“Weighed him down with rocks first. I picked a pretty deep stretch by the docks; no one’s going to find him—”
“Holy shit.” Kitay ran a hand through his bangs and yanked as he paced around the library. “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
“It might be all right.” Rin tried to convince herself as she said it, but she still felt terribly light-headed. She’d come to Kitay because he was the one person she trusted to figure out what to do, but now both of them were panicking. “Look, no one saw me—”
“How do you know?” he asked shrilly. “No one caught you dragging a Hesperian corpse halfway across the city? No one was looking out their windows? You’d be willing to stake your life on the fact that not a single person saw?”
“I didn’t drag it, I dumped it in a sampan and rowed out to shore.”
“Oh, that solves everything—”
“Kitay. Listen.” She took a deep breath, trying to get her mind to slow down enough to work properly. “It’s been over an hour. If they’d seen, don’t you think I’d be dead by now?”
“Tarcquet could be biding his time,” Kitay said. “Waiting until morning to set an army on you.”
“He wouldn’t wait.” Rin was certain of that. The Hesperians didn’t fuck around. If Tarcquet found out that a shaman, of all people, had killed one of his men, then her body would already be riddled with bullet holes. He wouldn’t have given her the chance to escape.
The more time that passed, the more she hoped—believed—that Tarcquet didn’t know. Vaisra didn’t know. They might never know. Rin wasn’t telling anyone, and the refugee girl would certainly keep her mouth shut.
Kitay rubbed his palms against his temples. “When did this happen?”
“I told you. Just over an hour ago, when I was walking Kesegi back to the barriers from the old warehouses.”
“What on earth were you doing by the warehouses?”
“Southern Warlords ambushed me. Wanted to talk. They’re thinking of defecting back to their home provinces to deal with the Federation armies and they wanted me to come along, and they had this insane theory about the Hesperians, and—”
“What did you say?”
“Of course I refused. That’d be a death sentence.”
“Well, at least you didn’t commit treason.” Kitay managed a shaky laugh. “And then, what, you just wandered back to the barracks and murdered a Hesperian on the way?”
“You didn’t see what he was doing.”
He threw his hands up. “Does it fucking matter?”
“He was on a girl,” she said angrily. “He had her by her neck and he wouldn’t stop—”
“So you decided to scorch any possible chance we have of surviving the Red Cliffs?”
“The Hesperians aren’t fucking coming, Kitay.”
“They’re still here, aren’t they? If they really didn’t care they’d have packed up and gone. Did that ever cross your mind? When your back is to the wall there’s a massive difference between zero and one percent but no, you’d rather guarantee it’s zero—”
Her cheeks burned. “I didn’t think—”
“Of course not,” Kitay snapped. His knuckles had gone white. “You never think, do you? You always just pick whatever fights you want, whenever you want, and fuck the consequences—”
Rin raised her voice. “Would you rather I had let him rape her?”
Kitay fell silent.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean that.”
“I didn’t think so.”
He pressed his face into his hands. “Gods, I’m just scared. And you didn’t have to kill him, you could have—”
“I know,” she said. She felt drained. All the adrenaline had gone out of her at once, and now she only wanted to collapse. “I know, I wasn’t thinking, I saw it happening and I just—”
“It’s my life on the line now, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I don’t think— You didn’t have— Fine. It’s fine. I understand.”
“I really don’t think anyone saw.”
“Fine.” He took a deep breath. “Are you going to go back to the barracks?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
They sat together on the floor for a long while in silence. He rested his head against her shoulder. She clutched at his hands. Neither of them could sleep. They were both watching the library windows, waiting to see Hesperian troops lined up at the door, to hear the fall of heavy boots in the hallway. Rin couldn’t help but feel a twinge of relief at every additional moment that passed.
It meant the Hesperians weren’t coming. It meant that, for now, she was safe.