With a final push, I send the teetering carriage over on its side. It crashes to the ground, wood splitting apart, and the remaining horse rears and charges. People scatter in panic, shoving in all directions.
I am already taking Elena’s hand, leaping onto the white mare’s narrow back. Frantically, we spur our mount through the crowd, away from the spectacle. The lady is lost in the horde behind us as people surge away from the fallen wagon.
At the edge of the square, I dare to look over my shoulder.
The lady is standing upright on the overturned carriage like a knife blade, scanning for us. Silhouetted against the sun, her long hair ripples over her shoulders, a black pennant. In her right hand she brandishes the flashing, copper-colored sword.
As we meet eyes, a solid thunk comes from the scaffold and the crowd roars in the guttural language of blood. The condemned man goes swinging by his neck from a short noose, legs kicking. I lose sight of Leizu as spectators close in around her, screaming and cheering, urging the prisoner on to a slow death as his relatives swarm around his feet, pulling at his body to try and hurry him along to the next world.
23
SEATTLE, PRESENT
The blank face of the skyscraper looms over us, beads of condensation scabbing its black glass surface, leaving it sparkling in the growing dawn like something frozen and abandoned centuries ago. Peter parks right across the street from it, illegally.
He leans over and pops open the glove compartment, pulls out a laminated badge, and hangs it on the rearview mirror. Glancing at it, I see police credentials. I don’t even bother to ask whether or not they are real.
“My friend is here,” Peter says, gazing up at the building through the windshield. He looks tired, shoulders slumped and an arm tucked over his chest.
“What is this place?” I ask, looking out.
Peter sighs, sounding distinctly human. “A kind of…hospital. Avtomat come here for repairs. If that fails, sometimes to sleep forever. Because of this, there is a sign written fifty feet high on the side of the building.”
“I don’t see anything—” I say, turning back to Peter.
His hand is out, palm flat. A small brass ring rests on it, like a monocle without any glass.
“This is a cedalion, June,” he says. “Keep it. It may become useful to you.”
“Cedalion?” I ask. “Who stood on the shoulders of Orion and granted him sight?”
Peter nods, and I catch the tiniest hint of surprise that I know Greek mythology.
I pluck the heavy brass ring from his palm and hold it between my thumb and forefinger. The surface is covered in tiny scratches and faint, washed-out writing. I turn to the passenger window and, feeling like an idiot, lift the circle to my eye.
The side of the building erupts with flaming script.
I pull the cedalion away and the mirrored skyscraper reverts to normal. Gingerly, I look through it again and watch the golden-red flames reappear. They are arranged into a large symbol, like an eye, writhing and twisting across the surface of the building but somehow staying in place.
“Oh my god…” I breathe. “What the hell is that?”
“A sigil,” says Peter. “It indicates this is the domain of an avtomat. Those with friendly intentions will be granted entrance, ideally. Any others will be killed.”
“These signs…they’re everywhere?”
“Only sparingly. Once, it was impossible for humans to intercept our messages. Now you have technologies that can do it, so we are more careful. But for all of history, our messages have haunted the faces of your temples and monuments.”
Still peering through the cedalion, I pull out the relic that hangs around my neck. Looking down, I see that it, too, has erupted with a flaming scrawl. A symbol I have never seen before, like a teardrop, traces across the curl of metal.
Fumbling in my pocket, I pull out a notebook. Squinting at the flaming script through the cedalion, I use a stubby pencil to mark the contours of what I’m seeing. While I’m at it, I glance up at the domain sigil and draw a copy of it, too.
In the seat beside me, Peter chuckles.
“What?” I ask, scribbling frantically, not looking up.
“You remind me of someone,” he says quietly.
I can’t identify the letters, but the lines remind me of early Chinese symbols. Something about it is elegant and simplistic and ancient.
“What is this symbol on my relic?” I ask, lowering the cedalion. “What’s it mean, exactly?”
Peter’s face is empty, his jaw set. Looking past me, he answers brusquely: “The relic was made before my time, inscribed with an elder language. The Word it bears has no direct translation to the tongues of men.”
“Word? What’s that mean?”
Peter opens his door. “Stay near me,” he says.
“Do you trust this friend of yours or not?” I ask.
“Completely,” says Peter. “The question is whether or not he trusts me.”
There’s a logic to all this, I’m telling myself. No matter how crazy it seems, the world always operates by the rules. Those rules can be understood, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.
I step out of the car into the cold morning. As Peter struggles to get out of his side, I turn the monocle over in my hands, reasoning out loud. “It must be some kind of metamaterial. Crafted to work as a wide spectrum lens, bending nonvisible light into something I can see. But it’s more than that. It’s doing some processing, too. Sensing patterns. And it must be at least as old as you are.
“How did you make it?”
“I didn’t,” says Peter, as he climbs out of the car on his broken leg.
I hurry around the side of the vehicle, suppressing a shiver in the dawn. Putting an arm out to steady him, I let Peter lean on me. His lips are pressed into a line, eyelids fluttering. As he puts his bulky arm around my shoulder, I feel an irregular vibration rattling inside his chest. Frowning, he takes cautious steps, dragging his broken leg.
“The cedalion pulls information from the world like water through a stone,” he says. I hold him, concerned at how he is cradling his heart. As we move around the car, I put the device back to my eye. The wall across the street lights up in the chicken scratch of a forgotten language, symbols written in cold light over condensation.
“Is this how you see the world?” I ask.
“I see as you do,” Peter replies. “Only more.”
The flaming eye stretches up like beautiful artwork. Something flickers in the reflection of the glass wall and I turn.
“Wow,” I say. “This is really—”
And I see Peter through the cedalion for the first time.
His skin is glowing, complex ribbons of reddish-orange light spreading across his chest and lacing over his face. Now, I can plainly see the intricate seams where his flesh fits together. And I notice a rapid, unsteady pulse of a clockwork heart beneath the metal ribs of his chest. A worrisome blue glow leaks from a wound over his heart, like a spreading stain.
Peter is beautiful, and something is going seriously wrong inside him.
“Yes?” he asks.