The street opened beneath us, and I ran for the black door.
The choice offended Pell’s sense of survival. She seized the back of my coat and hauled me sideways as the paving stones split where my boots had been. Tarrow drove one of his relic knives into the nearest rib, caught Venn by the belt, and dragged him clear. The faceless citizens kept walking toward us, their mouths working in time with the bell.
The silver tether had gone from four strands to three.
“Vera!” Pell shouted.
“I noticed.”
The widening street exposed a shaft full of white teeth. Far below, an imitation of the black sea churned beneath the city, and the pale shapes in it wore human hands.
The door waited at the end of the avenue. Its three notches glowed red. The tether disappeared beneath it, pulling taut enough to sing.
Every instinct I possessed told me to cut the line and retreat. Every memory of my first dive answered with the same voice from beyond the shore, patient and wet and asking for the hand that lit the first fire.
I hated when ghosts agreed with one another.
“Through the door,” I said.
Pell’s grip tightened on my coat. “That thing is dragging the tether in.”
“It’s the only direction that still has one.”
“We don’t know what’s past it.”
“We know what’s behind us.”
A faceless citizen reached us. Tarrow slashed its throat. The bone knife passed cleanly through the neck, but the wound opened into a furnace. Fire poured over Tarrow’s hand and ran up his arm in thin orange veins.
He screamed and dropped the knife.
The creature did not bleed. It leaned close, and a child’s voice came from its empty face.
“Show me what you burned.”
Tarrow stumbled backward. His eyes fixed on the furnace in the creature’s throat. His knuckles whitened around the second knife.
“Dock Nine,” he said.
I knew that look. The memory had found a regret and put a mouth on it.
“Tarrow, move.”
“I saw them under the beams.” His voice had gone small. “The whole settlement came down. I heard them calling.”
The creature opened its furnace wider.
Pell struck it with her hatchet. The blade lodged in its skull. She planted both feet and wrenched the weapon free, taking half the face with it. Fire scattered across the street and burned holes through the citizens behind it.
Next
Trapped beyond the severed tether, Vera and the crew must face the Godkiller’s true memory—and learn what the ritual demands from the three marked hands.
“Tarrow,” she said, “you can remember your dead after we live.”
He looked at her, then at the door. The second knife came up. He buried it in the creature’s chest and shoved until the blade broke through its back.
The thing collapsed into a heap of black ash.
Tarrow pulled his hand from the flames. The skin had not burned. Instead, pale lines had appeared beneath it, fine as cracks in porcelain.
“Stage one,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said through clenched teeth. “I was worried it might be a sunburn.”
The bell rang again. Another strand of silver went dark.
We reached the door together. The handle was shaped like a human wrist, severed cleanly above the palm. Its fingers curled around nothing.
Venn stopped.
The citizens had halted behind us. Their faceless heads tilted toward him. White grains pushed through the seams of his gloves.
“Open it,” I said.
He stared at the handle. “It doesn’t open for us.”
“Then find out who it opens for.”
“The Godkiller.”
“That corpse has been dead for a century.”
“His regret hasn’t.”
The three notches brightened. Each one held a different image now: a child’s hand wrapped around a coal, a soldier’s hand gripping a torch, an old hand placing flame beneath a blackened bowl.
Venn raised his right hand toward the door.
Pell caught his wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Reading it.”
“You’re already salted.”
His eyes moved to her face. The controlled mask he wore cracked along one edge. “You noticed.”
“I’ve noticed for three days.”
“Then you’ve had three days to decide whether I’m useful.”
“I decided you were dangerous.”
“Those qualities overlap.”
The tether shivered between us. Two strands remained. The door’s wrist-hand flexed.
I remembered Venn crouched beside the braincase, hiding salt under his nails. I remembered the hunger in his face when the door appeared. A secret could be a weapon. It could also be a map. We had arrived at the only map left.
“Let him read it,” I said.
Pell turned on me. “You’re trusting him?”
“I’m spending him.”
Venn glanced at me. Something like approval passed through his expression and vanished before it became gratitude.
Pell released him. “If you get us trapped, I’ll find a way to kill you in here.”
“You’ll have to reach me first,” Venn said.
He pressed his palm to the handle.
The memory took his hand.
White salt erupted through his glove and sealed his fingers to the wrist-shaped metal. Venn’s back arched. The faceless citizens began whispering, each voice repeating a different name. I heard mine among them, spoken by my mother, who had been dead before my first dive.
The door showed us a room built under a burning sky.
A man stood in the center, though the memory refused to give him a face. His left hand held a coal. His right hand rested against his chest. Around him lay hundreds of bodies arranged in circles, their mouths packed with salt.
Venn made a strangled sound.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“The pact’s first clause.”
“Read it.”
His eyes tracked words appearing in the air above the faceless man. “Fire belongs to the hand that carries it. The hand belongs to the one who survives the burning.”
The man lifted the coal.
The bodies around him caught fire. Their flames bent toward the coal as if the small ember were drawing breath. The faceless man screamed. His left hand blackened, split, and became bone. He thrust the ruined hand into his own chest.
The memory lurched.
Venn tore himself free. The skin of his palm remained on the handle. Underneath, his hand was white and rigid from wrist to fingertip.
“The ritual isn’t a weapon,” he said. “It’s an exchange.”
The door began to close.
I seized the severed wrist-handle with my stone hand. The contact drove a spike of heat through my shoulder and into my jaw. My fingers locked around it. Beneath the leather, the mineral shell in my arm split with a sound like ice breaking.
The voice from the shore spoke through the door.
“Bring me the hand that lit the first fire.”
Venn stared at my arm. “It recognizes you.”
“Many things recognize me. Most regret it.”
“That isn’t a joke.”
“I know.”
The door pulled. My arm dragged toward the widening gap. The tether shrank to a single silver strand, stretched from my spine through Pell and Tarrow to the living world. It had become so thin I could see the black city through it.
Pell wrapped her hatchet chain around my waist. Tarrow grabbed her belt.
“We can’t hold this,” Tarrow said.
“Then don’t hold me,” I said. “Hold the line.”
Pell understood first. She drove the anchor hook of her chain into the rib-stone beside the door. Tarrow braced behind her, boots sliding toward the street’s open mouth. Venn placed his salt-white hand over the red notch at the top of the door.
The memory fought us with the only thing it had left.
The door filled with my first dive.
I saw the white shore again. I saw myself younger, whole-bodied, kneeling beside a drowned woman whose face had been scraped away by salt. I saw Pell on the other side of the tether, screaming for me to return. I saw myself refuse because the drowned woman had opened her mouth and spoken in that same inhuman voice.
I had spent years remembering Pell’s cut as betrayal.
The memory showed me the silver line around my wrist, already darkening. It showed the woman’s hand beneath my ribs, reaching for my heart. Pell had cut me before the thing could pull me through.
The image lasted long enough to hurt and vanished.
Pell saw my face. “What did it show you?”
“Later.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the one you’re getting.”
Venn shouted. “Vera, the notches are a sequence. Three hands. Three deaths.”
The first notch flared around his palm. The second opened beneath my stone hand. The third remained dark.
“What completes it?” I asked.
Venn looked toward Tarrow.
Tarrow understood and went pale. “Absolutely not.”
“No one said your hand,” Pell told him.
“The door did.”
The handle twisted beneath my grip. A blade of black light opened across the threshold. Beyond it lay the shore from the first vision, but the pale thing in the water had come closer. Its head rose above the waves. It wore the Godkiller’s face, stretched over something too large for a skull.
Venn’s voice dropped. “The third hand belongs to the witness.”
I looked at the door. Then at the single silver strand.
We had one chance to cross before the tether disappeared. Tarrow could lose his hand. Venn could lose what remained of his. I could lose the arm that had kept me alive through half a body of stone.
I chose the person who had the answer.
“Venn,” I said, “put your hand on the third notch.”
His expression tightened. “That will finish the reading.”
“It will also finish your hand.”
“I know.”
He moved toward the final notch.
Pell’s chain snapped taut. Tarrow shouted. The silver strand broke behind us with a sound like a fingernail dragged across glass.
The living world vanished.
Venn pressed his ruined hand to the third notch.
The black door opened onto the sea, and the dead Godkiller turned to look at us.