The wall was older than it looked. Saad could tell by the way the stones shifted under her boots — not crumbling, just loose enough to remind her that nothing in this city was as solid as it pretended to be.
She moved fast, hands finding the gaps in the mortar, the thin iron rod tucked through her belt where it wouldn't catch. The suit did the rest — the invisible weave that the army didn't know she'd modified, that dampened sound and blurred her outline against stone in low light. It wasn't perfect. At close range, in full daylight, someone would see her. But this was dusk, and the crowd in the square below was facing the other direction.
They were always facing the other direction.
She climbed. Her arms burned. Her fingers found another hold, slipped, caught again. Somewhere below, the crowd noise thickened — a low chant building like water before a flood — and she moved faster without meaning to, her body deciding before her mind did.
The tower wall made her think of training. Not the sanctioned hours — she had always stayed past those, long after the other recruits had gone to eat or sleep, working the same climb over and over until her hands bled and her muscles shook and she could do it without thinking. She had needed that. She was not built like Suad, with his long reach and his legs that ate distance like it was nothing, with his body that seemed designed specifically to make military exercises look effortless. She had been built like herself — compact, efficient when she chose to be, but never gifted. Everything she had, she had fought for inch by inch.
It had never felt fair. It still didn't.
She reached the window ledge and hooked her elbow over it, pulling herself up and through in one motion — a maneuver she had practiced so many times it lived in her muscles rather than her mind. She landed in a crouch, pulled the iron rod free, and turned.
Suad was sitting on a barrel eating an apple.
He looked up when she landed, unhurried, and tilted his head with the faint expression of a man who had been waiting long enough to be mildly amused by the wait.
"I thought you'd come rushing," he said.
Saad stared at him. The apple. The barrel. The complete, infuriating composure of him.
"How," she said, "did you get here before me."
"Stairs," he said simply, and took another bite.
She crossed the room in three steps.
"We are getting her out," she said, her voice low and hard. "Right now. Before they—"
"Saad."
"Don't."
"Listen to me—"
"I said don't." She moved toward the inner door. "If you're not going to help, get out of my way."
He was in front of her before she finished the sentence — not rushing, just suddenly there, the way he always was, as if the space between one place and another was a formality he didn't observe.
"There are six soldiers between this room and the square," he said. "Armed. The Prefect is already at the platform. If you go through that door, you won't reach her. You'll be arrested, the mission ends, and she still burns."
"Then what do you suggest?" Her voice came out cracked at the edges. She hated that.
He didn't answer. He stepped aside from the door and gestured, instead, toward the window on the far wall — the one that looked out over the square.
She didn't want to go to that window.
She went anyway.
* * *
The square was full.
Merz turned out for its burnings the way other cities turned out for festivals — packed shoulder to shoulder, vendors selling food at the edges, children lifted onto their fathers' shoulders for a better view. Lanterns had been strung between the posts. Someone had thought to make it bright.
At the center, the stake.
Catreena was already bound to it, her wrists pulled behind her and the rope looped three times around the post. Her head was bowed, hair hanging forward over her face. From this height Saad could see the damage — one eye swollen nearly shut, her lip split and crusted, a bruise across her jaw that had already gone the deep purple of old blood. She was barefoot. They had taken her shoes.
Saad's grip on the window ledge tightened until her knuckles ached.
There had been no trial. She knew that now, could feel it in the shape of the crowd, the speed of it all — no announcement, no reading of charges, no theatre of justice. Just the Prefect on his platform and the soldiers and the wood already stacked at Catreena's feet. Someone had decided the outcome before the process began, and the process had simply been skipped.
Koko stood at the edge of the square.
Saad hadn't noticed him at first — he was still in his work clothes, the leather apron, standing at the far corner of the crowd with his arms at his sides. He wasn't watching the stake. He was watching the Prefect. His face held an expression she couldn't name from this distance, but something in his stillness was wrong — the stillness of a man who was supposed to be somewhere in this scene and had found himself outside it instead.
At the back of the crowd, motionless among the shifting bodies, the orange robe of the Starkash monk stood out like an ember. He wasn't chanting. He wasn't speaking. He simply watched, his hands folded, his face carrying something that might have been witness — the deliberate act of seeing something fully so that it could not be pretended away.
The Prefect raised his hand.
The crowd quieted, then surged back louder than before, and the chant began.
"Burn the witch. Burn the witch. Burn the witch."
Saad moved toward the door.
Suad's hand came down on her shoulder.
She spun, fury already in her mouth, and he pulled her back — not roughly, but with a completeness that shocked her, both arms coming around her from behind the way their father used to hold her when she was small and furious and about to do something she couldn't undo. She had hated it then. She hated it now with a depth that went beyond words.
"Let go—"
"No."
"Suad, let go of me right now—"
"No, Saad."
She struggled. He held. His arms were stronger than she remembered, or maybe she had simply never tested them like this — she had always assumed he was hers to manage, hers to carry, and discovering that he could hold her still when she most needed to move felt like another betrayal layered on top of all the others.
Below, the torch touched the wood.
The fire caught slowly at first, the way fire does, feeling its way along the edges of things. Then it found its footing and rose.
Catreena lifted her head.
Her good eye found the window where Saad stood — or seemed to, though from this distance Saad couldn't be sure. Maybe she was looking at the sky. Maybe she was looking at nothing at all. But for a moment her face was fully visible, the bruising and the blood and underneath it something that had not been broken, something that had decided, long before this moment, what it was going to be.
A rock came from somewhere in the crowd and struck her on the damaged eye. It closed.
Saad felt bile rise sharp and sudden in her throat. She stopped struggling — not because she had given up, but because her body had stopped working properly, every system rerouting toward the single task of not falling apart in front of her brother.
Suad pulled her back against him more fully. Not restraining her now. Holding her. The distinction was small and enormous at the same time.
She didn't even like Catreena. She had told herself that, had catalogued the ways the girl was naive and soft and too trusting, had kept her at a deliberate arm's length. It hadn't mattered. You didn't have to love someone to know they deserved to live. You didn't have to love someone to feel the specific wrongness of watching the world decide, cheerfully and in public, that they didn't.
A sob came up her throat and she let it out — one, only one, swallowed almost immediately — and felt his arms tighten in response.
The chanting went on.
She stopped hearing it after a while.
* * *
They left Merz before the crowd dispersed.
Suad led and she followed, which was not how it was supposed to go, which was not how it had ever gone. She told herself she was letting him lead because she didn't trust herself to choose a direction right now, which was true enough to walk on.
The streets were emptying as they moved through them, people drifting back toward homes and taverns, their voices still carrying the shape of the chant even in ordinary conversation — that particular looseness that came after collective violence, the relief of it, the lightness. She kept her eyes ahead. She did not look at faces.
The ferry station was quiet. Suad bought their passage without speaking, handed her the boarding slip, and they stood on the dock in the cooling night air waiting for the vessel to be ready.
Saad looked at the water.
She thought about Catreena's face — the one before the rock, the lifted chin, the eye that had found the window or the sky or nothing at all but had been open. She thought about Rayan leaving in the night while Catreena sat on the edge of her bed and listened and did not follow. She thought about the document with the stamp and the signature — real enough to be believed, which was all it needed to be.
She thought about the pilgrimage. The sacred city. The reward waiting at the end of all this — the rank, the recognition, everything she had worked toward through years of staying late, climbing walls until her hands bled, carrying what no one asked her to carry.
It felt very far away. It felt, for the first time, like it might not be worth what it cost.
She didn't say any of this. Suad stood beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and she understood that he already knew — that he had known, somehow, longer than she had, and had carried it quietly in that infuriating way of his, and that this was one of the things she would never forgive him for.
The ferry horn sounded.
She picked up her pack. She walked up the boarding ramp. She did not look back at the city.
She told herself she would not think about it again.
She thought about it the entire crossing.