spine. “There’s an easy way to win any argument, no matter the quality of your position—you kill the person with whom you disagree. When she sees I’m about to win, she’ll strike with every thaum of her power. I won’t be able to stop her. I’ll have fought my way to exhaustion already. A simple, blunt attack will go through me like an arrow through a paper wall.” Her brush spun in place to articulate a dot. The ink dried cool on his skin, and in his soul. Closing his eyes, he saw the night inside his skull painted with her diagrams. “That’s where you come in.”
Allesandre swelled with rage. Wires twisted like octopus arms around her, and her mouth shaped words in demonic tongues. She reared, serpentine.
Lightning poured down upon them like water from a height.
The lightning slammed into Mal’s protective wards, and would have burned through if its power had nowhere else to go.
Lines of silver paint flared on Caleb’s skin, and the scars on his chest and back and arms flared too.
Thunder riveted his mind. Power battered the cords of his being. His heart stopped.
Caleb held Allesandre’s might as a rider holds reins.
He knelt, and touched the lightning to the metal deck of Seven Leaf Station.
The bottom dropped out of his soul, and he fell into the station, into the water, into and through Allesandre’s defenses. She threw her head back. Her skeleton sparked through her skin; she screamed, long and high-pitched, until her own throat strangled her and the world collapsed in rushing water.
The dome, built to withstand storm and earthquake and divine wrath, gave way. Thousands of gallons of water fell on Caleb and Mal, on the Wardens, on Allesandre in her wire web.
Caleb collapsed to the deck. Time disappeared in the roar and rush. Gravity failed, and he grabbed for anything firm. His hands closed around a hot water pipe, scalding but stationary, and he held his breath through coursing dark.
The universe righted itself in noon brilliance. Caleb doubled over on the deck, coughing up sweet water. The sky spread blue above. He blinked at the fierce sun.
For months he knelt, years, gathering the pieces of his mind into a working whole. When he looked up, he saw the knotted pipes and wires in tangled disarray, Allesandre limp at their heart. Wire circled her head like a crown, and her neck like a collar. It was difficult to tell where she ended and the machines began—metal slipped smoothly beneath her skin.
Corpses lay on the floor, flood-tossed against consoles and raised altars. Two Wardens had fallen overboard, and Four and Eight were lowering ropes to rescue them.
The torrent had not moved Mal, who crossed her arms and canted her head to one side like a governess regarding a troublesome child. She walked forward. Her legs trembled with each determined step.
Allesandre looked up. Her face was Quechal dark, Caleb’s own color, and her hair streaked red. Ruined, she resembled the woman she had been months ago, the woman who ushered him into the burning foundations of the world. Her chest heaved. Her mouth was slack and her eyes set, exhausted and defiant.
“Mal,” she said so soft that Caleb barely heard: desperate, despairing. “What now?”
Mal did not answer. One hand rose to the hollow above her heart, and twisted. The sun dimmed, and above the wind and the waves’ soft roll, Caleb heard a sound like cloth being torn. Mal drew her hand from her breast, and she held a sliver of nightmare in the shape of a knife. She raised the blade.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Mal,” Allesandre repeated. “How did we get here?”
Mal moved her knife in a smooth arc that began on one side of Allesandre’s neck, and ended on the other. Allie’s eyes went soft, and she slumped forward with a wet gasp. The wires would not let her fall. Blood unfurled from her throat down her shredded blouse. She blinked once, and mouthed a word Caleb could not hear—it might have been Mal’s name, again. Pain twisted her, and she died.
Mal stood like a lightning-struck magisterium tree: solid to the eye, but the leaves and furthest branches quivered as the trunk fought to stand. The tremors traveled inward from her fingertips, and when they reached her shoulders she collapsed, curled over her knees, head down. The nightmare-knife vanished. Blood fell to the deck and mixed with water.
Caleb moved to her side and stopped, uncertain. Mal collapsed was more fearsome than Mal girded for war. He had staked his soul on games of chance, confronted the King in Red, jumped off buildings into empty space. Kneeling beside her and placing his hand on her shoulder was the hardest thing he had ever done.
He wondered if she had killed before, and wondered, as he had last night, what he would have felt if their situations were reversed, leaving him with the knife and her to watch. Alessandre was dangerous. He tried to think of Dresediel Lex dying of thirst, tried to justify the blood at his feet, and could not.
Sixty years ago, his father stood atop the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. As cantors sang, he raised his knife. It glinted black in the sun. The obsidian edge reflected the naked sacrifice. The blade fell, the murder was done, and that, too, had saved the city.
Silent, he stared into the dead woman’s eyes. But for the blood, she might have been lost in thought, or prayer.
His hand hurt. Mal had gripped it, hard. After a while, when she stopped trembling, she looked up.
“That was worse than I thought,” she said.
A distant lake bird called.
She tried to speak but choked, and stopped, and tried again. “Come on. Let’s get this place running.”
27
Caleb left Mal alone as she worked. He lacked enough Craft to help her, and she seemed happier without him. No. Not happier, exactly. She worked in a brittle silence that he feared to break.
The Wardens cased the scene. Four and Six draped the corpses in evidence shrouds, capturing pictures of each victim for later analysis. Three’s thigh was broken in the battle, and he rested next to twitching, unquiet One, whom Allie had trapped in a recursive nightmare. Four said she would wake soon. “If not, we have people who can bring her to her mind again.”
Seven walked around the station at a measured pace, forming detailed memories that specialists in Dresediel Lex would retrieve.
Couatl flew above. Four’s green-crested mount swallowed an unwary lake bird in a single bite. Feathers drifted down on the breeze.
Allesandre hung from her wire creche.
Caleb followed Seven, listening to his footsteps and the water. Broken glass glinted at his feet. Kneeling, he lifted a shard and threw it into the lake. It disappeared in reflected brilliance. Light pinned him down and made even his shadow feel small.
He turned back to Mal, who was stripping cables from Allesandre’s skin. He approached her, but she didn’t look up. “Are you okay?”
She stopped, mid-incision. Blood sizzled on her knife. “What do you think? Go kill a friend and tell me how you feel after.”
“I’m sorry.”
She kept working as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I’d like to help. But I don’t know how.”
She didn’t respond, so he shrugged, grabbed one of the wires at her feet, and closed his eyes. A brilliant network charged the blackness, extending from the station in all directions: the system that pumped and treated Seven Leaf water, and sent it south to Dresediel Lex.
The web was sick. Thick threads hung limp; slender strands knotted and tangled. The wire twisted in his grip like a living thing. He reached for a loose thread and pulled it tight.
Seven Leaf Station convulsed. Mal swore, Couatl roared, and Caleb’s eyes snapped open. The Wardens had drawn their weapons and faced the lake, as if they expected a host of Scorpionkind to rise from its depths.
