“What in the pits does that have to do with me?”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” She rubbed her fuzzed scalp with one hand. “If she can teach you to be calm, to douse your temper, and still control the flame you wield? Then maybe she could try to feel again, without fear of losing the talent that defines her very existence.”
Aella marched toward them, a forced smile on her face, slippered feet scuffing the deck in the unsteady gait of those who weren’t used to airships – as if their feet being in contact with the wood at all times would keep them from flying off.
“We will reach Aransa before nightfall,” Aella said. “I haven’t a clue why Thratia wants you, but if she’s going to make use of you then I won’t have you embarrass me with ineptitude.”
“Wouldn’t that be a disaster,” he drawled.
She fixed him with a narrowed gaze and clasped her hands to her hips. “Get up, now, and come along. We’ve some time yet to put you through your paces before we reach the city.”
Detan groaned. “I still say my practicing on a live, selium-bloated ship is a terrible idea. A better test of my refinement, I’m sure, would be to relieve the poor pilot of his post for just a while.”
She slashed a hand through the air. “You’re not flying this ship, Honding, though I suppose there’s something to be said for your enthusiasm.”
“Only thing I’m enthused about is not throwing up on my shoes. Where’d you find this pilot, anyway? Couldn’t be a Fleetie.”
Aella fixed him with a scowl. “Stop attempting to distract me. You’re overdue for a dose, and I want to test your fine control while you’re waning.”
Detan looked at her. Really, really looked, since the first time he’d seen her sitting barefoot on a barrel aboard Callia’s ship. She was just as neat as ever, her clothes finely made and the seams perfectly pressed, the colors all working together to harmonize with her natural hues. The white coat smoothing out her silhouette was jarring, sure, but she wore it with confidence, like it was armor, the pockets heavy with the tools of her trade. She coiled her hair up tight against her head, and plucked every stray strand from her youth-dewy face.
She gave the impression of total control, everything in its right place, nothing out of line or harmony. She was, Detan realized with a start, a walking doll. And she’d done it to herself. Even the annoyed creases between her brows were false. There was an aloofness in her eyes he’d always ascribed to the same flippancy he felt most of the time, but, no. Her detachment was something deeper, everything about her exterior a carefully planned and executed show. He felt a little sorry for her, then realized it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be able to relate to his sympathy anyway.
“Come on,” she said, tapping her foot with calculated impatience.
Misol was watching him. He met her eye, and nodded understanding even as he grunted and levered himself to his feet. “Bank your coals, girl, I’m coming. Things are stiffer than they used to be.”
The scar tissue on his back pulled, the length of his forearm itched with raw puncture wounds. There was an ache in his joints that’d never been there before, a radial warmth that both worried and distracted him. He’d lost both his parents to bonewither. He knew too well it was a sorry way to die.
“Say, Aella,” he said, as he stretched out and followed her back toward the cabin she’d commandeered for research purposes. “You think all this messing with sel, and the injections, could speed up the onset of bonewither?”
Aella flicked the needle of her syringe with one finger, watching the little bubbles within burst and sputter. She glanced up at him over the point of steel, brows pinched, and shrugged. “Oh. Definitely. Now sit down on that bench. I want to see if you can identify all the sources of sel on the ship before we renew your injection.”
Wonderful, he thought, and closed his eyes, reaching for his sense slowly, carefully. Ignoring that bright, magma-hot vein of anger that threaded through everything he’d ever been. Forced himself to forget the face of his mother, sunken as her cheekbones dissolved, even as he touched all the sources of sel on the ship with his mind.
Drone-like, he began to count them off, and wondered if Aella suspected he knew her secret fear.
Chapter Six
Ripka had no job to do. She paced the streets of Hond Steading, peeking in dark alleys, warning citizens of unsecured money pouches that would make for easy picking. The streets of the city twisted all around her, the natural sprawl of a city that grew up around itself; unplanned, unshepherded. Hond Steading’s rapid growth in its early days had left it a scattered division of neighborhoods, dead ends, and narrow roads that were once little more than goat paths.
The meander of the streets made her jumpy, expecting bad neighborhoods around every corner. For all Aransa’s flaws, the stepped nature of her home lent it to easy division – a blessing and a curse. With class barriers entrenched, the lines where trouble brewed grew clearer. Made her job easier, in theory. But it’d made her watchers lazier, too. At the end of the day, when a crime had been committed, she knew full well her watchers were more likely to go poking around for evidence in the nearest adjoining poor quarter. In her long experience, the vast majority of offenses were committed by those who knew the victim. The division, the poor quarters, just made for easy scapegoats.
As much as Hond Steading unnerved her, a semblance of order emerged as she stalked its winding streets. The city was not a sloppy mishmash, as she had originally thought. Its subtle melding and gradation of culture and class fascinated Ripka. So many here. So many pushed up against each other, but not drawing hard lines in rock and sand. However the Hondings had managed to foster this sense of togetherness, she admired them.
The more she walked the dusty streets, scents of honey and cactus and crisp-skinned goat heavy on the air, the more she began to see the city’s twisting paths as a benefit to their defense. Thratia would be just as thrown as Ripka had been upon arrival in the city. The hodgepodge nature of Hond Steading was unique on the Scorched, where most cities were laid out to best facilitate the mining of their firemounts. Hond Steading had been the first – organic in its growth, massive in its current scale. For any soldiers Thratia managed to bend to her banner, they would be Scorched-born, used to well-ordered streets and clear hard lines. Dealing with Hond Steading would not be an easy shift for them.
Ripka turned hard on her heel, angling back up the dusty road she’d wandered down toward the Honding palace. Nouli, for all he was clever, was Valathean born and raised. His tactics would focus on the clear, hard lines of the Scorched cities he knew well. And because he was too unwell to wander the streets himself, Ripka had to be his eyes and ears. Had to let him know what she’d observed.
It was a purpose she could serve well, and it added a little spring to her step.
As she looped up a curving side street toward a stone-laid thoroughfare, a blue-coated woman stepped into her path. Ripka stopped short, startled. A watcher. The woman had the weather-beaten appearance of one who roamed an outdoor beat, her age made difficult to discern by the sun-bitten wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
Ripka’d never been stopped by a watcher before. She felt naked without her own blue coat, and tugged self-consciously at the long caramel sleeves of the tunic Pelkaia had loaned her. She’d have to buy new clothes, soon. Clothes meant not to fit underneath a layer of blue.