“Have you tried?”

She raised her arms to the ceiling. “Hi! We’re here to help. Take us where we need to go!”

Nothing happened.

She fixed Shale with a stare she’d used to curdle milk.

“You could use a less sarcastic tone of voice. And say ‘please.’”

She did not let up the stare for a few seconds.

She closed her eyes. That made it easier.

“Hi,” she tried. “You don’t know me, and you don’t have reason to trust me. But if you show me where it hurts, I think I can help.”

Silence.

Oh, what the hells. “Please,” she said.

Rock ground rock. A thunderstorm smell stained the air. Strong wind struck her in the chest. She tried to steady herself on the wall—

And failed, because there was no wall beside her anymore.

A tunnel gaped to her right, its black walls covered with enormous painted figures that glowed the same red as the mine’s crystal veins.

“Not one word,” she told Shale.

He offered none.

They descended together.

54

54

Cat waited in line for the sunset service at the Church of Sacred Ashes in Slaughter’s Fell. The locals had come out in force, heavyset men in pit-stained work shirts and women with worn fingers. A mom in denim slacks caught her youngest by the arm and yanked her back from the street. Cat stuffed her hands in her coat pockets, hurting for a smoke, a drink, a fang, avoiding the blank stares of black windows in whitewashed houses. She watched the houses so she didn’t have to watch the people. A scar-cheeked young man beside her offered her a cigarette, which she declined though she wanted to say yes.

It had been a long day after a long night.

Church doors opened and they filed in.

Parishioners packed the pews. As many stood in the back as found a seat. Cat scored one of the last pews, though the benches were so tightly packed she might have rather stood, or popped wings to give the locals a taste of real divine intervention. She squeezed between a bearded man in a golem mechanic’s shirt—CAPISTANO SERVICE & REPAIR, grease stains included—and a dark-skinned girl with bushy hair, thin wrists, and thick glasses, who, after her mother hipped her into the pew beside Cat, slid the prayer book from the wooden pocket, and buried herself in the order of solstice ceremonies, high rite, second version, summer colophon. The evening congregation was a brew of hushed voices, pressure, and too-close bodies’ heat. Cat smelled shoe leather and popcorn, oil and engine grease, aftershave, deodorant, perfume, and the bodies all that aftershave, deodorant, and perfume were meant to cover.

The people filled the church floor, but they did not fill the church. Arches made the roof seem taller than the sky.

On tiptoe she could just glimpse the cage-throne for the god’s fire on the altar.

“Huh,” she said.