Chapter 66
KALI
Ispun around—
The sight before me tightened my grip on the two dripping knives.
The easily recognizable form of a lanky guard shoved Tarri into an abandoned bus, a part of Ilasall’s fleet of public transportation. I didn’t need to see the man’s face to know his nose was crooked.
“Arlo, no.” Tarri’s disbelief flowed through the bus’s open doors as he climbed the two steps, his body too slender to fully block the entrance.
Arlo. Ilasall’s citizen we’d considered to be a part of us, the man who’d earned our unconditional trust, the guard who’d helped us to sneak into Ilasall many times.
Ava’s friend of many years.
And all this time, he’d been posing. Scheming. Waiting for an opportunity to turn his back on us.
My blood tore through my veins, shredding the thin membranes of my capillaries.
Stalking the short distance to them, I demanded, “Why?” My question leaked bitterness so mighty, I tasted it on the back of my tongue.
Arlo stopped near the driver’s seat. Slowly, oh-so-slowly, he turned his head a fraction.
“Because I want to crush your compound.” He drew a knife from one of his two chest sheaths.
“You’re like flies, contaminating the minds of our people and steering them toward damnation. We had to lure you out—trap you.”
I followed his vanishing shape into the bus, ignoring how blood suctioned my boots to the asphalt. “That’s not what I asked.” Climbing the two steps, I crushed the glinting fragments of glass into dust. “Why are you doing this?”
Disregarding me, he backed a disarmed Tarri toward the back of the bus. Frantic, she searched the gray plastic seats bolted to the floor for anything to use as a weapon.
“Arlo,” I called out, imbuing the two syllables with as much contempt a person physically could. From now on, the four letters making up his name would always carry a sour aftertaste.
“I don’t answer to you,” he threw over his shoulder.
Right as Tarri glanced at me for help, he kicked her right in the sternum.
Her back slammed into a vertical pole anchored between the ceiling and the floor. Collapsing, she gasped for air.
But then her reflexes kicked in, and she rose onto her elbows—
And stopped.
“Pathetic,” Arlo sneered. “Just another case proving women don’t belong among fighters.”
With a vacant look, Tarri stared at her feet, her pink sneakers drenched in blotches of maroon. “My legs.”
Her whisper pierced my chest like an arrow.
Arlo had broken her spine.
I flipped one of my knives, gripping it by the blade. A breath, and together with the next, the sharp edges flew toward my target—Arlo’s back covered by a dark green shirt, the tears in the uniform revealing the injuries he’d sustained.
He ducked—
His foot caught on Tarri’s, and he crashed onto her shins. But she didn’t even wince. Just flopped onto her side, unable to move, to scooch away, to fight. To reach for the weapon clattering onto the bus’s floor.
“For this, you will answer to me,” I promised Arlo.
Tarri was my friend. Someone I valued so dearly, her life sat on a shelf higher than mine.
A second blade slipped from my hold. The handle twirled in the closed space—
Arlo dodged, using a storm cloud-colored seat as a shield, but my knife reached its destination. Sunk into flesh.
Except it wasn’t Arlo’s.
The rubber handle poked out of Tarri’s calf, a dark stain unfurling in her navy sweatpants. But instead of crying out, she simply stared at the weapon. “It…doesn’t hurt.”
Arlo sneered, “But this will,” and jumped into the aisle, an arm’s-reach away from Tarri.
I patted the sheaths on my upper thighs and my chest, cursing their emptiness. But eventually, my fist coiled around a handle secured to my bicep…right as Arlo’s knife vanished in Tarri’s neck to the hilt.
Her eyes bugged out. Fingers uncurled from the traitor’s wrist. A line of blood rushed down to the hollow of her throat as she gasped for air.
With a grunt, Arlo jerked the weapon out. Crimson spurted out of the wound so deep the blade had undoubtedly damaged everything vital.
Convulsions rocked her upper body, a fountain of scarlet flooding the ash-hued floor, drenching into her clothes, seeping into the strap of my shirt I’d wrapped around her arm.
My hands shook as my world narrowed to the tremors gradually deserting my friend.
Someone I’d considered my family. Someone I’d spent countless nights eating ice cream with.
Someone who’d taught me how to work the tables at Vice.
Someone who’d been aware of my past. Someone who’d once convinced me to try fries with caramel syrup drizzled on top.
Someone who’d laughed so hard at my disgust she’d choked on her orange juice and the sweet liquid had gushed from her nose.
Her chest flattened in tandem with mine as she stilled, her mouth parted, her lips crimson, drops of red marring her pasty complexion, her eyes as glassy as puddles of rain in the mornings.
“Don’t waste time thinking I’m here to kill you too,” Arlo drawled as he got back to his feet and flicked his knife, splattering Tarri’s blood on the metal seats framing the bus’s aisle. “My orders regarding you are different.”
Widening my stance, I beckoned the fissure in my heart to transform into a thread, to weave around my fist clutching my last knife.
If Arlo’s life was the cost I needed to offer to the gods to walk out of this bus and avenge my friend, I’d pay it. Twice. Thrice. A hundred times or more. He’d slaughtered my sister, and that…
That never went unpunished.
Digging my heels into the floor, I bent my knees, finding my balance. The tang of iron hung heavy in the air, and I invited it into my system, using it to saturate my vow with calmness. “You are going to die, Arlo.”
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of Tarri’s blood on his brown skin. My fingertips tingled with the need to carve the streak of my friend from his face.
“Obviously.” His combat boot squeaked as he stepped over my friend’s lifeless form. “It’s just that my time to go won’t be today.”
Before fury could get the better of me, I exhaled. Counted to four, like Gedeon had taught me. Inhaled. One, two, three, four. Breathed again.
And smiled. “Not if I can help it.”
His sneer was as cold as the swirls of mist clouding the windows. “Cute.”
“Like your dick is going to be once I skewer it at the next barbecue.” Charred and tiny—much more appealing than it was now.
“That’s the best you can do?” He scratched his fuzzy eyebrow. “How disappointing.”
“How about this? I can make sure you’re still breathing when I cook your cock.”
Leaning against a vertical pole, he used his knife to clean the crusted blood from under his nails. “You can stop with the insults. They’re a bit…unsophisticated for my taste.”
“Fine.” The chill climbing through the bus’s open door boosted my dropping adrenaline levels. “I’d rather spend my time flaying your ugly face, anyway.”
Arlo sighed. “I see you haven’t been properly disciplined to get that nonsense out of your head. But it’s nothing a fist or two couldn’t fix.”
The casualness in his tone brought me back to my days in the city. To the purples and blues and greens and yellows I’d seen on the green-banded women passing me by in the streets. To their gazes fixed on the ground.
To the blows I’d willingly taken myself if it helped the men to get it up. My body had been a commodity, to be used and traded for what I’d required or wished for. Like the books telling the real story of our world.
“Oh, don’t give me that look.” He waved his knife at me. “I’m not the villain here.” A drop of crimson left the blade as he pointed it at the window displaying the battle outside. “You’re the one who's at fault for all the casualties.”
My muscles burned from lingering in the ready-to-deflect-and-parry position for too long. “We’re not forcing anyone to take a stand. It’s a choice they’re making.”
“As it is my choice to trample the insanity you’re causing and bring the city back to the proper order.”
“It’s not proper if it’s forced.”
“So you keep saying. But have you ever tried herding a crowd? If you don’t employ a whip, nothing is going to happen. You need strength and fear to impose control. Otherwise, we’re just animals on the brink of extinction.”
“And what’s so wrong with that?”
“It’s the end of everything, Kali.” The way he said my name caused my last meal to rise back up.
“That aside, I’m pretty sure you’re aware of where I’m going with this.
” Pushing off the pole, he stalked toward me, coming to a halt ten feet away.
“My higher-ups informed me of the situation with your health records.”
The documentation stating I was a non-fertile citizen. The records Ilasall had reviewed last autumn, after they’d realized the data had been falsified.
Arlo rubbed his forehead, spreading the evidence of his victory against Tarri.
“I know you cheated the system. That you were supposed to wear a green wristband instead of the black one.” At the red film on his fingers, his lip curled.
“So, as you can guess, my orders are to capture you, not get rid of you. I’m not even allowed to get my own fill of you.
” He smiled, his canines yellowed from the nutritional bars all black-banded citizens consumed as a substitute for actual food.
“We could’ve had so much fun together. I would’ve broken you gently.
” A black band gleamed on his wrist as he shook it.
“Unfortunately, this prevents me from having access to you.”
Disregarding his displeasure, I spat out, “You can’t break what’s already fractured.” I’d split into two when I’d betrayed Alora, and nothing, no one could ever heal that. Not even Gedeon or Zion. Or the two of them combined.
Condemning the only friend you had at thirteen, your first love, to the worst life imaginable, to becoming a property of a green-banded man, a baby machine and not a drop more, would change anyone irrevocably.
Inching closer to me, Arlo left a trail of scarlet footprints behind him. “No, but you can glue the pieces back together into any shape you want.”
I tensed my core in preparation for his inevitable attack. “Try it then.”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head, and the black helmet slid from the movement, the strap under his chin secured too loosely.
“I wonder, how would your boys react if they saw you on my leash? Not a physical one—I’m not into those types of games—but an invisible tether.
Where you stood by my side, abiding by my rules, not a single thought about rebelling left in your mind,” he detailed.
“You would make a beautiful toy. Something I could show off.”
The picture he’d painted was cruel, immoral, wicked, but not a hint of dread tickled my heels.
I’d heard worse.
I’d survived worse.
I’d overcome worse.
So if he sought to catch me, to take me captive, he better prayed to the gods sailing the stars to grant him luck.
Because I wasn’t going to yield.
Like a vengeful angel, I was going to soar the skies, hunt my prey, and snap my beak at any predators challenging me.
“You will pay for this.” For draining my friend of her life. For convincing us he was on our side. For tricking us into believing his lies. For being so closed-minded, he refused to consider his masters might have turned him into a brainless puppet.
Ilasall’s military was wired like the microchips embedded into their purlicues: created to follow a specific set of rules and nothing more.
No questioning their laws, no pondering whether their creators were worth the worship, no free thinking.
“We’ll see.” Arlo twirled his knife graced with Tarri’s blood around, clutching it so hard, his knuckles turned white. “If you’re expecting backup, then know it’s not coming.” He passed another row of seats. “We blocked the catacombs.”
I stood my ground. “And yet half of your military is sick, aren’t they?”
A shadow crossed my peripherals, and a body slammed into a window from the outside. I grabbed the closest pole to hold myself up as the bus rocked on its wheels. Quick as a flash, someone cracked their target’s neck, and the corpse fell below the frame of the window.
Realization that I couldn’t recognize either the victor or the fallen curdled my stomach.
But it didn’t affect Arlo.
With a grin, he leaped onto me. “Let’s dance.”