“You mean a witch like Rem Murau?”

“Oh no. Worse. Much worse.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow, unsure if this was all another elaborate metaphor. She stumbled out of the lift to follow Lila into the chamber, her earlier confidence unraveling, the tight lump in her throat returning twofold. She did not have the energy to be angry with herself for falling back into her usually resistant state, but the sights and sounds of the spreading hall—which wound around a corner before disappearing—had put her on edge.

Glowing, flickering faces, carved into the stone and akin to plaster death masks, lined the walls in small alcoves, serving as torches that lit the path. They emitted a low electric whine as Lila led her past them, but that small sound was soon drowned out by voices that boomed from the walls. Kanna jumped, thinking that it had been the masks who had spoken; instead, she realized that some indistinct echo had traveled through the framework. It happened again: a pounding, a screaming. She could not make out the words because they buzzed from somewhere far away.

“How close are we to Goda?” She squinted at the coiled designs that etched the walls, looking for windows, looking for doors, looking for some kind of clue of where she was—but she only recognized a few glyphs of Old Middlelander between the curtains that vibrated with another round of pained voices. “Does this ‘sorceress’ torture people in here or something?”

“If you’re asking about the screaming, that’s coming from outside. We’re in the outermost hall that wraps around the fourth level of the temple, which is the path to the Heart Chamber—the room with the altar where Goda was last seen—but this is also the entrance floor, so we’re back to the top of the hill where we first stopped. The closer we get to the entrance, the more we will hear the mourners making their demands, I’m sure.”

“Well, if this temple belongs to a powerful witch, why doesn’t she expel them from her home?”

Lila’s laugh was mirthless. “Believe me, you’re not the only one asking that question. If she had wanted to stop this riot, she could have. But she hasn’t. Even with the High Minister begging and pleading with her to declare Rem dead or alive, she has chosen silence and has not evacuated the temple.”

Kanna glanced up at the patchwork heavens as they passed beneath an archway that had been molded to look like a woman with open arms.

“The Mother?” she asked.

“Yes. The High Priestess. In all but name, she is queen of the Middlelanders, the living incarnation of the Goddess herself. Because of the shrine buried deep in this mount, she is believed to have the power to summon and cast out serpents. She does not meddle in human affairs very much, but when she does interfere, she can be quite unpredictable, so watch out. I am telling you all this because she is currently locked in the Heart Chamber, in the exact room where Goda is right now, and it is better for you to be prepared for what you will find in there.”

“You mean the leader of this whole insane religion is just sitting in that room watching and doing nothing while the world goes to hell?”

“That appears to be the case, yes. Sadly, this is just her way. She does not often get her hands dirty in such affairs—she is a priestess after all, and you already know how that goes—though it does seem that she has abandoned her duty to Rem on purpose. We can only speculate as to why. Maybe she knows something that we mere mortals don’t. The High Priestess can see and hear and witness all kinds of things that would escape us within these walls. In fact, she is probably listening to this conversation right now.”

Kanna jerked again, taken off guard. She examined the high ceiling, the rows of archways and alcoves, half-expecting to see a pair of gigantic eyes following her movement down the path. Instead, she noticed the dozens of animalistic sculptures tucked into niches high on the walls, and how the draperies had slowly turned from an empty black, to a dark red, to a deep orange, and, in the distance as the corner turned yet again, to a jade green that contrasted sharply with the blood-colored carpet that flowed like a thin river beneath her feet.

The cries from outside flowed to her, too, the ceilings amplifying every booming shout, every collective thrust against some entrance that she could not see, where it had all become a rhythmic pulse.

“Fine. I don’t care. Where do I need to go?” Kanna kept her eyes trained on the path, following Lila into this purgatory in spite of her trepidation, wary of the volume of her voice so as to not attract the sorceress. “How do I get into that chamber? I’m not so naive anymore as to think it will be easy. Everything that the Middlelanders build is a goddamn trap, a pointlessly complicated labyrinth with a trigger around every stupid corner. Are there going to be flying spears and false floors waiting for me?”

“Not exactly, but there will be guards outside the main doors. In theory, they should be expecting to let us in, since the vice minister telegraphed them about our planned solution ahead of time, but the power has been dropping, and we’re not sure if the message made it through. Without the engineer, they will certainly be skeptical, especially once they see what you look like.”

“What I…look like?”

“A small, mannish foreigner waltzing right into the most delicate crisis the temple has ever seen? My word alone won’t convince them to allow it. They barely trust me as it is because of my Outerlander heritage; they’re going to insist on waiting for a good signal from the high minister, which we don’t have time for, especially with the power already faltering.”

“Then what do we do?” Slowly, Kanna unclenched her hand, the increasingly colorful edges of the path receding as she stared into her palm where the key warmly stuck to her sweating skin. “Unless we’re meant to pass through solid walls in here?”

“No, we’re not. But someone like you doesn’t need to.”

Much to Kanna’s irritation, Lila did not elaborate when Kanna threw her a questioning glance. Instead, the woman gestured to where the hall turned on itself, as if the answer would appear around the next corner—but nothing appeared except for more of the same bewildering corridor. The more they wound around the building, the more Kanna realized that the hall was a ramp, slowly rising like a spiral staircase, but far more subtle, gradual.

The voices grew louder, becoming a roar the further they walked. The pounding had turned into battering that shook the walls and the floor. Just as it had seemed to reach a crescendo and Kanna covered her ears with her hands to keep the bones in her head from vibrating, they found the last archway:

It was styled like a massive swan, wings spread, holding up the ceiling on its shoulders as if it were holding up the sky, the stars and planets etched just above the lights that had begun to flicker more and more. On the wall’s frame just behind it, two eggs, colored like the moon, were perched on a pair of small trumpet-shaped pedestals that led into veiny glass tubes flowing into the swan’s wings. The feathers, made of carved glass with many colors, warped the light and sent rays shimmering in a thousand directions while the bird rattled with the shuddering walls.

“Goddess almighty, that is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life!” Kanna cried after she took one look at it. “Lila, where on Earth have you taken me? Let’s get out of here and find Goda. I can’t stand this place anymore.”

Lila stopped right before the threshold of the arch, which was blocked by a tall set of black doors that seemed to be holding in whatever loud commotion was coming from the other side. Eager to move on, Kanna reached towards the door handles, but Lila grasped her hand before her fingers even brushed iron.

“Hold it. Don’t give yourself away. You don’t want to join the chaos on the other side, believe me.”

Kanna snapped back, giving Lila an open glare. “What’s in there, then?”

“Past this threshold, you’ll find the doors to the Heart Chamber on the left and the main entrance to the temple on the right. The space in between is the antechamber, where there is simply no way for us to slip through without having to answer lots of questions. Every guard in the temple surely must have swarmed to this failure point, since this is where the crowd is pushing against the front doors—but we have an advantage.” Lila yanked her to one of the corners of the archway, and before Kanna could complain, the woman grasped the back of her head and tipped it up towards the short stretch of wall just above the painted swan, between the two veiny eggs. “You see that?”

Kanna squinted in the waning light, finding the vague outline of an oval scored into the wood, about the height and width of an arms-length. “What is it?”

“It’s a hatch. The Maharan religion does not have male clergy in the strict sense, but there are male temple workers and monks. The problem is that the Heart Chamber is one of the most sacred places in the entire religion—second only to a sealed altar room at Samma Valley Monastery—but male religious workers may need to witness ceremonies in there from time to time.”

“All right. So?”

“So they are men! Men cannot set foot in the Heart Chamber! It is especially inconvenient if a priestess needs to bring a manservant, so they get around this issue by using that hatch. It leads to a crawl space that allows the men to reach a catwalk inside, which is perched just above the seating area that the priestesses use. That way, their mistresses can keep an eye on them without having them touch anything, and the men can passively watch the rituals through small viewing ports. It is a bit of a squeeze. The door is built discreetly and purposefully small to fit the frame of a Middlelander man, but as your people are built so efficiently, you will be able to slip in nicely, I hope.”

“You hope?”

“There is only one way to know for sure.” Lila patted the side of the archway that bordered the threshold, and it was then that Kanna noticed the grooves in the plaster for the first time. The hand-sized notches lined the curve of the arch all the way to the top, like the rungs of a ladder, like the bones of a spine. They twisted around the side of the threshold, flowing up to a shallow ledge and ultimately ending in a wooden knob rising out of the swan’s back like the horn of a saddle.

“You have to be joking,” Kanna said, stupefied. “There must be another way.”

“These days, when the men come, the guards bring an actual ladder and carry them up there, since more than one monk has had a nasty fall over the years. It’s a good thing the carpet is red. Sadly, we don’t have time for these luxuries, and you’ll have to take the traditional way.” The woman knelt down. “Come on, I’ll help you up. It’s easier than it looks.”

“Oh, you’ve done it yourself?”

“No, but it looks impossible, so technically it’s easier than it looks.”

Kanna’s wry glance was not lingering, since she did not have time to waste. Giving the key in her hand a final squeeze of resignation and dropping it into her pocket, she allowed Lila to boost her up the first few rungs. The woman watched her closely as she climbed—so closely that Kanna felt scrutinized and wondered if Lila was expecting her already to fall. She found that the inside of the handholds had been roughened with tar, though, and that the plaster itself had grooves shaped into the heads of strange beasts, so that as long as she kept her feet pressed hard to either side of the arch, the climb was not as effortful as she had first thought.

Halfway up the arch, she gritted her teeth, bracing herself when the walls shook yet again and she nearly lost her footing. “Lila!” she cried, heart pounding, though she managed to keep hanging, her foot stamped onto the face of a viper carved into the arch frame, its wooden fangs digging into her sole.

“What is it, girl?”

The near-miss had knocked her out of her single-minded focus. For the first time, she allowed herself to catch her breath. “What…what am I doing here?” The eyes of a falcon stared out from the etched plaster in front of her, and it unnerved her, so once again she met the gaze of her benefactor—or her manipulator—without hiding her helplessness anymore.

But the woman, who was not her master, only shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know.” The cryptic look on her face had returned, the one that seemed to say that she knew something Kanna could never guess. “Do you want me to help you down?”

“No!”

“All right. Climb, then. If you wait too long, you’ll get tired and fall, and I’m not strong enough to catch you. I’m no giant.”

Kanna groaned and reached for the next hold, but she hesitated, her attention still split in a dozen directions. “Lila!”

“What is it, my dear?”

“Once I’m in there—in the chamber, I mean…what do I even do?” She had not thought that far yet. She had been so narrow in her vision, and she was so close to the end, that now she could not fathom what was next. The hundreds of anxious thoughts, and the thousands of questions that had seemed so unimportant before rose again to the surface. It made her muscles lock with uncertainty.

Lila’s own face, however, looked more certain than before. “When you go through the hatch, follow the passage, but don’t get on the bridge to the catwalk at the end. Instead, climb down into the priestess’s viewing area, and you should be able to get into the main space of the chamber from there.”

“Thank you, but that’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

“How do I do it, Lila?” Kanna pressed her forehead to the plaster, her shoulders already aching as the archway shook yet again. “How do I get someone who absolutely hates herself to even want to be rescued, assuming we can find a way out? Is it even going to be worth it? What if nothing I do works?”

“Nothing you do will work, Kanna.”

Lila’s smile was serene when another strike rang through the walls, this time a blow strong enough to knock glass feathers from the swan’s wings, which fell to the ground and shattered.

“You see it now, don’t you? Yes, you see it: All your works are futile. All of them. Love is lost on her; it is wasted; it slides right off her like water, because she hates herself. And you cannot make her love herself. She sought to dissolve her sense of self, and it is true that transcending the limited self is the path to freedom, the price you pay, bit by bit, to let go of every impurity, until you are light as a feather and can fly up to God—but her way is not the way. Her intentions are not genuine. She wants to rid herself of herself, to fight herself, to beat herself to death, not because she loves God, but because she hates herself. She hates herself more than she loves anything. This is the ultimate evil, the unforgivable sin, the thing which the Goddess finds most detestable of all. What Goda has been seeking all this time is not enlightenment—it is self-annihilation.”

Kanna screwed her eyes shut and held onto the arch for her life, though the tension of her clinging only made her arms shake more as the walls shuddered with her.

“She is suicidal, Kanna. She has been for nine years. Nothing you do will change that. She has an inner sickness that cannot be healed by anyone. Even Flower will not heal it.”

Kanna fought back the tears, and when she opened her eyes, the faces of the beasts on the archway grew blurred, transforming into swirling patterns. She turned her gaze instead up to the rattling swan who had mocked her. “Then what do you want from me? Why am I even here?”

Lila did not answer; instead, she asked again, “Do you want me to help you down?”

The walls creaked and shook like a pitching vessel—but Kanna dug her nails in. “No.”

“Climb, then. There is nothing left for you to do except climb. Everything you want is in that chamber, and no plan you make out here will do you any good in there, trust me. You will have to do this on faith and faith alone. Stop looking to anyone else for reassurance; I won’t give it to you.”

With nothing left, with that last ounce of her expectation evaporated, Kanna climbed up towards Hell, because it was the only thing she had ever wanted. When she reached the ledge at the top of the threshold—which was barely as wide as the seat of a bench—she was able to lift herself up and finally rest her pulsing arms. The break was short-lived, however; the walls were buzzing with conflict, and because she was afraid that she would lose momentum, she dragged herself along the narrow shelf until she could grasp the horn on the back of the swan. She balanced herself atop the bird, pressing her hand against the spot on the wall that was marked into the wood.

The hatch flipped open easily, lighter and thinner than she had expected. It revealed almost nothing, though, only darkness peppered with rays of flashing light from the passageway inside. She crouched and stepped in, but found that she had to lower herself to her hands and knees to allow her head to clear the top. One last time, she gazed out at the ornate hallway, past the lights that flickered and waned, the perspective allowing her to see the full brilliance of the many masks, which were less eerie from above.

At the center of it all, Lila stood quietly below, smile unchanged.

“I don’t know if I’ll see you again,” Kanna told her. “I still don’t know what to think of you—you’re the most brazen and open hypocrite I’ve ever met—and I still don’t know why you helped me, but I never would have made it here without you, so thank you.”

“No worries. It’s my job to help—and to be a hypocrite.”

For a brief moment, Kanna was able to look at her face without judgment, to notice how something gleamed in the eyes, something that shined beyond the mask.

“But one more thing,” the woman added. “Be sure to heed my warning about The Mother, as she is certainly lurking somewhere in that chamber.”

“What warning?”

“If she appears, do not speak to her, do not approach her, absolutely do not stare at her face. Doing so can be seen as an invitation for her to unravel your serpents, as she does this to her own children by habit. However, she will not force herself on a heathen unless invited. Pretend that she doesn’t exist and she will respect your atheism.”

Not knowing what any of this meant, Kanna nonetheless thanked her one last time, then retreated into the passage. The hatch snapped closed behind her. She crawled through the dark, towards the dim opening at the end of the narrow tube, which was the main source of light. Beside her, small slits—facing whatever antechamber Lila had forbidden her—revealed the glow of torches and allowed the booming racket from the other side to reach her. Unperturbed, she did not stop crawling, but she did peer through the view-ports as she passed.

It was chaos.

Uniformed women sprinted around the room, dozens of them, the light weak and flickering, but casting shadows everywhere. On the right, huge doors of thick wood covered a massive threshold, and it was barred with chains and planks from top to bottom, with countless women pressed up against them, leaning their weight hard into the creaking frame. To the left, stood another set of doors, equally massive, but strangely untouched, and colored with an elaborate swirl of deep purple and green, the carvings upon it too complex for the waning light to do it justice. Near that entrance, a half-dozen soldiers crouched at an open control box on the wall where one of the women pressed switches in a mindless rhythm, in a wild panic.

Suddenly, the floor shook beneath Kanna as the doors of the threshold below her scraped open.

“Hadd?” The soldier at the control box snapped around, the sheen of sweat on her face pulsing with the living and dying light. “Thank goodness, finally! What took you so long? The Vice Minister telegraphed us over an hour ago, but the signal is dead now! It looks like the power is going out.”

When Lila appeared in the room below, her breath was steady, perfect, too contrasted with the rest of the chamber’s energy. It even sounded like she had closed the door quietly behind her. “There was an incident downstairs and I need you to send guards to the machine room immediately.”

“What? We don’t have the people for that! We have reinforcements now, but they’re outside trying to keep back the crowd. There’s no telling how long these doors will hold if the rioters break through the line again. Where is Engineer Mah? They told us she was coming with Brahm’s cuff key and a heathen mercenary who can…do what is necessary. We can’t wait much longer for this.”

“I’m afraid that we were separated from Engineer Mah—but about the rest, don’t worry; we’ve already deployed the heathen who will slay Goda Brahm. All we do now is wait.”

Kanna blinked, startled, but she reminded herself not to take Lila’s games so seriously. Having seen quite enough, she turned away, training her eyes on the end of the tube where she could spot the beginnings of the perch that Lila had mentioned, and the warm light of a very different chamber. The voices once again merged together as another strike rattled the building, and Kanna left it all behind.

When she reached the ledge of the catwalk, she remembered again what the woman had told her, and instead of proceeding, she looked down to find a loft filled with pews facing a closed set of dark curtains that appeared to cover an opening with thin rays leaking through. There was barely any other light, only a small electric torch illuminating what seemed like an exit on the other end of the room. There was no ladder, either, no path to get down from the start of the catwalk and into the chamber below—but it was not that far of a jump, Kanna thought. She turned around and, with a grunt, let herself slide down until she was hanging by her fingers. She dropped into the room.

Kanna hit a bench and rolled onto the floor, but was otherwise unscathed. The room rumbled from another blow against the walls outside, though it felt distant, more insulated. There was an odd quiet otherwise. The scent of incense overwhelmed her, made her cough as she ambled down the row between the pews. On a mantelpiece behind the last seats, a small wooden goddess smiled at her as she passed. She followed the light of the one torch into the opening of a passageway, since it was the only way out.

The dread had returned—the heaviness in her legs, the uncertainty—but she persevered and let it pass through her like any other storm, entering the small corridor that descended like a ramp and which was lit only by the light coming from its end. The sudden sight of a dozen women surrounding her made her start, until she realized that the walls were lined with mirrors. Kanna pressed a hand to the glass. She had not seen her own face so clearly in a long time, and as she looked into her own eyes, she found that she did not recognize herself anymore. Her face was clean, her eyes dark with pupils spread wide open. Serpents gathered behind her head, rearing up, casting shadows and colors. She ignored them and moved on until she reached the end.

Three steps separated her from the main space and, clenching her jaw, fighting the dread that slowed her, she looked hard at her feet as she descended them. The stone was cold when she hit the temple floor.

Finally, she looked up.

In the depths of the room, surrounded by firelight from all angles, a tall woman on a throne regarded her, amber eyes unblinking from her place on a high platform overlooking a deep pool of steaming water. Kanna could see nothing else except those piercing eyes, as the face was covered in a veil and the body was otherwise draped from head to toe—but after meeting that gaze for an eternal moment, she realized that the eyes were made of glass.

It was a huge statue of the Goddess, set upon an altar, decorated with flowing robes of fine silk, the altar steps leading down to the table upon which a lifeless Rem Murau lay, which overlooked the swirling waters. Kanna could not stop her own shudder when she noticed the woman’s face, when she saw the bright red smears, the oozing blood that painted her mouth and cheek and neck, that dribbled down to the floor and grew a small puddle on the ground.

At the other end of the pool, draped over its edge, face pressed to the stone and holding a bloody dagger whose tip colored the whirlpool in a weak pink, lay what was left of Goda Brahm.

Kanna stiffened with shock, unable to fight the dread anymore. Her chest seized; her shallow, sudden breath echoed through the room like a hiss.

“My God. She’s killed her.”

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 powerful sorceress on Earth.”

---

Onto Chapter 49 >>

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 >>