The sacrifice, at least, looked familiar. Mina waited behind the altar, flanked by Caleb and by the woman Chel, who Temoc had introduced as a friend—a strong figure, shorter, broader than Mina herself. Mina stood with hands clasped behind her back as the service progressed toward sacrifice. The people of Chakal Square clustered around the makeshift temple; the few hundred who could fit on the mats knelt there, and the rest, thousands she estimated, pressed near. Children rode on parents’ shoulders. Men near the back perched on tiptoes. They muddled through the call and response, sludging the sharp consonants and glottal stops of High Quechal.
She knew this service, but it felt different in the open air under so many eyes. Temoc’s muscles rippled as he raised his arms. Scars shone with faith.
Her husband. But he belonged to them as well.
“And nobody’s thought to bring more mats in the last few weeks?” Mina asked Chel.
“No.”
“It would let more people sit.”
“But it would make those who sit less special.”
She nodded. “So there’s status in kneeling.”
“Sure,” Chel said, though there was a hitch in her voice, uncertainty.
“How’s it decided, who kneels on the mats and who stands?”
“Some wait all night.”
“Do the same people always kneel?”
“No.”
“Why not? If it’s better to kneel than to stand, wouldn’t people with enough influence want to kneel all the time?”
“People who haven’t knelt before should have a chance,” Chel said as Temoc drew the knife.
“Who decided this?”
“Nobody,” Chel said. “It’s just the way things are. You ask a lot of questions.”
“That’s what I do,” she said. “I study this sort of thing. I don’t usually have a chance to see its infancy. This is stuff we speculate about in journals—that makes us scream at one another if we’ve been drinking.”
“What stuff?”
“Construction of ritual. Ossification, or codification really, of performance. The extent to which it’s intentional or accidental, or an intentional response to initial accident.”
“We’re not an experiment.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The blade came down. “Just—it’s interesting to think, given what you have here, what it might look like in a hundred years, or a thousand.”
Mina turned to Chel, and turned away too, from the gods that were and were not her own, which rose from the altar to lick the sacrifice’s blood. She shared Temoc’s faith—but in Chakal Square, under the burnt orange sky, she felt alien. “Do you think we’ll last that long?” Chel said.
And in that question she heard the fear Temoc buried under false certainty. “Why wouldn’t you?”
As the gods feasted before them, she wanted to shake Chel and demand: tell me why you’re scared. Tell me why I should leave here now, and take my son and husband home. But she did not.
“A hundred years is a long time. That’s all.”
“You’ll be fine,” Mina said, and hoped she was right.