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…