“Mortal forms are fragile, fallible. They have a time limit. I am what I needed to become.”
He starts to squeeze, his grip like a vise around my throat, but I phase and come back together behind him again, slashing Toothpick across his shoulders. He barely flinches. I keep moving, angling attacks at his knees, his stomach, his throat, but none of it seems to affect him at all. He grabs me and shoves me backward, off the dais, and then I’m surrounded by Herald-angels, descending on me, burning with righteous light.
I phase and dodge and strike out at them, trying to keep out of their grasp, but my body is injured and wobbly and exhausted. I can’t keep up, I can’t move fast enough, and all I can think about are the gray-eyed, ghostly faces inside those grotesque cages. The humans—no longer alive, not entirely dead—trapped inside that torment for thousands of years. It throws me off, a weird surge of sympathy that softens my attacks.
The Herald-angels drive me back and back, away fromHorace Cooper and into the middle of the room, until I’m trapped between them and the pool of light.
One of them brings a sudden, heavy fist crashing onto my back, sending me sprawling onto the floor. Pain sears along my spine and arms. More blows slam down on me, again and again, pounding me into the floor until I can feel darkness gathering at the corners of my brain. I lie face down, the pain in my shoulders throbbing up my neck and into my skull.
I stare at the pool next to me, watching its soft-blue light ebb and flow. The color and rhythm wash over me, relaxing my muscles, slowing my heartbeat, and I let myself drift in it.
voices calling
a song
a story
I float on its current, out of this room, somewhere where there is no space or time. Just a riot of colors and myriad ellipses spinning around one another in constant motion.
old pain
transformation
unmaking
Distantly, I hear Horace shouting something. Telling his angels to grab me, to get me away from the light. He almost sounds panicked. Afraid.
Afraid of what, though? Of me? He’s already broken me.
Valene. Why can’t you fly?
The voice is in the song. The voice is beyond the song. I feel myself reaching for it, my fingertips touching the edge of the pool, and I suddenly know why Horace is afraid. I finally know how to answer the question that voice keeps asking me.
Because I need you to give me wings.
The light flickers in reply. I raise my head so I can see Horace, standing on his precious dais, watching me. I grin at him, blood on my teeth, and raise both my fists to him, middle fingers up.
And then I roll over the edge, into the pool. Horace shouts in alarm, but it’s too late. The light surges to life, blazing bright as a star, enveloping everything.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Trinity sings me its story.
It sings of tens of thousands of years of living and burning and evolving as the heart of our world. It sings of what it was once, thousands of years ago: golden fields and green plants and flowers and water everywhere. It sings of its pain and its loneliness, bittersweet and sharp, as it was stripped and transformed of everything it once was. It sings of the saints it created, again and again, trying to reach out, to connect, to fix what was broken only to have each of us ripped away, dismantled, fed back to it in a horrifying cycle again and again.
My mind falls down, down, into the heart of the world, and Trinity reaches for me, folds around me. It feels like Mama’s arms, when she would hold me at night. It feels like Papa’s voice and his bright, sudden laugh whenever I said something precocious or unexpected. It feels like the warm weight of Halle’s and Kelda’s heads on my shoulders as they fall asleep.
Hundreds of saints live inside Trinity’s song. Those who came before me. Those who are destined to rise after I’m gone. Their voices swell and they are soft and loud and wild and sweet. They sing of their homes and their loves and their dreams and their pains. Every heartache and triumph and moment in between. It all crashes against me in a poignant flood. It spillsinto every inch of my mind, and I thought it would feel more like dying—giving myself over to Trinity like this. I’d imagined it as crashing, burning, smashing everything that comprised me against a wall of unforgiving fire and metal, but tasting the possibility of it now…
It doesn’t feel like obliteration or destruction or death.
It feels like an unmaking.
Chaos becoming something strong and alive and new.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“FOR THE STORM IS THE SYMBOL OF THE HERALDS, AND WHEN IT APPEARS, KNOW THAT THEIR POWER IS NIGH AND ONLY THOSE BLESSED WITH HUMILITY AND PROSPERITY WILL BE TOUCHED BY THEM.”
