The dragon followed the Ghost, her glass body silent and hidden in the night. Tris got to her own feet, passing her power over her eyes again and again to clear her vision. All of her braids sprang from their pins, hanging free. The ties popped off her two lesser lightning braids.
Tris reached to the top of each thin braid and ran her hands down, sparks leaping under her fingers. She moulded them into a ball to see by and let it hang in the air as she drew a good, stiff breeze from two wind braids. She sent it after Chime as a living rope, so she wouldn’t lose the glass dragon, then followed. As she trotted along she thanked the gods of earth and fire for Chime. If not for the dragon, her corpse might be on its way to defile one of Tharios’s proudest places right now.
The child of a yaskedasu and someone from the First Class, tossed in among the prathmun. It made a kind of warped sense, if the Ghost told the truth. Maybe he thought it was the truth. Maybe it was simply the excuse he needed first to murder women who showed him temptation they would never give to a prathmun, then to rub the noses of those who used prathmun in the worst thing they could imagine — public, unclean death.
She heard the claws on glass screech that was Chime’s alarm. Tris ran, sending more breezes ahead to keep the Ghost from opening any doors. As she rounded the corner into the next street she found him, tugging frantically at the handle of a door set in a cellarway. The building above it looked abandoned.
Tris slowed, panting. Chime flew at the Ghost’s face, slapping him with her broad wings. He ducked his head and continued to tug, refusing to let go of the handle.
“There’s no escape tonight,” Tris called. “Not here. You’ve used your last yellow veil.”
That got the prathmun’s attention. He struck Chime, throwing her against the building, and scrambled up the stairs into the street. He fled down its length until he reached a brick wall. Digging his toes into its cracks, he began to climb.
Tris lifted her hands to the single heavy braid that went from her forehead to the nape of her neck. The tie dropped from it; strands pulled free of the braid. The power they released flowed, ripe and heavy, into Tris’s palms.
She took a deep breath. The prathmun raised a hand to hit Chime, who had recovered quickly, and fell from the wall to the ground. With the persistence of a terrier he began to climb the wall again.
Tris held out her hands. The power in them trickled into the soggy ground of the alley. She set down protective barriers on either side, sinking them deep in the earth and up the walls of all the buildings. Only when her control was locked in place did she release what she had taken from that one braid. It followed the channel made by her protections straight down the street. The ground quivered. The quivers spread and rolled forward, taking the shape of waves in the soil, rolling on like a small earthquake. The floor of the alley turned to earthen soup as Tris harnessed the tremors, directing them to flow as she wanted. Her teeth hurt, they were clenched so hard. Her eyes were locked on the Ghost.
He was three quarters of the way up the wall when the tremors struck. The brick under his feet quivered. Old plaster and mortar dropped away as the waves hit directly under the wall, held there by Tris. With a cry the prathmun fell to the street, into now-liquid ground. It swallowed him up to his hips before Tris shoved all of the force she had released deep into the soil. She jammed it down through cracks and veins, letting it disperse into the earth that had lent it to her for a while.
In the ringing silence that followed, the brick wall grated and dropped. Tris’s winds thrust it back from the Ghost, into the yard it had shielded.
Tris walked down the alley, the dirt reasonably firm under her sensibly shod feet. She reclaimed her protections from ground and buildings, satisfied that she had done them no damage. No one here would die because she’d allowed a place to be shaken past the point where it could stand.