A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,84

Faris and me escape the Karkauns.

I reach her in three strides, and before she can draw a weapon, I have a knife to her throat.

“Loyal.” She speaks the code she was given without the slightest hesitation. “To the end.”

“Well met, Neera.” I clasp her hand, and her smile is a flash of hope in the darkness.

“Quickly, Shrike,” she says. “Before the Karkauns come.”

My men enter the city two by two. They drip with weaponry, and each carries a long, thin package weighing five stones. Twenty scims, light and strong. They are concealed, wrapped, and strapped tight against the backs of the men. Ten thousand scims for our people, everything we could scrounge up from Delphinium and the now-shuttered Kauf Prison. Everything we could manage to carry.

“Go!” I hiss to the men. “Faster!”

Musa finds me moments later. “The Karkauns are on the way,” he says. “We have a few minutes, if that. And Quin is stuck in the tunnels. One of my wights says the passages you used are collapsed.”

Those tunnels were fine only two weeks ago. And as Quin loves to say, only a jackass believes in coincidences.

“It was the Karkauns,” I say. “Tell Quin his sappers must clear a path. The Karkauns are trying to herd him. They want to ambush him aboveground, no doubt, and stop his men from getting into the city. If he doesn’t get through, he might as well turn back.”

Harper takes me aside, voice low so that the soldiers still passing through the door don’t hear us. “He should have been nearly through those tunnels by now. He won’t make it on time.”

“He’s Quin Veturius,” I say. “He’ll make it.”

“We need those men,” Harper says. “We cannot take the capital with five hundred men and untrained citizens, no matter how many there are. Not with tens of thousands of Karkauns quartered here. It would be impos—”

“Don’t say it.” I put my finger against his lips, and he falls silent. “We know better. Keris trained that word out of us. Impossible doesn’t exist. Not when the Empire is on the line.”

The rest of the soldiers are through the doorway. Harper and I are the last. “I will take this city, Harper,” I tell him. “With my bare hands, if I must. Come. I have an idea.”

XXXIII: Laia

I walk along a river of death, but I am not alone.

“I have missed you, my love.”

A shadow walks beside me. Pale hands pull down a hood, revealing fire-red hair and dark brown eyes that hid so much more than I ever imagined. Not my foe, but the first boy I ever loved.

“Keenan,” I whisper.

My skin burns, and I feel like I cannot breathe. For the blink of an eye, I see seething, muddy water roiling around me.

Then Keenan speaks, and the image fades.

“You’re in trouble, my love.” He brushes a calloused thumb against my chin, and there is no lie when he calls me his love. “You’re drowning.”

“I do not feel like I’m drowning.”

“You’re strong.” He takes my hand and we walk. Something calls out to me deep in my mind, a scream locked in a chest, locked in a closet, locked in a room that is too far away from this place to notice. “You always have been, because of the Star. But for other reasons too.”

“The darkness,” I say. “The one that lives within.”

“Yes,” he says. “Tell me of it. For I have darkness within me also, and I would know if we are two sides of the same coin.”

“Two sides—” I look up at him, dazed. It hurts to breathe, and when I look down, my clothes are soaked, and my arms and hands bleed. I taste salt and put a hand to my head. My head bleeds too. A voice within calls out. Laia.

“I cannot tell you about it,” I say. “I am not supposed to.”

“Of course.” He is so gentle. So kind. “Let’s not wake it if we shouldn’t.”

“I have already woken it,” I say. “I woke it when I defied you.” I look down at my body again. I am so tired. “Keenan, I—I cannot breathe.”

“You’re drowning, my love,” he says with such sweetness. “You’re almost gone.”

A flash across my vision. Darkness. The rain-heavy sky. Debris-choked water around me, dragging me along. High canyon walls rise on either side, streaked red and white and orange and yellow, like one of Darin’s paintings.

Darin, my brother, who loves me, not like—

Fight him, Laia. A voice calls out. So far away. But insistent.

“I should not