“Fuck you.” She felt too tired to play their games any more—any of them. “This is your fault. We got that thing on your chest, and I listened to you when I shouldn’t have. Now the Wreckers have my friends, and we have to get them back.”
“My fault,” she said. “What, among today’s many disasters, is my fault? Diagram, please, how I contributed to your decision to throw our lot in with Vogel? Is it my fault you handed my sister, and the Wreckers, a tool I gave up more than you can imagine to keep from them?”
“A tool? You mean Vane?”
Ley stopped walking. “Don’t bring her into this.”
“You stuck a person inside that knife.”
“She’s not stuck,” she said. “They can fix her. More’s the pity.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“I asked you to trust me.”
Zeddig turned to face Ley, as much as she could with one arm still draped over Ley’s shoulders. Pain tightened Ley’s features. She groaned. Zeddig had grown so used to seeing Ley masked that sunlight on her face looked strange. A spike of pity pierced her somewhere south of her heart, and she ignored it. “I won’t give you up.”
“We might have escaped without their help.”
“Oh, yes. All we had to do was fight off a Craftswoman, you with a broken leg, and one piece of possessed silverware between us.”
“They wanted to bargain. We could have lied, got close enough to hit Tara first. Kai couldn’t stop us alone.”
“Oh, so you’re on a first-name basis with the Craftswoman now.”
“You didn’t even try.”
“I was trying to save your life.”
“Don’t do me any more favors,” Ley muttered, and ducked out from under Zeddig’s arm. Zeddig caught her wrist; Ley tugged free, but in the shift and struggle her weight settled on her broken leg, and she screamed, high, sharp, short, and fell.
Zeddig caught her, and lowered her to the snake’s scales. Ley snarled. Cords of muscle worked in her jaw, and stood out in her neck. Her lungs filled and emptied too fast for the breath to help.
Zeddig cradled Ley’s head against her thighs. She slipped one hand free of its glove, and cupped the woman’s cheek. “Do you need something to bite on?”
Ley shook her head, but kept her eyes screwed tight.
“I tried,” Zeddig said. “I trusted your plan. But you would have thrown yourself to the Wreckers for the world’s slimmest chance at escape. They’d take you, and break you. The dagger can’t be worth that.”
“It is.”
“That’s not your decision to make. Your life is my business.”
Ley’s eyes opened, tiny slits baring wet black beneath. “How do you figure?”
“I love you, you asshole.”
Nothing lasted longer than that silence. The sky should have cracked. The world should have trembled. The Wastes should have become an enormous mouth to swallow them whole. Zeddig knelt, naked, above her, and any moment would come the scornful laugh, the joke, the deflection, the contempt.
“Oh,” Ley said. Her jaw relaxed. A dark space opened between her teeth. Her tongue flicked her upper lip. Her lungs filled, all the way down into her belly, and she exhaled mist. “Shit.”
Zeddig slumped to the sand. “That’s a hell of an answer.”
“I’m not talking about you,” Ley said. Steam issued from her mouth with the words. “It’s colder.”
Zeddig felt it then: chill fingers of wind, the serpent’s scales cold beneath her boots. She zipped her jacket, raised her hood. She cursed the sweat on her underlayers. “How long do we have?”
Ley breathed into her gloved palm, and watched the patterns in the mist. “The ward decays faster without the knife.”
“You could have mentioned this before.”
“Would you have listened?”
“Yes!” She was shouting. The cold insinuated through her coat—not unpleasant yet, just the first gentle pressure of a snake against skin, a promise of later tensing strength to come. Anger rose quick as ever to Zeddig’s heart, and she felt the weight of all the choices made since she opened that window, and before then, even, when she saw this girl on a balcony, armored in her loneliness. None of this was fair. She should not have given up the knife—but there had been no choice. Ley should have told her—but she had not. “How long?”
“I don’t know.” And, before Zeddig could offer more than a preliminary growl in reply: “We never tested it for this. The ward’s strong, we’re far from the Wound, but the closer we get to Agdel Lex, the faster it will go.”
“Ash.” Zeddig could not swear to gods, not here, upon their bodies. “Okay. So we walk east, and follow the train tracks home. Their wards should help ours last longer.”
Ley tried again to stand, perhaps hoping her leg had healed during her few minutes’ lie-down. If she’d expected a miracle, she chose the wrong day. “Then what? We knock on the gates? Ask customs to let us through? We’re not Wasteland monsters, honest?”
“The wall exists in the dead city, and in Agdel Lex. But there’s no wall in Alikand.”
“But the train tracks are in Agdel Lex. We can’t get into Alikand while we walk them.”
“So we walk away.”
“Our wards will give out in minutes, that close to the city.”
“So we walk fast.”
“We’ll die.”
Zeddig recognized the brittle texture to Ley’s voice—the broken pride, the self-inflicted wounds of failure. They couldn’t afford that now. “I don’t want to die. You don’t, either. So we’ll make this work.” She pulled Ley into a seated position and worked her arm beneath her shoulders. “You want to be pissed at me, you want to scream and curse, you want to never see me again? Fine. But first, let’s get home.”
Ley nodded.
“Stand on three.”
They stood—with a grunt, a hiss, and a weaving, wobbling result, but still, they reached their feet. Ley sagged against Zeddig’s shoulder. “Fair enough,” she said. “I can—” She shivered, tried again. “I can curse you just as easily while walking.”
Zeddig laughed at that, and they made their way three-legged through the Wastes.
Chapter Fifty-three
THE TRAIN, IT TURNED out, had cages. Izza, locked inside by Wreckers, tried not to ask herself what cargo the cages might carry during normal operation. The floors stank of reptile skin, and their bars were thick and silver-flashed. The Wreckers tossed Isaak in one cage, and she went in the other; Isaak drew back as far as he could from the bars, some kind of ward at work there no doubt, the fuckers. (Practical, she had to admit: the bars felt like iron, and Isaak could have bent them with his bare hands.) The Wreckers locked the cage with a big dumb padlock Izza could have slipped in seconds with the pin she kept in her braids, if the Wreckers weren’t watching.
But that was the thing about Iskar. Someone was always watching.
She didn’t talk to Isaak, and Isaak knew better than to talk to her. Anything they said would be monitored, passed along up the chain to the big squid-minds far away, and used against them. In Iskari clutches, talk as little as possible. They traded looks across the aisle between their cage doors: curiosity, fear, support. You learned to talk this way, when you weren’t allowed words.
She refused to think about Kai. They could hash their issues out later. She had other priorities now.
She needed to free Isaak. She’d sought him out, used him to get into this godsdamn mess, to help Kai, and after all that, she would not let the Iskari have him.
Yes, she had a duty to her people, to the Lady back on Kavekana. But she’d come here to help a friend, and she’d stay to help another. And, much as the thought scared her, he was her people.
The car doors snapped open after an hour. Lieutenant Bescond marched in, hands pocketed, chin up.
“Here to gloat?”
“I don’t gloat,” Bescond said. “I review. There were reports, observations, of strange events connected with t
he pair of you: a god’s touch, or a goddess’s. Care to comment?”
Whatever you do, Izza told herself, do not look at Isaak—keep him so far from your mind that Bescond can’t think of you at once, because Isaak can’t hide how he watches you with those eager yellow eyes.
“Got no time for gods,” Izza said. “Not yours or anyone’s.”
“It’s a question of jurisdiction, M.—” The Lieutenant cocked her head to one side as if listening to a whisper. “Jalai. Iz Jalai.” Izza tried to look as if it didn’t hurt to hear her full name, so rarely used in the last seven years, in that alien order. “Last registration at High Sisters Thornside, age eleven. We did not have great hopes for you at the time, I’m afraid to say. But after that, you disappeared.”
She tried to keep fear out of her voice. The Iskari liked their filing systems, and cultivated a fetish for data quality. “I kept out of trouble.”
The Lieutenant did not smile. “Your friend, we understand. Several brief turns at High Sisters for minor infractions; suspicion of serious crimes, though no formal implication, illicit augmentation, known associations with the lower sort of criminal. He was obviously part of the train job crew—no delver, no true threat. But you.” Bescond watched her like a bird, still and alien. “Tell me, Ms. Jalai. What do you know about foreign gods?”
In six years of running and hiding, Izza had never felt grateful for Kavekana’s flesh-eating laws, for the people who hunted her and her Lady, who would have killed her Goddess and locked her in a statue until she became compliant if she slipped. She didn’t feel grateful now—but all that fear and pain had some advantage: she’d become a master at staring grown-ups in the eye and spinning a tale she needed them to hear. “I don’t like them, any more than I like you.” The Lady chuckled in Izza’s heart, and she ignored Her. “I left the city. I wasn’t born here, had no ties, no reason to stay. But I was passing back through, needed a few thaums quick, and my friend”—not using his name, because Bescond hadn’t—“offered me a job.”
Bescond did not move when Izza finished, nor did she speak. She spun the silence out, built a space into which Izza was supposed to fall. But Izza had seen that trick before too.
“Courage,” Bescond said at last, “I respect, even if it’s misused. The Zur and the Imperials wouldn’t employ so obviously tainted a vessel; you have too much spirit for an agent of King Clock, too little bearing for a follower of the throne-lords.” The Lieutenant was firing into the dark, hoping her arrows struck warm meat. Izza wrapped herself in a foolish crook’s bravado. “Very well. You’ll learn to love the Lords, one way or another. You and your friend are still technically too young for our proper work-training programs, but High Sisters will care for you. Enjoy your stay.”
And the Lieutenant marched out, with a nod to the Wrecker who lingered in the corner, watching wetly.
When the door closed, Izza sagged against the bars, and turned to Isaak, still seated in the center of his cage—but he wasn’t looking at her.
No time to waste worrying about that.
She sat, and listened to the train, and tried to remember High Sisters Thornside. What scraps she could recall had been buried under seven years of willful forgetting, memories limned with stone and staring eyes, hardly any help at all.
The train stopped. Wreckers marched them to an armored wagon—two bound Isaak’s arms, but they let Izza walk alone. They sat across from one another in the locked carriage, under Wrecker supervision, as the world rolled by unseen outside.
“I’ve never seen Her like that before,” Isaak said.
She glared at him, did her best not to glance right at the Wrecker who watched them both. “I don’t know what you mean.” Subtext: shut the fuck up.
“In the escape. I saw it in your eyes. Miraculous.”
Isaak, I know you think you’re being clever, she thought but did not say. This is not clever. This is the kind of dumb that got us caught. “We almost got away, sure. But we didn’t.”
“Because I lacked—”
Don’t say it, don’t, Isaak, do not say the word, they can smell it even in your mind—
The Wrecker leaned forward in its seat.
That shift of rubbery flesh beneath coarse robes got through to Isaak just in time—or else her glare finally penetrated his reinforced skull.
“That is. I wasn’t strong enough,” he finished.
“Yeah,” she said. “That makes two of us.”
“You felt it, though. We—we almost made it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She projected disdain until the wagon stopped, until someone unlocked the door from outside and the setting sun’s light glinted red off the bare old bleak grounds she did, after all, remember, had seen in nightmares: the concrete towers and warden’s balconies, the cells facing in. The High Sisters’ turning lidless eyes glistened, affixed to every surface. Faceless ministers in tan jumpsuits fitted Isaak with his chainless manacles, and Izza with hers, and pulled them apart to the boys’ and girls’ sanitation zones. Isaak let himself be guided, at first; he turned back to her at the last moment—fought, the moron, against the hands that held him, scattered the ministers and ran toward her. “Izza, trust—”
She didn’t look. She didn’t have to. She heard the bass snap as the manacles engaged and slammed him down to concrete.
She felt lidless eyes upon her. She did not look back. She gave no sign she understood.
She prayed patience—not for herself, but for him.
Kai might come for her. But how? She’d have to navigate the justice system, find one juvenile facility among many, and if the Lieutenant hadn’t sealed her file. She could pray—but the High Sisters would hear, and call the Wreckers. Isaak was praying loud enough for them both already.
No sense waiting for rescue.
The ministers escorted her to the showers, and locked the door behind. A jumpsuit, drab gray, vaguely her size, lay folded on a table bolted to the floor. “Disrobe,” the eyes told her, “and bathe. In ten minutes, you will be led to your dormitory.”
She shrugged, and undid her shirt.
The eyes watched her undress, passionless, unblinking, uninterested. She was just more meat.
Cold water rained on her shoulders and back. Shivering, she turned to the corner of the shower, where the eyes could not see her face.
Only then did she let herself smile.
It had been too long since her last jailbreak.
Chapter Fifty-four
KAI FOUND TARA ABERNATHY wrists deep in a corpse.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” the Craftswoman said, her back to Kai, eyes on her incision. She’d unbuttoned her jacket’s cuffs and rolled them up to keep her forearms bare; shadow gloved her skin from the elbows down, and when she drew her fingers from the body, blood rolled down the shadow’s surface without sticking. “Your sister’s free.” She reached up to adjust one of the ghostlamps suspended from the ceiling on insectile metal arms. “And Bescond has what she wants. So, that’s sorted.” The dagger hung above Vane’s corpse, at the heart of a silver wire lattice strung from pillars that ringed Tara’s work table. “We’ve done the best we could.”
“I want to know what’s going on here.”
Tara chuckled to herself, then said, wryly: “It’s good to want things.”
“Would you accept that answer?”
The Craftswoman did not speak.
Kai watched her work: the lengthening incision, the moonlit knife changing form, now thick and sharp, now serrated, now fine and slender as a needle, trailing translucent thread from a spool that hovered unsupported in midair. Tara moved with beautiful economy. Every incision, every binding, every ward she cast upon the corpse, she’d worked a thousand times before. She knew these procedures so well she didn’t have to think about them. Maybe that was an advantage. But the woman bent over the table, the bed, practicing her art, was not the woman who planted seeds in the Temple of All Gods at dawn. She was more and
less than that.
Frost blued Vane’s skin. They must have stored her in a freezer.
Tara tried to pick up the conversation: “How did you get in here, anyway?”
“I told the squid at the desk that we had business. The building brought me.” She did not shudder as she remembered the ripple of organic light that guided her down winding halls to this room at the tower’s peak. Stars glimmered through the transparent membrane that served for a skylight. “I hope I haven’t disturbed your plans.”
“They’re not my plans.” But Tara cut herself off. “Keep going.”
“I just want to know what it was all for.”
“Nothing,” Abernathy said.
“That’s a lot of trouble for nothing.”
“I mean, there’s no one thing it was all for. Everyone here has her own goals—Bescond, me, her,” tapping the slab, “even you. But all our goals required rescuing the knife, and waking this woman up.”
Kai circled the table, and dug her thumbnail into her finger so she’d have something to focus on besides the gore. Craftwork made certain surgeries easier: death was the ultimate anesthetic. Abernathy took her time. With a twist of her fingers she knotted a stitch, then sutured a blood vessel, then slicked muscles back into their normal course and draped skin over them the way skin should drape. Glyphs on her forearms and back sparked, and Vane’s skin bound once more to meat. Tara’s brow furrowed as she worked.
“You’re not happy with Bescond,” Kai said. “Or with Vane, or this alliance. It must be hard, to be a Craftswoman working with gods.”
“I’ve worked with gods before.” Sweat froze on Tara’s brow.
“Never the Iskari, though.”
“No,” she said. “Never them. And never here.”
“Does it bother you?”
“What would bother me? Their mania for operant conditioning? The Wreckers? A society that grows minds like kittens in bottles? The propaganda and the brainwashing, this gross tower looming over a city that did not kneel to gods for two thousand years, to punish its people daily for the part they played in creating the Craft I practice? The fact that the Hidden Schools never came back here, that the courts look at Agdel Lex and see a situation well in hand, no need to intervene unless the wars down south impinge on the flow of natural resources? The fact that Alt Coulumb has played its own part here, as a trade partner who didn’t ask too many questions? I don’t know what about that could possibly bother me.” She shook her head. “My . . . employers have worked with the Iskari for centuries. But this project was my idea. I came to see it through. I thought I knew what to expect. But. You don’t need to know these streets well to see what’s broken here. I told myself, this isn’t your city. Just see things through and leave. Then your sister happened, and here I am. Implicated.”
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