“Have fun being reduced to a ball for us to kick around.” Gedeon shoved Adder’s head onto the tree stump, and?—
The axe whooshed down. The blade hacked through the tender tissues and the vertebrae in Adder’s neck with an addictive crunch.
The crowd gasped. Cries of shock from here and there floated over to us, but the majority of spectators remained silent, their smiles speaking for them.
Adder’s head plummeted from the tree stump, the round body part reminiscent of a ball. It rolled across the stage, one foot after another, until it bumped against my thigh, bouncing an inch away and coming to a stop.
“Ew,” Jayla screeched, scooching away from me.
But revulsion didn’t cling to me like it did to her.
I traced Adder’s eyebrow, the tiny hairs pricking my fingertips like thorns. Warmth still radiated off of him, as intense as the hue of his blood seeping between the planks of wood.
A quickly ebbing stream of scarlet gushed out of the clean-cut neck, soaking my pants and beckoning me to use it as paint.
And I did, dipping my fingers in the hot puddle and drawing an X on Adder’s face, from his left temple to the right side of his jaw and then the other way around.
A sigh of freedom sent tingles through my limbs. Perhaps I wasn’t completely sane. But what did it even mean to be of sound mind?
Pushing Adder’s head off the stage, I relished how it crashed onto the stone-paved square and rolled away, toward three green-banded men who jumped back before their master’s head could collide with their gleaming leather shoes.
Coated in a film of dust, Adder’s halo of dark curls rustled in the wind like a flag of our victory.
86
KALI
Afull day had passed since the public execution of Ardaton’s government, but Adder’s decapitation and the in-progress deaths of his buddies held nothing to kneeling in front of the funeral fires for the fallen.
Hovering above the blank piece of paper in my lap, the graphite pencil quivered in my grasp. The blaze cast a glow on the cream sheet, the red, orange, and yellow hues dancing to a beat I couldn’t hear.
In the dead of the night, Ilasall flickered with colors, the streets drenched in a flood of blazes. Wooden structures serving as the final resting beds for the deceased blocked the crossroads, the city squares, the parks, even the wide roads, so the clusters of flames could consume the corpses in peace, without threatening to engulf the nearby dwellings.
The larger part of the green- and black-banded alike had chosen to remain indoors. In Ilasall, like in the other two cities, the concept of funerals hadn’t existed before. Dead bodies were composted, turned into fertilizer. The government would leach any use out of you even after you’d drifted away.
Resting my pencil on the paper, I ignored how the graphite left a smear in the corner. For the life of me, I couldn’t convince myself to write a goodbye letter to my family.
Knowing Eislyn and Eli, Tarri and Amari, Sadira and…Ryder had perished, recalling how the latter had been jumped by a soldier the second we’d stepped out of the Ardaton’s prison, and then remembering how our friends’ bodies had been incinerated mere minutes ago, it…
The jumble of emotions formed a lump in my throat.
Inviting the heat radiating from the blaze before me and Zion and Gedeon flanking me, I savored the pinpricks from minuscule rocks and crumbs of concrete prodding my shins. The ache anchored me to the right here and now.
Cries and sobs and soothing murmurs mixed with the crackles of the firewood, the symphony trapping you in an eternity of suffering.
With the numbers of the dead impossibly high, the fires had been kindled since sunset, but the end was nowhere in sight. The stench of burning flesh made my stomach roll, the odor sickly-sweet, carrying notes of acridness at the same time, the combination so cloying, so thick, it smothered the city.
Yet the reek curling the short hairs in my nostrils couldn’t deter me or the thousands of our people from swarming the sources of light, writing the letters of goodbye, and sacrificing them to the blazes, as per the compounds’ tradition.
Finished with his note, Zion played with his piece of paper until a baby flame latched onto the corner. As it devoured the page Zion kept holding on to, he whispered the customary saying, “May your souls sail the stars, my friends.”
Once the flame slunk too close to his fingers, he tossed his letter into the fire. Instantly, the force of nature devoured it down to the last morsel. Only the glowing embers and incandescent soot floating away and into the night sky markedthe journey of Zion’s words. With a little bit of hope, whatever he’d written would reach the souls of our friends residing between the stars.
I glanced at Gedeon’s empty lap. It hadn’t taken him long to scribble what he’d felt like saying, and the ball in my throat thickened. I’d been staring at my blank page for half an hour, unable to string a single sentence. Like the raging night, too powerless to put out the twinkling dots in the sky, so was I—weak.
Paralyzed.
Zion shuffled closer to me, the plastic arm cast bumping into my side. “Pretty birdie.” He wiped away the rogue tear sculpting its path down my cheek. “How’s my favorite dessert doing?”
