THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING.”
Rin wasn’t sure how many times she repeated it as she and Berta began the long trudge back to Ajashe. Several days of travel on foot. Several days of seeing empty clothes on the dirt road and shoes at the edge of the forests where people had clearly tried to run. The wind carried thick, heavy black ashes.
They saw only one alive on their trek back. Deeper in the forest, Rin heard crying. After a quick search, Rin pulled the girl out of the pile of leaves she’d clearly hidden herself underneath.
“Are you okay?” Rin asked the girl in English without even thinking, not knowing what language she even communicated in.
The girl was of the Bariba people, for she spoke Baruba. Rin didn’t know it. But it seemed that the girl did know one English word, as among the ones she stuttered out was “devil.”
“Take her,” Rin ordered, pushing the girl to Berta half in a stupor. “We’ll find her some help in Ajashe.”
That was what she had hoped.
That was what anyone would assume.
As they came to the threshold of the city, Rin’s knees nearly buckled, taking her down to the ground. But her leaden feet somehow kept moving through Ajashe, through the once-bustling port town. Her dilated pupils kept searching for a single merchant behind the vending tents, a soldier, or a missionary beating his Bible.
“Dear God…” Berta’s long brown curls whipped across her face as her arms dangled at her sides. “There’s no one. There’s no one here….”
Rin shook her head. She wouldn’t accept it. She couldn’t. So she ran through the city. She ran from the marketplace to the ships at the dock. She doubled back to the homes and hospitals. She stopped to catch her breath against a nearby palm tree.
This can’t be happening, she thought for the thousandth time, touching her empty socket of a right eye from behind its eyepatch. This isn’t happening.
Abiade. Her nails scratched the bark of the tree trunk as she thought of her friend. As her cheeks flushed and her chest heaved, she turned and flew to his home, the place he’d given her to stay in, despite knowing the dangers that seemed to haunt her every step. And when she burst open the door of that thatched-roof house, Berta was already there, kneeling by a pile of ashes next to a bookshelf. Rin hadn’t been there when Abiade had bought it. But she had been present to hear him brag about it. All the money he’d saved to get it cheap from a merchant. All the books he’d be able to study before he started his career as a translator.
Abiade’s clothes hung over an empty chair.
Rin dropped to her knees and finally began screaming.
“What?” Inside her secret laboratory, Uma dropped her pipe. “You saw who at the mining site?”
The curtains that kept Jinn’s half-dead body—almost a corpse—hidden had been drawn closed in the center of the lab. Good. Rin couldn’t bear to look at him, not now that this horror had been unleashed upon them. As Rin and Berta barreled down the staircase, Lulu, who’d been cleaning some empty conical flasks on the rightmost table, looked up at the filthy, terrorized women with her big doe eyes.
“Iris?” the little girl said, squeezing her white cloth. “You saw Miss Iris? So she really is alive?”
“Oh, thank God you’re okay, kid,” Berta said, running up to a confused Lulu and hugging her tightly.
But Rin went straight for Uma, grabbing her by the sari, nearly tripping over her pipe on the floor. “Iris is back.” She could feel her teeth rattling. “I saw her with my own eyes. We both saw her. We both saw her kill Bosch’s men inside the Coral Temple.”
She looked back at Berta, who nodded in a daze.
“Well, that’s…” Uma paused, glancing between the two of them nervously. “But she didn’t kill you, clearly? We all know Iris is a creature who can’t die. We know she doesn’t particularly fancy the Committee either.”
“You don’t get it,” Rin hissed. “She’s killing. Right now she’s killing indiscriminately. The whole city of Ajashe is… is gone. Everyone in it is gone.”
She choked back a sob and turned away from them. Silence. Their sunken corpse-like expressions spoke volumes. Uma’s shoulders fell, and that told Rin more than words ever could. Uma picked up her pipe and moved to the map of the world plastered on the wall, staring at it for too long. Each second that passed was a knife slicing away whatever sanity Rin had left, like carving meat off the bone.
“Then Hiva’s Tomb is needed now more than ever,” Uma said, with a dark solemnity that frightened Rin. “We’ll need to go to Bosch. Ask him to send more troops to secure the area. Now that Iris is on the move, it should be safe.”
“Should be,” Berta scoffed, rubbing her dirty face with both hands. “Should be, she says. What is that? A guess? A wish?”
“That’s all we have right now,” Uma snapped.
Berta pounded the table with her fist, causing Lulu to jump in her seat and the glass flasks to rattle. “All we have isn’t enough. We already had one Hiva to deal with. Now Iris has turned her coat. We don’t know where she’s headed or what she’s planning.”
“But we do know what she’s planning,” Lulu told her simply. “She’s planning on punishing the wicked….” She pressed an inquisitive finger to her full bottom lip. “I guess that means all of us.”
Rin didn’t know whether it was innocence or madness that had made Lulu so eerily calm—or both. Seeing the girl tilt her head and consider everything, as if calculating a math equation, made Rin furious as much as it made her jealous.
“Damn it,” Uma cursed, muttering under her breath. “With the Solar Jumps around too, she may not even be on the same continent anymore.”
Maneuvering around the curtains in the center of the room, Uma walked to a long wooden cupboard in the upper left corner. Opening the cupboard door, she pulled out a shawl and wrapped it around herself. “The nights here get chilly,” she said. “Come with me, and quickly. We’re going to see my employer.”
Leaving Lulu with Berta and Aminadab, Rin and Uma traveled east to Lagos on foot. Because Iris could appear and strike at any moment, they stayed on alert, moving only at night and finding shelter among the trees during the day. Every time Rin saw another human being alive, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“But why did she leave us alive?” Rin asked one night as they trudged through a muddy path. “Or, more specifically, me alive? She looked right at me.”
“Did she?” Uma hadn’t taken her pipe with her and so sounded a little high-strung. The lack of nicotine probably didn’t help her nerves. “Well, there’s nothing to say that Iris wouldn’t still have her memories.”
“The other Hiva seemed to have his,” Rin said, remembering the hatred seeping from him as he’d stared down Iris in the Coral Temple.
“It’s her emotions that may be missing.” Uma batted a fly away and gasped as she almost tripped over the thick, protruding root of a particularly tall kapok tree. “John Temple wrote of Iris when she was under the surveillance of Doctor Seymour Pratt’s medical team in Cambridge. Though Pratt described her as a beast, Temple noted her frighteningly calm demeanor in between procedures.” Uma said the word “procedures” with a shudder. “Well, Pratt’s a racist sociopath who’d call anyone a ‘beast’ so long as they had a slightly darker hue than white porcelain, so that doesn’t surprise me. But after everything that was done to that poor girl, even if everything we knew of ‘Iris’ is gone, I wouldn’t be surprised if she did have one emotion left.”
“Anger,” Rin answered, staring up at the starless sky.
Boris Bosch owned a compound in Lagos, one of the major economic powers in the Yoruba territories colonized by Britain. The land he owned on the outskirts of the city could have rivaled that of any colonial administrator. White soldiers stood along the open arched entrances of his white mansion. When they saw Uma, they saluted, clicking their heels while keeping their rifles tightly bound to their sides. Uma nodded and gestured at Rin to follow her inside. Rin wondered if Uma quite liked it, being regarded so highly in this insular world of whites. Iris had told her once about Uma’s history while they were traveling: Uma was the daughter of an Indian woman and an English military man, who had been cheated out of her inheritance by the British side of her family. She had competed against white men her entire scientific life. The military women of Dahomey were servants to their king, and they’d committed many atrocities against neighboring tribes. But they, at least, bowed to no white man.
Uma’s jaw set once they walked into Bosch’s dining room.
He was dressed as a hunter, just as he had been in his facility within the Atakora Mountains. Boris Bosch, the merchant of death, who sold weapons through his Guns and Ammunitions Company. The round white helmet of a hat and ivory tiger’s teeth strung along his neck were just as she remembered it. The long slit that scarred his left cheek told the tale of his past hunts. But Rin couldn’t concentrate on anything other than his thin fish lips, bobbing up and down disgustingly as he tore through the wild boar meat plated delicately on his long mahogany table.
Soldiers lined up against the floral-patterned walls, their guns at the ready. Though the table took up half of the extensive room, only the arms dealer was allowed to dine. No other plate was set.
“Uma,” Bosch said, nodding his head but not looking up to acknowledge her. “I assume you’re here for one of two reasons: to tell me that you’ve finished producing the energy source for the Ark, or to tell me the status of the project at the mining site.”
Uma looked no less the proud genius, but Rin noticed that she seemed to stand a little straighter in this man’s presence. She cleared her throat.
“My work on the energy source is coming along but is still, as of yet, incomplete. I’m here to report a problem with that mining project,” she told him, folding her arms.
“I don’t pay you to report problems.” Bits of meat had gotten caught in his drooping mustache underneath that sharp, sloping nose. He brushed them aside and began carving into his food again with a fork and knife.
“And yet here I am.” She shut her eyes. “Your men have been killed. By Hiva.”
“Hiva? Nonsense. I thought he’d vanished from the mining site after promising to destroy the world within a year.”
“I mean… the other Hiva, sir.”
Bosch set his utensils down upon his messy plate with a careful clatter. The soldiers who stood just below the rows of framed elephant tusks and tiger hides straightened a little. Bosch’s gaze finally lifted to meet Uma’s but then shifted to Rin. Instinctively the girl lifted her chin with pride, before the crushing weight of her failure to stop Iris nearly broke her resolve. She clenched her fingers into fists as the foul man looked her up and down.
“Isn’t this her?” he asked most ridiculously, though his tone was fully serious.
After a quick, awkward glance toward Rin, Uma cleared her throat. “This is her ally, Olarinde. A member of the Dahomey military.”
“Ah. Well, such women look alike to me.”
Uma and Rin were rigid as Bosch sat back in his grand chair. Rin could feel her indignation, her hatred, for this man stirring within her, burning her dark brown skin. The audacity of this fool, whose manhood had to be supplemented by such a gaudy display of dead animals. Rin’s hands itched to pull out her sword, dormant and brewing inside her chest.
“Then the first Hiva is alive.” Bosch clucked his tongue as he brushed off breadcrumbs that had stuck to his fingers. “Yes, I remember her. That day near the Ark, during my meeting with the king of Dahomey. But the Ark is yet incomplete, as you’ve so astutely reminded us. Two Hivas mean two power sources. Uma. It is your task to oversee the capture of both.”
Rin clenched her teeth. “If it were so easy to capture Hiva, then we would have done so by now, you—”
Uma put up a hand to silence her. And though Rin bristled, she couldn’t ignore the apology in her stern face.
“Since Iris—the first Hiva—is gone from the mining site, you can send your men to resecure it,” Uma suggested. “If Iris appears there again, we can spring a trap.”
“We cannot wait for that girl to suddenly appear,” Bosch said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “We need to make her appear.” He leaned against the table, the sudden weight of his elbows making his solid silver dinner plate rattle. “We will spring a trap. But not at the mining site.”
The legs of his chair screeched against the tiled floor as he stood from the dining table and left through the arched doorway behind him, beckoning for them to follow. The narrow hallway was plastered in beige, with lamps hanging from the ceiling—each one lit so bright, it stung Rin’s remaining eye.
“These are desperate times, Uma,” Bosch said, with his hairy arms behind his back. “The invitations have already gone out to those who will patronize the Ark, and according to Madame Bellerose, many responses have returned favorable.”
Rin wondered who in the Enlightenment Committee had thought it a good idea to allow Madame Bellerose to vet who was “worthy” enough to be a passenger on a transdimensional flight.
Bosch’s thick leather boots pounded the wooden floors until he came to the end of the hall. After placing a hand on the golden doorknob, he turned to them, his bushy brows knitted together. “We cannot leave anything to chance.”
The vast room Bosch had led them into reminded Rin of a grand exhibit at some world’s fair. The ceiling was high enough for their footsteps to echo. Half the room was closed off by some thick metal meshwork that Rin couldn’t see through.
What she could see were rows of connected parchment that covered the wall. Traced on them in thick black ink were drawings of two giant spiderlike machines, one short and squat, the other long and lithe. They looked like designs for a new weapon. A new type of armored vehicle, perhaps? She’d never seen an armored vehicle before, but her military superiors had told her once that somewhere in the world, scientists were developing such monstrosities in earnest.
Each machine had a circular glass plate in the center of their heads. Black scribbles of English and German writing surrounded the diagrams. Rin could make out the words “Solar” and “Shadow.” And “Titans.”
As Bosch walked up to the wall of diagrams, Rin whipped around, looking to Uma for some kind of explanation, but the woman remained silent, her expression grim.
“So then,” she said. “You want us to activate the Titans.”
Titans? Rin scoured her memories for the word. Thanks to Abiade’s library, she’d managed to read John Temple’s book, A Family’s Travels through West Africa. But she remembered nothing about any Titans.
Wait. Iris. Iris had mentioned it in France while they’d stayed in that dusty tavern. It was among all the gibberish in the scrolls they’d stolen from the British Museum’s Library of Rule. At the time Iris had furiously pored over them, searching desperately for some clue that would help her take away the curse of Hiva. The Titans… what were they?
Bosch walked up to the wall and touched the drawing of the shorter machine. “The Naacal had created so many advanced weapons during their time—like these. Their ‘Titans.’ John Temple was the one who discovered and deciphered the information they kept on the Titans. Such monstrous machines the Naacal built. They must have been desperate in their war against Hiva to go so far as to use them.”
“The Titans,” Uma said, and for some reason, Rin felt as though the woman were speaking directly to her—though she didn’t so much as turn her head. “The Solar Titan and the Shadow Titan: twin mechanical beasts with the ability to release energy blasts that had an explosive power never before seen by humanity. From the information John Temple discovered, I was able to draw out what they might have looked like in those ancient days. But I’ve never actually seen them in person. I can’t even be completely certain they still exist. The Naacal were a frightening people—to think they’d managed to create weapons that could erase cities in one fell swoop?” Uma suppressed a shudder.
Machines with the ability to erase cities? A chill sank through Rin, settling as an icy lump in the pit of her stomach. The hairs on her arms stood on end. Such a thing couldn’t be possible. Such a thing shouldn’t be possible.
“The Titans do still exist. John Temple was sure of it—so sure that he even managed to pinpoint the precise area where the Naacal had hidden them. The Atlas mountain range in the north.” The wicked curve of Bosch’s liver-pink lips made Rin’s skin crawl. “We’ll use them.”
Uma took two careful steps toward her employer. “I would advise strongly against that. Even if we’re able to trap Iris—Hiva—in the delegated site, using the Titans would certainly mean sacrificing tens of thousands of people. The cost is too high.”
“Too high?” And at this, the man whom Rin had only ever heard speak in deadly, quiet tones let out a stream of awful, guttural laughter.
Each chuckle made Uma angrier, and she gripped her shawl more tightly. Then Bosch said something in German before gesturing toward the metal wall to their left.
“For you of all people to talk about the human cost in the pursuit of science is laughable. I haven’t been told a funnier joke in recent memory.”
“Boris!” Uma said, her nostrils flaring and her eyes blazing. “I’m serious about this. This is going too far.”
“And what do you think you’ve been doing for me all these years, my dear?” Calmer now, Bosch slowly approached the metal wall, his hands once again placed behind his back. “All those weapons you’ve made. What do you think has been the result of your relentless desire for knowledge?”
Uma stiffened when Bosch slid open the metal door of a little window on the dark mesh wall. She didn’t move when Bosch beckoned her forward, inviting her to look through the peephole.
But Rin did. She wanted to see.
“With the Great War now raging across Europe, Bosch Guns and Ammunitions is drawing in a higher profit than ever before,” Bosch said as Rin approached him carefully, her heart thumping in her ears. “The weapons you’ve helped me develop, Uma, are being used on battlefields. And some of the research you’ve laid down has been used by my researchers to create untold wonders.”
Bosch stepped aside. Rin looked through the glass.
Sealed inside a dark room behind the wall, African men, stripped of their clothes, each with one arm cut off, stood in a line as if in a firing range. The sight of their mutilated bodies infuriated Rin in ways she couldn’t put into words. Some spat and cursed, their fury and their defiance crackling. Others held hands and prayed. All looked terrified. Each and every one of them. Looking at them rounded up like animals drew hot tears from her that threatened to fall, a rush of heat rising to her head. But she wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Inside with the men were soldiers whose faces were completely covered in strange-looking masks. They were like sacks wrapped firmly around the soldiers’ heads, but with a bulbous filter over the mouth and a nosepiece through which each could breathe. All but two soldiers pointed their rifles at the African men.
Bosch knocked on the window with his knuckles. That was the signal. The two soldiers tinkered with some kind of metal barrel in the corner, and then—
Rin couldn’t hear the sound, but she could see the steam rising from the barrel. It wasn’t thick enough to obscure the African men, who quickly began to writhe and clutch at their throats.
“Presents from the Congo. King Leopold II’s policies in the rubber fields are considered quite gruesome—but the men whose limbs had been cut for not collecting their daily quota eventually became of use to me.”
Rin whipped around and grabbed Bosch’s collar. “What are you doing to them, you devil?” she screamed, not so much as flinching when she heard the soldiers’ guns cocking and then firing. But instead of bullets, the guns shot canisters that released plumes of noxious gas.
“I’m testing my wares. Poison gas made of sulfide components will revolutionize war in this decade, and for centuries to come,” he said. “To ensure that those centuries do come, we must retrieve both Hivas’ crystal hearts, no matter the cost.” He glanced back at the window. “Ah, pity.”
Rin followed his gaze. The Congolese men were clearly dying, clutching at their throats as they breathed in the gas—but they weren’t the only ones. The soldiers’ masks weren’t working. Some threw them off to gulp in whatever air they could. Others were reaching for help—from Bosch, from the other soldiers, and even from the Congolese they were cruelly murdering. Eventually every mouth in the room began gushing blood, until there were none left alive.
“The gas is a success, but the masks are a failure. These aren’t ready to ship to Europe.”
Without so much as blinking an eye, Bosch turned and strode past a frozen Uma.
“According to Temple’s research, the device to control the Titans is hidden somewhere else on this continent. A safety measure by the Naacal, I suppose. I order you to retrieve it. And use the Titans to take Hiva’s heart. That is, if you don’t want the world to end.”
Uma’s arms dangled listlessly at her sides as Bosch walked toward the exit. “What exciting technological treasures will the New World hold?” he said. “I’m sure you’re also excited to find out, Uma Malakar. Escort them from the premises,” he told the soldiers by the door.
Rin shut her eyes against the senseless death and pounded on the window glass in agony.