“The urn is full, my brother,” she says.
Urn? Akiva blinks, once; then he remembers. Hazael had told him that. Akiva is the seventh bearer of his name; six Akivas dead before him meant the cremation urn was full. “You have to live,” Hazael had said, silly and matter-of-fact.
Hazael who had died, while Akiva lived.
Akiva’s thoughts are fractured. The Dominion will be on them in seconds. He sees them as hurtling shapes behind Liraz. There’s a thrum of frenzy that his sister’s screams—“Go! Go! Go!”—have built in him, but still the thought finds purchase: that he’s never seen her look more alive than she does right now. There’s purpose and energy and resolve in her expression. She’s focused; she’s alight.
And then her feet connect with his chest.
Heart-bruising, rib-jarring, breath-stealing force. All his air and his thoughts are driven out in a rush, and he’s reeling, unmoored. He can’t breathe and can’t see.
And when he catches himself he’s through the portal.
It flares into flame, and Liraz is on the far side. She’s burning it shut. Akiva thinks he hears a shiver of steel—sword on sword—in the instant before the connection between the worlds is lost.
The slash in the sky is cauterized like a wound. Liraz is still in Eretz and Akiva is here in her place. With Karou.
43
FIRE IN THE SKY
And silence.
It wasn’t really silence. There was fire and wind, crackle and whisper, and the rasp of their own hard breathing. But it felt like silence in their shock, and they all squinted in the face of the blaze. It flared hot and sudden and died quickly, and there was no smoke and no smell. It was just over, and whatever it was that had burned—whatever held the worlds distinct—it gave off no residue of ash or fume. The portal was simply gone.
Karou scanned for a sign that it had been there. A scar, a ripple, a ghosted image of the slash, but there was nothing at all.
She turned to Akiva.
Akiva. He was here. He was here, and not Liraz. What had just happened? He hadn’t looked to her yet; his eyes were horror-wide as he stared at the new absence in the sky. “Liraz!” he called, hoarse, but the way was closed. Not just closed. Gone. The sky was just the sky now, the thin atmosphere above these African mountains, and that anomaly that had made Eretz seem like… like a neighboring country on the other side of a turnstile… it was over, and now Eretz seemed very, very far away, impossibly and fantastically far, like an imaginary place, and the blood that was being shed there—
Oh god. The blood was not imaginary. The blood, the dying. And it was so quiet here, nothing but the wind now, and their friends and comrades and… and family, every remaining Misbegotten soldier, Akiva’s blood brothers and sisters, they were fighting in another sky, and there was nothing to be done about it.
They’d left them there.
When Akiva did turn to her, he looked stricken. Pale and disbelieving.
“What… what happened?” Karou asked him, moving toward him through the air.
“Liraz,” he said, as though he were still trying to understand. “She pushed me through. She decided…” He swallowed. “That I should live. That I should be the one to live.”
He stared at the air as if he could see through it to the other world—as though Liraz were just on the other side of a veil. But with the portal gone, it had become all at once unfathomable how it had ever existed at all. Where was Eretz, and what magic had brought it within such easy reach? Who had made the portals, and when, and how? Karou’s mind defaulted to her picture of the known cosmos, starting with planets revolving around a star—a hugeness that was insignificant within a vastness that was incomprehensible—and she couldn’t fathom how Eretz fit into that picture. It was like dumping two jigsaw puzzles in a pile and trying to piece them into one.
“Liraz can handle that patrol,” she told Akiva. “Or at least glamour herself and get away.”
“And go where? Back to the massacre?”
Massacre.
There was a sensation, in the core of her body, like screaming. Her heart and gut screamed; it scoured through her. She thought of Loramendi, and shook her head. She couldn’t go through it again, flying back to Eretz to find nothing but death waiting for her. She couldn’t even contemplate it. “They can win,” she said. She wanted Akiva to nod, to agree with her. “The mixed battalions. The chimaera will weaken the attackers, and you said…” She swallowed. “You said the Dominion are no match for the Misbegotten.”
Of course, that wasn’t what he’d said. He’d said that one-on-one the Dominion were no match for them. And that hadn’t been one-on-one, not by a long shot.
Akiva didn’t correct her. Neither did he nod or assure her that everything would be fine. He said, “I tried to reach sirithar. The… power source. And I couldn’t get it. First Hazael died because I couldn’t, and now everyone will—”
Karou shook her head. “They won’t.”
“I began this, all of it. I convinced them. And I’m the one alive?”
Karou was still shaking her head. Her fists were clenched. She hunched in the air and held them tight against her middle: that pit below the inverted V of her rib cage. That was where she felt the hollowness and gnawing—like hunger. And there was hunger. She was underfed and too thin, and her own body felt insubstantial beneath her fists right now, like she’d been whittled down to essentials. But this hollowness and gnawing were more than hunger. They were grief and fear and helplessness. She’d long since given up believing that she and Akiva were the instruments of some great intention, or that their dream was planned or fated, but she found now that she still had it in her to be outraged at the universe. For not caring, for not helping. For, as it seemed, working against them.
Maybe there was an intention. A plan, a fate.
And maybe it hated them.
It was just so quiet, and the others were so very far away.
She thought of the Dashnag boy from the Hintermost, and of the Shadows That Live and Amzallag, whom she had just restored to life—Amzallag, who had hopes of gleaning his children’s souls from the ruin of Loramendi—and all the others, and most of all, she thought of Ziri, bearing up under his burden, shouldering the deception alone now in the absence of Issa, Ten, and herself. Dying as the Wolf.
Evanescing.
He’d given everything, or would soon, while she was here, safe… with Akiva. And her emotions were a poisonous brew in the pit of her empty, empty stomach, because deep down, unspeakably, under all the horror and turmoil, there was at least a shred of… dear god, surely it wasn’t gladness. Relief, then, to be alive. It couldn’t be wrong, to be relieved to be alive, but it felt wrong. So very, very cowardly.