Kanna wanted to laugh, but she held back the dark mirth that had swelled up from her gut, to her chest, to her throat. Instead, she sneered a half-grin, pacing back and forth along her side of the chamber like a hungry tiger, fangs unsheathed, eyes locked on the engineer who lay helpless on the floor. She wasn’t worried about the key. She didn’t need it anymore—because she knew that she had it already.

Kanna clenched her empty hand and could almost feel the key’s shape digging into her palm. Lila grasped her shoulder to pull her away from the buzzing wire, but she shook the woman off. She waited.

“Mahara’s blessed womb,” the engineer groaned under her breath. Her narrowed eyes and her challenging gaze did not quite sell her bluff, because she was sliding back across the floor to put more distance between her and the workers, and her hand choked the baton tighter than before. “I already knew Brahm had lost what was left of her mind, but even she should know better than to let a pack of murderers loose.”

“She didn’t. It was just me.” The worker with the crowbar stepped closer to the engineer, stopping short of the mesh, eyes gliding carefully along the border of the door, as if she were searching for some weakness—but the only opening was the tiny gap between the floor and the bottom of the cage wall. “I used to be a master porter, so she recognized me. Broke my chains and told me to get lost, to take the first train to the Outerland.” The woman gestured to the workers behind her. “But I wasn’t about to leave them, was I? We won’t get another chance like this, so I’ve been smashing as many chains as I can. Didn’t realize the doors would lock automatically after a few minutes.” She leaned even closer to the fence, boldly, until her wide body had overwhelmed the door, until the dim light above her cast a long shadow over Eyan Mah. “You can open them, though, can’t you?”

“You’ve swallowed Flower if you think I would let any of you out.”

“Oh, when we do get out—and we will—you’ll be swallowing worse than that, Engineer.” She tipped her chin towards the labyrinth of machines, the endless rumbling rows lined with workers. “We can’t stop feeding the machines when we’re tied to them, of course, since those blasted things shock the hell out of us every time we try to take a goddamn break—but once we’ve unchained everyone here and the fuel runs low, the pistons will stop moving eventually. And when that happens, it’s only a matter of time before the power will go out. Your little electric fence won’t do much after that.”

“Neither will you. You were stupid to not have listened to Brahm and slipped away when you could. This temple complex is surrounded by soldiers. Even more reinforcements are coming, and if you think you stand a chance against a thousand—”

The engineer’s voice was cut off by a rattling at the steel door behind her. More faces appeared in the outside window to steam up the glass. Muffled cries filtered through as the mourners shook the door handle again and again, before the shaking turned into outright pounding.

“Well well, looks like someone’s come knocking! You have company, Mah. Why don’t you let our guests in? Maybe they brought some gifts of condolences for the funeral!”

The other unchained workers laughed, all of them shuffling towards the engineer’s cage, surrounding the mesh as if they expected it to spring open any second. Unamused, the engineer sat upright with a grunt, her hand nearly slipping as she propped herself up. Still, she brandished her baton, even with the fence between them.

The worker at the front brought her crowbar near the handle of the door, as if to test it, but seemed to think better and lowered her hand again. “If we’ve learned anything in here,” she muttered, “it’s patience. Once all of us are free, there’s no stopping us. We’ll see you soon, Mah—if the crowd outside doesn’t get to you first.” With that, she turned back towards the labyrinth and motioned for the others to follow.

Kanna barely heard them. She had not broken her fixed gaze the entire time, and so when the women unblocked the path and moved on, she met eyes with Eyan Mah instantly. She had no time to waste, either.

“Give me the key, Engineer,” Kanna commanded. A voice had swelled up in her gut and surged through her chest and throat, a breath that had come from somewhere else, somewhere she barely recognized, somewhere devoid of any self-doubt. “I kept my promise. You have seen what I’m capable of now—and I’m about to make things much worse. Surrender the key. Surrender before I close the walls in on you even more and smother you with my loving death.”

The engineer recoiled, as if Kanna’s face had transformed into that of a demon, but her tone remained defiant when she muttered, “Goddamn. You’re even crazier than Brahm.” There was something in her expression, a twitch, a wound in her facade. She jerked when another round of pounding rang through the door behind her, and she looked all around the vestibule on reflex, until, finding no exit, she finally allowed her tense shoulders to drop onto the floor with a crack. Her breath slowed, still shallow. “What do you want, Rava?” she asked, eyes pointed to the ceiling this time, eyes that screwed shut and opened again in what looked like a test of her own sanity.

“You know what I want.”

Lila, who apparently had seen enough, finally intervened, yanking Kanna away from the mesh with a firmer hand this time. Kanna obeyed, her body loose and receptive now that she had released her incantations. The look of warning on Lila’s face surprised her nonetheless.

“Stop it,” she whispered in Kanna’s tongue. “You don’t know what you’re doing yet. Let it go or you will kill her on accident.”

“Oh, please. She did this to herself. She asked for what was coming. Can’t you see that?”

“Maybe she did. But do you want blood on your hands? Think carefully about what this revenge would entail. Everything you birth into this world births children of its own; every intention ripples into waves; every move you make takes everyone else with you. Remember that. If you ignore this truth and abandon the children you created, you are no better than Taga and Rem.” When Kanna clenched her teeth and did not argue with this, Lila turned back to the engineer. “Eyan! How do I get you out? Is there a control panel on this side?”

But the engineer was already shaking her head. “I can’t let you open the cage or these degenerates will get inside the temple. I can’t fight all of them off on my own, especially if they keep unchaining more and more. There are hundreds of slaves in here and they have no fear of authority.” With a tense jaw that made the veins in her neck pulse, she added, “Look, Hadd, you need to go. It’s too dangerous and we don’t have time. You will have to be the one to get Brahm out of the Heart Chamber, so take the elevator at the end of the corridor behind you to get to the main floor. Use the girl to lead Brahm into the hall between the chamber and the outer doors. The handful of temple guards who are still inside can subdue her once she’s cleared the room, and if the telegraph lines are still working, you can message the vice minister to tell her when Brahm has been captured.”

“That’s out of the question. I’m not leaving you alone in here to get torn to pieces.”

“I’m ordering you, Hadd. I don’t care what leverage you think you have. I outrank you and I am ordering you to leave! Now! We have forty minutes, maybe an hour after the last barrel of fuel has been poured before we lose power. The security doors will be some of the firsts to go dark—and then the elevator. You need to leave while the lifting mechanism still has energy. There are no stairs from here to the upper floors of the temple because of security protocols.”

“Even if we just left you in here, what about the key? How would we uncuff Goda before we lure her out of range? There is no way to break the cuff open without risking electrocuting a living priestess.”

In the silence that followed Lila’s trailing thoughts, Kanna caught the engineer’s gaze once again. There was nothing to say, no words, and yet the air was as pregnant with meaning as it had been when the woman had first eyed Kanna as bait—only this time, it was Kanna whose stare had turned predatory, relentless.

“I told you,” Kanna whispered again. “Why didn’t you believe me?”

The engineer could not have possibly heard her. Still, the meaning was exchanged through Kanna’s lips, because fat drops of the engineer’s sweat oozed to the floor as she shook her head, face twisted in resistance, in conflict. She glanced once through the mesh to make sure the workers had gone. She hesitated for only another moment, her hand rising up to her throat, her claws hovering, gripping nothing at first.

Then, with a deep sigh of acceptance, Eyan Mah ripped the clasp of her own chain to free herself. She unthreaded a single, heavy key, then dropped her burden on the stone floor, the harsh ring of metal becoming a whir in Kanna’s ears.

“Take it,” she rasped, lining the key up with the thin gaps beneath the electrified walls. “We’ve run out of options, so I’m trusting you, Hadd.” With a flick of her wrist, she sent the key sliding through the opening and across the floor, aimed at Lila’s feet. The key skidded between the safety lines, sailing next to the fallen workers, losing steam and pivoting as it scraped against a rough patch of ground, nearly reaching the other side—but only nearly. It stopped just short of the mesh. It had run astray, coming to rest in front of Kanna Rava instead.

“I’ll get it,” Kanna said, crouching before Lila could stop her. With a smooth hand, she reached through the gap, her fingers just thin enough to fit, her heart unmoved by the crackle of live wires, which, to her, had become only the plucked strings of a droning song. Fishing the heavy key onto her side of the vestibule, she pressed the cold metal so hard into her hand that she could feel it marking her palm. When she stood again, now greedier than before, she leaned away from Lila to avoid any thieving grasp—but the woman did not try to take her prize.

“That is the master key for Brahm’s model of cuff,” the engineer explained, breathless with either pain or exhaustion. “I don’t have the key for the priestess on hand. Brahm has a copy with her, so you’ll have to figure out where she’s put it.”

Kanna already knew where it must have been. She nodded in thanks and turned to search for an exit—but Lila had not moved an inch.

“Eyan, I told you: We’re not leaving you here. What will you do when the power goes out?”

The engineer smiled, though it was something like a half-grimace. “It’ll be fine.” Glancing over her shoulder at the mourners—whose knocks had softened, but only in favor of periodic kicks to the door handle—the woman seemed to contemplate her choices. “I’ll have figured something out by then. I might still be able to fight my way through the crowd outside if they lose interest and start dispersing. But you need to go now, Hadd. If you wait too long, the lift won’t have fuel to take you to the next floor.”

Kanna reached toward Lila, to be the one to grasp and pull and insist this time—but she stopped mid-motion because she recognized the look on the woman’s face, the glassy eyes that would not leave the engineer. Stiff with conflict, already turned to the exit, Kanna’s legs itched to dash through the threshold behind them. She had everything she needed. She could figure out where to go. She could shed the dead weight and abandon Lila with the engineer, to make her own way.

But as her eyes once again passed over the chasm and into the opposite vestibule, she winced at the sight of the fallen engineer, winced at the blood on the woman’s face, at the shallow breaths, at the cornered look of confusion, the pain, the fear that had suddenly become so naked to Kanna, as if a veil had been split in half over the threshold of a sacred place and spilled out a thousand snakes.

And she could not ignore anymore that she had birthed them all.

Kanna sighed, consciously stopping herself from taking another step. She closed her eyes. She listened to the buzz in the air, invited the whirring this time, surrendered to its breath that breathed her.

The room opened up, dropping the last of its veils. Without seeing, she saw. As if her head had become a single, pulsing eye, the spreading chamber appeared in her mind, free of all walls, all doors, all barriers, only a vast plane woven from endless threads of shuddering serpents, none of which was solid. The mourners cried behind the engineer, hissing desperate demands, their bodies ramming and pushing against nothing in a futile, self-mutilating dance. The engineer clawed the ground, her own serpents grinding together, cowering away from a growing sea of cloaks that hovered over her—but the serpents that flowed from outside, from the bodies of the mourners, slithered along the floor and ignored the woman, as they searched for something else entirely.

Kanna opened her eyes.

“Open the door.”

“What?”

“Open the door behind you and go free on your way, Engineer. Don’t make it complicated.”

The woman stared at her with an expression of complete non-understanding, of anxious bewilderment. “In case you haven’t noticed, Rava, if I do that, the rioters will get in. You’ve seen for yourself what these idiots did outside. Even at the bathhouse before all of this, I had to break my way through the crowd with a baton just to get people to move an inch in either direction. Once they realize they can’t worm their way into the temple from here, I’ll have to fight with all my strength to keep them from beating me to death.”

“Then don’t fight.”

“Are you drunk, Rava, or just naive? I have to fight.” The engineer’s breaths had grown quick again, as if by Kanna’s mere suggestion, the door would spring open. “You don’t know what it is to face these people day after day.”

But Kanna did not relent. “Have you faced them? They only fight you because you’ve made an enemy of them and don’t see them as your own people anymore. Don’t be a coward. Turn around, drop your weapon, and actually look at them. They haven’t come for you; you have nothing they want.”

Confusion creasing her face more deeply than before, the engineer’s grip on her baton clenched harder as she turned her gaze towards the door. She did not approach, but she seemed to meet eyes with the mourners, whose desperate pushing had begun to make the hinges of the door squeak.

“Stop resisting. You can survive this if you stop resisting. You’re the only thing in this chamber that threatens your life.” With that final word of warning, Kanna turned then to Lila, whose expression was mixed and unreadable, but who had been watching Kanna carefully the whole time. “She’ll be all right, I think. The people outside are only looking for Rem, the way I’m looking for Goda. They’ll leave the engineer alone as long as she doesn’t attack them.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. This woman is a masochist who wants to fight the world—like master, like slave.”

“But she’s unchained herself from Goda. She has sold her to me. So it’s none of our business what she does with that freedom now, is it?” Kanna held up the key. “Show me where to go.”

Lila nodded with resignation, the conflict on her face morphing back into bureaucratic neutrality. “We don’t have a lot of time,” she agreed.

She took Kanna by the sleeve to guide her towards the steel door behind them, which revealed a long, empty corridor as soon as she opened it. The sterile shine of the white floor and walls sent a wave of nausea through Kanna, but the threshold at the very end gave her relief: It was an iron-barred gate guarding the inner gondola of a lift.

After pushing Kanna into the hall, Lila hesitated one last time, glancing over her shoulder. Over the growing pounding and crashing of the mourners outside, she cried out, “Eyan!”

The engineer, who by now had turned towards her own exit, baton still raised defensively, lifted her head up with effortful alarm. “What is it now, Hadd?”

“I love you.”

Eyan Mah dropped her weapon. Kanna, too, was shocked, but before she could savor the woman’s helpless expression, the ramming door burst open with a crash. A dozen mourners spilled into the room at once, some tripping over the engineer, some stumbling into the sides of the chamber, one of them dashing for the mesh gate at the end of the vestibule.

“Stop!” the engineer screamed. “The wall is electrified, you idiot! You’ll kill yourself!”

Lila entered the hallway and slammed the door behind her, sealing the muffled shouts away until they could barely be heard.

“My God,” Kanna said, fumbling the key after Lila’s move knocked her off balance, her surprise transforming into disgust once she recovered her footing. “Every single time, you’re worse than I thought. I don’t even know what would be better: That you lied to that woman just now or that you were actually telling the truth.”

Lila shrugged. “I do what needs to be done.”

She led the way, her footfalls echoing through the hollows of the chamber with no sense that they had left anything behind. Kanna followed, but kept her distance, her distrust of the woman ebbing and flowing with their mirrored steps, as if she had just realized that Lila carried a viper in the breast of her robes.

“Robust women will fight to the death to defend physical boundaries; it is not a matter of right or wrong; it is their instinct, and it takes a lot to distract them from it. I had been saving a particular weakness of hers for an emergency, but if it will give her a reason to preserve herself until morning, I’ll cash it in. We need her at the tower; it would all fall apart without her.”

“Then maybe it’s meant to fall apart,” Kanna said through clenched teeth.

“You only say that because you think you don’t rely on everything that happens in that building.” Lila gave Kanna a wry look when they reached the lift, yanking a lever on the wall, standing with tense patience as the iron gateway began to rattle open. “Believe me, if I could be free of it I would. But as long as people are the way they are, it is these kinds of structures that must channel the world’s serpents.”

Dismissing Kanna’s lamentations in this way, Lila pushed her inside the lift. As she pulled yet another switch on the inside of the lift car, Kanna examined the walls, which were a cold cage of pristine steel, shining like a well-polished knife in the glow of the elevator’s single, overhead lamp. Everything was sharp, utilitarian, as if shaped by an engineer who had not seen the outside of the temple with its many shimmering colors and did not believe in its spirits.

“I see them clearly now,” Kanna murmured, watching the iron gate of the gondola shuttering closed behind them, “the serpents. Before, it was hard to see them outside of a shrine, and even then I had no control over my focus. But in that chamber with the engineer, I saw them as soon as I closed my eyes. Why?”

“You expect to see them now.”

“Maybe I do. But that’s not it. There’s something different about this building. It’s unlike any shrine.” As the floor began to rise, Kanna stared at the shifting wall of the elevator shaft through the bars of the gateway, at the grooves and the stains that flashed by, at the quick flicker of writhing threads that grew and shrank every time she blinked. “Out in the plaza when we first crested the hill, I saw them there too—the ones that belonged to the crowd, masses of them. It felt like someone was trying to reach me through them, like a channel had burst from the temple and flowed from person to person, then ended with me. And then a voice called my name, accusing me, like it hadn’t expected me to be there.”

The walls rattled. The cables whined. The whir in Kanna’s ears rose and fell as she watched the tiny smile on the woman’s face twitch.

“What is this place, Lila?”

When the lift jerked to a halt, its iron bars scraped open like the gates to an old garden, revealing a dim, spreading chamber that smelled like incense. The polished wooden walls were carved with swirling designs, half-hidden by an endless chain of flowing drapery hung from a gold-etched ceiling high overhead, the velvet cloth just a shade lighter than a priestess’s robes.

“Home,” Lila answered her, “to the most dangerous sorceress on Earth.”

---

To be continued…

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.”

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Onto Chapter 48 >>