Page 67 of Daughter of No Worlds

I openedmy eyes and the first thing I saw was blood. Blood dribbling through cobblestones, covering piles of wet, broken wood. Blood dripping into my eyes, covering my sideways vision, smearing against my cheek as it pressed to the ground.

My fingers touched something soft, and I almost jumped until I pulled it closer and realized it was a torn-up stuffed dog toy, stained crimson. My hand was soaked.

“That was stupid,” Max’s voice murmured. It was weak, nearly trembling. “Never do that again. I would have been fine.”

I tried to sit up. Pain screamed in my palms as I pressed them against the floor, and the world spun, but I forced myself to steady. Max caught my shoulders, stabilizing me. When I raised my head, he looked at me with an abject fear that would have caught me off guard had I not been so completely focused on not vomiting.

Nura’s shadows were gone, the harsh morning casting grotesque patches of gold over broken beams and crumpled stone. I was in what looked to be someone’s home — or had been, once. The building had collapsed into rubble, leaving eerie fragments of some poor family’s life scattered in stained sand. Max and Sammerin knelt in front of me. Sammerin rubbed blue dust between his fingers.

“Lightning Dust,” he said, brow furrowed.

I turned my head and strangled a cry. Two outstretched hands reached from beneath a massive beam. The rest of the body — or whatever could possibly remain of it — was buried beneath a pile of rubble, the river of blood trickling from beneath that mass of broken beams.

Max said something, but I didn’t hear him.

He tipped my chin with his finger, turning my face toward him, and said it again. “Are you hurt, Tisaanah?”

I shook my head, even though I wasn’t totally sure if that was an accurate answer. I looked down at my palms, which were slashed so deeply I caught white flashes of bone.

Without speaking, Sammerin took my hands in his. I bit back a yelp as my skin began to burn.

“He blew up his own city?” Max crouched at the ground, peering at the blue dust. “Ascended above. That’s fucking insane.”

“Perhaps he thinks it’s better than letting Sesri take it back,” Sammerin replied.

I watched, rapt, as the skin of my palms crawled like hundreds of tiny spiders, threads crossing the chasm of my wounds and bridging flesh to flesh. It hurt fiercely, and the gory image of it was… nauseating. But when Sammerin released my hands, the wounds were replaced with smooth skin.

Sammerin stood, pulling me to my feet. The rubble around us was intact enough to form a shadowy shelter, albeit one that looked like it might collapse at any moment. Outside, the soupy mist had returned, obscuring the wreckage to silhouettes. But I could hear the sounds of dull, blunt fighting, shouts and grunts and moaning, of calls for help. Still, always quieter than one expects to be. Just like the night the slavers came to my village.

Blew up his own city.

So that was why it was empty. But I couldn’t imagine what his final goal could possibly be — how this could possibly end well for his people.

I peered out of a gap in the rubble.

Ghostly figures melted into physical forms only to melt back into the fog as if they were nothing at all, striking our soldiers with lethal, silent strokes.

I felt ill. Max’s gaze flicked to mine and I could tell he did, too.

“They have a Valtain up there,” Max whispered. “Probably several. Good ones, to cast a spell like this over so many of their soldiers.”

“Everyone is in that tower,” I said, pointing. “We need to—”

A crash shattered my sentence. A morass of shadow and fog, thrashing with a young soldier, smashed against our pile of rubble. Max yanked me back away from the opening, and the three of us held our breaths in the darkness until the Tairnian soldier’s body was left twitching on the ground. And then Nura appeared, stepping out of the shadow, blood smeared over one cheek.

“You’re alive,” she breathed, panting. “Good. Can’t believe the bastard would— would…”

She let out a sharp, shuddering breath, then shook her head. “Get to the estate gates. He and whatever traitors are doing this are hiding in the hall. They’ll see how much they like to play with explosives when we bring down the building.”

My heart stopped. I hoped I misheard her.

“You can’t,” I blurted out. “The whole city is—”

“It’s the Syrizen’s directive, not mine. And we don’t have time to fuck around.”

“Nura, even you can’t think—”

She cut Max off before he could finish. “I don’t have time for your judgement. Either we get in there and root out those rats or the Syrizen bring the whole damn thing down.” Silver strands escaped her braids, echoing the whites of her eyes. A flicker passed over the icy determination in her face. “I tried to tell them— You don’t know how many bodies I’ve yanked out of these buildings.” Her throat bobbed. “Get to the gates. That is an order.”

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