Page 24 of Cast in Atonement

“I believe they look like...people. It’s how she managed to bring them to me in the first place.”

Kaylin grimaced. She stood in a darkness alleviated only by the light of her marks; those marks were now a livid orange, as if her skin was on fire. But without the pain, which she appreciated.

“Hope says he has Terrano.”

I did not say that.

“Hope says he’s aware of Terrano, and he doesn’t sound too panicked. I’m going to try to reach him.”

No!

“No!” Helen shouted, at the same time as Hope, the two denials overlapping in tone and texture. “Please, Kaylin, allow Imelda to attempt to quiet her ghosts before you do anything rash.”

“I can’t see Mrs. Erickson.”

“Just please remain where you are.”

“I’m not trying to reach her ghosts—I’m just trying to find Terrano.”

“The two, at the moment, are entwined. We do not know what these so-called ghosts are; we don’t know what they can do. What we do know is they were capable of possessing the Arkon.

“Death for the endless and Ancient is not death as we perceive it. Death for mortals is finite and irreversible.”

Kaylin hesitated, remembering the corpse of the Ancient, trapped in Azoria’s enchantments. Nothing about that being, when finally freed, was dead in any fashion Kaylin understood. Jamal and his friends had been: they were ghosts; they couldn’t interact with living people, with the sole exception of Mrs. Erickson, and that was more because she could see them; it was her power that allowed contact, communication.

If these ghosts, these words, were dead in the fashion of that Ancient, they weren’t dead in any way that Kaylin, a mortal Hawk who had seen her share of corpses, understood.

Did words die?

Did they perish, unspoken?

Or did they remain, waiting for new readers, new speakers, to give them life again?

She heard murmurs as she listened—as she realized she was focused on listening—in this dark place; they sounded like a crowd of people at a great enough remove that the words they shouted were indistinct, blurred.

The marks on her arms grew brighter, orange and flickers of red giving way, at last, to gold and white. As if she had finally reached the outer edge of the crowd, words broke through the murmur of the crowd.

To her surprise, they were spoken by Mrs. Erickson.

05

“No, you aren’t in a prison here.” She paused—the pause was long—before she continued. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand how you were trapped in the altar. I don’t think the Arkon was responsible for your captivity—I don’t think he was aware of your presence at all.”

The crowd’s volume rose, but the words remained unintelligible.

Kaylin needed to be closer to make sense of what was being said, but neither Hope nor Helen believed it was safe for her to move. She was a corporal now, not a private—or worse, a mascot. She could assess their concerns. She could sit on her impulse. She didn’t have to rush ahead.

She had always trusted her instincts; they’d kept her alive. But learning how to differentiate between impulse and instinct was way harder than it should have been.

“I live here as well,” Mrs. Erickson continued. “I brought you here because it would be safest—for both you and the rest of my people. We aren’t what you are, and we aren’t what you were. I’m not certain people like us could survive you. We don’t... Pardon?”

Kaylin strained to hear what Mrs. Erickson heard.

“No, dear—I’m not like you. I’m not as you were, even when you were alive. Alive? It means...” Mrs. Erickson exhaled. Clearly this wasn’t something she’d ever had to explain to the dead of her acquaintance.

For the first time since she’d started listening, Kaylin heard a single word. A word that she hadn’t heard before but was nonetheless familiar. Oh. It was a True Word. A word spoken in the first language of the Ancients.

To her great surprise, Mrs. Erickson repeated the word, syllable for syllable; her voice rose at the end, making a question of it.

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