One hand crested the edge of the hold, then another, and Raz pulled himself onto the deck. Regrown skin closed the cuts in his scalp. He did not need to breathe, so he wasn’t breathing heavy. He ran to her, held her, his hand tight enough on her arm she could feel it through the Suit’s narcotic haze. “Are you all right?”
She wasn’t used to laughing through silver. You?
“Fine.” He turned to the skeleton. “There are injured people in the hold. Help them.”
We have to go. Her mind raced through the matrix of Justice, assembling scenarios, considering data. Scraps: the sleepers woke when Raz signed the contract bringing them into Seril’s domain. Demons sought freedom. These were bound, now, by Seril’s rules alone—and if she died, they’d be free. Limitless.
“You’re hurt.”
Not much. She stood. Come on. The other officers won’t be able to stop them in time.
“We can’t either.”
You can learn, Aev had told her last night, on that rooftop. Well. No time like the present.
Yes we can, she said.
And, in silence, to the moon: you wanted me to pray, dammit. You wanted me to need you. Here you go. Here I am.
The smooth silver of her back rippled, and bulged, and birthed wings.
When she turned to him, he was looking at her differently.
She held out her hand. Are you coming?
33
The goddess condensed to human shape as Jones approached. The moonlight whirl receded behind a surface too slick and shimmering for skin. Gargoyles sang, a chorus whose treble notes flirted with the lowest range of human hearing. Theater? No, Tara saw stone faces fixed with holy effort: rising into prayer, lending the goddess the platform of their minds to help her address this faithless mortal.
So Seril had told the truth: Tara was, in some sense, a priestess.
You’ve fused the chain around your neck, and handed them the dangling end.
Dammit.
Tara saw traces of her own features in the face Seril assumed: her cheekbones, and a line of jaw more her mother’s than her own. Perhaps she saw only what she knew to see. That was often the way with gods.
Part of why she didn’t like them. Craft was clear: no wiggle room with ink and blood and starlight. A deal worked, or did not. Rights relinquished could not be willed back. Absolute truth issued from signatures on paper. Subjectivity was for people who couldn’t hack it objectively.
She had thought like that when she first came to Alt Coulumb. Still did, most days. But then why had she removed her glyph from Shale?
Jones slowed as she neared the throne, like the Ebon Sea philosopher’s arrow that crossed first half the intervening distance, then half that, then half again. She stared into Seril’s face.
At the foot of the throne she hesitated, and looked away. Tara saw a bright wet line on Jones’s cheek.
Tara knew the feeling. She’d felt that way herself last year when the gargoyles introduced her to their Lady. Cynical analysis: gods prompted this neurochemical reaction as a form of self-defense. Awe each human you encounter. Seduce them with ultimacy. If she examined herself the way the schools taught her, she could see classic signs of subversion—a drastic change of behavior upon exposure to a divine being. Broken by blessing. The libraries of the Hidden Schools held volumes about conversion, indoctrination, torture. She remembered the woodcuts of rats in mazes and babies raised in boxes.
Priestess.
But the scholastic method was a conditioning all its own. Any break in the pattern of thought she’d learned was a moral failing, an intrusion of dark powers to be met with suspicion and fear.
Daphne held the flightless bird in the temple gardens.
We’re so alone, she thought. We touch one another too firmly and wound or break, or else we pull away. We tell stories in which we are lone noble heroes, until we stand face-to-face with a goddess and see something older and bigger than each of us because it is each of us, our souls touching, the subtle interaction at a distance of minds with minds, when we reach the edge of loneliness and teeter uncertain at the brink.
Or else, old teachers’ voices whispered, you kneel because you lack the strength to stand.
Jones asked the Goddess a question Tara could not hear.
But she heard the answer: “Yes.”
*
The night before, when had Cat crouched on the roof’s edge, Aev told her: first we invite the wind into our wings. Without the wind, we cannot fly.
It sounded stupid. Mystical mumbo-jumbo, self-evident, of course you needed the wind to fly, that was how wings worked.
Raz took her hand. She invited the wind.
She’d tried last night, three times, and three times fallen, plummeting ten stories until Aev swept down to catch her. No room for failure now. Wings wide.
Two beats buffeted the deck. The Suit did what she asked, when she asked, but she felt like a climber with a finger grip on a narrow ledge: the wind was there, but she could not pull herself atop it.
The demons reached the port-facing rooftops, gaining altitude.
You can’t muscle yourself up from this position. Change the angle. Use your body, not your arms. Swing.
She bent her legs, gathered Raz to her, and leapt.
He squawked, undignified. The deck receded below, the ship rocking from the force of her departure.