The chair in Levi's room was the kind that had been repaired too many times, one leg slightly shorter than the others, the back loose at the joint. He had been sitting in it for an hour anyway, leaning back at an angle that worked if you didn't shift your weight.
Tomorrow was the last day.
A week in Salvene, and Colette was warmer than she had been at the market, that much was true. She had stopped looking at him like he was about to produce a hidden fee. The children had stopped tensing when he knocked on the door. Sable had started saving him a space on the bench. Pip had, twice, attempted to pocket one of his coat buttons to see if anything would happen, and Levi had let him both times because the disappointment when nothing happened was funnier than stopping him.
But trust was not the same thing as enough trust to leave. He knew that. He had been in this business long enough to know you couldn't ask someone to walk through a door they hadn't chosen yet.
And Colette had not chosen yet.
He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling.
Hhhh. What to do, what to do.
The System notification materialized before he finished the thought, large and red-bordered in a way it almost never used.
WARNING. WARNING.POTENTIAL PATRON: COLETTE MARCHANDRISK OF DEATH: 99%INTERVENE IMMEDIATELYUPON FAILURE TO INTERVENE: HOST COMBAT POWER REDUCED BY 50%
Levi was out of the chair before he finished reading it.
He hit the window latch, shoved it open, and went through. The frame cracked on his way out. He was on the roof before the broken wood hit the floor below.
The bakery.
.
.
.
Rooftop to rooftop, the slum spread out below him in the dark. He dropped into an alley, cut through a gap between two buildings he knew from the past week, came out on the street that led to the bakery and saw the door.
Hanging open. Torn off the upper hinge, the wood split at the frame.
He went in.
Mira was on the floor near the counter, one arm pressed to her ribs. Theo was against the wall, a cut above his eye still wet. Sable was on her knees in the middle of the room, turning toward the sound of his footsteps before he said anything.
He went to her first. Hands on her shoulders.
"Sable. Where are you hurt."
"My head," she said. "Check Theo."
He moved to Theo. The cut was clean, not deep. He pressed his sleeve against it and looked at Mira.
"Ribs," Mira said. "Not broken. I think."
He looked at all three of them, then back at Sable.
"Tell me what happened."
Sable's voice was steady.
"Pip's eyes changed yesterday. We were going to tell Colette when she got back from the market. But someone on the street saw him before she came home." She paused.
"The Thieves Guild came this morning. Six of them. They were going to take Pip. Colette fought them."
"She kept fighting," Mira said, from the floor, quietly. "Even when it was too many. She wouldn't stop."
"They had a knife at her throat," Sable continued.
"They were going to kill her. Right there. And then her eyes changed. Red. All the way through." She looked at her hands.
"They stopped. They grabbed her instead of the knife. Took both of them."
Levi was quiet for a moment.
Of course.
I fucking forgot that she was a protaganist. This is a starting point of her story
He looked at the broken door. Then back at the three in front of him.
"Where."
"The slave market. Underground, east side of the slum. The Guild has a deal with the Count's people. They hand over awakened commoners, the Count lets them operate the underground."
He stood.
"Stay here. Lock what's left of the door. Don't open it until I come back."
He was out before she could answer.
.
.
.
They had chained her wrists to a ring in the floor of a holding cell, which meant she could sit up but not stand, and they had left a torch in the bracket outside the bars that was too far away to be useful and close enough to mean they could check on her without coming in. One of them had a bruise forming on his jaw from the market and he kept touching it with two fingers, a habit. She had done that. That was the one she was thinking about.
Pip was in the cell next to hers, separated by a wall of bars. He had gotten himself upright against the far wall after the first hour and had been working at the lock on his cell door with a thin piece of wire he'd had in his pocket the whole time and said nothing about until now.
She turned away from him and looked at the ceiling.
Her eyes felt different. She had noticed it first this morning, a warmth behind them, like pressure that moved when she moved. When the Guild men had come in and it became clear what was happening, the warmth had gone bright.
She had not known what it meant in the moment and she still didn't know what it meant now, except that the man with the jaw bruise had called out to the others when it happened and they had changed their plan, and the plan they had changed to was this.
She hated this city. She had always hated it in the specific targeted way you hate a place you are stuck in, the count who took the eyes of children, the Guild who fed him names in exchange for the freedom to run their racket, the noble system that had decided the border was worth controlling but not worth protecting, and now this.
She had fought. She had fought until the numbers were too many and the knife was at her throat and she was still trying to find an angle that worked. There hadn't been one.
The anger sat in her chest alongside the warmth behind her eyes, and both of them ran hot, and she thought clearly and without self-pity that she would rather burn it all down, the count, the guild, the whole structure of it, than accept that this was simply how things were. That children with the wrong blood in the wrong city had their eyes taken and their lives taken, and the people who took them went home to supper every night.
She would burn it down.
She had no way to do that from the floor of a holding cell. But she would.
Pip made a sound. She turned.
He had gotten the cell door open.
She watched him push it slowly, checking if anyone was in the passage. He looked back at her.
"I can get yours next," he whispered.
"Pip—"
"I can. Give me a minute."
She looked at him. At the thin piece of wire. At the open cell door.
"Go," she said. "Get out. Don't wait for me."
"I'm not leaving without—"
"Pip." Her voice was low and flat. "Go now."
He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone who knows they're being told the right thing and doesn't want it to be the right thing. Then he slipped out into the passage.
She heard the footsteps a second later. Multiple, from the far end. Running.
She heard Pip's footsteps, shorter and faster.
She heard when they stopped.
She turned back to the ceiling.
The shouting was brief. Then the cell beside her opened and two Guild men brought him back in and chained him to the floor ring and left, and Pip didn't look at her, and she didn't look at him, and the torch outside flickered.
She gave up hope then. Not dramatically. It was less like something breaking and more like something running out, a candle at the end of its wick, and then dark.
Mira. Theo. Sable. She thought of them without finishing the thought.
I tried.
.
.
.
The first sound came from above.
A crack. Faint, up through the stone. Then a second one, closer, and dust came down from the ceiling in a thin line.
Then the ceiling smashed opened.
A hole, a full circular breach torn through stone and earth and old brick, wide enough that debris fell in chunks into the water channel below, and through the hole dropped a man in a dark coat, falling four meters and landing in a crouch at the edge of the channel with a hammer in one hand.
He stood up and looked around.
Levi had punched through the roof of whatever chamber he landed in and taken stock in two seconds. Torches on iron brackets. A long room of cells, most empty, a few not. Three guards near the far passage, staring at the hole in the ceiling and the man standing under it.
He walked toward them.
One of them raised a crossbow. He stepped to the side and the bolt skipped off the stone floor behind him and he closed the remaining distance in three strides, took the crossbow out of the man's hands by the stock, and used the other end of it to put him into the wall. The second guard swung a short sword. Levi caught his wrist, turned it the wrong direction, and the sword dropped. The guard went down holding his arm.
The third one he grabbed by the collar before the man could back into the passage.
"The girl with the red eyes," Levi said. "Where."
The guard's face had gone the color of old plaster. His mouth moved.
"I don't—I don't know what—"
Levi looked at him.
"East block," the guard said quickly. "That's where they put the new intake. Premium holding. Far end."
Levi set him down and hit him once, not hard enough to do permanent damage, hard enough that he sat down and stayed there.
He went east.
The second junction had four guards and a locked iron gate. The guards heard him coming, which gave them time to get their weapons out and form up in a line across the passage with the locked gate at their backs. One of them, the one in the middle, was the kind of man who runs these operations for a long time and doesn't rattle easily. He watched Levi come around the corner and didn't step back.
"Stop right there," he said.
Levi didn't stop.
The man on the left moved first, a long spear, good reach. Levi ducked under the thrust and hit the shaft near the middle and the wood cracked and the spearhead went into the ceiling. He stepped inside the guard's reach and shoved him sideways into the wall, and the guard hit it shoulder-first and went down.
The one on the right had a sword already moving in a diagonal cut that would have been dangerous to anyone who wasn't moving faster than he was tracking. Levi stepped back from it and let it pass and then forward again and took the man by the back of the coat and introduced his face to the door of the nearest cell.
The man in the middle hadn't moved. He was watching all of this with the careful attention of someone updating his assessment.
The two remaining guards looked at each other. One of them took a step back.
"Smart," Levi said, to the step back.
He looked at the man in the middle.
"The girl with the red eyes. Where."
The man said nothing for a moment. He was doing the math, Levi could see it, calculating whether the number of bodies in the passage changed his situation or whether Levi was just one man with a hammer and odds could still work.
Levi raised the hammer slightly.
"Premium holding," the man said. "Cell four. Left at the drain channel, end of the east block."
"And the boy. Green eyes. Nine years old."
Something moved in the man's face that he controlled fast but not fast enough.
"Also premium holding," he said.
Levi looked at him for a second. Then he hit him once, clean, and the man sat down against the gate.
.
.
.
He found the cell.
The bar lock was cheap iron. He pulled it off the bracket.
Colette was on the floor, wrists chained, her left eye swollen shut. Her right eye was red, fully changed, looking at him with an expression he couldn't read all at once.
He looked around the cell. At the floor. At the open bar door of the cell next to this one.
He looked back at her.
"Where is Pip."
"He gone"
"When," he said.
"An hour ago." Her voice was flat and careful. "He got the cell door open. Tried to run. They brought him back." A pause. "They didn't take him back to the cell."
The silence in the chamber was the kind that fills itself.
Levi crouched down and put his hands on the chain at the floor ring and pulled. The iron held for a moment and then gave, the ring coming free in a spray of old mortar.
He stood. He looked at her wrists, at the marks.
"Can you walk."
"Yes."
He stepped back. She stood on her own.
They walked.
He didn't try to make it easier than it was. There wasn't a version of this that was easier, and pretending there was one would have been insulting to them both. She walked beside him through the passages and up through the grate and out into the cold night air, and she didn't say anything, and he didn't either.
When they got back to the bakery, Mira opened the door before they reached it. She looked at Colette, at her wrists, at her eye. She looked at Levi. She looked at the space where Pip wasn't.
She understood without anyone saying it.
She stepped back and let them in.
Sable was on the bench. She looked at Colette, and then past her at the empty doorway. She kept looking at the door for a moment, waiting for the shape to fill in, and then her face changed when she understood it wasn't going to.
Colette sat down on the floor against the wall under the counter, knees up, and put her face in her hands.
Levi sat on the bench beside Sable.
He didn't speak. He didn't try to find the thing you say that makes it easier because there wasn't one. He just sat there while the room held what it was holding, and the candle on the counter burned.