The only trophy he cared to win was Most Times High.
There was no getting around the fact that he was failing.
Unless he was winning, in reverse.
No one had gone this deep into tlak-sickness before.
Anyone else would have killed themselves to feel so much pain.
Especially if they knew, as he did, that it was permanent.
That he could never awaken from this dream.
Life was full of possibility, but one thing was certain, and that was that Tanka would sooner kill him than bring back the sweetness now.
Jassa had taken that away from him.
She’d taken it away from herself, too, which almost seemed saintly.
He’d never again taste it flowing into his mouth, from a spigot under his tongue, that tide of sticky sugar sweeping all his memories out of reach, washing him from himself.
He’d never see his drash again, never calm it with the drug.
Never watch its eyes turn black or stroke its long-haired back.
He’d never feel its kiss sliding between the tendons of his neck.
Instead, he’d die like this—mourning the loss of a bug.
If Rafe was crying, it was less because this was happening than because it refused to end. It might have been going on for hours, though it felt more like days, but there was no light down here, and he could hear no sound that didn’t come from the vents or his own body. The noise he made astonished him. He cried like a newborn calf, pathetic and unrestrained. Later he understood that the raw flesh of his bottom lip, which was split in a dozen places, was due to his facial contortions. He’d been ugly-crying, as Little Gem would say, so hard he’d cracked himself open. I have nothing to do with this sound, he told himself as his bare chest buckled and hitched. This is happening to me, not in me, because I do not cry. When was the last time I cried? It never happened, and it’s not happening now. But someone was spending saltwater down here like they had a full tank. Someone was asking the walls why. Someone was listing all the people who’d gone away, calling their names like they might hear him and come back.
“Just come back.”
He could see death turning, drifting his way.
It wasn’t a specter or a personification, no bugbear in a hooded cloak.
It was the total absence of Rafe Davin, and it was very close.
Seeing its face, every pitted feature the exact inverse of his own, did he welcome death, or wish it away?
An avatar of the Inbetween, he had perfected the art of doing both at once.
Broken and whole were no longer distinct.
A false binary, Gingerbeard would have said. Like wicked and good, or man and woman.
You were either one or the other. But Gingerbeard had lived between, and Rafe suspected that everything did.
Absolutes are the hallucinations of culture.
That was a Gingerbeard phrase. He was full of them.
Take his body. Perhaps it was broken, and perhaps it was whole, but he thought it was both at once.
If his stomach was ruptured, was it any less his stomach?
Was his stomach ruptured?
No. That had been back on the killing fields.
That had been Jassa’s stomach. Hadn’t it?
It hadn’t been a dream, he was sure of that. It only felt like a dream because he’d been healed.
Wounds were the body’s nightmares, diseases their fever dreams.
Dreaming and waking—another false binary. Rafe was doing both.
He focused on what he could verify. His nose was broken, crooked, plugged with blood. Look, he could hardly breathe.
Of course, that was partly because he’d been sleeping in his binder, down here in the dark.
Somehow he worked it off, loosening the ties and wrestling his way out. His sweat made that easier.
If it was sweat.
His stomach kept on heaving. The floor beneath him was slick, whether with sweat or less prosaic fluids. He didn’t know, and didn’t care to.
He pictured a wave of blood pouring down into the maw of the catacombs from the sacrifices of the Assemblage. He heard the hissing and gurgling, and the sound was enough to drive him mad.
Or maybe that was just the vents jetting warm, wet air from below.
Rafe was not, in fact, lying in bathwater. But tell that to his body. It believed he could swim out of himself. He wished it was right.
When the heat went away he was grateful, until the shivering began. But before that he’d been relieved to know he wouldn’t be boiled alive.
Not from without. His bones, though, they were burning.
A skeleton built of embers was ready to slide out of his flesh, then slump, tinkling, into a mass of gray ash.
First the pain was excruciating. Then it went on for so long that it became excruciatingly boring.
“Is it worse to hurt or to get used to it?”
Speech struck his skull like a bell. Why he’d been talking, he didn’t know. Who could say what he’d been saying?
Who could say whether he was living or dying?
Who could say which pain belonged to the fall and which to the tlak?
“Without tlak,” he roared at the crowd, “there is no life. Yet I have no tlak, and still I live!”
They raised their dead fists, opened their dead mouths, and cheered. It sounded like the Masque at its peak, when no one could remember what their own faces looked like, and no one cared.
These were his dead, from his black-robed clan to the hundreds who stood behind them—thousands, even, and more, always more, because the dead who belonged to Clan Davin could not be counted. All the dead were Davin dead, which meant that all who’d ever lived had been neglected by Rafe. Until everyone is quiet, our people cannot leave this place, his Gran used to say, and now he was the last of his line.
And there she was, his Gran, toward the back of the crowd. With her bony hands, she was shepherding this mass of corpses, urging them to stand toward the front, to hear his speech.
“I will keep on living,” he cried, “and I won’t get high again!”
The crowd lapped it up. What he said was conclusive and loud, and they were dead, after all—they’d cheer just about anything.
Except for the two in front. Rafe could feel their disappointment, see the tall one one sigh.
It was Gingerbeard, wearing their purple dress, standing with their arm around Little Gem, who looked like Rafe’s speech might kill her all over again.
“Brave words, my love,” called Gingerbeard, their voice ringing out through the chamber.
The dead stopped cheering and stared.
“Brave words,” they went on, “but you don’t have any tlak, and never will again. You’re framing an inevitability as a choice. And what valor is there in failing to drown when you’re strapped to a raft?”
Little Gem sighed, taking their hand and pulling them away.
“Wait,” shouted Rafe, but Gingerbeard had already turned, showing Rafe the curls that spilled down their broad, shapely shoulders.
Their body was whole, he saw with a shock—set right by some unknowable force.
Gingerbeard had been quieted, and not by Rafe.
It should’ve been him who undressed them, who washed their broken body, who spoke to their life.
It had been his job to bring them peace—and where had he been instead?
He was crying again, the weakness spilling out of him like milk from a cracked pitcher.
The dead turned, frowning at the sound of his sorrow.
He was no leader. They carried him down from the platform.
Toward the back, they’d lifted someone else on their shoulders.
It was Lura Davin, holding her own head in her lap.
“No one left to quiet you, girl.”
Rafe was aware that he had been passing in and out of consciousness, and that his consciousness had been compromised by withdrawal, and that his brief moments of lucidity were gett
ing longer, and that his body was slowly cleansing itself of tlak, and that sooner or later he would be completely sober, and that he would die this way, of thirst.
Did he know how long it had been since he’d fallen down here, tumbling around corners in a long, snaking tunnel that led to this chamber?
He did not. He guessed: two days.
Could he guess how long it had been since Gingerbeard was hacked apart on the street outside his window while Rafe was too high to tell the difference between their screams and the twilit songs of drunken partygoers?
Three months. Four at the most.
Was he aware of how far he had fallen in such a short time?
He was.
If Gingerbeard knew, would they be so disgusted that they’d look at him with eyes gone cold with hate?
He wanted to say yes. In a sense, he had been saying yes, all this while.
Why couldn’t he say yes?
Because Rafe had not been the first among their chosen family to lose himself this way. Because Gingerbeard had not hated the other addicts at the boarding house.
Had Rafe?
Neither of them had. They knew how easy it would be to join their number.
What had Gingerbeard said?
We all do strange things to keep ourselves from dying. And when it comes down to it, love, no one knows which of those things might lead us back to life.
Still alive, Rafe crept toward the edges of the chamber. He couldn’t see the walls. He could feel them, though, irregular and rough. The space was larger than he’d thought. There were cracks in it, but no passages.
He laid down again. All he could feel was his papery mouth, his clicking throat. Even his bare breasts hardly bothered him, not next to his thirst.
He started to think about water the way he’d been thinking about tlak.
Wondering how much of it he’d sweated and pissed away. Gallons, it felt like.
How long before his organs rebelled, shutting down one by one?
He pictured the stone breaking open overhead, filling the chamber with cool, gushing liquid—which would drown him before he’d taken a gulp.
He almost laughed. But it felt like laughter might split his belly wide open.
The earth ruptured, again.
Rafe was tossed around, flying and thumping, pelted with rocks. His body was flung against the floor, against the walls, his eyebrow split. The pain brought him brief, airborne clarity.
This was no tremor. The city’s streets were shaking like a dirty rug.
He could hear the clatter of buildings falling. He smashed onto the ground again, wheezing.
The earth undulated. He touched his own blood, amazed that his body still had wetness in it.
Eth was coming to an end.
He wondered who’d done the killing that started it. Maybe it was Jassa. A real goddess now, remaking the city in her own jagged image.
It was awful to admit, but it made him feel better to think that he wasn’t dying alone.
He flew up again, feeling like he might never come down.
When he opened his eyes, there were people with him, reeking of sweat.
“Shitfire,” shouted one, leaning down and shining a blue-white light on Rafe, “this girl’s alive!”
Irritation roused him. Rafe opened his mouth to identify himself as crosswise, not caring if these strangers killed him or left him to die, needing more to be seen than to live.
Dazed, he stopped and squinted. The radiance was bound in a tiny bottle. The man holding it was grizzled and brown, with flyaway eyebrows.
His partner, a slight, dark woman in tailored clothes that were torn and dusty, squatted beside him. “So she is.” She sat down by Rafe’s side, her hands flying over his body, checking to see how bad things were. “Got off easy, at least where your bones are concerned. But you’ve been down here since the first quake, haven’t you? Hold tight,” she said, then turned, slipping down a passage the quake had ripped open in the side of the chamber.
The grizzled man pulled Rafe’s binder from under some rubble and draped it over his chest. “You’re in good company down here,” he said, shining his light over the walls. “We might be trapped, Chuck, but we’re trapped without guards. Safer that way.”
Rafe moved his mouth again, but his voice was gone.
“Name’s Graven Jacks,” said the grizzled man. “Set your mind at ease—I’ve lived through forty years on the killing fields, and I’ll be damned if I’m dying now, just because of some sneaky fucking temblors come up out of the blue!”
Rafe blinked. The man was shouting at the walls.
“Careful, Jacks,” called the woman, returning to kneel by Rafe’s side. “You’ll tantrum your way into an avalanche. Here. I’m Loxia Lydus.”
She put a canteen to Rafe’s lips.
Rafe put his hands to his mouth.
The water was hot and tasted of leather, but it was life.
After a while, he lifted his head. “Help me with this,” he croaked, patting the binder.
Loxia nodded, holding it up, peering with curiosity at the hooks and eyes on the back.
“Come on now, Chuck,” Jacks shouted—he seemed always to be shouting. “She won’t fit in that thing! She’s confused, poor critter. It ain’t even hers.” He’d come close, his hands starting to tremble from heated worry.
“It’s a binder,” Rafe said.
They stared blankly.
“I’m a man,” said Rafe, too irritated to dance around it any more. “Bent, you know? Crosswise. Open the back, cinch up the sides.”
“My mistake,” said Loxia softly. With a little more prodding, she figured out how to get it on him, then worked slowly at the laces. “The thing you have to understand about Jacks here,” she murmured, “is that he gets very nervous when he’s not doing anything. Like a very large, very old puppy. And I’m not entirely sure,” she said pointedly, “that he knows what ‘crosswise’ means.”
“Don’t you fucking patronize me, Chuck!” There was no threat in Jacks’ voice. It had gone so high with indignation that he was almost singing. “You have some sort of monopoly on the understanding of people? Is that what you think? I know about people, you know,” he growled, hopping up, beginning to pace. “People of—of all denominations!”
“All right, Jacks, all right, you’re a man of the world. Now pull it together. We need to get this man topside.”
“True enough,” said Jacks, calming immediately as he put his broad, cracked hands under Rafe’s arms.
“I can walk,” moaned Rafe, and both of them laughed.
“Like a newborn colt, you can,” said Jacks, hefting him up as Loxia took his knees. “But it’s quite a ways up, and we’ll only be walking halfway.”
“Save your strength,” said Loxia. “We’ll need your help once we’re up above. You’re doing well, all things considered.”
“What’s up there?” Rafe said.
“You mean what’s left?”
“We’ll know when you do,” said Jacks.
“There was damage enough after the first quake that we came down to hunt for supplies,” said Loxia. “And then—well, this was unprecedented. Worse than Radmun’s quake, from what I can tell. I’m glad we found so many of you alive, but I don’t have high hopes for what’s above.”
They carried him through a jagged corridor, Jacks holding his bright bottle in his teeth. They emerged into an enormous cavern, some long-abandoned transport hub sprouting shattered tunnels in all directions. A massive pile of debris stood in the middle, mostly the remains of a stone stair whose last few steps still clung to the ceiling, plus a building or two that seemed to have smashed down from the surface.
There were a dozen other people here, half of them wounded. There were bodies, too, and pieces thereof. The healthiest among the survivors were rifling through the rubble, pulling out anything whole enough to be of use.
A dozen wounded lay around him, their eyelashes coated in dust. Some of their heads were bl
oodied, some of their limbs crushed.
He’d live through this, given nourishment. They couldn’t say the same, not with any surety.
There was a clatter of debris sliding down the heap. Graven Jacks stood at its highest point, surrounded by a group of other scavengers pointing up at the hole in the cavern’s roof.
Swiftly, and with a minimum of argument, the group worked out a way to build tools from the wreckage, then mark out the safest path to the top of the hill. The ideas that flowed between them were disseminated quickly enough that splints and stretchers were soon in play. Loxia Lydus pulled a red glass bottle from a crate and began to describe to the others how they’d use it.
Rafe shrank back. It was the very same sort of bottle that Jassa had used to bind Ashlan.
Loxia produced a short, curved blade from the box.
This had been a trap all along.
They meant to sacrifice him to save themselves.
In a panic, Rafe began to struggle against his bonds, attempting to free himself without making any noise. If only he could get away from them, he might lose himself in the tunnels, and—
And he could barely move.
The sky above cleared, sending a shaft of sunlight down into the cavern. He caught a glimpse of Loxia pouring her potion, suddenly illuminated, all over the bare, brawny arm of Graven Jacks, who laughed as the sinews swallowed him up to the armpit.
With the tip of her knife, Loxia drew them out, speaking to the writhing tendrils with the same sort of sunny, inane babble she might have used to encourage a dog to go for a walk. Seemingly entranced by the glint of the sun on her blade, the sinews took on the shape she desired—a long, powerful limb many times the length of Jacks’ body.
Rafe watched as she repeated the process on Jacks’ other arm. Then, grinning, he lifted his tentacular appendages above his head, gripping the broken stairs and soaring up with a hoarse but childlike whoop.
“I had no idea you could use those things that way,” Rafe croaked as Loxia and another woman hefted up his stretcher.
“That’s why I defected from the Uni,” she said. “I have some experience with enchantments. And they were hoarding what we needed to keep this city alive, from looters who never came.”
Before long, it was Rafe’s turn to be hauled up by those sinewy limbs. He shut his eyes as the sky loomed closer, then felt a blast of cool air as Jacks set him down on the gritty street.
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