When Cathrynne drifted off, she saw a faceless angel with wings of flame, falling like a bolt of lightning from the heavens.
Chapter 11
Kal
The riverboat bumped against the wooden pilings of Pota Pras’s quay, sending a shudder through the deck. Kal tugged her watch cap lower, tucking in stray wisps of her springy brown hair. There was no sign of the cypher she’d spotted earlier, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t being hunted.
She shuffled forward with the line of disembarking passengers as a train whistle pierced the morning air. The Zamir Hills Express, preparing for its journey into the heart of mining country. Once, that sound had represented opportunity. Now it was just another grim reminder of all her mistakes.
Four witches patrolled the wharf, their rings and bracelets winking in the late afternoon sun. A pair of caracals stalked beside them, fur rippling over muscled shoulders. The beasts stood waist-high to their handlers, alert and deadly.
There were always witches at the quay since a Sinn attack had burned two dockside warehouses to the ground last year. They watched the skies, not the passengers, but Kal’s skin still prickled as she walked past them.
In her mind’s eye, she kept seeing Durian hit the river and not come up. If they knew his name, they’d know her name, too, and where she came from. But she couldn’t run far without identity papers. She also needed her savings, the stash she’d been hoarding since she was ten and sold her first find, a Sinn tooth that was bone-white and as long as her hand.
Thank Travian she’d had the sense to buy round-trip tickets when they left Pota Pras. Otherwise, she would have been walking for days to get home.
Home. Her heart lurched. How could it be home without her best friend? Her fellow oddball and dreamer, who insisted that anything was possible. Part of her refused to accept that he was gone. It was another boy they’d found. Kota Gelangi was a huge city.
The crowds thinned, dispersing into the dusty streets. Kal blended with a group of miners. Three steps later, a shoulder collided with hers, hard enough to make her stumble.
“I beg your pardon,” said a deep voice with a crisp Kirithi accent.
Kal looked up into a pair of golden eyes ringed with green. The man was tall and darkly handsome, with broad shoulders and coal-black hair. His clothes were fine, so he must be one of the agents who worked for the mining conglomerates.
The cypher from the riverboat stood behind him. Kal nearly shit a brick.
She muttered an apology and tried to move past, but he gripped her sleeve, the pressure light but inescapable. “I’m a stranger to Pota Pras,” he said. “Perhaps you could assist me?”
One of the witches had turned to watch them. Kal desperately wanted to get away.
“Sure,” she said with false cheer, “where to?”
“I’m looking for Elisabetta Street.”
Kal didn’t react through sheer force of will. “You a scribbler?” she asked, eyeing his hands. No ink stains.
He shook his head. “A friend of the Padulski family. Maybe you know them?”
Durian’s mother had no friends besides the other cleaning women she worked with, and a few from the Cult of the Bard. Certainly none who dressed like this man.
“Sorry, I don’t,” Kal said. “But I can give you directions to Elisabetta Street.” She pointed in the opposite direction from Durian’s house. “Five blocks that way. Turn left past the concrete air attack shelter, then right at the school. About a mile or so. It’s near the tannery.”
Let him smell that poxy stench while he figured out the right way.
“I’m most obliged.” His wolfish eyes lingered on her face. There was an intensity to him, a sense of hidden power that made her teeth ache.
“Happy to help,” she chirped brightly, and slipped into the crowd.
Kal counted to twenty before glancing over her shoulder. The man and the cypher were actually following her directions, and the witches with their caracals had moved on. Relief made her giddy. She walked fast, turning at the first corner. When she was alone, she squeezed her pocket, feeling the hard lump of the kaldurite stones.
In and out. Go home, grab her savings, and disappear again—this time for good.
The houses grew shabbier the farther she got from the downtown landing, but it was a familiar route. Kal knew the places where wild columbine poked through cracks in the sidewalk, where she and Durian would pick cherries in summer. The buckled asphalt where she’d tripped and skinned her knee when she was nine.
A gang of kids stood in a weedy lot, arguing over the rules of some game. Kal nodded at three men lounging in folding chairs outside the tobacconist’s shop. They were smoking and talking about the special election. Whether the Miners’ Union would finally get a majority in the Assembly.
People in Pota Pras hated the witches, but they hated Casolaba’s Freedom League even more.
