There were five others, black-haired strangers, and she heard what he said to them but it didn’t make sense, and she didn’t run to him. She didn’t run. Her feet never touched stone, but she was there inside a second, drawing him up beside her and looking at him, into him. Pouring herself into him, and knowing. At once.
Here was an ending.
He seemed to her a guttered fire, and all things lost and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she couldn’t fathom what had happened, in a matter of hours, to do this to him. Where was the waiting gaze, vivid and alive, and the laughter, the tease, the dance, the hunger? What had they done to him? She spun toward the strangers, and that’s when she saw their eyes.
Oh.
“What is this?” she asked, and was immediately afraid to hear the answer. She waited for it, though, and it was slow in coming, or else she was misperceiving time again, and then Akiva took her into his arms and pressed his lips to the top of her head, long and lingering. As kisses go, it might have been fine, had it fallen on her lips. As answers go, it was very bad. It was good-bye, through and through. She felt it in the rigidity of his arms, the tremor of his jaw, the defeat in his shoulders. She pulled away, out from under the press of his good-bye lips. “What are you doing?” she asked him. Belatedly she processed what she’d heard him say first of all. “Where are you going?”
“With them,” he said. “I have to.”
She took a step back, glancing once more to this “them.” Akiva’s people, Stelians. She knew that he had never met any before, and couldn’t guess what it meant, that they were here now. The older woman stood nearest, and she was very beautiful, but it was the younger woman Karou couldn’t look away from. Maybe it was the artist in her. Sometimes, rarely, you see someone who doesn’t look like anyone else, not even a little, and who could never, ever be mistaken or forgotten. That’s what she was like, this seraph. It wasn’t even beauty—not that she wasn’t beautiful, in her sharp, dark way. She was unique, extreme. Extreme angles, extreme intensity, and her regal stance spoke volumes. Here was someone, Karou thought, envious, who had known exactly who she was from the day she was born.
And she was going to take Akiva away with her.
Because whatever this was, not for a second did Karou wonder or fear that Akiva was leaving her by choice. She felt the presence of her own friends and comrades closing the space behind her. All of them were here: Issa, Liraz, Ziri, Zuzana, Mik, even Eliza. Plus two score Misbegotten and more than two score chimaera, all prepared to fight for Akiva when they found him.
Only to find him not fighting for himself.
“I have to,” he had said.
It was Liraz who responded. “No,” she said, in the way she had of laying down a truth and standing over it like a lioness guarding a kill. “You don’t.” And she drew her sword and faced the Stelians.
“Lir, no.” Akiva raised his hands, urgent. “Please. Put that away. You can’t beat them.”
She looked at him like she didn’t know him.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “In the battle. It was them.” He looked to the Stelians, focusing on the older woman. “Wasn’t it? You fought our enemy for us.”
She shook her head. “No. We didn’t,” she said, and Akiva blinked in confusion. But then she added, with a gesture to the fierce young woman at her side, “Scarab did.”
And no one spoke. They remembered the way their enemies had fallen limp in battle and plummeted from the sky. One woman. One woman had done that.
Liraz let her sword slip back into its sheath.
“Please tell me what’s going on,” Karou whispered, and when Akiva turned again to the older woman, she thought for the briefest moment that he was ignoring her plea. In fact, he was making a plea of his own.
“Would you?” he asked. “Please?” And Karou had no idea what he meant by it, but was aware that something passed between the two women then: a wordless argument. Afterward she would understand that they’d debated telling them—sending them—the answer to her question, and that Nightingale had won. Because afterward Karou would understand all of it.
Into her mind—all their minds—came an experience of sense and feeling so complete it was like living it, and it was nothing Karou wished to live. She knew why Akiva had asked his grandmother—his grandmother—to answer them in this way, because no told truth could match this. It enveloped her and entered her: a history of tragedy and unspeakable horror, relentless and complex and yet somehow delivered with the utmost ease. It was simply given to her mind, compressed and precise, like a universe contained within a pearl. Or like memories pressed into a wishbone, Karou thought. But this history was so much deeper and more terrible than her own. It was dreamlike.
Nightmarish.
And she understood what had happened to Akiva since she saw him last, because now she was a guttered fire, too, and all things lost and hollow.
How do you take in something so massive and so hideous? Karou found out. You stand there gasping, and wonder how you ever found it in yourself to imagine a happy ending.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Their horror was palpable, their breathing louder than it should have been. There had been, briefly, in Nightingale’s sending, a sensation of great weight and savage, quaking hunger, and now that they knew it, none of them would ever unknow it: the press of the nithilam against the skin of their world.
Karou stood but a pace away from Akiva, but it felt like a gulf, already. His own part in the story had been made clear in the sending, and there could be no question: He had to go. The reshaping of an empire had once seemed so huge to them, and now it was only a side note to the question of Eretz’s very survival. Karou reeled. Akiva looked into her eyes, and she saw what he wanted to ask but wouldn’t, because her own destiny was not some afterthought to pin to his. She couldn’t go with him. Without her, there could be no rebirth for the chimaera people.
It was he who was meant to stay with her—“a prior commitment,” as he had told Ormerod—but now he couldn’t, and their story was, after all, not to be the story of all Eretz: seraphim and chimaera together, and a “different way of living.” It was only one flutter out of millions within a world besieged, and once more, they were torn apart.
It was Liraz who broke the silence at last. “What about the godstars?” she asked, like a plea. “In the story, they battle the beasts and win.”