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Emelda stared at her blankly, then burst into laughter. “You humans are so funny. Helmets that explode and kill our own—oh, how ridiculous.” She shook her head, still chuckling, and took another drink. “So what happens, then? You just round us up in your sky carriages, transport us to your bases, and—boom, our little heads explode before you’ve had a chance to skin us for information.”

“Yeah—and can I request that you go for something a little more subtle in the future? They’re disgusting. I swear it looks like someone just took hold of their heads and squeezed.”

Emelda gave an exasperated sigh. “Oh all right, I’ll pass your message along.” She took another swig of her drink. “Kill switches. How funny.” And apparently this amused the fairy enough, because then she was explaining, “We get our powers at something called the Rebirth Ceremony. The Ancient One holds it twice a year, and every family that has had a child since the last ceremony is required to attend with their young—except for the beasts, of course. Dragons, stalkers, golems, they can’t wield magic so there’s no need for their young to be included. Ramapheal takes a small prick of the baby’s blood, and we drink a drop of his in return.”

The very thought horrified Soraya, but she didn’t let an ounce of it show on her face for fear Emelda would stop talking. “He does this for the babies down here? How does he even have that much blood?”

Emelda suddenly became very interested in her nails. Her eyes were a little glassy. “He collects it in stages throughout the year. Couple of liters a day, that sort of thing. Disgusting, if you ask me. Thank the darkness he does it when we’re so young. Can you imagine having to remember that sort of thing?”

“Doesn’t that drain him?” With a population this size, even thinking about the amount of blood that would require made Soraya feel dizzy. Could be something Noreen found useful, though.

“It does. The Ancient One has many gifts it’s true, but he’s hemokenetic.”

A cold sort of terror swept over Soraya’s body. “Ramapheal can control blood?”

Emelda took another deep swig, draining what was left in her flask. “Nasty magic, but powerful. His blood replenishes a lot quicker than ours does, and he can forge blood into weapons, too. He’s the only one in existence, and it’s from his blood that we get all powers.”

So he was some sort of messiah, then? Was that why the Dar’rak and fairies and everyone down here were so loyal to him?

“Then what happens?” Soraya prompted when Emelda’s smile grew sluggish, drink setting in. “To the babies? They drink Ramapheal’s blood and then they have powers?”

“Pretty much,” Emelda replied. “Though it can take several months for the gifts to manifest.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It is, but so is fighting an enemy that has learned to harness the power of the suns. You do what you have to to survive, and so do we.”

Soraya was just about to argue with her on this, when a throbbing ache pulsed at the back of her skull. She closed her eyes and ground her teeth until it passed. When she opened her eyes, Emelda was watching her. “What was that all about?”

“Just a headache.” It was still there, pulsing away like an insistent tap, tap, tap behind her eyes. “I assume it’s a lasting effect of the bite?”

Emelda’s lip twitched like she’d just smelled something rotten. “No. It is not. I make ash-sticks for the boys to help them sleep and things like that. I was going to prepare some for you anyway to help fight off any lingering effects of the bite—I’ll add something for your head too.”

“You don’t need to do that.” A warmth that had no business being there spread across her chest at the fairy’s kind gesture. Soraya quickly batted it away. They weren’t her friends down here. She couldn’t trust anyone.

“Oh, hush you. You’re having them and that’s that.” Emelda stood, wobbling a bit as she smoothed out nonexistent creases in her gown, and grinned down at Soraya. “Contrary to what you might believe, we’re not all out to get you down here.”

38

Sitting on the bureau in the corner of the room, Soraya decided that she really missed smoking.

She was up later than usual; whatever enchantments on the candles above that she used as some indication of day and night had gone out a long time ago. Illieck was the same, the pulsing red crystals and flaming torches that illuminated the way by day all dimmed with the need for rest, plunging this already dark world into near total blackness.

Soraya brought the ash-stick to her mouth again, the amber tip at the other end the only light in the room right now. Aside from being wrapped in dried dark leaves instead of paper, they weren’t too different from the ones she and Theron used to smoke above. She inhaled, her eyes fluttering shut as the gray smoke slipped down her throat like silk.

Gods. No, scratch that. She really, really missed smoking.

Her mind had always been a very busy place. Like the connecting platform in a monorail station where all the rails converged, her thoughts had a tendency to barrel through her mind all at the same time, seconds away from crashing into one another. Her workshop used to help; fixing things and poring over blueprints and ways to improve weapons and familiars was her own way of managing the chaos, pulling the levers to change the tracks before the carriages collided and pulled her into ruin.

Without her tools the rails were getting congested. She was still managing to divert the trains, but it took longer, and now there were all these extra carriages on the line. How could she shield her memories from Ikarus? The existence of the Bane. This weapon Ikarus was creating for Ramapheal. How long the shields around the Astro Temple would hold before they eventually winked out too, the piece of the Arch right there for the taking.

And that was without all she’d learned from Emelda.

Everyone down here got their magic from Ramapheal’s blood. As horrifying as it was, it made sense—what didn’t make sense though was Emelda having no knowledge of the kill switches. She was clearly no soldier, but surely she should’ve known about their existence. Maybe not, though. Their interaction had only been brief, but Soraya doubted the fairy knew there was an existence outside her own reflection and that flask.

There was so much that she didn’t understand about the world down here, and it was starting to make her head spin.

Nothing made sense—and she fucking hated it.