From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

So much to rue, but to what end? All unlived lives cancel one another out. She had nothing but now. The clothes on her back, the blood in her veins, and the promise made by her comrades. If only they would keep it.

"There is the past, and there is the future," he had said to his brothers and sisters not long ago. "The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other."

He'd been wrong. There was only the present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.

Once upon a time ...
A journey began,
that would stitch all the worlds together with light.

Somehow, in this crowd of beast soldiers, with Thiago front and center, the moment belonged to Karou and Akiva.

The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets.

Which, you know, only works until it doesn't.

Akiva didn't come.

Karou's torch sputtered and died, and she had no seraph fire to light her passage back. She had to feel her way in darkness, clutching her unbroken wishbone to her heart.

Liraz felt ... guilty.

It was not her favorite feeling. Her favorite feeling was the absence of feeling; anything else led to turmoil. Right now, for example, she found herself angry at the source of her guilt, and, though aware that this was an improper emotional response, she could not seem to unfeel it. She was angry because she knew she was going to have to do something to ... assuage the guilt.

Damn it.

Karou eyed the fruit tower. "But it probably took someone hours to build that thing.

"And we paid well for their labors. Eat."

Karou took some grapes and was glad that the sculpture didn't topple.

"You will have to learn to enjoy money now, my dear," said Esther, as though Karou were an initiate into this life of luxury, and she her guide. ... "Lesson one: We don't worry about how our fruit sculptures are built. We just eat them."

"I won't have to learn, actually," said Karou. "I'm not staying here."

Esther glanced around the [hotel] room. "You don't like the St. Regis?"

... "Well, no," she admitted. "Not especially. But I mean Earth. I'm not staying."

[Karou] looked down, shy again. "But you know better than I do. I'm just starting."

"You? You never lost your soul."

"I lost something. While you were saving chimaera, I was making monsters for Thiago. I didn't know what I was doing. The same things I hated you for doing, but I couldn't see it ..."

"It's grief," said Akiva. "It's rage. It makes us into the thing we despise." And he thought, And I was the thing you despised. Am I still? "It's the fuel for everything our people have done to each other since the beginning. That's what makes peace seem impossible. How can you blame someone for wanting to kill the killer of their loved ones? How can you fault people for what they do in grief?"

As soon as he spoke the words, Akiva realized it sounded like he was excusing his own vicious grief spiral and its terrible toll on her people. Shame seized him. "I don't mean ... I don't mean me. What I did, Karou, I know I can never atone for."

"Do you really believe that? she asked. Her look was sharp, as thought she were seeking through his shame for the truth.

Did he really believe it? Or was he just too guilt-ridden to admit he hoped that someday, somehow, he could atone? That someday he could feel that he'd done more good than evil, and that by living he hadn't brought his world lower than if he'd never been. Was that atonement, the tilt of the scales at the end of life?

If it was, then it might be possible. Akiva might, if he lived many years and never stopped trying, save more lives than he had destroyed.

But that wasn't what he believed, he realized, faced with the sharpness of Karou's question. "Yes," he said. "I do. You can't atone for taking one life by saving another. What good doe s that do the dead?"

"The dead," she said. "And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you'd think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements." She looked up at the chimney overhead, as though she were imagining the souls it had conducted in its time. "They're gone, they can't be hurt any more, but we drag their memory around with us, doing our worst in their name, like it's what they'd want, for us to avenge them? I can't speak for all the dead, but I know it's not what I wanted for you, when I died. And I know it's not what Brimstone wanted for me, or for Eretz."