My body seemed to fizz and spit like a poorly laid fire. I could tell from Patrick’s expression that my Hair was even wilder than usual, but I could barely feel it over theoverwhelming sensation that filled me. My tongue felt large and unwieldy in my mouth as I said, “I think so.”
Around us, the great bone-studded stone walls shuddered and groaned. Dust rained from the ceiling.
“The catacombs are collapsing,” said Patrick matter-of-factly, clutching at his side. “We won’t make it out.”
“We will,” I said through my teeth. “We have to.”
He shook his head. “The tunnels are under half the city. If they cave in …”
“I think I can prevent that.”
“And how areweto get out if it is collapsing around us? My shadows will not withstand that.”
I knelt among the collapsed skeletons that Mother had been trying to raise. They were still now, but the bones were alive under my hands, and willing. I closed my eyes and imagined the swift flight of my needle dancing through cloth. As it always did, the image focused my thoughts, made them sharp. I imagined a pattern forming. The bones gave a convulsive shudder.
“Netta,” Patrick whispered, his voice filled with horror. “You can’t … That’s what caused the Plague. If you start making the dead walk …”
I turned to glare at him. His face was white; his eyes dark and enormous with superstitious fear. I had to suppress a slightly gleeful satisfaction at finally unsettling him.
“I’m not raising an army of the dead, Patrick,” I said flatly. “I’m getting us out of here. Now please, will youstop talkingfor once in your life and let me do this?”
He pressed his lips together and nodded, still pale.
I turned my attention back to the bones.
I closed my eyes andfeltmy way into the magic again. Immediately, I was calm. It was a clean, orderly world down there, in that cold white space. Everything connected. Everything made sense. I could see what I was trying to create, feel the neat precision of all its parts and how they interlockedso neatly, each piece so perfectly made and perfectly suited to its neighbor. Inside the bones, the long-dead marrow now pulsed, red and malleable and so easy to bring to life now that I knew how.
That was not my purpose now, though, and so I let my awareness move through the white tunnels, searching for—Ah, there it was. I could hear Patrick’s voice faintly, and the terrible cracking of the old stone walls of the catacombs, but they were muffled. The Hair floated about me as I kept my hands pressed to the bones. As delicately as threading a needle, I took the remnants of their magic and stitched it into my own, forming the picture that was in my mind.
Now, the feathers.
I opened my eyes, spread my arms, and splayed my fingers, trying to keep the image in my head. I imagined my mind as a darting needle again, holding that image of delicate stitchery and my vision of feathers all together.
More bones skittered across the stone towards me. Patrick cursed, stepping over the ones that passed too close to him, muttering something that could have been a prayer. The sound of them coming together, the clicking and clacking, reminded me of therat-tat-tatof the masked Plague dancer in the parade as she had swooped and spun.
A long spine formed, made of a thousand tiny bone fragments; then an immense head with blind sockets where its eyes should be; then an ivory beak. Long, spindly limbs locked themselves fast to the bones of the shoulders and pelvis, sprouting toes and reaching fingers.
This was the most difficult part.
I willed the shafts of the feathers into being, feeling a forest of them splinter and pierce the bone, like the spines of my old porcupine mask, and then snap open, unfurling a fan of white barbs: a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand of them across the whole skeletal body, more like quills than feathers, with no softness to them.
It was done. An immense bird stood on powerful legs ending in long, grasping claws, turning its great unseeing skull from side to side and snapping at the air. It unfolded its new wings, the span of them almost touching the walls of the colossal cavern to either side. It could have been the skeleton of a dragon from myth, with those dreadful wings and claws, if it weren’t for the ivory beak arching from beneath its eye sockets. It opened that beak now and made a hollow knocking sound—the closest thing to a voice it could summon.
Patrick was dead white, his eyes even greener than usual in the reflected light from the bone bird.
“Well,” he whispered, his mouth dry. “That’s new.”
I could have curled up on the bare stone and slept for a hundred years, but I got to my feet and walked towards the bird, which swung its immense head towards me on that long, ridged neck, and lowered its empty eyes to mine. I rested my forehead against its skull, reaching my hands up to cup its bony cheeks. Baldbeak hopped along my arm and touched his beak to that of the giant bird in tentative greeting.
“It will carry us,” I said without turning. “Let’s go.”
“You mean … ride on …”
“Of course. How else were you planning to get out of here?” I moved to the bird’s side and used its ribcage to climb up onto its spine, sitting between one enormous vertebra and the next as if the scoop of bone between them was a makeshift saddle. Baldbeak perched on top of the skull. “Come on.”
Patrick hesitated, his gaze flickering from the eye sockets of the bone bird to my face. Then, clutching at the wound in his side, he heaved himself up behind me, finding a spot between two more knobs of the colossal spine.
“I would like to clarify that Iabsolutely do notlike this,” he said through gritted teeth. “And how is this … thisthinggoing to fly us back through the tunnels? It’s far too big.”
