“The other children,” said Lazlo, looking around at their solemn faces.

“You know about them?” asked Feral.

He did. He thought of Suheyla, and all the other women who’d birthed babies in the citadel and had their memories eaten by Letha before they were returned home. Over the past days, as Weep had revealed its dark history to him, this question had emerged: Why had the gods bred themselves on humans? Bred themselves on. His jaw clenched and he banished the pallid term, even from his mind. Why had the gods raped humans and forced them to bear—or father— their “godspawn”? Lazlo was certain that the rapes themselves weren’t the point but the means—that the children were the point. It was too systematic to be otherwise. There was even a nursery.

So the question was: Why? And: What did they do with them? What did they do with all those children? “You’ve no idea what it was all about?” he asked.

“We only know that they were taken away as soon as their gifts manifested,” explained Sarai. “Korako took them. The goddess of secrets.”

“Korako,” Lazlo repeated. “But you don’t know where she took them?”

They shook their heads.

“Could you be one of them?” asked Sparrow, fixing on Lazlo.

“I think Great Ellen thinks you are,” said Sarai, remembering. But they couldn’t ask the nurse now which baby boy she’d meant.

Lazlo told them about his fragile wisp of memory: wings against the sky, and the feeling of weightlessness. “The white bird,” he said. “I think she took me to Zosma.”

“Wraith?” said Sarai, surprised. “Why?”

Why had the great white eagle carried him away from here and abandoned him in war-torn Zosma, if indeed she had? He had no idea. “Could she have taken all of them? All of us? Could that be the answer somehow? Did Wraith carry all the babies out into the world?”

“They weren’t babies, though,” said Sarai. “Most gifts manifest at four or five, if not later, and that’s when they were taken.”

That made a difference. Could Wraith have carried children that age? Even if she could, children would remember it, surely, in a way babies wouldn’t. And if it were true, and the world was full of men and women who’d been born in a floating metal angel and carried from it by a huge white eagle that could vanish in thin air... wouldn’t there be stories?

“I don’t know.” Lazlo sighed, rubbing his face. He was feeling his fatigue. They all were. “What is she?” he asked. “The bird. Do you know? Did she belong to the gods? Was she some kind of pet, or messenger?”

“She?” repeated Feral. They had never thought to assign the bird a gender. “You keeping calling Wraith she.”

“Eril-Fane did,” Lazlo told them. “As though he knew her.”

“Maybe he knows something we don’t,” said Ruby.

“I’m sure he knows a lot that we don’t,” said Feral.

Sarai agreed. “He lived here for three years. He learned enough about the gods to kill them. He must have found out their weaknesses, and who knows what else.”

“We could talk to him,” Lazlo ventured.

Talk to her father? Meet her father? A thrill of anxious excitement raced through Sarai, but the anxiety quickly swallowed the excitement so that what was left simply felt like fear. Would he even want to meet her? Unconsciously, she glanced at Minya. The two were so tangled in her mind, all blood and vengeance and strife.

But what she saw on the bed pushed all thought of Eril-Fane from her mind. She gasped and pointed, and the others spun to look, stricken, sure to find Minya awake behind them and smiling her malevolent smile. But she wasn’t awake, or smiling.

She was simply gray.

. . .

“Is she dying?” cried Ruby. “Have I killed her?” Because Minya looked like she was dying, and what else could it be but the potion? She was

the color of ashes, of stone, and only Lazlo knew what it meant. He didn’t hesitate, but scooped her into his arms and laid her right down on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Feral demanded.

“It’s okay,” Lazlo said. “She’ll be all right. Look.” He took her little hands in his, one at a time, and opened her curled fingers to press her palms to the floor. He held them like that, palms flat against the metal. Her legs were touching it, too, and it wasn’t long before it was obvious: Her blue was coming back.

Sarai took a deep breath. Minya’s death also meant her own, and she’d braced for it for a terrible second. Minya had looked so ill, but she was fine now, bluer every second, and still sleeping peacefully. “What happened?” she asked Lazlo.

“She wasn’t touching mesarthium,” he said. He shook his head. “Stupid. I should have thought of it. But it happened fast.” He marveled. “I’d never have thought it would be that fast.”

“What?” demanded Ruby. “That what would be that fast?”

“Her fading,” he said, looking at his own hands. They were fully blue now, of course, but he remembered how, down in the city when he’d still been human, his hands had turned gray when he touched mesarthium. It had taken days for the tinge to wear off, but Minya hadn’t been lying here for much more than an hour. “It was a lot slower for me.”

“Fading?” asked Sparrow.

He stopped and looked around at them, realizing something. They were all barefoot, in constant contact with the metal. He said, “You know how it works, don’t you? How it’s the mesarthium that makes you blue, and gives you your power, too?”

In fact, they didn’t know. The metal had always been there, and they had always been blue. They hadn’t guessed the one was a consequence of the other, and the notion was at once obvious and staggering. How had they never realized? Lazlo explained it as well as he was able, from what he knew of himself: As a baby, he had been gray. “Gray as rain,” a monk had said, thinking he was dying. But the color had faded long ago, and he hadn’t thought anything of it until last night, when he pressed his hands to the anchor and turned first gray, then blue.

“Do you mean to say,” Sparrow asked intently, “that if we were to stop touching it, we would become human?”

Ruby straightened up. “We could be human?” she asked. “We could live as humans? In the world?”

“I suppose you could, if that’s what you wanted.”

Sarai asked softly, “Would you want that?”

No one answered. It was too big a question. They’d all daydreamed about it, Sarai too. They’d looked at their reflections and pictured themselves brown, wearing human clothes, doing human things. Above all, they’d imagined meeting new people who didn’t look at them the way the ghosts did, with loathing that pierced their souls.

“You’d lose your gifts,” Lazlo pointed out.

“But they’d come back if we touched mesarthium again? Yours did,” said Sparrow.

“I guess so.”

It was a lot to take in. They made Minya a new bed on the floor, with a pillow under her head and a folded blanket under her body, leaving her legs and hands in contact with mesarthium. After some discussion, they made a kind of gruel by watering down the mashed kimril, and Sarai spooned dribbles of it between Minya’s lips while Lazlo held her semi-upright. The realities of caring for someone unconscious began to sink in, and it was all the clearer to Sarai that this was a short-term solution.

Ruby took the next watch, and held the green bottle between her knees, her eyes fixed on Minya’s for any flutter of lashes that might signal her waking. The others left them there. The sun was edging toward the horizon, and Sarai still didn’t know if she’d rather it speed up or stop.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that Minya was waiting for her, even in her dreams, perhaps perched in a too-big chair just like the one at the head of the table, with a quell board set up and a smile on her face, the game already in play.

Chapter 19

First Ghost Nightfall

Sarai led Lazlo out onto her terrace to watch the sun set behind the Cusp. With the ghost guards all inside, they had it to themselves: the whole open palm of the seraph.

“That’s where I fell.” Sarai pointed. She’d slid from the pad of the thumb, down the scoop of the palm, and right off the edge near the fifth finger. Lazlo’s jaw clenched as he looked around. He’d almost landed here in the silk sleigh. His first sight of Sarai—his only sight, he realized, of her both alive and real—had been here when she’d screamed from her doorway “Go!” and saved his life, and Eril-Fane’s, Azareen’s, and Soulzeren’s, too. Right in this spot, she’d both saved their lives and lost her own.

“There should be a railing,” he said.

Of course, now that seemed like a good idea. “I never felt unsafe here,” Sarai said. “I didn’t know the citadel would tip.”

She went to the edge to look out. It wasn’t an edge, per se. It curved up at the sides to form a low, sloping wall. Enough to keep one from walking off the side, but not enough to catch a person if it were to tip. And though Lazlo was determined that that wouldn’t happen again, still the sight of Sarai standing there raised the hairs on his arms. He willed a railing to sprout up before her.

“Silly,” she said, running a palm over it. “I can’t fall now. Haven’t you realized? I can fly.”

With that, she sprouted wings from her shoulders, like the ones from their wingsmith dream. Fox wings, they’d been, of all things, covered in soft orange fur. Those had been on a harness. These grew right from her shoulders. Why not? She spread them wide and fanned them down, and lifted into the air. She couldn’t go far. She couldn’t fly away. Minya’s tether held her here, but it was still a thrill. It felt as though she were really flying.

Lazlo reached up and caught her by the waist, and drew her down into his arms, and as fine as it was to fly, it was better to land like this—to moor against him and make herself fast. She settled in, arms around his neck, closed her eyes, and softly kissed him. She kissed the side she hadn’t bitten, and she was careful. She only brushed her lips against his, softly parted, playing. Lightly, she licked with the tip of her tongue. His met hers, just as lightly.