her ribs moving against my knee as she breathed, and I didn't think about bridges or how many years were left before a comet turned the sky the wrong color.
I just sat there.
Karma found me about twenty minutes later. His robes were soaked through with bison saliva and he was holding a second apple.
"Did you give her a name yet?"
"Not yet."
"Do you want to feed them together? I've got a spare." He held the apple up. "Thunderguts already had three of them. I'm pretty sure he's going to be the biggest bison that's ever lived."
"She's not hungry. She just ate."
Karma sat down next to me without asking if the space was available. That was apparently just how Karma worked. He offered my bison his apple and she cracked one eye open to take it and then closed the eye again.
"I'm from the Northern Temple," he said. "I'm Karma. What's your name?"
"Sonam. I'm from the Southern Temple."
"Is it true that your airball court doesn't have a floor? Like if you miss the goal the ball just falls off the mountain?"
"It has a floor. It's about three hundred feet down."
His whole face lit up. "That is the single greatest thing anyone has ever told me," he said. He sounded like he meant it completely.
He reached over and absently scratched behind my bison's ear and started humming something tuneless and happy to himself. My bison's tail thumped once against the stone floor. He filled whatever silence was available with whatever was in his head and he did it without any apparent effort or self-consciousness. I let him. It cost me nothing and it was close to pleasant.
The nuns collected us at dusk. Boys and bison calves walked together back up the spiral path. The calves stumbled on the stairs, which were meant for human feet, and the boys sent little puffs of air beneath their bellies to help them balance. Karma walked beside me. Thunderguts tried to eat his collar the entire way up.
On the landing platform, while we waited for our riding bison to be saddled, I walked to the stone railing at the edge. The sun had gone behind the western peak and the bridges between the mountains had turned into dark lines against the cloud layer, which was glowing orange and gold from below. The first stars were showing above the pagodas.
Three peaks and three bridges. If you cut the bridges, each mountain becomes its own fortress. I noticed it but I let it pass.
My bison had followed me to the railing. Her head came up to about my shoulder. She was looking out at the same view. Whatever she made of it, I couldn't say.
I put my hand on her neck and felt her pulse under my fingers.
"Come on," I said. "We're going home."
She followed me to the saddle without needing an apple.