Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Calla crouches on the building’s third floor, scratching at the inside of her elbow through her coat. The wind blows through the rectangular cutout in the wall, swirling dust and dried paint chips along its sides. The whole level looks like it’s crumbling, like someone keeps taking bite-size chunks out of the cement.

“There are going to be a lot of Crescents on patrol,” Anton warns.

Calla presses her knuckles against her mouth, hard. Sharp pain blooms inside her lips, her teeth cutting into soft flesh, and only once she is anchored to this raw, human feeling can she find the capacity to think.

“A rescue mission shouldn’t be hard,” she decides. “This was Yilas’s last location, so the most likely scenario is that someone didn’t like the look of an outsider and decided to rough her up. She’s here somewhere—we just have to grab her and go.”

Anton cranes his neck out further, getting a better look at what awaits beneath. A thin metallic grille runs over the temple roof, keeping out everything that might drop from the buildings looming at its sides. Night’s darkness hovers close to the ground.

“You do realize,” Anton starts slowly, “that this is a central hub for vessel trafficking, right? The whole temple is heavily guarded.”

Calla doesn’t know much about the Hollow Temple, short of what Yilas has told her. Really, she doesn’t know much about the Crescent Societies at all. For most of their factions, the guise of being a religious sect mostly serves as a cover for their underground business endeavors. Secrecy becomes a tool to avoid scrutiny; their fierce devotion scares away prying watchers. Though she is sure some Society members really do believe in the old gods, everything in San-Er revolves around survival, and they wouldn’t organize this way unless it kept them safe.

Calla stands, placing a foot on the cutout ledge. “We’ll be fine,” she says. Then she leaps and lands hard on the metal grille above the temple, wincing when the whole frame dips with her weight. Her knees attempt to lock in protest, but she’s moving quickly, wading across half-rotted plastic bags and mounds of who-knows-what that’s been festering there for years, sun or storm. It’s hard to see, the illumination from the tall buildings only casting a weak glow.

The metal grille shakes again, protesting as Anton makes his landing too.

“The entrance is below , Fifty-Seven.”

“Do you expect us to march in through the front?” Calla whispers. She keeps wading through the trash, kicking until she’s at the northwest corner of the protective mesh grille. As quietly as she can, she moves the junk piles until a segment of the grille has been cleared. “Help me lift.”

Anton frowns, but he’s quick to hurry over and secure his hands on the other two sides of the panel. The grille pieces are joined together in a gridlocked network, but with some prying, Calla manages to lift a corner. Then a square of the mesh comes unaligned from the frame underneath, its sides scraping against metal.

“Toss,” Calla instructs. They toss the grille atop the trash bags with a muffled sound. Someone will certainly notice this square hole in the protective layer when trash starts leaking down to the temple, but by then, Calla can only hope she and Anton won’t be lurking around any longer.

Anton peers through the opening they’ve made. They’re greeted by the green tiles of the temple roof.

“Is there a back entrance we’re taking instead?” he whispers.

If Calla took a guess, she would say yes. But she can do better than a guess. “Follow me.”

Her boots strike against the roof tiles, the noise thankfully subsumed by the general clamor in San, and she slides for a quick second before gaining balance again. When she pauses, hovering at the curved edge between the two wings of the temple, she can hear Crescents walking around the path below, bantering among themselves about rising brothel prices.

It’s cold. The temple runs their air-conditioning at freezing temperatures.

“Come on,” Calla hisses. With a visible grimace, Anton skids down too. He lands solidly on his feet. They wait a beat to see if the Crescents will have heard, but when the voices move around the turn, Calla finally makes it to the paved ground, her sword already drawn.

“Put that away,” Anton warns when he’s joined her on the pavement. “If we act nonthreatening, we can pretend to be members.”

“We don’t have the tattoos,” Calla replies, but she puts her sword away obligingly. There is logic to his instruction: at a temple this large, anyone coming across them will not necessarily assume they do not belong. Calla can already see a tall window three feet away, its foggy, mud-streaked glass left slightly ajar.

“Give me a boost.”

They’re inside quickly, having entered a dusty back hall. Out of her periphery, she can see Anton glancing at her repeatedly, as if to check whether she knows their next steps, but the truth is that Calla hardly plans in advance. She establishes one concrete end goal, then rams through whatever barriers stand between herself and the result.

Right now, that goal is finding Yilas.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Anton hisses after her.

“Of course not,” Calla replies. She pokes her head into a corridor. It looks empty. She steps through, carefully avoiding a puddle. The lightbulbs above glow red, casting their surroundings in a crimson shroud. “Why would I know how to navigate a Crescent Society temple?”

Anton makes a horrified noise under his breath. When Calla turns over her shoulder to inspect him, though, his fright doesn’t seem to sink all the way through; that red glint in his dark eyes reflects amusement, whether at the nonsense of their plan or their present success.

A thunk travels along the wall. Calla pauses, listening. She presses her ear to the moldy lines and trails her hands across the surface, moving with the bumps and holes.

“I think,” Calla says slowly, “that sound is coming from beneath us.”

Anton presses his ear to the wall too. The thunk comes again, echoing all through the temple.

“It’s—”

A round of voices enters the next hallway, fast approaching.

Calla spits, “Quickly,” and they tear through the narrow aisle, going and going until, wait —her eyes snag on the outline of a door. She kicks. A staircase leading down. Without pause, she hauls Anton by his sleeve, and they descend three steps at a time, emerging in a basement area.

Calla’s vision adjusts. First, it’s the bodies on the floor that capture her notice. Then, sitting on a folding chair by another door that feeds deeper into the basement level is—

“Eno?” Calla and Anton say at once.

Eno jumps to his feet. Anton swerves, shooting a questioning look at Calla. “How do you know him?” he asks. “I didn’t think you would be acquainted with Snowfall’s clientele.”

“Pull up his sleeve,” Calla says, marching toward the bodies.

By a quick count, there are near thirty, collapsed in a large pile, some splayed on top of others. The first one she turns over is a stranger. When she tugs up an eyelid, she finds color in the iris still, and she can hear their quiet, smothered breath struggling in and out. Not dead. Merely unconscious.

Anton, as instructed, strides toward Eno and holds up his arm. The wristband comes into view. “You’re a player?”

“I saved his sorry ass from being cut in half.” Calla turns over a second body. Another stranger. She lifts an eyelid and, when she sees a washed-out bronze, keeps moving.

“What are you doing ?” Anton hisses at the boy. “And when did you join the Crescent Societies?”

“I’m new!” Eno whines, trying to writhe out of Anton’s grip. “You think debt is easy to pay? I need every chance.”

Shuffling to the next body in the pile, Calla quickly rummages through her own pockets, fingers locking around a mask that lies at the bottom with her coins and pins. There’s no telling what could be floating around the air with so many bodies, so she puts it on, just in case. What is this place? The Crescent Societies traffic occupied bodies, sure. They kidnap people and sell them off to bidders, but she always thought they made quick work of the trade-off. They picked a target, rushed into their place of employment with brute force, and brought the body in front of the client for jumping. Rarely did the victim need to be knocked out. If the Crescent Societies latched on to you as a target, you were already dead.

Calla puts her finger under the nose of another body, just to be certain. They’re breathing. Certainly breathing. But the one under it…

A chill sweeps from her neck to her toes, sweat breaking under her thick jacket. By the wall, Anton continues to lecture Eno, paying no heed to what Calla is doing, so he doesn’t see her blanche, fingers reaching out to prod the dead body. This is no trafficking scheme. A trafficking scheme wouldn’t go killing its assets.

Anton’s and Eno’s voices drown out. Calla’s fingers feel ice-cold when she turns the body over, exposing the ring of blood staining its chest. Its gray face stares at the ceiling, dulled dark-yellow eyes unblinking and beady. Under this light, Calla could almost mistake the color for her own. She shivers, reaching for the corpse’s shirt collar, and peels it back slowly, holding her breath beneath her mask.

The wound, if one could even call it that, is in fact a hole, carved through the chest and bones cut clean, an empty space where a heart ought to be.

A strangled noise escapes before Calla can help it, her throat sour with disgust. Her own heart is thudding hard against her ribs when she shoots to her feet and searches through the rest of the bodies, a prayer starting on her tongue. She has no faith in the old gods, no inclination to believe that any such nonsense would work in a place like San-Er, but still she finds herself muttering and muttering as she pushes through shoulders and legs, some cold and some warm.

She doesn’t understand. Even if Society business called for trafficked vessels to be stored at this temple, why tangle them up with dead ones? Why carve the hearts out of those vessels at all?

Calla goes still. She sees a familiar lock of dyed red hair. At once, she surges forward, her pulse racing so fast she could vomit. She turns Yilas over.

Yilas’s chest rises and falls with life, qi humming in her veins.

Thank the heavens—

“Yilas.” Calla gives her a rough shake. “Yilas, get the fuck up.”

Groggily, Yilas starts to stir, struggling to pry her eyes open as if they’ve been glued together. The same jade green. The same Yilas.

“Calla?” she murmurs.

“Shh,” Calla hisses immediately, throwing a glance at Eno. The boy is still arguing with Anton and hasn’t heard them. “Can you get up?”

“I—yeah, I think so. Where are we?” Yilas struggles into a sitting position, then teeters immediately, her face visibly paling even in the horrible red light. Calla mutters a curse, her arm shooting out to catch Yilas before her former attendant can smash her temple against the floor. With every iota of strength, Calla hauls Yilas to her feet, holding her weight with a firm grip under her shoulders.

But before Calla can take a step, her wristband is trembling, as are Anton’s and Eno’s.

“Ah, shit,” she mutters.

“I’m sure they’re only responding to each other,” Anton assures, switching his off. “Maybe the surveillance room thought—”

A heavy rumble of footsteps. Right above. One voice, bellowing over the rest, feminine and sharp, giving commands to scatter and search. Then: so much movement that the ceiling trembles. There’s definitely another player in the Hollow Temple, which can only mean trouble. If they’re a Crescent, they may be able to call on an entire entourage for the kill, and though Calla doesn’t recall seeing anything like that on the reels, if there’s anyone who knows how to avoid the surveillance feeds across the city, it’s a member of the Crescent Societies.

“Yilas, do you think you can walk on your own?”

“Absolutely not,” Yilas replies, her words slurring. At least she’s honest. Sometimes Calla really hates honesty.

Calla bites down on the insides of her cheeks. She’d give it thirty seconds before they’re found.

“Eno!”

The boy jumps to attention, his eyes wide and terrified as he presses his wristband to stop the ping. He’s so damn young that Calla cannot comprehend why she keeps seeing him in the most dreadful places, but given the situation, Calla can only push the thought away. She shoves Yilas at him, and Eno scrambles to hold his arms out before Yilas sways right to the floor.

“What—”

“I’ll owe you another favor, okay?” Calla snaps. She points down the hallway, deeper into the basement. If Eno is hanging around here guarding the bodies, then he must know how to navigate the place and find another exit. “Help my friend out of here. Makusa and I will keep them distracted until you get away.”

Eno casts a desperate glance at the stairwell. “But my status as a novice—”

“What will being a novice offer you?” Anton cuts in. “Likely a place as one of these bodies. If we don’t eliminate you from the games first.”

Eno grimaces. With a small grumble, he hauls Yilas by the arm and surges into the hall, disappearing into the shadows.

Calla silences her wristband and draws her sword. She loosens her grip, throwing the handle up an inch to adjust. When the weapon lands back into her palm securely, she is ready.

“Fifty-Seven.” Anton, however, does not pull his knives. His eyes are on the door. “As soon as they come in, we have to jump. Invade our way out.”

Calla’s glare is immediate. Her hair whips against her mask, curling against the edge of fabric as she scrunches her nose, trying to convey with her eyes how much she disapproves.

“No. We fight. Don’t be a coward.”

“It’s not being a coward,” Anton snaps back. “The games are only easy for us when the players are isolated, every man for themselves. Don’t you remember how we had to run from Seventy-Nine’s security team? Will you be growing extra arms? Extra legs? Summoning more weapons?”

Calla bites down, gritting the back of her teeth so hard she hears something crack.

“I’m not jumping.”

Anton whirls to face her. “Don’t think I won’t fucking leave you here, Calla Tuoleimi—”

The door blows open. Society members pour down the steps, spilling into the basement, surrounding them on all sides. Calla loses count after the first ten. They move with such cohesion that confusion slows her movements. Why are they gathering like this if it’s only one player among them who wants to make a kill? How could the games possibly be important enough to the Crescent Societies for this?

“Pampi,” someone calls down the stairs. “You can’t just move everyone away from—”

A woman at the back of the crowd throws her arm out. Though she is at the bottom of the steps and the other man is at the top, he staggers backward, like an invisible fist has hit his chest, slamming him into the wall.

Calla’s sword arm falters, the blade lowering. The man who attacked her during the flood sirens. The empty vessel, who somehow jumped without any light, without sighting a new body nearby. He had been able to fight without contact as well.

The woman—Pampi—steps near, into the red light. Her eyes must be red too, creating an illusion where her gaze is entirely swathed in color.

Suddenly, Anton stumbles, his hand going to his sternum. He inhales like he can barely catch his breath, then he turns to the Crescent nearest to him, fury burning in his eyes. “Did you just try to invade me? Piss off .”

“Watch your tongue.”

Pampi’s voice is high-pitched and syrupy. She reaches a finger out, prodding Anton in the chest. Before he can make a move to counter her, she has tied a swath of ribbon around his eyes, some material that sticks tight even as Anton exclaims, hands flying up to move it away. He can’t get a good grip on the ribbon; the Crescents around him take ahold of his arms while he tries, holding him prisoner.

Through the whole event, Calla watches quietly. Her mind is moving with the flurry of an electrical storm. She doesn’t rush to Anton’s defense, lest she waste an edge she has not yet identified. She only shifts the sword in her grip, feeling sweat build up in the lines of her palms. Pampi’s sleeves are rolled up. There’s a wristband sitting high up on her arm, alongside a canvas of puckered scars. When the screen turns in her direction, Calla catches a 2 on display.

“You,” Pampi says lightly. She’s addressing Calla now, ignoring Anton as he rattles off a chain of expletives. “Fifty-Seven. I was hoping you’d show up.”

Calla doesn’t say anything. How long has it been since Eno took Yilas? Has he left the temple yet?

“What’s the matter?” Pampi moves closer, seeing that she is receiving no response. “Can’t speak Talinese?”

Calla strikes hard, shoving her sword through Pampi’s gut.

In the palace, she had once asked what the point of a brute-force attack was if it achieved nothing in the forward march. The general training her that day had an easy answer. In the enemy, even a single shred of fear is better than nothing. A single cell of infection is how the fever starts.

“How dare you—”

Pampi tugs the sword out, letting it clatter to the floor. Without any light, her eyes turn from red to gray. She just jumped . Somehow, she jumped, and the body with the stab wound crumples to the floor, its original occupant clutching the wound and gasping with pain. A new red-eyed body steps over the old vessel from behind, looking down with disdain curling her lip.

Calla feels as though she is losing her mind. She is certainly losing her grasp on every rule in Talin she knew to be true.

The Crescents stir. They hurry to hold Calla in place, gripping her shoulders, her elbows, trying to keep her locked at every turn of a limb. But Calla does not struggle. When Pampi hisses a command, they force Calla to her knees too, pulling at her hair so that her chin tips up.

Pampi strides closer in her new body. The Crescents in the room look to her as if she is their leader, waiting for further instruction on what to do. Yet there was still someone who questioned her earlier, a conflict of authority. While each of the Crescent Society temples follows one cleric, the transitions of power are constant and fast, switching without notice depending on who can promise the most at any point in time. Pampi must be new, still shakily established.

The body on the floor has stopped gasping. Their head lolls back, eyes dull, neck craned and exposed. In such a position, the collar of their shirt falls back to show the skin below, and there: two parallel lines of blood, smeared almost artfully.

Calla’s eyes flicker away. Pampi must have done that when she was still wearing the vessel. It doesn’t seem like an aesthetic choice.

“Let’s try that again,” Pampi says, her tone unchanged.

One of the Crescents yanks at Calla’s hair once more to keep her looking forward. She catches another glimpse of the bodies in the room, the ones with their hearts carved out. Despite the roar in her head, she thinks she might be putting something together.

“Try what?” Calla asks, speaking her first words to Pampi. She adopts her palace voice, glacial and haughty and a thousand feet above everyone else. Two steps away, Anton snorts. Though he is still blindfolded, he has stopped struggling. He is listening, head tilted toward Calla. “Your poor attempt at intimidation? Do you hope to loom over me like some divine conqueror? You will never be one. The desperate never are.”

She used to observe her parents very carefully. Mornings in the breakfast hall. Afternoons in the indoor garden. Nights in the recreation lounges. Though they were not the closest family in the world—far from it—Calla spent plenty of time with them, tailing them at their daily tasks and learning how the Tuoleimis ruled their palace. She watched how they treated the servants, the rural women who had abandoned their children to work in the kitchen, the rural men standing guard where numbers were needed. If there was ever the barest hint that something was wrong, palace servants prostrated first, then checked what mistake they made second. It never really mattered what it was, or whether there had been a mistake to begin with. As soon as they heard a rise in volume from the king or queen of Er, submission was the only answer.

Those who hold power in their hands are the same. They want to walk through the world reminded over and over again of their might, and if they do not get that response, then they will force it.

Calla lifts her brow, inviting argument. Suddenly Pampi reaches out and tears Calla’s mask off, and Calla can’t help but grin, knowing she’s hit her mark. Whatever consequence is about to come, at least she has not lost.

“I know who you are.” Pampi crumples the fabric in her hands.

“Of course you do,” Calla replies. “You’ve seen me on the reels. I am the future victor of the games.”

Pampi lands an enraged slap across Calla’s face. When Calla rears back, she almost laughs, but then she sees one of the Crescents pass Pampi a knife. Calla’s eyes dart around the room as she runs through her escape options. The man holding her left shoulder has a weak grip. Her gaze drops down to his collared shirt. There’s only the barest glimpse under the red light as he jerks in movement, but Calla could swear he has the same two vertical lines of dried blood.

“I want her heart,” Pampi says. “It is a very special one.”

“Right now?” the man asks. “We have others about to expire—”

“Hold her still !”

They’re doing something to the qi of the trafficked bodies on the floor. Using it to change the way they jump, altering the very properties of the physical world and how they interact with it.

Calla slams her left elbow out, catching the man in the jaw. She tips hard into that opening, moving so suddenly that her shoulder veers to the floor. She lasts two seconds, freed and winded, gasping for breath. But as soon as she’s rolled upright, there’s an invisible grip on her throat, and Calla feels the first real hint of panic setting into her bones. She stops, hands flying to grip at nothing, and then they’ve got her again, nails and claws tearing her jacket off and digging into the softness of her skin.

The knife flashes. Pampi lifts it.

“A waste of power when it’s in you.”

“Fifty-Seven,” Anton shouts, alarm rising in his tone. He still can’t see. “Fifty-Seven, jump .”

Calla jerks to the side. It doesn’t do anything. Her jacket is a crumpled shield on the floor, her sword scattered afar.

When Pampi puts the blade against her heart, Calla swipes a hand forward. She’s not trying to escape. She’s trying to get another look: two parallel lines of blood on this vessel’s chest too.

“You think that’s going to do anything?” Pampi plunges the blade in, and then Calla can only see white—blinding white. What has it hit? It’s too far to the left. They don’t intend to damage the heart, but to carve it right out, whole and beating.

Someone’s screaming. Someone’s screaming, and then Calla’s nerve endings jolt to life again and it’s her that is screaming, her chest cold and hot and a hundred other sensations at once.

“Jump!” Anton is yelling. “Jump or they will kill you—”

Anton stamps his foot hard, then hooks it around the leg of the nearest body beside him. The Crescent stumbles, and when he feels the air move, when he feels them lifting a weapon with intent for harm, Anton leans right in, letting his face take it.

It cuts, and it cuts deep. But it also slices through the blindfold, which tumbles to the floor in one long piece.

Anton shakes his wristband off and jumps. He takes that nearest body first, the one who slashed him, and turns the blade on his own throat. It’s a risk, but he leaves fast and breathes a sigh of relief when the next body accepts him. He won’t stay that lucky—many Crescent Society members are doubled, resistant to jumping. The element of surprise is on his side, though; with his opponents clustered shoulder to shoulder, they can’t see where he keeps going, light darting in and out the closed space, light blinding and blinding each time it flashes, pushing him in and out even when he fails, onto the next within a split second.

Calla is still screaming. Anton takes his cold sweat with him when he moves, and it’s hard to determine what exactly is going on, hard to see what they are doing to Calla, until he is right beside Pampi, a chain in his hands and within arm’s reach.

He swings the chain over her neck. He tugs, slams her to the ground. Calla drops too, hand clasped to her chest and blood pouring through her fingers.

Hard to tell whether it’s fatal. Whether he has just lost his best ally.

Anton bares his teeth.

“You like blindfolding so much?” he hisses. And before Pampi can look elsewhere and jump, he finds a sharp knife in the pocket of this body’s jacket and slashes across her eyes. He thinks he blinded only the left, but it’s enough to shove her aside when she screeches, counting her incapacitated.

He swivels to Calla. Grabs her by the arm, uncaring whether she can stand or not. She must. If she’s stupid enough to stay in this body, then she must be strong enough to carry it through. The other Crescents in the room are all injured and bewildered. There is an easy path—a quick shove and then through, his arm swooping down to retrieve the wristband he’d tossed onto the floor before hurtling up the steps with Calla and barging out from the basement.

Anton looks left, right. The corridor is empty. There’s no one here.

“Fifty-Seven?”

Calla teeters sideways. He catches her immediately, his shirt staining with red where she presses close.

“I’ve got you,” he promises. “I’ve got you, Princess.”

And Calla passes out.