40. FORTY #2
She skidded to a stop at a dead end, a cloud of dust pluming out from beneath her boots. Zeb and Cam came up next, heaving to catch their breath with hands on knees.
Mitek brought up the rear, teeth bared in a grimace, tunic sleeve already pulled back, tanka leveled behind them.
Fankalo stepped past them as a half-dozen boys covered the opening to their only exit. She had been wrong—two of them did bear tankas. The others held knives. As they stepped closer, she scanned them for their leader.
“Kashaan, where are you?” she growled.
Her Luck spiraled in warning just before something scraped down the wall beside her and landed with a soft thud. He’d taken the rooftops.
Heart pounding, she feigned indifference, pressing her fists into her hips. “Ah. Promptness. I can appreciate that.”
Kashaan leered at her. “Don’t think I ever seen a crew takin’ orders from a girl.”
“That’s probably the reason you still have all your limbs where they’re supposed to be.”
He frowned. “Give up the haul before I beat your lot bloody and keep you as a plaything.”
Fankalo’s crew shifted behind her. No one had ever taken a sexual stab at her.
Not to her face, anyway. But it had only been a matter of time: she was long past the point of passing for a boy.
She gave Kashaan a too-slow blink. “Oh no. An insinuation has been made at me. Quick, somebody defend this strike against my honor before I blush.”
Cam snickered, but his hands fisted.
“Your fucking funeral, eah?” Mitek sniffed, but stepped closer to her.
Zeb’s throat made a sound like a mad dog.
Kashaan pulled a knife from his belt.
Fankalo scanned her various impulses, confirming that her initial plan still retained the best outcome.
“I’ll make you a deal, slumlord. A duel of leaders.
No weapons. No seconds. If you win, you leave us be, but take our full haul, and we won’t fight back.
No damage to your party.” She waggled her tanka-bearing forearm.
“If I win, I give you five percent for your trouble, we part ways as happy friends and avoid any unnecessary discord.” Though she did love discord.
Kashaan’s eyes narrowed. “You mean fight you? With fists?”
“Will you take the deal or not?”
“I’ll have your pretty face in the dirt before you can blink. You won’t land a hit.”
She smiled and lifted her chin. “Watch me.”
She took in her opponent. The way he favored his left leg but was right-handed. Too bad for him. He held out a hand for her to shake. She took it, seeing that he planned to throw her with it the moment their fingers clasped. He could grapple.
That made two of them.
So she took wrist control with her opposite hand, twisted beneath his arm, and drove his extended elbow down over her shoulder. A sickening snap, like the final axing of a tree, echoed through the alley. Kashaan howled but drove the knuckles of his free hand into the side of her face.
Fanklalo tasted copper as she twisted—maintaining her hold—threw her hips back, and tossed him. Kashaan hit the ground hard, but she still knelt on him, his arms pinned by her knees, hand to his throat.
“Five percent?” she panted. There, she’d even asked politely. Manners were free, after all.
The sound of a tanka bit locking into its launch chinked directly behind her.
How authentic. A slumlord who went back on his deal.
Truly, Shrokan was tourism at its finest. Kashaan began laughing, and Fankalo tightened her grip.
In her peripheral vision, Mitek aimed his own tanka at Kashaan’s head.
Great. A fucking standoff. Where was the scene her Luck had predicted?
The one with her crew running free and Kashaan’s blood in the dirt?
The moving shadow of wings darkened the earth beside them. Then the air around them was split by a spine-clenching scream. The encore of a hollow thump followed as a body hit the ground behind her. Then another. Fankalo’s stomach soured. She didn’t bother to take her eyes off Kashaan.
Calver had found them. The kind of Calver with no spark.
A dagger plunged into Kashaan’s eye socket, skewering him to the dirt beneath her before he had the chance to breathe a death rattle.
Fankalo lunged to her feet and grabbed her brother by the shoulder. “Aay!” she screamed. Calver ignored her, shaking her off like a fated flea. He moved not towards one of the slumlings, but Mitek.
“Easy, Reaper. Forget whose side I’m on?”
Calver raised the dowaga and Mitek yelped, his tanka pointed between Calver’s eyes.
“AAY!” This time, her shout was loud enough to put more cracks in the adobe. Calver didn’t look at her. So she pulled her boot free of her foot and chucked it at the back of his head. He turned and caught it before it hit its mark.
So. There was his fucking foresight.
Calver blinked and shook his head as though coming out of a trance. He holstered his weapon to free his hands, dark eyes empty of the boy she knew, replaced with malice.
“He was on the ground!” she raged. “I had him pinned, defenseless, when you–”
Calver opened his mouth and bellowed. The sound was so forceful she backpedaled into the building behind her. His hands flew again.
Her mouth hung open for the time it might take Killari to snap up Mitek’s lunch before she found her argument. These were the words of a butcher. A murderer. A madman. He had no right to reprimand her. She dug her foot into the dirt. “I fought him so they didn’t have to.”
What she’d studied of his psychosis told her this was a projection. But her life would not be like his. She jutted her chin forward. “He wouldn’t have. I’ve been training in hand-to-hand combat since I was seven. I—”
Calver rounded on Fankalo, snapped her into a headlock, and squeezed. Fankalo’s blood ran cold. Preservation, he’d finally snapped. She tucked her chin. Stretched her hands for his face to jab at his nose, claw his eyes. Fates, nothing was working. He was going to choke her out. He—
He let her go. Fankalo scrambled from him, breath coming in ragged gasps.
A hand clenched around her wrist. Mitek’s.
He pulled her into a huddle he’d formed with Cam and Zeb, still facing down the now-wary boys from the slum.
As they slunk, one by one, away from the alley, Fankalo never let her eyes leave her blood-brother.
Calver signaled.
Fankalo massaged her neck, feeling for all the world like a child under reprimand. Tears bit at her eyes. If he was normal, they could have faced all this together. Found Methu’su. Worked on strengthening their gifts… together.
Calver twitched and shivered suddenly. Then he turned toward the bodies of the two boys behind him. He slicked his dowaga with their blood and used it to draw his Ratka in the dirt.
She shook her head. She couldn’t feel him. His light. His Luck. Only darkness. Bile rose into her throat as Calver moved to face her, face twisted with spite.
They sailed away from Seraphinden with the setting sun. The Rogue’s Rapture set its course, the navigator took his shift, and Fankalo found her way to the aft balcony, hoping for a private moment with the night air. She was not ready to face her brother in her room.
She sank to the floor, knees to her chest. The wind off the back of the ship pulled her unruly curls in a tangle around her face. She tried and failed to keep it from her eyes, and swore then and there to lob it off in the morning. What did it matter that Mitek liked long hair anyway?
The crests they snaked through the water glistened like snail trails beneath the moonlight. She watched them for long minutes, embracing the peace of knowing the Rapture could—and would—carry her away from all her troubles.
Footsteps approached her pitiful hiding spot from the resource room. Fankalo cringed. Maybe someone was drunk, and just needed to puke over the rail.
It was too much to hope for.
Mitek burst through the door and poked his head around the corner in a way that told her he’d been checking corners for several minutes.
The wind blew his braids across his face, where they caught in the stubble on his chin.
He put them back into place with a simple run of his fingers. He made it look so easy.
“I know you’re mad. But we need to talk.”
Something lifted inside her. “Do we?” Was Mitek actually going to admit what a little shit he’d been?
Was he going to apologize for choosing Shrokan over her, even though she’d given him more money and power than a deckhand could have ever dreamed of?
Would he tell her he’d never let her feel alone like that again?
Fates, she wanted him to. Her whole body hurt with how much she wanted him to.
“About Calver.”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t want to talk about Calver.”
“I know you don’t want to talk about Calver.
Trust me, I don’t want to talk about Calver.
Nobody likes to look someone in the face and be told that they’re wrong.
But hear me now: you’re wrong on this one.
He’s broken. He almost killed you today.
And me?” Mitek dragged his top teeth over his goatee.
“Bratty, he didn’t recognize me. He was about to lob my bleeding head off.
Something needs to be done. I don’t want to be the one to say I told you so. ”
“Go away, Mitek.”
He pointed a finger at her. “Not until we’ve figured out a different plan for taking out the Tera’thians. One where he’s not involved.”
“We don’t need a different plan. Calver has it covered.”
“Calver is mentally unstable. I won’t let you put every man in this mission at risk because you’ve convinced yourself you’ve failed as a person unless you keep faith in him.”
“Go away, Mitek,” she repeated without looking up. Fates help her, she would not cry.
“Brat—”
“That’s an order!”