“Bang,” he said in Caldonnish—and the guard’s hand blew to pieces.
Before the man could start screaming, Thomil whirled around, gripped him beneath the jaw, and shoved him hard. His head went straight back into the alley wall, and he crumpled, unconscious.
The other two barrier guards had their firearms up and pointed at Thomil, but shooting in such a tight space would put them in danger from ricocheting bullets. Only one of them took his chances. The shot missed, blowing a hole in a rusting garbage can. Thomil was on him before he recovered from the kickback, raining punches on him. Years ago, Thomil would have easily incapacitated a Tiranish guard with one punch. So far removed from his hunting days, it took him three—which was two too many.
The third guard caught Thomil in the head with his club, splitting the world into a hundred ringing fragments, and Thomil came back to himself under the Tiranishman, a knee on his solar plexus, crushing the breath from his body. Thomil lifted an arm to defend himself, and the guard’s club struck it away, cracking bone.
In a moment of icy certainty, Thomil knew he was going to die.
“Carra!” he bellowed through the pain and lack of air. “Run!” Don’t look back!
“Shut up, Blighter!” The man lifted his club to bring it down on Thomil’s head—then jerked back. The light went out of his green eyes as his club slid from limp fingers to the cobbles.
As the Tiranishman slumped sideways, Thomil braced for the sight of Carra with her knife covered in blood. But the guard clearly hadn’t fallen to a stab wound. It had looked more like a hard blow to the back of the head. And the figure standing over Thomil now was far bigger than Carra.
This was a Kwen he didn’t recognize—a railway worker, from the look of his bulging arms and the hammer in his hands.
“All right there, brother?” a voice asked in Kwen pidgin, and Thomil realized that there were several more workers behind the first, all holding hammers and pickaxes. They were broad in the shoulders like Arras, their hair touched with fire like Carra’s. Endrasta. But they helped Thomil to his feet and brushed him off like he was one of their own, as Carra sheathed the knife she had all-too-predictably drawn.
“Careful out here, brother,” one of the men said. “They’ll see us all dead if they catch us. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Then, what are all of you doing out here?” Thomil asked, gratefully leaning on the shoulder his rescuer offered him.
“We’re getting out of here.” This speaker was a woman, out of breath from rushing to catch up to the men with a baby in her arms. “Look!” She shifted the child on her hip to point west. “The gods have sent us a sign!”
Thomil followed the gesture to where the barrier was expanding toward the mountainous horizon. That was when he noticed the coats and extra blankets bundled onto the Endrastae’s backs. They were serious about braving the Deep Night.
“You don’t know all the risks,” Thomil said.
“You’re right,” one of the railway workers agreed. “But the risks if we stay are certain.”
“The police are already jailing and shooting us without trial,” another worker said. “That man was ready to kill you just now. After whatever that was”—he gestured in the direction of Leon’s Hall—“how long do you think it will be before they round up everyone with a dash of copper in their hair and start Blighting us to death en masse?”
“Run with us!” the woman said, holding her child close. “Let’s be rid of this place before it’s rid of us! Let’s go home.”
These people knew nothing of Sciona’s theories that Blight would drop off with the barrier expansion. If they could have hope, then so could Thomil. Carra took Thomil’s good hand, and with their new kin around them, they ran.
“Do you know the best way to the caves?” Thomil asked one of the Endrastae, wondering if it was too much to hope that he and Carra had fallen into step with experienced mountaineers.
“More or less,” the Endrasta smiled. “You?”
“More or less.”
Outside the barrier, the Kwen would have only minutes to find shelter before the cold began claiming lives. But before that, they had to reach the new edge of the city alive.
The expanding barrier had disrupted the usually placid air inside Tiran, sending winds howling down the streets, swirling dust and knocking down people, trees, streetlamps, anything unused to standing against a gale. Changing pressure swelled and popped in Thomil’s ears as though he was running full-tilt up a mountain instead of across level pavement.
More guards had taken up position in the streets, blocking the way westward, but the Endrasta railway workers weren’t the only Kwen to take the shifting barrier as a sign, and the sparsely spread Tiranishmen were increasingly overpowered as more Kwen surged from their workhouses and apartment complexes.
In panic, Tiranish guards had begun firing indiscriminately into the tide of fleeing Kwen. A bullet struck the Endrasta woman in the leg. She buckled with a scream, barely keeping hold of her baby. Thomil turned back to reach for her, only to realize how useless he was with his injured arm. But Carra was already there.
“I’ve got him!” She took the child from the woman’s arms and clutched him to her bloodstained chest. “Don’t worry, Auntie, I’ve got him!”
One of the railway workers tossed his pickaxe to a friend and slung the whimpering woman over his shoulders.
“Keep running!” reverberated through the streets and alleys. They were words all Kwen knew well. Even those who had been born inside the barrier knew the echo from their parents and grandparents. “Forward! Don’t look back!”
Somewhere in the chaos, the gunfire had dropped off. Ahead of them, a brass-buttoned barrier guard paused to examine his gun in confusion, only to be trampled by the oncoming Kwen and die screaming as his bones broke beneath their feet.
“Their rifles have stopped working!” one of the Endrastae said in surprise. “Why? How?”
“Does it matter?” someone else said.
Thomil knew why, but there was hardly time to explain. If the guns had stopped working, it was because the barrier expansion spell had burned through all life inside the Main Magistry building and moved down the subsequent branches of Sciona’s spellweb to tap parts of the Reserve—including the energy pool designated for firearms.
It meant that everyone in Leon’s Hall was dead.
Realizing what the absence of gunfire meant, Carra turned to look at Thomil in pain and concern. If there had been any sliver of doubt, it was certain now. Sciona was gone. Thomil met Carra’s raw silver eyes and repeated the chorus around him:
“Don’t look back.”
The wave of Kwen had reached the former edge of the city, marked only by a line where thick green grass met sodden brown. The moment Thomil crossed onto the brown, bones crunched underfoot. Layers of them. Some fresh and strung with wet vestiges of muscle, some brittle with age, turning to dust beneath the hundreds of feet pelting out of the city.
These people or their parents or their grandparents had all crossed into Tiran separately with different hopes for what the city might hold. They were one now, bound by the sorrow of the crossing and a will to live that could outlast all Tiran’s machinery. One tribe. One purpose.