The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [99]
It’s too late, Anu responded. We’ve been set up. Now look at the damn—
Wire fingers screeched against the tin of the worktable as path let himself down to the floor. He had begun to glow. He felt his own heat. Light radiated from him in beams of white so that the room was filled with his luminescence.
Trembling, the castellan cried out, arms extended, as if to embrace the boy, but he came no closer.
Behind him, the taller man continued to clean the tools he had used.
“Sometimes,” said path, “I feel like I’m still in the tank, having the flesh corroded from my bones. Or maybe these memories are from before then, when I was a real infant.”
He sniffed the air.
The open window beckoned.
Three men confronted Name of the Sun as she took scraps out the back of The Cross-Eyed Traveller to dump them in the alley. The men had weapons. They blocked her way. One was young and pudgy, with soft-looking skin and short hair. He had a nasty shiner. The other two, holding stout wooden handles in their fists, were older.
“Garbage fucker,” said the man with the black eye.
“Get away from me.”
“We’re taking back the city. Tonight. We know who you are.”
“Leave me alone.”
Behind the group, in the light from a door that had just opened, Name of the Sun saw the unmistakable silhouette of her landlord, standing with her roommate, Polly. They were watching her. Name of the Sun was more shocked to see them than she was by this confrontation, and in her hesitation she was not quite able to fully dodge the first blow, which glanced off her shoulder, striking the wall behind. She did manage to rake the face of her nearest assailant, one of the older men, with her fingers, but the others were on her then, clubbing.
She went down fighting.
Flames appeared to be sliding down the stone, dripping onto the road, where they continued to flicker and leap. Nahid stopped at the doorway to the ostracon, trying to look inside, shielding his face from the blistering heat that roared through the opening. In the road, other kholics huddled. From a second story window, a woman leaned—a senior called Orlando—shouting down at another group, who were trying to convince her to leap.
There was a cry, very much like his sister’s, but by the time he heard it, Nahid had already entered.
The fires leapt at him as he forced his way down the main hall. He intended to call out but could not open his mouth; heat seemed to shrivel him, sucking the air from his lungs, his nose. Above, part of the ceiling had collapsed and more flames roared through the hole, breaking at its edges, consuming. The ostracon was filled with an almost ambient peace.
His skin might be splitting. He was transforming, emerging. There were no people here, in this landscape of flames and heat. Just him. He tried to mount the stairs, to get to the dorms where he had lived with Octavia for years, but the upper floor was completely engulfed.
Through a damaged wall toward the rear of the building he saw the dark and smoky courtyard. Out there, another kholic climbed the low buttress that ringed the ostracon. Looking over his shoulder, eyes wide and glinting, face reddened, he seemed to look right at Nahid, who stood in the inferno, hair gone, skin blistering and crackling.
When Nahid breathed, his lungs turned to cinders.
Over the roar and shouts from outside, he heard a baby’s cry.
The sisters flew below the clouds. Mummu had lent them a squad of diggers, and the ruthless drones spread out in formation below, rumbling as fast as their treads could carry them over sand and rocks.
Nearing the dark line of the perimeter wall, Kingu and Aspu banked, separating, to flank the city; Anu was within, though his signals were weak. If they could retain surprise, the sisters might be able to hold onto their dream of maintaining a utopia. This seemed their only hope, now that Anu had returned. Though blind, their brother possessed formidable firepower and a psychotic fury the sisters had witnessed—and been victim to—several times in the past. Previously, when they had defeated