“Are you sure he’d use—” Vex stopped on a hard wince. He’d almost asked, Are you sure he’d use the Port Camden prison? But of course Elazar would. The Port Camden prison was one of the few places on the island that Argrid had held until the war’s end. It was a fortress.
Nayeli flew to her feet and pointed at the raiders in the pilothouse. “To Port Camden.”
“Nay!” Vex shot up. “It’s a day’s ride to Port Camden. We can’t—”
“I’m not leaving her!” Nayeli whirled on Vex, voice raw. “I know you’re hurting, and I can’t make you not miss Lu. I can’t make Ben safe. But I can damn well make sure Cansu doesn’t suffer the same fate. I won’t lose her.”
Did Vex imagine the emphasis she’d put on that last sentence? I won’t lose her. He gasped, her words a punch to the stomach. “I lost them?” I did, damn it, I did.
“You know that wasn’t what I meant.”
“No. You’re right. I let Lu die. I lost Ben. I left Cansu. It’s my fault. Go—go to Port Camden. You’re better off without me.”
Why was he arguing? He owed Nayeli, but he couldn’t feel anything.
No. That wasn’t true. He felt anger. He felt rage. He felt hatred. And he loved Nayeli enough that she was one of the only people he could show his emotions.
Nayeli screamed. No words, just noise, and it scraped Vex clean out.
“He could be there” came Edda’s soft voice. “Ben. He could be in that prison.”
Vex closed his eye. If he hadn’t been so set on being furious, he might’ve seen that too.
“Damn it,” he muttered, tapping his fist to his forehead.
“Why?” Nayeli shot at him. “That’s good, right? It’s worth it to you to go now.”
Vex’s brain yelled at him to stop being an ass, but he ignored himself. “No, it’s not good, because our best chance of getting into that prison is to talk to Nate.”
Edda groaned. Nayeli did too. “Shit.”
“Nathaniel Blaise.” Vex looked at Kari. “The Head of the Emerdian raider syndicate. The prison’s in his territory, built by his people. He’s our best chance of making it in.”
Kari nodded, her blank expression not giving away her thoughts.
Like Lu, Vex thought. His chest burned.
Nayeli fished in her pocket and drew out the second Budwig Bean—one that communicated with Port Mesi-Teab. She started to put it in her ear, but paused.
“Are we going, Captain?” she snapped.
Their mission was to bring Kari to Port Mesi-Teab so she could unite the syndicates and they could stop Argrid from destroying Grace Loray. But Ben could be in that prison. And Cansu was one of the raider Heads they needed to lead her people against Argrid.
Vex exhaled, drained from the day. From the week. From the whole damn year.
He looked at the raiders in the pilothouse. “To Port Camden.”
2
COARSE ROPE BOUND Lu’s wrists to the back of a chair. She sagged forward, each breath a wave of knives. Sweat and humidity glazed her skin in a velvet film.
Stay strong, she told herself. Hold on. Mama and Papa will save me—
“Croxy, sir? Make her go a little wild,” a voice offered in Argridian.
Lu quivered, her raw throat burning on a swallow. Croxy, the berserker plant.
“No. I want her to break.” Frustration roughened the new voice with borderline loss of control. Booted feet stepped into Lu’s downcast vision. “Bring Lazonade.”
Panic crawled through her. No, please, no—
Fingers dragged her chin up. Night blurred the far reaches of this rickety wooden room, but a single circle of light drenched Lu from above and created a halo around Milo Ibarra.
He scowled, face glistening. His uniform was sweat stained and ripped at the shoulder, a product of the battle to take this rebel safe house. When he had led his defensors here, they had wanted secrets, maps, plans—anything to quell the revolution on their Grace Loray colony. What they had found was a resilient twelve-year-old girl.
A defensor appeared at Milo’s side and held out a vial filled with green paste. “You won’t break,” the defensor told her. “That’s why you’re my Lulu-bean. You can keep a secret so well it’s as if you’ve taken a magic plant that sealed your lips.”
Lu jerked back in the chair, ripping herself out of Milo’s grimy fingers. The defensor wasn’t a faceless Argridian soldier—it was Tom. Her father.
She had known he would come to save her. She didn’t feel relieved, though. She felt . . . furious.
The world contracted, and when it released, the safe house became the deck of a ship. Defensors crowded the planks, rifles blasting, and steamboats fired magic from the sea below.
Lu staggered at the sudden discord of battle. The chair and her bindings were gone, and she spun, watching friends and defensors alike fall in the raging war.
“No,” Lu forced out. “No! Get off my island! Leave me alone!”
That plea undid her, a croaking scream from the moment she had first heard rifles fired on Grace Loray.
I want Argrid off my island. I want to live here in peace.
But after all the things I have done, came Lu’s helpless thought, I don’t deserve peace.
Lu turned again, seeking escape. A figure caught her. Too late, she recognized Milo, and he drove his sword into her gut.
Her eyes flew open. The ship vanished. The battle, the screams, Milo—they rushed away as Lu bolted upright, gulping in thick air. Her hand flew to her stomach, not finding a wound or bandage under her baggy linen shirt. But the tightness of dried sweat on her skin, the roughness of a blanket over her—these feelings meant she was here. She was alive.
How? Milo had stabbed her. She should be dead.
Cautiously, Lu lifted her eyes, expecting to see Milo near her. But she was alone, on a cot tucked against a pale stone wall. The angle of a window farther down didn’t let her see outside, but it filtered in white light—morning, or the wake of it. Wooden floorboards stretched into a room clogged with things: crates and barrels and tables overflowing with papers, vials, mortars, pestles, and more that she couldn’t see. A laboratory?
Lu slid her legs to the floor and forced herself to shakily stand. Metal clanked next to her scuffed boots—a manacle that fed to a chain bolted to the wall.
She was a prisoner, then. How long? Where?
She felt one answer in the way her body ached from immobility. Her empty stomach grumbled angrily; her throat scratched with sand and dust.
Too long. She could be anywhere. Anything could have been done to her.
Revulsion clouded her vision. She wavered, wiping sweaty palms on her black breeches, wrestling each breath until she managed one long, calm inhale.
Where was Vex? Ben? Nayeli, Edda, Gunnar? She couldn’t fall apart, not yet. She would figure out where she was. She was, impossibly, healed. She could escape.
The window was too far for her chain length to reach. What crates were close by, blocking her cot from the rest of the room, were sealed, and no stray magic sat on the tables. She grabbed the only weapon-like item she could find: metal tongs. If they failed as a weapon, she could use them to pick the lock on her ankle.
“We should increase their dosages.”