A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes #2) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,101

I don’t know when it began.

I look into Cook’s eyes and dive into that blue darkness. I have to understand her all the way through to her core if I wish to remake bones and skin and flesh.

Elias felt like silver, a bolt of adrenaline beneath a cold, clear dawn. Laia was different. She made me think of sorrow and a green-gold sweetness.

But the Cook … her insides slither like eels. I flinch away from them. Somewhere behind the roiling blackness, I catch a glimpse of what she once was, and I reach for it. But in doing so, my hum becomes suddenly discordant. That goodness within her—it’s a memory. Now the eels take the place of her heart, writhing with mad vengeance.

I change the melody to catch hold of this truth at her core. A door springs open inside her. I go through, walk down a long corridor that is strangely familiar. The floor sucks at my feet, and when I look down, I half expect to see the tentacles of a squid wrapped around me.

But there is only darkness.

I cannot bear to sing Cook’s truth out loud, so instead I scream the words in my head, looking into her eyes all the while. To her credit, she doesn’t look away. When the healing begins, when I’ve captured her essence and her body begins to knit itself back to health, she doesn’t even twitch.

Pain grows in my side. Blood drips down into the waist of my fatigues. I ignore it until I’m gasping, when I finally force myself to release Cook. I feel the injury I’ve taken on from her. It’s much smaller than the old woman’s, but it still hurts like hell.

Cook’s wound is a bit bloodied and raw, but the only sign of infection is the lingering smell of death.

“Take care of that,” I gasp. “If you can get into my room, you can thieve yourself herbs to make a poultice.”

She peers down at the wound and then at me. “The girl has a brother linked to the—the—the Resistance,” she stutters for a moment, then goes on. “The Martials sent him to Kauf months ago. She’s trying to get him out. Your boy is helping her.”

He’s not my boy is my first thought.

He’s bleeding insane is my second.

A Martial or Mariner or Tribesman sent to Kauf might emerge eventually, chastened, purged, and unlikely to defy the Empire again. But Scholars have no way out that doesn’t involve a hole in the ground.

“If you’re lying to me—”

She climbs up into the window, this time with the spryness I last saw in Serra. “Remember: Hurt the girl and you’ll regret it.”

“Who is she to you?” I ask. I saw something inside Cook during the healing—an aura, or shadow, some ancient music that made me think of Laia. I frown, trying to remember. It’s like dredging up a decade-old dream.

“She’s nothing to me.” The Cook bites out the words as if even the thought of Laia is repugnant. “Just a foolish child on a hopeless mission.”

When I stare at her uncertainly, she shakes her head.

“Don’t just stand there gawping at me like a stunned cow,” she says. “Go save your family, you stupid girl.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Laia

“Slow down.” Keenan, panting as he runs beside me, reaches for my hand. The brush of his skin is a welcome shot of warmth in the freezing night.

“In the cold, you don’t realize how much you’re pushing yourself. You’ll collapse if you’re not careful. And it’s too bright out, Laia—someone could see us.”

We’re nearly to our destination—a safe house in a stretch of farmland far north of where we parted from Afya a week ago. There are even more patrols up here than farther south, all hunting the Scholars fleeing the Commandant’s merciless attacks in cities north and west of here. Most of the patrols, however, hunt Scholars during the day.

Keenan’s knowledge of the land has allowed us to travel at night and make good time, especially since we’ve been able to steal horses more than once. Kauf is now only three hundred miles away. But three hundred miles might as well be three thousand if the damned weather doesn’t cooperate. I kick at the thin layer of snow on the ground.

I grab Keenan’s hand and urge him forward. “We need to reach that safe house tonight if we want to make for the mountain passes tomorrow.”

“We won’t get anywhere if we’re dead,” Keenan says. Frost beads on his dark lashes, and patches of his face