Chapter 28
God Is a Woman and That Woman Is Harper Leong
RAVEN
Kiran ends up fully benched – as expected, Niko isn’t letting him fight in his condition – and Tia is begrudgingly allowed to come.
My heart thuds in my throat the whole journey to Marina Bay, lodged in my airway, and breathing becomes difficult through my mask.
We’ve been through the plan, but Maria has proven to be feral.
The only way I can get to her is by dangling my leadership as bait, but she knows everyone and everything that matters to me.
That’s the kind of thing that could kill you in a fight.
We stop on the roof of a towering office building, looking down to where the Nagas are ravaging Marina Bay Sands.
A tailback of cars lines Nicoll Highway, while people watch from their cars as kayakers are thrown out of the reservoir’s waters, and cyclists kicked off the roads so Nagas can break the cement and beckon new trees into life with their magic.
‘This is . . .’ Lune tilts her head to the side, clearly torn. ‘We’re not supposed to stop them, are we?’
‘Let’s just mitigate damage.’ Niko folds their arms and beckons us closer, their wings shimmering in the sun behind us. ‘Me and Kiran will work on making sure civilians are all right. You guys keep a lookout for Maria and the rogue Nagas.’
To my surprise, Lune says, ‘We’ll neutralize rogues around Kallang. Didn’t Avyaan say he’s only instructed his Nagas around Marina?’ She points into the distance, where the river slips from the ocean and into Singapore’s main body. ‘I think those Nagas are Maria’s.’
Niko shoots her a bright grin, and I watch Lune glow with pride.
I’m still staring when Niko and Kiran leave the rooftop.
‘What?’ Lune frowns, but she’s also smiling.
I take her hand, squeeze it tight. ‘Glad I don’t have to fight Lune any more.’
Lune’s smile grows, and she presses a kiss to my knuckles. ‘Let’s go, kit.’
LUNE
I dodge a blow from a Naga and power-kick someone in the chest. Beside me, Raven whips around and delivers a showy flying kick.
Our gaze catches. I roll my eyes. Show off.
She grins and surges off.
I think of all the Sentinel applications I’ve seen from Kiran. Extensive ancestry to track the intensity of their potential, endless statistics on the strains of magic each of them possesses, laundry lists of traits I could’ve pulled from practically any other job application.
Detailed, said one application.
Team player, fervent, eager, said another.
Kind, responsible, skilled in Taekwondo.
I look at Raven and none of these skills come to mind. I see her quip at a Naga, then snap an arm behind his back with a laugh. Again – all sharp edges, fluid movement, teasingly unserious in a way I used to hate.
But maybe the years spent fighting each other pay off, because I read Raven’s movements like a script, line after line.
I know what’s coming, know every stage direction and follow it.
We’re in the play of my dreams, perfect choreography onstage and fluidly synchronous – Raven ducks as I shoot over her head; I toss a dagger back to her so she can fend away a Naga sneaking up from behind.
I blast the Nagas that Raven seizes with her telekinesis (strong enough to stun, not enough to injure), and kick them to the ground in time for her to flick a dagger at them, often a blade through a thigh that stops them from fighting.
Back and forth, we continue this dance and it carves a groove into the way I move as I get used to Raven revolving around me. It hits me as I feign an attack at a Naga and Raven follows up immediately, kicking them in the gut the second they’re distracted: we’re partners. We’re a team.
After those picture-perfect applications, it turns out all I needed in a partner was a shit-eating grin, a smart mouth and an even quicker fighting instinct.
‘What?’ Raven throws a look over her shoulder, fists readied, her chest heaving. Our surroundings are clear of Nagas. ‘You’re looking at me weird.’
‘You’re perfect.’
She snorts. ‘Why tell me what I know?’
I open my mouth – and then the world goes black.
RAVEN
A bullet hits Lune’s helmet – not hard enough to penetrate, but enough to knock her out – and I catch her before she falls.
The gunman stands, a dark figure against the glass roof of the Sands mall, incriminatory weapon in hand.
Maria.
Lune stirs in my arms. I put her down gently as she rouses, pressing a kiss to her exposed forehead between her helmet and visor. ‘Hey, you okay? I’m going to go after Maria if you’re feeling fine.’
‘I’m fine. I’ll go check on Niko and Kiran.’ Lune squeezes my wrist. ‘Good luck. I love you.’
The sun beats down on my back as I approach Maria. Shimmering heat warps the air as she stands with her arms folded and her lips curved into a smirk. ‘Sorry, I was trying to test out your assignment, see how difficult it was.’
My grip tightens round my daggers. ‘Go after Lune again and you’ll regret it.’
‘Oh right, you’ve joined the Sentinels. Cute. You’ve always been easy to manipulate.’
‘You’d know, wouldn’t you? Years of—’ I throw the dagger mid-sentence, catching her off guard.
Maria dodges enough for it to graze her shoulder, sailing into the space behind until I recall it with telekinesis. ‘We trained together. I know all your little tricks.’
But it’s been months since we’ve trained together, with the moonstone heists and the internship taking up all my time. There’s no doubt she’s been training without me.
How strong are you now? I circle Maria on the rooftop as if I can figure it out if I look at her long enough.
When moments pass and I don’t respond, she raises a brow. ‘No comeback? What’d Tia do? Staple your tongue?’
Tia’s name coming from her lips sets off a fury so overwhelming that my world spins for a second and I rush Maria, knocking her to the ground. With a swing, I smash the hilt of my dagger over Maria’s face. ‘Give me the moonstones.’
‘Holy hell, babe.’ Blood flows from Maria’s nose as she uses her own magic to push me off. She laughs, harsh and dismissive. ‘You make me want to fight you.’
‘Tell me where the moonstones are.’ I lash out with my blades. ‘I’ve been waiting for a punching bag like you.’
The blades miss, but I sweep my leg under Maria as she’s distracted.
She thumps to the ground again with a wheeze. It doesn’t knock the smile – crimson teeth and glistening lips – off her face. ‘I’ll give you the codes when you give me what I want.’
As she gets up, I keep my buzzing fists by my side. ‘Why do you want to be Fox leader so badly?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Maria dusts herself off, flicking her ponytail over her shoulder. ‘I was meant to be leader. If I hadn’t been too soft to kill you, I would’ve succeeded. I was so close.’
I clench my jaw. The pain barely helps me focus. I grip the medallion around my neck in a white-knuckled hold that digs sharp metal into my fingers, cold against my skin. ‘Well, give me the locations of the moonstones and the passwords to their safes and it’ll be yours.’
She tugs a thumb drive out of her pocket and holds it up in her fist.
‘And they’re all correct?’ I unclasp the medallion from my neck. ‘You promise?’
Maria holds up three fingers. ‘I vow.’
Overhead, clouds begin to gather.
‘On one,’ Maria says. ‘Three.’
I swallow. ‘Two.’
Maria sucks in a breath. ‘One.’ Neither of us move. Maria laughs first, shaking her head. ‘Nice to see you haven’t lost this part of you even after joining those stupid Sentinels.’
It takes everything not to protest against ‘stupid Sentinels’, but I bite my tongue.
‘Are you going to make the exchange or not? You know the medallion is your last shot at leadership if you don’t have a completed assignment.
The clan might listen to you if you have it, but you won’t stand a chance if you don’t. ’
‘Don’t threaten me. You’ve grown so soft I heard you cancelled the moonstone transaction with Ferrix.’ Maria raises a brow. In the hand without the thumb drive, she flips a dagger blade end over end. ‘You’re the worst leader we could’ve had.’
She throws the knife at me.
I stop it with telekinesis and throw it back at her. In the distraction of the attack, I conjure multiples of myself and blend in amongst them. ‘Maybe, but how many would suffer? How far are we willing to go to hurt someone just to protect ourselves?’
‘Harper, we’d be protecting our clan. Our family.’
The hardest thing is that she’s right – and the Foxes are just as much my family as Niko and Kiran and Tia are. I’m sitting on a blade-thin fence between the two, a promise of blood and hurt as I shift to choose and cut myself while I straddle the razor edge.
But maybe I’m fine with that. Maybe even, as I go along, I get to tear the fence down.
I move around Maria, finding an opening to attack.
She spins round to face me and throws a dagger, forcing me to drop my illusion.
With a smirk, Maria says, ‘You always circle the same way.’
It irks me that Maria knows so much about the way I fight, and she’s clearly lording it over me. With gritted teeth, I stab forward with my knife. ‘I can be a part of two families, and I won’t let you hurt either.’
Leaping over the blade, Maria advances on me and shoves me against the glass wall of the Marina Sands mall, pinning me with a forearm barred across my chest.
‘Who are you kidding?’ Maria pats my cheek patronizingly.
Her breath smells of copper, hanging heavy in the oppressively humid heat.
Blood smears over her chin, her cheek, like a monster broken out of her skin.
‘You don’t belong with the Sentinels. You don’t even belong with the Foxes.
You don’t belong anywhere. You’re a criminal to them and a traitor to us, and nothing you do can change that. ’
I jerk my head out of Maria’s grasp, but she’s gripped my cheeks in her hands, her hold brutal. ‘They’re my family.’
‘I don’t see any of them here for you now.’ With a shrug, Maria presses a blade to my neck and swipes the blood from her nose, spreading it over her pale face like a mask of sin. ‘The Foxes would have had the upper hand over everyone. The government, the Sentinels, any descendants in the country.’
‘People would have suffered.’
‘Everyone suffers.’ Maria grabs my collar and twists, choking me. ‘We look out for our own. You never got that, and that’s why you failed.’
I jerk my head back from her grip, but it barely gives me leeway to breathe.
‘Fuck you.’ I clench my fist, activating my telekinesis to cast my knife at Maria.
Over her shoulder, it whips off the roof, hurtles towards us and hits home in Maria’s back.
The tip peeks from her chest, under her shoulder.
Blood blooms over her torso, soaks wet on her dark suit, shiny in the glaring sun. ‘This is saving people.’
‘You sound disgusting.’ Maria spits at the floor between us, blood swirling in her saliva. ‘Just like a Sentinel. Saving people? Betraying your clan so other people won’t suffer? Love made you weak.’
Weak. I betrayed my clan for an outsider. The thought catches me off guard enough that Maria gets a punch in, and my cheek explodes with pain.
‘You abandoned your family,’ Maria spits, her hand snapping over my throat. ‘You abandoned your family for people who wouldn’t even stand by you.’
Niko kicked me out the second Tia was gone. Another unbidden thought, another skip in my heart as my skin flashes hot with memory, my body recoiling with hurt from an experience that my mind had suppressed.
‘Ah Ma loved you, you know. Loved you when your parents weren’t around to.’ Maria slams me into the wall. My head knocks glass, and I don’t even have enough breathing room to gasp. Her hands tighten over my neck. ‘Why would you throw that away?’
My chest tightens with the thought of my parents.
I tried, I want to say. I wanted to stay with the clan.
It’s not because I didn’t care. I had no choice.
I’d raced through the city, pushed past my searing muscles and found that the hurt transcended the limit of my physical body, that it wasn’t something I could rid myself of. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
But I chose Tia in the end, because my parents weren’t here. Because I respect Ah Ma’s opinions, but I couldn’t let her validation control my life.
I didn’t choose to leave the clan. I chose to protect my family.
Maria doesn’t see it coming. Before she can recover, I kick her to the ground and pin her down with telekinesis.
I stand over the restrained Fox, whose hands are already beginning to call her own magic.
‘Love made me weak?’ I release my telekinetic hold and pick Maria up by the collar.
You killed my parents.
Fury wraps itself around my chest like a vice, rushes through my blood and burns.
Power surges into my hands, into my veins; I hold the world so tightly I could crush it between my fingers.
The universe answers and the stars cry and the sun bows and the moon sings to me and, for a second, I’m no longer just a descendant.
I’m a god.
But I don’t want to crush the world today – I only have one person in mind.
The heavens split. It’s a flash rain, droplets from the burning sky hot on my skin, stinging my cuts and turning the air torrid, suffocatingly thick.
It plasters our hair to our faces, washes blood away like crimson froth in a swirling ocean.
The rain seeps into the cloth mask of my face, making it hard to breathe.
I yank it down. I’m both Harper and Raven, in my uniform and out, different and the same.
None of that matters now.
I stand over the mortal that was my best friend, my lover, my family, and punch her in the face.
Something cracks. Maybe it’s my knuckles, maybe it’s Maria’s nose – I don’t care.
‘You know what?’ I shout over the rain as I grab Maria’s collar to hold her up.
Another punch. Maria’s head whips to the side, but she turns back to face me, her gaze furious yet wavering.
‘You think love made me weak.’ Punch. Can’t tell if that’s blood or rain hot over my knuckles. As I move my fist, something grinds and my bones shift, but gods do not feel pain, and I’m invincible.
‘Well—’ Punch. Maria’s shoulders slump as unconsciousness weakens her glare.
I pull her up to eye level, just so I can stare straight into that shark’s gaze, a void of twisted lies and shattered memories. ‘Without love, you became cruel.’
Then I crush Maria into the ground with telekinesis as the world watches and the rain strikes my skin, the sky bleeding onto me, spilling its steaming guts over my head and my shoulders as I stand triumphant, a villain and a hero, a god and a lover, a monster and a saviour.