Chapter 46

  The paper was all on her side. It loved words. It yearned to take form. It welcomed the pen as it welcomed the flame, making and unmaking.

  A chartaceous beast accosted her on her flight from Abraham Black. She cut it down in fire, hardly slowing, and she tore a sheet of paper from its twitching wing as she ran past. A smoking chasm had opened in the pulpy earth ahead, smoldering in its fathomless depths. She skidded to a halt and wrote a bridge in shaky script, using her own blood for ink. A haiku. She crumpled the paper, burned it, released it onto the hot updraft from below. The paperscape around the chasm, maroon and grey and bruised purple, folded, buckled, twisted, made a bridge. She ran across and torched it behind her.

  Her ship was near, but she could not outrun Black. He stepped from a shadow into the crimson glare of the smoky sunlight. He shot her once in the thigh, dropping her to the grey parchment.

  Something about him had changed profoundly. He had stopped being a person; this was what truly made him terrifying. Neither man nor angel now. He had become a monster.

  Abraham Black aimed a revolver at her head. He opened his mouth to speak, to give her his final words. But he stopped. He looked away, into nothing. His eyes widened. “Wha—”

  And he was gone. One moment: a nightmare in physical form ready to kill her. The next: empty air. Akkama thought she saw a black void streaked with silver.

  Trembling, she took a slow, deep breath.

  And then Akkama wept. For the first time in months, she truly wept. In fear. In rage. In frustration. Everything had gone wrong. Again.

  She beat a fist on the paper ground. Red tears fell, singeing the surface of her moon. Her arda burned like coals. It chimed a discordant cacophony. Her Song was a dissonant wreck.

  “A-Akkama?” said a voice. “Like…uh, like, are you okay?”

  “What the fuck does it look like, Emmius? And why is it always you?”

  He had arrived on a paper dragon, his favorite part about her moon. The dragon slithered back in retreat after Emmius fell off, afraid of Akkama. Tiny paper fireflies, blinking with light, mingled with the background of skybound embers.

  “Oh, man…” Emmius stepped forward hesitantly, wringing his hands. He looked all around, anxious to think of something to do. He began to unstrap his guitar, reconsidered, took another step. “This is like just like back at Guertile, man.”

  Guertile. Her crystals shattered, the Majesty slain, her best friend blinded, a Judgment pronounced that still echoed in her dreams. Abandoned by the dragon, Akkama had dragged herself to a nearby silo. And who but Emmius had found her there, sobbing and bleeding and crying about how she had messed it all up. And he had held her, and she had cried like a little child because she hadn’t really wanted people to die and get hurt. She hadn’t wanted to hurt Zayana, and she hadn’t wanted Anthea to lose her song, and…

  And afterward she had made Emmius swear not to tell, and she had promised to kill him if he ever talked about it again. No one could know.

  And now he was here, where everything had gone wrong. Again.

  “Like I know you probably don’t want to see me now,” he said. “But I mean, can I like help? You know?”

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  Akkama gritted her teeth and choked back her blubbering. Rage coiled within her. “Leave me alone,” she hissed.

  Emmius shuffled his feet. Akkama took Nemesis, cut through the paper and cloth on her thigh, and cauterized the wound.

  “Um, like, no,” Emmius said when she had finished.

  “No what, Emmius?”

  “Like, no, I won’t leave you alone.”

  She met his eyes. They were wide, afraid. But they were dragon’s eyes, and they did not look away. “Why not?” Her jaw ached from how hard she bit her teeth together.

  Emmius went pale as blood drained from his face. He leaned back, but did not take a backward step. “I mean it’s like, you, you’re my friend and—”

  “I am not your friend!”

  He flinched like a threatened dog. “Well, but like we’ve been doing stuff together and I just—”

  “I’ve been using you, Emmius! I only cared about your luck!”

  “I mean, like I know that.”

  Akkama stared at him. “Then why…” She could think of nothing, no explanation, nothing to say.

  Emmius shrugged. “I mean it’s like I was saying you know. Like you’re my friend and also I care about you and…uh…” He trailed off.

  Rage.

  Abraham Black had almost killed Akkama. That made her angry. Her plan had backfired; her bravado on Jeronimy’s cruiser was shown to be foolishness. That made her angry. She had felt fear again, and it was horrible. It made her weak. She was weak again, crying here. She hated being weak; she hated the thought of the others knowing her failure, knowing her like this. All of this, it made her angry.

  But nothing compared to the nonsense, the furious bafflement, the agonizing mystery. Emmius still cared about her. Why? Zayana had gone back to save her. Why? Neither Anthea nor Acarnus hated her after what she did to them. By all the gods, why? Why couldn’t anyone hate her?

  It was worse than sheer anger. It was an emptiness, a cold incapacity. It was a kind of fear that she had never felt before. All she knew—the only thing—was that she had to make it stop.

  She moved on instinct, without thinking, doing the only natural thing. The only thing to make it stop.

  Emmius didn’t speak when Nemesis slid through his heart. He didn’t even scream. He gasped faintly, belatedly, in surprise and pain. His eyes widened, and he looked down at the hilt of Nemesis on his chest as though he couldn’t understand. And when he again looked Akkama in the eyes, it was with an expression of stupefaction. He died as he had lived: without comprehending what was happening or why.

  Akkama hardly understood either. When Emmius had fallen, she wiped the brown blood from her sword in a daze. She limped to her vessel and left the Paper Moon burning behind her, a pyre for Emmius. She noticed, as she flew, that her ten-sided medallion had changed. The irregular brown lump that was Emmius’s symbol had gone dark, and that tenth of the medallion had turned a dull, dark grey. Everyone would know he died. But nobody had to know what had happened. She didn’t know herself.

  She trembled at the unknown, and she could not sleep.