CHAPTER 16 RAYA #3
“Nothing would make me happier,” Ezzo clips in reply, then together, we blink back into the physical realm.
The world explodes into sound and color, the darkness changing in texture as we swap the smokey ink of the Gray for the warm flicker of coal-burning lamps.
“Can you see her?” I whisper, scanning the near-empty market.
“Not yet, but she can’t have gone far. Let’s try back there.” He motions towards the row of workshops that sits behind the stands. “If she’s after a typic, then that’s where they’ll be.”
Right, of course. Because there are always a few vendors who work late into the night, and work equals craftsmen and craftsmen equal apprentices. Older children, usually, the kind the Meridian asked Alara to abduct.
“There—by the blacksmith’s hut.” The moment we round the corner, I catch a glimpse of her silver robe and her mousy brown hair, making straight for a boy who’s fetching water for his master’s tank.
He’s older than the girl we watched shatter, stronger-looking by a decent margin and quite clearly better nourished, exactly per the Meridian’s instructions.
“Okay, good.” Ezzo pitches his voice low. “Then you distract Alara while I scare the boy away.”
“What—no. That is not what we agreed.”
“What do you mean not what we agreed? We agreed to stop her.”
“Stop and follow are not the same thing, Ezzo. If we want to know what the Meridian is up to, then we have to let Alara take him.”
“Let Alara take him?” he parrots, mouth gaping as though I’ve lost my marbles. “That is a child, Raya. He can’t be more than fourteen!”
“And that girl couldn’t have been more than six.
” I refuse to let his outrage shame me. “Every pile of glass in that house was a child, Ezzo—and poor children, at that, street kids people are quick to forget.” I certainly forgot about them quickly enough; after a few short seconds spent reading their names on all those “missing” flyers, I put the thought right out of my mind, went to go annoy my rich mother.
“If we run Alara off now, we’d only be sending her in search of the next.
So yes, we have to let her take him. That’s how we find out what the Meridian is doing—and how we stop him from doing it again.
” My logic is callous; I know that—but it’s also sound and Ezzo is smart enough to follow it through to the same conclusion.
He drags in a mouthful of air, then another, and another, mulling over whatever objections are still urging him to argue, discounting them one by one until there’s no other option left.
“Gods, you Shades really are something,” he mutters, even as he relents.
“Hey, that’s a Hue doing the abducting, so you can put that sanctimony away. Will she use her gift to do it, do you think?”
“No, our gifts only work in the Gray—and she’s an Emerald, anyway, so hers is a protective gift, not an offensive one, good for projecting her In-Betweens around others but not for much else.
My guess is she’ll use a charm—there, watch her hands,” Ezzo says, right as Alara slips something into the boy’s pocket.
Well, I’ll be damned. A dazed look instantly clouds his face. “A compulsion charm. How did you know?”
“That’s what I would have done.”
It’s quite the admission after the scolding he just gave me.
“Spoken like a true criminal.”
“We are what you Shades make of us. Now, come on, I don’t want to lose them.”
We move as quietly as we can, keeping a healthy distance so as not to alert Alara to our presence.
Once she’s steered the boy out of the market, she sticks to narrow lanes and twisting alleys, leading us back towards the part of Sarotuza into which the Meridian has sunk his talons.
But not to his church or to the halfway house—her destination proves to be far more mundane.
A laundry hall. Where the sour smell of the city gives way to the pungent stink of lye and citrus water stewing in massive pails.
“What the hells is she looking for here?”
“No idea.” An identical question is written into every line of Ezzo’s face. “But if we follow them in there, she’ll notice; we should phase back into the Gray, track their echoes.”
With a nod, I blink into the shadows after him. Laundry halls are a physical endeavor, powered by sweat, soap, and dozens of typics who spend their days scrubbing away life’s stains.
“Shit. Can you see her?” Amid all the pails and the workers, I instantly lose sight of our prey. “Where did she go?”
“Over there.” Ezzo points to a pair of fireflies flickering through the haze. Though how he can tell one echo from another is anybody’s guess.
“Are you sure it’s them?”
“Pretty sure,” he says, expecting me to take that answer on faith.
It’s only when I grumble at him to say more that he grudgingly adds, “The flickering makes it look as though all the echoes are moving, but most of them are actually not, that’s just a slight migration.
Whereas those two keep jumping larger distances between flickers—that’s how you tell. ”
“You can really see that from here?” I ask, still struggling to make the distinction.
“I’ve had a lot of practice, remember?” His irritation blunts an inch. “This isn’t all that different to watching trails.”
Which makes the more interesting question: why did he stop watching them? Because someone this good at paying attention doesn’t just slip up one day and get caught, let alone twice in the same week.
Something happened to him.
And I don’t mean the story he told me about his parents—something more recent has made him lose the will to see. Maybe even the same something that turned him cold when my questions skirted too near.
I follow him through the laundry hall and down a narrow set of stairs, towards a dimly lit cellar that screams of danger and mal intent.
Why else would Alara be leading a child into the darkest depths of this building?
Why else would the door be made of iron and require three separate locks and a chain?
“We stay in the Gray until we know what’s in there—agreed?” Ezzo asks, though he’s asking in name only.
“Agreed.” But this is one command I have no intention of fighting, because with each step we take, the dread in my bones is deepening, the churn in my stomach gathering in bile and strength.
I already know what the Meridians do in the shadows: they shatter children and murder Shades.
Whatever we’re about to find in this cellar won’t be good.
Colors help me . . .
The scene that greets us lives up to every one of my fears and worse.
A double-width surgeon’s table dominates the center of the room, with two sets of restraints set at intervals along the metal, made to hold a person by the neck, wrists, and ankles, like some kind of medieval torture.
All manner of ominous tools hang off rusted hooks along the wall: needles, knives, tourniquets, lengths of rubber tubing and bottles filled to the brim with a liquid that’s viscous and cloyed.
Blood.
Even stripped of color, the sight is enough to sicken, as is the fear emanating from the frantic echo flickering inside the cage in the corner. That makes four echoes total—Alara, the typic, the prisoner, and an unknown.
“We need to get in there.” I scan the room for some crevice to hide in, desperate to blink back into the physical realm and see exactly what horrors are about to befall the boy we allowed Alara to kidnap.
“Over there.” Ezzo motions towards the recessed gap beneath the stairs. “But if they spot us, don’t think, just phase. We can’t help anyone if we’re dead.”
Well, isn’t that cheerful? I squeeze into the tight space after him, so close that we end up hip to hip and chest to shoulder, his breath hot against my neck in a way that feels downright lewd.
Though the second we blink out of the shadows, all thoughts of our compromising position are gone, replaced by a jolt of the utmost revulsion.
The stench is overwhelming, not just lye and lemon, but blood and decay. Blasphemy and hubris.
“You’ve done me proud, Alara, this tribute will serve us well.” The Meridian’s voice immediately snaps me to attention, setting my nerves on edge. “Get him ready. I’ll fetch the Shade.”
“Let’s get a better look. Carefully.” Ezzo’s whisper is accompanied by a tiny shifting of weight, just enough of a lean to allow us a glimpse at the table.
The boy—still under the influence of Alara’s charm—has already lain down without complaint, his eyes staring up vacantly as she restrains him, then steps away to fetch a wicked-looking needle. Once she returns, he doesn’t stay listless for long.
With ruthless efficiency, she drives the needle into the crook of his elbow, eliciting a scream that rattles me to the bone.
“Don’t.” Ezzo clamps an arm around my waist and a hand to my mouth, keeping me locked against him.
Silent. Unable to interfere as Alara stabs the pain deeper and ties it off with a length of hemp.
Clearly, she’s done this before—though I can’t even begin to imagine to what end.
At least not until the Meridian drags a squirming girl out from the cage in the corner.
Unlike the boy, the Shade doesn’t come quietly.
From where we’re stood, I can’t get a good look at her, but I can see the struggle she puts up every inch of the way, kicking and bucking as he wrangles her onto the table, and railing against each snapping of iron as the restraints rob her of the fight in her legs, then her arms, then finally, her neck, leaving her entirely at his mercy.
It’s only once the Meridian is satisfied that all she can do is muffle obscenities into her gag that he moves aside and affords me a look at her face—and when he does, it takes every ounce of strength I have to not bite right through the meat of Ezzo’s hand.
Because that’s not just any Shade the Meridian has gone and shackled to the table; it’s an Orange with dark, angular eyes and sharply cut black hair.
It’s Akari.