“…go of her,” she mumbled.
Two men, including the red-faced rude one, stared at her in surprise. The alley now ended in a wall. Jyrine and the other two men were gone.
What had happened to the cave?
Where was Jyrine?
The drunken leader glared at her, his expression darkening. “What are you looking for, little girl?”
Petal’s mouth stuck open, her lips quivering. Jyrine was gone.
The man’s scowl deepened, and he seized her by the left wrist. He shook her like a doll, demanding her attention.
It felt like Petal couldn’t get a deep enough breath.
“What are you looking for, I said! You spying out here? You spying on us?”
Petal tried to push air through paralyzed lungs to make a breath. “I…I’m a…”
With her one free hand, she withdrew her alchemist’s goggles from inside the pouch that hung from her waist. She waved them around, pushing them against her eyes in proof.
“…alchemist,” she managed at last.
The rude man shoved her away, still glaring at her. “Get out and don’t ask questions. Go!”
“That was my friend.” Petal’s voice was still unsteady, but she was proud of herself for managing the statement clearly. “Where is she?”
This was too much for the angry stranger to process. He lumbered toward her again. “I just told you not to ask—”
Petal withdrew a smoke bomb from her pouch and flicked the striker.
Most of these bombs worked on a longer fuse, with the fuse itself wrapped inside the package. Petal kept this one very, very short. Smoke shot from her clenched fist in an instant, spraying directly into the face of the drunken man.
He slapped his hands against his face and screamed as though she’d stabbed him in the eyes. His friend got off a little better; spared the direct spray, he stumbled away from the smoke, cursing and scrubbing at his eyes.
It was just an irritant, but it was a strong one. Such a dose from short range…
Petal took a few nervous hops backwards, away from the blindly flailing red-faced man…whose face had just gotten much redder. She pulled out her next emergency measure: a cloth, which she soaked with a measure of liquid from a sealed old wine bottle.
The liquid wasn’t wine.
In her nerves, she may have spilled a little more on the rag than she intended. She had barely gotten the cloth close to his nose before he stiffened up and fell to the ground, rolling and kicking at the dirt like a dreaming dog.
His partner had made it most of the way out of the alley before Petal, screwing up her courage one last time, leaped onto his back and clapped the rag over his face. This one managed to resist for almost an entire second before he, too, fell to the ground.
Between her pounding heart and her harsh, nervous breaths, Petal could barely hear anything else. But she forced herself to look around outside the alley, checking for witnesses.
She saw none. The street had mostly been bare when she entered, and it didn’t look like anyone else cared to investigate the noises outside the saloon.
However, the second man’s limp hand was lying in the street. She grabbed him by the belt with both hands, bracing herself against the dirt and dragging him backwards with her whole body weight.
Then she should leave and look for Jyrine. She knew that.
Instead, she dropped to crouch on her heels and trembled. She had to let the nerves out so they didn’t poison her from within. Like draining a wound.
And judging by how long it took her to get her breath back, she’d had a lot of poison inside of her.
In fact, she didn’t come back to herself until she heard her own name.
“Petal?” Jyrine asked in astonishment. “Why aren’t you back on the ship?”
She stood at the back of the alley with the other two men, all three of them looking equally stunned. There was no cave behind her.
Had there been some hallucinogen in the alchemy class? No, Petal was certain that wasn’t it.
If she was seeing things that weren’t there…and alchemy wasn’t the cause…there was only one other possibility.
Petal shrank into herself, looking from Jyrine to the other two strangers. “Are you…okay?” Petal asked.
She almost hoped the answer was no, that Jyrine had gotten herself in over her head and mixed up in something she didn’t understand.
But she didn’t look like someone out of control.
Jyrine knelt by Petal, taking trembling hands in her own, which were warm and calm. She gave Petal a familiar, almost motherly look, and the sudden sense of safety helped Petal to take a long, soothing breath.
“I’m fine, don’t worry. I was just catching up with some old friends.”
Behind her, the two men had started checking up on the men on the ground, shooting Petal horrified looks.
“Jyrine, there was…I mean, I saw a cave.”
Jyrine’s brow furrowed as though she had no idea was Petal was talking about, and Petal could see the lie forming on her lips. Petal would pretend to believe it, and then as soon as she was back on the ship, she would tell Captain Calder.
Well, maybe she would. There was the possibility that Calder wouldn’t listen to anyone say anything about his girlfriend or would believe Jyrine no matter what Petal said.
Better to tell Andel. He would know what to do.
Jyrine must have seen in Petal’s eyes that a lie wouldn’t work, because she suddenly relaxed. She looked resigned.
“It’s Elders,” she said at last.
Petal had figured that out already.
“Are you…with them?” Petal asked. She wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that.
Jyrine sighed. “You remember when he, the Great One, spoke to us?”
Petal couldn’t forget it if the Emperor himself tried to erase it from her mind.
“What did he say to you?”
“He said…” Petal had reported this to the crew already, but it was still embarrassing to say out loud. She mumbled into the neck of her dress. “He said you were my family.”
Jyrine smiled, squeezing her hands in reassurance. “That’s right. And we are, Petal. We are. So can you trust your sister, this once, when I tell you that what I’m doing isn’t going to hurt anyone? I’m just here to learn, like you. The more we know, the better. Isn’t that right?”
Petal nodded. That much was true. The Blackwatch studied Elders. Even the Luminians studied Elders, though their interest wasn’t as academic.
“I knew you’d understand. But the others won’t. They’d think it was too risky.”
She rolled her eyes as though they both knew how silly that sounded, though Petal happened to think that messing with strange men and Elder powers in the dark of a strange town was dangerous.
But she understood what Jyrine meant, so Petal nodded.
“So you’ll keep it a secret?” For the first time, Jyrine looked uncertain. Vulnerable. Petal wondered what she would do if Petal didn’t keep it a secret.
But…
Petal had hated it when she was denied official access to the alchemical knowledge she craved. She had immediately resorted to her own methods of learning, from stealing textbooks to sneaking up to the rafters to spy on lectures.
Who was she to stand in the way of Jyrine’s ambition?