Incarnate

He stopped walking. “Are you hungry now?”

I shook my head. “I’m glad you talk to me.” In the cabin, especially. Maybe he’d only rambled for hours to keep me from weeping in agony—maybe he’d only wanted to save his own ears—but he had, and he’d been careful and gentle. That meant everything. If only telling him that didn’t mean telling him that. “I won’t expect anyone else to be like you.”

“No one knows if you’ll be around very long. If people have been less than welcoming, that’s the reason why.”

“I’ll be around my whole life,” I whispered, not quite under the breeze in the forest, the pounding of my heart, and the beating of my invisible and incorporeal wings. “That’s a long time to me.”

He brushed a strand of hair off my face and nodded.

Chapter 7

Walls

AS WE BROKE through the forest, a white wall soared high into the air, like smooth clouds below the cobalt sky. It stretched in both directions as far as I could see, flowing like water on the dips and crests of the plateau that carried the city of Heart.

Gates of iron and brass guarded the Southern Arch into the city, but as wide as the entrance was, I couldn’t make out anything beyond. Just darkness.

“Look up.” Sam stood next to me, one hand twisted in Shaggy’s lead, and the other shoved into his pocket.

His cheeks were bright with chill, but his smile was wide and relaxed. Stubble darkened his chin like shadows, and his lips were chapped from wind. It had been a long walk, and he’d chatted constantly. He’d pointed out ruins, mostly derelict cabins, but there were a few mysterious mounds of rock. We’d walked by five immense graveyards, which we’d stopped to look at while he told me stories about the people buried there.

Apparently I hadn’t responded quickly enough. He glanced at me, his expression a cross between teasing and curiosity. “Not at me.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Look at Heart. Look up.”

Above the wall, an enormous tower jutted into the sky, taller than a hundred ancient redwood trees stacked on one another. It vanished into a cloud, white stone making that vapor look dirty in comparison. “What is it?” My chest felt too tight, like something squeezing and reminding me I was a nosoul. I resisted the urge to back away from it, lest it see me.

“The temple.” Now he peered at me with concern, something he did too much. “Are you okay?”

Evidently he saw nothing wrong with the tower, felt nothing wrong. So it was probably a side effect of my newness. “Yeah, of course.” I crossed my arms, mindful of my bandages. They were fewer today; the burns didn’t hurt nearly as much. Generous application of lotion helped. “So it’s a temple? For what?”

He started walking again, his gaze on the city. Or the temple. “It’s an old legend. Many stopped believing in it thousands of years ago.”

The reminder was a slap. He was old. He only appeared my age. “Why?”

“Because nothing ever happened, not once since we discovered Heart and made it our home.”

I searched my memory for anything about that, but Li’s library had been small. And if Sam had read anything about it in the cabin, it must have been one of the times I dozed off. “Maybe start from the beginning? What’s your very first memory?”

“Si—” He smiled and flipped a strand of hair off my face. “Maybe later. To be honest, some of the earliest memories are lost, which is one of the reasons we started keeping journals. The mind can hold a lot, but after a while, less important things fade to make room. You don’t have crystalline memories of everything in your life, after all. Or do you?”

I shook my head. There were some things I didn’t want to remember, either. How many memories had Sam willingly given up?

“One of the things everyone agrees on is that we started out in small tribes scattered across Range. Some say everyone appeared there, fully grown. Others insist that only a few did, and the rest were born.” He looked askance at me. “I don’t remember that at all. That truth is gone forever.”

“No one wrote it down?”

“We didn’t have writing yet. We had language, but I suppose we didn’t talk about it because we’d all been there. A lot of our early lives were focused on survival. It took time to learn what was safe to eat and what wasn’t, that not all the hot springs were safe to drink or bathe in, and the geysers—remind me later to tell you about the time one erupted while Sine was standing over it.” He started to grin, but other memories overshadowed whatever had been so funny about Sine’s misfortune. “We also had to focus on staying away from dragons and centaurs and . . . other things.”

“Sylph.”

He nodded. “We drew pictures in the dirt or on walls, but those weren’t permanent, and we couldn’t always translate one another’s—for lack of a better term—artwork. Things got lost and misinterpreted. I suppose we just gave up.”

“Okay.” As we neared the city, I could make out smaller metal tubes protruding from the southeastern quarter of the city. Antennae, perhaps, or solar panels. Maybe both. “So everyone was out wandering one day and you stumbled across Heart?”

“More or less. We fought over it for a while, before we realized how huge it is. There’s more than enough room for everyone.”

“Did that ever strike you as odd? That a city was waiting for you, complete with a temple right in the center?” I winced preemptively, but Li wasn’t here to hit me for my curiosity. Either Sam didn’t notice, or he was good at pretending.

“It should have, but we were so busy being grateful for shelter, we didn’t think about it. By the time we did, if there’d been a trace of a previous civilization, we’d destroyed it simply by living there. People still search for evidence, but there’s almost nothing in Heart.”

“Almost.”

“Well, there’s the temple, which is actually where we discovered writing.”

“But the books said—”

“That Deborl came up with the system? It’s not entirely false, but not accurate, either. He deciphered it. He’s always been good with patterns. There are words carved around the temple, which talk about Janan, a great being who created us, gave us souls and eternal life. And Heart. He was to protect us.”

I stared at the temple protruding from the center of the city. “None of that was in Li’s books.”

“Deborl has taken the liberty of editing a few things.” He tipped his head back, following my gaze. As we approached the city, the wall blocked more of the horizon. “At any rate, Janan never revealed himself to us, or helped during times of trouble.”

“Like drought and hunger, or some of the other year names?”

Sam nodded. “Exactly. The Year of Darkness was named because of a solar eclipse that happened early on. It seemed the entire sun went out. And Janan wasn’t there to help us when we were afraid.”

Until recently, no one had ever been around to help me when I was afraid, so the betrayal didn’t sit so sharply with me. But maybe it was different if someone promised, then didn’t follow through.

“The temple doesn’t even have a door. A few people firmly believe in Janan, and that he’ll return one day to rescue us from the terrors of this world, but most of us decided a long time ago that he wasn’t real.”

“But if what’s written on the temple is true—having souls, being reborn—doesn’t that mean he’s real too?”

“Maybe he was a long time ago. Some stories say he sacrificed his existence to create us, and that’s why there’s no door.” The sky vanished as we came to a stretch of barren land that ran up to the city wall. Steam puffed from a nearby hole in the ground. A geyser? “When it came time to write new copies of histories, some things got left out because people decided they weren’t real or important, which is why you’ve never heard about Janan.”

“You’ve said his name, though. You use it as a curse?”

He grimaced. “Some felt betrayed when Janan never saved us from griffin or centaur attacks. It’s been five thousand years, after all.”

I’d probably give up waiting on someone after that much time too.

“It started out as a simple oath, not an imprecation, but it grew and became a habit some of us can’t shake.”

“The people who still believe in him probably don’t like that.”

Sam chuckled. “No, not really. Try not to pick up my bad habits if you want to stay on the Council’s good side. Meuric really believes.”

As I left the road, my boots crunched on the ground, an odd mix of ash and pebbles. Sulfur-reeking steam tickled my nose, but it blew toward the forest, leaving white deposits of rime on branches. I started toward the geyser—I wanted to look inside—but Sam touched my shoulder, silently reminding me of his cautions as we’d entered the immense caldera: the ground was thin in some places, and would crack and drop you in scalding hot mud before you could leap away.

Since he tended to keep silent when I did potentially stupid things like scramble up old rock walls to get a better view of our surroundings, I’d taken the warning about the ground seriously.

“So did you feel betrayed? About Janan, I mean.” I drifted toward the wall, like I’d been heading that way all along.

“A little. I wanted to believe we were here for a purpose.”

“I know that feeling.” The wall bore no cracks or dapples of color, and was as hard as marble when I removed a bandage to feel if it was as smooth as it looked. The sun-warmed stone was frictionless on my tender palm.

“Wait,” Sam said as I was about to withdraw. He stood unnervingly close. “Just a moment.” Then his hand rested on the back of mine, fingers threaded between mine, carefully. “Do you feel it?” More a breath than a whisper.

Feel what? His touch? Heat radiating off his body? I felt it all over.

The stone wall pulsed, like blood rushing through an artery.

I jerked back, away from Sam, away from the wall. Sunlight hadn’t warmed the stone; heat emanated from inside. “How did it do that?” I itched to scrub my hand on my trousers, but the new skin was too delicate to risk. Instead, I wrapped the bandage around it again, sloppily and likely to cut off circulation to my fingers.

His gaze followed my hands. “It’s always done that. Why?”

“I don’t like the way it feels.” I edged away, not that I knew where I’d go. Just away.

He followed my not-so-subtle retreat, glancing between me and the geyser at my back. “Why?”

I stopped and ordered myself to breathe when the ground thumped hollowly under my steps; it was too thin to stand on safely. After weeks, I was finally at Heart, and now I wanted to run? No. I’d come here to find out why I’d been born, and I wouldn’t let a stupid wall scare me away.

Sam offered his hands, still shooting worried glances at the ground. “Come on. We’re nearly home.”

His home. Right. Where I’d stay until the Council decided what to do with me. “Okay.” I didn’t take his offered hands.

Sam studied me a moment more, but nodded. “This won’t take long. I can open the gate, but I suspect they’ll want to log your entrance.” He gave an apologetic smile, so I didn’t complain about the unfairness. This time.

“Why do you keep them closed?”

He walked between the wall and me as we returned to Shaggy, who swished his tail and gazed longingly at the archway. “Mostly tradition. We haven’t had a problem with giants or trolls in the last few centuries, but there were years we had to barricade ourselves in. Centaurs, dragons—all sorts of things used to attack, not to mention the sylph. Now the edge of Range is better protected, but just because they haven’t tried in a while doesn’t mean they won’t again. We don’t want to be unprepared.”