by Rin Chupeco
Her fingers grazed my elbow. “Is there still time?”
“Time?”
“To say yes. To your offer of the yexu and”—her voice shook, but she controlled it with a soft gulp—“staying the night. I don’t want this to be over.”
I don’t know what I must have looked like when I stared back at her, but from the way her breath quickened and her eyes took on a glazed look, she must have liked what she saw.
You can’t, I snarled to myself, even as I leaned toward her.
I saw her eyes flick to my right, saw them widen—and turn into a sudden fury of blazing green. Something vine-like whipped out from behind her, shooting past me to stake a shadow creature through where its heart ought to be. It skittered, squealed, and dissolved.
It had been almost directly behind me.
I whirled around, my broadsword already in my hands just as more shadows staggered out from the darkness. “Intruders!” I yelled, raising my voice loud enough for the others to hear and clamber into defensive positions, then lowering it again for Odessa’s benefit. “You said the galla were on your side.”
“Only the horned ones, with the blue jewels.” The plants curled around Odessa’s wrists, seemingly under her control. “The rest don’t necessarily want me here.”
“And I suppose there was a good reason you didn’t mention that.” I lunged forward and cleaved through another shadow with a clean stroke of my blade. These shadows appeared vulnerable to Asteria’s blessing, which meant they were also vulnerable to our swords. The new creatures were human height, at least, but there were enough of them to cause worry—three dozen, at least.
I took down another silhouette just as Noelle appeared by my side, her halberd already slicing through the air. From behind us, I could feel patterns being forged into weapons as the other Devoted readied themselves, sharp ice and blades of air cutting into the monsters. Odessa’s vines were just as effective, boring through those shadows’ bodies like rapiers or winding around them, squeezing them dry. I led a charge into the darkness, taking down as many of the creatures as I could, releasing the pent-up fears and anger I’d been holding in these last few weeks. I didn’t need magic. All I needed was my sword, and my rage, and my memories of Merritt and Nuala and everyone else to redouble my hunger for vengeance.
It felt great.
By the time we were all done, nothing remained. The shadows left no corpses, no indication that they had even existed. Gracea’s lights revealed nothing else lying in wait.
A cry rose from where most of the noncombatants had huddled. “Cathei’s gone!”
Gracea turned, incredulous. “Impossible! I just saw her standing—”
“Janella’s gone, too!”
The Starmaker looked furious. “Split up into groups. Holsett, take the lead and head into the north side of camp. Graham, you’ll go west—”
“No,” I interrupted.
“People on my team are missing, Tianlan! Why would you dare—”
“Because that’s what got my team killed, Gracea.” Breathe. Breathe. I kept seeing the dead in my mind’s eye, the bodies strewn around me when I knew they weren’t actually there. I was not going to break down again, and not in front of Gracea of all people, either—but it was getting harder to take in air.
I cleared my throat—several times, but my voice came out hoarse all the same. “Does anyone remember where they were last seen?”
“They were standing right beside me when the attacks started.” One of the crew spoke up—Salleemae—gesturing helplessly at the empty space beside her.
“I was standing guard right here,” Graham stuttered, his own face gray. “I saw nothing!”
“There are some marks on the ground,” Noelle pointed out quietly.
She was right. I knelt down to study them. “It happened the same way all those months ago.” My palms felt slick, my breath hitching at an uneven rate. “They’re smarter than we give them credit for. They want to divide us up into smaller groups, make it easier to pick us off.”
“Then what do we do?”
I wet my lips. “We wait.”
“We wait?” Odessa all but shouted. “We can’t wait! They could be out there, injured, trying to—”
“We have no other choice. We split off, that’s how they find us.”
“Are you saying we do nothing?” Gracea demanded.
“You’ve told me enough times that doing the opposite cost me my team.”
She glared at me but couldn’t find a proper answer.
“You can’t,” Odessa was nearly sobbing. “You can’t just abandon them to whatever is out there!”
“I’m sorry, Odessa.”
She took a step away, into the darkness.
“No!” I grabbed her arm, let just enough patterns through to let her know I had no qualms about rendering her unconscious again. She stared back at me, hurt and betrayal in her beautiful pale eyes. Was it only several minutes ago that we’d kissed like nothing else mattered? Her mouth was still swollen.
“I’m not going to stand here and wait like a coward when I know I could help them!” she shot back, and damn if that didn’t hurt.
“Your duty is to remain with the group,” I spat out. “Set out and search for Janella and Cathei, and you’ll risk the rest. What do you think is going to happen when you leave? Do you think there’s no mind at work here, conspiring to lure you away so it can slaughter the rest of us without your protection?”
Odessa paused, conflicted. The others shifted, discomfited by the thought. “Are you saying there’s nothing we can do?”
“I’m saying that there’s nothing you can do.” It took considerable effort to force the next words out. I didn’t want to do it. But this was how I’d protect her. Breathe in, Lan. Breathe out. All good. “Let me investigate.”
“What? No!” It was Odessa’s turn to grab me. “You’re not going out there alone again!”
“No visions this time, Your Holiness? Nothing for me to use as a guide?”
She hesitated, and for a second I thought she had one. But then she shook her head. “I forbid this.”
“They . . . the things out there spared my life before, and I don’t know why. Goddess willing, they’ll spare it again.”
“No!” Her voice rose, shriller. “I—I can’t allow—”
“She’s right, Your Holiness,” Gracea said. “She’s the sole ranger here, and the best choice.”
“Do you want me to remain and do nothing, Odessa, or do you want me to try and save these two women?” I grabbed my pack, adjusted my sword belt. “You chose to leave the Spire. Did you expect to treat everything else like some game the way you stowed away on the Brevity?” I didn’t want to act like she had no better motive for escaping in the first place, but it worked.
“You’re hateful,” she choked out.
“Maybe I just wasn’t the person you thought I was.” I strode into the darkness, leaving the brightness of the camp behind me. Everyone watched me leave without another word, and I didn’t need to look back to know the silent disapproval in Noelle’s eyes nor the crushed disappointment in Odessa’s.
I must have been half a mile away before I started breaking out into a cold sweat.
It was colder here, without any light to guide me by, even though my eyes had adjusted well enough to the darkness to know my own steps. But I wanted to run back to the safety of the group. I wanted to board the Brevity and sail back into Aranth and face the storms and the approaching seas instead of this agonizing silent darkness that had gutted me once before and would do so again. I wanted to run because this was where my nightmares were birthed, where everything I had always thought about myself as a person—strong, brave, fierce, unyielding—had been so easily proven wrong by the swipe of a dark, scaled claw and Nuala’s blood on my face.
My legs felt like lead, but I dragged onward. The cloak did nothing to keep me from feeling the cold, which numbed my fingers and bit at my ears. There were more marks on the g
round here, more signs of some previous disturbance, and I pushed on.
The shadows took on new forms this time; now that my eyesight had adjusted, I began making out more details. Some swirled into view like fog, taking on vaguely human features that gestured threateningly at me before disappearing again, to be replaced by more of the climbing mist, which drifted in from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Lan.
It was a figment of my imagination. It must be. Because when one of those flimsy shapes twisted and turned in the wind and called out after me, surely it hadn’t done so in Nuala’s voice.
Lan.
More figures. Ghostlike fingers brushing against my cloak, combing through my hair. Shapes dancing in and out of view, ambiguous enough to be anything but with enough form to imply that I could be mistaken.
No. I was seeing things. They can’t possibly be here. They’re dead. There is no way they could be . . .
Lan.
Clinging hands now, growing rougher. A faint ripping noise as my sleeve gave way to a particularly rough attempt, and I ran.
Lan!
Faces floated before me. Nuala, mouth open and face frozen in a never-ending scream. Merritt, her unblinking gaze focused on mine even while her face remained bloodless. Derel, Madi, Cecily, Aoba—they were all here, gazes accusing because they’d all died on my watch, and I hadn’t even given them the respect of doing the same.
Lan! Lan! Lan!
Not real, I gasped out to myself as I stumbled. Not real, not real, not real—
I almost didn’t see them until I’d heard a horrified, broken sob and nearly tripped over Janella. She was trying to roll herself up into a ball, to make herself invisible.
“Janella!”
She froze for a moment, then all but leaped into my arms.
“You’re real!” she wept. “You’re not a—you’re not a—”
“I’m here,” I said hoarsely, my eyes on a figure sprawled on the ground a few feet away. She was staring up at the sky, her eyes wide and a frozen look of despair on her face.
The mist disappeared. Panting, I scrambled to her, felt frantically for a pulse. There was none.
Aoba had been the first to die. I’d come across her body this way, too; stumbling in the dark, terrified of what lurked within it, like a little child who’d grown up on far too many nightmares. Like Cathei, she’d stared up into the starless sky with sunken eyes and mouth agape, and nothing we did could bring her back.
No. No no no no nonononono—
“Lady Tianlan?” It was Janella’s voice that brought me back into the present. I gulped in another mouthful of air, willed myself to stop, stop, stop it, Lan, stop it, get a damn hold of yourself!
But Aoba—no, this was Cathei—wasn’t the only dead body here. Another corpse lay sprawled against a large rock—picked clean and broken in places by the teeth of some creature I would much rather not know about. What little fabric it wore was tattered and falling off in places, but I recognized the partial remains of an insignia that had been sewn into the cloth.
It wasn’t any of my rangers. It was a ranger, but the corpse was too old; the clothing style different from the one my rangers and I wore. A brooch rusted and tarnished by the elements gaped out at me from in between its ribs: a silver star. I gathered what bones I could, shoved them into a sack I’d brought along.
“I need you to move, darling. Can you do that?”
Janella nodded. The fog was gone, and there were no other figures twisting in the darkness. At least I could bring Cathei’s body back to camp.
Aoba’s had been the only body I was able to bury. I choked back a sob. Another death. Another death on me.
A movement to my right. A figure from a distance, shrouded in a cloak of haze, watched us, and I swore it lifted a hand up—as a greeting or as a threat, I was never sure. But when I looked again, the fog had lifted, and it was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Arjun, Son of Clan Oryx, Going to Hell
OF COURSE SHE NAMED ALL the dolugongs.
In the space of a dayspan she had transformed the whole pod into pets. They swam before us like one big happy goddessdamned family, and I was annoyed at Haidee for encouraging the facade.
“Don’t nudge the side, Anastacia!” she scolded one especially playful dolugong. “You’ll tip us over again!”
“How can you even tell them apart?” I grumbled.
“How can you tell other people apart?”
“That’s different, and you know it!”
“Not to me. Shepard! Don’t stray too far from your mama!” The pup we’d rescued barked out an assent like it actually understood, shooting me an adoring expression. The mama in question scooped her baby up in its squared jaw. “Thank you, Madeline!”
“What are you gonna do when we finally leave the Sand Sea?” I asked her. “I’m not bringing them along.”
She shrugged, brushing the details off like she always did until they came right back to bite her in the ass, like this undoubtedly would. “We’ll figure something out. Besides, dolugongs are fiercely independent creatures, and highly intelligent. Maybe we can come back to visit, or something?”
“Visit? We’re not doing this for fun.”
She hummed, ever the optimist. Her short hair billowed in the wind, blue and purple and white, and I immediately hated myself for the way I stared. “Who knows? I mean, you’re here because you think we can save what’s left of Aeon, right? Who’s to say it won’t be better for them, too?”
I huffed my exasperation and reached for one of her tomes.
She’d brought a few books along for the journey (I’d asked if they were for kindling, and she’d threatened castration), and she’d given me permission to look through them under further veiled threats about what would happen if I marred them in any way. I’d obliged, mostly because the sand buggy wasn’t getting any bigger, the hours weren’t getting any shorter, and her voice wasn’t getting any softer. I’d taught her how to handle the rig, and she’d gotten competent enough for us to start taking turns driving.
So far, though, the books seemed nothing short of fantastic to me. Ice-capped mountains? Never-ending storms? Neither of them sounded appealing, but looking out at the sandscape right now made it hard for me to believe they used to exist. I flipped through a few more pages, taking in some illustrations of surrealistic-looking creatures—four-legged beasts with impossibly long necks, flappy-eared giants with tubes for noses, round animals made apparently of nothing but spiny thorns—before spotting a folded letter tucked between two pages.
“Is this a love letter? Did someone write you a love letter?”
She slapped the wheel, irritated. “Of course not, why would—No, it’s a letter I believe my father wrote to Mother.”
I frowned, silently reading it through. If this was her father, he sure seemed terrified. Sounded like a betrayal in the works—but which goddess, exactly, had done the betraying? “‘The magic that place wields can destroy the world as easily as it can revive it.’ That’s what makes you think there’s something at Brighthenge we can use?”
“There has to be. The letter was clearly important enough for Mother to keep it.”
“She could have kept it out of sentimentality.”
“Mother’s never been the type to be sentimental.” She paused. “She never told me anything about my father. All I know is that Brighthenge was built atop the entrance to the Cruel Kingdom—Inanna’s kingdom—to keep any monsters at bay.”
“What are you saying? That we’re going to hell? That we’re literally going to hell? We’re going to a literal hell that demons are escaping out of?”
She scowled at me. “I—look, I don’t know what the state of Brighthenge is right now. But from what I can gather, the Great Abyss is where the temple used to be.”
“We’re going to hell,” I groaned.
Haidee huffed at me again. “And there’s the mirage. It seems to want us there, too. Mother never told me much about ou
r history. Even some of the nobles know more about it than I do.” She sighed. “And I never went to the balls she was fond of hosting, so I never mingled with them long enough to learn. She played me well enough.”
“I’m still on the fence about this mirage of ours.” I craned my neck. “I haven’t sighted it again, by the way. You think it’s leading us on a wild-goose chase?”
“I don’t know. But it sure is expending a lot of energy for a jest.”
“Yeah, well.” I rubbed my eyes. “As long as we keep heading west, we’ll be heading to Brighthenge. No doubt we’ll find the mirage waiting there. May as well see if the temple still exists too, if that will ease your mind. And what’s with that ‘of course not’?”
“What?”
“When I asked if someone had written you a love letter, you said, ‘Of course not’ like it was offensive. No one’s ever written you one?”
“Hasn’t anyone written one to you?” she shot back.
“I live in a hellhole, and the closest neighbors we’ve got want to eat us.” There were definitely a few back in Clan Oryx who were obviously sweet on each other, like Millie and Kad, or Sam and Lybeth, but . . . I personally wasn’t interested in bringing kids into this kind of future, or expecting to live long enough to spend it with someone else. “On the other hand, you live in a city full of people, and you’ve mentioned suitors.”
She looked away. She didn’t seem annoyed anymore, or angry. She seemed . . . sad. “Heavily supervised by my mother, yes. Love letters written to me behind her back would have taken them out of her favor instead of the other way around. It’s always about politics in the Golden City.” She inclined her head toward me. “You never had someone? You’ve had more freedom than I do.”
I coughed. “I . . . well, there was a girl.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t make anything out of it. We weren’t in a serious relationship. We both ended it when Lisette moved away.”
She frowned. “But if you weren’t in a serious relationship, then what else would you be doing togeth—ohhhhh. Oh. Never mind.”