Or, they could really be brothers. Because it was clear from their reactions: These invaders in their oil-black garb with their lightning prods—these strangers—were the last godspawn taken from the nursery. They were kindred.

Sarai’s hand flew to her mouth. A thrum of wonder filled her, along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of gladness, in spite of all the fury and fear from the violence of a moment ago. Perhaps it was all a misunderstanding! She dropped her hand from her mouth to her hearts, and looked at the second man. He was young, too, sharp-featured, with dark hair and dark eyes and a shadow of beard growth. Repeating the litany in her head, she said, “I don’t suppose you’re Rook.”

She saw from his rapid blinking and hard swallow that he was. “You’re alive,” Sarai breathed. All her life this mystery had hung over them, but she had hardly dared hope that she might learn the truth from the lips of the missing children themselves. Could it be so neat? The last three taken, all returned together?

“But who are you?” asked Rook.

“We’re like you,” she told him. “We were born in the nursery, too. We’re...we’re the last.”

“The last,” repeated Kiska, taking in the five of them. Her brow furrowed. She was thinking of the last thing she saw as Less Ellen dragged her to Korako. She was thinking of Minya, and the rest— the toddlers they’d swung in their makeshift hammock. “But there were so many more.”

The fate of those others hung heavy over them all, and so did the fate of the rest, all those who came before. “There were,” Sarai said, their loss a part of her forever. “But what happened to you? Where did they take you? Are all the others alive, too?”

Kiska turned to Nova, whose ferocity had softened not a whit. Her pale brows were pinched together, her eyes slitted and flinty. They spoke, quick and harsh. Sarai couldn’t tell how much of the harshness was anger and how much was just the language. Kiska gestured toward them while she talked, explaining who they were.

Nova’s voice grew harsher still, and Kiska, flustered, nodded once, and turned back to face Sarai and the others. Sarai saw her compose herself and put her severity back in place like a mask. A chill went down her spine. Whatever kinship there was between them, she was setting it aside in favor of her allegiance to this woman. “Answer me,” said Kiska. “Where is Skathis? Where is Korako?”

If her voice had been less cold, they might have told her, but no one did. The way Nova was looking at them, it felt like a knife to their throats. What answer did she hope for? A new wave of fear washed over them all, and none of them spoke. At least, not out loud. But their minds answered the question in chorus: dead they’re dead they’re dead they’re dead. The words were echoing in Sarai’s thoughts when she saw Kiska stiffen.

She remembered then what her gift was.

Kiska was a telepath, and it was clear from the look in her eyes— the dismay, the sorrow, the fear—that “dead” was the wrong answer.

. . .

Nova saw Kiska’s look, too, and she knew it could only mean one thing. The treacherous whisper broke loose from inside her.

too late too late too late too late

Nova had peered into a volcano once, in some world whose name she’d forgotten. She’d seen magma, hot and bright, churning in its core, and that was how she felt—her gorge, like magma, rising, her rage ready to erupt. She didn’t wait for Kiska to spit out the words, stammering and sorrowful. She seized her gift.

She was already holding four gifts, and each one was a drain on her power. Kiska’s made five, as many as she’d ever held at once, and she felt the strain, but didn’t hesitate. With Kiska’s telepathy, she threw herself at the strangers’ minds and plunged right into them.

It was like flying into a tornado. She’d used Kiska’s gift before, but not often enough to get used to it—the whirl of thoughts and feelings. Fear, anguish, confusion, uncertainty assailed her eightfold and she almost recoiled. She heard the same words that Kiska had heard, but she didn’t know what they meant. Words were meaningless, but there weren’t just words. She could see their memories, too, a messy, mad tumult of them, like reflections in boiling water. There was so much chaos, so many images, but the one she wanted—or rather, the one she didn’t want, the last thing she ever wanted—was there among them. She saw, and she could not unsee, and she could not undo.

too late

She saw the life leave Kora’s eyes.

too late

She felt the knife as though it entered her own heart.

too late

Nova saw her sister die in the killer’s own memory.

forever and always too late

She let go of Kiska’s power. Kiska felt its return like a punch, and staggered with the blowback of Nova’s feelings. She wasn’t ready, and the raw emotion was crushing.

Nova was shaking all over. Her eyes had become pools of fire. The air was thickening around her with a cloud so dark it looked as though it had been pulled from a night sky with night still clinging to it. And as she shook, the room shook, too. The walkway heaved and juddered. Those on it had to grasp the rail.

“You killed my sister!” Nova wailed. She wasn’t using Werran’s scream, but her own voice was nearly as wild.

Eril-Fane heard and understood. He might almost have been waiting for this. That didn’t mean he wanted it. If he hadn’t always been sure, now he was: He wanted to live. That didn’t mean he believed he deserved to, but he wanted to, so very much. He even thought that he might be free, finally, of Isagol’s curse, because as he faced his reckoning, there was no more shadow to his love, no maggots feasting at its soft underside, but only love so pure it burned.

Whatever happened to him, though, he would protect all the others as he had failed to before. Azareen, the children. He had another chance to do that, at least. “Get out of here, all of you,” he told them. “Go!”

Little Sparrow was beside him. He gave her a nudge back up the walkway toward the door. She grabbed Ruby’s hand and tugged her along, both of them clinging to the railing as the walkway shuddered underfoot. Lazlo was still on his knees, Sarai crouched beside him. Eril-Fane took his daughter’s arm, pulled her upright, and urged her, “Go,” as he pulled Lazlo up, too. He was a commander. His voice brooked no dissent. Feral wrapped a protective arm around Suheyla and braced her between himself and the railing as they made their way back toward the door. Azareen did not leave Eril-Fane’s side.

He said to the goddess, in her language—how he hated the feel of it in his mouth!—“They are innocent. Please. Let them go.”

Azareen didn’t understand the language, but she understood his fixed footing well enough. He wasn’t retreating. Why wasn’t he retreating? “Come on.” She pulled at him but couldn’t budge him. His eyes were riveted on the goddess.

Nova was beyond thinking. The whisper had become a roar. TOO LATE. TOO LATE. Grief, formless and rampant, was sucking at her and pounding at her till she could hardly feel her own edges. She was entangled in dark mist with her eyes on fire, spilling out wrath, pain, and power. And all of it, right or wrong, was directed at her sister’s killer.

Azareen saw the burning gaze, and she felt her husband’s stillness. She looked back and forth between the two. Her eyes were open very wide, rings of white showing full around her irises, like someone who’s just bolted upright from a nightmare to find the nightmare real all around her. She’d known something was coming. Since she saw the bird’s shadow fall over Eril-Fane, she’d known and been powerless to stop it. Wasn’t there anything she might have done? Fought harder, raged harder, made him listen? She shook her head, still trying to deny it. She shook her head and shook it as though she couldn’t stop, would never stop defending him or defying fate or waiting for him to come back to her.

Nova raised a hand. The energy of the mesarthium surrounded her. She conducted it like music. The wasp ships were on the wall. Their stingers were as long as spears and as sharp as needles. At the lightest touch of her mind, they disengaged and hung poised in the air.

Eril-Fane and Azareen saw at the same moment. At least, they saw one of them. And as it shot like an arrow, Azareen raised her sword and stepped in front of her husband.

A deep horror filled him. He roared, “Azareen, NO!”

The stinger was a blur.

Azareen’s hreshtek blurred to meet it.

There was a sound, too small and sweet, almost like a bell’s chime, as she knocked the stinger away. It careened, spinning, off course, hit the wall, and fell to the floor.

Eril-Fane’s roar of protest died. He said, with an edge of desperation, “Azareen, go with the others. Please.”

She shook her head, grim, and adjusted her grip on her sword.

He remembered the first time he’d handed her a hreshtek, in the training cave when they were just children. He remembered her look of wonder, and the first awkward clash of their blades, and he remembered the first desperate touch of their lips, and he remembered her screams in the sinister wing, and he remembered her hollow-eyed after it was all over and the gods were dead and she needed her husband but he couldn’t even hold her because his soul was filthy. But she had never forsaken him, and he knew she never would. She would share his fate, whatever it was.

And she did. She shared it exactly.

The second wasp was on the wall behind them. They never saw the stinger coming.

If Azareen hadn’t stepped in front of him to deflect the first, she would still have been at his side, clear of the path of the second stinger when it hit between his shoulder blades and cut right between his hearts to burst out of his chest, slicing through his armor with an eruption of blood that painted her red in the instant before it cut through her, too—as though they were as insubstantial as Wraith, as ethereal as Sarai. But they were neither smoke nor phantom. They were flesh and blood and bronze, and the stinger ripped through them. It was moving with so much raw power it didn’t slow, but shot across the chamber to strike the far wall with a faint, bright tink! before rebounding to cartwheel backward in slow motion, spraying blood as it spun.