“Go back to the others. The Second Sweep will be here soon,” Dez says. Then his voice softens. Suddenly, he’s no longer my unit leader but something else. The boy who rescued me nearly a decade ago. My only true friend. “You shouldn’t have to see this.”
His thumb brushes softly over the top of my hand, and I stop myself from seeking comfort in his arms the way I am always tempted to do. A week ago there was a raid near our safe house, and I was sure we were going to be taken captive. Somehow we squeezed into a crate reserved for sandstone brick shipments, our limbs entwined. The kiss we shared then would have been romantic if it hadn’t felt like we’d been stuffed into a coffin, sure our luck had run out.
I slam the spyglass between my palms and return it to its hiding place. “No.”
“No?” He cocks an eyebrow and tries to twist his features into a fearsome mask. “There are no memories to steal here. I can finish the task.”
I cross my arms over my chest and close the distance between us. He’s a head taller than me, and as my unit leader he could order me to listen. I hold his stare and dare him to look away first.
He does.
His gaze goes to the side of my neck, to the finger-long scar I got courtesy of a royal guard during our last mission. Dez’s hands reach for my shoulders, and a sliver of temptation winds itself around my heart. I would prefer that he give me a command than tell me he’s worried for my safety.
I step back, though I catch the moment of hurt on his face. “I can’t go back to the Whispers a failure. Not again.”
“You’re not a failure,” he says.
On our last mission, Lynx Unit was tasked with finding safe passage on a ship sailing out of the kingdom for a merchant family whose father had been executed by the king. We were nearly to the shipyard when I was caught. I know I did everything right. I had the correct documents and I wore a dress covered in stitched flowers like a chaste farmer’s daughter. My job was to rip memories from the guard, enough to confuse him and give us insight into the ships coming in and out of the Salinas harbor. There was something about me that the guard didn’t like, and the next thing I knew, I was drawing my sword to defend myself. We won, and the family has spent two months somewhere in the empire of Luzou. It took ten stitches and a week burning off a fever in the infirmary. But we can’t show our faces in that town to help other families. In those two months the king’s justice has doubled its guards there. Our presence is supposed to be silent. Our units meant to be shadows. We saved one family, but what about the others trapped in the citadela living in fear of their magics being discovered? Even if Dez is right, and I’m not a failure, I’m still a risk.
“I have to be the one to find the alman stone, and I have to be the one to return it to your father.”
A smirk plays on his lips. “And here I thought I was the glory seeker among us.”
“I don’t want glory,” I say, and manage a bitter laugh. “I don’t even want praise.”
The wind changes again, smoke encircling us. When I look at him, he could be one of my stolen memories, coated in a layer of gray, somehow distant and close all at once as he asks, “Then what do you want?”
My heart twists painfully, because the answer is complicated. He of all people ought to know this. But how could he, when even in the moments I’m the surest of the answer, a new kind of want overpowers the next? I settle on the simplest and truest words I can.
“Forgiveness. I want the Whispers to know I’m not a traitor. The only way I can do that is by getting as many Moria on the next ship to Luzou as I can.”
“No one thinks you’re a traitor,” Dez says, brushing aside my worry with a careless toss of his hand. That dismissal stings even though I know he believes it. “My father trusts you. I trust you, and since Lynx Unit is mine to command, that’s what matters.”
“How do you walk around with a head that big, Dez?”
“I manage.”
I’d still be a scavenger if Dez hadn’t petitioned his father and the other elders to train me as a spy. My skill has been useful at saving Moria trapped in the Puerto Leones borders, but no one among our kind wants a memory thief like me in their midst. Robári are the reason we lost the war, even if our side has been on the losing end for decades. Robári can’t be trusted. I can’t be trusted.
Dez believes in me despite everything I’ve done. I would put my life in his hands—have done it before and will do it again. But for Dez, everything comes so easy. He doesn’t see that. Among the Whispers, Dez is the cleverest and bravest. The most reckless, too, but it’s accepted as part of what makes him Dez. And yet, I know, even if I were just as clever, just as brave, I’d still be the girl that sparked a thousand deaths.
I will never stop trying to prove to them that I am more. Seeing destruction like this in Esmeraldas makes it so hard to hold on to what little hope I have.
“We’re going in together,” I say. “I can handle myself.”
He makes a low grumble at the back of his throat and turns from me. I fight the impulse to reach out for him. We both know he won’t send me away. He can’t. Dez runs his fingers through his hair and reties the knot at the base of his neck. His dark eyebrows knit together, and that’s the moment he relents.
“Sometimes, Ren, I wonder who the Persuári is—you or me. We’ll rendezvous in the Forest of Lynxes or—”
“Or you’ll leave me at the mercy of the Second Sweep for being too slow.” I try to put humor into my voice, but nothing will stop the flutter of my heart, the memories pulsing to be freed. “I know the plan, Dez.”
I begin to turn, new purpose coursing through my veins. But he grips my wrist and tugs me back to him.
“No. Or I’ll come looking for you and kill anyone who tries to stop me.” Dez presses a hard, quick kiss on my lips. He doesn’t care if the others are watching us through their spyglasses, but I do. Wrenching myself from him leaves me with a dull ache between my ribs. When he smiles I feel a heady want that has no place here.
“Find the alman stone,” he says. He’s Dez again. My unit leader. Soldier. Rebel. “Celeste was to meet us in the village square. I’ll search for survivors.”
I squeeze his hand, then let go and say, “By the light of Our Lady, we carry on.”
“We carry on,” he echoes.
I drum all the nervous energy in my body down into my legs. Pulling my scarf over the bottom half of my face, I take one last breath of fresh air, then run alongside him, down the hill from our lookout point, and into the blazing streets below. For someone built so tall and broad, Dez is fast on his feet. But I’m faster, and I make it to the square first. I tell myself not to look back at him, to keep going. I do it anyway and find he’s watching me, too.
We split up.
I plunge deeper into the ruins of Esmeraldas. Flames as large as houses don’t crackle—they roar. The heat on the smoldering cobblestones is oppressive, and the snap of roof beams caving in sets my teeth on edge as houses crumble along the road. I say a silent prayer that their inhabitants have already made it out alive. Smoke stings tears from my eyes.
In the square, fire has eaten through every building it has touched, leaving nothing but black ruins behind. Hundreds of footsteps mark the ground, all of them leading east toward the town of Agata. By now there is almost no one left in Esmeraldas. I can tell by the sickening silence.