“And then Aslan Loo’s body will take out the Puppeteer, too, somehow or other. Wasn’t clear on that. But it’s a good trick, Luce says!”
“Then after the party, we’ll rule the city,” said Yabli, standing. “Whatever’s left of it. Shame you won’t be there to see it, Lickle Dee. Real shame. But you made your bed hard, boy!”
They hauled him up, their hands under his armpits.
“Ashlan,” Rafe moaned.
But she didn’t stir.
He hadn’t really expected her to.
The Deuces laughed. “She’s not gonna help you, kid,” said Yabli.
“This is it for you, I’m afraid—that Ace business cost you dear. Luce says we’re to gut you along with the rest—all the top brass of the Assemblage, all tied to posts just as neat as you please—and that wave of blood will carry us straight to the top!”
“Course, all that killing’ll prolly crush the city, too,” said Yabli. “But Eth had it coming.”
“All a big laugh to Fortune, though, innit? She’ll roll her dice on a carpet of bodies, and bless us all!”
They’d carried him out onto a jagged path. The collapsed tunnel stood beside them, its wide, shattered perimeter dotted with crates strung together with twine. On its other side milled the Assemblage, Jassa’s shrill voice rising above them, promising them the moon in exchange for the blood they’d spill.
The crowd cheered and surged. “Shit,” said Yabli, “they’re about to gut the bosses without us! Haul ass, Stank.”
The Deuces broke into a run, but between their intoxication and Rafe’s withdrawal, he ended up stumbling, sprawled on the floor.
He started to crawl then, shuddering from the effort, with no idea where he was going.
He stopped when the floor began to crumble under his palms. Delirious, he’d dragged himself right up to the mouth of the tunnel. Moist heat hissed from the blackness below, jetting between the boulder-sized rocks that choked the fallen entry.
“Grab this little jerk, Stankjar. They’re already carving, I don’t want to—”
But the city rumbled, then shook, and there was a moment of stunned silence.
Across the warehouse, a lone woman found her voice.
“Fuck you, Mother Luck!” she shrieked, in ecstasy.
Then the ground heaved, like a sleeping giant shifting its weight.
Blocks of stone tumbled down the tunnel’s throat as it opened wide. Darkness yawned, belching heat.
Then, before the Deuces could reach him, the floor tipped—and the catacombs swallowed Rafe whole.
—Kin—
When Ashlan’s father left—not her brood-father, who’d died before she and her six brothers were born, but the man who’d taken his place—her mother took them out through the gates one night, wearing their bedclothes. When the guards asked where she was taking them, Elil Ley said, “The wood. To visit an old friend.” She had changed lately, as she had before and would again, speaking more quickly, spending more money. She wouldn’t tell the children who she was going to meet, as if she couldn’t name the person, or wouldn’t. Then she left them, far from any trail, promising she’d be back. They slept fitfully on the leaves, and Ashlan’s brothers woke before dawn.
Ashlan didn’t. She’d inadvertently made her bed over a snake hole, and the last thing she remembered was a flash of excruciating pain. This isn’t fair, she thought.
What she meant, she’d reflect later, was that it wasn’t fair that such pain even existed, that the human body was capable of producing such a thing.
At least it didn’t last long. The snake that bit her was called a mudbrown, and its venom clotted her blood before she’d woken anyone. She died, as anyone would.
When her brothers found her, they took up wailing, having learned the way through the frequent deaths of their neighbors. It was a good thing, too, because the noise was the only thing that led their mother back to them. She’d gotten lost, she claimed, with the fiery intensity that afflicted her every so often, sometimes for months at a stretch.
She told them to hush, because their sister would be just fine. “You wouldn’t be, if it were any of you, but she’s different. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
This was both a family joke and a source of constant unease. Everyone who’d ever met them knew Ashlan was different. Broods were composed of identical children, and Ashlan, even if she’d been given the same haircut and dressed in the same clothes, was very much unlike the rest—darker, sharper, and taller, with different bits between her legs.
Her mother insisted that they were all born in the same brood. “They’re your brothers, Ash, you’re not adopted.” But she never elaborated, saying only that it would get harder as they grew. “For now, the neighbors can pretend she’s crosswise and I’m swimming with the current by putting her in dresses,” she told them once. “But it won’t hold for long. Your paths are going to split when you come of age, maybe even before. Nothing lasts forever. Even family shatters. I might do it, you might do it, we all might at the same time.”
On this particular morning in the wood, her brothers couldn’t tell whether they ought to believe their mother when she said Ashlan would be fine. She said so many strange things, and Ashlan’s body was getting cold.
But then, as their mother instructed them in her rapid-fire way to build something out of branches and vines they could use to carry their sister home, it began.
Ashlan’s body was spitting out the poison—and everything the poison had touched. Her coagulated blood, her stiffened veins, her actual heart itself were expelled, slipping out through sudden channels in her skin. The moment all of it was gone, she closed right up again, burning so hot that her brothers could feel the fever from a foot away. Then Ashlan started breathing, wearing her gore like a woven blanket.
They loved telling her, repeatedly and in great detail, how she’d split open and reformed, and she loved to hear it, at least before they came of age.
That morning they carried her blood-smeared body back with incredulous pride. Their sister was a magical creature, a secret they’d eagerly keep from the world, at their mother’s urging—and they were the only ones who could tell her about herself.
When she finally woke, she was bathed and in bed. “I’m starving,” she said, and they fed her all the porridge she could eat before presenting her with the discolored wonder of her own rejected heart, still attached to the fretwork of her circulatory system.
“No one can know, which is fine, because no one would believe you,” her mother rattled from the kitchen. “But now you see why she can never go to war. She’d get cut, then she’d heal, and they’d know. And once the world knows, once the city knows, they’ll take her. With coin or with force, doesn’t matter. They’ll change her. They’ll have enchanters, and they’ll sew her up, and she’ll never be free, and she’ll never be good. If they learn, your sister will turn into a monster. You might even have to fight her, all of you, and you wouldn’t survive that. None of us will,” she said, smiling incongruously, “after they turn her.”
Ashlan learned to hide herself, for her brothers’ sake, and they loved her enough to make up for it, for a while.
But when they came of age, her brothers would come to hate her, as the war took one after another from their brood. Partly because she couldn’t die, but mostly, she suspected, because she was never there to wail.
She was too busy learning, about her body, about her limits. She experimented with rocks and knives, shattering her fingers, slicing her muscles, yanking fistfuls of flesh from her bone. She mastered many things, the heat included, but poisons always eluded her—the best she could do, if she’d eaten bad meat, was force her stomach out through her skin, and it seemed better to simply wait it out.
She visited home, sometimes, but her mother never told her why she was what she was, or what it was called. “Don’t worry yourself, Ash. You’ve got enough on your plate, and honestly, you always will. Too much, maybe. So keep in mind what reall
y matters. You’re a healer—never lose sight of that. It’s in your blood, and I mean that exactly how it sounds. Never stop helping people. That’s who you are—you’re here to help. Do no harm. Don’t let them take that away. They’ll do it if they can. Make you a killer. A monster.”
Ashlan’s mother wasn’t well, but Ashlan heeded her all the same—maybe more than she would’ve if Elil Ley had been stable, whatever that word meant—for a solid century, at least. And along the way, she managed to avoid any doses of poison as conclusive as that mudbrown’s bite.
Until the drashes struck her neck, two at once.
They were drugged. For a split second, as her mouth overflowed with dark, nutty sweetness, Ashlan could understand the rush these cultists were chasing.
Then the screaming pain of the poison overwhelmed all her other senses, and she was plummeting, her vision going dark even as another stinger slid in—a third, for good measure.
There was no telling how long she was out.
Beat out her brains, and she’d still be conscious, somehow. But poison took her down, past sleep.
She called it death, because she didn’t know what else to call it.
But unlike death, it ended, and she woke with her mouth tasting like burnt caramel. She wondered when the plan had changed, and why. Maybe it had been one last nasty gift from Rafe. She hoped he was proud of himself, then.
Ashlan still wasn’t breathing, and her eyes refused to open. Worse, she could feel her veins sliding in bundles through the cool flesh of her body—cold, heavy, and rubbery, like one of Tanka’s nerve trees was being born through her skin. The sensation was so disgusting that she had to work to keep still, but she did it, because she could hear that she wasn’t alone.
A man was here, and he sounded delighted to be witnessing it.
“Well, that’s just fascinating, isn’t it? Look at her face! Look at that eyelid! It’s like a lattice—like a pretty little doily all soaked in beet juice. Why, her whole head is hooded in veins.” That explained the darkness, she supposed—her body itself was blinding her. “What a wonder she is. I mean, with one of her and a well-stocked cabinet, what couldn’t you teach? Ha! That’s a thought, eh? A school of our own, when all this is done. She might even help! You know, I bet she will, once she sees the students’ enthusiasm. Who isn’t curious about anatomy?”
He was talking to himself, she realized in time, his voice robust, musical.
Was this the Puppeteer?
She couldn’t give the go-ahead until she’d identified him first. Hollis had to be hearing this as well, however muffled it was in there—and he’d probably heard a lot more while she was out.
Father. That was the magic word—once she’d made their target, once she’d lured the man close enough to her loaded stomach, she’d say “Father,” clearly enough for Hollis to hear. And then it’d all be over.
He’d have his bloody fun, and she’d be free.
She could feel the tensed weight of the mannikin tucked into the hollow skin of her belly. She’d healed it carefully, pushing out Rafe’s clumsy stitches, back at the boarding house. She hadn’t grown her organs back—with a dose this big, poison kept her from healing anything else until she’d worked it out. Hollis shifted inside her, just a tiny bit, but enough that she could feel the point of his knife pressing up against her ribs.
Heat rolled through her flesh as the last of her veins slipped through the soles of her feet. She focused as intently as she could on leaving her organs in their fledgling state—so Hollis would have more room to maneuver.
The man gasped as her skin sealed up. “How toasty this girl gets. You could fry an egg right on her belly! Pity we don’t have any eggs. But no, that wouldn’t do—she might wake up while I was using her for a skillet. Plus, the omelet would be all bloody! Who’d want that? Not me.”
He paused. “I mean.”
At the sound of his voice, she felt Hollis bump against her ribcage, with a fist or a boot.
He was eager to know who it was.
It was time to help him find out. Holding back a wave of heat, Ashlan sat up.
Or tried to. She clanked and fell back, instead, restrained by her wrists and ankles.
The man made a noise like he’d just seen a pony do a backflip.
He actually clapped his hands, pat-pat-pat.
Then, humming excitedly, he peeled back her caul of veins.
She almost blurted out Father right then.
But they’d only get one shot at this. She had to be sure. Forcing her blood-gummed eyelids open, she kept blinking until her vision cleared.
The man was handsome, tan, and tall, with features so sculpted that she thought of a statue with the hair painted black. He’d seen a barber recently—the lines of his beard were ornate and precisely defined. Either he was a dandy or he was trying to impress her, or both.
“Well, hello, there! You’re up and about! I wasn’t sure what to expect, after all you’ve been through. A minute or a week, I don’t know all that much about how this works—not the particulars, I mean. But I just couldn’t bring myself to get things going until we’d been introduced. Ach! Listen to me, I’m so excited I’ve forgotten my manners. You lead with the introduction, then you gush.”
He held out a manicured hand, close enough to her shackles that she could have clasped it, had she wanted to.
“What is this?” she croaked. How could he think she’d be friendly, given the circumstances?
“Right,” he said, laughing at himself, moving his hand away with an apologetic wave. “We’re not on equal footing. Not yet. I’m getting ahead of myself! I do that sometimes. Just tell me when, I’ll back right off. My name’s Ram Annathanker the Ninth. Yes, like the warlord. And yes, we’re related, but no, I don’t want to follow in his footsteps.”
The words were practiced, timed, down to the chuckle.
“And I know your name, of course. Not ‘of course’—why would you assume that? Sorry, it’s just that I’m such a fan, Miss Ley. Miss Ley? That feels a bit formal. Ashlan? Too familiar? Oh, what works for you?”
A fan.
The Puppeteer—if that’s who Ram Annathanker was, and she hadn’t lost the thread completely—was a fan of her regenerating body.
Rafe, the little idiot, must have told him what she could do, angling for a larger payment, no doubt.
And he’d given her name up, too. Not Reena Greeshom, but Ashlan Ley.
“Ram.” She yanked her wrists against their restraints. “You’ve got me strapped to a—to an operating table, is that what this is? I could give a fuck what you call me. All I want to know is what I’m doing here.”
“Oh, dear!” he said, swooping backward.
His voice soared, like he was telling a joke.
He was performing dismay.
“I’ve gone and crossed you already. That took even less time than I’d feared!”
Ashlan looked more closely at the room as he drifted over to a metal table by the wall. They were in a long passage that bent at both ends. It had no corners, just rounded edges, and the ceilings, walls, and floor were covered in deep furrows. The chair beside her was crooked, and all the tables had wooden blocks under their legs to keep them even on the bumps.
“Maybe, if I may, if it’s not too presumptuous, I could ask if you’re angry because you’re—hungry? At least in part. I mean, all this—situating you’ve done, it takes it out of you, right? What was the phrase—ah! Nothing stimulates appetite like forcible regeneration.”
Ashlan’s skin was covered in gooseflesh.
Ram lifted a little silver bell from a tabletop and rang it.
Nothing stimulates appetite—
She couldn’t place those words. But it sounded like he expected them to impress her.
“Look, maybe you’ve got a point,” she said. “I could eat, I guess.” She’d get him closer with a plate of food, then find a way to confirm his identity when he was in range. “I—I do get irrational sometimes. I’m just fee
ling a little confused. Disoriented, you know? One minute I was up above, and now—where are we, exactly?”
“Right! It’s unexpected all around! We never imagined having you here. This was not a meeting I ever thought would happen! But I knew as soon as the Assemblage described you what was going on. And how could I pass up this chance? It’s like, I don’t know, raising Granther from the dead to give a lecture on rune-work.”
She felt dizzy.
What had Rafe told him?
He couldn’t have put together that Ashlan was Hollis’ creator.
Could he?
“That’s what you want from me?” she said, confused. “My—expertise? Because, you know, Ram, given the way the Assemblage was talking, I was starting to get the impression that you were about to scoop my insides out, then get me to heal so you could do it again.”
“Oh!” Ram laughed, his shoulders bouncing. “You are a pip!”
“Hey, let’s be honest, I’ve been through worse,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And in worse company. But—listen, could you tell me what you need them for? Just so we’re on the same page. Call me crazy, but I like to keep track of where my parts have gone. And, hey, I sure could use that food.”
Hollis tensed, rumpling the skin of her stomach.
“You want me—to explain how it works?” he said, beaming. “To you?”
“Knock my socks off.” She wiggled her bare toes.
Anything to keep him off the subject of her expertise.
“Sure, sure! I mean, I’d be happy to give you an update,” he said. “Honored, really! This is the house you built, Ashlan—we’re just adding a new wing.”
Dread overcame her as two young women entered the room, brood-mates. Clean, wearing medical smocks, smiling brightly at Ashlan. “I’m glad you’re up!” said one, her cheek adorned with a tattooed numeral III. “How are you feeling?”
These were students.
He’d been talking about schools, lectures.
The house she built.
He knew about the prototype. But how? The Uni had scrubbed her name from the mannikin project, and her confiscated notebooks had never been logged. Before she left, she’d called in every favor she was owed to try and find them. She’d had plenty of friends who worked in the stacks—and they turned up nothing, suggesting that the books must have been lost in a quake.
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