“I do not know,” I admitted. “For now. Ezra is being followed as we speak and will be apprehended before our return.”
Damia rested her chin on the heel of her palm. “That’s why Ava isn’t here, right? Dain said they’d invited her and Jayla tothe wedding, but they didn’t arrive with you. You set her on Ezra’s tail, didn’t you?”
I dipped my chin in confirmation. “She’s leading Zion’s catch-and-play in his absence. As we are all here, we hope Ezra will slip up from a false sense of security and they can catch him communicating with whoever else is on this. But there is also another matter we need to discuss.” Stroking Zion’s thigh through one of the endless rips in his jeans, I delivered the next bout of news. “Ezra and Clyde cannot be working alone. Clyde came from Coriattus, Ezra from Ilasall, and I doubt these two ended up with us by accident. The cities are collaborating, and the probability of them having established a network in our ranks is too high to be dismissed.”
“Which means Nara’s failed assassination was just the beginning.” Greyn gripped the table as his chair teetered on two legs. But it slammed into the floor, the thud as sharp as the angles of his features. “Like we suspected.”
Hearing your friend’s daughter, the teenager you saw as your niece, had been attacked in the middle of the night last autumn, had been a kick into my gut.
Conall rested an arm on the backrest of Aanya’s seat. “So what do we tell everyone?”
Through a rip, I slipped my fingers under Zion’s pants. “We don’t divulge this information to anyone. It would wreak havoc instead of keeping everyone’s spirits up, and the disorder would delay the last preparations before we invade Ilasall.”
Damia tapped the rim of her half-empty glass of water. “What do you propose?”
“We change the date,” Kali mused out loud. Holding Zion’s ankles, she sat up straighter. “We?—”
“Postpone it,” she and Damia finished simultaneously, as if the two women I viewed as my family had one mind. Well, three, if you counted Nara as an adult.
Though in my eyes, she was always going to remain the little girl who hated art classes and had pestered me into helping her make the clay cup her teacher had assigned her as homework. The same cup Damia had been using to drink her tea for the last decade. And the one secret of Nara’s I would take to my grave.
“Exactly.” Unable to help myself, I clutched Zion’s thigh as he shifted, searching for a more comfortable position. My limbs had melded themselves to his body. “We had set the date as eleven days from today. We’re going to make it thirteen now.”
Zion scratched his chest, his t-shirt hiding the marks his nails had undeniably left. The habit he had developed as a child had never released its hold on him. “You want to exhaust their military. Like you’re frustrating me right now by keeping me away from Ezra.”
And how he frustrated me by wearing a black t-shirt to this meeting, undoubtedly to irk me some more. Both friends and strangers often assumed wearing dark colors was a peculiarity of my personality, but in reality, it all came back to a trick my mother had taught me long ago: black diverted people’s attention from how you looked to what you did. It persuaded them to listen to you instead of scrutinizing your appearance.
And when you were the leader, your subjects tended to analyze you incessantly. So if you could pick the direction their curiosity should steer toward, it would be an unwise decision to ignore the opportunity.
“Yes,” I confirmed, drawing concentric circles on Zion’s leg. “We can presume the cities have been informed of our plans, so let’s make them question the reliability of their sources. By delaying our arrival, we can test the resolve of their military. Make the soldiers doubt their orders and, consequently, their authority.”
“What about our people?” Conall asked as he accepted the glass of water Dain had offered him. “Mine I can deal with, butyours will be the ones marching into war. You can’t just keep them in the dark.”
“We will use Ezra as an excuse,” I explained, right as Kali’s knee bumped into mine. A second ticked by, then two, three, but she didn’t retreat, and the continuous contact thawed the rigidness in my back. Sure, I had much groveling to do, but her not running away from me was a clear sign I had not lost the battle. “A public execution in our main square the day before we are scheduled to march. With his body at our feet, we will announce the adjustments to our strategy. Whoever else is working for the cities will rush to inform their superiors, and this should surely rattle them. They will expect us to scratch our plans while we will simply delay them.”
Damia pushed off the table. “What about your numbers? Will you have enough to stand a chance against Ilasall’s military?” Strolling toward the windows overlooking Conall’s compound, she offered, “You have our support, Gedeon. If you need a boost, we’re here.”
I inclined my head as a silent gesture of appreciation. Once you knew someone for as long as I did, since you were running in the sea buck-naked as a child, words ceased to be a good enough expression of the roots your friendship had spread. “We should be fine.”
“We have divided people into three categories,” Kali added. “The first: children and the elderly. They’ll stay behind, their groups barricaded in our schools. The second: everyone in the last year of our schools and pregnant women. We’ll give them a choice: stay safe back home or fight with us. Everyone who’s an adult or becoming such should be able to speak for themselves. And the third: the rest of us.” She gestured to me and Zion. “We’re the meat, prime for slaughter. Or, in other words, those who will give our lives up to the fates.”
“Just to be on the safe side, you have no doubts you have enough? And I don’t mean only people—any kind of resources,” Conall pressed, passing his glass of water to Aanya.
The woman we had smuggled out of Ilasall more than five years ago beamed at her partner. Her reaction to the simple gesture of affection betrayed how her story was not for the faint of heart.
“Thank you, truly.” I patted Zion’s leg, pretending it was Conall’s and Damia’s shoulders. “But I cannot take you up on this. You both know the Coriattus and Ardaton better and have to be ready to stand against them by yourselves in case we lose the battle in Ilasall. Time will be of the essence. If Ilasall crushes us, the other two cities won’t slumber. They will act.” I kneaded Zion’s flesh, his muscles as unyielding as my grip. “They will try to wipe you off the ground, no matter what it takes.”
“Fun times await us,” Dain remarked, hissing as he sought to wrangle a hair tie out of the thicket of his brown locks, the waves resisting each pull. Shaking his head, Conall took over the job and began untangling his partner’s knots.
I wanted to congratulate and taunt my childhood friend at the same time. Their relationship seemed so easy compared to the brittle truce between our trio.
“So stubborn.” Damia cracked a window open, and a wisp of cool air tickled my nape. “And I mean all three of you.” She gave Kali, Zion, and me a pointed look. As she perched on the edge of a windowsill, her leather pants grazed against the white paint, and flakes of it floated down to the floor in a flurry. “At least let us help you somehow. What’s your biggest issue currently?”
Zion twirled his knife. “The city gates.”
“A bottleneck.” Sana hoisted her feet onto what had been Nissa’s seat and crossed her ankles, the dirty heels of her pine-green sneakers smearing the cream cushion. Yet people refused to see the similarities between her and Zion.
“Yes,” Kali confirmed. “Sadira and Ryder have locked themselves in their workshop and are spending days and nights trying to figure out how to deactivate the security system remotely. Too many guards patrol the top of the wall and the gates for us to reach them undetected.” Releasing Zion’s shoelace, she plucked a piece of yellow from between the strings. “If all of us go there at once, we’ll have nowhere to hide. All Ilasall will have to do will be to line up the weapons atop the wall and pick us off with bullets one by one. We won’t even get a chance to open them with the microchips implanted in our purlicues.”
