Laila fell to the floor as the force of the Babel Fragment hit her. Her vision fuzzed. Blue streaks wrinkled the dirt stage, like ice cracking across a lake. Light lashed through the floor, a dark expanse opening in the middle of the stage, terrible and lightless, a chasm where stars went to be unmade.
Laila touched the floor, spreading her fingers in the hard dirt, feeling it bite into her nail beds. She had never been able to read anything Forged. Always, it was as abrupt and stark as a light turned off in a room. But this time… this time she could do more than just read the Forged power licking through the room.
She could understand it.
The vastness of it seized her from her own body. She was everywhere,everything, in that moment. She was at the top of a mountain, snow caught in her hair. She was on the floor of a palace, the sweet-smelling resin stinging her nose. She was clutched in the hand of a priest, placed in the mouth of a god,forged—in the old sense of the word, existence hammered into being—in a furnace of time. Points of connection mushroomed across the plane of her mind. Her consciousness scattered. She was infinite—
Laila gasped.
She pulled back her hand from the dirt. Points of blue blinked and dimmed on her skin. What did it mean that it called to her this way… if this was a place where stars could be unmade… what about her? Would she unravel here?
Who was she?Whatwas she? Her mother called her beloved. Her father labeled her blasphemous. Paris named her L’Énigme.
“Laila?” breathed Tristan.
Laila.
She was Laila. The girl who made herself. This moment—shining and distant—crashed around her. Her senses rushed back to her and with them, fear. She knew it was not desperate imagination that let her see the flash of matchlight far above in the terraces.Zofia.Enrique. They were here. Séverin was still swaying, kneeling. Blood dripping down his mouth from the cut along his cheek. She could feel Tristan’s hands on her shoulders, cold and quivering. She touched his wrist lightly, letting her hair fall over her face so as to conceal the gesture from Roux-Joubert.
The earth was not all that she had read.
When she’d kneeled on the ground beside an unconscious Séverin, Tristan had held a blade to her. And then he forced the hilt into her hand.Please. Make it stop. The wooden hilt had dug into her palms, splinters cutting into her skin, images lancing through her mind. In her visions, she saw Tristan forced under waves of nightmares that warped his doubts and made them seem real. They’d tortured him.And then they’d tortured him with the knowledge of what he had let happen. Laila had handed him back the knife, closing her fingers around his in the stolen seconds before Roux-Joubert had arrived with his associate.
I know what they did. It’s not your fault.
Tristan had wept against her. He didn’t even ask how she knew, he simply trusted, and the weight of it left her aching. She would not let anyone make Tristan cry. Never again.
“Laila?” whispered Tristan.
She shook her head, careful not to speak. The Night Bite was cold on her tongue. She only had one chance to use it, and she needed to time the moment just right. Laila glanced up, focusing on Séverin. Even now, even bruised, he looked like a king. His gaze stern. Unflinching. But not on her.
Roux-Joubert screamed louder. “Get that Tezcat open!”
The man with the blade-brim hat shrank. The obsidian chips of the Tezcat had fallen off, crashing and splintering on the ever-rolling floor. But the Tezcat did not budge. On the other side, the crowd of cloaked people remained unmoving.
The rest of the Fallen House.
Laila shuddered to look at them… so pale… so still.
“Sir, there’s no way… there is something blocking it,” said Roux-Joubert’s associate, removing his hat and placing it on his chest. “I… Perhaps you might use your blood? As you did before? The strength of your ichor will surely be enough.”
Roux-Joubert swallowed, his eyes wild. He touched his arm gingerly. “I do not like to keep the doctor waiting. But I have nothing left to give.”
Tristan squeezed Laila’s arm. She could sense his panic, the quick inhale he drew into his lungs.
“But you…” said Roux-Joubert, turning to Séverin. “What essence lies in the veins of the blood heir of House Vanth? I was told not to spill your blood… proof, perhaps, that the doctor sees some worth in you, but I find myself tempted.”
Laila nudged Tristan. He hesitated, and then he drew her hair in a tight fist, yanking her head forward. Laila winced. But it was part of the plan.
“Please,” she murmured. “A moment.”
Roux-Joubert’s eyes widened. He smiled, and the waxen skin around his lips cracked from the effort.
“Rather devoted whore you have, boy,” he said, sneering at Séverin. “It seems she wishes to say goodbye. Why not. I always planned to be benevolent.”
Séverin went still. His gaze burned into hers. Laila let herself be led by Tristan. Then, lightly, she touched Tristan’s wrist. She needed Séverin to know that she had seen what truly happened. That he had to trust her.
Séverin blinked slowly. In the gloaming of the catacombs, his lashes cast spiked shadows onto his face. When he raised his gaze to her, blue glinted in those violet depths.
