“Thirsty,” I reply, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.
Reykin hands me a small cup of water. I take it and drink it all in one long swallow. He takes the empty cup and thrusts an armload of clothes at me. “Get dressed. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“For what?” I look down at myself. All my bruising is gone. My skin is smooth.
“I found your father’s body. They’re going to transport him to Swords soon. We have to hurry.”
In stunned silence, I rise and change into slacks and a loose-fitting top. Reykin turns his back and waits by the door. I don’t know whose clothes these are, but they’re comfortable. My ribs no longer ache. I can breathe deeply, without pain. Bending isn’t a problem either. I slip on the shoes Reykin left on the chair.
He opens the door and waits for me to pass through. “This way.” He directs me to a stairwell at the back of the medical facility. Descending several flights, we stop at a red hatch-like door. Reykin uses his moniker to infiltrate a program into the Halo Palace’s operating system. In seconds, the hatch pops open. I pass through.
The corridor is cold and empty, but when voices sound from the junction up ahead, Reykin jerks my elbow and pulls me to a nearby doorway. We flatten against the wall. I glare at him. “Didn’t you clear this?”
“Not exactly.” His jaw tightens. “There wasn’t time. They’re shipping him to Swords in a couple of hours. It was now or never. I don’t know the state of his body, Roselle.”
The corridor quiets. Reykin grasps my hand. Our fingers thread. We hurry to the last door on the end. Checking his moniker, he says, “This is it.” He unlatches the door and opens it.
The morgue contains long steel tables with shiny surfaces. Long hoses hang from the ceiling like tentacle arms of a monstrous sea creature. Fluid congeals inside a swollen sack suspended from above. The air reeks of it. And of death. I hold my fingers to my nose. Reykin closes the door behind us.
No one attends the bodies. Every table has a corpse on it. Most of them are Sword socialites still in their god or goddess costumes. A few are assassins. I pause by one of the Death Gods. He doesn’t have a moniker. It was either cut out and repaired extremely well, or he never had one?
I scan the room for my father. At the far end of the morgue, high above one of the tables, a levitating transporter pod waits to be lowered over a supine corpse. I move toward it, weaving through victims, trying not to look at them. I shudder when I see it’s him, and a small gasp escapes me. His pieces have been fused back together. Someone took their time with him, cleaning him up and dressing him in a plain white outfit.
His eyelids are closed. He looks peaceful. Streaks of tears drip from my chin, spattering on the metal table. Reaching out, I touch his hair, smoothing it back. I don’t ever remember touching it before. Did he ever hold me? Did my chubby baby hands ever touch his face?
“I can’t change this,” I whisper. “I can’t fix anything.”
“No, you can’t change this,” Reykin replies, “but you can change the world, Roselle—the future.”
“Why bother? No one’s worth it.”
“You’re worth it. Do it for you.” I wipe my chin and cheeks with the back of my sleeve, sniffling. “Do you want a moment alone?” he asks gently. I nod, and he walks away to give me some time.
When he comes back, I know it’s time to go.
I dry the tears from my cheeks with the backs of my sleeves. “I’m ready.”
Reykin slips the pinkie ring from my father’s hand. It has an embossed golden halo on it. The ring has been in his family for generations. Kennet loved to wear it because it’s Virtue-Fated, not Sword-Fated.
“Here,” Reykin says, “take this.”
“What are you doing? Put that back!” I whisper-shout. “It’s Gabriel’s now.”
“Gabriel has everything—a palace full of your father’s things. What do you have? Fused ribs?”
“I don’t want it.” I move toward the door.
“Maybe not, but if you take it, that means your mother won’t get it. You can bury it wherever he asked you to take him, as a symbolic gesture.”
I pause. “Is that what you did?”
“I buried all their favorite things together.”
Turning toward Reykin, I hold out my hand. He drops the ring in my palm.
Suddenly a door swings open. Reykin and I both crouch to the floor like criminals. I peek from between the tables and see a pair of black boots. A voice says, “It wasn’t easy extracting the horns from Kennet Abjorn’s cranium. Whoever did it must’ve really wanted him to keep them.”
The voice of Agent Crow barks with laughter. “If you asked most people,” he replies, “they would swear the horns of The Sword’s husband were real!”
This elicits more cackles from them both.
“I had the room secured for your visit,” the technician says. “No other personnel have attended the bodies but me.”
“Show me all the corpses without monikers,” Agent Crow orders.
They walk from assassin to assassin. As they move, Reykin and I crawl along the ground, trying to make it back to the door unseen. My heart thumps in my chest when Agent Crow pauses at a table a few feet from us. I hold my breath.
“They don’t appear to have had monikers, wouldn’t you agree?” he asks.
“That is my conclusions as well!” the technician says proudly. “It’s astounding.”
“Quite,” Agent Crow agrees.
They wander toward my father, and Reykin and I scurry for the open door. In the empty corridor, I get to my feet and hug the wall. Reykin is beside me in seconds, breathing hard. We hurry up the hall, exiting the morgue the way we came in.
“That Census agent is everywhere,” Reykin mutters.
“You have no idea,” I reply with a shudder.
After backtracking through the medical center, I breathe easier. We take another air lift. My father’s ring is heavy in my fist. “You’re on lockdown until further notice,” Reykin orders softly. “Don’t even think about leaving the Palace grounds.” I don’t answer him.
The elevator doors open. “They didn’t have monikers,” I mumble. “What does that mean?”
Reykin’s expression is grim. “I don’t know.” He follows me out of the lift.
“I know my way from here.”
“Get used to me, Roselle. I’m not going anywhere.”
When we get to my apartment, I find a half dozen security stingers hovering around by it. I glare at Reykin, but he merely shrugs.
Once inside, I close the door immediately. Phoenix’s clanging steps ring out in the foyer. I smile, despite everything, and kneel to greet it. “Hey, I missed you, Phee. I have something important. Can you hold it for me?” The mechadome’s red lenses nod. I hold up my father’s ring. Phoenix lifts its vacuum arm and sucks the ring out of my palm. It disappears inside the squat bot. “Thank you.”
Reykin is already in the den after securing the apartment with his whisper orb. He sits on the sofa, leans his head back, and closes his eyes. I cross my arms and rest against the doorframe. “No one touches Hawthorne.”
Reykin doesn’t open his eyes. “Not your decision,” he replies, his jaw tight.
“It is if you ever want my help with anything in the future.”
“We have your friends.”
My eyes narrow. “We’d all risk our lives for Hawthorne—and he’d do the same for us—so he won’t talk. Tell them what I just said. Make Dune and Daltrey understand that this point is nonnegotiable. You kill him, I kill all of you.”
Reykin opens his eyes and lifts his head. “They’re going to want to use him.”
When Hawthorne was secondborn, he hated the way things were. Now that he’s firstborn, I don’t know what he’ll do. He says he loves me, but he’ll think that joining the Gates of Dawn is treason. This is going against everything we were raised to believe. Breaking that kind of indoctrination doesn’t happen overnight—if ever. “I’ll see what I can do to explain things to him, but I can’t promise anything. He has fought against the Gates of Dawn in active combat. It’ll feel like he’s betraying the soldiers he commanded.”
“Tell him his life depends on it—no—tell him your life depends on it.”