Aman knocked on the door at two, and entered, escorted. “Your brother’s waiting outside.” She walked surefooted in the bare room, in these Alikand back streets, far from the Agdel Lex she could no longer see. Ley pushed herself upright in bed, shifting aside tray, setting down her coffee cup. Aman waved her back. “We don’t have time for formality.”
“We can stop this,” Ley said.
“Maybe.” Aman nodded. “I bore your message to the other Archivists.”
“And?”
“It is complicated.” Aman did not look at either of them. Zeddig felt the scorn in that silence, the reluctance to share her difficulty. “We all take care. We keep faith. But some fear setting ourselves against Iskar. Some say, if you fail, it would be best for us to harbor our knowledge and hand it down, so at least our children will remember what’s lost, than resist and lose it all.”
“No,” Zeddig said, and Ley at the same time—but Ley closed her mouth and let Zeddig talk. Zeddig knew how the conversation must have moved between Aman and the other Archivists, their habits of preservation and secret-keeping, the need of generations under rule. “Aman, they want to take it all. If we—if the Families mean anything, we have to stand now. For everyone.”
She stopped when she saw Aman was smiling.
“What?”
“You remind me of your grandfather.”
“Aman.”
“I told the others, child. They agreed. Some faster, others with more reluctance—but if it comes to that, we’ll fly.” Simple words, simply spoken, seemed to have no weight at all. If Aman wanted to give them the force they deserved, she would have to scream, to sing. They did what had to be done. “Is that leg still giving you trouble?”
Zeddig saw Ley consider lying. “A bit,” she said at last. “Here.” And drew her leg from beneath the sheets. Aman’s touch had straightened the bone, bound torn muscles, but a bruise still cuffed Ley’s shin.
“You haven’t come up with a better plan?” Aman said when the work was done, before she left.
Zeddig answered: “None that works.”
“I love you,” she said.
They embraced. Zeddig breathed in, and wished she were a Craftswoman, to arrest her body’s function so she need never breathe out again. Then Aman released her, and left, and when the door closed Zeddig let her go.
When she returned to the bedroom she found Ley in underwear and T-shirt by the window, coffee in hand, watching the sky. Light painted her half-gold, half-dark. Ley rose onto the balls of her feet, settled again, testing ankle and shinbone with the smile of a pleased operator. The movement changed the curl of her calf, carved lines of muscle into the side of her leg.
The world held other angels than those of old Alikand.
Zeddig wrapped her arms around her, and bent her head to rest her temple against Ley’s. Her fingers slid beneath her shirt. Zeddig must have been colder than she felt: Ley tensed and drew a short, sharp breath through her teeth. Ley ran hot, like an engine strained to melting. There was such a thing, Zeddig knew, as a friction weld. To bond two pieces of metal, you set them touching and rubbed them back and forth, faster and faster, until their walls softened and melted. Once the pieces stopped moving, they could not start again. You had to be careful, making two things one.
“I missed you,” she said.
Ley turned against Zeddig’s chest, and kissed her for the first time, because every time felt like the first.
Zeddig turned her and lifted her. Ley squawked— “Coffee!”—leaned away, the gap between them momentary, unbearable, set the coffee down. Zeddig pressed her against the wall. Fingernails carved tracks on Zeddig’s back as Ley peeled off her shirt. Their skin met. Ley’s legs bound Zeddig’s sides. They stumbled to the bed.
Time passed.
“Your leg—”
“It’s fine.”
“I—”
“Don’t. Stop.”
Breath and sweat and sweetness.
“I missed you too.”
Time is weird. It runs faster or slower on different worlds, at different speeds, or so the Hidden Schools claim, and people, especially lovers, create new worlds constantly: realms of play, torment, consequence, abandon. If time changes pace from world to world, and if lovers build new worlds together, might not one of those worlds be—
“Purple!”
“Oh. Sorry. Damn.”
“No, it’s—” Breath. “I’m okay.”
“You’re sure.”
“Give me a second.” A nod. “Yes. Good. Yesss.”
Even if we saw time like gods, divorced from petty sequence, moments webbed to moments in jeweled space, still the webbing would endure. No matter how memories trail back (to their first time together, in a dorm bed they’d now think barely broad enough for one, but which seemed palatial once; to their last before the breakup, angry and sullen and hungry in each other’s arms for assurances that would never come, to that night after Ley’s first delve, the party Raymet threw, making out in the laundry room), circling through memories evoked by Iskari pastries or other tastes, more bitter, deep, and sweet, we would still find ourselves moving toward the future, the godsdamn subsequent moment when—
“Oh. Shit. Don’t we have to, um. You know. Save the world?”
They were still laughing when they entered the carriage, weighed down with gear.
* * *
Even with Fontaine’s introduction, Kai still had to argue, wheedle, duck, and at last fight past one doorman, a second, more elite doorman, three personal assistants, and someone she assumed was a bodyguard, before she reached Eberhardt Jax’s suite. Izza would have snuck through, no doubt, and Ley would have swanned past security with a toss of her head and a projection of authority so complete no one would dare challenge her, but one used the tools to one’s hand, and if one happened to be priestess of half a hundred idols, all of which were, on some level, masks for a still greater Being, well, one’s tools were miracles.
After all that work, Kai found herself before a closed door. She checked her hair and makeup in a compact mirror, clicked it shut, and returned it to her handbag with the other still-burning religious equipment. Waiting would not make this easier. Behind the door, she heard loud music, labored breath, and the sharp clash of metal.
She knocked. No answer. The music did not stop. Ordinarily she would retreated to wait, but she doubted the miracles that had brought her here could hold out much longer.
So she opened the door.
Within, Jax fought for his life against a black glass demon: four arms and scalpel fingers, six banks of red eyes glaring from a fused face, every corner a spike, every edge a blade, always moving, its carapace rippled with broken reflections. Jax dodged cuts and blows, blocked and counterpunched from a boxer’s guard, his skin slick with sweat; silver light clad his hands and climbed his arms, and a sharp spinning Craft circle burned on his back, running down his spine. The demon kicked; Jax stepped aside, caught the leg, tried to break it, but the demon slid out of his grip, its bladed leg drawing sparks against the wards on Jax’s hands. They fought without words. The conversation of scraped wood, struck flesh, rung glass left words superfluous.
Then the demon saw Kai.
It opened a previously invisible mouth, beared razor fangs, and boiled toward her.
The window of decision opens briefly. Boozing coworkers can talk a good game about about the heroics they’d commit if threatened, but all they’re really saying is that they hope they would respond that way. Perhaps they would. Perhaps not. Nothing’s true ’til experiment unearths it.
Kai, if pressed, tended to assume the answer to what she’d do faced with a demon was, run. She was as surprised as anyone to discover the answer was, in fact, to hit it with her purse.
The force of Kai’s blow spun the demon’s head all the way around, but the demon didn’t seem to mind. It reached for her anyway, fast and vicious and sharp, and then—
“Stop.”
All that movement
stilled in the instant of Jax’s command.
Kai did not need to open her eyes, because they were not closed. Another surprise. You found out so much about yourself, when faced with new experiences. She blinked, and the demon’s claws feathered her eyelashes.
Jax stood in the center of the room, panting, radiant with sweat; he wore a sleeveless shirt and black pants and leather shoes, and looked embarrassed, as if she’d surprised him in the middle of something far more compromising than, well, whatever this was. “Are you all right, Ms. Pohala?”
“That,” she said, straightening first her stance, and then her jacket, “is an interesting way to exercise.”
He shrugged, and reached for a towel. “Fear of death is a great motivator. Just ask the Craftsmen.”
“Just a moment.” The demon’s mass and its outstretched arms blocked her passage into the room. She squeezed under one armpit, though her jacket snagged on a projecting hip spine, and she had to back up to extricate without tearing fabric. By the time she managed, he stood by the water cooler near the window, filling a bottle. “I see two problems with that statement.”
He shrugged.
“First, did you actually ask this—” She remembered R’ok, and did not say thing. “Demon” was a weak substitute, but worked. “Did you actually ask her to kill you?”
“To fight until she could kill me, and then stop. It’s the only way to be certain my training has practical application. I can last almost four minutes now.”
“What if she forgets you asked her to stop?”
Jax raised a finger, begging delay, and drank half his bottle of water, then refilled it. “That, I suppose, will be my final exam. What’s the second problem you see?”
“Craftsfolk don’t fear death.”
His laugh was deep and guttural, and held no humor she recognized. “Of course they do. They fear it more than anything.”
“They don’t die.”
“They’ve built our whole world from their desperation not to die. And they—we—are wrecking the planet to satisfy that desire. I understand the resistance: who wants to die? Your whole subjective world vanishes at once. The universe goes away. The smarter and more powerful you believe yourself to be, the more terrifying that evaporation. All this can’t be for nothing. So you trap yourself. You don’t trust your friends, your family, your world to carry on without you. That’s what happened to this city. Gerhardt lost, for all his power, and could not accept his death. He stands on a rooftop in the dead city where that obscene tower rises today, delaying forever his final passing, and destroying the world around him to do it. If he’d just die, the whole world would be better off.”
“I wanted to talk about that,” Kai said.
Jax wiped his face and arms with a towel. His breath had almost returned to normal, and Kai could no longer see his heart throbbing in his throat. All the Craftwork enhancements had faded. He looked almost human again.
“Do you know what you’re launching tomorrow?”
“In general outline: an observation platform. Something to stabilize the city. The contents are classified. That was the deal. Sponsorship, investment, and access to the . . . topological oddities around Agdel Lex, which were helpful to our research. Commerce makes strange bedfellows.”
“It’s more than an observation platform,” she said. “They want to wall off the dead city, and the shifting spaces between them, where the Wreckers can’t go. They want to lock it all away.”
“That seems reasonable.”
“People will die. Their history will be shut away forever. Not even the ruins will remain.”
Jax tossed the towel into a bin in the corner of the room, and said nothing. He looked out over the city, as still as the frozen monster behind them.
“It’s true.”
“I don’t doubt you.”
“You have to stop the launch.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s a complicated system. Something could go wrong.”
“Oh, yes. Something can always go wrong. You do not, I think, comprehend just how much has gone wrong with this project in the last ten years. We built a launch center, and the desert swallowed it. I made fortunes, spent them, made others, spent those, all to save humanity and pry us off this doomed rock. If something goes wrong with a launch this high profile, this close to success—Ms. Pohala. My side of the operation has to go forward without a hitch. Nothing can compromise it.” Jax’s speech began slow, and grew faster, fiercer, as if with each comma and breath he felt with renewed weight the long slow push of decades that had brought him here.
“Agdel Lex has fought longer than you have,” she said, “and they’ve lost more.” She wished someone else were here to make this case. It did not belong to her. Ley would make it better, but really it was Zeddig’s case, or Fontaine’s, or Izza’s. But she was here, and they were not. The world was built to stop them from making this kind of case.
He drummed his fingers on the glass, once, twice. Kai recognized the way he held himself, poised, locked: he had spent his life in his own kind of Penitent—or locked in some other sort of armor, like Bescond’s Wreckers, his joys twisted to chains. “The launch must go forward,” he said, and could not face her even then.
He could not face her, nor speak the words he wanted. She felt their outline, and her own inadequacy, and his, for all his wealth, for all the curve and line of his muscle. There should have been a storm to batter at the windows of this grand hotel. The sun burned instead, in an Iskari sky. “You didn’t know about your payload,” she observed.
“No.”
“You can’t possibly be liable for whether it works, then. No Craftswoman would let you sign a contract with that stipulation.”
Even then, he did not turn.
“Bring me to the launch,” she said. “And give me time alone.”
He stood in silhouette. An elevator dinged; doors rolled back. Footsteps marched nearer, nearer down the hall. They paused at the door, two broad men and an equally broad woman, all in black suits, all discreetly, politely armed. If not for the frozen demon in the doorway, Kai figured she would already be on the floor, arm on the verge of dislocation, with a blade pressing into her back.
Jax turned from the window, and the only parts of his face visible in shadow were his teeth. “It’s all right, friends.” The hesitant, locked man had vanished behind the mask. “It’s all right. Ms. Pohala is a guest of mine. A guest,” he repeated, special emphasis, drawing close. He smelled beautiful. “My guest, for tomorrow’s launch.”
Chapter Sixty-nine
ZEDDIG AND LEY REACHED the shore at sunset. Sauga’s glittered on the Shield Sea as its first diners arrived for the night, in slim-cut suits and trailing gowns, in tuxedoes and frock coats, robes and masks, arrayed in shadows, jewel-bedecked: they strode onto the water, straight-backed and proud, and the maître d’ welcomed them home. Blushed sky curved to the horizon where the Altus Spire stood, lit against the coming dark.
“I’d hoped,” Ley said, “we could eat at Sauga’s together, when this was all over.”
Zeddig caught her arm, and squeezed. “We will.”
They wore delvers’ coveralls, heating elements quiet, for now. They had changed in the cab.
“You’re sure about this,” Ley asked her.
“No going back.”
“There’s always a way back.”
Zeddig kissed her again. “I’ll distract them, and keep you safe. Don’t try to talk me out of it.”
Ley kissed her back. “I love you.”
“Have you ever said that first?”
“I’ll say it more, if we get out of this.”
“When.”
She nodded once. “When.”
Zeddig checked her watch, though she already knew the time. The watch assured, like the sand, like the waves, like the whole unconscious world around them, that would not care if they survived. “Seven fifteen.”
Ley adjusted her own watch to match. “Give me half
an hour. Then get to safety.”
“I’ll give you forty-five minutes.”
“Be careful.”
“I’ll be better than careful.” Zeddig squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll be fast.”
Ley looked at her, then turned away as if she had been looking at the sun—and, as if she had been looking at the sun, her eyes were wet and bright. She fixed her gaze on the horizon, and bent, a woman become an arrow knocked to fly.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Together, they fell into the dead city.
Frozen waves stretched north. Metal monsters crawled a beach strewn with bone shards and barbed wire. Behind them, the skeleton of the dead city towered, sick, frozen, and aflame.
Ley ran toward the water, Zeddig toward the necropolis.
Back in Agdel Lex, sirens wailed.
* * *
Raymet woke to the alarms. A rotting sock stuffed her mouth—no, that was her tongue. It obeyed commands, a pleasant surprise, and with its tip she explored her teeth. Still there, mostly, which reassured. She realized her eyes were closed, then realized how bad a sign it was that she had to realize her eyes were closed.
She opened them. Gummy mucus had stitched her lashes shut. Through eyelash interstices she saw the bone ceiling painted a warning red. Her arms moved by puppetry: her wrist raked across her lips, pulling cuts there. Blood flaked and fell. She tried to rise, couldn’t quite, but rolled onto her stomach and told herself that was a good start.
Booted feet ran down the hall outside the closed door, and she heard the poured-syrup sound of Wreckers running too, their limbs slapping walls and floor.
“You’re awake,” Gal said. “I was worried.”
She rolled sideways. Her cheek pooled against the chitin, and from the pattern of pressure she deduced her face had swollen to an unfamiliar topology of bruise. “Alarms,” she said, the word slurred. Water would be nice. There was a sink in here, if she could do the impossible and rise.
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