“Can you hear yours?” Neri asked. “Does it say anything to you?” “It might,” Ysira admitted. “I’m not a telepath, so there’s . . . a bit of a language barrier.”
Neri looked at the ground, disappointed. In this regard, their circumstances differed. Even if they hadn’t, Ysira had never witnessed anything like Neri’s demon. She remained unconvinced he didn’t urgently need an exorcism. But now was not the best time to discuss that, so she evaded the subject.
“Some demons take over human minds,” she said. “But not mine.
Not yours. Trust me, you and I would both have noticed.” Whether or not Neri believed her, Ysira couldn’t guess.
“I can hear it,” he said. “Every time I fall asleep, it’s there. That red thing, still calling to me, but frominside.”
A chill crept down Ysira’s spine. “What does it say?”
“It’s hard to understand. It has . . . so many voices.” Mortification—and horror—dawned on Neri’s face. “It’s because I’m such a weak telepath, isn’t it? What if I needed to be stronger to control it or make any sense of it?” He was starting to wheeze again. He clutched his shirt as though he thought he might tear it off and, with it, his own skin. “I think I made a mistake. I made amistake.Oh, gods.”
“Neri!” Ysira reached toward him, thought better of it, and wrung her hands in her lap. “Slow down. I’m taking you to the Shrouded City. We’ll have answers there, I promise.”
It took him a moment to calm down and catch his breath. But that wild look remained. He demanded, “How do you know all this?”
“My friend Elyas,” said Ysira. “I was given my demon . . .” She paused, as less-pleasant memories engulfed her. “When I was Harvested.”
Neri’s eyes went wide.
“I was in training to be a knight, same as Seth, but after graduation . . . I can’t remember. I was gone for four cycles, and this”—she showed him her left hand, its little finger severed at the second joint, and the jagged scar across her throat—“these wounds are the only evidence. I think whoever put the demon in me tried to test it. It didn’t produce the results they wanted, so I was left for dead.”
She’d regained consciousness in a mass grave somewhere along the deepriver. She remembered crawling out of a pile of bones and rotted viscera, some corpses identifiably human, others unrecognizably deformed. The necrotic stench of the place had lingered in her nostrils for months. Starved and delirious, she’d pulled herself out, through the tunnels and muck in a monochrome world of total darkness. Nothing but the dead around turn after turn; nothing but fetid water, worms, anddead flesh to sustain herself. Her demon—still learning, still doing a messy job—must have been all that kept her alive.
It had kept Neri alive, too. By the time Ysira found a familiar branch of Esh and heard the rumble of the great machines that powered Zivora’s infrastructure, she’d felt him moving inside her. She shuddered at the memory.
Neri was watching her too closely now, so she cleared her throat and said, “I went looking for answers. Elyas told me about the Shrouded City and the people there who still follow the Zal religion. He was like me—he had a demon too.”
Elyas’s demon, acquired through a sacred ritual to which Ysira was not privy, had granted him superhuman strength. She’d once seen him knock down a stone wall with a single punch. He had thought a lot of himself, claiming the honorificVarlike the valak of old.Var Teneb—he’d chosen the name out of a forbidden history book. Ysira had thought it audacious of him, but a larger part of her envied his confidence.
“But you didn’t go with him,” Neri asserted. “What happened?” “The same thing that always happens,” Ysira said with a sigh. “The Church caught him.”
Ysira had long since learned to turn a blind eye to Zivora’s grim reality so long as she carved out a decent enough life for herself and the people she owed. She had insisted there was no shame in what she’d chosen, because it had been no choice at all. She was destined to live out her days in hiding from the Church lest they capture her and devise ways to punish her—for whatever unspeakable eternity she could endure. She had convinced herself she’d lost her chance at anything greater.
Hadn’t she?
She was so much stronger than she’d had any reason to believe.
AndNeri . . .
He could change everything. This boy might become the epicenter of a conflict that could break—and remake—their entire world.
It did not seem just, nor particularly wise, to put the future of millions in the hands of a child. But how could anyone condemn them for his sake?
After a long silence, Neri asked, “What do you think I should do?” Ysira swallowed hard. “I want you to be safe.”
Was that the most selfish thing she’d ever said? The deluge of overlapping, contradicting considerations made her head spin. There were so many unknowns. But she knew one thing above all else, so much that she said it aloud:
“I don’t trust any plan of Ged’s.” She shook her head. “If you want this demon out, there are exorcists in the Shrouded City. If they won’t help, we’ll find Jacen.”
Neri frowned. “That priest who’s drunk all the time?” Ysira winced. “He’s better than he seems.”
As knight candidates, Ysira and her classmates had all been made aware of Jacen’s abilities. A Sixth Tier telepath had little need for a sword. Only Seth was ever bold—or stupid—enough to provoke him. Ysira’s lips twitched at the memories.
Whether any exorcist she’d ever heard of could stand up to this sort of demon remained to be seen. But if such an exorcist existed, it would be Jacen Kheris.
“Did you know my father, too?” Neri asked. She’d said too much. “We’ve met.”
