Gavin said, “You remind me of my brother. I could never win against him growing up. And when I did, he’d give me some patronizing praise that made me wonder if he’d let me win. You see the cracks in things? Fine. It’s proof enough that you’re a Guile. Our whole family has it. Including me. Think about this, Kip: there are a lot of problems that would go away for me if I leave that mask on your face until you’re dead. You might want to think twice before you try to use a man’s conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn’t have one.”
Kip listened, conserving his strength against his rising panic, certain that after Gavin was done talking, he would take the luxin off his face. But Gavin stopped talking, and he didn’t remove the mask. Kip’s stomach churned as his diaphragm worked to suck in more air, pumped down to expel the dead air he held in. Nothing.
He reached up to his neck, trying to find the seam where luxin abutted skin. But the line was smooth, the luxin sticking close to the skin. He couldn’t get his fingernails under it. He reached up around his head, his eyes. If he stabbed his fingernails into the soft skin next to his eyes, he could lift the edge of the mask and get one finger underneath it. His vision was darkening. He looked at Gavin, pleading, sure that the man would step in now.
Gavin watched him, pitiless. “If the only thing you’re going to respect is strength, Kip, first, you’re a fool, and second, you’ve come to the right man.”
The panic came. He should have known better. Kip thrashed, tried to scream, reached up to that thin ridge of luxin by his eyes—but he barely touched it before his hands drooped. He should have known he couldn’t trust…
Chapter 24
After traveling all day and into the night, Karris first became aware of Rekton in the distance as a great, unvariegated glow as she stalked through the forest. It was long after nightfall now, the air cool in the undergrowth. She was enough of a sub-red to use dark vision, but it wasn’t perfect, and on a moonlit night like tonight she kept switching back and forth from normal to dark vision. Light below the visible spectrum was rougher; it didn’t lend itself to fine differentiation of features. Even faces simply looked like warm blobs, brighter here and there, but it was much more difficult to make out expressions or fine movements—or even to identify a face from much of a distance.
The glow meant Rekton was still burning. Karris circled it slowly, climbing the last hill. She stayed off the road, admiring the waterfall just below the town in the silver moonlight. She hadn’t seen anyone on the road all day, which she found odd. If no one was fleeing downriver from Rekton, it probably meant no one had made it out. But it was also strange to follow the river through arable land and not come across any other settlements. She’d seen orange orchards that clearly hadn’t been tended since the war, but they were still growing fruit. The fruit was sparse and the trees leafy and chaotic and growing haphazardly in comparison to the paintings Karris had seen of orange harvests, but they were still here. With the price Tyrean oranges fetched, she found that hard to believe. Tyrean oranges were smaller but sweeter and juicier than Atashian oranges, and the Parian oranges didn’t even compare. No one had moved back after the war?
Had the Battle of Sundered Rock really killed so many that even now, sixteen years later, the land lay fallow, bearing fruit for deer and bears alone?
Karris didn’t see any bodies until she crept into the still-burning town, wrapped in her hooded black cloak. She was following the main road, its cobbles even and well maintained: a symbol in Karris’s mind of a place well governed. A burned body lay in the middle of the street, facedown, one arm extended, a finger pointing deeper into the town. Only the hand and pointing finger were unburned. The head was missing.
She hadn’t seen this kind of burn since the war. During the war, the armies had clashed a number of times in areas where the bodies couldn’t be buried and where there wasn’t enough natural fuel for funeral pyres. Corpses had to be disposed of to avoid losing even more soldiers to disease, so red