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“ C OME ON !” I shout at Aliya. She’s falling behind.
Creaks and moans. That awful groaning sound.
They’re getting closer.
“Taj ...”Aliya whispers, pointing toward the rustling leaves of a bush a few feet to the right of us.
Before I can answer, black shapes launch themselves out of the shrubbery and gallop toward us. More inisisa. Aliya stumbles toward me. I grab her arm, and we run as fast as we can. A shadow glides through the sky overhead, blotting out the sun. Even from down below, I recognize the griffin. They’re going to get us.
Memories flash through my mind, blurry and out of focus.
The memories don’t belong to me. They’re from the sin I just Ate. Still, the guilt makes my chest so tight, I can hardly breathe.
Roots trip me up, and I fall hard. My daga comes loose. I see people in front of me. They look so real. Mages, cloaked in black. And other figures in brown robes, heads shaved. Men and women arranging tiles on the floor. They’re in a circle, and someone is chanting.
I shake away the vision. I can’t get lost in my head. Not now.
Aliya helps me up. The inisisa are gaining. The grinding is louder now. Closer.
Wind bows some of the tree branches in front of us. I muster as much strength as I can and leap for one. Thistles cut into my palms, but I maintain my grip. My arms burn. Slowly, I pull myself up. My feet scrape against the wet tree trunk. After a few moments of struggling, I manage to get all the way up and take a breath, leaning my back against the tree trunk.
Aliya’s below me.
“Here, grab my hand.”
She chances a glance behind her. The inisisa aren’t tall enough to get all the way up here, not if we climb higher. She leaps, grabs my hand, and I struggle with all my strength to haul her up. She scrabbles up, and we both make it onto the branch.
“We have to get higher,”I huff. The visions dizzy me. I know they’re someone else’s sins, but guilt bubbles up in me like bile, burning the inside of my throat.
“Taj? Taj!”
My eyes shoot open, and that’s when I realize I’d gone unconscious. The effects of sin-eating aren’t supposed to last this long. I haven’t been this sick since I Ate my first sin as a child.“How long was I out?”
“Just a moment.”Aliya has that worried look in her eyes that I haven’t seen in a while. It warms my heart to see her look at me like that again. Last time she did, she was begging me to leave my home and follow her into this cracked forest.“I just need ...”I put my palm to my forehead.
The sound of scratching draws my attention to the ground, where a small group of inisisa paws at the tree we’re trapped in.
“Come on, we have to get farther up.”The rain has stopped. The thunder is gone, but still, I can barely hear myself talk.
“Taj, you can’t move right now. The sin—it’s making you sick. We have to figure out what it did to you, if it’s different from other inisisa.”
“There’s no time,”I hiss through gritted teeth. I stumble to my feet, then sway. Aliya grabs me and pulls me back down.
“Taj, what do you see?”
I close my eyes. For a moment, the dizziness stops.“Mages. And people ... in brown robes.”My eyes grow wide.“Algebraists.”
“What else?”
The scratching gets louder. The inisisa are jumping on top of one another, trying to scramble up. They’re able to stand on one another’s metal backs. We don’t have much time. All at once, the feeling that I’m going to throw up goes away. I can breathe again.“I think I can stop them. Like before.”
“No, wait. Taj, what are you going to do?”
Before she can finish, I jump to a nearby branch, then hop onto the ground. My landing isn’t as soft as I would have liked, but now at least I have all the inisisa in front of me. My mind is still hazy. Each flash of memory is like lightning under a cloud. But I think back to that night on the balcony with Princess Karima, and I think of the inisisa that swarmed through the streets of Kos. I think of the chaos that swallowed my city, and I try to think of what was happening inside me when I did what I did.
I hold my hands out.
They’ve stopped trying to climb up the tree and instead stalk toward me. A wolf, a lion, a bear, and a lynx. Their armor grates and creaks with each movement. I can see them tensing. Then, in one movement, they burst toward me.
“Taj!”Aliya screams.
I expect it to be the last thing I ever hear. I squeeze my eyes shut. All at once, the metal screeching stops. I hear birds chirping. I hear wind whistling through tree branches and rustling pine needles. I hear insects buzzing. I open my eyes.
The inisisa all stand in front of me. They stopped.
I almost can’t believe it. They stopped!
“Aliya, I don’t know how long I can hold them like this.”My arms and legs tense. The whole inside of my body burns.
She scrabbles down the tree and stands close to me.
“We need to get going.”It’s creeping back into me. That dizziness, that feeling like I’m going to vomit every meal I’ve ever had. That guilt. Someone else’s guilt. Someone else’s sins.
She looks at the beasts in awe, breaking me out of my trance.“It’s like at the Fall of Kos. You did it.”
“OK, OK. I did it, sure. But we have to get moving!”I’m worried more are coming. There were a lot of them when they first cornered us. We have to get to safety.
The inisisa bow their heads, then sit on the ground. They don’t make a sound.
Aliya looks up at the sky, shielding her eyes with one hand from the sun. The clouds have parted. Then she spins in a slow circle.“OK, this way,”she says, pointing west. She grabs my hand and pulls me along.
I don’t even dare look behind me. I have no idea how long it’ll all last. I try not to think of what would have happened if they had caught up to us in that tree. More guilt latches on to my heart. Will the inisisa go back for the others? As we’re running and we see a break in the forest with sunlight shining through, Aliya turns and smiles at me, and in that moment, her face is glowing. My heart feels lighter.
We leave the forest with such suddenness that the sun’s brightness stops us in our tracks.
The land dips beneath us into a small valley with a river at the bottom.
“OK, let’s go,”I tell her.
This is new for both of us. It’s most likely the farthest either of us has been from home.
It finally feels like an adventure.
We set off down the hillside just as I hear the clatter of metal behind us. Inisisa emerge from the forest, pause at the top of the ridge, then charge after us. I grab Aliya’s hand as we sprint down the hill.
“Maybe if we can make it to the river, we’ll be safe,”I say, breathless. I have no idea how we’ll cross it, but the alternative is getting eaten.
The river flows with more force than any body of water I’ve ever seen before, but neither of us slows down. We run straight into the water. It’s up to our waists, and the current is strong.
“We have to keep going!”I don’t look behind us. It’s so cold that chills run up my back. The deeper we get, the less I can feel my feet.
“I don’t know how deep it gets,”Aliya tells me, worry thick in her voice.
“Have faith,”I say. I give her hand a squeeze and lead us farther into the water. The same rush of adrenaline I felt when I leapt across rooftops in Kos dodging Palace guards or raced through the narrow streets trying to lose the Agha Sentries surges in me.
“They stopped!”Aliya shouts.
I take a glance behind me. There they are, lined along the shore. I whoop with laughter.“The metal. It’s the metal! It’ll sink them.”I start laughing and don’t care that I sound cracked when I do. But my joy is short-lived.
I turn around just in time to see a massive tree branch swing toward me and knock me straight in the head.
The last thing I feel is my body spinning, flipping over and over as the current takes me. Aliya yells my name, and her voice grows fainter and fainter. Then darkness.
Blacker than the flank of an inisisa, nothing but darkness.