Diamond City

by Francesca Flores

  “Ryuu, give me the rest of the dynamite. You three head back to where we entered the prison. I’ll make a distraction to lead the guards somewhere else.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” Ryuu said as he withdrew another set of dynamite and a pack of matches.

  “Sorry, this distraction is a one-woman job.”

  She took the explosives and the matches, then waved him toward the stairwell with Raurie and Teo. He looked back once, like he was considering staying with her, but she shook her head and mouthed at him to hurry.

  Once they disappeared, she ran down the hall and turned the corner until she was certain she stood exactly two floors underneath the door where they’d first entered the central prison. If she failed at this, at least she wouldn’t have to worry about prison. She’d likely be dead.

  Counting in her head the time it would take the others to reach the fourth floor, she tied the pack of dynamite to the railing of the walkway. She struck the match. The flame touched the wire.

  Her breath came in quick, shallow intakes as she pulled out the grappling hook from her pack and threw it upward. In her head, she said a quick prayer to the Mothers that it would land, the first prayer she’d thought since her parents’ death.

  Maybe the Mothers listened, or maybe all those times she’d thrown knives at people’s throats had really sharpened her aim, since the grappling hook latched itself on to the edge of the walkway two floors above.

  Footsteps sounded behind her. She shifted as the light did, leaving her in darkness as an arm wrapped around her throat and the tip of a gun met her back.

  She spun out of their grasp, her neck twisting dangerously. Dropping, she rolled out of the way. As she came to her feet, the Diamond Guard she’d knocked out earlier faced her.

  At the sight of the bruise on his head where she’d hit him, she smirked. He blew into his whistle to call for backup, the shrill sound making her hair stand up on the back of her neck. Before he could do anything else, she lunged forward, ripped the whistle out of his mouth, and wrapped her arm around his neck to put him to sleep.

  But he twisted to escape her hold. Footsteps pounded on the walkways above; guards responding to his whistle. He stepped back to the railing, then raised his gun and aimed at her.

  The shot pinged off the bars behind her, making her grit her teeth as she pivoted away. From the corner of her eye, she saw the flame she’d lit under the dynamite draw closer to its mark. Was she imagining it or could she already smell the smoke?

  Dodging the guard’s next bullet, she jumped onto the grappling hook’s rope and climbed as fast as she could.

  The rope rocked wildly, nearly dislodging her. Looking down, she cursed. The guard had jumped onto the rope too, and climbed toward her just as the flame struck the dynamite.

  The explosion went off, sound shattered around her. She froze, ears ringing, her muscles bunching up as she clung to the rope. The booms echoed off the walls of the prison, grating against the guards’ shouts to each other and their footsteps pounding down the stairs—down, away from the fourth floor, where Teo, Ryuu, and Raurie were meant to escape. At least that part of the plan had worked.

  The force of the explosion had rattled the hinges of the walkway and the next two above, if their sudden shaking and bucking was an indicator. The balcony her grappling hook hung to swayed dangerously. Her pulse pounded as loud as the explosion, but she forced herself up the rope. If she didn’t reach the balcony before it collapsed, she’d fall two stories to the diamond courtyard below.

  But as she climbed, the rope swung again, making her legs and arms clench around it as if the rope alone could save her. It wouldn’t support the weight of both her and the guard for long. Kohl’s voice rang through her mind, telling her to do whatever needed to be done. She’d already failed one job. She couldn’t fail this one too.

  When the guard was a foot below her, climbing hand over hand at a rapid pace, she let him reach up to try to grab her ankle—and then slammed her steel-toed boot into his face.

  He slid, losing several feet before catching himself on the rope, making it sway drastically once more. Shouts rose up around them from guards and prisoners. A gunshot, probably fired in her direction, pinged off a wall. There was no choice but to get rid of the guard now.

  She slid down, hissing as the rope burned her hands.

  He tried to shift out of the way, probably expecting her to kick again, but this time she reached into her boot with one hand, grabbed a dagger, and sliced through the back of his hand. He let go of the rope, his screams joining the din as he fell toward the courtyard below.

  She turned back to the rope, her back and neck clenched with tension, but while she didn’t watch the guard’s body slam onto the courtyard floor, she heard it. She imagined Kohl nodding in approval.

  Resuming her climb, she reached the edge of the fourth-floor balcony just as it swayed.

  Teo, Ryuu, and Raurie raced along the walkway, their weight shaking it even more. Raurie flung open the door to the corridor, and Ryuu followed her inside.

  For a moment, she feared Teo would run after them without looking back for her.

  But then he reached over the railing, grabbed the rope of Aina’s grappling hook with both hands, and hauled her up as the walkway lurched one final time.

  They jumped into the safety of the corridor at the last second, Aina letting the grappling hook fall along with the walkway.

  As they sped down the corridor, they heard the walkway crash against the diamond floor of the courtyard. The sound reverberated so loudly, Aina failed to hear Ryuu shout something. He gestured for them to follow him.

  They raced down the hall and reached the vent in the floor. Aina went last, her hands flying over the holds in the wall until she landed in the hallway below. They ran for it, back toward the main tunnel of the subway, and slammed shut the door to the corridor.

  Since it was only midmorning, construction was still underway with workers gathered around the platform. A few glanced over at their sudden appearance.

  Ryuu took a deep breath and called over, “Just doing a quick site inspection. Continue working.”

  They nodded and turned back to their work, while Aina, Teo, Ryuu, and Raurie walked as casually as they could manage, as if they hadn’t just collapsed multiple floors of the prison.

  “You can go home after this,” Aina whispered to Teo as they walked. “I don’t want you getting hurt any more because of me.”

  He kept walking as if he hadn’t heard her. Fear hit her, almost as strongly as her fear of Kohl coming to kill her if she messed up the Kouta job again.

  But unlike with Kohl, she couldn’t simply kill Kouta and make things better.

  She didn’t know how to fix this, how not to lose Teo, and the idea that she might fail at this hurt more than any punch or threat Kohl had sent her way.

  29

  While a nurse took care of Teo’s injuries, Aina waited in a first-floor study room of Ryuu’s mansion, so that the nurse wouldn’t see her and recognize her from the posters around the city. She held a pack of ice to the back of her neck, which ached after the guard had twisted it.

  Teo’s face loomed in her thoughts, in the cell when he’d told her to get away from him, and on the balcony when for a moment, she was terrified he would let her fall to her death. He’d come back for her, but he also hadn’t said a word to her on the entire way back to Ryuu’s mansion.

  A steadily falling rain painted the Hirai gardens a nearly black color and pattered against the floor-to-ceiling window she stood in front of. In her parents’ home growing up, there was no glass on the windows, and rain only meant floods. The Dom grew chilly when it rained, as there was barely any insulation in its old walls. The cold usually kept her senses sharp, but right now, she preferred the warmth.

  An hour after escaping the prisons, they reached Ryuu’s house just as the rain began to fall. He snuck them inside a basement entrance and told Aina to pull up her hood and cover her face with her
scarf. It was still a risk that one of his guards or servants would recognize her or Teo, but they now had nowhere else to go. They managed to reach a room on the first floor with no one raising an alarm. Ryuu had a nurse called in from the city to tend to Teo and had two servants sent to retrieve Teo’s mother’s body. But when they returned, they reported that the body had already been removed.

  Though Aina had seen plenty of bodies thrown on the barges to be taken to the mass graves outside the city, this was the first one since her parents’ deaths that sent a chill through her. Teo never even had the chance to say goodbye.

  She knew that nothing could have saved Ynes’s life once the bullet met her brain, but part of her was convinced that if Ynes were rich, she might have been spared. At least she would have been buried in the cemetery behind Amethyst Hill, which was reserved only for the wealthiest corpses. She recalled Ynes’s smile, how she’d always welcomed Aina to their house with a cup of tea while Aina recovered from injuries or spent time with Teo, how she’d treated Aina like a daughter, and how she’d pleaded with Aina to always be there for her son.

  She’d always thought the fact that she was a child had been the reason she’d been unable to help her parents, but Teo hadn’t been able to save his mother either, even with all his skills. Perhaps she’d placed too much blame on herself.

  But if they both were truly powerless to save the ones they loved, then what hope was left at all? She pressed her nails into her arms, afraid to meet her own eyes in the window reflection.

  The door creaked open. By the light tread of his footsteps, she could tell it was Ryuu before his reflection even appeared in the window next to hers. A beat of silence passed. She kept her gaze forward, not meeting his eyes as he turned to face her.

  “The nurse is almost done tending to Teo,” he finally said. “His injuries are mostly superficial, so he’ll recover after a night of sleep. It’ll be safe here; Amethyst Hill is the last place the Diamond Guards would think to look for either of you. I’m glad we got him out of there today, though. Any longer and he would have faced a real interrogation.”

  She nodded, not knowing how to voice her real thoughts. If Teo hated her now, and he’d been interrogated, would he have given up everything he knew about her crimes?

  Instead, she changed the subject to something she did understand. “You were good back there. You acted like you break into prisons and beat up guards every day.”

  Ryuu let out a small laugh, one of his hands tapping an uneven rhythm on the windowpane. “You underestimate me, don’t you?”

  A smile tugged at her lips. “Not as much as I did when we first met.”

  “I understand that. Being brave is … something I’m trying to learn. After my parents died, we were afraid every day. Kouta hardly let me leave the house, he was so worried for me. And he fully invested himself in his work to get away from it all. After he told me how our parents really died, I was afraid to walk down the street because I thought I would get shot for having the name Hirai. Being a Steel didn’t keep my parents safe.”

  “And then you learned how to fight back,” she said quietly. In their reflections, she noticed their hands, hanging at their sides, were just a few inches apart. If she shifted slightly, they’d be touching.

  “I realized the fear itself was worse than the thing I feared.” His other hand trailed to the handle of the gun Teo had given him before getting arrested. “I refused to let fear and not knowing how to defend myself force me into hiding. Force me to stop living my life. My brother has protected me his whole life, even when he was scared too. It’s my turn now, even if it’s terrifying.” He cleared his throat and looked away from her before adding, “That’s why it’s good to have you on my side. I don’t feel as scared knowing I have an actual assassin helping me.”

  See, Kohl? I’m still a useful Blade.

  As if he’d noticed their proximity too, his hand moved slightly—close enough that they touched for a few brief seconds—and then dropped away again. Maybe he thought of her as a coldhearted killer, but he didn’t know how similar they were, how she felt like a coward too, and how often she tried to convince herself she wasn’t helpless.

  Yet, just last night, he’d tried to convince her she might be something more than a Blade. He’d told her to reach higher. But what would she even reach for, when the only thing she could do now was try not to be killed?

  She still had to kill his brother, and it would end this new connection between them. The way his eyes darted to her face in the window reflection, how her cheeks burned with the hint of his gaze, and how the few inches separating them seemed to be charged with electricity, would all screech to a halt once Kouta stopped breathing by her blade.

  “So, after Teo recovers, we’ll get back to the job,” Ryuu said, watching her through their reflections.

  She nodded. “We’ll find your brother.”

  “Do you want to go see Teo now?”

  She nodded again and followed him to a lounge. She expected to find Teo resting, but he was already sitting up on a divan, with much less bandaging than she’d expected. Raurie sat in a chair across from him, holding a cup of tea.

  “You look much better,” Aina said, sitting on the arm of Raurie’s chair and folding her hands in her lap.

  “You don’t need to talk to me like I’m fragile, you know,” he said with a weak smile, but the movement pulled at some stitches on his jaw. She winced at the sight, wishing she could help him, but fearing he’d push her away again.

  “Teo, I’m sorry,” she said, and let out a relieved sigh when he finally met her eyes. “It’s my fault your mother—”

  “No, Aina, it’s not.” He shook his head, but stopped quickly, as if it was painful. “You could say it’s your fault, or mine, Ryuu’s, Raurie’s. But I wasn’t thinking right, when I put it all on you. More than us, you know who’s to blame? The Steels. The Diamond Guards are the ones who killed my mother, and they did it because Bautix puts them up to it. They don’t care if my mother committed a crime or not. To them, she’s just someone who got in the way.” His voice turned to a fierce whisper. “I’m not letting my mother’s death be in vain. We’re going to show these bastard Steels they can’t do whatever they want to us. That they can’t villainize every person who isn’t like them. I’m not going to sit on the sidelines anymore while others die for daring to have a little freedom.”

  A chill swept through her, half empowering and half cold with the possibility that he was willing to start a new war. The idea of standing up against the Steels seemed like certain death. She agreed the situation was unfair, but she’d never considered actually doing something about it. How could she, when she’d spent her whole life simply trying to survive the unfairness?

  You just have to decide what’s important to you, and put your mind to it entirely. His words came back once more. Teo had always seemed so steadfast in his sole goal of protecting his mother, so much so that she feared he might forget about himself. But now that he was alone, he envisioned some new purpose, and it was something she couldn’t imagine for herself yet—perhaps not ever.

  But maybe Teo just needed assurance from her, for now. He’d given her all of his dedication. He deserved some of hers.

  “We will,” she said, in a voice so quiet, she wasn’t sure if anyone heard her.

  “I agree,” Raurie suddenly said, the certainty in her voice breaking the silence. “My whole family suffered because of them. I can’t be afraid of them anymore. If I want to honor my parents who died for their religion, and my aunt who risks her life every day to help anyone who comes to her, then I need to stand up instead of hide.”

  “I know a good place to start,” Ryuu said from where he leaned against a bookshelf. “We find my brother and figure out what he learned about our parents’ deaths.”

  “You’re right, let’s start there,” Aina agreed. This was something she could focus on; something that wasn’t confusing. “We should all rest tonight, though. Is there a
room available for Raurie?”

  He nodded. “Of course. I’ll have guest rooms set up for you both.”

  But she was already shaking her head. “I’ll be fine here.”

  Once she and Teo were alone, she moved to sit next to him. The room grew so quiet, she heard each press of her fingers on the divan as she placed her hands down.

  “I still feel like it’s my fault…”

  “I’ve always agreed to help with this job,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “I meant what I said about wanting to fight the Steels, but we’ll finish this job first. I’m not going to let your life continue to be in danger when I can do something about it. I said I’ll be there for you, and I always will be.”

  She opened her mouth again to argue, but he reached over and pulled her into a hug before she could say anything else. When he pulled away, she wiped away the tears that had built up, and saw that he did the same.

  “Ryuu tried to pay me for helping him, though, saying I’d done enough,” Teo said in a strained voice, then nodded toward the bookcase. “When he went to get you, I stuffed the money between the books on the middle shelf so he can find it later. I don’t want to take his money for this.”

  She nodded as he spoke, guilt twisting her stomach into knots. “I don’t want to either. I’m only pretending to want it so he doesn’t doubt me. I don’t want to hurt him, but I need to do this job. And once I start working for Kohl again, neither of us will have to worry about money.”

  Lowering his voice, Teo said, “I know you have to finish the job so you’ll be safe, but I want you to get away from Kohl. If the job doesn’t go as planned, end him before he comes after you. He’s the one who got you into this mess.”

  She shivered involuntarily and sat up straight, pushing her hair out of her face with shaking fingers. It was easy for Teo to sit there and tell her to write Kohl off, but if anything, these last days had proved how much she needed him. Between the Jackals and the Diamond Guards, it seemed everyone in the city was after her now that she lacked Kohl’s protection. She had to get it back and return to the life she knew, the life that was safe for her. She had to kill Kouta.