Days of Blood & Starlight(45)

A mere six soldiers into a maelstrom of enemy wings—it was suicide, and could end in only one way.

They knew it, they flew toward it, hearts on fire and blood pounding, in their doom infinitely more alive than their comrades who went the other way with every expectation of survival.




“So,” said Hazael, coming quietly to Akiva’s side as they awaited the order to fly. They followed Ormerod today, their patrols combined to follow the Dominion, who had already gone. “What do we do now, brother? Do you suppose there will be many birds out today?”

Birds?

Akiva turned to him. They had never spoken of the chimaera in the gully. “Must have been a bird,” they had agreed at the time, pretending not to see the huddled folk right in front of them.

“Not nearly enough, I think,” said Akiva.

“No, I suppose not.” Hazael put his hand on Akiva’s shoulder and let it weigh there for a moment. “Maybe some, though.” He turned away; Liraz was coming. He intercepted her, leaving Akiva to his thoughts.

Maybe some. His spirits lifted, just a little.

When the fly order came, he left his despair in camp and took instead only his sense of purpose. He didn’t deceive himself that it would be a day of heroics. It would be a day of death and terror, like so many other days, too many other days, and one—or was it two?—renegade seraphim couldn’t hope to save many lives.

Maybe some, though.





38


THE INEVITABLE


Rattle of thuribles, clatter of teeth.

Karou’s fingers were restless at her trays. Sift, string. Teeth, teeth. Human, bull. Jade chips, iron. Iguana teeth—little saw-blade nasties—bat bones. Sift, string. When she came to the antelope teeth, she sat back and stared at them.

“Who are those for?”

Karou startled, and clasped her fist around them. She’d forgotten Ten for a moment. Watching. The she-wolf was always watching.

“No one,” she said, and set them aside.

Ten shrugged, and returned to the task of mixing incense.

In London, at the Natural History Museum, Karou had hesitated beside the beautiful bull oryx for minutes, her hands tracing up its long, ridged horns, remembering what it was like to bear that weight on her own head.

“You could be Kirin again,” Ten had said, but the thought had never even occurred to Karou. The antelope teeth weren’t for her. They were for Ziri, and she hadn’t even wanted to take them. Superstitiously, it had seemed to her that the preparation invited his death—like digging a grave before someone died. Yes, death was expected, death was routine, but… not for Ziri.

Lucky Ziri.

Remarkably, he was still in his natural flesh. Through speed, skill—luck, he would be the first to say—he had never yet been killed. And, as foolish, as hypocritical as it was to care about his “purity,” Karou did. He was the last of her tribe, the last true flesh of her kind. There was something sacred in that, and when he had flown out on that first assault, a small, cold dread had crystallized in her and grown, only subsiding when she saw him return.

And now she was waiting again—just to see him, and know that the Kirin were not yet gone from the world—but this wasn’t like before. This time, she didn’t see how he could possibly come back. Her parting words to him—her only words to him—had been so cruel, as if he were to blame for any of it. Would she ever get the chance to unsay them?

Sift, string. Teeth, teeth.

The hours passed and her dread grew. The sun rose, dragging all the hours behind it, and never had a day in this place seemed so sluggish, so hot, so unending. Karou felt aged by the time it finally subsided to twilight. Again and again she found the antelope teeth in her palm.

In the end, that night in London, she had taken her pliers to the oryx’s mouth. It wasn’t an invitation to Ziri’s death, she had persuaded herself, but a way of preparing herself for its inevitability. All chimaera soldiers died. Maybe now his time had come. She tried to imagine him coming back in a thurible, his true flesh—the last Kirin body in all of Eretz—abandoned somewhere, broken or burned—and found that she could handle it.

So long as it kept her from considering the other possibility: that he might not come back at all.





39


TASK NUMBER ONE


On an unpaved road in southern Morocco, a car crunched to a stop, disgorging two passengers and their backpacks before pulling away with a backdraft of dust and Berber shouts for luck. Zuzana and Mik shielded their faces, coughing. The drone of the engine grew faint, and as the air cleared and they could look around, they found themselves at the edge of a vast emptiness.

Zuzana tilted back her head. “Holy. Mik. What are the creepy lights?”

Mik looked up. “Where?”

She gestured to the sky—the entire sky—and he shuttled his gaze back and forth twice before settling on her and asking, “You mean… the stars?”

“No way. I’ve seen stars. They’re, like, these faraway specks in space. Those are right there.”

What by the light of day was an austere land the unrelieved color of dust became, in the dark, a midnight tapestry ludicrous with stars. Mik laughed, and Zuzana laughed, too, and they cursed and marveled, their necks craned all the way back. “You could pick those bastards like fruit,” Zuzana said, reaching up and waggling her fingers at them.