Diamond City

by Francesca Flores

  His footsteps echoed down the quiet street as he approached her, the sudden movement making her take a few involuntary steps backward and curse herself for doing so. His eyes lit up as if he were amused by her state.

  She gulped when the sliver of metal visible under Kohl’s jacket flashed under the moonlight. He probably had his new favorite Blade, Tannis, waiting in the shadows to take out Aina with a throwing star to the throat. Was that a shadow passing along the window of the manor or did she imagine it? Nausea swept through her, but she forced it down and tried to still her trembling hands.

  “You never wanted me to win, did you?” she asked. “You never wanted me to open my own tradehouse.”

  Another long silence passed before he said, “I wanted it very much, actually. We could have started a partnership, and none of the other fools in this city would have stood a chance against us. But then you failed.”

  “And then you threatened and abandoned me. You left me open to be killed.”

  “You know how the job works. You were a Blade. When a weapon can’t do its job anymore, it needs to be discarded.”

  She swayed on the spot and stumbled, but caught herself before she could fall over. Then, she threw away all the rules of being a quiet Blade who didn’t question her boss.

  “Who paid you for this job?” she asked through gritted teeth. “Whose money is so important to you that all the years I’ve done my job right don’t even matter anymore?”

  “You knew the risks going in,” Kohl said in a slow voice, as if he were speaking to a child. “You knew this would be the biggest job you’d ever taken on, and you knew I trusted you to do it, but you still failed. Don’t you understand that the more you have and the higher you stand, the more someone will have to fight to knock you down? Everything I do is to raise our place on that pedestal. I got that job for you, for me, for everyone here, and your failure put us all in jeopardy. I won’t risk my life’s work for the sake of one disappointing Blade.”

  Just then, Kohl reached inside his jacket. Aina flinched, then realized he wasn’t withdrawing a gun.

  It was a small, porcelain statue of a horse with a pink ribbon around its neck—one that had reflected the glow of burning coals, one that the spiders in her house had never seemed to touch, one that had been the last thing she’d seen before fleeing her parents’ murder. One that was all too familiar to her. One he could not possibly have.

  Her whole body stiffened. The world collapsed in front of her, the cold night air and the reason she’d come here and the shadowed figures on the Dom’s roof all disappearing until nothing remained but her, him, and the small statue he held.

  “It’s been a bit of a good luck charm to me over the years,” he said, turning it over in his hand. “If you came here to die, you should probably know the truth.”

  “It was you,” she finally whispered, the words like crushed glass coming out of her mouth.

  She’d thought she’d known the worst of what he could do, threatening her, abandoning her, shooting at her, convincing her she needed him her whole life.

  But there was one thing worse he could have done, and he’d already done it ten years ago.

  When she spoke next, uttering the truth that seemed so impossible she’d never imagined it before, her voice sounded like it came from someone else, far away.

  “You killed my parents.”

  She’d tried so hard to wipe away the memory of that night by inhaling glue over and over. It had worked to an extent, blurring out some things, like the gunman’s face.

  The memory returned now, as clear as if it had happened yesterday, and suddenly she was a small child again watching her parents die the first time.

  That night, she’d been playing with a cat that had wandered in from the streets, right next to the coal stove with the porcelain horse behind it.

  A soft sound had come from outside. Aina hadn’t known what it was, but her parents sent a furtive glance at each other and then mouthed at her to hide.

  Panicking, Aina shrunk into the shadows under the table, spiders crawling all over her sandals. She yearned to flick off the spiders, but forced herself to stay utterly still like her parents did whenever a Diamond Guard patrol passed near them in the tunnels under the city. She focused on the copy of the Nos Inoken that had fallen to the floor next to the table—the Mothers would help, wouldn’t they?

  Her mother wore a blue robe, her hands wrinkled from washing other people’s clothes all day for meager pay. Her father, wearing the overalls prescribed by his factory job, stood to face a third person who shoved aside their scrap-metal door and walked in.

  Her gaze fixed on the man with the gun.

  Shadows hid most of him, beyond where the single candle’s light failed to reach.

  The man wore a disturbing scowl, one deep-set into him like he’d been born that way, with eyes like ice as he raised a gun.

  A shot broke the silence and Aina gasped, her back slamming against the wall as her mother fell to the floor with a red mess instead of a head. A smattering of four bullets made her jump with each shot. Her father’s body swayed wildly. As he hit the floor, Aina slipped through the back door on shaking legs. She hauled herself up to the roof and spent the rest of the night with her eyes wide open. She’d never wanted to move from that spot.

  Four years later, she accepted a helping hand from the man who’d made her homeless in the first place.

  “After I got out of prison, I found out my old boss from the Vultures had been killed,” Kohl said, his voice breaking through her memory. “So I took his gang and his businesses. I started the Dom. It was only a few years after the war, and there wasn’t a clear law on what to do with the Inosen and diamond smugglers, but anyone who took one out or brought them to the attention of the Diamond Guards was paid handsomely. I got paid to spy on a worship service underground, then track down and take out the Inosen who’d attended. I saw a little Milana girl there with her parents, and you reminded me of the friend I’d betrayed and pushed to her death in the Tower prison. I thought if I could kill you, who looked so much like her, and your parents … it would prove that I’d finally let go of my guilt for killing her, and that I was ready for this new life. I was fourteen. I could have gone after you when you fled, but … you reminded me of me, with how quickly you slipped away from danger. Maybe I was a killer, but I allowed one small act of mercy in letting you live, and that made me feel like I still had some kind of choice in the matter. Isn’t that what people in this city do every day? They take freedom in the smallest places they can find it, and they hoard it, knowing it might ruin them one day.”

  She wished he would stop talking, but she could hardly move, let alone speak. What he was saying made her want to rip the last six years off her, claw out her memory of them, throw them away, burn them. Her fingers twitched as if reaching for the bag of glue. Anything to banish the truth.

  “Four years later,” he continued, “I saw you enter a bar that I knew was going to be bombed. Some feud a gang had with the owner. He wasn’t paying them fees for running his business on their territory. I knew I’d ruined your life as a child, but thought maybe I could fix it by recruiting you, and later by offering to let you open your own tradehouse. But then you failed, and if I didn’t cut you off, I’d lose everything I’ve built up to protect myself and all the people I employ here. I had to, Aina.”

  Each new word he spoke cut into her like a blade, taking every memory she had of him—training by his side, going to him when she was injured or frightened, learning to remake herself into a weapon with a map of the city imprinted on her brain—and adding to it the knowledge that he’d killed her parents. Disgust rose through her and her head spun as she remembered all her hopes; all the nights they’d both stayed up, lost in their thoughts in the train station tower; how she’d wished he would lean closer, or take her hand, or kiss her.

  Had he taken the guilt for killing her parents, stored it away in his mind, blamed someone else, and thought t
hat teaching her to kill too, would fix everything? It fixed nothing.

  Though her vision still wavered and her hands shook, she raised her eyes to meet his and put as much venom as she could into her glare. His jaw tightened, and though it was a small reaction, it bolstered her to take a step toward him. He stepped back. All the years he’d never shown her anything, had kept his face as impassive as a wall of rock, made this a victory.

  “I don’t care what your twisted reasons are,” she spat out. Some of it landed on his face. “You tell me you killed my parents, and then you try to explain yourself? It doesn’t work like that, Kohl. You don’t own me anymore.”

  “You’d still be on the streets or dead from an overdose if it wasn’t for me,” he said, wiping the spit away. His blue eyes hardened to shards of ice. “Of course I own you.”

  “I will never be yours.” Her hands curled, trying to make fists, but her grip had weakened, so they fell back to her sides. “I’m glad Tannis beat me to Kouta. I’m done doing your work.”

  With some demented kind of mirth in his eyes, he said, “Once again, you’re wrong. Do you really think I’d give Tannis the job after you failed?” When she frowned, he continued, “I did my own damn work. I killed Kouta Hirai.”

  She stepped back in shock as Kohl whistled.

  Like the sleek bodies of spiders sliding down webs, the Blood King’s killers and spies and thieves, all the people she’d worked and lived with, descended from the roofs and windows. He must have brought on people from other tradehouses or from gangs nearby, as a show of strength; there were far more people than those who lived in the Dom.

  The rest of the street was empty. It was her against them.

  She would fight back and kill them all where they stood.

  But when her hand flinched toward her knife, she couldn’t even grip the handle properly. All her bravery vanished.

  As she turned to run, blue hair flashed at the corner of her vision.

  She swayed wildly, as if the whole earth had been tipped on its side.

  A moment later, she tripped. The ground flew toward her face.

  Everything went black.

  36

  When Aina next woke, she sat up straight immediately, surprised to find she was still breathing. Thick, crimson blankets surrounded her in a large bed. Her panicked breaths slowed as she checked her surroundings.

  A broad window was behind the bed, revealing manicured gardens, a dark gray sky, and heavy rain lashing the window. A gold chandelier hung above. To her right, a crystal glass of water sat atop a mahogany desk with a newspaper spread out next to it.

  Her thoughts were still scattered, but at least her vision was no longer blurry, and her limbs weren’t numb. She checked to make sure she had all her weapons. As she reached for the glass of water, the door opened with a slight creak, and Ryuu, Teo, and Raurie entered.

  “You’re awake!” Teo said with a sigh of relief.

  Guilt twinged through her as memories of last night returned and made her head spin. She’d said some terrible things to Teo, but he walked over and pulled her into a hug. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, hoping he could sense an apology, then straightened.

  “How did I get here?” she asked in a hoarse voice. Her mouth tasted like all the firebrandy she’d drunk last night.

  While Teo and Raurie had gathered around her at the edge of the bed, Ryuu hung slightly back, leaning against the desk with his hands clenched over the edge of it. She wondered why he wasn’t yelling at her to get out right now.

  “What did you do?” Raurie whispered. “We were really worried when we got Ryuu’s note.”

  When Aina hesitated to answer, Teo asked, “Did you go to Kohl’s?”

  She nodded, but only once, because her head ached if she moved it too much. Before Teo could do more than muster a look of surprise, she added, “I wanted to fight him. Then he set all of his people on me at once. I don’t know how I’m still alive.”

  A silence fell on the room, broken only by the rain pounding on the window. She could remember nothing after falling in the street outside the Dom. How had she arrived here unscathed?

  “How are you all here? Did you find me, Ryuu?” she asked, hating the bit of hope that leaked into her voice.

  He nodded once, the smallest movement out of the corner of her eye. “Last night, I went to the kitchen to get some water. I saw you passed out on the floor. You don’t remember how you got there?” When she shook her head, he continued, “Well, I couldn’t let you stay there. Plus, I found something I wanted you all to see, so I sent a message to Teo and Raurie to come here.”

  Still refusing to look directly at her, he withdrew a long piece of paper from a folder inside the drawer at the desk. “I held Kouta’s funeral a few days ago. Kept it quiet, only invited a few families from around here. Before we buried him, I found a note in his pocket. On it was an address and a code to open a bank security deposit box. Inside the box was this folder.”

  He approached the bed and handed her the folder, his fingers flinching back from hers as she took it. Trying to hide how much that hurt, she focused on the folder.

  All the pages inside were typewritten, which narrowed down the possibilities of where it could have come from. Only people with money could afford typewriters. Each page inside listed names, dates, and details. Many of the names seemed familiar to her, but it took her a while to figure out what connected them.

  She’d seen them all in newspapers. These were Steels who’d lived in Kosín in the past two decades. Every one of them was dead. Reports flashed through her mind, blurred by the time that had passed since she’d seen them.

  Train accidents. Gas explosions. Faulty electricity burning down houses. Her hands shook the more she read, and when she saw the names Hiroe and Masato Hirai, she nearly dropped the folder.

  It explained that Ryuu’s parents had died in a gas explosion, but it also detailed that they’d been shot prior to the explosion, along with a codename for the hired killer who’d done the job.

  This was documentation of hits on some of Kosín’s highest-earning residents. Her time spent spying on Kouta, and how he was reading all the time—had he been reading these documents that day she’d followed him home?

  As she read the rest of the pages, she frowned with suspicion. All of these kills had been covered up or blamed on someone else. She recognized the name of a businessman Tannis had been sent to kill once. She’d had to lie low for months afterward, as there were rumors that a Kaiyanis woman from the south of the city had been the culprit.

  It was clearly done to divert attention from whoever was truly behind the kills. There was nothing new to her about hired murder in this city, but to see that other people from the Stacks like her were being used as weapons and scapegoats for someone higher up than them engineering these kills made Aina’s stomach squirm with unease. When she saw Kouta’s name, her heartbeat slowed. She was a part of this operation even if she hadn’t known it.

  The final page simply said Black Diamond in the center. No names, dates, or details were given. She frowned, staring at the words for a while, but couldn’t understand what they meant.

  She flipped through the pages again, and as she neared the earlier kills made during and after the war, something caught her eye. In the paragraph that detailed the murders of Ryuu’s parents was the sentence: “Let it be known that our goal is to progress, not to regress.”

  She stared at the words for a few moments, trying to recall where she’d heard them. When the realization hit her, she tossed the paper aside as if it had burned her fingers.

  When she next spoke, Teo and Raurie both nodded. Ryuu must have shown it to them already. “General Bautix. He’s the one who got your parents shot and made it look like it happened during the Inosen’s attack on their mines.”

  Ryuu ran a hand through his hair, making it fall over on one side and block part of his face so his expression was nearly impossible to read. “I don’t know if he fi
gured out my parents were Inosen, but I don’t think it mattered. Nothing they did could have saved them. He’s been hiring assassins to take out prominent Steels for years, ever since before the war, regardless of their faith. I don’t know why, but Kouta figured out that it was him. And now he’s dead too.”

  As he spoke, a sharp pain struck the center of Aina’s forehead. She leaned forward and tried to take steady breaths, but that only made her nauseous.

  Memories of last night came back in piercing jolts, flashes of words, a sensation of the world falling away beneath her feet.

  Kohl’s the one who killed my parents.

  Her chest tightened and her breaths grew shallow, like she was using glue. This knowledge of what he’d done struck her with fresh force, as if she were hearing it for the first time all over again.

  “Can we talk later?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. “I feel like a train ran me over.”

  Ryuu nodded, already making his way toward the door. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Once they left, she lay back down and closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do with any of the information she’d learned, or how it even mattered since those people were already dead. She’d probably join them soon if Kohl found her again. Her head ached when she wondered, once more, how she could have survived last night.

  It hurt too much to think of it, so instead, she ran one phrase through her thoughts over and over as she fell asleep: black diamond.

  37

  The sun woke Aina the next morning. Her head no longer ached, but she was parched. She reached toward the desk for the pitcher of water, but it was empty.

  Next to it, however, lay the newspaper. Her head had ached too much to notice anything particular about it last night, but now a headline on the front page caught her eye.

  PRINCESS OF LINASH VISITS SUMERAND FOR THE FIRST TIME, TO RECEIVE RARE BLACK DIAMOND AS GIFT.