The main gate was a hundred yards away. Mal ran, his legs pumping, his vision blurry from his own tears and the after-image of his own cataclysmic "Spark." The magic had taken more than just his hair; it had taken his energy. He felt light-headed, his body hollow, a ringing in his ears.
But he ran.
He could hear the Reapers behind him, roaring in blind fury. "Stop him! At the gate! Stop him!"
He burst from the cloisters onto the main plaza, a vast, open-air circle of perfectly-manicured grass. At the far end was the Main Gate.
It was, as he feared, shut.
The Gilded Garden was protected by a high wall, thirty feet tall, which the Matron said was "woven from living wood" by the first Blooms. It was beautiful, a seamless, pearlescent barrier. The Main Gate was a massive, 20-foot-tall arch in that wall, sealed not by a door, but by a "curtain" of the same living, interwoven branches.
And it was sealed. The branches were laced so tightly, they were as solid as steel.
Two more Reapers stood guard at the gate. They had not been part of the chase. They were fresh. They saw him—a lone, ugly Drone, his face covered in blood, his scalp weeping—and they were confused.
Then they heard the shouts from Theron behind him.
"SEAL THE GATE! DON'T LET HIM OUT!"
The two gate guards' confusion vanished, replaced by cold duty. They drew their truncheons and moved to intercept him, forming a wall in front of the gate.
"Stop, Drone!" one of them yelled. "In the Matron's name!"
Mal was trapped. Again. A plaza of open grass. Three blind, furious Reapers behind him. Two armed, ready Reapers in front of him.
He was going to die here. He was going to die on the perfectly-manicured lawn.
He skidded to a halt, his breath sobbing in his chest. He looked left. He looked right. The wall. The seamless, 30-foot-high, living wall.
The guards advanced. "On your knees, Smudge. Now."
Behind him, Theron's voice was getting closer. "He's at the gate! Get him! Get him!" The blind Reapers were being guided by the sound of the gate guards.
It was an impossible choice. A beating, or...
The wall.
The Matron said it was "living." Kael and Jev always complained that the wall was too perfect, too smooth. But Mal... Mal had dusted the base of this wall. As a Smudge, he was given the lowest jobs. And he had seen, up close, what the others, in their arrogance, had missed.
It wasn't seamless. It was wood. It had knots. It had flaws. It had handholds.
He made the decision.
He did not run at the guards. He turned sharp right and ran, not at the gate, but at the wall beside it.
The gate guards, seeing his sudden, insane move, were momentarily stunned. "What is he doing?"
He reached the wall. He didn't slow. He leaped.
His ugly, disproportionate, gangly body—the body he had cursed every day of his life—was, for this one, singular moment, a blessing. His long, spidery limbs were light. His long, calloused fingers, strong from a lifetime of scrubbing, found purchase.
His fingers caught a thick, gnarled knot of wood, ten feet up, a flaw no one had ever bothered to look for.
He began to climb.
"HE'S AT THE WALL!" one of the gate guards screamed, his voice cracking in disbelief.
"He can't! It's... he's climbing!"
An arrow, blunt-tipped—they didn't want to kill him, just capture him—thudded into the wood, just inches from his head. A new guard, a "Tithe-Watcher," was on the parapet above the gate, nocking another arrow.
The thud spurred Mal on. He scrambled, his sandals, slick with his own blood, finding tiny, half-inch ledges. His fingers were raw, his nails tearing. Splinters, sharp as needles, drove into the palms of his hands.
He looked down. A mistake. The ground was twenty feet below. The Reapers were swarming the base. Theron, his eyes now open but weeping, milky, and useless, was screaming at the others, "Get him! Pull him down! Get him!"
Another arrow. This one grazed his ear, a hot, stinging pain.
He whimpered, pressing his face to the cool, pearlescent wood. He couldn't go down. He couldn't stay. He could only go up.
He climbed.
He reached the top. His raw, bloody hands gripped the rounded, smooth edge of the wall. He hauled his trembling, exhausted body over the top. He was on a 3-foot-wide walkway.
He looked down, back into the Garden. The Reapers were a swarm of ants. Theron, his head thrown back, let out a roar of pure, frustrated hatred.
Mal had won. He was free.
He turned, and for the first time in his life, he looked out.
And his mind, which had already been broken once today, broke all over again.
It was not the "Shorn" world of his lessons. It was not a diseased, empty wasteland of filth and dying vagrants.
It was... a city.
A massive, sprawling, magnificent, and terrifying city.
It spread as far as he could see, a dense ocean of stone, brick, and wood, choking the landscape. Towers of black steel pierced the sky. A miasma of brown-grey smog hung over it all, a stark contrast to the clean, pure air of the Garden. He could hear it, even from here: a low, constant din. The roar of a million voices, the clatter of carts, the clang of industry.
The Gilded Garden was not a utopian enclave in a wasteland.
It was a park. A tiny, walled-off, green-and-white bubble... sitting right on the edge of the largest, dirtiest city in the world.
The Capital of the Hegemony.
"He's on the wall!" The Tithe-Watcher on the gate-parapet was running toward him, arrow nocked, this time not blunt-tipped.
Mal looked at the city. He looked at the Watcher.
He jumped.
He fell. For a heart-stopping, endless three seconds, he was airborne.
Then he hit the ground.
He landed hard, in a pile of what smelled, unmistakably, like rotten cabbage and human waste. The impact drove the air from his lungs in a painful whoosh. He rolled, his body screaming in protest, every old ache and new wound flaring at once.
He was in an alley. A narrow, dark, filth-strewn gap between the Garden's outer wall and a tall, brick tenement building.
He was alive.
He was... out.
He was free.
He was also bleeding, terrified, and, now that his final tuft was gone, completely and utterly magicless. He was, in every sense of the word, bald.
He was a Shorn.
He lay in the filth for a full minute, his body shaking, his mind a total, white-static void. The roar of the city, so distant from the wall, was deafening here. People shouting in a language he barely understood, carts rumbling on cobblestones, a baby crying.
He pulled his ragged, grey, Drone's tunic around him—a tunic that now marked him as an escaped freak—and stumbled out of the alley.
The street hit him like a physical blow.
It was crowded. A river of people, a churning mass of humanity, unlike anything he could have conceived. And the smells—spices, sweat, sewage, roasting meat, unwashed bodies, charcoal smoke.
And the people.
So, so many of them were like him.
Bald.
Men, women, and children. They huddled in doorways, their eyes listless, their skin sallow. They wore rags. They were the magicless, the lowest caste. The Shorn. The "Baldlands," he would later learn the locals called this slum.
His teachings had been right about one thing. The Shorn were "bald and broken," and they lived in filth. But they weren't outside the Hegemony. They were under it.
And then he saw them.
A carriage, a massive, ornate thing of black lacquer and gold leaf, drawn by six, plume-headed horses, thundered down the street. The Shorn, the bald, scrambled, pushing and falling over each other to get out of the way.
Inside, visible through the pristine glass window, was a woman.
Her hair was a glorious, impossible cascade of fiery auburn, piled high on her head in a complex series of loops and braids, each one shimmering with an inner, magical light. It glowed with power. She was a Patrician, a noble of the Hegemony.
She looked at the Shorn scattering before her carriage, and her face held an expression of profound, bored disgust.
Flanking the carriage, on horseback, were "Justicars." The Hegemony's warrior-mages.
They were men. But their magic was not their own. Mal, his mind still reeling, could see it clearly now, with the horrible, new-found clarity of the truth.
They wore "Tress-Blades."
These were not weapons of steel. They were massive, two-handed sword-hilts, from which, instead of a blade, there extended a five-foot-long, thick, heavy braid of... hair.
Dozens of different colors. Gold, black, red, brown. All woven together into a hard, sharp, deadly weapon.
Stolen hair. Harvested hair.
This was the empire that Matron Flora was selling to. An empire built on harvesting the magic of others, to power their weapons, to guard their nobles.
Mal turned, stumbled back into the alley, and was violently, agonizingly sick in the pile of refuse he had just escaped. He had not escaped a cult. He had just escaped the farm. And he had landed in the slaughterhouse.