“Then why do you know so much about this world?”
“I grew up here, well, for the last six years.”
“An Ember? In the Dredge? Why?”
Sylah shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot of money. It was easier to work here.”
Sylah pulled up the sleeve of her right arm, normally covered by her inkwell. But Sylah had made them take them off before coming to the Dredge. She bared the raised flesh of her brand.
“Once I got this, I could work anywhere in the Dredge.”
Anoor flinched. “Who did that to you?”
This time Sylah’s smile was amused, if a little pained. “Me.”
Anoor hissed.
“I don’t understand.”
Sylah didn’t respond.
“How do you know all those fighting moves?” Anoor pressed.
“Oh, that, well, there’s this thing called the Ring, in the north of the Dredge. It’s a fighting contest. I was the champion.”
Anoor felt unsettled. It might have been the eerie song or the half-truths she felt Sylah was telling.
“Can we get two more firerums over here, please.” Sylah bellowed the request, but her voice sounded like it was shaking.
“Do you think they were good people?” Anoor suddenly asked.
“Who?”
“The Sandstorm.”
The firerum shots were served, and still Sylah didn’t respond, though her eyes looked troubled.
Eventually she spoke. “Drink up. You’ll need it for our final stop.”
It took them a while to reach the plantation fields; the roads got rougher, the smell thicker. Anoor had to hold a handkerchief to her nose. She had seen the fields of rubber trees from her window for years. They had always looked so beautiful and perfect, each row neatly planted straight. But now she could smell them. Not just the latex but the sour odor of perspiration and the coppery smell of clotting blood.
“Why are we stopping?” Anoor asked as they stopped on the edge of the field.
“Look.”
Anoor followed Sylah’s gaze. An Ember, a master of duty to be exact, walked between the trees a few hundred handspans ahead of them. Dusters toiled all around, their scythe blades dripping white, the handles dripping blue. They bent and hacked at the bark with blunt blades until white latex oozed from the creases. At the end of each row there were overflowing buckets. When a Duster squatted over one, Anoor realized they were toilets.
An irrigation system pumped around the fields using bloodwerk. A water bucket strapped to the back of a sleeping eru was manned by another master of duty. He rationed out the water in dirty and broken cups, some of them leaking away to the ground, but he didn’t give the workers another.
And from her tower on the hill, Anoor had seen the beauty, but now she saw the horror.
The master of duty barked an order, and Anoor could see his spittle in the sunlight.
Anoor flinched as his whip struck the back of an elderly man.
“Why are you showing me this, Sylah?”
“This morning you told me you wished you had power.” Sylah’s voice was rough. “But look, see that man. See the wound on his back?”