2.
She blinked. It seemed the only sane reaction one could have to such a statement. Claire blinked, then leaned on the railing next to him with a slight shake of her head. “A god?”
It should come with a laugh. Here, in the depths of a seabound house, it didn’t.
“That’s what they call it. Something not human, at any rate. Really not human.” Ash shrugged. “Tentacles and shit. You know the drill.”
No, Claire did not know that particular drill, but she didn’t press. “And they want to sacrifice me?”
“That’s the easiest term for it, yeah.” He reached toward his pocket, as if for another cigarette, then thought better of it. “We could quibble over mechanics, but there’s no real point. They want to give you to the god to be devoured. In one way or another.”
Her calm was crumbling rapidly, but sheer incredulity managed to keep her together. Hearing that the Ashburys wanted to sacrifice her to a god made the whole thing feel unreal, too ridiculous to be afraid of. “Why?”
“Can’t get something for nothing. Weren’t you paying attention, every time they talked about their success?
” Ash gave up the fight against his better angels and lit another cigarette.
His hands were steadier now, but he wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“That was one of your escape hatches, by the way. When they started talking about how they give to the sea, so the sea gives to them. You were supposed to put two and two together and hightail it the fuck out of here.”
“Sorry I didn’t pick up on the hint,” Claire snarled. “I’ve been distracted by the death of my fiancé.”
Ash finally looked her way. His eyes were pitying, and one of his hands raised, like he might try to comfort her but wasn’t quite sure how such a thing was done.
Then it settled on the rail again. “I understand,” he said.
“They got you while you were grieving. It’s against the rules, technically.
But so is drugging you.” He shrugged. “They made the rules. Some thin snot-scrim of civility, making it all seem like a religion instead of just insanity. So I guess it makes sense they’d break them the minute they become inconvenient.
” A snort. “Lucille broke them, too. She was supposed to share with the others.”
Claire’s stomach rolled over itself, the image of Lucille’s bloody mouth rising up in her brain like bile in her throat. “Who was…?”
“Michael Shipley. Thirty, unmarried, one kid he never sees, and, as far as I could tell, never paid child support for. Stockholder of Ashbury Marinography.” Ash turned, leaning his back against the railing.
“If it’s any consolation—I don’t expect it to be, just to clarify—he was a total asshole. And he signed up for it.”
“He signed up for it?” Claire fit her knuckles against her teeth. “The fuck?”
“They enter a lottery. I mean, they don’t know exactly what happens to the loser, but they know they never come back from Harrow Point. It’s totally voluntary, and the shares of the loser get split between the rest of them.”
“Jesus.”
“Would probably not approve of our business practices, no.”
Claire shook her head. “That doesn’t clarify why.”
“The god has unusual hungers.” Ash put his hands in his pockets. “It passes on its hungers, and other things, to those it touches.” He glanced her way. “How did Elias take his steak, Claire?”
She shuddered. She’d never stopped shuddering, really, it just varied in intensity. “He was mostly vegan,” she whispered. “Didn’t like the way meat tasted.”
“Not the meat you could get, anyway.”
Elias with his head full of death. Elias Ashbury with his smile and his forwardness, approaching her at the fortune-telling machine. Those it touches.
He never chose.
“The god chose you for this, Claire,” Ash said, giving voice to the awful thoughts, reading them on her lighter-lit face. “The god chose you, and sent Elias to bring you to it.” He paused, and his next words were unnecessarily harsh. “It was never about love. Never is, with them.”
There it was. Unpolite and unvarnished. Maybe he wanted it to break her, or maybe he just wanted to make sure she heard it plainly.
It didn’t break her, though. It almost felt… armoring. Here was something unimaginably terrible, the kind of thing that should send her straight to a padded room, but Claire knew how to turn away from that. How to leave it lying there, step over it, keep doggedly moving forward.
“Except it wasn’t supposed to be Elias’s job, was it?
” Things came together so neatly, now that she let them.
The responsibilities given to the eldest Ashbury progeny, the ways Elias had to step up where his older brother—his half brother—would not.
“It wasn’t supposed to touch him. Elias wasn’t the one the god wanted to…
to find me, to bring me here. It was you. ”
Their relationship had begun unconventionally and grown in the same way.
They were together for a year before Claire ever really began to feel loved by Elias, treasured and romanced.
As if his mind had chosen before his heart did.
Hadn’t it always felt preordained? Like a story already written, and she was just reading the script. Her fairy tale.
He’d grown to love her. Regardless of how it had started, she still believed that. A kind of love, anyway. The way a boot loved an anthill. The way a storm loved a ship.
She expected some kind of resistance from Ash, expected a lengthy, laden pause. But he just sighed. “Yeah.” Another long drag of his cigarette. “It was supposed to be me.” He held the cigarette out to her. “Last one. You can finish it.”
She took it in surprisingly steady hands. Claire inhaled until the filter burned her fingers.
“So you saw my picture up on that creepy-ass Shrine wall and just—left?” Her laugh felt jagged, like it was a piece of glass she was trying to cough up.
At least Elias had gone through with it; Ash hadn’t even wanted to try.
Part of her knew this was unfair to be angry about, ridiculous to be angry about, but that part of her was easily ignored.
“The god showed you your marital sacrifice, and you said, I’d rather not, actually? ”
“I didn’t know it would be you who was sacrificed, not at first,” Ash said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
“The god picks spouses for every Ashbury, then, when the time comes, picks one of them to be its… its body. Its skin. It could’ve been Theo or Dierdre.
I knew I was supposed to marry you, but not how it would end.
It was only after you were the one chosen that I left.
” His mouth stayed unhinged, like he would say more about that, like there was more to tell. But then he closed it.
Maybe it was a compliment, then, that he’d run once he found out. That he’d refused to be part of her sacrifice, at least initially. She didn’t want to think about what that meant about Elias. “I guess I should be thankful you were going to fuck it all up for me.”
“You were still gonna be sacrificed,” Ash muttered. “I just couldn’t bring myself to be the person who did it.”
“So what would you have done if I didn’t find the weird shrine? Just gone along with it?”
“You were given outs, Claire. It’s not my fault you didn’t use them.
” He shifted on his feet. “Believe me, if I could have, I would’ve thrown you out on your ass the minute you arrived.
But it doesn’t work that way. They go after people who will ignore the red flags.
I couldn’t tell you anything before you figured it out yourself; you saw what happened when I tried. ”
Choking seaweed, coughing bile. There were fail-safes built in. He was helping her now that she’d decided she wanted help, but it had taken too long. That first step had to be her own; no one could pull her out until she asked.
And Claire was too tired for it. Too lonely, too willing to accept any kind of belonging.
“I’m perfect for this,” she said flatly, dropping the spent cigarette butt to the floor. She didn’t grind it out, watching its glow slowly fade. “Just like you said.”
Ash didn’t reply. He checked his watch again. “Causeway is up in ten. Two more flights. Let’s move.”
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
“So what happened to Elias?” she asked, after a pause.
In for a penny, in for a pound, Aunt Margo was fond of saying, and hell if Claire wasn’t about as far in as she could get.
Still, she tiptoed around it, asking this question in the vaguest terms possible.
“That has something to do with this. I know it does.”
He knew what she meant. “Of course it does,” Ash said. “He died because of some… brain thing, yeah? That was the official cause, anyway.”
She thought of the lesions on those glowing boards, standing in that too-bright room with the scent of antiseptic burning her nose. Elias’s brain like basement black mold, the lingering effect of a leak.
“When he did his five years on the island with the lab,” Ash said, speaking as he climbed, “he and the god… communed, I guess. And that leaves marks. That leaves pathways for things to get in. Any time divinity—or something like it—touches you, it leaves a doorway. Changes you.”
“Fuck.” Claire shuddered.
“He ran out of time,” Ash said, quietly, pausing on the stairs.
“He dragged his feet, bringing you here. So the god used that doorway, and killed him, knowing that would send the message to Wellington that he had to step in. There’s only so much time between skins, it’s all on a strict schedule.
And if the schedule is fucked with, all the things the Ashburys get from the god—the safety from the sea that allows the subs to work, the power, the influence—it all starts to go away. ”
“So you fucked with the schedule.” She hauled herself up behind him, glaring at his back. “You refused to come get me, because you had a crisis of conscience when it seemed like blood was gonna get too close to your hands. And Elias died for it.”