Vex’s leg throbbed. He couldn’t absorb the idea of Lu making permanent magic, let alone taking it herself. Not after everything Milo had done to her, and everything she knew Vex had been through, too. Permanent magicwasa weapon.
But Tom had made Lu kill people during the revolution—she was already a weapon.
What had all this done to her?
“Lu,” Vex pleaded, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat—she didn’t need someone who would fall apart, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to give her that. Someone to lean on, when he could barely stand on his own. “Remember what I said on the boat? You aren’t—”
She turned, but she wasn’t looking at him, her focus on the sanctuary.
“Do you hear that?”
“Adeluna,” Kari sighed. “We’re trying to help—”
“It sounds like shouting,” Lu said. Vex’s heart broke a little more.
But he heard it, too. An uproar came from the middle of the sanctuary, a crashing like pottery or windows—
Kari and Lu took off. Gunnar ran too, and Ben started to follow, but Vex grabbed him.
“Can you”—Vex grimaced at the dirt—“help me get there?”
He couldn’t make himself look at Ben, so he had no idea what his initial reaction was. Sympathy, probably.
Damn sympathy.
“Of course,” came Ben’s reply, and he hooked his arm around Vex’s waist. The two of them started off, weaving through the people who crowded the roads but frowned at the noise.
Or maybe it was Ben they were scowling at. Vex couldn’t tell—he was too focused on how each footfall shot questions into his heart.Has it been too long? Even with Lu back, can anything stop the Shaking Sickness’s progression?
Vex refused to answer those questions. He ached, and damn it, hehatedhis body. With every flare of pain and every breath.He hated it.
He and Ben were the last of their group to reach the source of the shouting. In the middle of the sanctuary, the buildings sat in a crude square. Vex had seen markets here on past visits—lean-tos and stalls with vendors hawkingbolts of linen, bananas, and salted fish.
But now, it was all the worst parts of a tavern brawl.
Dozens of people flailed around in manic fights. Fists flew. Bodies crashed through benches. Someone catapulted off a barrel onto the back of another person. The air filled with flying pots and buckets, anything that could inflict pain.
Vex was surprised that something like this hadn’t happened already—cramming the Emerdians and the Tuncians together and expecting them to get along was a lot to ask of any two syndicates.
Kari was nowhere to be seen—no, wait, she was in the middle of the ruckus with Lu and... Fatemah?
“You brought this here!” Fatemah barked. “Now,threesyndicates—”
Vex squinted. Three syndicates?
The Mechts had sided with Elazar. The Tuncians and Emerdians were here. Which left—
Vex hissed in panic. That girl socking another raider in the eye—she had a piercing in her right ear, a garish chunk of gold that made her earlobe droop.
Neither Emerdians nor Tuncians wore things like that.
Nayeli slid up on Vex’s other side. Behind her, Edda came too.
Vex released Ben to seize Nayeli’s arm. He pointed. “Does that look like—”
Nayeli followed his direction. “Ohshit.”
Edda’s reaction was far less shocked. She shrugged. “We would’ve reached out to them to unify the syndicates. Maybe they heard and sought asylum here too?”
