POV: Serina
The notice is nailed to their door with a single iron tack.
Serina sees it before she even reaches the step. She knows what it is. She has seen them on other doors in the Dregs, always that ugly brown paper, always that red imperial stamp bleeding through like a wound. She has walked past them before and felt a cold, quiet relief that it was never hers.
She shifts the laundry basket to her other hip and reads it.
Then she reads it again.
Pip. Age nine. Theft of goods from a ranked citizen. Sentence: death. Execution date: three days from the above stamp.
Three days.
She stands there long enough that a neighbor's cat comes and sits on her foot. She does not notice. She is reading the notice a third time, the way you keep touching a bruise, like maybe this time it will not hurt.
Then she takes it down. Folds it small. Puts it in her pocket.
She goes inside. She finishes the laundry.
The water in the basin is cold by the time she gets to the last sheet, but she has been doing laundry in cold water since she was eleven. Her hands know the work without her. That is the only useful thing about grief: your hands still know things even when your chest has gone hollow.
She scrubs. She thinks.
Option one: the petition office. She walked past it last week. There was a sign on the door. Co-signature of a ranked citizen required. She does not know any ranked citizens who would claim her name. The noble whose linens she washes three times a week once called her the laundry girl to her face, while looking just past her ear, like she was part of the furniture.
Option two: the advocacy guild. She asked about their rates once, six months ago, just to know. The man behind the desk laughed. Not meanly. Just like the question was funny.
Option three: she walks into the holding cell block, takes Pip by the hand, and runs.
She wrings out the sheet. Sets it aside.
Option three ends with two bodies on the wall instead of one.
She is not going to panic. Panic is for people who have backup plans to ruin. She is going to think, clearly and slowly, the way she has thought through every bad corner she has ever been backed into, and she is going to find the angle she has not tried yet.
She scrubs.
She thinks.
The sky outside the one cracked window goes from gray to darker gray. She has been running the same circle for four hours, and it keeps closing on itself. No money. No rank. No name that means anything to anyone in a courthouse. No way in. No way around. Every door she pictures has a lock she cannot reach.
Except one.
She does not let herself think about it directly. She circles it the way she would circle a fire, aware of it, keeping her distance, pretending she is not measuring the heat.
There is a shrine on the mountain above the city.
Everyone knows it exists. Everyone knows not to go near it. The warnings are old enough that most people have stopped being afraid of the actual reason and are just afraid because their parents were afraid, the way you learn not to touch a stove before you understand what burning is.
The World-End Dragon is sealed inside. That is what they say. Something enormous, something old, something the empire spent a hundred years trying to put down and finally buried under stone and old-script locks. The kind of thing that unmakes armies. The kind of thing you do not wake up.
She has known about the shrine her whole life. It has never been relevant to her before.
Three days.
She rinses the last sheet. Hangs it over the line. Her hands are red from the cold. They always are, this time of year.
She dries them slowly on her skirt.
She is not going to do it. She is absolutely not going to do it. She is going to sleep, and tomorrow she is going to try the petition office anyway, and she is going to find a ranked citizen who does not hate her yet, and she is going to figure something out that does not end the world.
She is very logical. She is very calm.
She is her mother's daughter, which means she knows exactly how to talk herself out of stupid things.
She pulls the notice from her pocket. Unfolds it.
Pip. Age nine.
She thinks about the way he laughed last week when he found a beetle on the windowsill and named it General. She thinks about how he still reaches for her hand in crowded streets because old habits are hard to break, even when you are nine and trying very hard to seem
brave. She thinks about his fever four days running now and the way he coughs in the mornings, small and stubborn, the same way their mother used to cough before she stopped.
She folds the notice again. Puts it back in her pocket.
She looks at her hands.
Her wrist is blank. Has always been blank. No rank mark, no number, no proof she is anything at all to this empire or anyone in it.
She is used to that.
What she is not used to is the feeling that settles over her now, not hot, not panicked, but very cold and very clear, the way water goes still just before it freezes. She has reached the bottom of every option she is allowed to have.
So she is going to stop asking permission.
The water in the basin is cold. She stares at it. And something clicks into place in her chest like a door locking from the inside.
She is going to go to the shrine tonight. She is going to wake up whatever is in there. She is going to offer it whatever it wants, her life, her service, anything, in exchange for Pip walking out of that cell before his three days are up.
She is seventeen years old, and she has nothing to lose that she has not already been losing her whole life.
She tips the basin out. Stacks it against the wall.
Then she starts looking for a chisel.