A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes 2)

Beside me, Laia pants, her body dragging. She is slowing me down. You could leave her, an insidious voice whispers. You'd move faster on your own. I crush the voice. Besides the obvious fact that I promised to help her in exchange for my freedom, I know that she'll do anything to get to Kauf Prison--to her brother--including trying to make her way there alone.

In which case, she'd die.

"Faster, Laia," I say. "They're too close." She surges forward. Walls of skulls, bones, crypts, and spiderwebs fade away on either side of us. We're far south of where we should be. We've long since passed the escape tunnel in which I hid weeks' worth of supplies.

The catacombs rumble and shake, knocking both of us down. The stench of fire and death filters through a sewer grate directly above us. Moments later, an explosion rips through the air. I don't bother considering what it could be. All that matters is that the soldiers behind us have slowed, as wary of the unstable tunnels as we are. I use the opportunity to put another few dozen yards between us. I cut right into a side tunnel and then retreat into the deep shadow of a half-crumbled alcove.

"Will they find us, do you think?" Laia whispers.

"Hopefully no--"

Light flares from the direction we were headed, and I hear the staccato clomp of boots. Two soldiers turn into the tunnel, their torches illuminating us clearly. They halt for a second, bewildered, perhaps, by the presence of Laia, by my lack of a mask. Then they spot my armor and scims, and one of them releases a piercing whistle that will draw in every soldier who can hear it.

My body takes over. Before either of the soldiers can unsheathe their swords, I've impaled throwing knives into the soft flesh of their throats. They drop silently, their torches sputtering on the damp catacomb floor.

Laia emerges from the alcove, her hand over her mouth. "E-Elias--"

I lunge back to the alcove, pulling her with me and loosening my scims in their scabbards. I have four throwing knives left. Not enough.

"I'll take out as many as I can," I say. "Stay out of the way. No matter how bad it looks, don't interfere, don't try to help."

The last word leaves my lips as the soldiers who were following us come into view from the tunnel to our left. Five yards away. Four. In my mind, the knives have already flown, already found their marks. I burst from the alcove and let them loose. The first four legionnaires go down quietly, one after the other, as easy as scything grain. The fifth drops with a sweep of my scim. Warm blood sprays, and I feel my bile rising. Don't think. Don't dwell. Just clear the way.

Six auxes appear behind the first five. One jumps onto my back, and I dispatch him with an elbow to his face. A moment later, another soldier rushes me. When he gets a knee to the teeth, he howls and claws at his broken nose and bloody mouth. Spin, kick, sidestep, strike.

Behind me, Laia screams. An aux hauls her out of the alcove by her neck and holds a knife to her throat. His leer turns into a howl. Laia's shoved a dagger into his side. She yanks it out, and he staggers away.

I turn on the last three soldiers. They flee.

In seconds, I collect my knives. Laia's whole body shakes as she takes in the carnage around us: Seven dead. Three injured, moaning and trying to rise.

When she looks at me, her eyes grow round in shock at my bloodied scims and armor. Shame floods me, so potent that I wish I could sink into the ground. She sees me now, down to the wretched truth at my core. Murderer! Death himself!

"Laia--" I begin, but a low groan rolls down the tunnel, and the ground trembles. Through the sewer grates I hear screams, shouts, and the deafening reverberation of an enormous explosion.

"What in the hells--"

"It's the Scholar Resistance," Laia shouts over the noise. "They're revolting!"

I don't get to ask how she happens to know this fascinating tidbit, because at that moment, telltale silver flashes from the tunnel to our left.

"Skies, Elias!" Laia's voice is choked, her eyes wide. One of the Masks approaching is enormous, older than me by a dozen years and unfamiliar. The other is a small, almost diminutive figure. The calmness of her masked face belies the chilling rage that emanates from her.

My mother. The Commandant.

Boots thunder from our right as whistles draw even more soldiers. Trapped.

The tunnel groans again.

"Get behind me," I snap at Laia. She doesn't hear. "Laia, damn it, get--ooof--"

Laia dives straight into my stomach, a graceless, desperate leap so unexpected that I topple back into one of the wall crypts. I punch straight through the thick cobwebbing over the crypt and land on my back atop a stone coffin. Laia's half on top of me, half wedged between the coffin and the crypt wall.

The combination of cobwebs, crypt, and warm girl throws me, and I'm barely even capable of stuttering, "Are you cra--"

BOOM. The ceiling of the tunnel we were just standing in collapses all at once, a thunderous rumble intensified by the roar of explosions from the city. I flip Laia under me, my arms on either side of her head to shield her from the blast. But it is the crypt that saves us. We cough from the wave of dust unleashed by the explosions, and I'm keenly aware that if not for Laia's quick thinking, we'd both be dead.

The rumbling stops, and sunlight cuts through the dust. Screams echo from the city. Carefully, I lift myself away from Laia and turn toward the crypt entrance, which is half-blocked by chunks of rock. I peer out into what's left of the tunnel. Which isn't much. The cave-in is complete--not a Mask to be seen.

I scramble out of the crypt, half dragging, half carrying a still-coughing Laia over the debris. Dust and blood--not hers, I affirm--streak her face, and she paws at her canteen. I put it to her lips. After a few swallows, she pulls herself standing.

"I can--I can walk."

Rocks obstruct the tunnel to our left, but a mailed hand shoves them away. The Commandant's gray eyes and blonde hair flash through the dust.

"Come on." I pull up my collar to hide the Blackcliff diamond tattoo on the back of my neck. We clamber out of the ruined catacombs and into the cacophonous streets of Serra.

Ten bleeding hells.

No one appears to have noticed the collapse of the street into the crypts--everyone is too busy staring at a column of fire rising into the hot blue sky: the governor's mansion, lit up like a Barbarian funeral pyre. Around its blackening gates and in the immense square in front of it, dozens of Martial soldiers are locked in a pitched battle with hundreds of rebels dressed in black--Scholar Resistance fighters.

"This way!" I angle away from the governor's mansion, knocking down two approaching rebel fighters as I go, and aim for the next street over. But fire rages there, spreading rapidly, and bodies litter the ground. I grab Laia's hand and race toward another side street, only to find that it is as brutalized as the first.

Above the clang of weapons, the screams, and the roar of flames, Serra's drum towers beat frenziedly, demanding backup troops in the Illustrian Quarter, the Foreign Quarter, the Weapons Quarter. Another tower reports my location near the governor's mansion, ordering all available troops to join the hunt.

Just past the mansion, a pale blonde head emerges from the debris of the collapsed tunnel. Damn it. We stand near the middle of the square, beside an ash-coated fountain of a rearing horse. I back Laia against it and duck, desperately searching for an escape route before the Commandant or one of the Martials spots us. But it seems as if every building and every street adjoining the square is aflame.

Look harder! Any second now, the Commandant will dive into the fray in the square, using her terrifying skill to tear a path through the battle so she can find us.

I look back at her as she shakes the dust off her armor, unmoved by the chaos. Her serenity raises the hair on the back of my neck. Her school is destroyed, her son and foe escaped, the city an absolute disaster. And yet she is remarkably calm about it all.

"There!" Laia grabs my arm and points to an alley hidden behind an overturned vendor's cart. We crouch down and race towar

d it, and I thank the skies for the tumult that keeps Scholars and Martials alike from noticing us.

In minutes, we reach the alley, and as we're about to plunge into it, I chance a look back--once, just to make sure she hasn't seen us.

I search the chaos--through a knot of Resistance fighters descending on a pair of legionnaires, past a Mask fighting off ten rebels at once, to the rubble of the tunnel, where my mother stands. An old Scholar slave trying to escape the havoc makes the mistake of crossing her path. She plunges her scim into his heart with a casual brutality. When she yanks the blade out, she doesn't look at the slave. Instead, she stares at me. As if we are connected, as if she knows my every thought, her gaze slices across the square.

She smiles.

III: Laia

The Commandant's smile is a bloated, pale worm. Though I see her for only a moment before Elias urges me away from the bloodshed of the square, I find myself unable to speak.

I skid, my boots still coated in blood from the butchery in the tunnels. At the thought of Elias's face afterward--the loathing in his eyes--I shudder. I wanted to tell him that he did what he had to do to save us. But I couldn't get the words out. It was all I could do not to retch.

Sounds of suffering rend the air--Martial and Scholar, adult and child, mingled into one cacophonous scream. I hardly hear it, focused as I am on avoiding the broken glass and burning buildings collapsing into the streets. I look over my shoulder a dozen times, expecting to see the Commandant on our heels. Suddenly, I feel like the girl I was a month ago. The girl who abandoned her brother to Empire imprisonment, the girl who whimpered and sobbed after being whipped. The girl with no courage.

When the fear takes over, use the only thing more powerful, more indestructible, to fight it: your spirit. Your heart. I hear the words spoken to me yesterday by the blacksmith Spiro Teluman, my brother's friend and mentor.

I try to transform my fear into fuel. The Commandant is not infallible. She might not have even seen me--her attention was so fixed on her son. I escaped her once. I'll escape her again.

Adrenaline surges through me, but as we turn from one street to the next, I stumble over a small pyramid of masonry and sprawl onto the soot-blackened cobblestones.

Elias lifts me back to my feet as easily as if I'm made of feathers. He gazes ahead, behind, to the windows and rooftops nearby, as if he too expects his mother to appear at any second.

"We have to keep going." I yank at his hand. "We have to get out of the city."

"I know." Elias angles us into a dusty, dead orchard bound by a wall. "But we can't do that if we're exhausted. It won't hurt to rest for a minute."

He sits, and I kneel beside him unwillingly. The air of Serra feels strange and tainted, the tang of scorched wood mingling with something darker--blood, burning bodies, and unsheathed steel.