shattered; rifles and pistols clicked, combustion was killed. The crowd roared and pushed hard into the collapsing line of wardens.
Luce was gulping down sobs, desperately trying to be brave, but Diantha showed no fear as she and I lanced like a spear through any gap we could see. I used my cane ruthlessly to thwack and thrust and trip. Diantha used her knees, elbows, and hips to make way. Tanny, at the rear, levered her weight against any rioter or warden who crashed against us. Kayleigh had the strength of a big-boned girl accustomed to fieldwork.
I ducked a blow and dragged Diantha sideways as a grasping hand caught at a corner of her kerchief. The other girls shoved us forward into an eddy of open ground where carts lay overturned. Liquid from kettles splashed everywhere, meat pies crushed and leaking their innards.
A pair of wardens spotted me. “Stop, there! We is to detain all maku gals-”
I drew gentle shadows over me, becoming nothing more than the flutter of a skirt and a scuff of dust. The wardens let us pass. Diantha hailed a cluster of huddled batey players in smeared and torn skirts marking them as Rays.
“Hey, gals! Come on!” she cried. “Let us get out of this hurricane.”
“Wardens told us to wait until all is cleared,” said their shaken captain.
A pistol went off, the report sharp and stunning. What had happened to Vai’s magic? If I ran back, I could help him, but Luce was crying and Kayleigh was trying to soothe her in a voice not much calmer than Luce’s tears, and Tanny was hauling along another girl who was in hysterics.
“Let them see what we do to them we thought was we brothers,” cried a male voice. “Will they fire on us? Or join us?”
A huge surge flooded as men came running and the fight thundered back into chaos.
“Move!” I shouted, startling my gals and the straggle of batey players alike.
We moved.
With the Rays we flowed onto streets hazy with the smoke of late afternoon cook fires. The noise from the ball court rose and fell like a cyclone’s winds, and now a drumming hammered into life, hands beating on skin, on thighs, like the beating heart of anger. We made our way first to Diantha’s compound, and then to Tanny’s, leaving off the girls until there was only me and Kayleigh and Luce to make our way home.
A different sort of drumming rose in counterpoint to the rhythm voiced by the angry demonstrators: the rumbling tread of booted feet, presaging the arrival of armed men from the direction of the old city. We came to an intersection obscured by dusk and smoke. A dozen wardens came running out of the haze. Without thinking, I drew shadows tight around me.
The wardens barely slowed, but as long as Kayleigh didn’t speak, there was no reason by looks or dress to think her anything except a local gal. They jogged on.
“Get yee to yee home,” called the one at the rear gruffly. “Don’ be foolish gals. Move it!”
As they trotted into darkness, Luce began sobbing. “Where is Cat? How did we lose she?”
While their backs were to me, I released the shadows.
Luce turned, saw me, and screamed. “Stay back, spirit!”
“Luce, it’s just me.”
“Yee’s an opia,” she croaked out between sobs. “Yee have come to haunt yee husband. Please, don’ harm me. I shall never tell!”
“What is an opia?”
“An opia is the spirit of a dead person,” said Kayleigh, staring at me with a flat gaze I could not read. “That’s what they call them here.”
“Why would you think I am dead, or a spirit?”
“How else could yee vanish like that?” said Luce in a choked voice.
I did not want her to look at me as if I had just lumbered down a white sand beach and tried to bite her. But I could not answer her question even with a question.
Kayleigh sighed. “Show her your navel, Cat. Then she’ll know you for a living person. Vai’s an idiot where you’re concerned, but our uncle taught him too well to be fooled by that.”
I tugged up my blouse, already pulled askew by our headlong flight. “Luce has seen it often enough when we shower! Touch it! I was born from a human woman just as you were!”
With a trembling hand, Luce touched her forefinger to my navel. “Yee must be some manner of behica. Or a…witch.”
A creature was hiding in the shadows, watching us. Darkness coiled. I heard measured breathing like ghostly bellows as it waited to pounce if I said what I should not.
I grabbed Luce’s hand. “I’m not, Luce! I’ll never harm you or anyone at Aunty’s. But I can’t speak of what is secret.”
Her lips parted into the admiring infatuation that afflicts only the young and innocent. I had seen it on Bee’s face often enough, although never directed at me. “Yee’s a secret mage!”
“You’re no mage,” said Kayleigh. “And if you hurt my brother, I’ll dig your eyes out with a spoon. And eat them.”
I could not help myself. I laughed, and when I laughed, the listening darkness melted away like a huge shadow dog. Neither Kayleigh nor Luce saw it go, loping away on four long legs into the night. Good riddance. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but my eyes won’t taste that good.”
Kayleigh’s lips curled toward a smile, and I remembered how much I had liked her when we had walked together across a snowy landscape, fleeing the village of Haranwy. Before I’d realized she had been leading her brother to me even knowing he thought he had to kill me. Maybe it wasn’t just her who felt resentful.
“Peace, Kayleigh,” I said. “Maybe we can start over.” Then I looked away, to allow her space to consider the offer. “Luce, I’m lost. Can you lead us home?”
She took my hand with a proud smile. “This way.”
When we reached the boardinghouse, Aunty Djeneba and Brenna hugged and scolded us. Luce staggered through an incoherent and disjointed tale, and I interrupted and said, “A riot broke out when the wardens came through the batey stands with lamps.”
“They seek unregistered fire banes with lamps,” said Uncle Joe gravely. “I reckon they hope to bully the radicals into shutting they mouths. It will not work.”
The night came alive with drums speaking across the length and breadth of Expedition Territory, bursts of mountainous noise rising only to be asphyxiated by ominous valleys of quiet. Wind moaned along the roof, dragging the sounds of street battles in and out of windows until Djeneba’s brother and her sons came up from the jetty where their fishing boat was moored and told us to shutter the windows and net the roofs, for the weather was about to turn bad.
I was glad of the work, for I had grown restless. When I pressed my hand to my locket, I felt Vai’s warmth, but he could have been anywhere. After the gate was closed, I paced. I drank the dram of rum Uncle Joe offered, and then a second larger dram, for I simply could not sit still.
A rap came at the gate, regulars too nervous to sit at home in darkened compounds. They informed us of what we already knew: The gaslight in Passaporte District had been choked off at the Gas Works, as punishment. We lit candles and lamps. Younger men arrived, bruised and cut, eager to regale a receptive audience with an exuberant tale of how they and a pack of sailors had fought off the wardens down by the jetty. A fire had broken out and been extinguished by a fire bane of unheard-of power, which had spurred the wardens into a further frenzy of head-bashing and arrests.
Their tale was thirsty work, and I felt obliged, asking them questions about the location and extent of the possible fires, to drink rum with them, for my mouth was dry. My batey-playing admirer and his kerchiefed friend arrived without their crude companion; they had been down at the Speckled Iguana where lay wounded men.
“I have to go there,” I said, my mind churning with visions of Vai all beaten and bloody and of Bee’s head floating in a dark well. If Vai was hurt, I had to rescue him. If I knew where Drake was hiding, I could offer him upon Hallows’ Night. I would become a killer, like my sire. So be it.
Uncle Joe said, “Yee stay here, Cat. Yee’s had too much to drink.”
“I really have to go.” I drained another slug of rum for courage and went to the gate. They could not stop me as my admirer and his friend followed me out.
