I made it. I’m on the fire escape.
I stand shakily, my injured ankle throbbing, and I wipe my rust-covered gloves on my pants. The fire escape creaks dangerously with my weight, as if it might give. I’ll have to mention this to Ronan later; this thing is a death trap waiting to happen.
In a few quick steps, I reach the open window and peek carefully inside. Beyond the thin, mint-green curtains, I spy a cluttered kitchen that opens into a small living area, much like our apartment. No one is in sight, but there’s a bag of groceries still sitting on the kitchen table. Someone is probably home.
The window is a tight fit, but I manage to lower my legs inside and slide through, narrowly avoiding banging my head. I land basically in the kitchen sink and clamber down to the floor. The mismatched teacups in the sink rattle alarmingly, and I hold my breath, but no one comes in.
I tiptoe into the living room, peering down the hallway. The bathroom door is closed, and the light is on. Not even daring to breathe, I rush across the living room, ease the front door open, and dash out into the hallway.
I make a run for the stairs. I’ve wasted too much time, and I need to get those bandages before—
I turn the corner in the stairwell and run smack into a protector.
The man looks down at me, and his eyes widen. “You’re—”
I duck under his arm and run.
I don’t dare look back, just sprint up the stairs, into the hall, and straight toward the apartment. The door is unlocked, and I practically throw myself inside, slamming it shut behind me.
A second later I realize my mistake. I didn’t check to see if the apartment is empty. It isn’t.
Ronan and Mari are both standing in the living room, staring at me.
Everyone starts to speak at once.
“Alli, where—”
“What’s going—”
“Ronan! What are you doing here?” I glare at him. “Didn’t you get my note?”
My brother looks lost for words. “Yes, I got your note. Alli—”
“Then why’d you come back here? I told you it isn’t safe!”
“Isn’t safe from what?” Ronan says.
At the same time, Mari starts, “There are six protectors watching the building, Alli. We’re perfectly safe—”
“No, we are not perfectly safe,” I say. “No offense to your protector friends, Mari, but they don’t have a clue what they’re dealing with. I mean, I just got into this building despite them, didn’t I?”
That shuts everybody up for a second.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I say, starting toward the hallway. “But you need to get out of here, and you need to do it now. Get the protectors to escort you somewhere safe. There are . . . there are bad people looking for you.”
“Wait,” Mari says as I take another step, “you can’t just—”
“No time to explain. Just trust me,” I say, and I head for the bathroom.
I rummage frantically through the cabinet until I find the stash of first aid supplies. I have no idea what Rosalia needs, so I just grab everything. Maybe she’ll know what to do with this stuff.
“Alli.” Ronan stands in the doorway. “You need to tell us what’s going on.” Then he sees the stuff in my hands and the blood all over me, and his eyes widen. “Is that blood? Are you hurt?”
“Not mine,” I mutter, adding a roll of bandages to my pile. “We have to go, Ronan, we all have to—”
“Not until you tell us why, Alli. What were you thinking, leaving me a message like that? Do you know how worried I’ve been? How worried we’ve both been? I didn’t know where you were, I didn’t know what was wrong, I didn’t know how to find you. . . . Mari’s had half the protectors in the city out looking for you and the other half here, trying to guard against some unknown threat! I don’t—”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I scared you and I’m sorry I put us in danger, but none of that really matters right now.”
“Of course it mat—”
“People are dying,” I say loudly, talking over him. “Dying or about to die, right now, and I’m the only one who can help. I’m the only one who can stop the—the bad guys, so I need to go. You have to let me go.”
Before he can respond, I push past him. He reaches for my arm, but I yank myself free, sending first aid supplies flying, and run into the living room.
Mari stands in front of the door, blocking my way.
“Stop,” she says. “Explain.”
“I—”
Ronan walks in and stands beside me. “The whole truth this time, Alli. Please.”
I look back and forth from his face to Mari’s. They’re not budging.
I know I have to tell them something. I haven’t been fair to them. But how do I even start to explain?
And I can’t tell them everything. If I do . . . Ronan will hate me when he learns the truth, that I’m a thief and a liar and I’ve been one all along. Mari was right about me from the beginning. She’ll probably throw me back into prison once I confess, only this time I won’t have my brother waiting for me on the other side.
My brother. If I don’t tell him the truth, he’ll never trust me again.
If I tell him, I’ll lose him forever.
This is it. The two halves of my life have collided, and I can’t keep them both anymore.
“Alli.” Ronan’s voice is soft. “Just tell us the truth.”
So I do.
Chapter Twenty-One
I sit down on the sofa, dumping the first aid supplies in a heap beside me. Ronan moves to sit in the armchair. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, giving me his full attention. He doesn’t look angry—yet.
I take a deep breath. I still haven’t figured out how to tell them about the Guild without incriminating Beck.
I look at Mari, who’s still standing in front of the door, her arms crossed. Her expression is impossible to read. “So here’s the thing,” I say, mostly to her. “There are some friends of mine who are . . . they’re good people, really, who are kind of mixed up in some bad stuff, and I don’t know how to tell you about them because I don’t want to get them in trouble. I know being a protector is your job and that means you’d have to report them, but I really, really need you to not do that. Please.”
Ronan looks at Mari, who thinks this over for a long minute. “You’re right,” she says. “It’s part of my job to report criminal activity. I’d be obligated to report something if I knew about it.”
My heart sinks. How can I be honest without getting Beck arrested?
“But,” Mari continues, making my heart perk up a little, “if I didn’t know a crime had happened—if I were to hear about a completely hypothetical situation, for example—I wouldn’t have to file a report. Not without concrete evidence.”
Now she tells me. “So if, say, I were to tell you a completely hypothetical story that isn’t at all based on anyone I know, you’d be able to keep that entirely hypothetical story to yourself? Hypothetically?”
“Hypothetically speaking, yes,” she says. “Although I would feel obligated to report it anyway if I thought someone’s life was in danger. If, for example, you tell me that someone may or may not be about to walk in here and murder Ronan, I would need to report that to the protectors downstairs as a precaution to make sure he’s safe. But if you tell me that someone may or may not have committed a crime in the past, well, I don’t have to report my suspicions unless I have hard evidence.”
I mull this over for a moment. I need to choose my next words very carefully. “Okay,” I say, looking back at Ronan, “I’m going to tell you a very hypothetical story now. I need you to listen and not interrupt until I’m done, and then you can be mad at me if you want. Okay?”
Mari nods. Ronan just looks concerned, which makes me feel more guilty than ever. “All right, Alli,” he says, “start at the beginning.”
I take a deep breath, and then I let everything out in a rush before I can think better of
it. “So you may or may not have heard of certain legendary organizations for people whose activities are . . . less than legal. Organizations like, say, a group or a society or a guild.”
Mari’s eyes widen. Whatever she expected me to say, it wasn’t this. Ronan takes a second longer to catch on, but he masks his surprise more quickly.
“So, hypothetically,” I continue, “let’s say there was this orphan girl in Azeland who ran away from an orphanage and ran into some protectors and got cursed. But luckily she ran into this boy—his name was possibly Berkeley or perhaps Beck—and he was a member of this secret illegal organization. And he told the orphan girl that if she joined this organization, then she’d have the money she needed to buy a cure and not die. Which sounded pretty great to her, because she’s a fan of not dying.
“So, long story short, she goes to Ruhia to join this group, but things go really wrong during these illegal activities that were hypothetically done, and someone died. The boy was able to go back to the secret organization, but the girl got caught and went to prison awhile. Which turned out to be a good thing, because actually the girl has this long-lost brother who’s really pretty great, and he let her come live with him and everything, and so all she wanted to do was just live a normal life and not do anything else illegal and not go back to the secret organization ever again. There was just one teeny tiny little problem: Beck showed up on her doorstep, and he told her that some bad people might want to kill her brother, and he needed her help to stop them.”
Both Ronan and Mari are listening quietly, trying to keep their expressions masked. I can’t look at them during the next part, so I stare down at the rug and tell them the rest. “So hypothetically the girl starts helping the boy in secret, and she doesn’t want to tell her brother because she doesn’t want to get Beck in trouble, and also she really doesn’t want her brother to send her away. But then things get more dangerous than she thought. The bad people in this hypothetical organization are called Shadows, and these bad people want to do some bad things, and Beck tried to stop them and he got caught. So now he’s been captured, and possibly the Shadows are going to kill him, and the girl needs to rescue him. But there are a couple of other problems.
“Problem one: Beck has another friend whose name is Rosalia. She might hypothetically be a member of this hypothetical organization, maybe, and she’s really rude and annoying but also not such a bad person deep down. But one of the evil Shadow people stabbed her in the side, and she’s kind of bleeding all over the place, and I think she might die, not hypothetically.” I hold up my bloody hands for emphasis here.
“Problem two: The evil Shadow people are led by a guy who knows the girl’s brother and who threatened to kill him only a few hours ago. A guy who is not hypothetically named Garil Gannon.”
Ronan blinks, looking more than a little stunned. Mari glances at him in confusion.
“Gannon?” Ronan asks. “Are you sure?”
“Very, very sure,” I say. “He mentioned you by name, Ronan. He knows where you work, and I’m not sure if he knows where this apartment is. That’s why I went to the office to warn you.”
Ronan just shakes his head. “I never thought . . .”
“He’s . . . he’s leading some very bad people. He wants to overthrow the current leader of the . . . organization and put himself in charge, and I think he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. Which kind of accidentally includes me. And he seems to have some kind of vendetta against you for some reason.”
“Wait,” Mari says, breaking in for the first time, “let’s back up a minute. This girl who’s been stabbed. Where is she?”
Rosalia’s going to kill me for this later, but if I don’t tell, she’ll die first. “She’s hiding in an abandoned chapel on the top of the hill down the street.”
Mari frowns. “The little Harona chapel? That was closed ages ago. I forgot it was still standing.”
“We’ve kind of been using it—Beck and Rosalia and me—as a hideout,” I confess. “It’s where I’ve been going, mostly, when I’ve been sneaking out.”
Ronan and Mari look at each other. There’s so much going on in their expressions that I can’t even begin to decipher it. But they know each other well enough to converse without even speaking. I wait.
“All right,” Mari says, “here’s what we’ll do. I have first aid training, so I’ll go find this girl and make sure she’s okay. Ronan, Alli, you need to get out of this apartment. Go to the protectors downstairs and tell them where these Shadows are keeping the boy, and they’ll—”
“No!” I say quickly. “We can’t tell the protectors, Mari. They won’t distinguish between the Shadows and the other thieves. They’ll just arrest everybody, Beck included.”
Mari presses her lips together.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say quickly. “But not all of them should be arrested. Beck is just a kid who was raised in the G—the organization. His mom died, and he’s all alone, and it’s the only life he’s ever known. He’s a good person, really, who’s saved my life more than once. You can’t arrest him.”
“I know you want to protect your friend, Alli, but—”
“If you need to arrest someone, just arrest me, okay? I knew better than to steal and get mixed up with thieves again, but I did it anyway. I lied to both of you and I snuck out and I’ve been hanging out with thieves. You can throw me in prison if you want. But don’t punish Beck just because of how he grew up.”
Mari looks unsure, so I keep going. “If you send protectors in there, you and I both know it’ll get dangerous really fast. They’ll be arresting people left and right, and the thieves will try to run or fight their way out, and people on both sides might die. Your protector friends aren’t prepared for what they’d be walking into. But if you let me go, I can find my friend and stop the Shadows. I can tell the leader of the thieves about Gannon and his plan, and then the thieves will take care of him themselves. Nobody except the Shadows will get hurt, Mari. But you have to let me go now.”
“I’m going with you,” Ronan says immediately, standing up.
“No, I—”
“I’m not letting you walk into this by yourself. I don’t want you to do this at all. But if you want to try to save your friend, I’m coming too.”
Mari finally leaves her post by the door and gathers up the first aid supplies I’ve scattered across the sofa. “I’ll tell the protectors downstairs that it was all a false alarm, and then we can leave. I’ll find the girl in the chapel and see if I can help her.”
“We’ll meet you there after,” I say. “Beck has some healing magic—his mother was a healer—and he might be able to help her after we rescue him.”
Mari nods, tucking a roll of bandages into her pocket. “All right. But if you don’t show up after a few hours, I’m sending the protectors after you whether you like it or not. Where will you be?”
“The Night Market,” I say. Mari opens her mouth to ask, but I hold up one hand. “No time to explain all that right now, but yes, it’s real, and no, I don’t know its exact location. But I know a thilastri who can take me there. That’s all I can tell you.”
She frowns. “Be careful.”
“And, Mari? That girl you’re about to help—she doesn’t deserve to go to prison either. She’s just been trying to help her family.”
Mari sighs. “I’m not making you any promises. But I’ll do what I can to save her.”
I don’t have time to argue the point, so that will have to be good enough. “All right, let’s get going.”
I turn to Ronan. “Are you sure you want to go? You could leave with the protectors and—”
Ronan reaches out and pulls me into a hug. I’m so startled, I don’t know how to react, so I just sort of stand there, but it feels nice anyway.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Alli,” he says.
And for the first time ever, I actually believe it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ronan and I r
un through the dark, small halos of streetlights guiding our way. It would be faster to take a carriage, but there aren’t many out after dusk, and it would take too long to find one. So we run, our boots sloshing through the snow on the pavement.
“So tell me,” I say as we pause on a corner to catch our breath. “Who is this Gannon person, and why does he want to kill you?”
“I never would’ve thought . . .” He hesitates. “Gannon used to be another apprentice at Avinoch’s. We were sort of competitors, since both of us were hoping for promotions someday, but we were on pretty good terms at first. He was always this friendly, unassuming guy that everybody liked. But after a while I realized there was something off about him. He would come and go at strange hours, he was often late, he never shared anything personal about himself or let anyone see where he lived.
“Then some strange things started happening. Important files disappeared. Paperwork got messed up. Pieces of evidence vanished. And almost all of it involved this big fraud case Avinoch’s was handling against this prominent businessman.”
“Let me guess. Gannon was the one behind it?”
Ronan nods. He glances up and down the street before we turn the corner and rush down the next block. “I never managed to prove how Gannon was connected to that businessman or why he did it, but I caught him red-handed stealing a file out of the office one night, and I told Avinoch about it myself. Gannon tried to deny it, and things got ugly. Avinoch tried to call the protectors, but Gannon fled before they arrived. That was the last we heard of him, and I honestly hadn’t thought much about him since then. I knew he was corrupt, but I never thought he was violent or dangerous. I certainly never thought he’d hold a grudge against me, though I suppose I did get him fired and nearly arrested.”
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