“What can we do?” she asked, helpless.
Werran’s desperate eyes told her that he could suggest no plan. All he managed in his airless whisper was, “…help.”
Chapter 59
A Game that Kill Could Not Win
Help.
Werran might have been trying to plead “Help me,” or even “Help us,” and run out of breath, but it was the single word that rang in Sarai’s head.
Help. Help. Help.
It seemed to take up position opposite kill, as though they were facing queens on a quell board. This was a game that kill could not win—or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning. If they killed Nova, they were sentencing Lazlo, Kiska, and Rook to either eternity in the loop or to dying in it, while Werran would suffocate in the serpent’s jaws. The rest of them would be alive, trapped in this terrible sky instead of Weep’s, and here they would stay until Sparrow could grow enough ulola flowers to refill the silk sleighs’ pontoons with lifting gas, and then what? Go back to Weep? Make some sort of life? Leave the seraph here, leave Lazlo here, alive or dead in that shimmering bubble for strangers to find some day in the future?
It was, all of it, unthinkable. There had to be another way.
Sarai went back to the others, still clustered in the archway. She told them what she’d learned and let it sink in. In their stricken silence, she felt her own desolation deepen. Perhaps she’d hoped that someone else would see a way out that she wasn’t seeing.
Calixte ventured, “Maybe she won’t kill us when she wakes up?”
But Calixte hadn’t been in the citadel to see Nova in action, and judging by the scene in the gallery, she had not become more tolerant since then. Besides, “maybe she won’t kill us” is very thin ice to skate on. There had to be something they could do.
Help. Help. Help.
Werran’s word was still ringing in Sarai’s mind. Help. All her life, Sarai had been a prisoner and a secret, and she had wondered what her fate would be. Would the humans find her and kill her, or would she remain a secret prisoner forever? Then Eril-Fane and his delegation had returned to Weep and changed everything. It had become a certainty: The humans would discover the godspawn, and they would kill them—unless Minya and her army killed the humans instead. It was only a question of who would die, and who would get to clean up the blood and keep living.
And then Sarai had met Lazlo—in his mind, in his dreams—and once again, everything changed. This dreamer-librarian from a far-off land had taught her to hope for a different life—one without any killing at all. In his mind, ugly things were made beautiful, and that went for the future, too.
But now he was trapped, and Sarai realized she’d been relying on him to make it all come true. His gift—power over mesarthium— had meant their liberation and their strength, but it wouldn’t help them now.
What would help them? Who would save them?
A panicked thrum was building in her blood—illusory blood, illusory thrum, but still real, as she was still real—and Sarai scanned the hopeless scene again: the monstrous half-formed serpent crushing a man to slow death in its jaws; the shimmering bubble too pretty for a prison; the huge white bird guarding the sleeping goddess.
Nova looked so small and exhausted, slumped over and limp, and Sarai couldn’t help but remember the terrible anguish she’d seen in her eyes, and worse: her brief, brilliant joy, when, for an instant, she believed she’d found her sister.
She heard herself say, “Maybe I can do something.”
Everyone looked at her. Minya spoke first. “What can you do?” she asked, and some of her old scorn clung to her words, but not much, thought Sarai. Not like before.
“She’s asleep,” said Sarai. “I…I could go into her dreams.”
“And do what?” Minya queried.
“I don’t know. Help her?”
“Help her?” Minya stared. They all did. “Help her?” she repeated, her shift in emphasis eloquent. “After what she’s done?”
Sarai was at a loss. “That’s grief,” she said of the scene in the gallery. She knew that Lazlo would have understood. “You don’t have to feel sorry for her, but killing her won’t solve our problems, and maybe the only way we’re going to get through this is if we can help her.”
Minya was studying Sarai, contemplative. “You can’t save everyone, Sarai. You know that, don’t you?”
Sarai wondered if Minya remembered her coming into her dreams, unwrapping the babies, making an escape door, trying to help her and failing. “I know,” she said. “But we can try. And… maybe that’s how we save ourselves.”
Minya took in these words. Sarai could see it—that she took them in and turned them over, considering them. The change was so tremendous it almost stopped her breath. She was so used to Minya not taking things in, but only spinning them round, sharpening them into weapons and flinging them right back. She was already tensed for it, so when Minya’s consideration seemed to absorb her words, and the expected recoil didn’t come, she felt…lightened? As though it might really be possible.
“All right,” said Minya.
All right, said Minya. Sarai struggled to keep her astonishment from showing. Minya was never agreeable. It was part of her makeup. Sarai hoped that the miracle of her acquiescence might be the start of a chain of miracles that could see them through this, back to the strange and wonderful future Lazlo had taught her to believe in.
It occurred to her that those miracles—and that future—rested entirely on her. With a deep breath, she turned toward Nova and Wraith.
…
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Sarai breathed, slowly approaching the chair, though she didn’t know if the bird understood. She held its gaze the whole time. Its black eyes were intense, unblinking, but it didn’t object as Sarai drew near. Uneasily, she came to stand beside Nova, near enough to touch her. Where, though? She was still wearing that oil-black garb with the plates of mesarthium she’d rendered into armor. Sarai was reminded of trying to find a place for her moths to land on sleeping humans, though that had been so much easier than this. Back then, if a dreamer woke, she herself wasn’t looming over them.
Sarai wondered if she would have been able to torment the people of Weep with nightmares if she’d had to stand right beside them, touching them, feeling their pulse spike under her hand. It was so much more intimate this way.
Tentatively, mindful of Wraith, she reached out for the little triangle of blue skin where Nova’s fair hair slipped over her neck, revealing it. Sarai’s hand hovered just above it as she kept eye contact with the bird, trying to assure it with her gaze that she meant no harm. It could have been her imagination, but it seemed the bird understood.
So she placed her fingertips very softly against Nova’s skin and was drawn into her dream.
Chapter 60
Thin Ice
Sarai found herself in a place that was not the citadel or the red-sea world or Weep or anywhere else she knew. It was killingly cold, and as far as she could see in every direction, there were only sheets of white ice. It wasn’t peaceful, as she had, in the past, imagined snowy landscapes in dreams. This was the sea, and it was frozen, all its latent violence still boiling beneath the surface. A skin of ice lay over it, but not quietly. It moaned and shrieked, shifting under Sarai’s feet. When a crack opened up, lightning fast and jagged as teeth in a monster’s jaws, she had to leap aside or be sucked down into the fathomless black water.
Fear slammed into her, and she had to remind herself that it wasn’t real, and that she had power here, and was at nobody’s mercy.