"The Church has a prophecy," Lila announced that night, unrolling a stolen map across our wobbling table like she was presenting the crown jewels.
"Where did you get a Church map?"
"Don't ask questions whose answers implicate you." She smoothed it flat and stabbed a finger at an illustration crammed into the margin: a horned silhouette standing over a world split cleanly down the middle, one half burning, one half in shadow. Around it ran a line of ornate script. "Listen to this. 'When the two moons align, the King of Ash shall wake, and the land will remember his name.'" She sat back, thrilled beyond measure. "Ash. Ashlow. Do you see it? Do you see it? It's too perfect!"
"I don't think it's perfect that an entire organized religion is out here forecasting my personal apocalypse."
"It's a little perfect."
Vera wasn't looking at the prophecy. She was looking at the moons through our broken window — that gold coin and that pale one, still comfortingly far apart in the black — and there was something in her face I didn't like.
"If the Church sent an inspector with those credentials to a nothing town like this," she said, "it's because they've narrowed it to this region. Which means our clock is shorter than I thought." She turned from the window and slapped a contract slip onto the table beside the map. "We need rank, and we need it faster than fifteen copper at a time. This is a Rank E escort job — a caravan through Raven's Pass. It's above our weight. It pays like it."
[Rank E contract available: Escort the Fenwick caravan through Raven's Pass.]Recommended: Rank E or higher. Your party: Rank F.]
"The System is literally telling us no," I pointed out.
"The System doesn't pay Marda," said Vera. "We'll flag it for the morning. Tonight, we sleep."
But I didn't sleep. I lay on the lumpy bed under the screaming water stain and stared at the two moons through the broken glass, and I thought about that one word until it wore a groove in me. Align. I thought about how far apart they were, and I wondered — with the specific, cold dread of a man whose apocalypse has a schedule — how fast that gap was closing, and what, precisely, was supposed to happen to me when it shut.
I didn't hear Vera get up. She was simply there, suddenly, sitting on the windowsill, a dark shape against the double moonlight.
"You can't sleep," she said. It wasn't a question.
"There's a prophecy with my job title in it. Forgive me for being tense."
She was quiet a while. When she spoke again, it was lower, and it had a texture I hadn't heard from her before — the sound of a person setting something heavy down.
"The pages," she said. "The ones I used for the ritual. I didn't buy them off a fixer, Adrian. That's the story I tell Bruno and Lila, because it's cleaner. The truth is I stole them. A whole sheaf — burned, half of them, edges eaten away. I took them from a place I was never meant to be, out of a vault that was locked for a reason, and I only ever used one page. One." She looked at me, and the moonlight caught her eyes. "I've still got the rest. And I've started to think the ritual didn't reach out blind and grab whoever was nearest. I think it reached for you. Specifically. I don't know how, and I don't know why, and I don't know yet whether that makes you a miracle or the worst mistake I've ever made." A pause. "But you weren't an accident. I'm almost sure of that now."
The cold that went through me had nothing to do with the night air.
"What are you saying?" I asked. "Reached for me how? Why me? I microwave noodles for a living, I'm not—"
Vera opened her mouth.
And from the square below, the town bell began to ring.
Not the slow toll of the hour. The fast, jangling, wrong-sounding clang of the emergency bell — the one Bruno had told me only ever rang when something had gone very badly wrong. Vera was off the sill and moving before the second peal finished, the fragile, cracked-open moment slamming shut between us.
"Later," she said, already at the door, and I could have screamed. "I know. I hate it. But — later."
I took one last look at the two moons before I followed her out. Still far apart. Still just moons.
Almost.