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T HUNDER CRACKLES IN the sky as we reach the cave. The rain waits till everyone’s inside before it starts pouring down. The Mages watch in silence. Some of the aki—my bodyguards—take up posts at the cave’s mouth. A few of the others, the younger ones, sit nearby in a circle and laugh at something. Ugo, a kid with a single dragon spiraling up his leg, snaps his fingers at Nneoma and points to something he’s drawn in the mud.
“My favorite meal from home,”Ugo is saying while a few of the others hold their own side conversations.“Fresh fish.”He gestures at the drawing he’s made in the ground. Squiggles mostly, with a few lines around to suggest a table.“With kwanga surrounding it and makembe on the other side. What you call plantain. Or what the northerners will call plan teen .”He swipes at the air as if to disregard that word.
The others get raucous, and Nneoma smacks his hand away. She has the hard, broad shoulders of a northerner, someone used to working the mines to farm gemstones for the royals.“That’s because that’s the right way to say it. I don’t know no plant ain . We say plan teen .”The others roar with laughter. Plan teen . Plan teen !
But Ugo barges through the protest.“You’ve got it wrong. Main teen . Plan teen . Enter teen .”
The others start rolling on the ground.“Are you trying to enter teen him?”
Nneoma tries to stay serious, but even she’s starting to crack.“Fine, have it your way. Plan tain , main tain , enter tain , re main !”The group erupts into another fit of laughter.“You southerners talk like your mouth is full of suya wrap anyway,”she says.
They were probably there for the Fall of Kos. It sounds weird in my head to think of what happened to my city like that. The Fall of Kos seems like something you read about in a book, or a story your mama or baba tells you during the fasting period before the Festival of Reunification, or something the Ozi talks about in his sermons. It sounds ancient and faraway. But it’s not. I see it almost every time I close my eyes to sleep. The inisisa rampaging the streets of Kos, the hundreds of Forum-dwellers sprawled out in the streets or in their homes with their eyes glazed over, Eaten by the sin-beasts that had been unleashed. The aki who Crossed, fighting to keep everyone safe. The others who died. These aki probably saw it all too. The sins they’re wearing they probably earned saving Kos. And here they are arguing about how to pronounce“plantain.”And protecting me.
Miri finds me standing at the mouth of the cave, staring into the forest. The rain has started to come down in sheets. It’s as though I’m looking through curtains made of water.
“Taj.”She smiles.“How are you feeling?”
“To be honest, I feel like a housefly trapped in a jar. Do we have a plan?”
“That is just what we were discussing.”She nods to the other Mages.
“And?”
Her smile tightens.“We are waiting.”
That conversation was about as satisfying as I expected. No new information. No plan. No direction.“Those explosions,”I say finally.“Were those Baptisms?”
Miri frowns. A shadow has come over her face.“Dynamite.”
“Dyna-what?”
Nneoma walks toward us.“It’s what we use in the north to open up the earth for mining. Thunder sticks. You put flame to the string attached, then it BOOMs.”She mimes the blast with her hands.“Earth everywhere, and then there is a hole in the ground for you to dig into.”
Another tool in Karima’s hands. She’s tearing Kos apart.
Just then, I check movement out of the corner of my eye, and we all turn to see a group of aki carrying something large over their heads. From far away, they look like ants that found a giant gray leaf to shield themselves from the rain. Backs bowed, they enter the cave, then toss the thing to the ground. It makes a loud thunk that revereberates around the cave.
A bunch of the other aki crowd around it. By the time I get there, Aliya’s there too. She pulls down her spectacles and crouches over it, examining it in silence while the others whisper around her.
The hunk of metal has a rounded center with sharp edges. It looks like a shield. Something Palace guards would have, but bigger. Nobody can tell where it comes from, but somebody murmurs about how they bang metal up north of Kos. It’s too big and simple to be auto-mail. Auto-mail has gears and hinges. It is shaped like arms and legs and has mechanisms to mimic the movements of human limbs. For a second, I envision someone trying to fit this to a stub of an arm or to where a leg used to be. Nneoma taps the thing with her foot, then leaps back, like she’s been bitten by a snake.
Another Mage, Dinma, hovers over my shoulder, peering at the thing. His snakeskin eyes flicker blue before glazing over again.“There are no attachment slots on it.”
Aliya nods in agreement.“There’s nowhere for straps to fit in. And its geometric structure is odd. What could this have been fitted to?”
I shove my way forward next to her.“You think it was attached to something?”
It’s been flipped over like a turtle shell upside down. She points at its inside.“You see? There are streaks of black inside.”She crouches and gets even closer to it.“And the Fist of Malek.”She gasps. The faded insignia of the Palace Mages has been written in dried blood.“Mages made this.”
The Mages huddle together and whisper while some of the aki take to kicking the metal and testing its durability with their feet. Despite being around all these people, I feel alone. Trapped. No one seems to notice me walking away.
With my back against the cave wall, I hold my head in my hands. On my wrist, a dull blue stone dangles from a thin piece of string. The last time it glowed, I was standing on the steps to the Palace, fighting my best friend. The stone had belonged to Zainab, an aki girl with sin-spots covering every inch of her body. I remember when we were both children, a Mage brought her in to heal Mama of the sin that had crippled her. The Mage had led her around with a chain attached to a collar around her neck. Then, the next time I saw her, we were grown, and she was watching over the aki I trained in the forest just outside the Wall. I remember carrying her limp body after she had Crossed and died. After she had Eaten too many sins. Aliya and I had buried her somewhere in this mess of trees and bushes. I have no idea how near or far her grave is from here.
I look at Aliya and wonder if she’s thinking about Zainab too. Maybe Zainab’s inyo—her uncleansed spirit—haunts that patch of forest.
I’m so lost in the daydream that at first I don’t even notice everyone scurrying around. And that’s when I hear it. A noise that sounds like grinding metal. It sounds like something groaning.
We all get to the mouth of the cave, and a few of the aki move forward to peer through the sheets of rain. The rain falls so hard we barely see anything, but we can still hear the noise, and it’s getting closer.
Ugo’s at the front, and he takes a few more steps out of the cave.
“Ugo! Get back!”Nneoma screams.
Ugo keeps walking out until we can barely see him turn to look over his shoulder. Before he can turn back around, something massive leaps out of the forest and crashes onto him.
Through the sheets of rain, I see the metal plating covering whatever it is that’s crushing Ugo. I barely take a step forward before Ras grips my wrist and pulls me back.
Ugo’s struggling to cry out, but the beast on his chest chokes all the breath out of his lungs.
“Ugo!”Nneoma races out of the cave with her daga at the ready. She jumps into the air to get a good angle at the beast’s neck, but she hits the metal, and her daga spins out of her hand. She falls to the ground, gripping her wrist.
The beast rears back on its hind legs and lets out a roar. Wisps of black smoke curl out from between the plates of armor.
Miri gasps.“It’s... it’s a sin-beast.”
“But how?”Aliya’s between me and Miri, and everyone stares in shock while the inisisa covered in armor stares at all of us.“It’s... it’s impossible.”
“The armor is fused to the inisisa.”Dinma sounds like he’s in a laboratory ogling chemicals and not like we’re all about to be eaten by a metal sin-lion.
“We have to save Ugo!”It comes out of my mouth before I realize it. My daga is ready in my hands. I break away from Ras, and I can’t remember the last time I ran this fast. The sin-beast barely flinched when Nneoma struck its metal plating, but I can see small spaces between its shields. One opening right by its shoulder. The inisisa shifts on Ugo’s chest. I run up to it, gripping my daga, and slice right through its shoulder.
It bucks up off Ugo, throwing me off balance. I recover, move to strike its underside, but I realize too late that it is also covered in armor. Nneoma crashes into me, shoving me out of the way just as the sin-lion’s paw slams down where my head was. We aki all circle the beast.
Tree branches above us shift, and something drops straight out of the sky and lands on the inisisa’s back. Noor!
I remember she’d been out scouting and hadn’t returned before we found the cave. Her fingers find a gap in the armor on the lion’s back. It tosses its head, trying to throw her off, but she manages to hold tight with one hand. Noor stabs at the unprotected nape of its neck until finally the lion’s legs buckle. Noor jumps off.
As the beast dissolves into an inky black puddle, its armor slides off, falling to the forest floor.
The pool of ink where the inisisa had been splits and jets past Noor, bouncing off the ground in front of her before flooding into her mouth. She staggers back, coughing and sputtering. Then the Eating is over. We don’t have time to see the new beast that has been etched into her skin. Nneoma leads the way, and Noor and I hook Ugo’s arms around our shoulders and guide him back into the cave.
“We have to go. Now!”Noor shouts.“More are coming.”
Aliya’s eyes go wide.“There are more?”
“Many more.”
We don’t make it more than ten feet out of the cave before a group of more armored sin-beasts barges through a thatch of bushes. A bear, another lion, and several wolves. We all hurry in the opposite direction, but another squadron of inisisa is waiting for us.
“There are too many of them,”I hiss as the semicircle pushes us closer and closer together. We have our backs to one another, Mages and aki. I lean in close to Aliya.“Follow me,”I hiss.“When I move, don’t slow down. Stay right on my back.”
“Wait, but—”
I run as fast as I can right toward the sin-lion in front of me. If I guess right, I may make it out of this alive. I keep running, and when I’m only a few feet away, it crouches, ready to leap.
I time my steps perfectly, plant my foot, and jump. It jumps right after me, but I’m a little bit higher, and just as I arc over its back, I throw my daga out at the nape of its neck. The cord attached to the knife wraps around it, and I pull the inisisa with me on the way down so that it lands on its back. The line almost snaps under the pressure, but I glance behind me to see Aliya frozen right where she stands.
“Come on!”I shout.
The inisisa stirs, then dissolves into a puddle of shadows on the ground.
Aliya runs through it, ink clinging to the hem of her robe, and I grab her hand and swing her behind me. The pool of sin turns into a single stream in the air and rushes into my open mouth.
My eyes shut reflexively. My body spasms. The sin knifes through me like a river made of thorns, but eventually it passes. I fall to one knee. I have to get up. The clash of stone dagas against metal armor rings through the forest. Everyone’s still upright. Suddenly, the inisisa stop and all turn in my direction. They’re after me and only me.
Aliya turns and sees the pride of inisisa charging toward us.
“Run!”I shout. I catch up to her and take her hand, and the blood pounds so loudly in my ears that I hear nothing else. Not the soft patter of rain on the leaves in the trees overhead. Not the rumbling of a herd of sin-beasts that want nothing more than to eat my soul. Nothing.
At least the others are safe.