gifting her betrothed a Made object, a clever trinket, a token of goodwill? Let me do that for Kinok, as a gesture of goodwill and faith in our future together. That is all I ask.”
Get me out of here. Away from him.
“Daughter, you were nearly killed tonight. Do you really think it safe to leave the palace?”
“We will tell no one where I am going. Not even Kinok. You and I will be the only ones who know. And you can send a dozen guards along with me. Two dozen. If the—the handmaiden was a spy, who knows how many other servants are working for the queen? Surely I am safer on the road than here.”
He considered it.
“Please, Father,” said Crier. “Just three days.”
“Fine,” said Hesod. “Three days.”
At the beginning of the War of Kinds, the bone beasts—soft-bodied and fragile, those of full mating age killed as easily as their maggot bairn—thought themselves kings of this land. By the end of it, the sky was black with the smoke of twenty thousand corpses, and the superior Kind had ascended to their rightful place.
The age of Automae as mere pets and possessions of humankind was over.
The Golden Era had begun.
—FROM THE ERA OF ENLIGHTENMENT,
BY IDONA OF FAMILY PHYRIS, 3382960905, YEAR 19 AE
24
There were two things that had changed since Ayla last visited the market at the heart of Kalla-den. The first was that Luna’s dress was finally gone. Torn to pieces by curious seagulls, maybe, or perhaps it had simply been carried off by a particularly strong gust of sea wind. No matter how it had happened, the result was the same: the dress was gone, and with it the ghostly presence of Luna that had once hung, like the dress, over the marketplace, a stark reminder that nobody there was ever safe, not really.
The second was that Ayla and Benjy were fugitives.
“There he is,” Benjy hissed in her ear. “There’s the bastard.”
She followed his gaze.
They were huddled behind a stack of oyster barrels in the market at Kalla-den. It was the second dawn since their attack, since Ayla had tried and failed to kill Crier. She and Benjy had spent the past day and night with one of Rowan’s old friends, a fisherman who lived in a tiny shack nestled into a crook of the sea cliffs, impossible to find unless you knew exactly where it was. He’d recognized Benjy’s face and granted them a hiding place while the sovereign’s guards searched all the nearby villages. Yesterday, they’d made contact with the owner of the fish cart, offered him all but a few of their pooled statescoins, plus Benjy’s grandfather’s watch, to turn a blind eye when they snuck onto his cart this morning in the busy hour right before dawn, when all the traders and traveling merchants—including the fish cart man—were heading into Kalla-den for the day, choking the streets. The plan was to spend the day in the village, buy or steal enough food for a three days’ journey, and then slip back onto the fish cart at sundown. From there, they’d leave Kalla-den, once again cloaked by movement and merchants, and the fish cart man would take them to the docks.
By then, night would have fallen. Black cliffs, black rocks, black water. There was no better time to become stowaways.
Everything had been going all right—they’d pilfered three days’ worth of bread and salted meat, hardtack, waterskins. Everything had been going according to plan.
But the damn fish cart wasn’t in the agreed-upon location.
It was across the market square, and as Ayla squinted at the fish cart man, she could tell there was something off about him. Something shifty in his movements.
“He’s going to leave without us,” she whispered, still staring at him. “Maybe he realized who we are.”
“Will you please keep your head down,” Benjy whispered back.
She risked looking at him. His face was mostly covered by a hood—they had both borrowed hooded cloaks from the fisherman—but Ayla could tell by the set of his mouth that he was in pain. He’d been hurt during the attack, a guard’s sword glancing off his left calf. The cut wasn’t deep enough to sever anything important, but it was still painful. Could still become infected, if they didn’t take care of it soon, and it made every step miserable for Benjy. His lips were pressed in a thin white line.
Ayla looked away. She was trying not to think about Benjy’s lips.
His kiss. Her knife. All of it for nothing.
She hadn’t