exercises I’d done through the rooftops of Mara’s Inner City—how Corian and I would race together, side by side, from the double gates to the National Hall without alerting any of the city’s soldiers. If we failed, we’d start over. It would go on for hours.
Corian’s laugh still echoes in my mind from whenever he had beaten me. If he were here with us now, no doubt he’d take down the guards before I could even make my way off the roof.
Now I cushion each of my steps the same way I’d done during our training. Down below at the side gate, Adena materializes from the shadows of the trees to drag the guards’ bodies into the darkness. She moves quickly—one blink and they’re there, another and they’re gone. I stop in the trees right above the gate as Adena emerges to look at the lock. Another guard walks by on the complex’s gate. He glances in my direction, then looks right past me, and continues.
I slide a knife out of my boot and give myself only a split second to aim. The knife flies down at the guard, burying deep in his throat.
His eyes pop open as his hands fly to his neck. I’m already down from the tree before he can see me as anything more than a shadow in the night. My hand wraps around his mouth and I snap his neck hard. He goes limp in my arms as I lower him to the ground, collecting my knife and his weapons in one swift motion.
Well, look at you, Corian would say to me with a smirk if he saw me now. So light on your feet.
Adena pulls her face mask down as she studies the lock. There are a series of six tumblers against the rectangular grid, each with the numerals 0 through 9 on them. She turns each, realizes they don’t just move like a simple tumbler, and fiddles with the first one until she figures out that it requires a twist to the left and then a twist to the right. Her eyes dart occasionally to me as I sign the numbers to her as a reminder. Her fingers move quickly, feeling the weight and clicks of each tumbler.
“What a design,” she whispers to herself.
Four. Five. Two. Six. Nine. Four.
Then Adena tries to turn the lock in the same circle as the guard had done.
It doesn’t budge.
Her eyes dart immediately to me. “Wrong numbers,” she tells me. Her eyes go frantically to the edge of the gate. The new guards will come around the bend soon.
“Try again,” I tell her.
She runs through it again. Again, it fails.
What if Red remembered them incorrectly? He had sounded so hesitant. He must have gotten one of them wrong. I close my eyes, willing myself into calm, and think.
Then, through the fog of my memories, I think of one incident with sudden clarity. The moment after the battle, when Red was feverish and near delirious on the floor of the makeshift infirmary. He had called out words from a Karenese story that his sister had once read to him.
A hall with no end.
A day to live.
A millions ways to bridge the rift.
According to my vision of that moment between Red and his sister, she had read the lines from right to left, the Karenese way, not left to right as Marans typically do. Maybe Red had told me the code in the same way, meant to be input right to left.
I wave urgently at Adena. “Four. Nine,” I sign. “Six. Two. Five. Four.”
Adena starts again right as a guard comes around the bend in our direction. She spots us. I see her hesitate, shocked, and then get into a fighting stance. She’s going to raise the alarm.
But then a blur comes from the trees. Jeran. His knife sinks deep in her chest. She utters a gurgle, but I know the wet sound of her voice means her lung was punctured. She staggers against the wall, then slides down with a whimper.
It’s a messier kill and none of us can go over there to hide the body. But there’s no time.
Adena finishes putting in the new numbers and tries turning the lock again. This time it works. It spins in a full circle before sinking into the wall, and the gate clicks open.
We dart inside.
There’s little time to take in our surroundings. I turn my attention to the main building and then to the trees around it, hazy in