Snow Like Ashes(12)

“Snow and ice and frost above.” Luckily Sir likes to test Mather and me with inane challenges like Pick the lock on this chest, your supper’s inside. His tests and the finger-length hook-pick I keep in my hair finally prove useful, though I certainly don’t plan on telling him that. I tuck one of my knives under my arm and busy myself with the lock.

The soldiers stumble out of their room. Herod draws closer. The lock doesn’t budge, whether because I’m too twitchy or my hands are slick with sweat or I just need to practice more lock-picking. My chances of making it out of this room shrink with each breath I take, each strangled dance of my heart as it sputters against the anxiety filling my body.

“Who needs a key?” I growl as a I rear back and hurl all of my weight into kicking through the lock. It breaks open, sending the door thudding against the wall. A set of stairs curls downward with sconces lighting the way.

“Stop!”

I whirl. Herod stomps into the hall and his lumbering bulk freezes across the room. Such a perfect chakram shot; damn my shaky arms. But soldiers fill up the center, most half dressed, clutching weapons and blinking away the blur of sleep. Too many to take all at once.

Herod glares at me and his face reddens. “Winterian!”

I slam the door behind me, but my kick broke the lock so the door refuses to close. Though it means I’ll lose one of my knives, I jam it as hard as I can through the lock and into the wooden frame. It’ll hold enough to give me a better lead.

The stairs get slick the deeper I go, the walls coated in what smells like donkey waste. This isn’t just a cellar, and on a deep inhale, I realize exactly where I’m going, where they hid the locket half: the sewers. Oh, fun.

A few stifled breaths later, the sound of gruff voices echoes up at me. I test my arms—not quite as shaky—and draw out my chakram, tightening my hand around the familiar, worn handle.

“Hurry! There’s a ruckus above. Best we move quickly.”

I stop at the last turn in the staircase, the glow of lantern light strong. They’re close. Chakram-range close. My favorite kind.

“I’m not touching that thing. You know what it is! You pick it up.”

The other man growls. “I’m your superior! I order you to pick up the damn locket piece.”

I smile. There’s my cue. “Now, boys, no need to argue. I’ll pick it up.”

I emerge from the staircase with my chakram wound back, ready to soar through the air. We are indeed in a sewer—a tunnel stretches around me, holding a river of murky waste lined with foot-high walkways on each side. One man and a few horses wait on the farthest walkway, another man stands ankle deep in Lynia’s filth. Very few men, but any more would draw too much attention, and we’ve moved in on this location so quickly, Angra hasn’t had time to do more than send Herod here.

Behind the men, one of the wall’s bricks has been removed and in the hole, illuminated by a few lanterns, shines a blue box. Relief fills me up. After years of searching, half of the locket is finally within reach.

I aim my chakram at the captain, the one with his boots mucked up with sewer gunk. His eyes swim over me. “The Winterians are sending girls to do their dirty work now?” he sneers. “Why don’t you put that thing down before someone gets hurt?”

I push out my bottom lip and widen my eyes. “This?” I lower the chakram. It’s now aimed at the captain’s left thigh. “They gave it to me and said throw! I don’t even know how it works—”

The soldiers jeer, a deep-throated chuckle that says this is a fight they’re sure they’ll win. I let the chakram fly as the captain moves forward, my body bending into an arch. The chakram soars through the sewer, slices clean through the captain’s leg, and continues its spin back to me in one elegant circle of purpose. He screams and drops into the sewage, grabbing his thigh like, well, like I just sliced through it.

“Oh.” I run one hand down the flat side of the blade. “That’s how it works.”

The other soldier eyes me from the opposite walkway, his hands out like he might start dancing. Or running. Probably the more likely option. But then he smiles, and his shift from scared to amused is so abrupt that a flicker of disquiet tightens in my stomach.

Magic.

The word flies through my mind like it was there all along, a quiet pulse of knowledge that told me everything felt off. Wrong. And it was wrong, all of it, because the soldier drops his arms and pulls his shoulders up straight, his body morphing before me. Bones cracking and reforming, muscles stretching with a sickening rip. The soldier isn’t a soldier, at least not a nameless, nothing soldier, and the captain I shot laughs from his still-fetal position, his anticipation laced with pain.