Mom. Nyx’s mouth formed the word, though no sound escaped.
Her mother swallowed. Nyx could barely make out the bob of her throat through the gloom and the flickering sparks as the Destroyer opened the cell door.
Her mother’s jaw tightened and her gaze grew urgent. You must do it, she’d called out earlier. To the Destroyer, it would have sounded like she was begging Nyx to give up so the torture would end. But Nyx knew she’d meant the opposite.
Nyx shook her head, a pitiful motion, barely a tremor as her cheek pressed deeper into the floor. She couldn’t do this. Not any longer.
But the Destroyer was halfway out the door already, and if she left, it meant Nyx had failed. It meant Tal would be forever lost. And, Nyx reasoned despairingly, she herself was already likely going to die anyway. At this point there really was no hope of winning back her life, only of eking out a little more time. If she traded away that time, she could free her brother. She could make it all mean something. She could win.
She could still win. She could still make it worth it.
There was one thing that could make the Destroyer stop, could make her turn around, could make her come back to finish the job she’d started. Your family name, the Destroyer had demanded a moment ago.
Nyx forced in a breath. “Melaine,” she whispered.
And the Destroyer turned around.
BESIDE TAL’S COT, AN EMBOSSED CLAY CUP ROLLED back and forth with the motion of the train. The dregs of his tea dribbled out with each pass, turning the carpet soggy and fragrant with the scent of gold-infused sleeping draught. He’d requested triple his usual dose from the kitchens, but it had still taken nearly twenty minutes for the medicinal herbs and golden sleep magic to force Tal into an uneasy rest.
To a silver Smith, sleep was like being buried at the heart of the earth: encased in granite, enveloped in an immense, directionless pressure. This was what he feared. This was what he faced every night, what he fought every time he dared to sleep. He was surrounded by the vast, gentle, inescapable weight of his god, and he could not take another instant of it.
Tal tried to breathe. There was no breath to be had in this silent nowhere, though, and no body here for him to breathe with. This was the in-between place, the almost-dreaming place. If he concentrated, he could move past it, step beyond the disorienting pressure and into his normal nightmares. But that wasn’t why he was here.
He was distantly aware of the tautness of his muscles, of the coarse linen sheets that were crumpled in his grip. The tea had drawn sleep over his mind but did nothing to relax his body, which would have betrayed his terror and rage to anyone who could see. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, he thought bitterly to himself, that the Destroyer wasn’t here to notice?
The pressure—the presence—that surrounded Tal’s sleeping mind began to lighten. A rushing sensation built in his gut, making him dizzy. And then all at once everything simply released: no pressure, no weight, nothing tethering him to the world or to himself. It was as if gravity had suddenly reversed, and he was plummeting headlong into the great emptiness between the stars.
The vision was about to start.
My sister, he said, throwing the words into the empty blackness. Show me how I save my sister.
He briefly considered what else he should add. He used to worship in this time. Used to fall bodiless through the midst of his god and pray, so very certain of his belonging. Then, later, this was the time he begged and wept, clinging desperately to his fraying belief that his god had brought him low for a reason—that somehow, his pain would serve a purpose. But there had been no answer to any of it. Tal had wished then that he could be like one of the unbelievers, that he could imagine the Unforged God was an ancient myth, nothing but a fascinating story that had never been true. He hated that he knew otherwise. Hated that he could sense the god who had betrayed him in every dream, in every beat of his heart, in every ounce of his silver blood.
Maybe if he begged again. Maybe if he pleaded. If it was his suffering that sated his god, Tal could give it, to save Nyx. But when he tried to form the words of a plea, something within him rebelled, unwilling to be so vulnerable again in front of the one he used to trust.
You owe me, he said instead at last, blasphemy though it was. You owe me this much.
The vision slammed into place around him. The dizziness stopped abruptly. His stomach surged, and in his bed, his body curled in on itself as he tried desperately to not be sick. The vision was of a dilapidated cabin that smelled of copper and hemlock, and housed a woman and a girl. The woman he recognized as Saasha—his father’s on-again off-again first wife, who was Nyx’s mother. She’d cut her hair since he’d seen her last. It hugged her scalp now in a short black halo, but beneath it, her eyes burned with the same fanatical devotion Tal had always recognized.
It has to be you, you know, she said. Her mouth moved with no sound. The meaning of the words simply slid into Tal’s consciousness, in the way of dreams.
Nyx lifted a flask—the source of the hemlock smell, which Tal would recognize anywhere, because Saasha was an apothecist. Their house had smelled
