CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JORDIN HADN’T FELT SUCH FEAR as she had these last few days. The prick of anxiety, yes, when she couldn’t find Jonathan. That moment of hesitation when she realized that he was missing from camp. But never true fear because he always appeared, as though in response to her unspoken call for him, just as he had yesterday when he had returned to camp with the Corpse boy, Keenan.
But now, as they skirted the southeast edge of the city, she was afraid. Haunted by images of Dark Bloods, afraid that the day would come when there would be more than she could protect him from. Terrified that they would take Jonathan from her.
That she would ultimately be without him.
They shouldn’t have come. But Jonathan was set and would have come with or without her. And leaving his side was as unacceptable to her as losing him.
They’d ridden straight through the day, only stopping when necessary to rest and water the horses or relieve themselves, eating in the saddle, speaking little. She did not need to ask where he meant to go, or why. She knew. And what her Sovereign wanted was as good as a directive in Jordin’s mind.
It was the reason returning Keenan to the outpost had been so difficult. For the first time her loyalties had been thrown into direct conflict. It had torn at her to do it, having seen the look on Jonathan’s face, the way he had bent down to talk to the boy before reluctantly letting him go. But she didn’t resent Rom. She couldn’t; he was their leader, and of all people in the world, he loved Jonathan almost as much as she did.
Today they had come right at the city in full daylight. When she suggested that they go in through the tunnels, he had dismissed the notion. He wasn’t interested in entering the city center, then. That much, at least, offered her a slight measure of relief.
But only a little.
They skirted the city, east and then south, keeping to what cover they could. This entire side of Byzantium was scattered with stunted trees and the refuse of ruins-old storehouses and factories that were barely more than broken concrete foundations sporting scrub grass through widening cracks, their wooden sides and metal beams long ago scavenged for reuse.
They rode past a small electrical plant, one of several satellite centers that supported the ration of electricity to Byzantium’s citizens, and beyond that a sprawling rail station for the transportation of garbage. The tracks led directly south to the industrial wastelands, where it might be disposed of far from the capital. She watched one of the trains pull away from the station as another waited to take its place at the dock.
Overhead, the sky had begun to churn. A storm was coming. Odd how quickly the weather could turn. And this seemed to be a large one, come out of nowhere. Although she didn’t relish the idea of getting caught in a downpour, she would welcome the veil of a sluicing rain in any retreat.
Jonathan leaned forward in his saddle as they pressed southward through the scrim of scrub and ruined concrete buildings, skirting the garbage plant some five hundred yards out. Now she saw what had his attention: a walled perimeter extending beyond the last dock. It had to be twenty feet high, solid concrete, with rolled wire at the top.
Painted on the stretch of wall was the unmistakable compass of Sirin. Order’s most revered symbol.
The wind abruptly shifted again, blowing up from the south, carrying an odor far more familiar and far less appealing to her nose than garbage.
Corpses.
A putrid smell, different from any she had encountered.
She jerked back on the reins of her horse and stared past the end of the nearest dock. The great walled compound sat at the city’s perimeter like a tumor, with a sinister smokestack easily fifteen feet in diameter rising out of the middle.
Ten feet ahead of her, Jonathan had also halted. She moved up alongside him, turned to him, started to speak, and then stopped.
He was staring at the walls ahead of them, visibly shaking in his saddle.
“Jonathan?” she said.
He was too fixated to respond.
When she looked back, she wasn’t sure at first what he was looking at. The smokestack?
The sky above it?
No. He was staring at the smoke. It was faint against the backdrop of the coming storm, drifting serenely as a ghost up toward the roiling sky. Almost beautiful. Effortless as breath.
That wasn’t… that couldn’t be…
That was the smell.
With a sharp cry, Jonathan spurred his stallion forward into a hard gallop. Reacting instantly without a thought, Jordin followed hard after him-across the waste, toward the departing train, even as it began to pick up momentum. Jonathan leaned low, his stallion easily leaping the double track. Jordin glanced north, at the oncoming engine, the sound of it a banshee wail in her right ear, thirty feet off, closing-
She bent low, leaped the track just ahead of the rushing engine and spurred the horse on. A roaring gust of wind from the passing train blew her braids into her face.
Adrenaline charged her veins. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Despite fear, despite concern for Jonathan, she had been made-
But for
They raced along the length of the north wall, marked every hundred feet with Sirin’s compass painted in red and faded around the edges to brown like a drying wound.
There, on the adjacent side of the perimeter, a long brick building rose from the western wall. In the middle, a wide iron gate. An entrance. Rolls of barbed wire coiled along the crest of the roof like metal serpents.
Jonathan slowed as they came to the building, pulled up, and without warning dismounted.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re here.” He drew his horse by the reins toward the building.
She swung down from her mount, glanced back toward the city. There were train tracks here, leading up from a tunnel that emerged from the city perimeter. They stopped directly before the building itself.
She glanced up at the sign above the gate.
AUTHORITY OF PASSING.
Ahead of her, Jonathan was unbuckling the scabbard at his waist.
“Jonathan… What are you doing?”
“I’m going in.”
He was going in even as everything within her was suddenly screaming
This was a place of death.
“How?”
Overhead in the observation windows, a guard leaned forward watching them through the glass. A second man was pointing, lifting, and speaking into something on a cord.
Panic rose up, cold inside her. There was still time. She could still get him back to safety…
“Jonathan…”
He slipped his sword through the straps of his saddle bag, secure against the horse’s flank. “There’s only one way in that I can see.”
He glanced at her, held her gaze for a moment.
