The Timeless One luxuriated in their attention for a full minute, and Valentine sensed the fear, the wonder, the excitement cresting. Becoming a wave.
When Cucuy finally spoke, a low current of electricity ran beneath his words—a subsonic vibration that buzzed against some pleasure center in the brain, splitting the difference between seduction and hypnosis.
“You may think you know me,” he said, softly enough that they had to strain to hear him, and it dawned on Valentine that this was no public address, but rather eight thousand private conversations.
“But you do not. You may recognize the body of a man named Jess Galvan who was once a prisoner here. But I am not Jess Galvan. This, you already know.”
He dropped his head to his chest, walked forward a pace.
“You have heard my name whispered all your lives.”
He looked up, met the collective gaze.
“I am the one they call Cucuy.”
Valentine scanned the sea of faces, expecting shock, skepticism.
All he found was silence.
“I was once a priest,” the Ancient One went on. “My god was the god of your forefathers. The god of your true nature, before that nature was buried under lies.
“Mercy.” He spread his arms and spat the word. “Have you found mercy in the world? In your own hearts?”
He glared at them, long and hard. Waited. Let them mull it over.
Silence, awestruck and fearful.
Thoughtful.
“Answer me!” he thundered, and they jolted out of it.
“No,” a thousand voices mumbled and shouted, plaintive and choked, furious and reverent.
“Redemption.” Cucuy turned left and right. “Forgiveness. ‘The lamb who goes not to the slaughter.’ These are the lies on which your world is built. And when you reject them and embrace your nature, what then? Are you given mercy? No.” He stamped his foot, raising a cloud of dust that swirled as high as his waist. “Prison!”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the yard. Of possibility.
He has offered them nothing, Valentine mused. Demonstrated no power. Made no promises, no threats. Merely claimed a name out of some ancient, collective nightmare and spun a world around it.
“The old gods are gone,” Cucuy went on. “But I am here. Their power is mine.” He made a fist and shook it in the air. “Because I took it. I took it, and I waited. Until the time was right. Until falsehood and delusion had crippled the world, made it ripe for collapse. That time is now.”
Valentine took stock again. Something had shifted, by a hair. The rhetoric was too abstract for men like these. They knew they’d been wronged; they felt the boot of the world on their necks. But their world was within these walls, and there was no falsehood here, no delusion. Authority wasn’t abstract. Authority could have you raped in the showers or shanked to death in your bunk.
No sooner had Valentine thought it than the Great One pivoted, gave them his terms, exploded their world.
“Today this is a prison. Five hundred years ago, it was a temple. And tomorrow it will be a fortress. The first of many. And you, all of you, will be an army. My army.”
He paused, to let that ripple through the crowd and settle, and then his mouth cleaved into a vicious grin.
“Unless you prefer to remain shackled and powerless.”
Valentine reeled with the genius of it, even as he tensed for the inmates’ response.
Every prison a fortress.
Every prisoner a soldier.
They were already vicious and disciplined, regimented and organized. If there was a swifter way to recalibrate the balance of power in the world, he couldn’t bring it to mind.
“I already got a boss,” somebody said, from deep within the dense thicket of bodies, and a nervous ripple of guttural agreement spread from that unseen point.
Cucuy nodded. “Yes. Of course. Azteca. Sinaloa. Those organizations have raised you, no? Taught you the meaning of loyalty. But the new war must bring the old war to an end.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Valentine. “The bosses,” he said. “The top men here. Who are they?”
“Milagros,” Valentine replied, thrilled to have the information at his fingertips. “And El Sastre.”
The Great One nodded, raised a hand, and beckoned with two fingers. “Milagros. El Sastre. Step forward.”
The sea parted, and two men walked the corridor of bodies until they stood before him, square shouldered and resolute.
El Sastre was white haired and lanky, Azteca’s capo since long before Valentine’s time, the brother-in-law of the man who ran shipping for the cartel on the outside. An aristocrat, of sorts. The stereo system in his suite of cells was worth more than the guards made in a year, and he favored violin concertos.
Milagros was young and squat, an enforcer who had climbed the ranks through a combination of brutality and cunning and would likely meet his end at the hands of a younger version of himself.
Cucuy looked at each of them in turn. Appraising. Sizing up. The men stood with their chins raised, waiting for the opening salvo in a business meeting, a truce negotiation.
Instead, the Ancient One’s arms shot out and seized hold of both men’s faces, jerking their heads sideways until their necks snapped with a pair of criks that echoed through the yard.
He let go, and the bodies dropped into the dust.
“That way of life is over.”
He pointed at the crowd with both hands, fingers sweeping across the wide-eyed prisoners.
“You are no longer Barrio Azteca. You are no longer Federacíon Sinaloa. As of this moment, those words mean nothing.”
The silence was charged with dread, and with excitement. Here was liberation from all they had ever known—replaced by allegiance to a being, a cause, they might never understand.
“As of this moment, you are mine.”
CHAPTER 32
He had betrayed her. Traded love for power, light for darkness. The future for the past. Humanity for godhood.
She had watched her heart beat for the last time, glimpsed the fear, anguish, and excitement fighting for control of her lover’s face, and then passed out of space and time into the Great Void. Ceased to exist.
But oblivion had not wanted her. The void spit her back out. She was reborn in darkness, terrified and ravenous, gasping for breath, suffocating beneath the weight of the earth.
Until she realized that she did not need to breathe. The soil held her, rich and loamy, teeming with life. She could hear each wriggling worm and creeping blind insect, sense the thin roots of the grass questing for nutrients and the penetrating warmth of the sun. Slowly, the panic subsided—and the hunger moved in swiftly, to fill the empty space.
She clawed at the cakey earth and felt it crumble toward her, fall into her nose and eyes and mouth. There was only so much space—a thin bubble, a tiny cavern her body had hollowed out, and Chacanza’s task was to change its location, move it upward inch by inch until it broke against the meniscus of the world.
The grave was deep. The hunger gnawed. But Chacanza felt her strength returning.
No—not her strength. A new strength, cold and unflagging, unlike any she’d possessed in life. As if mercury filled her veins instead of blood.
But now it was hers, and she would use it—all of it. Empty the reservoir of her powers. Nothing was bottomless.
Not her strength, and not his.
What she was, she did not know. But what she was meant to do, why the Great Void had sent her back, could not have been clearer.
When at last she breached the surface, the process of learning about herself commenced. Lesson one: the sun and the breeze were lost to her; Chacanza’s body was insensate to their embrace. She found herself unsurprised and unconcerned; she was something else now, something new.
A creature of different pleasures. Of pure appetite.
As befit one who had been severed from her soul.
Her hunger focused at th
e thought of him, contracted into a fist of intention. Cualli had fed on her virtue, her innocence and love. Now the abomination he had created would return the favor. Destroy the vile, corrupt thing he had become. Unmake them both.
A monster for a monster.
And yet.
Here she stood, atop the Mount of Sacred Grace. The man who had defiled her body had buried it with the greatest of honor, in accordance with every ancient ritual; she had been transported nearly sixty miles from the capital and lain to rest on the peaceful, desolate plateau of a site holy to Chimalma, Shepherdess of Life, Chacanza’s patron goddess.
She could not make sense of it and soon ceased trying. There were more important things to discern. She did not know how long she had been gone; perhaps time had moved on without her. Perhaps it was a day since her death, or a year, or a thousand. She knew only that Cualli was alive—and that the gods were dead. Whether they had vanished from the world or were merely absent from whatever blighted shadow version of it she now inhabited, Chacanza could not be sure. But she felt the void. The loss. It was part of the ache inside.
There was no help for her, not from the divine and not from the living. No prayer would be heard, and even if her family still existed—and what reason was there to believe Cualli had spared any who might pursue vengeance on her behalf?—she was unfit to be seen by them. Were this mountain still a holy site, she would defile it. But Chimalma was gone. This mountain was no longer her temple, but her funeral mound. Yet another blasphemy Cualli had wrought.
And so Chacanza walked down toward the capital, to destroy him.
To destroy them both.
LIKE ANY DAUGHTER of the empire, no matter how poor or prosperous, Chacanza was raised to know what nourishment the desert yielded: how to tap its hidden water, pluck its edible vegetation.
But none of that mattered now. She was a creature of blood. She knew it before she made her first kill. The sun could no longer warm her, but the rich liquid of life still had power.
A rabbit.
A mountain cat.
On the third sleepless day of her journey, with the city looming on the horizon, a man.
A peasant, out hunting too, slingshot in hand. It was no different to kill and drain a man, provoked no feeling beyond satiation. She left his body where it lay, walked on.
Chacanza reached the capital at nightfall, disguised herself with a stolen scarf and headed for the temple of Tezcatlipoca, keeping to the narrowest roads.
But one did not simply approach the temple.
Not when the entire population of the capital was assembled before its steps, united in a frenzy of worship.
Not when a new god had supplanted the old, declared the site his seat of worship and government, and dispatched his personal army to eviscerate whatever infidels refused to bow before him.
And certainly not when the new god’s nightly sacrifice was being presented, atop the same temple steps where only days before he had been a man, a priest, humble, beloved.
Now he was transformed.
All-powerful, the people whispered, on Chacanza’s left and right, with reverence and with terror. Single-handedly, he had vanquished the old gods, the cruel gods. Taken their powers for himself—and for them. For humanity. He was both man and god, and the world was made anew. How miraculous, that a man could become a god! How liberating, to no longer labor beneath the yoke of those distant, unknowable beings, accessible only via the swollen, debauched ranks of the sundry priesthoods! Truly, this was mankind’s finest hour—to worship one of their own! To look upon him in the flesh, to know his appetites and supplicate him without confusion, or misgiving, or intercession—to have the veil finally lifted, and the truth revealed!
Suddenly, the crowd roared as one, and Chacanza watched as a dozen soldiers marched up the long sweep of glimmering quartz stairs and took up positions behind an empty throne.
The noise of the crowd resolved into a chant.
Cu-cuy! Cu-cuy!
So. He had taken a new name.
Chacanza scanned the rippling multitude and realized she did not recognize a single face. These were peasants. Newcomers from the provinces. It was as she had surmised: no one with any power, any lineage, had been left alive.
Cu-cuy! Cu-cuy!
But the man who took the stage was not her defiler. He was old and withered, dressed in the raiment of a priest.
What was a god without a priest?
By his side stood a young girl in a white tunic. Her bare legs trembled, and terror danced in her eyes.
What was a god without a sacrifice?
Chacanza turned on her heel, began to push her way through the throng and out of the square. There was no chance of getting to him now; she needed to retreat and reconsider. It had been foolish to come without a plan. Her enemy was the lord and master of all he surveyed; she could sense his strength in the air, feel it without even laying eyes on him. She would not bear witness as some innocent girl suffered the same death she had—would not add her eyes to the thousands eager to watch red soak the virgin-white tunic and tell themselves the monster who consumed the girl’s beating heart was worthy of their worship.
Chacanza missed her mountain.
Missed her grave.
At the outskirts of the capital, she broke into a run. Cucuy had his empire. His army. If she was to destroy him, perhaps she needed her own.
Why had she not thought to run before? The desert blurred, flew by, her legs pumping faster, the stride lengthening, the night purpling, the sun rising and peaking and disappearing behind cloud banks. Emerging in decline. Setting.
She reached Sacred Grace in the middle of the night, having broken stride only to hunt and eat. Time slipped away from her slowly, like a language she no longer understood. Its passage might still compel her to hunger or exhaustion—she felt her eyelids growing heavy even now, as she climbed the thistle-laden hillside, and wondered if she would sleep, if she could sleep, what sleep meant for a being like her—but the clock of mortality had stopped ticking.
Life was a countdown, driven by all the fear and urgency the lessening of days implied. But this, this was not life. It could only end in triumph, for its end would mean his end. This, Chacanza knew. The knowledge resided deep in her bones, unassailable, rigid.
The rest she would have to figure out. She had nothing but time.
She reached the flat plateau, lay down beside the hole in the ground, the mound of churned black earth, and learned that sleep was not among the many pleasures she had been denied.
CHACANZA OPENED HER eyes. She was lying naked on the banks of a drab, colorless ocean. A low sky leached of any hue loomed overhead. There was no sun in sight, nor any clouds to hide one. No horizon line separated the indistinct mass of the water from the equally featureless sky.
The sand against her body was gritty, unpleasant, but otherwise indescribable, lacking in qualities. It was as if everything here was unfinished, lightly sketched. Form without content. Form almost without form.
The air was still, unbroken by birdsong or the buzz of insects. Breezeless. Not even the water moved.
She stood, turned in a circle, tried to find some point on which to focus. Was this a dream? Or had she awakened from a long, vivid nightmare, into an anodyne realm beyond death?
A flash of white light crackled across the sky, as if in answer, and Chacanza started. She wanted to hide, but that was impossible.
The water rippled and a tiny wave licked its way up the shore, turned the sand a slightly darker shade of colorlessness. Chacanza squinted into the distance, tracing the disruption to its source, and saw a shape cutting through the water at tremendous speed, the ocean cleaving before it, splitting in two, great walls of water furling on either side.
The shape grew closer, more distinct, and Chacanza gasped, felt her body go rubbery, and her legs give out. She fell to her knees, eyes pinned to the form as it grew closer.
Closer.
Brighter.
Golden
.
Stunning. Unbearably beautiful—so beautiful that it was somehow cruel. She could not look away, though the luminescence of this creature seemed to be inside her now, lighting her own body from within, glowing from her mouth, her eyes, her womanhood.
Especially her womanhood.
There was no doubt in Chacanza’s mind or flesh. She was gazing upon a god.
Beneath her, the sand moved, rose. She felt caressed, lifted. It was becoming a new form, taking on new qualities. The granularity gave way to soft, smooth seamlessness—to something like the silk of the gowns she’d once worn. She felt her limbs being rearranged, configured, supported.
And still the light, beaming into her, beaming out of her, connecting her to the approaching god as he came to rest before her, magnificent and terrible.
“Hello, my queen. And welcome to hell.”
Only then did Chacanza realize that she was sitting on a throne.
The god spread his arms, and his golden light shot in both directions, freezing the faceless landscape in glory.
“But I shall make a heaven of this hell.”
He held out his hand, and Chacanza reached for it.
When her palm touched his, the spasm of pleasure that tore through her body was like nothing she had ever known.
THE BLOODCURDLING SHRIEK that rent the air, cut short the dream, might well have been Chacanza’s own. To be yanked back to reality was worse than death—just as the world she and Tezcatlipoca had created, were creating, was better, sweeter, than life had ever been.
The two of them, alone in the void, turning thoughts to matter, an abyss into a paradise. She had only to describe a fruit, a color, a nuance in the landscape, and he willed it into existence.
Her suffering had been worth it. A rite of passage, Tezcatlipoca explained. The only way he could guide her into the void. They were one being, one organism, two halves, one whole, and this was forever. Eternal. Unchanging, except through her suggestion and his artistry.
But it was just a dream.
She woke in a lather of panic and confusion. The memory of fruit lingered on her tongue, the indescribable pleasures of Tezcatlipoca still reverberated through her body, the perfect warmth of the sun he had made still danced on her skin.
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