Chapter 74:

The gap in the shelterbelt had been forced wider. Bits of hair, clothes, and traces of blood marked the branches that surrounded it. The ground beneath had been trampled, the soil packed tight under hundreds of footsteps. Trembling, and favoring her injured foot, Mayah passed the gap and crept on towards the Cursed urb. She almost fell into the Gather’s Children ditch before she saw it. The ditch’s skin-sheet roof was gone. A cloud of smoke had replaced it, a sour, stinking cinder-filled smoke that made Mayah want to throw up. Grateful she still had the breathflower mask on, Mayah took in one careful breath after another.

Inside the Gather’s Children ditch the air was better, as the smoke was rising, not falling. But when Mayah’s head emerged out of the ditch on the eastern side, she gagged, almost choking. What was that smell?

And why was it so silent?

Mayah pulled herself up and out of the ditch. As she did so, the wind picked up, clearing the smoke a little. Out of the haze, the lodge roofs around her emerged. All of them bore gashes. Here, a ragged cut gave testimony to a knife’s jagged edges, there, a singed hole still smoldered. The smoke-filled night seeped through the gaps like blood, like the blood coming out of the bodies that lay, contorted, all around the urb.

Her entire frame shaking, Mayah limped her way through the littered urb. In the atreola, a mound of stinking bodies lay heaped up only a few paces from the dais. This time Mayah actually did throw up. When she was done, she pulled off her ruined breathflower mask, and, throwing it to the side, stumbled as fast as she could into the eastern half of the urb.

The Jinkari lodge… it was around here somewhere… it was… oh Sarana… oh Tanush…

He was lying face down, right next to the Jinkari meal bench, not even a handbreadth away from it. Numb with shock, Mayah touched his shoulder. For a moment she thought she could wake him up, that he was just sleeping. But then she saw the blood-soaked soil all around him, and the knife wound out of which the blood had come. With a ragged breath, she stepped back, when something in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned her head. It was Shib-vyn’s dead body, tossed up against the mound of the Jinkari lodge.

Wildly Mayah looked around her. As far as she could see under the green and blue glow of the breathflower leaves, she was the only living person in the urb.

It was too much. Mayah couldn’t stumble across another body that she knew. She just couldn’t. She had to hide, to escape. Avoiding looking at Shib-vyn’s body, Mayah fled into the Jinkari lodge. The rubber mats and furs were still rolled and stacked in place; the water vat and waste bowl were still on their ledges.

Forcing everything outside her mind, Mayah went to the vat and drank deeply. Once she was no longer thirsty, she peeled off her clothes and cleaned herself. Then she used the waste bowl, flushing it down with water from the drain-bucket. After getting re-dressed, she ate dried meat from her pack and drank from the vat again. Finally, when she was finished, she unrolled a rubber mat and fur, lay down, and allowed sleep to claim her.

***

For two nights and two days, Mayah remained hidden inside the lodge, sleeping, eating, and drinking water. When she finally emerged, the sun was setting. She spent the last hour of sunlight wandering through the lodges and meal benches, looking through the bodies.

Almost all the dead were men. Most had the angular features Mayah had learned to associate with the old-Tabled Cursed. The women who had been killed were all old-Tabled as well. Here and there a myxte Cursed man lay stiff on the ground, but most of the myxte dead were children like Tanush, or elderly like Shib-vyn.

No myxte Cursed woman, no woman with any overbelter blood in her at all, was among the dead.

And neither was Sukren.

After Mayah was done circuiting the urb, she stumbled to the library. Torn out of their rubber sleeves, half the books were ripped apart. The forge was still standing, though, and thank Sarana, it blocked the smell and sight of the rest of the urb. Facing the shelterbelt, Mayah leaned back against the forge and slid down until she was sitting on the ground. She stared at the torn flaps of rubber and vellum all around her. She watched the shadows of the shelterbelt trees lengthen until they disappeared into the night’s darkness.

Only then did the hollow feeling in her chest erupt.

“Oh,” she wept, unable to form even a single word. “Oh, oh! Oh!”

Tears streamed down her face. How could this have happened? How could the Cursed urb and everyone in it be dead? They’d all been alive only a few diurnals ago, they’d all been so alive…

Her chest was heaving. Mayah buried her face in her arms and cried aloud. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

Still sobbing, she staggered to her feet. She had to go and find them, find the ones who were left, find Lainla and Sukren, and – oh Sarana – who was Mayah that an army would come after her? Because Mayah knew, she knew, she knew, she knew, that it was because of her that this attack had happened. She knew it from the bottom of her soles to the top of her crown. She knew it without knowing how she knew. The thought that had seemed embarrassing to her at the top of the mountains no longer felt ridiculous. It felt terrible, like a nightmare come to life.

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By taking her in, the Cursed had paid the ultimate price. Oh Sarana! They had argued so much about whether or not to accept the other overbelters as true Gather’s Children. They had been so worried about the cost. But they’d let Mayah slip in through the cracks even though it was her, and her alone, who’d presented the real danger…

Think, she commanded herself. Who did this? Only someone inside the shelterbelt could have. But who? The Xhota, it had to be. Nobody else had access to the gap in the shelterbelt. And hadn’t Rajani shared that story one time about how the Xhota almost arrested one of her Chenta-Cursed friends? They wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t already won political control of their quinter. And it would also explain the dead bodies in the atreola! The Xhota had burned their dead, they’d honored their own, and left the Cursed to rot.

Yet at the same time… for all Mayah knew, the political situation in the bio-dome had changed again. Stoneset Quinter could be ruled now by the Eenta or the Chenta or… the Free Serfs.

Mayah took a deep breath. This, at least, she could hold onto: some of the Cursed, Lainla included – and Sukren with them – had been taken into Stoneset Quinter. By whom, Mayah wasn’t sure. But there was only one way to find out.

Mayah strode up to the half-torn library. There were a handful of rubber sleeves that weren’t completely destroyed; she chose two of them. With her bare hands, she dug out two holes by the side of the rubber forge. In one hole she placed the journal and the dictionary, both of them wrapped in rubber. In the other she placed the Dome Ring. Finally, she covered both holes up, stamping down the dirt until the area was as even and smooth as before.

Then Mayah turned her face west, towards the gap in the shelterbelt. You can do this, she told herself. There’s something different about you, remember? Something special, like Vek said. You’ve done things no princess has ever done before. You escaped a castle. You crossed the shelterbelt to go and live among the Cursed. You even left the bio-dome itself. So you can do this. You can find them. You will. After what they paid for your sake, you have to.

***

Sukren did the best he could to care for himself. Bandages he made from his clothes to wrap around his eyes. Whatever drink or food was thrust into his hand, he consumed it all. The Cursed around him helped lead him to the wash-barrel the first time he needed it; after that Sukren went alone, making sure to do so regularly. There was little he could do, however, to fight the onset of infection.

Rajani would come by sometimes to tell him what was going on. Feverish, his eye sockets inflamed, Sukren would listen, then go back to sleep. The only time he truly paid attention was when Rajani told him that Lainla had let Mayah leave the bio-dome the day after Rajani had been arrested.

From the way she told him, Sukren could tell Rajani expected Sukren to be angry. But all he could think of was the prophecy: Over the shelterbelt, the Rajas Daughter who is Promised, Must go. Over and to The Lake Tower, Her feet will tread. With the Ring of the Dome, Dripping in her hand.

Maybe Lady Nari had been wrong all this time. Maybe the prophecy wasn’t a set of instructions after all. Sukren had certainly never encouraged Mayah to leave the bio-dome. And he’d never even hinted at the existence of the Lake Tower. Maybe Mayah going on her own was just more proof that Sukren had utterly no control, none at all, and – oh Sarana, was this really going to be the rest of his life, was this really going to be it?

Relief came eventually in the form of a liquid painkiller. The Cursed had procured a bulb of it, somehow, and it got passed along to Sukren. He gulped it down. It washed away some of the hurt and dulled the rest.

He was aware at some point of being required to move. All around him were the sounds of people getting to their feet and shuffling forward. How long he walked among them he couldn’t say. The voices nearest to him never changed, but after some time, the voices further away shifted from Xhom to Eenma. The part of Sukren that was still alert realized that meant they had left Stoneset Quinter.

A little while later, two Eenma voices grew louder. Soon they seemed to be coming from the space right in front of him. He heard one of them curse. “Damn Xhota.”

The other replied in the castle serf pidgin. “They didn’t know who they had. That was the point.”

Hands reached out of nowhere and pulled him forward. His sense of being surrounded by other people disappeared as Sukren was led through what felt like, from the change in the air, a doorway leading into a building.

A castle, he guessed. Greenhouses were warmer.

He was guided eventually to a bed. He could tell he was now inside a clinic from the taste of chemicals in the air and the bed rails on either side of the mattress. His left hand was taken and manacled with a bioplastic tie to the left bed rail. The same was done to his right hand. Then he heard a voice above him call for a doctor-priest.

Footsteps and heavy breathing announced the doctor-priest’s presence. Sukren wondered if he knew him. It wouldn’t be unlikely. Eenta, Chenta and Xhota had been proportionately represented among the doctor-priests and regents. Sukren had pulled many shifts on unsegregated teams.

But if the doctor-priest knew Sukren, he didn’t say so, and he didn’t introduce himself. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Someone stabbed my eyes,” Sukren replied.

Sukren felt fingers drawing up his makeshift bandage. He shied away from them. He didn’t like the sensation of being vulnerable to other people’s touch when he himself couldn’t use his hands. Feet and fingers, those were his eyes now. When they were restrained, he had no control over what he perceived.

But like it or not, this was Sukren’s reality. He had to endure it until he could find a way out. So when another hand drew up his tattered sleeve, Sukren held himself still. The prick of a needle in his arm followed. He recognized the drugs flooding his system. They were the same ones he had used to put Mayah to sleep back before they crossed the shelterbelt.

I wonder where she is now, he thought, as the medication took hold. I wonder if she’s found the Lake Tower. Maybe she’s already found a way back to Earth. Oh Sarana, I wish I could go with her, back to when she was a child, I wish I could go back, I want to go back, please, let me go back –