Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(5)
“I know it’s a shock, but please come back and let us explain about the Hive,” he said in a thoroughly rational tone. “I promise no harm will come to you.”
Tristan hesitated, but Lily stepped forward, avoiding contact with him. “Let’s at least hear them out,” she said, still not looking at him. “Not like we’ve got any other choice.”
They followed the emissary back to the group and Grace explained the strange arrangement between the people of Bower City and the Hive. For over a hundred years the Hive had been “choosing” people, flying them to the coast as they had with Lily and her mechanics, and leaving them there. The Hive had allowed those chosen humans to build a city and go about their lives as long as they did so in a diligent and orderly fashion. “That’s all they want?” Caleb asked, sneering his disbelief. “Order?”
“I swear it,” Grace replied. She gestured down to the bright blossoms at her feet. “They don’t even demand that we maintain these fields of flowers to provide them with food. We do it voluntarily. It’s our gift to them for giving us so much.”
Lily looked around at her coven, silently asking them what they thought.
“They’re right there,” Una said, gesturing toward the Warrior Sisters hovering around the gate. “They could have killed us at any time.”
“She’s right,” Breakfast said, backing her up.
Tristan nodded reluctantly, but Caleb was the hardest to convince. Lily could feel his hatred for the Hive, and for all Woven, like a hard lump inside of him—an infection that had calcified. She couldn’t blame him. The Woven had killed most of the people he’d ever known.
Where else are we going to go? Lily asked him in mindspeak.
I don’t like it. There’s something off about all of this, Caleb replied.
I don’t like it either, Lily replied. Then she shrugged a defeated shoulder and followed Grace, who was leading the rest of her coven toward the walled city.
Skittish as a herd of spooked horses, Lily and her coven had to pass under an arch of hovering Warrior Sisters in order to enter Bower City. The hum of their wings puckered her skin and sent bolts of static down her legs. Lily looked up. The Sisters’ black-faceted eyes glinted with oil-slick rainbows and their bulbous heads twitched lightning fast atop their long stalk necks. They looked back down at her, and Lily couldn’t tell what they thought or felt—or if they thought or felt anything at all.
“It’s okay. Really,” Grace soothed. “The Hive craves order above all things and, if you behave peacefully, they won’t bother you. All we need to live in harmony with them is to live in harmony with one another.”
Caleb didn’t argue entering the city, but as they walked through the gates, he couldn’t help but comment. “Harmony,” he whispered as he ducked under the dangling tips of a Warrior Sister’s cat-o’-nine-tails whip. “You sure they’re not tone-deaf?”
Lily curled up a cheek in a wry half smile, thinking that Caleb had struck on what was bothering her about them. The Sisters may have some of the physical attributes of people, but there was something distinctly alien about them. Lily couldn’t read emotion in them, nor could she imagine them understanding and enjoying something as fundamentally human as music.
When Lily got her first good look at the inside of Bower City, she had the nagging feeling she’d been there before. The brightly painted buildings were topped with terra-cotta roofs, and every windowsill and trellis spilled over with flowers. Blossoms dripped from every gable, and the pristine streets were edged not with grass, but with carpets of wildflowers. Even the trees that lined the street—each housed in its own enormous pot—were of the flowering kind, and the air tasted bittersweet with pollen.
“Do you like our city?” Grace asked after an appropriately long pause.
“It’s so”—Una looked around, her face puckered with confusion—“clean,” she finished.
Grace laughed—a throaty, warm sound—and flashed her straight white teeth. “I told you. Order. Symmetry. Peace. The Hive is diligent about keeping things neat, to the benefit of all who live under them.”
Looking down at cobbled streets that were so spotless she reckoned she could eat off of them, Lily couldn’t find one thing that was out of place. Not a hinge on the cheerful shutters leaked a red stain of rust. No flaking paint or loose tiles on any of the vaguely Italian-villa-style houses. Everything was picture perfect.
“Like Disneyland,” Breakfast muttered.
“Exactly,” Lily agreed, nodding. That explained her déjà vu. She stifled a memory of singing animatronic dolls before she got that saccharine tune stuck in her head. She hated Disneyland.
“Except with a vaguely Mediterranean flair instead of storybook-Swiss-chalet,” Breakfast added.
“I wonder where we are, exactly.”
Breakfast shrugged. “Somewhere between San Francisco and LA, I’m guessing. Where all the farms and vineyards are.”
Tristan gave Lily and Breakfast a puzzled look, and Lily averted her eyes and shook her head as if to say that it didn’t matter. He seemed entranced with Bower City, and Lily had to agree it was a beautiful place. Even the sunshine seemed, well, shinier than it did back east.
As they threaded their way through the grid system of the streets, Lily saw open-air trolleys gliding soundlessly up and down the center of the road. People wearing brightly dyed tunics and kimonos hopped on and off the rail system with ease, the men’s voluminous capes and women’s silk ribbons trailing behind them. If the beautifully attired and heavily perfumed citizens thought anything was odd about the bedraggled appearance of Lily’s coven, they hid it well.