“They’re not gathering there for the fun of it,” Jakibsa says. “They must be planning something.”
“Or else it’s a bluff,” Giniva says quietly. “Or a feint, and the real attack is elsewhere.”
“Exactly.” Hasaka rests his fingertips against his forehead. “We can’t know. And we have to guess right, because if they break through…”
He didn’t have to finish. If they break through, we won’t be able to stop them. We don’t have the numbers for a street fight, not now that the Ward Guard’s been reinforced. We have to hold at the walls, or not at all.
“Assign extra patrols to the Fourth’s walls,” I tell them. “If they’re going to try something, it’s not going to be a straight-ahead attack. They must have an edge. A hidden gate, or a weak spot.”
“Or a traitor,” Giniva muses.
“Or a traitor.” I resolve to walk the wall myself, as soon as I get the chance. Betrayal is hard to hide from a Kindre adept.
“If this goes on much longer, there are going to be a lot more traitors,” Jakibsa says. A sheet of paper shuffles itself free of the mess in front of him. “We finished our sweep last night. Everything edible is now in the depots.”
“And?” Hasaka says, though I can feel the answer in his gloomy mind.
“Four weeks,” Jakibsa says. “That’s on short rations for Red Sashes and half for the civilians.”
“Four weeks is long enough,” Hasaka says. “The Legions will crush us before we starve.”
“There’s already a black market for food,” Giniva says. “And it’ll get worse as people get hungrier.”
“Rotting hoarders,” Jakibsa says. “Selling out their neighbors for a handful of gold they won’t have the chance to spend.”
“We should have started rationing sooner,” Giniva says. “If we’d gathered food before the fire…”
They don’t look at me, but I feel the surge of guilt anyway. I was the one who burned the Sixteenth Ward. I should have seen this coming. We hadn’t worried about food as long as we had access to the sea—Kahnzoka Bay produced fish in plenty. After the Sixteenth burned, the Navy had taken control of the ruined docks, and we’d been forced to rely on stocks left in the city.
“There’s more under the temples,” Jakibsa says. “A lot more. But the Returners have them all locked tight.”
“I still say we should go in there and break some heads,” Hasaka says. “If they’re not going to fight, they can at least share their bread.”
Another stab of guilt. A monster is a monster. What does a little more blood matter? But there are some lines I won’t cross. Not yet, anyway, my inner voice taunts. Not until you can convince yourself you don’t have a choice.
“I’ll talk to Kosura again,” I tell Hasaka. “Today.”
He grunts and concedes the point, though his mind radiates skepticism. I turn to Giniva. “You’re working on finding the hoarders?”
“As best I can,” she says. “It’s not easy.”
“I know.” I blow out a breath. “How many cases for me today?”
“Two.”
“Let’s get that over with,” I decide. Better to have my plate clear before I go to butt heads with the cultists. “Anything else?”
Jakibsa and Hasaka shake their heads. Giniva gets up, and I follow her out, the three Blues falling into step behind me. We descend through the chaos of headquarters in a bubble of quiet, activity stilling as we turn a corner and resuming behind us. How much of that is me and how much is Giniva, I don’t know. Dealing with traitors is part of her job, and that tends to make people cautious.
There’s an extensive prison under the barracks, now mostly empty. A few guards hang around the near end, where two small holding cells are occupied by a man and a young woman. The man is middle-aged, with a patchy beard and ragged clothes, a rotten-egg stink of panic rising off him. He looks up at me as I stop in front of his cage, baring his teeth in a snarl.
“Here she is,” he says. “Rotting Queen of the Ashes. Hunting for your harem, is it? I heard you like it good and hard up the—”
One of the guards slams the bars with the butt of a spear, and the man subsides, his eyes wild. I look at Giniva.
“Attempted rape,” she says. “A couple of Red Sashes saw him pull a woman into an alley. He pulled a knife on them.”
“Acting like you have any right to tell us what to do,” the man says. “Queen of the Rotting Ashes. You’re going to be so much cold meat when the Legion gets here, and you know it.”
Probably.But you won’t be around to see it. Once I would have felt guilty about thoughts like that, but not anymore. “Hang him,” I tell Giniva. “With a notice of what he did.”
She nods, both of us as calm as though we hadn’t just condemned a man to death. He howls in incoherent protest as we leave his cage, until the guards get tired of it and start beating him with the butts of their spears.
The girl in the other cell is calm, the fear I can sense in her mind not visible on her face. She sits cross-legged, dark hair cut short. I guess that she’s seventeen or eighteen, with the hard, underfed look of a street kid from the lower wards.
She looks like Isoka. Not really. Her face is wrong, more broad and square than my sister’s, but there’s a hint of Isoka in her ropy muscles, the set of her jaw. I glance at Giniva.
“Desertion,” Giniva says. “She was a guard on the wall of the Fifteenth, and the others on her shift caught her climbing down a rope ladder.”
“Do you deny it?” I ask the girl.
She shakes her head tightly. “Why would I? It’s the only sane thing to do.” Her eyes bore into me. “We’re all going to die here.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She snorts, and says nothing.
“It’s Krea,” Giniva supplies.
Krea. She really doesn’t look much like Isoka. “I’ll take her.”
A sudden flare of fear from Krea. She looks at the floor of the cell to cover it. Giniva nods.
“I’ll have her sent over,” she says.
“Let me know how it goes with the hoarders,” I tell her. “We’re going to need to make a few examples once we catch up with them.”
“Of course.”
I give her a nod, and head back upstairs. Once again, the crowd parts in front of me.
Sometimes I feel like I’m watching myself, as though an actor were playing me on a stage and I’m just in the audience. Passing judgment, ordering patrols, making examples.
How did I get here? I can answer the question, step by step, but it doesn’t feel real. How did quiet little Tori, who only wanted to drink plum juice and eat dumplings with her sister, turn into this?
You were always this, the voice—my voice—tells me. A monster. You just don’t have to pretend anymore.
I want to go back to my room, wrap myself in my blanket, and sleep for a hundred years. Or forever.
Instead, I turn my steps toward the Temple of the Blessed’s Mercy, and try to figure out how to talk to a fanatic.