Page 59 of Immortal Longings
The line connects. He clears his throat.
“She’s on her way.”
CHAPTER18
Calla crouches on the building’s third floor, scratching at the inside of her elbow through her coat. The wind blows through the rectangular cutout in the wall, swirling dust and dried paint chips along its sides. The whole level looks like it’s crumbling, like someone keeps taking bite-size chunks out of the cement.
“There are going to be a lot of Crescents on patrol,” Anton warns.
Calla presses her knuckles against her mouth, hard. Sharp pain blooms inside her lips, her teeth cutting into soft flesh, and only once she is anchored to this raw, human feeling can she find the capacity to think.
“A rescue mission shouldn’t be hard,” she decides. “This was Yilas’s last location, so the most likely scenario is that someone didn’t like the look of an outsider and decided to rough her up. She’s here somewhere—we just have to grab her and go.”
Anton cranes his neck out further, getting a better look at what awaits beneath. A thin metallic grille runs over the temple roof, keeping out everythingthat might drop from the buildings looming at its sides. Night’s darkness hovers close to the ground.
“You do realize,” Anton starts slowly, “that this is a central hub for vessel trafficking, right? The whole temple is heavily guarded.”
Calla doesn’t know much about the Hollow Temple, short of what Yilas has told her. Really, she doesn’t know much about the Crescent Societies at all. For most of their factions, the guise of being a religious sect mostly serves as a cover for their underground business endeavors. Secrecy becomes a tool to avoid scrutiny; their fierce devotion scares away prying watchers. Though she is sure some Society members really do believe in the old gods, everything in San-Er revolves around survival, and they wouldn’t organize this way unless it kept them safe.
Calla stands, placing a foot on the cutout ledge. “We’ll be fine,” she says. Then she leaps and lands hard on the metal grille above the temple, wincing when the whole frame dips with her weight. Her knees attempt to lock in protest, but she’s moving quickly, wading across half-rotted plastic bags and mounds of who-knows-what that’s been festering there for years, sun or storm. It’s hard to see, the illumination from the tall buildings only casting a weak glow.
The metal grille shakes again, protesting as Anton makes his landing too.
“The entrance isbelow, Fifty-Seven.”
“Do you expect us to march in through the front?” Calla whispers. She keeps wading through the trash, kicking until she’s at the northwest corner of the protective mesh grille. As quietly as she can, she moves the junk piles until a segment of the grille has been cleared. “Help me lift.”
Anton frowns, but he’s quick to hurry over and secure his hands on the other two sides of the panel. The grille pieces are joined together in a gridlocked network, but with some prying, Calla manages to lift a corner. Then a square of the mesh comes unaligned from the frame underneath, its sides scraping against metal.
“Toss,” Calla instructs. They toss the grille atop the trash bags with a muffled sound. Someone will certainly notice this square hole in the protective layerwhen trash starts leaking down to the temple, but by then, Calla can only hope she and Anton won’t be lurking around any longer.
Anton peers through the opening they’ve made. They’re greeted by the green tiles of the temple roof.
“Is there a back entrance we’re taking instead?” he whispers.
If Calla took a guess, she would say yes. But she can do better than a guess. “Follow me.”
Her boots strike against the roof tiles, the noise thankfully subsumed by the general clamor in San, and she slides for a quick second before gaining balance again. When she pauses, hovering at the curved edge between the two wings of the temple, she can hear Crescents walking around the path below, bantering among themselves about rising brothel prices.
It’s cold. The temple runs their air-conditioning at freezing temperatures.
“Come on,” Calla hisses. With a visible grimace, Anton skids down too. He lands solidly on his feet. They wait a beat to see if the Crescents will have heard, but when the voices move around the turn, Calla finally makes it to the paved ground, her sword already drawn.
“Put that away,” Anton warns when he’s joined her on the pavement. “If we act nonthreatening, we can pretend to be members.”
“We don’t have the tattoos,” Calla replies, but she puts her sword away obligingly. There is logic to his instruction: at a temple this large, anyone coming across them will not necessarily assume they do not belong. Calla can already see a tall window three feet away, its foggy, mud-streaked glass left slightly ajar.
“Give me a boost.”
They’re inside quickly, having entered a dusty back hall. Out of her periphery, she can see Anton glancing at her repeatedly, as if to check whether she knows their next steps, but the truth is that Calla hardly plans in advance. She establishes one concrete end goal, then rams through whatever barriers stand between herself and the result.
Right now, that goal is finding Yilas.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Anton hisses after her.
“Of course not,” Calla replies. She pokes her head into a corridor. It looks empty. She steps through, carefully avoiding a puddle. The lightbulbs above glow red, casting their surroundings in a crimson shroud. “Why would I know how to navigate a Crescent Society temple?”
Anton makes a horrified noise under his breath. When Calla turns over her shoulder to inspect him, though, his fright doesn’t seem to sink all the way through; that red glint in his dark eyes reflects amusement, whether at the nonsense of their plan or their present success.
