“Who says I wanted you dead?”
“I burned your friend.”
“Megs?” she says, and laughs. “He wasn’t my friend. He was useful, but he wasn’t anyone’s friend.”
“Still, you would have killed me when I first got here.”
“Of course. You came out of nowhere with that story about walking down the mountain.”
“It was all true.”
“The Magistrate believes you, so now so do I.”
“But,” I say.
“But what?”
“No—you were going to say ‘but.’”
A leg collapses on a nearby roulette table and a mob of naked people tumbles onto the ground.
“You have secrets,” she sa
ys. “I watched you in that fight with Asodexus . . .”
“The guy who looked like a horned toad?”
“Yes. That wasn’t an ordinary fight. You did something.”
I wonder for a second if she spotted the hoodoo, but I’d be dead by now if she had.
“And you want to know what I did.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you saw wrong and it was just a fight.”
“I’ve seen fights. I’ve seen souls and Hellions kill plenty. What you did wasn’t like that.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
I give her my best shit-eating smile.
“If I tell you now, what will we talk about on our next date?”
Wanuri and the earless, noseless guy call to Daja from over by the fire.
She looks at me.
“You’re with the havoc now. Don’t forget it.”
“I won’t.”
Daja walks backward away from me, pointing at me with both hands.
“And I know your name isn’t Pitts, no matter what Mimir says.”