Page 23 of Sparktopia
Loyal friends who will stand by me, no matter what.
It is their duty now.
But I owe them something in return. Not just loyalty, but leadership.
Leaders don’t hide from their duties. They steer the ship. They guide it through rocky waters. They deliver it to safe harbors. They don’t lock themselves in their office so they can be sullen and petulant.
So I go downstairs and get into the boat that will deliver us to my father’s funeral pyre.
CHAPTER NINE
Oh, how they howled. All night long. Just three women. But three is more than enough to make those anguished screams that echoed through the dorms last night.
Eight floors up—at least. They could’ve been in Gemna’s quarters, and then it would’ve been ten. Or Clara’s, and it would’ve been nine. But still, we could hear them. The entire dorm heard them.
Even we, the down-city rebels sent here to disrupt and tear things apart, felt their suffering.
Haryet Chettle’s hours are now numbered.
Tonight, she dies.
Or maybe not. No one knows what happens to the Maidens. My best guess is that the god eats them. He devours them, and at the same time, he steals their spark. And this spark comes back to us as lights in lamps, or hot water from pipes, or heat in the orchards and greenhouses.
But I guess it’s just as likely that he rapes them? Tortures them? Tears them to shreds?
He’s an angry god, after all.
Because he’s a dying god.
And we are part of the reason he’s dying.
CHAPTER TEN
Ican’t seem to focusafter I get in the boat with Jeyk and Mitchell and we start the long float down-city where the canal empties into the lake on the edge of nothing and where a pyre has been built.
It’s weird and everything goes a little bit blurry. And I’m a little bit shocked—though I probably shouldn’t be—that the entire city has turned up to pray for my father’s soul as we burn his body until it is nothing but ash in the wind.
The bells ring the entire time.
Like it was planned this way.
Like the god himself is mourning the death of my father.
I am sitting as the ceremony happens. Elevated now, and alone on the dais meant only for the Extraction Master.
It takes six hours for the body to turn to dust and make all of down-city smell like death. How do they put up with it, that smell? People die every day. Bodies are burned every day and they don’t get a private service. They pile all the previous day’s bodies up into one boat and every night they all go up in flames together.
Every night there is an orange glow coming from down-city that makes all of us upwind thankful that we are not down here to smell it. How do these down-city people spend their whole lives in the vortex of that stench?
Mitchell comes down this way sometimes to drink and buy whores. But I haven’t been down here for a funeral since Clara’s father died years back. He got a private service. Not a grand one, like this, but it was nice.
Still, as nice as it can be, no one who lives up-city wants to be down here any longer than they have to.
There is a horn that blows when the Pyre Master decides that the body has been turned to ash and the funeral is over. And then… it’s truly over. My father is gone and the grief flooding through my soul feels like the heaviest burden I have ever carried.
But there’s something else inside me now too. I felt it the moment the Pyre Master declared my father to be dust.
It’s a heat. It’s an anger. It’s the weight of my duty, but it’s more than that. It’s more the death, and the sadness, and the tolling bells that refuse to shut up.
