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  “Where is he?” Jade said.

  Barak ignored her.

  Jade strained her eyes to peer through the darkness, yet saw nothing.

  Turning to Barak, she wondered if the man could have failed to bring Noah away. Or worse, if Noah could have been captured. The thought made her throat seize.

  A stick cracked in the distance. Slowly, through the leaves, a shape emerged.

  Noah.

  Jade passed a hand over her face and wondered at the relief she felt. Wasn’t it only days ago she believed Noah the reason for her suffering? Yet she felt in that moment that she would do anything to not be separated from him.

  “We took the cautious route,” Barak said.

  “Do you believe we are safe?”

  “For a time. The way is riddled with tangled brush and rocky hillsides. Not even a master tracker could find us so quickly.”

  Enoch nodded and motioned Noah close. “Sit beside me. We have much to take care of, and too short a time.”

  As Noah walked to the fire, Jade watched the orange glow of the flames flicker across his features and wondered if, for the first time, she saw him true. His steps bordered violence, and behind him the fire casted shifting shadows.

  “Jade,” Enoch said. “Join us.”

  Jade approached Enoch, but he stopped her. “No. There.” He motioned next to Noah, and Jade pushed her hair back, and sat beside him.

  “I have prayed,” Enoch said, “and the Almighty has spoken.” Enoch grabbed their wrists and crossed them. Jade felt the warmth of Noah’s wrist against hers and struggled to keep her vision from spinning. Noah turned his gaze on her, and the breath drained from her chest as Barak pulled out hemp rope and tied their wrists.

  “Noah,” Enoch said, “do you commit yourself to Jade?”

  Noah searched Jade’s eyes, parted his lips as if to speak, yet remained silent. Uncertainty clouded his eyes, and for a moment Jade wondered if he would refuse. Finally, he nodded. “I do.”

  “Jade,” Enoch said, and her body trembled. “Do you bind yourself to Noah?”

  “I do,” she said, for what else could she say? The ritual they performed seemed a distant dream, as if she knew it to be the consummation of what had already taken place.

  Had she mistaken the pain of bitterness for the ache of love all this time? For once, she thought she understood the love her mother had felt and failed to offer. And she realized her mother’s fractured abilities stemmed from her own unique pains. Tears came to her eyes as she mourned her mother’s hurts, and as the love in Noah’s eyes sealed them.

  “You were right,” Jade whispered.

  “Of course I was,” Enoch said.

  Noah glanced at him questioningly, but Enoch waved him away.

  Then, as Barak loosened the tie around their wrists, Noah wove his fingers into Jade’s, and she realized she’d never felt more at home.

  Or more vulnerable.

  When Enoch spoke his next words, the thrill in her chest gave way to panic.

  “Now, Noah. It is time to choose how you will die.”

  Chapter 59

  Noah was still reeling from Enoch’s words when Jade’s nails dug into the skin of his hand. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I mean,” Enoch said, “that every event in the past century has led toward this one decision: either Noah will reject the Almighty and, with the rest of humanity, die before sunrise, or he will choose to walk the Old Way, and in doing so will postpone the Almighty’s wrath.”

  “Do you mean to claim people will die because of my lack of faith?”

  “Of course not,” Enoch said. “The Almighty is going to destroy them, regardless. Humanity has rejected him, and the God-King’s seed has poisoned the human race. Soon, there will not be a single person left on the planet of pure lineage.”

  Noah said, “Wait, what do you mean by—”

  Jade’s eyes widened to twin moons. “The women?”

  Enoch’s eyes seemed to sink into his skull. “The Others have taken only women from every village they plunder because the God-King has the ability to change the womb so that every child conceived might be born soulless.”

  Noah laughed. “That’s not possible.”

  “It is no laughing matter,” Enoch said. “His power forces children to be formed into hollow shells. Just alive enough to keep a heart beating, yet far enough from human to never be given a soul. Bodies meant to be filled by the Watchers.”

  “The Watchers,” Jade said. “Who are they?”

  “The Others. Word of the Watchers has been passed down generation by generation, even back to the first generation. Because before the first child was born to human parents, the first man and woman were deceived by the Prince of the Watchers, the one who calls himself the Light Bringer. Followers of the Old Way have never forgotten.”

  “So,” Noah said, “what must I do?”

  “Make your decision.”

  “But there is more, isn’t there? I can see it in your eyes.”

  “Indeed,” Enoch said, and his voice sounded like steel on a whetstone. “For the Almighty finally revealed all that I conjectured, and more. Because of what you have done—because of your unbelief—my time with you ends today. The Almighty has another task for me. One that demands I leave. However, before I go, he has offered you the rare opportunity to meet him in physical form.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “You should say no.”

  A pause. “I should?”

  “To believe without seeing would be far better than to see and disbelieve.”

  “You think I won’t believe even if I see him.”

  “To whom much is given, much more is required. It would be better for the God-King to have flayed you alive than for you to reject the Almighty after knowing him.”

  “And you say your God is loving.”

  “It is for the sake of love that he would destroy the world and make it new. You forget that without God, man is incapable of love. And the more intensely someone denies God, the more their soul deteriorates, until there is nothing left but darkness within darkness.”

  Noah considered this as he stared into the flames crackling a mere arm’s breadth away. He thought of the burning and rubbed his chest with his free hand while Jade’s cold fingers clutched the skin of his wrist. As much as he wished he could be what Enoch wanted, he could not bridge the gap. To believe in the Almighty would demand he deny everything he ever knew. Everything he’d ever hoped for.

  In exchange for what? An old man’s religious fantasy?

  Noah closed his eyes and saw Father’s smiling face splattered red. A grin mockingly carved into Elina’s throat. The vague form of his mother shadowed by death.

  Then Jade’s hand twitching against the cold ground.

  It was for love of them that he could not believe.

  For love.

  Noah’s eyes snapped open. “You said the Almighty created us. That he knows how to speak in a way we understand.”

  Enoch nodded.

  Noah stood. “Then I’ve made my choice. I want to meet the Almighty.”

  Embers popped, and the fire collapsed, sending sparks to the sky in a cloud of smoke. A whisper scraped out of Enoch’s lips like bones across the cave floor, “So be it.” And with a flick of his wrist, the world swirled away.

  ...

  The colors were so bright Noah shot his arms across his face, but not even that could stop the Light from burning his eyes, until the swirling cloud around him seemed the disintegration of his very being. He tried to yell, but no sound escaped his throat. He tried to move, but there was no substance through which to twist.

  A Voice as deep as the earth and as ever-changing and wild as the ocean spoke a Word that sounded like violent Music, and darkness swooped over the Light, pressing his body like a grape in a winepress. Finally, with an ear-splitting crack that sounded like a laugh, he shot forward into swirling blue that churned with bubbles.

  Weightlessness
buoyed him upward. He twisted through viscous liquid until he breached the surface and slid, spluttering, onto a sand bar so fine he thought it might be ash. A foot splashed into view, and the hairy leg attached to it cast a shadow across his eyes.

  “Who—” was all Noah’s salted lips could make out, but already he knew, and refused to believe.

  The figure crouched and offered him a hand, but when Noah took hold of it, his fingers touched a deep scar on the backside of his wrist. He thought momentarily of withdrawing, but the Man pulled him too quickly to a stand. He nearly fell, but the Man steadied him and laughed, the same Voice he heard in the swirling Light, only its terrifying complexity had been replaced with a low warmth. “Disorienting, isn’t it?”

  Noah rubbed his eyes and tried again. “Who are you?”

  The Man bent forward, a smile spreading across his dark face. “You already know.”

  A shiver crawled down Noah’s spine. He found himself both disappointed and elated. “The Almighty is a man?”

  “Well . . . no. And yes. It’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  The Man nodded and said, “But first,” and swept his arm to indicate a line of trees laced together like the weave of a shirt, creaking in the wind. “Shall we join them?” the Man said.

  They climbed the incline to the trees, and when Noah reached out to touch a tree trunk, it slid aside, opening a path into the jungle. Noah paused at the entrance, the green-scented breeze bringing whispered melodies from within. He held his breath to hear better, though they quieted as if carried reluctantly from the forest. “Where are we?”

  “We are near the Shrine of the Song,” the Man said.

  “And you are my guide?”

  A nod.

  Noah swayed. Something about the world set his vision spinning. The colors were beyond reality. The Light too bright, the darkness too stark. The smells and taste and touch painfully enjoyable, strange, yet familiar at once.

  “You are no longer in the world of humans,” the Man said. “The absence of Time plays tricks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The Man pointed at the Water. “Those are the Sands of Time. You washed up on the boundaries of Time itself. Without Time to regulate your experience, your soul is overwhelmed. It won’t get better while your body lives, so there’s really no point in belaboring it. Follow me.”

  Noah rubbed his temples, bewildered and fascinated as they walked under the leafy canopy. The path lengthened. As they went, the melodies grew until they wove into a great Music. Like the rest of the experiences in that land beyond Time, the Music was larger, more complex, more nuanced than anything Noah had encountered. It set his heart fluttering, and his limbs burning to move deeper into the forest.

  They broke through the brush into an open space filled with stone ruins, and the Man lifted his hand and spoke a soundless Word that swept the Music away. A silence fell over them so deep it felt alive, but Noah found himself wanting to hear the Music again.

  For the silence to go away so that he might hear those melodies.

  “That Music you heard,” the Man said. “It is evil.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I draw your attention to it only to let you know that I will not allow you to hear it again.”

  “I didn’t hear anything wrong with it.”

  “Did you not feel it tempt you to enter the forest? How it drew you deeper, tickling your ears with strange notes until you smiled without knowing?”

  Noah opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t smiling but realized that he was. He rubbed the expression from his mouth and said, “If it was dangerous for me to enter this forest, why have you led me here?”

  “You will know soon enough.” The Man motioned him forward.

  Arches, domes, and towers lay half-fallen. Noah approached and examined the constructions with wonder, brushing fingers across porous rock lined with zigzagging patterns of fleshy plant life. The ocean air was further humidified by the grove that, other than the creeping vines and lichen, kept its distance from the buildings, as if the stones poisoned the ground.

  “If there is no Time, how do these plants grow?”

  The Man smiled. “Your body is being fooled. In this world, the depth of Truth is beyond your comprehension. You see only what representations your mind is capable of grappling with. And so you perceive me as just a man. I am a man. And yet I am also much more.” The Man pointed to a black recess in one of the walls and said, “Come, follow me.”

  They walked to the grim opening tarnished by weather and vine. A few of the stones lay on the ground like fallen teeth, and a staircase tumbled down its throat. The Man hurried down the steps, and Noah entered and found himself in a tunnel with windows every fifteen paces or so, dropping Light like flames into the cobalt shadows. At the end of the way stood a doorway in the shape of a shield with its center pressing toward them in a needlepoint. Forming a circle around the shield was an assortment of letters Noah could not read.

  The Man swept his hand from left to right and the door rolled into a dark recess. They continued into an expansive, circular chamber whose walls were formed of polished stone. Ornate script ran along the bottom, and pillars rose like arms to support the ceiling with many hands. A mural spanned the room, and Noah spun to take it in, though its details were obscured by shadows.

  The Man motioned him to the mural and lifted his hand. Light glowed at the tips of his five fingers, casting the relief in stark shadows. Countless beings marched in rows, carrying banners and weapons toward a great City. The figure at their head stood above the rest raising a trumpet to his lips. Volleys of light shot out from the trumpet, and the Man traced the rays with his fingers, mouth drawn downward, eyes pooled with sorrow.

  “This mural commemorates the Great Rebellion of the Watchers,” the Man said. “A failure they hold pride in.”

  Noah raised his shaking hand to feel the figures on the wall. Here, finally, was proof of the very legends Enoch spoke of, in a land beyond Time, a land filled with things he had never felt, seen, or heard.

  “The Watchers were once my beloved children, but they abandoned their identity to take what was not theirs. So very much like your forefathers,” the Man said, and offered Noah a meaningful glance. “Both races followed the one who calls himself the Light Bringer, who wages war against me.”

  “To what end?” Noah said.

  The Man sighed and withdrew his hand. “The Light Bringer said in his heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven. Above the stars of God I will set my throne; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’”

  “What happened?”

  The Man turned to him. “I cast him into the land of Death, to the far reaches of the pit, and now he seeks to escape his prison through you, Noah.”

  Noah stepped back. “Me?”

  “Why else do you think I have brought you to this accursed place? This Shrine exists to weave every note in the Great Rebellion into a single Music, to unify all the rebellion and chaos in the world into a living Death. And nearly every human being has offered themselves as its instruments. All that is left is for you to give yourself to it and its hold will be complete, for I have risked everything on you.”

  “But why? I understand that the Light Bringer wants to be freed from prison, but what can he gain if he failed to overthrow you before? And why do you do nothing about it?”

  “You asked me before if I was a man, and part of the answer to that question is that I am willing to humble myself and become a man to redeem you and all the others who bray their melodies like donkeys in heat. I frighten the Light Bringer. His primary goal is to stop me from being born to a human woman, and so he steals all the women he can find to twist their wombs and bar my entrance into the world.” The Man takes a deep breath, chuckles, and shakes his head. “And you have the courage to claim I have done nothing. I created you, Noah. I wove you together in your mother’s womb with my very Words. You are
my counter-melody, a thread woven through the Music of me, which is being assaulted by the Music of the Watchers even as we speak.”

  “You risk your success on me, yet give me the choice to deny you, to align myself with the Music of the Watchers?” Noah said.

  The Man nodded. “Now you begin to see.”

  “You are insane.”

  “I am in love,” the Man said.

  Noah shook his head. “I don’t even know you.”

  “I know you better than you know yourself, for I formed you in your inward parts, and know every thought you have ever thought, and every thought you will yet come to think.”

  Noah’s face warmed, and he turned away and folded his arms.

  “I know of the burning. I know that you think of it often. That you fear it. I also know that you hope I will take it away. That you wish you could believe in me, yet you think that to believe in me you must part with your father.” The Man laid a hand on Noah’s shoulder, warming it. He cupped his other hand before Noah as if ready to receive from him. “Let me have it.”

  Noah met the Man’s eyes, which shone with emotion as deep as the ocean, as intense as a wave that broke itself on a cliffside. “Have what?”

  “Everything,” the Man whispered.

  His words thrust a stab of longing through Noah that burst a well of tears that bubbled unbidden and fell down his cheeks. He passed a hand over his face and shook his head as the burning returned, coiling at the base of his belly. He clenched his teeth and yelled as he struck his palms against his eyes. “I can’t!”

  The Man pulled his hand away and nodded. “Not on your own. But I will be with you, Noah. All you must do is humble yourself and draw near to me. Remember that.” He motioned them onward, and thrust a second door aside, continuing before Noah could think to say anything else.

  Noah hurried through the doorway after him.

  The way forward was a long passage down into darkness. The floor was smooth, yet not steep enough to warrant danger. When the way grew too dark to see, the Man lifted his hand and illuminated the way with the tips of his five fingers.