Reality rippled, somehow frigid and scorching simultaneously, a squirm beneath her fingernails. Fi pushed, dragging the distortion wider, until the translucent folds of a new Curtain floated in front of her.
Moment of truth. Or certain death. Fi sucked in a breath and stepped through.
Solid ground met her on the other side. She stumbled in the dim light, colliding with a shelf of… filing boxes? A storage room. Fi dug an energy capsule from her coat pocket for light as she navigated to a window. She tipped onto her toes to peer outside.
A plaza stretched before her. Across it, the stone columns and aurora dome of the courthouse, a red perimeter wall at its back—placing her in the basement of the capitol building.
Astrid was right. Fiwasdamn good at what she did.
She stepped back to the Shard where Milana waited. “We’re good to go.”
They carried the crates through the Curtain into the storage room, leaving the cart within the Shard and Aisinay unhitched to browse the meadow for Shard voles. Milana handed Fi a bag.
“You’re not very faithful to the daeyari, are you?” Milana asked.
Fi withheld a snort. “Not particularly.”
“You are today. Put these on.”
Fi opened the bag—another jolt at seeing the silver attendant robes. She scowled, the cloth like slime beneath her fingers. Style varied across territories, but she could picture these too easily on the attendants in Verne Territory, where she grew up.
Too similar to the ones who came to her town a decade ago.
A disguise was a disguise. Fi’s stomach squirmed as she removed her coat and donned the wretched robe. Into the pockets she stuffed her sword hilt, a couple of energy capsules, a polished carnelian transport stone, small comforts against suffocating fabric.
Milana beckoned her to follow. “No sense lurking in a storage room. You can wait for us in the reflection hall. Find a place to sit by the candles, no one will bother you.”
Fi huffed and tied back her rainbow hair, hiding it beneath her raised hood.
Outside the storage room, dark tile set into patterns of conifers and mountain peaks squeaked beneath her boots. Copper energy conduits framed the ceiling, feeding lamps of blown glass in metal casings that spiked like stars. Milana led them through the maze of marble halls with startling ease.Someonedid her research.
Fi’s heart hammered harder with each step.
This was a distressing observation. She’d cut a Curtain into a capitol building, was poised to pull off her most lucrative job to date, all reasonable cause for nerves.
But that wasn’t the problem.
It was the robes. The corridors of polished stone. Milana leading her with hardly a backward glance. Sharp little pieces, each tugging at cold-clawed memories.
The weight of hands on her arms.
The lulling voices.
Don’t be afraid.
Fi bristled, chin up, metal barbs to reinforce her spine. Milana had assured her the Lord Daeyari was out of the city today. Nothing to worry about.
“We’ll fetch you once the work is finished,” Milana said.
She paused on the threshold to a large, circular chamber. On the floor, gray and white marble shaped a mosaic of trees, scattered with pillows for long spells of sitting. Overhead, the ceiling vaulted into a dome of Void black. High walls accentuated the emptiness. The pin-drop quiet. Scents of wax and pine oil mixed with the sulfur of matches, tiers of mahogany shelves lined with candles. Hundreds of them.
One for every sacrifice consumed by the daeyari. The grim memorial stood for anyone who wished to visit, though the sparse offerings of flowers and trinkets suggested few people opted to pay their respects here, of all places. Most families probably spread the ashes closer to home, energy back to the Void and body back to the dust of the Plane—or whatever remained of the body, once the daeyari was done with it.
In other words: one of the least fun places in the entire Plane. At least no one would bother Fi here.
“Under an hour, as promised,” Milana whispered. “Then back through the Curtain—”
Scuffed footsteps broke the silence.
