by Kim Smejkal
“Let me go, Nero,” she said. The realization that Diavala was still somewhere also meant that she was no longer there. She was no longer in the body lying on the stage.
Bleeding.
Dying.
Without Celia.
“Let me go, Nero. Let me go!” She pushed him away, strong enough in her need to escape the grip of a giant.
She fell to her knees beside Anya and suddenly didn’t know what to do. Her hands flew from Anya’s neck to her hands to her eyes, landing everywhere, doing nothing. Everything so warm, so red. “Anny, we were supposed to go together. I hate that you did this.” With the back of her hand, Celia swiped the tears and snot off her face, smearing the slick wetness of Anya’s blood on herself instead. It fell to her lips, the taste of what she’d done. “But you’ll wait for me there, right? I won’t be long, I won’t be long, Anny.”
She pushed one hand to Anya’s neck to cover the wound. Anya’s ocean blue eyes had already dimmed, she gave no Anya-like last words—Pull yourself together, Cece. You’re always such a mess. Her tenor, familiar enough to Celia to pick it out of a crowd of thousands, flickered painfully, vanishing by degrees.
“I hate that you did this!” Celia screamed. And someone, Lupita, tried to shush her, put an arm around her shoulders, but Celia pushed everyone away. No one else mattered. “Promise you’ll wait for me?” and she hooked her bloody pinky around Anya’s bloody pinky and squeezed.
Amid all that red—ribbons of it staining the stage, Anya’s white lace dress, Celia’s hands and knees and soul and heart—were thin veins of black ink. It must have been buried so deep, the ink in her blood, that it ebbed out only when life did.
With a shriek, Celia ripped her dress and dabbed the ink away, barely able to control her hands, her tears, her wails. She worked with single-minded determination, wiping and dabbing at the tendrils of escaping ink with clumsy, fumbling fingers. “I got it, don’t worry,” Celia repeated and repeated. “I’m getting it all. Don’t worry.”
Finally, after ten years, Anya would be free of it.
Celia got every last drop of the black ink off of her love. Anya would have wanted that.
And as the last light of Anya’s tenor disappeared, she looked every bit an angel.
Chapter 38
When Celia opened her eyes to right-side up, Zuni was there. Freckles dotting her nose, fingers lacing together under her chin, a fierce non-smile on her flawless face.
“I collected so many feathers for you,” Celia whispered.
Lupita elbowed Zuni out of the way. They both peered at Celia as if she were about to explode. Or disintegrate.
“Pretty scarf,” Celia said. Fresh teal, patterned with cheery paisley swirls. Or teardrops.
“Done,” Lupita whispered. “Done.”
“How drunk are you?” How drunk am I? “Are you my angels?” Or my devils?
It took a long time for her to realize that she was neither drunk nor dead. A long time to see impossible as possible.
She put her hand over her heart and felt for it—the ka-thumping—and it tapped there, under her fingertips.
Lupita batted her hand away. “Smarten up, idiot child. If you’re dead, then I’m dead, and that would make this nightmare decidedly unworth it.”
“Who else is dead, then?” Did she even want to know whose bodies Zuni had burned? Whose skulls she’d cleaned with her rats or beetles or acids? She looked around for the first time and realized she was in the temple infirmary. Unbound, with no mistico or physicians hovering.
Celia doubted her aliveness all over again.
Zuni tenderly stroked Celia’s forehead. “You’ve put me out of work.” Something like a smile passed over her face, but Celia couldn’t be sure, for she’d never seen Zuni smile.
“Did that really happen?” Celia asked. She meant, Did I really do that?
Zuni’s face softened so much it hurt. Celia closed her eyes and wished she hadn’t asked.
“It’s what she wanted,” Zuni said, sounding far away, as if she spoke to Celia through glass, her forever bell jar.
“Where’s Diavala?” Celia heard herself say. Whose bones hummed now? “We need to find Halcyon. He’s the final link to destroying her. We need to get to Wisteria . . .”
To Celia’s ongoing rambling, Lupita grumbled and growled, muttering that maybe they should put her under again. Apparently Celia had been unconscious for a few days, held there by one of Lilac’s teas as a mercy. Celia eventually fell silent; many more ka-thumps passed.
Zuni spoke to her in a hushed voice, as if Celia were a fragile thing and noise would shatter her. She said things like “vanished,” “chaos,” “fracturing,” but not much of it made sense to Celia. She tried to feel her bones; did they vibrate inside her, or were they silent the way bones should be?
“Sorry about this,” Zuni said. Her hand floated down to Celia’s collarbone, and she lightly traced the tattooed spiral there. “Dante had to make it permanent because it was part of the show.” She trailed away. It’s Divine canon, Celia heard. Your skin is forever part of the spectacle.
Sorry was a ridiculous word.
Celia shuddered and lifted the bottom of her shirt. A tattoo of a hand branded her stomach, the insides swirling in an abstract pattern, sharp and soft at the same time. Zuni didn’t mention the one on her back. Celia vowed she’d never look at it. Her last gift from Anya; the one that ended the world she knew. She had three permanent reminders of the ugliness they’d orchestrated onstage.
They were quiet long enough that whatever drug was winding its way through Celia’s veins had time to pull her back into dreamless sleep.
A good place, with no red stains. No black ink.
Anya was there. Waiting for her.
* * *
“He’s not the peacock he used to be, Celia,” Lupita said later of Dante, her new best friend. Then she chuckled. “Well, maybe it helps that I can’t see his strutting anymore.”
Dante was the one who had told Lupita to help with what everyone knew Celia wouldn’t be able to do. Without Dante and Zuni being her eyes, Lupita wouldn’t have known what was happening. “He cares for you in the strangest way,” Lupita mused, chuckling. “As if you’re a black adder he’s determined to tame.”
Save Celia from it, Dante had said.
Celia began to tremble all over again. She’d never get her body under control. The ka-thumps were there. Was that enough? Celia had been the one holding the dagger. Lupita had saved her from nothing. If she tilted her head the wrong way, the right way, she saw it. It consumed her.
“I’m sorry you had to do that, Lupita.” Tears burned Celia’s eyes, and she couldn’t meet Lupita’s blind gaze, even from behind the happy teal scarf.
Lupita leaned over, the bells in her hair jingling. “It was a way of righting my wrongs. You always said you didn’t kill so you could save Anya, but I’ve always known it wasn’t in you to do it. Dante knew too. The temple got it backward: the ones who didn’t kill were the stronger. You understood this, even when you didn’t understand it.”
It sounded familiar. As if she’d had the same thought, once, forever ago. Celia still didn’t fully understand it, but the way Zuni and Lupita looked at her, it was as if they believed she’d have time to figure it out.
“Where’s Diavala?”
Lupita laughed in a strange way: half happy, half devastated. “No one believes she exists anymore. She lost all her power with two cuts of a knife. Everyone believed in her Return so absolutely that when her beautiful new body died, she died too. There’s no way she can come back from this. Half the temple has already disappeared, trying to make sense of a world where the Divine has left them. It’s a mess out there. An absolute disaster. But everyone’s safe from the poison.”
“But where is she?” I took away her power, her consolation prize, her toy. She’ll need her revenge.
And, more important, Celia needed revenge.
Zuni squeezed her hand
. “It’s so quiet, Cece.” Zuni said this as though they thought Diavala was truly gone. Could it be possible?
Ruler Vacilando would have to make her own decisions about the nation now. The mistico weren’t a threat anymore, not even the iron-eyed one who’d haunted Celia for ten years. He was now just a cleaned skull on a shelf.
Their Divine had been freed from her servitude.
And it was quiet.
Profeta had fallen, no matter what.
Chapter 39
In an irony of ironies, Ruler Vacilando commanded the blind, perpetually drunk, half-mad excommunicated mistico to restore order to the Asuran temple.
Lupita had spun her a story of how she’d seen this coming years ago. She’d taken out her eyes because she couldn’t bear it. But from losing everything comes strength. Not everyone would have been brave enough to kill their Divine, even if it was by the Divine’s own order. Lupita had been meditating alone on this inevitability for years.
Her isolation had had nothing to do with gin and absinthe and loss of faith, or so she told anyone who would listen.
The mistico remaining at the temple still reeled from their shock. They aimlessly wandered the halls, crying, screaming. So deep was their grief, it sounded much like the Touch, except it had a pulse: it settled with sleep and occasionally stilled with conversation. Despite how much Lupita loathed the temple, Celia came across her with a comforting arm wrapped around another mistico as he sat, despondent, in a dark hallway. Lupita knew exactly what it felt like to lose your Divine.
The Mob had been so convincing with their final show that it couldn’t have been anything but preplanned and then staged with precision. The Mob were new heroes, suffering for their Divine, then carrying out her last order like martyrs. The mistico understood that their Divine cared for them, but she’d needed to leave. Her message, words from her own mouth that night, had been one of hope and a new era dawning.
That era would begin by shattering the Chest Majestic in her honor. A way of thanking her for centuries of guidance. A way of saying, We’ll be fine without you. Be free.
Lupita believed that Diavala had gotten it wrong; she’d never been immortal. That a millennia ago she’d been tricked too. That the ink had tethered her to the land of the living, and once they destroyed the Chest Majestic and the bond was severed, she’d return to the afterlife she’d lost before.
That she would truly be dead.
Celia stayed at the sidelines and watched Lupita, Dante, and the Rabble Mob close out an era. The main square was packed again with inklings, mistico, guards, and other workers of the temple. No one lined up in a structured way. Ruler Vacilando didn’t perch in her balcony, but stood near the back. Rank didn’t exist anymore. They all just needed to say goodbye to someone they loved.
Nero smashed the Chest with a sledgehammer as big as his head (making it look as light as a feather), and Marco set it aflame. Kitty Kay’s gaze found Celia’s and she nodded. We did it.
The Chest burned, inky black smoke rising from it as the crowd looked on.
Besides Zuni, none of them would even be unemployed.
Lupita gave a rousing speech. Not even slurred. She’d left her green fairy and juniper gin at home. She announced that the infrastructure of the Profetan temple would still be used in the Divine’s memory.
Hesitant cheers rose up.
Ruler Vacilando had decreed it, so funding would continue and donations would still be accepted. The temple would be an orphanage. Housing for the homeless. A place to receive hot meals.
The cheers got louder. A few people smiled, imagining the future. They turned their faces to the statue of their Divine with a look of pure rapture.
The plague doctor popped up beside Celia at the side of the stage. “Bloody hell,” she said, and paused to restart her heart. Come back, ka-thumps. Come back. She resisted the urge to punch him, but barely.
He wound his arm under hers, pulled her close, his beak between them, and whispered into her hair, “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” He pulled her tighter to his side as they watched the black smoke feed the sky. “It ended as Anya wanted it to.”
“Yes, everyone keeps saying that.”
A deeply sad chuckle rumbled from his chest, but other than that, he didn’t respond.
Celia didn’t pay any more attention to the ceremony. She put her hand on his chest and felt his ka-thumps, trying to decide what she felt about them. Everything seemed so muted now. “It snowed once,” she said. “When we were about seven or eight? And all of Asura was pushed under this cold, white blanket. I hated how it stung. How it muffled everything but also made everything so loud. The crunching of boots in the snow were like giants munching carrots.” Giant carrots, maybe to make into a giant carrot cake, Vincent?
If the plague doctor had a question about the relevance of her story, he didn’t say anything. He only hugged her closer, as if he knew what she was trying to say. I’m under a terribly cold blanket.
The plague doctor exhaled, wrapped her up tighter, keeping her warm. “They’ll clean this place up nicely.”
There were so many plans being thrown around that Celia could barely keep up. Lilac, Cas, and Sky wanted to be the personal stilt-walking entertainers for the orphaned Kids. Part of Celia thought their ultimate goal was to turn the place into a carnival. Wallis and Remy were circling each other in a strange dance of new friendship where they bonded over their shared exasperation with Celia. Each night for weeks, Celia had fallen asleep with a flea on one side and a pretzel on the other, wondering how she deserved them. Seer Ostra was ready to embrace her retirement and bake a mountain of sweet buns in a real kitchen, which she’d never worked in before. Marco and Dante were ramping up to be . . . something. They’d be great together because their massive egos perfectly balanced each other.
Even Kitty Kay and Lupita had gotten their own happily ever after, decades after they’d lost hope of it ever happening. Wallis had gifted them with a loud, “Eww, gross, find some privacy!” when they’d caught them kissing.
Part of Celia wished she could see the fresh beginnings rise from the ash.
Diavala might be gone.
It looked like she was.
But she might not be. And if Celia ran, Diavala would follow her. The tattoo on her back and the bloodstained bracelets she refused to remove would follow her. Forever tainted, Celia had to take herself far away from these fresh beginnings.
And it scared her to think of what she would turn into, now that Anya was gone. Outwardly, she responded to the bursting of hope around her, but inwardly she felt shriveled and hollow. Something would have to grow in that empty space, and she didn’t expect it to be beautiful.
Without Anya being a light, I would have fallen to darkness long ago.
Despite the silence, Celia still saw Diavala everywhere. She was close. Mourning the loophole her dark twin had pulled her through. Waiting. Planning.
Once, Celia had caught a glint of something in Dante’s eyes. It was gone by the time he’d turned to say something to Marco.
Then she’d seen it in Remy, who’d insisted on inking herself in the old ways with a matching handprint on her stomach, swirly and sharp, like her Lalita was.
Like the tattoo on her back, this haunting had become part of Celia’s payment. Every action had a cost.
She felt the plague doctor’s ka-thumps under her hand and held her tears in, distracting herself by pulling his mask up and off. Stupid thing. She wanted Griffin. Or at least she had wanted him before.
“I know what you’re planning.” Griffin wrapped his fingers around hers and held them at his lips. Did he know? He probably did. He must know all about unfinished business; his own death was the biggest of all. “You should go to Kinallen. You wouldn’t believe the stars.” His small smile widened, and something stirred in Celia’s stomach, a butterfly warmed enough to reawaken. “And when you see how they mine that c
ommon powder, you’ll never want to leave. Your entire world will explode with blue and purple.”
More butterflies, rustling faintly. The two of them melted together so no one watching would know where Celia ended and Griffin began, but their lips didn’t meet. The smile fell off his face slowly, until he was all serious. “I do have to restock my supply of this wicked stuff, so it would make sense if we traveled together . . .” His gaze went from her eyes to her lips and back again.
“Well, that’s stupid. Beside me is a dangerous place to be.”
Griffin’s dark eyes swallowed her. His hands on her back warmed her. His ka-thumps erupted from his chest and pushed right into hers. “Only because you’re dangerous, Celia. But I have some ideas about how we can play with that fire.”
She flushed at his words, more butterflies woke, and he tilted his head in that familiar way, savoring how he could make her squirm.
But.
To the right.
Angling his Leonus constellation away instead of offering it.
Her heart pounded, trying to bash its way out from behind her ribs.
And then it stopped.
She put her hand on his cheek and tried to tilt him the proper way. Tilt the right way, Griffin. Damn it. Such a small thing—the tilt of your head—but it could change everything.
Griffin had told her once, “If someone takes me over, you’ll be the first to see it, Celia Sand.”
Payment, payment. Everything had a cost.
Griffin frowned at her, at the hand on his face pushing in a way that didn’t make sense. It began as a twitch of his eyebrow, cool and questioning. Then she watched every line on his face tense, one by one, in response to what he saw in her expression.
Tension coiled slowly. They were so close, dark to dark, she felt every one of his muscles harden. He closed his eyes and dipped his head, maybe listening to the humming of his bones, hunting for the melody.
She ignored the crowd behind and around them. This was a place of new beginnings.
