By the time we reached Rat Island, I was ready to stab someone in the eye just to make a little space. The island, fortunately—the only true island in the whole quarter—was less crowded than the canals surrounding it, and for obvious reason.
There are no burials in Dombang—there isn’t enough dirt to bury anyone. According to the stories, the city’s earliest inhabitants laid their dead in slender canoes, set them alight, then shoved them out in the current. It sounds like a beautiful practice. As Dombang grew, however, the tradition became impractical. There would have been an armada of burning canoes blazing through the channels every night, getting hung up on docks, setting the wooden homes alight. The city wouldn’t have lasted a week. Instead, the dead are cremated, the very rich in broad plazas inside their homes, everyone else on Rat Island.
Unlike literally every other structure in the Weir, the crematorium sat all by itself, ringed by a firebreak of ten paces on every side. Four stone walls—some of the only stone walls in Dombang—delimited a wide courtyard. The walls were high enough to block the sight of what happened inside, but not so high that we couldn’t see the flickering tips of the fires. I’d climbed those walls once as a child—part of a dare—and I could still remember the sight: five long troughs carved in the dirt, each one filled with dozens of bodies, bundles of rushes piled under and over the corpses. I’d watched, horrified, mesmerized, as workers doused the pits with oil, then set them alight. Not so different from cooking, I’d thought, my stomach twisting. Ash settled over the whole island, white and silent. You could see your footsteps in it each morning. When I first saw snow, years later, my first thought was that it looked like the ashes of my city’s dead.
“She lives here?” Ruc asked.
I pointed to a small shack just at the edge of the firebreak. “Like I said, she doesn’t like the water.”
“There are places to get farther from the water. Even in Dombang.”
“Not if you’re a fisher who’s quit fishing.”
Unlike most of the structures in the Weir, the door to the shack was closed and latched from the inside. Maybe to keep out the ash.
I knocked. No reply.
“How long ago did you leave the city?” Ruc asked after a moment.
I grimaced. “Fifteen years.”
“She could be dead by now, gone somewhere else.”
“She said she meant never to go near the water again.”
“People change their minds.”
I knocked again, louder this time, then tried the door once more. The stench of the crematorium clogged my nostrils, coated the back of my throat, but I caught a whiff of fish congee from inside the hut. A moment later, through the crack between the door and the frame, I glimpsed someone moving.
“Chua Two-Net,” I called out. “We need to talk to you. It’s worth a full Annurian sun if you open the door.”
Ruc shot me a glance. “Who’s supplying the gold?”
“You are.”
“Not the Kettral?”
“You’re the one in charge of keeping the city from going up in flames. I’m just here to help.” I turned back to the door, “Chua—”
The spear slid through a chink in the wall fast as a striking viper. I saw it at the last minute, knocked it aside, caught the shaft with one hand just below the head—a fishing spear, I realized, with a barbed fork rather than a leaf blade—then twisted. Usually, that would have been enough to get the person on the other end to drop the weapon, but in this case the person on the other end was strong as an ox; I managed to yank the spear a few inches out through the gap and then it was being hauled back. I wrapped my other hand around the shaft—I didn’t intend to give the weapon back until I knew no one was going to stab me with it—and after a momentary struggle we settled into a stalemate.
“Well, you may be stupid,” a woman’s voice drawled through the wall, low and ragged, “but you’re fast. I’ll give you that.”
“Chua,” I replied. Even after sixteen years, I remembered that voice. “You want the gold, or you want to keep trying to stab me?”
“I was planning to do both.”
“Time for another plan. Can we come in?”
“Let go of my spear.”
“So you can stick me with it when I walk through the door?”
“Don’t be an idiot. Spear’s no good in here. If I’m going to come after you, I’ll use the gutting knife.”
I found myself smiling. “You’ve got a strange notion of hospitality.”
“You’ve got a strange notion of the Weir,” she spat back, “if you think pounding on strangers’ doors bragging about all the money you got is a good way to stay alive.”
“I don’t have the money,” I said, then nodded toward Ruc. “He does.”
“Who the fuck’s he?”
“Ruc Lan Lac. The commander of the Greenshirts.”
Ruc had taken a step back when the spear snaked through the wall, but aside from that he remained still, those inscrutable green eyes of his wary, ready.
“Long way from home, Greenshirt,” Chua said after a pause.
Ruc shrugged. “The Weir was part of Dombang last time I checked.”
“When was that? Don’t see too many green shirts this far east.”
“I imagine you don’t see much of anything,” Ruc replied evenly, “if you insist on talking to everyone through the wall.”
“I like to know a person before I invite them into my home.”
Ruc spread his arms. “Now you know me.”
The spear twitched in my hands. “And you? You got the delta accent, but it’s strange.”
“I’ve been away.”
“Away. Lucky for you. Why’d you come back?”
I glanced over at Ruc. “Dombang is in trouble.”
“Dombang,” Chua replied, “is a rotting cesspool sinking slowly into the delta, and one dumb girl isn’t going to change that. I don’t care how quick you are.”
“The rotting and the sinking aren’t really my concern,” I said. “I’m more interested in the slaughter.”
“Slaughter is a mite more interesting than rot,” Chua conceded.
“Especially for people in my line of work.”
“Which is what? Grilled meat?”
“Fighting.”
“You don’t look like a soldier.”
“Kettral,” I said quietly.
It was getting easier, each time I said it, as though simple repetition could transmute the most basic lie into truth. I wondered briefly if the same thing could work with love. I glanced at Ruc. If I just said it over and over—I love him, I love him, I love him—would the bare words flower into actual emotion? It might have been easier to imagine if we’d been somewhere else, anywhere else. Outside the ramshackle door, however, a spear shaft clutched in my hands, ash from burning bodies falling softly on my hair, love seemed as distant as the sky.