When he was fourteen, Kaz had put together a crew to rob the bank that had helped Hertzoon prey on him and Jordie. His crew got away with fifty thousand kruge, but he’d broken his leg dropping down from the rooftop. The bone didn’t set right, and he’d limped ever after. So he’d found himself a Fabrikator and had his cane made. It became a declaration. There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He’d become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, bastard of the Barrel.
The gloves were his one concession to weakness. Since that night among the bodies and the swim from the Reaper ’s Barge, he had not been able to bear the feeling of skin against skin. It was excruciating to him, revolting. It was the only piece of his past that he could not forge into something dangerous.
The baleen began to bead around his lips. Water was seeping in. How far had the river taken them?
How far did they have left to go? He still had one hand gripped around Bo Yul-Bayur ’s collar. The Shu boy was smaller than Kaz; hopefully he had enough air.
Bright flashes of memory sparked through Kaz’s mind. A cup of hot chocolate in his mittened hands, Jordie warning him to let it cool before he took a sip. Ink drying on the page as he’d signed the deed to the Crow Club. The first time he’d seen Inej at the Menagerie, in purple silk, her eyes lined with kohl. The bone-handled knife he’d given her. The sobs that had come from behind the door of her room at the Slat the night she’d made her first kill. The sobs he’d ignored. Kaz remembered her perched on the sill of his attic window, sometime during that first year after he’d brought her into the Dregs. She’d been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof.
“You shouldn’t make friends with crows,” he’d told her.
“Why not?” she asked.
He’d looked up from his desk to answer, but whatever he’d been about to say had vanished on his tongue.
The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbour wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world.
“Why not?” she’d repeated, eyes still closed.
He said the first thing that popped into his head. “They don’t have any manners.”
“Neither do you, Kaz.” She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and got drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.
Kaz took a last breath as the baleen dissolved and water flooded in. He squinted against the rush of the water, hoping to see some hint of daylight. The river knocked him against the wall of the tunnel.
The pressure in his chest grew. I’m stronger than this, he told himself. My will is greater. But he could hear Jordie laughing. No, little brother. No one is stronger. You’ve cheated death too many times.
Greed may do your bidding, but death serves no man.
Kaz had almost drowned that night in the harbour, kicking hard in the dark, borne aloft by Jordie’s corpse. There was no one and nothing to carry him now. He tried to think of his brother, of revenge, of Pekka Rollins tied to a chair in the house on Zelverstraat, trade orders stuffed down his throat as Kaz forced him to remember Jordie’s name. But all he could think of was Inej. She had to live. She had to have made it out of the Ice Court. And if she hadn’t, then he had to live to rescue her.
The ache in his lungs was unbearable. He needed to tell her … what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.
The water pressed at his chest, demanding that he part his lips. I won’t, he swore. But in the end, Kaz opened his mouth, and the water rushed in.
PART 6
PROPER THIEVES
Inej’s heart careened against her ribs. On the aerial swings, there was a moment when you let go of one and reached for the next, when you realised you’d made a mistake and you no longer felt weightless, when you simply started to fall.
The guards hauled her back through the prison gate. There were many more guards and many more guns pointed at her than the first time she’d come through this courtyard, when she’d stepped off the prison wagon with the rest of the crew. They passed through the mouth of the wolf and up the stairs, and dragged her down the walkway through the corridor with its giant glass enclosure. Nina had translated the banner for her: Fjerdan might. She’d smirked at that the first time she’d passed, gazing down at the tanks and weapons, one eye on Kaz and the others on the opposite walkway. She’d wondered what kind of men needed to display their strength to helpless captives in chains.
The guards were moving too fast. For the second time that night, Inej made herself stumble.
“Move,” the soldier snapped in Kerch, dragging her forwards.
“You’re going too quickly.”
He gave her arm a hard shake. “Stop stalling.”
“Don’t you want to meet our inquisitors?” the other asked her. “They’ll get you talking.”
“But you won’t look so pretty after they’re through.”