faith

He woke still clutching the bottle of bourbon which had, so fraternally, ushered him into sleep the night before. His head pounded rhythmically; the world tilted, balanced precariously on an axis, first this way and then that, so suddenly that he worried for a split second that he might be bucked from the bed entirely. Somewhere above him, a voice said, "aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

It might have been a celestial figure, speaking down to him from upon high. It might have just been Khal. He said, groggily, "God?"

"Certain similarities have been noted in the past."

The hangover was picking at the stitches of his being, plucking at his seams like guitar strings. She knelt beside the mattress, and pressed a bottle into his hands. She set her hand flat on the bed, and put her head on her hand, and gazed at him. He said, "I love you."

"Yes," she said. "Sweet chariot, don't I know it."

She sounded tired. She had shadows around her eyes, painted there as dark as grease-paint, and the drawn pallor of a hangover. He said, "did you sleep?"

"A little."

"Come sleep some more."

She needed little invitation: she climbed over him, and he did not protest as once he might have done, even as she was all elbows and knees and wrists, and she wrenched back the blanket, and she rolled in next to him. She smelled like city, like modern city, like Opona, like home: dock-salt and train-smoke and petrichor. Her skin was warm and her hair was cold, as though she had been wrought from the cool fire of the dawn itself. He held onto the bottle of sugar water like it was a living thing that dearly he loved. She did not reach for him, but tucked her surviving arm beneath her head and turned her face into the shelter of her crooked elbow, and gave a deep sigh like something primordial settling on the land. His hand looked very grey next to hers, even next to hers.

From the doorway, an unimpressed Uriasz: "I've been usurped."

Ilja said, "I like her better."

Uriasz made a sound far detached from the sounds he had made the night before, and picked up his keys. He was dressed for work at the Bureau. He was wearing a suit and tie. It shouldn't have suited him, but it did. The Chariot was starting to worry that his time in Illéa had done something quite irreversible and damaging to him, something shameful: he was starting to appreciate a good uniform. A cravat, he thought. He thought Uriasz could be persuaded towards a cravat if he played his cards right.

Khalore said, "you have individual debrief at two."

"What time is it now?"

"Two thirty."

He jabbed her with the bottle she had gifted him. The door closed behind Uriasz. She laughed.

"Really?"

"Uriasz is a lazy bastard," he said, and smiled when Khalore could not fight the giggles that bubbled up in her chest at this comment. "But he can't be that bad. If he's only leaving for work now..."

"Your gifts of deductation," she said – "deduction," he said, and was ignored – "as ever, astound and amaze."

She yawned. Her eyes fluttered. He could see the imprint of the imprint of an embroidered cushion on her face: it was not there, not truly, and yet Ilja saw it. She had slept on someone's couch. There had been a hand in hers on this awful second night in Illéa. She had, at least, not been alone. Nor had Ilja. Nor had Ina.

"Have you seen Zor?"

She shook her head.

Ilja stared at the ceiling.

"We're haemorrhaging Warriors," said Khalore. It was a flatness that permeated her voice, simple and honest. "Should we worry?"

"No," Ilja said. "Not yet."

"Well then," she said, "tell me when."

She had picked the lock with a screw bloodied about its tip: Ilja found it in the hallway when he wandered out that way, lying on the carpet. He did not pick it up, but left it where it was; he went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face, and stared very hard into his own grey eyes, wondering what colour they might have been before.

He was badly bruised. He ran his fingers across his own skin, and thought of Illéa, and pulled on a shirt that did not belong to him. Uriasz was broader in the chest and shoulders than he: the garment hung from Ilja like something pilfered, and his skin stained it grey where it touched him.

Khalore said, "family dinner tonight?"

She was exploring the cupboards in the kitchen; Ilja came barefoot to the threshold, and reclined against the doorframe. He said, "are we to while away lives of leisure, then?"

"They're re-deploying Inanna," Khalore said, cracking open the coffee tin Uriasz kept beneath the icebox and poking about within, suspect. "Only a matter of time before they find a use for us as well."

Ilja knew that he should have slept longer. So much longer. He was tired – so tired. It wasn't fair. Wasn't this the end of the road? Didn't oblivion beckon? He missed Azula, and Ghjuvan, and Hyacinth, and Mielikki. Kinga would follow him before long, if she hadn't gone before. She would not have gone so far, nor so fast: she would have known that he was coming close behind.

Weren't they due that much?

Decebal's spectre was hanging about him, cool like a hovering mist. He was a second skin layered over Ilja's own: the Chariot on top, and Schovajsa below, hidden as Frida had instructed him to hide. The Chariot overlaid all, and Decebal overlaid the Chariot, and it ought to have felt natural but…

but.

How could he have brought himself to wish for more time? He had stood beneath the sky, every molecule of his being faltering into sand and dust, and he had wept and wished for more. More? More?

How could one bear much more?

What masochism, Ilja thought, but watching Lore brewing cups of coffee in an apartment that belonged to neither of them, her hair wild about her shoulders, her arm slung up with Myghal's borrowed scarf, humming a song that Inanna had taught them, he could almost – almost – see the appeal.

The Mannazzus had a very nice house that buttressed the edge of the Old Kur demarcation line, as close to the real world as any Kur was permitted to reach. Ghjuvan had always called his father a collaborator, and the evidence of that was apparent in the gold filigree of the front door, the navy livery of the small staff that marshalled the entryway and dusted the enormous windows and tended to the small, emerald garden which ran for six metres along the street. The paving stones had come from Siarkis, and displayed that region's characteristic mottle pattern where the long-ago magic of feuding Warriors had sunk into the rock and never quite lifted again: this particular set were streaked blue and green, as though a child had spilled paint across them, with tiny pieces of silver embedded deeply within.

When Khalore came to the gate, she paused for a moment with her hand on the black iron railing, and watched the woman within the house pacing from the drawing room to the lounge and back again, flitting between narrow frames of visibility accorded by those enormous sash windows as though she were leaping from one painting of domesticity to another. She was trying to sooth a baby cradled within her arms; she kept showing it her white, white smile, as though hoping it might prove contagious. Khalore found herself staring without meaning to, and then, when she caught herself, she looked for just a little bit longer, feeling the curse turn over in her chest like a living thing. She had ripped a bit of flesh out of shoulder that morning with which to pick the lock; she found herself wishing again for a screw between her fingers, so that she could do worse again.

Khalore had brought a pathetic bundle of flowers. They had felt like too little, even when she was buying them. She did not leave them, but brought them with her when she turned and retreated down the street, feeling the house grow enormous behind her until it had become so large that it blotted out the sun as surely as any Wall.

Commandant made for good company in silence, though Inanna did not think the same could be said for her. She remained at his table for an hour more, stewing and musing, and after twenty minutes, he rose and he went about his business while his former pupil watched the children playing from the window and bit back bile.

Matthias Kloet had not wished for success alone. She could say this much, vile snake that he was: there had been something else here, something ulterior. The Warriors could have succeeded in their mission umpteen ways: it had been a simple mission, elemental. He had wound his own purposes into that simple crusade, intertwined them and bound them so bastardly tightly that they could not be extricated from one another. And so it was: had Ghjuvan died for their cause, or for Kloet's? Had Pekka been brought to Illéa for the Radiance or for some other, hidden, awful purpose?

She would have to speak to Zoran. The thought had a serrated edge: how much had the new Hierophant known about the motives of the old? He observed Matthias in the world. How much had he hidden from them? How much had he contributed to… this?

Was Nanshe a part of it or simply, awfully, collateral?

She knew what Kinga would have done, if she was here. Inanna could practically imagine the Moon sitting opposite the wooden table, head resting on her fist, looking at Inanna as though she were stupid or heartless – irony there, irony true. Kinga would have said, my mother broke my wrist to keep me out of the Programme, and Inanna would have closed her eyes and shook her head and pretended to laugh and pretended that the idea did not, in a single horrible moment, hold merit.

And yet here you are.

Pekka had been the same: he had ploughed through the kinds of injuries that usually caused a cadet to fall out with a single, simple, sweet rationale. You need me here, he would have said, and she would never have dreamed of arguing. He was right. He had always been right.

Commandant set a rhubarb tart in front of her after an hour had passed without her moving from her seat. They were tied together by a strong purple cord, metallic-looking in the wan noon light. Ina found herself plucking it distractedly, and watching the effect it had on her old mentor: each time she pulled at it, the Commandant's gaze would flick towards her, almost unwillingly, with something like apprehension behind his eyes.

Hadn't he tired of this pattern over these last long years?

Didn't it get exhausting, to live in constant fear of what you had created?

She said, "did you send the World to Illéa?"

Commandant said, "we don't get a say in what he does."

The way he pronounced the word – he – was so twisted and distorted with venom that Inanna, for a moment, relaxed. Blissful for this, at least, to be clear and distinct. "That's a no," she said.

"It is."

"And what he did to Pekka," she said. "Did you… did you stand by while he did that too?"

For a moment, she thought the old man was going to drop the plates in his hand – that, she thought, or flip over the table in front of them. He took a step towards her, and she remained where she was sitting, regarding him levelly as though he were her inferior, as though she knew – no, she did know – that she could stop him as soon as the thought of causing her harm so much as flitted across his mind.

He said, "what are you talking about, Nirari?"

She said, "you..."

She rotated her wrist, and caught the purple cord in her outstretched fingers, weaving it between her knuckles in a rough approximation of the cat's cradle she had taught to Azula as children.

She said, "don't lie to me, Konrad," and there was something more than Inanna behind the words.

Beside her, Allegra Sauer smiled from the photo over the stove; beside her, framed photos of four generations of Warriors stared forward, stark and unsmiling. Avrova Vovk had been caught in movement, light glinting off her hair and teeth as she turned towards their Tower, so that her face was all a-blur, silver on grey on tintype.

He opened his mouth. No sound escaped.

Inanna said, "did you know?"

"I didn't know," he said. "I don't know."

She said, "where do you think Pekka is now?"

"In the urnyard in the cemetery in the grave in the ground."

She said, "is that where he should be?"

He shook his head, quite mutely, and that was not good enough. That was not enough.

She said again, lower, "is that where he should be?"

"He should be alive."

Ina pulled the cord tight like a garrotte. It was a real, physical thing in her hand; she could see the hard lines it was cutting into her hands, pulling her skin yellow and taut around it, drawing blood. She pulled it harder still, until it strangled.

It choked the next words from the man she had once believed to hold up the whole of the sky: "in a just world, he would still be alive."

Outside, she could hear children laughing. They should not have laughed so much in this place, but they did not know any better and so it was constant: it was that, or the sound of flesh on flesh as one child struck another. Nanshe was small and serious, and did not offer her laughter as freely as Gracjan and Gosia did, but here and there Inanna could hear some evidence of her sister's mirth rising above the fray, a giggle or a call or a jibe, even as Ragnar Kaasik went about his awful business of cutting her down and reducing her, little by little, into a thing.

Ina said, "is this a just world?"

Konrad said, "it could be."

The cell into which they had deposited Eunbyeol Seo was perfectly pleasant. That was more than she had expected from the prison. That was better than the horror stories Uriasz had spread around the academy when they were children. Whippings – he had always mentioned their penchant for floggings, with a kind of fascinated glee. Pekka had always chided him for it, though it had deterred him little.

But there had been, unexpectedly, nothing. Belle had been put into a room with a bed and a light and grey brick walls, with an adjoining water closet and a change of clothes on the end of her bed. After examining them closely, she had realised that they were her own: some of the belongings she had left behind at the academy when they had been rushed away for Illéa. Her name had been stitched into the tongue of the boots; they bore the laces she had inherited from Inanna Nirari. The shirt, too, had six black buttons and one red button where Ragnar Kaasik had sewn on a new one in the middle of the night to save her the trouble. Belle Seo had not gone too far: Eunbyeol found her easily enough, and slipped her on like old boots.

Meals arrived while she was asleep, as though by magic, sitting in the very centre of the room as though it had grown up from the concrete itself. The last time she had glimpsed another human being had been the soldier in the brown coat who had guided her to this room, and that had been a whole three days ago.

There was a single window, set very high up so that she could not see through it. The window itself was obsidian black but it had been left tilted open, just a little, so that air and light could enter. She had tried to drag the bed over to that wall so that she could climb up and see through it, but the whole structure had been embedded into the very concrete of the floor, so that it could not be moved without utterly destroying it. For a moment, Belle debated doing just that, but could not perceive many advantages to doing so beyond, perhaps, as an outlet for the tension knotted up in her hands, in her chest, in her throat, behind her eyes.

The whole cell was utterly quiet, so she knew that she would not be heard if she screamed. Did that make her a bad friend, then, that she did not even bother to try? She almost laughed at the thought – yes, a bad friend indeed. As if they would have left Silas somewhere that he could hear her. As if they would have left him alive. As if her voice would soothe him any. Given what she had done to him. Given what they had done to his whole world. He would never forgive her. She would think less of him if ever he did.

And yet her hands shook when she thought of how sick he had looked, being dragged from the airship in front of her. He had shaken, like the Radiance was still trying to find a way out from the maze his arteries had formed around it. He had shuddered as the Radiance wormed its way back out from behind his skin. His eyes had rolled, and he had burned up from the inside-out. She had never felt so useless. She had never felt so…

Her throat ached anytime she thought of him. She had cried for most of her first day here. That had left her with bruises under her eyes and a headache. It had not helped. It had not changed her situation. It had not alleviated the knots in her hands, her throat, her chest. She had not cried since.

Were the Warriors being held somewhere similar? She, somehow, doubted it. They were not so disposable as she. They would be heroes; they would have to be feted somewhere obvious. And Evanne? Belle could not decide whether she thought her fellow Selected would be pitied or punished for the massacre in Illéa.

Would Asenath really believe that she had known nothing of her best friends' plotting?

In the few moments that Silas and Evanne left her mind, Azula's broken little body took their place and that was hardly better, so Belle spent much of those sixty hours straining, fervently, not to think at all.

She had stacked Ghjuvan's teeth on the floor next to her bed, for lack of other surfaces onto which to leave them. She whiled away many long hours turning them over in her hands, and looking at the engravings that the World had carved into them to help along the process of initiation. Every hour, on the hour, the instinct seized her bodily like an actual physical force: wouldn't it be so easy? They would, she thought, have to let her out then – release her, and fete her. Or she would force her own way out. She would be able to find Silas. She would be able to find her own way out instead of relying, perpetually, on those around her.

Would the Star be a bit less invisible than little Eunbyeol Seo?

She was, now and always, too much a coward to find out. Each time, she held the tooth close. Her hand shook as though with the exertion of holding back the instinct. She always put it back down on the ground and she always felt something like shame sweep through her, red-tinged.

In the end, she was caught in her hourly ritual – curse clenched tightly in her hand, fear through her veins like mercury – when the door swung open. It was the same brown-coated soldier who had brought her there first. He said, "up, Seo."

She climbed to her feet slowly. She hoped, fervently, that he would not notice how quickly she had put her hand in her pocket to hide what she was holding.

He gestured that she should follow him, so she did. They went through a set of bureacratic hallways, and down a wooden staircase which went around and around, until they had come to a small dark grey stairwell and the soldier had to fiddle with a bronze lock that was clearly rarely used.

It did not feel like a path one would take to a firing range, so Belle dared to raise her voice: "where are we going?"

"You have been released on another's recognizance."

She blinked. "I've been bailed," she said, dubiousness leaking through her voice quite uncontrolledly.

"For the time being."

She could not imagine that it could be this simple – not when she had dwelled within the enemy, welcomed into their every sanctuary and safe haven. She said, slowly, suspiciously, "have I to report back?"

"We know where to find you."

The latch caught, and the soldier could push the door open wide. Belle advanced onto the fresh air, blinking defensively in the pale light. They were emerging on the side of a large grey building: not the enormous red brick prison in the centre of town, where she had imagined she might be, but the cube shape of the Bureau building which overlooked all of the buildings in the ghetto, ever-watchful. set a little higher in the road than the other buildings so that it seemed to survey all that fell within its realm. The windows in its face were tinted obsidian black, so that one could not look inside; banners bearing the Irij coat of arms hung from the roof and billowed gently in the dim wind, shining red and yellow in the warming day.

There was an automobile sitting at the end of the roadway. The soldier gestured towards it, and retreated back within the Bureau building. Belle took this hint, such as it was, and advanced down the street towards it. Her every nerve screamed at her to retreat.

She almost giggled: did she really expect Kasimira Schreave to be behind the wheel?

The idea did not seem so far-fetched as she would have liked.

In the end, she needed not have worried: it was Ragnar Kaasik, wearing black driving gloves and a green army jacket fraying about one wrist. He said, "I am sorry, Eunbyeol."

"Don't be," she said. She slipped into the passenger seat. The car was warm. He had kept it idling. It was an official government car: the centre of the wheel bore the seal of the chancellery. "Thank you."

She did not need to ask the reason for his apology: he had been the first to think of her, she reckoned, the first to realise that she would need a sponsor and a vouchsafe. Did that mean she was to remain in his custody? There were worse fates: she knew, at least, that he would have a good store of books, and that he would be kind.

She said, "do you know where they are keeping Silas?"

He glanced at her, and said nothing.

She reckoned he didn't know who Silas was. And why should he? She was the only one foolish enough to call the Radiance by name in these parts.

He took a circuitous route back. They didn't speak at all as he did. Belle stared out the window at the city as it vanished past them, all pedestrians and ornamented buildings and tramlines and smoke. She was wearing the uniform of a Programme cadet, which made her feel much younger than she was, and Ragnar was dressed like a professional soldier, which made him seem much older than he was. He had grown handsome and tired in the scarce months that the Warriors had spent away from home. Did he remember stitching back together her father's letter? He had borrowed the stationery from a dying Tower, Klaara Aas. He had taken a week to do it. He had remembered her then, when even her own father had made a point of how unwanted she was.

What had he said to her? It's important to remember why you're here. She had said, even the bad reasons?and he replied, coldly,especiallythe bad reasons.

That had been stupid of them. Neither of them had made it. Neither of them had been selected as Warriors. Both of them had been left behind. Both of them had failed, despite their bad reasons, because of their bad reasons, bad reasons and all. She had gone out into the world, and she had betrayed the goodness it had shown her for the simple reason that she had thought she ought. She had thought that it was the right thing today. She had thought, perhaps, it would show that she had a place here, amongst the Warriors if not of them. And they had left her.

It had only been three days. She chided herself: it's not languishing if it was only three days.

Her own rebuke spoke with Silas Schreave's voice, languid and drawling. Languishing? Really?

Her eyes burned. She stared fixedly at the walls of the ghetto as they drew up alongside it and then turned away again, delving into the depths of Opona.

Ragnar lived in one of the pretty streets near the docks, where the houses were coloured brightly like candy. The building in which he lived was mint-green, and the enormous wooden door on the street admitted them onto a small cobbled courtyard from which they could ascend to his chambers.

Whatever the universe had granted him since their schooldays, it must have paid decently: his apartment consisted of four large, well-heated rooms with good views of the water and rugs underfoot. Belle left her boots by the door and went to the window straight away. Below them, the docks heaved with afternoon activity and market chatter; beyond, the water churned with the wake of the boats going out, nets shuddering behind them; beyond again, and she could faintly make out the mist which wreathed the faraway isle of druj.

She remained there for a moment, searching for a black silhouette in that fog: the enormous shape of the stone golem moving across the island in search of destruction, or the pinprick shapes of excubitors rising above their island as though gravity meant nothing at all, or a winged wraith coming back across the water, as close as it could come to victory.

The clouds closed in. She was alone in the drawing room. She could, for a moment, pretend that the city behind her did not exist at all.

In the next room over, Ragnar had set a record spinning on the gramophone. Belle didn't recognise the song which poured from the cylinder, but it was pleasant and light and sweet, and it made the light in the room seem a little more honey-tinged. He was humming along to it. She suspected that he was not himself aware of this fact.

She had been right about the books: he had a bookshelf beside the fireplace, packed densely with secondhand classics. She chose one at random, and a photo slipped from its front cover, showing a small girl with dark hair holding aloft an enormously patient tabby kitten.

The familiar chessboard sat atop it, stranded halfway through a match. Ilja and Zoran had played a game on this very board their very last night as human beings. Who had won? She would have to ask. She imagined that it had been Zoran, although she hoped for Ilja's sake that it had been him: after all, he could not hope to ever win again now.

There was a knock on the door. She glanced towards it. She remained where she was, lingering by the window like a shadow, while Ragnar went and answered.

Ilja Schovajsa was the first across the threshold, shaking the lightest drops of rain from his hair. He smiled to see her. Belle returned the smile, her every muscle straining. Khalore Angelo followed close behind him, a bouquet of wilted flowers clutched tightly in her hand, and then Myghal Enys, who still looked very hard at Belle as though trying to decide where he had ever seen her before.

They went into the kitchen with Ragnar. Belle tucked the photo back into the book, and sat down on the couch with it clutched tightly in her hand. Ghjuvan's teeth threatened to burn a hole in her pocket all over again. There was another knock on the door as Uriasz Chrzanowski arrived, after which Ragnar left it on a latch so that Inanna Nirari could let herself in.

There was then a long scatter of moments and minutes wherein the door remained quite resolutely shut, and Belle wondered why she had ever thought that Ghjuvan or Azula or Pekka might have joined them. Nez should have burst through the doors; Kinga should have been asleep on the couch already, as comfortable in this space as if it was her own; Mielikki should have shown up late with a new tattoo half-etched into whatever spare skin still remained on her arms.

Belle stayed where she was, even as the voices rose in the other room, even as the scents wafted out and cutlery scraped on crockery. Finally, Ragnar Kaasik came to the threshold, and said, "Belle," and she almost jumped to hear her own name from someone else's mouth, spoken with such familiarity, with something like kindness. It had seemed, for awhile, that she might be condemned to remember it always as a word spoken only in anguished plea – like, leave Belle here. Like, Belle, go back to the palace. Like…

"Belle," he said again. It was gentle.

She said, "yes?"

"Come on," he said. "We're waiting for you."

She closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She climbed to her feet, and followed him into the dining room, and did not thank him for the lie. Here, at least, she was not alone: there were other failures here. Traitors as well, though she did not think Ilja Schovajsa would ever admit to as much. There were no empty seats around the table, but the absences were as much a presence as those in attendance, real and warm and awful. She sat next to Ragnar, and accepted the brandy when Myghal passed it to her, and tried not to blanch when he addressed her by name. "Good to see you, Seo," he said, and she nodded and murmured something in response that might have been you too.

Ilja was on her other side. She said, softly, "do you know where they're keeping Silas?"

He murmured his response. He said, not unkindly, "please god, they've killed him by now."

Belle nodded. She smiled. She raised her glass in the toast that Uriasz proposed to the lost, and she drank deeply, and she proposed a toast to the survivors when it came her turn. The world turned and tilted, and the music kept staining the air honey-toned. Inanna Nirari was ablaze in the corner, and Khalore and Myghal were practically stitched together so closely did they mirror one another as the toasts went around and around and around, and Ilja and Uriasz hurled invectives at one another from across the table between bites of wine. Like the old days, Belle thought, except that she had never sat with them in the old days – she had been in the younger guard, always across the canteen with Azula and Mielikki and Eifion – and she had the uncanny feeling that here, at Ilja's left hand, beside Ragnar, she had usurped a position that was not quite her own.

Inanna's turn for the toast came last. She was more muted than Belle could remember ever seeing her before. "To faith," she said, tilting her glass, and gazing about the table so that her gaze rested on her two Warriors in turn. "To belief."

The smile that Ilja gave her ought not have been seen by anyone else; Khalore bowed her head, and nodded.

"To duty," said Ragnar, and it did not escape Belle's notice that Ilja's hand shook as he raised his glass to his lips on that turn, or that Inanna's lip curled, or that Khalore smiled with the kind of venom she had once reserved for Nerezza Astaroth alone.

To duty, went the echo, over and again. Tucking her hand into her pocket, Belle rolled two teeth between her fingers and echoed along with the rest.