Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
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 focus after 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.
I feel evil. Truly evil.
Because only an evil man would take part in these traditions we have.
Jeyk and Mitchell come up beside me as we leave, flanking me as the people part, giving us a path back to my boat. The good thing about being the last to arrive is that we are the first to go.
But it’s Clara, waiting for me in her black dress and veil on the deck of the boat, who puts my upside-down world back into some kind of order.
“How did she get here?”
I’m mostly talking to myself when I say this, but Mitchell answers. “I threatened those fucking Matrons. Told them they’d all be kicked out on their asses, freeloading days over for good, if they didn’t have her waiting on this boat when you got here.”
And despite everything that has happened in the last twenty-four hours, I smile.
Because Clara Birch is truly the only way I will get through the rest of this day.
I climb up onto the boat and Clara falls into my arms sobbing and apologizing at the same time. “Oh, Finn. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
I hold on to her. Tight. Closing my eyes and letting out a sigh as we stand there, in front of the whole fucking city—letting them get a good long look at our grief—and forget about everything but her.
I just want to stay here like this. Capture this moment and hold it prisoner.
It’s my father’s funeral, which should be one of the very worst days of my life, but this moment right after is gonna stick with me. Because I know in my heart this is as good as it gets. My happiness peaked yesterday afternoon when I was dragging my fingertips up and down Clara’s naked thigh after our tryst and the slipping started the moment she and I parted. We didn’t know that the best moments were now behind us. That we had just lived through the good ol’ days.