Alight (18 page)

Twenty-nine layers to go.

My eyes trace the steps that lead to the second plateau—yep, another hundred. At the ninety-fifth, Bishop stops and turns to me.

“Em, don’t be afraid of what you’ll see next—the woman is just a carving.”

We take the last five steps side by side.

I reach the second plateau and am grateful for his warning. A snarling woman in red robes is carved into the wall at the base of the ziggurat’s third layer, vines on either side of her held apart like drawn curtains. Bishop must have tied them off. A vine-covered block of stone sits in front of her. She’s plunging a knife down. She looks so
real
.

Bishop nods toward the woman. “When we came up, we thought we saw something behind the vines. It was her.”

Some of her color has chipped or flaked away, but if I had just glanced I would have thought she was moving, thought she was alive.

The woman has a double-ring on her forehead.

I walk to the block. Through the vines covering it, I see a carved man, on his back, hands chained to the block’s sides. The two images are meant to be viewed together—the red-robed woman driving a knife into his chest. The man’s face is forever frozen into a twisted mask of pain and terror.

A vine covers his forehead. I push it aside. His symbol is a half-circle.

“There’s more carvings,” Bishop says. “All the way up, on every plateau. We didn’t look at many. After the first few, well…we stopped looking at anything but our feet.”

Aramovsky walks to the carving. He runs his fingers down the woman’s robes, as if they were cloth instead of stone.

“This is important,” he says.

He closes his eyes. His brow furrows. I think back to when O’Malley told me I was a slave, how it felt to have blocked memories suddenly flare to life.

Aramovsky’s eyes open wide.

“Ritual,” he says. “The God of Blood demands
ritual
.”

That is Aramovsky’s important word, his
cloud cover,
his
microorganisms
.

I feel O’Malley looking at me. He stares hard, his message clear:
I told you Aramovsky is a problem—now he’s going to be even worse.

“Let’s go,” I say. “We don’t have time to look at stupid art. Let’s climb.”

—

At the tenth plateau, we are already exhausted. We’re higher than most of the surrounding buildings, yet there are still twenty plateaus before we reach the top. And we thought walking “uphill” on the
Xolotl
was bad.

Every level has more images, all somehow worse than the level below:

…red-robed, double-ring priests cutting hearts from the chests of living people, throwing the bodies down the Observatory steps…

…severed limbs arranged into patterns, like the pinwheel of arms we saw up on the
Xolotl
…

…people with their hands chained above their heads, shot repeatedly with arrows, their blood draining into troughs that channel it to stone bowls carved into the terrace. Those images alone are disturbing enough, then I notice actual stone bowls beneath the vines at our feet, waiting to be filled with blood…

…scenes of two people fighting, one armed with a sword and protected by brightly colored armor, while the other is naked, holding only a small knife—or sometimes just a pointed stick…

…people pinned on their backs by bars like the ones that held me in my birth-coffin, one robed priest holding their jaws open, another pouring liquid down their throat…

…people being burned alive…

…people being
skinned
…

Every level holds images of torture, terror and death.

Was this what the Grownups wanted? A world of murder and human sacrifice?

We are all horrified. All, except Aramovsky.

—

We reach the twenty-fifth plateau. The tall statue is there, still looking up toward the ziggurat peak. Even this close I can’t make out if it’s a man or a woman, not with so many vines hanging all over it.

We need a rest. I tell everyone to sit in the statue’s shade.

My legs tremble. They moved past simple pain three or four levels back. Now they are numb. I can only imagine how badly they will ache tomorrow. O’Malley, Spingate and I are drained to the point I’m not sure we can make it the last five levels. Visca and Bishop look tired, but can clearly keep going. Where does their strength and endurance come from?

Spingate and I rest with our backs against the base of the statue. O’Malley lies flat on his stomach. Aramovsky, somehow, is still moving, looking at carvings with wonder. Bishop and Visca sit on the steps, staring out across the city. They don’t want to see any more of the horrors.

These top layers are just as thick as those on the bottom—a hundred steps each—but are increasingly smaller in width. It would have taken us hours to walk all the way around the base. We could walk around the twenty-fifth layer’s thin plateau in only a couple of minutes.

Everyone is still except for Aramovsky. He’s just as exhausted as I am, I’m sure of it, but you’d never know by his expression. Every new image makes his face blaze with reverence. He’s running his hands over a carving that shows two red-robed people—a man and a woman—using stone blades to scrape the skin off a little girl. The child’s agonized, terrified face is so real I can almost hear her screams.

For a moment I think,
I shouldn’t have brought him
. But we probably can’t get inside without him. I had no choice.

I notice that Spingate is watching him. She’s getting angry. She stands, walks over to him.

“You like that?” she says.

I hear the threat in her voice. Aramovsky doesn’t. He answers without turning around.

“It’s beautiful. This had to be carved by hand. And how did the artists make the rock different colors?”

“Artists,”
Spin says, spitting the word out like it’s made of poison. “There’s something wrong with you, Aramovsky. I always knew there was, but this proves it.”

He turns to face her. If he didn’t hear her tone, he can see her body language—fists clenched at her sides, shoulders forward. I’m behind her, I can’t see her eyes, but I know they are narrowed to slits.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he says. “I don’t know why you’d say that.”

She points at the image of the girl, at the girl’s forehead. “That’s a
tooth-girl
being butchered. Is that why you like it? Or because the two people
skinning her
are double-rings, like you?”

I glance at the forehead symbols of the carved people, see that she’s right.

Spingate takes a step toward him. I see Bishop and Visca rise, watching carefully.

O’Malley lifts up on one elbow.

“Give it a rest, Spin,” he says. “Aramovsky didn’t make this place.”

She takes another step closer. Aramovsky takes a step away, unsure of what’s happening. A second step away puts his back up against the very carving he so admires.

Spingate closes the distance.

I realize all at once that she’s going to hit him. He could crush her if he wanted to, but that doesn’t matter—a fight could easily result in someone tumbling down the steps or, worse, rolling off the edge to the hard stone below.

I scramble to my feet and run to them.

“Spin, take it easy,” I say. “Like O’Malley said, Aramovsky had nothing to do with making these carvings.”

She whirls, fists clenched, eyes blazing with hatred. She hoped this building might bring answers, but it is nothing more than a temple of nightmares.

“He’ll do the same to us,” she says. “Mark my words, Em, Aramovsky will…”

She glances above me as her voice trails off. Then she looks at me again. The expression on her face, it’s like a dagger through my heart—she’s
terrified
.

I reach out for her. She flinches. I let my hand drop to my side.

“Spin, what’s wrong? You don’t think I’d let Aramovsky do something to you, do you? I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you.”

Aramovsky starts to laugh. The deep sound makes my skin crawl. He slowly claps his hands, absolutely delighted.

“Some things you let happen, Em,” he says. “Some things you can’t stop, because they are your destiny.”

He points up at the statue.

I turn and look up, raising a hand to block the sun.

And then I see why Spingate is so afraid.

There are only a few vines hanging from the statue’s head. I can see the face—a face that is unmistakable.

Because it is
mine
.

I
stare until my eyes water.

It’s me.
Me
.

No, it’s Matilda, or it would be if she took over my body. All the horror that decorates this monstrosity of a building, all the promises of death and carnage and hearts ripped from chests and tossed down steep stone steps…the statue means all of this was her doing.

Being the leader wasn’t enough for Matilda.

She wanted to be
worshipped
.

Aramovsky is at my side.

“Our two Grownups were together when we found them.” His voice is smooth, calm and low, the hiss of a smiling snake. “The circles and the double-rings working together.
You and I,
working together. This was meant to be. Remember how I told you I wanted to help you lead? This is a sign, Em—a sign that can’t be ignored.”

He doesn’t even know the proper terms. He means
Spirit
and
Service
working together. Did my progenitor and his cooperate to create this nightmare?

I feel ill. Aramovsky makes me sick. This place makes me sick. This entire
planet
makes me sick. We woke up in coffins and fought our way off an orbiting tomb only to inherit a city of death.

O’Malley approaches. “Get away from her, Aramovsky. She doesn’t need your whispered lies.”

The tall boy grins. “Because whispering in her ear is your job?”

O’Malley’s right hand flexes, fingers opening and curling. Like a crawling animal, the hand drifts toward the jeweled handle of his knife.

Bishop moves in, his steps noisy only because he wants us to hear him coming.

“The sun will set soon,” he says. “We should continue on—I don’t like the idea of being on these steps at night.”

Neither do I, but
should
we continue? This place is evil, and we’re not even inside yet. O’Malley is ready to attack Aramovsky. Aramovsky suddenly thinks he and I are destined to rule together. And the look on Spingate’s face—she’s scared of me, scared and disgusted.

I stare at her until she looks away.

Arrogant tooth-girl. I wonder what she thinks of “stupid empties” now? Special girl,
rich
girl. I remember people like her laughing at me. One of her kind
owned
me. I remember being afraid to say anything, knowing that my owner could punish me, beat me if she wanted to, that I had no rights. Girls like Spingate liked having power. Now the power has changed hands—of course she’s scared. She
should
be.

My thoughts pause. A moment of blankness, of floundering confusion. What am I thinking? Am I taking
joy
in Spin’s fear? Hatred of her and her kind bubbles and boils, but that hatred isn’t mine—it’s Matilda’s. Spingate has done nothing to me.

Those things she said to me in the lab…is she suffering the same turmoil as I am? Is her sudden prejudice against my kind actually from
her
progenitor? If I have legacy memories, then Spingate probably does, too.

These emotions aren’t
ours
.

“Spin, that statue isn’t me. It will never be me.”

She sniffs. I can tell she wants to believe me, but it must be hard while seeing these images of her kind being tortured, skinned,
slaughtered,
and with my oh-so-heroic face lording down from above.

“In a way, it
is
you,” she says. “Matilda was your age once. You have her mind.” Spingate points to the statue. “Like it or not, that’s what you could become. This search isn’t just about food or the mold, not anymore. If this building can tell us about our past, help us understand how Matilda turned into a monster that sacrifices gears and halves, that’s information we need.”

Alone, she starts up the thin steps.

Five more steep flights to go.

We follow her up.

—

At the twenty-seventh plateau, the lush vines start to thin. By the twenty-eighth, they don’t grow at all, leaving the orange-brown stone exposed. It’s colder up here. The wind whips at us. I see heavy clouds coming in from the north, but for now the skies above remain clear.

The lack of vines means we see all the images. We can’t even look away, because many are carved into the flat fronts of the stairs themselves.

We wobble and shudder as we finish the climb. I think I make it up the final steps on willpower alone, because my body gave up on me about three layers ago.

My legs feel like boiling goo. They burn, they sting. O’Malley is grunting and wheezing—I wonder if he’s going to throw up. Aramovsky is worse off: he looks like he might keel over and die at any moment, but that horrid glow remains in his eyes. Even Bishop and Visca are tired, trails of sweat cutting skin-toned streaks through the plant juice on their faces. They have made this climb twice in two days—too much for anyone, even a tireless circle-star.