by Jenny Martin
We climb out of the valley to soar over the Hill of Kings, scattering the flocks of barden as we pass. Stubborn birds. They won’t even leave when the dawn stinks of scorching debris. Incredibly, the tombs stand untouched, as if invincible against all assault. Only time and bird drip have left their mark on the mossy stone of the high ground.
Miyu’s freighter hiccups over the last line of crypts and we descend as if we’re pulled, drawn by the natural fall of the would-be mountain. Miyu lands much better than I ever could. The freighter nudges the turf and I hardly feel the impact. We power off in a shuttered-down whine, and the pound of our engine’s replaced with human whir, the sound of marshaling forces.
We step out of the cargo bay.
It’s chaos on the ground. Lines of rebel fighters refuel and take off, firing up into the haze like reversed shooting stars—searing, hissing bodies of energy tossed back into the skies. I recognize some of the vacs, the secondhand aircraft we started with. But there are newer, state-of-the-art birds too, still bright in silver and blue. Our Cyanese friends have come through for us. I owe Larken. A lot.
I turn to him, but he’s rushing to meet a towering Cyanese woman who’s geared up for flight. We catch up just as her helmet comes off. A flash of recognition, and I see this isn’t any pilot. She’s the young woman from the Skal, his ally on the council. And apparently, she’s also his fellow commander.
Quickly, Larken bows, and she returns it.
“Vilette,” he says. “What happened?”
Vilette tucks the helmet under her arm. “You should have been here.”
Larken’s stricken. He nods. “I know.”
“We’ve no time for a briefing,” she says. “I need you in the air.”
Larken trails as she heads for a refueling fighter. His guards scatter in their wake, and suddenly, Fahra, Miyu, and I are alone.
“Come on,” I say. “Help me find Hal and Mary.”
First, we report to what looks like an improvised flight control, a tent near the foot of the hill filled with screens and headsetted officers. They’ve cobbled together a small communications hub—the servers at base must have been blown to bits. “Explains why we couldn’t get through,” Miyu says. “They crippled communications first, then swept in to burn everything else.”
Fahra’s thoughtful. “They came for a small number of rebels, I think. But they had not bargained on Cyanese reinforcement.”
Inside the tent, we wait for a break in the rapid-fire lines of ground-to-air squawk. Captain Nandan’s here, directing our forces. Finally, I catch his eye.
“Reporting for duty,” I say.
“I’m a pilot,” Miyu adds.
Fahra straightens. “As am I.” That gets Nandan’s attention. There’s recognition between the two Biseran men, and I can’t tell if it’s the kind that’s bad or good.
I’m about to offer myself as a gunner, but Nandan shuts us down. “Every bird we’ve got’s already manned now. I can’t use you up there.” He turns away, leaving no more room for discussion.
Miyu and Fahra exchange questioning looks, but I don’t wait for them to figure out our next move. To our right, away from the improvised airstrip, there’s another hub of activity. Under a stand of balm leaf trees, I spy stretchers and bodies and tents.
“There.” I point, then take off in a run.
Inside the medic station, my eyes dart from one face to another. So much movement and frantic exchange. You can almost taste the chaos, the way it hovers, antiseptic and gritty, in every breath. I look for the Larssens, but all of these medics are Cyanese, fresh reinforcements who’ve arrived since I left for Manjor. Quickly, they separate the injured from the dying. It’s a ruthless mercy, and their work has just begun.
Again, I interrupt a soldier’s work. “I’m looking for Hal and Mary Larssen,” I ask. He’s a young medic with too many bags of anti-gel in his arms. I reach out and catch one before it falls.
“They’re riding the medi-vacs,” he says. “At the front. Picking up survivors.”
Don’t know whether I’m more relieved they’re still alive, or terrified they’re still in the air. I can barely answer the medic, my voice a garroted squeak. “Thank you.”
“We can help,” Miyu adds. “Whatever you need us to do.”
The medic nods, but he’s already moving away to deliver his armload of remedy.
So we jump in. I show Miyu how to hang plasmatic lines and Fahra how to run a sterilizer. We hustle until there are no more instruments to clean, no more crates to haul, and no more white sheets to drape over the dead.
Until dark. We work until the battle is over.
Not long after dusk, our vacs quit going back to the fields and slowly, the rest of them return. A steady stream of skycraft—some soaring, some scorched and crippled—touch down at our fallback position. I wait at the edge of the action, watching for some sign of the Larssens. Soon enough, they stagger in, their vacs touching down.
First Bear, jumping out of his fire-blown Tandaemo, his copilot Zaide behind him. Then the last medi-vac drops, crowded with stretchers and soldiers. Among them, I can barely see Hal, whose face is marked with ash. In his arms, one of the wounded. As the medics around him break away, Hal sinks deeper into the floodlights, and I see his patient’s a corpse. Her head lolled back, blue eyes vacant as glass.
Mary.
Bear sees her too, and he runs to his father. I reach them both as Hal’s strength begins to fail. Hal falters, but we help him hold tight. Together, we cradle her body.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE DAY AFTER THE ATTACK, AN EAST WIND CARRIES WHAT’S left of the poppies, and all morning, they drift—bits of ash and tattered blooms, floating through smoke. Confetti for a hollow victory.
Because that is what they’re calling this. A victory. Benroyal’s forces were driven back, at the cost of three dozen lives. Already there are scraps of hopeful talk. Surely now, Cyan—a nation of millions—is mobilizing against the enemy. The war, they say, isn’t just our own anymore. Now the rebels are part of a larger cause. We will fight to the last, they say. We will win.
But I don’t feel like a victor at all. I sit in the grass, in the gray-tasting breeze. Mary is dead because I brought us here. I think of my last race and the day I ran away from Benroyal. I could’ve stayed in the Spire, and my family would still be together, a circle of four. Pulled apart by my contract, but in heart still knit tight.
Larken approaches like a spirit conjured up in the smoke. He sits beside me, a small wooden box in his hands. “We’re moving as much as we can into the tomb,” he says.
I tilt to look back at the rise, eyes fixed on the top. “Up there?” I say. “In those little vaults? We’d be sitting targets.”
“No,” he says. “Not those tombs. The tomb. My ancestor Khed the First is buried under the hill. There’s a whole empty warren under there. Strong enough to shelter five hundred. The catacombs are sacred, but Vilette and I convinced the Skal to let us open them.”
“Nothing is sacred anymore,” I say.
I settle back down, resting my chin on my knees.
“You’ll be safer there. At least at night,” he adds. “It’s cool and dry and made to last.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder, and that almost makes it worse. In a second, he’s going to say he’s sorry, and how deeply he feels for my loss, and then I’m going to shut down or implode or sob. But Larken doesn’t apologize. Instead, he puts the box in my hands. The wood’s warm and smooth to the touch. There’s a sigil carved into it—his ring of nine thrones—but I don’t linger over it.
“My father made it for my mother,” Larken says. “And now I’m lending it to you.”
I pause, staring at Larken, but he gestures me to open it. I do.
Inside, there’s a sealed horn wrapped in embroidered cloth. The horn is ornamented with jewels, and
there’s bright, silky silver in the needlework of the fabric. The sweet aroma of balm leaf and poppy and moss-wood springs from the box. This is an heirloom, beyond priceless. I press it back to him, but he refuses, palms out.
“For Mary,” he says.
I wince. I can’t bear to hear her name so soon.
“I don’t deserve this. I’m nothing, why would—”
“She was a mother to you?” he asks.
“More than anyone else.”
“The oil inside the horn must not go to waste. It is fresh, of the same kind we used to anoint my own mother. Blessed in the Skal-rung, the palace in Raupang. Vilette brought it in case I was lost in battle and would need to be buried here. But I’m alive, and Mary is not. Take this and anoint her in peace.”
He puts a hand at my shoulder again. This time, I lean in like a caving wall.
He sits with me for a long time.
We choose a spot at the base of the hill, near the lower entrance to Khed’s tomb. Half shaded, the soil here that’s not yet overturned is thick with carpet vine and wildflower buds. Mary will rest here, in the cool green.
I’ve pulled us so far away from Castra, and now she’ll never return.
Hal and I stand side by side, and I shift Larken’s box, tucking my right arm around it. Hal calls out to Bear, who’s avoiding the freshly shoveled mounds. “You’ll have to help me,” Hal says.
Bear nods, and we make our way back to the medic’s tent. It’s early; not many are here yet. Exhausted, grieving, asleep under the hill, they’re not ready to make their way out of the tomb. But Miyu’s awake. She waits for us at the entrance of the tent, a covered pail in her hands. There are others like it—metal buckets, the kind we use in the old mess hall—on the ground.
“Fahra left this,” she says. “The water’s for you, and the rest.”
“Water?” I ask.
“He went to the spring,” she says. “You know, the stream that ran by the old armory? Fahra walked all the way to the source. Hauled all those buckets. He wanted there to be water for the bodies, from a blessed well.”
I remember the abbey. Sibat. The current of souls.
Silent, Hal accepts Fahra’s gift.
Miyu moves to leave, but turns before loping off. “Fahra asked me to tell you: He prays for her, and the others too. Emam arras amam.”
I nod, a breath away from choking up. My mind whispers the words.
In this life or the next.
In the tent, I put the box down. Hal and Bear lift Mary’s body, moving it onto a clean-sheeted gurney. She’s still dressed in the same dirty gear she wore during the attack, but Hal’s brought a simple white shift for her, salvaged from the old infirmary. Crudely, another sheet’s been draped over a chin-high tent cord, and Hal reaches for it, to pull the makeshift curtain closed. He looks at me, and I understand.
I take Bear’s hand, and lead him away so Hal can clean Mary up and dress her alone. Far behind the thin curtain, we sit on the ground, which is as littered and dirty as you’d expect it to be. The bloodiest work—the real evidence of battle—has already been disposed of, heaped into barrels and burned away. But there are still abandoned plasmatic lines here, oxygen masks, and crumpled bits of discarded wrap. Small reminders, in case we forgot. As if we ever could.
We wait as Hal struggles with his task. Every whisper of movement is deliberate and gentle. Finally, the pile of her dirty clothes tumbles to the floor, and the movement stirs the air. The smell of death. But then the sound of rippling water. The rainwater drip-drip-pour in the bucket as Hal soaks up a handful of cloth. A burst of something sterile and antiseptic. My eyes are drawn to the pantomime shapes behind the curtain, but I force myself to look away. Barely breathing, I listen. Finally, there’s a hitch of breath, a quiet sob.
At the sound, Bear twitches. The grief burns so plainly in his face. It’s all I can do to not reach out to smooth it away. Before I can stop him, he bursts up and out of the tent. I want to follow, but a second later, Hal is finished. He pulls aside the curtain.
He’s as wrung out as the cloth resting at the lip of the pail.
He takes a step forward, and at first, I think he’s going to fall. But he doesn’t. Straightening up, he reaches out and hugs me tight.
And then I’m alone with Mary.
Even in death, Mary’s defiant. She’s supposed to look peaceful, as if she’s at rest. But her mouth’s slightly parted, and it’s as if any second, she’s going to wake up gasping and angry.
Sibat, Fahra says. Life after life. One rippling current.
And so I try to imagine a more gentle death, her soul cascading, slipping away like water in a stream. But I look at her pearl-gray face and see that’s a lie. No, her life was ripped free in a split-second blast. Every part of her—her smile, her hoarse laugh, her sharp-edged scolding, and her selfless grit—is gone. Scattered like so many bits of poppy ash. I open Larken’s box and look at the horn, and the tears come hard and hot. What good is royal incense and oil? What good is water and sacred words, when Mary is gone? How can any of it matter, when I’ve lost my foster mother?
My sob is a keening, broken cry. No. Not Mary.
She is my always mother.
And as my eyes drift back to the box, I finally sense the gift in my hands. This oil was offered to me, not because the ritual’s holy or it will bring her back or send her off in peace. The anointing’s given as a lasting gesture. One final expression of love.
Hands shaking, I open the horn and pour a measure of oil onto the cloth. Gently, I press it against her skin. I anoint her forehead, the one that touched mine when I was small and sick with fever. I anoint her hands, her hands that threaded stitches and burned toast and cupped my cheek. I anoint the sun-spotted softness above her breast, the heart that took in an orphaned child, the heart that was bigger than two worlds.
I anoint her with Larken’s gift and Fahra’s water, with all the prayer that is in them. When the horn’s empty, I lean down and kiss her temple. I give her what’s left, the last of my tears.
We bury her at sunset.
Afterward, I can’t bear the thought of spending the night in the tomb. I leave word, then slip back to the makeshift infirmary. It’s peaceful here now, just the handful of patients who can’t be moved yet and the pair of medics still working this shift. I check in, then claim my own half-curtained spot. Exhausted, I settle near the front, so I can try to fall asleep while watching the stars. But every time I close my eyes, it’s not the night I see. I see the flash of battle; I’m caught in the rumble and thunder. Mary and all our fallen—their faces loom. Dead, they whisper to me, but I cannot reach them through the smoke.
My sleep’s so uneasy, even the softest tread wakes me. Heart knocking, I wipe the sweat from my cheek and sit up. A split second of confusion, and for a moment, I’d completely forgotten where I was. Not at home. Not at camp. Not in the tomb, but here, in the new and unfamiliar infirmary tent. The lights have been dialed low to let the wounded catch a few hours of actual sleep. Some of them snore, almost as loud as the chugging equipment, but that’s not what jerked me awake.
I tilt and focus on the infirmary entrance, between the open tent flaps. A half-lit silhouette. A breeze blows, ruffling the not-quite-as-short-anymore crop of his hair.
“Hey,” I whisper to Bear.
He doesn’t answer, but he takes a step in my direction.
I can only see his shadow. He is slumped. At first, I’m cautious, like I’ve lost even the right to comfort him. But then he takes another step and I see his face and read the shape of my name on his lips.
Barefoot, I meet him. I move to put my arms around him, but just my hand on his arm tells me this tower’s already crumbling. No tears, but Bear is sinking into himself, like just one gust of wind and he’d tumble and fall. He lets me pull him to the cot, where he falls onto his side.
There, he finally cracks, trembling like he’ll never be warm again. I climb onto the little cot and slip next to him. At his back, I put my arms around him. Wordless, he speaks to me. I sense the grief in his breath and his heartbeat and in the lace of his fingers between mine. In answer, I cover him. I’m the wall between Bear and the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WE GET THROUGH THE NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS. I’VE ONLY given the barest report on our trip to Manjor. Word has spread that James and Cash are alive, like an adrenaline burst of hope. But there’s been so little time to process the news or plan our next move. No chance to mourn or rejoice or fight back; we’re focused on survival.
We move everything we can to our fallback position, settling behind the valley, fitting as much as we can into the catacombs under the hill. All the frantic talk and whispered questions in the air rattle through the rebel ranks. Do we dig in or go? Do we brace for battle or give up the Strand? So much depends on the Cyanese now. They’re here for the moment, thanks to Larken and Vilette, but if the rest of the council change their mind, if they decide to back away and cut their losses, we’re finished.
Hank and I push through the uncertainty. He rebuilds communications and commandeers a space inside Khed’s tomb, the biggest cell in the whole underground hive, a floodlit operations room filled with screens and micro-servers. Like so many others, I jump in, doing whatever I can.
A hundred times a day, I think of Mary.
But it’s different for Hal and Bear. In the tense bustle of retreat, I watch them implode. Silent and flat, Hal mostly sleepwalks. Bear’s just as quiet, but a lot more angry. Outside, he helps the Cyanese set up a new flight control. He buries himself in a simulator, flying through missions, shooting down fighters, one after another. For him, there will never be enough targets.
On the third day, Hal and I stand in the center of the war room, at the biggest flex table. Today, I can tell he’s so tired, he’s edging toward manic. This morning, we finally finished patching things up, with interstellar feeds finally coming back loud and clear. At Captain Nandan’s order, we’ve scheduled a flex meeting with James, to parse intel.