The next day Temoc took a stroll.
He told Mina he was going to the store, which was true, but he took the long way round, toward Chakal Square.
He didn’t enter the Square, so it wasn’t even a lie of omission. He just drew close enough to hear the crowd.
The city was dead. Trash lay discarded in gutters. Airbuses and civilian traffic had deserted the sky. Only Couatl swooped above, so high up they seemed small as birds. In darkened shop windows decal monsters advertised new low prices. Chicken breast, six thaums a pound. New cheap combo platter.
Faith and hunger drew him like gravity. Though the sidewalk lay flat beneath his feet, walking toward the Square he felt as if he walked downhill.
Long after he should have turned away, he came upon the fight. Wardens, inch-high black silhouettes at this distance, manned a wall of sandbags at the end of the road. Cries rose beyond the barricade. A red-banded arm crested the wall, and the first rioter lurched over.
The kid was young, clad in browns and blues save for that red band. He slipped the dismount, fell hard to the street, and as he tried to stand a Warden beat him down again. A swarm of red-arms followed the kid, rained on the Wardens from behind. The red-arms fought bravely but not well, and with merely human strength. The Wardens seemed frantic, angry: beat cops, out of their element.
They were strong, though. A woman—Temoc guessed she was a woman from the long hair—ran at a Warden, who kneed her hard in the ribs. A burly man tried to lift a Warden in a bear hug, but the Warden lifted him instead, and threw him down. Some red-arms fell and did not rise again. Dots of white and red stained clothing: blood and compound fractures, broken bones jutting from torn skin.
Temoc’s scars itched. Gods growled half-thoughts and broken sentences in the caverns of his mind. For the fallen. Against all enemies. Unceasing and eternal. In defense of the weak. In service of the holy.
He could help. Twenty Wardens might be a stretch, but he could manage. Strike from behind without warning, hit the commander first and move through their ranks as a whirlwind. Chant the blood chants; his enemies’ pain would feed the gods. As each Warden fell, Temoc would grow stronger—and with the red-arms at his back he could roll on to Chakal Square, to his destiny. They would cry the gods’ names and the heavens would open. The demon wind would break and rain would wash his shriven city.
What then for Mina? What then for Caleb?
He watched the fight.
The Warden commander signaled retreat. The red-arms laughed when the Wardens fled. Foolish. Wardens unhooked slender cylinders from their belts and threw them underhanded. One bounced off the cobblestones, and a second.
Then came the noise.
A god cleared his throat. A goddess screamed. Metal horses galloped through a steel jungle. An enormous insect chewed through a fat man’s gut. Temoc clapped his hands to his ears. The Wardens’ masks protected them, but when the sound faded the red-arms lay writhing on the street. Blood leaked from noses and ears. A woman retched on a sidewalk. Long white cracks marred a Muerte Coffee window halfway up the block. From this distance Temoc could not hear the people moan.
He left them fallen, and walked to the store, where he bought vegetables, rice, beans, and two pounds of chicken at eight thaums a pound—demand, the butcher said with a shrug, what you gonna do. Eggs, tortillas. Tequila. Newspaper.
Mina was waiting for him when he came home. She sat in the courtyard with a cup of coffee and yesterday’s news spread on her lap.
He should have said something about the barricade, about the noise, about the chicken. He didn’t.