The voice’s owner wore a white three-piece suit, immaculate. A silver mask covered half a face Telomeri artists would have given their tongues to paint. The eye beneath that mask was red; its mate, still human, the blue Daphne had seen in glacial fissures. One skeletal hand closed around a cane.
Two associates in charcoal gray flanked Ashleigh Wakefield. They might have been Wakefield’s shadows, or afterimages.
“A pleasure as always,” Ramp said with a sharp slight smile. “Your clients have willfully misrepresented their God in market filings. Kos Everburning is a greater investment risk than his priesthood claims. In specific we allege that the God and His church are exposed through their off-books relationship with the renegade Goddess known as Seril Undying.”
Wakefield’s head edged to one side, like a cat considering a mouse that, rather than cowering, had performed a backflip. “Unfounded accusations. Kos’s filings were correct, his exposure is managed, and his relationship with Seril Undying founded on mutual collaboration rather than strict liability as you claim. The nature of Kos’s bond with Seril does not subject investors and creditors to undisclosed risk.”
“You’ll forgive us if we don’t take your word for it.”
“Why else would we be here?” Wakefield said. “Surely you would not waste Her Honor’s time.”
“You’re dangerously close,” the Judge said. “Present arms, Counsel, or get out of my sky.”
Ramp raised her hands, a staged surrender. “Of course, Your Honor. By all means, let us reach the point. We begin with the portion of our complaint directly addressing Kos’s personal vulnerability, and that of his church. Permit me to introduce to the court my associate, Ms. Mains.”
With those words, the cold behind Daphne’s heart turned. She thrilled to the sensation of herself unlocking, of long-dormant glyphs drawing light from the sky and power from the army arrayed behind her. The tight-wound trap of her mind sprung.
Somewhere in the unfolding, a girl screamed with her voice.
She ignored the scream.
Wakefield’s human eye widened slightly, but the being who was still, basically, Daphne noticed.
She smiled with sharp teeth and moved to the circle’s center. “Thank you, Ms. Ramp. Now, let us begin.”
She raised her hands, long fingered and strange, and made the world go mad.
*
Tara and Altemoc and the bone-borne bodies landed on the dry ground of the miners’ camp as the tunnel collapsed behind them. Dust choked the sky, but sharp morning sunlight shafted through. Tara stared into the sky’s bright face as the dust settled, and knew despair.
They’d spent too long wandering in the Keeper’s twisted time. Human shapes approached through dust, shambling over unsteady ground; they seized her arms and bore her from the tumbling rock. She choked on polluted air. She had not realized how tired she’d become, how little soul remained to her.
The sky blued as they carried her from the dust. Altemoc ran to the Quechal woman who had met Tara on her arrival at camp. His rhythm was off, or Tara’s was, the clock of her heart erratic. The woman hugged him, fierce, stepped back and shouted words Tara couldn’t sort from one another. Altemoc pointed at the mountain in stutter-step motion, slow and too fast at once.
Gray chewed the edges of her vision, and her colors bled. The ground was not where she expected it to be, the force vector into her ankle a crucial few degrees off just. She fell hard on her knee, felt trousers, stocking, and skin tear.
Human speech was wind through a flapping aperture of meat. Altemoc ran three-legged toward her, mouth producing more dumb meat-sounds. The fields back home looked like this in the hours before dawn, hueless and achromatic. But the home wind tasted of earth and dew and waking things. Where was that taste now? Had she lost it?
He caught her, and his scars burned green.
The sun rose.
59
Corbin Rafferty heard a thunderclap of silence.
That was new.
The screams weren’t. There were always screams inside his head these days.
But he had never heard (or not-heard) silence like this. It fell like a ten-ton sandbag and broke as suddenly. The cries and hospital noise, metronome ticks and cart wheels and doctors’ footsteps, returned as if never interrupted, until the silence struck again.
The silent bell peals were hands that squeezed his heart, lungs, stomach.
Am I dying? Is this how death feels?
His arms did not tingle; he felt no pain in his head. He heard, but there was nothing to hear.
The moon had dragged him through so many nightmare memories, his life seen from outside as if a stranger lived it. He did not like this stranger. But this silence was not of the moon: always in those dreams he heard the crash of surf on the beach where he’d wept when she left.
He opened his eyes. He could not do that in the dreams, which was part of their torture: he felt his body as an inmate felt prison walls. But he opened his eyes, and closed them at the brilliance of the day. No, not of day: of fire in the sky, of fire that was the sky.