I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty

Chal let me go when I had no more questions. The gods would tell Grillo Negro where we were, she said, as soon as they could introduce themselves to the villagers without causing panic. I needed to process everything from that and yesterday, and Jem probably wanted time alone, so I went to find Emma. The sound of her giggles led me to an open door near the hallway's end. The room beyond was gigantic and bare, lit by the grey sky through a large skylight. Tlaloc sat at one end of it, almost as tall seated as Emma was standing. Emma crouched at the other end.

The rain god lifted his hand, and the ceiling loosed a rainshower like the ones Miguel and Rosa liked to dance in. Emma sprang into motion. She twirled around the room with hands out and feet as light as an antelope's. Where she passed, the raindrops hit the ground as slush.

"Better," rumbled Tlaloc when the rain ran out. His huge glasses magnified pleased eyes. "Try for freezing rain next."

Emma noticed me at the door and grinned. Her face was sweaty and her hair was making a break in every direction at once, but I hadn't seen her this happy since the party in Grillo Negro. That had been her happiest in years. The only thing missing from the scene was the rest of the village's children, who would have joined this game in a heartbeat, ice magic be damned.

A large splash dropped on Emma's head, and she shrieked.

"Focus," chuckled Tlaloc.

Emma's tongue poked from her mouth in concentration. She pointed her hands straight down. There was a crackle.

"I did it!" She gave an ecstatic hop and wiped out on the ice she had made. Tlaloc started the rain again. Most of it still splattered to the ground, but the drops that came closest to Emma's fingers now left tiny disks of ice where they landed.

My thoughts right now were a soup of disjointed fragments swirling through everything I needed to sit down with for a bit. In the midst of it all, something curious wondered what I might be able to do if I too had magic. It might be nice, at least, to be able to summon water or light fires as easily as the gods did. I packed the idea away. The less I had to do to manage this disease long-term, the happier I would be.

Tlaloc and Emma were having fun, and it didn't look like they planned to stop before lunch. I left the room and wandered, finding myself among the couches again. Tochtli was asleep on one. Grifo was asleep on another. I chased him off and looked in dismay at the Grifo-shaped patch of loose hair he had left. Xolotl's dogs at least were hairless.

I retrieved the brush I used to rid Grifo of burrs and was halfway back up the hallway when a sound behind a door stopped me. It was a voice, smooth and quiet, half-singing in a sinuous language that was neither Spanish nor Nahuatl. It belonged to Tezcat.

The eerieness of the sound and the fear of being caught eavesdropping overwhelmed my curiosity. I hurried back to the couch room and cleaned up the fur as best I could. Grifo had sulked off somewhere. There were no gods or goddesses in sight, so I took up my circling again. Now and then, a brushstroke of black would punctuate the endless grey on some part of the desert. I wondered if any of the village remains were Grillo Negro under its magical camouflage. The thought, coupled with Tezcat's low, singing incantation voice, was unsettling.

The next window held mountains I felt I'd seen a hundred times now. I moved on to the next, the first of the set looking onto Tlalocan. I was just in time to see a shooting star.

Some deep, visceral instinct made me wrench back below the windowsill. I slid to the side, my heart thundering like four hands on a dog-sized drum, and I willed with all my strength for the glyph-lights to go out. They remained undimmed. I couldn't call, and my legs barely held me. Coyol's army, her four hundred eldest brothers, who had shot Quet and slain an entire village fifty-one years ago, who were looking for the gods with the intent to kill them, were in Tlalocan.