Page 68 of The Only Way Out Is Up

She must have known it was a possibility. But she left me to work without a second thought. Trust? Or just the acknowledgment of the way it had to be?

Some of that must have leaked through, because Star’s voice echoes in my mind.

[Query: would you have abandoned me?]

Never.

I need an EXPLODE. Since I haven’t got one, I’ll have to make one. I grab the knife and a sigil blank and start to carve.

Making sigils isn’t hard, exactly, although EXPLODE is one of the more complicated characters. It’s not just a matter of cutting the word into the clay, though. It pulls at the spirit, far more than activating a device. In the workhouses, the laborers churn them out, day after day, burning their souls black until they drop dead. I try to avoid it, for obvious reasons.

Even EXPLODE isn’t exactly what I want—it burns out whatever device it’s attached to for a spike of power, which is good, but I need something that throws that power out into the world. Like EXPLODE but… more physical. No sigil I’ve ever heard of does that. I’m not even sure where to start, but—

Somehow I feel it. The knife moves easily. Something tugs at my spirit, drawing pieces of me into the clay, but it doesn’t hurt like I’d expected. It feels… right. In a moment my hand stops moving. The sigil under the blade feels primed and ready. It says EXPLODE, almost, but not quite.

That’s only half the work. I move as though in a trance, opening Star’s thief body and my climbing gloves, yanking out pieces. STRONG and FAST, and a LIGHT noun from the optics, wired in backward in a way that makes sense only in my fevered imagination. The thing that takes shape is a dense ball of sigils and threading wire, not a proper device at all. I turn back to the fight just in time to see Ky throw herself flat to avoid a horizontal sweep of Gestian’s blade. Her own sword skitters away across the floor, fetching up nearly at my feet.

“There,” Gestian says, putting a foot on her back. “Have we expressed our feelings sufficiently for today?”

Ky twists to look up at him, her eyes bright with hatred.

I hurl the… thing and put my arm across my face. My spirit tugs at it, and the EXPLODE-but-not triggers. Light blooms, very bright and very fast, not running down the channels of the threading wire but bursting forth into the world. For a brief moment, it’s as though the great sunlamps of Hod have opened at full blast; I can see the outline of my bones through my flesh.

Then it’s gone, as quickly as it grew. Gestian is staggering back, sword slashing dangerously in front of him, one hand clawing at his eyes. Ky scrabbles blindly across the floor until I reach her and take her hand. I grab her sword and Star’s body and lever up the floor tile, exposing a black hole in the surface of Malkuth. We both slide through and I shut it behind us as the booted feet of Gestian’s thugs clatter in.

PART

THREE

TWENTY-THREE

From there, getting out of Malkuth is just a stumble through a dark, unfamiliar, and treacherous maze while suffering from blood loss and leading a blind, wounded girl. Piece of cake. The only mercy is that we don’t have far to go; we come out of the tunnels near Stair #3, then push through the night market and go through the checkpoint. Nobody says a word, in spite of how we look. The people who work on the Malkuth/Heap border have raised not getting involved to an art form.

There’s no way we can make it down the stairs. Ky scrapes out a few bits for one of the barrel-men, and we tumble into a contraption hanging from one of the upper girders. We descend slow and steady, a rattling cage full of scrap from below serving as counterweight. The boy at the bottom bows and scrapes, hoping for a tip.

The Heap market is as bustling as ever. I guide Ky into an alley and she leans against the wall, blinking furiously and waving her hands in front of her face.

“I think it’s getting better,” she says.

“That’s good,” I say fervently. I’d been terrified that I’d blinded her permanently with the strange thing I’d cooked up.

“Still going to need your arm,” she says. “And I hope we don’t have far to walk, or I might pass out before we get there.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’re asking me?” She rubs her watering eyes with the heel of her hand. “This was your plan.”

Of course there’s only one place to go, and that’s home. I’d been avoiding the idea because it seems… wrong, somehow, transgressive; I’ve worked so hard to keep the two parts of my life from meeting. But we both need rest and a physicker’s attention, and I don’t have anywhere else to get it. I give a weary nod, remember she can’t see it, and take her hand.

“This way. It’s not far.”

We walk away from the market, down the curving streets and jagged alleys I know practically by instinct. The bakery comes into view, smoke gently rising from the chimney. Nothing has changed, but it feels different already. I circle around to the back door and thump my fist against it.

After a few moments I hear footsteps. Somi opens the door a crack, a heavy iron poker clutched in one pudgy hand. At the sight of me he hastily steps back and opens it all the way.

“Moon and stars, Taj, why didn’t you say something?” Somi says. “I thought it was the Clawmarks… again…”

He trails off as he takes in my expression, my wounds, and my company. His eyes have gone very wide.