Chapter 7 #2
My marks flared—both of them—and I didn't stop it.
Didn't want to stop it. Silver fire tendrils lashed from my skin toward the nearest poster, whispers rising to a keening wail as they clawed at the falsehood, trying to unweave it thread by thread, to burn the lie off the wall and show them the truth—
The ward hit me like a hammer.
King's magic, old and vicious, had warded the posters against my marks. It slammed through my Unravel and reflected, turning my own power back on itself. Light fractured. Shadow surged. The cobblestones under my feet cracked, lifted, spun—
Behind me, glass shattered. The air hiccuped, that same sick ripple I'd seen in the merchant, and I felt it in my marrow: the Veil, screaming.
Because of me.
Because I'd just made it worse. Instead of revealing the lie in the posters…they had multiplied, there were now thousands of them, gleaming on every surface of the city.
I reeled back, blood trickling hot from my nose, my vision swimming. The crowd had scattered and taken cover, fleeing the glitch, the cracking streets, the wrongness bleeding out from where I stood.
Serenya caught me before I fell. Her face was pale. Grim.
"The loft," she said. "Now. Before they regroup."
I didn't argue, I couldn't. Because my throat was closing and my hands were trembling and somewhere behind us the fae with my face was sobbing in a pool of her own blood and I had just proven every lie the King had told about me.
The Rupture.
Maybe he wasn't lying after all.
We took the long way. Through the tanner's alley with its eye-watering stench, up the crumbling stairs that only locals knew existed, across the rooftop where the tiles had long since given up pretending to be watertight.
My legs burned. My nose had stopped bleeding, but the taste of blood still coated my tongue.
Almost there. Almost home.
The thought was a lifeline. The loft wasn't much—a cramped space above a dying spice merchant, accessed through a trapdoor that stuck in humid weather and a ladder missing its third rung.
But it was ours. The only place in Velmyra where I could sleep without one eye open.
Where Serenya's herbs hung drying from the rafters and my spare blades and throwing stars waited oiled and ready under the floorboards.
Just a few more steps.
It was right there—the spice merchant's sagging roof, the crooked chimney pipe, the stain on the plaster where rain had been getting in all winter. Ordinary. Invisible. Ours.
Then Serenya stopped so suddenly I nearly crashed into her back.
I didn't have to ask why.
The street below our building was crawling with midnight-blue cloaks.
Enforcers. A dozen at least, maybe more—spilling out of doorways, blocking the alley mouths, their silver-banded helms catching the fading light like beetles' shells.
Two of them flanked our entrance. Our secret entrance, the one no one was supposed to know about.
The trapdoor hung open. Splintered. Torn from its hinges.
An Enforcer descended our ladder carrying Serenya's medicine chest. Another followed with an armful of my clothes—the good ones, the ones I'd been saving for when we finally left this city behind.
At least someone would get use out of them. Maybe an Enforcer's wife would look fetching in my only decent tunic.
The joke died on my tongue.
"No." The word fell out of me, small and stupid.
Serenya's hand closed around my wrist in warning.
But I couldn't stop staring.
They'd found it. They'd found us. The one place that was supposed to be safe, the one corner of this rotting city that belonged to no one but Serenya and me—
Gone. Just like that. Torn open and picked through like carrion.
An Enforcer emerged from the building holding a limp figure. Small. Pale. Familiar.
The stuffed rabbit Serenya had kept since childhood. The one she thought I didn't know she still slept with.
He tossed it into the gutter.
Serenya's breath hiccuped, a tiny fracture in her composure. But I heard it. Felt it shatter my own.
Home.
We didn't have one anymore.
"Baker," I whispered. "We try the baker."
Serenya nodded once, her eyes fixed on that gutter where her rabbit lay in the muck.
We melted back into the shadows, two ghosts with nowhere left to haunt.
Morcam's bakery sat three blocks east, tucked behind a leatherworker's shop in a building so nondescript you'd walk past it twice without noticing.
That was the point. Five years, his ovens had hidden more than bread—false-bottomed flour bins for smuggled medicine, a cellar that led to the old cisterns, a back room where the wounded could heal without Enforcer eyes.
The male ran a resistance operation disguised as sourdough. I respected that.
He'd been the first contact to trust us when we arrived in Velmyra.
Serenya had saved his daughter from fever.
I'd pulled a knife from his brother's gut after a deal gone wrong.
We weren't friends—Morcam didn't do friends—but we were owed.
In this city, debts were the only currency that hadn't been devalued.
The shutters were closed.
That wasn't unusual. Morcam kept odd hours, worked through the night, slept when the ovens cooled. I raised my hand to knock—our knock, three short, two long—
The shutter twitched.
Just a sliver. Just enough for one eye to peer through the gap, catching the last dregs of daylight.
I saw recognition. I saw the moment it curdled into fear.
"Morcam." I kept my voice down. "We need—"
The shutter slammed.
Wood on wood. Final as a coffin lid.
I stood there, hand still raised, knuckles hovering over the door that had always opened before. Behind it, shuffling. The scrape of furniture being dragged. A barricade. Against me.
"Morcam." Louder now. Desperate, and I hated how it sounded. "Please. We just need one night. A few hours. Anything—"
His voice came through the door, muffled by the wood between us. A voice I'd heard laugh over spilled ale, curse at burnt crusts, soften when he spoke his daughter's name.
Now it just sounded tired. And terrified.
"You're not Amaria anymore." The words landed like fists. "You're twenty million marks. You're a death sentence for anyone who stands too close." A pause. A shaky breath. "I have children."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
What could I say? He was right. Every word of it.
"Go," he said. "And don't come back. I can't—" His voice snagged. "I'm sorry. I can't."
Serenya's hand found mine and I let her pull me away.
We were halfway down the alley before I realized a deep tremor was running through me again. Not from exhaustion but from the understanding that had been building since the square, since the mob, since my own power had cracked the street we ran on.
I wasn't just hunted anymore.
I was contagious.
Anyone who helped me would burn. The people who'd once reached out their hands were learning, one by one, to pull them back. Friendships and alliances weren't enough to save us anymore. Not when my face was worth more than their futures.
So where do you go when no one will open their door?
I dragged the back of my hand under my nose. It came away red. Still bleeding from the Veil surge—or from whatever I'd torn open in that plaza. The blood was warm and steady and I was running out of sleeves to ruin.
Which reminded me—at least one place in this city still owed me stitches before opinions.
The Medical Tent. Neutral ground. Healers who'd taken oaths that predated kings. Oaths that were supposed to be stronger than fear.
Surely that still meant something.
Famous last words.
The medical tent crouched at the edge of the canal district like something the city had tried to shed and couldn't. Canvas walls, patched a dozen times over.
The smell of crushed herbs and boiled linen drifting through the gaps.
A place where healers asked no questions and the dying came to do it in peace.
And somewhere inside—if she was still alive, still working, still foolish enough to practice where the Crown could find her—was Velish.
She'd trained Serenya. Taught her the old ways, the ones the temples had tried to burn out of existence.
More importantly, she ran the only smuggling line left that could move people past the city gates without a caste-brand check.
If anyone could pull a miracle out of this disaster, it was a female the Crown had been trying to kill for thirty years and kept failing.
"She might not help," Serenya said quietly. "We haven't spoken in two years. Not since—"
"She'll help you."
Serenya's jaw tightened. Whatever had happened between them, she wasn't sharing. But I'd seen the way she flinched during certain rituals, the gaps in her memory she never explained. Velish had claimed a piece of her once. Maybe that debt ran both directions.
The guard at the entrance—thick-necked, scar bisecting his lip—looked us over. His eyes snagged on my face a moment too long. Twenty million marks. I could practically hear him doing the math. To his credit, greed lost.
Then he looked away. Stepped aside without a word.
Neutral ground. The healer's code held fast. Or so I wanted to believe.
Inside, the air was thick with sickness—rot and the cloying sweetness of brewing herbs. Rows of cots. Bodies huddled in threadbare blankets. Healers drifting between them like ghosts who hadn't realized they'd died yet. This was where hope came to get practical.
Serenya scanned the space, searching. "There. The back corner."
I followed her gaze. A healer bent over a patient, her silver-streaked hair pulled back in a severe knot, hands steady as she stitched a wound by lamplight. Even from here, the precision was unmistakable. The calm.
Velish.
We started toward her—
And my Luminar mark prickled.
Faint. Almost nothing. Just a whisper of wrongness brushing the edge of my senses, the Unravel stirring in its sleep.
I slowed. Let my eyes drift.