by Laura Legend
Cass stuck close to Amare’s instructions. She circled around the back of the main building and located a ground-level window. The latch was loose and, just as two more guards turned the corner, dropped into a basement hallway. Staying low to the ground and close to the wall, she wound her way down one hallway, took a left, and down another. The deeper she went in the building, the older everything seemed. Concrete floors gave way to stone. Metal doors gave way to wood.
Peeking around the corner of Miranda’s hallway, Cass saw just one guard stationed next to the door. She fished along the seams of the uneven floor for a loose stone and found one about the size of a dime. She tossed it around the corner, low to the ground. It landed on the far side of the guard, drawing his attention. The moment his head was turned, Cass took a run at him. In full stride, just as his head was swiveling back in her direction, Cass leapt and unleashed a vicious punch, aided by gravity and the full weight of her body. The guard slumped to the ground, unconscious.
Cass sucked on her knuckle, split and bleeding from the force of the blow, and took stock of the heavy wooden door, hung on ancient iron hinges, that barred entrance to Miranda’s cell. The massive iron bolt that locked it in place required no key. It only required that you not be inside the cell.
Cass took a deep breath. Now that she was here, she was afraid to open it.
30
Cass hesitated. She wasn’t sure what she would find on the other side of the door. Would Miranda be alive? Would she be wounded? Would she still be Miranda? What if Miranda had betrayed the Shield and was, in some way, in league with the Lost? What would Cass do then?
She didn’t know. But there was only one way to find out.
Cass slid back the bolt and leaned her full weight against the door. It creaked open a few inches, just enough for Cass to squeeze inside.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to darkness. When they did, Cass found Miranda where Kumiko had left her: chained to the wall, wet and freezing, the weight of her body borne by her bruised and raw wrists.
“Miranda,” Cass whispered, trying to get her attention. “Miranda, it’s me. Cass.”
Miranda’s head lolled to the side, her eyes pointed in Cass’s general direction, but she didn’t reply.
“I’m here to . . . rescue you,” Cass said, feeling ridiculous even as she said it. She put her arms around Miranda, helping her stand on her own two feet, relieving the weight from her wrists. Miranda let out a deep sigh as if she had been holding her breath all this time. Her skin was pale and ice cold. Cass leaned in and kissed her on the forehead.
“I’m so sorry, Miranda,” Cass said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
In response, Miranda mumbled a few broken phrases that Cass could only partly make out. “Go, Cass . . . get out . . . leave me . . . Kumiko is coming . . . she . . . a trap.”
“Just hang in there, Miranda,” Cass said, aiming for a tone that sounded confident and reassuring.
Cass leveraged her sword in the clasps of Miranda’s manacles and, one after the other, popped them open. Freed, Miranda wilted and collapsed to the ground. Cass slid her hands under Miranda’s head just before it would have hit the stone floor. She removed her jacket, slipped Miranda into it, and pulled her into her lap. She rubbed Miranda’s arms and legs, trying to generate some warmth and bring her back around.
Miranda’s eyes opened a crack. She recognized Cass immediately but it wasn’t clear if she understood where they were or what was happening.
“Cass,” Miranda tried again, her blue lips cracked, her left eye bruised. “I should have told you.”
Her voice faltered but, before Cass could interrupt, she tried again. “All the flowers, all the blossoms, all the roses and tulips and petals and thorns . . . I had to find out if it was true . . . but I should have told you, I should have trusted you . . . but I was afraid I was wrong . . . so many flowers . . . I had to find out what was happening with the Lost . . .”
Miranda’s eyes lost focus and she trailed off. Cass didn’t know what to make of that string of riddles. But she did know they had to get out of there. And the longer they delayed, the poorer their chances would become.
Cass swung Miranda’s arm over her own shoulder and, with a grunt, stood, bringing them both to their feet. She bore most of Miranda’s weight as they shuffled toward the door and out into the hall. The guard was still unconscious next to the door and Cass didn’t hear the sounds of anyone approaching.
“The flowers, Cass,” Miranda continued to mumble. “I had to see.”
“Shhhh, Miranda,” Cass whispered. “Just be quiet now and work with me.”
Miranda’s bone-white feet found some footing and her weak knees bore a bit more of her weight. Following Cass’s lead, they worked their way down the hall, around the corner, and up a flight of stairs. There was no way they could exit through the window Cass had used to enter.
They didn’t encounter anyone. The building had the mute feel of something abandoned.
Cass had been terrified they would bump into someone and the alarm would sound. Now, she was beginning to worry because they hadn’t bumped into anyone yet. Where was everyone?
They exited the stairwell on the first floor. With her sword in one hand and Miranda supported with the other, Cass shunted them out a side door and into an alley between two buildings. Cass could hear a pair of guards rounding the perimeter and, without any real choice, found herself flushed out of the alley and into the compound’s courtyard.
As soon as they stepped out into the courtyard, a series of floodlights lit up the space as bright as noonday. A phalanx of guards emerged from hiding and surrounded them. At the head of the party, near the well, was the giant of a man that Cass had barely escaped in the warehouse.
In response to the light, Miranda looked up. “Dogen,” she murmured.
Cass was frozen like a deer in headlights, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach pinning her in place. There was no way she could fight them all. There was no way she could protect Miranda while she tried. There was no way that, together, they could manage to escape.
“Shit,” Cass said in response. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The guards encircling them didn’t move. They stood frozen in place, waiting for something—or someone.
A rumble passed through the crowd as Dogen stepped to the side and, out of his shadow, a tiny woman in a kimono joined the circle. She advanced toward Cass and Miranda and the circle closed behind her. Cass knew her wrinkled face and white hair immediately. It was the woman from her memory of the cherry blossom festival, the woman whose presence her father had lied about.
“Kumiko,” Miranda said.
“Kumiko,” Cass repeated to herself, recognizing as she said it that the name fit like a glove.
The old woman stood at a distance, her arms folded inside the sleeves of her kimono, appraising them.
“You look so much like your mother,” Kumiko offered. “I’m sorry that the two of you aren’t less like her in the end.”
Kumiko drew her hands out from her sleeves and, chanting quietly in Japanese, began to weave threads of green light together, her hands dancing in time with the rhythm of the song. The threads of green light intertwined and extended toward Cass and Miranda, enveloping them.
The net began to constrict around them. Cass took a swing with her sword but the blow had no effect. Before she could try again, the shimmering green web cinched tight, pinning her arms to her side.
Cass felt the will to fight drain out of her. Her knees buckled, her sword fell from her hand, and her vision went black around the edges. The spell didn’t just constrain her physically, it dampened her will and slowed her mind to molasses.
Just as she was about to lose hold of the world, she saw Dogen swoop in from the side. He caught her, deftly and gently, cradling her in the palms of his enormous, soft hands.
31
Amare was one of the few people who had unfettered access to the Heretic—to the woma
n who, since the death of Judas, had largely seized control of the Lost.
He’d been working closely with her for many years now, all through the time that Judas, fearful of her, had sent her into exile. He owed her everything. His loyalty was absolute. He loved her.
Amare passed through layers of security, weaving his way deeper into the old but still operating casino in Reno, Nevada, that they had recently co-opted as their new headquarters. The security was meant not only to protect them from outsiders but to protect them, too, from themselves. Many of their number were on the brink of going feral.
Almost four in the morning now, things were winding down on the casino floor. The site was a good fit for them: it offered a viable front for their activities and it was located at a site that, unknown to the former owners, overlapped significantly with the Underside. They could come and go as they pleased without ever being seen.
Amare found his master deep in the casino’s command center. The room was full of surveillance feeds from every part of the building. More, the command center connected directly to the casino’s vault—a vault that, to a significant degree, his master had repurposed. Now, in addition to handling the normal forms of wealth that flowed through a casino, a portion of the vault was used for storing relics.
As he approached her, Amare hefted the bag containing the relic recovered by Cass. He smiled, reassured by the weight of the chains in the bag. They needed this relic. He hoped that she would be pleased.
“Amare,” she said, taking him in. “You’re back. You were successful?”
“Yes, master,” Amare replied. “Cassandra did as you asked and we passed along the information about Miranda. Kumiko will surely be waiting for her, but I think you’re right to wager that, in the process, Kumiko is going to get much more than she bargained for and that, in the end, Cassandra will be disillusioned with them.”
She turned her back on the control room and paced into the dimly lit vault. Amare followed her. Given the relics that it contained, the vault felt more like a crypt than a bank.
With an iron thud, Amare set the bag on a table in the center of the room. Almost half of the room was commanded by the wealth of relics that Judas had accumulated over the years and that they had, with exception of the fragments of the One True Cross, recovered from the ruins of his castle. Many of the most powerful relics were displayed and preserved in museum-grade glass cases.
Still with her back to Amare, the Heretic wandered through the vault, tapping her fingernail on each glass case as she walked by.
“Damn these relics,” she hissed. “I hate them. I hate the fact that we need them. I hate the fact that, like dumb idols, their power doesn’t derive from the truth of what they are but from the masses of ignorant and petty believers who invested them with power.”
Amare trailed along behind her, hands clasped behind his back, nodding his head in agreement.
She stopped at a case that displayed the half rotten, half preserved finger of some unlikely saint. It glowed faintly under the warm light positioned above it.
“But the Lost grow more lost and feral by the day, Amare,” she continued. “They are overrun by their appetites and passions and the only thing preventing them devolving wholly into animals is the power that we draw from these relics. That power is the only thing still binding them with a thin thread of loyalty to us and their own humanity. If that power gives out, if that thread breaks, then they are as likely to destroy us as anyone else. They will rage across the globe, setting in motion a cataclysm the likes of which the world has never seen.”
As she spoke, she passed cases containing a golden crown from India and a bejeweled dagger from China, again tapping each glass case with the tip of her fingernail. She stopped in front of a glass case that contained an extraordinarily powerful relic from Alabama: a rabbit’s foot, dyed neon pink, suspended from a keychain that said “Suck Balls or Die.”
Amare raised an eyebrow. He’d never seen this one before.
“We’ve got to hang on, Amare. We’ve got to hang on regardless of the cost. These relics are just stop-gaps. But we are very close—as close as we’ve ever been—to unlocking the deeper secret we’ve been looking for.”
She circled back around now to the bag on the center table and unzipped it. She removed the heavy chains and laid them out on the table’s polished steel surface.
She held her hand out above them, as if she expected them to be hot, as if she were feeling for whatever heat was radiating from them.
But she couldn’t sense anything. They were stone cold. These chains were powerless.
Amare retreated when her saw her face go blank and her eyes glow an angry, feral red. Whatever anger was swelling inside of her had breached the dams that, with the help of these relics, she’d set in place inside of herself. Her own appearance slid from the human and toward the animal. Her teeth grew visibly sharper. With one arm, she tore the table from the steel brackets that bolted it to the floor and tossed it across the room, smashing it against the wall.
“They’re fakes,” Amare said. “We’ve been played.”
“Yes,” she confirmed, “but not by Cassandra.”
The Heretic turned her back to Amare, struggling to control herself and reassert her humanity.
“Damn you, Richard York,” she said to herself. “Damn you and your Turned.”
32
Cass was chained to the wall, her arms suspended over her head, the tips of her toes just barely touching the floor. Her wrists already felt raw from intermittently bearing her body’s full weight. Her hair hung loose around her bowed head. Her vision was still fuzzy and her will still weak from the spell. Trying to think clearly felt like slogging through mud. The room was freezing and they’d taken her socks, shoes, coat, and outer layers of clothing.
Cass wasn’t sure how much time had passed. They’d gone to deal with Miranda first, but they would surely be back for her soon.
You’re in deep trouble, now, she thought to herself as she struggled to lift her head and get a look around the room.
The cell basically looked like Miranda’s. Stone walls and stone floor. A heavy wooden door bolted from the outside. The same iron chains anchoring her to a fat iron ring embedded in the wall above her head. No window. What she could see of the room was illuminated by the little bit of light that shone from the hallway through the barred window in the top half of the door.
Cass started to cough and couldn’t stop. The coughs racked her whole body, rattling her chains. She coughed until it felt like something dark and organic had come loose inside of her. She spat it out onto the floor. The residue dripped from her chin like a string of shiny black pearls.
She felt a little better. Her thoughts seemed to cohere more readily and her will seemed stronger.
With a clearer head, she took a second look around the room and, this time, noticed something new. There was a difference between this cell and Miranda’s: in addition to the heavy wooden door that led to the hall, there was, in the opposite wall, a second door. The door was flush with the wall and lacked a handle. It seemed older than the rest of the already ancient room. It gave the impossible impression that, somehow, it predated the construction of the monastery itself, like it had been standing there long before anyone had bothered to block in walls around it.
Cass shook her head, trying to clear her vision. Maybe she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she’d thought. Who knew what residual effects Kumiko’s spell might have.
At the thought of Kumiko, Cass flashed on her memory of the cherry blossoms. In her mind’s eye, Cass could see Kumiko plainly, framed by the explosion of pink and white flowers. Kumiko’s hand gripped Rose’s upper arm as she leaned over and whispered something in her ear. Rose nodded and smiled in response.
Cass couldn’t make sense of it. Had her mother been wrong to trust Kumiko? Had Miranda been wrong to trust Kumiko? Had her father been right to lock this all away and hide it from her? Had he been right to pretend that Kumiko didn�
�t even exist?
Cass hung her head.
What was she doing here? What did she actually know? Who did she think she was, trying to rescue Miranda on her own, jumping into the middle of something that she barely understood?
The doubts and questions snowballed. For Cass, it felt like the echo of that memory of Kumiko had set in motion an avalanche of emotions that were rushing down the face of time to sweep her away and bury her forever.
Cass couldn’t do it anymore. Whatever doors or dams or protective measures had been set in place in her mind to protect her from the force of her emotions—they were failing. Hopelessness broke loose, caught up with her, and overwhelmed her.
Now, for the first time in decades, Cass was feeling her own emotions, in the first person, immediately. She was feeling them as her own emotions. And though she greeted their return with a sense of relief, she also felt like she was drowning inside her own mind.
In short, she could feel again, but what she was feeling felt like dying.
The stronger the echo of that memory grew, the deeper Cass felt buried: Kumiko whispering in her mother’s ear, Kumiko whispering in her mother’s ear, Kumiko whispering in her mother’s ear . . . until, subtly, the weight of the memory began to shift from front to back and—instead of it being a memory about Kumiko—it became a memory about her mother.
Kumiko whispering in her mother’s ear.
Once it became a memory about her mother, the scene stopped looping and the rest of the memory unfolded. Cass found herself in the memory again: she was seven years old and lost in the trees. The shadow loomed over her, enveloping her. Her mother found her and saved her. Her mother told her to repeat a word three times and, while she was saying it, to think of her.
What was the word?
The memory slowed to a crawl and Cass could see her mother’s face, her lips forming the word, her breath warm on Cass’s cheek.