I was right. It is real.
“I’ll be damned,” Dani breathes.
Orion wanders forward, awestruck, gaping. He bends down and plucks one of the flowers by the stem, twirling it between his fingers. “It’s exactly like the one from the Aaldenberg knot.”
I put a hand under Dani’s elbow, steadying her as she pushes herself to standing. Where Orion’s face is full of wonder, Dani looks alarmed and wary.
“What the fuck is this?” she whispers.
I shake my head. “The gateway to the Heralds’ heavenly afterlife, I guess?”
She shoots me a skeptical look. “You don’t believe that.”
I look down at the green carpet of plant life underneath my stained, wet boots. The air smells so different—sweeter somehow and warmer than the aqueduct, but significantly cooler than the rest of Trinity. After years of standing on alloy, the ground here gives in a way that’s soft, almostsquishy.
The song is different here, too. Louder and clearer, but there’s less of apullto it. Like because I’m finally here, it doesn’t have to tug at me anymore.
“Honestly? I don’t know what to believe right now.”
Orion takes the lead across the unfamiliar landscape, pausing often to run his fingertips over the rough trunk of one of the trees, to bend down and touch all the strange variations of plants stretching up from the ground. Dani and I stay close behind him,and even as I’m awed by the riot of life unfurling in every direction, I can’t shake the sense of danger churning in my gut.
A low, soft hooting sound comes from one of the trees, and Dani spins toward it, pulling her pulse pistol out in one smooth motion. I phase up beside her, my hand going to my knives, but Orion leaps in front of both of us, his hands out.
“It’s okay! Don’t shoot… or stab… or whatever you’re about to do.” He points over his shoulder at a creature high up in the branches of the tree. “It’s not an enemy. It’s just another… creature-thing. Like Ember.”
Another one. Organic and alive. This one is fluffy but not in the same hairy way that Ember is, and it stands on two clawed feet instead of four. It’s spotted brown and white all over with wings tucked close into its sides and round yellow eyes that look severely unimpressed. I try to reach for the word for it, dig it up from my dreams like how I know that rain is rain and trees are trees.
Dani huffs, holstering her pistol. “Doesn’t look anything like Ember. How many of these things are running around this place?”
Orion gazes up at it, his face practically glowing with delight. “I don’t know. Isn’t it incredible?”
I drop my hand from Wrath’s hilt. “It kind of looks like it wants to incredibly murder us.”
Dani brightens, nudging my arm with hers. “Hey, that makes it a perfect fit for you.”
Rolling my eyes, I turn away from her and scan the horizon ahead of us. The Gate of Heaven gleams against the dark sky, somehow both closer and farther away than ever. Who is upthere? How many more secrets are they hiding ifthisis just the beginning?
Light glints off something a little way up ahead, glimmering through the tree trunks, and there’s another, more distant sound beneath the ringing of Trinity’s song I can’t quite place. I head for it, my boots swishing through the… what’s the word for it…grass. It’s a soft sound that is so foreign from the usual clump of my feet against alloy that I shiver. The trees end abruptly, opening into a wide, expansive grassy space, but I don’t step out into the open, staying in the relative safety and cover of the trees’ shadows.
It’s the water that catches my eye first. Not in an aqueduct. Not parceled out in a drinking ration or steam shower. Just a whole, wide, enormous stretch of it, off to my left, rippling in the glow of the starlight. Greenery-drenched aqueducts spring up from the middle, shooting off in all four cardinal directions.
“Holy shit,” Dani breathes as she and Orion come up behind me.
“So this is where it comes from.” I glance up at Orion. He’s scanning the scene in front of us with a pair of binoculars, and all the wonder in his face is gone, replaced with something close to bitterness. “Millions of thirsty dusters living ration to ration, and all of this is just… sitting up here.”
“What are those other things?” Dani asks, pointing to two other constructs that take up every inch of the open space that isn’t occupied by water.
One sits directly below the stained glass sphere of the Gate, poised over a massive hole in the alloy, cutting down into fathomless darkness, three times as big as the Crater back in the Shipyards. The construct itself is sharp-angled and glitters clearlike a diamond—except when a column of blue-white light from the heart of Trinity miles below shoots upward and into it. Its facets catch the light, glowing as it whirs with activity.
Orion nudges me, handing me the binoculars, his jaw tight. It takes me a second to adjust them to my eyes, but as soon as I do, I have to laugh a little.
“It’s making naphtha. You know, the blessed blood of the Heralds? It’s actually just thisthing, generating it, like a fabricator’s shop, and all our precious aqueducts carry it from there.”
I swing the binoculars right, to the other construct Dani pointed out. It’s less flashy than the diamond generator, a bulky gray rectangular type of building propped up on stilts. Below it is a huge pit of dark-brownstuff—I can’t find the word. Like dust, but not dust. Mounds and mounds of it being constantly churned by enormous paddles.
As I’m trying to piece together exactly what I’m seeing, around a dozen Archangels fly out of the enormous hole in the alloy, soaring past the naphtha generator, each of them holding…
White-shrouded bodies. They’re carrying the dead of Trinity.
