He turns to me. “Which do you think is better? And if you say Ithnaan pepper soup . . .”
A smile breaks across my face. It’s not that I can’t tell the difference. It’s that I want to play with him for a little bit. Get him riled up. Mama never really cooked her soup with peppers. Instead, her special dish included spreading sweetened herbs over yogurt and stirring that together with a special tomato sauce. Ithnaan pepper soup has its own merits, that’s what I want to tell him, but I just shrug. “My family comes from Khamsa, so I’m agnostic.”
Ras raises an eyebrow. A challenge.
“We choose no sides.”
Ras nods to himself. “Eh-heh. This is smart. You are smart. Stay above the fray.”
I look off into the dark forest and see Zainab standing alone, her arms folded across her chest. She looks on at the dancing by the fire. Without a word, I push myself up and walk to her. When I get close enough, I can smell something strong and pungent. She doesn’t notice me. Or she pretends not to notice me, as she slips a small flagon from its hook by her thigh and tips it onto the back of her free hand. A small line of black and gray dust falls out. She sways back and forth when she puts the flagon back, but not to the rhythm of the music. It’s like she’s dancing to a song only she can hear. Her free hand remains absolutely still until she puts it to her nose and inhales sharply.
“Zainab,” I call out.
She looks up and smiles, but her eyes are sad.
The smell thickens, and I flinch. “What is that?” I ask her. My hand comes up to cover my nose.
“Do you want some?” she slurs. She holds the thing out to me. A stone sways on the bracelet around her outstretched wrist. It glows softly in the night.
I look at it for a moment, then take it and look it over again. Slowly, I unscrew the cap and sniff lightly. It burns my entire face. I hold the flagon out to her, begging her to take it. Meanwhile, I’m trying to spit out the mucus in my throat from inhaling the fumes. Laughter explodes from Zainab. She clutches her stomach, bends over, slaps her thighs. She can’t stop laughing. I’m still trying to figure out how to breathe again. It’s poison. It has to be.
She takes it, ready to pour again.
“Why do you do that?” I cough before every word. I try to wipe the rest of the burn from under my nose, but the heat lingers. I wince. This must be how Arzu felt with the pepper sauce.
“It helps,” Zainab tells me, still smiling.
“But it hurts.” I cough again. “It’s like sniffing fire.”
She examines the flagon in her hand. “It is bad to do. But I do it.”
“Why?”
With her free hand, she taps her temple. “It quiets me here.” She points to her chest. “And here.” And that’s when I see it. Tears. Leaking down her face, running along the spider legs that trace her cheeks. “Too many sins.” She turns the flagon over in her hands and turns the other way.
Stone-sniffers aren’t supposed to look like her. They’re supposed to be emaciated, worn-down old men or women unable to find work and make families of their own. Stone-sniffers in Kos, they’re supposed to be the ones the city gave up on. They’re not supposed to look like Zainab. My first instinct is to feel disdain and disgust for her. How can she do this to herself? But I look at how covered she is, and I understand.
Zainab starts to limp away.
“Wait!” I shout and chase after her. We stand at the very edge of the forest. In front of us is pure darkness. “You don’t have to do that.” I want to tell her what I learned about keeping the sins out of my head. I want to tell her that all she needs to do is not think about people, not care for them. To just focus on herself and staying alive. She doesn’t have to sniff that coal. “What are they making you do?”
“I’m their Catcher.”
That word again. “Catcher?”
“When Mages call forth sins for the aki to face and the young ones cannot defeat them, I am sent to catch them.”
“You Eat escaped sins?”
“That is what they have me here for.”
So, this is how they’re using her and how she believes they will use me. As just a bucket for sins. How long has she been here? How many training seasons has she been doing this for?
The sins drawn on this side of the Wall . . . the Scribes didn’t paint those. She did. They’re her sins.
How much longer does she have? There’s almost no bare skin on her left. She shifts from foot to foot, as though trying to get feeling back in one leg. I’ve seen her do that before. When we first met in the forest and she called me the Catcher.
She puts both hands to her chest. “You are like me. Your sin-spots do not fade. That is why they chose you: This is your future. This . . .” She gestures all around her. “It’s not what you think. They’ll never want to celebrate us. They will use us to destroy Kos.” Then she steps back, and the forest swallows her. I take a step after her, but a hand grips my shoulder. I turn, and it’s Ras. He merely shakes his head. Destroy Kos? How?
We head back to the fire. I watch the others dance. I can see their skin. When I finish teaching them to fight, they will go with Mages who will call forth sins for them to fight. If they win, they come back with new tattoos. If they don’t, they don’t come back at all. Some of them have only begun to gain their sin-spots. For most of them, so much of their flesh remains untouched, unblemished.
And they are still so happy.
This is your future, Zainab told me. I think about the young aki I’ve been training. I think about the festival, and that conversation I overheard between Aliya and Izu makes less sense than it did before. He wants to bring the aki out of hiding, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
CHAPTER 24
IN THE SHADOWED enclosure where the stone has been moved from the mouth of the cave and where moisture drips somewhere in the black depths farther on, I sit with a sharp stone in my hands. Like the clearing with the bag I spend hours hitting, this is a place where I know the others can’t find me. Where I can let go.
It’s been getting worse. My fingers lose their feeling for a few seconds, then it all comes back. And every time I go to sleep now, I get night terrors.
I know the guilt isn’t my guilt. I know it’s the guilt of other sinners. I know that there’s no reason for me to feel this way about myself, that I haven’t told that lie or committed that act of adultery or broken that person’s arm. But at the bottom of my stomach and in the space that fills my lungs, I feel like I’ve done those things, that I deserve the pain and torment, that I’m guilty. I know this is merely the sins breaking through the walls I’ve spent my life building. I can’t pretend I don’t care anymore, and that’s how it happens. I think of others—the aki, Bo, Karima—then suddenly the others become the people whose sins you’ve Eaten.
Whenever I get tired, whenever I’m about to fall asleep, the visions attack. All the sins I’ve ever Eaten, so many of them, it feels like I’m the one committing them, like my lips are telling every single lie, like my hands are causing the violence. And always, at the end, that vision of Princess Karima, the sin-lion, and the sin-snake.
It has gotten to the point where I just wind up sleeping alone in the forest, away from the tents. Sometimes, I wake up with bruised knuckles from the stone and trees I thrash against in my sleep.
This is probably what Zainab’s going through. Maybe, while she sleeps alone on the forest floor, she thrashes in her sleep. Maybe she scatters leaves all around her. Maybe, while walking, she collapses as a foot or a whole leg falls asleep. Maybe her hands tremble when she brings a bowl of stew to her lips. Maybe some of the stew drips onto her rags. Maybe she has to close her eyes against the shaking, trying to will it away. Maybe when she Crosses, every movement is a struggle, and every morning waking up from the night terrors sees her riddled with fear. It’s starting to happen to me.
S
he’s going crazy. Paranoid. The festival is just that—a festival. What else could it be? My heart sinks. Maybe that’s why she said what she said about using the aki to destroy Kos. She is losing her mind.
This is why Zainab sniffs coal. This is why other aki give up in the middle of a fight with an inisisa.
I squeeze my eyes tight and let out a sigh.
By the time I get enough energy to push myself to my feet, the sun has begun to show over this empty patch of forest, and I can start walking back to the campsite.
Somebody runs past the entrance to the cave, then doubles back.
Aliya.
“Hey, I was looking for you.”
“You found me. What do you need?”
Her face softens. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Why?”
She comes into the cave and sits too close to me. “I’m starting to see. The Eating ritual. What it does to the body. It is all so different from what is written in the notes. It is mentioned only in passing in the Paroles, and even when the Seventh Prophet speaks of Balance and the prophecy, there is no mention of what happens to you.” She looks up from her hands folded in her lap. “Taj, what happens to you?”
I meet her eyes and straighten my spine. “Whenever you Eat, whenever you consume a sin, you take the sinner’s guilt. And it becomes a mark on you.” I pull my sleeves up to reveal the sin-spots that wind trails up and down my forearms. Some of them have been burned into the back of one hand and the fingers of the other. “Eventually, it becomes too much. The guilt consumes you, drives you mad.” The glass-eyed beggars on the side of the road in the Forum who can’t even move to collect the ramzi in their bowls. They’re Crossed, cowering in alleyways. The ones who can still move, roaming the streets like ghosts. “It’s kind of your destiny. There are no adult aki. By the end, you can’t stand. Can’t speak. Can’t even see. You just stop moving, and that’s when you know it’s the end.” I shrug. “You can’t Eat any more sins.” I remember the first time I saw Zainab, when she limped away from me into the forest. Even then, it was happening.
Aliya looks out the entrance to the cave. She’s probably thinking of all the aki out there and the fates awaiting them. “How do you know?”
I look at my hands. “You run out of skin.” That’s when you know.
We’re sitting there for a little bit when she says, “I want to spend more time with you.” I look up, startled. “In the camps, I mean. With the aki you are training. In my own tent, of course. And apart from the aki quarters, but . . .”
I smile. “I know what you mean, Aliya.”
I move a little closer to her, so that we’re looking out the cave’s entrance together. The leaves shiver, and drops of rain plop their music into puddles that are already forming at the mouth of the cave. I come here to be alone, but it feels good to be with Aliya. Like a different way of being.
I lean back against the cave wall. “I remember the first Eating I saw. I was a child. Maybe up to Baba’s hip. Mama was sick. Very sick. Coughing and wheezing. She could barely breathe. She couldn’t even get up out of bed. Baba took me with him into the Forum to see a Mage, and the Mage had a whole group of aki with him in the alley. They didn’t have many sin-spots on them yet. Some of them were my age. And the Mage had one aki, a girl, on a chain. She had this collar around her neck like an animal. She was the one the Mage brought to our home to Eat Mama’s sin.”
Aliya is still and silent.
I feel myself drifting into the memory as I tell it. “I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I could peek through the beaded curtains. I watched the Mage speak over Mama, and I saw the inisisa escape her. I’d rushed in because it sounded like Mama was in so much pain, and the inisisa chased after me. It cornered me against a wall, but the little aki was able to sneak up behind it and kill it with her daga. Then she Ate it.”
Aliya looks into her lap.
“What was it?” she asks, her voice small.
Suddenly, my heart jumps into my throat, and I can’t breathe. A spider. “The inisisa was a spider,” I murmur. “The sin-spot appeared on her forehead—”
I leap up from where I was sitting, my mind racing. “It was Zainab,” I say, stunned. “By the Unnamed, it was her. She was the one who cured my mother.”
A couple aki walk by in the rain, then more, and I see a bunch of them holding a blanket heavy with a body. Ras carries one end. I don’t even have to see the sin-spots covering the leg that dangles over to know what has happened.
“Zainab.” My limbs go numb. I fall to the ground. I feel Aliya’s hand on my shoulder, but I shrug her away.
“Taj, I’m so sorry. I—”
I don’t hear the rest. I’m already walking away.
The patch of forest they eventually bring her to is otherwise unremarkable. Looks like any other patch of forest. We shiver in the rain that has made the soil moist enough for easy digging. My body trembles, but I barely feel the rain. I barely feel anything. There aren’t enough shovels for everyone, so most of the aki stand to the side while Ras and I and two others dig. I don’t think anyone else knew who Zainab was or what she did. Some of the girls look at her body and cry, not because this is the first burial they’ve seen, but because Zainab was something special to them. She would occasionally cross their path, and all they needed to do was glance in her direction and know that they could survive. They could wear all the sins in Kos and survive. Tears burn my eyes, but I keep digging anyway. Digging like it’s the only thing I’m meant to do right now, like I wasn’t built for anything else but this moment.
The world fades away, and the only sound I can hear is my shovel scraping into the ground and scooping up dirt. I can’t even hear the rain pattering on the leaves overhead. I can no longer feel my clothes growing heavy on me.
My arms are on fire, and I stop just long enough to wipe the rainwater from my eyes. When I look up, I see a blur of black. I blink, then that blur turns into robes, and I realize there’s a Mage in front of me, back bowed as they dig. Aliya looks up, returns my gaze, then goes back to digging.
The others begin to peel away to escape the rain. It’s clear training has been called off for the rest of the day.
The cut on my forearm stings.
By the end, the only ones left are me and Aliya.
When I walk back to camp, my daga is wet with blood from the throat I had to cut, and I have Zainab’s stone in a bracelet around my wrist.
CHAPTER 25
I’VE FOUND A fallen tree trunk to crouch on, and I’m squinting as hard as I can at the writing on the Wall.
All that time I spent around Mama and Baba and the books they would bring, and I only ever scrolled through them for fun. They were all pretty to look at—my eye pressed to the cylinder as the words and pictures danced before me.
Beneath the inisisa painted here are words splashed out in the paint Zainab used. She’s buried far from her work, her art, but the stone I now wear on my wrist glows from being so close to where she scribbled. Auntie Sania tried to teach me how to read, but I didn’t need it. When you’re trying to scavenge for your one meal of the day, you can tell how valuable something is by how people treat it, not by what’s written down as its price.
I wish I’d been able to tell Zainab thank you. She probably never recognized me. By the time she’d helped Mama, she’d probably Eaten so many sins and killed so many inisisa that the families all blended together. But if her sin-spots never faded, then she never forgot. As much as I try, I can’t ever truly forget the ones I’ve Eaten either.
The right side of my face goes numb. I shut my eyes tight and try to let it pass, all the while working my jaw. Eventually, feeling returns. It’s getting worse.
This is my destiny, Zainab told me.
I wish I’d been able to tell her that it didn’t have to be. It didn’t have to be hers either.
; “They’re beautifully done.”
I jump and nearly fall off the branch. Scrambling, I get back on and see that Aliya’s standing there next to me. She pulls down her glasses and connects the bridge, then she squints like I was doing. “Some of the spelling is a bit off.” She glances at me. “I don’t mean misquoted verses. But you can see, right?” She points at a bit of script beneath a red falcon’s talons.
“Yeah, I see it. The . . . yeah.”
She takes a few steps forward, still squinting, then comes back next to me. She sits heavily on the tree trunk. “Do you come here often?”
I shrug. In my head, I’m stumbling over half-formed excuses, things to tell her that probably won’t make sense once the words come out of my mouth anyway, but then, all of a sudden, I say, “Zainab was here a lot.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, she . . . she did a bunch of these.” I point to a couple of the inisisa. “I think she was a Scribe before . . . well, before she got brought here.”
“In the Paroles of the Seventh Prophet, we’re told that it was like this in the Before.”
“What do you mean? Like what?”
She’s looking at the inisisa. It feels like she sees something different from what I see. “Inisisa weren’t made of sin, because during the Before, there was no sin. They were these magnificent creatures made of light. They were like glass, so that all colors passed through them whenever they walked. Beasts composed of perfectly angled geometric patterns. They were walking equations, explaining the wonders of the Unnamed.”
“Not this lahala again. Tell me why this is supposed to matter to me.” I know I’m not angry at her. Not really. I’m angry because Zainab’s dead, and Izu forced her into this work.
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