by Janice Hardy
Though we couldn’t see them yet, scouts had sketched out where the blue-boys were hunkered down behind barricades on the other side. Twelve of them.
Ipstan gave the order and his squad charged, a wall of steel and anger rolling across the bridge. Soek and I followed, waiting for a break in the fighting to slip through. We crested the bridge as Ipstan and the others hit the barricades.
Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp!
Flashes washed over me, prickling my skin one right after the other. Ipstan was wrong! The blue-boys did still have pynvium weapons! Soek staggered and fell against me, but caught himself and stayed upright. Ipstan and the others cried out and dropped, slamming against the stone bridge. I tugged Soek faster. We had to get in range before the soldiers reached our people lying helpless on the bridge. It wasn’t the command tent, but maybe they had more pynvium and the flash would trigger all the way there anyway.
We reached Ipstan and the others. I turned and slapped my hand against Soek’s chest plate. Pictured dandelions blowing in the wind.
WHOOMP! Whoomp! WHOOMP! Whoomp! WHOOMP!
The bridge soldiers screamed and dropped, but no echoing pynvium thumped in the distance.
I drew Soek’s pain away and his eyes snapped open. He scrambled to his feet without a word. We knelt as one, and each grabbed one of the unconscious officers. We drew and they jerked awake.
A horn sounded and another answered it.
“Was that ours?” Soek asked.
“No.” My stomach churned. “Heal faster.”
Boot stomps shook the bridge behind us, our people moving forward, expecting us to have secured the bridge and cleared the square, unable to see in the rain that we hadn’t. Shadows moved in front of us, becoming soldiers as they closed in.
So many soldiers.
Ipstan hollered orders and his squad attacked. “Nya, flash it!”
I had nothing left to flash. Nothing to use but my hands and whatever pain the blue-boys gave me. I pulled Soek into the approaching army, dread coursing through me. “Get ready to heal.”
Two soldiers charged. I braced myself and stepped into them, catching their blades in my shoulder and side. Pain cut as skin cut. My hand tingled and it was gone.
I feigned a stumble and the soldiers came at me again. Stings from their swords, and Soek pulled it away. I spun, put a hand on the pynvium.
Whoomp!
No chain of flashes, but enough to make five or six soldiers scream and fall. Our people took advantage of the distraction.
More, I need more.
Bodies slammed against me, blades pierced my skin. Soek filled his chest piece with their pain and I flashed it, taking out as many as we could before they got to our people.
“Ipstan’s in trouble!” Soek cried, pointing.
Ipstan fought twenty feet away, fending off men who seemed to be taunting him, pricking him with the tips of their rapiers like cats with claws. The thin blades slid between the links of his chain mail. I headed for them, weaving as if injured, luring in attacks.
I was almost to Ipstan. Soek’s armor was full of fresh pain. Ipstan darted for a small opening in the circle. A soldier moved faster, stabbing him once—twice—three times before he even had a chance to fall.
Soek leaped forward into the circle, dragging me along with him. My hand hit his armor before my feet hit the street.
whoomp
A small sting, less than it should have been. Grit poured through my fingers as the pynvium chest piece crumbled to fine sand.
Saea, no, I flashed it too much.
“Nya?” Soek gaped at me, terrified.
“Run!”
The soldiers closed on us, thrusting their rapiers. I tried to take what I could but there were too many. Soek dodged and screamed. He stumbled sideways, blood speckling his lips.
“Soek!”
The soldier yanked the rapier out of Soek’s chest and he collapsed, dragging me down with him. I struggled, flat on my stomach, my arm pinned beneath his body. I pressed my fingers against his head and felt my way in. Please, Saint Saea, let him still be alive.
Nothing. He was gone.
His heart. It pierced his heart.
Tears blinded me. I blinked hard, wiped my eyes with my free hand. Cry later, but now you’d better move! I rolled right, sliding my arm out from under him. I rose and was jerked back to my knees. Our hands were still tied together. My knife, I needed my knife.
A shadow fell over me. The soldier who’d killed Soek sneered, his friends circling in behind him. I scanned his body for bare skin, but he wore armor on everything but his face.
Something moved beside me, lunging past me. Armor clinked, steel met steel, and the soldier staggered back.
Danello!
More of our people appeared, leaping over me and skirting around those who had fallen. They crashed against the wave of blue-boys, swords flying, people dying.
Danello grabbed my shoulders. “Nya, come on,” he cried over the shouts and screams of the fight.
“Soek!”
“Is he alive?”
I shook my head, trying to saw through the silken cord, but it wouldn’t cut.
Danello took the knife and sliced the cord in one quick jerk. He hauled me to my feet, pulled me away from Soek, so still and pale on the bridge. Dragged me toward the safety of our people on the other side.
I stumbled, thumping off bodies as we passed, Danello’s arm tight around my waist. I clung to him, shaking, hurting, my heart sputtering like a bird in my chest. Cold hands, hot face.
Another friend dead. Too many sacrifices.
My head spun, the street closing in around me. I couldn’t get enough air. I tipped sideways against Danello, gasping.
“Breathe,” he said, hand on my back. “Take a breath, that’s it—no, slow down, breathe deep.”
Soek was dead. Quenji was dead. Mama, Papa, Grannyma—all of them—dead.
More horns blew—two short blasts. Our order to retreat.
The rain continued to fall, turning dirt to mud and streets to rivers. I sat on the floor of a boardinghouse room not far from Aylin’s old building. Danello and Aylin sat with me, though no one else had joined us. One lamp sat in the corner, the flame turned low. Danello held me while I cried.
“You need to get out of that armor,” Aylin said gently when I was too spent to cry anymore.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to see what was underneath it.
“Nya?”
I kept staring at nothing. When I closed my eyes, I saw Soek; when I looked at the others, I saw the fear. I couldn’t bear to look at either.
“Danello, help me with this, would you?” Aylin tugged and lifted and together they pulled the armor over my head and set it on the floor.
Aylin gasped and pressed her fingers against her lips. “Oh, Nya.”
I didn’t look down. No point.
“Are those hives?” She reached toward my arm, then stopped. “You have bumps all over.”
“Scars,” I said. “They’re scars.” Every sword tip, every cut, healed so fast there hadn’t been time to avoid them. They’d all left their mark. And it had been for nothing.
Kione entered the room. He shut the door and stood there, dripping.
“Ipstan’s dead.”
I closed my eyes. Saw Soek’s face. Opened them again.
“Most of his officers, too. We’ve pulled back, but it’s a mess out there. Can’t see in all this rain, which is lucky for us. They won’t attack tonight. Tomorrow? Who knows?” He sighed. “Nya, what happened? Why didn’t you—”
“It’s not her fault,” Danello said.
“I’m not saying it is, but she was supposed to flash the armor at the soldiers.”
“They were waiting for us,” I said, throat tight. “They knew we were coming—that I was coming—and they were ready.” Nothing else explained the lightly guarded bridge, the pynvium weapons, the sudden ambush of soldiers. It was a trap. And we’d fallen into it.
“How many did we lose?” Aylin asked quietly.
“A third, maybe a little more. Would have been twice that if the bridge hadn’t gotten clogged with bodies. Folks couldn’t get across to join the fight.”
I twitched. All those lives, gone.
“People are talking about running. No one knows what to do. I was hoping Nya had an idea.”
They all looked at me. I shook my head. Running sounded good to me.
“She might later,” Danello said. “She needs rest right now.”
“Yeah, sure, I understand.” Kione paused in the doorway, and a fresh gust of hot, wet air blew across my face. “Get some rest.”
How could I rest when I couldn’t even close my eyes?
EIGHTEEN
Pale light cut through the window, draining the color out of the already worn carpet. At some point I’d fallen asleep, but nightmares had woken me long before dawn. I’d been standing at the window for hours.
Bedraggled men and women walked past, shoulders tense, jaws set. I’d seen those same faces years ago when Tali and I hid under bushes, crying. People who’d been thrown out of their homes, same as we were. Scowls that swore silent revenge against the man who’d killed their loved ones and turned them into beggars.
I hadn’t sworn revenge. I was too young to know what it was back then. But I’d sworn a promise later with Aylin and Danello while we stood on a farm and said we would fight for our home.
“Okay, I’m in. The Duke can send only so many soldiers at once, right?”
“It’s a small island,” said Aylin. Danello chuckled.
“Yeah, but it’s our island.”
“No, it’s our home.”
Look at our home now. Everything was grim and gray, our hope draining into the canals with the mud. But bits of blue sky poked out around the remaining storm clouds smudged across the dawn. It wouldn’t be long before the sun followed.
And when it set, we’d meet Onderaan and…
What? Run?
Maybe we should. Eggs should never fight with stones. Hope and faith were nothing compared to steel. Soek was dead because of me, because I thought we could win—believed all those hopeful faces and thought that I could do something and be more than what I was.
A Shifter.
Shifted pain, shifted blame. I couldn’t help anyone. The soldiers would come just as they’d come five years ago, yank us from our homes and throw us into the streets like trash.
Ipstan would never have charged the bridge if I hadn’t been here. Soek wouldn’t have put on the Undying’s armor and run right into pain and death. All those people wouldn’t have stepped forward to fight because of their faith in me.
I killed them all.
Worse than that. Geveg wouldn’t even be in trouble if not for me. I’d killed the Luminary. I’d exposed the experiments that had caused the first riots. It was my fault the Duke demanded more and more pynvium, trying to replace the ore I’d destroyed in Baseer. My fault the Baseeri in Geveg rebelled and killed the Gov-Gen over it.
If I hadn’t gone after Tali, none of this would have happened.
“You’re up early,” Danello said softly.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He nodded, gazing out the window. “The rain stopped.”
“A while ago.”
We watched people walk by, some with packs and travel baskets stuffed full. People were leaving, running.
“We never should have come back,” I said. “Why did I think I could change anything?”
“Because you have before.”
I shook my head. “I just made things worse. Got people killed.”
“You didn’t kill Soek,” Danello said.
“I got him killed.” Quenji, too.
“He volunteered to fight.”
Quenji hadn’t. “I flashed the armor too much. I didn’t keep track of how many times.”
“It was a battle. Even trained soldiers forget things in a battle.”
“I panicked.” I whispered, closing my eyes. Seeing Soek again, his fear, his pain. His death.
“That’s understandable.”
“No. When his armor disintegrated, I should have protected him, taken the attacks meant for him and shifted them, but I panicked. I wanted to get out of there and that got him killed.”
“Nya, you can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Then who can I blame?”
He didn’t answer. Not at first. Then he took a deep breath and turned back to me. “Blame the Duke.”
“I tried, but it doesn’t work anymore.” They were my choices, my mistakes. That made them my responsibility.
“So what do we do now?”
Staying was foolish. We could do nothing but die, and still Geveg would burn. Leaving meant that Quenji and Soek died for nothing.
Like Mama and Papa? Grannyma?
Would they have run if offered the chance?
“Wait until sunset,” I said. “Then we’ll decide.”
The noon sun shone bright, drying the puddles and the mud, steaming the air. More people were on the streets.
“Do you think the blue-boys are going to attack again?” Aylin asked. She hadn’t said much since she’d woken up, just stared out the window with the rest of us.
Danello shrugged. “Maybe. Depends if they know Ipstan’s dead.”
“Would that make them more or less likely to attack?”
“Maybe less. No leader, no resistance.”
And no reason to fight.
By midafternoon more people were passing our window, some in a hurry, and all going the same way. Hopefully an evacuation, boarding every boat on the isle and getting as far away as possible.
“Kione’s coming.” Aylin got up and went to the door.
He and three others stomped up the front steps of the boardinghouse. Aylin opened the door before he got there, and they walked in and looked around. His gaze stopped on me.
“We need you at the plaza. Everyone is gathering there, asking what we’re going to do.” He gestured at the three people behind him—one man and two women. “We were all aides to the officers, but we can’t lead the resistance.”
I gaped at him. “You think I can?”
“No,” the man said, “but people will listen to you, and that could hold everyone together until we can find someone to lead.”
“I’m not sure they’ll listen to me anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” muttered one of the women.
I frowned. “Then why ask?”
“Because we don’t know what else to do, okay?” she snapped. “General Ipstan thought you could save us. That you were this unstoppable force, but he was wrong and it got him killed.”
“His arrogance got him killed,” Danello said. “His plan was flawed, but he went ahead with it anyway. He never accounted for an ambush, never planned for pynvium weapons to be used, never even thought for a moment that someone saw or survived the tradesmen’s corner attack and reported back.”
“And he put too much faith in her.” The woman pointed at me.
“Yes, he did,” Danello said. “We all did, and that was wrong.”
My throat tightened. All true, but to hear Danello admit it?
“Because she’s just one person,” he continued. “An army isn’t about one person—it’s about a lot of people working together. What happened in the corner was lucky, and it was stupid for Ipstan to plan an entire offensive around it. Nya doesn’t even know how she did it, so how could she possibly do it again on command?”
“Then she shouldn’t have volunteered.”
Aylin scoffed. “She didn’t. You people forced her into it, with your flowers and songs and acting like she was Geveg’s patron saint. How was she supposed to say no to all that?”
No one answered.
Aylin folded her arms. “Right. Don’t put this all on her shoulders. You drag someone into the lake, don’t blame them when you get wet.”
“Will you come?” Kione asked. It
felt odd, him asking me for help when I’d practically had to beg him to help me save Tali all those months ago.
“I don’t see what I can—”
“She’ll be there,” Aylin said. What was she up to? No one was going to listen to me, not after I got so many killed. “Soon as she gets cleaned up.”
“Thanks.” Kione and his friends left, joining the growing crowd headed toward, I guess, the plaza.
“You want me to speak?”
“I think you have to or the resistance is doomed.”
“It’s already doomed. I failed.”
She huffed. “So what? That doesn’t mean you give up. And you never give up.”
I gaped at her. “Aylin, you don’t even want to fight.”
“Not even a little, but I’m behind you all the same.”
“Why?”
She took a deep breath and pointed at Tali. “Because of her. I’ve spent a lot of time with her the last few days, and she’s been singing. I thought it was just lullabies and nursery songs, but they’re stories about you.”
“Me?”
“Some of it is recent, but a lot of it is old, from when you two were little. ‘Nya stole me breakfast, Nya stole us beds. Nya tricked the soldiers and now we won’t get dead.’ Things you did to protect her.”
“I failed there too.”
“No, don’t you see? You’ve been fighting your whole life. Tali’s songs made me realize just how much, and you’re not the only one who’s had to struggle. Everyone in Geveg has. If you leave, everyone gives up and everyone dies. You have to fight, because if you can fail and keep fighting, so can they.”
“… don’t know anything more than that,” Kione was saying as we worked our way through the crowd in the plaza. His friends stood behind him. Not a one inspired any confidence. No cheers today, nobody passing back information. Fewer people stood around the fountain, but they were more closely packed together, as if clinging to each other for comfort.
“Nya’s here,” someone said after I elbowed past them. “Do you know what we should do?”
I didn’t even know what I should do.
People pushed closer. I didn’t like the looks on some of their faces. The angry ones were easier to face than the hopeful.