43
FIRE IN THE SKY
And silence.
It wasn’t really silence. There was fire and wind, crackle and whisper, and the rasp of their own hard breathing. But it felt like silence in their shock, and they all squinted in the face of the blaze. It flared hot and sudden and died quickly, and there was no smoke and no smell. It was just over, and whatever it was that had burned—whatever held the worlds distinct—it gave off no residue of ash or fume. The portal was simply gone.
Karou scanned for a sign that it had been there. A scar, a ripple, a ghosted image of the slash, but there was nothing at all.
She turned to Akiva.
Akiva. He was here. He was here, and not Liraz. What had just happened? He hadn’t looked to her yet; his eyes were horror-wide as he stared at the new absence in the sky. “Liraz!” he called, hoarse, but the way was closed. Not just closed. Gone. The sky was just the sky now, the thin atmosphere above these African mountains, and that anomaly that had made Eretz seem like… like a neighboring country on the other side of a turnstile… it was over, and now Eretz seemed very, very far away, impossibly and fantastically far, like an imaginary place, and the blood that was being shed there—
Oh god. The blood was not imaginary. The blood, the dying. And it was so quiet here, nothing but the wind now, and their friends and comrades and… and family, every remaining Misbegotten soldier, Akiva’s blood brothers and sisters, they were fighting in another sky, and there was nothing to be done about it.
They’d left them there.
When Akiva did turn to her, he looked stricken. Pale and disbelieving.
“What… what happened?” Karou asked him, moving toward him through the air.
“Liraz,” he said, as though he were still trying to understand. “She pushed me through. She decided…” He swallowed. “That I should live. That I should be the one to live.”
He stared at the air as if he could see through it to the other world—as though Liraz were just on the other side of a veil. But with the portal gone, it had become all at once unfathomable how it had ever existed at all. Where was Eretz, and what magic had brought it within such easy reach? Who had made the portals, and when, and how? Karou’s mind defaulted to her picture of the known cosmos, starting with planets revolving around a star—a hugeness that was insignificant within a vastness that was incomprehensible—and she couldn’t fathom how Eretz fit into that picture. It was like dumping two jigsaw puzzles in a pile and trying to piece them into one.
“Liraz can handle that patrol,” she told Akiva. “Or at least glamour herself and get away.”
“And go where? Back to the massacre?”
Massacre.
There was a sensation, in the core of her body, like screaming. Her heart and gut screamed; it scoured through her. She thought of Loramendi, and shook her head. She couldn’t go through it again, flying back to Eretz to find nothing but death waiting for her. She couldn’t even contemplate it. “They can win,” she said. She wanted Akiva to nod, to agree with her. “The mixed battalions. The chimaera will weaken the attackers, and you said…” She swallowed. “You said the Dominion are no match for the Misbegotten.”
Of course, that wasn’t what he’d said. He’d said that one-on-one the Dominion were no match for them. And that hadn’t been one-on-one, not by a long shot.
Akiva didn’t correct her. Neither did he nod or assure her that everything would be fine. He said, “I tried to reach sirithar. The… power source. And I couldn’t get it. First Hazael died because I couldn’t, and now everyone will—”
Karou shook her head. “They won’t.”
“I began this, all of it. I convinced them. And I’m the one alive?”
Karou was still shaking her head. Her fists were clenched. She hunched in the air and held them tight against her middle: that pit below the inverted V of her rib cage. That was where she felt the hollowness and gnawing—like hunger. And there was hunger. She was underfed and too thin, and her own body felt insubstantial beneath her fists right now, like she’d been whittled down to essentials. But this hollowness and gnawing were more than hunger. They were grief and fear and helplessness. She’d long since given up believing that she and Akiva were the instruments of some great intention, or that their dream was planned or fated, but she found now that she still had it in her to be outraged at the universe. For not caring, for not helping. For, as it seemed, working against them.
Maybe there was an intention. A plan, a fate.
And maybe it hated them.
It was just so quiet, and the others were so very far away.
She thought of the Dashnag boy from the Hintermost, and of the Shadows That Live and Amzallag, whom she had just restored to life—Amzallag, who had hopes of gleaning his children’s souls from the ruin of Loramendi—and all the others, and most of all, she thought of Ziri, bearing up under his burden, shouldering the deception alone now in the absence of Issa, Ten, and herself. Dying as the Wolf.
Evanescing.
He’d given everything, or would soon, while she was here, safe… with Akiva. And her emotions were a poisonous brew in the pit of her empty, empty stomach, because deep down, unspeakably, under all the horror and turmoil, there was at least a shred of… dear god, surely it wasn’t gladness. Relief, then, to be alive. It couldn’t be wrong, to be relieved to be alive, but it felt wrong. So very, very cowardly.
Akiva’s wings were fanning slowly to keep him aloft. Karou just hovered. Behind them, Virko was flying short back-and-forths with Mik and Zuzana on his back.… Oh. Karou did a double take. Virko. He wasn’t meant to stay here; he couldn’t pass for human, not even close. He was to have set Mik and Zuze down and circled back to the portal. But Karou’s thoughts skipped over him for now. Akiva was looking at her, and she was sure he was feeling the same poisonous mix of relief and horror that she was. Worse, because of Liraz’s sacrifice. “She decided,” he’d said. “That I should be the one to live.”
Karou shook her head yet again, as if somehow she could shake out every black thought. “If it were you,” she said, looking right into his eyes, “if it were you on the other side right now, like it almost was, I’d believe you were okay. I’d have to believe it, and I have to believe it now. There’s nothing we can do.”
“We could go back,” he said. “We could fly straight for the other portal.”
Karou didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t want to say no. Her own heart lifted at the idea, even as her reason told her it was untenable. “How long would it take?” she asked after a pause. From here to Uzbekistan, and then, on the other side, from the Veskal Range back to the Adelphas.
Akiva’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Half a day,” he said, his voice tight. “At least.”
Neither of them said it aloud, but they both knew: By the time they could get back, the battle would be over, one way or another, and they’d have failed in their task here on top of everything. It wasn’t a failure they could afford.
Hating to be the voice of sense in the face of grief, Karou asked, cautiously, “If it were Liraz here with me, and you were there, what would you want us to do?”
Akiva considered her. His eyes burned out of hooded shadows, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She wanted to reach for his hand like she had on the other side, but it felt wrong, somehow, like she was using her wiles to persuade him to give up something intensely important. She didn’t want that; she couldn’t make this decision for him, so she just waited, and his answer was heavy. “I’d want you to do what you came for.”
And there it was. It wasn’t even a real choice. They couldn’t reach the others in time to make a difference, and even if they could reach them, what difference could they hope to make? But it felt like a choice, like a turning away, and in Karou, like a bloodstain, bloomed the earliest apprehension of the guilt that was to haunt her.
Did I do enough? Did I do everything I could?
No.
Even now, barely this side of catastrophe and the battle still under way in the other world, she could already taste the way that it would taint any happiness she could hope to find or make with Akiva. It would be like dancing on a battlefield, waltzing around corpses, to build a life out of this.
Look out, don’t step there, one two three, don’t trip on the corpse of your sister.
“Um, guys?” It was Mik’s voice. Karou turned to her friends, blinking back tears. “I’m not sure what the plan is,” Mik said, his voice tentative. He looked pale and stunned, as did Zuzana, gripping Virko tight and in turn gripped by Mik. “But we need to get out of here. Those helicopters?”
This was a jolt to Karou. Helicopters? She saw them now, and heard what she should have noticed sooner. Whumpwhumpwhump…
“They’re coming this way,” said Mik. “Fast.”
And so they were—several, converging on them from the compass points. What the hell? This was no-man’s-land. What were helicopters doing here? And then she got a very bad feeling.
“The kasbah,” she said, a new horror dawning. “Damn it. The pit.”
Eliza was… not quite herself today. She was faking it well enough, she thought, taking a swig of tea. She had her family to thank for that ability. Thank you, she thought, with the special bile reserved for them, for the complete disconnection of my emotions from my facial muscles. It comes in so handy for pretending I’m not losing my mind. After years of concealing misery, shame, confusion, humiliation, and fear, she could pretty much walk through life like a blank, her facade imperturbable, a thing scarcely animate.
Except when the dream took her over, of course. Then she was animate, all right. Hoo boy. And last night, up on the roof terrace… or was it this morning? Both, she guessed. It had gone on long enough to straddle the dawn. She just hadn’t been able to stop crying. She hadn’t even been asleep this time, and still it had found her. “It.” The dream. The memory.
A storm had moved through her, entirely impervious to her will, and the storm had been grief, unfathomable loss, and the full intensity of the remorse she’d come to know so well.
With the fading of the stars and the break of day, Eliza’s storm had passed. Today she was the ravaged landscape it had left behind. Waters subsiding, and ruin. And… revelation, or at least the cusp of it, the corner. This is what it felt like: detritus washed away, her mind a floodplain, clean and austere, and at her feet, just visible, a corner, protruding from the earth. It could be the corner of a trunk—pirate’s treasure or Pandora’s box—or it could be the corner of… a rooftop. Of a buried temple. Of an entire city.
Of a world.
All she had to do was blow away the dust, and she would know, or begin to know, what else lay buried within herself. She could feel it there. Burgeoning, infinite, terrible and wondrous: the gift, the curse. Her heritage. Stirring. She’d poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.
So… what if she just stopped fighting and surrendered to it?
Ay, there’s the rub. Because Eliza wasn’t the first to have the dream. The “gift.” She was only the latest “prophet.” Only the next in line for the asylum.
That way madness lies. She was feeling quite Shakespearean today. The tragedies, of course, not the comedies. It didn’t escape her that when King Lear made that statement, he was already well on his way to crazy. And maybe she was, too.
Maybe she was losing her mind.
Or maybe…
… maybe she was finding it.
She was in possession of herself for now, at any rate. She was drinking cold mint tea up at the kasbah—not the hotel kasbah, but the beast-mass-grave kasbah—and taking a break from the pit. Dr. Chaudhary wasn’t very talkative today, and Eliza flushed to remember the awkwardness with which he’d patted her on the arm last night, at a total loss in the face of her meltdown.
Damn it. There really weren’t all that many people whose opinions mattered deeply to her, but his did, and now this. Her mind was circling back to it yet again—another rotation on the shame carousel—when she noticed a commotion rippling through the assembled workers.
There was a kind of makeshift refreshment station set up in front of the massive, ancient gates of the fortress: a truck serving tea and plates of food, a few plastic chairs to sit on. The kasbah itself was cordoned off; a team of forensic anthropologists was going over it with fine-tooth combs. Literally. They had found long azure hairs in one of the rooms, apparently—the same room in which they’d found, scattered across the floor, a peculiar assortment of teeth that had led to speculation that “the Girl on the Bridge” and the “Tooth Phantom”—the silhouette caught on surveillance cam at Chicago’s Field Museum—might be one and the same.
The plot thickened.
And now, something else. Eliza didn’t see where it began, the commotion, but she watched it move from one cluster of workers to the next by way of gesticulations and loud, fast chatter in Arabic. Someone pointed to the mountains. Up, into the sky above the peaks—in the same direction that Dr. Amhali had pointed when he’d said, wryly, “They went that way.”
They. The living “beasts.” Eliza drew a hard breath. Had they found them?
She made out the glint of aircraft moving in the distance, and then, at her right, a couple of men disengaged from the general mass of people whose function she couldn’t determine—there were a lot of men here, and most of them didn’t appear to be doing anything—and made for the helicopter that was at rest on a piece of flat terrain. She kept watching, her tea forgotten in her hand, as the rotors began to spin, picking up speed until billows of dirt were kicking their way toward her and the helicopter lifted up and flew. It was loud—whumpwhumpwhump—and her heart was pounding as she scanned the faces of the people around her. She felt handicapped by the language barrier, and very much an outsider here. Surely someone spoke English, though, and this was a small enough feat of courage to perform. With a deep breath, Eliza threw her paper cup in a bin and approached one of the few female workers on-site. It only took a couple of questions to ascertain the source of the commotion.
A fire in the sky, she was told.
Fire? “More angels?” she asked.
“Insha’Allah,” the woman replied, gazing into the distance. Allah willing.
Eliza recalled Dr. Amhali saying, the day before, “It’s all very nice for Christians, yes?” “Angels” in Rome, “demons” here. How neat, how tidy for the Western worldview, and how wrong. Muslims believed in angels, too, and Eliza gathered that they wouldn’t mind getting some for themselves. For her own part, she had a presentiment that they were better off without them, and she had to wonder—especially in light of what she was beginning to believe—why the prospect of angels frightened her more than the prospect of beasts.