He sent them against us in waves. And we responded with fire.
We passed a larger-than-usual rock formation and found our path bristling with spears. If the warriors had thrown their weapons right away like the first man had, there was no telling what might have happened. Instead, they formed a phalanx to stop us, which didn’t stop us for a second. Mercy and I exchanged glances, then we raised our rifles and fired a series of quick, short bursts, disabling the men in front. When several of the uninjured warriors cocked their arms for a volley, Mercy switched tactics, training her rifle on me. I had a split second to be amazed she was actually doing it before the beam hit.
At its touch, angry power burst from me like a searing wind. It scattered the warriors, flung them against the rock, snapped spears and bones like twigs. Once they were down, Mercy turned her rifle back on them, firing one precision shot per man, the energy from her gun filling the air with a burning smell. I hefted my own rifle and laid down a stream of fire the way she’d taught me. After a couple minutes, I stopped trying to keep track of which victims were hers and which were mine. Mercy’s rule didn’t seem very useful once we’d entered the battle: all of the warriors posed a threat, and none of them showed any sign of retreat or surrender. What I told myself, while I watched human bodies slam against the stone or take flight in a stream of amber fire, was that I’d made my choice. I didn’t want to kill anyone, much less people whose sorrow and grief and despair Asunder had warped into madness. Deep down, I wanted to believe what Laman had said in the protograph: The power to kill can’t save. I knew I couldn’t cauterize guilt with fire. But I wasn’t the one who’d started this war. I wasn’t the one who’d stolen people from their homes and enslaved their minds.
The warriors met me without a trace of fear in their blank faces, even when their companions fell before my and Mercy’s fire. Maybe death was welcome to them. Maybe they didn’t want to remember the lives they’d lost.
Within minutes the plateau had been cleared, the few surviving warriors so bruised and burned they could barely crawl. My body trembled with the energy I’d expended, but I didn’t feel like it was ready to burn out. In fact, I felt like I was just getting started.
Mercy stooped to recover an extra knife, then we were on our way again.
“Now you see what I meant by firepower,” she said.
“You actually had to try it?” I asked. “You actually had to shoot me?”
“Would I be me if I hadn’t?” she said.
The next ambush went pretty much the same. Six or eight armed warriors dropped from a ledge, but Mercy shouted a warning and the power ripped through me, producing a shield of energy that scorched them as they fell. Seeing their bodies streak through the yellow light was like watching some bizarre meteor shower. They hit the ground still alive, though with patches of charred skin glowing ember red on their tanned chests and shoulders. This time the ones who could stand hurled their spears, but they were too weak to aim straight, and the points bounced off the rock like pebbles. The few who were able to run did, and though Mercy was all for shooting them in the back, I managed to restrain her. The burned and battered warriors who remained, feebly creeping on the black rock, took the butt of her spear to the head and didn’t rise again.
“Never a good idea to let the enemy get away,” she grumbled. “Or was it part of your brilliant plan to let Asunder know what he’s up against?”
“He already knows,” I said. “I don’t think anything happens here that he doesn’t know.”
“I wonder if he knows the party’s over.”
We shared a smile, and walked on.
We met no other warriors on our way across the plain. I found my hands prickling, my heart racing. It felt like the nervous energy that comes from staying up too many nights in a row, that feeling of hypersensitivity all along your scalp and pressure building behind your eyeballs. I almost would have welcomed another confrontation, if only to bleed some of the energy worming through my fingers. I figured, though, the confrontation would come soon enough, whether I wanted it or not.
Mercy laid a hand on my arm. The power must have been contained, because she didn’t flinch.
“News flash,” she said. “We’re not going to the canyon.”
I looked at her, confused.
“Over there,” she said with a jerk of her head. “I think that’s our welcome party.”
I turned my attention to the altar, its horns poised like fangs to take a bite out of the sky. I’d totally forgotten about it in the heat of battle, but it dominated the vast and barren plateau, its peak crowned in the gold of daylight but its sides drenched in red like fresh blood. Now that I knew what had put it there, I saw its history carved into the shape of the stone: if an explosion could be frozen in place, this was what it would look like. It seemed to me figures clustered at the top, too high up to tell who or how many. But at the base, right at the foot of the stairway, I could clearly make out a single human form. I had no idea who it was—they all looked so similar in their caveperson outfits—but I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it wasn’t the giant Archangel. I’d been worried about facing him, and not only because of his size and strength. On the protograph, I’d seen Mercy lose most of her family. I couldn’t stand the thought of her losing her brother at my hands. I wondered whether, if it came down to it, she’d consider Ardan another enemy we had to kill.
“Why just one?” I said. “Unless this is some kind of trap.”
“No unless about it,” she said back. “The only question is what kind.”
We stood still for a moment, Mercy scanning the plateau, me wondering what the range of our rifles was. It seemed crazy to stop at the sight of a single warrior, but Mercy was right: Asunder had something planned, and I didn’t want to walk right into it.
“Any cover?” I asked.
“Waste of time,” she said. “I’m sure they’ve spotted us already.”
“So what do we do?”
Her face broke into an evil grin. “We find out the old-fashioned way.”
And she walked right into it.
I joined her. No spears rained down on us, no warriors materialized to back up the one at the altar’s base. The man himself seemed unconcerned by our approach, standing stiffly with arms at his sides, his gaze, from what I could tell, fixed not on us but on the sky over our heads. When we got within several hundred feet, I saw that he held no spear.
And that’s not all I saw. Mercy saw it too, at the same time as me.
“Peculiar,” she said. “I didn’t think he allowed his women out in the impact zone.”
“Maybe he had no choice. Maybe he ran out of reinforcements.”
“Much as I appreciate the vote of confidence in my gender,” she said, “I don’t think a solitary woman’s going to be able to stand up to the kind of heat we’re packing.”
We kept walking. The woman showed no reaction, her gaze fixed and her long blond hair whipping carelessly across her face.
“I hate to say this”—Mercy nudged me—“but we’re going to have to take her down.”
“She’s defenseless.”
“And my dear old dad is anything but,” she said. “So let’s stop being such a wimp, okay?”
I looked at my partner, saw the anger threatening to rise back to the surface of her eyes, but also the plea that lay even deeper in those black wells. I felt the power building in me, straining for release. I might not know what our rifles’ range was, but I was pretty sure I knew my own.
At the last second, I clamped down on the power, letting it die. Mercy’s eyes snapped to mine.
“What’s the problem?” she whispered harshly. “Take her down!”
“I can’t.”
“If this is your idea of a chivalrous gesture,” she said, “I’d advise you to get the hell over it. We’re running out of time.”
She rolled up her left sleeve, placed my fingers on the tracker. Faintly, like a heartbeat, I felt it pulsing.
&nb
sp; “Udain’s on his way,” she said. “So unless you want to tangle with him on top of Asunder, it’s now or never.”
“I’m sorry, Mercy,” I said, my heart sinking as I said it. “I just can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because . . .” I pointed to the motionless figure at the foot of the stairs, the blond girl dressed as one of Asunder’s brides. Then I raised my hands above my head in surrender. “Because that’s Nessa.”
11
When Asunder saw me and Mercy drop our rifles, he descended the stairs of the altar, his giant son shadowing his steps.
But Archangel wasn’t the only one who came with him. Surrounding him and clinging to the hem of his blood-red cloak were his own children, a cluster of kids with brown hair and black eyes. I could barely tell one vacant face from another. The children of Survival Colony 9 came next, dressed in identical cave-dweller costumes and looking far better fed than they’d been less than a week ago. Like Asunder’s children, their faces were so empty they might have been robotic. They nestled against his body, seeming content and safe in his embrace. They formed such a tight ring around their new father, I knew we’d never be able to hit him without scorching them as well.
Nekane was nowhere to be found. Neither was the old woman. But Nessa’s face was as blank as the children’s. As if to prove his complete victory, Asunder tilted his head, and she fell to her knees at his feet. I watched her slim hands pick up the staff he’d let drop and mutely offer it to him.
He fastened the staff to his belt. His smile stretched so wide it seemed like the scar of the Skaldi.
“At last you learn the truth, Querry Genn,” he said. “None may resist the power of the Scavenger of Souls.”
“It’s great to see you too, Dad,” Mercy remarked.
Asunder’s eyes passed over her face with no more interest than they would have shown a complete stranger, or a fresh slave. Then he shook his shoulders until the cape settled over his scarred body.
“Bind their hands,” he said, and a company of warriors stepped from behind the altar, holding the brown ropes. Nessa herself tightened the bands around my wrists. The careless touch of her fingers froze my blood.
Asunder strode to the head of the stairs, where he turned to face his followers. Nessa joined him, her golden head bowed.
“Querry Genn,” Asunder said with a smile. “I welcome you once again to my lands. And yet it strikes me that your coming today is not as it was before. I find there are scores to be settled between us.”
“More than you know,” Mercy muttered.
Again her father ignored her. “My warriors you have slain, their bodies left to waste away under a cruel sun,” he said, his voice modulating to convey the impression of sorrow. “You have come bearing the weapons of the despoilers, desecrating with unholy fire the valley of the blessed. What punishment befits such a crime?”
“Step away from the kids for a second,” I said, “and you’ll find out.”
His smile never wavered. “But these young ones are mine. And your presence here poses a grave threat to their safety. Those other deaths I might forgive, but never the deaths of ones so innocent as these. So again it behooves us to ask: what punishment should we mete out to an intruder who so threatens our way of life?”
“Feed him, father,” Bea sang sleepily. In her cave-dweller clothes, her tiny figure looked less like a girl than a girl’s doll. “Feed him to the Scavenger of Souls.”
Asunder gazed affectionately at her. Yet when he spoke, his hand strayed to the staff of bone, caressing it as if he was stroking a child’s hair.
“It is just, my daughter,” he said softly. “It is the way of our people.”
“You tried that once before,” I said. “What makes you think it’ll work any better now?”
At that, Asunder’s fingers fell from the staff, his eyes springing to mine. Behind their feverish lenses I glimpsed a fragment of pain, some small part of what he’d felt when his real daughter’s body had shattered under his hands. Remembering the same look in his father’s eyes, I wondered if there was any struggle left in him, any part of him the Skaldi hadn’t claimed. But then the look vanished, and he sent his voice booming across the waste.
“We will rest here till nightfall, then feed the traitors to the almighty one,” he announced, his voice echoing from stone to stone. “With the death of Querry Genn, none will remain to stand in our way. His destruction will mark the dawn of a new era, one in which the blessings of the chosen people will be fulfilled for all time.”
Mercy took a step toward her father, but she didn’t get any closer than that. Archangel’s hands descended on us with a grip of steel and dragged us away.
We sat by the base of the altar, waiting for night to come. Our jailer stood within view, a silent sentinel as massive, and as motionless, as one of the desert’s basalt forms. Asunder’s warriors had disappeared up the stairs to prepare the ritual of our sacrifice. Faint sounds of revelry—chanting, drumming—floated down from above. Their leader had retreated a short distance into the black rock desert, supposedly to pray. The children from our combined colonies had stayed behind, watched by the girl I’d once known. She stared into the falling sun as if she no longer felt its piercing rays.
Mercy glanced at her, then turned to me. “So that’s Nessa.”
“What about her?”
“No, she’s cute,” she said. “When she’s not, like, groveling at Asunder’s feet and licking the ground clean.”
“That’s not her,” I said. “That’s the power of the staff.”
“Still, you’d think she’d have a little more dignity,” she yawned. “But actually, you’re wrong about her. She knows exactly what she’s doing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s see if I can explain this in simple terms,” she said. “Look, if she was completely under his power, his wish would be her command, right? No coercion necessary. In which case she wouldn’t need the knife.”
My heart jumped. “I didn’t see a knife.”
“That’s because you were too busy moping about Goldilocks and the big bad wolf. But she’s got one, all right. And she’s keeping it where she can get to it fast.”
“Where?”
“A lady doesn’t tell,” she snorted. “But trust me, if he tries anything ungentlemanly, he’ll find himself getting a nasty little paper cut.”
For the first time since I’d seen Nessa at the altar stairs, hope flared in my chest. “I wouldn’t put it past her. When we were in the canyon, she—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Mercy said. “I’m sure she’s going to make a wonderful hostess someday. And I’m sure a guy as awesome and powerful and good-looking as you will be at the top of her wish list.”
I grinned despite everything. My blush felt as bright as Adem’s. “You think I’m good-looking?”
“Did I say that?” Before I could react, she leaned forward and kissed me. Her lips were softer than I expected, and they coaxed mine to part before withdrawing just as fast. “Oops. You and Barbie aren’t an item, are you?”
“Who’s Barbie?”
She shook her head and laughed. “You really are adorable, you know that?”
I laughed with her. “And you really are nuts.”
Her eyes flashed before lowering in what I could have sworn was embarrassment. “So they tell me,” she said. “But then, it runs in the family.”
I guess I was doomed never to sleep in the land of the blessed.
Mercy crawled into a cranny at the altar’s base and, with her soldier’s training, dropped off in an instant. I lay with my hands clasped on my chest, heart beating madly, thoughts zooming forward and backward like a protograph gone haywire. I imagined the power building in me, flowing outward like a shower of glowing tears.
For the first time, it seemed to me, I saw what it meant to be the leader of a survival colony. To be a man like Laman, a woman like Aleka. Even a man like Udain. To try to hold
it all together when everything around you was trying to tear it apart. To know, deep down, that no matter how hard you tried, things would get broken, hopes would fall short, lives would slip through your fingers. There were so many people I would have saved if I could have. Soon. Wali. Laman. Korah. And every one of them I’d lost.
I glanced across at Mercy’s sleeping form. In a few hours, I might lose her, too. I might lose me. The thought of my own death felt more real than it ever had. Facing the Skaldi at the nest, in the cage, I hadn’t had time to think about death. I’d been too busy fighting for my life.
I sat up, hands between my knees. I remembered something Laman had said to me before he died: There is no luck left in this world. That was just like him, gloomy and bitter to the end. But he’d also said, the very last words to leave his mouth: You can’t choose the life you’re given. But you can choose the kind of man you want to be. There might be no luck, no way out, no chance. But there was still choice.
Not Asunder’s version of choice. Not Udain’s. A real choice. A choice that came from me.
I rose and went to Mercy, stroked a dark curl that had fallen across her forehead. Her fingers laced through mine, whether in sleep or not I couldn’t tell. Her arm contracted, pulling me down beside her. I couldn’t hold her with my hands bound, but I moved as close to her as possible, felt her wriggle until the curve of her body shaped itself to my chest. We lay like that for hours, me listening to the sounds of her quiet breathing and my own thudding heartbeat, however many hundreds of breaths and hundreds of beats it takes to fill up a night. I wondered if, reversing the breaths and the beats, that’s what her night was filled with too. Her soft inhalations and exhalations had the ease of sleep, but the pulse in her arm had quickened to a desperate, silent whine.
That’s how Archangel found us when the moon rose and the fires sprang to life at the altar’s crest.
“The Scavenger awaits,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft in the perfect stillness of night. “Come with me now, and all will be revealed.”
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