Chapter Thirty-Three
“CAN ANY OF US REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME WE WERE TOLD THE STORY OF THE HERALDS? WAS IT TOLD TO US AT ALL? OR WERE WE BORN WITH IT ON OUR TONGUES? CARRYING IT ACROSS OUR BACKS, BURDENED BY GRATITUDE UNTIL IT BEGAN TO TASTE LESS LIKE BENEVOLENCE AND MORE LIKE GUILT.”
—EXCERPT FROM TRACTS FROM A REBEL PREACHER
It takes us several long, hot hours to cross the last miles of the Copper Plains.
The air is warm and dry and not even the breeze can stop the sweat beading underneath the layers of my Butcher kit.
Heat radiates from the ground, sometimes so warm that I can feel it even through the thick, reinforced soles of my boots.
There’s no sound except the soft beat of our feet against the alloy, the whistle of wind across my ears, and the flow of Trinity’s song dragging me toward the storm, the pull of it so strong and fierce that I’m sometimes not sure if I’m even in charge of my body.
Could I stop walking if I wanted? Or would my feet keep moving, tugged ever forward?
I wrung the last drops out of my canteen about an hour ago, letting the water sit on my tongue, savoring it before I finally swallowed it down.
The dryness of the air feels like it tears the moisture from my mouth.
Dani and Orion are already dragging, several steps behind me.
I have no idea how we’re going to make it back across the Plains once we get out of the Gate.
If we get out of the Gate.
Dani jogs up to my side and offers her canteen to me, but I shake my head, pushing it away. I can hear how little she has left in there, probably not more than a mouthful, and we could be walking for hours more.
“Keep it,” I tell her. “You don’t have enough as it is.”
She sighs, tips the barest sip past her lips, and then caps the canteen off. To our left, the sun is riding low, slipping toward the horizon, painting plum streaks across the evening sky.
“You’re being stubborn just to be stubborn, ghoulie.”
I snort. “Here I thought I was being heroically noble.”
“That would make even less sense than you being stubborn.” Her eyes drift upward, to the glowering silver clouds looming almost directly over our heads now. “What do you think we’re going to find there?”
I follow her gaze, tracing the splintered path of a lightning strike.
I try to picture what the Gate of Heaven might actually look like.
Will it be the intricate, multicolored glass orb the Ministry depicts it as?
It’s possible, but all my brain can come up with is an image of thousands of Archangels piled atop one another, beaming gold light between their razor-sharp wings.
I imagine the Gate cracking open like an airship and all of the automatons spilling from its insides.
“Maybe it’s just Archangels making more Archangels over and over,” I say.
Dani humphs, skeptical. “But someone had to create the first Archangel, right?”
“I guess. But that was thousands and thousands of years ago. Whoever that was has got to be long gone by now.”
“So what’s your plan, then?”
What is my plan? All I know is I want it to stop. The fear and secrecy plaguing me, the shadows of angels haunting me. I want to walk away from here knowing that they’ll never be a danger to Kelda or anyone I care about ever again.
“Whatever it takes,” I finally say. “I’ll blow up the whole thing if I have to—I’m not really picky.”
“Blow up the Gate of Heaven … Can’t really accuse you of small goals, huh?
” Her voice is light, teasing, but there’s an edge of nervousness underneath it.
“You’re not worried about what might happen to your immortal soul—or anyone else’s soul—if you explode the one place that’s supposed to be our bridge connecting Trinity to the Heralds’ heavenly afterlife? ”
I frown and glance at her, trying to read her expression in the soft glow of the dying sun.
I honestly hadn’t even thought of it in that way.
Maybe because I’d stepped off any pathway to the Heralds’ holy realm years ago, when I became the Butcher.
That stuff always felt to me like it was for rich skyliners who tithed regularly and were already “blessed.” Not dusters like me with blood beneath our fingernails.
“Do you think that’s what it is?” I ask her.
Dani shrugs. “I don’t know what I believe.
You watch enough people go down into the Depths, and it starts to feel like you’re straddling them yourself.
” She lets a sigh slip from between her lips, soft, tired.
“On the one side, you want to believe in an afterlife where you can see your family again, but on the other side, we’re dusters.
We know how dangerous it is to trust an empty promise.
Something we can’t see or touch or taste. ”
The silence drops between us, cut through with the warm, dry wind. A few steps behind me, Orion swings his head from the setting sun to the shadows of aqueducts off to our right, muttering something under his breath that I can’t make out.
“I say let’s blow it up,” Dani says suddenly, and when I look at her again, her eyes are narrowed, her expression hard with that simmering, familiar anger. “Worst-case scenario, we piss off the Heralds and they’ll come down from on high to punish us. At least then we’ll know for sure.”
I smile a little and look away, down at the alloy. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, I haven’t blow anything up yet.”
I shake my head. “I meant for coming all this way. For sticking around.”
“Oh, that.” She waves me away, her tone light and teasing. “Eh, it’s not like I had anything else on my schedule. Plus, all those skyliner homesteads dropped on my house…”
A week ago, I would have let it go, but I don’t know what I’m walking toward and I want to stop being afraid of asking the questions that might have messy, emotional answers. “That’s not the only reason, though, is it?”
“I guess not.” One corner of her mouth curls upward in a half grin. “Truth is, I don’t really have anyone else. Somebody who gives a shit if I’m alive or dead. Somewhere along the way, you’ve become the only family I have left anymore. And there’s not a lot we wouldn’t do for our family, right?”
I meet her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, and the words taste so strange because I’ve never before apologized for what the Butcher did. What I did as the Butcher. “I’m sorry about Big Haul. And all your crew.”
She nods, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry, too. If I hadn’t set you up, maybe—”
“Don’t.” I know how the rest of that sentence will go—maybe Halle wouldn’t be dead—and I can’t hear it. I can’t. My rib cage is too fragile for those words; it’ll shatter if they’re spoken. “We were both just…”
“Surviving,” she finishes softly.
She’d said something similar, back in her lodgings. That we were all just pawns, using or getting used. And look where it got us. Look at what we left in our wake.
Surviving can’t be all that matters, Val. Halle’s voice, Halle’s words, ringing again through my head.
I don’t want to use anyone anymore. I don’t want every interaction I have to be a transaction. It can’t be that the only way to live is to take from someone else.
“I saw it in you,” Dani says after a minute. “A couple of months after we started working together.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “Saw what?”
She waves a hand, gesturing to me and herself.
“That similarity between us. I’d gone into the whole thing expecting you to just be some mindless, murdering monster.
But then I came to pick you up for a job one night, and you were on the rooftop, crying.
You tried to hide it, but there were tears all over your face. ”
I suck in a breath. I remember that night.
How embarrassed I’d been to have been caught.
But also how nice it had felt when she’d put her hand on my shoulder and asked me what was wrong.
“After I visited Mama in the chapel. First time I’d gone to see her since they found out she was a prophet and took her away. ”
“Still can’t believe you actually told me about that.
In that one, brief moment, you gave me this little piece of your heart, and it had all the same jagged edges that my pieces had.
” She flashes me another grin, and then, after a beat, she adds in a much softer voice, “I kept hoping that it would happen again. That you would let me in.”
The words are surprisingly tentative, and there’s an expectation underneath them that I don’t know what to do with.
It’s the same kind of expectation I heard in Orion’s voice back in that room above the dram shop, when he talked about us becoming something new.
Is there a future where I could see myself wanting the same?
With Dani and Orion both? To give in to that thread in my chest that tugs me toward them and let it crash all three of us together?
I’m not sure. I’m scattered into too many pieces right now.
It takes everything in me just to hold myself in this shape and not dissolve into the air.
Maybe in some distant tomorrow under a different sky.
I’m staring down at the ground, trying to come up with some kind of response, when Trinity’s song crowds into my mind, growing suddenly loud and discordant.
I’d been following it almost instinctively as we walked, adjusting our path little by little, but now I stop short, throwing out an arm to keep Dani from going any farther.
She frowns at me, confused. “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head, unsure how to answer. The landscape in front of us looks exactly the same as it has for the past ten miles—flat alloy running off in all directions, the storm roiling overhead, the aqueducts off to our right, snaking northward.
Orion draws even with us, swinging his rucksack off his shoulders. “Something’s changed, hasn’t it? Something’s different?”
Tentatively, I put a hand out in front of me …
It stops abruptly. The air is as solid as metal.
Dani hisses in shock as I flatten my palm against it, the juxtaposition of the open landscape and the solidness under my fingers causing my brain some real problems.
Dani looks over at Orion, who’s dropped to his knees on the alloy with his kit open in front of him. “Orion, what is this? Because you don’t look at all surprised.”
The Skywayman nods as he rummages around in his things.
“I’m not. I’ve broken into a lot of very fancy places above the skyline with a lot of security, and all they’re hoarding is cash.
So it definitely occurred to me that something as ‘sacred and holy’—and by that, I of course mean invaluable and wildly private—as the Gate of Heaven would have an extra barrier or two. ”
I walk a little way to the left and then back to the right, running my hand across the solid, transparent surface. “So this is some kind of … invisible wall?”
“More or less, yeah.” He glances up as Dani puts her shoulder against the barrier and shoves against it. “I wouldn’t try pushing through it if I were you. We have no idea how it might respond to … force.”
Dani quickly steps away.
I move up next to him, watching him select three different pieces from his rucksack and start fitting them together with quick, sure movements. “You’ve got another way in.”
“It’s kind of why you recruited me in the first place, right? I have, once or twice, needed to cut my way through Trinity’s alloy—”
“Nothing cuts through the alloy,” Dani counters briskly. “Big Haul tried a million ways to slice open the aqueducts around Covenant, and it never worked.”
“Lucky me, I tried a million and one ways, I guess.” He winks at her and holds up the device in his hands.
It looks like a tiny saw, but it’s circular in shape, with a hollow handle that glows like there’s a tiny naphtha engine inside it.
I didn’t even know it was possible to make naphtha sources that small.
“My own creation and design. Specifically for tricky situations just like this.”
I frown at the little saw and then up at the covered aqueducts nearby. One for water, one for naphtha—both of which continue on north toward the Gate. They’re a lot bigger up here than they are down by Covenant. Twice as tall as me and just as wide.
I raise my eyebrows. “We’re getting in through the aqueduct?”
A wide grin splits Orion’s face. “We’re getting in through the aqueduct.”