too broad in the shoulders. The coffin wasn’t actually mirrored—the top was like a windowpane, and Rags was looking at another person within it, their figure distorted through the sheet of nearly liquid glass. Over their chest, a fist-sized hole had been melted through the lid.
A quick glance upward showed a hole in the ceiling about the same size.
How deep down was he? Had something living burrowed its way in from the surface?
Rags longed to take a step away but couldn’t. His gaze slid back to the coffin. Radiating rolling heat like forge fire, the shape inside undefined, warped and wavering. Rags didn’t trust that touching it wouldn’t sear his hand off at the wrist and leave him with an oozing stump.
But how much he did want to touch it outweighed all rational fear.
He couldn’t explain it. Both hands went up, discovering the same shapes on the surface as on the first door. Handprints.
“Daring as ravens, rich as magpies,” Rags whispered, reciting the old Clave prayer for luck, and set his palms against the handprints in the glass, meeting the figure’s hands below it fingertip to fingertip.
Rags’s hands fit perfectly into each groove. He discovered that the surface itself wasn’t burning hot, or, like the rest of the fae technology in the ruins, it reacted to his presence, his touch. The glass began to cool, and as it cooled, it hardened.
As it hardened, it began to crack.
One fissure ran straight down the center, between Rags’s fingertips. He was vaguely aware of the coffin shattering open, of its shattered pieces burying themselves in his palms, though no pain accompanied the fact, only mild amazement. One fragment sliced his cheek, another his chin. But instead of blowing him backward with the final force of its destruction, it sucked him inward, so that he met the figure within chest to chest.
The figure sat up, then slumped forward. Rags caught it in his arms, but it was dead heavy, an anchor dragging him to the floor. He managed to slow the fall, to soften the impact. His bloody hands smeared red stains along its bare forearms, a bare chest. Long black hair, save one silver-white shock, tumbled everywhere. The body sagged down, down, and Rags fell back, pinned under its weight.
Then the body began to scream.
13
Rags
While the screaming continued, too loud and too close and drawing on a depthless well of emotion beyond human comprehension, Rags remained stunned. He spiraled in and out of the scream’s pain with dizzying speed, no room left for thoughts in his head, only the echo of the noise.
At the point when Rags suspected his head might split apart at the straining seams like an overstuffed moneybag, the screaming stopped.
The silence in its wake proved worse, leaving Rags empty and adrift. His palms began to sting. Blood dripped down his fingertips. The weight of the other body pinned him to the ground. Gusts of trembling, cool breath stirred his hair.
Something round rolled across the floor.
The body moved. Jerky, awkward movements from limbs trying to remember how they worked, what their purposes were. The weight—thankfully—lifted. Rags stayed put, flat on the floor and staring upward. He watched the body relearn itself, watched it hold up its hands and spread its tattooed fingers apart and stretch each in turn. Strong, tawny arms, with black bones tattooed on the skin. Everywhere on the skin. That long hair reminded Rags of the first fae corpse. It fell over the body’s face, hid it in endless shadow, until suddenly the body’s large hands pushed it back and all its features were revealed.
Looking not entirely majestic.
The face over Rags’s was baffled. Bewilderment stamped on majesty, a contradiction amazing enough to make Rags attempt a weary laugh.
“I am awake,” the bow-curved lips parted to say. At the corners of the mouth sat twin black X’s. No, they were crossbones. The rest of the face was golden skin unmarked by black ink. Big, silver eyes without whites; a nose that reminded Rags of an eagle, or pictures of eagles, which were all he’d seen.
“Yes.” Rags’s voice emerged in an ugly croak. “The screaming made that obvious.”
“A side effect of the Sleep.” The fae—because he was fae, had to be fae, looking everything and nothing like a person, like so much more than a human could hope to be—bent over Rags again. The intensity of his fae gaze burned. Rags flinched. The fae noticed the blood on Rags, squinting at it until recognition crossed his features. “You are