Page 46 of These Godly Lies
Anna swallows, mouth dry. She knows how far Jammu Tawi is. It had been their last stop before they left the train tracks and continued by foot and good samaritans who were willing to let them ride in the back of their cars and carts. It would be a journey just to get to the station, but she doesn’t dare doubt Silas’ word. Not when they had proven to be right so many times before. “Where do we go from there?”
Silas shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He pauses, his brow furrowed. As if he’s struggling to interpret something she can’t hear. “It’s too convoluted—from there, the outcomes lean too heavily on your choices.”
Khiran rips the seam of his coat, his nimble fingers fishing out a small nugget of gold from his collar. “No time to waste, then. We’ll hire someone to drive us.”
He approaches a middle-aged man busy unloading the back seat of his car. Anna can’t hear what’s being said, but she can tell by his expression and hand gestures that he must be in the middle of deliveries. Khiran holds out the gold piece in offering and the man’s uncertain smile shifts.
“Will you be joining us?” Anna already knows the answer—can feel it curling behind her ribs, a quiet regret, but she asks anyway.
“No,” Silas answers, voice soft. “I will serve you best if I continue to listen for danger at the source.”
Anna nods, suspecting as much. “How will you find us?”
“Our paths will cross, just as they did a century ago.” He takes her hands, folding them between his own. “Have faith, my friend.”
She smiles, but it feels as weak and trembling as her heart. Khiran waves her over, their ride secured, and Anna’s chest aches. She turns back to Silas, a goodbye resting on her tongue like bitter medicine, when he takes her hand in his—turning her wrist until her open palm faces the sky.
He places a blade in her hand, sheathed in leather but its handle a raw unfinished tang where a handle was never fashioned. It’s old, crude iron she hasn’t glimpsed the likes of in centuries. “One of Ying’s blades,” he murmurs, holding her stare.
The Bladesmith. The one who forged weapons capable of piercing gods.
Anna’s fingers fold over the leather, gripping it against her chest to hide the tremors in her hands. As unfinished and crude as it is, she knows the value of what she holds. The implication that they’ll need it is terrifying. Swallowing past the knot in her throat, she forces herself to speak. “Thank you. I’ll make sure Khiran gets it.”
Silas pauses, that strange concentrated look in his eyes as he studies her. His dark brow furrows. “No,” he mutters, as if the word comes as a surprise to him as well. “It needs to stay in your hands.” He grips her shoulder, the weight of his palm as heavy as the gravity in his gaze. “Do you understand?”
The iron bites into her palms, freezing against her heated skin like a bad omen, but she forces herself to nod despite the fear prodding her heart. “Yes.”
Their driver’s name is Akar.
Anna had expected the long drive to be smothered with silence, but Akar is full of stories. She didn’t realize Khiran had known him from a few odd jobs around the village, had worked with him in his family’s fields only last spring. Anna suspects that he might not have been convinced to take them, gold or not, otherwise.
He tells them about his two daughters, seven and nine years old, and all the trouble they get into. The smile he wears when he talks about them helps to soothe the sharp edge of fear she’s been carrying since they’ve left. She still feels it, lodged between her ribs like the blade in her pocket, but as the minutes pass it becomes easier to breathe around.
Khiran sits, stiff and silent, beside her as she answers Akar’s questions and makes small comments just to show she’s listening. His hands are fisted in his lap, tendons straining as his eyes flit over the moving landscape. The twisting mountain roads have given way to a level stretch of dirt and rock, the lingering dusting of winter snow slowly melting as they lost altitude. They make it an hour before everything goes wrong.
There is a woman in the road.
Khiran curses, his arms wrapping around her, cradling her head to his chest just as their driver shouts. Swerves. The tires skid on the gravel before they lift. For an extended moment in time, gravity becomes more theory than law. She is suspended, lap belt cutting into the tops of her thighs as the world outside the windows goes upside down.
The roof hits the ground first, steel crunching and windows shattering. Glass showers over them, pelting her skin and tangling in her hair like crystal confetti. The car rolls again, and again, and again. It rolls enough times that the movement stays with her like an echo even after everything goes still.
For a moment, everything is suspended. Quiet. When she looks,Anna finds Akar dead. The roof is crushed in, jagged steel pinning him to the seat, his eyes open and sightless as the blood saturates his shirt. Anna thinks of the picture of his children that was on the dash, placed with care beside the speedometer. The two girls he took this job for. The two girls who will never again welcome their father home.
Anna forces a breath, the air rattling in her lungs, as shaky as she feels. She’s not sure what’s happened—not sure whether to feel shocked or afraid—not until the feel of Khiran’s grip registers. When she looks down at the hand clutched in the fabric of her shirt, his knuckles are white and his expression is frantic.
Anna does not bleed. She does not bruise.
She knows it’s not her physical wellbeing that has made his face pale and his eyes wild.
Beside her Khiran, wheezes. “The belt,” he urges, his hands already fumbling with the catch. “Undo the seatbelt!”
It’s the pain in his voice that startles her back into the moment. She turns to him so quickly, it takes a moment for her vision to catch up and her palms to find his cheeks. There are a dozen tiny cuts on his hands and face. One at the hollow of his neck bleeds enough to stain the collar of his kurta. His fingers are slippery with it as he finally succeeds in unbuckling the latch. “Khiran—”
“Later,” he hisses. “Right now, we need—”
A voice calls out to them from outside the wreckage, familiar in ways that haunt Anna’s nightmares. “Khiran, I’m surprised at you!” Marcia croons, a cruel tsk sharpening the edges of her voice. “It’s not like you to miss an opportunity to run. You must be getting rusty. Living like a mortal the way you’ve been.”
He curses under his breath, eyes flitting over the crushed interior of the car, before winding his arm around her waist. “Hold on!” The words are a harsh whisper against her ear, the only warning she receives before the pit in her stomach drops, and the crushed steel shell around them twists, threads of color spinning until there is only open sky above them. Anna recognizes this feeling, can almost taste his magic on her tongue.
