The Ukrainian, meanwhile, slipped away, no doubt furious at X’s recklessness. The Countess would think the guard had gone for food, but X knew he would never see him again. He watched as the Ukrainian dropped his club and left it behind. It lay like a splinter on the ground.
Oedipus hoisted X onto the altar, and pushed him flat. The rock felt weirdly alive, as if it still held the heat from Shiloh’s struggle. Its surface was stained every shade of red and brown. It looked exactly like what it was: a butcher’s block.
“You need not hold me down,” X told Oedipus. “I come willingly.”
The Countess waved the boxer away. She sat on her bed with her eyes closed, as if clearing her mind. X knew that what she was really doing was giving him time to be afraid.
The truth was, he was terrified already.
X had dared the Countess to look at his sins because he believed he had none—that, unlike in everyone else she might turn her knife on, she’d find nothing to torture him for or gorge herself on. But now, as X lay on his back, a fear he had carried for years surfaced unbidden: What if the souls he had taken to the Lowlands were held against him? What if the 15 missions he’d undertaken were not just missions, but murders?
He remembered Zoe warning him once that the lords were just trying to turn him into a monster—into one of them.
What if they already had?
The Countess strutted toward him, her knife in one hand. With the other, she clicked open and closed the silver button on a leather sheath at her waist. For X, the clicking was somehow more menacing than anything else.
“Art thou afeard?” said the Countess.
Click, went the button. Click. Click.
“Of pain?” said X. “No. I have known pain before.”
“Of what, then?” said the Countess.
Click. Click.
Click.
X wouldn’t answer.
“So there is SOMETHING,” said the Countess, digging at her pimple. “You perceive now that you are no hero. Thou hast deceived thyself at great cost.”
Again, X held his tongue. One thought looped in his brain: The ceiling will know if I am a sinner. He couldn’t wait another instant. He needed to see what was inside himself.
Click.
“Perhaps you wonder where the Countess shall guide the knife,” said the Countess. “Yet the knife picks its own path.”
“Why must you stoop to such depravity?” said X. “Is damnation not punishment enough for us?”
The lord seemed intrigued by the question. She stopped fiddling with the sheath.
“ This ‘depravity’ is the only thing that brings the Countess peace,” she said. “It was ever thus.”
“So you’re not cutting something out of us—but out of yourself?” said X.
The Countess bristled, and for just an instant spoke of herself as a more ordinary person might.
“It is a pretty theory, yours,” she said. “Yet in a moment I shall slice thee apart, and we will shall see which of us screams.”
She thrust her palm onto X’s chest. He hadn’t expected pain, not yet. But she pressed so violently that he couldn’t breathe. He bucked on the altar, as Shiloh had. His vision blurred. It wasn’t like when Regent put the names and stories of souls into X’s body so he could hunt them down. He was not being given something. Something was being forcibly taken. The Countess was trying to pull whatever sins he had out of his heart.
This feeling, this pain—did it mean that he did have sins and that they were grievous? Above him, on the ceiling, something was stirring. Something was about to unfold.
X wasn’t ready to look. He closed his eyes and summoned Zoe’s face for comfort. He summoned Jonah. Then Ripper, Banger, the Ukrainian. Even Plum. They flitted by, one after the other. Everyone he cared about. He tried to stop the faces from flitting by so quickly, but couldn’t. He tried to call Zoe to him again. Hers was the only face he wanted.
The cat cried in its box on the bed, making a desperate, strangled sound. Distracted, the Countess lifted her hand from X’s chest.
“If that damnable feline erupts again, the Countess shall stop its breath,” she said. “Would that the creature had been named for something mute, like a statue or the wind.”
A voice X had never heard before spoke. A woman.
“Let me comfort him,” she said. “He doesn’t belong in a box.”
It must have been the servant in the bloody apron.
“Still thy tongue, if thou means to keep it,” the Countess told her.
The lord returned her focus to X, and slammed her palm back onto his chest. The pain obliterated everything else. X could feel her fingers burrowing into his ribs.
He tried to fill his lungs with air. He was frantic. His head, his body, his veins … Everything was poised to burst.
He screamed.
But no, he couldn’t have. He didn’t have enough air. The scream couldn’t get out. It howled inside him.
He saw, or maybe felt—he couldn’t tell the difference anymore—a shower of light, an exploding star.
eleven
“Slowly, friend. Come back to us slowly.”
It was Plum, coaxing him back to consciousness.
X felt himself slip back into his skin, like it was a suit laid out for him. His arms became his again, then his legs and feet.
Then he noticed the pain. It’d been there all along, waiting for him to wake. His body felt broken. His lungs burned when he inhaled, like a furnace lighting up.
He opened his eyes.
Plum stared down worriedly. He’d spread X’s coat like a blanket beneath him. X was moved by that and by the already familiar sight of his friend’s fluttering hands. Soft, kind Plum: it was good to see him.
Every soul within a hundred feet was staring at X, and murmuring. Whatever had transpired after he’d passed out on the altar had set everyone abuzz.
X didn’t know if he could speak, but he had to know if his heart held sins as he feared.
He attempted a single word.
“What,” he said.
“Don’t try to speak,” said Plum. “Not yet.”
“What,” X said again. “Happened.”
“Ah, yes,” said Plum. “I will tell you everything, but only if you swear you won’t try to speak.” He paused, adding quickly, “Swear to me with your eyes, not your voice.”
X blinked.
“Very good,” said Plum. “Now, I don’t know how much you were aware of before you lost consciousness.” Plum hurriedly put up a hand. “That was not an invitation to tell me. I will choose a starting point myself. All right? All right.” He sat quietly, considering. “I was meditating. It’s not that I don’t let any thoughts or noises into my mind—I do—but I pretend they’re soap bubbles, and I prick each one as it floats by.”
“Skip,” said X, “this part.”
Plum made a wounded face, then grinned.
“If you speak again,” he said, “I will talk even slower. We Buddhists have more patience than you can imagine—Buddha once sat beneath a tree for seven days, and I think he was just trying to decide if it was a good place to sit. Anyway, I managed to shut out Shiloh’s screaming, but then I heard your voice: ‘It is me you want!’ I was stunned—and cross with you. I trudged up the hill with no plan at all. You were thrashing on the altar—lifting your head, then banging it back down. It struck me that unlike every other soul on this hill, myself included …” Plum paused, and struggled with feeling. “Forgive me. It struck me that you—my new friend and my only friend, if I’m being honest—could die up there. Truly die. I don’t mind saying that if you died … Well, I’d be angry with you for a little while, but then I would miss you.”
X would have smiled if he weren’t in such pain. Zoe and Ripper had taught him how to let kindness in.
“I hiked closer,” Plum went on. “I kept stumbling. I am not in peak condition, as we’ve discussed. Yes, I know I’m babbling. I’m just so excited that you’re awake. Anyway, everyone on the hill was watching the ceiling and waiting. You’d gone limp. Your hands hung off the altar. It was awful.”
“Sins?” X demanded—or tried to demand. The word came out like a whisper. “Sins.”
Plum was surprised by the question.
“What do you mean, ‘sins’?” he said.