Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Mirie’s corpse looked exactly as it had the night I found her.
Her eyes were open, but unseeing. Her head lolled to one side.
She wore her gold armor and her white robes, though the fabric was tattered and dirty and the breastplate scratched.
Her once-radiant skin was now a sallow grey.
Srana had replaced her legs with dented rods; she had welded knives to her hands. A stiff metal rod ran up her spine.
This thing was not a warrior, not a creature, not even an automaton. It certainly was not Mirie.
It was a machine, a parasite, using the flesh of my dead friend as a weapon. Not even a weapon, but the glue to hold one together.
My stomach lurched. I wanted to look away, but I could not. A skewer of pain through my left arm as one of Srana’s creations took advantage of my sudden stillness, pinning my arm to the wall. And still, I didn’t move.
I was so angry that I could not move.
Mirie had been the most noble person I had ever met.
Noble even in a world in which all nobility had viciously stomped away.
Still, she remained straight-backed, calm, kind, patient.
Even in death. I could still picture her as I had found her, arms crossed over her chest, sword lying over her.
Fallen in the service of defending innocents.
And this was what Srana had done to her. Used her. Defiled her. The melding of flesh and machine wasn’t even good. It was sloppy, torn skin puckering where metal met decaying muscle.
And at this sight, I heard the words Zefiah had hurled at me:
She died slow. She died begging for you.
I had seen great atrocities these last ten years. And I was honest with myself that I had committed my fair share, too. But in this moment, I knew that none of them would be as bad as allowing this to happen to the most honorable person I had ever known.
My eyes burned. My rage clenched my heart so tight I shook with it.
Mirie’s corpse joined the other in pinning me against the wall. Fwip, as a makeshift blade flipped from what had once been her hand.
And then, behind her, another familiar face appeared.
Marko.
Marko’s body had been in pieces. That had not stopped Srana.
He was more machine than corpse, his broad shoulders replaced with a dented mantle of copper, his massive arms mounted to ticking gears.
His legs had been replaced with rods, like Mirie’s—the left one longer than the right, so he walked with an awkward limp.
His head lolled back, his face blood covered, jaw missing, nearly unrecognizable, tilted to the sky, as if in pained frustration to the goddess who had done this to him.
His flesh, after all, was merely putty upon which she could mount her collection of horrors.
Unlike her automatons, he did not even need to pretend to think.
An unworthy fate for the one person who had ever pleasantly surprised me. Who had fought to the very end to protect Valentina, just like I had told him to.
His corpse seized my other arm. Drove a rod of copper through it.
I gasped, but I barely felt it. Someone screamed my name, but I barely heard that either.
And I wasn’t stupid—I had known, of course, she would be here. I had tried to prepare myself for it. Steel myself against what I was about to see.
But when Valentina’s corpse stepped through the crowd, I could no longer breathe.
Everything went numb. The world faded away.
Valentina’s face had been mostly intact when she died.
Now, her lifeless eyes, wide open, their deep brown clouded with milky grey, stared right through me.
Her face was still half covered with her own blood, and that of the vampire she had killed in her last breath.
But her machinery was more complex than that of Mirie and Marko—though no less sickening.
Both of her arms had been fully replaced with metal, starting at the shoulder, and her legs, which were still backward and broken.
Her neck had been replaced with copper rods too, bolted to the curve of her jaw and the bone behind her ears.
Swoops of silver, some kind of monstrous mimicry of a rib cage, encased her torso, keeping it upright but revealing the disintegrating flesh within. She slumped slightly against the frame.
In her mechanical hands was the spear. The very spear I had attempted to use to kill Srana. The one she had taken from me when I failed.
A terrible, wordless sound bubbled out of me. Not a sob—a groan of utter rage, too hot, too painful, to stay locked soundlessly inside.
Valentina approached, pushing aside Marko and Mirie. I could not blink. I could not take my eyes off her.
It occurred to me that Valentina’s machinery was so much more advanced than the others because in life, she had been a machinist. A follower of Srana. She had whispered prayers to her every night, blessed every one of her creations with magic from her copper goddess.
And look at what that goddess had done to her. Abandoned her. Ignored her. And then carved her up for parts.
She looked so fucking young. Little more than a child.
Every regret I’d ever had in the years I had spent with her burst free at once, like blood from a fresh wound.
And somehow I could see all of them right now—every careless word, every time she reached for me and I pulled away, every callous response.
I had pushed her away, and chased her away, and I was not there when she needed me, and now here she was, twisted and broken and denied even a dignified afterlife, used by the same goddess she had given her life to.
I felt myself at the edge of that cliff, just like when I’d woken up in Glaea, before the job and the deal and the gods and Septimus—when I had stared into the churning waters below and felt myself slipping.
I had turned away that night. But I could sense the cliff crumbling beneath me now, threatening to take me forever.
But stronger than my despair was my rage.
Srana let out a low titter of delight.
“Do you recognize it?” she said.
It took me a moment to realize that she was not referring to Valentina at all. Because after all this, Valentina was nothing but a useful pile of flesh, in the right place at the right time, and Srana didn’t even know or care who she was.
She was referring to the spear.
It pulsed faintly in Valentina’s grip. Agony shot through my arm as Marko began sawing at it. Across the courtyard, through the blinding flames, I saw Septimus raging against the corpses that held him to the wall. He was screaming something, but I couldn’t hear what.
Clickclick clickclick click, as Srana lowered, as close as she could get to this blessed ground, her smile growing.
“You have given me such inspiration,” she cooed. “It has been ten years since I have had such vision. It turned out you brought me the perfect addition to what you could become.”
I hated her, and hated her, and hated her.
I let that hatred flood through my veins. I let it spill out through every wound she had opened in my skin. I let it pool in my heart until it swallowed every shred of my own self-loathing.
Valentina’s corpse pushed against me. It occurred to me that it was the closest I’d given her to a goodbye embrace.
She had deserved that. She had deserved so much better.
BOOM, as a thrum of thunder shook the ground. A flash of lightning lit up the sky, brighter than the others—bright enough to cut through even the flames. Something was strange about it.
I looked up. Even Srana paused.
The sky glistened with streaks of rainbow light.
A god. Another god.
“Kyrene!” Septimus’s distant voice bellowed across the courtyard. I brought my gaze to him.
There was no doubting what the look in his eyes meant. He didn’t need to say anything else.
The sky parted. Srana fully turned. As her attention shifted, the monstrous reanimations went slack. Valentina’s lifeless head slumped forward. Her body leaned against mine. Her metal hands fell limp, pushing the spear against my torso, as if in offering.
I closed my eyes for a moment—just a moment—relishing this.
Her ear was right near my lips. And maybe another version of myself would have had some poignant words for her.
Maybe some version of myself could have told her that I was sorry, that she was a gift I had never deserved, that I loved her more than life and I should have told her so every day, every hour, and of all my sins in this pathetic life, that was the greatest.
But not this version of me.
Because I knew this was a fucking corpse. A desecrated corpse, used one last time by a goddess who didn’t give a single fuck about Valentina or anyone else, and she couldn’t hear a single thing I had to say about it.
But I could kill the one who did this to her. Just like I’d set out to.
I seized the spear from her and, with a roar of rage and pain and grief, I ripped myself free from the stakes through my arms.
I looked up at Srana, who watched the sky, distracted. She was so far. It was a wild shot. But I’d taken worse.
Septimus’s eyes met mine, and he inclined his chin, as if to say, now.
When Nyaxia appeared in the sky, distracting Srana, I hurled the spear with every ounce of my remaining strength. It arced through the night like a copper comet hurtling into the atmosphere.
And right when I was certain that it was going to fall, that it wasn’t going to make it, ropes of black-red surged around its staff, pushing it through that final leap.
A smile unfurled over Nyaxia’s lovely mouth.
Just as the spear struck Srana’s back, shattering her metal body, piercing straight through to her chest.
Srana whirled around, metal legs buckling. The plates that made up her face shuddered through countless expressions. Copper rained like sleet from the sky. Ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-k-k-k-k-k, as hundreds of automatons flailed, gears jamming and cracking.