“I owe you an apology,” said Hypnos.
Laila frowned. “Whatever for?”
“I behaved badly when I found out you had broken the Mnemo bug,” he said, looking down at his lap. “Though Séverin has my trust, it is obvious he has not earned yours. I don’t know what he said to you, but I can assure you he did not mean it. I know it was a ruse to protect you.”
That familiar numbness rose up once more in Laila. “I know that now.”
“You must know, too, that even though he cares for all of us, it’s you that he—”
“Don’t,” said Laila coldly, before adding, “Please.”
Hypnos held up his hands in surrender, leaving Laila to her thoughts. Her gaze dropped to her ring: 9. Nine days left to breathe this air, stare at this sky. Her mind eagerly lapped up every image as if it were cream—the pale domes of cathedrals, a smudge of thundercloud on the sky. Thinking of Séverin was like dousing all those thoughts in ink. It blotted her mind with dark, and she could hardly see past it. He was not here. Not yet. So she endeavored not to think of him at all.
* * *
THE CEMETERY ISLAND of Isola di San Michele was still and quiet, walled in with red and white brick. A domed church wrought of the pale, Venetian stone appeared to float on the dark lagoon. As the gondola pulled toward the dock, a three-meter-tall Forged statue of the archangel Michael spread open its wings and raised a pair of scales in greeting. The bronze scales swung in the frosty February wind, and the seraphim’s sightless eyes seemed to fix on them, as if preparing to weigh the good and bad of their lives. Down a white-stoned gravel pathway, stately cypress trees swayed and stood guard over the threshold of the dead.
The moment Laila stepped off the gondola, a strange feeling wisped through her stomach. A blankness, there and gone. For a moment, she could not smell the snow on the wind or feel the cold at her neck. Her body felt disjointed and too still, like a thing she must drag with her—
“Laila!”
Hypnos caught her around the shoulders.
“What happened?” asked Zofia, rushing to her.
“I-I don’t know,” said Laila.
Her body felt too still, too quiet. She felt her heart beat slowly, as if fighting through syrupy blood.
“You’re hurt,” said Zofia.
“No, I’m not, I—”
Hypnos lifted her bejeweled hand. There, Laila saw a slash across her palm. She must have grabbed the wooden spike at the dock too hard.
“Here,” said Zofia, tearing off a bit of her scorched hem as a bandage.
Laila took it blankly.
“You’ve been through a lot,” said Hypnos carefully. “Why don’t you stay with the boat? We won’t be long, will we?”
Enrique stammered. “I can’t say for certain, but—” Hypnos must have thrown him a look because Enrique nodded quickly. “Stay and rest, Laila. We’ll be fine.”
“Are you hurting?” asked Zofia.
“No,” said Laila, staring blankly at her hand.
She must have nodded and waved them off, but the whole time her mind screamed with something she could not bring herself to say aloud. She hadn’t lied to Zofia. She hadn’t felt any hurt.
Laila hadn’t felt anything at all.
5
ENRIQUE
Enrique Mercado-Lopez knew many things.
He knew about history and languages, myths and legends. He knew how to kiss well, eat well, and dance well, and though he was uncertain about many situations at the moment, there was one thing he knew without a shadow of a doubt: This was not his place.
And he was not the only one who knew it.
A few paces behind him, Zofia and Hypnos walked in weighted silence. They expected him to know what to do next. They expected him to lead, to give commands, to plan the next steps … but that wasn’t Enrique.
You wouldn’t belong, an old voice whispered in his skull. Know your place.
His place.
Enrique could never seem to figure it out. When he was a child, he remembered trying out for the school theatre. All night, he’d practiced the hero’s lines. He had propped up his toys on chairs as his future audience. He had bothered his mother until, exasperated, she gave up and helped him practice his lines by reading the script of the female costar. But on the day of the auditions, the nun running the play had stopped him after he said two sentences.
“Anak.” She laughed. “You don’t want to be the hero! Far too much work and far too many lines. And the front of the stage? It’s a place of terror, trust me … you don’t belong there. But don’t worry, I have a special role for you!”
The special role ended up being a tree.
His mother had been very proud though, and Enrique had reasoned that trees were symbolically quite important, and so perhaps he could be the hero next time.
But further attempts ended the same way. Enrique entered writing contests, only to find that his opinions had not found an audience. He would try out for debate contests, and if they didn’t dismiss his ideas outright, they would take one look at his face, the Spanish features blending with his Visayan heritage, and in the end, all the responses were the same:
You don’t belong.
When Enrique had found work as Séverin’s historian, it was the first time he had dared to believe otherwise. He thought he’d found his place. Séverin was the first to believe in him, to encourage him … to offer friendship. With Séverin, his ideas found root and his scholarship soared to the extent that even the Ilustrados and their nationalist groups whose ideas could one day reshape his country, had let him in, and though he was nothing more than a member on the fringes writing his historical articles, it was more than he had ever been given … and it made him hope for more.
A fool’s illusion, in the end.
Séverin had taken his dreams, and used them against him. He had promised that Enrique would always be heard, and then silenced him. He had taken their friendship and bent it to his needs until it broke, and Ruslan had picked up the pieces and fashioned it into a weapon.
All of which had left Enrique here: utterly lost in every way, and almost certainly not in the right place.
Enrique reached up, gingerly touching the bandage covering his lost ear. He winced. Since they had left the Sleeping Palace, he had tried not to look at himself, but his reflection in the lagoons of Venice found him anyway. He looked off balance. Marked, even. Before, when he was in the wrong place, at least he could hide. But his cut-off ear was a declaration: I do not belong. See?
Enrique shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t afford to lose himself in pity.
“Come on … think.”
He looked around the cemetery, frowning. The length of the Isola di San Michele cemetery was little more than five hundred meters, and by now they’d circled the perimeter twice. This was the third time they were walking down this path lined with cypress trees. Just ahead, the path would curve into a row of statues of the archangels, who would turn their Forged heads to watch them pass. On the cemetery plots, the granite tombstones stood tall and elaborately curved, many of them crowned with wide crosses draped in Forged roses that would never lose their scent or shine, while the mausoleums bore little decoration on their exterior, hardly anything that would put Enrique in mind of a god with either no head or multiple heads.