She uncoiled—leapt, with the speed of a rattlesnake, straight toward the waiting shadow. Her knife was meant to catch the shadow in the chest, but it parried with surprising speed. All she could see of the shadow was a smear in the darkness, a larger silhouette that seemed to move in time with her. The shadow wasn’t screaming; all its energy was focused into the fight, pure, incandescent, the dance that gave the gods their due, that kept Tonatiuh the sun in the sky and Grandmother Earth sated, the one they’d both trained for, all their lives.
There was something wrong, very wrong with the way the shadow moved. . . . She parried a slash at her legs, and pressed it again, trying to disarm him.
In the starlight, she barely saw the sweeping arc of its knife, moving diagonally across her weak side—she raised her own blade to parry, caught the knife and sent it clattering to the ground, and moved in for the kill.
Too late, she saw the second blade. She threw herself backward, but not before it had drawn a fiery slash across her skin-suit.
They stood, facing one another, in silence.
“You—you move like us,” the shadow said. The voice was high-pitched, shaking, and suddenly she realized what had been wrong with its moves: the eagerness, the abandon of the unblooded novices.
“You’re a boy,” she breathed. “A child.”
Black One, no.
“I’m no child.” He shifted, in the starlight, letting her catch a glimpse of his gangly awkwardness. “Don’t make that mistake.”
“I apologize.” Onalli put all the contriteness she could in her voice; she softened the muscles of her back to hunch over in a submissive position: he might not be able to see her very well, but he’d still see enough to get the subconscious primers.
The boy didn’t move. Finally he said, as if this were an everyday conversation. “If I called, they would be here in a heartbeat.”
“You haven’t called.” Onalli kept her voice steady, trying to encourage him not to remedy this oversight.
In the starlight, she saw him shake his head. “I’d be dead before they came.”
“No,” Onalli said, the word torn out of her before she could plan for it. “I’m not here to kill you.”
“I believe you.” A pause, then, “You’ve come for the House. To avenge your own.”
Her own? And then she understood. He thought her a Knight; but not of the Jaguar. An Eagle, perhaps, or an Otter: any of the former elite of Greater Mexica, the ones Revered Speaker Ixtli had obliterated from the Fifth World.
She’d forgotten that this was no mere boy, but a novice of her order, who would one day become a Knight, like her, like Tecipiani, like Xochitl. He’d heard and seen enough to know that she hated the House’s heart and guts; but he hadn’t yet connected it with who she was.
“I’m just here for a friend,” Onalli said. “She—she needs help.”
“Help.” His voice was steadier, almost thoughtful. “The kind of help that requires infiltration, and a knife.”
She had more than knives: all the paraphernalia of Knights on a mission, stun-guns, syringes filled with endurance and pain nanos. But she hadn’t got them out. She wasn’t sure why. Tecipiani had turned the House into something dark that needed to be put down, and she’d do whatever it took. And yet . . .
It was still her House. “She’s in the cells,” Onalli said.
“In trouble,” the boy repeated, flatly. “I’m sure they wouldn’t arrest her without a good reason.”
Black One take him, he was so innocent, so trusting in the rightness of whatever the House did; like her or Xochitl, ages before their eyes opened. She wanted to shake him. “I have no time to argue with you. Will you let me pass?”
The boy said nothing for a while. She could feel him wavering in the starlight—and, because she was a Jaguar Knight, she also knew that it wouldn’t be enough, that he’d call for the guards, rather than entrusting himself to some vague stranger who had tried to kill him.
No choice, then.
She moved before he could react—shifting her whole weight toward him and bearing him to the ground, even as her hand moved to cover his mouth. As they landed, there was a crunch like bones breaking—for a moment, she thought she’d killed him, but he was still looking at her in disbelief, trying to bite her—with her other hand, she reached into her skin-suit, and withdrew a syringe.
He gasped when she injected him, his eyes rolling up, the cornea an eerie white in the starlight. Now that her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, she could see him clearly: his skin smooth and dark, his hands clenching, then relaxing as the teonanácatl inhibitor took hold.
She could only hope that she’d got the doses right: he was wirier than most adults, and his metabolism was still that of a child.
As she left the courtyard, he was twitching, in the grip of the hallucinations that came as a side effect. With luck, he’d wake up with a headache, and a vague memory of everything not being quite right—but not remember the vivid nightmares the drug gave. She thought of beseeching the gods for small or large mercies; but the only two in her wake were the Black One and Xolotl, the Taker of the Dead.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear her; knowing he would hate and fear her for the rest of his days.
“But I can’t trust the justice of this House—I just can’t.”
Xochitl stands by the stall, dubiously holding the cloak of quetzal-feathers against her chest. “It’s a little too much, don’t you think?”
“No way,” Onalli says.
“If your idea of clothing is tawdry, sure,” Tecipiani says, with an amused shake of her head. “This is stuff for almond-eyed tourists.”
And, indeed, there are more Asians at the stall than trueblood Mexica—though Onalli, who’s half and half, could almost pass for Asian herself. “Aw, come on,” Onalli says. “It’s perfect. Think of all the boys queuing for a kiss. You’d have to start selling tickets.”
Xochitl makes a mock stab at Onalli, as if withdrawing a knife from under her tunic. But her friend is too quick, and steps aside, leaving her pushing at empty air.
“What’s the matter? Eagles ate your muscles?” Onalli says—always belaboring the obvious.
Xochitl looks again at the cloak—bright and garish, but not quite in the right way. “No,” she says, finally. “But Tecipiani’s right. It’s not worth the money.” Not even for a glance from Palli—who’s much too mature, anyway, to get caught by such base tricks.
Tecipiani, who seldom brags about her triumphs, simply nods. “There’s another stall further down,” she says. “Maybe there’ll be something—”
There’s a scream on the edge of the market: not that of someone being robbed, but that of a madman.
What in the Fifth World—
Xochitl puts back the cloak, and shifts, feeling the reassuring heaviness of the obsidian blades at her waist. Onalli has already withdrawn hers; but Tecipiani has moved before them all, striding toward the source. Her hands are empty.
Ahead, at the entrance to the marketplace, is a grounded aircar, its door gaping empty. The rest of the procession that was following it is slowly coming to a stop—though with difficulty, as there is little place among the closely crammed stalls for fifteen aircars.
The sea of muttering faces disembarking from the aircars is a hodgepodge of colors, from European to Asian, and even a few Mexica. They wear banners proudly tacked to their backs, in a deliberately old-fashioned style: coyotes and rabbits drawn in featherwork spread out like fans behind their heads.