by Will Wight
Yala continued, still wearing that irritating smile. “I’ve sent word to Meia, in case you aren’t recovered in time to leave for the next mission. Heal quickly.”
Then she had the nerve to leave a basket of fruit on the nearby table! Shera was almost insulted by the insincerity before she brought herself under control.
What was she thinking? Free food was free food.
A week later, Shera was stripped naked in her infirmary bed, with a cluster of alchemically trained Architects busying themselves over her blistered skin. The burns on her lips had healed, but there were a shocking number of more severe burns all over her body, especially the left side. Even she couldn’t dodge fireballs and walk off unscathed.
One of the alchemists emptied a syringe into her upper arm, sending blessed relief flooding through her veins. At the same time, another woman spread a cream on her skin that made her burns blaze to life again.
Shera gasped as the pain outpaced the painkiller. “Couldn’t you have waited?” she asked.
The Architects didn’t even acknowledge that she had spoken, continuing their work without paying attention.
Someone else answered. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be on the Island yet, let alone in the infirmary.
“Serves you right,” Meia said. “Excuse me, Architects.” She poked her face between two masked alchemists, blond hair falling almost down to her shoulders. “I heard you tried to fight a Soulbound by yourself.”
“Trust me, I didn’t know,” Shera said, wincing at another shock of pain. “I wouldn’t have fought her if I knew she could throw fire. That’s way too much work.”
“Not without me around,” Meia said. She surveyed Shera’s body and shook her head. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you hurt this badly. When I was a girl, I didn’t even think you could get injured.”
“That’s because I avoid injury whenever possible. I don’t know if you know this, but getting burned hurts. It’s not worth the trouble.”
“You should remember that next time, before you try and fight a Soulbound. Without me.”
Shera closed her eyes and yawned ostentatiously. “You’re interrupting my nap time.”
“I came from the prison.”
She snapped alert, pushing back the Architects who were wrapping new bandages around her burns. They protested, but she ignored them. “What does he know?”
Meia gave her a wry look. “That you were injured. His guard is free with the gossip.”
Hansin. Next time, she would have to teach him to keep his mouth closed.
“Anything else?”
“You’re asking me if he knows you did this for him? No, he hasn’t figured it out.”
Shera sighed and leaned back against her pillows, letting the Architects continue to do their jobs. “Did your mother tell you?”
“I knew as soon as they told me I could find you in the infirmary. When you fight with a clear head, you don’t get injured.”
“Your faith in me is inspiring.” For the first time, Shera noticed what Meia was wearing: a close-fitting suit like the ordinary Consultant blacks, but white and padded with fur. There was even a fur-lined hood dangling behind her. “Is it snowing outside? In the middle of summer?”
As if she herself had realized what she was wearing, Meia started pulling off her heavy white gloves. “I rode in from the Fioran Reaches. Some of the tribes up there just found out that the Emperor was dead, and they had started causing trouble. Independence, rebellion, Elder worship, you know how it is. I’d finished pruning some of the low-hanging branches when I received my mother’s message.”
She shrugged. “As soon as I arrived, I headed straight to Lucan and then to you. I haven’t had much of a chance to settle in yet.”
Out of nowhere, Shera had a vision of Meia as a girl: haughty, fragile, and desperate to prove herself better than her friends.
That was a long time ago.
“Thank you,” Shera said simply.
Meia adopted a stern look. “Lucan told me you were starting to express human emotion, and I can’t approve of that in your condition. If you strain yourself, you could break something.”
“In that case, I’ll go back to sleep,” Shera said. “Safer that way.”
Meia’s expression firmed, and she spoke more seriously. “I’ve begun preparations for the next mission. We leave in five days. My mother tells me that you might be in fighting condition at that time, and I do want you along. But if you haven’t recovered, then leave it to me.”
Shera gave another theatrical yawn. “I’ll leave it to you. I’ve always wanted to try sleeping for a week straight.”
But Meia wasn’t having it. “I’m serious, Shera. If you’re not ready, stay here.”
“Fine,” she said. “I hear you.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’m going to sleep now.”
Meia shook her head and walked off, thanking the Architects before she left.
When the door closed behind her friend, Shera turned to the nearest alchemist. “You have five days to get me back into fighting shape.”
“That’s possible,” she allowed, “but it depends on the efficacy of certain solutions. We can’t predict—”
Shera cut her off by raising a hand. She had never trusted alchemists. Childhood trauma, perhaps.
“The correct response is, ‘Yes, Gardener.’”
“...yes, Gardener.”
~~~
As she left the infirmary room, Meia caught the end of Shera’s threat.
How nostalgic, she thought. It had been more than ten years since she’d last heard Shera threatening a medical alchemist with death.
The muscles in Meia’s hand rippled beneath her skin, stretching and pulling at her joints. Her fingers forced themselves painfully apart, her fingernails hardening into claws. An inhuman rage filled her heart, and from the prickling in her retinas, she knew her eyes had changed shape. Tiny movements in the corner of her eye made her jerk her head—the swish of a passing Shepherd’s hand brushing against the wall made her snap to the side, looking for prey.
With a moment’s concentration, Meia pushed the sensations back down. The anger subsided, her vision returned to normal, her claws retracted, and her arm settled back to its human shape again.
This happened four or five times a day since the Emperor had ordered her...‘enhancements.’
When she was fourteen years old, the Emperor decided that her talent did not match her dedication. She was given a choice—leave his service and return to the Gray Island, or undergo a series of painful alchemical alterations to bring her up to the required level.
Meia had never given up on an assignment in her life. She would have rather died.
So she was left in the care of Kanatalia, the Alchemist’s Guild.
Alchemists surrounded her, in their glass-eyed masks and long, stained aprons.
“The Emperor has given us permission to do everything we can,” they’d said. “We have solutions that will give you the power of a Hydra, the constitution of a Nightwyrm, the fortitude of a Deepstrider...all the natural advantages that the Kameira have over man, they will be yours! You will be like a Champion, but unbound by their rules!”
They were so excited by their opportunity to serve the Emperor with their art, the alchemists had pulled out all the stops. She was poked, prodded, submerged, and injected day and night, forced to swallow potions, pills, and solutions with every meal.
And the pain...even twelve years later, Meia shuddered at the memory of the pain. She’d gone to bed every night shaking and crying, praying that this day’s treatment would be her last. Worse, her body was out of her control. Before long, her room was covered in bloody scratches from the times she’d tried to claw her way through the wood and stone.
Two thoughts had sustained her through the whole process.
First, I can’t let my mother down. Yala could forgive failure, but she could not forgive weakness. Even if she let her
daughter continue to serve the Guild, she would never see Meia the same way again.
Second, I can’t lose to Shera.
Meia had trained on the Gray Island her whole life. Not like Shera, who had come to the Island when she was almost ten. Yet somehow, Meia found that Shera outperformed her in every test. It had eaten her like a burrowing worm in her gut. If this process could help her surpass Shera, she would tolerate anything.
But her suffering did not go unnoticed.
One day, three months into the treatment, she lay strapped to an examination table screaming. Alchemists stood at each of her four limbs, simultaneously injecting her with a solution that was intended to prevent her muscles from twisting and snapping her bones.
The process felt like it was doing exactly what it was supposed to prevent. She shrieked until her voice was hoarse, begging for help, all the while thrashing about on the table trying to escape her own body.
She didn’t expect help to actually come.
An apprentice had crashed into the room through the door, body tumbling to a stop against the far wall.
And a black-clad shadow had rushed into the room, bronze shears in hand.
Shera knocked a masked man over, paralyzing him with a needle, then leaped over to an alchemist who was trying to sound the bell that would call for help. Shera slashed across the woman’s legs, rolling and landing next to Meia.
Meia remembered that day clearly, but one detail stood out from the rest: Shera’s eyes, usually so cold and lifeless, burned with rage. She’d never seen such anger in the girl before or since.
Shera sliced through Meia’s restraints, speaking through the black cloth covering her mouth. “Let’s go. We’ll tell the Emperor what they were doing to you. He’ll burn this place to the ground.”
She started to lift Meia up, pulling her off the table, but Meia raised one sweat-slicked hand to stop her.
“No!” Meia shouted, through clenched teeth. Her bones still felt like they had been replaced with broken glass, but she couldn’t quit now. If she did, she’d never be able to face her mother.
Or Shera.
“I want this,” Meia rasped. “Please. Don’t stop them.”
Shera quickly covered over the pain in her expression, returning to her usual stony mask. “I heard you,” she said. “Last night, you were crying and screaming after you came back. They’re not helping you. This is torture.”
One of the alchemists tried to crawl up, but Shera kicked her back down without looking.
Meia had felt her consciousness fading, but she had to make Shera understand. She clutched at Shera’s sleeve as she faded into sleep. “Please...keep going...”
Just before she lost consciousness, she saw Shera hauling a masked alchemist to his feet. “You heard her,” Shera said. “Keep going. But if anything happens to her, I’m coming back. As long as she survives this process in one piece, so will you.”
That was the first time Meia had ever thought of Shera as a friend.
Seeing Shera in the same position, helpless on an infirmary bed and surrounded by medical alchemists, made her feel...oddly protective. Part of her hoped that Shera would do the wise thing and stay home, recovering from her injuries instead of going on the mission.
But they were hunting Nakothi’s Heart. Even the name brought up years of traumatic memories for Meia, and it had to be much worse for Shera. Meia’s friend would do whatever it took to get rid of the Dead Mother’s Heart for good.
She knew it was true, as she knew that Shera would follow her to Nakothi’s island if she had to hobble there on a crutch.
Typical. The one time Shera could actually stay home and sleep all day, and she won’t do it.
~~~
Five days later, when Meia woke up, she found Shera standing over her dressed in all black.
“You should be more alert, team leader,” Shera said, taking a bite of an apple.
Meia sighed and rolled out of bed.
CHAPTER NINE
Thirteen years ago
Shera, Meia, and Lucan cleaned their training ground, as they always did. They sewed up the rips in their ‘target,’ stuffing it with fresh straw. They polished the armor of the Masons who had posed as guards, swept the tower floors, and hung suspended on ropes to clean the outside of the tower from alchemical residue.
And while they worked, they talked.
“You can’t tell Meia,” Lucan whispered. “She’ll say I cheated.”
Shera glanced over at Meia, who was busy hanging window-curtains. “Cheated? You either got the target or you didn’t.”
Lucan stopped pushing his soapy rag across the floor. “One might say I didn’t.”
She bit back a laugh, hiding her expression while she scrubbed the floorboards.
“Nobody can Awaken blankets that fast,” he went on, a grin in his voice. “But Ayana’s not a Reader, so how is she going to know? I told her the blankets strangled him, and as far as she can tell, it’s true.”
“What about the window? How did you get it to close behind you?”
Lucan shot another glance at Meia. She was still grumbling into her curtains. He peeled his sleeve back, revealing a spool of white thread taped to the inside of his wrist.
Shera pressed a finger against the thread. It came away tacky.
“I’ve got a few friends in the Architects, you know that. Well, some of their alchemists are breeding spiders. Silk that’s almost invisible when you spin it out, it sticks when you want it to, and you can pull it right off. One of the apprentices let me borrow it.”
Now, that piqued Shera’s interest. What else did the alchemists have that Ayana didn’t know about? How much easier might they make Shera’s job?
“And the boots?” she asked. “You walked right up the wall.”
Lucan winced, putting a hand to his abdomen. “I don’t advise it. It kills your stomach muscles, trying to stand straight out like that. I kept wanting to crawl, but then it would look like I was pulling my way up with my hands like Meia did.”
“So was it a trick, or not?”
He sat back, tapping the side of one boot proudly. “Not this one. Took me three months to make a pair that worked, but now I’ve actually invested boots that let you walk up walls. I was trying to get them to hang me on the ceiling, like a bat, but it turns out alchemy’s a lot better for that.”
Shera only knew about Reading secondhand, from Lucan, but everyone knew about investing Intent. A new knife might be sharper, but an old knife held so much Intent that it would never fail. The pair of blades they would inherit, when they finally became full Gardeners, had been passed down from assassin to assassin for almost a thousand years. They were made of old bronze, but they would serve her far better than even new-forged steel.
“Still, that’s got to be impressive,” she said. “How many alchemists on the Island could do what you did?”
Lucan stretched out his legs so he could admire his boots in the light. “Not even five.”
“Are you going to tell Ayana?”
He laughed bitterly, returning to his knees and starting to scrub the floor again. “Why should we share our secrets with them, when they don’t tell us anything?”
It was the same old argument, and Shera was weary of it. “Why should they? They don’t have to justify themselves to us.”
“They don’t justify themselves to anyone. The Architects get a contract, and so long as they’re not killing a high-ranking Guild member or a famous philanthropist, they take it. Are human lives so cheap?”
“Three hundred silvermarks,” Shera said automatically.
Lucan slapped his rag down on the floor. “Would you give me up for three hundred silvermarks?”
Shera closed her mouth. Of course she wouldn’t, but that was completely different.
He nodded to the bed. “This target. He’s somebody’s husband. He tucks a little girl into her sheets at night, makes her feel safe. To someone, he’s a best friend.”
“He’s
a pillowcase stuffed with straw.”
“Well, sure, he is, but that’s not…my point isn’t…” He grumbled in frustration, searching for the right words. “Maybe it’s different for you, but I see things you can’t. I pick up a woman’s hairbrush, and I can see that she inherited it from her older sister when she was seven. It’s all that she saved from her burning house. Once I know that, how am I supposed to kill her?”
“Brain, heart, lungs, arteries,” Shera listed. “Same as everyone.”
Lucan looked straight at her, his dark brown eyes piercing. “When you kill someone, you’re ending a life that’s like yours. Doesn’t that make you feel anything?”
No, she thought. It really doesn’t.
But she was beginning to wonder if maybe it should.
The end of a rolled-up rag snapped in the air like a whip between them. They both looked up, startled, Shera’s hand moving to the dagger tied to her ankle.
Meia stood above them, her blond hair pulled back in a kerchief, twisting a rag in her hands. “I can hear you, you know. I’m still in the room.”
Lucan held up a hand. “Listen, it’s not like—”
She snapped the rag in front of his face. “There are Readers on the Council. They’re older and stronger than you. You think they haven’t heard these questions before?”
“Not from me.”
“The Gardeners exist to maintain balance in an imperfect Empire,” Meia went on, quoting from their lessons. “Through us, individuals settle their differences by relying on an Imperial Guild, instead of raising their own armies and dividing this Empire into a thousand petty nations.”
Lucan scoffed. “That would never happen. Why would anyone want to be ruled by a thousand emperors instead of one?”
Meia smirked, as though he’d made her point for her. “It’s never happened before because we do our jobs. Whichever side loses, the Consultants win, and the Empire is even stronger.”
“Just because your mother told you that when you…”
Lucan’s words faded away as Shera leaned her forehead against the straw man’s stuffed mattress. He and Meia were so absorbed in arguing that they might not even notice if she slipped into the bed and under the covers. It would probably be half an hour before they wound down, and that was half an hour of sleep in a warmer, softer bed than her own.
