The mask Thesil tied over my nose and mouth was rough linen, not the silk of my childhood. I still stuck my hands out of my new cloak to sign to Grandmother, "Doesn't this make you feel like a baby again?"
Grandmother's lip lifted. "When I was a child, we wore none of this costume."
I blinked. "Really?"
"There was no need, then."
Thesil tapped my shoulder. She'd enveloped herself in a huge hooded cloak, which hid every inch of her skinny frame. I couldn't even see her hands.
"Are you sure you want to come?" I signed. "You seem nervous."
Thesil twitched her head to the side, her gaze dropping to our feet. Her lips moved. "I'm coming. Help me put the mask on."
I did, and soon only her big green eyes peeked out at me.
"You look like a walking blanket," I said.
She fumbled her hands free of the cloak. "Do you think anyone will recognize me?"
"In that? Not unless they know your eyes really well."
Her fingers clenched for a second.
"I don't think so," I signed quickly. "Do you think someone might? Have you been to the Starred City before?"
"Once."
"Well. Whoever you met there won't be in the camps outside, will they?"
Thesil shook her head.
"Then you'll be fine," I promised.
#
We rode southeast out of town on three asses, each one white as salt. Grandmother said it would be faster this way. My concerns with riding were, one, I had never done it before and, two, I couldn't use sign language while holding the reins. Even though we rode close together, I felt helpless, unable to communicate.
But Grandmother was right. It would be faster. Besides, if I yelled, at least Thesil would hear me. Though she looked so small on the donkey's back, hunched under layers of clothes like it was the dead of winter.
We rode for two days, stopping at night to camp alongside the road without tent or fire. Grandmother said we needed neither, and the fire might draw attention. Out here in the barrens, I couldn't imagine whose attention she thought we might catch. But I didn't protest. My thighs and rear ached in places I rarely noticed, and I was happy to just lie down.
The morning of the second day, I spotted the smoke. It rose in the distance, a plume that caught the red sunrise and held it like a handkerchief soaking up blood.
I pulled my donkey up beside Grandmother and signed, one handed, "What is that?"
Her gaze followed my finger. "Smoke."
"The city can't be on fire, can it?"
"I doubt it," said Grandmother.
We rode on.
As the sun lifted from the horizon, the walls of the Starred City came into view. They were golden sandstone, carved pure and featureless, and obscured behind smoke. The fire wasn't inside the walls– it came from just outside. Dread built in my stomach. I'd seen this before, in my second vision sent by the Unknowns. Seen bloody smoke rise from the desert and the Plenary Cities. Now it had come true.
Grandmother said I was an oracle.
The smell – the same as in my vision – didn't reach me for another hour, when at last we grew close enough to see the camps huddled at the city's borders. Beyond the camp, a low mound smoldered, as wide across as Grandmother's town and as black as a fox's eyes. The stench choked me. I'd smelled it when Thesil and I burned the dead man.
I stopped and stared. My hood fell back onto my shoulders. I didn't bother to fix it.
Grandmother twisted in her saddle to face us, her legs clamped round the donkey's belly as if she were younger than me. She signed, "Whatever you do, keep your masks on." Then she swiveled forward and led us into the smoke-smothered camp.
#
My eyes were drawn to the smoking heap beyond the tents, not the white rumps of my friends' donkeys, and so I missed the man that lunged in front of Thesil and snatched her reins. The ass lurched to a halt, its ears pricking, and Thesil nearly toppled forward. Her eyes were terrified.
Amaz was almost unrecognizable. Circles lined his beautiful eyes, and chalk caked his face and hair and bare chest, an old sign of mourning. Symbols should have been drawn in the chalk to symbolize who he had lost, but the white expanse was untouched. Like he was mourning everything.
I urged my donkey up beside Thesil and slid from its back, ignoring Grandmother's gesture for us to continue. Thesil's legs were stiff, clenched against the donkey's sides. I laid a supportive hand on her knee and glared at Amaz.
"Let go of her," I said aloud.
He turned haunted eyes on me. "Where is my wife?"
The sentence was so unexpected it took me a minute to decipher it. "What? I don't understand."
He let go of Thesil's reins and rounded on me. His jerky hand-signs were a far cry from the perfect, emotionless ones he had once used. "Do you expect me to believe you and she vanished at once by coincidence?"
The realization came slowly. "Lira… blind Lira? She's your wife?"
How had I not guessed? Amaz had trained her donkey. She had defended him as a good man. Unknowns save us, she had married him. The baby was his.
His jaw set. "I knew you were responsible. Where is she? What have you done?"
His gaze shot behind me. I turned and caught the hind end of Thesil signing, "…ran away from you." Her donkey's reins hung free, but the animal only stomped a hoof and lifted its head to scent the air.
"You lie, imperfecta," Amaz said. "She would never have fled me."
Thesil's brows wrinkled. "Why not? You're a psychopath. You tried to have us killed."
He flung a hand towards the smoking mound. "I was trying to prevent this!"
My heart slammed into the bottom of my ribs. So I was right. That was a pyre, and death-palsy had come to the camps. How many had died to make a fire that size? I wanted to throw up.
My hands were unsteady as I signed, "Killing us wasn't the way to stop it. Amaz, we were never infected."
"I know that now," he signed, his face twisted with bitterness. "Your plague-bearing troupe had already reached the walls when I found you. Tell me, is that why Lira freed you? Out of mercy for uninfected children?"
"No," I said, unable to bear the look on his face. I pulled up my hood, as if it could block the sight. "She wanted our help. She's pregnant." It was his child. He deserved to know.
His hands went still.
"I don't think she could bear for you to give it away. She's safe now. Far from the infection. They both are."
Amaz said, "She was sterilized. To prevent–"
I didn't want to know that. It shouldn't have been my business. "The Unknowns chose otherwise."
Before he could respond, Grandmother pushed between us, her donkey's lead wrapped around her wrist. "Get back on your beast, Granddaughter. You can chat with pilgrims on our way out. We have business to attend to."
Amaz didn't try to stop me from leaving. He just stood, still as a mummy, as we rode farther into camp.
#
I expected Grandmother to seek out one of the tents – perhaps the large red one that lay farthest from the pyre. But her donkey pulled ahead of us, aiming straight for mighty gates of the Starred City. The artisan that had crafted them had punched small holes through the thick iron, and the lighter world on the other side shone through. It was like riding up to the night sky. Automas the size of elp stood guard to either side, their bare legs patterned with the grain of the trees that had made them. They didn't carry feather-staves. They didn't need them.
Grandmother dismounted with ease that belied her age and rifled through her saddle packs. I exchanged glances with Thesil.
"Grandmother, what are you doing?" I signed, but she wasn't looking at me. She had buried her whole head into the saddlebags. I almost thought she would climb in.
The end of a varnished wooden bar stuck out of her bag. She wriggled it free and pulled out several feet of cloth-wrapped wood. A snap of her wrist unfurled it.
The linen banner caught for a moment in the breeze before Grandmother stretched it between her arms and lifted it over her head. I could only see the back of it, which black knots littered. Embroidery, tied off.
The automas took one step forward. Another. They turned like ponderous wagons and pulled open the iron gates.
"What?" Thesil signed.
Grandmother rolled the banner back up, stuffed it into her bags and remounted. "Come along," she signed with one hand and urged her ass through the gates.
I gaped after her. Imperfectas did not go in cities. We were exiles. Unwanted, impure. We were exiles, and there was a plague on. The city could not have invited us in.
Grandmother was yards away by now. When Thesil started after her, I had no choice but to follow. I looked back as I rode. We were barely past when the starred gates swung shut.
Farms stretched into the distance on the other side. It should have been familiar, for the August City was built along similar lines. But weeds sprouted among these rows, and brown crops shed withered leaves. It looked as though the desert had stretched out its dry arms and tried to reclaim the land.
I searched for signs of people as we rode. I spotted none until the gates behind us were just a smear of black on the horizon. A wagon trundled towards us on the paved road, hauled by a massive elp.
The elp's trunk wavered towards us as it passed, but it didn't stop. The beast was so large I couldn't see the wagon and driver until it had drawn up alongside us.
A single man hunched on the wagon seat, his clothes a perfecta's rich garb, his dark head uncovered. He didn't look at us. He didn't look at anything.
The wagon behind him was piled with bodies.
I tried not to look at them. At their slack faces and twisted, rigid backs. At warped limbs and blood-red eyes. But I couldn't ignore the smell of sickness and shit and death, and I couldn't resist a final glance as the wagon rolled by. No children lay amidst the corpses. At least there was that. Perhaps their masks had saved them.
I would not take mine off, I swore, until we were so far from this place that even the memories of it had died.
#
Unlike the August City, the Starred City didn't have a second set of walls between the farms and the city. Perhaps once a wall had held back the houses, but now they sprawled and spread in no particular direction. In the August City, we had little space to build out, and so every building stretched three or four stories high. None were taller than two stories here. But they were built of the familiar marble and obsidian and rosy granite, their flat roofs covered in container gardens and pens of quail and geese. The doors were the familiar arched shape, with the thin white finger-bones of ancestors tied over the threshold for luck and guidance.
It was almost like coming home. But the streets at home had never been so empty.
Nobody tried to stop us from riding into the city. I couldn't believe it. We were impure, unwanted, believed to carry death-palsy.
Perhaps they thought it no longer mattered. Death-palsy was already here.
#
We dismounted in the center of the city, tying our animals to a post next to a communal water pump. My thighs ached from riding, but Grandmother didn't shorten her long stride for my sake. Thesil trailed behind, but I ran to keep close enough to Grandmother to sign, "Where are we going?"
She signed back without a halt, "To a meeting."
"With who?"
"A man."
"He speaks our language?"
"I don't deal ore with anyone who can't be bothered to learn."
The buildings grew taller the farther we walked, and the city sprouted gardens and walled parks. Tiled fountains poked up everywhere like beautiful weeds. I felt terribly uncomfortable. Even when I had lived in the August City, my parents had rarely taken me to the richest parts of the city – only once, to see the Mausoleum.
The building Grandmother finally stopped at was large enough to be a mausoleum, but its open door smelled of varnished wood and oracle ore, not dusty perfumed death. I tugged at Grandmother's arm as she made to enter. "I can smell ore. Thesil–"
"Right." She turned towards the porter who stood inside and signed, "Tell him we'll meet him in the garden." As I marveled that it was a rich enough house to have a porter, she strode left towards the walled garden that girdled the back half of the mansion.
#
Someone had thrown seeds out on the garden path. A flock of tiny birds pecked for them, forming a living carpet of aquamarine and emerald. A few fluttered to perch among the rose trees as we walked in, but the rest stayed. Fearless.
Solid wood benches curled like sleeping automas around a crescent pool. Grandmother took a seat on one of them. Thesil and I claimed another. I held her hand in mine, even when she clenched it until my fingers numbed.
We sat watching the flitting birds for so long my mouth dried up. But as I weighed taking off my mask to drink against the chance of catching death-palsy, a man strode through the garden door.
His skin was the same tree-bark shade as Grandmother's, and his black hair was nearly as short as hers. Like all perfecta men, he was barefaced and clean-shaven, but he had let his sideburns grow daringly low. His formal robe brushed the path, scattering birdseed. The sleeves and hem were embroidered with faces.
"Hashida Yamurai," he signed. "How good of you to come."
Grandmother's brows lifted, but she didn't rise from her seat. "Kanuraz Ampanai. We don't bother with last names out in the desert. What use are mother-lineages when you have no family?"
The man perched himself on the statue beside her. "Allow me my quirks, imperfecta. Especially in this trying time. Will you not introduce your friends?"
Grandmother glanced towards us. "They're family."
His grin flashed gem-studded teeth – jade and lapis lazuli. Straight out of my vision!
As I gaped, Thesil pulled at my elbow. I turned, and in the shelter of our bodies she signed, "That's one of the Cene!"
"What?" I signed back. "It can't be."
"The teeth," she said, as if it were obvious.
I'd never seen a member of the Cene, a cena, not if you didn't count Holy Efra from my visions. And I hadn't seen her teeth. I inspected the cena – Kanuraz – carefully. He carried himself like he owned everything he saw and nothing could threaten him. Thesil carried herself that way, too, sometimes, when she was being particularly Thesil-y.
Kanuraz was still signing with Grandmother. I suspected he'd missed our secretive conversation. "Will you not come inside and share our communal drink?
"Save it for the ones you love," Grandmother said. "The garden will work well enough for this. Your house is too stuffy."
"How unkind, when I had it aired just for you." He glanced over at us, his expression casually amused. Then his gaze sharpened. "Well. Do my eyes deceive me?"
Thesil stiffened beside me as the man rose and walked towards us. The flock of birds on the path let him stride right over them; perhaps he was the one who put out their seed. Grandmother rose, too, her arms folded under her sagging breasts.
"Can that be who I think it is?" Kanuraz signed as he walked towards us, his expression wondering. "Little Aconta's daughter?"
"Leave them be," Grandmother signed, but he had his back to her now.
He stopped a few feet away from us and nodded. "Yes. Your eyebrows have a particular shape. Thesil Acontai."
Thesil's arm trembled against mine, but her hands were steady. "I don't know you."
"You were much younger when we met. How are your parents?" His head tilted. "Ah. But you sign like the old woman does. How did you become imperfecta? You were your father's little rose. His heir."
I shot to my feet before he could step closer. "Your business is with my grandmother. Not Thesil. Leave her alone."
His brows lifted, and he smiled. "Your grandmother, is it? And you are?"
"Zisha Ferimei."
Grandmother came up beside me. She must have circled the flock of birds. "My heir. If you want to keep buying from me, you leave the children alone. What do you want, Kanuraz? You wouldn't have sent for me for nothing."
He bowed his head. "Of course. Of course. I'm sure you can guess."
"The mine's closed. It'll stay that way until death-palsy is gone again."
His mouth thinned. "I need more ore, Hashida. Reopen your mine, and I will well recompense you."
"I gave you enough in the last shipment to get the whole city high."
He spread his hands in a helpless gesture. "And I've used almost all of it. People are desperate for escape. They want to see beauties, not their brothers and sisters dying of death-palsy. Soon I'll have to cut into my personal stash."
Grandmother's nose flared. "And that would be a pity, wouldn't it?"
"Hashida, be reasonable. Would you have your people starve?"
Grandmother stared into the rose trees for a long moment. Then she dropped her gaze to meet his. "Fine. I'm not going to reopen the mine – I don't want the workers out where they might be attacked or infected. But I may have some ore stored away that I can ship out with you."
The perfecta's face regained its glittery grin.
"I'll have to track it down," Grandmother said. "Bring a wagon loaded with food and goods to the town in a month, and I'll give you your ore."
"A pleasure as always to deal with you." His gaze landed on Thesil and me as he bowed. "Imperfectas."
Outside the garden, well away from the cena's house, I wrapped my arms around Thesil and held her until the stiffness left her shoulders.
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