Akiva’s wings were fanning slowly to keep him aloft. Karou just hovered. Behind them, Virko was flying short back-and-forths with Mik and Zuzana on his back.… Oh. Karou did a double take. Virko. He wasn’t meant to stay here; he couldn’t pass for human, not even close. He was to have set Mik and Zuze down and circled back to the portal. But Karou’s thoughts skipped over him for now. Akiva was looking at her, and she was sure he was feeling the same poisonous mix of relief and horror that she was. Worse, because of Liraz’s sacrifice. “She decided,” he’d said. “That I should be the one to live.”
Karou shook her head yet again, as if somehow she could shake out every black thought. “If it were you,” she said, looking right into his eyes, “if it were you on the other side right now, like it almost was, I’d believe you were okay. I’d have to believe it, and I have to believe it now. There’s nothing we can do.”
“We could go back,” he said. “We could fly straight for the other portal.”
Karou didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t want to say no. Her own heart lifted at the idea, even as her reason told her it was untenable. “How long would it take?” she asked after a pause. From here to Uzbekistan, and then, on the other side, from the Veskal Range back to the Adelphas.
Akiva’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Half a day,” he said, his voice tight. “At least.”
Neither of them said it aloud, but they both knew: By the time they could get back, the battle would be over, one way or another, and they’d have failed in their task here on top of everything. It wasn’t a failure they could afford.
Hating to be the voice of sense in the face of grief, Karou asked, cautiously, “If it were Liraz here with me, and you were there, what would you want us to do?”
Akiva considered her. His eyes burned out of hooded shadows, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She wanted to reach for his hand like she had on the other side, but it felt wrong, somehow, like she was using her wiles to persuade him to give up something intensely important. She didn’t want that; she couldn’t make this decision for him, so she just waited, and his answer was heavy. “I’d want you to do what you came for.”
And there it was. It wasn’t even a real choice. They couldn’t reach the others in time to make a difference, and even if they could reach them, what difference could they hope to make? But it felt like a choice, like a turning away, and in Karou, like a bloodstain, bloomed the earliest apprehension of the guilt that was to haunt her.
Did I do enough? Did I do everything I could?
No.
Even now, barely this side of catastrophe and the battle still under way in the other world, she could already taste the way that it would taint any happiness she could hope to find or make with Akiva. It would be like dancing on a battlefield, waltzing around corpses, to build a life out of this.
Look out, don’t step there, one two three, don’t trip on the corpse of your sister.
“Um, guys?” It was Mik’s voice. Karou turned to her friends, blinking back tears. “I’m not sure what the plan is,” Mik said, his voice tentative. He looked pale and stunned, as did Zuzana, gripping Virko tight and in turn gripped by Mik. “But we need to get out of here. Those helicopters?”
This was a jolt to Karou. Helicopters? She saw them now, and heard what she should have noticed sooner. Whumpwhumpwhump…
“They’re coming this way,” said Mik. “Fast.”
And so they were—several, converging on them from the compass points. What the hell? This was no-man’s-land. What were helicopters doing here? And then she got a very bad feeling.
“The kasbah,” she said, a new horror dawning. “Damn it. The pit.”
Eliza was… not quite herself today. She was faking it well enough, she thought, taking a swig of tea. She had her family to thank for that ability. Thank you, she thought, with the special bile reserved for them, for the complete disconnection of my emotions from my facial muscles. It comes in so handy for pretending I’m not losing my mind. After years of concealing misery, shame, confusion, humiliation, and fear, she could pretty much walk through life like a blank, her facade imperturbable, a thing scarcely animate.
Except when the dream took her over, of course. Then she was animate, all right. Hoo boy. And last night, up on the roof terrace… or was it this morning? Both, she guessed. It had gone on long enough to straddle the dawn. She just hadn’t been able to stop crying. She hadn’t even been asleep this time, and still it had found her. “It.” The dream. The memory.
A storm had moved through her, entirely impervious to her will, and the storm had been grief, unfathomable loss, and the full intensity of the remorse she’d come to know so well.
With the fading of the stars and the break of day, Eliza’s storm had passed. Today she was the ravaged landscape it had left behind. Waters subsiding, and ruin. And… revelation, or at least the cusp of it, the corner. This is what it felt like: detritus washed away, her mind a floodplain, clean and austere, and at her feet, just visible, a corner, protruding from the earth. It could be the corner of a trunk—pirate’s treasure or Pandora’s box—or it could be the corner of… a rooftop. Of a buried temple. Of an entire city.
Of a world.
All she had to do was blow away the dust, and she would know, or begin to know, what else lay buried within herself. She could feel it there. Burgeoning, infinite, terrible and wondrous: the gift, the curse. Her heritage. Stirring. She’d poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.
So… what if she just stopped fighting and surrendered to it?
Ay, there’s the rub. Because Eliza wasn’t the first to have the dream. The “gift.” She was only the latest “prophet.” Only the next in line for the asylum.
That way madness lies. She was feeling quite Shakespearean today. The tragedies, of course, not the comedies. It didn’t escape her that when King Lear made that statement, he was already well on his way to crazy. And maybe she was, too.
Maybe she was losing her mind.
Or maybe…
… maybe she was finding it.
She was in possession of herself for now, at any rate. She was drinking cold mint tea up at the kasbah—not the hotel kasbah, but the beast-mass-grave kasbah—and taking a break from the pit. Dr. Chaudhary wasn’t very talkative today, and Eliza flushed to remember the awkwardness with which he’d patted her on the arm last night, at a total loss in the face of her meltdown.