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“No they couldn’t,” Jayla growled.
“But she’s too small. Her little body doesn’t hold enough blood to move the lever. And they can’t wait until she’s old enough and big enough, because they don’t have that kind of time.”
“So then what?” Cody asked, his voice even more strained. “If we can’t figure it out?”
“The continent tears itself apart. In a matter so violent it perhaps is not survivable. We become just like the lands to the east. Ruined by the god’s hand.”
Jayla was in a daze as they left Pietro’s small apartment. She honestly didn’t think she would have been able to find her way back to the Alayne house without Cody’s hand on her arm. Even so, she was clumsy and unsteady, blundering into small hazards on the road and bumping into people striding in the other direction. They had elected to walk, at least for part of the way, and in absolute silence they made their way out of Pietro’s neighborhood and into the wide bustling avenues of the Quatrefoil.
She felt Cody tug her to a fancifully carved wooden bench that overlooked a small patch of green and was currently unoccupied. “Let’s sit for a minute,” he said, and so they did.
Jayla stared blindly ahead of her, barely registering the play of sun and shadow on the street or the clicking of the cars as they passed along the gridway nearby. She had leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, and now she was not sure she would ever have the strength to push herself to an upright position again.
“What are you going to do?” Cody asked.
She just shook her head, and they sat there in silence a while longer.
“Do you want me to get you something to drink? There’s a vendor selling bottles of something.”
Her stomach was in such turmoil that she might throw up anything she swallowed, but her mouth was so dry that her lips felt cracked. She nodded. She didn’t look up when he left or returned, but she did straighten her back and take the bottle when he handed it to her.
“Just water,” he said. “He had juice if you’d rather. Or wine.”
She just shook her head and took three cautious sips. The water tasted almost sweet on her parched tongue, washed some of the horror down her throat. Her stomach tensed, then quieted again.
“Each part of that story was more dreadful than the last,” Cody said. “And I have this terrible feeling it’s all true.”
Jayla addressed the patch of grass at her feet. “I can’t let either one of them die.”
“Of course you can’t!”
“I mean. He says the world will end if one of them isn’t sacrificed, but I—I can’t let them be sacrificed.” She turned her head just enough to see his face from the corner of her eye. “Maybe you think that’s wrong of me.”
“What? No! How can you even say that?”
With the hand that didn’t hold the bottle, she gestured at the busy square, filled with such energy and motion and life. “This beautiful city. All these people. How do you weigh that? The life of one person against the value of all this?”
The glib and light-hearted Cody shook his head and showed her the most somber look she had ever seen on his lively face. “I don’t know how to make those calculations. All I know is that if the person to be killed was my sister or my roommate—if that person was you—I would do everything I could to save them. I don’t know how to think about—” His hands made circles in the air, trying to shape the city or maybe the entire planet. “Everybody, all at once, in the abstract. All I know is how to take care of one person at one time. All I know is to watch out for the people who matter to me.”
“I have to tell her.” At his gasp of horror, she quickly added, “Not Aussen. I would never put this nightmare in her head. But Madeleine has to know.”
“You think she doesn’t have any idea? No suspicions at all?”
Jayla shook her head. “I don’t think so. Tivol, though—the man she’s supposed to marry—I would bet everything I own that he knows.”
“Tivol Wellenden?”
She nodded, a little surprised. “You know him?”
Cody shrugged. “Not to speak to. I’ve made deliveries to him. And of course, everyone in the city knows who all the Council families are.”
“I don’t like him. I could never figure out why.”
Cody managed the ghost of a smile. “You don’t like anyone.”
“But if he knows what’s supposed to happen to Madeleine—and he has kept it a secret from her all these years—”
“What do you think she’ll do? When you tell her?”
