hiked up the steeply sloping path toward the palace, his eyes full of hope and excitement. The message was clear: he wanted to join. Even after the disastrous uprisings of last year.
She shook her head. No. He knew better. He knew she couldn’t leave now, tonight. Not when she was this close to the inside of the palace. And Crier.
Benjy’s smile vanished. “Ayla.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going.” Did she want what he wanted? Did she want the leeches dead? Of course, but not like this. Not when it only meant a trail of human blood, not when it was doomed to futility. She was not ready to lose anyone else. The last time there had been an uprising in the South, it was quashed almost immediately—and that uprising had been massive, with nearly two thousand humans marching through the streets of the city Bram, armed with torches and saltpeter, aiming to take the heart of the city where the most powerful Automae lived. They had been defeated in a single night. The Automa who had led the counterattack—who had destroyed them—became a decorated war hero. A household name, a household monster. Kinok.
Benjy fell silent, but Ayla could finally feel his anger—could tell that it was now directed at her. His strides grew long, determined, as they reached the narrow path that curved up toward the palace. She could see the peaked roofs of the palace towers now in the distance.
She hurried to catch up with him, panting in the heat. By now they were farther from the crowd. She grabbed his shoulder, and he stopped walking so suddenly she nearly crashed into him.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he said through gritted teeth.
Ayla struggled to catch her breath. “You could always . . . watch the comet without me.” The words grated in her throat like she’d swallowed a mouthful of salt.
His dark-brown eyes locked onto hers. The breeze danced in his messy hair. He’d grown taller than her, and broader too. She held his gaze.
For a full minute, he said nothing. They just stood there, breathing hard, looking at each other. Thinking the same thing: it was too soon.
Ayla wanted to say: Don’t leave me.
Ayla should have said: Leave me. Because maybe it would be better that way.
Benjy’s anger seemed to transmute into sadness, his lips parting. Finally, he said, “I won’t do that. I won’t go without you, and you know it.”
She did. And that scared her more than anything. He wouldn’t leave her. It made her heart rage. Leave, she wanted to scream. Don’t stay for me.
But then another part of her, buried so deep it had almost, almost, gone silent, knew she couldn’t do this—do any of it—without him.
His lips were still slightly parted, as though there was more he wanted to say. She knew how badly he needed this. Revolution. Blood. Change. She waited for him to keep going, to try again to convince her. But he also knew how much she wanted what she wanted: Lady Crier’s blood on her hands.
So in the end, Benjy just sighed. More and more servants began to pass them on their way up the narrow path, and Ayla put a few paces between herself and Benjy, kept her eyes on the rutted path as they marched the rest of the way back to their quarters in silence, the past piling into her thoughts like shovelfuls of dirt.
After what Ayla had come to think of as that day, the day that changed everything, the splitting point in her mind, the thing that cracked her life into a before and after, the waking nightmare, the bloodstain, the splintered bone that would not heal, that day, Ayla had allowed herself one week to mourn.
Even at nine years old, she’d known that it was all too easy to drown in grief—get pulled under and never come back up. One week, she told herself. One week.
One week to mourn the deaths of her entire family.
Mama. Papa. Her twin brother, Storme, who had loved Ayla more than anything else in the whole world. Who had been wrenched away from her, trying to protect her from Them. Storme, who, from the sounds of his screaming cut short, had met his end then and there, just beyond the walls of what had been their home.
You couldn’t depend on much in this world, but you could depend on this: love brought nothing but death. Where love existed, death would follow, a wolf trailing after a