Another Mage, Dinma, hovers over my shoulder, peering at the thing. His snakeskin eyes flicker blue before glazing over again. “There are no attachment slots on it.”
Aliya nods in agreement. “There’s nowhere for straps to fit in. And its geometric structure is odd. What could this have been fitted to?”
I shove my way forward next to her. “You think it was attached to something?”
It’s been flipped over like a turtle shell upside down. She points at its inside. “You see? There are streaks of black inside.” She crouches and gets even closer to it. “And the Fist of Malek.” She gasps. The faded insignia of the Palace Mages has been written in dried blood. “Mages made this.”
The Mages huddle together and whisper while some of the aki take to kicking the metal and testing its durability with their feet. Despite being around all these people, I feel alone. Trapped. No one seems to notice me walking away.
With my back against the cave wall, I hold my head in my hands. On my wrist, a dull blue stone dangles from a thin piece of string. The last time it glowed, I was standing on the steps to the Palace, fighting my best friend. The stone had belonged to Zainab, an aki girl with sin-spots covering every inch of her body. I remember when we were both children, a Mage brought her in to heal Mama of the sin that had crippled her. The Mage had led her around with a chain attached to a collar around her neck. Then, the next time I saw her, we were grown, and she was watching over the aki I trained in the forest just outside the Wall. I remember carrying her limp body after she had Crossed and died. After she had Eaten too many sins. Aliya and I had buried her somewhere in this mess of trees and bushes. I have no idea how near or far her grave is from here.
I look at Aliya and wonder if she’s thinking about Zainab too. Maybe Zainab’s inyo—her uncleansed spirit—haunts that patch of forest.
I’m so lost in the daydream that at first I don’t even notice everyone scurrying around. And that’s when I hear it. A noise that sounds like grinding metal. It sounds like something groaning.
We all get to the mouth of the cave, and a few of the aki move forward to peer through the sheets of rain. The rain falls so hard we barely see anything, but we can still hear the noise, and it’s getting closer.
Ugo’s at the front, and he takes a few more steps out of the cave.
“Ugo! Get back!” Nneoma screams.
Ugo keeps walking out until we can barely see him turn to look over his shoulder. Before he can turn back around, something massive leaps out of the forest and crashes onto him.
Through the sheets of rain, I see the metal plating covering whatever it is that’s crushing Ugo. I barely take a step forward before Ras grips my wrist and pulls me back.
Ugo’s struggling to cry out, but the beast on his chest chokes all the breath out of his lungs.
“Ugo!” Nneoma races out of the cave with her daga at the ready. She jumps into the air to get a good angle at the beast’s neck, but she hits the metal, and her daga spins out of her hand. She falls to the ground, gripping her wrist.
The beast rears back on its hind legs and lets out a roar. Wisps of black smoke curl out from between the plates of armor.
Miri gasps. “It’s . . . it’s a sin-beast.”
“But how?” Aliya’s between me and Miri, and everyone stares in shock while the inisisa covered in armor stares at all of us. “It’s . . . it’s impossible.”
“The armor is fused to the inisisa.” Dinma sounds like he’s in a laboratory ogling chemicals and not like we’re all about to be eaten by a metal sin-lion.
“We have to save Ugo!” It comes out of my mouth before I realize it. My daga is ready in my hands. I break away from Ras, and I can’t remember the last time I ran this fast. The sin-beast barely flinched when Nneoma struck its metal plating, but I can see small spaces between its shields. One opening right by its shoulder. The inisisa shifts on Ugo’s chest. I run up to it, gripping my daga, and slice right through its shoulder.
It bucks up off Ugo, throwing me off balance. I recover, move to strike its underside, but I realize too late that it is also covered in armor. Nneoma crashes into me, shoving me out of the way just as the sin-lion’s paw slams down where my head was. We aki all circle the beast.
Tree branches above us shift, and something drops straight out of the sky and lands on the inisisa’s back. Noor!
I remember she’d been out scouting and hadn’t returned before we found the cave. Her fingers find a gap in the armor on the lion’s back. It tosses its head, trying to throw her off, but she manages to hold tight with one hand. Noor stabs at the unprotected nape of its neck until finally the lion’s legs buckle. Noor jumps off.
As the beast dissolves into an inky black puddle, its armor slides off, falling to the forest floor.
The pool of ink where the inisisa had been splits and jets past Noor, bouncing off the ground in front of her before flooding into her mouth. She staggers back, coughing and sputtering. Then the Eating is over. We don’t have time to see the new beast that has been etched into her skin. Nneoma leads the way, and Noor and I hook Ugo’s arms around our shoulders and guide him back into the cave.
“We have to go. Now!” Noor shouts. “More are coming.”
Aliya’s eyes go wide. “There are more?”
“Many more.”
We don’t make it more than ten feet out of the cave before a group of more armored sin-beasts barges through a thatch of bushes. A bear, another lion, and several wolves. We all hurry in the opposite direction, but another squadron of inisisa is waiting for us.
“There are too many of them,” I hiss as the semicircle pushes us closer and closer together. We have our backs to one another, Mages and aki. I lean in close to Aliya. “Follow me,” I hiss. “When I move, don’t slow down. Stay right on my back.”
“Wait, but—”
I run as fast as I can right toward the sin-lion in front of me. If I guess right, I may make it out of this alive. I keep running, and when I’m only a few feet away, it crouches, ready to leap.
I time my steps perfectly, plant my foot, and jump. It jumps right after me, but I’m a little bit higher, and just as I arc over its back, I throw my daga out at the nape of its neck. The cord attached to the knife wraps around it, and I pull the inisisa with me on the way down so that it lands on its back. The line almost snaps under the pressure, but I glance behind me to see Aliya frozen right where she stands.
“Come on!” I shout.
The inisisa stirs, then dissolves into a puddle of shadows on the ground.
Aliya runs through it, ink clinging to the hem of her robe, and I grab her hand and swing her behind me. The pool of sin turns into a single stream in the air and rushes into my open mouth.
My eyes shut reflexively. My body spasms. The sin knifes through me like a river made of thorns, but eventually it passes. I fall to one knee. I have to get up. The clash of stone dagas against metal armor rings through the forest. Everyone’s still upright. Suddenly, the inisisa stop and all turn in my direction. They’re after me and only me.
Aliya turns and sees the pride of inisisa charging toward us.
“Run!” I shout. I catch up to her and take her hand, and the blood pounds so loudly in my ears that I hear nothing else. Not the soft patter of rain on the leaves in the trees overhead. Not the rumbling of a herd of sin-beasts that want nothing more than to eat my soul. Nothing.
At least the others are safe.
CHAPTER 3
“COME ON!” I shout at Aliya. She’s falling behind.
Creaks and moans. That awful groaning sound.
They’re getting closer.
“Taj . . .” Aliya whispers, pointing toward the rustling leaves of a bush a few feet to the right of us.
Before I can answer, black shapes launch themselves out of the shrubbery and gallop toward us. More inisisa. Aliya stumbles t
oward me. I grab her arm, and we run as fast as we can. A shadow glides through the sky overhead, blotting out the sun. Even from down below, I recognize the griffin. They’re going to get us.
Memories flash through my mind, blurry and out of focus.
The memories don’t belong to me. They’re from the sin I just Ate. Still, the guilt makes my chest so tight, I can hardly breathe.
Roots trip me up, and I fall hard. My daga comes loose. I see people in front of me. They look so real. Mages, cloaked in black. And other figures in brown robes, heads shaved. Men and women arranging tiles on the floor. They’re in a circle, and someone is chanting.
I shake away the vision. I can’t get lost in my head. Not now.
Aliya helps me up. The inisisa are gaining. The grinding is louder now. Closer.
Wind bows some of the tree branches in front of us. I muster as much strength as I can and leap for one. Thistles cut into my palms, but I maintain my grip. My arms burn. Slowly, I pull myself up. My feet scrape against the wet tree trunk. After a few moments of struggling, I manage to get all the way up and take a breath, leaning my back against the tree trunk.
Aliya’s below me.
“Here, grab my hand.”
She chances a glance behind her. The inisisa aren’t tall enough to get all the way up here, not if we climb higher. She leaps, grabs my hand, and I struggle with all my strength to haul her up. She scrabbles up, and we both make it onto the branch.
“We have to get higher,” I huff. The visions dizzy me. I know they’re someone else’s sins, but guilt bubbles up in me like bile, burning the inside of my throat.
“Taj? Taj!”
My eyes shoot open, and that’s when I realize I’d gone unconscious. The effects of sin-eating aren’t supposed to last this long. I haven’t been this sick since I Ate my first sin as a child. “How long was I out?”
“Just a moment.” Aliya has that worried look in her eyes that I haven’t seen in a while. It warms my heart to see her look at me like that again. Last time she did, she was begging me to leave my home and follow her into this cracked forest. “I just need . . .” I put my palm to my forehead.
The sound of scratching draws my attention to the ground, where a small group of inisisa paws at the tree we’re trapped in.
“Come on, we have to get farther up.” The rain has stopped. The thunder is gone, but still, I can barely hear myself talk.
“Taj, you can’t move right now. The sin—it’s making you sick. We have to figure out what it did to you, if it’s different from other inisisa.”
“There’s no time,” I hiss through gritted teeth. I stumble to my feet, then sway. Aliya grabs me and pulls me back down.
“Taj, what do you see?”
I close my eyes. For a moment, the dizziness stops. “Mages. And people . . . in brown robes.” My eyes grow wide. “Algebraists.”
“What else?”
The scratching gets louder. The inisisa are jumping on top of one another, trying to scramble up. They’re able to stand on one another’s metal backs. We don’t have much time. All at once, the feeling that I’m going to throw up goes away. I can breathe again. “I think I can stop them. Like before.”
“No, wait. Taj, what are you going to do?”
Before she can finish, I jump to a nearby branch, then hop onto the ground. My landing isn’t as soft as I would have liked, but now at least I have all the inisisa in front of me. My mind is still hazy. Each flash of memory is like lightning under a cloud. But I think back to that night on the balcony with Princess Karima, and I think of the inisisa that swarmed through the streets of Kos. I think of the chaos that swallowed my city, and I try to think of what was happening inside me when I did what I did.
I hold my hands out.
They’ve stopped trying to climb up the tree and instead stalk toward me. A wolf, a lion, a bear, and a lynx. Their armor grates and creaks with each movement. I can see them tensing. Then, in one movement, they burst toward me.
“Taj!” Aliya screams.
I expect it to be the last thing I ever hear. I squeeze my eyes shut. All at once, the metal screeching stops. I hear birds chirping. I hear wind whistling through tree branches and rustling pine needles. I hear insects buzzing. I open my eyes.
The inisisa all stand in front of me. They stopped.
I almost can’t believe it. They stopped!
“Aliya, I don’t know how long I can hold them like this.” My arms and legs tense. The whole inside of my body burns.
She scrabbles down the tree and stands close to me.
“We need to get going.” It’s creeping back into me. That dizziness, that feeling like I’m going to vomit every meal I’ve ever had. That guilt. Someone else’s guilt. Someone else’s sins.
She looks at the beasts in awe, breaking me out of my trance. “It’s like at the Fall of Kos. You did it.”
“OK, OK. I did it, sure. But we have to get moving!” I’m worried more are coming. There were a lot of them when they first cornered us. We have to get to safety.
The inisisa bow their heads, then sit on the ground. They don’t make a sound.
Aliya looks up at the sky, shielding her eyes with one hand from the sun. The clouds have parted. Then she spins in a slow circle. “OK, this way,” she says, pointing west. She grabs my hand and pulls me along.
I don’t even dare look behind me. I have no idea how long it’ll all last. I try not to think of what would have happened if they had caught up to us in that tree. More guilt latches on to my heart. Will the inisisa go back for the others? As we’re running and we see a break in the forest with sunlight shining through, Aliya turns and smiles at me, and in that moment, her face is glowing. My heart feels lighter.
We leave the forest with such suddenness that the sun’s brightness stops us in our tracks.
The land dips beneath us into a small valley with a river at the bottom.
“OK, let’s go,” I tell her.
This is new for both of us. It’s most likely the farthest either of us has been from home.
It finally feels like an adventure.
We set off down the hillside just as I hear the clatter of metal behind us. Inisisa emerge from the forest, pause at the top of the ridge, then charge after us. I grab Aliya’s hand as we sprint down the hill.
“Maybe if we can make it to the river, we’ll be safe,” I say, breathless. I have no idea how we’ll cross it, but the alternative is getting eaten.
The river flows with more force than any body of water I’ve ever seen before, but neither of us slows down. We run straight into the water. It’s up to our waists, and the current is strong.
“We have to keep going!” I don’t look behind us. It’s so cold that chills run up my back. The deeper we get, the less I can feel my feet.
“I don’t know how deep it gets,” Aliya tells me, worry thick in her voice.
“Have faith,” I say. I give her hand a squeeze and lead us farther into the water. The same rush of adrenaline I felt when I leapt across rooftops in Kos dodging Palace guards or raced through the narrow streets trying to lose the Agha Sentries surges in me.
“They stopped!” Aliya shouts.
I take a glance behind me. There they are, lined along the shore. I whoop with laughter. “The metal. It’s the metal! It’ll sink them.” I start laughing and don’t care that I sound cracked when I do. But my joy is short-lived.
I turn around just in time to see a massive tree branch swing toward me and knock me straight in the head.
The last thing I feel is my body spinning, flipping over and over as the current takes me. Aliya yells my name, and her voice grows fainter and fainter. Then darkness.
Blacker than the flank of an inisisa, nothing but darkness.
CHAPTER 4
WHEN MY EYES open, Aliya’s mouth is on mine.
<
br /> “Taj,” she says. “Taj, wake up.” It sounds like she’s yelling underwater.
I feel something bubble in my stomach, then my chest, and I throw up water so hard it comes out of my nose.
It takes me a minute or two of feeling like I’m coughing out every single organ in my body before I can sit upright. Everything’s white, then Aliya’s face comes into focus. The sun’s still out. But I’m dripping wet and shivering.
“Wh-where . . .” I look around. It’s all green shoreline. Water laps at my ankles. One of my flats is gone, never to return. The river is so wide here that I can’t see to the other side. “Where are we?”
Aliya slaps my back. Hard. “The river took us down for a while. You were unconscious the whole time. But I managed to drag you to shore.”
“What hit me?” My hand goes to my forehead. The lump feels like it would fill my palm.
“A tree branch. While you weren’t looking.” She’s smiling, joking, but I can tell in her voice that she’s grateful I’m alive.
“Branch didn’t give me a chance to fight back.” I try to get to my feet, but the ground’s too soft underneath me, and I slip and land hard on my backside. Now that hurts too. That’s when I notice it. On my right forearm. A single, solid band of black. No lion or bear or dragon. Just a stretch of solid black covering the sin-spots that were there before. The armored inisisa. My mind replays the battle again in flashes.
“The others?”
She sees the expression on my face and looks away, toward the riverbed. “I don’t know.”
“They’re OK,” I say, more to myself than to her. I force myself to my feet and do a few stretches. Satisfying cracks echo up my spine. I feel limber again. Dizzy, but limber. “Trust me, they are.” I have to believe it. It hurts too much to think otherwise. Aliya’s still crouched, so I reach down and help her up. “At least now we’re out of that cracked forest. Uhlah, I was starting to get claustrophobic.”
Crown of Thunder Page 2
