“I’ll take you before I go to the kitchen,” Mama said. “Where’s your chair?”
“Under someone’s house. I can take myself.”
“And then Mrs. Prim Rules can fire you because you didn’t come in your chair?” Mama rolled her eyes and got the extra chair out of the cupboard. It rattled Revna back and forth on anything but the smoothest roads. But Papa had made it, and she loved it.
Before she’d gotten hit by the cart, Revna had hated to sit down. She’d run everywhere and not even Papa could keep up with her. And that was how the accident had happened. She’d been nine, running free, flying over the ground. Then she’d woken in the Tammin factory hospital, on fire from the calves down.
Her right leg had been amputated just above the ankle, her left leg just below the knee. The phantom pains visited her every day at first, pricking where her feet and ankles used to be, as though they’d gone to sleep and needed a good shake. The sight of the crude wooden legs Papa made for her, little better than stilts, had nauseated her. She’d learned to walk on them, though, and when she outgrew them, Papa made her new ones. Each time he replaced them they got a little better, a little better, and then he’d brought home enough scrap metal from the factory to fashion the living metal legs for her. He’d adjusted them after her last growth spurt, and the metal tried to take care of her in its own way. She could walk, nearly as well as anyone else, but they’d kept the chairs for when she got tired, and now her job depended on them.
She buttoned her coat and got her clean scarf from the peg by the door. Mama tucked it under her coat, then leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
“Me too,” Revna replied.
A second knock sounded. “Yes?” Mama said, wrenching open the door.
A man in a silver coat pushed her aside. No, the man in the silver coat. The Skarov Revna had saved. And he had two others with him.
Problem: She was about to be arrested.
She’d expected it. She’d spent half the night thinking about it. But that didn’t stop the shaking in her hands, or the involuntary squeeze of her prosthetics against her calves.
“Revna Roshena?” said the first. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. One of his companions sported a black eye, while the other fiddled with the torn hem of his coat.
“What do you need, sirs?” Mama asked. She held her hands clasped in front of her and her head cocked, all politeness and curiosity. But Revna could see the whites of her knuckles, the way her throat bobbed when she swallowed.
The Skarov’s eyes never left Revna. “We have business with your daughter.”
Mama lifted her chin. “Then you have business with me, as well.”
“It’s all right,” Revna cut in. Mama couldn’t go around antagonizing the Skarov. She had Lyfa to think of. “You’ll be late for your shift.”
The Skarov glanced at his companions. Then he said, “You may come, if you wish.”
“Mama,” Revna began.
“Get in your chair,” Mama said.
Revna knew what Mama was doing. She was trying to make Revna look helpless and innocent. If Mrs. Rodoya could be fooled into underestimating her, why not the Skarov? Revna didn’t think it would help them this time, but she got into the chair and let Mama push her out the door. Her gaze lingered on the things she wanted to remember. The stove. The lopsided ramp that Papa had stuck over the sagging front steps. The birch tree that defiantly broke through the stony ground in their yard. She’d climbed that tree, before the accident. She’d always intended to try again. This was probably the last time she’d see it.
Tammin was a bizarre mix of ruin and order. Buildings stood proud next to heaps of brick, all that remained of some people’s homes and livelihoods. First responders and living metal flatbeds had cleared enough rubble that people could make their way to and from the factory quarter. They stopped to observe the strange little entourage as it passed, and Revna knew the news would be around Tammin before sunset. The traitor’s daughter had been carried off, too.
Revna folded her hands in her lap and tried to ignore the whispers that followed them. This was how they would remember her. Not as the girl who was always on time, not the girl who worked hard and stayed late. She’d never given Mrs. Rodoya any reason to discipline her, nor given any of the girls on the assembly line some excuse to dislike her. She handled living metal better than anyone else on the factory floor, and most times she could calm it with a touch. No one would remember that. She was the disabled girl who was as traitorous as her father. GOSSIP WON’T HELP BUILD WAR MACHINES, but apparently it fueled Tammin.
The Skarov wove through the city, backtracking and second-guessing as they took streets that dead-ended in ruin. Mama and Revna fell behind, but they finally passed the munitions quarter and made their way to the nicer parts of town. Here the damage was worse, and the houses drooped, moments from collapse. First responders and young citizens picked through the wreckage, calling to one another when they thought they found life. Mama’s hand rubbed her shoulder as they passed a team pulling a limp body from a collapsed house, and for the first time since last night, Revna was glad she’d used the Weave.
Tammin wasn’t the first civilian-heavy city targeted by the Elda. Four years ago the Elda had flown their first prototype planes over Goreva Reaching, a mining town at the edge of Union territory. By breakfast, war had been declared. Everyone in Tammin had thought that the twenty-year truce between Elda and the Union meant peace, but the first bombing put an end to that.
The Elda had swooped in hard and fast to save the God Spaces, the holy sites where this god or that was said to have blessed the earth. Supreme Commander Isaak Vannin said there was no God, they wrote, so why should he be entrusted to take care of the God Spaces? According to the old traditions, Goreva was blessed by the goddess of the morning. The Elda decried the way the Union stripped the earth to pull gold and silver and living iron out of its depths.
Revna had always found it strange, though, that when the Elda took Goreva, the mining didn’t stop. The resources had gone to Elda instead. And they’d used those resources to make Skyhorses and Dragons that could fly farther and farther north, all the way up to Tammin and its farmland, and the Teltasha Forest around it. And in some way that led to Revna being paraded through town, and what next? The family earnings cut again for Mama, the shadow of secondary citizenship dogging Lyfa’s steps as she grew. Even if the war ended in the next few years, Lyfa would be punished—in which schools she attended, which jobs she could take. Don’t cry, Revna told herself. The Skarov would think she was afraid. And she was. But more than that, she was angry.
Their journey ended at an impromptu military compound that had sprung up in the night. The wide double-story houses of the governor, the factory owners, and the wealthiest merchants hadn’t escaped the Dragon fire, but a few stood with little damage. Dust coated their pane windows, and debris had been swept between ridged decorative columns. More men in silver coats directed the rebuilding effort, checking papers and generally doing whatever it was they did when they weren’t arresting people and shipping them off to the far north.
The Skarov led them to a grand structure with a green tile roof. The front garden held a few battered flowers, clinging grimly to life. Nothing had escaped the fine sheen of dust from the bombardment. In peacetime Revna would have wept for such a house. Now she was glad for a less ostentatious one in a neighborhood the Dragons had ignored.