“If we’re not going to save RKC, what do you think we should do?”
“Caleb.” She closed her eyes, and massaged them with her hand. When she opened them again, they looked soft, and red. “We have to wait.”
“That’s it? That’s your plan? Wait?”
“At first.”
“The riots will get worse.”
“They must. When the eclipse comes, we’ll use the Serpents to grant water to the city. They will rise, and we’ll chase the Tzimet from our land—and the skyspires, too. Craftsmen will flee rather than face the Serpents.” She said it as if reciting the bids in a round of bridge. “We can start fresh.”
He leaned back from the table, and from her. “Mal. What are you saying?”
“If the King in Red recovers, he won’t let Qet’s death go unpunished. He’ll destroy the old religion and everyone who follows it, snap the spines of the last gods and goddesses, break their bones and feast on their marrow. But only if he recovers. If he doesn’t, we have a chance to take a different path.”
“You’re talking as if this is an opportunity.”
“It is. You asked me for an answer, last night. This is it. RKC is dead. Let it rot. Build something new.”
“No.”
“When the cards are dealt, and the players go all-in, what do you do if you hold the winning hand?”
“But you don’t hold the winning hand.”
“We do,” she said.
The world chilled. Caleb forced himself to speak. “Who’s ’we’?”
“Me, and people like me. People who care about fixing our city, our world. You, too, if you’ll join us.”
He licked his lips. To the south, fires spread. “Mal.” He didn’t, couldn’t, say anything more.
“Caleb.” She leaned across the table, laid her hand on his, gripped tightly. Long hours of climbing had left her fingers smooth and hard. He thought her running, a goddess in flight.
“You’re talking about rebellion. Regime change.” He exhaled. “I get it.” Gods writhing in the lake. Qet Sea- Lord dead in a sea of filth. Burning nets fell from the sky to snare her parents, his father, the thousands of the Skittersill Rising. The Rakesblight Center slaughtered twenty thousand pigs every day, turned animals to meat with hooked blades and spinning diamond wheels. “Not today. Please. Not now. Even if you chase the Craftsmen out of town, where would that leave you? In the middle of a desert, without any water. Qet is dead. Without the firms you won’t be able to bring him back to life. Let’s save the city first, then talk.”
“I’ve taken care of that.” She released his hand, placed her leather bag on the table, and undid the brass buckle. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands trembled.
She opened the bag and turned it toward him in the same motion.
He fell.
Falling, forever, into a sky without stars. Silent colossi moved through limitless space, invisible presences whose immensity built the world. He was a speck of dust, a leaf drifting down a cave chimney.
A misshapen planet of meat and rainbow blood hung below him. Severed arteries and limp veins the size of skyspires dripped ichor.
He fell through nothingness toward the heart of a god.
Caleb caught the table’s edge and pulled himself upright. The bag gaped. The heart filled the space within, yet was somehow swallowed by that space, too, a single bright spot in blackness deeper than the deepest cave, longer than the longest tunnel.
“What is this?” he said, though he knew already.
“His heart,” she replied.
“Where did you get it?”
She closed the bag. “I cut it from his chest with a knife of lightning. I would have used obsidian, but I couldn’t lift a blade that large. Lightning is less traditional, but easier to handle. And the effect’s the same.”
“You…”
He trailed off, hoping she would finish for him, but she didn’t.
“You attacked Bay Station. While I was asleep.”
“Yes.”
“I saw what happened there.”
Pain flickered across her features. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? Sorry for what you did, or sorry I saw it?”
“Both. The attack had to be last night, because of the eclipse today. Bad luck. I tried to get you to turn back. I should have insisted. But. I didn’t want to be alone before it happened.”
“You’re lying. You couldn’t have done all that. You’re not powerful enough. No one is.”
“The Serpents are with me. I am weak, but they are strong.” She opened her hand, and fire blossomed in her palm—not the cold fire of Craft, but a hungry inferno, a burst of heat that blew desert wind in his face. She closed her hand, and it stopped. “Nothing can stand against them.”
“Gods. You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“But drawing power from the Serpents makes them hungrier.”
“Which weakens RKC, and Kopil. Alaxic insisted on that condition. You remember? RKC has to keep the Serpents sleeping. When I attacked Bay Station, everything I threw against them weakened their defenses. The more RKC fights, the more it’s caught.”
“And once Bay Station cut out, RKC tried to draw water from Seven Leaf, but…” He remembered his own work: melding red wires with blue, splicing the Serpents into the system. “Hells.”
“Your people audited Seven Leaf with a magnifying glass and sharp calipers before you bought us; we couldn’t tie Seven Leaf to the Serpents until the deal was done.”
“Oh,” he said. “No.”
“So we broke the station, knowing we could rebuild it later. Allie started the work. You and I finished it. Now, when RKC tries to pump water out of Seven Leaf Lake, it draws power from the Serpents, and the King in Red fades further.”
“The True Quechal didn’t poison Bright Mirror.”
“Of course not. They can barely paint graffiti without misspellings. Their hearts are in the right place, but they’ve had nothing to guide them for eighty years. No sacrifice. No transcendence. They’re small, and petty, and mean.”
“Your entire Concern was a sham.”
She laughed bitterly. “Have you ever tried running a Concern? You need people to do the work. People to manage those people, and to manage those in turn. The Concern is a dumb god and human beings are its cells. After his defeat in the God Wars, Alaxic studied the Craft. He started Heartstone to beat Kopil at his own game. We made contact with the Serpents in their slumber. And when we were ready, Alaxic showed the King in Red what he had found. Kopil raced to acquire us—he couldn’t let Alaxic control the Serpents. Out of two thousand employees, only a handful knew the full plan. Alaxic. Allie. Me. A few engineers, a few Craftsmen. The True Quechal—even if they’re small and petty, they have their uses. When you need someone to take a suicide run into North Station, for example, why not use a premade band of zealots, any one of whom would gladly die at a Goddess’s side?”
“That was you.”
“Once Kopil knew we had the Serpents, we had to convince him he was under attack, which made him more desperate to acquire us, to control them. He wanted insurance. Security.”
“You played me all along.”
“No.” Mal pushed her chair back and rose. Her expression was earnest, desperate. “I didn’t plan for you to see me that night. At first I was scared. I wanted to get rid of you.” Her heels tapped on marble as she rounded the table toward him. He stood and retreated, not fast enough to escape. “But you chased me, through death and pain and fire. You chased me, devoted, suicidal, scared—and I saw you wanted more than me. You wanted to give your life to something. To change the world, only you’d forgotten how.”