They bind me and put me in my old cell, the one I had stayed in that first time in the temple. They won't kill me, not yet, not during the Decade-Races. The blood of my death would bring only stains and bad luck, after all.
My jaw is swollen. My cheek is split. In the rocked frenzy of the crowd, Esp had slipped away. The mother, a solitary figure lonely on her height, wept on.
The High Suns stand before my cell. The guardians fan around them. All of them ask me questions: Where is the real Lumi? What is your real name? What is your relation to that red headed woman? Why did you do it? How could you do it?
I tell them nothing.
There's no point now, no point at all.
They confiscate Gaia from me and store her for the moment in a steel locker in another cell down the trench, because they are unsure how a star like Gaia could have accepted something like me. Perhaps the star has been corrupted, somehow. Such a thing shouldn't be possible.
The High Suns and others are leaving. Yashi is set as guard over me once more, and she takes her place to the side of the grate, and does not look at me.
The races will continue as normal, though guardians and police will be deployed in searching out the city of Tall Titan, to look for the body of Lumi Sidik. A few days after the Decade-Races officially end, I will be executed on the stage in the plaza, before the eyes of all.
I wonder if they will use a bolt gun, the same kind of gun from years ago, against the canvas of that white wall, against the head of that blue-eyed girl.
I see Naqi. He's come to the cells.
Back at the plaza, I had kept my eyes down, down, because seeing Naqi and the faces he might have worn – I would have shattered open.
Now I rise to my feet and climb up the ladder. I press against the grate.
The High Suns have stopped him. They stand stoic before the boy, murmuring. I don't hear what they say. Naqi hangs his head, looks up at me several times, and does not smile.
They don't let us speak. They tell me nothing else. Naqi is led away with a hand on his shoulder, and he looks back at me the entire time. His neck strains against the turn and the distance. His eyes cling like grasping, desperate hands. My cheek sinks into the lines of the grate, and I do not blink. My eyes burn and water, and I do not blink.
I don't dare blink; Naqi's back and neck and needy eyes will be the last things I ever see of him.
#
In the middle of the night, someone rattles my grate.
I turn, and look up, and see Pea.
Yashi is standing guard to the side, eyes gleaming in the moonlight. She says nothing with her hands, to me or to Pea, so I push up from my bed. I move to the ladder, though I do not climb. I stand there, looking up, waiting.
For a long while, Pea says nothing. She watches me in the dim. Her hands are fisted against her robes.
I remember how she used to touch the back of my hand.
I remember, seated by the edge of my hammock, how she had said – you can talk to me, you know? Whatever is on your mind. Anything. I'll listen.
So I open my mouth.
I say, croak out, "I'm sorry, Pea."
My voice is a crumpled thing. My heart is a crumpled thing.
"I should have—told you everything. I should have—never been here. I, I can't run anymore, from the things that I've done, and I'm, I'm scared, Pea."
I'm so scared. I'm terrified. Why didn't I die instead of Lumi?
And then Pea opens her mouth.
She says, "Good."
She says, "You should be scared. It's what you deserve. But you talking about it? Thinking you deserve to be comforted? To be helped? It's sick."
Her voice is all coils, coiled, like a snake's.
"You've hurt so many people. Lied to so many. Staying scared is the only thing you deserve, nothing else. I don't know your real name; Frea is catatonic and won't speak. But your real name is a curse, and I came to say that we'll all be glad when you're gone."
She turns, and leaves, melds back into the night.
She's right.
Rama is right.
Of course. That's why it hurts.
It hurts because I keep thinking that maybe, maybe, it's not true – the things they call me, the things they hurl. Maybe Esp's words about me are not the etched laws of who I am. And maybe I can be saved. Somehow, someone will look at me and see me and choose to stay, choose to help, because maybe there is still something in me worth saving.
But that's a lie. Of course.
When my omen stain thickens over me, all of me – cracking and growing my bones and teeth and nails – I do not stop it.
I will give myself once and for all to what I was always meant to be, to what I always have been, and will be – a monster.
#
(I understand the world in clicks.
Click, click, again, again. I hear the whine of a pitch that holds. It keens higher, louder, like a kettle screaming, like something evil stepping close and closer.
I can't see, not really, though I understand shapes and colours. I don't know up from down from in and out, and it's like I'm seated in a storm, blown and tossed. A thunder like rage crashes over me.
This will be my life now, for the rest of forever. Forever, until someone puts me down.
I've broken out of the cell. The trench is caked white like a flour mill because I've blown through everything, and rubble tumbles over and around me. My hands and knees and feet are like that of an animal's, and I ravage through cell after cell, just because I can.
A bright light. I remember I used to know this light.
A large tree. I remember I used to know this tree.
Someone is shouting, or laughing, I don't know – but it's wet and wrong and broken. I hate the sound. I hate it.
So I turn on it and open my jagged maw, and then that someone raises their hands and smears out a smile and says, don't shoot.
Oh.
Oh.
Something is wrong. It hurts. Everything hurts. This someone has shot me. He must've. He's shot me clean through.
I never knew words could hurt like bullets.
A sense pops open between my brows, a sense like light dawning.
I feel the beats of a boy's heart inside my chest.
I feel the heat of his blood in my veins.
I hear the roar of a monster and see the diseased hide of one, and then I see that my hands – not my hands, the hands of that boy – are clutched on a star. Pain jars through me, through him. Heat like spikes pierces through the boy's body because of what he's doing with the star, but he does not let go. He reaches up and touches my not-face, my not-cheek, and is not afraid.
An image flickers behind my eyes: the boy knocking his fist against his chest and kissing it to his forehead.
Ya'tuv mi-eh.
I'm slipping. I'm falling.
My understanding saps from me.
The world gives way to dark.)
#
I come to by the tree, underneath the hole in the wall.
My robes are tatters. My omen falls from me like matted fur. I understand two things:
Yashi is here with her hand on her sling, and beside her is an anchor.
Naqi is here with his hand around a star, and he is lain on his back.
His head is in my lap. I don't know how it happened. All I know is that omen stains are creeping over his skin, over Naqi's skin.
His skin has been stained.
The black scabs crawl up his neck and over his mouth, and over his eyes and ears. He does not move.
What is this?
What have I done?
I snap my head up to Yashi.
"Yashi," I quake. "What is, what did I—?"
She holds up a hand: stop. She looks off into the brush and listens.
People are coming.
Rama went to get help, or people simply heard for themselves the roar and the rage of me, bulldozing through the cells and the trees and Naqi, Naqi. If people saw him now, like this, what would they do to him? Lock him up like me, or worse. Stars, stars. What do I do? What have I done?
Yashi is standing before me, now, and her movements are clipped, quick. She replaces the star in her sling with the star that Naqi is holding – it's Gaia. Why was he holding Gaia? Wasn't she locked away?
She winds Gaia up and slams her into the lock of the anchor, and then she takes me by my arm, and wrenches me to my feet.
She explains nothing, not with grunts, not with her hands. She lifts Naqi up and drapes him over my back, and places my hands beneath his thighs to support him. Then she hauls us up the tree, into the cradle of the tree, all with the anchor in tow.
Suns and guardians are breaking through the brush, now. They carry with them lanterns and torches and lit stars, the fires harsh and cackling. They know where we are. They've gathered around the roots of the tree.
Yashi thrusts me into the hole and toward the edge, and I don't understand. I don't understand anything. Why is Yashi doing this?
She guides the silver cord around my leg, and then kisses her forehead gently, gently, against the lock. She closes her eyes, and communes. She is speaking to Gaia. When her eyes open once more, she pushes at me and pushes at me, until I'm teetering by the edge.
"Yashi." My voice is a shattered thing. "I don't, what are you—"
She shakes her head at me: don't, don't ask.
She points at the horizon behind me: go, go now.
A Sun has climbed up the tree and is scrabbling at Yashi's heels, and she gives me no time to think, no choice to think – she shoves me and Naqi off the wall. We fall.
I don't let go of Naqi.
Ichor bleeds through me, and the anchor realigns with the soles of my feet, and then we are flying, I don't know where. Gaia is taking us somewhere, somewhere Yashi had disclosed to her.
The sky is thick and grey, and in the distance, thunder growls.
Hunched under the coming sheet of rain, I weep.