Diamond City

by Francesca Flores

  For the past few hours, she’d sat in the balcony of a bookshop while he read on the downstairs floor, and tried not to pass out from boredom while waiting for him to do something interesting. His guards had sat near him or wandered around the shelves, and she wondered if they were growing as weary as she was.

  Luckily, the brisk wind and the noise from the train station a block away kept her awake. Train whistles blared and people’s suitcases banged along the sidewalk as they rushed to the station. Dusk was a velvety blue smear on the sky littered with streams of smoke. The few visible stars painted a revealing silver on the statue in the square ahead, making it even more macabre. It figured King Verrain, his face stretched in agony, a sword buried to the hilt in his back with its tip splintering out of his marble chest.

  “Solís.”

  She turned to face Teo, who stood at the corner in a dark jacket with his hands tucked in the pockets—either to stay warm, or to hold the handle of a gun, she wasn’t sure. The reddish-gold rays of the sun lit his face a soft amber color.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “The sun is setting.”

  With a shrug, she led the way to the next stage of their job. They weaved through soot-covered, dejected factory workers getting off their shifts, and soon reached an alley that emptied onto the entertainment district’s main road, Lyra Avenue. Casinos, bars, and burlesque theaters were lined up on all sides, so locals and tourists would never run out of things to do.

  Shouts and laughter in different languages flooded down to the street. Most immigrants in Kosín kept to small communities, like La Cumbre, where Aina’s parents had raised her alongside other immigrants from Mil Cimas; the Linasian neighborhood near the river where Teo lived; and the Kaiyanis, Natsudan, and Marinian neighborhoods in the southeast. But Lyra Avenue housed people from everywhere. Apartments for immigrant workers were on the second floor of each building, packed with people who’d come to Kosín for jobs before the war and had gotten sucked into the fighting during it. Living close to the Stacks, most of them had fallen into poverty along with the Inosen, but some had found stability by starting small businesses along Lyra Avenue.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help earlier,” Teo said loudly over the music issuing from a casino. “I needed to take my mother to the clinic for an appointment. How was our friend today?”

  “So boring!” Aina said, as a strong gust of wind whipped her black hair in front of her face “All he’s done is read. I think he’s read more books than people I’ve killed. Shouldn’t rich people be more interesting to spy on?” She stopped in her tracks. “What’s going on here?”

  The end of Lyra Avenue was marked with bike stands and a corner bookshop before it curved into Rose Court. Now, a gaggle of people choked the street and shouts rang out over the usual bustle.

  “You’re annoyingly tall,” she scoffed, standing on her toes and nearly falling over from trying to see above the crowd.

  “Want to sit on my shoulders?” he teased. “I can buy you an ice cream cone after.”

  “Shut up. What’s happening?”

  “They’ve made a circle. Some guards are there. Their rifles look extra shiny today.”

  “What the hell?” With a frustrated huff of air, Aina placed her hand on Teo’s shoulder and pressed up, so her feet dangled above the ground and she gained a better vantage point.

  A circle had formed in the center of the crowd. The Diamond Guards held the crowd at bay, rifles hoisted and used to shove unruly citizens back into line. In the center of the circle, two men knelt with hands tied behind their backs and nail-studded leashes around their necks. Droplets of blood covered the stones they knelt on. One of the guards removed rough diamonds from the men’s pockets and tossed them on the ground where they clattered dully on the street.

  A chill swept down Aina’s spine. As cautious as she was with her diamond sales, she still feared this would be her fate one day.

  She’d been a child during the war, but as if she could suddenly view it through her parents’ eyes, she imagined the hundreds of people who’d met their end in the same way—the shine of diamonds the last thing they saw. She imagined her parents kneeling to pray in front of an altar to the Mothers, but then the altar disappeared and their knees struck concrete, where they waited for a bullet to strike like the two smugglers here now.

  General Alsane Bautix stood to the side of the prisoners. A crisp black suit over his muscles hardened by years of military service, his red copper hair and beard bright against his ivory skin, a glittering diamond earring in one ear, and unreadable features chiseled from jagged stone, General Bautix was the last person anyone in Sumerand wanted to cross. He’d originally built a fortune through manufacturing guns and other war machinery, and then joined the military. After King Verrain instigated the war, Bautix helped turn the army against him, and became known as the hero who killed Verrain and thus ended the war. His victory gave him the highest commanding military position and a seat in the Sentinel, the country’s governing oligarchy.

  King Verrain, who’d been a Sacoren, hated that people had begun moving away from faith and toward an industrial future that relied on technology. Verrain found Inosen who followed his guidance, and together they began to shut down factories by force, starting with the event fourteen years ago known as the Estrel Ka-Noten—the night the stars fell. He’d demanded universal worship of the Mothers, and for all signs of industry and technology to be destroyed. The Steels fought back, forcing their employees to take up arms to fight. The Estrel Ka-Noten triggered five months of civil war.

  The Tower of Blood and its monarchy fell, and became the Tower of Steel, run by the oligarchy. The ban on technology became a ban on worship and magic instead, and many believed that in the violence of the war and its aftermath, the Mothers had abandoned Sumerand and its people to suffer in the mess they’d made.

  “Just kill them already,” Aina said, jumping down and rubbing away the tension from her wrist.

  “When heretical beliefs disrupt our workforce and put visitors to our country in harm’s way, it becomes clear why such discipline is necessary,” Bautix drawled, his voice never tiring, his lungs never seeming to need air as he spewed ultimatums. “Magic users violate public order and safety. Magic unchecked is magic that has the opportunity to bring our country to ruin once more. When diamond smugglers undermine the economy for their own profit, we all suffer.”

  Turning away, she counted down the seconds to the execution while the general’s voice rang out above the crowd’s whispers and murmurs. As he went on, her mood jumped between indifference and anger. She leaned against a cold lamppost and stared between the shoulders of the gathered crowd. But her eyes were drawn back to the rust gathering on the lamppost. Bathed in the sparkling gold lights of a nearby shop, the rust looked like dried blood.

  Bautix smirked as he spoke the words that had become famous in the years after the war; the words he always said before a public execution: “Let it be known that our goal is to progress, not to regress.”

  His statement was punctuated with two gunshots, each one banging against her eardrums like an avalanche. She clenched her jaw, but tried not to react in any other noticeable way. Gunshots, whether they were fired near her or at her, brought her back to the night her parents collapsed in front of her. She could usually shove the fear aside, and it didn’t bother her when Teo used his guns, but executions of diamond smugglers and magic users always brought her too close to the memories she’d tried to push away.

  “All right, show’s over,” said Teo, turning to leave.

  The crowd began to disperse. People spoke in hushed voices, some trembling as they glanced at the dead men. But as the Diamond Guards began to clear away the bodies, people returned to what they’d been doing before. Aina shook her head. She might move on from death easily, but she didn’t forget it—not after her parents had died for daring to believe in a power higher than steel and the coin it wrought. Her heart ached for a moment, but she ig
nored it to get back to work.

  “Wait.” She grabbed Teo’s elbow, her eyes fixed on a slim figure with a stack of books carried under his arms. “I see him.”

  Kouta Hirai was a tall, lanky man in his early twenties with blue-black hair that fell below his ears. He might be mistaken for a student, but everyone in Sumerand knew he wasn’t in school anymore; he managed one of the country’s wealthiest enterprises. Just then, he’d stepped out of the bookshop where Aina had been spying on him, cast a single glance of disgust at the execution and dispersing crowd, then turned right. His guards followed him out of the shop a moment later.

  She and Teo slipped away from the scene, pushing past the spectators and following the Hirai heir to Rose Court at a slight distance so as not to draw attention to themselves. They soon crossed a street crowded with horse-drawn carriages. Benches surrounded a garden of willow trees and rosebushes that lined a path toward a pond at the center.

  One of Kouta’s bodyguards masqueraded as a businessman eating lunch on a bench, but through his shirt, Aina saw the outline of a gun. Two more guards stood at a corner, pretending to admire the garden, but their eyes were trained to watch for any threats. She couldn’t simply throw a dagger from here and walk away whistling. Any one of those guards would jump in front of a blade to protect her mark.

  Kouta sat on a bench near the center of the garden, reading a stack of documents now. She wondered at what age he’d learned to read, remembering how she’d only picked up the skill at fourteen after Kohl had thrown enough books at her to get her to learn.

  “You can’t be a great assassin if you’re illiterate, Aina,” Kohl had said when she’d finally thrown a book back at him.

  “Why not?” she’d asked. They were sitting at a small table in the training room. Two other employees of the Dom sparred with each other, using techniques Kohl had taught them to take down bigger opponents. She itched to run over and join them, beat them, prove herself.

  But Kohl’s hard sapphire eyes pinned her in place as he tapped the book in front of him. “Because you can’t be an effective assassin if all you do is swing around a knife. What makes an assassin different from any other killer?” Without waiting for her to reply, he said, “Assassins don’t get caught. You find your mark and take them out, leaving the least amount of bodies behind as you can. You are efficient; you are fast; you are flawless. So you need to make people think you’re something else. You’re an aristocrat, a bartender, an artist, and you have no idea how that man just slumped over in his chair with a dagger sticking out of his neck. Sometimes that’s the only way to reach a target. Not through a window or up a drain, but through the front door, as someone they would never suspect. To pull that off, you need to research. You need to read.”

  “I can read a room,” she’d replied instantly. “And my marks. I know who will fight back, who will beg, and who will freeze up and wait for me to strike. That should be good enough.”

  Before she was done speaking, he’d opened the book to the first page and shoved it in front of her.

  “Who taught you to read?” she’d blurted out, partially to continue avoiding this lesson and partially because she was curious. Had he grown up reading, or had he learned at a later age like she had?

  “My old boss taught me.” His gaze had flicked to the vulture tattoo on his forearm. “My parents were illiterate. After they got arrested and I was on my own, I joined the Vultures, and reading was the first thing he made sure I knew how to do.”

  Her brow had furrowed. “Why’d your parents get arrested?”

  Instead of answering, he’d shoved the book closer to her and tapped the top of the page. “Read.”

  For Kouta Hirai, reading was just another thing he could take for granted, something he’d grown up with. Shoving down an intense feeling of having been cheated, she waited for him to finish. Finally, an hour later, he placed his stack of documents into his bag.

  “Let’s follow him home and figure out the rest of our plan,” she proposed to Teo as Kouta stood. His guards immediately flanked him.

  A loud, girlish voice sounded nearby, and Aina had to fight the urge to whip out a knife.

  “Your scarf is really pretty!” squealed the young woman from a few feet away. She wore a silk blue dress and gems at her ears that indicated how rich she was. One of Kouta’s guards turned around, so Aina put a smile on her face and pretended to be intrigued by what the girl was saying.

  She’d bought the scarf as a joke when the shop had run out of red ones and only carried white, so she decided to dye it herself with blood. The redness had faded to a rust color she wasn’t very fond of, but apparently this girl liked it.

  “Thank you!” she gushed as the guard turned back around and left with Kouta; time to follow. “You’ll never guess how it got this way.”

  The girl tilted her head to the side, mouth popping open in curiosity, but Teo pulled Aina away.

  “Come on. Don’t traumatize the poor girl,” he grunted, but smiled anyway.

  “Live a little, Teo!”

  7

  It was a short walk out of the city with the setting sun at their backs as they followed Kouta and his entourage eastward. The path curved away from Rose Court, turning from cobblestone to dirt. She beckoned to Teo, and they both stepped behind trees that lined the path out of the city.

  A carriage with two horses waited ahead. The guards’ voices were the only sound as they quickly confirmed with Kouta whether he would like to go anywhere else before heading home. He got in the carriage moments later, the carriage lurched forward, and she and Teo stepped through the trees, their footsteps in time with the sound of the wheels churning through mud.

  At a safe distance, they followed the carriage across a bridge and through a dirt path enclosed by a small forest. The farther they walked, the less tainted the air became.

  Soon, the carriage left the forest trail. Aina and Teo hid behind the trees at the fringe of the forest and watched the carriage approach the gate surrounding Amethyst Hill, the community where the rich stored their mansions and jewels. She’d heard enough stories of the people there to be disgusted by them. Last year, one of the women who lived here threw a bonfire party by burning all her out-of-season dresses, which had cost thousands of kors each.

  She and Teo moved closer to get a better look, but managed to stay in the shadows of the trees. It was more of a wall than a gate, ten feet high, hewn of a pinkish stone inlaid with scattered brick that was supposed to look chic and accidental, but really just looked pretentious. Armed guards sat inside bulletproof enclosures at intervals along the wall, ready to open the giant iron gates for anyone with proper identification.

  One of the guards pulled a lever from inside his glass enclosure, and it triggered the opening of the gates. The carriage rolled through at a slow pace.

  “That’s when we can get past,” Aina said, pointing. “The other guard can’t see us from his position, and the guard facing us won’t be able to either. There’s a blind spot when the gate opens for a carriage to go through.”

  Teo nodded, then pointed at a few willow trees lining the wall. “We can use that for cover too. We’ll have to move fast to keep up.”

  They settled in to wait for another chance. In a few minutes, another carriage approached the gates, this one with white letters on the side declaring that it belonged to the Spennard Cleaning Company.

  The guards opened the gate for the cleaning company’s carriage to make its way through. It rolled toward the gate, gravel crumbling beneath it, and blocked the guard’s view.

  “Let’s go now,” Aina whispered.

  Keeping low, she led the way toward the willow, with Teo behind her. Once they reached it, she stepped onto Teo’s cupped hands to push herself up the wall, then pulled him over as quickly as she could manage. His weight nearly knocked her off the narrow ledge, but she steadied herself and jumped down. She crouched and held her breath as she looked toward the glass enclosures with the guards. Their plan h
ad worked; no one had seen them.

  They ran swiftly behind the mansions. Before leaving the Dom earlier, Aina had asked the Fox, Mirran—Kohl’s best thief—where exactly Kouta’s mansion was in Amethyst Hill. Mirran knew the area well from past robberies of these mansions, and told Aina that Kouta lived in the northernmost one. As she and Teo made their way to it, she tried to conceal her disgust and jealousy at all the luxury surrounding her. Who in the world needed a three-story home as wide as a city block with a backyard as big as a forest? Lattice screens surrounded windows lit by electric light from within, while children starved in the streets a few miles away.

  The sun had fully set by the time they reached the Hirai mansion. It was the largest one they’d seen yet, its gardens massive and perfectly maintained, the smooth white façade of the house sickening in its luxury. Maple trees lined the sides of the house like pretty soldiers, their leaves brushing against the cream walls. Servants waited at the front doors, somehow managing not to drop dead from the boredom of standing there all day. Only two people actually lived there, Kouta and his younger brother, Ryuu. She couldn’t fathom why they possibly needed so much space.

  They’d arrived in time to watch Kouta, flanked by his bodyguards, approach the front doors. The servants bowed them inside, holding open the doors and then closing them tightly after Kouta and his guards entered. She and Teo waited behind the fence, searching for some way to enter the building without getting caught.

  Long minutes passed. Guards stood in some of the windows and at the back entrance, all of them carrying guns. Her eyes scanned the trees, windows, and rooftops, trying to find a way that could be accessible to both of them. Teo couldn’t climb along a window ledge, and she couldn’t masquerade as a guard since the only ones she’d seen here were men as big and bulky as houses. Even if they did manage to get through a window, they had no way of knowing what the security was like inside.