A Torch Against the Night (3 page)

She smiles.

T
he Commandant’s smile is a bloated, pale worm. Though I see her for only a moment before Elias urges me away from the bloodshed of the square, I find myself unable to speak.

I skid, my boots still coated in blood from the butchery in the tunnels. At the thought of Elias’s face afterward—the loathing in his eyes—I shudder. I wanted to tell him that he did what he had to do to save us. But I couldn’t get the words out. It was all I could do not to retch.

Sounds of suffering rend the air—Martial and Scholar, adult and child, mingled into one cacophonous scream. I hardly hear it, focused as I am on avoiding the broken glass and burning buildings collapsing into the streets. I look over my shoulder a dozen times, expecting to see the Commandant on our heels. Suddenly, I feel like the girl I was a month ago. The girl who abandoned her brother to Empire imprisonment, the girl who whimpered and sobbed after being whipped. The girl with no courage.

When the fear takes over, use the only thing more powerful, more indestructible, to fight it: your spirit. Your heart.
I hear the words spoken to me yesterday by the blacksmith Spiro Teluman, my brother’s friend and mentor.

I try to transform my fear into fuel. The Commandant is not infallible
.
She might not have even seen me—her attention was so fixed on her son. I escaped her once. I’ll escape her again.

Adrenaline surges through me, but as we turn from one street to the next, I stumble over a small pyramid of masonry and sprawl onto the soot-blackened cobblestones.

Elias lifts me back to my feet as easily as if I’m made of feathers. He gazes ahead, behind, to the windows and rooftops nearby, as if he too expects his mother to appear at any second.

“We have to keep going.” I yank at his hand. “We have to get out of the city.”

“I know.” Elias angles us into a dusty, dead orchard bound by a wall. “But we can’t do that if we’re exhausted. It won’t hurt to rest for a minute.”

He sits, and I kneel beside him unwillingly. The air of Serra feels strange and tainted, the tang of scorched wood mingling with something darker—blood, burning bodies, and unsheathed steel.

“How are we going to get to Kauf, Elias?” This is the question that’s plagued me since the moment we slipped into the tunnels from his barracks at Blackcliff. My brother allowed himself to be taken by Martial soldiers so that I’d have a chance to escape. I will not let him die for his sacrifice—he’s the only family I have left in this blasted Empire. If I don’t save him, no one will. “Will we hide out in the country? What’s the plan?”

Elias regards me steadily, his gray eyes opaque.

“The escape tunnel would have put us west of the city,” he says. “We’d have taken the mountain passes north, robbed a Tribal caravan, and posed as traders. The Martials wouldn’t have been looking for both of us—and they wouldn’t have been looking north. But now …” He shrugs.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you even have a plan?”

“I do. We get out of the city. We escape the Commandant. That’s the only plan that matters.”

“What about after?”

“One thing at a time, Laia. This is my mother we’re dealing with.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” I say, lest he think that I’m the same mouse of a girl he met at Blackcliff weeks ago. “Not anymore.”

“You should be,” Elias says dryly.

The drums boom out, a barrage of bone-shaking sound. My head pounds with their echo.

Elias cocks his head. “They’re relaying our descriptions,” he says.
“Elias Veturius: gray eyes, six foot four, fifteen stone, black hair. Last seen in tunnels south of Blackcliff. Armed and dangerous. Traveling with Scholar female: gold eyes, five foot six, nine stone, black hair—”
He stops. “You get the point. They’re hunting us, Laia.
She
is hunting us. We don’t have a way out of the city. Fear is the wise course right now—it will keep us alive.”

“The walls—”

“Heavily guarded because of the Scholar revolt,” Elias says. “Worse now, no doubt. She’ll have sent messages across the city that we haven’t yet cleared the walls. The gates will be doubly fortified.”

“Could we—you—fight our way through? Maybe at one of the smaller gates?”

“We could,” Elias says. “But it would lead to a lot of killing.”

I understand why he looks away, though the hard, cold part of me born in Blackcliff wonders what difference a few more dead Martials make. Especially in the face of how many he has already killed, and especially when I think of what they’re going to do to the Scholars when the rebel revolution is inevitably crushed.

But the better part of me recoils at such callousness. “The tunnels then?” I say. “The soldiers won’t expect it.”

“We don’t know which ones have collapsed, and there’s no point going down there if we’ll just hit a dead end. The docks, maybe. We could swim the river—”

“I can’t swim.”

“Remind me to remedy that when we have a few days.” He shakes his head—we’re running out of options. “We could lie low until the revolution dies down. Then slip into the tunnels after the explosions have stopped. I know a safe house.”

“No,” I say quickly. “The Empire shipped Darin to Kauf three weeks ago. And those prisoner frigates are fast, are they not?”

Elias nods. “They’d reach Antium in less than a fortnight. From there, it’s a ten-day journey overland to Kauf if they don’t run into bad weather. He might already have reached the prison.”

“How long will it take us to get there?”

“We have to go overland
and
avoid detection,” Elias says. “Three months, if we’re swift. But only if we make it to the Nevennes Range before the winter snows. If we don’t, we won’t get through until spring.”

“Then we cannot delay,” I say. “Not even by a day.”

I look over my shoulder again, trying to suppress a growing sense of dread. “She didn’t follow us.”

“Not obviously,” Elias says. “She’s too damned clever for that.”

He ponders the dead trees around us, turning a blade over and over in his hand.

“There’s an abandoned storage building near the river, up against the city walls,” he finally says. “Grandfather owns the building—showed it to me years ago. A door in the back courtyard leads out of the city. But I haven’t been back in a while. It might not be there anymore.”

“Does the Commandant know of it?”

“Grandfather would never have told her.”

I think of Izzi, my fellow slave at Blackcliff, warning me about the Commandant when I first arrived at the school.
She knows things
, Izzi had said.
Things she shouldn’t.

But we have to get out of the city, and I have no better plan to offer.

We set out, passing swiftly through neighborhoods untouched by the revolution, sneaking painstakingly through those areas where fighting and fire rage. Hours pass, and the afternoon fades to evening. Elias is a calm presence beside me, seemingly unmoved by the sight of so much destruction.

Strange to think that a month ago, my grandparents were alive, my brother was free, and I’d never heard the name Veturius.

Everything that has happened since then is like a nightmare. Nan and Pop murdered. Darin dragged away by soldiers, screaming at me to run.

And the Scholar Resistance offering to help me save my brother, only to betray me.

Another face flashes in my mind, dark-eyed, handsome, and grim—always so grim. It made his smiles more precious. Keenan, the fire-haired rebel who defied the Resistance to secretly give me a way out of Serra. A way out that I, in turn, gave to Izzi.

I hope he’s not angry. I hope he’ll understand why I could not accept his help.

“Laia,” Elias says as we reach the eastern edge of the city. “We’re close.”

We emerge from the warren of Serra’s streets near a Mercator depot. The lonely spire of a brick kiln casts the warehouses and storage yards into deep shadow. During the day, this place must bustle with wagons, merchants, and stevedores. But at this time of night, it’s abandoned. An evening chill hints at the changing season, and a steady wind blows from the north. Nothing moves.

“There.” Elias points to a structure built into the walls of Serra, similar to those on either side but for a weed-choked courtyard visible behind it. “That’s the place.”

He observes the depot for long minutes. “The Commandant wouldn’t be able to hide a dozen Masks in there,” he says. “But I doubt she’d come without them. She wouldn’t want to risk me escaping.”

“Are you sure she wouldn’t come alone?” The wind blows harder, and I cross my arms and shiver. The Commandant alone is terrifying enough. I’m not sure she needs soldiers to back her up.

“Not positive,” he admits. “Wait here. I’ll make sure it’s clear.”

“I think I should come.” I am immediately nervous. “If something happens—”

“Then you’ll survive, even if I don’t.”

“What? No!”

“If it’s safe for you to join me, I’ll whistle one note. If there are soldiers, two notes. If the Commandant is waiting, three notes repeated twice.”

“And if it
is
her? What then?”

“Then sit tight. If I survive, I’ll come back for you,” Elias says. “If not, you’ll need to get out of here.”

“Elias, you idiot, I need
you
if I want to get Darin—”

He puts a finger on my lips, drawing my gaze to his.

Ahead of us, the depot is silent. Behind, the city burns. I remember the last time I looked at him like this—just before we kissed. From the taut breath that escapes him, I think he remembers too.

“There’s hope in life,” he says. “A brave girl once told me that. If something happens to me, don’t fear. You’ll find a way.”

Before my doubts creep up again, he drops his hand and flits across the depot as lightly as the dust clouds rising from the brick kiln.

I follow his movements, painfully aware of the flimsiness of this plan. Everything that has happened so far is the result of willpower or sheer, dumb luck. I have no idea how to get safely north, beyond trusting Elias to guide me. I have no sense of what it will take to break into Kauf, beyond hoping that Elias will know what to do. All I have is a voice inside telling me I must save my brother, and Elias’s promise that he will help me do so. The rest is just wishes and hope, the most fragile of things.

Not enough. It’s not enough.
The wind whips my hair about, colder than it should be this late in the summer. Elias disappears into the courtyard of the storage building. My nerves crackle, and though I inhale deeply, I feel as if I cannot get enough air.
Come on. Come on.
The wait for his signal is excruciating.

Then I hear it. So quick that I think for a second that I’m mistaken. I
hope
that I am. But the sound comes again.

Three quick notes. Sharp, sudden, and filled with warning.

The Commandant has found us.

M
y mother hides her anger with practiced cunning. She wraps it in calm and buries it deep. She tramples the soil on top, puts a gravestone on it, and pretends it’s dead.

But I see it in her eyes. Smoldering at the fringes, like the corners of paper blackening just before they burst into flame.

I hate that I share her blood. Would that I could scrub it from my body.

She stands against the dark, high wall of the city, another shadow in the night but for the silver glint of her mask. Beside her is our escape route, a wooden door so covered in dried vines that it’s impossible to see. Though she holds no weapons in her hands, her message is clear.
If you wish to leave, you go through me.

Ten hells.
I hope Laia heard my warning whistle. I hope she stays away.

“You took long enough,” the Commandant says. “I’ve waited hours.”

She launches herself at me, a long knife appearing so swiftly in her palm that it’s as if it popped out of her skin. I dodge her—barely—before lashing out at her with my scims. She dances away from my attack without bothering to cross blades, then flings a throwing star. It misses me by a hair. Before she reaches for another, I rush her, landing a kick to her chest that sends her sprawling.

As she scrambles up, I scan the area for soldiers. The city walls are empty, the rooftops around us bare. Not a sound comes from Grandfather’s storage building. Yet I cannot believe that she doesn’t have assassins lurking close by.

I hear shuffling to my right, and I lift my scims, expecting an arrow or spear. But it’s the Commandant’s horse, tethered to a tree. I recognize the Gens Veturia saddle—one of Grandfather’s stallions.

“Jumpy.” The Commandant raises a silver eyebrow as she scrambles back to her feet. “Don’t be. I came alone.”

“And why would you do that?”

The Commandant flings more throwing stars at me. As I duck, she darts around a tree and out of range of the knives I send hurtling back at her.

“If you think I need an army to destroy you, boy,” she says, “you are mis
taken
.”

She flicks opens the neck of her uniform, and I grimace at the sight of the living metal shirt beneath, impenetrable to edged weapons.

Hel’s shirt.

“I took it from Helene Aquilla.” The Commandant draws scims and engages my assault with graceful ease. “Before I gave her to a Black Guard for interrogation.”

“She doesn’t know anything.” I dodge my mother’s blows while she dances around me.
Get her on the defensive. Then a quick blow to her head to knock her out. Steal the horse. Run.

A bizarre noise comes from the Commandant as our scims clash, their strange music filling the silence of the depot. After a moment, I realize it is a laugh.

I’ve never heard my mother laugh. Never.

“I knew you’d come here.” She flies at me with her scims, and I drop beneath her, feeling the wind of her blades centimeters from my face. “You’d have considered escaping through a city gate. Then the tunnels, the river, the docks. In the end, they were all too troublesome, especially with your little friend tagging along. You remembered this place and assumed I wouldn’t know about it. Stupid.