Seven Leaf Station was not designed for comfort. Below the surface, between banks of slowly revolving Craft circles and humming soul catchers, Heartstone architects had added as an afterthought a few bare rooms for the station’s staff. The Wardens split four chambers among themselves. Caleb chose a cold bed in a room with a writing desk, a few pictures of a dead man’s family, and a chessboard set with a problem involving knight moves. He glanced at the board but didn’t mull over the problem. He had enough of his own.
Troubled by the thought of sleeping in a corpse’s sweat, Caleb stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. He lay down to rest, but sleep evaded him. He saw blood and water flow from a cut throat, surging in time to the beat of the machines that drained the lake.
He stood at last, slipped on his shoes and jacket, and left the room with the chess problem still unsolved. Turning through a maze of corridors he found the Wardens’ larder; he poured a cold glass of water, assembled a plate of rice and meat and tortillas, and bore them back into the twisting halls.
There was no mystery as to where Mal slept. When Caleb and the Wardens followed her into the under- station, they found all the doors open save one, marked “Manager’s Quarters” in thick block letters.
The door was still closed. He knocked, waited, and heard her muted by steel: “Go away.”
“I brought you food. You didn’t come to dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It’s not for your sake. What if we hit bad weather on the way back and I’m thrown out of the basket? I want you strong enough to catch me.”
“Who says I would catch you?”
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The manager’s suite was larger than the other rooms, but still small. It smelled faintly of incense, and contained an overstuffed bookcase, a desk, a nightstand, and a large bed.
The far wall was transparent. Beyond it writhed the gods impaled on thorn-tree contracts, larger underwater than they had seemed from the surface. Currents and passing fish distorted their features. Their cries did not penetrate the walls.
Mal sat in silhouette, cross-legged on the bed with her back to Caleb. She was naked from the waist up, the curves of her neck and ribs and the swell of her hip lit blue and green and red by light from the window. As he entered, she lifted her shirt from the bed and slid it on, one arm at a time, without hurry. She fastened one button at her breast, but did not look back at him. “I thought I told you to stay out.”
“You didn’t. You told me to go away.”
“And you listened so well.” She set a slender object down on the nightstand. In the dim light he could not tell what it was.
“I’m a good listener.” He set the plate of food on the desk, turned the desk chair to face her, and sat, watching her back.
She seemed so still, a statue in contrast with the fluid pain beyond the window. He focused on her outline.
“Allie was a colleague,” she said. “She left for Seven Leaf soon after the Bright Mirror thing. This would be her big break into management. She wrote me, at first. Her letters stopped coming a month ago, but I was too busy to check.”
“It must have been hard for her,” he said, “so far away, no friends.”
“Nothing but the work, and what work.” Mal waved at the water and the things inside it. “Subdue these spirits, torment them. Even if they aren’t conscious the way we are, they feel.”
“It’s worth the price,” he said, though he was not certain.
“For how long?” Her voice was hollow. “Ten years from now, or twenty, this lake will be a dry and cracked bowl in the mountains and we will turn to the next, and the next after that. One day it won’t be mindless gods who suffer for our thirst, but other cities, other people. How long until we decide Regis doesn’t need its wealth of water? The cities of the frozen north, surely they don’t thirst like we do. Shikaw, next. We could drink this continent dry, from the Pax to the World Sea. Water is life, and life is worth any price, even life itself.”
He didn’t say anything.
She sighed. In the depths of Seven Leaf Lake, the trapped gods screamed. “This is the world we live in.”
“Why not try to fix things?” Even as he said the words they felt small. A broken window or a broken promise you could fix. The scene in the lake was beyond fixing.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed, a sour, sad sound that hung on the station’s dead air like a corpse on a rack. “Everybody needs to make a sacrifice sooner or later, to survive. I guess this was my first—or the first one to hit me so close. I prepared for this moment years ago. I told myself I had.”
He didn’t ask what “this moment” was. In the flickering light, he could barely recognize Mal. Maybe she couldn’t recognize herself. He moved to the bed, which gave slightly under his weight. The mattress was a firm lie: the world beneath was only water. He slid next to her and touched her shoulders. Her muscles were knotted steel cables. He pressed into those knots with his thumbs and the heels of his hands. Mal stifled a cry as he began. He tried again, with a lighter touch. “Thank you,” she said this time.
The cropped fringe of her hair feathered against his fingers. Small, downy hairs trailed down the nape of her neck, an arrow pointing to her back and shoulders. He had expected her skin to be cool to the touch. Everything down here was. She was warm though, feverish.
So close, he studied her: smooth skin a shade lighter than his own, shoulders and neck dark and freckled by sun. He could not feel her glyph-marks—the Craft left no scars, unless you knew how to look for them.
He studied her to capture her, to capture the moment, but also to distract himself from the tortures outside the window. Why would she choose to face that? Maybe she felt it was a part of her sacrifice, or Allesandre’s. He pressed against her skin, and thoughts of sacrifice faded. He worked her shoulders until the steel melted and became almost human.
Sitting on Mal’s bed, massaging her back, Caleb felt time stretch and transform. This moment was a door ajar.
He leaned into her, silent, and she leaned into him. His arms drifted around her. Mal’s breath fluttered like wings. The tips of his fingers explored her jaw and throat, the slim even lines of muscle and the gently pulsing vein. She clutched his arms. He felt the line of her collarbone, the skin above the swell of her breasts.
It was wet. In surprise he lifted his hand from her and held it up to the light of tortured gods. His fingertips glistened dark and red.
Later he could not recall whether he recoiled from her, or she from him. One of them moved, or both, and seconds later she sat a foot away from him on the bed, in profile like a temple statue. Beneath the open collar of her shirt ran two long cuts, one on the left side and one on the right. Other cuts, long healed, lay below them, parallel to her collarbone: a necklace of scars. Her eyes glittered.
“Mal. What the hells, Mal.” The object she had placed on the nightstand was a knife—not the Craftwork blade that killed Allesandre, but a length of black glass with a handle of beaten gold and silver wire.
The half of her that faced him was in shadow. The half that faced the gods reflected the bitter green glow of their pain.
Behind her, on the windowsill, sat a stone carving, three inches tall and no broader than a woman’s arm: a hollow cylinder formed by the bodies of two serpents intertwined. Twin trails of thin gray smoke wisped from a coil of incense at the idol’s center. Rising, the wisps wound around each other and faded into air.
“It’s called—” she began.
“I know what it’s called,” Caleb said before she could finish. “Autosacrifice. Bloodletting. Cutting.”
“It’s not cutting.”
“What’s the difference?”
She wiped the blood with a handkerchief, folded the handkerchief and set it beside the knife. “I told you to leave.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Hells, Caleb. You saw what I did up there. You see what’s happening outside. I need to atone.”
