Four Roads Cross by Max Gladstone Page B

student loans.”
    â€œRight.”
    Either he didn’t get the joke, or didn’t think it was funny. He sat beside her, limp. She wished she could reach inside his skin, snatch him from whatever mental cavern he’d chosen to hide within, and pull him free. “Look. We both stumbled into weird spaces in our careers. People need things from us we’re not sure we can give. Doubt’s healthy. But we can’t let it cripple us.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    The question took her aback. She’d never considered letting herself fail before—the struggle’s difficulty always seemed proof of its value. “If we do, they win: the Cardinals who wonder why you’re at the table, or I am. The little gnome in your skull who says you shouldn’t be here, and when you try and fail it laughs and says, ‘See? You never should have tried at all.’”
    â€œHe’s in your head too?”
    â€œInside everyone’s, I think.”
    â€œYou don’t let on.”
    â€œMine’s loud enough I got deaf to the little bastard a while ago.” She looked down at her hands, and over at his, and before she could think better of it she laid her left on his right. Abelard was skin and gristle and bone. Not fit for roasting, Ma would have said. “The church will need a saint before this is over. It’ll need you. And I might, too.” Gods and demons, but that last felt hard to say—like peeling a hangnail into blood. What diagnosis would a headshrinker make of a woman who found admitting weakness less terrifying than necromantic war?
    His hand stayed limp under hers. “I’ll try,” he said, and smiled weakly.
    She hoped her disappointment didn’t show. “Good.”
    She’d reached the ladder down before he spoke again. “We can win this, can’t we?”
    â€œSure,” she said, covering the lie.

 
    15
    Cat dove from the Bounty in the dark.
    She never liked swimming. She liked it less in the ocean, and even less at night, but duty and preference were rare bedfellows. Not even bedfellows, she thought as the black water closed over her. They’d had one bitter night when duty and honor were on a break and preference was too drunk to remember she hated duty’s smirk and the way he treated waiters.
    How could you not like swimming? was one of those questions fellow gym rats asked, with a precious emphasis on the last word. So calming, so rhythmic. Good for your back and blood pressure. Cat didn’t like calm, and she distrusted rhythm. More to the point, the Suit sank, an after-effect of its connection to the gargoyles and their goddess: she wasn’t made of stone, but the Suit convinced the world she was. Dive Suited and you’d tumble to the seafloor, which admittedly helped when the time came to dredge Alt Coulumb’s harbor.
    So if you were a Blacksuit and knew how to swim (which Cat did, because, dammit, instinctive hatred for an activity was just the world’s way of challenging you to master it), you sometimes ended up doing things like this: swimming un-Suited, read weak, read human, leading a team toward an anchored ship after dark, with—how deep was the water here, a few hundred feet?—anyway too much water underneath you, and Lord Kos alone knew what monsters below, star kraken and bloodwhales and saltwater crocs. She surfaced, gulping air.
    The ship’s swelling sides blocked out the stars. Moonlight glinted off the black paint that named her Demon’s Dream. Cat turned onto her back to watch the bowsprit figure pass overhead: crystal carved into a woman’s shape. The rest of Cat’s team followed her, dark V’s against dark water.
    The ship rocked as she slipped along its starboard side. Waves lapped barnacled boards. Anchor chain links rasped. She stopped near the chain, touched the wet hull, and triggered her climbing bracelets. Her hands burned as if she’d rubbed