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Karou was still shaking her head. Her fists were clenched. She hunched in the air and held them tight against her middle: that pit below the inverted V of her rib cage. That was where she felt the hollowness and gnawing—like hunger. And there washunger. She was underfed and too thin, and her own body felt insubstantial beneath her fists right now, like she’d been whittled down to essentials. But this hollowness and gnawing were more than hunger. They were grief and fear and helplessness. She’d long since given up believing that she and Akiva were the instruments of some great intention, or that their dream was pla
Maybe there wasan intention. A plan, a fate.
And maybe it hated them.
It was just so quiet, and the others were so very far away.
She thought of the Dashnag boy from the Hintermost, and of the Shadows That Live and Amzallag, whom she had just restored to life—Amzallag, who had hopes of gleaning his children’s souls from the ruin of Loramendi—and all the others, and most of all, she thought of Ziri, bearing up under his burden, shouldering the deception alone now in the absence of Issa, Ten, and herself. Dying as the Wolf.
Evanescing.
He’d given everything, or would soon, while she was here, safe… with Akiva. And her emotions were a poisonous brew in the pit of her empty, empty stomach, because deep down, unspeakably, under all the horror and turmoil, there was at least a shred of… dear god, surely it wasn’t gladness. Relief, then, to be alive. It couldn’t be wrong, to be relieved to be alive, but it felt wrong. So very, very cowardly.
Akiva’s wings were fa
Karou shook her head yet again, as if somehow she could shake out every black thought. “If it were you,” she said, looking right into his eyes, “if it were youon the other side right now, like it almost was, I’d believe you were okay. I’d haveto believe it, and I have to believe it now. There’s nothing we can do.”
“We could go back,” he said. “We could fly straight for the other portal.”
Karou didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t want to say no. Her own heart lifted at the idea, even as her reason told her it was untenable. “How long would it take?” she asked after a pause. From here to Uzbekistan, and then, on the other side, from the Veskal Range back to the Adelphas.
Akiva’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Half a day,” he said, his voice tight. “At least.”
Neither of them said it aloud, but they both knew: By the time they could get back, the battle would be over, one way or another, and they’d have failed in their task here on top of everything. It wasn’t a failure they could afford.
Hating to be the voice of sense in the face of grief, Karou asked, cautiously, “If it were Liraz here with me, and you were there, what would you want us to do?”
Akiva considered her. His eyes burned out of hooded shadows, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She wanted to reach for his hand like she had on the other side, but it felt wrong, somehow, like she was using her wiles to persuade him to give up something intensely important. She didn’t want that; she couldn’t make this decision for him, so she just waited, and his answer was heavy. “I’d want you to do what you came for.”
And there it was. It wasn’t even a real choice. They couldn’t reach the others in time to make a difference, and even if they couldreach them, what difference could they hope to make? But it felt like a choice, like a turning away, and in Karou, like a bloodstain, bloomed the earliest apprehension of the guilt that was to haunt her.
Did I do enough? Did I do everything I could?
No.
Even now, barely this side of catastrophe and the battle still under way in the other world, she could already taste the way that it would taint any happiness she could hope to find or make with Akiva. It would be like dancing on a battlefield, waltzing around corpses, to build a life out of this.
Look out, don’t step there, one two three, don’t trip on the corpse of your sister.
“Um, guys?” It was Mik’s voice. Karou turned to her friends, blinking back tears. “I’m not sure what the plan is,” Mik said, his voice tentative. He looked pale and stu
This was a jolt to Karou. Helicopters?She saw them now, and heard what she should have noticed sooner. Whumpwhumpwhump…
“They’re coming this way,” said Mik. “Fast.”
And so they were—several, converging on them from the compass points. What the hell?This was no-man’s-land. What were helicopters doing here? And then she got a very bad feeling.
“The kasbah,” she said, a new horror dawning. “Damn it. The pit.”
Eliza was… not quite herself today. She was faking it well enough, she thought, taking a swig of tea. She had her family to thank for that ability. Thank you, she thought, with the special bile reserved for them, for the complete disco
Except when the dream took her over, of course. Then she was animate, all right. Hoo boy. And last night, up on the roof terrace… or was it this morning? Both, she guessed. It had gone on long enough to straddle the dawn. She just hadn’t been able to stop crying. She hadn’t even been asleep this time, and still it had found her. “It.” The dream. The memory.
A storm had moved through her, entirely impervious to her will, and the storm had been grief, unfathomable loss, and the full intensity of the remorse she’d come to know so well.
With the fading of the stars and the break of day, Eliza’s storm had passed. Today she was the ravaged landscape it had left behind. Waters subsiding, and ruin. And… revelation, or at least the cusp of it, the corner. This is what it felt like: detritus washed away, her mind a floodplain, clean and austere, and at her feet, just visible, a corner, protruding from the earth. It could be the corner of a trunk—pirate’s treasure or Pandora’s box—or it could be the corner of… a rooftop. Of a buried temple. Of an entire city.
Of a world.
All she had to do was blow away the dust, and she would know, or begin to know, what else lay buried within herself. She could feel it there. Burgeoning, infinite, terrible and wondrous: the gift, the curse. Her heritage. Stirring. She’d poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.
So… what if she just stopped fighting and surrendered to it?
Ay, there’s the rub.Because Eliza wasn’t the first to have the dream. The “gift.” She was only the latest “prophet.” Only the next in line for the asylum.