Chapter Thirty-Five
“PROOF OF LIFE.”
—SAMUEL COVENANT
My body thrums with the rhythm of Trinity’s song.
It’s so loud inside my head, so soaring and bright, that it wraps around my bones and fills my chest with its fierce, wild beat.
I let it pull me along, coming back together slowly, so slowly that it takes me a moment to recognize what it feels like to be solid and whole. To be a person in my real, human body.
And then, in a snap, it all catches up to me.
I exhale violently, coughing and sputtering on aqueduct water, my fingers still gripping the handle of Orion’s saw.
Freezing wet clothes plaster against my skin as I try to sit up or roll over, but there’s a tangle of arms and limbs all around me.
I can’t move. I don’t have the strength to move.
“Dani? Dani!”
Orion’s panicked shout cuts through my muddled brain. He scrambles off me, and I push up onto my elbows with effort, trying to make out the scene next to me. Trinity’s song still rings in my ears, making me lightheaded, and I have to shake my head to clear it before it pulls me back inside.
My blood goes cold—even colder than it was already. Dani lies perfectly still next to me, her eyes closed, her skin tinged purply-blue. She looks …
No.
Orion kneels next to her, beads of water trickling down his face and neck as he slips a hand underneath Dani’s neck and lifts it up just a little. Just enough for Dani’s head to tilt back, her chin lifted, exposing the length of her throat.
“Orion, what—”
“I got it, V, just—” He cuts himself off, bending low over Dani’s face and placing his lips against hers. Pinching her nose closed, he exhales hard into her mouth, and her chest visibly expands with his breath. She doesn’t move on her own, though; she remains still and cold.
Cursing, Orion repeats the movement again, and then again.
Panic and anger creep up the back of my throat.
A hollow echo of the helplessness I’d felt when I lost Halle.
I see Dani’s cold, empty body. I see Halle falling into the Depths.
Their faces blend together, back and forth, swamping my vision—
Suddenly Dani jerks upward. She gags hard, water bubbling out of her mouth, and Orion and I move in sync to roll her over onto her side as she retches up what looks like a gallon of liquid.
Gently, I brush the hair from the sides of her face and hold it back as she purges everything out of her system until there’s nothing left.
Dani sits up, shaky, her breathing starting to even out as she pulls her knees into her chest. “Y’know, Booker,” she says hoarsely, looking up at him. “You could’ve just asked me for a kiss. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
Orion chuckles, halfway between relieved and irritated as he drags his hands down his face, wiping the remaining water from his skin.
Impulsively, I reach out and put a hand on Dani’s cheek. “Glad you’re okay.”
She looks at me, a little stunned, the hint of a pleased smile hovering around her lips. “You know me, ghoulie. I’m hard to get rid of. Nice move getting us out of that thing, by the way. Didn’t even know you could do that.”
Neither did I.
“Hey.” Orion’s gaze drifts behind me, out toward the horizon, and he slowly climbs to his feet. His face is stretched with shock and bewilderment, and he opens his mouth multiple times before finally saying, half jokingly, “Is it just me, or does everything look a little … different?”
I turn, following his line of sight, and my mouth drops open.
I’ve never seen anything like it before—except in my dreams. Greenery explodes everywhere, carpeting the ground, crawling up the sides of the aqueducts.
Here and there, enormous—I have to dig deep in my brain to find the word—trees shoot into the sky, their branches laden with thin dark-green needles, their trunks too big for even all three of us to wrap our arms around.
Silvery starlight paints the delicate petals of flowers in shades of violet and white, bright yellow and pale pink, intermixed with the long blades of green.
Above us, a huge, glittering orb of stained glass sits atop seven massive, curving prongs of black metal that sprout from the ground below it, the facets of its jewel-toned panes reflecting the stars and the night sky.
The Gate of Heaven.
I was right. It is real.
“I’ll be damned,” Dani breathes.
Orion wanders forward, awestruck, gaping. He bends down and plucks one of the flowers by the stem, twirling it between his fingers. “It’s exactly like the one from the Aaldenberg knot.”
I put a hand under Dani’s elbow, steadying her as she pushes herself to standing. Where Orion’s face is full of wonder, Dani looks alarmed and wary.
“What the fuck is this?” she whispers.
I shake my head. “The gateway to the Heralds’ heavenly afterlife, I guess?”
She shoots me a skeptical look. “You don’t believe that.”
I look down at the green carpet of plant life underneath my stained, wet boots. The air smells so different—sweeter somehow and warmer than the aqueduct, but significantly cooler than the rest of Trinity. After years of standing on alloy, the ground here gives in a way that’s soft, almost squishy.
The song is different here, too. Louder and clearer, but there’s less of a pull to it. Like because I’m finally here, it doesn’t have to tug at me anymore.
“Honestly? I don’t know what to believe right now.”
Orion takes the lead across the unfamiliar landscape, pausing often to run his fingertips over the rough trunk of one of the trees, to bend down and touch all the strange variations of plants stretching up from the ground.
Dani and I stay close behind him, and even as I’m awed by the riot of life unfurling in every direction, I can’t shake the sense of danger churning in my gut.
A low, soft hooting sound comes from one of the trees, and Dani spins toward it, pulling her pulse pistol out in one smooth motion. I phase up beside her, my hand going to my knives, but Orion leaps in front of both of us, his hands out.
“It’s okay! Don’t shoot … or stab … or whatever you’re about to do.” He points over his shoulder at a creature high up in the branches of the tree. “It’s not an enemy. It’s just another … creature-thing. Like Ember.”
Another one. Organic and alive. This one is fluffy but not in the same hairy way that Ember is, and it stands on two clawed feet instead of four.
It’s spotted brown and white all over with wings tucked close into its sides and round yellow eyes that look severely unimpressed.
I try to reach for the word for it, dig it up from my dreams like how I know that rain is rain and trees are trees.
Dani huffs, holstering her pistol. “Doesn’t look anything like Ember. How many of these things are running around this place?”
Orion gazes up at it, his face practically glowing with delight. “I don’t know. Isn’t it incredible?”
I drop my hand from Wrath’s hilt. “It kind of looks like it wants to incredibly murder us.”
Dani brightens, nudging my arm with hers. “Hey, that makes it a perfect fit for you.”
Rolling my eyes, I turn away from her and scan the horizon ahead of us. The Gate of Heaven gleams against the dark sky, somehow both closer and farther away than ever. Who is up there? How many more secrets are they hiding if this is just the beginning?
Light glints off something a little way up ahead, glimmering through the tree trunks, and there’s another, more distant sound beneath the ringing of Trinity’s song I can’t quite place.
I head for it, my boots swishing through the …
what’s the word for it … grass. It’s a soft sound that is so foreign from the usual clump of my feet against alloy that I shiver.
The trees end abruptly, opening into a wide, expansive grassy space, but I don’t step out into the open, staying in the relative safety and cover of the trees’ shadows.
It’s the water that catches my eye first. Not in an aqueduct.
Not parceled out in a drinking ration or steam shower.
Just a whole, wide, enormous stretch of it, off to my left, rippling in the glow of the starlight.
Greenery-drenched aqueducts spring up from the middle, shooting off in all four cardinal directions.
“Holy shit,” Dani breathes as she and Orion come up behind me.
“So this is where it comes from.” I glance up at Orion.
He’s scanning the scene in front of us with a pair of binoculars, and all the wonder in his face is gone, replaced with something close to bitterness.
“Millions of thirsty dusters living ration to ration, and all of this is just … sitting up here.”
“What are those other things?” Dani asks, pointing to two other constructs that take up every inch of the open space that isn’t occupied by water.
One sits directly below the stained glass sphere of the Gate, poised over a massive hole in the alloy, cutting down into fathomless darkness, three times as big as the Crater back in the Shipyards.
The construct itself is sharp-angled and glitters clear like a diamond—except when a column of blue-white light from the heart of Trinity miles below shoots upward and into it.
Its facets catch the light, glowing as it whirs with activity.
Orion nudges me, handing me the binoculars, his jaw tight. It takes me a second to adjust them to my eyes, but as soon as I do, I have to laugh a little.
“It’s making naphtha. You know, the blessed blood of the Heralds? It’s actually just this thing, generating it, like a fabricator’s shop, and all our precious aqueducts carry it from there.”
I swing the binoculars right, to the other construct Dani pointed out.
It’s less flashy than the diamond generator, a bulky gray rectangular type of building propped up on stilts.
Below it is a huge pit of dark-brown stuff—I can’t find the word.
Like dust, but not dust. Mounds and mounds of it being constantly churned by enormous paddles.