23

Wind crashed against the buildings of New Alms, and rain buffeted its streets. The sun was gone, hidden by clouds black as night. The calm waters of the bayou raged and danced, and the trees held tight to the earth with all their might.

Birds of countless flocks flapped their wings in unison and flew in a circle above the Manufactory. A bolt of lightning struck the building’s roof with such force that the brickwork exploded apart. More bolts struck, and the wind picked up with such fury that entire chunks of the structure were torn away. Cerenite priests screamed as their arcblasters were ripped from their hands by the wind and thrown into the sky. The workers building the rail line ran for cover, and those who could not find it were similarly dragged up into the clouds.

The horses whinnied with fright in their stable. They feared the storm, yes, but more than anything else they feared the forces that now clashed within the Manufactory. The gods of the Wild and of Civilization brawled, and the fury of their battle rent the world asunder.

I saw it all on the wind, because I was the wind. I was the rain and the clouds and the birds and the horses and the Manufactory itself. I was the Wild. I was Jackson Balor and I was Ferengris. I stood in the Manufactory—in me—as I tore myself apart, and I cowered in fear from the storm as I fought against my foolish and prideful brother.

All of it. Everything. I was the whole world and all that was within it. It was so much, and I was so overwhelmingly whole, that I couldn’t make sense of a damn thing. So I focused myself. I concentrated. And I became just the wind, and everything else grew quieter.

I found Imogen where I’d left her, huddled up against the trunk of a tree, holding Syl tight in her arms. The wind—me—I—was pressing hard against them, and her hair and dress were blowing this way and that. I eased up on the force of the gale, and I lifted up the bushes and lowered the branches to protect them from the worst of it.

From there, I traveled the length of the wilderness. I found the wreck of the Salamastis, sinking even more deeply beneath the water as the bayou itself washed over it. In time, the wood would break down, and the metal would be covered by plants and silt, and what was once a rich lady’s fancy steam yacht would be just another part of the landscape.

Rain fell. It fell in heavy sheets that covered the world. The spider whose web we’d used to cross the water was hiding in a hollow tree trunk, waiting for the storm to pass. Its web was torn, the strands flying in the wind, and when the weather calmed the creature would emerge to rebuild its net.

The pieces of the web were consumed by the water, and deep below that water I beheld the shadow of the amphibious beast that’d destroyed the automaton and nearly devoured me. It could feel the world raging above it, but it didn’t care. It was calmer in the deep. Nothing from the world above could touch the water monster far below.

Back on the island, the supplies I’d salvaged from the wreck flew into the sky. I juggled them with arms that were wind, and I watched as they danced in the air. I dropped a pot into the pond, then flew off through the trees til I came across the body of Stuart. The bugs and scavengers had already begun their feast, and I could see the beginnings of rot’s destruction all across his features. I pushed him into the water, and pushed him some more, and his body sank below to join with the remains of his beloved. The sword fell from his corpse and was lifted up into the clouds above.

Why I should care for the dignity of a dead thing confused me for a moment. The wind and the rain do not trouble themselves with such human sentiments. Neither does the predator or the scavenger or even, in most cases, the herbivore. But I did care. I cared because, I remembered now, I was human.

My hand curled into a fist, and I drove it into the stone face of Cerenis. I felt something break and give beneath my knuckles, and cracks spread across his stony countenance. My brother let out a cry of anger and grabbed my horns. He twisted my head and neck round and kneed me in the gut.

I laughed. It’d been so long since I’d had a body—a real body. Every sensation that traveled through this meat, every signal that went through my nervous system, was something to be treasured and cherished. Yes; even the pain.

Pain lets you know when you’re in danger. It helps you live. Pain signals to you that even if everything’s become difficult, even if your body’s shutting down from the sheer weight of it all, you’re still alive.

And alive I was. I was Ferengris. I was Jackson Balor. I was the Wild.

Across the water I flew. The bayou raged all around me. Lightning struck a tree and its branches lit up in flames. A boat capsized in the storm. One fisherman hit his head against the hull, was knocked unconscious, and drowned. Two more struggled to swim up to the surface of the water, but were tossed around by the fury of the waves. Another bolt of lightning struck a watchtower out on the edge of New Alms, and it blew apart into chunks of mortar and stone.

I watched it all and felt it all. I drowned the sailors and fell apart in chunks with the tower and burned in the tree. The howl of the wind was my voice, my bellow of defiance at this world that’d harmed me, at myself for harming me. I was Cerenis but I denied it. I was Ferengris and I accepted it.

From the sky I fell. My form struck the streets below and shattered and splattered and ran down an incline to pool in the gutter. I fell and fell and fell and splashed. I covered New Alms and I ran down the windows and saw through the glass where I hugged my family—myself—tight and prayed to Cerenis—me—for an end to the storm and sometimes I even did something blasphemous and said a prayer to the Wild God and hoped I’d heard.

My hand was pressed against the window as I watched the rain outside. I worried for my girls and I worried for Jackson. I was the rain and the wind and I saw Miss Nora there watching me with concern in her eyes. She was scared. A part of her was certain that this storm was somehow connected to what’d spooked Jackson so bad, even though she had no idea how that could be.

She was surprised when the glass against her palm warmed up for just a moment, and she saw a face in the streaks of water outside the window.

“Jackson?” she asked, and she felt a fool for it.

I whispered goodbye into her ear. I whispered my apologies. I whispered everything. I hoped that she heard. And then I was dripping off the window, falling down the brickwork, blowing out across New Alms.

Not all of me was inside. Some had been caught out in the storm. We ran for shelter, held our coats above our heads, held onto the fabric for dear life as the wind tried to rip it from our grasps.

Eric. I was Eric Etterna, running across the bridge that crossed the canal, cursing my luck and hoping to reach my manor before I was completely soaked through. I was Lilly, a girl who’d always loved to read, who’d dreamed of adventures she’d never have, who’d run away from a grandfather who’d liked to beat her and ended up as a prostitute and found a new family where people cared about each other even in the face of a society that hated us.

Lilly. Lilly was loyal. She loved her family. She loved Jackson—she loved me—and my rejection had hurt her deeply. But more than that, there was a betrayal eating away and her. It ached within her, and it needed to be addressed.

She hadn’t told anyone her plan. In truth, Lilly wasn’t fully sure if she’d actually go through with it, or how. It was a half-formed thing at best. But she’d have plenty of time to mull it over—or at least she’d assumed she would. All she needed to do for now was wait for when Eric next visited Miss Nora’s. He always requested her. She was his favorite. And when they were alone together, that’s when she’d make her decision.

The storm snuck up on her while she was out for a walk, trying to clear her head after what’d happened with me two days before. Was it serendipity that led to her running into Eric on that bridge, or was it something else? Did the pieces of the Wild work according to a design I hadn’t even realized I was setting forth? As I danced in the storm, I wondered if I’d been the one to direct these souls and bring them together, or if it was all just some grand coincidence?

Was there even a difference, really? I can’t say.

“Eric!” Lilly shouted when she recognized the man rushing by her on the bridge. She had to shout it—it was the only way she’d be heard over the rush of the wind and rain. “Eric, wait!”

He was holding his jacket over his head, and he started at the sound of someone shouting his name. Eric spun round to see Lilly rushing for him. He didn’t understand what she was doing out here, or why she was coming toward him instead of running for shelter.

“Lilly?” he asked, and then had to repeat the name because he couldn’t even hear himself over the pouring rain. “Lilly, go home! It’s dangerous!”

“Did you do it?” Lilly demanded. She was close to him now. They were only two feet apart. Her brown hair was matted against her head. Rainwater flowed down her face and mixed with her tears. “Did you turn in Jackson?”

“What?” He’d heard what she’d said, but he wanted to pretend he hadn’t. How could she’ve even known about that, anyhow? Eric hadn’t wanted anyone to know—to know the shame of what he’d done. So he decided he’d play dumb, and this would pass along with the storm.

But there’d been a moment—a brief moment, but a moment nonetheless—between when he’d heard her question and when he’d schooled expression where the truth of his guilt was written plain on his face. Lilly saw it, and she knew.

How could he!?

She screamed in rage, and she pushed her hands against his chest and shoved him with all her might. I shoved him too—with Lilly’s hands and the wind’s gales and even Eric’s own foot—and Eric Etterna let out a scream of his own as he went tumbling over the side of the bridge and plunged into the canal below.

I was Eric and I was the water. I was the canal and with my cold and flowing arms I embraced him. I hugged him firm and I hugged him tight and I hugged him with all the tenderness and ferocity I could manage. He gasped for breath but got only water. I took him into me, and I filled him. We were intertwined, and we were one.

His muscles spasmed against and within me. His eyes widened, all bug-like and panicked, and for an instant he saw me. His guilt reared up in his heart, and his tears were invisible in the currents of the canal, but I recognized and tasted them all the same. We embraced each other. At long last our bodies were together, in the way I’d always wanted them to be but had always been too cowardly to admit.

Yes, I loved Eric Etterna. I loved him dearly. My heart beat for him, and I lived my life for him, and I’d never admitted it to anyone—not even myself. He was my everything, and when he shattered my trust, he’d shattered my heart as well.

My lips were the flow of the water, and I kissed him with a gentleness that storms do not possess. I kissed him and stroked his hair. He closed his eyes, pressed himself against me, and as the last of the air was expelled from his burning lungs, as darkness overtook his sight, he knew that he was not alone.

Eric Etterna died, and his body was lost in the storm.

Above him, Lilly sobbed. She’d watched him fall, and the weight of the murder she’d committed was already heavy upon her. She wondered if maybe she should follow him down into the water.

But before she could, a hand grabbed her shoulder. Lilly spun in terror, and she saw the baker, Fiona, pleading with her to come inside and out of the storm.

Together they ran off, down to Fiona’s bakery, where her husband stood in the doorway watching for his wife. Just a few minutes earlier, she’d thought she’d heard someone calling for her outside. She’d thought it was the voice of her friend Jackson, who needed her and needed her help. She left the bakery and she ran to the canal and there she saw that Lilly girl who lived and worked at Miss Nora’s push Eric Etterna off the side of the bridge.

In time, Lilly would stop crying. She would warm herself by the fire, dry her body and dry her tears. And she would tell Fiona everything.

But not yet. That would come after the storm passed. But for now it was still raging.

I slashed at Cerenis’ shoulder with my clawed hand. He tried to grab me again, but I moved too fast. I bit into his arm, and black blood oozed from the wound. It was a sick, toxic sludge—the runoff of industry and waste—and it tasted of sewage. Tree roots burst from the floor around us, and my brother screamed in agony and in horror.

He was starting to realize the truth: I hadn’t lied. The last time we’d fought, I really had been curious. I really had let him win. He could’ve seen it, maybe, if all this time his pride hadn’t deluded him. But hubris makes your thinking small.

Miles away, I flew against a window, and I passed through the glass as though it were nothing. I was the floor and the walls and the building itself. Therese and Lonnie held each other tight in the room I’d become, and their three children were all there was well, clinging to them.

Constance and Eugene struggled to get closer to their parents. Their little hearts beat with terror, and they wondered if this was what death was. Something crashed outside—a signpost torn away by the wind—and they became certain that, yes, this was death that had come for them and their family. Eugene began to cry, and Therese wished desperately that there was some way she could soothe her children’s fear, while Lonnie wished he had some method of chasing the storm away, of driving it far from his family.

Valerie too was holding onto her parents and siblings. She turned her head and coughed into the crook of her elbow. Her head ached, and she was so tired—too tired to even feel terror at the storm raging just outside the window. The glass could shatter and slice all five of them to ribbons and she wouldn’t care.

Death didn’t frighten her anymore. She’d been looking at it for too long.

I kissed my niece’s forehead. She didn’t feel it, but life poured into her. She shuddered and wondered at her new and sudden vitality. Had it been the storm, somehow, that’d brought it to her?

Her family would never connect the storm to her recovery, but in Valerie’s mind the two would forever be linked together. For the rest of her life, she’d love the rain, and even years later she’d stand outside and let it all wash over her, and people would wonder: how can that girl never get sick acting like that?

Leaving my sister’s house, I looked out over New Alms, the place I’d called my home. I watched the lower streets flood, the lightning that struck the towers, the buildings that crumbled. My eyes, such as they were, found the clock tower of the Cerenite Temple, and a stray thought about what I’d like to do to those bastards took hold of the world.

From the sky above, something fell. A sword, pulled from a dirty corpse in the bayou and flung about in the clouds by raging winds, flew through the air. It struck the top of the clock tower, hit it at just the right angle. The metal blade embedded itself in the groove between steel and brick.

In an instant, I was lightning, and I was the tower. The bolt struck the sword. The electric force ran down the length of the blade and spread into the clockwork within. I was the clock, and with this energy I tore myself apart. For a moment, even the sounds of the storm were drowned out in the screeching explosion that ensued. Gears fell upon the Temple roof, and the metal screamed as it ripped. Stone crumbled into the streets below, and the shrine of my fool brother was rent open to the natural elements that he and his followers so pridefully thought to master.

These elements were not merciful.

My hands gripped the chains on Cerenis’ chest, and with little effort I broke them apart. The links shattered, and the metal turned to rust, and my brother fell back. He landed on the ground, on the moss that was rapidly spreading its way across the pavement. Rainwater pelted him, and his stone face broke and fractured.

There was nothing beneath it. I listened as he screamed—his myriad voices all united in their terror and disbelief. And then, there it was: a single dissonant scream, just barely out of sync with the others.

It was the harbinger, the opening of the floodgates. More and more voices fell away from the chorus, til it weren’t a chorus at all but a cacophony. The mob cried out in pain, and the stone pieces of my brother’s mask turned to dust, and the voices faded away.

Cerenis’ body died. I calmed myself.

And just like that, the storm passed.