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Chapter Text

i.

On the onyx crags of the Isle of Voldsoy, the last colony of Nedarii gathers to hear a course of the future.

They sit encircling their fire. The leaping flames reflect in the marble of their eyes. Heat turns the ice to glittering dew that slicks the walls of the cavern. Rarely is this cave full. Every creature that still lives upon the Isle has come tonight. Foragers sort their sticks and twine, and explorers share sweet berries with eager-eyed fawns. Infants barely old enough to open their eyes are bundled against their parents’ backs, and aging elders lean against their children. Still, the last colony is few.  

In their language of notes and shapes and letters, plucked from drafts and polished beauty, they speak of their livelihoods. They pass broth between their paws—a drink brewed from bone and sea salt and inspiration. They leave space by the cavern fissure, where the sky shines inside, in deference to the long-dead Beast of Paladin Straight. The dragon and the colonies had been Voldsoy’s skeleton, once. Now, there are only a few scattered Nedarii ribs. 

Quiet falls when a paw lifts above the flames. It belongs to a Nedarii with a full rack of branched antlers. The leader of the colony is called by a name approximating its beauty, one poemrhythmgrace, and it bids quiet among the cavern. A fawn cries, and is shushed. 

In the language of the Nedarii, it speaks to its friends. Voldsoy is strong. Your numbers show the fundament remains. Thank you for being here. 

The Nedarii sing and cluck and metaphorize. What news? What news of Trench?

Our fellows across the Straight tell of a great change. This was strange news to poemrhythmgrace, who had lived very long and seen very little change. There has been music in Dema.

Whispers and titters echo amongst the last colony. A voice.

A Voice, corrects poemrhythmgrace. Our fellows heard it from fissures and the cliffs. It was strong, like those of the lostpriests.

It came from Dema? Doubt, from the Nedarii. The City strips the Voices from its citizens with blood, and the colony has not seen someone that took after their ancient friends in a very long time. It was not born of Trench?

Indeed. The dance of poemrhythmgrace hides its hesitance. Though the dragon is dead, it still has a duty not to deceive. It creates, but it is in defiance. 

What would you call it?

A breath. A paw traced along the curve of antlers. Art. At least, its potential. 

Art. There are motions of excitement. The Nedarii turn grins and black eyes upon each other, extending their paws as pledges. Let it be so. 

Let it be so, says poemrhythmgrace. 

Perhaps one day, we may give our gift again. 

At this, the leader of the last colony balks. That day may be near, it says. That Artist may be this one. 

How? How?

You know of the Trenchwalkers. Those who escape the City, says poemrhythmgrace. They walk in the footprints of a human.

The Nedarii know of this creature. They know it is bright like a compass is bright. Yes. Yes. 

Our fellows dwelling in Trench say that it knows the Artist’s power, too, poemrhythmgrace says. Creation is strengthened by number. There have been Voices before, and there have been escapees before, but never in tandem.

The Nedarii regard their elder and the sky behind it. They have watched the suffering of humans for a long time. They have tried to provide respite, to lead the lost to the joy the Nedarii burn with. But their power is the lifeblood of the City. Every Nedarii lives with the guilt of this, and the grief for the colonies long-extincted.

The leader of the last colony lifts its paws to its antlers, and its eyes to the stars. Hear this, it says. Know what is to come. 

Far within, fear turns to conviction. Far above, a vulture with yellow eyes circles on dead wings. Far away, a man clings to the stem of a golden flower and begins to question. 

Say the Nedarii, it will come: 

A car. A torch. A death.

ii.

Fourteen years ago

A boy walks the border of the Necropolis. He is not supposed to be there, and he knows this in the way a child knows things—idly and incompletely. He is still a child, though he would insist otherwise. Adulthood is an honor in Dema, and age is a disgrace. 

The Glorious Vista drops away beneath the boy’s right hand, mud and rock sloping down toward the gathered districts of the city in its center. The Vista is perfectly circular. Asphalt roads cut radiating lines of grey from each sector to the lip of the Necropolis, which stands at the boy’s left. Vast and flat, the Necropolis is churned black mud and the smell of tombs. The stark white light of countless gravestones makes the mud gleam like oil-slick. So far away that they look like toys, the Walls of Dema stand unbroken. The boy can see figures shambling through the lines upon lines of white tombstones, washed out to black silhouettes by the harshness of their light. Gravediggers—loathsome, godless creatures. 

The boy looks across the fields of graves and shies back. He made the journey in secret. It had been so simple in his mind, and climbing those hundreds of stairs was unexpectedly pleasant. His feet had struck the concrete in a particular rhythm, and he’d hummed while he ascended. The boy likes humming. 

But there are simply so many graves. Even more, he thinks, than the stars he used to count on rare clear nights when he snuck from his bed in the bunker and pushed away the curtains to look beyond the Towers of Silence.

The boy has come looking for one grave in particular. Evan had been very lucky; only fourteen when the Lights chose her and she went home to paradise. Barely older than the boy now searching for her gravestone. They had slept near each other in the bunker, and though the boy is glad for her, proud of her honor, he has a strange feeling when he thinks of her. When he goes to perform his duties and knows she will not do the same. 

She is free of Dema. Is he envious? He knows that feeling. Perhaps envy is what he feels now, in a way. 

The boy’s feet slide in the black mud. He tries to steady himself on one of the gravestones. The glass burns, the misty white light inside dreadfully hot. He pulls his hand back, hissing. 

“Hey,” says a ghastly voice. “Don’t do that. What are you doing here?”

The boy turns. He nearly breaks into a run back to the stairs, but he thinks the mud has swallowed him up to knees. One of the gravediggers is standing before him. It’s a tall, gangly thing, a boy with strangely curled hair and rags covering its mouth and nose. Mud and rot cake its hands. It looks barely older than the boy himself. 

The boy makes the Sign of Nine. “The disgraced aren’t permitted to speak to citizens,” he says. 

The gravedigger does something odd—it circles its eyes in its head and groans. “And smarmy kids aren’t supposed to come to the Necropolis without Glorified supervision. Here you are.” 

“I’m looking for something,” says the boy.

“Aren’t we all?” says the gravedigger. 

“Evan went home two days ago.” The boy looks over his shoulder, then down at his hands. He wonders if the gravedigger can poison him somehow, can mark him a way that will damn him when he returns to the city. “She was of district four. Nico.”

“I’m sorry,” says the gravedigger.

The boy doesn’t understand. “She is honored among us. Why would you be sorry?”

“I used to feel bad when people got chosen. I still feel bad,” says the gravedigger.

The boy scoffs. “You are disgraced. You rejected paradise, defiled Vialism and your Bishop. Of course you feel shame.” 

The gravedigger does that strange movement with its eyes again. “God, what an ideal citizen you must be. Look, I don’t want to debate this with you; I have things to do. So, are you coming or not?”

The gravedigger starts to limp through the lines of light. The boy calls out, “coming where?” He has heard such terrible stories of the Necropolis in chapel. 

“To Evan’s grave. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“You’re going to help me?”

The gravedigger says, “sure. What more can they to me?” 

The boy trips over himself to catch up. This time, he doesn’t touch the gravestones. The light inside them hisses lowly, just beneath what he can comfortably hear. It’s a thunderous buzz throughout the fields. The boy can hear his own teeth shifting at its frequency, and it’s not quite painful. He begins to hum. The way the gravestones pulse makes an interesting layer beneath the notes. 

“That’s… nice,” says the gravedigger. It sounds surprised. 

The boy stops humming sharply. He hadn’t realized the gravedigger could hear him or would care. Singing outside chapel is punishable. “What is?”

“I’m not going to tell on you,” the gravedigger says, and now its voice is gentler. “It’s okay. I promise. Evan is here.”

They stop before a grave. It looks akin to all the others—churned black mud, reflecting the boy’s face. It’s a single vertical post of white, about five feet high and thin enough that the boy could touch his thumb and forefinger together around its circumference. It glows blindingly. 

The boy looks at it and feels… nothing. The same, really, as he had walking through the Necropolis, the same as he had that morning, the same as he will feel, he is sure, every day that follows. It was stupid of him to come here. 

“Hey, are you alright?”

The boy blinks. The white light is blurring in his eyes, and his cheeks are wet. “What’s going on?” he says. “What is it?”

“Oh,” says the gravedigger. “Nothing, I suppose. Nevermind. Just—it’s okay. You’ll be okay, even though she’s gone.” 

“Of course I will,” says the boy. “And when they Light the Road for me, I will join her.” 

The gravedigger’s face moves in a way that the boy sees very rarely. When his coworker, Saratal, had sliced his arm on one of the engines they were constructing, he had made an expression like the gravedigger. When the Glorified that used to watch over the bunker had grown sick, she had made that expression. The boy wonders if he has ever looked like that. He hopes not. 

“It's not so bad,” says the gravedigger, “being alive. I mean. It's bad. But it's good too, it can be. I know it.”

The boy makes the Sign of Nine to ward off the curses this creature is spewing. The gravedigger lurches forward. 

“Just promise you'll consider it. When you're chosen. You can always live, instead. Always.” 

“Don't say such things, disgrace,” says the boy. 

“It's Josh,” the gravedigger says. 

“What?” 

“Not ‘gravedigger’, or ‘disgrace’. My name's still Josh.” 

It's a familiar name. Normal. There are three with that name in the boy's district that he knows of, and he wonders how many others are scattered throughout the City. Just humans, waiting to die like all the rest of them. Hearing it here does something to the boy, like when his bench-mates sing the wrong note of the Vialistic harmony. It’s unpleasant. 

“You shouldn’t tell me that,” says the boy. 

The gravedigger tugs the rag away from its face. It—he, the boy supposes—has chapped lips and blood around his nostrils. “I think I should. I think I should do whatever I want. I think you should tell everyone your name, as often as you can. We have nothing else, so we might as well give all we can. Don’t you think?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just… ugh. I also think you shouldn’t have to go back to the City because of what they’ll do to you if they find out you were here, but that one’s not something I can do anything about right now.” 

The boy looks back toward the Towers of Silence, and he can see the sun shining between them. When had it gotten so late? His hands scramble for his elbows, crossed in front of him. He turns to the gravedigger, and takes a careful step away. Something seems wrong, as though he is leaving the warehouse without being dismissed. Can he simply leave?

“It’s okay,” says the gravedigger. “You don’t have to say anything.”

It’s true. He doesn’t. He has nothing to say to the lowliest of Dema’s citizens, the criminals that disgrace the peace of the city. The grave beside him flickers and spits moon-white sparks. The mud slithers beneath his shoes. He doesn’t stop clutching at his arms.

And he halts, a dozen steps closer to the Towers. Perhaps he does not wish to let a gravedigger have the last word. Perhaps he wishes for a few more seconds outside the looming district walls. Perhaps there is something the gravedigger said that lingers, that reminds him of something he might want to understand. Someday. 

He looks over his shoulder. The gravedigger does, too, and they wait, the pulsing grave between them. 

 “I'm Clancy,” says the boy. 

Chapter Text

PART ONE: WELCOME TO TRENCH

The skies above Dema are clear for the first time in four years on the day Clancy is to die. 

It is oppressively warm, and the concrete walls sweat dust within the great chamber of the Tower. Clancy stands in a loose ring with the thousands of his district fellows. No one speaks, but the sound of so many breathing in such proximity is thunderous. He has always found the low rumble peaceful. When one set of lungs falls still, it is obvious and yet instantly forgotten. Each time the Road is Lit, Clancy thinks only of the sound.

Far above, a circle of color betrays the smogless sky. The Tower is so tall that Clancy could block it out with one palm. The circular walls seem to lean inward, converging to that point of blue that has only ever been gray, and Clancy thinks it is a sign of honor for him. 

There are so many people—every person that lives with purpose, anywhere in the vast and empty world, is standing and breathing in these walls. Each holds a knife; the same knife they were born beside, that lay beside each of them in their cribs. 

When he speaks, Nico’s voice is clear. It is always clear, like he stands right beside Clancy. 

“Citizens of Dema,” he says. He has a low voice, like waves crashing, like the collapse of a neutron star. It is unfathomably heavy. Just hearing it drags at Clancy’s eyelids. “The Gloried Nine of the Vialist Council welcome you. The moon has waned and the calendars have torn, and it is time once again for the heart of Dema to beat its lifeblood.”

“Life to the city,” says Clancy. It comes from twenty-one-thousand throats, under the breath of a city that turns it to a roar. 

“For the rest that we await,” Nico says. “For you, honored in your motionlessness. For some of you, the road begins today.” 

Clancy lowers his eyes from the pinprick of sky above. In the center of the tower, their districts radiating from them in rows, the Bishops stand in ruby red. They are untouched. Resplendent in their robes and their cowls, merely the memory of faces, as their hands cradle glass vases of Neon. Each has an enormous, ebony vulture on their shoulder. The creatures’ yellow eyes flick through the gathered ranks of citizens. 

“Let us Light the way,” says Nico. The Bishops raise their hands. Along the walls, great streaks of Neon splash the concrete to a sharp lattice of bone. The light bleaches the Tower in stark black and white. Even the Bishops’ robes are more black than red. 

Clancy is too far from the walls to touch. He knows all the same that the neon would be hot, and perfect, and torturous. His fingertips buzz. He bites his lip to stop himself from humming. 

The Bishops lower their hands. Like curtains drawing open, the great black wings of the vultures extend. The thunderous breath of the citizens catches all at once. 

Keons’ vulture takes off first. It is as thoughtful as its master, scrutinizing the rings of citizens beneath it. Clancy watches it circle, and one by one, the other vultures join the patterns of its wingbeats.

All eyes watch the birds. The choice of paradise is on their feathers. Clancy’s gaze flickers to the shadows of the Nine. Nico’s voice has left What’s Heavy dripping from his skin, but traces of the other Bishops’ power linger beneath it like aftertastes. Clancy can barely perceive Keons’ Unknown; Sacarver’s Craved; Listo’s Falsehood; Lisden’s Lost. The cocktail of Neon overpowers any hint of hesitation Clancy might have clung to. He does not remember that he wanted to hum. 

The shadow of a vulture passes above him. Reisdro’s watcher, the vulture of What’s Lonely.  Its silent wings leave smokey trails through the Neon. 

The crowd is still. Tens of thousands of bodies, tied in symmetry. Utterly silent, Clancy waits for the choice of gods, the determination of destiny.

The vulture tucks its wings. A woman from the second district lifts her arm, and the vulture lands upon it. Its claws clasp around her wrist like manacles. The vulture lets out a great shriek.

The woman closes her eyes. She lifts the blade of her knife to her wrist, guided by the vulture’s talons. 

Another cry. In the eighth ring, Andre’s vulture chooses a boy with a scar on his lip. The smell of blood joins the mist of neon in the air. 

Clancy hears wingbeats. He looks up. When he sees storms on the horizon, rolling in on slow drifts of wind and pressure, he thinks of vultures. Of inevitability. He can see the Lights of the Road. He can see Nico’s eyes in yellow and gold. The vulture tucks its wings. 

Clancy is still thinking of storms. Still thinking of horizons. In chapel, the Glorified told him that, in paradise, beauty is as easy as breathing. They told him he would walk the Road in honor, lit by red and white and yellow, and meaning would finally be his. 

Black feathers brush his face. Before him: yellow lines and white neon, red skin and black fingernails. Paradise on the edge of a blade. Clancy has always imagined that paradise would be gentle and empty. He thinks that’s what he’s always wanted. Nothing. 

(When he was a boy, he wanted to hold a star.)

The vulture’s claws curl around his ragged sleeve. It scrutinizes him. Its eyes are vacant as a mirror. Sweat slicks Clancy’s hand on the handle of his knife. 

(When he was a boy, he wanted to visit a grave.)

The vulture cocks its head. Clancy lifts his knife. What would honor sound like, he wonders, on strings and frets? How would he strike the glass of the Neon alters so they rang with the same notes he hears right before he falls asleep?

(Is there music in paradise?) 

Hot blood paints his face and hands. Clancy slips his knife out of the ribs of the vulture. Blade and bird fall to the concrete at his feet. 

There is silence. His heart is loud as a drum. Tears drip down his jaw, and the lights of the Road are gone.

He feels eyes on him. They make him feel—something. Like a bite of bread after too long with an empty stomach. Look at me, he thinks, nonsensically. Listen to me, and never stop. I am, I am. No one has ever listened to him, but he thinks they could. He thinks he has something that they could not turn away from. 

He opens his mouth. 

A hand settles on his shoulder. Barely touching. It is so Heavy that Clancy collapses to the concrete.

“What is the meaning of this?” says the Lord of the Forth, Drowned King, Architect of Dema, the Bishop Nico. Clancy’s knees melt into the earth. 

Dead vulture eyes gaze at Clancy. Twice-dead. His knife has fallen within his reach. His hand is too heavy to reach for it. His thoughts are too heavy. Why would he wish to retrieve the knife at all? 

“Clancy,” says Nico. His name in a Bishop’s voice stuns Clancy. “What is the meaning of this?”

Clancy sees his face in the corpse’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he whispers.

“You extinguish the light of paradise. You reject the call of Vialism. Upon turning from Truth, you are disgraced.” 

There is a lance in Clancy’s chest, bloodying his breath. Fear, he thinks. The likes of which he’s never felt. “No,” he says. “No, I—” 

“Do not look at me.”

Clancy turns his gaze back down. He can see the feet of the other citizens encircling him. “I don’t know what happened,” he says. “The beast flew for us. But not for me. I thought—that I could take it for myself, the choice, that I could—”

The hand tightens, and the sensation of claws is now familiar. Clancy stops talking. He is shaking. 

“Envy,” says Nico, “is a Light of the Road. But disobedience is punishable.”

“I know, Bishop.” 

“You murder a holy beast, desperate to step into paradise.” Nico releases him. “Stand.”

Clancy struggles through the curtain of What’s Heavy. He drags himself to his feet. The Bishop smells of glass and rot. What little of his face that Clancy can see is ashen grey. The same ash coats Clancy’s mouth and lips, fills his bones.

“Bishop?” 

Nico reaches into his sleeve and produces a knife. Not a citizen’s knife; this is a blade of Glory and bone, nearly as long as Clancy’s forearm. Nico presses its hilt into Clancy’s hand. 

“If you are so impatient for your turn,” says Nico, “then take it.” 

Clancy’s arm shakes beneath the weight of the blade. Faces of citizens are reflected in the metal, their features too warped to identify. “You… reward me?” 

“I am a guide, not a captor,” says Nico. “I won’t keep you from committing to Vialism, if you have heard it so strongly.” 

The vulture’s blood is drying on Clancy’s face. It is an honor beyond gods to hold the blade of a Bishop. To walk the Road with it. 

(To die with it. Die, when there are stars to hold.)

Clancy looks at Nico. He does not know the words to describe the Bishop’s face, the twist to those pale lips, the glint of the blackened eyes. The red veil does not obscure the truth. 

This is a test. A game that Clancy cannot win. There is no music in paradise, Clancy knows, but maybe he will remember it when he’s gone. 

He lifts the knife. Closes his eyes. A note slips from his lips. Another. A poem scratched into bedposts where it will never be seen, a chorus he’s never dared sing aloud. For fear of punishment. For fear that if he was heard, it would change nothing at all. What is there to be afraid of, now?

Heavy. 

Cold metal presses into the skin of Clancy’s wrists. He sings. 

Dirty. 

A hand catches his own. 

“Stop,” says Keons’ voice, graveled and taunt with Unknown, and Clancy freezes. 

Silence fills with whisps of Neon. Clancy stands between two gods, red smeared on black feathers between them. Keons’s gaze flays him apart in layers. Nico only sneers. 

“You overstep, Number Three,” says Nico. 

“I heard him,” Keons replies. “You would waste a vessel like that simply to make an example.” 

“You forget what our City is made of.” 

Keons says, “it is you who forgets, my Lord.” 

The Bishops watch each other. Keons’ vulture returns to his shoulder, fluttering its feathers. It has a shred of viscera in its beak. Clancy’s own gut twinges. 

“Dismissed,” says Nico. He wrenches the blade away from Clancy. Then he turns and strides back through the crowd. The citizens part before him, and he leaves white Neon footprints.

Clancy has fallen to his knees again. He spits Neon and blood between his teeth. It clings to his lips in wet strings. 

“Stand, Clancy,” says Keons. He offers a gloved hand. 

Clancy accepts. Hundreds of people are watching, and it no longer feels right. Now, his skin crawls. 

“I’m not going to paradise?” Clancy asks. His voice should shake, but it doesn’t. 

“Nico will not send you anywhere you do not want to go yourself,” says Keons. 

“I want to go,” Clancy says. “We all do. I am—I am no disgrace.” 

Keons says nothing. He turns away, and Clancy is left with no honor, no answers, and the bloody corpse of a vulture. 

The first time someone touches him after the ceremony, they become breathless. Mute with fear. The second time, a child brushes passed him accidentally in the back of the chapel and flees, weeping. 

No one speaks to Clancy. No one helps him. The Glorified of Heavy look at him like he is an undug grave. 

He hears Nico’s voice. When he wakes from sleep. In his footsteps. In the engine of the bus he rides to the Towers every morning, alone, surrounded by blurred faces. “Is this what you wanted, Clancy?” 

Paradise would have been better than this. Clancy feels like thunder. 

Clancy scrapes a spoon along the ceramic of his bowl. He can’t recall what he’d eaten. The dusty taste still coats his mouth. 

He’s drawn the curtains of his room in the bunker. Through the thin walls, he hears nothing. His neighbors listen when he sings now, and it’s too much and not enough. Clancy misses the ceremony, sometimes—but not the vulture. 

He runs his fingers along the plastic curve of the folding table. There are tally marks scratched into it by the blunted tip of a pencil. A word, every now and then. ‘Therefore’. ‘Limp’. ‘Save’. They feel unfinished. 

Restless, he stands. He curls his fingers in the curtain. Even through the thready fabric, he can see the corona of the Necropolis. It bleaches his skin white. Clancy used to count the gravestones, and when he opens the curtain, his fingers feel cold. Where would his grave have sat? How close to the walls?

Perhaps it would have been closer than Clancy had ever gotten, in life. 

He shuts the curtain quickly, and he presses his back against the wall. Mist and clouds extend beyond the walls of Dema. They swallow nothing. Clancy believes the blue of the sky, so endless on clear days, is stored on the other side. An endless reservoir of blue paint. He imagines drowning in it. 

It’s quiet. Quiet as dawn. Clancy wishes he could hear footsteps in the hall, a neighbor cleaning dishes, or a child bouncing a ball in the street. A beat, just to keep his mind from the sky. 

But there’s nothing.

Someone has written a word on the alley wall. Amidst air thick with exhaust, Clancy stops halfway across the road and stares. 

‘Heavydirtysoul,’ reads the chalky scrawl. Clancy’s ears ring. 

A horn honks. Clancy dodges back to let the car pass. It’s black and rusted. So are Clancy’s fingernails as he digs them into his palm. He’s supposed to be back at the bunker, settling into his cot for the long night. He will need to be back at the Tower before dawn. District West is on maintenance rotation. Clancy is sure they had been assigned elsewhere previously, but he can’t quite remember the task. Likely something in the chantry cells where Keons conducts his research into the Eternal Vessel. It’s always difficult to remember Keons’ assignments. 

When the road is clear, Clancy creeps across anyway. He touches the wall. Chalk rubs away on his fingertips. It’s soft, like cinders. 

He doesn’t understand. No one should whisper words like these for fear of making the same mistake he did. Inviting the same blood. 

He looks into the alley. It retreats into darkness, tracked with the open lids of dumpsters. The reek of trash almost obscures the pure scent of Dema—like graveyard dirt and copper. Clancy sees no movement. 

He looks over his shoulder. The street is clear. 

The flimsy shaft of his pencil is buried at the bottom of his pocket. He sorts through lists, assignment tickets, and coins for the bus fare to reach it. He pulls it free and spins it over his fingers. 

Something winds in his throat. With every circle of the pencil, it becomes tighter. 

He kneels. Beneath the word on the wall, he writes. It’s a spider’s scrawl, barely visible. 

‘Just to say something.’ 

He leaves quickly. His heart jackhammers long into the night. He snaps the pencil in half with how hard he clutches it. 

The next day, the words on the wall have been painted over in perfect grey. The whole city seems colorless, in a way Clancy has never noticed before. 

The Fourth Chapel is the grandest building in the district. It’s constructed of black brick and silver mortar. Crowned with a ring of Neon, it sheds a shadow in all directions. 

Clancy sits cross-legged in one of nine gathered dozens. Marble pillars rise to the ceiling, draped in red fabric, and the room is dark but for the high skylight. The dais, elevated a few feet above the concrete ground like a stage, is eye-height with Clancy. It holds the darkened alter. Five thin tubes of glass intersect each other, forming the symbol of the Lost. 

The citizens sit silent, still as the honor bids. A Glorified in red approaches the dais and bows. She ascends the stairs, keeping her back to the citizens, and reaches into her robe. She produces a vial. Clancy’s breath catches. 

“Praise to the Glorious Gone,” says the Storyteller. “Strength to Dema.” 

“Strength to Dema,” echoes the congregation. Clancy does not speak, and no one notices. 

The Storyteller unscrews the silver top of the vial. She extracts from it, like the shaft of a feather or a needle, a strand of Neon. It’s bottled moonlight. When she drops it into the alter glass, it settles and expands like smoke. 

“There have been newcomers to Dema,” the Storyteller says. “They sit among us. They came from far away to follow the Bishops’ call, seeking their protection, their comfort. We welcome them home.” 

Clancy dares to glance around. He spies a woman with the city’s mark—smears of black, like oil or ink—along her cheeks. Her face is splashed with awe and truth. Clancy looks away before he can begin to wonder where the woman came from. How the blue of the sky outside Dema could have spat out someone with working eyes and working hands, could make something out of nothing. 

“The Bishops send us a story, today,” says the Storyteller. “A story some of you know. I will tell it as I know it—for caution and for vengeance.” 

She steps behind the alter and places her hands on the long, glass bar. 

“Many years ago, the Roadbuilder, Blurryface, the King of Paradise built a home. It was a home for all things, safely protected from the Paladin, the cruel dictator of life. He toiled for many years. With paint. With clay. With words. He placed each brick of paradise precisely, an architect of pride and perfection.”

Clancy sits up straighter. There is something about this woman’s voice that makes him want to listen. 

“When the true world had been completed, he invited all creatures to it. It was not difficult to reach. The gates of paradise open to all who die intending to reach it. The lost, the heavy, the unknown, the lonely, the powerless: the Roadbuilder’s world is for us, if we make the choice to travel there. It is never too late.”

The Storyteller’s grip tightens on the alter. She says, “Paradise is for the dead. But long ago, a serpent was sent in service of its Paladin—its master of torture and anarchy—into Honored Death’s domain. It deceived the Roadbuilder into believing it was dead. Hiding its heartbeat beneath its tapping claws and beating wings, and hiding its breath behind a laugh and a smile, it tricked the Roadbuilder. He led the dragon into paradise.”

Clancy feels eyes on his neck. He does not turn around. He thinks about the taste of a vulture’s blood. 

The Storyteller continues, her words rapt. “The dragon spread deceit through paradise. It took a greedy fancy to a hue of paradise. With corrupted claws, it took yellow from Death’s kingdom. The Roadbuilder soon realized the Paladin sought to destroy his woven kingdom. He pursued the lying serpent. Across the walls of his home. Between the stars.

“He caught the dragon just as it crossed the threshold to the Paladin’s domain,” says the Storyteller. “He dragged it back into Honored Death, and paved the Road with its scales in vengeance. But even now, yellow remains defiled. It belongs to the dishonored. Never to us.” 

Her words buzz, leaving the chapel in a spring-tight silence. Clancy realizes he has rocked forward onto his hands. He sits back quickly. The room is brighter now; the neon altar has grown stronger, with each of the Storyteller’s words. 

The sermon continues. Clancy presses his palms to the floor and thinks about yellow. About the paint used on the walls of paradise. He wonders if notes and melodies had been tools of Honored Death as well. 

He doesn’t realize that chapel is over until he’s one of the last in the building. The Neon is fading from the alter, and the Storyteller’s eyes follow it. Clancy stands, muscles sore from yesterday’s Tower work. 

The woman with smeared cheeks remains. She approaches Clancy slowly. 

“What district do you live in?” she asks. It’s been weeks since anyone has spoken to Clancy. 

“West,” says Clancy hoarsely. 

“Will you show me the way? I’m afraid I don’t know the city well yet.”

Clancy glances at the Storyteller. She’s still standing before the alter, and her hand raises to the fading Neon as though to touch it. She grabs her own wrist and pulls her hand back. 

“It was a good legend,” Clancy says. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” says the woman. “Beautiful.” 

“I’ve heard it before,” says Clancy, still looking at the Storyteller, “but not like that. I think the words were even more beautiful this time.”

The Storyteller’s hand flexes. Her shoulders are held back, held high. She doesn’t turn, but neither does she move, and Clancy knows she’s listening. 

“I’ll show you the way back to the bunker,” Clancy says to the woman. “Come on.”

As they leave the chapel, he thinks he sees the Storyteller glance over her shoulder at him. There is a terrible grief on her face. She has her knife in her hand. 

The door closes before he hears her body hit the dais. 

Someone has written another message on the alley wall. 

He sees it, painted boldly where all would see but only he would understand, and something angry burns in his chest. He doesn’t bother to wait for the cars this time. He strides across the street, engines in his ears, and scratches at the wall. The bricks tear his fingernails. A red pain drips onto the grey. 

It’s color. That’s all he needs to write, so Clancy does. 

‘Saying nothing,’ he says, an accusation, beneath the painted words: ‘Say something.’ Someone had taken his pencil scrawl and rendered it in careful, dark letters, like it was worth remembering. How dare they?

He stands back. The road rushes in his ears, and feathers brush his throat. 

Saying nothing. 

He sinks to his knees. That rage within his ribs is so hot. He deserves—he deserves—

He doesn’t know. No one knows anything, within the walls, and there is only the sky outside. 

He looks down at his hands, rough and stained. The wall, red and black, slips down into his lungs and comes back through his teeth. Clancy hears himself singing under his breath. Gentle and slow. Lonely. 

He gets up. Stumbles further into the ally. His footsteps aren’t loud enough, and he dares to sing louder. It doesn’t fix anything. It just makes him burn. He can’t stop, and he’s running now. Dumpsters form an abandoned maze before a chain link fence. Clancy braces his shoes, dirty with concrete dust, against a dumpster’s rusted metal handles. He climbs. He’s halfway to the roof of the closest building. He jumps, and catches himself on the fence. The wires cut into his fingers. 

Clancy ascends. The top of the fence is barbed. He barely notices the thorns catch and pull at his clothes, his skin. The roof is not quite within reach, and Clancy lunges for it thoughtlessly. He catches the gutter. It bends under his weight. He swings his legs, frantic, and the metal warps and screams. Hot tin and fiberglass press against his shins. 

He rolls to his knees. Stands. Legs and hands stinging, he limps up the slope of the roof. He’s still humming. A new iteration of what he’d sang in the Ceremony—a better one. It sounds almost right. Not perfect, but as though it can imagine perfection. 

At the summit, Clancy stops. He can see the Towers of Silence, but he is singing, and he turns away from them. Behind him, beyond him, the walls of Dema disappear into grey. Mist, and nothing. The Necropolis glows. It pulses with the promise of paradise. 

Clancy imagines striding through it. He imagines wrapping his hands around the thin graves and tearing them down. The glass would shatter, and the mud would splatter his shoes. There are a thousand—maybe a million, maybe more—graves. Clancy would die before he made more than a scratch, a bruise to the very edge of Dema. 

The burn envelopes him. Escapes into the song. Clancy screams, and screams, and his body tears itself a space for his voice. 

He stops. His chest heaves.

In the mist beyond the walls, he sees a light. Like a tiny flicker of fire, it dances on a black shelf of darkness. Just a spark, but Clancy stares. He reaches for it with bloody fingers until the clouds obscure the yellow light. 

In Dema, he is already dead. But he had gutted a carrion-eater to remain on his feet. He had fought to stand on the edge of this roof. He had wanted to see. 

He wants to see. 

This city is not his home. And maybe there is something out there. Something beyond the walls of Dema. 

Chapter Text

He climbs the cliff, and lichen flakes off beneath his boots. The moon is his guide through the fog. He knows each step of this mountain, from the base of the trench to the summit. When he had started the climb, his Banditos were behind him. Now, he is alone. 

He isn’t alone every night. But he makes the climb every night, hand over hand, boots sending pebbles skittering down into the camp below. He glances down. Amongst the dotted campfires, he sees a few silhouettes looking up. Watching him. They wave. He smiles and waves back. They can’t see him smiling in the darkness, but they know anyway. 

The cliff crests in a pile of boulders, studded with quartz and shrub-brush. One has a flat top and a hollow weathered into its base by rain. A drumstick lies on the stone, forgotten from last night. 

He settles comfortably onto the boulder. He sets his backpack in the hollow. He withdraws first the stake of wood, its end wrapped in cloth. Second, the prized box of matches, protected with his life. Finally, the dented canister tied behind the backpack. 

He sets it on the stone beside him. The musty scent of gasoline, edged with smoke, drifts around him when he cracks the canister open. 

There is a new beat in his mind. A rhythm for a song with no lyrics, no melody. He taps it against his leg as he stands. Many things bring him joy here—the smile of a friend, the taste of meat roasted over campfires and shared with family, the moment duct tape tears between his fingers and teeth, shooting stars—but nothing reminds him how to live like a drum show. 

Fingers still tapping, he stands at the edge of the boulder. A steep drop crumbles away beneath him. Far beyond the mountains, leagues beyond the last deltas of Trench, and wrapped in the fog of its gods, the city of Dema stands like a scar. He pretends he can smell the rank death emanating from it, even here. The nine Towers are taller than imagination, but they look small from atop the castle of Trench. 

He closes his eyes. One hand is wrapped around the wooden stake. The other strikes the match. 

He lights the torch and bears it high. 

Chapter Text

Clancy counts down the days to the next Lighting of the Road with something like dread. He can’t rush this—this flimsy, fool’s plan—but he thinks he will not get another chance. 

He tries to pretend that all is normal. That the grey meals in his bunker quarters don’t make him sick; that the grey walls on his commute to his assignments don’t make him itch; that the grey lights of the neon alters don’t make him burn. But he cannot stop looking at the walls. He cannot stop hoping that other citizens beside him will glance up, just for a moment, and see what he has seen. 

Lies, and lies, and lies. They never do. 

He returns to the bunker from Listo’s greenhouses, and he wonders why citizens never manage to walk the streets of Dema while the sun is high. Each night, he pulls a sheet of paper from beneath his mattress. He’d stolen it from one of Reisdro’s schoolhouses. He writes small to conserve paper. There is no eraser on his pencil. The day before the Lighting of the Road, the page looks more like a blackout poem than a draft, coated in layers and layers of graphite. 

But there are words. They match the melody in Clancy’s mind, the plea he needs to voice. He doesn’t know if it will work. Most of him doesn’t care. 

The morning is grey, as all the mornings are. Clancy shrugs into his clothes and combs his hands through his hair. It’s starting to grow out, just slightly.

Breakfast is a haze. He leaves with the rest of the West Bunker, but he does not follow them to the greenhouses. When he can see the Third Tower, he stops the bus. He ducks down a cross street and presses up against a wall until the bus has long passed. His hands and pockets are empty but for the paper. He knows the words by heart, but he still could not bring himself to leave it. 

Clancy approaches the Towers alone. He can hear a faraway whine the closer he comes to the Third—sourced from Keons’ Chantry deep beneath the surface of Dema. Clancy has been there often, assisting Keons alongside the rest of his district citizens, but the specifics are hazy. He’s never been to the center of the Chantry. He doesn’t think anyone has. 

There are Southeast district citizens in attendance to the tower. Clancy sees them hauling material, and he slips into rank. No one looks away from their work. His hands feel clumsy, but he accepts a piece of sheet metal and follows a stranger into the Tower. 

The First Tower is hollow, an amphitheater for the Lighting of the Road. The others are scattered with balconies, or packed with empty rooms and strange cells. The Third Tower is topped by the council room of the Nine. It is said that the Bishops spent holy night there, communing with the Roadbuilder. 

Clancy does not know how long it will take to reach. He doesn’t know if he will be killed for the effort. But again—most of him doesn’t care. 

Sheet metal in hand, melody in mind, he begins to climb. There are stairs that spiral and stairs that zigzag. He takes an elevator up the final stretch of the tower, and it smells like powdered bone. No one stops him. No one, he thinks, has tried something so bold. So there is no one who thinks to catch him. 

He passes Glorified in red and pearl-white. He passes others, too—servants of the Bishops, golden-eyed and quick. They look at him. One begins to follow him.

“I don’t need your escort,” Clancy says to her. She smiles at him, and her teeth are starting to rot. 

“All who seek audience require escort,” she says. It is a Heavy voice, and Clancy freezes. 

“Nico,” he says. He kneels. 

“Rise. I do not recall summoning you, so bold and troublesome.” 

Clancy says, “I was summoned by Keons.”

“Bold, troublesome, and a liar it seems.” 

“My Lord.” Clancy’s tongue feels too thick. “I just… have a question.”

The woman’s yellow eyes glint, and she steps closer to him. “Surely all have been answered by the Storytellers of your Chapel?”

There’s something sharp beneath the words. Clancy doesn’t fully understand why he feels the need to set his spine. 

“No, Nico,” says Clancy. 

“No.” The woman is close enough to strike him, now, if she wished. “We have made exceptions for you, you know. And you treat them without gratitude. You would have great potential in paradise, if only you stopped squandering it here.” 

Clancy almost lunges. It’s a dizzingly stupid urge, and it feels both wonderful and terrifying. But he says, “you own me, Lord, as you own all of us. I don’t know why Keons stopped me reaching paradise in the last ceremony.”

“Hm. Is this your question?”

Clancy takes a breath. “Yes.”

The woman laughs with a voice not her own, and Clancy sees that her throat and wrists are slit. This corpse had followed the Road. “I have known you all your life, Clancy,” says Nico. “I have known your thoughts, and doubts, and screams.” There’s a pregnant pause after the word. “And I know when you are lying.”

“Lord, I—”

“You may pose your question to me. Follow.”

The corpse turns and strides away. Clancy, shaken, does not dare refuse the Bishop’s direct order. He trails the woman through the last rooms and levels of the Tower. 

The room he enters is grand. It forms a vast semi-circle, supported by nine pillars. Radial lines are carved into the floor, pointing into the centerpoint of the far wall. They are covered with a thin layer of glass. Neon pulses beneath, lighting the room from beneath Clancy’s feet. Gravestones and alters, twisted into shapes even Clancy has not seen before, hang from the walls. Podiums of white marble stand within small circles etched into the floor. Clancy thinks there are bones lying on one of them. 

A red-robed figure stands between two pillars. The Bishop himself. Clancy turns, and sees only a corpse on the threshold, lying limp, stinking slightly. 

He can’t see Nico’s face from beneath the veil. The Heaviness in the air pulls him down, and he has no choice but to kneel. He does not know if he would have anyway. 

“Hello, Clancy,” says the Bishop. 

Clancy says nothing. One knee had landed atop the thin glass barrier to the flowing Neon beneath. It’s already painfully hot. 

“What question keeps you from serving Dema?” asks Nico. His voice reverberates. 

Clancy wets his lips. His plan has already crumbled. “I…”

Nico waves a hand. The Heaviness grows, stymieing Clancy’s fear and flattening his certainty. He feels nearly nothing. “Speak,” says Nico.

“I saw,” Clancy struggles to say, “something. Near the edge of the Necropolis.” 

“Something,” Nico repeats. “And what were you doing beyond the Vista?” 

“I wasn’t… beyond,” Clancy says. There are tears in his eyes. The heat of the Neon has grown unbearable. 

“Clarify, citizen.” 

“I was on the roof.” He bites his lip on too much more of the truth. “Of the Bunker. And I saw lights—yellow lights, at the edge of the walls. I didn’t know…”

The Bishop is in front of him. Clancy doesn’t remember him moving. “How long ago?” he says. 

“Last night.” 

“Where? Exactly?” 

Nico’s shadow is long, and Clancy forces his deadened limbs away from the glass. The skin of his knee has begun to blister. “Southwest sector. I think.”

The Bishop pauses. “Southwest? Are you certain, Clancy?”

“... No,” Clancy says. Perhaps there is still a plan he can salvage. 

“No. Do you have a more useful guess?”

Clancy shakes his head. “I couldn’t see the moon. Just the lights.”

“Does anyone else know about this?” says Nico. The Neon rivers pulse, reacting to his voice, and Clancy collapses back to his knees. His blistered skin rips. 

“No,” Clancy manages.

“Good,” says Nico. Finally, finally, he stands back. “There is no need to trouble your fellow citizens with such concerns. I will deal with this infringement—if there is indeed any such issue.”

Clancy raises his head. He catches a flicker of blue-grey skin beneath the veil. “Infringement. From what?” 

“From enemies of Honored Death, Clancy,” says Nico. “There is nothing beyond the walls of Dema.”

He’s lying. He’s lied to Clancy for years, and yet this lie, this lie when Clancy cannot even see his face, revives the memory of the poem in Clancy’s pocket. Notes rise through the haze of heavy. 

“If you need anyone,” hums Clancy, “I’ll be—”

“What did you say?” 

“I’ll be right there,” Clancy repeats. “I’ll be right—”

Nico takes his shoulder. Clancy’s voice dies. He can feel bones beneath icy skin, and he is too heavy to move. 

“Silence,” Nico hisses, “in the Tower, citizen. The only reason I do not seal you from paradise forever is because I assume you are too ignorant to turn your Voice against one of the Nine. Do not prove me wrong.” 

“I’m sorry,” Clancy says. “Please.”

“Better,” says Nico, and releases him. “This oddity you witnessed. It was of the defiled color?” 

“Yes, Lord.”

Nico turns and strides toward the center of the chamber. From his robe, he withdraws two objects. Branched, ivory antlers, like those of a deer. Clancy stands, trembling.

“You will accompany me to Necropolis,” says Nico. “Perhaps helping to dispose of a threat to Dema will recover some of the honor you have abandoned, yes?”

Clancy can hardly believe the words. “Yes, Nico,” he says. 

“Good. Then leave me now. I will recover you from the tower’s base when I require you.”

When Clancy bows, for the first time in his life, it is to hide a smile. 

-

The corpse of an old man drives Clancy from the city. He doesn’t speak. For this, Clancy is grateful; it’s easier to ignore the endless weight of Nico’s presence if Clancy can’t hear him. 

The sun sets as they drive. Clancy hasn’t been in a car in longer than he can remember. It’s oddly intimate, compared to Dema’s buses and subways, and though Clancy sits behind the driver, he feels as though the Bishop’s eyes are on the back of his neck anyway. 

He occupies himself looking out the dingy window into the Necropolis. He wandered the gravestones once as a child, but he hasn’t been close since. The mud smells rotten. Fog hangs low over the fields, painting a fine mist over the car’s windows and windshield. Clancy hears the rhythmic thu-thud of two sets of wheels passing over each crack in the asphalt. It makes him want to hum in harmony with the engine. 

The glowing gravestones blur together into an omnipresent smear of silver. Every now and then, Clancy can see the ragged form of a gravedigger. The creatures shy back from the car as it passes. Eyes sunken in infected skin watch Clancy, and he tries not to think of vultures. 

The edge of Dema grows ever closer. Clancy waits for an order as the black and yellow lines on the road become completely obscured by mud. It comes only when they have passed the final line of graves. There are a short patch of leafless trees, freezerburnt by Neon, before the imposing base of the city walls. 

“Whatever you saw last night,” growls the roughened corpse in the front seat, “do you see it now?”

“No,” Clancy says. “Not yet.”

The car turns. They drive parallel to the trees. Clancy reaches into his pocket and wraps his fingers around the poem. 

He wonders how long he’ll have. He wonders how long he’ll last. His injured knee still stings beneath torn pant legs, and his stomach reminds him that he had abandoned the bunker and its kitchen to chase… what? Death? 

A different kind of death, perhaps. If that is all that awaits Clancy, so be it. 

“Lord Nico,” Clancy says. “Did you know the last Storyteller sent to the Fourth Chapel?” 

“She was one of mine,” lows the corpse. “I lead her to paradise.” 

So many of Nico’s district are welcomed by Honorable Death. It makes him the first of the city—the Bishop whose power shapes the architecture and technology of Dema. The other Nine defer to him. His citizens are so eager to die. Had Clancy truly been so eager?

“She made something beautiful,” Clancy said. “A telling of the dragon’s betrayal. It made me think. Maybe there are other versions of that story. Where the Roadbuilder catches the serpent sooner. Where it stole more than just the dishonored hue.” 

“Silence.” 

Clancy is already leaning forward. Already reaching around the neck of the corpse. “Where it gets away for good.” 

He pulls the steering wheel. 

-

It smells like smoke. 

Wake up. 

Light teases Clancy’s eyelids. Something wet and sticky slides beneath him, coating his back and his neck. He feels his skull thudding, as though someone has taken a hammer to it. He groans. 

“Wake up. You must…” says a thread of a voice. Clancy has never heard it before. It sounds like frayed curtains. 

He pulls open his eyes. Sparks brush the grey expanse around him. He blinks. Smoke curls in great billows across the sky, and Clancy sits up so quickly his head splits.

“Gah—where—” 

“Shh…” says the voice. Clancy blinks and tries to focus on the shape beside him. Slowly, like sketching the end of a paragraph, it resolves into a humanoid shape. A gravedigger, wrinkled and built of sticks and twine, crouching beside him. Clancy shies back on instinct. 

“What… happened?” Clancy begins. 

The gravedigger points. Clancy follows her shaking finger to the source of the smoke. The car, overturned, burns from its engine and drips blue-clear fluid like blood. There is a charred shape crumpled into the ceiling. 

Clancy lurches to his feet. He looks toward the city where the Bishop’s spirit remains. 

“How long?” he asks, desperate.

“Minutes,” rasps the gravedigger. “Five? Ten?”

Clancy’s urgency shoves away his headache. He begins to stumble away from the car. The trees, skeletal and black, beckon beneath the walls. 

“Wait.” Clancy almost misses the gravedigger’s voice. “You can’t leave.” 

“I’d like to see you stop me,” Clancy snarls. He hadn’t known he was capable of that. It feels good. 

“There is nothing out there,” says the gravedigger. “You can still return to paradise.”

“You haven’t.” Clancy faces her. “You’re still alive. Why should I die, when you get to live?”

The gravedigger says, each word built of a shame Clancy wants to tear apart, “I am here because I was a coward. But you don’t have to be.” 

“You’re right,” says Clancy. “I don’t.”

He runs for the walls. 

They are taller than he thought. Than he imagined. Black and smooth, they extend in all directions like the horizon. Clancy had always thought they were the only horizon. He runs his palms along them, searching for handholds, for impurities. There are none.

He beats his fist against them. It doesn’t so much as make a sound. 

“No,” Clancy says. He reaches higher. His fingers slide uselessly down the wall. 

He starts to run. Legs aching, chest having, blood drying on his temple, he follows the slow curve of the wall toward where the sun had disappeared. The black never falters. Neither does Clancy. 

He snatches a dead tree branch from the ground. The bark is smooth as onyx. Clancy searches for another; he snaps a thick twig from the side of a tree. Both sticks sit cooly in his hands. 

He limps back into the Necropolis. In the distance, the plume of smoke still rises from the destroyed car. Clancy approaches the nearest grave. Fast. Faster. Until he’s sprinting, arms raised, both branches held above him like clubs. The grin on his face feels inhuman. 

The glass of the grave cracks. A hiss, like escaping steam, fills the air. Clancy brings the branches down again. The gravestone shatters, and Neon spills along the ground like mercury. Clancy makes a series of sounds like vultures’ cries. They pull themselves from his chest, uncontrolled. 

Something yells. A gravedigger lurches for him, clawing at his face, but Clancy pushes the weakened thing away. He goes sprawling into the mud. 

The Neon steams. Clancy descends on the fallen gravedigger, tearing a long strip from his muddy clothes. He kicks the creature when it tries to drag him down. The fabric reeks, and Clancy ties it around his mouth and nose to keep the ghostly fumes of the pure Neon from reaching him. 

He retrieves the fallen tree branches. Quickly, he rolls their tips through the Neon-soaked mud. Glowing silver begins to congeal along the bark. 

“Perimeter… escape…” growls the gravedigger. He pulls himself back to his feet, lurching after Clancy. Starving and weak, he collapses before he reaches the tree line. 

Clancy doesn’t look back. The momentum of his run is behind him, and he leaps as high as he can. He slams the broken, Neon-coated edge of one of the branches into the wall. It sinks in. Clancy dangles from the petrified wood, arm shaking. His weight drags it down, slowly. It leaves a ragged trench in the stone. 

Clancy shakes blood out of his eyes. With a cry, he reaches up. The second stake digs into the wall, burning through like a hot knife into bone. 

Hand over hand, Clancy scales the wall. His muscles burn. For every yard he climbs, he slides backward a foot. Neon steams his face, slowly infiltrating his lungs despite the mask. It dulls his senses and weakens his movements.

He’s not going to make it. He knows this, in a vague and inevitable way. He’d been born knowing it. The lip of the wall is only a few feet above him, but his eyes are so wet with sweat and the crust of Neon that he can barely make it out. He reaches up to anchor his next branch. The wall resists, as always. His fingers finally lose their purchase. The branch slips free and tumbles down, down, into the chasm of Dema beneath him. 

Clancy dangles from a single stake. He is so close. He is so close to the sky. 

He looks back. The Towers of Silence devour the land in their shadows, and Clancy thinks about weight. About What’s Heavy. 

There is no Bishop here. Nico’s eyes are locked behind the deadly emptiness of that prison, and Clancy will never see them again. There is no Bishop here. Just the Earth, and Clancy, and the first chance he’s had the bravery to take. 

In his pocket, paper crinkles. Clancy drags in a breath and begins to sing. He shifts his weight on the branch. With screaming arms and all the skin scraped off his palms, he pulls himself up onto the thin branch. It drags a ragged line through the stone, sinking slowly. Clancy forces himself to move faster. 

He plants a foot. Overbalances. As the branch snaps, he leaps. 

Wood and Neon go plummeting to the Necropolis. There are headlights in the Necropolis, blue as the moon. Gravediggers have gathered in dozens to watch the climb. 

By the tips of his fingers, Clancy climbs over the walls of Dema. 

-

Clancy walks. It feels like flying. For the first time, he does not dread the moment when his sole meets the ground. 

-

The sun rises, and the sky is blue. Clancy watches, on his knees in grass softer than any he’s ever known, and the notes spill from his throat like sobs. 

He can see mountains. Great green cliffs rise in every direction, and valleys running wild with crystal rivers wind like snakes across the landscape. He sees white, exposed stone. Small plants grow across the surface of boulders. They have leaves with shapes he’s never seen; color in their blooming flowers he’s never known. He wanders amongst them, awestruck. But he doesn’t stop. There isn’t yet enough time, enough eternity, between himself and Dema. 

When the sun reaches its apex, he finally stops. He drops to his knees beside a shallow river. He drinks. The cool water slips through his fingers and drips off his elbows. It’s cold, but not frigid. It carries away the blood and soot that crusts his skin, and the chill soothes the sting of open wounds. 

Clancy feels a smile pulling at his lips—but he does not understand it. There is no satisfaction, no vindication, no pride. What reason is there to smile? 

All the same, he can’t stop it. His cracked lips pull up, and he leans forward and splashes the water onto his face. The water leaves the seeds for a dozen melodies in his mind. 

He stands. Humming without fear of punishment, he continues on his way. 

If he’d known the world could be like this, he wouldn’t have had such trouble imagining paradise. 

-

He tries, but he can’t walk forever. When exhaustion leaves him unable to take another step, he curls up beneath the shelter of a crumbled boulder. He disturbs something—a creature with long ears and powerful legs. It darts away from him. Clancy had seen illustrations of rabbits before. They are different from how he pictured. 

Images come to him in his sleep. Sounds. They wake him with memories never lived, and he lies shaking, terrified that Lisden or Listo has found him. But nothing comes. Perhaps it’s the lingering Neon in his lungs, working through his system. Perhaps the hunger has reached his mind. Still, he doesn’t sleep well. 

He finds that without the fog of the city, the sun is harsh. It has turned his skin red and itchy. He waits until the late afternoon to set out, and he travels through the night. There are more stars here than in the city. 

His pace slows. The humming helps, but the gnawing in his chest is the sort of deep pain he can no longer ignore. Even the city doesn’t seem as large a threat. 

Clancy diverts his course to search for plants he recognizes from the greenhouses. It’s difficult in the darkness. As the sun rises, he finds a short, leafy sprout that looks familiar. Like all things, it’s not quite the same out here. Where the plants had been edged in brown and trimmed constantly in Dema, they grow green and nearly spiny along the walls of the canyon. Yellow flowers on thin stalks sprout energetically from the nest of leaves. 

Clancy pulls them up in handfuls. He doesn’t bother to wash off the dirt before swallowing them desperately. He regrets it when they come up again later, and he wipes bile from his lips as his head falls between his shoulders. 

The next time, he is more careful. The hunger remains, but at least it dulls to a keenless ache.

-

One of those visions in the night shows him the end of the river. It is a vast black sea, reflecting the sky. But instead of stars, there are only neon gravestones above and below. There is nowhere to go. 

He feels Heavy fingers brush over his neck. A veiled face leans to his ear. Thin fabric billows with the breath of quiet words. 

“You are mine.” 

Clancy wakes, shaking. He stumbles from the tiny hollow he sheltered in, and finds the sky dark. He’d slept into the night. His internal rhythms are gone—he feels a hollowness in their place. The ground feels faraway, and his vision is blurred. He can’t breathe. 

He claws at his throat. Calls out, “please”, but he can’t hear it.

Water splashes under his feet. He’d wandered to the banks of the river. He stops, swaying on his feet, and wonders there is a place deep enough to submerge himself, to drown out the Bishop in his head. 

He almost thinks it’s beneath the water at first. Something burning beneath the surface. But he looks up, and sees it on the horizon—the spot of light, gold as the flowers he has eaten for days. It seems closer. Maybe it is. Maybe he can feel warmth, just slightly, seeping across the surface of the water, spread from its reflection. 

Clancy wraps his arms around himself. He watches the light until gold is the color of stars again, not silver. 

-

He doesn’t know where he’s going. Maybe nowhere. Part of him has started to miss the order of Dema. The familiarity of what he used to understand. He is between two emptinessess; an abyss and an unknown. 

In the nights, when the wolves howl in the cliffs and Clancy grows weaker, he wonders if he has made a mistake. 

It is then that he sees it. Obscuring the stars, for just the flash of a moment. A vulture. 

Clancy fixes his eyes on the flicker of that yellow star, and he stops pausing to sleep. 

-

The river slows and widens that day. It runs like black glass, covering the ground by mere inches. Clancy hasn’t been dry or warm since the city. The sun has him blinking dust from his eyes. 

The cliffs are steeper here. The stones seem stronger, more protected, and Clancy walks on the edge of their shadow. Every other step is in the sun. He’s singing—just to hear his own voice, echoed back through the trench. 

Beneath his feet, on the stony ground, the cliff’s shadow changes. Warps. Clancy looks up. 

It’s been five days, to his best estimation. Five days wandering the unforgiving wilderness, fleeing a city that still looms in the peripherals of his mind, if not his vision. Five days alone. 

No longer.

A figure watches him. They wear a jacket the color of the sagebrush. Streaks of yellow cross their shoulders and line their arms. Clancy retreats. He crosses into the sun, and the water ripples beneath his clumsy steps. 

He turns. Two more figures stand on the opposite cliff. Clancy grips his collar, the touch of the dirty fabric suddenly too tight. Each time he blinks, there are more. A dozen, two, three, countless. They line the cliffs like fangs in the maw of a great beast. Like pillars, holding up the sky. 

Clancy lurches away. His boot catches, and he falls. Stones skitter beneath him, knocking against his chin. He stops singing. 

He pushes himself to his feet. The silence is louder than his voice, waiting like a starving man for a feast, like a cheetah crouching to run. It lasts. One of the figures steps forward—tall, wrapped in green-grey fabric with an X of yellow across their chest. As though marking a target. Look here. Here I am. 

Clancy looks. The figure raises a hand to the kerchief wrapped around their face. 

A sound echoes through the trench. Just quiet enough that Clancy doesn’t notice until every one of the figures has turned as one, looking back the way he came. It’s a death rattle. The sound of hooves in water. 

Clancy is hungry. Clancy is sick, and sunburnt, and exhausted. And Clancy knows what he will see. It still stops his heart, standing in the grey water as the color bleeds away from the grass and stones, to see the Bishop riding toward him. 

Nico wears red. Clancy hasn’t seen red like that since the city. Even his blood seems lighter, out here. But Nico is all his blood, all at once. 

He’d stolen a few moments. Now, though, is when he falls from the wall. He was never going to make it. He is a weak man, and he always has been, and now he must be taken home. A disobedient child who thought he was worth something. A fool. 

Clancy offers his throat. He’s so tired. 

He hears footsteps, and he tastes bitter power. It’s barely more than a tinge on his tongue; he’s too far from Dema for it to weigh him to his knees. Cold fingers settle on either side of his neck, and they drag like pencil on paper. Feeling dissolves. 

“There you are,” whispers the Bishop. “Did you think we wouldn’t find you, Clancy?” 

Clancy is ashamed that he had. Clancy is ashamed of everything. 

“Come,” bids Nico, and Clancy does. 

His hunger is gone. His peeling skin no longer hurts. His muscles move like machinery. Every sign of the last five days falls into the clean gravity of the neutron star, and Clancy cannot remember what the walls had felt like. What destroying the grave had felt like. What smiling on the banks of the river had felt like. 

He steps on a plant. It bends beneath his weight, and the stalk of a yellow flower drags in the clear water. 

Clancy blinks. He has stopped walking, and he raises his eyes as Nico turns. 

“Citizen…” Nico says, but he trails off. Something falls from the sky. 

Clancy looks up. The figure, cross-marked, throws out his hand. Flower petals fall from his fingers. They are yellow as sunlight. 

Nico’s horse spooks and pulls. The Bishop wrenches at its reigns, and Clancy feels the same pressure on his neck. Pulling him toward his place. The figures on the cliffs toss handful after handful of the Paladin’s color into the trench. They fall around Clancy like rain. 

Clancy remembers Dema. The comfort of routine. Of a life without choice. Gentle comforts, at odds with the satisfaction of a Bishop, the knife under Clancy’s pillow, the blood on the Tower floor. 

He does not forget the star in his chest. He does not forget the lyrics.

“I’ll be right there,” Clancy says. Roars. “But you’ll have to tie me down and then break both my hands.” 

There is no outrunning the Bishop. Clancy turns anyway. He would rather remember failure than obedience. 

The last he remember of the world outside the walls is the snap of a flower stalk pulling apart beneath his hands. 

Chapter Text

The first of the Bishops claims Clancy beneath the protection of Trench. Again. As far as the Torchbearer is concerned, it is a declaration of war. 

Nico of the Niners glares at him with a hatred he returns in full. Nico’s hands are curled in the collar of Clancy’s jacket. The Torchbearer makes a point never to forget a name, and there are some things a child can’t grow out of. Flower petals litter the ground. He holds one tight between his fingers, and Nico can’t see it. 

The banditos have retreated from the ridge. They wait for him on the path toward camp, far enough from the Bishop to be safe but close enough to hear the Torchbearer’s call, if he gave it. Nico’s face is a void beneath his cowl. The Torchbearer does not balk. 

Do it, he dares the Bishop, mouthing the words unseen. Years of chipping away at the walls of Dema, and Nico is finally close enough to meet his eyes. To chain the Torchbearer with a wave of his hands. To curtail all the trouble he will continue to cause. 

But he will have to let go of Clancy to do it. They both know it. 

The Bishop chooses the Voice. As Nico rides away, he proves its power to the Torchbearer. Proves what he had known. He has been tapping a rhythm against his leg since before he heard Clancy sing—lyrics forgotten and familiar, like a story or a dream. 

Hooves fade to silence. The wind loops through the canyons of Trench, taunting the Torchbearer with the memory of that Voice. Deftly footed on the crannies and crags, he climbs down to the stony gulch beneath. He’s careful not to tread on any flower petals. 

There’s something else fluttering in the dust and pebbles. A shred of paper, smeared with so many crossed-out words it is nearly entirely grey. 

The Torchbearer holds it carefully. As carefully as he would hold a still-beating heart. As carefully as he would hold the other half of the song he has been waiting for since he fled the city. 

It’s too late. It’s too late, but he runs anyway. His footsteps obscure the prints of horseshoes. He calls out, frail compared to the immortality that had echoed in this canyon in Clancy’s Voice, “we’re coming. Stay alive.”

He runs until the pain in his chest stops him. The wind tosses his words away. The Torchbearer throws his hand up, three fingers raised, and promises. 

“East is up.” 

Chapter Text

A click rings against grey stone. Halfway through his circuit of the room, Clancy freezes. He’s made 938 circuits since he woke up. Yesterday, he made it to 1500 before the world faded into silver. 

A man stands in the doorway. He wears a black collared shirt and cuffed sleeves. He has worker’s gloves, embroidered with the numeral ‘III’. Clancy watches him, unblinking. 

“Come on,” says the man. 

“What?” says Clancy.

“The Honorable Bishop says you’ve recovered from your illness. I’m here to escort you back to the West District.” 

The words mean something to Clancy. Something. “What?”

“It’s time to leave.” 

Clancy looks over his shoulder at the walls, so smooth they could be glass, and the threadbare sheets on the cot that he has to curl in half to fit atop. There is nothing in him but a gentle ignorance. “Alright.” 

The man steps aside, and Clancy slips out the door. The floor turns from concrete to tile. The shift in the sound of his footsteps surprises Clancy, and he nearly trips. He can’t remember the last time he heard anything but his own footfalls, over and over and over. Clancy tugs at his sleeves. He has red lines on his wrists from the scratching of his jagged fingernails. 

“How do you feel?” asks the man as he walks. Clancy watches the corridors pass, trying to place them. 

“What?”

“You must have been quite sick, if What’s Unknown is still lingering.” 

Clancy shakes his head. He feels as though marbles, slow and mercuric, are rolling along the bottom of his skull. He grits his teeth. “Yes. I must have been.” 

He counts his steps as they walk. They climb a staircase that seems endless into a semi-circular foyer. It’s bustling with sound. People, dressed like the man at Clancy’s side, carry supplies, update records, and clean instruments in methodical rows. One or two look up when the man leads Clancy through the room. He doesn’t recognize the looks they give him. 

A folding, overhead door is pinned open by silver cables on the back wall. Outside, Clancy can see a grey sky. Black birds circle beneath the clouds. 

Something sinks in his gut. He presses his hand to it. 

The man continues, and he does not crumple to ash when he crosses the threshold into the city. Clancy cannot shake the fear, all the same, and pauses in the shadow of the door. He glances up. 

Three figures lurk on a balcony, so far away that Clancy almost mistakes them for more birds. One sits in a gilded, iron-wrought chair. One holds a chain. One spins a blade. All wear red. All watch Clancy. 

He swallows. One of the marbles in his mind melts, and he watches Nico’s obscured eyes above his calm smile. 

“Come on,” says the man, impatient. 

Clancy drags his legs into motion, but can’t look away. He’s still craning back until the door becomes only one of many slots in the base of a cloud-scraping Tower. 

“I think something’s wrong,” Clancy says, his voice unfamiliar. 

The man frowns at him. “We’re in Dema,” he says. “Exactly where we’ll always be.” 

-

There’s something missing from his room at the bunker. Clancy can’t put his finger on it. He searches his table—smooth and unblemished—and beneath his mattress. He digs through the cabinets and the dresser. He bends a coat-hanger into a thin hook and pulls up the contents of the sink drains. 

One of his floor tiles is loose. It slides down when he falls, one night, racing to close the curtains between himself and the vulture that had landed on the windowsill. Clancy’s temple strikes the floor bruisingly. He rolls onto his elbows, wincing, and feels his fingers curl into a tiny, exposed crack. 

He pauses. The vulture is peering at him through one golden eye. 

Clancy gets up. He covers the crack with his foot, and he busies himself pinning up his wet clothes to dry. The vulture lingers for a long time. 

When Clancy thinks he’s alone, he kneels down and pulls up on the linoleum. It does not feel nearly as dusty as it should. It squeaks when he pulls gently upward. The underside of the tile slightly bluer than its surface, as though it might once have had some color, before grey wore it thin and pointless. 

Beneath the floor is a wilted flower. Dead and crumbling and daringly yellow. 

Clancy runs his fingers over it, and he doesn’t dare lift it free. The petals crackle at his touch. They are sharp in a way that goes beyond his skin. 

He replaces the tile, feeling filthy. For days, he cannot stop thinking about the flower. 

-

The graffiti is trying to talk to him. Or if not to him, Clancy thinks, then he’s the only one who notices. 

There’s an alley about halfway between the bus station and the west bunker. It hides drifting trash and the occasional idling car. Most days, the tiny square of wall is grey. Sometimes, it has been written on. 

Clancy glances at it when it reads ‘saying nothing’ in careful, black and red script. He notices when it reads ‘wasn’t the only one’. 

He stops, caught in streetlit spotlight, when it reads ‘does this mean you’ve lost your dream?’ 

Before, the writing had been oddly beautiful. Each line flowed and dripped into the next, an elegant design that made each letter purposeful. Now, it’s just hasty handwriting in fading marker. A rusted hubcap lies against the wall beneath it. 

Clancy puts his head down and hurries past. His collar is wet with sweat and itching with dust from working the tunnels in the northern districts. All he wants is to go home. All he wants is to sleep, so that for a few unremembered hours, he won’t feel heavy. 

He stops a block from the bunker, turns, and returns to the alley. His hands curl into fists. He reaches out and touches the bricks, and he imagines he can feel the layers of paint beneath. 

“What’s a dream?” he asks, softly. 

The stones don’t answer. Clancy leaves them. He takes a different route back from the bus station after that. 

-

It’s entirely pointless to have least favorite assignments. Clancy had told himself so all through his childhood, but it still doesn’t make the greenhouses comfortable. 

He shies away from another stinking splatter of mud, hair and face already coated in soil. Dirt has slipped over the openings of his work gloves and wormed its way to crust the sensitive skin between his fingers. He can smell rotting roots. The crops’ bitter taste touches the back of his tongue, and here there is no salt or spice to make it bearable. 

He drags his bucket of weeds to the disposal chute. It winds down to the bottom of the Tower, where the incinerators hum. They heat the greenhouses from beneath, and they dispose of everything from the city’s refuse to its bones. He watches the sprouts tumble toward the faraway red glow. 

From beyond the canvas door, a bell rings. The shadow of a Glorified calls, “fifteen. Last block before sundown.” 

There’s a rustle as the working citizens release their buckets and spades for the boredom of a break. Clancy finds the intermissions are always too long and not long enough. He drags his bucket, empty but for a few sticky clods of dirt, back to his station. He sits. 

As he always does while waiting for the second bell, he watches his hands. Thoughts of graffitied words wriggle over his mind. He pushes them away, and they return. 

Clancy stands, abruptly enough that the citizen at the opposite station jumps. She hides something from Clancy’s sight. 

“Sorry,” Clancy says. It’s quiet beneath the creaking of irrigation equipment. 

“It’s alright,” says the woman. “You just surprised me.” 

“What are you doing?” 

“Nothing.” She doesn’t look at him. 

“Oh.” Clancy tries to remember the brush of green he’d seen in her dark hands. “Fifteen minutes feels like forever. Sometimes. Especially in here.” 

“It is quite hot,” the woman admits. 

“I’m going to take my gloves off for a minute,” says Clancy. “Don’t tell anyone.” 

“Sure,” says the woman. “Just don’t touch the parsnip leaves.” 

“What?”

“They can give you hives. That’s why we’re supposed to wear the gloves.” 

Clancy frees his hands and glances over at one of the nearby plant beds. Thin, twisted leaves flutter gently. “I didn’t know that.” 

“They don’t really talk about it. I suppose it’s not important,” says the woman. “I just—find that sort of thing easy to remember.” 

“What sort of thing?”

“What the plants do.” The woman shrugs. Her hands are still out of sight. She has tight braids bound to the back of her head. 

Clancy says, before he can think, “do you know if any of these plants can grow yellow flowers?” 

“The defiled color? We don’t let them,” says the woman with certainty. 

“But they can?”

“Some.” She points, and Clancy follows her finger through the greenhouse. “The dandelions and the parsnips. The sunflowers, too, but those are only in the higher houses.” 

Clancy wants to ask what those look like, but he holds his tongue. He glances at the door. The Glorified shouldn’t see him neglecting his proper equipment. 

“Aren’t you Clancy?” the woman says, after a moment.

“Yes.”

“Is it true what you did? Two Lightings ago?” She leans forward, grey eyes not quite afraid. “You killed a vulture.”

“Did I?” It should surprise Clancy, but it doesn’t. “I don’t remember.” 

“Oh. Well, I suppose it was only a rumor.” 

“Why would I do that?” 

“You were jealous it picked someone else,” the woman says. “But I heard citizens from the West District say it did pick you, and you killed it anyway.” 

Clancy’s hands curl on his knees, digging into his pants. “I…” 

“Sorry,” says the woman. “I shouldn’t say those sorts of things.” 

They are quiet for a moment. Dappled shadows cross the dirty floor between them, like light reflected through water. Clancy hopes she can’t hear how his heart his suddenly hammering. He worries Nico, somewhere, can hear it. 

“You know me,” he says. “That’s not fair.”

“Oh. Right. I’m Anya,” says the woman. 

“Now we’re even.”

She nods. There’s another pause. 

“I lied before,” she says. “I’m not doing nothing.”
“I won’t tell anyone. That wouldn’t be fair either, given the gloves.” 

Anya pulls her hands back into her lap, and Clancy sees something woven between her fingers. Three strips of plant stems are braided into a long strand. That strand is braided with three more. That strand is braided with five. A lacy spiral of knots sits in the woman’s palm. 

Clancy leans forward despite himself. He wants to touch, but he doesn’t know how to ask. “That’s…”

“I’ve been working on it a week or so,” she says. “It helps the breaks not take so long, I guess.”

Clancy nods. If he lets himself think about it, there’s a pleasant whine in the creaking of the irrigation machinery. He wants to hum along. Anya looks between him and the sculpture, and neither of them know what to say. 

“Maybe you could teach me,” Clancy tries. 

She says, “Okay.”

-

Anya lives in the Northeast District, and the bunker is identical to the West’s but for the placement of its windows. Clancy sits across from Anya on a mess hall bench. The moon comes through the high eastern windows, slivers of glass in concrete. 

“It’s going to be full tomorrow,” Anya says. 

“How do you know?” 

“I’ve been counting the nights. I have a log.” 

Clancy wonders if she stole paper. He doesn’t ask, but something about the possibility relaxes him. “It’s best when it’s new,” Clancy says.

She frowns. “Why?”

The answer should be easy, but when Clancy opens his mouth, nothing comes out. He frowns. “I… I’m not sure, I suppose.” 

“It’s best now,” Anya says with certainty. “Come on.” 

She takes his bowl and hers. She weaves away through the mess hall so quickly that Clancy hasn’t enough time to refuse. Clearing the bitter taste of the meal from the back of his teeth, he follows. 

The halls here are familiar ones. They duck through them together, taking turns that Clancy has never had reason to before. Anya shoulders open a creaking door to a bedroom. It doesn’t appear to have someone living in it—although Clancy supposes he would have no way to tell. The curtains in the window are drawn. When Anya opens them, Clancy realizes the window is missing an entire pane. His breath catches. 

“I know I should report it,” says Anya, “but it’s not dishonoring anyone, right?”

Clancy has already slotted his shoulders through the gap. “Is the window ledge above secure?”

“No, but there’s a broken brick you can use to reach the gutter’s edge.” 

“I see it.” 

He folds himself out over the many-story drop. If he fell, he wonders, would it count as a commitment? Perhaps Honorable Death would let him into paradise on a technicality. 

He clambers up onto the roof, and it feels easy. He can’t place why. Reaching down, he gives Anya a hand up, and they cross to the center of the roof. They step over pipes and dodge AC vents. Clancy sings along to their rattles. 

“What’s that?” Anya asks. 

Clancy stops singing. “Sorry.”

“Oh. Alright.” 

They reach a small alcove: a boarded-up maintenance door. Clancy sees tally marks carved into the wood. 

“Your log?” he asks. 

“Yes. Each diagonal slash is a week. Each circle is a full moon.” 

Clancy counts them quickly. He reaches up and frames the moon between forefinger and thumb. 

“It’s best full because you can see everything,” Anya says. “The whole city, like it’s made of ice. And if it’s too foggy to see anything but the towers, it’s like you’re a vulture up here. Flying.”

Clancy shakes his head. “You can’t see it, if it’s too bright.”

“See what?”

“I’m… I’m not sure.” Clancy looks toward the horizon. The clouds are thick and dark. “Just something. Anything.”

“I see it sometimes,” Anya says, so quiet that Clancy barely hears her. 

“You do?”

“It’s a test, right?” She looks at him, her hand lingering on the slats of the moon-count. “A test from Honored Death. That’s why the full moon—well. It makes it easier. Not to look.”

Clancy says, “I feel like I’m always failing a test.” It should make him feel weak. 

Anya rubs her wrists. “Me too,” she says. 

-

The next Lighting of the Road is tense when it should be glorious. 

Clancy stands, wound like a spring, loaded like a bullet. Surrounded by thousands of citizens, he feels exposed. The knife in his hand threatens to fall from his sweat-slick fingers. Perhaps it is anticipation. Perhaps this feeling is the call of paradise, and Clancy will be honored. 

Far above, the hollow top of the Tower opens on grey sky. How long would it take to climb these walls, Clancy wonders? Hours? Days? Lifetimes? Would will or heart give out first? There is no value in such musings, no value in Clancy. He wishes he could hide questions from his face, so that the Bishops did not look at him as though he were alone and not one of thousands. 

They stand like faraway memories, but when they speak, they are as though within reach. Red burns itself into Clancy’s mind. He imagines the sound of rushing water. He looks up again, as though he will see figures on the faraway lip of the Tower’s clifftop. 

Nico, first of the Bishops, raises his hands. The amphitheater was already grave-silent, but even chests go still. 

“Citizens of Dema,” he says. Clancy sees the vulture on his shoulder. It is huge and unfamiliar. “The Gloried Nine of the Vialist Council welcome you. Moon and sunrise endlessness has lead us once more to the beginning. It is time to fill the veins of paradise.”

“Life to the city,” comes the roar. Clancy does not speak. 

“You need not wait.” Nico pulls glass from his robes—a cord of braided black strung with vials of Neon. “You need never wait. But some, today, will walk the road with the honor of wing beats beside them. Let us Light the way.” 

Nine hands cast nine patterns over the walls. Clancy tries to watch the sky instead, but the glow calls its fascination. It draws his eyes and ears, a black hole of beauty. He watches it swirl to frame the birds that take to wing. They hypnotize in circles high above. 

Notes come to Clancy’s lips. They taste like shards of terror, and they make it easier to swallow. He waits. 

A vulture dives. A second. A third. They drop like arrows into the rings of citizens, until only Andre’s remains. Then it too descends. 

It comes to rest on the arm of a boy, three rings in front of Clancy. His wrist his thin, and his blade is so large compared to his hands. Clancy realizes his eyes are green. The vulture is already snapping for them when skin and knife and blood mingle on the lanes of the Road. 

Neon reflects in pooling liquid. Onyx and ivory. There are cracks in the concrete that fill and flow with thick warmth. 

“Let there be silence,” says Nico, “in honor of those who walk.” 

“Glory,” whispers the man in front of Clancy. 

Clancy breaks like a bone. He descends on the man, fingers in claws, blade bent and blunted beneath his boot. He wraps a hand around his throat. He can smell nothing but blood. “Glory?” he screams. “That boy is dead, and you celebrate?”

Hands wrestle him back. He doesn’t care the difference between citizen, Glorified, or Bishop anymore. The man lies on his back, staring at Clancy. He is lost. Heavy, maybe, like Clancy. Clancy lunges for him again. He is restrained. 

“Show some respect,” someone hisses. 

Clancy struggles. He can see the sky far above, and he knows a vulture could reach it in moments, but chooses not to. Why can’t he choose? 

The leaded hand of Heavy presses over his neck. Clancy stops straining. His ribcage struggles to rise. 

“Troublesome,” says Nico. Clancy feels the brush of his veil against his ear. “The others think there is something useful to you, but I know better.” 

“You did this.” Clancy heaves the words across light-years. “How could you do this?” 

He feels a pain, bright like gravestones. There is a shriek. It comes from his own throat, he thinks, crumpled to the ground. His hand searches for the tear in his sleeve, and his palm grows wet. Above him, the shadow of a Bishop sheathes a silver blade.

“Kneel,” says Nico. 

The surrounding citizens do. The Tower takes a knee in waves.

“Kneel,” Nico says again. 

Clancy raises his head. He pushes himself to his elbows, his left arm blind with pain. 

“Necromancer,” Clancy spits. The word feels black in his mouth. 

Nico uppercuts, swift as a snake. Clancy goes sprawling, and he tastes blood. He feels it a moment later. His breath catches. 

The blade presses to the side of Clancy’s neck. “Kneel,” says the voice of weight. “You have no chances left.” 

“You won’t kill me,” Clancy says. “You can’t kill us yourselves—that’s it, isn’t it?”

The blade burns. Clancy cries out, clutching the long gash across the center of his chest. His vision is swimming. All he can focus on are the black buttons sliced from his ruined shirt, dotting the bloody ground around him like cast dice. 

“Enough,” Nico says. “Keons. The judgement of the disgrace is yours.” 

He leaves Clancy in smears of his own blood. The sound of his blade sheathing is a razor on tile. Clancy reaches out with a soaked hand to gather two of the buttons from the ground. He holds them, as though that alone can turn them into a weapon. As though that alone can stop Keons. 

The Bishop pulls him to his feet. The citizens have stepped back, far out of reach, like Clancy is a drop of oil on water. Clancy doesn’t dare search their slack, shocked faces for Anya’s, certain Keons would follow his gaze.

A crumbling hand settles, almost comfortingly, on Clancy’s upper arm. It stings the deep cut, and Clancy hisses. 

“He won’t kill you,” says Keons. “But you should know by now that death is a mercy.” 

-

Clancy claws at the walls of the chantry cell. His wounds are undressed. He thinks this is the same cinder block room he woke up in all those weeks ago, and he understands now something he hadn’t, then. Something that had been taken from him, then.

He is not Heavy. Not here. Released of weight, the smoke and splinters of fear are rising in his chest and choking him. 

He slams his shoulder into the locked door and layers another stamp of helplessness on the metal in blood. It is painted grey. It does not give. Clancy yells, and his voice echoes. He has so little time left. 

The room contains only a cot, restroom, and empty chest of drawers. Clancy’s knife is on the floor; he’d shattered the blade trying to slip it through the lock. The two pieces are sharp and serrated. Clancy takes one into his palm, holding it tightly. 

He can’t think. They’re going to drag him back. They’re going to clean him from his own mind like he is nothing but an offending stain, blood on a spotless door. He can’t start over. He can’t lose everything—how many times has he been here, too cowardly to nip the backslide in the bud? 

How many times has there been a yellow flower, shriveled to nothing, hidden beneath his floor?

No more. Clancy is no one’s pendulum, and he doesn’t care how the cycle ends. Just so long as it ends. Just so long as it stops. 

He can hardly tell through the grime caked on his skin when the knife bites down. Clancy stops at the first sting of pain. He can feel his jaw clenching as though wired shut. 

The walls loom around him. The locked door yawns a great, empty laugh. Clancy is letting the Bishops win. 

He slumps against the wall. The ground is cold when he sinks down, and he wishes it would swallow him. It remains as hard and unforgiving as a Bishop’s hands.

Time slips by. Pain preens its feathers, getting comfortable under Clancy’s skin. He imagines shapes. He imagines melodies, but they feel as empty as this room. 

Faraway, something thuds. 

Clancy raises his head. He can hear a rhythm. Four and four, two and two, getting louder. Get up, Clancy. 

The stone carries the vibrations, not the sounds. They’re deafening all the same. Footfalls carried on the silence of this cell. 

Get up, Clancy. 

He has moments. There is only one thing he’ll share with the man who walks out of this cell. He reaches for the knife. In desperation, in memory, he rolls up his sleeve. He carves a message on the only canvas he has. 

‘ALLEY’. 

He has strength enough for this. One more time. 

Clancy gets up, and the door opens.

Chapter Text

The zipper on the backpack’s second pocket sticks. The Torchbearer tugs it diagonally, and the seams strain. He swings it over his shoulder and reaches for his drumsticks. 

“We’re setting out again, boss?” says Koa. He stands with the tent’s entry-flap held above his head. His bandana is tied around his wrist. Olivian lingers behind him, cleaning dried paint from beneath her fingertips. 

“Think the wind will stay eastward?” the Torchbearer says. “The smoke reached the Towers too soon, last time.” 

“Clouds are a good sign.”

“Toss me that travel pack. No, that’s for Dakota.” 

Koa tosses him a bedroll. The straps clatter together when he catches it, and he starts to lace them over the top of the backpack. 

“You sure you want to turn around now?” Olivian says. “We’ve only been back half a day.” 

“Just a restock,” says the Torchbearer. He needs to make sure the nursing tent has enough rations before he leaves—and, right, Kally needs more paper for the map. The Torchbearer knows half of it goes to the girl’s doodles, and it’s worth every sheet. 

Koa and Olivian glance at each other. They have a language between just the two of them, and the Torchbearer waits with a raised eyebrow for them to translate.

“You think he’ll be there, this time?” Olivian says. 

The Torchbearer ties the laces a little too tight. “He’ll be there.”

“We’ve been risking as far as the square for weeks now. No one’s followed the compass.” 

“We aren’t leaving him there,” the Torchbearer says, and his hand drums on the top of the crate.

“Boss, no one’s saying that,” says Koa. “Just that the trek to the city takes a lot.”

“If I fail him again—” The Torchbearer stops. He relaxes his hand, pressing his palm to his leg and holding it there. His voice is calmer when he says, “I won’t fail him again. But you’re right. I’ve been neglecting camp.”

“No one’s saying that, either,” Olivian mutters. 

“You two stay. Raymond and Eden too. Help with the winter pathfinding and scouting for blizzard shelter.” 

“Hell no,” says Koa instantly. 

“We aren’t staying here on our asses while you tempt the Bishops on the other side of Trench.” 

The Torchbearer claps Olivian on the shoulder as he pushes past her and out of the tent. The bustle and chatter of camp surrounds him in a blanket of yellow. “You won’t be on your asses. You’ll be scouting for blizzard shelter.” 

“Boss—”

“I’ve been pushing you too hard,” says the Torchbearer. “I know that. I’m sorry. I’m sure Kally misses you both, and that’s never what I want.”

Olivian and Koa share another look, and this one, the Torchbearer understands. “Fine,” Olivian says. “Swear you’ll sleep a few hours on the way?” 

“Swear,” the Torchbearer lies. “Sahlo folina.” 

“Sahlo folina,” echo the banditos. Soon, the Torchbearer thinks, there will be another voice among them. Then, and only then, will he rest.