Chapter 16

The Remnant Nation held only one secret: the identity of the Great Master in the Golden Room of Grief. The Great Master who gave commands, rewards, updates, and promises. The Great Master whom no one had ever seen—until today. All of it a practice in pretension.

Mikhail walked along the crimson-red wall of the empty Golden Room of Grief with his hood cloaked over his face, as he always did, but he planned to reveal his full self to them today. Well, maybe not the little part about him being with a member the Godhead that they were trained to kill, but he did want the Grief Bearers to see the fire in his eyes when he spoke of the war. The flames within Mikhail needed to spread to their souls and filter down to the hearts of the soldiers. Flames of anger and justice.

His fingers shook as he hovered them over the alarm that alerted the Grief Bearers of his arrival. Pain radiated from his right kidney and he wiped the sweat from his forehead. The human body was capable of regenerating and repairing almost any cell, but the human body was also capable of eating itself alive from the inside out. A wonderful fact.

Mikhail never knew which path his body might take.

One of obedience. Or one of betrayal.

He depended on his body to regenerate healthy cells, but he'd learned after breaking his ankle in the Glade years ago that the body stored trauma in different ways. Nicholas forced Mikhail to spend to six weeks on his couch for constant observation as he explained that sometimes trauma was processed as expected: the body healed. But at other times, the impact of one trauma caused an explosion of multiple side effects.

The body and the mind are interlinked, Dear Mikhail.

Nicholas insisted on testing Mikhail's memory and levels of anger each and every day, worried the broken bone might trigger his mental state back into the comfort zone of a Crank. Mikhail hated the tests. He hated the time it took to heal. He loathed it all.

Mikhail breathed deep for three seconds, held his breath for three seconds, exhaled for three seconds, then hit the alarm. He tried to relax as he moved to the exact center of the room, holding his body in as normal a posture as possible, but the stab wound in his right side weakened him. His legs buckled and his breath labored. Even so, he felt better than he should have. Shock. Like the broken ankle on which he'd walked three miles to reach Nicholas, he remembered that shock could last for hours or days before the true impact of an injury presented itself.

But enough time had passed since the boy stabbed him that Mikhail was sure the kid had missed his main organ. Probably why the little bugger was in Hell. Weak strength and poor execution. The Remnant Nation had no room for such weakness. The men Mikhail awaited to join him were twelve bearers of knowledge but they were even weaker than the boy who'd stabbed him. He needed the armies of the Nation to be strong while keeping these most senior leaders of the Nation weak. It was the secret to any successful government: Power was one thing, strength another. As he waited for the Grief Bearers, he closed his eyes under the shadow of his hood.

Mikhail entered the place in his mind where anything was possible and all was revealed.

The Infinite Glade.

And he exhaled.

He conjured in his mind a single, simplicable, proposal: to give the present and the future one last chance to change its course before he revealed himself. Before he started the war. What was about to be done could not be undone.

Ever.

He asked the Infinite Glade, Is it time to execute the war? And in a flash the word YES, in all white, glowed within the blackness of his mind. Still, knowing this was what he'd prepared for, Mikhail felt conflicted. A similar feeling had come over him when the boy cut the wild pig loose and he watched it run and squeal into the far distance. This confliction between anger and relief mesmerized him, because it meant he was—at least for today—more human than Crank.

A shuffle of footsteps. He opened his eyes and the colors of the Golden Room of Grief flooded his vision. A room with red walls and golden accents that almost blinded. He'd created this war room, with the red a shade somewhere between the color of bright bloodshed and that of darkened, dried blood that stained weapons. The gold accents were crafted from pyrite found alongside deposits of gold. And along with the pyrite there was sure to be arsenic, because as great as gold was, it was always mined alongside clusters of poison. A lesson he'd never forget, no matter how muddled his mind:

Anything of value was equally toxic.

Mikhail straightened his legs and steadied his breath as the footsteps drew nearer.

"The Great Master!" one of the Bearers of Grief exclaimed upon entering.

"Oh highest of high!" Another Grief Bearer bowed. Mikhail quickly counted six of them, but that wasn't enough. Not to ignite the flames of war.

"Where are the rest?" He spoke low and slow from the shadows of his cloak, careful not to let on to his pain.

"Griever Glane and Griever Barrus are missing. Along with a Priestess." One of the Grief Bearers stepped forward. It had been decades and Mikhail still failed to learn their individual names. He didn't care who Glane or Barrus were, he just needed the numbers.

"And what about the Orphans from the cliffs? You haven't promoted anyone in their absence?" It had been his plan for years to promote stronger Grief Bearers by the time they went to war. He had systems and plans, and the faces of those before him were ones lacking competence. His anger raced through his wound and pounded at his back.

One of them continued. "Griever Haskin and Griever Clarence have sped up the pilgrimages for the Orphan soldiers, even starting the rituals at sixteen for some of the stronger ones."

"Then why are there only six of you right now?" He emphasized the word now as if it were a command and not a question, but he was met with only silence. He'd once again overestimated the Bearers to be more than what they were. Just like he'd underestimated Alexandra. And now he was in the middle of this mess of Evolution without a solid Nation to stand before him. "Say something!" he demanded.

"They . . . they . . ."

A skinny Bearer stepped forward. "The Orphans have not been . . . coming back."

Mikhail breathed his routine. The cloaked men in front of him were merely tools. Nothing more. The entirety of the Remnant Nation, a box of tools that he would finally use today. Tools that could break and be thrown away after the war.

The men before him did not deserve the sacrificial ritual of war. They didn't deserve the feast of a pig. And they didn't deserve to see Mikhail's face. He fixed the hood of his cloak tighter. "You have more problems in the Nation than I have time for. Missing Grief Bearers, holes in the tunnels of Hell, allowing Orphans to flee. Never mind the missing. This war has begun." He paused as each Grief Bearer lowered to their knees. At least he still had their will to bend to his own. "Gather the Orphan Army and the Crank Army at once." The Bearers looked at each other with great hesitation. "What is it?"

"The Army of Cranks oh, Great Master . . ."

"What about them?" He slowed his speech to increase his patience, another trick taught him by Nicholas. He may as well have been talking to Cranks.

"They are . . . not well."

It had been months since Mikhail visited the Crank Army. Was his memory already failing him? He thought of Nicholas' tests for memory loss after trauma. The pain from his back amplified with his anger. "Take me there, now."

Within walking distance of the Golden Room of Grief was an unassuming plot of land, stretched within the walls of their fortress. On the surface, it was empty and sparse, but ten feet below, a bunker held over a thousand Cranks. Within the underground was a complex tunnel system, filled with safe rooms and areas for supplies. Mikhail let the six Grief Bearers walk before him so they wouldn't see the tear in his cloak. They walked like cowards, their backs stiff with fear.

"You're sure we all need to go down there?" the skinny one turned to ask.

Mikhail simply nodded and motioned to the moss-covered hatch. One by one, the six men lowered themselves into the bunker's entrance, as if they were lowering themselves to certain death. The Grief Bearers of the Remnant Nation were no better than the starving Orphans in Hell, but the cloaks made them think otherwise. Cloaks of power. None of the Bearers actually held any power, no, Mikhail made sure of that. They only knew as little or as much as he deemed to share during his masked visits to the Golden Room.

He climbed down the hatch, into the tunnel, walked to the lift.

"Sir. The Crank Army is very hungry." The skinny Grief Bearer followed too closely.

Mikhail's loss of blood made him dizzy. "Hunger for war is a good thing." He shouldn't have needed to tell the Grief Bearers that.

"No. They are not, how do I put this . . ." The Bearer stepped forward, ahead of the entrance to the bunker's shaft. ". . . Satisfied."

"Then feed them more." Mikhail moved past him and into the small elevator but one of the men stopped him from pushing the lever to descend.

"I saw one eat their own arm yesterday, Sir." The Grief Bearer let go of Mikhail's cloaked arm.

Mikhail didn't believe it. Self-cannibalism. Autosarcophagy? Cranks were cannibalistic, but they weren't going to eat themselves for Flares-sake. No animal would. He lowered the lever of the lift once all six Grief Bearers were inside; the elevator clanked and grinded down, gears shifting and turning until they arrived at the bunker level. The others collectively took a deep breath as the gated door of the lift opened. The wound caused a clammy heat to coat Mikhail's body and he welcomed the cooler air from the mine shaft. The smell, however, he could have done without. It smelled of stomach acid and bile. Had the Grief Bearers not been keeping up with maintenance of the Army?

"They're chained in groups of eight?" Mikhail asked. Eight was a sacred number. Part of the digits Alexandra recited. She clung to those numbers for her sanity, and soon he would deliver her an army of eights.

"Yes, sir." A Grief Bearer who'd brought a notepad and pen cleared his throat. "For the most part." He clicked the pen nervously. Click clack. Click clack. Click clack. The sound of it made Mikhail's eye twitch.

"What the hell does that mean? They're either shackled together, ready to fight, or they're not." He stepped out of the lift, onto the bunker floor, suddenly assaulted by the sounds of chains, dragging. Metal on concrete. CLANK CLANK CLAAAANK. . . . Noises that somehow seemed both loud and quiet at the same time. Harsh and angry sounds, coming from back hallways out of view.

"Soldiers report!" a Grief Bearer shouted, but only the dragging and clanking answered him. "Soldiers report!" Still no answer. Mikhail had never come down to the bunker without one Orphan soldier being at the lift and another one standing guard in the hallway. Every entrance point to a path within view should have had a soldier standing near it.

"Something's not right." The skinniest of the Grief Bearers positioned himself at the back of the elevator, ready to return to the surface. Not a chance, Mikhail needed to know what was going on with these Cranks. Maybe the Orphans were already moving them to the Bergs.

He started to walk toward the loudest of the sounds, coming from a hallway off to the right, and realized he was walking alone. He turned to the Grief Bearers behind him. "If you're going to be cowards, I'll feed you to the army as a sacrificial war feast. How's that sound?" Mikhail hid his own pain and doubt. Slowly, five Grief Bearers stepped forward. The skinniest, the weakest one, pulled the lever to go back up. The gears clanked as the mechanical sounds lifted him away.

Some people might call that dastardly.

"Griever Banks!" one of the men shouted at the elevator shaft.

"Long live the Cure!" The skinny, scared, Grief Bearer said as he rose from view.

Mikhail seethed. The Cure would live, yes, but the Bearer who turned his back on the Remnant Nation would not. One way or another that idiotic coward would die a painful death, reserved for those who betrayed the Nation.

Mikhail grimaced with pain as he walked from the main lobby of the bunker to the hallway. "Get both armies together. Make note of the coordinates," he said to the incessant pen-clicker. "56.8125 degrees North and 132.9574 degrees West."

"Wait, say it again?" The man scrambled to keep up.

Mikhail took a slow, deep breath. "56.8125 degrees North and 132.9574 degrees West." He walked toward the sounds of dragging metal. "Pack the Bergs full of Cranks. You'll land on the exact coordinates and send them to march in on foot from the south. The Orphan Army and the air strikes will happen from the north, and the two will meet in the middle to destroy the city of Gods once and for all." The Grief Bearers looked to each other with something that could only be described as dark excitement, all wide eyes and suppressed grins. "Do you have any questions?" The clanking noises got louder. There had to be at least one group of Cranks loose from the pits.

"We have the coordinates. We have the orders. We just need to know the target day for the attack."

"Sunday." He hid his own smile. "The holiest of days. The Goddess will address her people in the square after Mass. When you see a woman more beautiful than Alaska herself, that is the Goddess." He never wanted Alexandra hurt, just destroyed, and there were several ways to destroy a person without physical harm. But the way she'd boasted on and on of taking Nicholas' head, he couldn't afford a second thought. "Kill her however you see fit."

"Long live the Cure," the Grief Bearers said in unison.

Mikhail turned a corner in the hallway and saw an unnatural sight: a group of Cranks shackled together in a line of eight, working themselves out of chains . . .

By chewing at their own limbs.

It took his mind a moment to wrap around the situation in front of him. He had never feared the Cranks before, but the wound in his back made him weak. Vulnerable. In counting the Flare-ridden, bloodied bodies before him, he only counted six still attached to their wrist and ankle shackles. Two gaping holes in the link—loose chains dragged on the concrete. Two Cranks were loose in the bunker.

"Get to the armory room!" Mikhail shouted as he stumbled backwards, not able to take his eyes off the sight of their madness, their desperation to be free. Like caged animals, they would rather chew off every limb than stay enslaved. The armory room had a full supply of guns, knives, ammo, and hand grenades, but his right leg suddenly gave out from the spreading pain. Like something poked him from inside the wound. He screamed despite himself.

"Great Master!" one of them exclaimed, but the cloaked men didn't have the instincts of Orphans who'd trained their whole lives. They were organizers and politicians, didn't have the minds of soldiers. To guard. Protect. Kill. Mikhail spun around and within an inch of his face was a snarling Crank, ripe with rage.

Widened eyes with no soul behind them. Only bloodlust.

Such smells. Every bodily fluid combined into one. Spit. Bile. Blood. The Crank lifted his half-chewed wrist toward Mikhail but he grabbed it, held it back, held it tight. The Crank gargled a scream.

"Give me your pen!" Mikhail shouted. He reached for it, grabbed it from the hapless Grief Bearer, clicked it, then stabbed the Crank in the neck. Right in the artery.

The monster dropped to its knees, Mikhail still holding its wrist.

Detached from its body.

"Great Master, you've been hurt!" a Grief Bearer cried from behind, finally observing Mikhail's wound. But he wouldn't allow this to weaken his plan.

"Pack the Cranks into the Bergs. Now!" He forced himself to his feet and moved swiftly toward the armory.

"One time, Skinny found an Orphan all the way out in a field. Dead."

Minho appreciated company while he steered the ship, but Orange was not going to convince him that one dead soldier in a field meant there was an army of Cranks. "He saw the Crank Army?"

"Well, no. The guy was dead. Skinny never reported it, he wasn't supposed to be out there."

"Then how does a dead soldier in a field equal a whole army of Cranks?"

"Because." Orange took a deep breath. "Skinny said the body was hollowed out."

Hollowed out? He shrugged. A single Crank could have done that, or a pack of Crank-wolves. Minho didn't know if Crank-wolves existed but if they did, it would make more sense than an army of trained Cranks. "Don't go telling her all these crazy stories, okay?" He nodded toward Roxy, approaching the two Orphans at the captain's bench.

"Stories about what?" Roxy asked.

Orange shook her head. "Nothing . . ."

"Everything working okay?" Roxy asked as she looked over the controls. Minho nodded. He'd figured most of them out. Steering a ship on water was a hell of a lot easier than steering a Berg in the air, but still, being out in the ocean made him nervous. He kept the Maze Cutter within sight of the coastline so that he could anchor in at night. The Orphan found that being behind the captain's wheel required only one thing: Focus. Like watching the distant tree line from the walls of the Remnant Nation. Patience. Balance. Watching the surface of the water. Listening for the sounds of the ship to change.

He tried to ignore the things he didn't know, like why the rudder of the ship kept pulling to the left, but it was getting worse by the hour. "The alignment's off. It wasn't this bad when we started. Something's making it pull." He steered slightly to the right in order to go straight. "Think you can take over while I look at the mechanics?" Orange nodded.

"I can help, too," Roxy said.

Minho scoffed. "No offense, Roxy, but I've seen you in a truck. I don't need you finding every bad wave and hitting every whale."

"Heyyy." She almost sounded offended. "I'll have you know my grandpa taught me how to canoe. Yeah, that's right. It's a little different, but his first rule," she held a single finger in the air, "was to respect the water."

"That's a good rule," Minho replied. "You can help Orange ‘respect the water' by keeping watch for anything ahead of us."

"Ain't nothing in this water but water." Roxy looked out at the gentle ocean waves. "No other ships, no whales, nothing to look at. Kinda boring, gotta be honest."

"Wait." Orange took over the captain's wheel. "You knew your parents? And your grandparents?" Tiers of soldiers and generations of Grief Bearers were about as close to a family tree as Orphans from the Remnant Nation ever got. Minho wanted to hear the answer.

Roxy nodded with pride. "I knew my grandparents and my dad. Although I wouldn't exactly say I knew him. I met him and we spent lots of time together, but I never got to really know him." She stuffed her hands in her pockets. Minho thought about what that meant, for Roxy to have had someone like that in her life but still never really know them. "My mom, she died some horrible death that no one loved me enough to talk about."

"Oh." Orange turned the captain's wheel to the left as she glanced at Roxy. "I'm sorry."

Minho remembered Roxy telling him about her mom before, but it must have really bothered her. Never knowing the truth. "Maybe . . . they loved you a lot and that's why they didn't tell you. You know, if it was horrible." He stepped over and corrected Orange's steering back to the right to overcompensate for the pull to the left. "Sometimes, what we know. . . it changes what we knew, and maybe they didn't want that for you." He understood this by how much he'd kept from Roxy and the others about himself, his true self—because he knew it would change what they thought about him.

Roxy was lost in thought. She may not have been his real mom, but he wanted to get to know her—really know her as much as he could before they got to Alaska and things changed. He could look at the rudder later. "Tell us about your grandpa." He sat on the captain's bench. "He taught you about the water, what else?"

Roxy sat down next to him and pulled her legs up to her chest as if she was about to tell a proper yarn. "He collected stories from all over. Books, pamphlets, almanacs, whatever he could find, and he'd memorize those stories. He'd travel the country and towns on horseback to find more." She laughed.

Minho couldn't picture it. "Your grandpa went around on a horse? Just to tell stories?"

"Why is that so hard to believe?" She scrunched her eyebrows.

Minho didn't mean to offend her, he just didn't get it. Traveling to give a warning he understood, because he'd killed many people doing so. Traveling to give aid was another excuse he'd heard often before shooting arrows at trespassers. But traveling to share fairy tales seemed less . . . respectable. It seemed like an unworthy reason to die.

"What, spit it out. Whatever you're thinking." Roxy frowned.

He wasn't sure how to share all that without telling her how many men he'd killed who had been traveling with greater missions. He looked at Orange but she was only watching the ocean. As she should when at the wheel, but it didn't help him find the right words. "Because there's no honor in doing so."

"Honor?" Roxy spat it out as if she'd never heard the word before.

"The reason. The purpose. A need that's greater than your own." The Orphan explained as best he could. He didn't want to say that telling stories wasn't worth dying for. He knew Orange would understand his perspective.

Roxy shook her head back and forth. "Connection is the purpose. Without stories, we're all just barely living. Stories help us understand life so we can live. Stories are the glue that hold our bones together. Stories of family. Stories of Old. Stories of make-believe. Didn't that Nation of yours ever teach you anything?"

"We have rumors in the Remnant Nation. They're like stories, right?" Orange asked, and Minho tried not to make a face. "Tell us one of yours." She didn't take her eyes off the small waves ahead.

"Oh, there were so many." Roxy tilted her head back as if looking to the cloudless sky might help jog her memory. "People used to come from many towns over just to hear his tales. The ones about the ancient Gods were the stories people loved the most."

"What ancient Gods?" Minho asked.

"The Elohim."

He gazed lazily at Orange but she looked just as confused as he did. "What is that?"

"You know, the God with the Angels and the Devil?" Roxy waved her hands in front of her as if that could help them place it. The only God they'd ever heard of while growing up was the Godhead, and those weren't stories about how to worship them. No. Only ways to kill the Godhead.

"The Flare was our Devil," he said. "And our God was the Cure."

"Still is," Orange agreed.

Roxy huffed. "The Cure is just a thing. You can't worship a thing." Minho knew plenty of people who did just that.

She continued. "Most people of old worshiped a God, but not everyone had the same one. Different names, different origin stories, different lands and planets the Gods came from, but one thing that never really changed was the Devil. Evil remained a constant in all tales of old."

Orange steered the ship, and Minho watched to make sure she continued to favor the right side. To him, evil was evil, no matter what shape, body, or thing it possessed. The Flare would always be his Devil even after he joined the Godhead. And the Evolution was needed to stop that Devil. "This guy have a name?" he asked to appease Roxy.

"Iblis." She paused. "God commanded all the spirits to bow before man, which he'd created from his own breath, but the spirit named Iblis refused. He wouldn't bow to anyone but God. He didn't believe man could be a God."

"Kinda like the Godhead," Orange contributed. "People who think they're Gods and can control the Cure." What would she think of Minho when she found out his personal mission in Alaska was to join the so-called Godhead? To become one of them, despite the rank he was born into? "I agree with this Iblis fella. Men aren't Gods."

Roxy seemed pleased with the conversation. "But by not bowing, Iblis offended God. So much so that he was cast into Hell."

Minho and Orange looked at each other with wide eyes. They both understood Hell long before these grandpa stories. They had been there before. It was the lowest level of the Remnant Nation fortress, a place of torture and cruelty. A place to which Minho vowed never to return.

"Oh, we know Hell," Orange said.

"Yeah," Minho added. "We've both been there."

"No, no, no." Roxy laughed. But if she had ever been to their Hell, she wouldn't have. "Hell is a place you go to after you die, where the Devil rules his little scary kingdom. I don't believe in it, not literally anyway, but some people do."

Roxy could say Hell was a made-up place all she wanted to, but it was real.

All too real.

"So . . ." Orange thought out loud. "This Iblis guy. He's in charge down there?"

"Sent there, then ruled it." Roxy paused. "Still does, I suppose?"

Minho stepped in to correct Orange's steering again. "I got it, I got it," she said. "Go check the rudder, already."

He nodded. Yeah. He'd check the rudder. Anything but this Devil nonsense.

He thought about everything Roxy had said as he walked toward the other end of the ship. It seemed like every generation on the Earth had a different idea of God, and every generation their own idea of a devil. He had his own beliefs and would stick to them.

Men could be Gods, no need for a Heaven or Hell.

Maybe those left back in the Remnant Nation already thought of Minho as a devil for not returning. They'd surely think it when he joined the Godhead.

It didn't matter if they did.

He'd never go back to find out.