Yshwa didn’t give up on Ada, which was touching, I suppose. He started to materialize inside her mind, as if he was one of us, as if he belonged there. He was trying to reach her but I never liked him, so I blocked him at every chance. He had too much light inside him, it was always reflecting off the marble and glaring into my eyes. I would have to pull in shadows just to soak it all up. But it wasn’t difficult to keep him away from Ada; she didn’t believe him anyway, that he would take her back. Yshwa kept trying to tell her what it would take her three years to hear, that she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was so hurt and broken that she heard nothing. The only one who was listening to him was me, and he could tell I didn’t care. Yshwa had this way of looking at me, with this half-loving, half-sad face, his head tilted to one side and darkness drifting off his shoulders from the shadows I tried to throw on him.

“I’m just trying to help her, you know.” His voice was tucked and soft. I didn’t care.

“I don’t care,” I told him. “Just go away.”

“I want to help you too. I can help you too.”

“I don’t need your help. Go away.”

“As?ghara,” he said, and my name sounded like a spring bubbling in his mouth.

I glimmered in and out impatiently. He was sitting cross-legged on the marble, wearing bone-colored linens, his hair short and curled this time. I stood by her eyes, looking out, dressed in matte black. The shadows were good at sticking to me.

“Do you really think what you’re doing with Ada is helping?” he asked, and I could feel my temper growing my nails out, long and pointed, dark red like his blood an hour after they pierced his side. I folded my arms and stared at him. I wanted him to leave.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked.

“I don’t want you here,” I told him. “You make her sad. You remind her of too much shit. You know I don’t give a fuck about you, but you still matter to her, and this”—I gestured at his presence on my marble—“all this does is make it harder. For her.”

He looked at me as if I was a wound. “You’re so far away from home,” he said, so quietly that I thought he was talking to himself. Then he added, “I’m not leaving her. You understand?”

“Then you’re an idiot,” I snapped. “It doesn’t matter whether you say you’re leaving her or not. You don’t want to hear word—Ada is not talking to you anymore.”

“She talks to me all the time,” Yshwa shot back. “She’s crying, she’s screaming, the girl is sorry all the time. There’s so much guilt over her eyes, it covers everything else.”

I scoffed at him. Gods always think everything is about them. “Biko, that’s not talking. That’s basically her telling you good-bye. As in, you’re behind her while I’m in front. In fact, I’m around her. I’m everywhere. She tells me what she’s too ashamed to tell you.”

“You are the thing she’s ashamed of,” he reminded me. “And I hear everything anyway.”

I was amazed at how well I was keeping my temper. “Clap for yourself. She’s still not talking to you. So go away.”

He stood up, towering above me. “I’ll be here, As?ghara. Ada knows that.”

“She has me.” I couldn’t help snarling at him when I said it. “It’s enough.”

Yshwa touched my cheek and his palm felt like wet silk. “I’m not ashamed of you,” he said, as if it was nothing. “You know I love you.”

I jerked my head away. “Fuck you.”

He gave me that damn look again as he left, the fucking resurrected bastard, but I didn’t care, I was just glad that he was gone. He wasn’t getting her back. Ada was mine, I told myself, standing in the empty marble.

She was mine.

Chapter Eight

The back of your brain is open.

We

Allow us to interject; these births are complicated moltings, leaving skins all over the place. But remain assured, As?ghara’s presence was not our absence, never that. We fell back when she burst forward, true, but we are many and she was just one of us, a beastself, a weapon that needed to be put in play. We let her mount the Ada, we let that story ride out—it has as many layers as we do. Here is one of them: the story of the other gods.

We have told you about some of them—Yshwa, for example. Ala, the controller of minor gods, our mother. But there are others, and anyone who knows anything knows this, knows about the godly stowaways that came along when the corrupters stole our people, what the swollen hulls carried over the bellied seas, the masks, the skin on the inside of the drum, the words under the words, the water in the water. The stories that survived, the new names they took, the temper of old gods sweeping through new land, the music taken that is the same as the music left behind. And, of course, the humans who survived, those selected among them, the ones in white, the ones shaking shells and mineral deposits, the ones ridden, the ones chosen, the ones who follow, work, and serve because calls pass through blood no matter how many oceans you drop death into.

Those humans recognized us easily; it was as if they could smell us under the Ada’s skin or feel us in the air that heaved around her. After the Ada left home and got tucked into that little town in the mountains, she met one of them, the Dominican girl with the cigars. Her name was Malena and she was a daughter of Changó, of Santa Bárbara. She met the Ada at a meeting for the community service fraternity they’d both joined, before the Ada met Soren, before As?ghara arrived in the third birth-skinning.