Days of Blood & Starlight

grounds for hope that he had ever heard of—we are alive and in the same world—but he clung to it as he told her his plan to fly to the Samarkand portal and burn it first, before doubling back for this one. He wanted to ask her where the rebels would go now, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t for him to know. They were enemies still, and once he left here, Karou would vanish from his life again, for long or forever, he couldn’t know.

“How much time do you need?” he asked through the tightness in his throat. “To retreat?”

Again she glanced toward the door, and Akiva felt the burn of fury and envy, knowing that she would go to the Wolf as soon as he was gone, and that they would plan their next move together, and that wherever the chimaera rebels went, Karou would still be with Thiago, and not—and never—with him. All his restraint broke. He took a heavy step toward her. “Karou, how…? After what he’s done to you?” He started to reach toward her, but she shrank back, gave a single sharp shake of her head.

“Don’t.”

His hand fell.

“You don’t get to judge,” she said in a violent half whisper. Her eyes were wet and wide and desperately unhappy, and he saw her hand lift by old instinct to her throat, where once upon a time she had worn a wishbone on a cord. She had been wearing it their first night together; they had broken it when the sun threatened dawn and they knew they must part, and in the days that followed it had become their ritual. Always in parting. And if the wish had blossomed over the days and weeks to become their grand dream of a world remade, it had begun much more humbly. That first night, the wish had been simple: that they might see each other again.

But Karou’s hand found nothing at her throat and fell away again, and she faced Akiva squarely and spoke coolly, and what she said was, “Good-bye.”

It felt like a final tether snapping. As long as you’re alive, there is always a chance. A chance of what? Akiva wondered, throwing a glamour over himself and his sister together, and pushing himself out into the night. That things will get better? How had the rest of the conversation gone, back at that grim battle camp?

Or worse. That was it. Usually worse. 

84 Apocalypse

Karou felt Akiva’s departure as she always had: as cold. His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry. It was a childish, cartoonish anger—facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her.

As if he might be the place of safety that she was always seeking and never finding.

Karou breathed. She imagined she could feel him growing farther away and farther, and the distance hurt more with every phantom wingbeat. She took gulps of breath to fight back sobs. Issa’s arm was around her. Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife tucked in her boot—though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain—and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.

Be who Brimstone believes you are, she told herself, willing the strength to suddenly well up from some unknown depth. Be who all those buried souls need you to be, and all the living, too.

“Sweet girl,” said Issa. “It’s all right, you know.”

“All right?” Karou stared at her. Which part? The threat of human weapons to Eretz, or the threat of seraphim here. The havoc the angels could cause to human society just by existing, let alone by soliciting guns for a war beyond human ken… What had she done now? How could she have turned Razgut loose on Eretz with his poisoned soul and such deadly knowledge as he possessed? How many more such mistakes did she have it in her to make, huge enough to destroy worlds? What, exactly, she wanted to demand of Issa, was “all right”?

Issa said, “To love him,” and Karou felt a jolt go through her at the unexpectedness of it.

“I don’t—” she tried to protest, out of habit of shame.

“Please, child, do you think I don’t know you at all? I’m not going to say there is some easy future for you, or even any future at all. I only want you not to punish yourself. You’ve always felt the truth in him, then and now. Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don’t have to be ashamed.”

Karou stared at her, blinking away the tears. Issa’s words—her permission?—hurt more than they helped. There was no way…. Surely Issa could see that. Why was she torturing her by talking as though there was? There wasn’t. There was not.

Karou steeled herself. Be that cat, she remembered from a drawing in her lost sketchbook. The cat that stands out of reach on a high wall, needing no one. Not even Akiva. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s gone, and we have to go, too. We have to get everyone ready.” She looked around her room. Teeth, tools, thuribles, it would all have to go with them. As for the table, the bed, and the door, she felt a wave of regret. Rough as they were, they were so much more than she’d had on the run with the rebels before they came here. She swallowed, felt all the hollow horror of being shoved out a door into darkness.

“Issa.” She started to tremble as the full dread of this new predicament took hold of her. “Where will we go?”

***

Coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance. Later, Karou would wonder where they might have gone, and how everything else would have fallen out differently, unknowably.

If the Dominion had not already arrived.

***

The chimaera host was gathered in the court and ready to fly when they heard a sound in the distance, a mundane sound with no place in this wasteland silence. It was the honking of a horn. The incessant, insistent honking of a horn, and the crunch of tires grinding over the trackless hill, careless with urgency and far too fast. More than a few of the soldiers broke formation to rise into the air and see over the wall. Karou was first.

Her breath and heartbeat caught in her throat. Headlights on the slope. A van. Someone was hanging out the passenger window waving both arms, shouting, drowned out by the honking.

That someone was Zuzana.

The van skidded, fishtailed, stopped. Zuzana was out and running through the kicked-up dust, and Karou knew what she was screaming before the words came clear.

And she knew that the blame for two worlds’ fates was on her shoulders now.

“Angels! Angels! Angels!”

Zuzana was sprinting. Karou dropped out of the air, catching her friend by the shoulders.

“Angels,” Zuzana said, breathless and wide-eyed and white. “Holy hell, Karou. In the sky. Hundreds. Hundreds. The world. Is freaking. Out.”

Mik came running around the van to Zuzana’s side, and lurched to a halt. Karou heard rushing on the hill like a landslide and knew the chimaera were gathered behind her.

And then… she felt heat. Zuzana, looking past her, gasped.

Heat.

Karou spun around, and there was Akiva. For a long moment, he was all she saw. Even the Wolf was only a white blur, moving to take his place at her side. Akiva had come back, and his beautiful face was tense with remorse.

“Too late,” she said softly, knowing that this world that had nurtured her in hiding, that had given her art and friends and a chance at normal life, would never be the same again, no matter what happened next.

The chimaera host, bristling in the presence of the enemy, was watching Thiago for a sign that did not come.