A door slammed open and two guards charged down the hall through the door she and Teo had come from.
Teo shot one in the chest and dodged the next shot. A volley of bullets followed, barely missing them and pinging off the marble floor.
Footsteps sounded from the other direction. Aina wouldn’t stand a chance against multiple men with guns while she only had blades and darts. She rushed down the hall, grabbing the dagger she’d thrown at the maid, then waited at the corner, pulse pounding in her ears. Right before fights like this, she sensed herself, along with any guilt or softness, melting away to be replaced by the Blade that got the job done, the sharp edge that made people fear her instead of the other way around.
Someone turned the corner a moment later, and she jumped. Tackling the guard to the ground, she punched him in the throat and knocked his gun from his hands. Another guard rounded the corner, but she slammed the hilt of a dagger into his head before he got a good look at her face. He dropped to the floor with a heavy thud.
More footsteps sounded from both directions, the ceiling above shaking as boots pounded across it. The light bulbs rattled in their silver cages. Teo was nowhere to be seen, but she heard gunshots from the floor above.
Turning the corner, she ran up a staircase at the end of the next darkened hall. Sweat dripped down her neck. A clock seemed to tick in her head, counting down the time until she either found Kouta or was caught in the effort.
She edged around a landing and peered upward to see guards and servants gathered around the banister ringing the next floor’s landing. Servants stood at either end, maneuvering iron chains wrapped around pulleys. Something metallic screeched. From a crack in the ceiling, a steel gate slid down to seal off the staircase to the upper levels. She couldn’t slip under—the guards would shoot her on the spot. She could try to run to another staircase, but those might be getting blocked off too, and she was running out of time. Kouta would be evacuated if she failed to reach him soon.
A vent in the wall with a bronze grate caught her eye. She waited for the steel gate to fully drop, closing off the upper landing and set of stairs ahead of her. But this vent … if it led to the other side, into the inner halls of the building beyond the gate … maybe she could get in that way.
After pulling out the nails holding down the grate with a dagger, it fell to the floor. She cringed at how loud it was, then slid inside before anyone could come to investigate the noise. It was narrow, but she had enough room to pull herself along by the elbows.
The darkness of the vent closed in around her. Pinpricks of light were in the distance, but still far away. Her breaths grew shallow; her throat closed up. She searched the dark corners of the vent as if expecting a giant spider to crawl out and devour her, or for something to grab her and pull her into the depths of the shadows. She hated the dark, but her jobs often required that she used it for cover when she had to. When she still slept on Kosín’s streets, she’d had to sleep in the dark, but often kept her eyes open at night, unable to truly relax. If she couldn’t be brave in the darkness when she had to with her jobs, she’d end up on the streets again. The thought chilled her for a moment, sending doubt through her at lightning speed.
Everything was going wrong. They’d been seen and had left bodies everywhere, some alive, some not so lucky. If Kohl were watching right now, he’d call her the biggest idiot alive. She swallowed hard, trying to shove down the sense of incompetence that rose up, but it clawed at her.
She crawled until she reached another grate. Cool air hit her from beyond, but she couldn’t see much out of the tiny holes in the grate. Instead, she pulled out her dagger again and tugged out the nails. This grate fell to the ground two stories below.
The vent had led outside rather than farther in. She was staring at the gardens, Kalaan and Isar’s moons shining down on her, illuminating the copper skin of her hands where she rested them on the edge of the vent. Taking a moment to breathe in the quiet night and let the light of the red and silver moons wash over her face, she glanced left and right.
A pipe was attached to the building with thick iron bands set every five feet or so to hold it in place. The Dom was lucky enough to have pipes, unlike anywhere else in the Stacks, but the sight was still somewhat foreign to her. Without a second thought, Aina reached over and grabbed the pipe as tightly as she could. She shifted her body out of the vent halfway, then withdrew a single leg and placed her foot on one of the iron bands, and then the next leg.
She climbed as fast as she could, her back burning with the exertion, Kohl’s voice in her head screaming, Stop being weak!
The third floor’s window came into view. Peering over, she saw an empty hallway. Freeing one hand from the pipe, she anchored herself in place, then withdrew a knife to cut open the screen so a hole appeared big enough for her to squeeze through. She grabbed onto the window ledge, removed her legs from the pipe and for one horrifying second dangled in the air before hauling herself up to sit on the ledge.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead, but before she could take another breath to calm her nerves, a hand latched on to her shoulder and yanked her off the windowsill.
Dropping to the floor, she head-butted the person behind her. Their nose cracked. They tried to call out, but she spun around and punched the guard in the jaw, knocking him unconscious, the blades between her knuckles leaving bloody marks all over his face.
She took a moment to listen. Gunshots still fired from somewhere, which meant Teo was doing fine. This hallway was less lavish than the one downstairs. The walls were a pale beige color. Detailed carved wooden panels sat above doorways with lamplight glinting off their smooth finishes.
The carpet muffled her footsteps as she walked down the hall. At the corner, she crouched and quieted her breaths. An empty floor spread away ahead, and on the right, only visible if she peered around the corner very carefully, was a door with three guards standing outside it. Just then, someone about her age was escorted into the room, and it was locked behind him. It wasn’t her mark, so it must have been his younger brother, Ryuu Hirai. Perhaps they were both inside.
Careful not to prick her fingers, she withdrew a small blowgun and four poison darts. She placed one in the blowgun. She blew into it, replaced the dart, and repeated until all three guards fell to the ground unmoving with darts in their necks—the effects would last several minutes, giving her all the time she needed. Placing the last dart between her teeth, she moved forward.
A rough grunt sounded behind her. Whipping around, hands going to her knives, she saw Teo knock out a guard who’d been creeping up on her.
“You go in. I’ll keep watch,” he said, his hands covered in someone else’s blood as he dropped the guard to the floor. “That was his younger brother who went in, so he must be hiding there too.”
With a cheery wave, Aina leapt over the guards’ immobile bodies and opened the door ahead, expecting a bedroom. What she actually saw made her roll her eyes. A library. Of course Kouta would be in a library even in the middle of a lockdown on his own house.
It was one like she’d never seen before. The whole library was circular with bookshelves set upon rising concentric platforms, the room so wide that the farthest bookshelves disappeared into the room’s shadows. Cedar beams crisscrossed the ceiling in an umbrella-like design, meeting in the middle. A wide table sat in the sunken center of the room, but was unoccupied.
Kouta must be among the bookshelves. And what of his brother? All the guards must have been busy searching the halls to find her, not yet aware that she was already here.
A hand latched on to her shoulder.
“No one is supposed to be here. Intruder! Guards, help!”
She spun around, shooting the dart out of her mouth. It buried itself in the servant’s neck, and he collapsed on the floor with a dull thud.
Aina moved forward, searching every inch of the place for Kouta and placing another dart in her mouth as she went. She kept her footsteps light. The libr
ary was so quiet, the slightest sound would give away her location and the Hirai brothers could hide. But as she passed an aisle between bookshelves, her breath caught.
There he was, at a desk, scribbling in a notebook full of figures, probably something to do with their family’s mining business. Shadows encroached around the small bubble of golden light from the lamp on his desk. She withdrew a diamond-edged dagger.
For a moment, she hesitated, doubt gripping her. Success had never been so close before, never right at her fingertips and so easy to grasp.
Good things don’t happen to girls who come from nothing.
Another Blade should be in this mansion, a defenseless target the only thing standing between them and their future. It didn’t seem real that this could be her opportunity.
Yet she was the only one who could make it real.
Lunging forward, she grabbed Kouta around the neck and forced him to the floor in the span of a breath.
He tried to speak, but she swept the blade across his throat, blood coating her arms in a hot wave. All his money wouldn’t save him now.
She never felt joy from killing, but with this one, like the baker, she felt a small sense of justice. Kouta was a Steel, the same as all the others who kept people like her poor and Inosen like her parents at their mercy. But unlike the baker, she’d just earned twenty-five thousand kors for this kill.
Before letting Kouta drop to the floor, her eyes fell to a ring on his right hand: three large diamonds interspersed with two rubies on a silver band. That would fetch a nice amount of kors.
As she slid the ring off his finger and placed it in the pouch with her darts, a gunshot fired and a searing pain reached her side, making her drop the dagger. She let go of the dead man and rolled to the side to face his younger brother, Ryuu Hirai.
He held a gun in one hand, its barrel still smoking from the shot he’d fired at her.
“You’re too late,” she hissed, trying to mask the fear that surged through her at the sight of the gun.
A long beat of silence passed. Ryuu shifted slightly. Candlelight caught his face—narrow with high cheekbones, a sweep of black hair, unblemished bronze skin and umber eyes that somehow reflected anger and fear at the same time. They held the shortest, but somehow also the longest, staring contest in history. He had the advantage here, his gun aimed at her face, but he wasn’t shooting. She could tell he didn’t intend to kill. He’d only meant to stall her.
“Who sent you after him? Don’t move.”
She lunged forward and twisted his wrist so the weapon fell, then kicked one of his knees so he dropped to the floor.
“When you yell out threats instead of acting, no one will fear you,” she spat, retrieving her dagger from the ground and sheathing it in the brace on her torso.
Some of the bravery dissipated in his eyes, fear leaking through in its place. He let out a sigh that sounded like resignation, disappointment. When he looked up at her, it was clear he expected to be killed next.
One sentence in Kohl’s voice flitted through her mind with the same dazzling sensation as a shooting star.
Kill anyone who sees you.
She smothered its light. This job had been accomplished through her own merit. She didn’t need Kohl’s lessons anymore with this success behind her.
The door slammed open and three guards rushed inside, shouting for her to step away from Ryuu. Aina bent her knees, prepared to jump behind a bookshelf to dodge any bullets they fired. Just then, two gunshots sounded from the hallway, and one of the guards dropped to the floor screaming with both knees blown out.
Teo appeared behind the second guard and put him in a headlock before he could react to his colleague’s collapse. Aina rolled to the side as the third guard shot at her, then flung a dagger into his side.
They ran into the hall, jumped over the bodies—Aina grabbing her dagger on the way—and slammed the door shut behind them.
“There’s an empty set of stairs down this hall and to the right that leads outside,” Teo said as they ran down the hall, breathing heavily with cuts on his forehead and a bruise swelling under one eye. “You’re bleeding.”
She shrugged, fighting down a wince at the building pain in her side. It didn’t matter if she was bleeding; it only mattered if the job was done. She needed to tell Kohl she’d done the job—collect her money, open her tradehouse, prove to him she was no longer the helpless girl he’d saved—and hope that all their mistakes tonight wouldn’t come back to ruin them.
“Not as much as Kouta Hirai,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
10
Aina tightened the bandage around her waist after cleaning up the wound and wiping the blood off her hands with a wet rag. She wished Teo’s mother, Ynes, didn’t have to see all the blood, but she’d had to take care of the wound as soon as possible. Luckily Ryuu Hirai hadn’t really tried to kill her, and the bullet had passed through cleanly. It would heal over completely in a few weeks.
Everything in Teo’s apartment seemed so normal compared to a few hours ago in the Hirai mansion: the table adorned with porcelain knickknacks, Ynes resting against a pile of sheepskin blankets, and Teo standing in front of a teakettle on the stove. The steam from the kettle rose into the air, its warmth reaching Aina where she stood at the windowsill.
A breeze brushed against her face from the open window, bringing with it the coolness of a late spring evening. The air was already humid, which was a welcome relief from the cold winds of the past few days.
Raised voices reached her ears from the street. An alley extended between Teo’s building and the one across from it, with the flickering orange light of candles in all the windows. Passing by the mouth of the alley, sometimes in groups and sometimes as stragglers, were factory workers off for the day and ready to let go of their stress at one of the nearby bars. Teo lived in the neighborhood called the Wings, which was made of roads shooting off from Lyra Avenue like the wings of a bird. It was mostly an area of cheap apartments where immigrants and factory employees lived.
A few minutes later, Teo handed a cup of mint tea to Ynes, who muttered thanks in Linasian, and then gave one to Aina.
“I’ll collect our pay from the Blood King in the morning,” she said.
“Thank you. She needs medicine.” He glanced over his shoulder to where Ynes sat wrapped in blankets on the floor, a cup of tea held in both hands.
She leaned forward, speaking low enough that Ynes couldn’t hear. “After this job, will you have enough?”
He nodded stiffly, wringing his hands together. “She’ll never have to work again. Or she could take a part-time job somewhere that won’t kill her just by breathing in the fumes. I won’t lose both my parents because of Steels.”
His voice caught, then, and he turned back to the stove to resume cooking. Aina glanced between him, Ynes, and the Linasian paintings hanging on the walls—some of the countryside and some of Terroq, the name of the falcon god that people from their country worshiped freely.
Like so many others, his parents had emigrated from Linash in search of work in one of the many factories here. They’d been falcon riders in Linash, but border skirmishes with Kaiyan had made the country dangerous to live in, so they left when Ynes was pregnant. Once the war began, his father had thought he’d be safe working on the rail tracks on the outskirts of the city. But since rail construction sites were some of the most important projects to the Steels, King Verrain had made sure to bring his fighters there. The rail workers tried to fight back, but most were killed. After his father had died, Teo left school to work and help his mother.
While Teo cooked, Aina walked to the bed and sat across from Ynes, who coughed and clutched the necklace she wore, its amber pendant decorated with the etching of a falcon. Worry lines pulled at the edges of her eyes and mouth. It was rare to see her here, since Ynes was always either working on the textile factory floor or being treated in the clinic for the illness in her lungs.
For a moment, Aina
felt out of place in their home and wondered if her life might be different if she’d somehow moved south to Mil Cimas after her parents’ death when she was eight. She didn’t have a family. That was what she always told herself, but maybe there were relatives in Mil Cimas who’d have been willing to take her in and care for her like she belonged with them. But the thousand-mile journey to the southern tip of Sumerand, and the boat she would have had to take to Mil Cimas, weren’t cheap. And then if she had even gotten that far, she would have had to search for family she’d never met.
Thinking this way—imagining other lives for herself—never got her anywhere. All she had was Kosín and what she could wring from it. Could her parents, despite their beliefs about the sanctity of life, be proud that she was one of Kosín’s most feared killers if they knew that was all she had to live for? All that their beliefs had gotten them was a death sentence.
As Teo worked in the kitchen, Ynes glanced toward him once, then leaned forward and took Aina’s hand in her weakened grip.
“I know Teo is always getting into trouble,” she whispered. “He’ll never work for a factory, and there aren’t many other jobs in this city, I know that. We thought our lives would be safer here than in Linash, but … sometimes I can’t be there for him in the ways I should.”
“You can’t help that you’re sick,” Aina said. “He knows that. He would never blame you for having to take these kinds of jobs.”
A cough rattled through Ynes’s throat. She covered her mouth with the blanket, then focused on Aina with watering eyes.
“You’re strong, young, smart,” she said. “I can’t do much to help either of you, but you need to be there for each other. Promise me you’ll be there for him. Please help him when he needs it, and I can’t.”
Aina nodded vigorously. “Always.”
She hated making promises she wasn’t sure she could keep, but Ynes smiled warmly at this one, so she couldn’t regret it. Whenever she was around Ynes, she felt some comfort, like she had another mother caring for her when her own couldn’t. She would do what she could to assuage Ynes’s worry for her son.
Diamond City Page 7