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Who knows the mind of God?
When he opened his eyes again, Kuyoc’s look was dangerously intent.
“The mirror was made to grant knowledge,” he said fiercely. “But not the knowledge you ask for—not the knowledge youthinkyou want. It has no ears. It does not care about your thoughts. It seeks the answer in your heart—in yourdesire. What desire do you hide in your heart?”
The crate by the mirror was nearly completed. In a few minutes, Dawson would order the men to lift the relic from its plinth, set it in the box, and carry it away.
Ellie’s chance to stop that from happening was slipping past her.
“How do you know all this?” she demanded. The words burst from her in a frustrated whisper.
Kuyoc’s expression softened with sympathy.
“Because I have used it, mija,” he replied solemnly. “Because it showed me the way to what I wanted in my heart.”
“San Pedro Siris?” Adam quietly guessed.
“Our leader wanted peace,” Kuyoc returned flatly. “He thought it would save us from the destruction being wrought by your British, but that isn’t how it works. It would only have sentenced us to a slower death.”
He pulled his gaze from the men by the mirror, fixing it dangerously on Ellie instead.
“I thought I wanted freedom,” he said. “And I did. But the mirror found another dream inside my heart—a deeper dream.Thatwas the path it showed me.”
Ellie’s thoughts snapped to her own dreams—to the splashes of blood on white shirtwaists and the smell of smoke that bled through the air of London as she stood in the midst of a wild, violent ecstacy—and she knew.
“Vengeance,” she whispered. The word fell from her lips like a chip of ice.
The fire in Kuyoc’s eyes collapsed into grief.
“I walked away from it. It offered me what I dreamed of, and it was a path paved in blood.Theirblood,” he said with a sharp nod toward Dawson and the others. “Ourblood. I resisted, but it was close. Too close.” His gaze snapped to Ellie once more and sharpened with challenge. “Could you do the same?”
Memories flooded in. All the little slights and exclusions, the casual aggressions. How they kept adding up, building inside of Ellie until it felt like they must take on a life of their own and burst out of her skin like a monster.
Fear clenched at her chest.
“I... I don’t know,” she confessed. Her throat felt tight.
Kuyoc answered with a sigh. For the first time since Ellie had met him, the priest actually looked his age, his shoulders bent by the weight of the burden he carried.
“She would not have come to you if you were not meant to be here,” he solemnly declared, and then raised his eyes to the heavens that lay on the far side of the dark stone of the cave. “D’iyoos ka’ u-kanan-t-e,” he said and shook his head.
“What does that mean?” Ellie pressed uncomfortably.
He didn’t answer.
“You passed through the cave below,” he said instead.“You saw what was there. If you want to see through the eye of the gods, you must pay for it in blood.”
Ellie’s thoughts flew to the mountain of bones piled in the cavern beneath them… animals and warriors, birds and children—an avalanche of the slaughtered and cast aside.
All of them were tributes. They were the price the people of Tulan had paid for the whispered secrets of the dark oracle that lay beneath the heart of their city.
“There were so many…” she said helplessly as the horror of it washed over her.
“Then think of how many more there will be if your countrymen take it from here!” Kuyoc countered fiercely. “Ask yourself whether they will hesitate to give the oracle what they must in order to get what they want!”
His eyes were a tangle of emotion—guilt and regret. Hope and fear.
He straightened.
