nearest patron, a man in a flowered cape, and shoved the bottle at him.
“Here,” she said. “My treat.”
The man looked confused at first, but when Xiala smiled and insisted, he took it and thanked her.
Xiala wound through the balcony crowd and down the steps until she was back on the street. Crowds of people milled about in the darkness or gathered by bonfires that were waiting to be lit with the new year’s fire. She could feel her Teek eyes widening, shifting to take in what light they could, but it was so dark she had difficulty seeing her feet before her. She muttered apologies as she bumped shoulders and avoided obstacles, moving through the crowd. She didn’t realize where she was going until she was at the landing of the bridge to Sun Rock.
She hesitated, looking out at the expanse. She could see something was happening on the Rock. Darkness, darker even than the false night around her, roiled over the mesa, churning like a living thing. She thought she heard screams, faint and distant. She couldn’t be sure over the singing and shouting. The woman on the balcony had said that a runner with a torch would come over the bridge, so she squinted into the blackness, looking for any sign of an approaching light.
Something was coming. Something big and churning that set the bridge swaying. The thick braided cables rocked and strained against their stone bases. Screams—she was sure there was screaming now—grew louder.
The churning mass revealed itself all at once. Dozens, no, a hundred or more people were running toward her, shoving and pushing to get across the bridge. She watched in horror as the great span tilted, and a woman dressed in a bright blue dress toppled over the edge. Another followed her, a body too dark to identify.
Xiala blinked. It had happened so fast she couldn’t be sure she had actually seen it. The shadows were thick, even with her improved eyesight, and no one had stopped or cried out. The mob was still coming, and she ducked to the side just as bodies streamed across the bridge. Their solstice finery was torn and bloodstained, eyes wide in shock or broken by fear.
Her mind tried to take it in, tried to process it all.
“Serapio,” she whispered. She knew without a doubt they were running from him.
She shoved her way into the crowd, fighting against the flow as best she could. But there were too many people. She didn’t make it far before she was pushed back, farther away from the Rock and back to Titidi.
No! She would fight. She reached for her Song, and it came, wild and fierce, to her lips. She lashed out, a sharp weapon to drive her way through the crowd.
The people around her halted as if suddenly frozen in place, but her Song didn’t reach far enough through the stampeding throng, and those who couldn’t hear her trampled the others. They went down without complaint, crushed underfoot.
She choked, horrified, and modulated her Song, softening the command, lowering the pitch to soothe, not wound. She thought of gentle waters and star-filled nights. She thought of laughter and good food on a sandy cay. She thought of childhood stories shared with a captive audience of one. And it worked. People slowed, calmed. She raised her voice loud as she could, and everywhere she reached, people quieted.
She pushed through pliant bodies, still Singing. Made it back to the bridge and well onto the bridge itself. She smiled around buoyant notes. It was going to work.
Suddenly, the air shifted. A dark gale, shards of ice like glass, hammered down across the bridge. It whipped her hair, stinging, across her face. Sliced her skin open, sharp as obsidian. Froze her from the inside like ice crystals on a lake, deadening nerves and thought.
Her Song faltered and died.
Everywhere around her, people were falling, stumbling, wracked by the same unnatural wind. She was on her knees, clutching the thick rope of the bridge, sure the gale would throw her off into the canyon below.
And then it stopped, but it was all she could do to hunch down against the railing, gasping, reeling from the pain, and trying to breathe. Panic rolled through the crowd like a rogue wave, and what calm she had been able to Sing drowned on a fresh wave of terror. The crowd surged around her, dragging her to her feet and back toward the landing. Someone kicked her, an accident, and then