“Well, here we are. Let’s change. Let’s change the world. Together.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we’ll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke.”
“You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first.”
“A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world.”
“I kind of like it the way it is.”
She reached for his hand but he drew back. They circled the table, and each other.
“This city bothers you as much as me. I’ve seen the way you look at the long streets, the empty-faced men and women. You hold back when you talk, when you think, because you know thinking too deeply will drive you mad. I’ve dragged the madness out into the open. There’s no need to hide anymore.”
He slowed, despite himself, and she caught him in her orbit. She gripped his arm, and through his jacket he felt the feverish warmth of her fingers.
She pressed against him. One hand slid up his arm to cup his chin, curve around the back of his neck, and pull his head to hers, his lips to her lips.
They kissed, atop the pyramid, as the world crumbled.
The kiss was a collision. Hunger shot through them both, and need. They kissed violently, and violently they broke apart, each stumbling from the other.
Caleb looked at her, and imagined years beside her, leaping from rooftop to rooftop above blood-soaked streets as two serpents reared in the sky.
He grabbed the bag off the table, and cradling it in his arms ran from her toward the door.
“Caleb!” she cried behind him, which was all the warning he received before a curtain of flame blocked his path. Glass and metal melted. Recoiling from the bloom of heat he skidded on marble, nearly fell, and ran again, this time toward the banister.
“Caleb, please!” The air thickened to slush and ice, but he opened his scars and the ice thawed. The world inverted, directions twisted, but his scars bore him forward. The marble balcony became an ocean of clashing stone waves and he pressed through. Blind, staggering, he struck the railing, and threw himself over the edge.
He fell ten feet, and stopped, arms jerked nearly out of their sockets. His scars protected him from Mal, but did not guard her bag and the heart it held. Closing his eyes, he saw the silver cords of Mal’s Craft binding the leather. He flailed at those cords, but they rewove themselves faster than he severed them.
The strap warmed in his hand. He gripped it tighter, teeth bared. Heat seared his skin. He held a length of molten metal.
With a cry, he released the bag, and fell again.
After five feet he struck the side of the pyramid, bounced off stone, and slid, accelerating down the incline. Rock tore his pants and jacket. His fingers scraped for handholds, found none. The bag floated back to the balcony and Mal’s waiting hand.
He reached the step of the pyramid and tumbled into emptiness. Out of reflex his eyes closed. Silver-blue cobwebs whipped past his face. Desperate, he clutched at them.
The Craft lines slowed his fall; unlike the cords around North Station, though, these were too thin to support him. They ripped free of the wards that cocooned the pyramid, and those in turn unraveled; an avalanche of Craft followed Caleb down, sparking off pyramid stones.
He shattered the skylight of the pyramid’s next step. Impact rainbowed his world in pain.
He stood, slowly, favoring his left leg. His ribs hurt: bruised, he hoped, not broken. He was alive. He brushed glass splinters from his face and clothes with his jacket sleeve.
Opening his eyes, he found himself in a gray office beside a desk glittering with skylight glass. Thick books filled shelves on the office walls; a three-ring binder lay open on the desk.
Caleb waited for Mal to follow him. She did not.
She would not. He’d made his choice.
But what had he chosen?
When he trusted his legs to carry him, he limped out of the office toward the stairs.
39
Caleb walked, bleeding, down Sansilva Boulevard. He needed a drink. He needed rest. He needed to scream. The first two options were unavailable, and the third would be no help, so he pressed on, limping. Retreating floodwaters of adrenaline revealed new vistas of pain to his battered body.
The distant mob cried rage. A group of ragged young Quechal ran past him down the sidewalk, laden with loot: jade amulets, hammers to drive any nail through any surface, speakers with demonic symphonies trapped inside. A long-haired girl turned cartwheels in the road.
Lighthearted looters, glorying in brief anarchy. No danger.
Tzimet swarmed behind the broken windows of restaurants, jaws clattering. They crawled over a chewed corpse in a busboy’s uniform, who grinned with bloody teeth. Sentient spikes jutted from sewer grates. Demons scuttled down desolate alleys.
Caleb walked south, and east. Blood dripped from his cut face onto his torn shirt. Blood seeped from the slice on his right thigh into his shredded pants. Blood was his point of contact with the world.
He found the building without trouble—could have found it blind. He had walked this path many times before, drunk and nearly dead. Caleb walked through the front door; it flowed away from his scars. The lift rattled him up seven floors. He lurched through opened doors and down the bare hall, to apartment C.
He tried to knock, but collapsed instead. His cheek pressed into the pale wood’s grain. A heartbeat rhythm pulsed in his ear.
Halting footsteps from within: slippered feet approached.
“I have little water, less food, and a blast rod pointed at the door.”
“Teo,” he said. “Glad to see you’re … hospitable as ever.”
“Caleb?”
He grunted.
Chains rattled. Locks unlocked. When the door opened he stood straight for three seconds before slumping into her arms. She shouldered the door closed and latched it with one hand.
“Caleb, gods. What happened to you?”
“Gods happened.”
She sat him in the chair beside her coffee table. The cubist war scene taunted them both from her wall.
“You look like you went ten rounds with the bastards.”
“Only one. That was enough.”
“I didn’t take you for such a pushover.” She disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with water. “Drink it slow. There’s not much left. Three quarters of a pitcher, and the ice in the icebox.”
“Water in the desert,” he said wryly, dipped his finger and flicked a drop onto the floor.
“What’s happened?” she asked as he drank.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then sucked the moisture from his skin. “What do you know?”
“I woke up and saw the shell from my bedroom window. I thought it was a joke before I heard Sam scream from the bathroom. She’d turned on the shower, and they were all over her.”
“Is she—”
“I got them off. The tap shut down pretty quick. She was cut, bruised, one bad tear in her shoulder where they dug in.” Teo exhaled. “We went door to door, telling people not to use the water. They understood pretty quick. Nobody here’s forgotten when the demons came from the taps, during the Seven Leaf crisis. Most of the building’s trying to wait the trouble out, for now. Some went to Sansilva to complain. I stayed here, lucky for you.”
“Good idea.” He savored the water. “The city’s dangerous.” Doomed, he almost said. “Where’s Sam?”