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And Morgan didn’t hear the rest, because soasped, "It’s Eliza!" and then the others erupted in a frenzy

And that was all right Frenzy all you want,back to his lab It’s good to be king

45

CATS OUT OF BAGS

The next fluttering of coh the kasbah had a different feel fro skyward this time There was disbelief, rancor, and… they appeared to be looking at… Eliza

Eliza had had a probleood chunk of her life, it hadn’t even been paranoia, but the foregone expectation of rote persecution: si at her, and they were judging her Back home in Florida, in a small town in Apalachicola National Forest, everyone had knoho she was And after she ran aell Then it was the chill at the nape of her neck, the dread of being found or recognized, the always looking over her shoulder

That had gradually faded--never completely--but when you lived with a secret, the paranoia was never far beneath the surface Even if you’d done nothing wrong (which in her case was debatable), you were guilty of having the secret, and any searching glance cast your way took on this o

They know They knoho I am Do they know?

But they didn’t They never knew At least, they never had before, and for that, Eliza had a particular perversity of the church to thank They shunned "graven ies"--not just of God and their "foremother," but of the prophets as well, and after Eliza’s first vision, no more pictures of her were taken Not that there were many before that Her family wasn’t exactly preserve-memories-for-posterity kind of people They were uns-in-a-bunker kind of people The photo used on the news had been taken by a tourist passing through Sopchoppy--that was the actual name of the town near which their church compound stood--who, alerted by a local, had snapped a picture of "those angel-cult freaks" when they came in for supplies

"Those angel-cult freaks" had been a local story for decades, but had only exploded nationally when Eliza disappeared Herweeks after the fact, desperate enough for help finding her lost prophet to go to the officials she scorned as idolaters and heathens Of course, it had looked fishy, and society is not predisposed to give cults the benefit of the doubt The headline had snagged the national iination like a briar: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT

That’ll do it

Eliza could have cleared them at any time She could have come forward--she was in North Carolina by then--and said, "Here I am, alive" But she hadn’t There was no pity in her for them None Not then, not now, not ever And, as a body was never found--though it was looked for, assiduously, for months--eventually the law had had to leave theh this had swayed neither public opinion nor the ators It was a sordid affair, and you had only to look into the eyes of the mother, they said, to know the worst One of the detectives had gone so far as to state, on caated the Gainesville Ripper in his career, and he had interrogated Marion Skilling--her name, it was not lost on the tabloids, contracted to Marion’s killing--and they gave you the sa into a dark hole

"I find it difficult to sleep, knowing that woman is free in the world"

A sentiirl Elazael must certainly be buried somewhere in the vastness of Apalachicola Forest There was not an iota of doubt

At least, not until today

"Eliza, coid Behind hiid He was livid He was breathing like a cartoon bull, Eliza thought, her e in inanity even as she understood whatit

Oh god, oh god

Oh godstars

Another tarot card turned over in her ave that to her Godstars It tickled her memory, but she couldn’t stop to consider it, not just now "What’s the matter?" she asked, but Dr Chaudhary had already turned and walked away, fully expecting her to follow And they were in theland, at the center of a military peri The corpses were out of the pit Karou hadn’t even considered this possibility It felt like a violation, as if her hoht She had been deeply miserable here It was a chapter of her life she had no wish to revisit, and yet she couldn’t help circling nearer, peering down at the figuresbeneath her She passed in front of the sun and saw her own shadow--tiny with distance--hover and flitter like a dark uise herself, but not her shadow, and soht of it and looked up Karouher shadow-moth aith her

She could smell the rankness of the chimaera corpses even fro a conflict that would pit "deels" was up in smoke Or rather, stupidly, not up in smoke "I should have burned them," she told Akiva, whose presence she felt by her side as heat and the stir of wingbeats "What was I thinking?"

"I can burn them now," he offered

"No," she said, after a pause "That would be worse" If all the corpses were to suddenly combust? No matter that it was seraphi, it would look… infernal "There’s no undoing this We just get on with it"

He didn’t answer right away, and his silence was heavy It was a mercy they couldn’t see each other, because Karou was afraid of the pain she would find in Akiva’s eyes, as theytheir heads and not their hearts They would return to Eretz when they had done their part here, and not before And ould they find when they did?

There was an odd feeling of half death settling over her with the realization that the best they could hope for noas not very much at all, even if they succeeded here and drove Jael, weaponless, back to Eretz What then, for the and bruises now, life squeezed in around the edges, and stolen tastes of "cake" to sweeten a difficult life Cake for later, cake as a way of life All of that was gone, s sky, shadows chased by fire: an enereat to defeat

How had she ed to hope otherwise?