THE WORD “COTONOU” MEANT “BY THE river of death” in Fon. How apt, then, that this trading city would be the place where Uma Malakar had taken Jinn’s corpse.
No, not a corpse. His body still held a spark of life in it.
Rin held her breath and walked down the creaky wooden steps of Uma’s apartment, which housed one of the handful of secret laboratories she had scattered across the world. Uma couldn’t return Jinn to the Atakora Mountains; he wouldn’t have survived the trip. This, apparently, was the next best thing.
But could this be considered surviving?
Rin stepped through the threshold of the lab and immediately felt the chill of the air. Thick violet curtains hung down from the ceiling to the floor, all angles and lines. The glass cylinder in the center of the room resembled a closed casket—and perhaps it was. Jinn had been placed inside. He looked to be in some kind of suspended animation; his angled jaw and high cheekbones remained stiff, his eyelashes not so much fluttering from behind the glass, which was fogged with the chilly air pumped in from a folded tube that stretched behind the curtains.
Perfumed lamps scented the air with a mixture of fragrances. Uma listed off a number of strange chemicals she’d never heard of, but when Rin let herself breathe in deeply, she caught a hint of herbs that were familiar to her: yew, wolfsbane, and myrrh.
“Aminadab!” Uma shouted, calling for her assistant. “Go to the fuse box. Bring down the temperature a little more, will you?”
A short, bulky man with shaggy brown hair peeked his head through the curtains from the outside. Then, after a short nod, he limped over to the corner of the basement next to a black metal furnace—a large beast that smelled of coal—and fiddled with the buttons on some kind of wooden contraption attached to the wall.
Uma sighed. “I’d love another assistant here. Someone who can keep a secret. All my other ones are at Bosch’s facility in the mountains. It isn’t fun, by the way, having to split my time between there and here.” For a moment Uma tapped her chin, and then she snapped her fingers with a wide smile. “Don’t you have a little angel living with you over in Ajashe? What was her name? Tutu? Lilith?”
“Lulu,” Rin muttered, rolling the one eye she had left. The little girl was learning Fon at an incredible speed, playing with the village children, making friends by the day. Even after having lost her parents in such a horrible manner, she’d adapted to this new environment with uncanny speed. Rin hated to admit it, but she was a strong girl.
Stronger than you were at that age, accused a nasty voice within her head. Stronger than you are now.
Rin bit her lip to push down her sudden flush of shame.
“Would you mind sending her over?” Uma asked her, clasping her ringed fingers together. “What a wonderful opportunity it would be to introduce a young woman to the sciences. How fun would it be to be a mentor to girls—especially girls of a certain hue.”
“Like I care. Do what you want,” Rin snapped, and looked over to her present assistant working the fuse box. His skin was sooty with the grime of scientific progress. And yet there was nothing exceptionally grimy about this room at all. Inside the curtains, especially, it felt almost serene, like a final resting place—a secret sanctuary cut off from the rest of the world. Jinn’s body had been placed in a bed of flowers; echinacea and lavender hugged his skin like a blanket.
And—
“The white crystal?” Rin narrowed her eyes as she counted the shards strewn about the violet and magenta leaves. They sparkled and trembled a little as the cool air pumped in and out of the casket. It was as if he’d been laid to rest in a sparkling garden.
Well. At least he could be with his beloved Iris, in a way.
“He isn’t dead, thanks to me.” Uma folded her arms as Rin stepped closer to the cylinder and placed her hand on the cold glass. “He should be. The surgery wasn’t enough to save him. It’s his heart. It’s too weak to sustain his brain function. It’s just no good anymore. But I’ve been experimenting with all manner of chemicals to go along with the mysterious properties of the white crystal. This will keep him alive. This will make him even stronger, until…”
Rin turned to her. “Until?”
Uma looked all too proud of herself as she whipped open the curtains and beckoned for Rin to follow. The shelves lining the wall were filled with books and instruments. A large map of the world covered the space where a window could have gone. And underneath the dirty furnace was a cabinet. Using a skeleton key, Uma unlocked it and pulled out a chest.
“Open it,” Uma egged her on.
Her smirk made Rin uncomfortable, but curiosity got the best of her. She did as she was told.
Bizarre how a brass monstrosity made of shifting gears and pulsating fuses could be shaped like a human heart, but it was indeed. Inside the mesh of metal and clockwork was a mineral mixture unmistakably born from the white crystal.
“I always thought we were at least twenty years away from the first successful heart transplant. But Iris’s existence has made many impossible things possible. Hiva told me of a thing called anima. People’s life force. He and Iris could use it to track people—to track each other. Iris could never die because of her crystal heart. Do you know what that means?” The shining white crystal reflected in Uma’s wild, shimmering eyes. “It means the white crystal is life. I can make life with it.”
The shudder that cascaded down Rin’s back had nothing to do with the cold. Rin stepped away from the scientist almost instinctively.
“This is…” Rin shook her head, pushing the chest back into Uma’s hands. “This is nothing but conjecture. Your science is more like wishful thinking. Making a life?” She scoffed, though her body stiffened with a mysterious kind of fear and dread. “What hubris. Do you think yourself a god, Malakar?”
“Who needs gods? Gods can die. Look at Iris.”
Uma had said it so nonchalantly, so disrespectfully, that Rin’s body flushed with heat. Her fingers clenched into fists as she glared at the woman.
“Oh, don’t be so upset. Iris’s death is a tragedy, yes—poor girl. But it’s more confirmation that our world is governed by the rules of evolution: survival of the fittest. We humans must use whatever we can to evolve and live on into the future.” Uma stared at the artificial heart in her hands. “Science is the way. Thanks to Iris’s existence, technology has advanced much further than it should have. And with the war in Europe getting rowdier, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of new subjects to test my theories on. Then one day, more people like Jinn will be saved. See? The world tends to move in the direction of progress. Always.”
Rin grew cold as Uma stashed Jinn’s replacement heart back in the drawer underneath the furnace. In Rin’s experience, those who felt they had power over life or death were not to be trusted with power in any form. It was the folly of most humankind. Iris surely knew this. It was what she’d been fighting against since the moment she’d regained her memories.
But if it could help Jinn… if it would give Iris peace…
“So what’s next?” Rin turned from the woman and her strange inventions, focusing instead on the map of the world on the wall. It was similar to the one Temple had handed to her the day Uma had put him on a ship bound for Europe and watched him set sail, guarded by her men. It was made on yellow parchment, with old partitions marking colonial borders. The X symbols scribbled on sites around the globe were difficult to miss.
Taking her favorite pipe off a counter, Uma began mixing in fluid to smoke. “Each X marks a Solar Jump, as we’ve discussed. Do you see the different colors?” Walking up to the map, Uma took a puff of smoke and tapped one section. “It corresponds to pairs—according to Temple’s research, each Jump had a twin.” She nodded to John Temple’s journal, left on the counter, as Aminadab began burning a pastille in the corner. “You have a similar map. Study it. Memorize it. With these we’ll be able to hunt down Hiva, wherever he is. We’ll be able to lure him to Hiva’s Tomb.” Uma’s eyes glinted. “And disassemble him.”
“Do you think he already knows of the Jumps?”
Uma stroked her chin. “Well, it is Naacalian technology. He seemed particularly fond of the civilization, judging by the way he spoke to me about them. It was during that period of time he battled Iris. So we shouldn’t assume that he doesn’t. And even if he didn’t—you said he’d left with that boy Lawrence Hawkins, didn’t you? Then either way, he can travel wherever he pleases, as long as it’s on this earth.”
And when Hiva was done with this earth, he’d need a way to leave it to destroy another. That meant he’d make his way to Uma eventually.
“Goodness. I guess I’m in a bit of trouble,” Uma said with a shrug, before taking a drag from her pipe. Rings made of the fumes rose from her lips with each puff.
“Stay on alert then,” Rin ordered, turning to the wall of purple drapes hanging from the ceiling that was concealing Jinn’s frail body from her. “If you’re going to play the mad scientist, at least don’t die before you bring this man back to life.”
“You care a lot about this boy,” said Uma, giving her a sidelong look.
Rin scoffed. The man she’d willingly drugged and manipulated to force Iris to do her bidding? No. She couldn’t claim such a privilege. But Iris loved him. And in one corner of her heart, she hoped that if the world were to end, at least those two might survive.
Rin turned and strode toward the staircase. “Tell me when Bosch returns from the Congo. We’ll set out immediately after that.”
“Yes, General.”
Rin didn’t care if the salute Uma gave her was in jest. She’d been used to giving orders and feeling nothing when her subordinates pounded their chests and shouted in response. But this emptiness was of a different kind. It was lonely and spread within her like a cancer threatening to decay her from the inside.
Rin’s body felt heavy, her footsteps like lead as she dragged herself up the steps, refusing to take even one last look at the half corpse trapped in a cage like an experiment.
This was a war. Any warrior knew that one could not win a war without heart or will.
The two things she didn’t have.