Odion paced in the periphery of her vision.
She put a mindstone into the mouth of the older man first, and left him on the ground at the base of the wall. She moved on to Bahtir. Two guardsmen held him in place, one gripping each of his arms. She slid the glassy stone between his lips, and the life flowed out of his body. The guardsmen held him against the wall, and she pinned him there, driving shards of amethyst through the nine sacred points—palms and feet, hips and shoulders, and the final point through the nook at the base of his throat. The amethyst penetrated through his flesh, just until the tips touched the wall, and yet the attraction between the lavender shards and the clear stone held Bahtir firmly. His head drooped as though he bowed it in remorse, but once he was opened, smaller amethyst pins would hold the muscles of his face, and his head would no longer hang.
Odion handed her the obsidian blade. Like the wall itself, the blade came from an older time. Mbenu, who made tools for the village, could knap a blade from obsidian, but his tools did not have the power of the Ancients in them. This blade slipped between the cells, and Njeri had learned through many years of training to trace the exact paths that would peel a man open without spilling a drop of blood.
Her first cut sliced only skin, beginning at the top of Bahtir’s forehead and moving down the midline, over his nose, and to his lips. There she paused and traced the outline of his mouth with the blade before picking up the midline once more. Chin neck, chest, groin, all without a drop of blood. The only loss was a strand of his hair that grew exactly on the midline. Sliced away by her blade, it fell to the base of the wall.
She sliced down the inner edge of each leg to the ankle, then drew the blade around to the front of each foot and into a gentle curve to the tip of the middle toe, completing the first vertical sequence. After that came a series of horizontal lines, branching out from the center. One cut along each arm, branching into five lines at the fingers. Evenly spaced cuts along the torso and legs so the skin would lie flat against the wall. Last, a series of lines radiating out from the center of his face, so that it would open like an exploding sun.
Light streamed through his skin. Any darkness on his surface was artificial, a trick of the eyes and not an indication of his being. On the wall, skin of every color let the same amount of light pass through. Njeri passed her blade to Odion and wiped the sweat from her face.
When she looked up, she saw Kanika, standing on the hillside, one face among many watchers. She stood near the top of the hill with the people of Stonewall, all of them staying as far from the wall as possible. The villagers had seen this many times, and attended now only because the general demanded it. A foolish demand, Njeri realized, for even if no one watched, the shame of these men would be forever sewn onto the surface of their skin. No army would follow a sewn general.
Everyone on the hill judged these men. All except Kanika. She was there to judge Njeri, and simply by having begun the flaying, she had failed. Standing at her side, Odion held the obsidian blade lightly, as though it was made of air from the night sky. When she took it from him the weight of it pulled her down towards the earth. She had to ease the burden on her heart; she had to prove that Bahtir deserved this punishment. Instead of moving on to the next man, Njeri stayed with the former general, peeling away the muscles to get down to his bones.
She placed the tip of the blade on Bahtir’s breastbone, and leaned into it with all her weight. His breastbone split in two. She pried his ribcage open and revealed his shadows. They crawled like slugs from the core of his being, leaving trails of black slime behind them. This was her vindication, her proof that the punishment was just—but it was a hollow victory.
Njeri could feel the eyes of every man, woman, and child on the hillside, boring into the back of her neck. They looked at Bahtir, not at her, but she felt as though she was the one whose heart was exposed. She wanted to throw down her blade, or smash it to slivers against the wall.
The sunlight that passed through the wall cast no shadows. Even the stones that were flawed with a spiderweb pattern of cracks—scars from poorly aimed rocks of generations past—even those stones contained no darkness. Those imperfections on the wall simply broke the light into rainbows. It was a mockery of mankind. A mockery of Bahtir, whose shadowed heart was exposed for all to see.
Judging from the sun, it was mid-afternoon now, and a plate of untouched food sat behind her. Odion must have offered it, but she did not remember waving it off. The boy stepped forward and sprinkled water on Bahtir’s body to keep the tissue from drying out. When he finished, he came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He could see that she was suffering, and Njeri knew he would gladly take over her task.
The second man lay unconscious in the dirt, his mind still locked away in stone. He was older, his hair a pale gray, almost white in the bright glare of the wall. Njeri could see the outline of his bones; he was underfed, or ill, or both.Njeri didn’t know the man’s name.
Two guardsmen held his limp body against the wall and Njeri pinned him into place. She raised her blade, holding it at the man’s head, at the starting point for the series of incisions she had made a hundred times before. It didn’t matter that the man was old. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know who he was or what he had done. She had opened Kanika, she could do this.
“Do you tire?” Odion whispered when the pause grew too long. “I can bear this burden for you.”
Njeri could not pass the blade to her apprentice, not at this moment, not in this way. Not even if the boy was ready, which Njeri doubted. This was a decision she had to make, to cut or not to cut. If she couldn’t open this man, it meant that Kanika had been right—that in thinking it was not her place to pass judgment, she had been judging just the same. The blade quivered in her hand, and a droplet of blood appeared on the man’s forehead.
“Give me the blade,” Odion said, holding out his hand.
“No,” Njeri said. This was her duty, and had been for many years. She could not escape from this, not now, not ever. To fail in her duty would be an act against General Yafeu. She could feel his gaze boring into her from the hillside, waiting, judging, finding her wanting.
“What is the delay?” General Yafeu called out. “Your task is not yet finished, woman.”
“Who is this man?” Njeri asked. “What is his crime?”
“That is no business of yours.” Yafeu’s voice held amusement. He found this entertaining. Like a circus act, or a play. This was the man who Njeri had trusted to pass judgment. If she had believed herself unfit to decide the fate of others, surely this man was worse. Which made Njeri worse for having accepted his orders.
Njeri couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open this man that she didn’t even know. She tore an amethyst pin out of his hand and reached for the one in his shoulder. Guardsmen rushed in to restrain her, and she put up no fight. The obsidian blade was taken from her.
“Open him,” Yafeu said, speaking to Odion.
“No!” Njeri cried. “Please, let him go.”
“At last, a statement with conviction.” Yafeu smiled. “Will you take his place, then? Do you believe so strongly in this man that you would face the wall instead of him?”
Njeri knew her motives weren’t pure. She wanted to save the man, yes, but not for his sake. She wanted to save him to make up for all the times she’d cut people open blindly. She wanted to make amends for opening Kanika without even asking of her crime. But surely it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than to not do it at all.
Odion stood before her. His eyes brimmed with tears. He had wanted to prove himself today, but not this way. Even with all his impatience and ambition, he still loved her. There was hope for him yet.
“Yes,” Njeri said. “I will take the man’s place.”
“Pin her up,” the general ordered. “Boy, you can gut them both.”
Njeri managed two steps toward Yafeu before the guardsmen closed in and restrained her. “It could kill him. Especially
at the hands of the inexperienced.”
“You had your chance to do it, and if the boy kills him, the ghost will curse him, not me,” Yafeu said. “I can’t let an enemy go free.”
Njeri turned to Odion. “Open me first. I can stand to lose a few drops of blood, and you will do better with the old man if your hands are practiced with the blade.”
“I don’t have a mindstone,” he said. His whole body shook, and he reeked with the sweat of fear. “We only brought two mindstones.”
The general would not be pleased. She wondered if he would order her opened without the stone. That way would surely mean death.
“Take this one.” It was Kanika, her voice soft and close. In her hand was the mindstone that had held her mind, the one Njeri had given her to keep. The guardsmen moved to encircle her, but backed away at the sight of her scars. She was a ghost, a curse, a plague. Njeri couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, the punishment that continued after the wall.
“I will be there when you wake. We can face the world together,” Kanika said. She brushed her hand against Njeri’s cheek.
“Touching,” General Yafeu said, “but it’s time for you to go back to the hill. Unless you’d like another turn on the wall? I don’t think anyone has ever faced it twice.”
Kanika kissed Njeri’s forehead, exactly on the spot that Odion would begin the first incision. She lingered a moment more, then walked past General Yafeau and up to the top of the hill. Odion stepped forward. It hurt the boy to see Njeri with someone else, sharing the intimacy that he himself longed for.
“You and I will share a different bond, Odion,” she told him.
He nodded, and his jaw clenched as he prepared for what he must do. For a moment she feared he would refuse this duty, as she had done. It would anger Yafeu if he had to take his second prisoner to a lesser fragment of wall, and it would mean death for her and Odion—they had no claim to the citrine throne, their blood wasn’t powerful enough for Yafeu to fear their ghosts. She held her mouth open and waited.
Odion pressed the mindstone between her lips, and she closed her eyes and swallowed herself.
The stone became her body. She sensed its boundaries, smooth and round. Her mind swirled restlessly inside. It felt like something was missing. She was indigo-blue. Perhaps green was missing? She searched and found flickering flecks of green, like emerald rain in her river of blue. She found red and yellow and purple. All her colors were here, but something was fundamentally wrong with this existence.
She pressed against the boundaries of her stone, and discovered thousands of tiny windows. Speckles of color were stuck to the edges of each opening. She tasted one of the windows, and the flavor of otherness repulsed her. She withdrew to the center of her stone, checking her threads of red and yellow, her flecks of green, her river of blue. She was intact.
Her churning nature sent her out to her boundaries once more, and she tasted each of the windows in turn. She began to develop favorite spots, flavors she returned to again and again. Her extremities oozed out through those windows, the ones that tasted best, and her strands of rainbow-self brought images from beyond the stone.
The first was Odion. The boy held the obsidian blade in his right hand, and a bundle of muscle tissue in his left. The tissue belonged to Njeri. The name came without the sense of self that she knew ought to accompany it. Njeri was a painting of a memory, hanging on the wall. Njeri was the body, and she was the stone, and yet they were the same.
Odion flayed Njeri open. Tiny beads of blood leaked out from misplaced seams and poorly detached muscles. The tip of the blade tore into her and isolated every thread of her being. Odion cut Njeri’s body apart, and every slice he made burned her in the space between her colors.
Odion plunged the blade into Njeri’s breastbone and pried her ribcage open. She burned like a white-hot flame, a blaze too strong for her river of blue to extinguish. Ragged black canyons stretched out from Njeri’s heart like festering wounds. Her colors recoiled from the darkness. Odion misted the body with water. The searing fire of pain died to glowing embers. He was finished, and he disappeared from her senses.
She stretched her colors towards the darkness. That was what was missing inside the stone. Her colors dimmed with the setting sun, but even as her red and yellow shifted into lavender and silver, there was no shadow. She reached into the dark canyons and tried to latch onto them, to pull the blackness out. Instead, the shadow pulled her inward, down through the center of Njeri’s heart, and into the wall itself.
Bahtir was beside her. The cuts she had inflicted on his flesh drew her further out of herself, closer to her patient and deeper into the wall. Echoes of Bahtir’s shadowself seeped out from his body and writhed in the cracks between the giant stones of the wall. She felt his flesh, still hanging, but he stayed inside his mindstone.
Someone new appeared. She recognized the woman by her shadow. Kanika. Tendrils of red and gold and green seeped out from Kanika’s mindstone, but they wandered aimlessly, without direction or purpose. Kanika had stretched out from her stone and seen visions on the wall, just as she had claimed, but the wall did not guide Kanika backwards. The wall did not pull everyone as it pulled her. She wanted to stay with Kanika, but the wall carried her away.
She moved backwards through time. She felt every cut of every man and every woman she’d ever flayed open, and still the torture did not end. Talib’s final patients were next, the ones that she had watched to learn his trade. Then people she didn’t know, stretching back before she was born, before Talib was born. The knowledge that passed from teacher to student across the generations bound them all together as surely as if they’d shared blood. She was tied to the surgeons, and that bound her to their patients.
An infant appeared on the wall. Black threads grew out from his heart like mold, and covered the insides of his ribs. His blackness barely moved, it was a constant, steady thing. She did not know if it was greed or fear or rage. Perhaps it was something she had no name for, because a shadow grew within her people before they had the words to name it. She felt the infant’s agony twice over—the searing heat of the blade that cut him open, and the anguish in her heart at learning that even the innocent held shadows.
Soon after that, she came to the earliest days of her people, when watchers threw stones at those who hung helpless on the wall. Each blow crushed her colors, smashing them together into a muddy brown.
Then, nothing.
She had seen all that the wall had to show her. She waited for Odion to return, to take her down. She sensed that in her distant present, Odion was taking the men down from the wall. The men, but not Njeri. He could not bear to heal her, after having seen her darkness.
The wall rebuilt itself.
Tiny fragments merged together to form a perfect ring of glassy stone. It happened so fast that she had no way to know what had destroyed the wall. All she knew was that it was whole now. The vastness of it made her feel small, a tiny raindrop of color in an ocean of stone and light.
Two Ancients touched the wall, and she felt them as though they touched her skin. It was the end of their time, and the knowledge of that fact filled them with sadness. She waited for the surgeon, the last true surgeon, but then she realized that each of the Ancients that touched the wall also held an obsidian blade. Moving in perfect synchrony, each Ancient sliced open the other. They controlled the blades in a way she did not understand, and even after they were opened, they continued to cut each other. The surgeon and the patient, the judger and the judged—in the time of the Ancients, both went together to the wall.
Like them, she knew both ends of the obsidian blade.
Odion appeared before her.
Not yet, she pleaded. They were almost done. She wanted to see the Ancients, to see if they had blackness. Odion began to take her down, removing the amethyst pins one by one as guardsmen held her in place. Her colors pulled back into her heart and towards her mindstone. With just one hand still pinned against t
he wall, she could not see the Ancients, but she could feel them, and what they did here was not punishment, it was not judgment. For them, the wall was love. The Ancients did not hide their shadows—not from each other and not from the wall. And in the moment of their union, when they lay open to each other, they drew knowledge from the wall. They absorbed the history of their people, the wisdom of countless generations.
She caught fleeting images of cities a thousand times larger than the capitol, and weapons that could scar the earth itself, and ships of glassy stone that sailed not on water but in space. Her river of blue wept in undulating strands of turquoise at the beauty and the horror of their past.
Njeri’s hand came free of the wall, and the connection was broken.
She watched from the mindstone as two guardsmen placed Njeri on a stretcher. They moved the body to a table, and Odion spent hours stitching it together, stopping once to sleep. The boy made two mistakes, and had to tear out the seams and start again. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how long it took, or even if he never woke Njeri at all. She had been wrong about the wall, wrong about the blackness. They had taken something beautiful, and sullied it with their imperfections.
Odion checked every seam seven times, then reached into Njeri’s mouth. His touch shattered the boundaries of the stone. Her colors whirled outward, searching for structure. She dissipated into the space around her, traveling down her tendrils into Njeri’s body—her body—the form she had lived in all her life. The shape of the body was wrong, like a shell that was too big.
Her eyes wouldn’t open. Her body was desiccated and weak, and she couldn’t stretch tendrils into the world beyond. She longed for her colors, for the fullness of history within the wall, for the knowledge of the ancients. After such vivid truth, the drab reality of life seemed false.
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