That’s only a little older than Kelda, I think, and then wish I hadn’t because it makes it so much harder to look at him without a flood of emotions clogging my throat.
He’s all long limbs and elbows and elfin hands. Big, round hazel eyes that are even bigger and rounder under the bursts of flashlight powder erupting all around him. Light skin gone pale and peaked as the wall of attention and excitement pounds down on him like a dust storm.
The crowd ebbs and flows around me, but I stay, watching the reel again and again and again.
I listen to the announcer telling Gabriel’s story—A brilliant child. A prodigy. The family’s personal preacher discovered the boy’s storm-touched ability—and the statement from his parents recorded in crackly audio—So grateful to have been blessed with bringing a new saint to Trinity. I hear the unique cadence of the chapel bells, the song that rings in every city and town across Trinity whenever a saint is found.
But mostly I stare at Gabriel’s young, round face. At the fear flickering behind the excitement in his eyes when the Archangels land and he stares up at their towering metal bodies and their masks shaped into frozen, benevolent smiles. A fear that ignites into terror when their giant articulated hands wrap around his tiny body and pick him up, away from his family, who beam and wave even as he cries out and reaches for them. The dailies catch it all, rolling it out in perfect detail, all the way up to the moment when the Archangels and Gabriel Cirillo disappear into the sky, winging their way upward, beyond the clouds to the Gate of Heaven.
Better him than me.
I gag a little on the thought, glad no one around me can hear inside my mind. Mama would say it’s a horribly dark thought for a twelve-year-old kid to have, and maybe she’s right. But it’s true all the same.
I only learned the full story of my birth about a year ago when I’d admitted what I was to Mama, only to find out she already knew. Mama had told me she’d been heavily pregnant when she’d been caught out on the streets in the middle of a quick-moving magnastorm. She’d never seen the lightning arc so low like it had that night—not when it’s usually blocked by the copper sails orthe skyliner ships eager to absorb the Heraldic blessings of the storms for themselves. She’d felt something strike her, go through her, and thought for certain that she was going to die. But she hadn’t. She’d survived.
And so had I.
A storm-touched duster. The only one among hundreds of saints across thousands of years.
Mama said she loves me too much, that’s why she’s never said a word about what I am, not even to Papa.
I stare at Gabriel Cirillo’s family, at the blankness behind their happy smiles. Do Gabriel Cirillo’s parents feel the same way about him? Are they just putting on a good face for the dailies, but they’re secretly devastated to have him taken away?
Or maybe because skyliners have so much more than they will ever need, they just fill the spaces of their storm-touched children with more paper, more water, more tithes and bribes to preachers, more ornamentations for their airships and homesteads, until they don’t miss them anymore.
Trinity’s song whispers across my ears, curling around, beckoning as a cool breeze, but I’ve gotten good at not listening to it. I keep my promise to Orion. And to Mama, too.
Because I will never,neverend up trapped in an Archangel’s grasp.
CHAPTER NINE
“EVERY CITY IS CALLED TO KEEP WARDENS TO SERVE AS THE HANDS OF THE HERALDS. FOR, LIKE PARENTS, THEY ASK OF US TO BE OBEDIENT, CLEAR OF HEART, AND CLEAN OF CONSCIENCE, BUT TRUE OBEDIENCE CAN ONLY COME THROUGH FIRM AND DISCIPLINED LAW.”
—THE SACRED LAW OF THE HERALDS
Here’s what I currently know about Orion Booker:
He disappeared from Covenant three years ago and I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.
He’s apparently picked up some sophisticated thieving skills since he’s been gone.
And he’s headed out of town on a prison train at the top of the midnight hour.
Which means I’ve only got about fifteen minutes until it departs and twenty minutes until he’s out of my reach completely and I’m back at square one.
I don’t even bother going to Covenant’s central station to try to board the prison train there since the wardens will becrawling all over that place—tall, broad-shouldered figures, all wearing the same white broad-brimmed hats with gold-plated armor gleaming underneath their ivory longcoats, their hands constantly resting on the gold pistols sitting on their hips. I could probably avoid them—they stand out well enough—but if they’re in the mood to harass passersby for extra cash or even just for fun, I can’t guarantee it’ll end pretty or subtly for them. And I don’t have time for that kind of holdup right now.
Instead, I sit on the top of a short, squat boardinghouse right by the lightningrail tracks near the edge of town, slowly nursing the little bit of water I poured into my canteen. Behind me, Covenant is a dusty, rough-edged sprawl, buildings like crooked fingers reaching for the gleaming blanket of skyliner airships and homesteads and dirigibles clogging the onyx sky above us. In the very middle of the borough, the zigzagging greenhouse towers rise above every other structure, dripping with greenery and gleaming with suncatcher panels. The only way most of us dusters even know what the color green looks like is because of those greenhouses. All of Covenant’s fertilizer rations are sent there and used to grow and process edible plants, only a fraction of which ends up in the hands of dusters.
In front of me, though, just past the last block of scraggly lodgings of West Parish, the buildings all fall away, and there’s… nothing. Just the complete emptiness of the Copper Plains, flat expanses of bronze- and copper-colored alloy that separate towns, cities, and boroughs, softly glowing under the low silver light of the stars and moons. The Ministry tells us that Trinity was all Copper Plains once, thousands and thousands of years ago—a constellation of new metal and glowing aqueducts, birthed into being bythe Twelve Heralds. They united their divine selves, becoming the glowing heart of power at the center of our world that gives it life.
Everything we have, we owe to the Heralds. It’s the first lesson anyone learns on Trinity.
The far-off whistle of a lightningrail departure cuts through my thoughts.
Here he comes.
I drop my rucksack in the middle of the rooftop and strip off my clothes, tossing everything except for the longcoat in the corner and laying out the midnight-dark pieces that make up my stronger, deadlier skin. I put them on in the same order as always. I never meant it to be a ritual, but it is. A way to peel off everything I am, everything Val is, and become the Butcher instead.
