Yemi said nothing. The surface of her metal visage was etched on its left half in scalloped scales. Thick stripes the texture of rivers flowed from beneath the black mesh eyeholes and straight down its face, ending in a rolling wave pattern that adorned the outer edges. Yemi ran her hand across the unetched surface. In a proper world, she’d have seen the inside of it first as it was affixed to her face and bound behind her head by its broad strips of crimson silk. This side, she was meant to see in a mirror.
A lovely gesture. Meaningless if her mother lived. She wasn’t proud of the thought. She wanted her mother alive—she just didn’t want to be forced back into her shadow.
“The letter was just broadcast. How many have left?” she finally asked, mounting the mask to one shoulder by tying its ribbons beneath the other.
“No one yet.” Nova leaned against the trunk of a thin tree.
“Good.” Yemi’s nerves seemed to vibrate, anxious as she was for the coming conversation to end. It was labor, keeping the whispers at bay.
“I think everyone knows you aren’t planning to sack a city with twelve commandos, a tired journalist, two dapper guardians, and a witch who doesn’t like you very much. Though they’re assuming it’s safer to be on the side of you and your mysterious trump card than anywhere else.”
“Good of everyone to put that together,” Yemi replied.
“I’m not,” said Nova.
“Not what?”
“Assuming it’s safer on your side.”
Yemi let out a long, dreading breath. “Nova, please.”
“No one knows where your head’s at anymore, but we took oaths, Yemi. Of conduct. Principles,” Nova insisted.
“You took oaths ofservice,” Yemi reminded her.
“Yeah, and it’s feeling lately like we’re being punished for that.”
Yemi closed her eyes tightly against another thing to worry about. “In less than a week, I will have time to be invested in your collective feelings. Right now, it’s all just a storm.”
“Then wait. Collect yourself, come up with a better plan than martyring half a city.There is no rush.” The pleading was present in her voice now.
“There is no waiting. My mother is alive.”
Nova blinked. “What? How? Inside the stone shell?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Yemi muttered. Best not to get into the finer details of Selah’s end. “This might be a rescue mission. Or a discovery mission to find her body, whatever condition it’s in. I don’t know that yet. What Idoknow is the longer I wait, the more Dahlia’s influence solidifies. The larger the shadow over me grows no matter where I end up, the more my mother’s legacy disappears. You think Dahlia will let up on her erasure efforts when she finds out I sent her father off? It’s already in motion. There’s no way to stop now and still win.”
“But there might be, if you just—”
“I said no!” She spun around. “Gods, Nova, can you for once pretend something I’ve said isn’t up for negotiation?”
“Last time I did that, the tongue in question put us here,” Nova snapped. “Cutter, me, the rest of us—we all have to live with whatever comes next. Your father may have met his end prematurely, yeah, but with honor. Whatever’s happening with your mother will be the same. She has gone or she will go to some extent loved. There is no future like that for you or any of us if you do this.”
The part of her that wanted to be talked out of this, that found comfort in Nova’s practicality, was buried beneath years of grief and resentment and impatience. Yemi found herself searching for it in the silence, but being driven away by the hiss of her hunger and the lure of the stone.
“I understand feeling useless,” Nova continued gently. “I felt it watching you go with Ursla to someplace I couldn’t follow. You’re theonly person in the world with more pride than me, so I imagine you feel that powerlessness even worse.”
“I was never powerless,” Yemi whispered, but Nova continued.
“I get it. I get the seduction, her promise that you won’t ever have to feel that way again—”
“I was never powerless!” Yemi screeched. “You don’t know what I know.”
“Then tell me!” Nova insisted. “It’s my job to hang on your every word, and this is the longest I’ve ever waited for it.”
“I am descended of the Old Gods,” Yemi said. It sounded mad even to her own ears. “Their blood courses through my veins. I know their power, their hunger. I hear their voices, even now. The crown? The title? Constructs. All of that is Men’s creation to give and take away, and even then, it’s only to rule them or hold their blame.Thispower, my ancestral power, is mine. It’s always been inside me.”
Nova watched her, seemingly at a loss.
