Once the room fell silent, Fi and Erik stood side-by-side, breaths shallow, lighting sticks burnt to ashes in their hands.
“You lied to me,” Fi said with all the venom of a frost asp.
“We may have… omitted some details,” Erik admitted.
Merciless Void, Fi could shake him for semantics later. “What are we going to do now?” There were any number of acceptable options: running, fleeing, cutting losses while they still had their throats.
“We wait for Milana,” Erik said.
“…Excuse me?”
“There’s still time to—”
“There is adaeyarihere!”
“Milana will get rid of him.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think—”
“One hour!” In Erik’s fingers, the lighting stick splintered. “That’s what you agreed to. There’s still time.”
Fi braced her hands on a shelf while he returned to the charade of candle lighting.
How had this gone to shit so fast? The daeyari saw her. He knew Milana and Erik. Even if the beast could be diverted, the capitol brimmed with supporters, people who could take notice of two attendants and their nervous behavior.
Fi wouldn’t go down with them. She could get through this. Shehadto get through this. She took this job because she was bold, unshakeable, the best damn smuggler across the Season-Locked Planes. She clutched the confidence like armor, this cloak of bristles she’d woven to keep herself safe.
To prove she was more now than she’d been on the worst day of her life.
She wouldn’t be dragged to a daeyari. Never again.
A small eternity passed before Milana returned, footsteps quick against the tile.
“He’s gone,” she reported, breathless. “Out of the city, back to the eastern border, but we’re severely behind schedule. We need to move.”
By the Void. Not her, too.
“Milana,” Fi said. “You’d be better off—”
“We have half an hour still! We’ll meet you here once our business is finished.”
They hurried off, leaving Fi alone in the reflection room. Cold drifted in from the courtyard, flickering the candles. She dropped onto a pillow with a snarl,reflectingon how little she wanted to be here.
Fi could run. She could very easily run right now and call this business finished, professional impropriety be damned to the deepest pit of the Void. This wasn’t an art heist. That much she’d bet her last rainbow-stranded hair on.
Then why did Milana and Erik need so many energy capsules—
A muffledBOOMshuddered the building.
Fi nearly jolted off her pillow. The impact rumbled stone and left the candle shelves rattling. On the high walls, windows groaned, glass cast purple in the growing dusk.
She held still as a startled rabbit in the aftermath.
An explosion. That was anexplosion, from the neighboring wing of the capitol. Milana and Erik said they’d planned to break into a safe in the governor’s office, but…
A scent of stone dust itched Fi’s nose. Footsteps and frantic voices passed by the hall.
Slowly, she rose to her feet.
