gave her hope. Maybe Luke and his death squad would be reduced to hers and Duncan’s same blind groping.
They climbed the stairs, resting more often than they wanted. Duncan’s exhaustion mirrored hers. He seemed every bit as weak and confused as she was. She faltered, he faltered. She had wounded him with her doubt. It had to be more than that, of course. She remembered the smoke coming from his chest that afternoon, and feared he’d caught some of the shrapnel after all. Had she been so preoccupied with her own wound that she had missed his?
Near the top they huddled like invalids. Resting her head on his back, she could feel his ribs against her cheekbone. In her mind, his grip was big and meaty, but now his hand felt narrow. She blamed herself. He had shielded her so often that she’d built him into more than he was, a man, a tired man at the end of a long, terrible day.
They finished the stairs at last.
The city was alive tonight. She remembered Duncan’s embrace that morning, and his marvelous heartbeat and the swelling of his lungs, and the city was like that. It pulsed with water. Its clockwork was in motion. The rain had resurrected it.
The rain had stopped, even the wind. But the city was activated. Runoff coursed through its veins.
Molly thought the storm was over. The raindrops quit biting at her eyes. The great sea roar above the canopy was silent. But Duncan wanted the calm to be just the eye of the typhoon. He wanted more tempest and fury to cover their escape. “It’s our only hope,” he said.
Moonlight trickled through the leaves, not in straight pencils of light, but reflecting, from one leaf to the next. It alloted a silver murk to the ruins, enough to give her sight.
To their right and left, all along the rim, water poured from the cobra mouths of
They crept deeper into the ruins.
The city was a hydraulic monument, a celebration of the water that had once powered an empire. Even terrified and hurting, Molly was astonished by the intellect within the ruins. Two thousand years ago, architects had designed the buildings to make music with the water.
Stealing among the moon shadows, she could hear the notes. Water overflowed from one huge bowl to another, cascading harmoniously. It streamed through stone flutes, forcing air through whistling pipes. It beat rhythms against panels lining the canals.
Each structure seemed to have a song built into its vent holes and gutters. The trenches and pipes were more than simple veins to drain away the water. They were throats designed to sing.
The Blackhorse men had heard it, the journal fragments said so. Had they felt her marvel? Had they listened to the music? It called to her from side paths and stairways, even from underfoot, beneath the paving stones. She wanted to linger and search the city, listening to its parts.
“Listen,” she said. It mesmerized her. The music overruled their pursuers. It seemed more powerful than any danger. It drew her. She couldn’t explain it.
Duncan kept himself immune to the temptation. “Keep going,” he whispered.
They came to the tower, and she would have been happy to rest in its summit. From up there they could scout for Luke and his shadows, and Duncan could warm her in his arms. They could forget with the city’s song rising up to them.
Duncan forged on. Each time she lagged, he said, “The gates.”
“But the gates are closed,” she said. “They’re choked with wire and vines.”
“One or the other will go,” he told her. “I know.” He stated it as an article of faith.
“I’m tired, Duncan.”
“A little more.”
“We can rest in the tower.”
“They’d find us.”
He pulled her by the hand, hustling her across a bridge. The architecture began to diminish in size. The high, dark snake back of the fortress wall appeared. The interior moat was bellowing with runoff. How many enemies had been sucked to their deaths trying to leap across that monster?
Duncan grew more wary, moving them from one pool of shadows to the next. The light began failing. The storm was returning. Clouds rushed the unseen moon. The intervals of silver gloom shortened, swallowed by darkness. The wind was finding its lungs again. The patter of leaves gave way to branches thudding like giant footsteps. Duncan was going to get the other half of his typhoon.
“There it is,” whispered Duncan.
The multiheaded gate tower straddled the wall. Another bank of clouds shuttered out the moon. But they had their bearings.
“I’ll go in front,” Duncan said.
He was afraid of mines, she thought. Luke had sealed one entrance, why not the others? That was the mischief they had to test. And if anyone could unravel the knot of wire and vegetation, it was Duncan. They had desperation on their side, and their hunters had a whole city to search.
They edged through the darkness, connected by her fingertips on his shoulder. The noise rose as the wind hit and the sail effect began to grind the city’s foundation.
Even blind, Molly could sense the gate’s nearness. That vague, familiar claustrophobia began to press at her. With each step, it grew, an undertow of disease and despair. What were they thinking? The barrier was impenetrable. A curse upon trespassers. The thought drove at her.
In the next instant, she heard a sudden dull crack. Duncan gave a startled cry and collapsed backward, against her. They both fell, and she thought,
40.
He struggled for air. His feet scraped against the slippery stone. She was certain he’d been shot.
“What is it?” she whispered. He was pushing, she realized, to get back from the gate.
She stood and dragged him by his shirt, away from the gate. It surprised her. He weighed little more than a child.
Duncan coughed in animal bursts and sucked for air. Above the canopy, the clouds parted for a brief minute. The swamp glow lit them.
Black oil—blood—spread from his broken nose and mouth and a gash across one eye.
“What?” she moaned. She had to be strong. It was her turn to play savior.
He couldn’t form words, only noises, strangled and nasal, through the blood and the damage. His jaw was crooked. Had they shot him in the face? She rested beside him, searching for their attackers.
A small forest of ceramic warriors stood before the tunnel. Their heads had been returned. Their jade eyes surged with menace.
Molly tried to take it in. They had risen up. Shoulder to shoulder, they no longer lay toppled or sunk into the earth. Someone—Luke, or Samnang, or others—had dug them from the ground and propped them upright to block the exit. They were ranked in columns, more than she could quickly count.
The tumble of light made them seem alive. They were nothing but hollow shells. But with their incandescent eyes, it was almost as if they were the ones who had maimed Duncan. She searched for Luke hiding among the statues. But all was still among the legs and jade armor.
The moon died again. Darkness swamped them. She held Duncan on her lap.
He kept reaching for his face. She could feel him touching it, probing his own wounds, and that made her more afraid. They were like deep-sea creatures reduced to learning the world with feelers.
Terrified of hurting him more, Molly made herself touch his face. She deciphered blood and the bony protrusion at his jaw, and that scar above his ear. She ran one hand through his wet hair, and it pulled away in long strands. It was weeds or moss, she told herself. But it felt like hair as she untangled it from her fingers.
The stones grated under her knees. He groaned.
