City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(49)

There is another voice. Someone is screaming, she realizes.

Then the fire in the jail cell stands to its feet, looks at her, and reaches out.

She sees a face through the flames, blistering and cracking.

It is the boy, yet he burns as if doused in kerosene.

He opens his mouth to scream again. Shara watches as flames flood into his mouth, down his throat. She can see his tongue bubbling.

The door behind her flies open. Mulaghesh grabs her and jerks her into the hallway.

The cell door slams shut, its edges and cracks illumed with bright firelight. There is a pounding from the other side, and screaming. Policemen come running, but they are unsure what to do.

“Oh,” says Mulaghesh. “Oh, by the seas. What in the f*cking world. Someone get some blankets! We need to put that man out! Come on, everyone, move!”

The pounding on the door weakens, softens. A smell pervades the air, bubbling lipids like a chandler’s shop. By the time the officers finally manage to bring blankets and a doctor, there is a dark smoke seeping through the top crack of the door.

They prepare themselves and rip the door open. It opposite side is black, charred. Beyond is a wall of smoke, streaming plumes like black water.

“No,” says Mulaghesh. “No. Far too late. Far too late.”

A dark, crinkled shape surfaces among the sea of black. Shara moves to look, but Mulaghesh pushes her away.

*

Wild havoc. Hallways of people screaming and shouting, fighting to get out. Shara wishes to ask “What’s all the commotion about” but she feels too stunned and slow to ask.

She sees Saypuri soldiers fighting through the crowd to get to her; feels Mulaghesh shove her into their arms; feels herself being ripped out of the stampeding throng.

She feels these things, but they do not register. I suppose this is what shock feels like, she thinks, rather curious.

She is stuffed into a car along with Mulaghesh and two soldiers. Pitry looks back at them from the driver’s seat, alarmed. Mulaghesh tells him, “The embassy. Now.” When they pull away, an armored car bearing the polis governor’s insignia on its side coughs to life and follows closely.

“Look up,” Mulaghesh tells the soldiers. “On the rooftops. And keep an eye on the alleys.”

“What are you telling them to look for?” Shara asks softly.

“Are you insane? For any more assassins! That’s, what, twice in six hours? By the seas, I don’t even know how he did it. … He must have had a device on him, some flask with oil, or something. … I don’t know how the police missed it, unless one of them snuck it to him while he was imprisoned. Which I wouldn’t put past them.”

Shara thinks, She thinks he attacked me.

But he didn’t. I know exactly what that was.

But I only ever read about it. …

“I was turned away,” says Shara. “What did you see?”

“No, you weren’t,” says Mulaghesh. “You were looking right at him. I thought it was some kind of mind game you were playing with him. You went to the door, opened the slot so I could see in. Then you said something about light and turned around, and you both just … stared at one another.”

“For how long?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Then he just … burst into flames. I didn’t see him activate anything, push any button, light any match. He didn’t even seem to move. Whatever he used, I want to know what it was. They might use more of them.”

“And … And did you hear a voice in the room?”

“A what?”

“A voice? While we stared at one another?”

Mulaghesh takes her eyes off the street to look Shara over. “You’re in shock. You need to lie back and rest. Let me take over today. This is what I do. This is what I know. Okay?”

He spoke to me from the heart of the world.

No—he was the heart of the world.

“You don’t need,” says Shara softly, “to order your men about so.”

“Shara, just lie back—”

“No,” says Shara. “Listen. That was not a planned, coordinated attack. And it was most certainly not an assassination attempt.”

“Then what was it?”

Shara debates not telling her. Some secrets, she tells herself, can’t be borne alone.

She sits up and says to Pitry, “Pardon, Pitry, but could you pull over briefly? And when you do, could you roll up the partition back here?”

“What?” says Mulaghesh. “Why?”

“Because I’m afraid your soldiers will have to join Pitry in the front seat,” she says. “This conversation will have to be private, you see.”

*

The broken buildings are like savage landscapes as they speed by, gray glaciers creeping down a mountain. A pale face appears at a window: a young girl heaves out a prodigious amount of what can only be human waste. The passersby stop only briefly: not an unusual occurrence for them.

“I have read more about the history of the Continent than nearly anyone else alive in the world,” Shara says. “Before me, the only person who knew more was Efrem Pangyui. He’s now passed, of course. Which means it is only me.”

“What’s your point?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I have read of instances of spontaneous combustion on the Continent. It hasn’t happened in decades, but once, long ago, it happened occasionally. The cause of these episodes of spontaneous combustion was widely known here, back then: they were the result of Divine possession.”