“Wait!” Selah shouts, but her brother’s retreating back is already disappearing into the crowd.
“He can handle himself,” Tair answers. “Selah, we have to go.”
And now Tair is pulling at her arm, and in the distance Theo is throwing a pitmaster over their shoulder, and crumpled at their feet is the bloody corpse of Cato Palmar, and all around them gladiators and mine servae from even deeper under the earth are wringing necks, running people through, making no distinction between handler and spectator, patrician and pleb, and Selah can see her point.
“Right,” she says. “Go go go go go go go.”
Through the thrashing mob, Tair’s prybar gleaming as it swings.
Past the gate.
Through the exit, slamming it closed, though the echoes of the fight behind them still ring in her ears. Tair grabs her hand and jerks her along in an all-out sprint down the dim-lit catacombs, and Selah’s heart is pumping so hard she doesn’t know how it hasn’t already pumped clean out of her chest, and this isn’t the way either of them came, and this doesn’t matter, and did Arran and Theo and Diana and Miro make it out all right, and did any of them make it out all right, and she doesn’t know how long they’ve been running now, and Arran killed Cato Palmar—
They round the corner, Selah and Tair, straight into a mourners’ vigil. Sheer-gold veils and flickering pyre-light, and fervently hissed apologies are not enough to spare them the bereaved family’s scornful glares. But when they retreat back the way came, no one comes after them.
She beckons Tair over to someone’s familia crypt, holding open the white stone gate so they can conceal themselves into the little natural-formed alcove in the rock. So they can stop to take a breath. So they can hide, hands clasped tight, tucked between two effigies, and Selah thinks the dead won’t mind. So the blood pumping furiously through her heart can calm itself, and her lungs can even their heaving, and she can stop to think properly for the first time since turning on the Iveroa Stone. So she can sit there in her own drying sweat, Tair’s hand clasped tight in her own, and wonder how it is that they can no longer hear the battle raging below.
“Diana,” Tair’s quiet voice says, next to her. “We have to find her and Miro.”
“Do you think it even matters now? With Palmar gone . . .”
“She knows about the Stone. She heard your father’s message. We should find her before someone else does.”
This is your burden to bear now. That’s what the ghost of her father had said. No one else’s. No one else can know. Well, it’s too late for that now as a hard and fast rule, but Selah’s inclined to agree that they can still mitigate the damage. Whatever else she might think about the secrets Antal Iveroa buried, or the morality and rightness of that choice, she does see Dad’s point. The more people know about this, the more they’ll be fighting tooth and nail to use it to their own ends. And Diana knows too much.
“Well, fuck.”
Adrenaline still coursing through her veins, it just slips out.
Tair snaps her head around so fast it’s a wonder she doesn’t give herself whiplash. “Did you just . . . ?”
“Yep.”
Tair eyes her for a moment. “How’d it feel?”
“Honestly?” asks Selah. “Really fucking good.”
And Tair bursts out into laughter. An inelegant cackle that is so purely Tair, and then she straight-up snorts, and it’s that more than the adrenaline, or the violence and the death, or even the absurdity of the last hour—or maybe some combination of everything—that has Selah joining her. Like a release of steam from a pressure valve, it all comes pouring out. Selah, a hand clamped over her mouth as she throws her head back against the wall, trying to stay quiet. Tair, having less luck, doubled over into Selah’s chest and shaking with bursts of barely contained giggles.
She takes Tair’s hand, and presses their sides more firmly to each other. Silver and blue beads from Tair’s ocher hair glint in the dark, and she tucks her head into the crook between Selah’s shoulder and chin as her laughter finally dies.
“Selah,” Tair says suddenly, into the dark.
“Hm?”
“Did you turn it off?”
“Turn what—Oh.” She scrabbles for the Stone, still glowing faintly, and jams her thumb on the icon reading Metro Rail. Presses it a second time against the etched sun at the bottom, and the Stone itself goes dark.
“What happens now?” Tair turns to her, wonder and terror and something deeply unsure mingling in her voice. Mourning vespers rise around them from the nearby vigil, deep and haunting and strong, beseeching All-Mater Terra receive her child back to the earth. Tair’s quiet voice beneath it could be the wind. “We just took out an irradium mine and maybe even the fighting pits. Liberated thousands of people, just with a couple buttons and levers. That kind of power . . . you could do so much good with it. And so much damage. It just depends on who’s controlling it. It’s amazing. And it scares me.”
Tair sets her jaw, and Selah’s lungs are slowing but her heart won’t stop pounding and suddenly she knows precisely the reason why. Brown fingers laced with browner ones, disappearing entangled into the dark, she turns her head and meets Tair’s lips with hers.
They are alive, and they are here, and they have the Iveroa Stone. Whatever comes next, they’ll figure out how to meet it together.
• • •
They emerge with the dawn, just as the first spectacular purples shot with orange climb up into dark blue. Selah has always loved Luxana’s sunrises. She’s not as well-traveled as she would like, but somehow she knows this in her bones: they’re like no other in the world.
They’ve come out somewhere in the Regio Marina, and it feels friendlier, this time around, despite the steady fisting heartbeat caught firmly in her throat. Maybe it’s something to do with the warmth of Tair’s hand in hers. Maybe it’s the reassurance that this is, after all, where they agreed to meet back up with Arran and Theo, should something go wrong. Or maybe it’s just the emptiness of the early-morning piers. At the docks, schooners in their berths hang their paraffin lamps, the transition from night to day still some ways off. Just ahead, a half-repaired sloop sags lower than it should in the waterline.
Darting between the growing shadows, Selah follows after Tair. They discussed this, in the dark hours of the night. They don’t know what the fallout of the last few hours will be yet, and while Selah has the plausible deniability of having been present for the massacre in the pits as Palmar’s guest, anyone might have caught a glimpse of Tair in the fighting and recognized her. Until they know more, Tair has to lay low, and Selah is staying with her. In the meantime, she thinks, they’ll have to decide what to do about the Stone.
There’s a flicker of lamplight, just up ahead, and a hushed conversation where they can make out two silhouettes in the waning dusk. Tair grips Selah’s hand tighter, wary eyes darting toward the sound as they creep along the side of some half-rigged boat, and pulls her safely out of sight behind a cluster of barrels.
Somewhere in the distance, the ancient bells of the Plaza Capitolio clocktower echo out across the rooftops of Luxana.
There are no lanterns here, not even a sailor’s meager candlelight for a game of decktop cards. Whoever’s approaching, they’re well and truly shrouded in the midnight gloom, keeping to the shadows of the ramshackle sloop. A schooner passes in the water some meters away, a leisure cruise at the end of its tour, filled with Fornian wine and the latest Roman fashions, laughter and light and gently lapping harbor waves spilling out in its wake. A beam of paraffin lamplight passes over the pier, and for the smallest of moments one shadowed figure is illuminated in stark relief.
It’s enough. Selah knows those clever eyes. That warm, amber-glow skin. The hand held tight in Arran’s, who she can see clearly too once another light from the schooner casts briefly across the pier.
The pair of them look terrible, frankly, with blood and sweat and bits of matter she does not want to know the origin of, thanks, matted in their hair and spattered across their clothes. Selah can’t imagine she looks much better herself. None of that matters. She’s never been happier to see her stupid big brother.
“Oof,” says Arran, as she launches herself at him and latches on. She is never letting go of him again.
“You’re such an idiot.”
“Glad to see you, too.”
Selah buries her face in his shoulder, and he squeezes her tight. The reality of what’s happened comes down to bear full weight at last. Arran killed Cato Palmar. Arran killed the Consul of Roma Sargassa in just about the most public manner he could have. It doesn’t matter that Palmar killed their father, though Arran couldn’t know about that. It doesn’t matter that he was acting in her defense. It doesn’t matter that chaos rained down around them as it happened. Someone will have seen.
“Where will you go?” she asks, pulling slightly away. Tair isn’t the only one who has to hide now.
Arran smiles down at her, a little sad, then glances over at Theo. “I have some people to lay low with,” he says, and by now Tair has joined Selah at her side. “But I could use your help.”
It’s on the tip of her tongue—Anything. She has plausible deniability, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect him. But before she can speak, a soft thunk on wood heralds the arrival of another set of footsteps. Next to Selah, Tair goes stiff.
The woman’s gait is both heavy and brisk, an easy thunk on the dock’s sea-worn boards. Selah hears her well before she emerges from the wharf-side end of the pier.
“So, you’re Selah Kleios,” the woman says.
Long black hair twisted into two thick braids, small and sturdy and somewhere vaguely middle aged. Selah thinks that if she passed her on the street, she’d never have given her a second thought. Here in the Regio Marina, however, in the early hours of the dark morning, every breath of air seems to gravitate toward her, this strange woman commanding the attention of all who fall into her orbit. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. It sends a chill down Selah’s spine.
“You look like him,” the woman says, now. “Your mother’s there, of course, but your face is all Alex.”
“Arran . . . ?” she starts, because she doesn’t understand.
But neither her brother nor Theo look in the least surprised. They know this woman.
“Don’t worry,” says the woman. “I knew your father well. He was . . . well, I wouldn’t go as far to say one of us, but we worked together when it made sense.”
“Who exactly is us?” Selah asks, wary, but bolstered all the same. Because Tair’s hand has slipped back into hers, and it’s like rediscovering solid ground.
“She’s lying,” Tair says, a whispered mix of confused warning in her ear. “Your father wouldn’t have trusted them. That’s Griff. They’re the Revenants, Sel.”
And Selah wants to laugh, because that has to be a joke. This woman—Griff—maybe, she could see. But Theo? Arran? Her Arran, who runs away at the first sign of responsibility, who never puts up a fight. Who mostly sticks with jav for breakfast because he can never make up his mind. A Revenant. One of the ghosts who haunt children’s stories. It’s too ridiculous to conceive.
But there are the things.
The way Griff crosses her arms, brass knuckles shining over the fingers of her left hand.
The way Theo isn’t who they said they were from the start.
The way Tair wouldn’t lie to her, not after all they’ve done and seen.
The way Arran meets her eyes, daring her to deny it.
“Two out of three, Tair,” the woman called Griff says. “I am a Revenant. But Alex was a canary, too. I wouldn’t lie about that. You, on the other hand . . . I wonder if you’ve been entirely honest with your paterfamilias here. I wonder, did you tell her who helped you escape from her house?”
Tair grits her teeth. “That doesn’t mean I was ever one of you.”
“No. All it means is that Alex called in a favor. I’m not in the business of freeing every verna who asks for it. Especially not ones that go crawling back to their patrician girlfriend looking for protection. I don’t waste my time with lapdogs.”
She can recognize the warning signs, the way Tair grits her teeth. The way she stands a little taller, her shoulders pulling back. Like she wants to punch Griff right in the face. Like she knows doing so would be a death sentence. Like she’d do it anyway. So when Selah steps in, it’s not to save Tair from herself.
Tair doesn’t need a champion. But Selah needs answers.
“He called in a favor,” she echoes, the gears of her mind already whirring to the inevitable conclusion. Five years ago. Tair’s sentence of a lifetime spent in service. It’s not my place to interfere. That’s what Dad had said, in his home office as the setting sun streamed through the windows and Selah’s heart had felt like it would give out on itself from the unfairness of it all. We all have our parts to play. Someday you’ll understand.
“He couldn’t overrule the magistrate,” Selah says now, the inconceivable realization grabbing hold, “but he had another way to give Tair her freedom. The Revenants. You.”
Griff nods her head once, curt, like the merest act of acquiescence causes her pain.
“But if you hate patricians . . .”
“We had a complicated relationship, Alex and I. He was a valuable resource, but he only passed us the supplies and information he thought we should have. Like I should have expected anything else from a Historian. We believed in the same things, but we disagreed on the means to get there.”
“He was a pacifist,” Selah says.
“Yes.”
“But he had a weapon that you wanted. A weapon that he’d shown you before.” A weapon he’d shown to Cato Palmar, too, for which he had paid the ultimate price. This is your burden to bear. No one else’s. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. No one else can know.
Who is this woman, with whom her father risked sharing his life’s work? This woman, with whom he had a falling-out? This woman, nodding humorlessly now, saying, “Yes. He had something that didn’t rightfully belong to just him.”
Like I should have expected anything else from a Historian.
It rankles on instinct, but somewhere deep in her gut Selah knows that’s only because she’s been raised since birth to revere the work of the Imperial Archives. They all have, but her most of all. The collection and preservation. The curation of what’s sent back out. Inexplicably, she thinks of Jankara and the Shikibu team, and the curdling acid trying to hold back the words. Censorship. Propaganda. Is that really what the Archives are for?
The proof of it is there in the Iveroa Stone. The Imperial Historian’s work, deciding who gets to know what. Shaping the narratives of how they’re allowed to understand it at all.
And then she thinks of Linet. Caught in the narrative they wrote for her, the one that even Selah and her supposed authority couldn’t save her from. Because it didn’t matter if she was a criminal, or what her crime even was. Selah used to think it did. She understands now that it’s an excuse, a convenient way of shuffling more people through the great machine. The machine that’s working perfectly as it’s meant to. Tair helped her to see that.
“So,” she says slowly, “you were waiting for it to pass to the next Historian.”
“I was hoping you might share our views.”
“Or that I’d get my hands on the Iveroa Stone and learn a few hard truths.”
Griff smiles at that, a sly and broad thing. “Clever girl,” she says. “You’ve already worked out how to turn it on.”
Selah shrugs, but her heart is pounding.
Her father, in league with terrorists. Her father, an anarchist. No. Her father, who believed in a better world, but was too paralyzed by the mistakes of the past. Too mired in the misery of what he knew, who did his best in small acts of kindness but would never allow himself to dream beyond the world he’d inherited. The world that worked for some, but not for many. Her father, who alone held the keys to possibility, yet willingly put a leash on his own imagination.
“And if I have?” she asks, voice quiet among the lapping waves. She needs to know just how much this woman Griff knows. “What good is it to you?”
“You’re Alex’s daughter, don’t play dumb with me. Information is knowledge—”
“—and knowledge is power. Yeah, I know. And I also know the Stone doesn’t just have my dad’s far-fetched conspiracies about world wars and a lying Imperium, I know it controls dormant solaric systems all throughout the city. And I know you know that, so what else does this thing really have that you people want?”
For a fraction of a second, Selah thinks that Griff is going to slap her. She doesn’t. Instead, the older woman regards her for a long, drawn-out moment. Appraising. Selah feels naked under her eye, but she doesn’t back down. She can still see Arran in the periphery of her sphere, hard gaze crinkling beneath a divoting brow. Did he know about Dad all along? Is that why he joined the Revenant cause? Either way, the sinking disappointment of betrayal shivers its way into her gut, even as she knows full well why he wouldn’t have trusted her with this.
Finally, Griff nods, apparently decided on something, and gets right to the point. “It’s a weapon of the mind,” she says, “that much is true. That tablet contains unimaginable histories, going back millennium on millennium. Textbooks, sure, but photographs too. Something called films. Songs. Novels. Culture. The ideas, Selah Kleios. The medicine. The science. The political theory. The statecraft. The warcraft. The technology. And if you dig deep enough, if you know where to look . . . the location of where to find more.”