The streets ran with both blood and petals.
From a distance it could have been a holiday—yellow marigolds strewn in bright loops over doorways, paper banners torn down and repurposed as headbands, smoke twisting upward like ribbons. Up close, the holiday had teeth. The garlands were ripped from funeral wreaths and temple steps; they clung wet to broken glass, drifted in gutters that moved red. The smoke was incense burned past recognition and the sickly sweetness of ruined groceries. Somewhere a siren tried to remember how to be authoritative and failed, reduced to a stammer.
The Seeker and Nakamura held to the lip of an alley that emptied into the square. The Seeker's scar pulsed with a steady heat he could have mistaken for courage if he were less honest. It was the composure that annoyed him, the way the light under his ribs refused to match the panic in the air.
"They've lost their minds," Nakamura said, not casually and not kindly. He kept his voice clipped, as if editing reality down to something he could file.
The Seeker watched a man sprint past, a string of prayer flags tied around his neck like a superhero's cape. "No," he said, and the word scraped. "They've… offered them up."
A laugh rolled through the square, rich and wild, followed by a sob of equal volume. It should have been dissonant. Instead it harmonized in a key the city had never learned until now.
And then she was there.
Kali, not confined to one body any more than a song is confined to one voice. On the far side of the plaza she danced in a crimson sari, ankle bells chiming a rhythm the crowd's feet groped after. On a wall she was a grin in wet red paint, the paint dripping in deliberate lines down into the cracks. In the gutter she was a face reflected in filthy water as a mother cradled three infants who were not all hers, wrists slit open and bound with garlands, eyes alight with the kind of joy usually reserved for miracles or crimes.
Everywhere she moved, contradiction followed like the shadow of a bright thing.
The Seeker stepped forward, resisting the tug on his sleeve. Nakamura swore under his breath and came with him, because abandoning the Seeker in a crowd like this would be the kind of decision that keeps you awake until old age, if you make it that far.
At the corner of the square a mob dragged a man by the collar, shouting that he had hoarded shrine-water, that he had fattened his faith while theirs starved. They beat him with lengths of pipe until his jaw folded in on itself. Then—without a seam, without even a change of breath—they lifted his body onto the temple steps, laid marigolds on his chest, and sang until the notes were damp. Murder and benediction lived in the same frame, like two faces drawn on opposite sides of a page and flicked for animation.
A little girl wandered into the knot of bodies and was lifted without discussion—hands from nowhere, maple seeds spinning upward. She was kissed, blessed, declared luck by a dozen mouths and three pantheons. She giggled. The crowd shifted; the hands let go. Boots came down smiling. By some ugly grace she rolled into the gutter; the water took her, the laughter took longer to leave.
The hospital on the next block had remembered how to be a building under siege. The power was gone. Nurses moved in gray light with the economy of people who have run out of options and patience in equal measure. Then the worshipers broke the doors and pulled up the blinds as if unveiling a statue. They tore IV lines with hands that shook from piety or hunger. They painted fevered skin with ash from the morning's pyres. A man with a shattered leg howled while they pressed him into glowing coals, then blinked through tears at the crack of bone sliding into grace. He kissed the hands that scarred him, leaving stripes of soot on their knuckles. A woman who had sunk too far beneath her own breath sat up and asked for her mother. Her mother had been dead four years. This did not seem to discourage either of them.
"You see healing," Nakamura said, voice taut like wire. "I see an excuse to hurt people and keep your hands clean."
The Seeker could not spare him words. He had seen shock and rage and faith all his life, and this was none of them. His scar beat time with ankle bells no one else could hear.
"Do you see what she is?" he asked.
"I see a riot with a PR department." But there was fear under the grit.
Kali turned. Parades turn more slowly. She was not the red sari now. She was not the gutter or the wall. She was a woman walking toward them with garlands and blades and bare soot-black feet and a face that did not ask for names. A dozen versions of her collapsed into this one without argument. The world did a small, obscene trick of focus to accommodate her.
She lifted her hand, palm open, and the Seeker's scar erupted, light running out in lines as if his ribs had learned the glyph for fire. Pain scissored him cleanly—an editing, not a wound. The square went thin and distant; the crowd became puppets stilling; the smoke straightened its back and waited.
Then the sight came on like a fever that refuses to break.
It was not gods. It was not temples. It was scaffolding.
Beams of story lashed across ages. Runes tied to hieroglyphs with sailor's knots. Hymns soldered to prayers with lines of breath and grief. Totems bolted to crosses and then the bolts engraved with new myths so they could be deemed original. He saw Odin's ravens as threads gone astray in the garlands at Kali's throat. He saw Amaterasu's missing sun as a hole in the roof tarped over with speculation. He saw Lakota visions stitched to Egyptian funerary text and understood that the seamstress had been time, or hunger, or both.
The pantheons had never been rivals in any way that mattered. They were bracing for the same leaning wall. The wall had always leaned. Every repair argued with every other, and the arguments were called doctrine to make the carpentry sound like philosophy.
His mind tried to hold the whole structure and did what hands do when they catch more than they can carry. It dropped. Not once—over and over, like a child losing a toy and insisting it had meant to. He heard himself laugh because sometimes laughter is last ditch duct tape.
And then it snapped. The vision took the useful part of him and put it down somewhere he could not reach.
He folded to the cobbles. The cobbles had more sympathy than most gods.
Nakamura's hands were on him—shaking, patting, counting, swearing. "Look at me. Look at me. Goddamn it, breathe." He obeyed two out of three.
When the world thickened again, the square had quieted. The storm had burned through its fuel and left a sky stunned by its own endurance. Bodies lay cornered by petals. Survivors moved with a tenderness usually reserved for first love and newborns, binding wounds in strips torn from shirts with someone else's name sewn inside, kissing the seams as if that could keep them from leaking. A woman rocked a stranger and called him by her dead son's name until her throat went raw and he believed her. Men whose faces had been enemies an hour ago leaned into one another like exhausted drunks and learned the word brother without saying it out loud.
As a theology it was a mess. As a moment, it worked.
"You chase gods like an addict chases needles," Nakamura said, and it should have been a cruel thing, but it sounded like the tremor you get after you keep someone you love from stepping into traffic. He dragged the Seeker toward the shade of a half-collapsed arch, away from the square, away from the center where attention stabs. "You'll die with your mouth full of meaning and I'll be the idiot who let it happen."
The Seeker pressed his palm to the light that kept pretending it belonged. "I saw it," he said, and the words were ridiculous and he hated how grateful he felt for them. "All the beams. All the patches. It's one thing and the thing refuses to be one."
"What good does that do us?" Nakamura demanded. "Can you hold it? Use it? Trade it for clean water?"
"None," the Seeker admitted. The admission cost less than it should have. "It breaks when I touch it. To see it is to fracture."
"Then stop seeing." Nakamura's voice sharpened back into pragmatic cruelty. "Look at what's in front of you." He gestured with his chin and his jawline became a vector.
What was in front of them:
A boy sat on a curb with a dead dog across his lap. He stroked the fur with the soft concentration of someone trying to memorize a language by touch. Tears cut tracks through the soot on his face. He dipped two fingers in the dog's blood and drew lines on his cheeks like a warrior or a child or a child warrior. Then he laughed and the laugh was an animal learning its own voice.
Two women carried a body between them and sang lullabies as if returning a child to sleep. They laid him on a pyre; they danced until their breath failed; the flames took the tune. When smoke stung their eyes they wept, but the melody did not break, because some songs are not beholden to air.
An old priest stood in front of his congregation and tore pages from his Bible with hands that shook from fatigue and joy in equal turn. He fed the paper to a brass bowl where fire had been taught to act holy. The flames flared. He cried, "Fulfilled!" and ate the ash. It blackened his tongue and he smiled like a pervert at a sacrament. His congregation cheered as if they had been waiting their whole lives for a reason to applaud obedience.
At the edge of the square, a woman with henna drying on her palms squatted and painted spirals on the pavement around a pool of blood until it looked deliberate. A child joined her with a stub of red chalk. They argued about whether the spiral should run sunwise or widdershins and settled it by flipping a coin which was actually a bottle cap. They chose widdershins. It felt right.
A group of young men with bare chests and knives moved through the crowd cutting hair—men's, women's, children's—tying it into ribbons, hanging it from street signs so the breeze could comb it. "Offerings," one said when someone demanded to know, "for the mother of endings." He said it with a tenderness that made his knife look embarrassed.
Mercy and cruelty had married in public and registered the address.
"She's in the water," the Seeker said softly. "In their breath. In mine." He could feel her in the ache behind his eyes, the place you press when a headache decides it lives here now. Infection is one word for it. Sacrament is another. He wasn't sure they disagreed.
"Then we leave," Nakamura said. "Before we are decorated like cake and set on fire." He tugged and the Seeker followed because consent can be pragmatic.
They cut into a narrower street where the riot had not bothered to send invitations. Smoke lay low and got into your throat without asking. Laundry hung from lines like tired flags—baby clothes, a suit jacket that had never seen its wedding, a single red dress with a tear in the hem that looked intentional.
The Seeker's pocket rasped. He pulled out Xuemei's hymn—the Shinto fragment she had smuggled under her shirt as if texts were contraband and she a small-time saint. Amaterasu did not withdraw in anger, it said when read abruptly, when read with the heart. She wanted to know what mortals would do when the light was not a gift but a task. The paper was brittle and brown at the edges, like bread left too long near a stove. He wanted to eat it. He wanted to copy it on every wall. He wanted, inconveniently, to cry.
"She made an experiment," he said, and it sounded like someone else's voice. "Kali brought her results."
Nakamura's mouth went tight. "Hypothesis: people prefer certainty to truth. Corollary: they will bleed to be told what to do."
"Conclusion?" the Seeker asked, because he still had one petty corner of himself that liked the formality of it.
"We leave," Nakamura said again. "We survive. You write, if you must. Then we hurt him"—he meant Marius without naming him—"by making certainty embarrass itself."
They passed a door where someone had chalked the lantern sigil of Marius's sect and someone else had drawn a hand over it, as if to shade the flame from wind or steal it, hard to tell which. Further along a team of nine in chalked armor—the arithmetic Marius had taught them—moved with the choreographed jerkiness of zealots, lanterns shuttered and knives singing their thin, metallic hymns. The priest at their front scattered ash that glowed where it fell and declared a peddler's cart sanctified property. The old woman who owned the cart nodded faster than a woodpecker and then dared to ask for a handful of ash back so she could sanctify the space where her husband had died last year. The priest refused. The boy at his shoulder lifted the lamp and loosed a blade-thin ray that trimmed her question down to size. There are punishments that look like editing.
"Don't," Nakamura said, seeing the Seeker's breath sharpen. "We will bleed to make a point no one is keeping score of."
The Seeker forced his hands to unfist. The scar made the choice easier by hurting at exactly the right time.
They slid past the patrol into a lane where all the walls had something to say. ONLY FLAME SURVIVES in black caps. LIGHT IS MANY, NOT ONE in a hurried cursive, the sort learned in school and thrown away for work. Someone had drawn a ladder into the sky. At the top, in a childish hand: SORRY, OUT. Someone else had added FOR LUNCH with an arrow pointing toward a noodle stall that was, in fact, open. The Seeker was briefly, traitorously hungry.
A man sat on a stoop etching the same symbol into his palm over and over with a safety pin—at first the lantern of Marius, then a spiral, then a crooked sun, then something that looked like the Seeker's scar if you squinted and didn't know better. He had a paper cup for coins next to him and a neat little sign that said customs available. Commerce, the oldest god, refuses to cede territory.
They ducked into a side court littered with mirror shards left from yesterday's attempts to coax the sun into appearing. The Seeker paused and looked. The hymn had said something inconvenient about mirrors: When the sun retreats, the mirrors learn honesty. In a jag of glass he saw himself—ash at the mouth, eyes threaded with red, a man carrying a lantern that happened to be inside him. He looked older than he had this morning. He looked like a rumor and not a good one.
"You're thinking about writing," Nakamura said, watching him instead of the path. "I can hear the gears."
"I'm thinking about forgetting," the Seeker said. "Writing is the cheap fix." It was not, and he disliked himself for saying it.
"Write then," Nakamura said. "But not until we find a place without knives for opinions."
They took shelter under the staved belly of a billboard that had once promised phones better at pretending to be friends. The metal groaned like something thinking of sleep. The Seeker's pulse and the iron chimes of Marius's cult found a way to overlap; the beat made the air feel smaller.
Kali came again—not in flesh. In the way the smoke rose and refused to disperse. In the way the marigold petals, wind-blown, arranged themselves at his feet into a ring, then scattered again as if embarrassed by the gesture. In the particular silence between chimes. Her voice found him through bone. I am your ending, and your beginning. Do not fear me—fear the silence after.
He could have argued—he could always argue—but the argument would have been a pout and he was not, he told himself sternly, built for that. His scar brightened once and settled as if agreeing to wait.
They moved when movement stopped looking like a preference and started looking like a requirement. Through the court, down a stair that knew limestone intimately, past a door that had been kicked so many times it had learned to love it or at least fake it, across a yard where weeds had taken up waltzing, up into a street where someone had chalked a hopscotch board and no one had erased it even as they bled.
The Seeker felt the compulsion come on like weather—something you dress for or don't, but either way it arrives. It was not holy and he suspected that made it cleaner. He had to write. Not because what he had seen could be held in words. Because without the attempt, it would rot inside him and eventually he would be only rot and glow, which is a poor combination for a person.
"Truth cannot be whole," he said aloud, because sometimes you need to hear your own lie and your own clarity in the same air. "To see it is to fracture."
"Then we learn to live cracked," Nakamura said, which was not a comfort, but it was a plan. He checked the lanes the way a man checks a chessboard he doesn't trust to stay put. "Across the river. Old tunnels. Fewer eager eyes."
They moved toward water. Petals drifted in the edges of their vision like big, stupid snow. Behind them, the iron chimes kept time for the city's new catechism and for every heartbeat that refused to sync with it. Ahead, the dusk breathed slow.
The Seeker kept his coat tight around the light that would not take a hint. He thought of Xuemei in her wrecked bookshop, of Eveline in the sanctum that had collapsed with dignity and noise, of Marius with his crown that insisted on bleeding to be believed. He thought of beams that wouldn't hold and beams that would, if only you called them something else.
A page drifted by—just a scrap torn from a flyer announcing a market for bottled daylight—but he bent and caught it because he was that kind of fool. The blank side looked obliging. He found a stub of pencil in his pocket like a small, stubborn friend. He began to write while walking, because there are some kinds of balance you only learn under duress.
A line, then another, a fragment set against the bigger fragment of everything. The letters were ugly and would not help his reputation with readers who preferred elegance to honesty. He wrote anyway. The city did not pause to applaud or object. It had other projects.
Kali's laugh braided with the rattle of the chimes and the river's small, unspectacular applause. It sounded—if you squinted your ears—like approval.
They reached the bank where reeds had decided to pretend this was still a place for swans. The water moved with that defeated energy rivers get in cities. Across it, the opposite shore wore its own bruises. Above, the sky refused to adjust the aperture.
The Seeker tucked the scrap into his coat. The scar warmed against it, as if recognizing a family resemblance. He did not take this as encouragement. He did not not.
They descended toward the old tunnel mouth, and for a second—just one—he let himself imagine the world without chimes or crowns or experiments. Then he did the adult thing and folded the picture very small and put it somewhere no one would think to ask for.
Behind them the marigolds kept falling. Ahead of them the dark made room. Between the two, a man carried a light he did not want, and a city learned, briefly, to call ruin a kind of mercy.