At some point, he must have had a seizure, because he came to facedown on the floor with vomit caked in his hair. His nose was bloodied and throbbing, certainly broken.
Jacen sensed someone standing in the corner, on the border of his line of sight. He expected them to disappear like the bugs, but?—
When he saw Elyas, Jacen thought it must be the end. As a priest, he had stood vigil over enough deathbeds to know such visions were common. He’d called them harbingers of a reunion in paradise, a comfort to the dying. But that, too, was just another lie. This specter had to be another figment of his imagination, come to torment him.
Jacen’s former apprentice slouched against the wall, arms crossed, one foot hooked over the other. Elyas appeared as he had the day he’d died, nineteen years old and possessed of areckless arrogance found only in the very young and talented. Shaggy dark hair cast his disdainful face in shadow, but his eyes glimmered like beacons. They were a bright, alien amber, no longer pale—the sign he’d made the irreversible decision to integrate with a demon.
“What’s the matter?” said the hallucination. “Not happy to see me?” “You’re not real,” Jacen croaked. “Go away.”
“I don’t mean to gloat—actually, yes, I do. How does it feel to have ruined your own life? You thought you’d secure yourself a seat on the Council by turning me in, and instead, it cost you everything. You should have been Chief Exorcist, instead of that idiot Lev. But look at you now.”
Jacen was silent. If he pretended not to hear Elyas, perhaps he’d disappear.
“I heard you took another novitiate. Are you teaching her the same way you taught me?”
“You have no grounds on which to judge me,” Jacen burst out. “You got people killed, your own Brothers and Sisters. What was I supposed to do? For gods’ sake, you hadintegratedwith ademon.”
Integration. The threshold after which not even exorcism—nothing but death itself—could separate demon from host. It must be crossed to access a demon’s full power. That crossing must be voluntary, but it could not be undone. It was the ultimate surrender of the soul, the gravest possible sin.
“I made mistakes,” said Elyas. “I owned them. And I chose integration because I knew, after what I’d seen, that there could be no going back. Everything I did, I did to save our people. What haveyoudone for them? How many have you given to the Harvest? Scores? Hundreds?”
“If I could take it back,” Jacen rasped, “I would.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t take it back. It’s done. They’re all gone. I’m gone. We’re nothing but dust now. You will never make amends with us.”
“I’m sorry,” Jacen said anyway. He said it to the walls, just to get the words out. “I am so, so sorry.” Then: “Am I dying?”
Elyas shrugged. “What do you care?”
In the last five miserable years, Jacen had tried to end his life once—had every intention of doing it; cut one of his wrists and watched himself bleed out. But once he had begun to feel lightheaded, he panicked, stanched the bleeding long enough to see a healer. He’d told her he broke a window and told himself she believed him.
“Why didn’t you try again?” asked Elyas. “Try a little harder?” “Don’t you think I considered it? If I—” Jacen’s voice failed him. “If I were convinced that death was nothing but oblivion, I would have met it gladly. But the gods promise eternity to their faithful, and what have I ever been if not”—he had to spit out the last words—“fucking faithful?”
“That was a lie,” said Elyas. “You’ve known it for a long while.” “Maybe.” Jacen took a steadying breath. “But the fact remains that we know nothing about our reality. We don’t know what makes a human soul.” He met Elyas’s terrible gaze. Those amber eyes glimmered, two bright holes in the grey darkness. “And I felt you die, remember? I. Felt. You. Die.”
Just once, Jacen had broken that most important rule. His guilt had been unendurable, and he’d decided he owed it to his novitiate, whose life he had sacrificed on the altar of belief.
He had felt Elyas die—and there had been no pain. No trace of the unending agony he’d been taught awaited the demon-possessed. Nor had he found that crushing oblivion, said to drive men to madness.
Jacen had felt only peace. It was as though, in a moment, everything was healed. Was it the continuation of existence ora final farewell? He might never be sure. But he’d come away knowing one thing for certain.
“We were all taught a lie.”
“That doesn’t mean there is no truth.”
“Then what is the truth?” Jacen asked helplessly.
Elyas scoffed. “I’m not going to tell you. Believing what you’re told is how you got into this mess.” He straightened and began to walk toward Jacen. “There’s a path before you, and a choice. You already know where to start. Find the Shrouded City and you’ll find the truth.” He stopped when they were face-to-face. “You can lie here and rot—or you can stand up and follow it.”
22
RESURRECTION
YSIRA
Ysira clawed her way out of the burning wreckage as skin and fat melted from her bones. As they fell from the sky, she had watched the station fade behind them, its true scale apparent for a fleeting moment: an impossibly massive sphere, large enough to create an eclipse. Now she fixed her eyes on the horizon, an anchor through the pain, as the crescent-darkened sun sank below it.
Neri was a trembling shadow in her peripheral vision, crouched on the sand in shock but unharmed. The scientist hadn’t lied. Neri had been ejected from the craft as they plummeted to earth, tangled like a spider’s prey in strange white foam, which now shriveled in the heat. The scientist and the navigator—thatthing—had long since burned to ash. Even if Ysira had been capable of saving them—even if she hadn’t lain there for what felt like hours, delirious with agony as her demon knitted her back together—she would not have tried. She smelled the scientist’s charred flesh on the air, blended with her own, and hoped her suffering had been long.
