Page 73 of Tempting Fate

“What are you doing?”

I looked up at Bekatal. “I—” No, if my findings were correct, speaking aloud was not sensible. “Am taking a stroll.” I jerked my head away from the building and started walking, a confused Bekatal in my wake.

When we were far enough away, I murmured, “My device suggested there was a listening probe here. I couldn’t find anything, so it’s probably nothing, but I was curious.”

He gestured for me to give him the datapad, and I passed it over.

Bekatal returned to the building. He ran practiced fingers around the window’s lip and stopped with a mouthed curse. After curling his hand around something, he nodded towards the courtyard and strode away, me at his heels.

What had he found? More to the point, why was it there, and how? Much as I disliked how the village walls reminded me of the trading enclave I’d lived in—a barrier keeping us in as much as others out—Zyamzh was impenetrable. Not only were the original stone walls substantial, but the blue energy cords pulsing above rendered them unscalable, augmenting the stone and refracting the air around them. Deflector shields. Ugly but effective.

Bekatal found Tokki and caught his arm. They peeled off, Bekatal holding out his hand and gesturing towards where we’d been.

I pushed down my resentment. All my life, I’d been excluded from anything important, and I shouldn’t expect this place to be any different. Besides, what did I know of subterfuge?

They went into the kitchen building, and the door closed behind them with a faint shimmer of purple.

A slow smile spread across my face. The secure seal. Clever. They could neutralise the device in a protected room without tipping the owner off, if they decided that was the best course of action.

My smile widened as Imani appeared from the direction of the gardens; her presence always made me feel like I could take on the world, or at least, attempt to move within it.

The kitchen door opened, and Tokki and Bekatal headed straight for me, their expressions unreadable. When Imani spotted us, she hurried over too.

“You were right. It’s a listening device,” Tokki said without preamble. “We can try to trace the signal, but we have to assume this is a bounty hunter trying to find out if you’re here.”

Wraiths knifed through my bones. I wasn’t close enough to a solution, and neither was Shohari. “How can it be? Nobody can get in here without being seen.” Or get past the walls in the first place.

Tokki and Bekatal shared a glance.

“What? What do you know?” I asked, fear worming its way through my veins.

“You know we’ve been monitoring things,” Tokki said. “There’s one bounty hunter we thought was still elsewhere, chasing your sister.”

“And? What are you not telling me?”

He took a slow breath. “She’s a shadow stalker.”

Shadow stalker. A name so ominous, even the birds should have stopped singing. “What is that?”

“A problem,” Tokki said. “They can shift into smoke. And that’s the only way someone could get past the deflector shields and plant something.”

I swallowed my scoff. Just because something was implausible didn’t mean it wasn’t real. But if it was real… “Please tell me it is hard for a smoke person to snatch someone corporeal.”

“Probably. But it’s hard to detect them too.”

I shuddered. How long had the device been here? What had they learned? “My sister said I was mostly untraceable. But if they have heard my name spoken aloud…”

They knew I was here.

Imani laced her fingers with mine and squeezed. “So what do we do?”

“I become a prisoner once more,” I said in a monotone. “It is the only choice, is it not?” All this way. I had come all this way, and Mother still held me captive.

Tokki clapped a hand on my shoulder. “If anyone can protect you, it’s us. But you should stay in the village, yes. Don’t worry, we’ll assign armed guards. You’ll be safe.”

Armed guards.

My brain whooshed with white noise, a fog overtaking me, a sense of impending doom in my gut. A prisoner.