She would find out what the angels were. That was Eliza in control of her thoughts. She would find out, the way she was trained to find out. Nucleotides in sequence, and the world and the universe and the future would all fall neatly into sense. Phylogeny. Order. Sanity.
Then the thought spun around and seized her, forced her to look at it, and it wasn’t what she’d thought she was chasing. It had madness in its eyes.
It wasn’t: I will know what the angels are.
What Eliza was really thinking was: Will I know what I am?
27
JUST CREATURES IN A WORLD
When Karou joined Zuzana, Mik, and Issa, she discovered that they’d been busy while she was in the war council: preparing the space, unpacking the trays, cleaning and sorting teeth. Zuzana had even taken a stab at laying out some necklaces—still unstrung, pending Karou’s inspection.
“These are good,” said Karou after careful study.
“Will they work?” asked Zuzana.
Karou looked them over further. “This is Uthem?” she asked, indicating the first. A row of horse and iguana teeth with tubes of bat bone—doubled, for the two sets of wings—along with iron and jade for size and grace.
“I figured he was a given,” said Zuzana.
Karou nodded. Thiago would need Uthem to ride into battle. “You have a knack for this,” she told her friend. The necklace wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close—and pretty amazing considering how little experience Zuzana had.
“Yep.” No false humility from Zuze. “Now you just have to teach me the magic to actually translate them to flesh.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Karou said with a dark laugh.
“What?”
“There’s this story where a man is fated to serve as ferryman across the river of the dead for eternity. There’s one catch, only he doesn’t know it. All he has to do is hand his pole to someone else, and he hands them his fate, too.”
“And you’re going to hand me your pole?” asked Zuzana.
“No. I am not going to hand you my pole.”
“How about we share it?” Zuzana proposed.
Karou shook her head, in exasperation and wonder. “Zuze, no. You have a life to live—”
“And presumably I will be living while helping you?”
“Yes, but—”
“So let’s see here. I can either do the most amazing, astonishing, unbelievable, magical thing that anyone has ever heard of—ever—and, after all this war stuff is all over, help you resurrect a whole population of women and children and, like, build a race of creatures back to life, at the beginning of a new era for a world no one else even knows exists. Or… I can go home and do puppet shows for tourists.”
Karou felt a smile twitch her lips. “Well, when you put it like that.” She turned to Mik. “Do you have something to say about this?”
“Yes,” he said, serious—and not mock-serious, but serious-serious. “I say let’s discuss the future later, after ‘all this war stuff,’ as Zuze put it, when we know there’s going to be a future.”
“Good point,” said Karou, and turned toward the thuribles.
Best-case scenario was a dozen resurrections, and that was pretty optimistic. The question was: Who? Who are the lucky souls today? Karou pondered, and as she sifted through the thuribles, she started a “yes” pile, a “maybe” pile, and an “oh Jesus, you stay dead” pile. No more Lisseths in this rebellion, and no more Razors with his sack of spreading stains. She wanted soldiers with honor, who could embrace the new purpose and not fight against it at every turn. There were a handful of obvious choices, but she hesitated over them, contemplating how they would be received.
Balieros, Ixander, Minas, Viya, and Azay. Ziri’s former patrol—the soldiers who had defied the true Wolf’s order to slaughter seraph civilians, flying instead to the Hintermost to die defending their own folk. They were strong, competent, and respected, but they had disobeyed the Wolf’s order. Would their resurrection seem suspicious, another tick mark in a growing column of Things Thiago Would Never Do?
Maybe, but Karou wanted them; she’d take the blame. She wanted Amzallag and the Shadows That Live, too, but she knew that would be a push too far. She kept their thurible apart, a kind of totem for a brighter day. She would give them their lives back as soon as she could.
Balieros’s team she put in the “yes” pile. There was a sixth soul with them. Brushing against her senses, it felt like a knife of light through trees, and though it was unfamiliar to Karou, she remembered Ziri telling her about the young Dashnag boy who’d joined their fight and died alongside the others.
It made no sense to choose an untrained boy as one of a mere dozen resurrections before a battle like the one ahead, but Karou did it anyway, with a feeling of defiance. “Resurrectionist’s choice,” she imagined herself telling Lisseth, or, as she now thought of the poisonous Naja woman: future cow. “You have a problem with that?” Anyway, the Dashnag wouldn’t be a boy anymore. Karou didn’t have juvenile teeth, and even if she did, this was no time for youth. So he was going to wake up and find himself alive, fully grown, and winged, in a remote cave in the company of revenants and seraphim.
Should be an interesting day for him. A part of Karou’s mind kept telling her it was a terrible idea, but something about it felt right. Dashnags are formidable chimaera, few more fearsome, but she didn’t think it was that so much as the purity of his soul. A knife of light. Honor and a new purpose.
“Okay,” she told her assistants. “Here we go.”
The hours vanished like time-lapse. Thiago came in somewhere in the middle to take over the tithing—he’d been to the baths, Karou saw, and was clean of crusted blood, his wounds beginning to heal—and together he and Karou added fresh bruises to those all but faded from their arms and hands. They didn’t make it to a dozen ressurrections. Nine bodies came into being in under six hours, and they had to stop. For one thing, there was no space for more bodies. These nine pretty well filled the room. For another, Karou’s exhaustion was making her dopey. Loopy. Useless. Done.
Apparently Zuzana was feeling the same. “My kingdom for caffeine,” she mumbled, making prayer hands up at the ceiling.
When, however, in the next second, Issa entered with tea, Zuzana was not grateful. “Coffee, I meant coffee,” she told the ceiling, as if the universe were a waiter that had gotten her order wrong.