Page 6 of These Divided Shores
“Nathaniel Blaise.” Vex looked at Kari. “The Head of the Emerdian raider syndicate. The prison’s in his territory, built by his people. He’s our best chance of making it in.”
Kari nodded, her blank expression not giving away her thoughts.
Like Lu, Vex thought. His chest burned.
Nayeli fished in her pocket and drew out the second Budwig Bean—one that communicated with Port Mesi-Teab. She started to put it in her ear, but paused.
“Are we going,Captain?” she snapped.
Their mission was to bring Kari to Port Mesi-Teab so she could unite the syndicates and they could stop Argrid from destroying Grace Loray. But Ben could be in that prison. And Cansu was one of the raider Heads they needed to lead her people against Argrid.
Vex exhaled, drained from the day. From the week. From the whole damn year.
He looked at the raiders in the pilothouse. “To Port Camden.”
2
COARSE ROPE BOUNDLu’s wrists to the back of a chair. She sagged forward, each breath a wave of knives. Sweat and humidity glazed her skin in a velvet film.
Stay strong, she told herself.Hold on. Mama and Papa will save me—
“Croxy, sir? Make her go a little wild,” a voice offered in Argridian.
Lu quivered, her raw throat burning on a swallow. Croxy, the berserker plant.
“No. I want her to break.” Frustration roughened the new voice with borderline loss of control. Booted feet stepped into Lu’s downcast vision. “Bring Lazonade.”
Panic crawled through her.No, please, no—
Fingers dragged her chin up. Night blurred the far reaches of this rickety wooden room, but a single circle oflight drenched Lu from above and created a halo around Milo Ibarra.
He scowled, face glistening. His uniform was sweat stained and ripped at the shoulder, a product of the battle to take this rebel safe house. When he had led his defensors here, they had wanted secrets, maps, plans—anything to quell the revolution on their Grace Loray colony. What they had found was a resilient twelve-year-old girl.
A defensor appeared at Milo’s side and held out a vial filled with green paste. “You won’t break,” the defensor told her. “That’s why you’re my Lulu-bean. You can keep a secret so well it’s as if you’ve taken a magic plant that sealed your lips.”
Lu jerked back in the chair, ripping herself out of Milo’s grimy fingers. The defensor wasn’t a faceless Argridian soldier—it was Tom. Her father.
She had known he would come to save her. She didn’t feel relieved, though. She felt... furious.
The world contracted, and when it released, the safe house became the deck of a ship. Defensors crowded the planks, rifles blasting, and steamboats fired magic from the sea below.
Lu staggered at the sudden discord of battle. The chair and her bindings were gone, and she spun, watching friends and defensors alike fall in the raging war.
“No,” Lu forced out. “No! Get off my island!Leave me alone!”
That plea undid her, a croaking scream from the moment she had first heard rifles fired on Grace Loray.
I want Argrid off my island. I want to live here in peace.
But after all the things I have done, came Lu’s helpless thought,I don’t deserve peace.
Lu turned again, seeking escape. A figure caught her. Too late, she recognized Milo, and he drove his sword into her gut.
Her eyes flew open. The ship vanished. The battle, the screams, Milo—they rushed away as Lu bolted upright, gulping in thick air. Her hand flew to her stomach, not finding a wound or bandage under her baggy linen shirt. But the tightness of dried sweat on her skin, the roughness of a blanket over her—these feelings meant she washere.She was alive.
How? Milo had stabbed her. She should be dead.
Cautiously, Lu lifted her eyes, expecting to see Milo near her. But she was alone, on a cot tucked against a pale stone wall. The angle of a window farther down didn’t let her see outside, but it filtered in white light—morning, or the wake of it. Wooden floorboards stretched into a room clogged withthings: crates and barrels and tables overflowing with papers, vials, mortars, pestles, and more that she couldn’t see. A laboratory?
