As Sarai had felt waves of Lazlo’s feelings even through the barriers of his consciousness, so did he feel the sudden blaze of hers.
A fry of panic—no thoughts, no images, just a slap of feeling and he jerked to a halt, two blocks from the anchor, and then, flooding his senses: the tang of sulfur, hot and rotten and wrong.
It was the stink of Drave, and it felt like a premonition, because just then Drave came into view at the top of the street, rounding the corner at a dead run. His eyes widened when he caught sight of Lazlo, but he didn’t slow. He just came pelting onward as though pursued by ravids. All in an instant: the panic, the tang, and the explosionist. Lazlo blinked.
And then the world went white.
A bloom of light. Night became day—brighter than day, no darkness left alive. Stars shone pale against bleached-bone heavens, and all the shadows died. The moment wavered in tremulous silence, blinding, null, and numb.
And then the blast.
It hurled him. He didn’t know it. He only knew the flash. The world went white, and then it went black, and that was all there was to it.
Not for Sarai. She was safe from the blast wave—at least her body was, up in the citadel. The moths near the anchor were incinerated in an instant. In the first second before her awareness could flow into her other sentinels, it was as though fire scorched away her sight in pieces, leaving ragged holes rimmed in cinders.
Those moths were lost. She had some eighty others still on wing in the city, but the blast ripped outward so fast and far it seized them all in its undertow and swept them away. Her senses churned with their tumbling, end over end, no up, no down. She dropped to her knees on the terrace, head spinning as more moths died, more holes melting from her vision, and the rest kept on reeling, out of her control. It was seconds before she could pull her senses home to her body—most of them, at least. Enough to stop the spinning as her helpless smithereens scattered. Her mind and belly heaved, sick and dizzy and frantic. The worst was that she’d lost Lazlo. The moth on his hand had been peeled away and snuffed out of existence, and for all she knew, he had been, too.
No.
An explosion. She understood that much. The roar of the blast was curiously muted. She crawled toward the edge of the terrace and lay over it, her chest against the metal, and peered over the edge. She didn’t know what to expect to see down in Weep. Chaos—chaos to match the churn of her wind-scattered senses? But all she saw was a delicate blossom of fire from the district of the anchor, and fronds of smoke billowing in slow motion. It looked like a bonfire from up here.
Ruby and Sparrow, peering over the balustrade in the garden, thought the same.
It was… pretty.
Maybe it wasn’t bad, Sarai thought—she prayed—as she reached back out for her remaining sentinels. Many were crushed or crippled, but several dozen could still fly, and she hurled them at the air, back toward the anchor, to where she’d lost Lazlo.
Vision at street level was nothing like the calm view from overhead. It was almost unrecognizable as the landscape of a moment ago. A haze of dust and smoke hung over everything, lit lurid by the fire blazing at the blast sight. It didn’t look like a bonfire from down here, but a conflagration. Sarai searched with her dozens of eyes, and nothing quite made sense. She was almost sure this was where she’d lost Lazlo, but the topography had changed. Chunks of stone stood in the street where before no stones had been. They’d been hurled there by the blast.
And under one was pinned a body.
No, said Sarai’s soul. Sometimes that’s all there is: an infinite echo of the smallest of words. No no no no no forever.
The stone was a chunk of wall, and not just any chunk. It was a fragment of the mural, hurled all this way. Isagol’s painted face gazed up from it, and the gash of her slit throat gaped like a smile.
Sarai’s mind had emptied of everything but no. She heard a groan and her moths flurried to the body—
—and as quickly away from it again.
It wasn’t Lazlo, but Drave. He was facedown, caught while running from the chaos he had caused. His legs and pelvis were crushed under the stone. His arms scrabbled at the street as though to pull himself free, but his eyes were glazed, unseeing, and blood bubbled from his nostrils. Sarai didn’t stay to watch him die. Her mind, which had shrunk to the single word no, unfurled once more with hope. Her moths wheeled apart, cutting through the blowing smoke until they found another figure sprawled out flat and still.
This was Lazlo. He was on his back, eyes closed, mouth slack, his face white with dust except where blood ran from his nose and ears. A sob welled up in Sarai’s throat and her moths slashed the air in their haste to reach him—to touch him and know if his spirit still flowed, if his skin was warm. One fluttered to his lips, others to his brow. As soon as they touched him, she fell into his mind, out of the dust and smoke of the fire-painted night and into… a place she’d never been.
It was an orchard. The trees were bare and black. “Lazlo?” she called, and her breath made a cloud. It streamed from her and vanished. Everything was still. She took a step, and frost crackled beneath her bare feet. It was very cold. She called for him again. Another breath cloud formed and faded, and there was no answer. She seemed to be alone here. Fear coiled in her gut. She was in his mind, which meant he was alive—and her moth that was perched on his lips could feel the faint stir of breath—but where was he? Where was she? What was this place? She wandered among the trees, parting the whip boughs with her hands, walking faster and faster, growing more and more anxious. What did it mean if he wasn’t here?
“Lazlo!” she called. “Lazlo!”
And then she came into a clearing and he was there—on his knees, digging in the dirt with his hands. “Lazlo!”
He looked up. His eyes were dazed, but they brightened at the sight of her. “Sarai? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” she said, and rushed forward to throw her arms around him. She kissed his face. She breathed him in. “But what are you doing?” She took his hands in hers. They were caked with black dirt, his nails cracked and broken from scraping at the frozen earth.
“I’m looking for something.”
“For what?”
“My name,” he said, with uncertainty. “The truth.”
Gently, she touched his brow, swallowing the fear that wanted to choke her. Being thrown like that, he had to have hit his head. What if he was injured? What if he was… damaged? She took his head in her hands, wishing savagely that she were down in Weep, to hold his real head in her lap and stroke his face and be there when he woke, because of course he would wake. Of course he was fine. Of course. “And… you think it’s here?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.