—and clattered against the blackstone-infused glass. The crowd gasped; people pointed.
The Windwraith had launched herself into the air, arms spread and legs tucked like a bizarre sort of bird. She soared over the Steelshooter’s head in an elegant arc. Faster than the blink of an eye, her feet tapped lightly on the gigantic man’s shoulders; she flipped a full circle and, with acrobatic precision, landed behind him.
In an extension of her landing, she whipped out her hands. Two of the Steelshooter’s throwing knives glinted in her palms.
By the time the Steelshooter, blinking in confusion, turned around, it was over.
The Windwraith pounced, graceful and deadly as a jaguar. She latched on to his shoulders and slashed her hands down upon his throat.
The thump of the Steelshooter’s body hitting the marble stage echoed around the silent auditorium. Red seeped onto the floor, turning the marble’s veins crimson. Ana’s Affinity stirred, a soft whisper at the back of her mind.
The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
“Mesyrs and meya damas!” Bogdan’s voice boomed across the auditorium. “It appears we have a new winner and a new record! I present: the Windwraith!”
The crowd erupted into cheers and screams. The few who had placed bets on the Windwraith were waving their slips and shouting at the top of their lungs, clamoring for their gold.
Ana turned and began shoving her way to the exit. She had no strength left in her to spend even a second more in this Deities-forsaken place. As she pushed her way through the wild, drunken crowd, she couldn’t help but look behind her. The audience had worked itself into a frenzy and had begun chanting the victor’s name. Yet onstage, behind the blood-splattered glass wall, the Windwraith was quiet. She stood several paces from the blood pooling around her opponent’s body, head bowed, arms hanging by her sides.
Ana looked away. Like the Windwraith, she felt no victory at the Steelshooter’s defeat. It didn’t matter that a condemned girl had fought her way out and won tonight. No matter what, a body lay cooling on the floor. No matter what, a life had been lost. And until all the stadiums and brokers had been burned to the ground, Cyrilia would keep on losing.
Ana threw one last glimpse at the gleaming marble statues of the four Deities and wondered how they could ever stand to look upon such a godless place.
The cold autumn air that stung his face was a blissful release from the hot, cramped chambers of the Playpen. Ramson slipped through the crowds, his eyes trained on Ana’s chestnut hair, the slim silhouette of her black dress as she walked briskly. He called out to her, loudly enough to attract the attention and giggling of several drunk revelers.
He caught her wrist. By instinct, he turned, pulling her into the darkness of a small alleyway. She made a noise in her throat and grew still. “Ana,” Ramson panted. Something in him twisted like a knife at the sight of her: arms crossed, shoulders hunched, as though she wanted to fold herself away.
She was unbelievably naïve—yet something in the way she viewed the world, as though it were carved of white and black, reminded him of the way he’d been before Jonah’s death. And somehow a small part of him wanted to protect her.
Ramson found himself reaching out and gently tilting her chin toward him.
She stepped back, snapping out of his hold, and ripped her mask off. It landed facedown in the wet garbage of the empty alleyway.
She was crying. Tears had carved dark streaks of kohl down her cheeks, mingling with her powders. For a moment, she stared at him, and he wanted to pull her close. “That,” she whispered, “was beyond inhumane. I don’t have the words for it.”
The heat coursing through his veins dissipated, and Ramson suddenly felt cold. “It was,” he said hoarsely.
She turned her gaze to him, eyes burning like embers. “How could you associate with those people? How could you watch them do that and not feel anything?”
For all these years, he’d taken the coward’s way out, refusing to sink to a level as low as the brokers under Kerlan’s command. Yet standing by and doing nothing was another form of evil, he realized as he dropped his gaze to the ground. And fate had rewarded him in kind, anyway.
Ramson was silent.
Ana took a deep breath. She swiped angrily at the tears on her face and seemed to collect herself as she lifted her chin and straightened. “I just need some time by myself.” Her tone was impassive and flat, the same as the first time she had spoken to him back in Ghost Falls. Somewhere, somehow in her life, she had learned to mask her emotions. And she was almost as good as he was.
Looking at her, eyes blazing, shoulders squared, standing tall and regal in her evening dress, he thought she burned like a beacon. Something stirred in him—something that drew him toward her like shadows toward the light.
Ramson stamped out that inkling of desire. “All right,” he said, shrugging. “I have some matters to take care of.”Stay safe. I’ll see you back at the inn.Yet he said none of those words as he turned abruptly and walked away, leaving her in the darkness of the alleyway. The Ramson Quicktongue of Novo Mynsk, Portmaster and Deputy of the Order of the Lily, gave no reassurances and made no promises.
Ramson stalked through the streets that he knew like the back of his own hand. He’d grown up in the city as a petty thief, running errands for the Order and learning everything he could about the cruel, crooked world he had been given to work with. In time, the red-shingled rooftops of the dachas had become his safe haven, and the shadows of the grimy alleyways had grown to welcome him like an old friend.
Ramson stopped by a pub. He spoke with several hooded patrons before slipping cop’stones beneath begrimed wooden tables and shaking hands, arrangement made. He then set out for the Dams.
The Dams was less of a dam than it was a vast meshwork of tight alleys and underground tunnels that separated the poor from the rich in Novo Mynsk. It was the nest of all gangs and crime networks. An open-air sewage funnel ran along the edge of the Dams, lending the area its wet, rotting stench that clung to one’s clothes if one stayed too long. It was also a convenient place to dump victims. Every few days, a body would bob along the foul green stream—corpses of nobodies or criminals that the city guards and Whitecloaks alike chose to ignore.
The streetlamps had all been smashed long ago, and the remaining shards of glass on the ground crunched beneath Ramson’s polished shoes. The moon hid behind clouds that promised snow—the First Snow—in four days, and Ramson was grateful that the stink of sewage had dissipated in the cold. He walked briskly, navigating the crooked twists and turns with no more hesitation than a man would pace through his own backyard.
He stopped suddenly, at the corner of an alleyway no different from any other. Ramson leaned against the wall and melted into the shadows.
