“Do you know how long I’ve wanted you?” And now he looks venomous, his face scrunching like a wad of cloth. “From the first moment I saw you in the Celestial City, my body screamed and bawled. I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me. Ever since then, every time you’ve walked into a room, I’ve wanted to shout at you and kiss you, make you bleed and make you come. I wanted to punish you and hold you, like I was two different people.”
The soft contours of his confession clash with the battery acid taste of it. “You’re still on my shit list for substituting me for him. I’m still on your shit list for being a son of a bitch. If we weren’t being hunted, I’d still walk away from you, just like you should walk away from me. But it looks like only one of us’ll be doing any leaving.”
“Malice, no—”
“I hate these,” he says, taking her hand and pressing his lips to the starburst scars. “Hate them so much.” He glances sideways at her. “Now fuck off.”
“No!” she screams, leaping forward to steal his bow, take his place, rob him of free will and, hence, seal his fate for the better this time.
Malice may be a former human, and he may carry some of that residual vulnerability with him, but in that second, he’s faster than she. Barreling from behind the encasement, he targets and shoots, causing glass shards to detonate in the Court’s path and blind them.
This is the part where she’s supposed to run, flee to safety. This is the part where she’s supposed to honor his choice, so it’s not in vain. This is the part where she loses him again.
Wonder thrusts herself into the maelstrom of glass and arrows, dismissing the door and pitching toward the channel threshold from which they’d come.
But the thing is, she has never been good at listening to Malice. Or to anyone.
Once she passes the rulers, Wonder doubles back. She skids behind the gossamer goddess and rams a booted foot into the female’s tailbone.
On the goddess’s way down, Wonder swipes the pearl longbow, its arrow still nocked. The weapon is heavier than Wonder’s, forcing her arms to slip momentarily.
The room becomes a prism, a spinning kaleidoscope as glass splinters. It’s a wave crashing ashore, translucent fragments sparkling like droplets. The effect flings particles of gem colors across the space and illuminates bursting scraps of clover and iris paper.
Attack or be attacked. Sacrifice texts or be sacrificed.
The Court has made their decision. Though debatable, these taboo relics are supposedly less valuable than all others in the main Archives. Sovereigns of history have stashed them away, but they can be rewritten if need be.
Their people cannot be replaced as easily. The Court believes Wonder and Malice are here for a traitorous purpose: treason against their superiors, anarchy against their kind. To these rulers, the two of them are dangerous.
Still, the literary carnage is a mournful visual that sets Wonder’s ivories. Then, beyond the minefield of glass, there are flickers of Malice’s hair, his tattoo, his bow. Relying on adrenaline, he deflects a series of strikes.
Saturated in glittering crusts of blue, an azurite arrow flies toward her demon god. Wonder growls and aims. The bow is foreign, forcing her to adjust, making her feel like an amateur.
She has no time to collect herself fully. Her shot breaks through the azurite projectile, severing its length in half. The weapon’s hawk-nosed owner flounders and then rounds on her, gobsmacked until he realizes that it’s Wonder instead of his comrade.
They gawk.
She dives for the fallen goddess’s pearl quiver, surges upright on a bent knee, and lets loose as he targets her. His strike aims to disembowel Wonder, but she gains her feet and arches into a backflip, propelling herself over a casement that’s blessedly still intact—for a second.
Then more glass shrieks, slicing the air.
Wonder lands and ducks an arrow of lava rock, swinging her upper body beneath its trajectory. She whisks to the right and blocks an agate arrow, then a crystal one. Suddenly, she’s the primary target of every ruler present. Throwing herself to the ground, she somersaults and comes up, her elbow cocked and ramming into the jugular of the pale female in lace. The goddess goes down, bowling into the cloaked god as Wonder yelps, glass biting into her side.
Where’s Malice?
An agate arrow explodes behind her, blocked by a hickory weapon, sparing Wonder from taking the hit. Wherever that misfit is, he’s got her in his periphery. He sees her, even if she has lost sight of him.
Wonder retrieves another arrow but grunts as the dark female in butterfly gossamer hauls her backward, pitching Wonder to the ground. Pages crush beneath her weight, and the quiver shudders from the impact. The goddess’s mouth peels back to reveal incensed canines.
Wonder rolls over, averting the ruler’s fist, which punches through a mound of parchment instead. Flicking her limbs forward, Wonder catapults to her feet and blocks another blow from the goddess, who manages to brawl without shredding her gown. It’s surreal, the confounding vision of this female charging her, when she’d once encouraged Wonder to have faith in her abilities. All of these sovereigns and illustrious servants of the stars had once supported her.
Perhaps that wound appears on Wonder’s face, because the goddess pauses, twitching in hesitation as they face off. There’s a millisecond of regret that kin have become enemies. And for that millisecond, Wonder muses how it has come to this.
Why must it continue this way? None of them want to fight, and these dearest rulers have never known war. Theirs has been a peaceful mythology for eons, however prepared they are for the opposite.
The goddess blinks, then swerves her bow toward Wonder.
What have these figures taught her? What have her Guide and peers taught her?
To endure.
A second twang resounds from behind, a weapon forged of hickory. Waiting until the pearl arrow is about to spear her, Wonder rotates sideways, letting it bolt past her nose and crack into flashing pieces as Malice’s hickory arrow guts through it.
Pirouetting, the back of Wonder’s arm jabs into the goddess’s profile, causing the female to drop the longbow. Wonder catches it and aims toward the cloaked god homing in on Malice.
“I wouldn’t,” a feminine voice cautions.
Staying the weapon, Wonder’s eyes dart toward the androgynous ruler in frosted lace. Stationed behind Malice, she nocks her crystal arrow at the nape of his neck, a placid expression on her face. Meanwhile the gossamer goddess festers, and the hawkish god with braids aims at Wonder, alongside the female whose hair compliments the purple agate of her archery.
Malice’s hickory weapon lies on the floor, amidst the gallery’s casualties. His chin locks, and his annoyed eyes lift heavenward, but whether he’s vexed at Wonder or the figure imprisoning him remains to be seen. Red slashes cross his chest and arms and throat and cheeks, red leaking from the strips in his skin.
Wonder tenses, her side stinging. Under her ripped blouse, she feels her waist oozing from the casement piece that had pierced her.
Her grip trembles. Is the pale goddess bluffing?
“Cease, Goddess of Wonder,” the sovereign commands. “I’m quite serious.”
No, she’s not. The compartments of Malice’s brain are too important to do away with, at least until they have sifted through him for answers.