Not afraid. I want to be precise about that. I was not afraid. I was furious in the cold and focused way that tends to be more dangerous than fear, and I was thinking very hard about what I had. My shadows were diminished, sluggish, like commands given through water. But I was thinking. And Erlik wanted something—he had not killed us, had not broken anything yet, which meant he wanted something. The thing about people who want something is that wanting makes them manageable. Even gods.
I was still working through the angles when consciousness left me.
I didn't feel it go. There was no warning, no slow dimming at the edges. One moment I was thinking. The next, the floor was against my cheek and the screaming was louder and the light—such as it was in this lightless place—had changed.
I pushed myself upright.
My mother was standing twenty feet away.
Not the way she had been standing before. Not the careful, controlled stillness of a woman managing her own exhaustion. She was held upright, her arms pinned at her sides, her head?—
Her head was caged.
Black iron, bars thin as fingers, fitted to her skull from collarbone to crown. I could see her face through the gaps. What I could see of her face.
The blood on her temple had dried and crusted at the edges. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, the skin beneath mottled deeppurple in the pattern of fingers—deliberate, methodical, not the bruising of a struggle but of something applied with patience. And her hands. Her right hand hung wrong at the wrist, the last two fingers bent at angles that made my stomach drop before my mind had fully processed what I was seeing. The kind of angles that didn't happen on their own. The skin was already swelling, tight and shiny, the fingers immobile.
She had been here while I slept.
Erlik was circling her.
Not quickly. Every step deliberate, hands clasped behind his back, his gaze taking her apart piece by piece. He had all the time in the world and he wanted her to know it.
He glanced up when I scrambled to my feet—registered me the way you register a sound you were already expecting—and said nothing.
My mother's eyes found mine.
"What the fuck did you do to her."
It didn't come out as a question.
"Good morning." Erlik sounded genuinely pleased. "You slept for six hours. I was starting to think you'd opted out of the rest of the proceedings." He glanced at my mother with mild appraisal. "She's been remarkably composed, actually. You should be proud. Most people start making considerably more noise much earlier."
I hit the barrier so hard my shoulder went numb.
It didn't move. It never moved. I hit it again and my shadows tore out of me in every direction and dissolved against it likesmoke against glass and I hit it again anyway because there was nothing else to do?—
"Careful." He didn't stop walking his slow circuit. "You'll hurt yourself. And then we'll have matching sets."
"Get her out of that?—"
"I'm walking," he said patiently. "I've been in this room for some time and I need to move. It's a very large room. You'd understand if you hadn't spent the night unconscious on the floor."
I slammed both fists into the barrier. The impact split the skin across my knuckles — I felt it open, felt the blood come, felt the shadows surge through the wounds like they could succeed where bone had failed. The barrier swallowed everything. Gave nothing back. Not even an echo.
My mother had not looked away from me since I woke. Her jaw was set so hard I could see the muscle working in her cheek. She was not looking at him. She was staring directly at me with the focused, inward expression of someone whose concentration was the only thing keeping them functional.
Don't look down. I understood it suddenly—the angle of her chin, the rigid hold of her neck. She was keeping her head deliberately level. The cage sat at her throat with its inner collar of short angled thorns—I could see them now, the way the lowest row was positioned—and the calculation was simple and merciless. Any downward movement of the chin. Any drop of the head. Any bend of the knees significant enough to shift the angle.
I looked at her broken fingers and understood that whatever he had done to them had not been enough to make her fall.
"The agreement," Erlik said. "From last night. I believe we were in the middle of a conversation before you decided to take a nap."
"Let her go and we can talk."
"Let her go and we can talk." He repeated it thoughtfully, as though testing the sentence for structural integrity. "No, I don't think so. I find the current arrangement focuses the mind wonderfully. Yours specifically." He tilted his head. "My offer still stands. I'm generous to a fault—Kaan always said so, right before he told me to go straight to hell, which I found geographically confused but emotionally coherent." He paused. "You remind me of him sometimes. He had that same expression. The one that says you've decided to be difficult as a matter of principle."
"There's no agreement."
