Defiance (26 page)

Amateurs.

Which means they’re guards. Highwaymen and trackers are far too experienced to be so obvious. I say as much to Melkin.

“I thought the same. Can’t figure why the Commander thinks we need extra protection.”

“Please tell me you aren’t that stupid.”

He frowns at me.

“They aren’t here for our protection, Melkin. If they were, they would’ve traveled with us from the start. They’re here to pounce once we have the package.”

“But we’re going to bring it back. We have to. I’m not going to lose Eloise. You said you thought if I did what he asked, he’d keep his word.”

I lied. But looking into the misery on his face, I can’t find the cruelty to give him the truth. “Maybe they’re insurance in case we decide we want whatever’s in the package more than we want Eloise and Logan’s safety.”

“There’s nothing more important than her safety.”

“To
you
. But the Commander doesn’t place the same value on human life as you do.”

We’re silent for a moment, staring at the two guards as the day subsides and the first stars of the night glitter like shards of silver in the darkening sky.

“What if they want the package for themselves?” he asks, the darkness he harbored earlier back in his voice.

“Then they’ll try to kill us once we find it.”

“Not if we kill them first.”

Crimson. Sliding down silver blades. Covering me in guilt that won’t ever wash clean.

I shake the morbid thoughts away. It’s ridiculous to think I’d feel guilty shedding the blood of a guard. Especially one who is here with the express purpose of shedding mine.

But if I do this—if I deliberately ambush and kill without provocation—will I lose something I need? Something that keeps me from becoming like the Commander? Will it harden me toward violence the way repeatedly holding my knife builds calluses into the skin of my palm?

Or will it strengthen me into the kind of weapon I need to be to bring the Commander down?

“I’ll go out the back and circle around. I’ve already checked through the window at the opposite end. There’s no one watching us from behind. Give me at least an hour to work my way to them without being noticed. Then sneak out of the house as if you’re going looking for the package. While they’re focused on you, I’ll kill them.”

His voice is cold, empty, and more than a little scary. Gone is the courteous, understanding Melkin I’ve been traveling with for a week. In his place stands a fierce predator willing to do whatever he must to obliterate anyone who stands between him and Eloise.

I wonder if I’m catching a glimpse of who I’m becoming as well.

Banishing that unwelcome thought before it can take root, I nod my acceptance of his plan and follow him back downstairs. He leaves out the back door, and I mark time by lighting candles in the kitchen and assembling dinner from the supplies Dad keeps here. I eat my fill, leave plenty on the table for Melkin, and pack a spare travel sack with food supplies from the cupboards.

My hour is up. Checking that my knife slides easily from its sheath, I light a small torch, the better to make myself seen, and open the front door. The loamy scent of the sun-warmed ground is fading into the crisp chill of night. I creep along the length of the porch, peering beneath the boards as if I expect to find something.

My skin prickles with awareness. I’m being watched.

Which is exactly the point of this entire charade, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.

When Melkin doesn’t appear within the first few minutes, I leave the porch and wander to the side, still in full view of the guards at the tree line. I feel exposed with my brilliant little torch ablaze amidst the overgrown grass and the distant icy stars. The tingle of awareness becomes a full-fledged, adrenalin-fueled need to draw a weapon and be ready for anything.

I don’t ignore it.

Instead, I drop down, shove the lit end of the torch deep into the soft soil at my feet to extinguish it, and run as silently as I can away from the spot where I was last seen. In seconds, I hear someone crashing through the grass behind me.

I dodge to my left, drop to a crouch, and freeze. The darkness will cover me. The person following me doesn’t have a NightSeer mask, or I’d see its green glow.

He also doesn’t have the sense to stop moving once he no longer hears me. Soft footsteps creep toward the spot I just vacated. I slide my knife free without a sound, and ready myself.

The fear I felt earlier at the thought of shedding someone’s blood without giving them fair notice is gone. In its place is cold determination.

I’m not going to die. Not until the Commander lies in a pool of his own blood at my feet.

My pursuer is close enough that I can hear him breathe now, rough, uneven pants that speak of someone without the proper training to control his breathing when it matters most. I wait until he’s a mere three yards from me, and tense for my attack.

A hand snakes out from behind me and wraps around my mouth while a second hand grabs my knife hand before I can swing it back.

“Wait,” Melkin breathes against my ear, and I hold still.

My follower moves forward, making enough noise to announce his presence to any but an inexperienced fool, but I trust Melkin and wait.

By the time the man moves out of range, my muscles are stiff, and I can’t feel my lower legs. I turn to look at Melkin, his gaunt frame a black smudge against the starry sky.

“Who?” My voice is little more than a whisper.

“Rowansmark tracker.”

That doesn’t make sense. Any tracker worth his weight would’ve been on me before I ever knew what hit me. And if by some chance I managed to elude him, he wouldn’t have chased me in such a noisy, clumsy fashion.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. He killed the guards before I got there. Saw his handiwork. He’s an expert.”

“Then why act like an amateur?”

He looks at me, and the answer hits me. Because the tracker didn’t want to kill me. He wanted to flush me out so he could capture me and force me to reveal the location of the package to him. The realization adds fuel to the adrenalin already pounding through me. The cruelty of Rowansmark trackers is legendary. Some say they carve off pieces of their victims and feed it to the vultures bit by bit while the person bleeds and begs. Some say they know how to kill their victims with a single, deadly touch.

On our second-to-last trip to Rowansmark, we entered the city through an aisle of half-rotted human heads skewered on stakes. Five on one side. Six on another. An entire band of highwaymen who’d had the stupidity to try cheating Rowansmark merchants out of their coin.

What would a tracker do to me to get the location of the package stolen from his leader? My skin is icy as I turn to Melkin.

“We need to leave.”

Melkin nods, and together we slowly circle back to the house. I crouch in the shadow of a tree, my knife ready, while Melkin slips inside and snatches up my pack, my Switch, and the bag of food supplies. When he returns, we melt silently into the tree line behind the house and make our way south, our weapons out, our ears straining to catch the sound of pursuit.

I
pace my cell, willing the blood to flow into my legs fast enough for me to leave before a guard decides to investigate my conversation with Eloise. The dungeon is full of the sounds of dripping water and heavy sleep. I’m chilled without my shirt, but I can’t yet put on my cloak.

I need to dismantle it first.

My legs still tingle, but they’ll hold me when I need to run. Approaching the far right corner of my cell, the one with the draft seeping in through the cracks, I run my fingers along the damp, craggy stone, judging distances and looking for a weakness I’m not convinced is there.

It doesn’t matter. I’m about to obliterate the whole thing, weakness or not.

Turning to my cloak, I remove the five buttons lining the front flap. They come loose with a soft pop and reveal the plain steel fastenings underneath. Ignoring those, I flip the face of the buttons over and smile. The back of each holds one of my most destructive inventions to date—the gears of an ancient pocket watch attached to two tiny vials of liquid. One holds acid. The other holds glycerin. All my experiments have proven the combination to be explosive.

I hope it’s enough to turn the back half of my cell into rubble.

I slide my fingers along the bottom of my coat until I feel a tiny knot of thread. Pulling on it, I rip out the extra seam I painstakingly installed just days before the Claiming ceremony and remove a length of wire already spliced into five pieces at one end. Finally, I sit down, tug my left boot free, jiggle the sole until it comes loose, and remove a tiny, copper-sheathed detonator.

The buttons attach to the wall with ease, the same gluey substance that stuck them to the plain steel fastenings on my cloak easily clinging to the wall like a second skin. I carefully wrap the loose wire ends around the central gear in each button, and then back away to the cell door, taking the thin straw palette of a bed with me.

Pulling my cloak over my shoulders, I fasten the toggles, flip the hood over my head, and crouch beneath the palette, my back to the wall. With steady fingers, I wrap the other end of the wire around the coils on the detonator and take a deep breath.

Time to show the Commander which of us can truly outwit the other.

I press the trigger on the detonator and hear a faint clicking sound as the pocket watch gears engage and set the vials on a collision course with each other. Then the entire dungeon shakes with the force of the explosion at my back.

I don’t give the debris time to stop falling. I can’t. The main door at the end of the row is already opening, and a guard is shouting an alarm. Keeping the palette over my head to protect myself from the worst of it, I stand and face the destruction of my cell.

The back corner is nothing but crumbled bits of stone and dust. A slippery pile of dirt is sliding in through the hole, but above that pile, the night sky beckons. I race forward, scramble over the debris, and dive through the hole as someone rattles a key in the door of my cell.

The straw palette wedges against the opening as I go through it, and I push as much dirt as possible against the back side of the hole while climbing my way toward level ground.

From the main compound, an alarm bell peals, disturbing the darkness with its insistent clamor. I scan my surroundings, take in the distance between me and the iron fence surrounding the compound, and start running.

I’m still ten yards from the fence when someone shouts behind me. I don’t bother looking. It would just slow me down. Instead, I reach inside my inner cloak pocket and remove what look like two slightly thick Baalboden coins. A quick toggle of the tiny switch embedded in the ridges of the coins releases the spring-loaded mechanism inside, and they become a smaller version of the handgrips Rachel tried to use on her disastrous escape attempt.

More shouts echo across the yard, and I catch guards with NightSeer masks running along the fence line, primed to intersect with me if it takes me longer than twenty seconds to scale the iron poles.

I lunge forward, slam my hands onto the metal, feel the magnets latch onto the iron like they’re soldered to it, and start climbing.

My rib screams at me, even through the pain medicine I took, but I ignore it. I won’t get a second chance at this, and I refuse to fail.

The top seems impossibly high, and my arms tremble with the effort of ignoring the weakness on my right side, but I reach it just as the guards converge below me. One grabs at my foot, but I slam my boot into his forehead, wrap my hands around the top of the fence, and vault over to the other side.

I don’t wait to see who’s following me.

The compound is located in the eastern quarter of the city. I turn north and run, hoping the guards take note of my direction and report it back to the Commander. Let him fortify the North Wall. Let him comb the city streets. I won’t be there.

Once I’m sure I’m out of sight, I change my trajectory and head southwest, trusting the magnetic field of my hand grips to block my wristmark from any Identidiscs being used to find me.

The only way out of the city is over the Wall or through the gate. Over the past week, thanks to Rachel’s prodding, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking of another way to escape.

Most of the ideas I came up with had one fatal flaw: They were obvious choices, and the Commander isn’t a fool. I discarded them all and decided the perfect solution is the one no one would be crazy enough to try. The one that could end with me accidentally calling the Cursed One to devour me in a single, fiery gulp.

I’m going out under the Wall.

I enter North Hub, avoiding the street torches by using backyards and alleys, and circle Center Square in favor of moving west. When I’ve gone far enough to be sure I won’t be seen by any upstanding citizens, I cut south and hurry toward Lower Market.

I’m sure the travel bag I left behind in Center Square is long gone. I’m equally sure the bag I always keep at Oliver’s has been confiscated too. If the Commander thinks he’s backed me into a corner where my only two choices are heading home for more supplies or hitting up merchants who’ve undoubtedly been warned that the penalty for doing business with me is death, he’s wrong.

I have Rachel to thank for it. When I chased her to the Wall, I went through the alley between the armory and the deserted building at the base of Lower Market, and realized it was the perfect place to hide a backup escape plan. No one ever goes into the abandoned building. And as I have no ties to the place, the Commander would never suspect it as a base of operations for me.

It takes me nearly an hour to reach it. I stick to the shadows, sometimes sacrificing speed for stealth, but I never see any signs of pursuit. Either the bulk of the guards are converging on the North Wall, or the guards in the western edge of the city have the brains to keep silent about their search.

It doesn’t matter which is true. All that matters is that I’ve reached the building. I duck inside and use the faint moonlight streaming in through a broken window to sort through my stash.