“I’m going to get some height,” I sign. “Better vantage point.”
She nods silently back.
In the night, my boots don’t make a sound. Every ounce of my Striker training comes forward now as I move like wind through the shadows. At the edge of the building, I get a foothold against the wall and reach up for the roof. My gloved hand closes around it.
I grit my teeth and pull myself up into a crouch on the edge.
There are guards patrolling up here too. I can see a couple making their rounds on the top of the gates that surround the complex. I wait quietly until they’ve turned their backs to me, and then melt into the night by blending into the branches of a tree that leans over the roof.
From here, I get a better view of the main entrance. There are two additional guards we hadn’t seen, each posted at the far edges of the building.
I tell Red this.
Good, comes his answer.They keep watch when the rotation happens. It will be soon.
And almost like clockwork after he tells me this, the other guards around the perimeter pause in their usual routes as another set of soldiers comes to replace them. There is some shuffling, and for a while, the placeseems to crawl with their uniforms. But in this there is a slightest sense of chaos, exactly the window we need as the only soldiers with their minds entirely on their watch are the pair at the side entrance, doing temporary duty.
Now is our only chance.
I bite the inside of my cheek and glance toward the trees. No one else would be able to see where Jeran has hidden. But after a beat comes a low trill, followed by the sound of what seems like a clicking beetle. Only a few seconds later, I hear a faint rush through the air. Down below, one guard at the side gate suddenly touches a hand to his neck before his knees give way. He slides slowly to the ground. On the west side, the guard makes the same gesture, then hunches as if he’d sighed. His body crumples without a sound.
As always, the Deathdancer never misses.
For the briefest moment, a flash of doubt sparks through me. This is it—this is too easy, but it will become difficult very soon. We are going to fail in what we do, we will die for it, and the fear of that fills me with sudden hesitation.
But then my training kicks back into gear, and my body acts before my mind can decide.
I’m sprinting as the second guard hits the ground. We have to move fast now. They’ll know within minutes that something has happened. I dart to the edge of the building, take a silent leap, and land on the building next to the main one. In my mind rush the exercises I’d done through the rooftops of Mara’s Inner City—how Corian and I would race together, side by side, from the double gates to the National Hall without alerting any of the city’s soldiers. If we failed, we’d start over. It would go on for hours.
Corian’s laugh still echoes in my mind from whenever he had beatenme. If he were here with us now, no doubt he’d take down the guards before I could even make my way off the roof.
Now I cushion each of my steps the same way I’d done during our training. Down below at the side gate, Adena materializes from the shadows of the trees to drag the guards’ bodies into the darkness. She moves quickly—one blink and they’re there, another and they’re gone. I stop in the trees right above the gate as Adena emerges to look at the lock. Another guard walks by on the complex’s gate. He glances in my direction, then looks right past me, and continues.
I slide a knife out of my boot and give myself only a split second to aim. The knife flies down at the guard, burying deep in his throat.
His eyes pop open as his hands fly to his neck. I’m already down from the tree before he can see me as anything more than a shadow in the night. My hand wraps around his mouth and I snap his neck hard. He goes limp in my arms as I lower him to the ground, collecting my knife and his weapons in one swift motion.
Well, look at you, Corian would say to me with a smirk if he saw me now.So light on your feet.
Adena pulls her face mask down as she studies the lock. There are a series of six tumblers against the rectangular grid, each with the numerals 0 through 9 on them. She turns each, realizes they don’t just move like a simple tumbler, and fiddles with the first one until she figures out that it requires a twist to the left and then a twist to the right. Her eyes dart occasionally to me as I sign the numbers to her as a reminder. Her fingers move quickly, feeling the weight and clicks of each tumbler.
“What a design,” she whispers to herself.
Four. Five. Two. Six. Nine. Four.
Then Adena tries to turn the lock in the same circle as the guard had done.
It doesn’t budge.
Her eyes dart immediately to me. “Wrong numbers,” she tells me. Her eyes go frantically to the edge of the gate. The new guards will come around the bend soon.
“Try again,” I tell her.
She runs through it again. Again, it fails.
What if Red remembered them incorrectly? He had sounded so hesitant. He must have gotten one of them wrong. I close my eyes, willing myself into calm, and think.
Then, through the fog of my memories, I think of one incident with sudden clarity. The moment after the battle, when Red was feverish and near delirious on the floor of the makeshift infirmary. He had called out words from a Karenese story that his sister had once read to him.
