“Not nearly enough, I think,” said Akiva.

“No, I suppose not.” Hazael put his hand on Akiva’s shoulder and let it weigh there for a moment. “Maybe some, though.” He turned away; Liraz was coming. He intercepted her, leaving Akiva to his thoughts.

Maybe some. His spirits lifted, just a little.

When the fly order came, he left his despair in camp and took instead only his sense of purpose. He didn’t deceive himself that it would be a day of heroics. It would be a day of death and terror, like so many other days, too many other days, and one—or was it two?—renegade seraphim couldn’t hope to save many lives.

Maybe some, though.

38

T

HE

I

NEVITABLE

Rattle of thuribles, clatter of teeth.

Karou’s fingers were restless at her trays. Sift, string. Teeth, teeth. Human, bull. Jade chips, iron. Iguana teeth—little saw-blade nasties—bat bones. Sift, string. When she came to the antelope teeth, she sat back and stared at them.

“Who are those for?”

Karou startled, and clasped her fist around them. She’d forgotten Ten for a moment. Watching. The she-wolf was always watching.

“No one,” she said, and set them aside.

Ten shrugged, and returned to the task of mixing incense.

In London, at the Natural History Museum, Karou had hesitated beside the beautiful bull oryx for minutes, her hands tracing up its long, ridged horns, remembering what it was like to bear that weight on her own head.

“You could be Kirin again,” Ten had said, but the thought had never even occurred to Karou. The antelope teeth weren’t for her. They were for Ziri, and she hadn’t even wanted to take them. Superstitiously, it had seemed to her that the preparation invited his death—like digging a grave before someone died. Yes, death was expected, death was routine, but… not for Ziri.

Lucky Ziri.

Remarkably, he was still in his natural flesh. Through speed, skill—luck, he would be the first to say—he had never yet been killed. And, as foolish, as hypocritical as it was to care about his “purity,” Karou did. He was the last of her tribe, the last true flesh of her kind. There was something sacred in that, and when he had flown out on that first assault, a small, cold dread had crystallized in her and grown, only subsiding when she saw him return.

And now she was waiting again—just to see him, and know that the Kirin were not yet gone from the world—but this wasn’t like before. This time, she didn’t see how he could possibly come back. Her parting words to him—her only words to him—had been so cruel, as if he were to blame for any of it. Would she ever get the chance to unsay them?

Sift, string. Teeth, teeth.

The hours passed and her dread grew. The sun rose, dragging all the hours behind it, and never had a day in this place seemed so sluggish, so hot, so unending. Karou felt aged by the time it finally subsided to twilight. Again and again she found the antelope teeth in her palm.

In the end, that night in London, she had taken her pliers to the oryx’s mouth. It wasn’t an invitation to Ziri’s death, she had persuaded herself, but a way of preparing herself for its inevitability. All chimaera soldiers died. Maybe now his time had come. She tried to imagine him coming back in a thurible, his true flesh—the last Kirin body in all of Eretz—abandoned somewhere, broken or burned—and found that she could handle it.

So long as it kept her from considering the other possibility: that he might not come back at all.

39

T

ASK

N

UMBER

O

NE

On an unpaved road in southern Morocco, a car crunched to a stop, disgorging two passengers and their backpacks before pulling away with a backdraft of dust and Berber shouts for luck. Zuzana and Mik shielded their faces, coughing. The drone of the engine grew faint, and as the air cleared and they could look around, they found themselves at the edge of a vast emptiness.

Zuzana tilted back her head. “Holy. Mik. What are the creepy lights?”

Mik looked up. “Where?”

She gestured to the sky—the entire sky—and he shuttled his gaze back and forth twice before settling on her and asking, “You mean… the stars?”

“No way. I’ve seen stars. They’re, like, these faraway specks in space. Those are right there.”

What by the light of day was an austere land the unrelieved color of dust became, in the dark, a midnight tapestry ludicrous with stars. Mik laughed, and Zuzana laughed, too, and they cursed and marveled, their necks craned all the way back. “You could pick those bastards like fruit,” Zuzana said, reaching up and waggling her fingers at them.

They soon fell silent and stood looking out over the rough and rugged crust that was this land. It was like something out of a documentary—and not the feel-good kind. His voice bright, Mik said, “We’re not going to die out there, are we?”

“No.” Zuzana was firm. “That only happens in movies.”

“Right. In real life, fool city folk never die in the desert and turn into bleached skeletons—”

“To be crushed under the hooves of camels,” added Zuzana.

“I don’t think camels have hooves,” said Mik, sounding less than certain.

“Well, whatever they have, I would kiss a camel right about now. We probably should have gotten some camels.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Let’s go back.”

Zuzana snorted. “Really, intrepid desert explorer. We’ve been here less than five minutes.”

“Right, and where is here, exactly? How do you know this is the right spot? It all looks the same.”

She held up a map. Overscribbled in red ink and fluttering with Post-its, it was not an object to inspire confidence. “Here-here. Don’t you trust me?”

He hesitated. “Of course I do. I know how much work you’ve put into this, but… it’s not exactly our area of expertise.”

“Please. I’m an expert now,” she said. She would have aced any quiz on southern Morocco after the research she’d done, and thought she should qualify as an honorary nomad for her efforts. “I know this is where she is. I’m sure of it. Come on, I even learned how to use a compass. We have water. We have food. We have a phone—” She looked at her phone. “Which doesn’t get a signal. Well. We have water. We have food. And we told people where we’re going. Sort of. What’s the risk?”

“You mean, besides… the monsters?”

“Oh, monsters.” Zuzana was dismissive. “You’ve seen Karou’s sketchbooks. They’re nice monsters.”

“Nice monsters,” Mik repeated, staring out at the stark starlit wilds.

Zuzana wrapped her arms around his waist. “We’ve come all this way,” she cajoled. “It can be one of your tasks.”

He perked up at that. “You mean the fairy-tale tasks?”

She nodded.

“Well, okay then. In that case, we’d better get moving.” He hoisted his backpack on and held hers up as she slipped her arms through the straps.

They stepped off the road, and all lay before them.

“Maybe I should have asked before,” said Mik. “But how many tasks are there?”

“There are always three. Now come on. It should be about twelve miles.” She grimaced. “Uphill.”