Diamond City

by Francesca Flores

  After glancing around to make sure no one was watching, she stared at it within the pouch: the diamond-and-ruby ring she’d stolen from Kouta when she’d first tried to kill him. It stared up at her, twinkling like little stars. In the madness after her failure to kill its owner, she had completely forgotten about it.

  It had, of course, been too dangerous to go to the mines or jewelry stores to try to sell it since anyone there might have reported her to the Sentinel if they recognized her from the wanted posters. Now, she might be able to sell it, and then at least she wouldn’t starve.

  But it wouldn’t matter if she sold the ring. Kohl would still come and kill her. She couldn’t do anything with money if she were dead.

  Maybe she could hold on to it. It reminded her of Ryuu, after all. She knew it wouldn’t make up for his brother being dead or for how she’d betrayed him, but if she found a way to give it back to him before Kohl killed her, she would.

  The day they’d found Kouta dead on the train played in her head over and over as she walked deeper into the Stacks.

  After those long, tense seconds when they’d stared at his brother’s body, Ryuu moved to the train window and thrust it open.

  “Stop!” he shouted to his guards.

  They stopped firing. Aina ran to the window and peered out, searching for Teo and Raurie.

  They walked out from where they’d taken cover behind a train, their own guns still half-raised toward the remainder of the guards. Raurie must have fought even after Teo tried to hide her. Only three of the guards still stood, while the others’ bodies lay scattered across the train yard.

  From the corner of her eye, Aina watched Ryuu’s gaze flick to each body, as if he were taking them in and blaming himself for their deaths.

  “Get out.”

  His voice shocked her into stepping back. It wasn’t harsh or sad. It was cold and flat, entirely emotionless, something she’d never heard from him before.

  She began to back out of the train car, her eyes flicking to Kouta’s body a few more times—at the perfectly placed gunshot in his forehead, the spreading circle of blood around him, and how fresh the wound was.

  Ryuu, on the other hand, didn’t even glance at the body. He seemed incapable, at that moment, of doing anything other than watching her retreat. He still held a gun, and she wondered if he would finally, truly use it on her.

  “Ryuu, I’m…” She thought about saying she was sorry, then stopped herself.

  Was she only sorry she hadn’t gotten here before Tannis?

  “How stupid do you think I am, Aina?” he finally forced out, his voice cracking a little. “I admit, I really thought all you needed was the money at first. I even felt bad for you. I knew you didn’t have anything personal against my brother. It was your job, and sometimes we get forced into doing jobs we don’t want, so I thought offering you the money was a way out for you. There were times when I doubted you, but I really needed your help, so then … I truly thought that helping you break Teo out of prison would keep you on my side. You almost lost him, and I helped you get him back. You know I almost lost Kouta. All you did was try to take him away again.”

  She cringed at his words. She had no excuses that he would understand—how her life depended on her own ability to take out Kouta, and that her survival was the only thing she’d been able to worry about for so long. Kohl had taught her to be a Blade: to rationalize murder, to blame it on someone else, to put it in boxes in her mind so that guilt and morals could never consume her.

  But to Ryuu, murder was murder, and maybe that was the only reason he hadn’t shot her in the head already.

  “Get out,” he repeated, before finally looking away from her and toward his brother.

  This time, she listened. She left with Teo and Raurie, none of them speaking to each other as they traversed the tunnels northward out of Jackal territory and finally climbed out onto a sunlit street. The rain had cleared, leaving the day blindingly bright compared to the tunnels.

  That night, she started seeing the shadows. Sometimes she wondered if Kohl was taunting her, watching her from dark alleys and rooftops like a vulture, trying to place fear in her bones before he’d finally strike. Was the long wait before he killed her simply part of her punishment?

  She’d always been careful walking around the Stacks, but now she was even more so. The Jackals might have regrouped by now and could come after her at any moment. Diamond Guards could find her and haul her off to the Tower. Kohl might shoot her in the middle of the street. Her body would be thrown in a mass grave and forgotten about.

  For two days after Kouta’s death, she, Teo, and Raurie had stayed in the safe house where June had been hiding. The Diamond Guards would be watching for Teo to return to his apartment. June’s old place was still at risk, and June and her husband wanted to lay low for a while longer before searching for anywhere new to live. At first, Raurie had been confused and angry that they’d actually been planning to kill Kouta this whole time instead of save him, but then she’d taken it in stride the way one only could if they’d grown up around crime, betrayal, and desperate moves.

  The safe house was in a tunnel dug far underground, below the sewers even, along the western edge of the city. Statues and carvings of the Mothers surrounded them in the small, hollowed cave.

  When she’d woken up the first morning there, a Milana woman was leaning over her with a diamond in her hand. For a moment, she was convinced she was dead and that this was her mother greeting her in some kind of afterlife. Then she’d blinked and the world came in clearer around her. The wound on her thigh had started bleeding, and the Inosen woman was tending to it.

  The prayers of June and other Inosen who hid there filled her ears. She heard her parents doing the same and reminding her that life was precious. The cave soon became suffocating. All she could think of was how her parents died and she’d fled to save herself.

  As long as Kohl was after her and the Sentinel still had a price on her head, Teo and Raurie were in danger simply by association with her.

  When they fell asleep that second night, she left a note that she was leaving, slipped out of the safe house, and for the next five days slept in her old spots: an abandoned warehouse, a supply shack near a bridge, the fire escape of an old apartment building. Anywhere empty and quiet.

  Now, she was sick of waiting and hiding. If Kohl wanted to kill her, he would do it. Prolonging the inevitable would hurt more than simply facing it.

  A block away, a man stood at a corner wearing an oversized jacket and whispering at passersby what drugs he could sell them. Without hesitation, Aina walked up to him and passed him enough kors for a paper bag coated in glue and a flask of deep brown firebrandy, then walked to her parents’ old house.

  34

  Aina had thought that, if at any point in her life, she decided to go back to the drugs she’d used as a child, something would rise up in her, protest, and remind her how proud she’d been for having quit in the first place.

  But as she sat on the roof of her parents’ home with a bottle of firebrandy and clutching a glue-soaked paper bag with only the cold night wind surrounding her, she realized that nothing had ever been easier.

  The only other time she’d fallen back to glue was one day four years ago.

  Kohl had pushed her harder than ever in training. Afterward, she’d bought glue for the first time in years and planned to put herself into a coma on the Dom’s roof. She’d known there was a chance the plastic bag she inhaled from would suffocate her like the dead girl she’d seen in the river, but she saw no point in being conscious anymore.

  She was there for an hour, and the sun had set by the time Kohl found her. She watched him with blurred vision, her pulse pounding faster than it should and her breaths growing short. He pulled the bag away from her face and yelled at her to move.

  When she’d stared at him listlessly, he helped her sit up and stayed next to her until she recovered. Though all her senses had been fuzzy and uncl
ear that night, she remembered the exact pressure with which his arm rested around her shoulders, the taut set of his jaw, and the way the moons shone in his eyes as he never took them off her.

  His voice replayed in her head, whispering that she should never have done this, that he was trying to help her and she kept destroying her chances. He said he would stay next to her the entire night if that was what it took. By the time she finally recovered, he straightened and muttered that he was glad she hadn’t died.

  The next day, she went to him and asked, for the first time, if she could one day be free to run her own tradehouse in the city. He agreed without even looking up from his desk.

  “I’ll tell you when,” he simply said, and she left the office feeling like she finally had a purpose.

  To avoid thinking of her failure, she stared out at the city. Kosín resembled a painting more than ever in her blurred vision, and she wondered from where the artist had drawn the inspiration to paint such a place that dulled sensitivities with its bleak gray shadows yet also attracted people like her, like Teo, like Ryuu, to stay there even when the city made them choke on its fumes. She imagined what this place might have looked like in the past, draped in fine silks, coated in blood, and studded with diamonds. Her gaze trailed over the Stacks, where she knew every corner, every speck of dirt, every boarded-up house, and every rumbling stomach far better than the painter ever would.

  If Kohl was going to come after her anywhere, she’d prefer for him to kill her here where her parents had died. At least maybe inhaling more glue would leech away all her good memories of Kohl and leave only the bad, so maybe dying by his hand would hurt less.

  She’d chosen a paper bag rather than plastic. It was less likely to suffocate her. She hoped to at least be conscious when he came, so she could ask him if she’d ever been anything more to him than a Blade.

  Just then, a creak came from the other side of the house. Her head rolled to one side and her vision spun as she took in Teo. She tried to wave, but her hand tingled with numbness and fell limp.

  “Should have known I’d find you here,” he said, standing and walking toward her.

  But instead of sitting down, he stopped a few feet away. The cool spring wind pushed his hair in front of his face. Dark brown strands brushed against the stitches on his jaw still healing from his time in the Tower’s cells.

  “Where else am I supposed to be?” she asked, her voice sharper than she’d intended.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and gazing out at the close-pressed houses of the Stacks and the constantly hovering smoke carried down the hill from the factories. He hadn’t even looked at the bottle of firebrandy and the glue-soaked bag she held, though he must have noticed them by now.

  “Congratulations, you found me,” she said, waving the bottle as if in celebration. “What do you want?”

  Instead of answering her question, he sat next to her with his legs hanging over the edge of the roof. Her head drooped a little to the side, growing heavier each passing second, but Teo caught her before she fell over.

  As he helped her sit up straight again, with one arm around her shoulders, his other hand moved to her chin and turned her face toward his. Her vision spun again, so she wasn’t entirely sure what she saw in his eyes now, but it reminded her of a long night last year when neither of them had to work.

  They’d spent hours at a bar, drinking firebrandy until she had no clue what she was saying or doing. Her memories of the night had always been spotty at best, but one thing she remembered was sitting in a booth next to him and how he’d brushed her hair away from her neck where it clung with summer heat.

  She’d moved away, wishing it had been Kohl.

  Maybe she should have stayed in place and seen what would have happened. Now there was no point.

  “Your heart is beating really fast,” Teo said in a soft voice as his hand fell away. “You should stop using that.”

  In response, she gripped the paper bag more tightly.

  He raised an eyebrow incredulously. “I know you’re high out of your mind and scared, but please stop and think about what you’re doing for a second. My mother was shot in front of me because of this job with Kouta, and now that job is ruined.” He paused, then forced out the next words. “You owe—”

  “I don’t have any money, Teo.” She shook the paper bag in his direction. “Spent my last kors on this. Sorry.”

  “You thought I was going to ask you for money?” He let out a bitter laugh.

  “What else would you want?” she snapped. “I have nothing left that I could possibly owe you or anyone else. I can’t fix things so that Kouta dies by my hand, and I wouldn’t even do that if I could. I can’t join any fight against the Steels, so give up on that fantasy. And I can’t bring your mother back from the dead.”

  She bit her lip, almost about to take back those words, but the numbing sensation from the glue coursed through her and held back the apology. A chill spread between them, cold as winter.

  When Teo next spoke, he already sounded far away.

  “I was going to say, ‘You owe yourself more than this.’”

  Keeping her gaze on the city ahead and gripping the bag of glue with the little feeling she had left in her limbs, she heard him stand. She didn’t look back to watch him go.

  But once his footsteps faded away, tears fell down her numbed cheeks. She only noticed them when they dropped onto her hands and she watched them dry on her skin.

  Good things don’t happen to girls who come from nothing.

  What could Teo possibly think she owed herself? She was an idiot to have ever thought she could reach higher. Kohl had lifted her off the streets, and she should have stayed with him instead of trying to achieve something more. She should have known she’d only get knocked down, back to being nothing but the burdensome, starving kid he’d had to save. The suspicion demanded resolution: Am I only strong when Kohl stands behind me?

  Burying her head in her hands, she pressed her palms against her eyes until green and black stars exploded in her vision. She dug her fingernails into her forehead, hoping to draw blood. If she drew blood, she was still human, not just a failed Blade. If she drew blood, she couldn’t be a useless thing to throw away.

  Suddenly, a bitter taste grew in her mouth. She heard Kohl’s voice pounding in her head, telling her what to do—

  She stood, grabbed the bottle, and threw it. Glass shattered on the street below, brown liquid spilling everywhere. She wanted to scream, but there was no one to listen.

  Kohl had kicked her out of the only home she’d ever known, taken every kor she’d earned, threatened her, and left her to die. All the while, he’d told her it was best for her. He’d told her what she needed to do, who she needed to become, how to save herself, and in the end, he abandoned her anyway. When they were close, she’d aimed to be exactly like him, had thought no other person in the world could compare to him, and had found herself drawn to the side of him that praised, cherished, and protected her despite her faults. He’d constantly clung to the back of her mind, so that escape seemed a myth and the only option was to remain close and never disappoint him.

  When love was the last thing given on Kosín’s streets, it was hard to tell the real thing from something toxic. Maybe she’d clung to his version of love, telling herself it was good for her—after all, it was far better than her life on the streets—when in reality it only ate her alive. It drew her in, telling her she was nothing without it. Like the glue, her addiction to Kohl was dangerous, a tightrope she balanced on in swift wind, a call to darkness masquerading as a lullaby.

  Ryuu’s voice broke through her clouded thoughts: Fear itself was worse than the thing I feared.

  Killing Kouta, completing this job, opening her own tradehouse … that wasn’t what she needed.

  No, she needed to cut Kohl off. Unchain herself from him and the fear he stirred in her veins.

  She stumbled down the ro
of, her hands numb on the rusted metal surface, then made her way back to the Dom. The cold breeze passing through narrow streets cleared her mind a little as she walked.

  A block away from the Dom, where the stench of the Minos River grew strong, she remembered a night two years ago when a target had fought back and nearly killed her. She’d slit his throat, but barely escaped with her life. Bleeding, she’d returned to the Dom and passed out on the floor in Kohl’s office.

  When she’d woken up, her wounds were bandaged, and his arms held her upright. If she could go back to that night and—

  What?

  Kiss him? Yell at him?

  Stab him, she decided, and picked up the pace.

  The Dom stood tall, the willow trees shadowing the entrance as she approached under the soft silver and red of the waning moons. Candlelight shone between the bars on the upper windows.

  Ten feet away from the door, she slowed to a stop. They already knew she was here. There was no point in hiding. For a few minutes, the only sounds in the night were the wind and her rapid pulse.

  Straightening her shoulders, she shouted, “Kohl! We need to talk.”

  A few more minutes passed. Her vision wavered, blurring momentarily and then clearing, over and over.

  Finally, the door creaked open. Shadows spilled onto the sidewalk. Kohl Pavel stepped outside, his eyes and the sapphires on his watch brightening the dark street.

  35

  Silence fell as Aina and Kohl stared each other down. The glue helped dull her fear of his calculating expression and the shadows surrounding them. She tried to focus on him, but swayed slightly in place as a wave of dizziness hit her.

  “I’d ask if you have Kouta Hirai’s head behind your back,” Kohl said after a few long minutes of silence had passed. “But we both know—”

  “If you’re going to kill me, stop stalling,” she said, her lips numbing as she spoke. “Don’t hide behind your gun or your taunts. Fight me and we’ll see who’s left alive.”