“Dead,” he declared, reporting to the man who still stood over me.
“Not this one,” the golden-eyed Sentinel stated. There was a frown on his face, pulling at the deep white scar that cut through his cheek beneath his right eye, almost matching the golden line on the other side of his face. He crouched, his frown deepening, his hand reaching out as though to touch me, though his fingers only hovered, his eyes detached. “Magic residue,” he muttered, eyeing something that I couldn’t see. He sniffed, his frown deepening. “It clings to her. It reeks of death. Restrain her.”
He stood without another glance, striding for the doorway. A man and a woman stepped forward, catching my arms and pulling me to my feet. The dress that I had draped over my front crumpled to the floor and the woman paused, passing me over to the man, who supported my dead weight.
“Captain,” she said. “Look.”
The golden-eyed Sentinel turned, his eyes skipping over my nakedness, pausing only when he caught sight of the bloodied bandage wrapping my leg. His brows lowered, flicking up to my face. He searched for something in my features, but my attention was slipping off to the side. The Sentinel had straightened away from my mother, revealing her to my eyes.
Dead, he had said.
Her eyes were wide open. She still looked on the verge of tears. Fear tracked the hard line of her lips, her hand limp against her chest. The neckline of her silks had parted slightly, showing the dark scorch mark that crept over her skin.
The shadow … my shadow…
This child is doomed to death and to share death with those closest to her.
My cracked lips parted, a hoarse sound stolen from my tongue. On the table, the bell whispered a reply that only I could hear.
“Can you speak?” the Captain asked. He had taken a step forward, waiting for the sound that struggled to manifest from me. He was imposing, even for a Sentinel. He carried his own vast size in such an effortless way that he almost seemed to widen the world around him. His golden eye glowed subtly, staring right through me. I couldn’t imagine him having a friend or smiling. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything other than glaring and tossing out orders. He seemed to me like the Vold statue raising his sword over the Steps of Atonement. Fierce and impersonal.
I tried again to speak, tears welling in my eyes as grief and anger fought for purchase inside my still-fluttering chest. He watched with lowered brows. I had thought that he was utterly unreadable until I saw the quick flash of disgust in his one blue eye.
Defeated, I shook my head.
“Cover her up.” He turned for the door again. “Call in a Sjel to examine the bodies. We can’t know for sure what happened here, but all souls have secrets to tell. Even the dead ones.”
I refused to look at my mother as the female Sentinel grabbed my dress off the floor and, together with the man holding me, managed to wrangle it into place. She pulled a set of chains from her belt and snapped the manacles around my wrists, touching them and muttering a word.
“Stille.”
Another empty word that echoed with a sound I couldn’t understand.
I could sense the magic in the iron as it thrummed against my skin, the whispers of many voices brushing against my skin, all of them saying the same word.
Stille.
Stille.
Stille.
At least a dozen people had poured their magic into these chains and yet … I could also sense the mechanism in the lock. The object’s weakness. I imagined flooding my own magic into it and could feel how easily the lock would turn, how simply the cuffs could become as brittle and useless as the collar. It made sense to me now that I had done it twice before with the ring and the collar. At the thought, my heartbeat increased, and I turned my attention inward with the same critical eye, sensing another weakness.
My own weakness.
It was right there, caged against my ribs, fluttering nervously.
I could see myself crumbling just like the cuffs and the collar, just another object layered in magic, pressure grinding me into brittle emptiness. I had a power like a hammer and an anvil in a smithshop dedicated to destruction instead of creation.
I did have a magic mutation of some kind. I could feel it as surely as my own fingers and toes. There was a sickness inside my heart. A spreading rash. I felt that if I reached for my power, the sickness would grow, or swell, or something awful. I could imagine the rash feeding off my power, becoming overwhelmed until it was bubbling, replicating, consuming the organ giving me life. If that ever happened, there would be nothing left of me.
I was cursed.
Death was inside me.
Somehow, all these years, I hadn’t believed it.
The Sentinels took me by the upper arms as I held the sagging dress to my front, the back of it still unsecured. I was reeling, trapped within my thoughts. I almost allowed them to drag me out of the room, but I dug my heels in before it was too late and pointed to the bell. I moved my finger from the bell to my lips and tried to speak again. The woman understood, grabbing the bell and turning it over in her hand. Her flaxen hair was braided along her skull, the braids hooked against her head by bronze circles with bronze needles threaded through them. Where the braids should have ended, there were only a multitude of bronze spikes. Hair to metal—her mutation. She shared a quick, dark look with her companion, and then she slipped the bell into her pocket.
“Is that really the Dealer?” she whispered as we passed through the doorway. Both Sentinels had snuck a last peek at the bearded man on the ground.
“Ingrid.” It was a warning, spoken anxiously by the male Sentinel, whose pupils were split into two. He cast a look to me and then they were both silent.
Fyrio had a healthy fear of words. Names had power, just like incantations, and so the most powerful sectorians were all referred to by Fated names—words formed from the whispers of their deeds. The Dealer was an Eloi infamous for dark deals and even darker power, though he was rumoured to be of Reken descent, residing in the desert far to the east of Fyrio, across the wide ocean. It wasn’t conceivable that the man in our kitchen was the Dealer, but it was even less conceivable that I hadn’t realised it earlier. Who else would trade for the lives of three unborn children? Who else would deal in blood and the theft of something so precious it was nothing more than an abstraction? Who else possessed the power to hide my curse for so long?
The Dealer was a wanted man in Fyrio … which meant that I could add illegal trading to the list of crimes and mistakes that I had committed over the past two days. Ingrid and the split-pupiled man dropped a dark hood over my head, but I could still see through the fibre enough to be sure of my surroundings as they escorted me through Breakwater Canyon. The bridges and cavern hallways were narrow, meaning that we had to walk single file. I could make out seven Sentinels in total, with the Captain leading the procession. He walked with purpose, his shoulders wide and stiff, his stony face frightening everyone away from our path. He didn’t look as old as the Sentinels surrounding him, but he carried his own authority with an enviable ease.
The stewards were scrambling back beneath the eaves of the closest houses or huddling in the shadows of the tunnels we passed, each of them gossiping in fearful tones.
“The windows were smashed in, didn’t you hear?”
“That’s kynmaiden Lihl’s daughter.”
“There wasn’t a sound from the house until the door exploded.”