Page 98 of These Divided Shores
Let them weep, part of her thought.Let them know what I am capable of.
But Lu looked down at her scarlet fingers, hearing the words Milo had left in her mind.Port Mesi-Teab.
“Port Mesi-Teab?” Nayeli echoed, somewhere to Lu’s right.
“We don’t know he meant anything by that,” Kari tried. She put a hand on Lu’s back. “Adeluna—are you all right? Do you—”
“Why’d he mention Port Mesi-Teab at all?” demanded Nayeli. “He got Cansu to submit to him—what if she told him stuff about the sanctuary? Its secrets?”
“He was desperate.” Kari came to stand in front of Lu, between her and Milo’s body.
Milo was dead. Dead at Lu’s feet. Dead by Lu’s hand.
“Adeluna. Look at me.”
Lu lifted her eyes. When they met Kari’s, she braced herself to unravel, but all that came was a statement, old and weathered and as achingly empty as her soul.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Lu whispered.
Milo was dead. She had killed him. She had murdered again. She was a soldieragain.The Incris in her body, if it truly was permanent, had made her even more lethal, a better version of what Tom had helped her become: an assassin-spy, blood on her hands, her heart in tatters. Which war was this? Whose blood was that? This was her life, a cycle of hatred and fighting.
Kari’s lips flattened into a line, the pinch of holding back tears, or a scream, or an argument. All she said was an echo of her promise outside Fatemah’s office. “You don’t have to, sweetheart. You can be done.”
Rosalia came running across the square. “Elazar escaped! He waited until we’d put in a good fight, lost half a dozen raiders, and he slipped out the back door of the mission.”
“He left?” Nayeli whipped on her. “Why’d he wait at all then?”
Lu staggered, seeing a scene from a lifetime ago, when she had been twelve, the night the revolution ended. Two little girls huddled in a revolution safe house, a handful of people watching over them, because who even knew where they were? The rest of the revolutionaries gone, off on a mission to take an Argridian storehouse.
That tip had been a lie to empty the safe house. Argrid had attacked.
Tom had arranged all of it.
“We need to leave,” Lu said. She was sick, aching deep in her soul. “We have to get back to Port Mesi-Teab.Now.”
22
SILENCE CHOKED THEsanctuary after the raiders moved out. It sounded more intense than the shouting, as though every passing second was building to an explosion. With so many of the raiders gone, would the refugees retaliate like the man with the Variegated Holly bomb?
Not that Vex could bring himself to care. Whatever disaster Fatemah would have to deal with, let her drown in it. He’d put up with her mistreatment of Nayeli, her views on who deserved help and who didn’t, for way too long. He should’ve stood up to her years ago.
Vex grimaced. Guilt, not Shaking Sickness, would kill him. Was this how Lu felt? Why she’d apologized to him after they’d saved her from the prison?
She’d come back. Nayeli too. They’d saunter into the sanctuary with Cansu and Teo, and Vex’d grovel until they forgave him. Things would go back to normal. They had to.
Except now Lu had taken what was apparently permanent magic. How would that change her? Could Vex bring her back from whatever it had made her?
Ben paced the length of his cell. Gunnar sat on the floor, watching him. Jakes stayed on the opposite side of the cell from Vex as though shoved away from him by some invisible force.
Vex curled in on himself, sulking, chin to his knees. Every time a tremor grabbed him, he sank his teeth into his tongue.
Whether Ben could heal him didn’t matter. If Lu didn’t come back... not a whole lot else would matter to Vex. He wouldn’t survive losing her twice.
He winced. He couldn’t think like that. The island was at war; Lu and Nayeli were gone, fighting that very war; people were suffering, dying, imprisoned and burned—and then there was Vex. The useless raider with Shaking Sickness who cared only about the people closest to him.
He was worse than a coward. He barely even existed.
A shout echoed through the barred window in Vex and Jakes’s cell. The four of them pulled to attention as the raider guarding them at the end of the hall vanished outside.
