She raised a completed rifle to her shoulder and peered over it. It lacked a scope. “Testing.”
Rone almost whistled, then remembered himself and stopped. He’d never actually fired a gun before meeting Sandis. He didn’t own any. His father hadn’t believed in them, of course, and he didn’t use them in his own business because they were too bulky, too loud.
Sandis moved faster on the second firearm, though one of the parts got stuck and she had to disassemble and reassemble it. Finished, she handed it to Rone.
More footsteps, far away. One story up. Rone doubted the guard had suddenly multiplied. They’d been followed, which probably meant Kazen hadn’t been killed in the alley. He and Sandis either needed to find a door out and hope it wasn’t being manned or stay very, very quiet.
Sandis bit her lip. Stood.
Rone grabbed her wrist.
“I need ammunition,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
She sounded confident, so he let her go, and she danced away into the shadows. Rone strained to listen to the footsteps. They came and went, sometimes closer, sometimes farther. Sweat licked his palms.
Sandis returned with a box, and Rone tried not to let his sigh of relief be audible. As she knelt on the ground and began loading the rifles, a new question came to mind.
“Sandis,” he whispered, despite knowing that, for now, they were alone. “Who’s Anon?”
She glanced at him, confused.
He pointed toward the scaffolding. “You said Anon broke the lock.”
Her eyes saddened. “He’s my brother. Was.”
The one she’d been looking for when the slavers had found her. That story still sounded so odd to him. Random slavers in Dresberg, kidnapping citizens in alleys . . . He pushed the skepticism away. Sandis wouldn’t lie about that. He hadn’t known her long, but he was sure of her honesty.
“You never found him,” he tried.
She shook her head. “No, but he’s dead.” Her body wilted under the statement. “Drowned in a canal.”
“You saw him?”
“Kazen told me.”
“And we trust him now.”
She lifted her head. Swiped hair from her face. “He’s gone, Rone.”
“But how—”
“He hadn’t come home for three days . . . That’s why I was looking for him when . . .” Her throat tightened around the words, and she shook her head. “I know Anon. He would have come after me. Even if it was a lie . . . if my brother came looking for me, Kazen wouldn’t have liked it, you know?”
Rone nodded. Either way, a dead brother.
He bent his knees and rested his arms on them. For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps in the room . . . but no, those came from above.
“My father worked in cotton,” Sandis continued. She’d set the guns aside and cleaned her thumbnail with her other thumbnail. “I’m not sure what happened. Someone smoking inside, maybe. But the place lit up. He died in the fire. When I was branded . . . I wondered if his death felt something like that.”
Rone’s shoulders drooped, and something pinched deep inside him. She had a way of messing with his insides. “Oh, Sandis.”
“My mother gave up living after that,” she went on. “Just . . . stopped going to work. Stopped eating. Stopped drinking. Lay in our flat until she died. Anon got a job here first.” She scanned the shadows. “We managed to keep everything afloat for a few years. Then he went missing . . . You know the rest.”
He frowned. Yes, he knew the rest. “How old were you, when they died?”
“I was eleven. Anon was nine.”
Rone rubbed his hands together. He wasn’t cold, but it gave him something to do. It was no wonder she wanted to find this Talbur guy so badly.
Sandis knew a little about his mother, and she’d gotten to see in person what a winning father he had. That ball of guilt moved back and forth inside him. The story of his mother would have the same depressing notes if he didn’t get her out of Gerech soon.
“Three years ago, when I was twenty-two . . .” Already the story sounded awkward. He’d never told it before. “I was still working in the sewers. Still cleaning Kurtz’s street.” He chuckled. It wasn’t funny, really, but he couldn’t help it. “I was picking garbage out of one of the sewer tunnels. When the collection is slow to pick up people’s trash, they like to throw it down the manholes. Real generous of them.”
Sandis smiled.
“Anyway. I was scooping something out of the water when the tunnel collapsed.”
She stiffened. Waited.
“I obviously made it out all right,” he said, “though a big chunk of something hit me in the back. Messed up my shoulder.” Thinking about it made the muscles ache anew, and he reached back to massage a knot at the base of his neck. “I clawed my way out of the rubble. The concrete had crumbled all the way to the street. Some sunlight came through the wreckage, and it glinted off something. Even though I couldn’t move my arm and I was bleeding from my head, I dived for it. No one around here turns down gold.”
He pulled his fingers from his sore shoulder and pulled the amarinth from his pocket. Tossed it up, caught it. “Found this sucker. The first Kolins, they leveled everything out when they came here, but they didn’t clear it all. I assume there was some sort of crypt over that tunnel. Not sure—never searched for bodies. I was going to sell this, but some bastard went bat crazy trying to steal it from me. If not for Kurtz, he would have gotten it.”
“Kurtz saved you?” she asked.
Rone laughed. “I saved myself. Second time I ever got to use what he taught me, you know? Anyway, it took me a while, but I figured out what it was.” He let out a long breath and stuffed the artifact back into his pocket. “From there I conjured Engel Verlad, quit my job, and started making more money.”
Sandis nodded, slowly. “And what does Engel do?”
Rone shrugged, the action tugging unpleasantly on his shoulder. “I do what others are too scared to do. Steal things, spy, deliver one person to another.”
She pulled back from him. “Assassination?”
Rone shrugged a second time, then resumed rubbing that knot. “I don’t know what they do with them. I don’t ask. I won’t kill anyone myself, though. Those jobs I turn down.” He wasn’t a killer. Maybe Kurtz’s philosophies had stuck more than he’d like to admit. Maybe his father had drilled morality into his brain too solidly, before he left. It was why he didn’t work for mobsters or grafters, if he could avoid it. Their jobs got too dirty. Too political.
He let the amarinth dangle from his finger. “It was a job I did . . . the one with Marald Steffen—”
“The old man you beat up.”
His lip twitched. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
Sandis shrugged.
“It was a job I did for him that got twisted and put my mother in Gerech. I tried to pay off the warden and turn myself in, but . . .” He shook his head. “God’s tower, I hate this place.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Rone didn’t have anything more to say. Sandis was probably judging him. Here she was, running for her life to find family she didn’t even know, and he’d let his innocent mother get thrown into prison. He knew what she’d ask next. Why not sell the amarinth, Rone? Wouldn’t that be enough money? But she wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t— Sandis pushed herself onto her knees and pulled Rone’s hand from his neck.
“What—” he started, but Sandis gently eased his head over and prodded the area.
“This side?”
His injured shoulder? “Uh, yeah.” She pushed a tender spot, and he started.
“Turn around.”
Rone wasn’t sure what was happening, but the footsteps above quieted, so he did as he was told, putting his back to her.
Her fingers followed his shoulder blade, then his spine. “The grafters don’t employ doctors,” she said, her voice close to his ear. “But Kazen makes sure his vessels are in good health. We don’t work as well otherwise.”
“You talk like you’re a thing.”
“To him, I am.” Her touch crept up to his neck. “I’m glad you don’t think so.”