A sea of people swelled with each strike against the doors, rows of fists serving as crests of the wave before pounding hard against the temple barrier—but still, nothing; the fortress held, the energy of each blow rippling backwards through the crowd instead. It knocked body against body until the wave reached the engineer’s truck, beating against the hull like mallets on a drum.
Kanna winced and covered her ears. Her hollow metal carapace rang with what sounded like hundreds of hands, since the crowd had finally noticed them and had begun to explore them as intruders. Though the back windows were clear, as they had stopped at the very edge of the mob, more hands appeared on the windshield and front windows, people reaching up to feel the hazy glass. The engineer did not move a muscle, only squeezing the speed lever with bloodless knuckles, her teeth gritted.
“Eyan,” Lila said, eyes wide with awe. “Eyan, there are too many of them. They have crowded the temple grounds. We can’t cut across the main plaza to get to the back entrance like this. We’ll have to descend the mount again and find another way to the machine room.”
“No. No! You know how long that would take? Who knows what side-paths are flooded with water or packed with another mob? When the rest of the convoy catches up, we can force the crowd apart. With enough numbers, we can just barrel through and—”
As if tied together in unison, a hundred fists rammed against the side of the truck, sending it teetering. Kanna jumped. A hundred more rammed from the other side, shaking an avalanche of metal tools from the wall onto Kanna’s back.
“Reverse!” Lila screamed. “Reverse the truck! Now!”
Startled, the engineer yanked a lever, but the wheels spun in the mud.
More hands. More and more hands smacking the windshield, leaving oily smears in their wake that oozed with the remnants of rain. Through those spreading fingers and pounding fists, the melting glass shuddered. One flicker, one pulse, so fast that Kanna thought it was a trick of the light, a reflection of the pyre flames licking the drops that trickled down as the truck shook from side to side. Each blow roared louder than the last, rods and cuffs raining upon her, steel thudding against steel.
Kanna braced herself.
But then it all stopped. The rain, the drumming, the lamentations of the mob. Even the streaking sounds of the hands that covered the windows grew still, and a hollow whirring began to fill its place—the sound of the void, the fullness of emptiness.
Recognizing what it was, Kanna cursed, though she knew she was helpless before it. The glass contracted. It let out a massive breath and broke into a thousand colors, the light from the shining temple swarming into the cabin like a wave that passed through the countless bodies outside to reach her. Each ray broke into threads and each thread rattled with infinite serpents, each serpent whistling its hollow song and passing through the void, a storm of every color and feeling of fear and elation.
Kanna gasped, but she remained moored in place. She did not writhe like the snakes; she sat still while the storm pelted against her face. She listened to her breath, the breath that happened on its own. She watched the serpents of ten thousand people and she let them pass without shock or judgment. They were furious, bursting with energy—but they did not attack her, did not even notice her, because she was no one.
Until one of them called her name.
“RAVA!”
Kanna tensed and screwed her eyes shut. She pressed her hands harder to her ears and shook her head, but the sound was booming.
“RAVA!”
She had been seen. She did not know how she knew it was there, but the spotlight of a massive eye fell upon her, from a serpent with pupils that glared like the sun. Unlike the eye she had sensed in the garden, this one did not look out from within her—it very much burned her from the outside.
“YOU, RAVA!”
The flood of serpents whipped past, and this time, in her broken focus, Kanna was caught up in the current. Countless voices rang in her head, countless anxieties of every shape passed through her, until she could hear the banging—the ringing—once again of the metal drum that surrounded her. The truck finally broke free from the mob’s grasp, falling back as if sucked into the void framed by the back windows.
“Kanna!”
They fell and fell. The monster with a thousand hands shrank away from the front of the truck as they were swallowed again by the darkness.
Only one hand remained, grasping her by the scruff of her robes. The collar caught against Kanna’s throat and shocked her back to her senses. This time, the cabin was empty, except for the glare of the last sharp tools swinging menacingly above her, hanging by their thin threads.
The snakes had disappeared.
Except for Kanna herself, they had all disappeared.
“Kanna!” Lila cried again, yanking her up to a sitting posture, her arm squeezed through a gap in the bars to reach her. “What is wrong with you, girl?”
Kanna had not realized she had fallen to her knees, but as the truck lurched forward again and carved its way through a pitch black path at a lower part of the hill, she steadied herself against the wall as best she could.
When her mind finally processed Lila’s question, she did not know how to explain what she had heard, or even if Lila would understand. “I…don’t know.” Bile had risen up her throat, but it settled once she sat back down on the floor. “There was a voice.”
“What voice?” Lila’s brow furrowed. The hint of nerves in her tone, the glare in her eye put Kanna on edge. “There were thousands of voices, child, thousands.”
“No. A voice came out of the temple. It called me by my father’s name. It spoke to me in my native tongue.”
Lila fell silent. The wheels of the truck crunched against the wet gravel, jostling, teetering between the side of the hill on Kanna’s right and a cliff-edge on the left with darkness below. Lila met her gaze for a long time, reading something in her eyes, before deciding to let her go and face the dim landscape in front of them instead.
The headlights barely broke through the haze. There was nothing much to see—though the engineer seemed to know where she was going.
“Mahara’s blessed womb,” she muttered, heaving hard until the heat of her breath painted the glass in front of her. “I’ve never seen a more massive swarm of goddamn locusts. Where did all those idiots even come from?”
“Everyone cleared their schedule and awakened early for a public service. I imagine they have nothing better to do now that the funeral is canceled. If it turns out they’ve swarmed the back of the temple as well, then I’m afraid we won’t be able to get inside, Eyan. With half the city storming the temple mount, a handful of crowd controllers with steel batons just isn’t going to work.”
“We’ll get inside!” The engineer wiped the sweat from her brow and leaned harder into the speed lever, kicking up pebbles that battered the underside of the truck. “These commoners are like ants. They’ll all crowd the same entrance just because they see the people in front of them doing the same. And besides, no one except our own workers know about the machine room door.”
“Let’s hope that’s true. But even if that’s the case, how will the rest of the convoy know which path to take and where to meet us, since you insisted on rushing so far ahead of them?”
“Save your ‘I told you so’ for later,” the engineer spat. “After I’ve handled all this and we have time for luxuries, you can bicker with me all you want, but we have a job to do right now.” She jerked the truck to the right, twisting heavily around blind corners, turning hard along the winding path of the hill. The force of the momentum made Kanna’s stomach lurch, like she was caught up in a centrifuge. She swallowed this, too, and crawled her way up to the bars again, to peer more closely through the windshield.
The top of the hill still faintly glowed, and the top of the spires still cut into the sky from her vantage point, but it was a new perspective, a new side of the temple that had been hidden before. Most of it was cast in shadows, but the white of its stone base stuck out of the earth and gleamed like the moon. Each frantic turn of the wheels pushed their truck higher up the incline, revealing more steel and stone and glass. A mass of green appeared as well when they reached the crest, a well-trimmed hedge garden encircled by trees, which was an odd contrast to the chaos that had been brewing on the other side of the complex.
Most importantly, there was silence. The plateau looked nearly empty. Sparse pockets of mourners wandered in the distance, but they appeared confused, aimless, missing the focused fury of the mob, so Kanna guessed that they were late-comers who had not yet learned where the festivities lay.
Letting out a breath of what sounded like relief, the engineer nearly bumped a tree before the truck came to a jerking halt at the edge of the garden. The sudden stop knocked another spray of cuffs from the ceiling that Kanna had to dodge, but the engineer did not seem to notice or care, because without missing a beat, she turned off the ignition and ambled out of the truck.
Cold air rushed in when the woman ripped open the back cabin doors, though the mist of the rain had vanished altogether and the engineer’s hair had dried up.
“Come,” she ordered, not an ounce of patience on her face, nor an ounce of pity. This time, she did not reach in to seize Kanna, and since the truck was much lower to the ground than the military rigs had been, Kanna was grateful that she didn’t need the woman’s freezing hands to help her down.
“What now?” Lila asked when she had appeared beside them. “Do you think the Vice Minister’s truck was able to find a way around?”
The engineer slammed the back doors shut. “Who knows? We’re going to have to take the lower-level path through the machine room. The entrance is discreet enough under normal circumstances, but let’s pray that the stragglers over here don’t realize what we’re doing.” She pushed past Lila and headed towards a break in the hedge. Lila followed, but not before grasping Kanna by the sleeve and tugging her along.
“Eyan!” she called, exasperated, with the voice of a woman who had faced that stubborn walk more than once. “We already talked about this with the Vice Minister: The machine room is full of lifelong slaves who have been cuffed by your technicians, and who may have even been cuffed by you personally at some point. They will know who you are. And in their present situation, they have nothing to lose. Without an escort, you’re basically asking to be torn to pieces.”
“A safe path is marked on the floor inside the chamber. Their chains can’t reach. I measured them myself when they were installed.”
“Your shoulders are wide for that narrow path. They are almost all robust women, too; their arms may be long enough to reach you. Let us wait for awhile to see if the rest of the convoy finds us, so that we have some safety in numbers at least.”
The engineer huffed as she led them through a maze of manicured bushes that reached just over her head. “Numbers won’t make a difference if we’re talking about the Vice Minister’s people. Her advisors were hired for being bootlickers, not for having any idea what in the hell they’re actually doing.”
“What are you saying, then, exactly? That we should just waltz right into The Mother’s temple without them?”
“If anything, they’ll only slow us down and attract trouble.”
“I can’t believe this. For God’s sake, Eyan, can’t you stop acting like a battering ram for once? We can’t brute-force our way out of this situation. We don’t even know what’s going on inside that temple right now!”
The woman stopped at a fountain surrounded by topiaries, so abruptly that Lila almost ran into her. Water trickled peacefully from the spigot, untouched by the engineer’s impatience.
“No one is getting in my way—not even you, Lila.” She snatched Kanna’s arm, yanking her electric baton from its holster with her free hand. “Do I have to take the girl myself or what?”
“You can’t unlatch two cuffs at the same time on your own.”
“Watch me.”
“You just expect that you’ll be able to wrestle Goda Brahm out of whatever twisted trap she’s made for herself? You know that she will never surrender to you and she will never come running in the first place if it is your voice that is calling.”
“No.” The engineer pressed the trigger of her baton and it responded with a searing pop. “But she’ll come if she hears the girl screaming.”
Kanna’s eyes widened. She twisted, trying to rip herself away from the huge woman’s grasp—but the grasp loosened quickly, to Kanna’s surprise, because Lila had snatched the engineer by her baton. Both women stared deeply into each other, fingers tense and intertwined around the same shared weapon, a million unspoken snakes flashing between them that Kanna could only barely sense.
“You don’t know how to handle her—you never have,” Lila snapped, her grip growing visibly tighter. “You don’t have the nuance. The only reason you still have a job is because I know how to keep Goda Brahm in her mental cage. Never forget that.”
In her expression, Eyan Mah had not conceded. Still, when Lila let go of the baton, the woman scoffed and shoved Kanna hard into Lila’s chest. “I told you, we don’t have time for stupid bickering. Let’s hurry up and place the bait, it doesn’t matter who does it.”
She rounded the fountain, baton still in hand, and when they passed a lone mourner who was similarly lost in the garden, the engineer locked her in a narrow gaze and shouted, “Hey! You! What are you doing over here, trying to find some way inside? There’s nothing to see out here. Go home!” Eyeing the baton, the stranger picked up the pace and disappeared into a hedge path in the opposite direction, which seemed to satisfy the engineer well enough.
“If you guard this place too desperately,” Lila muttered, “then you may as well tell them exactly where to go.”
The engineer waved her free hand, the one covered in burn scars. “Even if they magically find some way past the locks, once they see what’s in that machine room, they’ll lose all their courage. That’s why this arrangement has always been perfect: Those animals in there are natural security.”
Animals? Kanna thought.
When they neared the base of the temple, they entered a shallow, clearly artificial grove of manicured evergreen trees, whose branches obscured a high wall on the other side. The ledges of the moss-covered stone reminded Kanna of the crags she had seen throughout her journey, all the pedestals that she had climbed to reach the shrines; it felt like a sculpture, a tribute—but she was not able to stare for long after they had pushed through the trees, as the engineer led them quickly to a threshold in the stone, an alcove that stretched into a long concrete hallway built into the hill.
The electric lights above them flickered and gave off a hum. Some of them swung with the short, buffeting gusts of wind that leaked into the hall and the engineer had to duck to keep from tapping her head against them. Otherwise, it was almost silent. The wall vibrated with some kind of mechanical life, a vibration that rumbled against Kanna’s feet more intensely with every step they took down the path, but with a sound that had yet to reach her ears.
At the end of the hall, they found a steel door. It looked heavy. Though its tiny window let out a faint light from whatever was inside, it was hard to see anything clearly: The glass was covered in sweat from the cold, moist air, and the light from the hall was too harsh on it. A dark shape moved across the frame—briefly, far away, somewhere deep in the room—but Kanna was the only one to react, to jerk back, then to peer harder.
None of this distracted the engineer, who had reached for a set of metal buttons on a panel next to the door frame. When the controls didn’t respond to her touch, she flicked the panel open, revealing an array of switches and a tangle of wires in a half-dozen colors. She examined the mess with a furrowed brow, as if something had caught her attention, though it all looked quite incomprehensible to Kanna’s eyes.
“Hm. That’s what I thought. Someone ripped this open and reset the combination for the lock.”
Lila mirrored the engineer’s look. “You mean someone broke their way in here?”
“Maybe. It could also be that one of our lazy junior technicians forgot the code and didn’t want to come all the way back to the tower to ask, so she did this. Luckily, it’s not hard to fix.” She fiddled with a few switches and the door rattled in response, the sound of tumblers creaking through the frame. “There. I’ll investigate this incident later and reinforce the panel,” the engineer said, reaching for the handle of the door. “For now we’ll have to bypass security protocols. I popped all the electric locks open and deactivated the electric fences, but they’re on a timer. We’ll be safe to cross for one hundred twenty-eight seconds, then the doors will seal again and the mesh will re-electrify. That should give us enough time to file through all the barriers and get to the lift without leaving the door wide open to any of those people outside, but we’ll have to move fast.”
When the engineer peeled the entrance open, hot, humid air struck Kanna in the face at the same time as the rumbling roar of engines. Spirits filled her nostrils when Lila pushed her into the inner vestibule, and it made her want to cough, but she recovered fast as she came face to face with a cage.
Not a cage, she realized while the engineer slammed the door closed behind them. It was a wire mesh, like the iron grid of a chicken fence, serving as a wall that separated them from an inner chamber. Beyond it, the floor was marked with lines that flowed ahead of them, ending in a similar mesh wall on the other side of the room, and yet another door behind that. Like Rem’s temple in the desert, there were many thresholds to cross, though these appeared rusted and decidedly less sacred. Kanna tilted her head, confused at what such a shallow, empty room could be holding, but after she glanced to either side, she realized that the caged chamber held much more than she ever would have assumed.
Rows and rows of machines—generators, Kanna guessed, by the sounds and smells—lined the space, spreading out in perfect intervals for as far as she could see in both directions, thick wires bundled and twisting along the floors and walls, much of the machinery disappearing into the darkness, so that she could not tell how long or how deep the chamber truly went. There were barrels, too, sick with the smell of spirits, stacked top to bottom in some of the paths, some even empty and tipped to the side.
Worse still, she did not see the bodies instantly. They were so cool and gray under the dingy, dim overhead lamps that they blended into the machines. Pulsing veins and tensed sinew looked like blue-red wires. The white glare of blinking eyes looked like flickering lights. Soon enough, however, she could make out the faces. The quiet lack of reaction. The stares. The braided iron of countless chains.
“My God,” Kanna whispered. There were dozens of workers in both directions, huge women pressed against every machine, surrounded by black barrels and dressed in dark, ill-fitting uniforms made of weathered thread and old stains. “All these people are enslaved in this hell?”
“That they are. The worst of the worst. The kind of people who will stab a stranger to death to steal their pocket change and think nothing of it. Luckily our program can rechannel all that aggression into usable power.” The engineer’s tone was casual as she said this, though Kanna could not help but take a step back when the woman pushed the door of the mesh cage open after testing it with the back of her hand, exposing them to the apparent chamber of murderers. “Come, hurry. It’ll be re-electrified in a few moments, and we still have two more doors to pass through.”
Lila ushered Kanna inside, shutting the door again behind them once the engineer had forged closely ahead. The woman appeared to sniff the room, but she did not pause for long before leading them deeper.
“Look at the markings on the floor,” she continued, pointing with the probes of her baton to where a set of twin red lines flowed towards the other mesh door across the room. “Keep between the lines and you’ll be safe. The workers’ chains are too short to reach here.”
Kanna tried not to look to either side as they advanced between those narrow lines, but she couldn’t stop herself: The weight of a sea of scrutinizing eyes seemed to push them to and fro as they walked, as if they were riding in a teetering vessel, though the engineer herself had fixed her gaze straight ahead—focused, confident, as if she had not noticed the misery inside the room—though the sweat on the side of her neck betrayed at least her discomfort with the thick, muggy air. The closest rows were much too close. Kanna did not know if the rush of heat she felt as she walked past was all waste from the generators, or if she was after all close enough to sense the inner fire emanating from the workers themselves.
As Kanna’s eyes adjusted to the dark, however, she found the initial fear fading as she took in the dirty faces, the deep scars smeared with tarred oil, the faint smell of blood. The more she walked, the more human they became, the more distinct their faces. One woman, her cheek streaked with water that had turned the ash on her skin into mud, watched Kanna closely from behind a curtain of filthy hair. Another woman, the top of her uniform ripped in half, shoulders and arms slashed with both old scars and red streaks, leaned towards her with what seemed like the last, effortful vestiges of curiosity that she had left—until she collapsed back against her rumbling machine, exhausted.
When the group had come close to the halfway mark of their journey, there was a worker spilled onto the floor along with a barrel of spirits, her face pressed to the ground, her quick, shallow breaths rising and falling, her nails digging into cement bathed in fuel.
Kanna broke. The energy sprung through her legs, but before she could take a step towards the woman, Lila caught her.
“How can you treat them like this?” Kanna demanded, her voice cutting through the silence of the room, though it was quickly drowned by the engineer’s own hissing admonishment:
“Don’t skirt the line!” she said—but before Kanna could glance down at where her feet had wandered, the sound of rattling chains rang through the hollows of the chamber.
Kanna cried out while Lila yanked her across the floor. She had barely caught the movement in her periphery when that hot breath had hit her face. Arms as taut as the chain, a massive monster barreled past Kanna and dove towards the engineer—but the attacker grasped in vain. The slack of her bonds caught loudly with only a sliver of distance to spare. Even still, the engineer closed the space and replied with a shock to the worker’s ribs, which sent her attacker to the floor.
“Listen to me!” Eyan Mah screamed over the growling of the injured party. Lila had seized Kanna by the shoulders, her expression tight and displeased, but she did not add a single word, as if even that effort would push them over the edge of a precipice. “Stay in the lines! We don’t have time for a fight!”
Kanna swallowed. She obeyed as the engineer brushed herself off, but a part of her relaxed, as she realized that the worker had seemingly ignored her altogether in favor of thicker prey.
“Keep going! I’ll watch them.” The engineer waved for Lila and Kanna to continue ahead of her, covering them from behind with her wide stance, glancing suspiciously over her shoulder as the sounds of more rattling chains awakened around them. “Don’t worry. Ignore them! They can’t reach!”
Just then, a thread of steel scraped across the floor—except it was not at all taut.
“Eyan!” Lila shouted. “Watch out!”
Kanna snapped around just in time to see another slave bash a pair of joined fists into the engineer’s face. The woman’s chains, entirely loose, whipped around her as she raised her arms for the next blow, but the engineer had somehow stayed awake enough to block the second punch as they both fell to the ground. This knocked the weapon from her grasp, her baton rolling along the floor and down towards the cage wall from where they had entered.
As they struggled on the ground, Lila wrestled Kanna back, “Stay away! Don’t get in the middle of it!”
The worker had gained the upper hand, and though the engineer had fallen on her back, she kept her attacker at bay with a hand to the throat, dodging the strikes that swung at her wildly. “Go through the door!” the engineer bellowed. “This one’s loose! Who knows how many others she’s helped escape! Get out and close the door!”
“Eyan, are you mad? I can’t just leave you with—”
Though the growls of the women had filled the room, they were both soon overwhelmed by the blare of a siren. Kanna jumped.
“That’s the warning alarm!” The engineer’s eyes were wide as she caught her assailant by both wrists. “The fence is about to electrify! Get out now! Get out and close the door before any of these animals escape into the temple!”
Lila rushed Kanna to the mesh exit, bumping it open and pushing her through—but she hesitated at the threshold, her gaze frantically searching the ground behind her until it landed at the dented baton on the opposite side of the room. When Lila doubled back into the chamber, her intentions clear, the engineer screamed at her, “Leave it! Go! Just go! Close the door! I’m ordering you, Hadd!”
After a final, split-second of hesitation, Lila dashed to safety, shutting the door behind her and yanking Kanna away from the wire of the mesh. “Stay clear of it!” she shouted. “It’s about to electrify!”
The engineer kicked the worker in the gut. It bought her enough time to roll towards the entrance from where they had come in, where she snatched the baton and defended herself against another blow. This time, the probes made contact with a loud crackle and the worker landed hard on the ground, the alarm drowning out her cry. This did not stop her from reaching for the engineer’s legs, clawing at her slacks with overgrown nails. Panicked, the engineer ripped open the cage door behind her, the one that led back to the entrance. With what seemed like the last of her drained strength, she kicked the worker away and slid into the vestibule, knocking the mesh door shut with her boot, her back still on the stone ground.
And then the alarm cut out. It was the type of silence that left Kanna with the ghost of the siren still ringing in her ears, the kind that made the pistons of the generators seem only like a soft background hum. It was broken only by the groans of the worker that the engineer had left on the floor and a faint electric droning that had swelled into the room.
Lila stood a finger’s length from the electric cage, her body still tense. Though she swayed with stifled action, her gaze was steady, aimed at the engineer who lay panting and bruised on the ground. They met eyes through the twin walls of woven mesh, the engine room like a wide canyon between them. Above the engineer, in the window of the steel door behind her, living ghosts had appeared in the harsh light, filling up the hallway with fluttering mourners’ robes. Curious faces pressed to the glass as they tried to peer inside. It appeared that the noise had attracted their attention—or else the earlier straggler had come back with an army.
“Eyan…,” Lila began.
The engineer was shaking her head, but before she could speak, the scraping of chains interrupted them. Having seemingly heard the alarm and the commotion as well, a half dozen workers emerged from the dimmest parts of the chamber, their loose, broken bonds dragging. One of them, a huge woman with a gnarled nose who carried a set of tools, led the others into the light of the middle path, regarding Kanna and Lila with surprise. Crowbar in hand, she poked at her fallen comrade, then finally seemed to notice the engineer who was trapped in the vestibule beyond the mesh.
To Kanna’s shock, the woman’s hardened face broke into a gleeful smile. “…Mah? Engineer Mah? Is that you?” Her voice was raspy and deep, the kind that had been roughened by smoke. “Brahm told us you might come.”
“Brahm? Goda Brahm passed through this room?”
“Hm. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. I don’t remember things too well anymore—but I do remember you, Engineer.” She tapped the crowbar hard against the ground, the ring of the metal making the walls of their cage vibrate in resonance. “What are you doing all the way over there, sister? Come on in so we can have a talk.”
To be continued…