My new lie is that I am an old friend of Yashi's, one she taught signing and starsongs to, and so I have been assigned as caretaker over Naqi.
The boy doesn't question it. The doctors and nurses can't sign or write starsongs, so they can't refute it. I don't tell them, anyways, what it is I'm doing.
It's cruel, my lying. I know. I've lied enough for two lifetimes and three. I know. But fears rattle on in my ribcage. Most of those fears look the same: Naqi turns to me and his expression twists, and he says, I regret giving up my senses for you. I regret you.
Another fear, smaller, burrowed deep and deeper, sees Naqi turning to me and smiling and saying, ya'tuv mi-eh.
And I can't.
I can't.
I would rather that he regret me than accept me after everything I've done.
#
In the hospital cafeteria, as I eat, news from Tall Titan crackles from an old radio.
The people are enraged – at Lumi's death, at Naqi's abduction, at my disappearance. Injustice after injustice. So mobs have taken to assaulting Omens on the streets, or raiding known Omen hideouts, and the Omens retaliate with tooth and nail and scavenged weapons. Despite police presence, looting and violence break like hives throughout the city.
I can imagine it, the sounds of it all like firecrackers.
The food in my mouth no longer tastes like anything.
When I return to Naqi's room, I hear the shatter of glass.
Naqi had reached for the water on his bedside table and missed. The cup fell and shattered, but Naqi did not hear it, so he stepped unknowing into the sting of glass when he swung his feet down from the bed.
His foot is up on his knee when I see him. He's hissing. The glass is sunk into his flesh, and he touches it like it is a hot thing. He picks and picks, but his blood is slippery. He picks and picks, but he can't see how small the glass is. He can't see how deep it is. He can't see.
I step over to him. I reach to help, but then he's swearing, and I stop.
He fists a hand in his bedding. His fingers smear red where he clenches. He turns and covers his mouth, hides his face, but he can't hide the shaking of his shoulders. He can't hide his bandages that patch dark with tears. He crumples into himself, lower, lower, so his lap swallows his sobs. I'm not supposed to see this.
I step away. I exit the room. In the hall, with the door closed behind me, I lose my strength. I'm on the floor. The wall is cold and hard on my spine, and I wonder when, when?
When will the blade fall?
When will I burn?
#
He doesn't cry when he knows I'm around. He smiles. He signs things like: Gosh, you're looking quite nice today, Sozo. Did you get a new haircut? You sound like you're about to get a cold, Sozo. You should be careful.
And I have to tell him to stop being silly, and to slow down, because there's only so many signs I understand.
He asks me about me, about Lumi, every day. When is she coming? Have you talked to her? Seen her? I've told Naqi by now that she was the one who flew him to the hospital, and that she left soon after, because maybe she's a coward.
"What's there to be afraid of?" Naqi laughs. "I'm just a blind, deaf boy."
This blind, deaf boy frightens me more than any monster ever did.
#
The week comes to a close. I fall into routine.
In the mornings, I help Naqi with what he needs, and then I work in the kitchens or gardens. In the afternoons, after lunch, I bring Naqi to a seat out in the courtyard, underneath the shade of a tree.
He sits there. He lounges there. He smiles when he feels the breeze over his skin. I go to the back of the hospital, where my star and anchor is kept in a shack. I stare at Gaia. That is all I do. She still will not wake, no matter what I do.
"Why," I ask her, "did you let Naqi do what he did?"
She does not answer.
"Why," I ask, "will you not answer me?"
Still there is silence.
I pace into the shack and lift Gaia above my head, and I think about hurling her down the mountain, or throwing her against the ground, again and again, until she shatters. I'm angry, so angry. Why would she let Naqi hurt himself? Why won't she let me take the omen back?
I do not toss her. I never do. I set her down and leave the shack and return to Naqi. Against his protests, I help him back to his room.
Tonight, out in the foyer, the news on the screen is consumed by fire. The shaky video is of looming beasts, three times the size of a man, with fur like prickly shadows. Their teeth are serrated knives, and their eyes flash red. The headline reads:
Act of Terror. Temple Attacked by Omen Monsters.
I don't understand what is happening.
For nights, I've pondered over Esp and the things she did at the plaza, and on some level, I understand why she did them.
Eye for an eye.
She betrayed me after I betrayed her.
She had commanded me to draw the stain on everyone's skin, and the opposite instead had happened. She had seen me smiling on that stage, basking in the glory of my line, and she had said enough.
Sozo must be punished.
And now, with this news of terror flashing on the screen, I know how she was able to cut me loose so easily.
If I did what was according to plan, it would have been war.
If I did not act according to plan, still it would have been war.
In Esp's mind, there's never been and never will be another way.
Her guns and bombs were for this moment. In secret, in the shadow of her warehouse, she had been training her Omens to turn into hulking monsters, things that would rail against the temple walls with wild abandon.
If I had been able to break through cement wall after cement wall, what could her monsters do?
The newswoman says that the temple walls and gates have yet to be breached, but the number of Omen monsters seem only to be increasing. Guardians and authorities are doing what they can, and are holding strong, but for how long?
The leader of the monsters go by no name, and the only thing known about her is her demand: that all who have oppressed Omens must suffer and die.
That those who have betrayed her must suffer and die.
That anyone who have ever wished harm upon Omens will get what is coming to them, that she is a reckoning, a retribution, one the guilty will never be allowed to escape.
#
Naqi's parents send him a transmission.
The hospital had reached out to them through an encrypted message, to mask the location of the hospital, and had received an encrypted message in return.
I sit Naqi in front of the holo of the data-packet, and touch-sign everything I can to him. I palm-trace the remaining words I do not know.
They say: Naqi, darling, sweetheart. Honey, we love you. We love you so much. We're coming to see you as soon as we can. By the time you receive this transmission, we should already be on our way. Hold out for a little while longer, honey. We love you so much, and you've been so brave, been through so much, but you're so strong, ko-ang, darling, sweetling.
And then they're crying. I've never seen a man weep. The mother wipes and wipes at her face. Even through the holo, their cheeks shine.
I don't know the different signs for darling, sweetheart, honey, sweetling. And I don't know what ko-ang is. I don't ask. So for all the endearments, I replace them by pressing three specific fingers — the position of love — over Naqi's heart, because I think the meaning is the same.
Every time they say Naqi, darling, they are saying Naqi, we love you.
Naqi, sweetheart. Naqi, we love you.
Naqi is crying too. He fumbles three fingers over my heart and taps them there, again and again, like maybe his fingers were telegraph keys, and he's tapping out the code for love, to be carried from his heart through mine, to be pulsed like radio waves through the vast dark of the galaxy.
#
The temple gates have been broken. The carnage plays live over the feeds.
Bodies like torn flags litter the steps. The entrance is all crumpled ruin. Smoke rises black and in billows, and out of that blackness, rises the hunched backs of monsters.
The first monster I ever saw was still like a girl, just feral, full of teeth and nail. These monsters are nothing like girls, like boys – their limbs are no longer stitched together. It's like someone has taken their bodies and cracked them open and apart, and filled in the gaps and breaks with tumours that pulse, with filth that writhes. They are creatures playing at humans.
I see the arms and legs of one – the arms and legs of a man. They dangle useless in the air because the rest of his body has bloated into something like a giant leech, all oil and cracking scabs. I see one with their ribcage cracked open and walking on those bones, like a centipede with its many legs.
Is this what I looked like, when I turned?
Is this what I really am?
All of the monsters tower. All of their hides are like steel. Blasts of ichor from whistle-slings are to them like puffs of wind, and it's a wonder the guardians and authorities have held out for this long, against abominations like these.
I see Esp. She's stepping into the temple.
The newscaster rattles on and on from somewhere off-site, saying that the woman has taken the temple and the people inside as hostage. One wrong move, or a move she doesn't like, and she'll kill those hostages one by one by one.
Brother Marat is still in there. Sister Ena is still in there.
Yashi is there, and Frea, and Roaz, Rama.
Slowly, surely, understanding dawns.
It's not like Esp to take hostages, to hold back from pulling the trigger when her mark is in her sights. So she's holding back because she needs them – the whistlers, the racers, the ones that could survive the titan's eye.
Esp is still planning on making her wish.
A cry shatters through the hall. I startle, and jerk to my feet. Naqi. That was Naqi's voice.
I bolt toward his room. Naqi is being held down by two nurses. He's thrashing. He clutches the bandages over his eyes while his omen stain bleeds out of those bandages, down his cheeks, down his neck.
His omen is getting worse.
Why, why?
No one knows why. No one has answers. I'm useless here.
Something has to be done.
I turn from the room and make my way down the hall, down the steps, to behind the building. I enter the shack and take up my star, Gaia in her whistle-sling, then return to the courtyard, where there is plenty of space for a star to be swung.
And like that, by the tree Naqi sits at, smiles at in the breeze, I swing my sling – on and on, slowly at first, with an ease like warming up, and then harsh, curt, firm. I clap the full edge of gravity over Gaia's skin, and when she still does not wake, I wind back down. I repeat the process. I start slow, then snap fast. I start loose, then snap tight, muscles tensing and teeth gritting.
On and on, I do this.
On and on, I work and work to swing Gaia awake.
#
The sky above me was dusking when I started.
The sky above me now is cloaked violet-grey, static-grey.
Hours have passed. I am still swinging.
Nurses, dozens of them, have come to where I am in the courtyard and asked me to come back inside, to take a break, to get some water and sit for a while, that I've done this for long enough, and it's already dark, and Naqi needs you, doesn't he? So come back inside.
Come back inside.
And I do not answer them. I do not answer any of them.
Naqi needs me. I know. He needs me to take the stain back from him, to take away the pains that were meant for me, and I can only do that if Gaia is awake to transfer our senses, and so I have to do this. I have to be here, twisting and whirling, for as long as it takes, for as long as it takes.
My hands are bleeding. The swinging cord frictions my skin away and makes me bleed, but it doesn't matter.
Naqi is hurting so much more.
Yet the stars above me are coming out, and the city of Tall Titan – small in the distance – is winking full of lights, and Gaia is still not waking. Gaia will not return to me, or answer me, or heed me, and I will do this until my hands chafe into dust, and then I will swing with my teeth if I have to, but, but—
The cord slips and clips hard into my finger, clip into it wrong, and I yelp, and drop her. I falter. I sink to my knees. Gaia rolls in the dirt before me. My hands scrabble at dust.
I bring those hands up to my eyes, and keen.
My wail, even to my ears, is a ghastly ghostly thing.
I want to help Naqi. I want to save him. I want to run away with him, and make belief with him in the stars, and I want to hit him and call him khab, and then I want to kiss him. But I don't deserve to. I don't deserve to.
Why did he save me?
Why can't I save him?
Omen stains, omen scabs, sins that turn us into monsters. Esp and her lumbering beasts and all the hate given that brought them there, to the temple. They're monsters now, yes, but no one sets out to be a monster. I gave in to one because I thought it was all I deserved.
I want it to end. I want it all to end. I want no more, no more. Please. Please.
Gaia taps against my mind.
I don't hear her, not at first – the pulse of my sorrow is something that drowns. But she taps again, and again, like a bird against a windowpane, and I stop. I jerk my head up.
Gaia in the dust is bright awake, wide on lights, so very like the sun. Her warmth brims like hope. Her presence against my mind is like an old friend.
She says nothing. She does not need to, not anymore. I understand her, just as she understands me, me on my knees, me in the dust, me buried beneath the hide of a monster.
I know what I have to do, to save Naqi, to save them all.
It's time, she says.
I agree.
This, finally, is how the blade falls.
This, finally, is how I burn.