As to the first question, they were taken to the island in the wild red sea, and transferred from the cages in the wasp ships to larger cages there. When Rook was brought, he the first of the three, all the cages were empty, and he was all alone—except for the guards with their lightning prods, that is, which they employed liberally to discourage him from even thinking about using his gift. Those were the worst days of his life by far: five years old, alone in a cage in a row of empty cages. There were signs that other children had been kept there. He’d wondered at Topaz, taken before him, and Samoon and Willow before her, but he hadn’t understood until much later: There had been an auction just before he came.
The others had already been sold.
And there it was, the truth at the dark heart of it all. Two hundred years of tyranny, and it all came down to this: Skathis, so-called god of beasts, was breeding magical children to sell as slaves across dozens of worlds. In the wake of the empire’s collapse, wars had broken out all over as factions fought for dominance like pit dogs all turned loose at once. Who wouldn’t pay a king’s ransom for a girl who could stir up the sea just by looking, and drown the whole enemy navy in an hour? Who wouldn’t bid on a child who could pass through walls and murder foes in their sleep, or marshal scourges of insects, read minds, shake the earth, persuade, teleport, control wind?
Skathis amassed a fortune, all while living as a god and siring bastards to sell as slaves to the highest bidder. Several times a year he held an auction. Buyers came from worlds away, paid princely sums, and took home children to fight their wars for them. Rook was the first of what would have been the new lot, to be sold at the next auction. Werran came soon after, then Kiska, then...no one. No more godspawn came after Kiska. Because the portal never opened again.
Nova arrived soon after, and she set the three of them free. She was too late to free her sister, but she had never given up the belief that she would. Now Rook saw that it was all that had been holding her together. He exchanged a grim glance with Werran and Kiska, troubled by the ruthless death loop. They’d come here hot with the wrath of their youth, ready to look into the eyes of the monsters who’d bred them and sold them like litters of puppies, but the monsters were gone, dead already, and Nova was killing humans. She was
killing them over and over.
They didn’t know what to do.
Sarai tried to interfere with the loop. Lazlo wanted to help, but she made him stay back. “They can’t hurt me,” she said. “I’m already dead. You’re not.” She didn’t add that Minya wasn’t there to catch his soul if he died. “I can’t lose you, too.”
She edged forward, watching the stinger’s trajectory, thinking that if she timed it right she could push her father and Azareen clear so the stinger passed by them, breaking the cycle while they were alive. But she couldn’t get to them. She tried turning herself insubstantial, but it didn’t help. There might as well have been an invisible wall. “Stop it!” she screamed at Nova.
Nova did not stop. Eril-Fane and Azareen kept on dying. The scene took on a numbing sameness, as though they weren’t people but automata locked in a clockwork drama. Sarai couldn’t bear it. She rose into the air, as she had before. She would make her stop. She had flown at her before as a nightmare, with teeth and claws and blood-red eyes. This time she took a different form. It wasn’t one she knew well. She’d only seen her in dreams. In an instant, Sarai was no longer Sarai. Her cinnamon hair and blue eyes were gone, and her sunset lashes, her sprinkling of freckles, her full lower lip with the crease in the middle. In her place was another blue woman—with brown eyes and fair hair and pale brows, wearing a mesarthium collar.
Sarai became Korako as she’d looked in the nursery doorway, and she flew right up to Nova and screamed in her face. “Is this who you want? Is this who you’re looking for?”
What did she expect? A snarl, more spiders, a heavy booted kick? She got none of that, but something far worse.
Nova’s eyes had been burning with Ruby’s fire, but the flames cleared in an instant and they were revealed: soft and brown and lambent with sudden joy. The wrathful goddess was transfigured. The change left Sarai breathless.
“Kora?” Nova asked, her voice quavering but bright with an eagerness that was childlike in its pure, naked vulnerability.
Sarai’s own rage died like a smothered fire. Her remorse was instantaneous. This woman might be her enemy, and she might even now be tormenting people Sarai loved, but this was a cruelty she wouldn’t wish on anyone—to be taunted with phantoms of the beloved dead, and given hope where there was none. She hadn’t meant it. She wanted to take it back.
Nova reached out with trembling hands and laid her palms to Sarai’s face—Sarai’s face that was shaped into her dead sister’s face. Her touch was unspeakably tender, and her smile unbearably sweet. She practically glowed with relief—as though she’d thought her reason for living lost, and been granted a last-second reprieve.
Sarai drew back and returned at once to her own form. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m not...”
Her words trailed away.
Again, Nova was transfigured, but not by hope this time. Sarai felt as though she were seeing into a bottomless well of anguish. She had the feeling of falling headlong into it, and she hardly knew if it was Nova’s anguish or her own. For that instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.
If the anguish had been black before the false hope, what Nova felt after was indescribable. With a wail she flew at Sarai and wrapped her hands around her neck. Sarai became mist. Nova couldn’t grab her. She couldn’t strangle or strike her. She didn’t know what Sarai was, but she was beyond trying to figure it out. All she wanted in that moment was to hurt her, and there was more than one way to do that.
Her mind lashed out like a whip and seized Kiska’s power. Telepathy was a gift of great subtlety. It could infiltrate minds and sift memories, hear thoughts, feel emotions, plant ideas. Nova had no use for subtlety now. She turned it around and used it to pour all her pain into Sarai.
From the very first, back on Rieva, Nova’s power had been like a lighthouse lens, amplifying the intensity of whatever gift she wielded. It had only grown since then. Now it was more like her name: nova, a star that steals energy from nearby stars and explodes into violent radiance.
Her pain exploded at Sarai. Like a blast, it blew her backward, out through the door to hit the wall of the passage and slide down to the floor.
Sarai had died and cremated her own body. She had known crippling nightmares and the misery of a people oppressed by bad gods. But she had never felt despair like this before. She felt flayed open, skinned and hacked apart and left for the flies and carrion birds, like the husks of dead creatures on a desolate beach at the bottom of a faraway world.
She buckled under its weight. A voice inside her told her to fight, but it was so faint, and she felt so heavy—so alone—and she knew she was lost. They all were. Her own feelings—any hope and courage that were in her—were washed away by the torrent of despair. Nothing and no one could save them now.
“What have you done?”
The voice barely registered. It was outside the misery. It couldn’t possibly matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
“WHAT. HAVE. YOU. DONE?”
The voice was icing sugar and iron. Sarai blinked, shock searing a path through the haze of despair. She managed to turn her head. And there stood Minya with her army behind her.
Chapter 44
A Pirate’s Smile
Ghosts flooded into the heart of the citadel.
Nova and her cohort didn’t know what they were. They were floating. They cascaded off the edge of the walkway, a rippling river of men and women buoyed on the air without boots like their own to countervail gravity. Most were old, their hair white, gray, or sparse, faces lined. But there were younger men and women, too, and even some children among them. They weren’t wearing anything resembling armor, but they were formed up in ranks and moving with precision. They wielded knives and meat mallets. Some hefted big iron hooks. Others carried nothing, but had claws and fangs, and there seemed no end to their numbers. In they flowed, dauntless, expressionless. Inexplicable.
They were human. Their skin was brown, not blue. So what magic was making them float? There was no time to wonder. They attacked.
Nova met them with her stolen powers. Fireballs bloomed in her fists. She hurled them. They hit the leading edge of the oncoming assault and exploded in bursts of white flame. The soldiers—if that’s what they were—ought to have been engulfed in fire, but they weren’t. Sparks rained down, harmless. The flames died away, and the soldiers came on, unfazed.
Rook, Werran, and Kiska held their lightning prods before them, and they drew their short swords from their scabbards, but they had little faith in their weapons. These foes were not natural. Could they even be hurt?
Nova unleashed godsmetal next. She peeled strips from the curve of the walls, shaped them into scythe blades, and sent them spinning so fast they blurred. The soldiers ought to have been maimed, dozens at a swipe, but they didn’t even bleed. Their flesh re-formed with every strike and they just kept on coming. They engaged.
There was a ringing of metal on metal as Rook and Werran parried the first blows.
Nova let go of Kiska’s telepathy, and the torrent of despair dissipated. Sarai rose shakily to her feet in the passage. Ghosts were still pouring past her. Minya was standing stock-still. Her face was terrible, both bleak with hurt and dark with disgust. Her eyes were slits, her nostrils flared. She was flushed violet and breathing fast. Her little body was shaking with rage.
Sarai had never been so glad to see her. “We’re under attack,” she told her in a rush. “The orb. It’s a doorway. They were waiting.”