“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Mal,” Allesandre repeated. “How did we get here?”
Mal moved her knife in a smooth arc that began on one side of Allesandre’s neck, and ended on the other. Allie’s eyes went soft, and she slumped forward with a wet gasp. The wires would not let her fall. Blood unfurled from her throat down her shredded blouse. She blinked once, and mouthed a word Caleb could not hear—it might have been Mal’s name, again. Pain twisted her, and she died.
Mal stood like a lightning-struck magisterium tree: solid to the eye, but the leaves and furthest branches quivered as the trunk fought to stand. The tremors traveled inward from her fingertips, and when they reached her shoulders she collapsed, curled over her knees, head down. The nightmare-knife vanished. Blood fell to the deck and mixed with water.
Caleb moved to her side and stopped, uncertain. Mal collapsed was more fearsome than Mal girded for war. He had staked his soul on games of chance, confronted the King in Red, jumped off buildings into empty space. Kneeling beside her and placing his hand on her shoulder was the hardest thing he had ever done.
He wondered if she had killed before, and wondered, as he had last night, what he would have felt if their situations were reversed, leaving him with the knife and her to watch. Alessandre was dangerous. He tried to think of Dresediel Lex dying of thirst, tried to justify the blood at his feet, and could not.
Sixty years ago, his father stood atop the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. As cantors sang, he raised his knife. It glinted black in the sun. The obsidian edge reflected the naked sacrifice. The blade fell, the murder was done, and that, too, had saved the city.
Silent, he stared into the dead woman’s eyes. But for the blood, she might have been lost in thought, or prayer.
His hand hurt. Mal had gripped it, hard. After a while, when she stopped trembling, she looked up.
“That was worse than I thought,” she said.
A distant lake bird called.
She tried to speak but choked, and stopped, and tried again. “Come on. Let’s get this place running.”
27
Caleb left Mal alone as she worked. He lacked enough Craft to help her, and she seemed happier without him. No. Not happier, exactly. She worked in a brittle silence that he feared to break.
The Wardens cased the scene. Four and Six draped the corpses in evidence shrouds, capturing pictures of each victim for later analysis. Three’s thigh was broken in the battle, and he rested next to twitching, unquiet One, whom Allie had trapped in a recursive nightmare. Four said she would wake soon. “If not, we have people who can bring her to her mind again.”
Seven walked around the station at a measured pace, forming detailed memories that specialists in Dresediel Lex would retrieve.
Couatl flew above. Four’s green-crested mount swallowed an unwary lake bird in a single bite. Feathers drifted down on the breeze.
Allesandre hung from her wire crèche.
Caleb followed Seven, listening to his footsteps and the water. Broken glass glinted at his feet. Kneeling, he lifted a shard and threw it into the lake. It disappeared in reflected brilliance. Light pinned him down and made even his shadow feel small.
He turned back to Mal, who was stripping cables from Allesandre’s skin. He approached her, but she didn’t look up. “Are you okay?”
She stopped, mid-incision. Blood sizzled on her knife. “What do you think? Go kill a friend and tell me how you feel after.”
“I’m sorry.”
She kept working as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I’d like to help. But I don’t know how.”
She didn’t respond, so he shrugged, grabbed one of the wires at her feet, and closed his eyes. A brilliant network charged the blackness, extending from the station in all directions: the system that pumped and treated Seven Leaf water, and sent it south to Dresediel Lex.
The web was sick. Thick threads hung limp; slender strands knotted and tangled. The wire twisted in his grip like a living thing. He reached for a loose thread and pulled it tight.
Seven Leaf Station convulsed. Mal swore, Couatl roared, and Caleb’s eyes snapped open. The Wardens had drawn their weapons and faced the lake, as if they expected a host of Scorpionkind to rise from its depths.
Mal grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Helping, I thought.”
“Allie almost destroyed this place. Pull the wrong thread and everything might unravel. We could sink. Or the spirits bound in the lake could break their chains.”
He released the wire. Its falling tip scraped the deck.
“Good. Thank you.”
“Is there any way I can help?”
“Well,” she said, softly, considering. “Pick up that wire again, and close your eyes.”
The web hung in darkness. She touched his shoulder. “See the red lines?”
Faint solar afterimages shadowed the blue and silver strands. “I do.”
“Those threads tie the station to the Serpents back in DL. Without them, we’ll have to spend another week rebuilding the local generators. Using the Serpents, we’ll have water flowing in a few days at most. Help me link them to the system.”
“How?”
“Touch one of the red lines, first—only one.”
With his free hand, Caleb clutched the nearest line. Fire shot up his arm, crisping nerves, singeing muscle.
Mal caught him as he stumbled. “You’ll get the hang of it,” she said as he recovered his balance. “You’re not being damaged; your soul’s just reacting to the Craft. All you need to do is merge the red lines with the blue.”
He grabbed another thread, and this time he was ready for the pain. When he touched the red line to the blue he felt a movement in his heart like shuffling cards as the two strands melded into one.
He opened his eyes. The wire he held was the same color, the same weight, but something had changed about the way it gathered and reflected light.
“That’s it,” Mal said. She examined the wire. “Do the same wherever you see a red and a blue line twinned. You’ll save me a day at least. I’ll focus on the hard stuff.”
She turned to a tangle of bent metal, closed her eyes and furrowed her brow.
He left her to her work, and went about his own.
They paused for a brief lunch around three. Sweat soaked Caleb’s shirt. Mal had discarded her jacket and rolled up her sleeves; her arms quivered as she lifted the canteen to her lips. She tore her meat with her teeth. They ate without speaking. When Caleb was only half-finished with his lunch, she stalked back to work.
Later he remembered that afternoon as a series of images, mostly of Maclass="underline" she knelt atop a Craft circle cut into the steel platform with the blade of her knife. She stripped Allesandre’s body from the web, cleaned the wires of blood and meat, and replaced the dead woman with a cold iron ring. She leaned against a console, shaking. A handkerchief tied over her hair kept sweat from her eyes.
Sunburnt, exhausted, five hours later, they stepped back to examine their handiwork. The station was clear of human refuse, and Allesandre’s web re-strung. Smashed crystal screens stared from control kiosks. Gears and levers, frayed wires and mystic diagrams protruded from broken panels. But when Mal said, “That’s it,” Caleb did not challenge her.
The setting sun cast the station’s shadow long upon the water, and their shadows with it: the Wardens, Caleb, and Mal.
“It’s working?” Caleb asked—the first words he had spoken since lunch.
“No.” She moved her hand in a swift circle. “Now it’s working.”
At first, nothing seemed to change: a stretching, still span in which he wondered if Mal had fixed the station at all, or if she had snapped when Allesandre died, and spent the afternoon drawing ineffectual lines in metal. He waited in silence. Four’s feet scuffed the deck as she shifted. Caleb slid his hands into his pockets, and the sound of fabric on skin was louder than the waves.