by Tara Sim
“Why don’t we start now? Here, I’ll show you how to use a compass. Navigation is important when it comes to sailing.”
But after a while, Amaya had gotten bored and instead played around the ship. Her father had dozed off under the warm sun, the sails furled and the anchor weighed as they bobbed in the ocean’s current.
Which was how she had challenged herself to climb the mast—and how she came to be stuck.
“I can’t climb down,” she’d cried.
Arun had stood at the bottom of the mast, trying and failing to hide the alarm on his face. “It’s all right, thikha. I’ll be right here, so just jump and I’ll catch you.”
“No!” she’d wailed, holding the mast tighter. “I’ll fall and die!”
“You won’t. I promise.” He had held his strong arms out, motioning with his hands for her to jump. “I’ll catch you.”
“But…”
“Just trust me.”
She did trust her father. She always had. So Amaya, crying, took a deep breath and leaped from the mast and into her father’s waiting arms.
He’d caught her easily, staggering back a couple of steps as he held her tight against him.
“Don’t scare me like that again,” he had admonished, but there had been no heat in his words, just shaky relief. He kissed the top of her head as she clung to him, feeling safe and protected so long as he continued to hold her. “And whatever you do, don’t tell your mother.”
Amaya liked to think of her father this way: strong and brave and knowing what to do. Reaching for his hand and trusting that he would never let go of it. It helped to drive away the memory of what had happened a year later, when the debt collectors had come. When her father’s life had been taken by the man to whom he owed an unpayable debt, and Amaya had stopped feeling safe.
Stopped being able to trust.
“Are you sure about this?” Remy asked, his voice hushed.
“Nope,” Amaya whispered back. “But if I spend another minute in that apartment, I’m going to strangle somebody.”
“Do I get three guesses who?” Remy asked with a knowing smile. She had told him about the way she’d blown up at Cayo yesterday, how they had been avoiding each other ever since.
It wasn’t just that she was embarrassed for the outburst; she had been truly, desperately angry, all the negative emotions she had built up over the last few weeks crashing out of her like a bullet from a pistol. Cayo had insisted he hadn’t been thinking of going back to gambling, but she had seen him hesitate. Flirting with the idea of losing himself to the very thing that had ruined him.
Cayo came from wealth. He had always had everything handed to him. After living as Countess Yamaa, Amaya could see the allure of it, the way the rich didn’t have to worry about trivial things such as where their next meal would come from, or if they had enough money saved up to buy a new pair of shoes.
She had certainly seen that in him while they were in Moray, but she had also seen who he was underneath the boy that society had molded. She had seen a boy who cared about his family, who would do whatever it took to protect them. She had seen a determination to right his wrongs, even if it cost him more than he was willing to give.
He had been willing to send his father to jail. More than anything, that had shown her the type of person Cayo Mercado was.
But there was still so much more he was capable of being. Amaya just didn’t know if he was dedicated enough to find out what that was.
Amaya sighed, her breath turning to vapor in the night air. Remy had gotten her a thicker jacket, but threads of cold stole through the collar and cuffs. “I can’t be responsible for him. Besides, my focus is on something bigger.”
Remy looked across the street. They were perched on a rooftop above Heliope Avenue, waiting for the last of the workers to leave the currency exchange office. Remy was dressed in dark clothing, his naval jacket tactfully left behind. Amaya’s fingers constantly drifted to the outlines of the hidden knives she carried.
Knives that Boon had given her, a reward for learning how to fight with them.
“Make sure you always have one hidden on your person,” he had told her, an odd tone in his words that Amaya knew couldn’t have been protective. Nervous, maybe, to begin their long con. But she had listened to him, grabbing tightly to any scrap of advice he’d given her.
She had once thought of the gift as high praise—an honor, even. Then the bastard had double-crossed her.
But she would have been a fool to get rid of knives as nice as these.
Finally, when the waning moon had risen completely, the front doors opened and the last of the workers stepped out. They locked up the building and strolled down the lantern-lit street, heading home for the night.
She and Remy climbed down the side of the building—the Chalier style tended toward balconies, which she much appreciated—and hurried across the street.
“I still can’t believe you roped me into this,” Remy muttered as she jiggered the lock on the back door. She had scouted it earlier that day, pretending to be lost as she wandered through the street, wanting to make use of Jasper’s lead. “What if we get caught?”
“Are you seriously the same boy I grew up with? Don’t you remember stealing from the pantry on the Brackish, or eating some of the oysters we’d caught before reporting to Zharo?”
“That was different,” he whispered back. “And besides, that was mostly you. I was just the lookout.”
“Then reprise your role and keep a lookout.”
Amaya slipped inside, blinking as her eyes transitioned from moonlight to the shadows of the offices around her. She hunkered down, searching for some sort of alarm system, and stopped Remy before he could walk in after her.
“Wait.” She pointed upward, to a thin, nearly invisible string about chest height. “That’ll trigger some warning bells, I’m guessing.”
Remy cursed and crouched beside her. “You’re strangely good at this.”
“Maybe I was born to be a thief. Maybe I should take up with Jasper and his crew.”
“I know you’re joking, but your words just gave me a stomachache.”
Amaya crawled forward until they were clear of the alarm rigging and stood. They were in some sort of supply closet filled with empty canvas sacks and sheafs of paper and pencils. Through the door, they found a more spacious room with wide, wooden desks lined up on either side. The windows along the walls were close to the ceiling, filtering in sheets of moonlight.
“This is where they take their customers,” Remy whispered. “All the coins and notes that come through here will end up in their safes.”
“And where would those be?”
Remy pointed to a heavily locked door nearby. “Through the most fortified door, if I had to guess.”
There were a half dozen padlocks that Amaya opened only after a great deal of patience and quite a bit of finger cramping, silently thanking Liesl for teaching her these tricks. When she opened the door, Amaya felt a drop in temperature and found a long staircase leading down.
“There’s a Kharian myth about monsters that horde their treasures underground,” she said as they descended. “The legend goes that if you disturb them, they’ll turn you into a golden statue and add you to their collection.”
“Well, I wouldn’t fault them for their taste. I’d make a pretty attractive statue.”
Amaya pointed out a trip wire at the bottom of the stairs, which they smartly avoided. She found a bit of flint next to an extinguished torch on the wall and struck it against one of her knives. The low, flickering light illuminated a row of thick metal doors, all leading into separate safes.
The first safe they opened contained Kharian currency, colorful bank notes and silver coins with cameos of the gods. The next safe was full of money from the Sun Empire, a curious collection from different regions that ranged from brass to agate and even to wood.
“Here we are,” Remy said as they pulled open the next safe. There were neatl
y stacked rows of boxes filled with Rehanese currency, gleaming in the torchlight.
But all she had eyes for were the golden senas. Amaya took out three coins and laid them on the ground. Remy then poured a clear alcohol from his flask, filling the underground chamber with a sharp, medicinal smell. They sat and watched the coins, Amaya lightheaded from the alcohol fumes as her belly squirmed.
None of them turned black.
“What?” Amaya picked one up, finding only solid gold. “But I thought…”
Frowning, Remy opened the next safe, finding solstas and nieras native to the Rain Empire. When they performed the same test again with the alcohol, Amaya’s heart sank as the solstas’ coating gave way to black.
“Damn it,” Remy muttered as the alcohol ate away the gold on two of the coins.
“Did Mercado send these?” she whispered. “Or… do you think Boon…?”
“I have no idea,” Remy whispered back, already sounding defeated. “But I’m sure the Benefactor has something to do with this.”
“We can’t just leave them here,” Amaya said. “What if we took them?”
“We’ve been over this.” Remy scrubbed a hand through his hair, eyes tight with remorse. “Taking the coins out of circulation will lead to economic catastrophe. Moray is already on the brink of total collapse. Which would mean that possession of the city state would go to the Rain Empire, now that the prince is dead. And if the Rain Empire faces the same catastrophe…”
“The Sun Empire will attack,” Amaya finished for him. “If they’ve been spared from the fever, anyway. Gods. This… This has the potential to cause a full-scale war.”
“One thing at a time.”
She reluctantly returned the coins to the safe, pocketing the black discs. The torch extinguished, they headed back upstairs, up another flight of steps leading to a set of double doors. Amaya picked the lock and the doors swung open, revealing shelves and shelves of files.
“Mm, good,” Remy said, looking around. “I was hoping this would be easy.”
They worked quickly, silently, pulling file after file off the shelves. Amaya tried to find the word Benefactor anywhere—Liesl had written it out for her in Soléne so that she could memorize it—but the words and numbers began to bleed together, making it difficult to focus.
“I found something.” Remy rushed to her an hour later, pointing at a file in his hand. “Records from a year ago, with Mercado’s name. He was using these offices to exchange the money, but he must have switched to make the trail harder to follow.”
“What does it say?”
Remy read silently to himself, brow furrowed. “There’s no address. Damn it. Oh!” He pulled the file closer. “Wait a minute.…”
He continued to read, and Amaya crossed her arms with mounting impatience. She was about to snap at him to hurry up when he finally met her gaze again, just as confused as he’d been in the vault.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he whispered. “According to these records, currency was being sent to Moray. There’s no record of Mercado sending anything back.”
Amaya nearly grabbed the file to read it for herself before remembering it was all in Soléne. “I thought Mercado was sending fake coins here?”
“That’s what we all thought. After seeing the coins in the safe, I guessed that the Benefactor might have been grafting the substance onto the solstas. But maybe they had a different arrangement.”
Amaya shook her head. They only had bits and pieces of a puzzle that still had not taken shape. It felt as if the more they found out, the further they were from understanding.
“There is something useful in here, though,” Remy said.
“What’s that?”
He lowered the file, grinning. “A name.”
A door opened below them. They exchanged a horrified look.
“We didn’t trip any alarms,” Amaya hissed. “We would have heard them!”
“Doesn’t matter, we need to get out of here now.”
They put the files back and crept toward the stairs. The man who had closed up the offices for the night had returned, muttering to himself as he checked his desk for something.
“Swore I left it here,” they heard. “She’ll kill me if I lost it.”
Then he headed back for the stairs.
Remy frantically pushed Amaya back into the records room, closing the door silently behind them. He pointed at a window in the back, but Amaya’s eyes widened and she shook her head.
“We’re on the second story,” she whispered. “We can’t make that jump.”
“Who said anything about jumping? We’re climbing to the roof.”
Remy carefully opened the window, wincing as it scraped a bit. The stairs outside creaked under the weight of footsteps coming closer.
“Come on,” Remy whispered, gesturing for her to follow. He disappeared out the window, reaching high above for the roof’s ledge and hoisting himself up.
Amaya put her hands on the windowsill and leaned out, greeted with a kiss of cool night air. Her heart beat frantically in her chest.
“Amaya!”
She looked up at Remy, crouched on the roof with his hand extended toward her.
“I won’t let you fall,” he promised. “Come on.”
But she couldn’t move. She could only stare at his hand, waiting to clasp with hers.
Remembering her father’s hand reaching for her when she had gotten stuck on the mast.
Remembered Boon’s hand extending toward her, to help her up from the sand on the atoll.
Behind her, the door began to open.
Panic welled in her throat, choking off her breath. Her mind shut off completely and her body took over, making her dive out the window and hang on to its ledge with her fingers.
The man hummed off-key as he searched the shelves, scraping and shuffling until he crowed with triumph.
“I take it off for one bloody minute and suddenly it becomes the lost treasure of Valens.” A rustle, then his voice climbed higher as if impersonating a woman. “‘Take your wedding ring off, Belamy, I don’t want to see it.’ Last time we do that here…”
Footsteps, then the door closing. The creak of the stairs. The slam of a distant door.
Her fingers were already fatigued from all the locks she had picked. She was beginning to slip when Remy reached down and grabbed her, then hauled her onto the roof.
“Amaya, what in the hells?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you take my hand?”
She stared at him, lips parted. Swallowing, she looked away as the wind blew her hair back. “I don’t know.”
She didn’t want to say that she felt fractured and unsure, that for one painful second she’d had a vision of him releasing his grip and letting her fall. Just as so many others had let her fall.
Hands were too easy to let go of.
Remy sighed and hugged her. She slowly returned the embrace, missing when this had been easy, when she could just rest her head on his chest and allow it to be a comfort.
“You need to trust me, Amaya,” he whispered. “I know we’re not the children we once were, but that doesn’t change the fact that I care about you. That I want to help you.”
She closed her burning eyes, trying not to remember a day on the sea, eating dumplings and cake with her father. The way his arms had felt around her. “I know. I’m sorry.”
But she had trusted Boon, and look where that had gotten her.
Remy pulled back, trying to smile. “Well, near-capture or not, at least we got something out of this.”
“You said you found a name in the file. Whose name was it?”
“Julien Caver. I don’t recognize it, but it’s a start, and certainly better than nothing.”
Amaya nodded, thinking of the pile of counterfeit coins below their feet, as dangerous and deadly as a monster’s horde.
When she returned to the apartment, she thought everyone would be asleep.
She wasn’t expecting to find Cayo sitting at th
e table, an arm wrapped around his midsection as if it pained him.
“Cayo?” She came closer, frowning at the state of him. He was bruised, hair a mess and falling limply across his forehead. His clothes were torn and stained, his posture defeated. “What happened?”
When their eyes locked, he rolled his shoulders back with a wince, sitting up straighter.
“I want you to teach me how to fight,” he said.
The hands of the gentry must remain soft and smooth, unmarred by callus or other such visible sign of physical exertion. That is how we tell the elite from the commoner.
—THE HANDBOOK FOR NOBLES, VOL. I
Cayo regretted his decision as he climbed onto the roof of the tenement building after work the following day. Amaya had found a ladder leading to the flat slab of stone and mortar, deeming it the perfect place to begin training.
Cayo did not agree. There were no protective mats, no practice weapons, no walls to shield his incompetence from anyone who happened to look out a window.
He had woken this morning already sweating with nerves. It wasn’t merely the thought of fighting that tangled his intestines into a pit of restless snakes; it was also the thought of being alone with Amaya, of having her instruct him in something so foreign and intimate. Part of him was still upset about her earlier outburst, but it was quickly fizzling away into a singular, heavy block of dread.
Yet when he crawled onto the roof after another frustrating day at the fish market, the wind buffeting his shirt, he quickly realized the two of them would not be alone. Liesl stood waiting, Deadshot on her right and Amaya on her left.
“Um,” said Cayo. “What’s this?”
“You really think Amaya’s capable of teaching you all you need to know?” Liesl said, ignoring Amaya’s glare. “She’s still green herself. I’m going to be in charge here.”
“And I’m going to be your sparring partner,” Amaya said.
Cayo swallowed and glanced at Deadshot, her expression—as it normally was—stony and unreadable. “And you?”
Deadshot smirked, the tiniest crack in a statue. “I’m here to make sure they don’t kill you.”