I woketo rain pelting my face. Cold rain, stinging rain—acid rain?
My eyes opened, round as coins, to a gunmetal sky. Big pellets of rain slapped my cheeks and forehead. The instinct overtook me to move, to take cover, but my limbs were heavy as iron. I lay prone, and beneath me the world jostled over and over without proper rhythm.
Where was I?
I turned my head, and a rogue wave of pain and dizziness nauseated me. I swallowed and swallowed against the acid in my throat until it receded. Now it came back to me: I’d taken a blow to the temple, been struck by the pommel of a sword. Then, in a flash, I saw the rest of it in reverse—the crater, the mad rush through the city, Isa crushed, the wall exploding.
We’d been attacked.
We’d been slaughtered.
Monsters.
But I was alive, and my brain had been left at least partly intact. As for my body—I couldn’t even lift my hand to check if my skull was fractured; both arms were weighed down.
The rain went on hitting my face, and my eyes opened again. This time I didn’t move my head, only my eyes. To my left and rightrose the wood frame of a wagon, which meant I lay in the back of it. A horse’s hooves clopped on the earth. Above me there was no green hue in the sky, which meant no acid rain.
This was real, pure rain.
But that was so rare, I’d only seen a real rainstorm once in my life. It had been the greatest event of my childhood; people had danced in throngs on the cobblestones. What were the chances it would come again now?
I let out a strained breath. Had I been rescued? Had the guard come for me? Maybe I was being taken to the inner wall. Maybe a god had taken pity and blessed us?—
Above my head, from the wagon’s seat, a voice said, “There’s the rabbit coming round.”
Dread settled in me like sediment.
I knew that voice. I’d heard it once, which was more than I ever wanted to hear it at all. Never, never again.
Against every instinct I shifted my eyes up, tilting my head to catch an upside-down view of the wagon’s seat. There, above me, sat a raven-haired figure with leather reins in hand. A man. He wore an ebony cloak with strange, entwined patterns inlaid in forest-green thread.
His face half-turned toward me, one hazel eye catching mine. “Wasn’t certain you’d ever wake.”
My lips parted. My voice came out as a rasp. “You…”
“Yes?”
“You domed me.”
A beat of silence as the rain fell, and then he burst into a carrying laugh. “Did I? Memory’s a funny thing.”
My teeth had begun to chatter. One of his hands came around, veined and large, and he drew a brown tarp over the bed of the wagon. The rain pattered against the tarp above me instead of my body. Meanwhile, I shivered; I’d never been so cold.
It wasn’t the wetness or the rain. It was everything else.
My people had been attacked. The southern wall was destroyed.My best friends and mother were dead. Isa the nurse had been crushed. My neighborhood was a crater. And now—now I was with the creature who’d pommeled me in the temple with his sword.
Then Vaelen had seen fit to make it rain—really rain—for the second time in my life. Somehow that felt like a greater injustice than everything that had come before.
The wagon rolled on, jostled by the rutted road. Neither of us spoke again, but questions revolved in my head. Where were we going? Who was my captor? Most of all: How to escape?
Escape, escape, escape. A part of my brain had been humming that word from the moment I’d seen that hazel eye gazing down at me from the wagon’s seat. I knew he was one ofthem—the reason we’d built the walls. The reason we couldn’t venture outside. The reason I’d become a guard.
Last night he’d loomed large, a wraith of shadow. But in daylight he appeared almost human. Almost.
My mother was right. Monsters weren’t from nursery rhymes or fables or fairy tales—the tales wereof this thing sitting above me. No doubt she had seen one of these creatures brought into the city so many years before. Black-veined, she’d said, though I didn’t see that on his hands now.
And now she was dead because of them.
