“This was all so unnecessary,” he says, gesturing around the room, at me in the chair. “Do you still not understand that we’re on the same side?”
He’s wearing white pants and an elaborate metal vest, layers of overlapping steel creating armor. The kitchen light surrounds him, a nimbus of gold. Giant locust wings made of flexible metal flare open, as delicate and beautiful as lace, like some sort of insectoid angel.
I spit a mouthful of blood on the ground, and the small movement makes me dizzy. I struggle to focus. “Let me go,” I say, sounding slightly drunk.
His eyes linger on the place where I’ve defiled his high-end flooring. “Neither of us is stupid, Godslayer. Once today’s business is done and Dinétah is no more, I will be back for you. We will try this conversation again. But until then, I think it’s best you sleep.” He draws a small leather book from the inside pocket of his suit. Unzips it and pulls out a needle. A memory of Knifetown shivers down my spine as he tests the plunger.
“You disapprove of Bishop, but you don’t mind his methods.”
He fills the needle, unconcerned. “His methods are humane, even if he is not.”
“Convenient morality.”
A flash of irritation crosses his features but passes quickly. He walks forward and leans in close to me. Not close enough for me to reach him, my arms chained by my sides. But close enough for him to brush my hair from my face. Study the place the glass sliced open my forehead. His breath smells of whiskey and rotted pork. I turn my head, but he grips my jaw and holds it tightly. He pushes against my face with his thumb, as if searching for something under my skin. It’s horrific, and too intimate, and I toss my head violently to shake his hand off. He lets me go, some emotion I can’t read coloring his face.
“Stay still, please,” he says, lifting the needle to my neck. “I will chain your head to the wall if I have to, but I would rather not. This is thiopental. Do you know what that is?” I flinch as the needle pierces my skin. “It will make you sleep until I can return.”
He steps back from me. Pulls his black case out and stows away the needle.
“Where are you going?” I ask, voice slurring. The drug, combined with my injuries, is too much, and my world is quickly sliding into darkness. I blink, try to force my eyes to remain open.
As he stands there, he begins to vibrate. His wings open wider. The lace-like lattice ripples, begins to shimmer and flow, and a thousand locusts drop free, plopping thickly to the floor. They mill over one another before lifting into the air. He opens his mouth, and more pour out from his throat, crawling over his cheeks, his eyes. He raises his arms, and they rise from his hands. Locust song fills the room. Thick and warm and bilious, a physical thing. Like drowning in a vat of molasses. The steel beams in the wall of glass behind me rattle in their foundations. The glass shifts under the weight of the mass of insects that have settled on the windows. Cracks in the glass split the air like the shrieks of giants. Gideon hovers feet off the floor, arms extended, and locusts swarm to him, encircling him, lifting him higher.
“I go forth to devour,” he says, and his voice is the buzz of a thousand insects speaking as one. “I go forth to remake the known world and bring the very gods to account for their atrocities. I go forth to bring a reckoning.”
The last thing I hear besides the deafening drone of locusts is the groan of the steel beams ripping apart as the glass wall behind me shatters.
Chapter 38
“Is she dead?”
“No. With the right dosage of the counteragent, I should be able to . . . Will you move back, Ben? I need room to work.”
Someone grabs my eyelid and pries it open. I see bright lights, faces. I try to pull away, but Rissa’s thumb digs into my eyeball. “Let me the fuck go,” I mumble, my tongue thick as wool. I work my jaw, trying to draw moisture to my mouth, but all I produce is a groan of pain.
“She lives,” Rissa says, grinning and mercifully letting go of my eyelid.
“It’s already working,” Ben says excitedly.
“Of course it’s working,” Aaron says. “Gideon was never very good in the Reaping Room. No subtlety. The man would choose a cleaver when a scalpel would do. The dose he gave her must have been twice the recommended—”
“Water,” I croak, cutting Aaron off. I hear someone hurry away, probably Ben and hopefully to the kitchen. I manage to get both my eyes open on my own, eyelids scraping like sandpaper. “You came back,” I manage to wheeze out.
“We weren’t going to leave you to do this alone,” Rissa says. “Good thing, too, because clearly Gideon kicked your—”
Ben’s back. She holds a cup of water to my mouth. I gulp it down, grateful. Blink to try to clear the crust from my eyes. Rissa uses a white napkin to wipe blood from my head and then starts to work on loosening the metal wires still coiled around my chest. I wait until they fall to the floor around the chair in a puddle of steel loops. I shake my arms out to get the blood flow to return. Try to ignore the deep gashes in my arms where the metal dug through flesh, the hundreds of tiny stinging cuts all over my skin.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” I say, feeling something like a sob wanting to break free.
Rissa softens. “Friends, right? Just because you’re a solid bitch sometimes doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon you.”
“I’m sorry too,” Ben says, head down. “I know I promised not to argue with you, and a deal’s a deal, so . . .”
“I shouldn’t have treated you like a child, Ben. I was trying to do what was best for you, but all I did was deny you the right to make your own choices.”
Ben looks up, teary-eyed, and before I can tell her no, she rushes forward and throws her arms around me. Pain flares across my chest, and I whimper. Rissa laughs and pulls Ben away. “Leave her alone. She’s injured. Plus, I’ve heard she melts if you hug her too much.”
“What time is it?” I ask. “How long was I out?”
“It’s a few hours before dawn. Ben made it all the way back to Page before we caught up with her.” Rissa shoots her a look. “It took some time to get back. And then when we found the Amangiri empty, we thought you’d probably gone with them.”
“Wait, what? It’s empty?”
“Like a big concrete crypt,” Ben offers. “Furniture’s there. Everything looks lived in. But no people.”
“Where did they go?”
“Don’t know,” Rissa says. “But Ben still had a beat on you from Knifetown, and she tracked you here.” She sniffs the air. “Does it smell like apples in here to anyone else?”
“Gideon’s planning to flood Dinétah,” I say. “There were maps on Kai’s walls. And he had books, lots of books. Different versions of the end of the world.”
“Come again?” Rissa asks.
“Accounts of the Big Water, but also all kinds of apocalyptic stories. From different cultures and different times. He has Kai studying them.”
“So you did find Kai?” Rissa puts her hands on her hips, looks around. “But, funny, he’s not here with you.”
“It’s complicated.”
Rissa’s jaw sets in a hard line, and her hazel eyes darken to a swirl of deep green. “He’s helping him,” she says, her voice flat. An accusation.
I nod again, slower this time. I want to defend him, tell her that I believe he’s lying to Gideon, using his clan powers to trick all of them into thinking he’s on their side, but I don’t want to explain to Rissa what I saw—the blonde, him seated at Gideon’s side, the things he said about Gideon helping him get over the trauma of dying. And all I have for proof is my blind trust. Trust that’s been wrong about Kai before. So I just hold her gaze. Ask her to trust me if she can’t trust him.