and took Ayla’s hands, held them between her own. It felt like being cradled: like being held all over. “You’re not alone anymore. I can give you something to fight for, child. I can give you a purpose.”
“A purpose?” Ayla had said. Her voice was weak, scraped out.
“Justice,” said Rowan. And she squeezed Ayla’s hands.
“The moon is full,” said Rowan now, looking straight ahead, in the hushed, coded tone Ayla had come to know so well.
The three of them moved easily through the crowd of humans, used to dodging people and carts and stray dogs. The chaos of the Kalla-den streets was a strange kind of blessing: a thousand human voices all shouting at once meant it was the perfect place for conversations you didn’t want anyone to overhear.
“Clear skies lately,” Ayla and Benjy said in unison. Nothing to report.
It was Rowan, of course, who had taught them the language of rebellion. A sprig of rosemary passed between hands on a crowded street, garlands woven from flowers with symbolic meanings, coded messages hidden inside loaves of bread, faerie stories or old folk songs used like passwords to determine who you could trust. Rowan had taught them everything. She’d saved Ayla first, Benjy a few months later. Took them in. Clothed them. Taught them how to beg, and then how to find work. Fed them. But also gave them a new hunger: justice.
Because they should never have needed to beg in the first place.
“What news?” Benjy asked.
“A comet is crossing to the southern skies,” Rowan said with a smile. “A week from now. It will be a beautiful night.”
Benjy took Ayla’s hand and squeezed. She didn’t return it. She knew what the code meant: an uprising in the South. Another one. It filled her gut with suspicion and dread.
They turned onto a wider street, the crowd thinning out a little. They spoke more softly now.
“Crossing south,” Ayla repeated. Her heart sank. “And how many stars will be out in the southern skies?”
Rowan didn’t pick up on her skepticism. “Oh, I’ve heard around two hundred.”
“Two hundred,” Benjy repeated, eyes gleaming.
Two hundred human rebels gathering in the South.
“High time, loves.”
Rowan was gone as swiftly as she had appeared, leaving only a crumpled flyer in Benjy’s hands—a religious pamphlet, something about the gods and believers. Ayla knew it would be riddled with code—code that only those in the Resistance could decipher.
Part of Ayla worried that Rowan was still harboring hope for these uprisings, for what she called “justice,” because of her grief for Luna and Luna’s sister, Faye. After all, they’d been two of Rowan’s lost children, just like Ayla and Benjy. It was known within the village that any orphan kid could find food and comfort with Rowan. Ayla remembered when Faye and Luna had come to Rowan’s after their mother had died. Ayla had taken to Luna immediately, a girl with shy smiles and sweet questions. Faye had been pricklier, distrusting, far too much like Ayla for the two of them to get along. But still, they’d grown up around each other. And Ayla knew that Rowan’s soft heart grieved for the two sisters. Those two girls she’d tried to save.
Two girls who, in her mind, she had failed.
And in that grief, Rowan was willing to send more innocents off to find more of her “justice.”
Over the years, they’d received word of a few uprisings here in Rabu, but each one had been bloody—and quelled quickly. The Sovereign State of Rabu was controlled by Sovereign Hesod. His rule had come to extend to all of Zulla except for the queendom of Varn. Though he claimed he did not hold all the power, as the Red Council—a group of Automa aristocrats—was supposed to share governance of Rabu, Ayla hardly believed that to be true. Hesod was enormously wealthy and influential. He was also power-hungry. It had been his father who led the Automa troops in the War of Kinds. It was he who first declared humans should be separated from their families. And it was on his personal land, the vast grounds of his seaside palace, that Ayla, Benjy, and four hundred other human servants lived and worked.
The Red Council was cruel, merciless, and worst of all, creative. That was part of the reason the Revolution was so slow-going—people were just so damn terrified of the Council and its ever-tightening laws. Even Ayla had to admit their fears were well founded. Luna—and her disembodied dress—was proof of that.