Emma jerked as though a knife had traced down her spine.
Turnbulls.
Her face felt entirely numb; her lips, two chips of ice. She might have been deep under water, the sounds of the chamber a distant storm above the waves. Here she was. Mortal no more. A ghost in the world she had been born to, a stranger to every soul she had loved. There was a collar around her neck. There were bruises on her arms. And she felt them as little as she felt the pulses of her own heart, which should have been tearing at her chest. She could look at it all, turn the whole knotted horror over in her mind, quite without any feelings.
So she had been promised to this dark. They had known, the Turnbulls. Known of this power, known enough to bargain awaya girl who had turned up at their parties and drank what they gave her, but would never be one of their own. Had she not thought that it made no sense for her to be with them? Hadn’t she felt it every moment, in the exchange of names she did not know and schools she could never have attended? She had never been able to copy their glow. That invincible ease, gained from knowing what it was to belong all their lives. There she had been, so full of desperation and longing. With them, but never one of them. She had been so convenient.
Someone had been clever enough to see that.
The Judge continued, somewhere far away.
“It is a bargain of long standing, and always paid before now at the appointed time. The Turnbulls selected her for sacrifice, a full winter ago. And yet the payment has not been made.”
Yes, someone had been very clever, to choose her.
The pain bloomed through her. It was frostbite put before a flame. It was waking too early on the surgeon’s table. She saw his laughing eyes, his careless smile. He had steadied her hand on a camera viewfinder. He had kissed her bare skin on the rooftop of a cathedral.
He had dressed her in ears and a tail and set her running through the dark.
He had called the hunters to her path.
“She has prevented this payment from being extracted, firstly by transforming into an animal whose form obscured her, and then by fleeing the City’s officials.”
The Judge turned to Emma. As though her fate depended on memorizing the tiniest of details, Emma noticed for the first time that there were no whites around his eyes. They were pure ruby,split only by a snake-slit pupil. Hunger glowed from their depths. She could not look away.
“So, Emma Curran. Your soul was promised to the City by the Turnbulls. And yet it was not given. You made your own bargain with the City to become a fox, and hid in animal form so that your pursuers might not find you. And now you have sealed that bargain further by swearing to the City within these very walls. A clever scheme.”
It was clearly pointless to protest her innocence. Emma only wished that she was as clever as he believed her. Someone that clever might yet find a way out of this.
“None may betray a bargain with the City. Your very existence is a conundrum. To honor the Turnbulls’ contract, you owe the entire essence of your mortal being. But you are no longer mortal, are you? Your current state prevents the payment of the Turnbulls’ debt.”
Emma straightened her back, as her mother would have. Distant afternoons in lecture halls filtered back to her. It seemed unlikely that any of the mortal law she had studied would apply here. Who at the University had ever written an essay on the finer points of a contract to drain the soul of another person?But what if this were just another tutorial,she thought.An exercise to be solved? Think. Just think.
“Current state. You can turn me back? Make me mortal again?”
The Judge’s eyes flared, hard and glittering as rubies. He watched Emma shrink back, then continued. “You owe a debt of your own to the City, from your later contract as a fox maiden. One hundred years of service. A fox maiden must hunt. An employment you cannot undertake if we take the essence of your soul, as isowed. You see? You cannot fulfill the contract with the prior claim without reneging on the second. But you cannot fulfill the second contract before the first has been honored. This is a thing which has never happened before in the annals of records.”
“I see. By honoring the Turnbulls’ bargain, I would default on my own debt to the Night City. If that draining is so complete, so final, I would have nothing of value for the City to take. Nor even the faculties to earn payment elsewhere.”
“Indeed. By either path, you default on one of those bargains. For which death is the only sentence.”
Death. With that word, Emma found that every particle of cold had seeped away. In its place, she finally felt the pain. It was rage and fear and grief. It was a tangled throbbing mess of wanting, and it screamed its need to live. In that instant, Emma knew she would tear through the world with her teeth for a chance to survive.
Emma raised her voice for the whole Court to hear. “Then I wish to make a bargain with the Night City.”
The chamber erupted with murmurs.
“The debt that the Turnbulls offered must be paid. And I will do it. But not with my soul. With payment that I earn in service of the Night City. I am a fox maiden, so I have a trade to earn with. This is my bargain: Add the Turnbulls’ debt to my own, let me repay it in my own way, and I shall see that the City receives what it is owed in full.”
The Judge’s pale brows rose.
Emma continued. “My death would not only be entirely unnecessary; it would prevent the Night City from receiving the payment that is owed.”
The chamber behind her roared. But Emma’s gaze was locked with the Judge’s.I dare you,she telegraphed with her eyes.Go on.
The Judge leaned forward in his throne. He was alight with the same animation Emma had seen in her own law tutors, when a student finally made a point worth hearing. “A bold demand, indeed. And yet the City cannot find fault with your terms: Your bargain is acceptable.”
At her back, she dimly heard the chatter bouncing from the cavern’s walls. A grunt close behind reminded her of the boar-men’s presence. “And I will no longer be hunted? You’ll call off the Boars?”
