Lucius.
Zhang pulled back in terror—but the shadowless simply stared impassively at him as the disciples clutching his arms floundered, trying and failing to swat away anyone who got too close. It was equally plausible that Zhang was shocked because he was a New Orleanian as because he was one of Transcendence’s own who had accidentally just touched the hand of his god—but the fact that the not knowing didn’t seem to trouble Lucius was unnerving. Was he really so powerful that even the instinct to flinch against the possibility of a knife in his gut was gone?
But then the disciple on Lucius’s left tugged on his elbow until the shadowless turned toward him, the one on the right following, to move deeper into the crowd. Zhang watched, transfixed. He understood suddenly then why everything had seemed so strange before. Lucius’s dead expression, the way the disciples had clung to him as they walked up to speak with The Eight. They hadn’t so much been holding Lucius back as holding him there.
Zhang looked at the shadowless again just as Lucius’s pale, resigned eyes met his own. He had never been their leader, or at least if he had been, he wasn’t anymore—he was their hostage.
“Lucius,” Zhang started to say to him. He reached out as the disciples turned, their knives emerging swiftly from their robes. “Wait—”
“Marie!” Downtown and Curly shouted at that same moment over the din.
From above, everywhere, there was a deafening, groaning whine, like a great beast awakening to the sound of its name. Who was Marie? Zhang thought frantically, and remembered that she was one of the original Eight at the same moment that he realized from where the sound had come.
She was the one who had known the most about hurricanes.
The water hit the city in a deafening boom.
Everything happened on instinct—Zhang closed his eyes and squeezed his nose and mouth shut to hold his breath before the wave pummeled him. The freed flooding storm enveloped everything, surging with the starving rage of a tsunami. They did it! Zhang reeled. Downtown and Curly! The hurricane! The Eight had lured the entire Transcendence army into a trap, and then freed the storm from its imprisoned shape, unleashing it directly inward onto New Orleans.
His lungs began to burn. Everywhere, the sounds of bodies being thrown against the ground, of air being strangled out of lungs and cold liquid glugging in, assaulted him. Zhang fought desperately to keep his last gasp inside his lungs. But he was still . . .
He opened his eyes.
Over and over, the waves crashed, towering, inescapable, as they filled the city. Zhang waited to be consumed by the deafening roar—but every droplet curved sharply around him. He looked down at his false white robes, the grass beneath his feet, amazed. There wasn’t a single inch of him that was wet.
Through the spiraling flood, he caught sight of others crouching, bewildered like himself, each encased in a narrow tunnel of air. New Orleanians. All of them safe. He stared in disbelief. The hurricane knew the difference between the ones it had protected as the wall and their enemies.
Above, around, the war was being decided. Zhang watched in stunned, horrified wonder as other white shapes thrashed in slow motion, suspended in a current of bubbles and clear, sparkling death. No matter how hard they kicked for any twisting, curved surface, the hurricane simply pulled them back in, like fish on a line. Even though the New Orleanians were all veiled, Zhang stumbled between the swirling columns to the cowering shape he thought was Ahmadi, and was right. He held her as the other white shapes each wrung themselves a final, agonized time, and then at last all floated still, veils spread like graceful fins.
“WIND? MAYBE FOG?” DAVIDIA SAID SOFTLY.
Gajarajan nodded slowly. “Perhaps. The Eight will know the right thing to use for a new wall when it comes.”
Zhang rubbed his face. The hurricane had finally spent the rest of the destruction it had meant to wreak before it had been bound, and what was left of it was draining slowly around the closed gate—around either open side of it, since there were no longer any walls—and into Lake Pontchartrain. Everywhere, New Orleanians wandered, bewildered but alive. Downtown and Curly’s magic had managed to spare not just their people, but even the buildings of the city as well. The only lingering sign there had been a storm at all was the faint drizzle that now hung in the air, coating everything in a misty sheen. And all of the drowned bodies. The ground looked covered in snow again. Only this time Transcendence wouldn’t ever move—until New Orleans burned or buried them.
It was over. Zhang could hardly believe it, even as he saw the destruction with his own eyes. It was finally over. Transcendence was gone.