by Kim Smejkal
He didn’t struggle when a mistico grabbed him. “You need to understand! These humming bones tell the truth!” he said over his shoulder to the mistico, who was soaking a rag.
“She’s so desperately lonely,” he said to the mistico in front of him as she brought the dagger up.
Marco was taken down and pinned, mere paces away, but Vincent didn’t acknowledge his shouts.
Celia called up the memory of Vincent’s perfect smile, as rare as diamonds, as warm as a fire. How his eyes had danced at their stupid joke about giant cakes. How he’d sat so still and patiently, indulging her when she’d wanted to draw him. How he’d suspiciously lost nearly every game of Imp tiles after it became clear that she was a sore loser.
She remembered when he’d welcomed her with a bracelet. A simple gesture. The best moment of her life.
Just before the chloro-soaked rag pressed against his face, he laughed and said to the sky, “This is probably for the best.”
“No!” Marco shouted. An officer slammed his baton down, the crack as Marco’s nose broke sounding like a thunderclap. The Mob was made of heaving shoulders, rocking backs, and bowed heads. Collective shock and grief pinned most people in place.
They’d found that one name on the Roll of Saints—proof that someone had been Touched and lived—but it hadn’t mattered at all. For Halycon Ronnea’s name, they’d gotten the Divine orders. They’d pushed every boundary to define the ink’s capabilities, but had ultimately pushed too far and pissed Diavala off. Their effort had cost them Vincent, not helped him.
The dark tinted lenses of the plague doctor’s mask found Celia, and they shared a moment of surreal pain. Something un-understandable.
A quick conversation of exclamation points.
A question mark.
A period.
My fault. My fault. I’m sorry.
Celia remembered things.
Like the day Lupita had gouged her eyes out. Lots of blood, quickly bandaged, and Celia’s detached thought, Hope this works.
Like how nice it had been to be able to say goodbye to Salome before she’d been taken away—because one day’s warning had been such an unexpected luxury. Play tiles with me, Salome had said. She knew better than to waste time running. So on Salome’s last day among the living, they’d played a few hands of Imp tiles and pretended it wasn’t her last day.
“It’s all right, Cece,” Anya said. Her eyes were so blue. “Look at me. Don’t look up.”
Celia was lying sideways.
So instead of a V, they cut a >.
And there was death.
Anya kept whispering, “Cece, look at me. Look at me, Cece.” Her voice fluxed like waves. And even after Celia met her eyes, she kept whispering it, “Cece, Cece. It’s all right, look at me. Be strong.” Her lips scrunched in a peculiar way in an effort to say those words over her own crying. Her eyes bled tears.
The sobs reached a crescendo together. Loud wails mixed with screams. Kitty Kay’s heartbreaking cries tempered with soul-racking moans. So loud, their grief. So overwhelming.
And Celia had no idea how to join them.
Celia had grown so desensitized, she’d forgotten how the rest of the world grieved.
She understood then why the Palidon always wore the black teardrop under his eye.
Because his breaking was inevitable. Like everyone’s breaking was inevitable.
But the Palidon was the only one brave enough to acknowledge it.
Chapter 29
They took Anya away from her. Celia rocked inside the dank prison coach, bumping along, leading the disgraced Rovers back toward Asura with her giant shadow, Nero. If not for the one small barred window facing the rear, it would have been travel by coffin. With her hands on the bars of the window, Celia scanned the procession behind her. The Rabble Mob’s caravan of wagons moved under a heavy guard of Ruler Vacilando’s officers and mistico alike, another dark carriage like hers near the back. Perhaps Anya was there with her own shadow—iron-eyed with humming bones.
Celia’s knuckles turned white on the bars.
They traveled almost constantly, so Nero let Celia stand and pace and look out the window. The two of them had been alone for days, quarantined from the rest of the group.
Every once in a while Celia asked him, “Where’s the angel?” Where did you go, Anya?
He’d go statue instead of answering, but she kept trying.
“What happened to the angel?” Anya must have lost her quill fingernail, otherwise she would have used it a hundred times by then. Sketching the outline of her idea, shading in contours, adding dimension. The last thing Anya said to her before they’d been pulled apart was a fierce, “Make your peace with it, Cece!” If what Kitty Kay had said was right and they did have a stage in Asura, Anya had found a brilliant way of using it. She wasn’t done fighting yet.
But the image of Anya whispering, Be strong, look at me, while sobbing was the one Celia had circling around in her mind.
Where are you, Anny?
Finally Nero answered. “I don’t owe you answers, Inkling.”
So he’d put it together: not regular runaways, but inkling runaways. Celia’s teeth ground into nubs, hating that he had to be so clever.
And damn it, she hated that title even more. Spouted from lips that knew nothing about her life, as if she were a petulant child and should have accepted the honor bestowed on her when her mothers abandoned her.
“If anyone calls me Inkling ever again,” she said through her teeth, “I’m flying at their face with my fists.”
He arched an eyebrow. “This is a long trip, and it will be a lot worse for you if you insist on snapping at your jailer.”
She snorted but otherwise ignored him, pressing her face to the bars. The Illinian countryside rolled by. People stood at the roadside and watched them pass. Huddled under umbrellas, families clutched one another close. Celia wanted to ask them what they thought was happening. What did they see in a pack of famous Rovers guarded by Profetan mistico?
Celia got an answer, of sorts, from a loud group that had set up a temporary camp by the road, passing the time with drink as they waited for the procession to roll by. “There she is!” one bellowed, pointing at Celia’s face in the window. Their friend dropped his flask in the ditch and rifled through his pockets, eventually whipping out two crumpled papers: her wanted poster and the Mob’s advertising. The people shoved at one another, all wanting confirmation for themselves. Celia grasped for something to say—“Don’t believe what they tell you!” or “It’s not what it looks like!” or “These people did nothing!”—but the first rock hit her arm as she reached out, stinging furiously and unexpectedly.
They trotted beside her coach for a long time, chucking pebbles, aiming for the window she’d now retreated from, making a game of it, until Nero interceded and yelled at them.
She rubbed the red welt on her arm. So much anger aimed at her already, and they didn’t even have the whole story. The rumors were obviously flourishing, but Celia had no doubt that the true reason the temple had spent so much time and effort on her capture would stay a secret until the bitter end.
More dramatic that way. More of a spectacle.
A stroke of genius, to directly link the Mob to the Return. The connection would come together seamlessly. Instead of the Return being a grand but distant thing, the people would be intimately affected. I saw their show! My parents told me about the Devil in the Bell Jar. I still have my playbill. I wasn’t fooled; I knew something was wrong. Their show was too different, too strange, the messages too mixed up.
To think, all that time we were watching Diavala . . .
Hundreds of people followed behind the prison coaches and Rabble Mob wagons. The crowd had transformed from audience to players in the greatest show of all, and they knew the grand finale would be in Asura, even if they had no idea what it would look like.
It felt like a funeral march. They all traveled by coffin.
&nb
sp; “I hate this.”
As long as Celia hated, she had something.
“Is your arm okay?” Nero cracked his knuckles as he stood near the window, long after the rock throwers had dispersed.
“Not at all. But should my jailer really care?”
“I—” Nero started his sentence ten times before landing on what he wanted to say. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.” He sat beside her on the floor, folding his giant legs under him with supreme effort.
Simple words, becoming a doorway. So Celia walked through and told him everything. What did it matter if he knew all her secrets?
It passed the time, anyway. And like a masochist, Celia went into explicit detail as she described the sections about the Flogging in the Book of Profeta. They were now a primer for her final moments, and they didn’t promise to be pretty ones. She was scared of the pain, more scared of losing herself to it. Most of her story was awful, but she saw no reason to spare Nero the ending.
When she finished, she waited for his reaction.
Nero gifted her with a succinct, “Now that is some horseshit, Inkling, but I appreciate the effort.”
She sighed. “Yeah. I wouldn’t believe it either.” She almost thanked him for listening, since it was already more than she’d get in Asura.
Whenever the carriage stopped, Nero bound her. Inevitably, Captain Andras made her rounds. Celia and Nero were stop one, a head count of everyone in the troupe was step two, and if they were close to a town, hiring a messenger to send into Asura with their location and various directives was step three.
“Where’s the angel in all this?” Celia asked, staring as the door slammed shut on them again.
Nero put his finger to his lips. “Quiet,” he whispered, so low she could barely hear him.
Something unusual lingered in Nero’s tight line of a mouth. He never backed away from eye contact. An imperceptible difference in his demeanor Celia hadn’t noticed until then.
She decided to try again. “Where’s Anya, Nero?”
Before he could answer, Remy’s hissed whisper of “Lalitaaaaaa” sprang up from under her feet. Hiding below the frame of the carriage? Celia flopped down ungracefully and pressed her lips to the floorboards.
“Go away!” she hissed with as much heat as she could. “The captain is doing the head count!” How had Remy escaped?
“And your friend is under guard,” Nero added, falling back on his old routine of enforcer. He even crossed his tree-trunk arms as he talked to the air, as if Remy could see his authority through dusty wood.
Celia put her lips to the floor. “Go away!” Was that crunching gravel under bloodred boots she heard in the distance?
“I drew a picture for you.” Remy shoved it through the cracks between the wood right under Celia’s grimy nose. Celia grabbed the paper with her teeth and yanked it through the floor, ripping part of it, cursing, and silently begging Nero not to turn back into a complete jackass.
But alas, he did. “Shit!” he said, and in a flash of agile movement that belied his size, he had the door unlocked and open. Remy held Celia’s gaze and didn’t cry out, despite being dragged into the carriage by the scruff of the neck like a wolf pup. Celia had the terrible impression being captured had been her plan all along.
“A prisoner can’t pass another prisoner notes,” Nero said, stating the obvious. “How did you even get out?”
“I’m bendy,” Remy said, proceeding to demonstrate how she might have slithered through an opening too small and awkward for anyone else.
“She’s a child, Nero!” Now Celia definitely heard crunching gravel, getting louder. “I’ve been teaching her to draw.” She tried to squirm her way to sitting but owing to her bound hands, she ended up flat on her stomach with a half-ripped piece of paper beside her. “It’s probably an eel. We liked drawing eels. In knots. It’s an eel or something, right, Remy?”
“It is an eel, Lalita! And it’s my best one yet. I needed to show you.” Clever, stupid thing made her wide eyes even wider, and her voice crept an octave higher than normal. She winced against Nero’s hand at her collar, though Celia could tell it wasn’t a tight grip. “I’m sorry, Officer,” Remy whimpered.
Nero rolled his eyes and pulled her back out of the carriage. “Nice try. Bend your way back to your people quickly and don’t make me regret this. Don’t let the captain see you, and don’t try this again, because I won’t be nice the second time. I’ll give you to her myself.”
She darted away like a grasshopper. In the time it took for Nero to close and relock the door, Celia had time to shuffle over to the paper, lick it up, and start chewing.
“Oh, for goodness sake.” Nero yanked it out of her mouth. He tossed it aside like the decoy it was, hoisted Celia to her feet, and proceeded to give her a not-so-gentle pat-down. “Hands. Mouth. Lift your tongue.” He ran his big hands through her hair as if she might have slid a blade in like a barrette.
“She’s a child,” Celia repeated when he didn’t find anything. “And she’s so proud of her knotted eels.”
When he unfolded the paper, cringing against the saliva coating half of it, he stared at it for a long time, searching for meaning. Eventually, he sighed. “It’s a nice eel. You’re a good teacher.” He folded it and put it in his back pocket.
Then he bent over and grabbed the sliver of a quill nub that Celia had kicked under his bench as he’d pulled her to her feet.
Her clever, bendy old shadow bested by her clever, giant new one.
“Sorry.” He stuffed it in a deep pocket, sounding as if he meant it a little.
Damn it. She really needed to keep hating him.
She needed that quill even more. Celia and Anya had tried to ink with other implements—a needle, a fork—but only feathers dipped in the ink of the Chest Majestic channeled the ink in inkling veins—a truth that hadn’t been so inconvenient until then. Where had Remy even gotten it? Sneaky, perfect little thing, she’d probably nicked it from Celia’s stuff while the mistico were rounding everyone up.
“We have a long time together, Officer Nero. I can teach you how to draw knotted eels.”
He appraised her, kept right on being his clever self, but eventually nodded. “Tell you what: don’t do anything stupid to force my hand, and I won’t toss it out the window. Yet.”
“Deal.”
* * *
But a few days later Celia did something stupid. She ended up on her stomach again, her face pressed hard on the wooden boards, a boulder of muscle and knee shoved into her spine.
Worst pickpocket in history. Nero had been sleeping, and her fingers hadn’t even grazed his pocket before she kissed the floor.
“Where’s the angel?” she yelled. “Where is she?” She didn’t know if it was physically possible for her to die without Anya nearby. She kept yelling it until he slapped a hand over her mouth, and then she yelled it some more until it turned into a whimper.
He leaned down. “You’re shouting your weakness for everyone to hear, and trust me, they’re listening.”
Nero tossed the quill nub out the window after she’d done that stupid thing, delivering on his promise.
* * *
It took a few more days, but eventually Celia’s bees went dormant, colors disappeared into gray clouds, and time lost meaning.
She’d scraped at corners only to get broken nails and splinters. Nero had no weapon on him she could fantasize about stealing. The iron bars didn’t change shape under her grip.
She dreamed about that long-lost quill nub—the sliver of hope it had offered. How could they keep fighting without their only weapon?
Ripped, stained, and smelling like the rest of the carriage, her costume dress hung in tatters. Nero had taken pity on her and demanded a scratchy wool blanket. She’d wrapped it around her torso like a high-waisted sarong at first. Then like a shawl. Then around her legs. It covered only one-third of her body at a time. She lived her new life two-thirds cold.
C
elia learned to like the plank floor the most. The air seemed lighter down there. Or heavier. She spent more time lying prone and less by the window. More jostling to the rhythm of the cart and less time picking at the wooden slats. More time with her eyes closed than open.
Her existence melted into days and days of random stories.
“A rat used to come by the crypts,” she whispered. To Nero, to herself, to no one. “Zuni made a deal with it. She named him Squire and declared him to be a civilized rat. She told him if he could keep it a secret and not tell his rat buddies, and of course stay away from the corpses, she’d put out a bit of good food and fresh water for him every day. He never caused trouble, and she fed him for three years before he died.” A pause in her whispers. “We always thought Squire was the smart one, but it was Zuni.”
“Why?” Nero asked.
“She made the rat forget he was a rat.”
Nero gave her another blanket, and she lived one-third cold.
* * *
On the floor, Celia kept talking, trying to block out the squeaks and squeals of the carriage, Nero’s regular breathing and knuckle cracking, and the silence of outside. “I’m sorry,” she said to Anya. “I shouldn’t have pulled you through that loophole with me six years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to Griffin, “that you’ll die again. That’s not fair, for someone to have to do it twice.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to Remy, “that you had to see so much blood so early.”
Her biggest apology went to her Palidon. So big it wouldn’t fit in the carriage if she voiced it. I’m sorry, Vincent. If my story had ended when it should have, yours wouldn’t have ended in Malidora.
She wept until she had no tears left.
