His horrified eyes had lit up with wonder.
“El,” he had whispered, “that’s some kind of magic.”
“Ridiculous,” she’d replied, her heart pounding but her voice cool. “Magic does not exist.”
“But it did, once. Maybe some of it survived Queen Rielle’s Fall.”
Eliana had snorted. “Doubtful. That bitch was a lot of things, but she wasn’t sloppy. She wouldn’t have left us any magic, not even a scrap.”
“So how do you explain it, then?”
She had shrugged, grinning. “I won’t argue with my body being a wonder. Harkan could tell you that much—”
Remy had clapped his hands over his ears. “Please, spare me.”
“I suppose I’m just more resilient than most.” She hadn’t really believed that inane explanation, even then. But what choice did she have? Any other possibility would be…too much to consider. Preposterous at best and dangerous at worst. And she had given up her hope for miracles years ago.
“Anyway,” she had continued, “I hope you won’t tell anyone. Not even Mother. Because—”
“Because if anyone found out, they’d use you as a weapon. Even more than the Empire already does.”
“Right,” she said stiffly after a pause. “Exactly.”
He had nodded. “I’m still going to believe it’s magic though. I have to.”
“Whatever lies you have to tell yourself, Remy, are no business of mine.”
But now that Eliana had seen Lord Morbrae, the knowledge of what her body could do—the question of what that meant—sat noxiously inside her.
Am I one of them? she thought, reaching back to scratch her shoulder. Or will I become one of them?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hob staring at her and remembered to wince as she moved.
“Quickly and quietly,” Simon muttered, “slip into the crowd along with everyone else. Stay close.”
Together, their ragged group of five slowly moved onto the broad, crowded road that led to the city of Rinthos.
It was a path congested with travelers: Refugees seeking shelter from the wild lands beyond. Small clusters of musicians fiddling baudy traveling songs and singing laments for the dead. A few merchants shilling wares—clothes, medicines, drugs, idols of the Emperor carved out of wood and small enough to wear around one’s neck.
Eliana kept her gait stiff, uneven, and her eyes focused straight ahead on the city gates. Adatrox drifted throughout the crowd and patrolled the perimeter wall, but they did not stop anyone from passing through the city gates. Not even the Empire, it seemed, wanted to do the work of clearing out the massive, clogged sprawl that was Rinthos.
It was the perfect place to hide.
It was also, quite possibly, a disastrous place to hide. Surely the Empire knew of what had happened at the outpost, had heard of the girl blowing apart an entire regiment of adatrox and, perhaps, surviving. An adatrox could have seen Simon retrieve her body from the wreckage, flee on horseback with her. Maybe this adatrox had sent a message to Lord Morbrae.
Maybe the general’s ashes, blown apart when the outpost detonated, had coalesced back into a solid frame. Maybe he was, at this very moment, stalking their trail.
Eliana counted her breaths until her thoughts stopped spinning.
They had no choice; they had to stop in Rinthos. Hob needed to meet his contact, who would help resupply Patrik, his soldiers, and the now-homeless refugees.
And Eliana, as far as they knew, desperately needed medicine.
As they passed through the outer wall of Rinthos, Eliana glanced up at the overcrowded city towering above her and licked her cracked lips out of sheer uneasiness. An interweaving network of stone paths, wooden bridges, and twisting staircases stretched high above them, connecting apartment to apartment and high road to low road. Not far from the city was the Sea of Bones, which churned between Ventera and the occupied kingdom of Meridian. A thin film of sand coated the crumbling roads, and whenever they passed one of the canals that snaked through the city, the pungent smell of fish and waste was enough to turn Eliana’s already restless stomach.
They had been navigating the choked streets of Rinthos for an hour when they finally found Sanctuary’s entrance—an unremarkable door at first glance, coated in peeling gray paint and bolted with a broken lock.
But past the door, down a narrow staircase, they emerged into a small, damp room manned by three masked guards. Each towered two heads above even Simon.
The lead guard stopped Simon with a curved blade at his throat.