“I’m trying,” Nina growled, hands raised, fists clenched. “They’re not feeling it.”
“Get down!” said Wylan. They dropped to the cobblestones. Jesper heard a thunk and then saw a black blur as something hurtled at the winged man. The flyer dodged left, but the black blur split and two crackling balls of violet flame exploded. One landed with a harmless hiss in the canal water. The other struck the flyer. He screamed, clawing at himself as violet flames spread over his body and wings, then careened off course and slammed into a wall, the flames still burning, their heat palpable even from a distance.
“Run!” Matthias yelled.
They bolted for the nearest alley, Jesper and Wylan in the lead, Nina and Matthias on their heels. Wylan tossed a flash bomb recklessly over his shoulder. It smashed through a window and released a burst of useless brilliance.
“You probably just scared the hell out of some hapless working girl,” Jesper said. “Give me that.” He snatched the other flash bomb and lobbed it directly into the path of their pursuers, turning to protect his eyes from the explosion. “And that’s how it’s done.”
“Next time, I’m not saving your life,” Wylan panted.
“You’d miss me. Everyone does.”
Nina cried out. Jesper turned. Nina’s thrashing body was covered in silver netting, and she was being dragged backward by the Shu woman, who stood with legs planted in the center of the alley. Matthias opened fire, but she didn’t budge.
“Bullets don’t work!” Wylan said. “I think there’s metal beneath their skin.”
Now that he said it, Jesper could see metal glinting from under the bloody bullet wounds. But what did that mean? Were they mechanicals of some sort? How was it possible?
“The net!” Matthias roared.
They all grabbed hold of the metal net, trying to pull Nina to safety. But the Shu woman kept yanking her backward, hand over hand, with impossible strength.
“We need something to cut the cord!” Jesper shouted.
“To hell with the cord,” Nina snarled between gritted teeth. She snatched a revolver from Jesper’s holster. “Let go!” she commanded.
“Nina—” protested Matthias.
“Do it.”
They let go, and Nina zipped down the alley in a sudden burst of momentum. The Shu woman took an awkward step back, then seized the edge of the net, yanking Nina up.
Nina waited until the last possible second, then said, “Let’s see if you’re metal all the way through.”
She shoved the revolver directly into the Shu woman’s eye socket and squeezed the trigger.
The blast didn’t just take her eye but most of the top of her skull. For a moment, she still stood, clutching Nina, a gaping mess of bone, soft pink brain matter, and shards of metal where the rest of her face should have been. Then she crumpled.
Nina gagged and scrabbled at the net. “Get me out of this thing before her friend comes looking for us.”
Matthias tore the net away from Nina and they all ran, hearts hammering, boots pounding over the cobblestones.
Jesper could hear his father’s fearful words, hastening him through the streets, a wind of warning at his back. I’m afraid for you. The world can be cruel to your kind. What had the Shu sent after Nina? After the city’s Grisha? After him ?
Jesper’s existence had been a string of close calls and near disasters, but he’d never been so sure he was running for his life.
A s Inej and Kaz moved farther from West Stave, the silence between them spread like a stain. They’d abandoned their capes and masks in a rubbish heap behind a run-down little brothel called the Velvet Room, where Kaz had apparently stashed another change of clothes for them. It was as if the whole city had become their wardrobe, and Inej couldn’t help but think of the conjurers who drew miles of scarves from their sleeves and vanished girls from boxes that always reminded her uncomfortably of coffins.
Dressed in the bulky coats and roughspun trousers of dockworkers, they made their way into the warehouse district, hair covered by hats, collars pulled up despite the warm weather. The eastern edge of the district was like a city within a city, populated mostly by immigrants who lived in cheap hotels and rooming houses or in shantytowns of plywood and corrugated tin, segregating themselves into ramshackle neighborhoods by language and nationality. At this time of day, most of the area’s denizens were at work in the city’s factories and docks, but on certain corners, Inej saw men and women gathered, hoping some foreman or boss would come along to offer a lucky few of them a day’s work.
After she’d been freed from the Menagerie, Inej had wandered the streets of Ketterdam, trying to make sense of the city. She’d been overwhelmed by the noise and the crowds, certain that Tante Heleen or one of her henchmen would catch her unawares and drag her back to the House of Exotics. But she’d known that if she was going to be useful to the Dregs and earn her way out of her new contract, she couldn’t let the strangeness of the clamor and cobblestones best her. We greet the unexpected visitor. She would have to learn the city.
She always preferred to travel along the rooftops, out of sight, free from the shuffle of bodies. There, she felt most herself again—the girl she’d once been, someone who hadn’t had the sense to be afraid, who hadn’t known what cruelty the world could offer. She’d gotten to know the gabled peaks and window boxes of the Zelverstraat, the gardens and wide boulevards of the embassy sector. She’d traveled far south to where the manufacturing district gave way to foul-smelling slaughter houses and brining pits hidden at the very outskirts of the city, where their offal could be sluiced into the swamp at Ketterdam’s edge, and their stink was less likely to be sent wafting over the residential parts of town. The city had revealed its secrets to her almost shyly, in flashes of grandeur and squalor.
Now she and Kaz left the rooming houses and street carts behind, plunging deeper into the busy warehouse district and the area known as the Weft. Here, the streets and canals were clean and orderly, kept wide for the transportation of goods and cargo. They passed fenced-in acres of raw lumber and quarried stone, closely guarded stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, huge store houses brimming with cotton, silk, canvas, and furs, and warehouses packed with the carefully weighed bundles of dried jurda leaves from Novyi Zem that would be processed and packaged into tins with bright labels, then shipped out to other markets.
Inej still remembered the jolt she’d felt when she saw the words Rare Spices painted on the side of one of the warehouses. It was an advertisement, the words framed by two Suli girls rendered in paint, brown limbs bare, the embroidery of their scant silks hinted at by golden brushstrokes. Inej had stood there, gaze fastened to the sign, less than two miles from where the rights to her body had been bought and sold and haggled over, her heart jackrabbiting in her chest, panic seizing her muscles, unable to stop staring at those girls, the bangles on their wrists, the bells around their ankles. Eventually she’d willed herself to move, and as if some spell had been broken, she’d run faster than she ever had, back to the Slat, racing over the rooftops, the city passing in gray glimpses below her reckless feet. That night she’d dreamed the painted girls had come to life. They were trapped in the brick wall of the warehouse, screaming to be set free, but Inej was powerless to help them.