HAWKINS WAS SCREAMING, AND RIN COULDN’T tell if she’d joined him or if those desperate howls were only a figment of her imagination. Iris had torn out Max’s heart in front of her. The young thief’s crooked smile was still on his face, though faded, his eyes open but dull. The frayed edges of the hole in his shirt fluttered in the wind as his corpse lay on the ground.
Rin had done nothing. Fear had gripped her from the moment Iris had slipped out from behind the trees and approached her. Max hadn’t been here when it had happened. So had he been the bait? Or had she? It didn’t matter now. Not to her. Not to Max.
The sudden realization of Max’s death overwhelmed her. Like a great flood, it washed over her—rising to the top of her head and then down again, knocking her off-balance, until she thought she’d collapse on the floor weeping. Rin gasped for air as if she’d run a marathon. She clutched her chest and bent over as panic overrode her senses. All it had taken was a second. A second. A flash, and he was gone. He was gone.
She covered her mouth to muffle her whining moans but released it again when she realized she needed more air. But there would never be enough. Iris had murdered Max in front of her.
Hawkins was howling, crying, cradling Max’s dead body, hugging him, weeping, cursing. But Iris…
Iris… why were tears forming in her eyes? Could Hiva cry?
The goddess dropped Max’s bloody heart upon the grass and stepped back, confused. But she had been like this before. Back in the Naacalian facility, where they’d stolen the Titan Control Device. Iris could have killed her then. She’d meant to kill her then but couldn’t.
Iris wasn’t a monster. She was trying not to be.
“Oh, Iris,” Rin cried, clutching the letter in her right hand so hard, her fingers could have torn through the paper. “Iris…”
“You’re dead.” Hawkins’s fiendish whisper interrupted her, harrowed and cruel and filled with hatred. “You’re dead, you monster! Your terror ends. Now!”
Iris didn’t notice him. She was looking at the blood on her own hands. That was good for Hawkins. He was able to whisk Max’s corpse away through the blue void, his murderous oath lingering in the air. “You’re dead!”
The Titans. Rin couldn’t breathe. Suddenly her fear for herself turned into fear for Iris. She ran up to her and grabbed her bloodied hand.
“Iris!” she cried, forgetting how close she was to death when Iris slowly looked up at her, their eyes locking. “Iris, we have to go. Please!”
The Dahomey would be waiting for them to return to Uma’s apartment in Lagos, but she needed to get Iris there first. She would, even if by foot. The Ark was her only hope.
But Iris’s gaze had turned once again to the blood on her hand. Her face scrunched and twisted as if she was trying to understand what she’d just done. Hawkins was probably giving the others the signal. If she didn’t move now…
There was another way. The opium bottle in her dress pocket. She’d given one to Sesinu. She had one here. She’d shove it in Iris’s mouth now that Iris was distracted. The drug wouldn’t hurt Iris. Or, even if it did, even if it killed her, she’d come back to life. They just needed to leave.
“Iris…,” Rin said, letting go of her and secretively dipping into her dress pocket.
“M-Ma… ax…”
Rin’s hand froze. What was she saying?
“Ma… aax. Ma… x?”
The word had indeed come from Iris’s lips. She didn’t look sad. Just surprised. Confused. She turned her bloody hand over and over, rubbed the blood down her face, and then stumbled back, shaking her head, not understanding what she’d just done—not wanting to understand, not ready to understand…
Iris began screaming. The wind carried her shrieks into the sky.
Rin took in Iris’s frantic state, and all at once it hit her: a crushing awareness of her own heartbreak. This was what the world had done to Iris. A world where the powerful crushed the weak. This is what it had reduced her to, this once-unstoppable warrior: unstoppable not because of her magic but because of her will, determination, and compassion.
It was when Iris began scratching her own face that Rin covered her face and cried. They were doomed. Maybe they’d been doomed from the start by this awful world.
“Don’t… give up…”
That voice. Rin lowered her hands. Her breath hitched in her throat. She didn’t dare look up, even though she knew that voice, who it belonged to. Even though she heard him clear as day, repeating those words that were directed as much to her as it was to Iris.
“Don’t… give… up…”
Jinn. He was holding Iris from behind, his legs barely sturdy but keeping him up as he crushed the screaming Iris against his chest.
“Don’t give up.” Rin whispered it to herself, wiping her tears. “Don’t give up.” She said it again, fortifying her own heart as Iris’s screams devolved into wild, staccato breaths.
She remembered what Max had told her inside Uma’s apartment. About the last time he’d seen Iris. That she’d looked sad.
Hiva had emotions. Of course she did. She was Iris. She had always been Iris.
“Rin,” Jinn said, and looked up at her. “Don’t… give up.”
Rin touched her trembling lips with a hand and nodded. No tricks. No schemes. Jinn had Iris. She had to do her part too. Rin let go of the opium bottle in her dress and unfolded the letter in her hands instead.
“Iris. This dress. Do you recognize it?”
Rin had asked her slowly, repeating herself when she saw Iris was too preoccupied with Max’s blood to hear her the first time.
“Granny Marlow made it for me. Your Granny Marlow.”
Iris’s arms fell to her sides. She nearly collapsed in Jinn’s arms, but Jinn held her firm, just like he always had. She was listening. Listening but unsure. Rin shut her eyes, knowing that the wayward goddess could kill her at any moment, knowing that they were running out of time. But she wanted to remember that day she’d used the Solar Jumps to leap through lands far and wide and ended up trudging, bones weary, into London.
There she’d seen, near Iris’s circus camp, an old lady in a tent, shivering in the dark. Afraid and surrounded by fabric that hadn’t yet been sewn into clothes. Alone but for a goose with burnt fur, waddling around and pecking at the floor.
“Are you Granny Marlow?” Rin had asked after entering her tent gently, not wanting to frighten the woman. In her rocking chair, Granny Marlow nodded sadly. Her sunken old eyes, dark as coal, had reminded Rin of a deer. “I’m Iris’s sister.”
The words had simply flown out of Rin’s mouth. But at the sound of Iris’s name, the old woman had lifted her head. Whimpering and vulnerable, the old woman had reached out to her, gesturing her to come close.
“It’s not her fault,” she’d said, and Rin was acutely aware that there was not another soul left alive in this camp but the old woman and her goose. “She’s lost. She just needs to find herself. You’re her sister too. You’ll help her, won’t you?”
Rin remembered how tightly the old woman had grasped her hands. How the two of them had cried together.
And then Granny Marlow had given her something.
“I wrote this days ago, when I could get my hands on some ink.” And she’d shoved the letter into her hands. “It’s in my native language because it’s easier to write for me than English. Please don’t let her think that she’s alone.”
Standing here in Ourika Valley, with the waterfall ahead of her, the river behind her, and the blood of a friend staining the grass, Rin remembered her promise. She vowed to keep it.
They were sisters.
“Listen to her, Iris…” Jinn’s whisper was so filled with love that it had paralyzed the god. It must have. Iris took her shaking hand and placed it upon Jinn’s arm. She was listening.
Rin took Granny Marlow’s letter written in Yoruba. How she had cried that night when she’d realized Granny Marlow’s native language was the same as her own. She wondered what kind of impossible fate had bound them all together. Ties of a family that shared no blood, only the promise of a loving future. Rin looked up at Iris, who stared back at her with a helpless, frustrated expression. Then Rin sucked in a breath and began to read, translating it into English for Jinn’s benefit as well.
“My dear Iris, my name is not Agnus Marlow. It is Adebisi. My name is Adebisi, and I wish that this were a kinder world.
When you were young, you had aimed to kidnap me and my sister, Adelola. And then someone crueler than you kidnapped all of us, placed us on a slave ship, and took us to England. I remember looking down into the waters and wondering how many ghosts haunted the seas. How many of my people marched along the ocean floors, howling for justice.
The first night I slept inside Gorton Zoo, I remembered thinking that justice didn’t exist in this world, because the men who’d made it didn’t believe in such things. They believed in only their own power and wealth. Their own comfort and greed. They wanted to satiate their own desires even if it took the blood of children. As long as it was not their children, they would be satisfied. It was those men who had given me the name Agnus, my sister the name Anne, and you the name Iris. They had carved out our identities and forced us to inhabit them.
And as I think about all these things, I wonder if this feeling of the unfairness of it all is what you feel now. I wonder if that is why you gave up your own voice to gain the power of vengeance. But Iris, is this too who you want to be?”
Rin stopped, for Iris was shaking her head. She was trying to speak, but the word was too faint.
“Iris?” Rin whispered, blinking back tears as she watched the girl struggle. “Iris—”
“Read, Rin!” Jinn told her, the desperation and hope clear in his brown eyes. “Read Granny’s letter!”
Biting her lip, Rin continued.
“That’s the thing, Iris. We have to know who we want to be in this world, and we have to be it without fear, without apology. We have to do it, especially women like us. We have to do it in spite of those who give us fake names and fake lives. Who tell us who we are and tell us where to sleep and what words to speak. We have to choose.
And there are so many terrible, horrible people in this world who will tell you that you have no right to. That there is a script, and you must follow it. That there is a role, and you must play it. But they’re wrong. Nobody can decide who you are but you. All you have to do is imagine.
What if we imagined a different world?
What if we imagined a different life?
What if we imagined a different self?
They say a leopard can’t change its spots, especially an old one. Maybe it’s too late for me. Or maybe my imagination is too limited. But I wonder, Iris. I wonder. Who do you want to be? What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of life for you, for us, do you imagine?
Imagining something different takes strength. Believing in your own self takes courage. Understanding your own power takes wisdom. And being willing to use it for good—well, that takes kindness, the sort of kindness I’ve seen in you every day for the past ten years, as you read to me and fed me my medicine and brought me food from the store.
Don’t give up on yourself, my dear.
I love you always—Granny.”
Tears from Rin’s eyes had begun to splash upon the paper. “Don’t give up on yourself,” Rin repeated, this time in Yoruba, speaking the language that connected the three women, letting the words roll off her tongue as she thought of her parents and the home that had been taken from her. “Don’t give up on yourself,” she repeated, because though she’d lost one home, the possibility of a new one had opened up for her. And she realized then, so deeply, that where there was life, there was hope. “Don’t give up on yourself, Iris.”
Rin wiped her tears with one hand, her missing right eye stinging, the letter shaking in her other hand. It was only when her face was dry that she realized that she wasn’t crying alone.
Quiet whimpers reached her ears. Rin looked up with a shaky breath.
Iris was crying too.
Tears rolled down her cheeks, one after another, an unstoppable flood. She collapsed into Jinn’s arms, squeezing tight the hand that had taken Max’s heart.
She shook her head, looked up at Jinn, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Jinn… Rin… Max… I’m so sorry!” Her voice was scratchy with disuse, but it was still her voice. It was Iris.
“It’s okay, Iris,” Jinn whispered back, cradling her head in the crook of his neck. “Everything is going to be okay. There’s still hope.”
“There’s… still hope.” Iris gazed up at Rin. She stared at the girl, the wind fluttering her braids in the air.
And she smiled.
“There’s still hope,” Iris repeated with this tearful smile like an oasis in the desert. “Rin…” She giggled, half crazed, but then again, hoping was often thought of as insanity in desperate times. “There’s still hope….”
Rin’s heart stopped. Iris was back.
Dropping her letter, she reached out to her.
And then the Atlas Mountains rumbled. The tremors escalated in a matter of seconds, shaking the earth, knocking Rin to the hard ground. Birds fled from the treetops in droves. Granny Marlow’s letter fluttered into the sky with the rush of wind, then fell into the river.
“What the hell is happening?” Rin cried, grasping at the grass.
The end of the world.
The tops of the Atlas Mountains shuttered and then at once crumbled in a massive avalanche that stopped Rin’s breath. And two raging beasts, the likes of which Rin had never seen, emerged from inside the rock.
Giant metal machines blotted out the sun. Each spider leg was an iron monstrosity, each bulbous, tanklike head thrice the size of a building. One short and squat, the other tall and lithe, their armor darkening the sky as they blocked the sun from view. The circular glass plates on their heads were sparking. Yellow. Silver. They were worse than the drawings on Bosch’s wall could ever have depicted them.
“What are they?” Jinn breathed, his jaw agape in awe.
“The Titans.” It was Iris who spoke. But Rin already knew. The Solar Titan and the Shadow Titan. The twin beasts of destruction.
If human beings could make such machines, then did that make them gods too? No. They were devils.
Their glass plates glowed. Their legs were immobile. But their heads were shifting back and forth. Like an octopus spinning in the water, unsure of where to turn.
On the other side of the Atakora Mountains, Hawkins and the others had activated the Titans. Somewhere beyond the blinding fear and awe, that fact registered in Rin’s mind. But why were the Titans moving in such a frenzied, uncontrollable way? Was this what they had planned?
“Iris. Jinn.” Rin lifted herself to her knees. “We need to go now.”
Screech. The piercing sound of metal that hadn’t moved in millennia pierced the air. Dark cloud gathered overhead as the Titans’ legs began to move—the Shadow Titan down one side of the mountain, the Solar Titan down the other.
“They’re coming toward us!” Rin cried when she realized, and blood drained from her face.
Jinn grabbed Iris’s wrists. “We have to go, Iris! We have to go now!”
Iris looked at the Titans like she’d seen them before. She was too scared to move.
Rin wasn’t. She was a warrior. No matter the enemy, no matter what she faced, she wouldn’t fall. She grabbed Iris’s hand while Jinn took the other.
“Don’t give up, Iris,” Rin whispered through gritted teeth as the Shadow Titan made a high-pitched screech that shattered Rin’s eardrums.
“Don’t give up,” Jinn said too, though Rin was no longer able to fully hear him. Blood was leaking from her ears down her neck.
A thunderous blast knocked them all to the ground. Rolling over onto her back, Rin looked behind her. A beam of pure, wondrous light shot from the Shadow Titan like a canon. It was like the waterfall—radiant and beautiful.
“Jinn!”
Iris’s shriek called Rin back to her. Iris was kneeling by Jinn. He’d fallen as hard as any of them, but why wasn’t he moving? They had to get up. They had to leave before the Titans—
“Jinn! Jinn!” Iris grabbed her hair. “No!”
It was then that Rin noticed Jinn’s head, twisted and bleeding against a sharp rock. His eyes were open. Lifeless.
No.
No, no, no.
Rin gasped for air, her heart thrashing against her chest as Iris screamed.
This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t… this wasn’t the end… was it?
The Shadow Titan was firing consecutive blasts. The area behind the Atlas Mountains—the area where Hawkins, Jacob, and the others were—had gone up in flames and smoke.
The Solar Titan began to rumble.
Rin shook her head. “Don’t give up,” she repeated, because they had been Jinn’s last words. She pulled a weeping Iris to her feet and dragged her toward the forest.
“Don’t give up!” This time Rin said it to herself too. Iris was the one who’d been honored among the ahosi. She Who Does Not Fall. But Rin wouldn’t fall either. That was who she decided to be in that moment, as death rained down upon the valley. Another Who Would Not Fall.
I will not fall, Rin thought as the Solar Titan fired at them. We will not fall.
Heavenly white light enveloped them, lifting Rin off her feet and into the air. Rin held Iris’s hand until the end.