Lu didn’t pause as she said, “They have their mission. We have ours.”
Nayeli didn’t respond. Lu knew half of her was here with Lu; half was with Vex and Edda.
Lu felt it, too. She felt a lot of things, all of them suffocating, but she kept walking, pistols rattling against the sword at her waist.
A map of the fort said that the storage area was on the lowest level. If they didn’t find Tom’s supplies there, they would search this fort, ceiling to cellar, until they located his plants, his equipment, whatever potions he had made—and destroyed them. Nate hoped they’d be able to steal a good amount of magic. Rosalia hoped for bloodshed.
Lu couldn’t get her mind to function. Each step she took peeled more of herself away, until she was less a living girl, more an embodiment of years-held fury. This was who Tom had wanted her to be, wasn’t it? A weapon. A murderer.
The hall took a turn. Rosalia, at the head, swung down it—and quickly flew back as defensors beyond cried in alarm.
She grinned. “Two defensors at the top of a stairwell.”
Nate checked his pistols, his manic smile peeking out from beneath the brim of his curved leather hat. “Guarding something?”
“Should be the—Shit!”
Rosalia’s words cut off in a startled shriek as Lu brushed past her and chucked a small satchel down the hall. The explosion was small enough not to rattle the stones, sending a feeble, echoingpopback at them.
The defensors went silent.
Nayeli sank her fingers into Lu’s arm. “Rhodospine?” She had recognized the noise. Each Rhodospine pod released a barrage of piercing spikes—a deadly, violent thorn grenade, far more dangerous than its cousin plant, the Rhodofume smoke screen.
Lu nodded, unfazed. Rosalia cackled and shot back around the corner. Her cackling faded to a long, impressed whistle.
“Well, they’re dead,” she announced.
Nate chuckled, brushing past Lu and Nayeli. Lu made to follow, but Nayeli seized her arm, two bright red spots touching her cheeks.
The emotion—or absence of emotion—in Lu’s eyes must have been clear, because Nayeli didn’t say anything. She released Lu and held her hands up in surrender.
The defensors were, indeed, dead. Slumped against either wall, their bodies contorted in macabre dances, skinand uniforms riddled with the Rhodospine spikes.
Lu’s eyes trailed over the blood leaking from their wounds, the glazed surprise to their vacant expressions. Her eyes moved to the stairwell. At the bottom was the lowest level of the fort; the storage room. Tom?
Rosalia was busy searching one of the bodies for anything of value. Nate had the other, and as Lu walked past them, she stopped to make sure Nayeli, at least, had her.
A step behind, Nayeli’s face was pale, her eyes on Lu’s boots.
Lu ignored any feeling of sympathy. She took the stairs, dropping down, down, down.
Two more defensors waited at the bottom. This time, a satchel of Variegated Holly with Hemlight—one to cause an explosion when lit; one to do the lighting.
The aftermath left two dead soldiers at the base of the stairs—right in front of a wide storage room. Boxes and crates filled the space in something like organization, netting holding barrels to the ceiling and the air thick with the smell of decay, dust, and earthy plants.
Rosalia and Nate stumbled down the stairwell as Nayeli pulled various plants out of her own pouches. More explosives, again Hemlight and Variegated Holly.
“What do we destroy?” Nayeli asked, moving for the closest crate.
“Let’s see what it is first,” Nate countered. “We’ll take as much as we can carry.”
“I would prefer you didn’t,” came a voice.
Rosalia, Nate, and Nayeli spun. But Lu smiled. She wasn’t sure where it blossomed from, this odd, uneven tilting of her lips.
Across the room, taking slow steps toward them through the maze of waist-high crates, came Tom.
Lu had her pistol out. Her thumb hit the hammer, cocking it, and she looked at her father down the barrel.
