“Pity.” Akkani tilted her head. “I was wrong about you.” She stepped forward, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry, Jacen.”
Pale fingers curled toward him, reaching.
He took an involuntary step back and toppled into the cell. Landed flat on his back, gasping for air. His efforts to defend himself crumbled. She knew him too well; he’d given her too much.
Her mind slid inside his. A shudder wracked his body. He tried to scream but could not, because his mouth no longer belonged to him. She delved deeper, shredding through his defenses until his entire being was laid bare. She flayed his mind open and prodded at it like an expanse of bruised flesh, homing in on every tender place. She ripped those painful memories up, dragging them to the surface inch by bloody inch. He could not stop her, and soon, she knew everything.
Not just the answers she’d come for—an inquisitor left no stone unturned. Even as the barrier between their minds blurred and she felt his pain and humiliation as her own, she endured it. She tookeverything.
His guilt over Elyas. His complicated hatred of Brother Marez. His longing for a home he could not remember, his passion for his work, his crisis of faith, his guilt, his guilt, hisguilt . . .Every time he’d nudged someone’s mind because he wastired or irritated or simply lazy. The day he stole from an elderly confessor to afford his liquor. All the heartbreaking stories of poverty, sickness, and strife with which his congregants trusted him, all those struggles he could do nothing about but pray, and pray towhat?
Every vow he’d been tempted to break. Every odd and embarrassing thing he’d ever fantasized about. The time he’d kissed Hesaya and they’d both hated it. Lying in the sand after Ysira knocked him flat on his back. His feelings for Seth, deep enough to drown in. Every terrible thought he’d ever had that made him wonder if he was a madman or a degenerate or a monster. Everything he would never have admitted to another soul, because surely no decent person could have a mind likethis.
When Akkani gave him back control of his body, Jacen crawled to his knees on the filthy floor. Tears soaked his cheeks. A horrible sound escaped him. He vomited until there was nothing left in his stomach. Hugged his shoulders in a vain attempt to stop their violent shaking.
“Someday,” said Akkani, “I hope you understand you gave me no choice. This is for the good of all our people—and for you.”
She believed that. As she’d ripped through his mind, Jacen had felt the depth of her conviction—that she had done something necessary to him, something he would one day even thank her for. And he could not make sense of it. What he would have given, to claw his way out of his own skin.
She left him alone, catatonic in his cell. The guards returned to shut the metal slab overhead, and his world became unbearably small. He huddled there in silence, old wounds ripped open, the contents of his mind strewn about in disarray like the shattered pieces of his life.
16
REVELATION
YSIRA
Ysira awoke in a bed, under a cover of unfamiliar fabric. When she stirred, a strip of light brightened around the ceiling’s circumference and illuminated the room.
Light.
Last she could recall, there had been too much of it, down in the dark below Zal Fel. Her passenger had led her to a Gate. Those armored people had found her, then?—
Neri.They could have followed her trail back to Neri. Ysira sat bolt upright, heart pounding.
Wherewasshe? Her bed was a sleek oval, the table a perfect circle, both melded seamlessly with the wall. Everything seemed to be made of the same black material, smooth as metal under running water.
A mirror faced the bed, flat and clear as a cloudless desert sky. Ysira had never seen an image of herself so vivid. She looked haggard. Older than she’d thought. Her hair hung in an unwashed tangle around her dirt-smeared face, in stark contrastto her loose white shirt and pants. The clothing was so clean and silky, it could have been liquid.
She slipped out from under the cover and stood. The floor was frigid beneath her feet. She sniffed the air, picking up a sterile odor. As she crept past a certain section of wall, bracing to be attacked at any second, a hidden door slid open.
Her pulse quickened. She padded through the door, into a hall as dark and glossy as the bedroom. The dim ceiling lights reflected against the floor. A faint, highpitched hum with no obvious source filled the area.
Despite the trepidation lurking in her core, she felt strangely light on her feet. She had the most bizarre urge to run and leap and see how far she might go. The air was rich and clear, as though she had been living in a cloud and it had suddenly lifted.
Then Ysira came upon a massive window, and her legs went weak. At first, she could not be sure what she was looking at. There was blue-green Oe, its rings as familiar as ever. But her vantage point was impossible. Another sphere, centered in the window, hung in a sea of star-speckled black, like the moons in the night sky. But she could alsoseeboth Ixion and Nue, their pocked grey surfaces flush with Oe’s light.
If these were the moons, the central one had to be?—
A gasp escaped her. The sphere was green, and brown, and blue. There was so much blue, stretching over most of the globe. Ysira had to tear her eyes away from that impossible sea to look east. East—to a great expanse of brown, gold, and, like a deep gouge in the flesh of the world,red.She knew that shape, from countless maps at the Citadel. And then there were the coasts, the mountains, the fragmented mass of the Fractured Peninsula . . .
Her world. That gouge was the Scar and that sphere, surrounded by stars, was Celes Lor.
Ysira’s first wild thought was that this must be the gods’ celestial paradise, but she had never been faithful. No, her demon marked her for eternal torment. She was alive. This was real. She had seen this very image on that frieze in the temple ruins.
In the distance, beyond Oe, a bright spot crested the edges of the sphere. Red-gold spears of light flared out from what could only be the sun.
When Ysira was a child, she had gazed in awe at the White Cathedral’s soaring buttresses and towering effigies. She’d thought herself small. But then she’d ventured into the immense, ageless stone maw of the Scar and realized she was much less than that. And here, now—on the threshold of infinity—she didn’t have words for it. No mortal language did.
