Not Malik. Jun.
The lad sat in the bed of the second truck, and drew the knees in, and squeezed his eyes together till white stars came out behind the lids. Blood was streaming out of both nostrils not the drip drip drip of earlier, but a fine steady stream that gave his lips and chin a crimson hue. There was a streak of red, oozing out of his left ear, into the collar of his oversized jacket.
Ten minutes. Ten minutes he had been like that.
Nari pressed his hands to the twitching body of Aya, Ruin circulation, the cut-throat algebra of keeping a person alive when the poison was winning. Her eyes were flicking to Jun though. It was a vibration that shook the little body of the boy, and had nothing to do with fear.
He heard everything.
Microfractures in the glass floor like slow lightning, the tower where Malik fought with Shou sang its death song, were stress points that would crack in minutes more were the duel kept up. The beat of Shou's heart was striking, higher and faster, yet, beneath, there was something wrong with her heartbeat; something wrong with the beautiful clockwork of her body. The breathing of Malik remained steady, even, anticipating that single opening which would put an end to all things.
And below all of it, below the water and the submerged and the neon glow, something.
Something approaching.
Heavy footsteps. Deliberate. Ceremonial. One after another a prayer bead fell into place. Echo Breath of Jun had taken in the beat, and had re-echoed due to this presence not merely bearing Ruin. It was Ruin and it was molded in a man who had lost the way to be anything but that.
Old Jina could feel it in her boots.
Scrap Sense registered the vibration of a distribution of weight so finer, too precise, to be human. The roof moaned with the footsteps that belonged to something which had ceased to be merely mortal many decades ago.
"We got company." Her voice was rust and gravel. "Big company. And it ain't human."
She stretched over to her chain hook.
Abbot Gorei was a service lift, which ought not to have been operational, its wires extremely rusty, their energy exhausted over many years. He came forth as a priest entering his pulpit tall, emaciated, corded with ash hardened sinew beneath the layered robes of the dried blood and old prayer.
His breathing was harshly hissed by his gas mask, and the respirator tubes wrapped in prayer beads rubbed against the matte black face. One of the lenses was broken, revealing a strip of white gray skin underneath. The Litany Scars branching up his neck and jaw was faintly glowing and charred scripture under thin flesh.
The execution beads, fist sized of iron and bone, carved with sutras and inlaid with human finger bones, got struck once with each step. An executioner of a timepiece.
His amber eyes which were level and colorless stared at the convoy. On the children.
The Iron King sends his greetings, he said in a low, subdued voice, which resonated in the mask a little. The heretic children shall be cleansed. The doctor will be servant. The relic mechanic will be cut to pieces.
It wasn't a threat. It was a liturgy. A prayer of blood dispensation which came with the serene confidence of the man who had never questioned his Bible.
Nari moved.
She stood between Gorei and the children, Pulse Breathing: Quiet Ward Palm on the point, her posture broad and deep. Her white haori had been lost in the platform battle, ripped open in the fight, and the skintight black tactical bodysuit lay underneath. Every scar showed. The surgery lines along her collarbones. The needle burns between her breasts. The survival tattoo that had been placed on her by men who had used sacred words to explain their actions on her body.
Gorei threw back his head and examined her, as though she were a specimen.
You were a purifier in the camps. You know purification.
I know men who make holy words to be a cover to rape and kill. The voice of Nari was steel. You are not special, you are another monster, with good vocabulary.
He didn't rage. He officiated.
First Toll: Kneeling Breath his knuckle bumped her sternum before her body could feel the action. No wind up. No warning. Nothing but the awful, abrupt, certainty of impact.
The next breath of Nari. Her Ruin circulation was as dead a bridge, with its supports cut. She fell down on one knee with her mouth wide open as her chest heaved, and she could not breathe the shock. The children screamed.
Gorei gazed down at her with those flat, colourless eyes. Purification is not punishment, it is mercy; you will learn that.
Jun came between them.
Not to struggle against his little body was trembling, and still the blood dripped down his chin, and his eyes were still clenched against the overwhelming rush of sensation. But his feet went. His physique stood between the executioner and the lady who held him when the echoes became too loud.
Hope Resonance activated. Not consciously. Desperately.
The air upon him calmed down. Children began to breathe more slowly, in a panicked manner. The lungs of Nari opened, the following breath came harsh yet true. The murder pressure emanating out of Gorei... wavered.
Eleven-year-old Jun was there with blood in the places that no child should have blood, and would not let the world destroy the people he loved.
Gorei paused.
"The echo child." There was interest possibly in his voice, had the man who had burned away all but ritual known how to be interested. Jaro told me about you. It was a rarity to hear the last prayers of the world.
He stretched out Jun. Long fingers, scarred and pale, the Litany marks faintly glowing.
I will hear thee now.
The chain hook of Old Jina broke.
The iron pierced the hole where his hand, Gorei, had been, and he was driven a step backwards, the first step he had taken in years. Jina was out of the truck, her heavy body between the monk and the children, Rust Lung Breathing making visible the exhaust of her breath in the cold air.
Her eyes were unmerciful and old and completely un-fearing.
Touch that boy," she said, swinging the chain slowly, and I will tell you what busts first in that pretty monk body.
The standoff held.
Jina and Gorei were confronted by three feet of broken roof. rust and corrosion in opposition to ritual and execution. A monk who had turned into the judgment of the wasteland embodied in the form of an old woman who had endured all that the wasteland could cast towards her.
Neither moved. The air grew so thick that it was like breathing wet cloth.
The eyes of Jun opened.
They were white. Not rolled back white, with its glimmering within, the eyes and irises swallower-up light. He had blood streaming down his nose and ears in new spurts but a calm face. Serene. Ancient.
His mouth opened. It was not his voice that came out. It was superimposed, repeating, bearing the burden of all the dead who had ever spoke to him in metal and water and ancient stone.
The burning man comes. he hath a crown of stolen scars. the refinery will drink his blood or thy blood. make thy choice before the sunrise.
He collapsed.
Nari stopped him before he struck the roof, and held him to her bosom, fingers already seeking his pulse. Still alive. Still fighting.
Gorei stepped back a step.
His first retreat in many years. Perhaps since the Black Incense Purge, when he had come out of a walled-up temple the single survivor, his religion seared into his flesh and his incontrovertible truth. It seemed to me that his flat eyes were examining the unconscious form of Jun with a certain amount of doubt.
In one of the towers of silk and neon and beautiful death somewhere in the flooded city, Malik heard the words of Jun ringing in his scars. The ninth scroll of the scripture throbbed with the awareness, the warning, the prophecy, all in one. He didn't understand the words. But his body had to know that they were important.
Lady Shou smiled, but her smile broke.
She'd felt it too. Something shifting. Something greater than her play, her delight, her fair little kingdom of blood and applause.
The Smiling Champion looked confused, the first in many years.
The thunder rolled outside.
Closer now.
The flogging man was approaching.