Something was climbing the stairway inside the Godkiller’s chest.
The first hand appeared between the ribs, fingers dragging over the white bone. It belonged to a woman with no head. Her wrist ended in a loop of silver cord, and each time she pulled herself up, the cord tightened around the next step.
Pell raised her hatchet. Blood ran down her arm from the wound in her shoulder and dripped onto the beach, where it turned into little black beads.
“Vera,” she said, “move.”
I moved toward the ribs.
The headless woman climbed faster. Behind her came a child with a coal in its mouth, then a soldier carrying his own spine like a ladder. The Godkiller watched from the surf. Its open chest framed the stairway in white ribs, and the stars inside its body had begun to go out one by one.
Tarrow limped after me. His right hand had stiffened to the wrist. He held the relic knife in his left, though his grip kept slipping. “You said we were making a door.”
“I revised the plan.”
“You had a plan?”
“Briefly.”
Pell caught up and shoved me through the gap between two ribs. Her good hand closed around the back of my coat. The headless woman struck the bone where my skull had been. The impact rang through the corpse like a bell.
Venn entered last. He dragged his salt-white hand along the rib as he passed, leaving a line of blood. The bone drank it. The Godkiller’s body shuddered.
Venn looked at the blood on the rib. “It knows we’ve crossed the threshold.”
“Does it know where we’re going?”
“It knows you’re going.”
A hand closed around the ankle of his good leg. Venn drove his heel down, but the fingers wrapped tighter. Pell swung her hatchet and severed the wrist. The phantom hand fell against the stair and became another step.
Tarrow stared at it. “That’s efficient.”
“Keep climbing,” I said.
The steps were warm. Each one carried a different imprint: a palm burned smooth, a child’s fingers pressed into soft flesh, a laborer’s hand with the nails split and packed with salt. When I set my stone arm against the wall for balance, faces opened in the bone beside me.
The first showed Pell’s face.
The second showed mine.
The third showed the tether.
I kept climbing.
Next
Vera must confront the figure wearing her face and learn whether it is the ritual’s taker, the Godkiller’s buried self, or the identity the pact intends to erase.
Behind us, the dead poured through the ribs. Their feet struck the beach in a rapid, dry rhythm. We had the length of a prayer before they reached us, and prayers had poor engineering.
The stair bent inward. The black sea disappeared. The walls narrowed until Pell’s shoulder scraped one side and Tarrow’s knife scraped the other. Every scrape made the memory tremble.
Venn climbed beside me. His breathing had become shallow. Blood had dried in the creases of his mouth.
“You’ve read this part,” I said.
“I’ve seen pieces.”
“What did the pieces leave out?”
He looked at the hand-shaped steps. “The witness doesn’t walk into the pact willingly.”
“That makes two of us.”
“The pact chooses someone who already carries a severed memory. It needs a wound that has survived being cut away.”
Pell heard him. “Venn.”
He continued climbing.
I caught his sleeve. “Say it plainly.”
His eyes moved to my stone arm. “The witness has to bring the missing thing to the door.”
The stair gave a violent lurch. Tarrow fell against Pell, and Pell struck the wall with her wounded shoulder. She bit down hard enough to make blood appear between her teeth.
The faces in the bone opened their mouths.
Silver cord spilled from them.
It hung across the steps in tangled loops, bright and wet, each strand leading downward toward the beach. I saw the old dive in every loop: the dead god’s skull, the memory entity wearing a woman’s face, Pell at the anchor, her hatchet rising.
The image repeated until the moment of the cut became a gate.
Pell’s hatchet paused above the tether.
Her eyes met mine.
Then she cut.
The stair vanished beneath my feet.
I landed on the old shore.
The first dive’s dust filled my mouth. The dead god’s skull lay open before me, its inner chambers glowing with marrow-fire. The silver tether ran from my waist to Pell’s hands. She stood beside the anchor, younger by three years and less careful with her fear.
The entity crouched behind me. It wore my mother’s face, then Pell’s, then mine. Its fingers had already entered the back of my skull.
Pell saw it.
She lifted the hatchet.
“Don’t,” I told her.
Her younger face twisted. “You’re caught.”
The entity pressed deeper. Memory tore across my neck like hot wire.
Pell looked at the tether. She looked at me. Her hand shook.
Then she cut.
The shore folded.
I was back on the stair, kneeling with both hands around a silver strand. The strand ran through my fingers and into Pell’s chest. She stood below me, trapped among the dead, while the headless woman climbed over her back.
“Cut it,” Pell said.
Her voice came from the old shore and the stair together.
Tarrow reached for her. “Vera, get her out.”
The strand tightened. My fingers began to crystallize where it touched them. The pact had chosen its shape: Pell would take the place of the memory entity, and I would become the hand that severed her.
Pell looked up at me. Her face was grey with pain, but her eyes were clear.
“If you pull me up,” she said, “it uses me to reach you.”
The headless woman opened its chest. Inside was the familiar dark chamber, packed with white insects. Names moved inside them. One flew toward Pell’s mouth.
I understood the trap. The pact did not require Pell’s death. It required me to remember her rescue as betrayal, then carry that altered memory to the door. The old wound was valuable because I had kept it sharp.
The entity behind Pell smiled with my mother’s mouth.
“Choose,” it said.
I drove my relic knife through the silver strand.
The blade passed through my hand first.
Stone split from wrist to palm. Pain shot up my arm, clean and bright. The strand snapped, but Pell remained on the stair. The false shore collapsed around us. The headless woman fell backward, taking the entity with it, and the dead below screamed as the memory rejected its own lie.
Pell grabbed my coat and hauled me upright. “You cut the tether again.”
“I cut a memory wearing its shape.”
“That distinction won’t comfort me if you start turning hollow.”
“Then keep talking.”
She stared at the split in my stone palm. Her anger had no room to settle. “You could have asked.”
“The memory was in a hurry.”
Tarrow came up behind us, pale and sweating. Salt had crossed his wrist and reached the first joint of his thumb. “Are we done arguing?”
“No,” Pell said.
“We can schedule it.”
The stair ended at a door.
It had been made from blackened ribs fused into a single slab. Three handprints marked its surface: one small and burned, one broad and split down the center, and one smooth as polished stone. Beneath them ran a line of writing in the Godkiller’s cramped, ancient script.
Venn climbed the final steps and read it aloud.
“Give the fire to the taker. Let the taker open the body. Let the witness carry the name where the dead cannot follow.”
The small handprint began to glow.
A coal appeared in its palm.
The broad print filled with blood.
The smooth print filled with salt.
Venn’s gaze fixed on the last one. “The door is waiting for your hand.”
I pressed my good palm against it.
The bone closed around my fingers. Cold traveled up my arm, through my shoulder, and into the place where I still kept the first dive. I saw the shore. The anchor. Pell’s hatchet. The moment before the cut.
A voice spoke from behind the door.
“Name what was taken.”
Pell stepped forward. “Vera—”
The door swallowed her voice.
I could no longer hear her. I could see her standing beside me, but her face had begun to blur at the edges. The pact was reaching for the memory that made her dangerous to me and necessary to me.
Venn seized my shoulder. His fingers were rigid against my coat. “Don’t give it the first thing it asks for.”
“You know what it wants.”
“I know what it does.”
His grip tightened until fresh blood ran from beneath his salt-white nails. “It takes the name attached to the wound. Once it has that, the witness can pass.”
Pell’s mouth moved. I could not hear her. Her hatchet hung at her side. Her scarred shoulder, her blunt stance, the way she leaned forward when she expected an argument—all of it remained visible, while the sound of her voice drained away.
I had spent three years calling her a traitor in the private room where I kept my worst mistakes. The pact wanted that word. It wanted me to surrender the name I had given the memory so the Godkiller could carry the truth away.
I pressed harder against the door.
“Her name is Pell,” I said.
The bone shuddered.
The smooth handprint cracked beneath mine. Salt burst from the seam and climbed over my fingers. Pell’s voice returned in a single harsh fragment.
“—you stubborn—”
The door opened inward.
Beyond it lay a chamber filled with hanging silver cords. At the center stood a figure in a hood, holding a coal in one hand and a human name in the other.