“I told you,” Kanna said.
She had not avoided the engineer’s gaze. In fact, she had caught it without an ounce of fear. When Eyan Mah sprung from the chair and rushed towards her with gritted teeth, Lila’s protective hand was not enough: Kanna broke past her surrogate master and pushed her way through bystanders to meet the barreling giant head-on.
“Engineer Mah!” the vice minister shouted as the two of them charged towards each other. “What are you doing now? Who is this foreigner?”
When they crashed together, the engineer seized Kanna with such savage force that she nearly ripped the seams of Kanna’s robes—but Kanna did not so much as tense up. Even as the murmur in the room turned into shouts, even when a dozen hands that she did not recognize dove in to separate them, Kanna did not fight. The grip of the engineer was too strong; Kanna’s will was too strong; like a pair of magnets, their shared passion had fused them and no one could pull them apart.
“You have nothing, do you?” Kanna could not suppress her smile. “If all you have is me, you have no one.”
“Shut up,” the engineer grunted in her face. “What do you want, Rava? Name your price.”
Kanna glanced at the woman’s choke-chain once again, at the keys. “You already know what I want.”
“Again with that!” As the engineer’s jaw tightened more with frustration, the mob finally pulled her back and she let go of Kanna’s robes, though her stare did not waver, and she ignored the eruption of voices around them that demanded explanations. “I’m not giving you the master keys, so forget it. Have the sense to blackmail me with something practical, goddamn it. Do you want money? That I can give you.”
“I’m a slave. What in the hell would I do with money?”
“Fair. Then it’s freedom you’re after. In that case, we can ask the high minister to reduce your sentence tomorrow morning after you’ve cooperated.”
Kanna laughed. “Even if I was willing to betray my master over this, that doesn’t mean I’m dumb enough to trust a slaver to set me free. God knows you all deserve it if she stabs Priestess Rem.”
The engineer launched towards Kanna again, but this time the crowd was prepared to stifle her. The vice minister, for her part, had lost the last of her patience: She snatched the engineer’s neck-chain and yanked it so hard that the force snapped the woman’s attention away from Kanna at once.
“I ask you one last time!” the vice minister shouted. “What is going on here? Answer me! Who on Earth is this, Eyan?”
“This is Kanna Rava,” Lila answered for her, though when all eyes turned in her direction, the woman was busy rubbing her temples with exasperation. “Don’t mind her ramblings. The poor girl is just confused. She’s an Upperlander and doesn’t speak our language well.”
“Like hell she doesn’t,” the engineer said with a scoff. “Upperlander or not, she’s the key to our way out of this. Stop trying to protect her, Lila. She doesn’t need it; the Ravas know how to bargain and manipulate just fine on their own.”
But the vice minister was still lost, still holding the engineer’s chain with stiff tension. “What are you talking about, Eyan? Are you saying this is one of the fuel baron’s children?”
“Yes. And she is Goda Brahm’s consort.”
At that, a ripple of surprise murmured through the room and the vice minister let go of the chain abruptly, which nearly threw the engineer off balance. As much as Kanna backed away to avoid the vice minister’s hand, she soon found the woman grasping her chin and forcing her under a dim, swinging lantern that hung from the tent ceiling.
After examining Kanna’s mud-smeared face, she turned to Lila Hadd:
“Is this true? How would she even know Brahm?”
Kanna could almost see the machinations behind Lila’s eyes, the weighing of pros and cons. Finally, after a brief hesitation, Lila answered, “She is Goda’s slave—or she was. Goda was assigned to transport her from the desert because she had fled the Upperland along with her male-mother, and now she is in my hands until Priestess Uma from Samma Valley can escort her to her new post. As for whether she has some kind of relationship to Brahm, I find this unlikely, as they don’t even speak the same language.”
“Oh please, Lila!” the engineer shouted. “It wasn’t something I would have expected from Brahm, sure, but I was there in the cuffing room along with you. Don’t act like you didn’t notice anything odd about this prisoner compared to the hundreds of others. Don’t act like you didn’t see them clinging to each other, lamenting their separation. Brahm is enamored with her.”
Kanna twisted her face against the vice minister’s grip, but when the woman looked into her eyes once again with curiosity—with bewilderment—the peaceful emptiness in Kanna’s chest rose up again, the part of her that hid nothing.
“It’s true,” Kanna said, ignoring Lila’s sigh.
“See? She admits it herself! At the very least, she’d be a compelling distraction, so we can use her to get Brahm into a more favorable position. You can offer Rava much more than any of us can, Vice Minister, so make her a good offer. And if she still refuses to cooperate, I’ll tie her up myself and hold a knife up to her throat in front of Brahm, and we’ll see if that gets the beast to move.”
“You will do no such thing!” Lila began, but she was soon interrupted by the vice minister, whose curious expression hadn’t changed:
“What is it that you want, child?” she whispered, her eyes locked on Kanna now, her gaze having transformed from that of a woman assessing a broken clay pot to one noticing a sliver of muddy gold buried in its cracks. “Our nation is wealthy compared to your own, as you must already know. Loyalty to your own pride would only be silly at this point, especially since it was your own king who tossed you aside to us, so that he could gather a few table scraps in return. Our Mother’s throne, on the other hand, lies atop a foundation of riches. Her milk flows in many rivers, and she is generous to those who serve her, too. Are you willing to serve The Mother, young Rava?”
“At what cost?” Kanna asked.
The vice minister chuckled softly at this. “You ask the right questions, my dear. Tell us what you need, then I’ll tell you what it costs. I’m afraid we cannot undo your sentence altogether—it would set a bad precedent for our sacred laws; it would make outsiders doubt our authority, too, since we captured you and your family to fulfill a promise—but we can make your life much easier while you wait out your time, and we can ensure that a comfortable life will be waiting for you once you are free, as long as you remain in the Middleland. What do you say?”
Kanna was quiet for a long moment, unconflicted, the peace from before swirling in her somehow, even in the face of a room full of eyes that watched her with careful expectation. She did not try to think of a reply, did not try to scheme and decide; she only waited. Then, out of the nothing, the answer came:
“Only if Goda lives.”
“Oh? Surely you know that she signed her death warrant the moment she walked into that temple. She doesn’t want to live. Is saving someone who does not want to live really all that matters to you?”
“Yes. I wish I could care about a comfortable life—but I’ve lived comfortably before and that alone didn’t fix me.” Kanna set her jaw, even against the vice minister’s grip. “I’m broken. No one can fix me. I have to fix myself, but she’s one of my fractured pieces, and I haven’t had a chance to know her well enough to learn where she came from within me. So that’s all I want: For her to live. For selfish reasons, I want her to live long enough for me to squeeze the truth about myself out of her.”
“Even if we could somehow convince the high minister to spare her, Brahm would be imprisoned for the rest of her life, confined to a room no bigger than a closet and fed through a window no bigger than a plate of mashed root. Is that the life you want for your beloved? The life of a caged giant?”
Kanna waited, though again she did not have to think. The thought came on its own.
“Yes,” she replied. “Contain her for me. This crisis was lucky, because I could never have captured her on my own.”
The vice minister tilted her head in surprise, clearly not having expected Kanna’s answer. But soon enough, the initial shock broke into a smile—a smile of intense approval.
“Done,” she said. “I can’t make promises that she won’t end up dead from her own actions, but we can endeavor to capture her alive if you will cooperate with us.” When she let Kanna go, she placed a light hand on Lila’s shoulder. “I’m not sure where your hesitation was coming from, Junior Hadd, but you made the right choice to bring her here. These are exactly the model immigrants we entrust you to find, and as always, your intuition has been on the mark. She is undoubtedly one of us. She will make an excellent citizen once her papers are in order.”
Lila’s smile was weak under the sudden praise, but she conceded with a nod. “Thank you, Vice Minister.”
“Now, listen here, everyone!” the woman continued. “This tiny stroke of good fortune is not nearly enough to carry us up that hill. We’ll have to come up with a plan of approach—and fast, as the crowds are only growing. We don’t have time to argue amongst ourselves, so pick up this table and plot a course—any course—that will discreetly get us into the Heart Chamber without a crowd trampling in behind us.” She turned to the engineer. “Eyan, the machine room is not a good place for you, as it is full of violent slaves, but it also leads to the central elevator. We may have no choice except to pass you through that chamber to get to the upper floors so that you can uncuff the priestess from Brahm. For your own safety, I will assign you an escort of two guards.”
The engineer huffed. “I don’t need an escort. All those slaves are chained just fine.”
“That is not a choice for you to make. In fact, you are out of choices, Eyan, until this issue is resolved.” The woman turned to help her underlings pick up a stack of wrinkled papers, but before she had buried her hands in the mess too deeply, she whipped her glance over her shoulder towards Kanna. “In the meantime, someone clean this child up, for the love of God! She can’t enter a temple looking like this. Hurry! Cold or hot water, it doesn’t matter. We can’t linger for much longer here.”
“I have hot water.” The voice was soft, but not meek; it was strangely relaxed within the chaos, strangely serene, like someone who had just awakened from a long slumber. “And a change of clothes that will fit Slave Rava.”
The vice minister looked up to meet eyes with Parama Shakka, who was still standing at the back threshold of the tent, where a second door flapped in the wind. His cuff gleamed in the light of the flashing lanterns and his form was nearly dwarfed by an over-sized satchel that dangled from his shoulders.
“That will be fine,” the vice minister said, “as long as your master is there to supervise.”
“My master is here.”
“Then take the girl! Hurry up!”
Kanna turned to Lila, though she was not sure why; perhaps it was that lingering sense of needing a master’s approval, since she was not quite used to her freedom yet. Nonetheless, Lila nodded and motioned for her to go with him.
It took effort to weave between all the bustling bureaucrats to get to the door, but Kanna reached for him when she was close enough. His cuff knocked hard against her wrist bone when he seized her hand. His smile was firm, determined.
“I know you’ll save her, Slave Rava,” he whispered. “You’re the best chance she’s ever had.”
Taken by surprise yet again, Kanna squeezed his hand. “Parama, I….”
But she did not finish because he was already pulling her into a pitch black night. Kanna peered through the darkness of the alleyway, the flap closing behind them to shut out the light and the sounds of arguments, but her eyes had not yet adjusted. When she winced at the sudden bitter scent of Rava Spirits in the air, she could not find its source.
“God, was there a fuel spill out here?” Kanna coughed. The slick puddles that she ambled through burned her bare feet. “Where is your master, Parama?”
“Assistant Finn? Uh, well, I wouldn’t worry about her right now. She’s a little distracted.”
“Distracted? With what?” Kanna couldn’t imagine what the woman was entertaining herself with at a time like this. Did this sort of crisis require yet another mountain of paperwork for her to fill out?
Parama waved his hand dismissively, already walking her along. “C’mon, there’s a water tap back here. This building actually used to be a bathhouse, the closest one to the temple, before they closed it down for renovations when they discovered some structural problems—or that’s the story, anyway. It’s also an old shrine, you know. That’s probably the real reason, since they’ve been closing them up a lot lately. People would bathe in the cold spring water, but they also bathed in the used water from the priestess’s heated pools in the temple, since the pipes flow downhill. It’s still warm by the time it gets here, so you’re in luck.”
Kanna made a face. “You’re going to bathe me in used bathwater?”
“There’s nothing holier, Slave Rava! Don’t worry, you know how clean the priestesses are. They actually bathe a first time in freezing water before they enter the warm pools, and since the water in their pools is always flowing, many times they haven’t bathed in it at all! It’s lovely!”
As he hurried along, Kanna was startled by a figure stooped in the shadows beneath a beat-up awning, rain pooling around the edge’s of the stranger’s already drenched robes. A vagrant? Kanna thought, surprised to find such a thing in the Middleland. She turned to take a second look, but Parama yanked her around a corner and towards a disheveled-looking garden.
It was not as bad as what she had seen in the desert at Jaya’s inn, but it was close. Construction equipment was littered everywhere—hammers, hand drills, pull-saws—along with broken glass and splintered wood, but Parama carefully avoided stepping on any jagged edges and guided Kanna over a fallen fence to an old fountain.
As he turned the lever with a surprisingly deft hand, he shouted to Kanna over the sound of steaming water, “So what’s the plan? How are we going to help Goda escape?”
Kanna contemplated this, shuddering as she ducked into the wild, sputtering stream of warmth. It was yet another shock, not unlike how the cold had been. “I…can’t say. To be honest with you, I don’t have a plan. All this time, it hasn’t seemed to help much. None of my plans worked the way I expected.” For the first time, she allowed herself to have a helpless expression when she looked at him, but because of the urgency that she still felt, she did not linger for long in the self-doubt. She slithered out of the mud-soaked robes that had confined her, even if she was uncertain of what her new skin would look like.
“I understand, Slave Rava, I understand!” Careful not to be struck by Kanna’s fountain himself, he had stepped aside to dig through his satchel while he continued, “But just because your plans didn’t work as expected, doesn’t mean they didn’t work! It’s kind of like what we talked about in my cabin.” He ripped a set of thin robes from inside his bag, and they unfolded in a flowing ripple in front of Kanna’s bewildered face. It was the color that struck her: not at all discreet, such a bright shade of red that she doubted she could be invisible even in the dark; any thought of sneaking through a crowd to escape fell out of her mind instantly. “Sorry,” he said, a bit sheepishly. “All I have to give you are funerary robes. This is what men wear at the temple when we morn, but I’m sure it’ll be a lot warmer than what you have on right now.”
Kanna let the water cleanse her and accepted this. Maybe he was right, she thought. Maybe her intention had mattered more than the plan, and maybe the plan knew how to construct itself on its own, because from what she could tell, all of her intentions had come to pass in their own way—all except for one.
“I will free her,” Kanna said finally, her voice softened as Parama began closing the tap. “I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”
As he struggled to shut the rusty valve all the way, the water pressure fighting him, his smile was earnest with not a single touch of sadness. “I believe you, Slave Rava.” His tone was one that Kanna had once thought of as naive, but it didn’t seem that way anymore. He offered her the robes, though Kanna could not take her eyes away from his to grasp them.
“Parama,” she began. “I owe you an apology. Back when we first met, I thought you were weak. I saw the way you just…surrendered to Goda, and I didn’t really like it. I didn’t really understand you.”
“Oh, but you did, Slave Rava!” he shouted gleefully, his sleeve pulled back, the veins of the muscles of his forearm pulsing as he finally brought the water to a trickle with a powerful jerk of his hand. Kanna tried not to be taken aback. “We’re a lot like each other, you know. Maybe that’s what you saw. But who said that you’re weak? Goodness, you judge yourself too much, Slave Rava!”
Kanna blinked against the warm water that still rolled on her face. Having nothing to reply with, and having no shame left, she kicked away her soaked robes and dressed herself in the new ones, but as she pulled the bottom hem over her knees, she noticed an unexpected raft of flotsam drifting over her feet in the residual stream.
Flower. It was unmistakable. Even half-waterlogged and bruised, Kanna recognized them.
“Did this come out of the pipes?” she asked, startled. “The ones you said flow from the temple?”
As if on reflex, Parama shuffled away from the petals that had now come to litter the ground. The air had turned their bruises slightly pink, staining their pristine white and making them almost look like vague spatters of faded blood on polished stone.
“Seems like it,” he said, not at all hiding his concern. “The heated pool is in the Heart Chamber in front of the altar, and the water flows underground from there to this garden, before running through some other bathhouses and finally into the sewers. This had to have come from a place upstream between us and the altar.”
Kanna stared hard at the ground. “Then we don’t have much time. We need to go now.” She took Parama by the sleeve. “Listen, Goda doesn’t want to kill Rem. She’s just trying to buy time, so that she can—”
“I know.” His expression had turned as helpless as hers. “I’ve heard a lot of things about Porter Goda’s past since they’ve brought me back to Suda, but I know she would never murder a priestess.”
They hurried back through the ruins of the courtyard, only the moon to light their path, but soon enough they had returned to the alleyway that had ended in the glowing dome. As they weaved around fallen bricks and avoided an open sewer hole, they once again passed near the vagrant that Kanna had seen before, except this time she was close enough to spot the dim outline of a glass vessel against the person’s lips—close enough that she covered her mouth when the stench hit her all at once.
Rava Spirits.
She soon realized that this heaving drunkard had been the source of the smell from earlier, as a tiny fence of overturned liquor bottles surrounded them. The mouth of each fallen vessel had been spilling down the incline of the stoop and into the path like a bitter river.
A waste of fuel, Kanna thought—but after that first thought, then came the flood of compassion.
“What are you doing out here like this?” Kanna asked, sliding to a stop before the vagrant, even as Parama yanked her sleeve with insistence. “It’s freezing. Please come into the tent with us.”
But she had her answer even while she was asking: It was Temple Assistant Finn who crawled out of the shadows like some wretched insect. The woman snatched her by the bottom of her robes. Startled, Kanna jumped. In the struggle, they both knocked down another set of bottles, some of which shattered and sent glittering shards exploding on the stone, some of which simply rolled downhill and into the dark.
Eyes wide, Kanna swallowed. She did not know what to say. She could not even take off running. Though the light was weak, she could see how bloodshot the woman’s eyes were, how every last ounce of life had been drained from them, how she had somehow aged a thousand years from the last time Kanna had seen her.
“I heard!” the woman rasped. She glanced down the path, at the nearby dome, the slur in her voice overcome by her urgency. “I heard what they said to you in there, Rava, what they’re asking you to do. Don’t do it! Don’t do it! It’s not worth your life. Let Goda meet whatever end she wants, and let these people face what has been coming to them, which is what they deserve for putting an innocent child in bondage to cover up a priestess’s wickedness! Rem knows this! She knows! The fault lies in her as much as it lies with Taga, because of what she did to Goda! She poisoned her mind.” Hacking and coughing against the frozen air, the woman desperately pulled Kanna down by her robes, and Kanna was too shocked to recoil. “Listen, Rava, this has nothing to do with you! Don’t get involved in this. You’re still young! I’m telling you as a member of the clergy, as a member of this entire system: Even if they say that they have a lot to offer—and Oh, yes! They have endless riches to tempt you with—in return they will wring you dry until there is nothing left; they will take back from you a hundred times whatever they give to you. There will be no Kanna Rava left.” She grasped Kanna by the arms and heaved her closer, and with a frantic sweep of her hands, she searched Kanna’s wrists. “Perfect, they’ve taken off the cuffs! Look, Rava, you are better off running now. Get away from them! They are distracted with all this business at the temple mount and will give up looking for you easily. You mean nothing to them, do you understand? Go! Go back to your family! Go back to where you mean something to somebody and where no one will try to erase your name! Please. I already betrayed the very last of my values yesterday, and I already sold my soul to the Devil the moment I chose to say nothing and allow someone like Rem Murau to remain a priestess, even against her own good—but if I can save just one person from suffering the same fate, maybe the Goddess will see it in herself not to cast me into the deepest pits of Hell!”
“Assistant Finn, what are you…?” Kanna gasped, wanting to answer her—wanting to make sense of what she had just heard—but Parama was adamant. He dragged her down the rest of the path until the woman’s grip on Kanna’s arm had failed, until the woman had fallen against the stone and collapsed on her hands and knees, her body racked with shudders. As they trudged through the puddles of glass and spirits, leaving the woman behind, Kanna had to fight the urge to turn, because the alleyway echoed with deep sobs that she felt rattling against the marrow of her own spine.
“Don’t worry,” Parama said, apparently sensing Kanna’s discomfort and swallowing hard himself. “It will pass. She’s been like this all night. Surely, it will pass.”
“What did she mean about Rem? That this was all Rem’s fault?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Slave Rava. She’s been ranting and raving ever since she got her hands on your Spirits—no offense—and they tend to have that effect on people, you know. They’ve never been my favorite.”
When they reached the flap of the dome tent, Parama lifted it up to let Kanna inside, and though a gust of light and warmth and frantic voices greeted them, he did not follow her inside.
“I have to care for my master now,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Time will exorcise the spirits, but who knows what she’ll get into without any supervision for the moment. She already ripped her robes to shreds, so I had to give her a bureaucrat’s uniform, which she hated even more, and the last thing I want to do is chase around a naked clergy member.” He gave Kanna a wry look, to which Kanna couldn’t help but smile.
“I can understand that. Sometimes nothing ever fits.” On impulse, she pressed a hand to Parama’s face, a gesture which seemed to take him by surprise. “You’re a lot stronger than I thought. Making the most of what happened to you, moving forward without getting paralyzed by resistance—I didn’t know what kind of strength that took until I tried it for myself. I wasn’t strong enough, it turns out. I had to bring the resistance along with me like a passenger in my truck.”
“Oh,” he said, waving his hand with some kind of flamboyant version of modesty, “it gets a whole lot easier once you’ve seen the snakes.”
“Wait, what? You see them, too? You’ve seen the—”
He closed the flap. Kanna sighed deeply, though at this point she had grown very used to having doors shut in her face. She had come to see it as a sign to turn around and look for another one.
And so she turned.
The engineer was standing there in the warm shine of the lamps, panting with either exhaustion or heat, her outer robes missing, the sleeveless tunic underneath revealing a pair of muscular arms riddled with gashes and scars. Kanna winced.
“What took so long?” the woman snarled. “We’re just about ready to go.”
Kanna’s eyes lingered on the landscape of marks, on the swirl of old burns around the woman’s left wrist especially. “So you were a slave after all,” she said.
The Engineer followed Kanna’s gaze and scoffed. “Hardly. I was raised better than that. And you should let go of those stereotypes about robust women if you don’t want people to think you’re an uneducated peasant. Not all of us are violent heathens.” Before Kanna could make a smart retort, considering the irony of what the Engineer had done in that very tent, the woman added, “This is from back when we couldn’t find anyone to test the cuffs on at first—so I tested them on myself.”
* * *
“Well, that explains it,” Kanna muttered to Lila as they sloshed through the growing flood of dirty water and towards the rumbling trucks that had appeared outside. “She must have fried her brains while electrocuting herself in that cuffing room.”
“I told you. She’s committed. She loves the cuffs more than anything. But it also means that it’s not in the interest of her reputation to let Goda mess up this badly, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you could say she’s on our side, if maybe for the wrong reasons. Sometimes even an enemy can be the vehicle that takes you where you need to go. Are you going to learn to discern this?” Lila tipped her chin towards the Engineer, who was stomping through the mud and towards one of the blinding headlights ahead of them. “Or are you going to judge it?”
“Get out! Get out! I’m driving this one myself and I don’t need your bumbling escort! Have them come ride up in a different truck and meet us there, I’m sick of this!”
“Oh, I’ll judge it,” Kanna said, pursing her lips through the engineer’s shouts, “but I think I know what you mean now.”
Lila’s smirk was sardonic. “It’s not my place to fight the will of the Goddess.”
“Then why do you keep trying to stop me from getting involved?” Kanna followed the engineer from a safe distance and balked when she saw the woman rip the door of a truck open to yank the driver out. “I saw Assistant Finn in the alleyway—or what’s left of her, anyway. She warned me, too. She told me that doing the Middleland’s bidding wasn’t worth it and that I should run away.”
“Of course. That woman has been broken by this system, but she has had The Mother’s teat shoved in her mouth from the second she was born. She doesn’t realize what it means to run away from the kind of wealth and security that this kingdom provides. She knows no alternative, so she can’t give good advice.” Lila sighed. “But there is a more balanced path: If I were you, I would not run. I would not give them every ounce of my energy, either, but I would just live an ordinary life and do the bare minimum, avoiding scandals like these until they slowly trust you. That is how you play the game in this system and how you gain a bit more freedom.”
“You know I’m not satisfied with just a bit of freedom, Lila.”
At this, Lila laughed. “Yes, I know. Same as me. But I have learned to live unsatisfied for now.”
“Come! Let’s go, Hadd; we don’t have all night!” The engineer charged towards the doors at the back of the enclosed truck, seemingly victorious over the driver, who was slinking away in defeat towards another group of headlights. “The girl will ride in the back where we can contain her. I don’t trust her for a second until she can be re-cuffed, and I don’t trust you to watch her after all this nonsense tonight.”
She wrenched the double-doors open to reveal a long compartment filled with metal that shined in the flickering lamps of the quickly-passing military trucks. Kanna blinked, the glare off-putting. At first, she had thought she was seeing strings of gleaming jewels hanging from the ceiling and lining the walls, but she soon realized what it all was: chains, batteries, batons, cuffs strung on ropes; an array of torture devices, all lovingly arranged—with the engineer ripping a set of shock rods from the collection and stuffing them into her pocket, where they made a grotesque bulge.
Kanna turned to Lila with alarm. “Who is all that meant for?”
“Oh, it’s a crowd control truck. Unfortunately, we’ll probably need it. If you’ve ever seen how insane a mob of Middlelanders can get, you would understand why it’s necessary.”
“Get in!” the engineer demanded. Though Kanna approached obediently after only a second of wide-eyed hesitation, the woman dragged her along the sopping ground once she was within arm’s reach. She boosted Kanna into the back of the truck. “Stay! I don’t want any trouble from you, do you understand? Once we’re on temple ground, you are to follow me. I don’t care what anyone else says, stay behind me and don’t touch anything. I will tell you where to stand and what to do, then hopefully we’ll have at least a chance in hell to resolve all of this discreetly.”
“I think it’s a little too late for discretion, Eyan,” Lila murmured, but she was already heading towards the passenger side.
When the engineer slammed the door shut, Kanna ducked under the hanging batons and scrambled her way through the back cabin towards the front of the truck, only to find a set of crisscrossing steel bars separating her from the front seats. She glared at Lila through the gaps of this cage, which were barely wide enough for her to slip her arm through and grasp a handful of the woman’s robes.
“Relax,” Lila said without looking at her. “If you’re really going to free her, it’s going to take a massive amount of patience and strategy. Her bonds are not something that can be brute-forced.”
Kanna’s grip loosened with surprise. “So you’ll help us escape?”
“Yes. I will do my best, even if the situation is honestly quite impossible. But we can’t be as obvious as you have been about it so far. Shut your mouth and stop wasting your effort; let them take us to her most of the way.”
Lila said no more, however, because the engineer had climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door behind her. The woman wasted no time in yanking a lever to pull the truck backwards from out the alley, which sent Kanna colliding with the swinging rods behind her. With another jerk, she launched the screaming machine up the hill, pressing on harder, weaving around the other military trucks and ignoring the shouts that came from the windows until she had inched her way to the front of the convoy.
“I’m not letting them shut down the program, Lila. I don’t care what I have to do to bury this. Even demotion would be better than giving them yet another excuse to cut funding. We are so close to what we’ve been trying to achieve for more than a decade.”
Lila reached across the chasm between the seats to press a comforting hand to the engineer’s arm. “They are just using threats to light smoke under you, Eyan, since they know you’re the only one who can fix this. They’re afraid, and they want you to be afraid with them. Don’t let it cloud your judgment. Good decisions are not made in desperation and anger.”
Her voice was soft, a jarring contrast to the chaos of hail and engines outside, much different from how it had been in the tent during all the arguments and in front of all the bureaucrats. It made Kanna instantly suspicious, but she held her tongue. Instead, she peered through the windshield and up at the steep horizon, at the glowing signs of something that shined at the very top—and then she noticed them: the bodies.
They were rippling shadows on the street sides, their staggering movements seemingly chaotic at first, but then flowing in a strange, grand unison. They flowed more and more, a march of living death, their murmurs growing louder, their white robes reflecting the headlights where they struck, but their faces indistinct. The higher the truck pulled uphill, the more of this shadowed mass that came to cocoon them on either side, until they had almost slowed down to a stop.
With a thud, a bruised face appeared in Lila’s window. Kanna let out a cry, but Lila did not react while the stranger outside was dragged away into the crowd again.
“Goddamn it!” the engineer spat. “They’re everywhere! How many people came out here? What are the guards even doing? Aren’t they enforcing the curfew yet?”
The shadowed mob had come together in front of them, so that she had to weave onto the road’s shoulder, then onto a grassy incline beside to avoid them—but the engineer pushed on. She drove faster. She rose higher. The higher they rose, avoiding the flowing sea of bodies that was also climbing its way up, the more hotly the bodies around them came to life, sprinting and vibrating in the shine that had begun to bathe them from the top of the hill, hoarse voices rising up over the roar of engines.
Soon enough, the engineer had crested the steepest part, and Kanna could finally see the source of all the light.
The source of everything.
At the center of the mount, surrounded by a human ocean more vast than she had ever seen in her life, sprouted a massive flower blooming out of steel and stone. From its roots made of polished blocks of granite to its rising metal stamen-spires that reached into the heavens, every layer was built like a spiraling array of petals, each holding up the layer above it, each ledge self-similar, each flower sprouting the next and the next, each inch of glass on each of its windows stained in intricate shapes of every color.
Kanna’s anchored grip fell from Lila’s shoulder. Her mouth fell open, too.
At a break in the very center of this temple, like a pathway to its core, flowed a wide staircase leading into a set of doors much taller than any giant—doors fit for the stature of a goddess, but swarmed with a thousand commoners who were dwarfed by them. They screamed and pounded and pushed against that barrier of steel, their voices crying in unison for their Mother within.
To be continued…