René turned again to the crowd. “The Tombs are empty! Fate was to have two out of three in the prison, but she cannot. The Rook has led them out, on La Toussaint, because their city, because he …” René pointed at LeBlanc. “He would put them to death! Not Fate!”
“Enough!” said LeBlanc. He spread out the black arms of his long hanging robes, the streak in his hair bright in the dim. “I am the premier of the City of Light, and the instrument Fate has used to make her will known!” His voice was authoritative and sure as it echoed. “The Goddess has decreed that the Red Rook dies. It is already done!”
“And who did Fate decree should die at highmoon?” Tom shouted.
René shouted it louder. “And who was supposed to die at highmoon? Did anyone die?”
“Gendarmes! Remove these men and let Fate’s will be done …” The gendarmes did not move. It was as if the entire prison yard had been cursed with doubt. Except for Sophia, who had never been more certain of anything in her life. René was here, he was real, and he knew what he was doing.
“Let the Goddess speak!” she cried out. “Spin the coin. If the Goddess is real, she will tell us. But if not, then I will destroy the Tombs, and the people of the Sunken City will choose their next leader, Upper and Lower together. Do you accept the challenge, Premier?”
LeBlanc leaned out the window of his box, looking up at her on top of the scaffold like a fly he wished to swat. She could see his hands shaking. She could also see two or three of the ministres moving quietly down the steps of the viewing box and away. Like rats from a sinking ship. Then LeBlanc’s face became suddenly serene, and he raised his arms again.
“I accept! But we will toss the coin, not spin. The toss of the coin is the proper way to speak to the Goddess!”
Sophia’s heart banged hard in her chest. René was good at flipping that coin. But she had only ever seen him purposely catch it on face, and they needed it to say facade. He looked up at her, and smiled with half his mouth. Sophia smiled back. “Move the people away from the prison!” she yelled, looking down. “Move them away from the prison building!”
To Sophia’s surprise, a group of gendarmes near the prison doors obeyed and began scooting people forward, shifting the crowd, a remarkably silent process.
René held up the coin again. “Who will witness the toss?”
The executioner and his men seemed to have slipped away as well, but a man with the arms of a metal worker or a liftman climbed the steps. He had a mask of Fate swinging by its strings around his neck. “I will witness.”
The mob was still shifting, making room for those trying to move away from the prison building. Sophia looked up at the sky. The torches almost weren’t needed now. She concentrated on her balance, legs aching from the strain as René went to stand behind the stone altar, the man with the mask of Fate with him. Tom had sunk down to sit on the scaffold, still trying to work his hands free.
“Are you ready, Albert?” René yelled. “Will you call the toss?”
The two ministres still left in the box sat forward. “Face is yes, and facade is no,” LeBlanc shouted. “That is the proper way!”
“Face yes, and facade no,” René repeated for the crowd. “Then ask her!” he said to LeBlanc, holding the coin aloft. People were still finding places to stand, some crawling up onto the scaffold itself, eager to see the truth.
“Ask her, LeBlanc!” said Tom.
Sophia held her breath.
“Goddess!” LeBlanc cried, his eyes closed. “Answer the Sunken City! Are you real?”
René flipped the coin and it went sailing into the air, glinting in the first ray of the dawn that came shooting over the cliff edge and between the buildings.
Spear stood in the stinking dark of cell 522, the firelighter in his palm, the wheel in the back pointing to the symbol of the rising sun. The soft tick, tick, tick and his thoughts were all he could hear. He’d pushed the knob in. There would be no explosion, and now there was nothing. He could not cry; he could not even feel. Sophia was gone, and probably Tom, too, by this time. And what was he without them? Nothing. Just like what he felt. Nothing.
Why hadn’t she told him what she’d set out to do? Why had she never, ever looked to him? It didn’t matter, in the end. He’d driven her down this path. It was his fault she had died, as much as if he’d thrown the lever. Had she been frightened on that scaffold, he wondered? Or had she stood her ground? Both. Sophie had done both. And she had come so close to achieving the impossible.
Suddenly, Spear smiled. And so he would do this for her now. He would give her the last thing he could. Spear set the firelighter back in its barrel and pulled out the knob. Then he sat down on the floor, still smiling, surrounded by Bellamy fire, and closed the cool blue of his eyes, letting the mechanism tick, tick, tick …
The coin turned, and turned, and turned again in the air, flashing gold in the dawn light. Sophia gripped the rope, LeBlanc leaned out of his viewing box, the man with the mask of Fate tracked the coin with his eyes. René stepped back and Tom had his head in his hands. The people of the city waited. The coin hit the stone of the altar with the tiny echo of a clink, and there came a muffled BOOM from somewhere deep below them.
The Razor trembled, making Sophia sway for balance on its top, four more booms in rapid succession, and then one mighty explosion that rocked the wood beneath her feet. She swung out on the rope before she fell, hearing screams and panic and a roar that made her turn her head to the prison even as she spun crazily through the air. The building that squatted over the Tombs hovered for just a moment, and then it was falling, collapsing in on itself, sinking down and inward as if the earth had opened its mouth and swallowed, exhaling a thick, rolling cloud of dust.
Sophia shinnied down the rope. The world was shaking, the hole that had eaten the prison building slowly opening wider, the surface cascading down, creating a stampede of people running in the opposite direction. Another explosion, this one with a flash of fire and wind and a noise that left her ears ringing, and then rain fell, a heavy rain, all scattered bits and pieces. The panic of the fleeing crowd intensified as they were pelted, and Sophia saw a larger piece fly past and shatter on the scaffold. One part of her brain registered that what had just sailed past her head was a skull. That it was raining bones. But the bigger part of her was intent on surviving.
Her feet hit the wood of the platform and an arm came around her, pulling her into a run. René had her, Tom on his other side, and he was dragging both of them across a scaffold that was suddenly tilting uphill. The ground was giving way. LeBlanc’s viewing box fell, though whether he was in it or not she didn’t know. And then they were enveloped in a choking cloud of smoke and dirt.
“Jump!” René yelled.
Sophia pushed off the edge of the scaffold as it tumbled downward into a hole, the Razor collapsing with it. They hit the paving stones hard, but just enough to stumble; the ground had not been all that far away.
“Tom!” she said, pulling him upright. “Move!”
They all three began a slow run, tripping over bricks and bones, the rumbling beneath them slowing and softening to only the occasional fall of stone somewhere deep below. The prison yard had nearly emptied, but there was a thick ring of people around the edge of it, a fence of bodies. They stopped before them, and Sophia turned to look back.
The first light shone down on air that was hazy with dust, and where the prison building and the Razor had been was a great, smoking, rubbish-heaped pit. She looked up to the cliffs and saw people there as well, pressed against the iron fences, and even higher up, black specks thronging the balconies and air bridges. Above that was the white line of smoke pointing the way across the sky. She felt Tom grab her harder, his legs giving way beneath him.