John stopped to rest. Many hours into the battle, there were fewer people. The outlaws had breached the compound wall. They streamed inside. The fighting continued there. The screams grew farther away. John sat down in a pile of canvas—it had once been a tent. Tygo had gone for water.
Then he saw her through a maze of toppled stones. She wore a plumed helmet now, with the short ends of her hair sticking out. She’d cut her dress off at the knee so she could run. Overhead those two amazing lights shone their alarm down on them all, like an awful being waiting for them to die. Behind them their arcs of light. John felt he was looking into a dream. She did not seem afraid of any living being. Handless, covered in blood. Yes, smiling. Just like David. She was smiling at him now, she saw him. John’s heart leapt into his throat.
A young girl in white stood behind her, her wrists chained together, fastened to a metal collar around her neck.
Orchid nodded to him. She had noticed him walking toward her before he’d noticed her.
When he reached her he could not speak. He’d gone to her like she’d summoned him. She touched his shirt. Behind them something caught fire. A sound like wings beating as it went up in flames. Neither of them looked. The heat coming off it made John’s left side redden. She didn’t seem to notice. “The man who needs proof,” she hissed. “You must have found something undeniable, to have left your friendly palace for this filth pit.”
The girl lurched from behind her, screaming. “Help me! She’s going to kill me!”
“For my bastard of a husband, you came here?” She looked beyond him over the field of dead and dying people. All her features were crowded on her face, the upturned snub of her nose bathed in the light of the fires. “O, but so did I, I suppose. What a fool I’ve been. This will not end well for any of us. I have a feeling.”
“The end,” John gasped at last. “Is coming.”
“O, I know it well.”
“No. The end of the world. Of this world. The Cape.” He felt that he was a carving of a man about to fall from a great height. What would remain when he smashed open? “The lights in the sky. They’re meteors.”
Now she did not speak. Her bandaged stub was dark with watery blood. The girl’s chain was fastened to a thick girdle around Orchid’s stomach.
“She’s going to kill me,” sobbed the young girl. “Please save me.”
“Don’t kill her,” John implored. “Leave. We all must leave.”
“I’m the rightful queen of the Cape. This is my kingdom.”
Then John pulled her close to him, their chests touching. They were each covered in blood and sweat. She let him hold her, even sinking into him. The fire flickered over her helmet. “I cannot kill the stupid girl,” Orchid whispered in his ear. “Wonderblood is over. There is a Law of Mercy now. I cannot … I cannot de-head her as I once would have.”
He did not know what she meant.
She pushed back from him, her face turned up toward him like a heliotrope. “Will you kill her for me?”
The girl met his eyes across the dark. “Her men chained me! She has the key around her neck! Save me!”
“I—I … I can’t execute anyone.”
Orchid pushed him away. “Then what good are you to me?”
“Leave, I said.” He grasped her hand with both of his. “You have to.”
“Not without the sigil. David cannot do a thing without her.”
John looked to the girl, then back to Orchid. “Take her with you, then.”
“No!” the girl screamed again. “Don’t let her take me!”
“Where would I go?” Orchid spat. “Back on the circuit? There are my people. Helping him.” She motioned with her stump toward the fighting, which was now raging inside the compound walls. “All I’ve made of my life is his now.” She pulled on the girl’s chain again, and the girl cried out as her head was jerked down with her arms. “Where is my sword? I cannot even use it, she has cut off my good hand.” There were no tears in the woman’s eyes.
John did not know why he was talking to her, what compulsion drove him, except that now, having been shown the truth, he wanted—needed—to tell someone. “Go to Kansas,” he whispered. “We are. It’s where we should have been this whole time, where the True King will rule. We’ve been wrong this whole time.”
“But the texts—”
“Everyone was wrong.”
“How do you know?”
He gazed at her helplessly. “I just do.”
“David will never leave this place. He has dreamt of the Cape since killing our Prophetess Lois. He was born for this moment.” The woman was backing away from him now. She was singularly the most magnetic person he had ever seen—even handless she throbbed with a power that could not be contained. She pulled off her helmet with her one
