“First”—she yanked out the plugs of bloodied cotton from my nostrils; I gritted against my cry—“there isn’t any heroism in the guard. There’s no winning. It’s a job, and that’s all it is if you’re lucky.”
She was right: I didn’t like the first one. Though it rang of a truth I’d already begun to suspect. Still, I wasn’t sure what she meant bylucky,and some part of me was reluctant to ask.
“Second.” She pressed fresh cotton into my nostrils, one by one. That hurt almost as bad, and I gripped the chair’s arms. “You’re a daughter of scorn. Never trust a man, especially not outside these walls.”
A daughter of scorn.
That was what they called us women inside the walls. It was meant to be meaningful, empowering—we were sons and daughters of scorn, who could survive the acid rain, who had built the high walls.
Instead, it always felt to me like a consolation prize.
Survival and wheat. Survival and scorn.
The second half of what she’d said filtered in.Never trust a man outside these walls.For the first time it occurred to me that she might have once been among the patrol who ventured outside the walls. Did she mean I shouldn’t trust the other guard, or was there something elseshe’d encountered beyond the walls?
Silence fell as she yanked at the tape and fumbled to get itstraight with her unwilling fingers. I watched, waiting for her to continue, until I realized she had nothing else to say.
“What do you mean, ‘outside the walls’?”
“I’ve said what I meant to say.” She got the tape straightened and she placed it over my nose with a fresh jag of pain. “Men are men. Every single one of them will hurt you like those bastards did to you tonight, and worse.”
So Isa knew what had happened. Or at least she’d pieced together enough that she understood.
The only men I’d ever really known were Theo and Aldric. I hadn’t known my real father; he’d died in the guard before I could form memory. Theo and Aldric weren’tmenlike I sensed Isa meant—they were my family.
I stared at Isa as she prepared a splint for my nose. Something terrible had happened to her, perhaps more than once. There was a cold truth to her words, offered with no ulterior motive. After what had happened to me tonight, those words settled in my belly like stones.
She was maybe the only ally I had here in the barracks, besides Theo.
“Isa—”
I stopped, my gaze lowering. Beneath my hands, the arms of the chair had begun to vibrate.
Across the infirmary, the jars on the shelves tinkled in a constant, growing jangle.
Under my feet, the floorboards vibrated up through my boots and into my legs.
Isa’s hands went still, and as we met eyes, one of the jars fell off the shelf. It crashed to the floor with such suddenness I flinched in the chair.
The two of us rose, and her hand went out to grip mine as we approached the infirmary door. She kept me behind her like she would her child, even as the rumble seemed to grow to a growl around us, filling the whole space.
She pulled the door open to the night. As she did, a glow filled the sky, illuminating the southern wall. We threw our hands up, shielding our eyes. For a second I thought I could see the exact spot where I should be standing up there, next to Theo.
Then the southern wall exploded.
CHAPTER FIVE
My world had always beenone thing, and now it was another.
Pieces of the southern wall filled the glowing sky. They sailed like tossed coins through the air, arcing over the city. At this distance they looked small enough to hold in my hand. They rose higher, and Isa and I stared with our fingers still entwined. There was no time to think, to wonder, to consider.
There was only this: the horizon burning like a candle’s enormous flame, and the southern wall blown to shards.
Only two seconds had passed since the blast. In those seconds, the pieces of wall reached the apex of their arcs and began to descend.
They were headed for the city.
One piece in particular grew larger than the others. Moment by moment, it grew—larger than my hand, larger than my head, larger than me and Isa put together, larger than my house. And in a dawning moment, Isa and I realized the same thing.
