I drop the binoculars from my eyes. I don’t think I want to see this next part up close. The Archangels hover above that big gray construct and drop the corpses they’re carrying. The bodies disappear into it; there’s a distant sickening whir of machinery and blades and the crunching and splintering of bone.
“What”—Orion’s mouth is set in a thin, flat line—“the fuck?”
The bottom of the construct opens up, dumping a sludgy substance into the ever-churning mounds below.
“So that explains where our dead go,” Dani says quietly andlifts her shoulder in a half shrug. “Take the bodies, turn them into seed-growing stuff, and send it out to the greenhouses.”
“If only they didn’t tell everyone that their loved ones were being delivered back to the Heralds,” Orion growls. It’s a vicious sound; I’ve never heard so much rage in his voice.
“Maybe it’s both,” Dani counters. “These are just the physical bodies, after all. Who knows where the soul goes?”
“So now you’re the religious sort?”
“Maybe. I keep trying to tell people I contain multitudes.”
I’m not really listening to either of them. I can’t tear my eyes from that pit and the enormous paddles stirring it around and around.
If the Archangels collected all the dead who were thrown into the Depths… what about Halle? Wouldn’t they have collected her? But then, what would they do with someone who fell in, but wasn’t dead? Would they kill the person before processing them like that? Or would they just throw them in alive? Was Halle—
Acid burns up the back of my throat, and I double over, retching. Wasting all the water I drank from the aqueduct in a bitter, bile-filled spray.
Orion’s hand presses against the curve of my back. “Val, are you—”
“Fine.” I straighten abruptly, though I can’t stop the tremors shaking through my body. From adrenaline or horror or fury—I don’t know. “I’m fine.”
I have to be. First the saints and now our dead.Someoneis doing all this. And I’m not leaving until I either meet them face-to-face or die trying.
There is movement far off on the horizon as the tiny silhouettes of Archangels arc back down into the Depths, a few others splitting off and winging their way toward the glowing shape of the Gate. I shrink back into the shadows of the trees a little. The sky is too busy out here. We’re too exposed.
“We need to get into cover.” Orion jerks his head over toward our left. “Come on.”
Dani and I follow him to the hollowed-out ruins of some kind of building not too far away. It looks like there are a number of tumbled-down shells scattered here and there around the open space, almost like the remains of a town, but this one is the most intact. A section in the middle of it even has a few walls and most of a roof still in place, so we move quickly toward it, keeping an eye on the sky and the Gate the whole time.
As we get closer, I realize that the building isn’t made of alloy or metal, like everything on Trinity. It’s a mix of materials—rough gray blocks that look like they were polished smooth; beams of dark-gray metal; and even some components that look like they might have been part of the tree trunks outside at one point. All the surfaces are streaked with ombré cascades of violet and indigo and bluish-green that sparkle in the ambient starlight. Inside the more-intact area, liquid drips from the ceiling, sometimes in haphazard drops, sometimes in steady, trickling streams that glitter like necklaces. In certain places, the liquid has even collected and hardened into jagged, crystallized columns that hang toward the plants growing out of the floor. Light bounces off every angle, making the whole place seem glowing, effervescent.
“This place gets weirder and weirder,” Dani says as she shrugs off her pack and drops it on the ground.
“Someone built this.” Orion paces the edge of the space, which seems to have been a decent-size room once. There’s the metal frame of a table in the middle, rusting away, and little fragments of glass are scattered around the thickly growing plants like fallen stars. “Who, though? What happened to them? Where did they go?”
I set my pack down, too, and drift over to the walls, placing my hands against the surface. Trinity’s song bounces around inside this place in a way that distorts it, makes it difficult to follow, but the ombré of colors glittering beneath my fingertips grounds me. Even with the ambient glow around us, it’s dim and shadowy in here, so I start to work my way along inch by inch, from the bottom of the walls to the top. Over my shoulder, I see Orion doing the same, starting on the other end, working with me as we try to find…
I don’t know. Answers. There has to be something here.
I’m halfway around the space when I finally come across something new—a plaque of some kind, embedded securely into the wall.
“I found something,” I call over my shoulder.
At the top is a photograph in black-and-white of a group of people, standing together, smiling. They’re all wearing strange clothes in styles I’ve never seen before—half of them appear to be men in dark buttoned coats over light-colored striped pants and light vests; the other half seem to be women in dark, high-necked dresses with voluminous layered skirts and their hair pinned up.Below them, words are etched into the plaque surface. I have to scrub hard to get the sheen of colors and some kind of thick brown dust off enough to make out what they say, and then I read them aloud for Orion and Dani to hear:
IN DEDICATION TO THE THIRTEEN FOUNDERS OF THE HERALD POWER COMPANY TRANSFORMING TRINITY TOGETHER
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“IN EVERY TOWNSHIP AND CITY, IN EVERY PLACE WHERE PEOPLE ARE GATHERED, THEY MUST ENSHRINE IMAGES OF THE TWELVE HERALDS, SO THAT THEIR PRESENCE MAY ALWAYS BE FELT, THROUGHOUT THE AGES.”
—THE SACRED LAW OF THE HERALDS
Herald?” Dani’s voice sounds tight and choked. “As intheHeralds?”
