“I try.”
“Is our questing done now?” asked Kamala, trotting up beside me. “Will you nurse your broken heart and moan over it forever? May I now take a bite of that lush-lush arm?”
I snapped my arm back. “No.”
“Good,” said Kamala. “Because I hate the taste of cowardice.”
“There’s no way we can get back to the Otherworld.”
Kamala cocked her head. “Yes, we can.”
“What, do you have a bellyful of sapphires and a double-rainbow?”
“No. But you have something that will make the world open,” said Kamala. “A sacrifice.”
That other way.
“I have nothing to give.”
“Everyone always has something to give. Always. It does not matter whether it’s worth something to anyone but you; all that matters is that it is cherished.”
Her gaze leapt to my pocket, where the last memory lay buried in the cold onyx stone. The last full memory I had. I held it close to me. Aside from the bracelet of my own hair, this was all I had left of Naraka. It had guided me to the Chakara Forest, left me with a single burning hope that I wasn’t foolish for coming here, that I had some place in all of this. This was the last claim I had to a life I could only remember in wisps. A life that, while I acknowledged, I couldn’t reconcile.
“Why couldn’t we do this earlier?”
Kamala looked at me shrewdly, one eye dark as dried blood.
“Could you have done this earlier?”
I knew what she meant. Before seeing Bharata and Gauri, I had been lugging along the ghosts of my past. But not anymore. Still, something stung me, like tiny insect bites of regret.
“What is the matter?” asked Kamala.
I pulled the stone from the makeshift pocket in my robes. “I feel like I’m losing a piece of myself.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
I glared at her. “You don’t know what happened back there. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like for a moment you were entirely whole. Like you finally knew yourself and then to have that ripped from you.”
Kamala regarded me for a moment. “Yes, actually, I do. That is the whole purpose of a curse. To remind you that you are lacking, but never know what that hollow is.”
I stepped away from her, chastened. “I’m sorry.”
“Do not be. Do not be anything. Do not mourn a life you do not know. It is done, it has happened. It is a riven bone, without meat or memory.”
“But it was me, Kamala.”
“You have more than one self.”
“But—”
“But nothing. It is foolish to cling to ghosts or spent bones. It is better to forge ahead. It is better to leave what you do not know and make yourself anew. I have slung the ghosts of memories across my back for years and it has done me no good and earned me no victuals.”
I nodded. She was right. Souls had no shackles. They knew no nationality and swore no allegiances. Whoever I was, whoever I could be … that was a choice. And I had made mine.
“How do I give it away?”
“Consign it to the earth with blood,” said Kamala, before tossing her head at the scorched earth. “Bury it in the ground.”
Despite the curiosity burning inside me to know that last memory, I forced it away. It was part of me, but separate, and I wouldn’t let it define me. I used the sharp edge of the stone to prick the pad of my finger.
“Oooh,” crooned Kamala. “How about a lick, then?”
Ignoring her, I smeared blood across the stone and dropped it to the ground. It landed with a silent thud against the dirt. I knelt toward the stone, bringing the memory close to my eye. I let myself sink into it just barely, teasing only the slightest detail of the memory before I forced myself to drop it.
I blinked back the barest of images—a samite curtain, an upturned hand. I held the emotion coiled inside me, the knowledge that the memory was potent. Beloved. My voice trembled:
“This is what sacrifice I offer you for passage to the Otherworld. Take a memory that I lay claim to only in name, but not in spirit. I will be less whole without it. But let the weight of it, its promise of love and tears, of something lost and beautiful, serve as fair barter.”
I kicked a small hole into the ground and buried the memory there. Earth ate the offering, flashing pale threads of tubers like gnashing teeth until the stone had disappeared. Above, thunder groaned in the bellies of the sky. Kamala and I both started, shocked by the sound. Thunder never used to bother me, but this was a horrible, wrenching sound—like the sky screaming.
Kamala inhaled sharply. “Look!”
I turned.
The memory was gone. The hole I had made for it had fallen in on itself; moon-bright roots clung to the sides, forming a tunnel veined with quartz.
“Is that how—” Kamala began.
“Yes,” I said, pushing her back, “get in, get in!”
“I don’t like being underground.”
“Not the time!” I said. I squatted to the ground, kicking my legs into the hole, and suppressed a shiver. It was cold and damp. But not like dirt. Like sweat-covered skin cooling in the wind. “Ready?”
“Absolutely not—”
I grabbed hold of her reins. “Not looking for an answer.”
And then we slid forth.
25
IMPOSSIBLE HUNGER
Roots tore through my hair. Lodes of quartz banded around the tunnel, but the light was stingy and pale, and refused to illuminate what lay ahead. I threw my hands out against the dark. My insides slammed together and left me weightless. Dark fell in such cold, thick veils that for a moment, I didn’t know whether my eyes were open.
I blinked, squeezing my eyes shut before opening them just in time to see the earth leaping out to meet us. My shoulder knifed into the ground. Light spiraled across my vision and pain needled into my joints.
Kamala tumbled beside me. The moment she found her bearings, she cast a withering glance my way.
“I do not like you.”
I winked at her.
She bared her teeth at me.
Around us, the Night Bazaar was more than just unrecognizable—it was gone. Where the sky had once been divided by perpetual day and night, it now appeared uniformly black. Haphazardly strewn gems poked out of the ground, casting a cold light that joined the glow of bone-white corpses hanging from trees in a shadowy orchard. The vendor stalls were gone. Snapped wheels, chipped signs and shattered jars littered the outskirts of a large clearing in the middle of the bazaar. Except for some shriveled trees, it was deserted. Everything had a haunted look. Scorch marks covered the dais where the gandharva musicians had once played beautiful music.
And in the orchard where Amar had handed me a fey fruit, nothing remained but charred stumps. Beside me, Kamala suppressed a shiver before glancing around. Sounds fluttered from a haze-riddled section of the Night Bazaar. The noise was at once soft and deafening, like a frenzied heartbeat or a scream unleashed underwater.
“He is here.”
I didn’t need to ask who.
I pulled my robes tightly across me. Heat slapped the air, but the atmosphere held not warmth, but fury. The ground changed beneath us. Where it had been coarse and ashy, now it was smooth and cool. I glanced down and my stomach flipped. We were walking on sanded bones. Their slender, asymmetrical shapes were fitted together like slats of wood. Strange crenulations like teeth marks dented the bone floor and I looked away sharply. By now, my sandals were hardly more than thread and I could feel each bone’s smooth ridges curl beneath my feet.
The sounds around the corner were deafening and chaotic, not at all like the alluring music the gandharvas played. Even the air felt foreign. Where the Night Bazaar once smelled of secrets and the promise of adventure, the smell of the Netherworld had a cloying unpleasantness ripe with the stench of fermenting fruit and sulfur.
“What happened to everyone else?” I asked.
Kamala shuddered, her withers rippling with goose bumps. “They have fled.”
“Where did they go?”