“You look worse,” Marso said.
She grimaced, though she couldn’t argue with that. “Lack of sex.”
“I can’t help you there, but...” He hesitated. Behind him, Amurra popped her head up over his shoulder and whispered, “Go on, tell her what you saw.”
That is one tiny woman, if she can hide behind Marso.
Zera waved them inside and shooed them onto couches. She signaled to one of her followers to fetch refreshments and wondered when she’d last eaten. She remembered Guine coaxing her into slurping down some whipped duck liver, but that could have been hours ago.
Marso studied his hands as if he’d written the words he wanted to say on his palms. She peeked but they were clean. Glancing at the report again, she waited until Marso spoke.
He didn’t, though. Instead Amurra did. “He’s been reading the bones.”
“A little,” Marso said. “Not like I used to.”
“But regularly,” Amurra said.
“Good for you?” Zera tried to sound encouraging, though she didn’t know why Marso wasn’t just spitting it out. She flipped to a new report. “Any chance you found our stray enemy army?”
He hung his head. “Not that. But: one dies and another lives.”
She put down her papers. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what it means. But I see the same vision over and over, with every question about Eklor and his miracles: one dies and another lives.”
Zera digested this.
“I know I’m new to bone magic,” Amurra said hesitantly, “but I watched him do his readings, saw the images in the smoke, and it seems to me there’s a clear interpretation. If we could pair it with evidence...”
“Yes,” Zera agreed. She dug into the piles on her desk. In seconds, she’d located a list of the dead. “Do we know exactly the time of each resurrection?” When Amurra and Marso were silent, she raised her voice. “Guine!”
He entered as if he’d been lurking just outside, which he might have been.
“Exact times of Eklor’s ‘miracles,’ please?”
He joined her at the desk. Sorting through her notes, they compiled a list of the six new resurrections, plus Lorn’s son. Zeraand Guine then pored through the lists from the hospital and mortuaries.
“I think—” Amurra began.
“Shhh,” both Zera and Guine said.
Zera handed him a page. “Look at this.” He handed her one. “You look at this.” They traded pages back and forth until they had found matches for every single time.
For each resurrection, there was a death recorded at the same exact time.
All were from the same location: the hospital on the third tier, all from the recovery wing, a mix of men and women in their early twenties. “Look at the causes of death.” Zera waved the papers in front of Guine’s nose. “‘Inconclusive.’ ‘Heart attack.’ ‘Unknown.’ Another ‘heart attack.’”
He intercepted the papers. “All the dead were young.”
“Young and not hospitalized for anything that should have been fatal. No prior histories of heart problems. None were under any kind of special near-death watch. You can’t convince me this is a coincidence: at the exact time Eklor works his spell, a hospital patient, one who shouldn’t have been in danger of dying, dies.”
Marso exhaled a loud breath. “One dies and another lives.”
“It’s not proof enough for Lorn,” Zera said. “But it’s proof enough for me. Eklor hasn’t repented.
“He’s killing again.”
At dawn, Kreya woke tangled in Jentt’s arms. With her head on his chest, she listened to him breathe. It was the most beautiful sound in the world. So alive.
