“No.”
The denial had come out of Kanna’s mouth as a whisper, told to herself in her own native tongue—but it had also rasped from the engineer’s throat at the very same time, loud enough to make the whole room pause. Otherwise, not a soul dared to speak.
It was only the walls of the dome that shuddered in reply, a gust of wind, a hollow breath from the goddess passing through the flap of the door and rumbling the steel bones that held up the canvas. The frame creaked precariously. Kanna thought for an instant that it was about to collapse on top of them.
Helpless, she whipped towards Lila for some kind of clue, for some sign that she had misheard—but the woman’s face was cryptic once again, the face of a passive observer, her eyes locked on the engineer.
Goda, what did you do? Kanna thought, but underneath this surge of panic, there was a strange calm: Goda was alive.
“That’s impossible!” The engineer bellowed when she found her voice again. “What are you even talking about? Brahm knows this would mean her neck; she would never do this! Besides, how could a criminal be allowed on temple ground in the first place? Someone surely would have recognized her passing through the gateway. There has to be some mistake. Make some sense!”
The minister grasped the engineer tighter, her grip stiff, as if she were fighting the urge to shake her. “You expect us to make sense of a lunatic, Eyan?” she shouted. “And you expect the guards to have noticed her among the throng? Wake up! We’ve lost control of the situation. We’re overrun! We have no idea how Brahm got inside—none at all—but she’s raving mad. She closed herself up in the Heart Chamber with the altar, and she’s waving a knife around! We can’t approach directly because she’s threatening to stab the priestess!”
“What?”
“Worse still, even if we get her to move away from the body somehow, we can’t just chase her. She could easily run beyond the cuff’s range and end up electrocuting Priestess Rem. And in this fragile state, if our lesser goddess is still alive, even one shock could….” The minister trailed off, as if it were too horrific of a possibility to even put into words. “That is why we called you: We need a way to decouple those cuffs, otherwise we are walking a forty-pace tightrope no matter what we do. If we don’t approach this just right, we could face an incident worse than the one at Samma Valley—and in public this time.”
“No. No!” the engineer repeated. “That’s impossible, that’s—” For once, the woman seemed to choke, her previously self-assured voice gasping out from a narrowed throat. Shaking her head slowly, she ripped herself away from the vice minister’s grasp, retreating deeper into the room until she bumped into the table at the center. Like a drunk, she staggered as she turned. She pressed her hands to the wood to keep steady, and in that moment she seemed to notice the papers on the table all of a sudden, her fists crumpling through them as if on reflex, though Kanna did not know what the woman was digging for.
“These are all the maps we have of the base floor of the temple, diagrams of the hallways and electrical infrastructure,” a stranger piped up. Apparently sensing the growing tension in the engineer’s muscles, all the bureaucrats had stepped away to give her space—all except one, a cleanly-dressed woman with a younger face, who leaned in cautiously while gripping the edge of the table. “We’ve come up with a plan that might work, but we need you to take a look, Engineer, since you’re the one who knows these tunnels best.”
The engineer jerked, her focus broken by the voice. Slowly, she turned her head towards the woman, and Kanna could finally see her eyes: perfectly dark, perfectly unblinking, a gaze of complete non-understanding.
A gaze filled with writhing snakes.
Somehow, this did not seem to deter the younger bureaucrat. Perhaps she had not seen what Kanna had seen, because she continued rambling, faster this time, as if she had interpreted the engineer’s expression as impatience: “We think we might be able to avoid the mob by breaking in through the machine room beneath the temple, then we can make our way up to the Heart Chamber with the internal elevator. I remember you explained to us once that the cuffs speak to each other through the air in a language we cannot hear, right? Maybe you can change the way they speak to each other from afar, and then once we get close enough to Brahm, we can—”
When the table flipped over, all the lamps crashed to the ground. Papers scattered. Tinder boxes clanked onto the floor and broke ash on the stone. Before anyone could react, the engineer had seized the bureaucrat by the neck.
“Do I look like a magician to you? Do I look like a goddamn prophet of Mahara?” she exploded, but the younger woman could not choke out a reply because both the engineer’s hands were wringing her throat.
Chaos erupted, half the women in the room descending on the engineer and fighting to pull her away, Lila grasping for Kanna’s robes to drag her back towards a wall, the engineer’s victim heaving and sputtering.
“You think I can just wave a magic wand and make the cuffs do whatever the hell you idiots want, is that it? As if the laws of nature work like the laws of your brain-dead bureaucracy? Do you know how many years, how many countless hours of pain it took to make this even work at all, you imbecile?”
Panicked, the young bureaucrat made a wild strike. Though her punch landed squarely on the engineer’s jaw with enough force to send the pop of bone against bone through the room, there was no reaction. There was not even a flinch on the engineer’s face; only the beads of sweat on her brow were disturbed by the blow, spraying on the vice minister who had run over to separate them.
“Engineer, please! Control yourself! Let her go, Eyan, for the love of God!”
Kanna recoiled at first on reflex. Still, her body tensed with the urge to run into the very chaos that she feared, to see these snakes up close, to be seduced by their gaze—until Lila pushed her harder into the stretched canvas and stood in her way.
“I see it now,” Kanna confessed in the Upperland tongue, her gut roiling with the engineer’s anger, as if these snakes had been her own—and in that moment, she knew that the engineer had actually restrained most of her fury. “I can see why she’s Goda’s master.”
“Perhaps she is.” Lila’s tone was again disturbingly calm as the others shouted behind her. It gave Kanna the same unsettling feeling as when she had seen the woman happily standing outside in the frozen rain. “But as you have now discovered, she is also Goda’s slave.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cuffs burn both ways, don’t they? They did for you. They always do. See for yourself.”
The mob had finally dislodged the engineer’s steel grip, but not without mussing the huge woman’s robes in the struggle. The keys around the engineer’s neck were dangling freely again as the young bureaucrat in front of her coughed and doubled over, but this time Kanna saw that necklace for what it was: the heavy choke-chain of a fellow prisoner.
“Who did this?” the engineer demanded, whipping around the room. “Who allowed Brahm into the temple? Do you know what this will cost us? It’s the end of everything!”
“The one responsible is the one speaking!” The vice minister had seized the back of the engineer’s robes and yanked her off balance, her teeth gritted, her anger on raw display in contrast to the veneer of politeness that Kanna had usually seen on every official’s face. “You are the one who put us in this position, Eyan. It is you who will dig us out!”
To Kanna’s surprise, the woman’s voice appeared to stifle the engineer somewhat, though the engineer still heaved deeply when she shook her head and said, “I can’t! I can’t! The cuff’s signal drops beyond around a hundred paces. There is no technical way to control Brahm from the kind of distance you’re asking for.”
“Then we’ll get closer.”
“Even if we get closer, I can’t undo the cuffs without touching them! They are designed to pair and unpair only with the keys; anything less would have introduced a huge vulnerability, don’t you see? They’re impossible to break without shocking the wearer. I made them foolproof!”
“Apparently not foolproof enough,” the minister huffed. “Eyan, if it is impossible, then you must make the impossible possible. You will wave your magic wand, as you say, if you want to keep your job—no, if you want to keep your freedom. We have put up with enough from you in this room. Remember that people have been thrown in confinement for lesser offenses against The Mother. Also remember that it was you and your masters who sold us on this program years ago and insisted that someone as young as Brahm could be reformed into one of your automatons, as if you had something to prove. So if you don’t want to end up in your own chainless chains like the rest of them, then you will stop wasting time and go wrangle your slave!”
The engineer tensed her jaw, but nonetheless seemed to contemplate. “What if she fights us tooth and nail?”
“Then kill her.”
“I can’t do that. You can’t ask me to kill Brahm.”
“Why not? What is your objection now? Certainly it can’t be your morals. Was it not you who just called our customs brain-dead a moment ago? Oh, how fast you have repented from your blasphemies, Eyan!” When the engineer could not offer an intelligent answer, the minister added, “Get a foreigner to shoot an arrow, then. They have no qualms about killing Maharans; it is not against their heathen tradition.”
With a tense hand, the engineer gripped the back of a chair. Kanna thought at first that the woman was about to throw it across the room, but instead she scraped it along the stone floor and had a seat, pressing her face into her hands.
“How are we to find a non-Maharan archer at this hour?” she said. “And in Suda? We don’t have time for this! We can’t dig through the dark for a single needle in these mobs! Not to mention that Brahm is close to the altar. It would be hard to get a clear shot without putting either The Mother or the priestess in peril if that’s the case.”
“Not if we make some space. She would need to be lured away from the altar slowly, then we could either take her down with soldiers or have a foreigner make a fatal shot.”
“Lured away with what? That beast doesn’t want anything from the likes of us. We have no leverage anymore if she’s done this!”
“If anyone knows a list of Brahm’s desires and aversions, it would be you.”
“You don’t understand: Brahm is a survivor. That creature is afraid of Hell more than anything. All she wanted was to stay alive another day; that’s what made her perfect. She does not ever give up. I’ve never met anyone who fears the Goddess the way Brahm does. But if she is willing to enter a temple, knowing full well that there is no way to escape death after what she’s done, then something has changed. The fear is gone. And if the fear is gone, Brahm has nothing left.”
“Are you sure?” The minister’s tone was desperate. “There has to be something she wants more than death. There has to be some kind of bait we can use for a trap.”
“There is no bait in the world for an animal like…”
But then, the engineer lowered her hands from her face. Her stare was quiet, eyes narrowed, aimed at the floor as if she were seeing something deep in the pattern of the cobblestones for the first time, something that she had missed before.
When she lifted her gaze, her expression was firm. They were eyes that searched for nothing—because they had already found Kanna Rava.