Elena turned away before her face crumpled, her heart quickening with a sudden, shooting pain. She reached for her Agni, for the wrath inlaid in her bones. She wanted to drown the ache. But it hooked into her ribs, and when she looked up again, she saw her father falling into the Eternal Fire. In the near distance, Samson climbed the path toward them.
“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll be better.”
CHAPTER 38
JAYA
A Sesharian is a hard worker, but they are not honest. The ones with a higher pedigree must be watched closely, for they have tasted freedom and power, and they will not so easily give them up.
—fromA Manual on Employing a Sesharian for Jantari Gentlefolk
Jaya surveyed the holos of Samson’s Agni in the darkness of their makeshift encampment. All Arohassin operatives were housed in the western district of the city, close to the command center—close enough for Chandi to keep an eye on them. But Jaya had taken great care with her holos. If someone were to glance at her panel, they would only see battle schematics and gameplans of their last mission. Not the terrible truth of Samson’s fire.
Jaya cast a glance at Akaros as he paced.
“See this?” She pointed to a holo full of temperature readings. “See how it flares when he summons his urumi. How quickly it rises, then drops. His urumi is his channel. That is how he controls his Agni.”
Akaros chewed on his lip. “And what of Elena?”
“I’ve heard rumors that when she and Samson fought, she needed no weapon to call her fire. She twirled, or spun, or made signals with her hands—”
“She dances,” Akaros said. “The Goddess’s Dance. Of course.”
“So Elena’s channel is dance. Samson’s is his urumi. I wonder, then, what the third’s will be,” she mused.
Akaros pointed. “What about that? Did you get a reading?”
Jaya brought up a holo of a video recording of the Cyleoni courtyard, where she and the others had watched Elena kneel above Samson and raise him from near death. Samson still had the metal lotus in his pocket then.
“There was an alteration. His temperature was dropping rapidly, but at the exact moment Elena summoned her flames, it went haywire. Spiked beyond what I could measure.” She remembered the blue brilliance of Samson’s fire, the red earthiness of Elena’s. How, for a beat, they had twined together when she healed him.
She sighed. “Something happened there. Ifeltit—didn’t you? Like lightning in the air, except there was no storm. And the way he revived…” She trailed off, thinking hard. “You don’t suppose she did something to his Agni?”
Akaros deftly slipped a coin in and out of his fingers. It was a nervous tic. His only tell, or the only one she had found. “If she did, then she can endanger the third.”
She thought of Div. The burns lacing his throat, the quiet rattle of his lungs as he lay trapped in a coma on borrowed time. The night before she had left for Magar, she had sat with him in his ghostly chamber and whispered her promise against the glass.
I will revive you, come what may.
“I will not allow it,” she growled.
“So why haven’t you given Elena a metal lotus yet?”
He finally met her gaze. Before, long ago, Akaros had frightened her in the way he so easily cut his mark to the bone. He was always watching. It had intimidated her, his casual hunting. But now Jaya chided herself for not picking up on the details he had seen, for ignoring what had been before them all along. If she meant to fulfill her purpose, how could she be so ignorant?
“I will,” she said hotly. “I just haven’t had the chance—”
“The longer we wait, Elena becomes stronger. The third grows more unstable. Div gets weaker.”
It was not a provocation. Not a threat. She knew Akaros well enough now to understand how he delicately manipulated others to his bidding. She knew his tricks. And yet, Div’s name sent a searing, blearing hurt through her.
“I’m not hesitating. You know that. I just—I’m not—”
“You’re not a fighter, I know.” Akaros slid his coin back into his pocket. “And I know you’d rather hide behind a panel, safe with your bank of holos. But you need to grow a fucking spine, Jaya. Elena won’t bite your head off.” He rapped his knuckles on her panel. “I won’t let her.”
Jaya stared at him, then the holos, and then the second metal lotus, a perfect mirror of the one she had given Samson. It was not that she feared Elena any more or less than Samson. They were both so laughably transparent in their obsession with each other, she almost felt pity for their stubborn blindness. But Jaya had not forgotten who had burned down her house. The gold caps had sworn fealty to Leo, toElena, and had erected a gold statue brazenly in the heart of Rani to declare,Look how she is one of us.
Jaya feared that if she faced Elena, she would lose her objectivity in the face of her own hatred, and it would lead to a fatal mistake.
