The Reckoning

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He patted her hand reassuringly.

She felt him grip his jawbone, and knew what he meant to do. He got his thumbs underneath and clutched the sides, and tugged at the bone. The bones gave a gristly pop and he groaned. But the jaw would not go back into joint. She was almost sick.

The moon returned. Duncan leaned forward to let the blood run from his nose and mouth. She got to her knees and unknotted her sling, his checkered kroma, and wrapped it around the gash on his forehead. What now?

The statues scared her. Luke had posed them as a warning, obviously. What other tricks had he arranged in the tunnel?

She got Duncan to his feet. He was so thin. “Put your arm over my shoulder.”

Holding him gave her strength. The endorphins were kicking in, she thought. He seemed almost light enough to carry in her arms.

Clouds gobbled up the moon again. The gate was out of the question, and it would be foolhardy to try for the tower at the center of the city. By now their pursuers would be hounding the ruins.

She led Duncan along the moat path, following it by ear. She planted each foot with care. One slip and they would both be swept away. They shuffled higher, alongside the wall.

The wind began to scream, clamoring to tear the canopy open.

Thunder fell upon the mountain. She heard the bamboo chattering at her, and vines lashing like bullwhips. The ruins grated like the bowels of a glacier.

She felt helpless. They were the walking wounded. Even if there were a breach in the wall, how far could they hope to get? What lay out there in the night?

While she still had strength, Molly turned Duncan toward the city.

There were no more holes in the darkness, no more moon. The storm sprang at them. Molly found her way by the songs of the ancient buildings.

She listened for hollowness and found a doorway. That got them out of the rain, but the floor was half flooded. She felt her way up a short staircase to a ledge.

By touch, quivering with fever, she tucked Duncan along the back wall and foraged moss and leaves to pile over him. When he was well covered, she burrowed under to hold him. The rain would wash away their tracks and scent and any last evidence of them. In the morning, they could start over.

41.

She woke holding an armful of leaves on a ledge, an ancient veranda that faced out upon the ruins. Maybe lovers had once cooled themselves here and shared this secret view of the street below. The light was blue turning green, and the mist was sinking in the street below. It was dawn in the city.

She lay unmoving above the ghost river. A dragonfly appeared, a jewel with wings. Gods—their wandering faces—invited her back into the great dream.

The typhoon had passed. The stones no longer grated. The water songs had dried to a faint trickle.

Duncan was gone.

She looked at her empty hand sticking through the leaves. He had gone to draw them away from her. That was Duncan.

Whispers threaded up from the mist. “Molly,” she heard. They knew she was here somewhere. They were backtracking for her, which could only mean they’d run Duncan to earth. His footprints or scent, whatever they were following, led this way.

Her hand drew into the leaves. Eyes wide, she watched them from above.

They surfaced in the street mist, phantom hints of them, a bare shoulder, a hunched back, a wisp of black hair, khaki-green rags. It was a parade of apparitions, of fragments of apparitions, even of relics. Held by no one she could see, a rifle barrel, beaded with dew, swiveled from side to side.

They were mere pieces in the mist, silent except for their hiss of words. They might have been a giant serpent gliding through the labyrinth, its skin whispering against the walls.

Molly waited, hating the adrenaline that woke her body. The shrapnel wound burned with infection. She could feel the tickle of insects on her legs, the gentle suckling of leeches.

At last her hunters faded away.

She forced herself to wait, counting time in her head, devising plans. The gods smiled at her foolishness. The fortress walls stood whole. There was no exit.

She crawled out from the decay. Her vision swam in broken auto-focus, soft to sharp, near to far. Glossy black leeches clung to her arms. The forest was stealing her. It took all her strength to stand, and when she glanced down, her bed looked like an animal lair.

Her thighs trembled as she descended to the street. She went the opposite way from her pursuers, both to avoid them and to find the origin of their tracking. That was where they would have left Duncan.

As the mist cleared, the spires grew taller. All around, buildings leaked their lungs of fog. It ushered out of blank doors and cascaded down stairs. It exhaled from the mouths of giant heads. Between the flags of it, she saw parrots and smaller birds wheeling in the morning air. Monkeys sprinted overhead like spies. Invisible deer barked at her progress.

They were giving her away. But her presence was already known. She accepted that.

Here and there weapons and rusted C-ration cans fanned across the road, tossed from doorways like garbage. Had the soldiers become so careless, even discarding their rifles? It was the animals, she knew. Over the years, they had rooted through the fragments and pulled them outside. Her mother had been scattered over a mile of mountainside.

It was all she could do to stay on her feet.

She peered inside a room, and it was like a lunatic’s cage. Hand-sketched maps were plastered to the walls like wet leaves. Their ink had bled, but it was still possible to see the attempts to map the ruins. Each map bore a date in one corner, July, then August, and one made in late September…three months after their arrival. Each was scratched out, drawn over, crumpled, and smoothed. The mapmakers never had gotten the hang of this place. The ruins had defied them to the end.

When she stepped from the room, Molly saw the black bead of a gun barrel aimed straight at her. The sniper’s nest was practically invisible among the leaves, but her eye went straight to it. She could not explain her gift for finding them.

The sniper sat in a fork, tied to the tree. His rifle was rooted in place, stitched to his shoulder by vines. His skull leaned against the stock, taking infinite aim with round stone eyes. Like Luke, he had been fitted with the vision of jade. It was as if the city watched itself through their eyes.

Nothing remained of his uniform, though he still wore web gear and a towel around his neck vertebrae, and the skull sported a do-rag. His leg bones and boots had long ago fallen to the ground, but his upper half still maintained a bull’s-eye on the street.

Duty was one thing, this was something else. Besides tying himself to the tree, the man had cooped himself up inside a cocoon of barbed wire. His last act—hauling up the wire and constructing a shapeless ball of it— bewildered her. What had he hoped the wire would protect him against? Starvation, despair, madness? Had he caged himself to prevent his own wandering?

She recalled the monkeys plundering the body yesterday. Had he chosen the tree for his tomb and wired shut his mortal remains against the animals? Who else could he have feared among his dead and dying comrades?

Molly stumbled on, passing beneath his aim. One of the soldiers—or perhaps some of Duncan’s seventeenth- century Dutchmen trekking through Indochina—had carved a cross into the wall. A red and white painted Confederate flag graced one sheltered wall, and beside it a black-and-white peace symbol. They had scratched the names of wives and girlfriends among dancing, round-breasted aspara nymphs.

She passed through the canyon of story panels that she and Duncan had shared, and the carvings had altered. Now the train of prisoners lay beheaded. The dragon had retreated back into the sea. The monkey-gods