When I was younger, I can only remember seeing two orthree prophets in the chapel at any given time, but now there’s always more like seven or eight, swaying away up here.
We’re told it’s a blessing to have your loved one turn prophet. But I never wanted that blessing. I just wish I had Mama back. My mama. Clever, straightforward, all calloused hands and sharp brown eyes edged with laughter. Wrapping me in her arms when I couldn’t sleep. Cuddling me against her and kissing the freckles on the bridge of my nose. Calming all three of us with a soft word and a gentle squeeze of the hand.
But that was years ago. We tried so hard to hold on to her, but she slipped away, dust through our fingers, scattered into nothing by unforgiving winds. I haven’t heard my name from her lips or seen any recognition in her eyes for four years, and it’s carved out this raw wound inside my ribs, jagged with shards of bone, that never seems to scab over. To have the face that I knew better than my own grow so empty, squeezed of everything until the shapes of it don’t even make sense anymore. Sometimes I can’t remember the exact color of her eyes or the sound of her laugh, and another little piece of me is shaved from my body, exposing my insides.
“Hey, Mama,” I murmur, dropping down to my knees in front of her. “Looks like they’re still getting food in you, at least.”
My sisters and I saw the signs weeks before we lost her, and we tried to hide her away in our lodgings, keep her out of sight. It worked for a few months. But then one morning, when we were all asleep, she’d wandered out into the streets and been spotted by a warden. The chapel had eaten her up in a matter of minutes.
Mama tilts her head, swaying, humming a song as familiar to me as my own bones. Trinity’s song. It’s extra loud in the chapels,nearly vibrating my eardrums as it swells around me, piercing, insistent. Maybe being around the prophets amplifies it? They’re the only other ones I know of, other than myself, who can hear it, who sing it. It seems to be about the only thing they do.
A sound that is half sigh, half sob slips from my mouth, and I curve forward, my back bending under an invisible weight. “I lost them, Mama. I let them down. I let you down.” A tear slips free of my eye, dripping down my cheek, and I roughly swipe it away, angry at it for being there and at myself for crying in the middle of a chapel. “I lost them and I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what to do.”
She doesn’t answer. She never answers. I don’t know if she can even hear me. A fierce ache builds in my chest, and all I want to do in that moment is grab Mama by the shoulders and shake her. I want to hug her so tightly that she wakes up and hugs me back just as hard, like she did when I was younger. Before we lost Papa. Before the Butcher.
But I don’t. I scrub another tear off my face and stuff that feeling down into the bottom of that wretched, painful hole, making it small, so small that maybe eventually it’ll go away. Maybe I can make all my feelings go away.
Someone behind me clears their throat, and I cross my arms and bow forward, trying to look deep in reverent prayer.
“I don’t know where I’m going next. Or if I’ll see you again,” I whisper to Mama’s feet, the words heavy in my throat. “People say that prophets are treated special by the Heralds in the afterlife. I hope that’s true.”
Trinity’s song slips softly from her mouth, barely more than an exhale. I don’t know whether the prophets have always heardit, like I do, or whether it crept up on them later. Maybe the fact that I can hear that same melody right now, thrumming in my bones louder and louder each day, means I’m not actually a saint at all. Maybe it just means the clock is ticking before I become a prophet myself.
My chest tightens as I gather my things and stand, making my way back down the aisle and out the doors.
Outside, the setting sun glints off windows and the dull metal sides of buildings, and I pause, letting my eyes adjust to the brightness and my lungs to fill with deep breaths of incense-free air as I try to get my bearings.
The Gold Towners didn’t kill Halle and Kelda outright, so they must want them for something. Maybe to sell them as indentureds in another borough, a way to recoup some paper. I don’t know how much time that gives me. Dani might, but she’s gone. Maybe even—my chest tightens—dead. And as much as I wish I could find her, could know for sure, if it’s a choice between going after her or my sisters…
Then it’s no choice at all. Halle and Kelda are my only priority right now. I need a plan. Some new way to track them down.
I could try to cut my way through what’s left of the Gold Town ranks. Go at it, knives blazing, until someone coughs up where they’re keeping my sisters. But that’ll take too much time. The Gold Town Gang is a big, sprawling organization with plenty of resources and more hidey-holes than I can possibly count. And for as much as I profit off this town’s seedy underbelly, tracing the structure of it has never been a specialty of mine.
There’s also no telling what the remaining Gold Towners willdo if they know for a fact that the Butcher is coming for them. Most likely, it would be really bloody and foolish.
I need help. Insider knowledge and a coordinated plan of attack. Maybe a Gold Towner I can convince to go turncoat? But then there’s no way I could fully trust them, and I’d be just as likely to end up being led straight into a trap.
On a nearby corner, the dailies flicker, showing rough, grainy footage of two wardens, tipping their hats to the cameras as they lead a prisoner, hooded and cuffed at the ankles and wrists, through the middle of what looks like Covenant’s central lightningrail station.
I wander over a little closer so I can hear the announcer better.
“… High Warden Clarence Roberts, seen here arriving at the central station, delivering the notorious prisoner Orion Booker, the Skywayman, to the midnight prison train, bound for the Ninth Circle…”
A little curl of a smile tilts one corner of my mouth, and I tighten my grip on my rucksack.
That’s what I need. Someone with experience taking on impossible tasks. Someone who has integrity. Maybe even insufferably prides himself on it.
I need Orion Booker.
THE OUTLAW
THEN
A new saint has been found.
I stand on the street corner, watching through the gaps between people as the footage plays on the dailies and chapel bells ring across Covenant. The images flash by in a dazzling stream—shots of an elegant homestead floating up in the skyline, a well-dressed family with the kind of air and refinement that comes from long-term familiarity with wealth. The parents and older sibling beam proudly down at the youngest.
Gabriel Cirillo. Six years old.
