Worldbreaker.
“It does not matter. You will be the last of your troublesome line.”
He smiled. Folded his hands before his chest and tipped his head back, staring at the blank expanse of the ceiling though his thoughts, his sense, was decidedly elsewhere.
“Because we could do this.”
“Detan, no!” Tibs cried. But this time – this time Ripka hushed him.
He didn’t fully understand what he was doing. He lacked the vocabulary to describe it. Maybe, after this was all done, he could seek out one of those Catari enclaves Pelkaia was always going on about and ask them to explain it to him.
But he didn’t need to know the proper words. There were valves – filters – set to varying degrees of openness in every banal mind he held. The mechanism was endlessly complex, but it had a lever. A button, a wheel, a switch. Whatever it was, whatever he’d later decide to call it – Detan had never met a button he didn’t want to push.
He started with Ranalae. Reversing her sensitivity, shutting the valve tight. He moved on to Aella, then Callia. For the rest… He opened them. Blew them wide. Didn’t stop until he’d exhausted the whole of the sphere of his influence, and every one of those banal consciousnesses had switched over to sel-sensitive status.
He opened eyes he didn’t remember closing. Ranalae managed to look white as gypsum, despite the dark cast of her skin. Callia let out a howl to make a coyote shiver, collapsed to her knees and curled in upon herself, shuddering.
Aella had no eyes for her adopted mother. She stared at Detan, eyes wider than he’d ever seen them, every muscle of her body straining as she tried, tried so very hard, to take back what was hers. What she was just beginning to understand he’d taken from her.
The brigade, the imperials, the Honding guards – they all shifted their weight uncomfortably, and Ripka was staring at her hands like she’d never seen them before. She shook all over, Tibs’s support the only thing keeping her on her feet.
“What have you done?” Ranalae rasped.
“See for yourself.” He reached out, snagged disparate particles of selium from the air and congealed them into a fist-sized mass. A task that’d once left Coss sweating to drown the desert now came to him merely as an afterthought. He had no time to ponder what he had become, only what he must do next. “Catch.”
He threw the selium ball at her. Ranalae flinched backward, holding her hands up instinctively, but nothing happened for her. The sel sailed through her upheld fingers, broke into a thousand tiny fragments and faded as it dissolved into the air.
“I’ve taken from you your greatest pleasure,” he said. “And given it to every single banal body in all of Hond Steading. Most of them will be normal. Many of them will be what you call deviant. But you can’t enslave a whole city. You can’t send all of them to the mines, and you sure as shit can’t collect all the deviants up for your little science experiments now.
“This is not your city, Ranalae. This is not Valathea’s city. It is not even the Hondings’ city, though I will do what I can to guide it forward into peace. Hond Steading is a city entirely of sel-sensitives. This is something new. Something of hope. And you. Are. Not. Welcome.”
Fury gathered in her eyes, in every tight line of her body, in the bulging of her veins and the tendons snaking around her neck.
“I could still cut you down, you fool,” she snapped.
He sighed, low and slow, and drew himself up to his full height. “Even if it were your greatest desire, you wouldn’t. Not if you think for just a sands-cursed moment.” He tapped the side of his head. “Don’t you get it? I know how it works. You kill me, that knowledge goes to my grave. I am the only person alive who can give it back to you.”
Aella had a knife in her hand in an instant. Detan stepped back, wary, but she turned to Ranalae and placed the silver edge of the blade against the whitecoat’s throat. “If you order him killed,” she hissed, “you die with him.”
Ranalae paled, and fell silent.
The door to the antechamber slung open, cracking in its frame, and Dame Honding swept into the room with a retinue of a hundred guards on her heels. The sight of them very nearly made Detan weep with relief. Bluster aside, he really wasn’t sure just how long he could keep convincing Ranalae he had the upper hand.
“You’re a little late to the party, Auntie.” He beamed at her, and she scowled back as, with a snap of her fingers, her people swept in to detain Ranalae and her entourage.
“You wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the widespread panic on my streets, would you, boy?”
Even with his awareness a glowing, vibrant thing stretching out to blanket all of Hond Steading, even at the peak of his power and control, that razor-sharp scowl still made him flinch and kick at the ground with one dusty boot.
“I, uh, made some… improvements.”
Hands on her hips, eyes narrowed enough to cut glass, she dismissed all of Ranalae and her people in one gesture and squared her full attention on Detan. “Explain.”
He grinned, reached for sel, and said, “Catch.”
To her obvious surprise, she did.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Ripka awoke to find Honey at her side. The woman slept, curled on the rug by Ripka’s bed like a puppy, breathing peacefully in the shaft of morning light that fell upon her. Ripka rubbed at her eyes, scraping away sleep crust and tear stains alike, and pushed hair from her face. Had she wept in her sleep? If so, she had no doubt Honey had heard and come to lend her presence, if not her words.
Any other time she would have found Honey lying there creepy. Now, she just smiled. If someone loves you, you revel in as much time with them as you possibly can. She’d learned that the hard way.
“Honey,” she said, swinging her legs off the bed. The woman didn’t stir. She crouched beside her and brushed her hair, gently, away from her face. In sleep, the woman looked dreamy as a ceramic doll, her features unlined and innocent.
It had taken a great deal of time to scrub the blood out of her hair the night before.
“Come on, girl, rise and shine.” She gave Honey a shake, and she blinked awake with a startled, piggish snort.
“Are we under attack?”
Ripka sighed and sat back on her heels, dangling her hands between her knees. “No. Not any more.”
Honey rolled to her feet and stretched, working the kinks out of her body from having spent the night on the floor. She hummed a little, warming her voice, and while once that would have sent shivers down her spine, Ripka just laughed. Honey pouted at her.
“What?” Honey murmured.
“Your singing…” She trailed off, seeing a dark crease form between Honey’s brows. Pits, but that woman was sensitive about her voice. She settled back into a cross-legged position, wincing as her sore ribs shifted beneath the wrap the apothiks had bundled her up in. She was simply tired of not knowing her friends well enough, of keeping them distant for fear of… Of so many things. Maybe Honey really didn’t want to tell her. Maybe she just didn’t know how.
“What happened?” she asked eventually. Honey’s perfectly smooth face scrunched up as she worked through the question.
“I used to sing,” she said, quietly, and fiddled with the hem of her nightshift. Ripka reached out, took her hands and turned them over, palm up. The pale flesh there was crisscrossed with countless scars, the marks left behind from many, many knife fights. She’d ignored them when she’d first seen them on Enard’s hands, so very long ago now, and been blindsided by his past. Nothing good lay behind those scars on Honey’s hands. She wanted to know anyway.