Nina raised her hands, prepared to attack. They waited, hearts pounding, as the door slid open.
The room was as white as all the others, but hardly bare. Its long tables were full of beakers set over low blue flames, heating and cooling apparatuses, glass vials full of powders in varying shades of orange. One wall was devoted to a massive slate board covered in chalk equations. The other was all glass cases with little metal doors. They contained blooming jurda plants, and Nina guessed the cases must be heated. A cot was pushed up against the other wall, its thin covers rumpled, papers and notebooks strewn around it. A Shu boy was seated cross-legged on it. He stared at them, his dark hair flopping over his forehead, a notebook in his lap. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
“We aren’t here to harm you,” Nina said in Shu. “Where is Bo Yul-Bayur?”
The boy brushed his hair back from his golden eyes. “He’s dead.”
Nina frowned. Had Van Eck’s information been wrong? “Then what is all this?”
“Have you come to kill me?”
Nina wasn’t quite sure of the answer to that. “Sesh-uyeh?” she ventured.
The boy’s face crumpled in relief. “You’re Kerch.”
Nina nodded. “We came to rescue Bo Yul-Bayur.”
The boy pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “He’s beyond your rescue. My father died when the Fjerdans tried to stop the Kerch from taking us out of Ahmrat Jen.”
His voice faltered. “He was killed in the crossfire.”
My father. Nina translated for Matthias as she tried to take in what this meant.
“Dead?” Matthias asked, and his broad shoulders slumped slightly. Nina knew what he was thinking
– all they’d endured, all they’d done, and Yul-Bayur had been dead the whole time.
But the Fjerdans had kept his son alive for a reason. “They’re trying to make you recreate his formula,” she said.
“I helped him in the lab, but I don’t remember everything.” He bit his lip. “And I’ve been stalling.”
Whatever parem the Fjerdans had been using on the Grisha must have come from the original stock Bo Yul-Bayur had been bringing to the Kerch.
“Can you do it?” Nina asked. “Can you recreate the formula?”
The boy hesitated. “I think so.”
Nina and Matthias exchanged a glance.
Nina swallowed. She’d killed before. She’d killed tonight, even, but this was different. This boy wasn’t pointing a gun at her or trying to harm her. Murdering him – and it would be murder – would also mean betraying Inej, Kaz, Jesper, and Wylan. People who were risking their lives even now for a prize they’d never see. But then she thought of Nestor falling lifeless in the snow, of the cells full of Grisha lost in their own misery, all because of this drug.
She raised her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If you succeed, there will be no end to the suffering you unleash.”
The boy’s gaze was steady, his chin jutting up stubbornly, as if he’d known this moment might come. The right thing to do was obvious. Kill this boy quickly, painlessly. Destroy the lab and everything in it. Eradicate the secret of jurda parem. If you wanted to kill a vine, you didn’t just keep cutting it back. You tore it from the ground by the roots. And yet her hands were shaking. Wasn’t this the way drüskelle thought? Destroy the threat, wipe it out, no matter that the person in front of you was innocent.
“Nina,” Matthias said softly, “he’s just a kid. He’s one of us.”
One of us. A boy not much younger than she was, caught up in a war he hadn’t chosen for himself.
A survivor.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Kuwei.”
“Kuwei Yul-Bo,” she began. Did she intend to pass sentence? To apologise? To beg forgiveness?
She’d never know. When she found her voice, all she said was, “How fast can you destroy this lab?”
“Fast,” he replied. He sliced a hand through the air, and the flames from beneath one of the beakers shot out in a blue arc.
Nina stared. “You’re Grisha. You’re an Inferni.”
Kuwei nodded. “Jurda parem was a mistake. My father was trying to find a way to help me hide my powers. He was a Fabrikator. A Grisha, as I am.”
Nina’s mind was reeling – Bo Yul-Bayur, a Grisha hiding in plain sight behind the borders of the Shu Han. There was no time to let it sink in.
“We need to destroy as much of your work as we can,” she said.
“There are combustibles,” replied Kuwei, already gathering up papers and jurda samples. “I can rig an explosion.”
“Only the vault. There are Grisha here.” And guards. And Matthias’ mentor. Nina would have gladly let Brum die, but though Matthias had betrayed his commander, she doubted he’d want to see the man who’d become a second father to him blown to bits. Her heart rebelled when she thought of the Grisha she’d be leaving behind, but there was no way to get them to the harbour.
“Leave the rest,” she said to Matthias and Kuwei. “We need to move.”