Shae got out of the car and walked numbly down the street. She couldn’t bear to feel so useless, even though Lott was correct and she was in no shape to be exerting herself physically in the heavy wreckage and dust-choked air. No one noticed her leaving the scene. Maybe she should’ve stayed at home after all. Wen would’ve heard the news by now. Niko, Ru, and Jaya had been pulled out of school and she ought to be there to meet them when they got home. Her breasts were beginning to feel uncomfortably hard and swollen, and she realized she’d forgotten to tell her mother where the diapers were stored.
Shae’s feet carried her through the eerily abandoned streets of the Financial District, and out of unthinking habit rather than any conscious decision, she found herself three blocks away, standing outside the Temple of Divine Return. The courtyard with its prayer trees was empty and silent. Even the wind seemed to have fallen still. Shae walked through the doors. The platform in front of the mural of Banishment and Return was empty. It seemed that in the immediate aftermath of such an unprecedented attack in the heart of Janloon, every nearby building had been evacuated, even the temple. The sight was disquieting. Over the years, she’d come to this place hundreds of times, sometimes early in the morning before work, sometimes late at night, but no matter the time of day, there had always been penitents sitting in dutiful meditation, eyes closed, hands resting on sacred orbs of jade, their auras a crooning hum of peaceful but vigilant energy filling the sanctum. Now that energy was absent, and she was alone.
That was not true. Shae’s sense of Perception was foggy, not what it would normally be, but as she walked slowly down the aisle between the prayer cushions, she felt a tug on her senses, the flicker of an undeniably familiar aura. She turned around, slowly, disbelieving. Her eyes slid into the shadows at the back of the chamber and came to rest on a figure slumped against the back wall, unmoving.
Shae walked toward the hunched shape. The rough sound of her own breath and the tread of her shoes against the floor seemed intrusive, deafening. That dense red jade aura—she would recognize it anywhere. It was muted, thinning, the heat of a black coal evaporating in the cold. Ayt Mada lay with both hands pressed over the wound in her neck, her arms and shoulders caked with drying blood, her chest barely rising.
At Shae’s approach, Ayt’s eyes cracked open and gradually focused. A long surreal moment of mutual astonishment stretched between the two women. Then a slow, ironic smile lifted the corners of Ayt Mada’s mouth and crawled across her glazed but glittering eyes. “Truly, the gods do have a sense of humor.” Ayt’s voice was barely audible. “Kaul Shae-jen. What a coincidence.”
Shae lifted her face to the ceiling of the empty temple, where she and Ayt had met in years past, under the eyes of the gods in Heaven, to stake themselves irrevocably against each other. She brought her gaze back to the woman at her feet. “Perhaps not such a coincidence, Ayt-jen,” she whispered.
Ayt rasped, “Your brother is dead. I wasn’t even in the building, and the explosion threw me across the street.” The matter-of-factness of Ayt’s words chilled Shae to the soles of her feet. It was remarkable that the woman had survived her wounds, that she had managed, somehow, to stagger the distance to the temple, where perhaps she’d hoped to find aid and sanctuary. Shae took a few steps closer. Ayt’s face was as pale as chalk, and her lips were turning blue. The stiffly curled fingers of her hands were white. Ayt had been Channeling into herself, a difficult feat for any Green Bone. She had clotted the grievous wound in her neck and slowed the bleeding by redirecting and spending her own life energy, drawing it from elsewhere in her body. It was an unsustainable tactic, like a starving man eating his own flesh. She would lose function elsewhere, go numb in her extremities and limbs, black out as her organs shut down.
“Who did it?” Shae was genuinely curious, almost bitterly admiring. Decades of murderous hatred between No Peak and the Mountain, and someone else had plunged a knife into Ayt’s neck.
“I did,” Ayt answered. She smiled again at Shae’s uncomprehending silence. “I executed Ven Sando and his sons for treason ten years ago. But I let his wife and daughters live.” Ayt’s voice was a slurred, dry, acidic whisper. “It wasn’t enough for Ven’s daughter that I die in the bombing. She wanted me to know it was her. I made the error of underestimating another woman.” The Pillar wetted her lips and fixed her eyes on Shae. “I’ve only done that one other time.”