MAX HAD BEEN TAKEN FROM HIS home as a child. He’d lost his sister. He’d been chased by police, threatened, blackmailed, and almost killed. He’d been tortured. He’d faced horrors the common man would never know about. And yet as he stood upon that ladder, staring over the trench wall, Max had never been more terrified than in the moment when his eyes met hers.
Iris. She looked just as Max remembered her. Slender and beautiful, with just an ethereal slip the color of sunset covering her from chest to buttocks. When Max squinted, he could see something glinting behind her. He couldn’t make out what it was, but it didn’t matter. He could barely tear his eyes from her. Iris. Iris was alive. Iris was coming.
Coming for him.
She was more than a hundred yards away, and yet her gaze never left him.
Max’s heart began thrashing against his chest as fractured memories rushed through his mind. Lunging for the bone sword. Feeling the rough surface against his skin. A snap decision drowned in his aching loneliness—in his desperation to never be alone again.
The sharp end of the bone messily burrowing into flesh.
“Hiva!” Blood rushed from Max’s face as he turned behind him. With his eyes flashing, he stared down at the turncoat god. “You said the only thing that could kill Iris was her own bones!”
“Yes.” A frustratingly short answer. This wasn’t the same Hiva he’d seen in the Coral Temple facing Iris, his hatred shining through. This wasn’t a god. It was barely a man.
“Then how is she bloody alive?”
“This was the decision made by the One who created her.”
“What?” Max was screaming now. “What does that even mean?”
But Hiva, barely a god, barely a man, was more like a child resigned to his scolding. Perhaps he’d always been like this—limp and feeble in the presence of the true death god of this world. The grand villain who’d hunted down Iris was nothing more than a child throwing a tantrum, desperate to punish his sister for hurting his feelings but unready to deal with the blowback.
Blowback.
Max felt suddenly off-kilter on the ladder. Light-headed, he felt his body begin to sway. What was it that he’d seen in Iris’s unmoving gaze? Was it… hatred?
She was too far away for him to see it for sure. Surely it hadn’t been hatred.
But if it was—
No. Did she hate him? No, no. She understood. She knew why Max had done what he did. She understood the position he’d been forced into. To avoid a bloody future. To avoid her descent into the cataclysm she had been before, he’d had to kill her.
But it hadn’t worked. She was here now. She was here, and she wasn’t herself. He could tell. He could tell just by her steady stride across the dead grass.
Even if she could forgive him for killing her, could she forgive him for killing Jinn?
Jinn. Just thinking of his name, remembering the way his body had slumped on the floor, sent a shiver down his spine. No. No, how could she forgive him when he couldn’t forgive himself?
The woman making her way through the flatlands. Who was she? Iris or Hiva?
It probably didn’t matter anymore.
Oh God. Max grabbed a fistful of his curly brown hair and let his hand slip down his sweaty face. Did I do this?
“Wait—boys—you hear that?” Carl said to his fellow soldiers, because after a minute had passed, a strange silence had descended upon the battlefield. Where was the high-pitched screeching of the bombs whizzing by? Where were the explosions?
Max felt a hand unceremoniously tug him down from the ladder so another man could race up it. Other soldiers were doing the same, peering over the battlefields. No gunfire. Nothing.
“Who is that woman?” someone asked, but for most of the men who’d been besieged by enemy gunfire for weeks, a woman on the battlefield was the least of their concerns.
“Is it a cease-fire? I can’t hear nothing.”
“The bombs have stopped. The bombs have stopped!”
“What about the Germans?”
And next to Max, Hiva stirred. “She’s killed them,” Hiva answered with chilling calm.
Someone might have heard him. Or perhaps not. Perhaps, in this heightened state of battle where lives were on the line, they felt the sudden absence of human bodies as keenly as Hiva did. But this was the first lucky break the soldiers had had in weeks. So as Max stared at Hiva in frightful silence, the men began to stir and gather up their weapons.
Carl grabbed Hiva and pulled him into a bear hug that under normal circumstances would have embarrassed them all. Max was next. The man’s vise grip choked the air out of his lungs.
“I don’t know what you did, boy, but you sure did something.” Carl clapped Max’s back hard, drawing a hoarse cough out of his throat. With a naïve, all-encompassing relief, Carl stared between the two of them, man and god, and grinned as if on the brink of tears. “You both did it.”
“Fire into the enemy camp! Full assault!”
Bombs flew from their side across the fields, exploding with no return fire. A boon. A miracle, as far as they were concerned.
Max covered his ears and crouched behind the trench wall, feeling the vibrations through his bones. A one-sided attack. An embarrassment of riches for Gladstone’s men and their allies. Minutes had passed when the last bomb exploded and hissed into silence.
“Gather your guns! We’re launching a full frontal assault, boys!” Max heard someone say. “Make sure you pick off anyone who survived the attack. We’re going for victory!”
“Victory!” the men screamed, cocking their rifles, waving the weapons in the air.
And why wouldn’t they? The longer time dragged on, the more courage they gained from the other side’s silence. There was nothing to mind about the woman on the battlefield. She could be taken in for questioning—and then maybe comforting.
Hollering as if they’d already won the battle, the soldiers climbed over the trench walls and began their race toward the enemies. Very few stayed behind. Max hid in a corner, his breaths haggard, his heart beating in his ears, crouched with his hands still covering his ears.
“I’m seeing things, right?” he muttered to himself while filthy boots shuffled up the ladder next to him. “That wasn’t her.”
“It was.”
Hiva.
“Sod off, will you?” Max spat while four men standing behind him pored over maps excitedly, discussing their plans after winning the battle. “If you’re not going to talk any bloody sense—”
“Nothing about my existence here is rational. None of it, as you would say, makes any sense.” Hiva looked up at the trench ledge, the battle cry of excited soldiers shaking the heavens. “Our creators are not the same. I was born on a different earth. When I first came to this earth, I came to my sister for help—a way out of this endless cycle. I voluntarily became her enemy only because I disagreed with her mission—the mission she was made to achieve by the One who created her. A mission she wouldn’t abandon. I then chose to return out of vengeance. Each time, I made a decision. And each decision was made from emotion, not sense.”
“I thought,” Max said, sliding up the trench wall, “that you so-called Hivas were just unfeeling monsters. Killing machines.”
“So too did I once, my friend.”
Max’s eyebrows arched up to his hairline. “What… did you just say?”
“Yes. I call you my friend, because there is no other entity, in any of the dimensions I’ve traveled to, with whom I have been able to express myself so freely. No one else on any earth. Not even sister. Especially not sister.”
The soft smile upon Hiva’s lips stopped Max’s breath in his chest.
“I thank you,” Hiva added, and Max could tell that he’d meant it.
When Hiva looked at him with such tenderness, Max’s face flushed with confusion. Suddenly Max realized that the sounds of the soldiers aiming to ambush the Germans had disappeared. Their triumphant battle cries had vanished.
“I once thought I had been born only to complete my mission. But now I see,” continued Hiva, “that I was wrong. Yes, the answer is so clear.” Hiva looked up at a flock of white birds flying through the darkened skies as an arctic caress slid across Max’s tight chest, paralyzing his lungs. “We are who we choose to be.”
Iris jumped down into the trench, her feet landing with the grace of a dancer. When she shook her head, ashes fell out of her long braids.
Max couldn’t breathe. The blades on her back, the ones she and Jinn had once used to twirl around in their circus act together, glinted against her back, begging for blood. He stumbled backward until he was pressed flat against the trench wall, while the four soldiers behind Hiva dropped their maps and their plans in surprise.
“Who’s this woman?” said one soldier, picking up his rifle, which had been resting on a pile of dirty sandbags. He lifted it. “Stop right there, you—”
Iris’s hand found his face, clamping his mouth shut. She burned him alive as he screamed in agony.
“What? What?”
“It’s some kind of devil!”
More of the soldiers who had stayed behind began shooting. Barely able to catch his breath, Max squeezed himself into his corner, watching as Iris brushed off the bullets tearing through her flesh like mosquito bites. The last he’d seen her, it’d taken minutes, sometimes even hours, for her to revive after dying. Now her healing speed was nearly simultaneous with her injuries. Like her body, the slip she wore was of a material not of this world. Every tear mended itself. It was as if she were wrapped in the heavens. As if the very stars were on her side. Not even a bullet to the forehead stopped her as she burned several men alive with a twitch of her head.
In that moment, Max vividly remembered his mother. Her long brown hair, her hopeful brown eyes whenever she’d kneel down in their little hut, clasp her hands, and pray to a statue of Mary upon the wooden ledge in their kitchen. He couldn’t remember when he’d stopped praying. It hadn’t been after he went to Europe, nor had it been when Berta was taken from him. And now, as he curled up in this corner, he could not recall when his lips had begun muttering the Hail Mary prayer in the same Spanish his mother always had every morning before breakfast. Before he knew it, the words were flying out of his mouth, quiet but sure, each word a reflection of his guilt and his pure terror.
They only stopped when Iris’s furious eyes met his.
Raising her arm, she reached for him as if to tear off his head. Max held his breath. Hiva gripped her wrist.
“Your quarrel is with me, sister.”
Iris tore her arm out of his grip and lunged for Max again, only to be thwarted by Hiva a second time.
“It was I who set the stage for your betrayal and murder,” said Hiva, his golden eyes flashing. “I who incited fear and hatred among your friends. It was only fitting. During the age of the Naacal, I had hoped so desperately to forge bonds, but you tore them from me. And so I would tear your bonds from you. That was what I set out to do when I reached this earth again.”
Was Hiva… making excuses for him? No, Max could only think it because his fear had paralyzed him to such an extent that he could not move his lips to form words. I was the one who killed you. No matter who set the stage, I made the decision to betray you for the second time….
Iris opened her mouth, and Max expected a tongue-lashing. But what he heard instead made his blood run cold. The sigh she’d exhaled from her lungs sounded like ghosts rustling within a dead graveyard at night. Like the dust of ancient bones. A dribble of saliva dripped down her bottom lip.
“I see. This is the sacrifice you made to return and exact your revenge,” said Hiva, still struggling to hold her in place. “The ‘Iris’ that you once were told me her dreams in defiance; in defiance of all who sought to confine her, she asserted her ‘self.’ But you are but a shell of her. You cannot assert your dreams, your identity, your grievances. You can’t even speak.”
Iris backhanded Hiva so hard, he flew into the trench wall. Max flinched from the impact, biting his lip. He tasted the thick, tangy blood. Debris tumbled over Hiva’s head, but he was unfazed. Slowly, Iris reached for the shamshir blades strapped to her back. She threw one upon the ground in front of Hiva and grabbed the handle of the other.
A duel to the death.
For a time Hiva looked at it. The two gods stood there, in the trench bred for war, the ashes of men speckling the earth between them. Silently, he took the handle of the shamshir and got to his feet, the weeds in his hair shivering.
“If I could have burned you alive, I would have done so a lifetime ago, when you sent me spiraling in misery through dimensions. The only weapon that can kill Hiva is the Hiva’s own bones. It is the same for me. It doesn’t make sense to battle in such a way.”
Hiva stared at the handle with a solemn sense of the weight of whatever fate had brought them to this moment. Then, for one split second, Hiva looked over his shoulder to Max, cowering in his corner.
Looked over at him and smiled.
“Then again, decisions are often made from emotions, not sense.”
The collision from their clashing blades sent shock waves through the trench, each so strong that Max felt as if his bones would shatter. They were so fast, his eyes could barely follow them. Slurping in breaths, he slid against the trench wall, but there was no direction he could slink off to in order to stay out of their way. Iris pushed Hiva down the long, narrow stretch and brought her blade upon his head, only for Hiva to block the blow and punch her in the stomach. Blood gushed from her mouth and from his eyes, where she’d bashed the handle of her shamshir against his temple.
Every blow was one that Hiva took in Max’s place. Max couldn’t bear the knowledge.
“I asked you once: Isn’t there another way, sister? I asked you back then, and you wouldn’t even listen to me. The truth is as it shall always be. But what is truth? What is justice?”
Iris’s blade strike was quick. It slashed against Hiva’s chest and would have severed him in half if Hiva had not jumped back.
“The truth before you is that you were betrayed,” Hiva continued, spitting out blood. “And so you’ve given up. You’ve decided that all humanity must pay as recompense. But what if that isn’t the answer? What if we’ve both failed in our true mission?”
He threw dirt in Iris’s face, blinding her momentarily. But when he leaped upon her, Iris must have heard him, even though she couldn’t see. She blocked the strike from his blade and kicked him up in the air over the trench wall. Hiva grabbed hold of that wall, lifting himself upon sticks and dirt. Iris followed, jumping into a high backflip that only a tightrope dancer could perform with such grace upon the opposite ledge.
The gathering dark clouds crackled with energy. There were no whizzing bombs, no gunfire. This was true thunder this time, as if the skies had cursed their battle. One raindrop. Another. Max felt the cool water plunk down upon the tip of his nose. Then the rain began to fall in a sudden, angry rush. If there were a real God out there, he must have meant to drown them all. Max’s lips curved into a sarcastic grin before he thought of his mother and shivered in the cold.
Mom, I can’t believe I’m rooting for Hiva, he thought to himself. And tears fell from his eyes, because he’d done this to her. He’d done this to Iris.
Blood and rainwater mixed down the edge of her blade as she stared across the gulf that separated her from her other half. The sun and its shadow—except Max could not tell which was which. All he could see was darkness and the promise of death.
“I chose revenge too, once,” said Hiva, “because I still could not find another purpose—another reason for my existence. Now I’ve turned away from such things. I no longer wish to kill. That is why I now understand her. I now understand the ‘Iris’ that you once were.”
Iris said nothing. But upon the wall of the trench, her grip on her blade trembled.
Hiva’s grip, on the other hand, had never been stronger. His golden, pupilless eyes stared across the chasm with the certainty and determination Max once saw in Iris.
“I no longer wish to kill”? It’s the same for me. The salt trickling into Max’s lips told him his tears had joined the rain droplets sliding down his cheeks. I don’t want to kill. I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore. Max squeezed his hands into fists.
“Sister,” Hiva called over the crackling thunder. “I do not know who I am, nor who I should be. But what I do know is this: I cannot let you kill this boy.”
I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.
Hiva and Iris bent their knees at the same time. Both prepared to end it.
I don’t want to hurt anyone… and I don’t want anyone hurt because of me….
In his mind’s eye, Cherice winked at him with that precocious smile.
No more!
The two Hivas leaped at each other, launching through the gray sky, their weapons drawn. And at the same time, Max threw himself to the ground and screamed so loudly, he could feel the flesh in his throat tearing.
“I’m sorry, Iris!” Kneeling, he shook his head, trench dirt gathering in his fingers as he gripped the earth. “I’m sorry I killed you. I was wrong. I’m sorry I killed Jinn. It was an accident! I’m sorry I betrayed you. I’m sorry for all of this! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
What was it that Max thought he would achieve? An armistice? A standstill? In that moment, all he wanted was to stop feeling the toxic guilt and fear melting him from the inside. He wanted her forgiveness. He wanted absolution.
What he’d done instead was serve as a distraction. It hadn’t been his intent. He didn’t think that Hiva cared so much that he would look down in concern for his “friend.” But that was the diversion Iris needed. Max heard his name from the god’s lips: “Maximo.”
When Max looked up again, Iris was already slicing off Hiva’s head.
It landed with a thump next to him. Bile lurched from Max’s stomach out of his mouth as he scurried away on his back, desperate to widen the distance between them. Hiva’s body landed next, then Iris lightly upon her feet after it.
But what was this? Hiva wasn’t dead. Of course he wasn’t. Hiva couldn’t die, not unless his own bones were used to kill him.
Was that why Hiva’s lips still moved?
It was impossible. It must have been Max’s imagination. Hiva had no throat. There was no air through which he could form words. But Hiva spoke nonetheless. In slow, steady words, he said only one thing:
“Sister, we are not gods. We are—”
Iris drove her sword through his skull. Hiva spoke no more.
Max gripped his own head, wanting to shriek but unable to summon the strength. Iris kicked over Hiva’s body and drove her hand into his chest, ripping out his crystal heart. It was a different color than hers: an opaque pink. She used her own finger to crack a hole into the surface. Max couldn’t work out why. All he knew was that he was next. He could tell by the way Iris turned and looked at him as if she had no soul.
Yes. Yes, this is why he had come to the battlefield: to die. Absolution.
He got to his knees and pressed his forehead against the earth. “Iris, I was the one who killed you,” he whispered. “I took the sword made from your bones and stabbed you. I didn’t stop, even after I’d realized Jinn had jumped in front of me to protect you. He died protecting you. And I killed you both.”
Iris stepped toward him. It was fine like this. Fate. Retribution. He wouldn’t complain. If he was to die by anyone’s hand, it should be hers.
Cherice. I’m sorry. Wait for me. Max squeezed his eyes, surprised when he realized he had one last tear to shed.
And then the wind behind him shifted. A familiar whooshing sound battered his ears from behind. He looked up. His and Iris’s eyes locked.
Those gorgeous brown eyes. They look so sad.
It was the last thought he had before he was pulled into a vortex of darkness.