is burning.
I wrench myself out of the Gray and train my eyes on Dez.
The strongest man I know, cut down. Blood drips from a severed neck. There’s the white of bone, blood vessels, a mass of tender insides that makes us mortal. Breakable. No matter who we are we are breakable.
I reach. I reach for the tangle of wet black curls.
Something inside me snaps in two, like I’ve been splintered down the center. My fingers graze a single errant thread in the air, and then I drop my hands. I grab hold of the wooden platform because I can’t stand on my own anymore. My hands come away wet and sticky. My screams scrape across my throat like jagged nails.
Strong arms wrap around me, but this time, they don’t belong to the guard.
“I’ve got you,” Sayida says, breathless. “We need to leave, now.”
“No,” I say, helplessly. Lost. Adrift. “I have to kill Castian. I have to—”
“Shhh,” Sayida says urgently. “You’re going to get us killed instead.”
She tugs on me, and I struggle against her, but she’s stronger than she looks. Or perhaps I’m tired of fighting. I can’t do it anymore. My screams dry up, but my throat burns.
We move quickly, hiding in alleys and turning onto narrow streets. She half carries me, half drags me into a building that smells of firewood and fish.
The Gray blurs my sight, billowing like storm clouds.
A little girl points at the sky. There is a shower of stars. Someone picks her up and brings a kiss to her cheek.
The image is sucked back into the Gray and replaced with another.
Small fingers pick at a tray of chocolates decorated with sugar pearls.
“Ren! You have to snap out of it. I can’t—I can’t carry you the whole way.” Sayida’s dark-lined eyes run with her sweat and tears.
I slam my fist into the nearest wall, and the pain that splinters across my knuckles helps me focus. Helps me out of the Gray.
Sayida directs me down a flight of stairs into a small windowless room and locks the door behind her.
Crates of potatoes and jars of olives and pickled fish line the walls. Sayida pushes a rack containing nothing but sacks of flour to reveal another door. A hidden room.
“Where are we?” I ask, and realize I’m shaking.
Margo’s lying on a pile of rice bags, a cloth over her eyes. Esteban sits on the stone floor, his head resting against a brick wall, turning only when he realizes we have returned.
“Ren?” He hurries over to me. “Are you all right?”
At least, that’s what I think he’s saying. His lips move and his voice is an echo that’s already fading.
Fingers snap in front of my eyes.
Suddenly, Sayida wraps her hands around my shoulders, gentle as a caress. Her fingers spread out around the curves of my sweat-drenched back. Her magics flood my body, like a cooling balm on a sunburn.
Dez sits under a tree in San Cristóbal. He cuts the skin of a bright red apple with a pocketknife. There is something about the way he smiles at me—
Dez returns from a solo mission. Before he goes to report back to his father, he finds me in my small chamber. “I brought you something.” He pulls out a box of sweets—
Dez searches for me in the dark and pulls me close. Closer still. “Stay a little longer, Ren.”
“No more,” I beg Sayida. The emotion she’s pulling gathers at the base of my throat. I want to name it, but I can’t. With her power she’s found my memories. I don’t want them. “Please.”
Sayida sits back, rubbing her hands against her trousers. “I’m sorry. I wanted you to find your happiness.”
I turn my face toward her. She’s blurry, as though I’m staring at her through the thin veil of a funeral shroud.
I slowly sink down onto a rolled-out cot on the floor. It hurts to swallow the metallic taste on my tongue. “Even I didn’t know that’s what you’d find.”
When I wake, I snap up and reach for my sword.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Margo asks, standing with her hands on her hips. I can’t meet her red-ringed, swollen eyes for long because they mirror my own.
All three of them are in similar borrowed clothes. Plain loose trousers and white tunics like cantina servers. There’s a bundle at my feet.
“Where are we?”
“My nan’s boardinghouse,” Esteban says.
“You have a grandmother?” He’d said he had family, but I thought that meant a distant cousin. So many of us have lost