Rone.
Rone glanced up from the crystal ground beneath him. He knelt on a single knee, fingertips brushing the cool glass that reflected Ireth’s fiery mane and tail, his white halo.
“Is there not enough time?” Reaching into the mortal plane made him fuzzy. He didn’t want to be fuzzy when Kolosos struck.
Ireth shook his dark head. Something is wrong.
“What?”
His tail swished. Something has changed. The atmosphere is different. Wrong. His dark eyes locked on Rone’s. Is your strength adequate? We must hurry to the epicenter. I believe that is where Kolosos will be.
Rone stood. He felt . . . all right. He was hungry, but rest had done him some good. “I’ll survive. The epicenter? Of the columns?”
Ireth nodded. That is where the planes will first merge. Where Kaj will be. Where we will strike.
Rone turned from the fire horse and looked out over their small, obscure army. It had grown again. If he counted each numen as five men, they had a decent retinue.
I cannot carry you.
Like he’d forgotten. “I can run.”
And he did.
Sandis held a god in her hands.
She cradled it in her palms, the brilliance of its shining center sending sparkles of light across her skin. It reflected off her tears, no matter how many times she blinked her eyes.
High Priest Dall knelt before her. They stood just outside the room where it had happened. Where the Angelic lay lifeless, without a heart. Sandis closed her hands over the amarinth, hiding its brilliance. She thought she could feel a pulse between its golden loops.
“My child.” The priest cupped his larger hands over hers. His eyes glimmered with sadness, but hope limned them, giving her strength. “Time waits for none, even God. I beg you with all that I am: don’t let this sacrifice be wasted.”
Sandis nodded, a final tear splashing off her cheek. “I promise.”
High Priest Dall pinched his lips together and stood, moving aside to reveal her path. Sandis took the stairs down slowly. She needed to hurry, but her bones . . . they couldn’t. An awed reverence had worked its way into them, her blood, her muscles.
Cleric Liddell and Priestess Marisa waited at the bottom of the stairs. Cleric Liddell opened his mouth to speak, but after seeing Sandis’s face, he didn’t. Sandis wondered what her countenance looked like.
Sandis pushed past them, clenching her fingers to hide the power clasped between them. She pushed toward the front of the church, out the door, and into the night.
Cool air whisked by, carrying the promise of autumn.
From the church, Sandis could see much of the city; the ground here was higher than farther west. She couldn’t make out the Innerchord, but she knew how to reach it without Oz.
She’d promised to save them.
Dots of black moved against the city streets that had once glowed with lamplight. The evacuation? From here they were all shadows, merging together. Shadows that feared the monster lurking in a plane so intimately connected with theirs.
It was no wonder they hated her. Feared her. If the occult had been snuffed out years ago, Kolosos would not be here. He’d be trapped in that ethereal place alongside the other Noscons. Alongside Ireth, who must so desperately want freedom. Just as Sandis did.
Squeezing the amarinth, Sandis prayed. I need your help, Ireth. I promised to save them. Save them, and you, too.
And she would, or die trying.
She wasn’t afraid anymore.
Slipping the amarinth into her pocket, Sandis undid the button holding together the collar of her dress and rent the garment down the back.
Elfri folded her arms across her chest as her men passed firearms down a line, arming Riggers and citizens alike. Elfri had promised the citizens that the act of bravery would earn them protection after the war, presuming they survived. The rest of the beleaguered city folk had joined the ongoing evacuation, which was crowded and slow, since only one exit had been cleared through the rubble that was once Dresberg’s great wall. But at least Elfri needn’t oversee it anymore. She just didn’t have enough of her to manage it.
“Go!” she barked when a boy no older than sixteen ogled his newly received gun, lifted from Helderschmidt’s firearm factory. The place was weakly guarded; it had been easy to infiltrate. The boy snapped to attention and ran with the others toward the center of the city, where Kolosos’s red light burned. This would be the quickest battle of their lifetime—roughly half an hour for them to stop the monster.
Pete and Rufus galloped up, the former towing Elfri’s mare behind him. He left the reins hanging for her. She grabbed them but didn’t mount. Not yet. She’d see all her people off first. It might be the last she ever laid eyes on them.
She didn’t like their odds, but if Sandis believed there was a chance, it was either take it or admit defeat. And a Rigger never cried defeat.
Admittedly, Arnae Kurtz had helped bring Elfri around to the idea. He approached her now, a gun strapped to his back. He preferred to use his hands, but every man needed to be armed. The bullets did nothing to the monster, but they’d take down its servants just fine—servants so enslaved to Kolosos’s will they’d die for it.
“Move!” she shouted as the remaining men got their guns. “Go!” She followed the last one, but Kurtz stopped her with a hand clasped on her shoulder. They almost saw eye to eye; Elfri was just a hair taller.
“See you on the other side, my friend.”
Elfri snorted. “I don’t plan to die tonight.” But there was no way to avoid watching the death. How many men would she lose? Oh, for Celestial’s sake, don’t cry.
Kurtz smiled and dropped his hand. “Then we’ll reunite tomorrow.”
Tilting her head to one side, Elfri said, “You don’t strike me as a man interested in the mob.”
“Not in the mob, no.”
Elfri blinked once, smirked, and pulled her rifle from the sling on her back. “Get moving, or we’ll miss our chance.” She didn’t clarify what she meant. She swung up into her mount’s saddle and, with a jerk of her head, ordered Pete and Rufus to follow her into the fray.
Celestial speed that they survived the hour.
Sandis walked toward the center of Dresberg.
She couldn’t run. There were too many people for that. Sprinting, riding, crawling through the dark. Packs on their backs. Animals on leashes. Lamps swinging in their hurry, casting dancing light across abandoned buildings. The breeze swept across her exposed back, but it didn’t raise gooseflesh or invite shivers. It warmed her.
Sandis’s gaze floated over them, as though it could peer through the flats and factories that surrounded them. As though she could see all the way into the charcoal heart of the city. The Innerchord. She clung to that destination like ice to an eave. She felt every dip in the cobblestones under her worn shoes. Smelled sweat and kerosene on the breeze. It tousled her hair, her skirt.
The amarinth sat heavy in her pocket and yet weighed nothing. Its concealed light burned like a hot poker against her leg. She felt it like the promise it was.
“Hey, stop!” someone called to her. A man about her age. He slowed, only to be knocked forward by another evacuee behind him. Stumbling past her shoulder, he said, “You’re going the wrong—”
And then his voice cut off completely. Sandis knew why. She paused and turned toward him, not to hide her exposed script from his eyes, but to meet his stare head-on. To look into his dark gaze, so much like her own.
His gaze moved sluggishly from her back to her face, disbelief widening his features.
Yes, I’m one of them, she thought, the words cocooning her in a loose blanket. I’m one of them. And I am not afraid.
“Hurry,” she whispered. The sounds of footsteps, murmurs, and wagon wheels nearly swallowed her voice. Someone else bumped into the man’s shoulders. Oddly, no one collided into Sandis.
Eyes still round, the man nodded once, then vanished into the crowd.
It felt like a dream.
Rone ran over a world made of glass, one brick in a wall of monsters charging over the stars. Their presence gave him energy, focus. His legs pumped beside Ireth’s and Grendoni’s. Iihedoh flitted almost directly overhead, as though protecting him from threats from above. He could hear Drang’s hot breath as the wolfish creature panted. Mahk’s song floated nearby, reserved and reassuring.
We are nearly there.
Rone looked up, barely registering the change in terrain in time to jump as the ground dropped down. He blinked, and the monster was there, his red light reflecting off the hardness of the plane. His back was to them—or that’s what it looked like. Rone was still too far to—
The light narrowed and brightened into a crimson pillar, and Kolosos vanished.
He has descended! Ireth called. Surround the epicenter!
The numina growled, sang, roared, chirped. Surged forward with renewed vigor to the place their captor had just stood.
Rone, stop.
Rone nearly kicked himself in the ankle at the command. He stopped, chest already heaving from the exercise as he turned toward the silvery beast beside him.
“What’s wrong?”
Ireth tilted his head, as though listening to something. She will need me soon.
“You can fight until she does.”
Ireth nodded. But I want you to watch, Rone. I want you to be our eyes, to see what Kolosos does in the mortal realm. You will need to stay close to me.
Rone nodded, trying to ignore the cold fingers of fear walking up his ribs. He pushed questions and doubts out of his mind. If he just focused, just did what Ireth said—
Come. Ireth galloped forward, nearing the circle the other numina had formed around the epicenter—a place they’d somehow recognized despite the fact that it looked no different from the rest of the ethereal plane.
Ireth’s back right hoof circled the glass. The image of a starry sky swirled and parted, revealing a half-molten monster descending upon Rone’s homeland.
“Sometimes,” the Angelic’s voice curled in Sandis’s memory, “we have to sacrifice what is dearest to us to save what is dearest to others.”
A tear escaped her eye as she marched forward. The heavy truth bore down on her heart like a hundred grappling hands.
It had to end this way, didn’t it? And she’d known. She’d always known.
To save the others, friends and strangers alike, she had to sacrifice Anon.
When she’d found him in that building, she’d been struck by the fear in his eyes, the gauntness of his body—death would be well met. She didn’t know her brother as a man, only as the twelve-year-old boy who had gone missing mere days before her own capture. Where had he been? She would never know.
I’m sorry, Anon. She put one foot in front of the other. The streets had opened, only stragglers passing her. I’m sorry I can’t save you, too.
“You!” a familiar voice barked. Sandis almost didn’t turn, but a man in scarlet uniform stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “Oz needs you, blasted girl! Where have you been?”
Sandis turned her head, not to look at the scarlet in her path, but at the man who’d shouted at her. Chief Esgar jogged up from the north, surrounded by a half-dozen policemen.
His gaze dropped to the ripped back of her dress. He gawked. Why? He knew what she was. She wouldn’t hide it, not anymore.
When she saved them, they would all know what she was.
Chief Esgar shook himself. “Oz is west of the Innerchord. Go! Before it’s too late!”
Sandis shook her head. “My path has changed.”
The ground rumbled, and all of them looked skyward, to the red light blotting out the stars.
Hissing through clenched teeth, Chief Esgar grabbed her forearm and jerked her toward him. “Insolent woman! You will—”
“Unhand her.” A new voice finished the sentence for him. Low, feminine. Sandis knew it immediately.
Twisting her arm the way Arnae had taught her to do, she broke free of the chief’s grip and turned around. Sherig’s lamplight highlighted the lower half of her face: a strong jaw and lips painted red. Two burly men on horseback lingered just behind her.
“Sherig!” Sandis exclaimed, and the scarlets immediately tensed. She rushed toward the taller woman. “I need to get to the Innerchord.”
Sherig studied her for half a second before nodding. “Pete, take her.”
Chief Esgar pulled a club from his belt and marched forward. “I must deliver her to the west flank!”
Pete offered a hand, and Sandis bolted toward his horse.
Sherig squared her shoulders. “I trust her more than you, old man. And we haven’t time to bicker about it.”
Pete clasped Sandis around the wrist and hauled her onto the saddle behind him.
“Don’t kill my mare,” Sherig snapped over her shoulder.
“Please.” Sandis grabbed Pete’s sides. “Hurry.”
The mobsman kicked his heels into the mare’s flanks, bringing her toward the sound of screams.
Rone watched in horror as Kolin fought Kolin. Whatever magic Kolosos worked, he wielded it efficiently, transforming ten men at a time into mindless minions. They dropped nearly as quickly as they rose, save for when the soldiers second-guessed their kill orders. In those cases, they died instead.
Behind Kolosos, the gold plate began to grow—and so did the epicenter in the ethereal plane. It glowed faintly at first, then brightly. The light slowly leaked outward, illuminating the crystal floor.
Drang howled, unleashing his fury against the lucent ground. All the numina did. They beat it, sprayed it, engulfed it in flames. Every numen, large and small, Ireth included, attacked the epicenter as though it were Kolosos himself.
Their attacks reached Kolosos on the mortal plane. He ticked. Winced. Every now and then, the monster would jerk and step on one of his minions or send an elbow into a standing building, lighting the interior on fire.
But the numina didn’t stop him. Couldn’t hurt him.
The epicenter and the Innerchord gleamed with power. The merge was beginning.
He searched the army ranks for Sandis, but didn’t see her. He didn’t know where she was, what she was doing, or how to find her. His belly tightened, and not from hunger. Where are you?
The epicenter reddened. Rone stepped away from his porthole to spy through the one in the center of the numina ring. It revealed the top of Kolosos’s head. The center of the battle.
Some of Mahk’s spray rained on Rone’s head and shoulders. He barely noticed.
“He’s ignoring us,” Rone murmured, though none of the numina responded. “This isn’t enough.”
His hands formed tight fists at his side. Gritting his teeth, Rone muscled his way into the circle, pushing between Pesos and another numen.
“Kaj, you rank bastard!” he shouted. “Fight us yourself, you coward!”
Beneath the glowing glass, Kolosos tilted his horned head back and looked up with both brilliant eyes.