Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning, Mina and I run five or six miles. She covers at least twice that distance, ranging ahead, doubling back and circling me whenever I fall beneath her exacting standards.
Afterwards, I dash around, clean up and drop the dirty clothes into the washing basket, including the sock with the hole in it. I shower and use the shampoo I retrieved from Cáel’s car the previous evening.
Now both Mina and I smell like him.
It is pleasant.
Annoyingly so.
He knocks on the door, cheeks flushed, expression pained. He is pocketing something as I open it—a slim black device, not the camera.
“Crikey,” he says. “Those stairs.”
I laugh and let him in. I offer tea; he declines. Mina has already eaten, so I grab my coat and we leave.
I look at him properly as we descend the endless stairs.
Cáel wears a warded coat similar in function to mine, though far better cut. At his shirt collar, a small gold crown catches the stairwell light.
Not exactly incognito.
He notices my stare. I smile awkwardly and look away.
The device goes off again somewhere around the sixth floor. He looks at it, does not answer and puts it away.
“Velmora,” he says, without my having asked. “There is a time difference, and nobody there respects it.”
I make a noise of sympathy and think no more about it.
We forgo the cars—mine is too recognisable, and his is too conspicuous, its diplomatic plates gleaming far too cleanly—and walk.
As we move through the Ink District, I feel the runes the way you sense a change in air pressure. At street level, I can’t see them properly. Too much lies between me and the magic: stone, pipes, cellars, bodies, traffic, the dense clutter of lives built over lines never meant to be noticed.
Height strips some of that away.
Down here, all I have is pressure and direction: a low pull that strengthens whenever I turn the right way. I do not need the drawings, or even my memory of them, to find this anchor.
The pull leads me directly towards it.
Cáel walks beside me in silence, allowing me to lead.
We head towards the government apartment. Its entrance lies around the back, in a residential block adjoining the old civic building, but the pull draws me past the turning and into the square at the front.
The closer we get, the stronger the drain becomes—a deliberate, heavy suction centred on the grand official building ahead.
The street opens into a square.
The surrounding buildings are old, all built from the same warm sandstone as the Bounty Hunter Depot, their golden-brown surfaces stained now with damp and neglect.
The grandest stands on the northern side. A wide columned arcade runs the length of the building, its arches darkened by weather, pigeons roosting in the carved roundels above. Broad steps lead to tall doors of dark wood and wrought iron; one hangs slightly askew.
In its day, the building declared, “We are permanent. We matter. We will last.”
Last it has.
Though only just.
For seventy years the square has been left to itself. Trees once planted in neat civic rows have grown wild, their roots heaving the paving into ridges.
Yet it remains a gathering point.
The District Overseer appears here occasionally for elections and public addresses, each visit a carefully staged reminder that the local government has not entirely forgotten the Districts.
Today, it is crowded for a different reason.
We find a protest.
Placards. Shouting. A crowd presses against the facade of the official building, which sits squarely in the centre of the rune I mapped. These people are angry enough to be here despite knowing that every hour away from work means less food on the table.
“What are they protesting?” Cáel asks.
“When aren’t they?” I scan the crowd. “Everything. The Fade. The food. The water.”
It takes courage to protest when you have nothing.
People think it must be easy to fight when there is so little left to lose.
It is not. It is harder.
A woman near the front has brought her son. He is nine or ten and holding the far end of her placard because it is too wide for one person. He appears bored out of his mind and is trying to bop the edge of the sign on the head of the person in front of them.
I slip towards the edge of the crowd. Cáel and Mina fall into step beside me.
Police struggle to contain the throng. I watch the building and feel the rune pulsing beneath the noise.
Insistent.
Strained.
Something shifts.
“Do you feel that?” I ask.
The explosion tears the building apart.
The sound comes first—a concussive crack that empties my head—then the pressure wave.
People drop around us.
Stone, glass and metal slice through the air.
Cáel moves before I can react. He turns and shields Mina and me with his body as the world disintegrates. Dust swallows the square. Debris strikes the ground with hard, brutal snaps, and screams break through the thunder of collapsing masonry.
He keeps us covered through the worst of it, then pulls Mina and me backwards through the haze until we can breathe without choking.
My ears ring. I work my jaw until sound returns in broken fragments.
We both drop to check Mina.
Her eyes are clear, though she whines and presses against my leg. Cáel’s hands glow gold as he runs them over her head and shoulders, healing whatever the blast has bruised.
“Thank you. Are you all right?”
“I’m good.”
I inspect him anyway.
Dust coats his hair and clothes, and a thin cut runs along the back of his neck. Blood threads beneath his collar. His coat should have stopped that. The wards must have spent themselves shielding us from the blast or been overwhelmed before he was struck.
I wince but say nothing. Better to wait until we are somewhere safe enough to see to it.
“What was that?” he asks. “The Resistance?”
“No.” I am already turning the sensation over in my mind. “I felt something just before it happened. I registered it, but I didn’t understand.”
I look towards the smoking ruin. “Now I do.”
The Bone District.
The roadblock.
The Overseer’s visit.
It was not the Resistance then either.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” I say. “I think it overloaded.”
From the ground, the ruin is only smoke, bodies and broken stone. I need height. Not much—just enough to lift my sight above the worst of the interference.
A single-storey storage garage stands nearby. I mutter an apology to its absent owner and haul myself onto the flat roof. My chest scrapes against rough concrete, and my hips and ribs protest as I drag myself high enough to see across the square.
Where the anchor lay beneath the official building, there is nothing.
The central pattern has collapsed in on itself, and the lines that once ran behind it towards my apartment end abruptly.
“The rune is gone,” I call.
I stare again and trace the broken strands. “No. The anchor. The rune beneath that building held part of the network together. The anchor filled beyond capacity and collapsed.”
Why now—and whether someone caused it—I cannot yet tell.
I lower myself from the roof, drop the last few feet and bend my knees to absorb the impact.
“Are you certain?” Cáel asks.
“I can feel it. The pull has vanished.” I spread one hand towards the square. “Can’t you sense the difference?”
“No.”
Of course not.
He has never lived with it grinding him down for decades.
His navy-blue eyes search my face. I know he believes me even without proof.
“You don’t think it will happen again?” he asks.
“Here? I doubt it. Nothing else is behaving the way that anchor did. Magically, for now, this may be one of the safest places in the city.”
I glance towards the ruined building. “Structurally, it is another matter.”
He surveys the wreckage, worry tightening his features. “I have to help.”
Then I see what he sees.
I have been so focused on the runes—on the puzzle—that for a moment I forgot the people scattered across the square.
Injured.
Bleeding.
Dazed beneath the dust.
What sort of person needs reminding?
I nod, and Cáel is already moving.
He kneels beside the nearest victim, his hands working before he has finished assessing the injury. From one person to the next, he heals what he can, sharing magic openly in a place where such generosity could attract exactly the wrong attention.
He is a good man.
I knew that.
Seeing him work makes it real.
Magic this visible is dangerous down here.
I look at Mina and point towards him. “Protect him.”
She sniffs through the smoke and dust, then darts between fallen masonry and stumbling bodies until she reaches his side just as he crouches over another wounded person.
Cáel glances up and finds me through the chaos.
I nod.
He shakes his head slightly, says something to Mina and returns to his work.
I hope he will be all right.
Police push through the crowd, helping the injured while arresting people indiscriminately. Cáel’s gold crown insignia is visible at his collar.
The officers notice it and hesitate, unwilling to interfere with a foreign dignitary even while he pours forbidden generosity into the wounded.
One of them speaks into his radio, listens, then steers his colleagues towards the far side of the square. Somebody a long way above him has already been told whose collar that is.
I do not go to him.
I would only get in the way, and I do not want to make the connection between us any more obvious than it already is.
Behind him, I spot another unit.
Government operatives.
They move like soldiers—controlled, purposeful and dangerous. They head towards Cáel, and I do not like the expressions on their faces.
I bite my lip.
Then I have a plan.
It is reckless, but sometimes you must step willingly into the beast’s belly.
If I act now, I may keep him and Mina safe a little longer.
Instinct guides me, but it rests on calculation, not whim.
If I reveal what I know before hundreds of witnesses and a foreign dignitary, they can’t kill me quietly. They will take me somewhere secure, somewhere connected to whoever controls the rune network.
Being publicly arrested is safer than being quietly followed.
Not safe.
Merely less convenient for murder.
It is time to shake things up.
“They are killing us!” I shout. My voice rises above the clamour. “That wasn’t a bomb. It was their magic. The Fade isn’t a virus—it’s them!”
Faces turn.
Good.
I keep shouting, loud enough to be heard and remembered.
That’s it. Come after me.
Two operatives reach for me.
I chop the first across the throat, twist the second’s arm behind his back and sweep his legs from beneath him before either registers what I am.
Six more rush me.
One snares me with wind magic. A tight coil crushes my arms against my sides and lifts me almost onto my toes.
I nearly laugh.
Handy.
Now they have to take me somewhere, as I have become very memorable.
“They’re killing us!” I shout again. “The rune exploded—”
Cáel forces his way through the crowd.
No. There is no sense in both of us being taken.
I meet his gaze. Chaos and horror sharpen his features. “Get me out,” I mouth.
Then I am yanked backwards so hard that my shoulder nearly leaves its socket. The wind magic drops, and someone wrenches my arm up my spine as though they mean to tear it off.
My slight build gives me enough room to turn within the grip, though my shoulder still screams.
They shove me into a car, secure my hands and slam the door.
Through the window, I meet Cáel’s eyes.
And wink.