The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(108)

Coral, to her credit, moved to obey without asking questions.

The cloaked man grunted as she sat, and lay back on the beach. The rain had subsided to a light drizzle, and he blinked against the moisture.

“Who are you?” Sand asked.

He looked to her, his dark eyes solemn. “I am like you.”

She barked out a laugh. “I don’t have four arms, stranger. You brought these people here. You brought us here. Where did you come from?”

He said nothing.

Sand held back the next question and just watched him. She wanted to ask where she had come from, where all of them had come from. “Shell, can we use the rope to—?” Her throat caught. The thought caught with it. No, it seemed restraining this man was also out of the question. No violence, no restraint. What was more cruel though? Tying him up or leaving him here to die without food or drink on this beach? She held out her hand, sweating. “Give me the rope, Shell.”

He handed her the rope.

It took all her concentration to tie the stranger’s three remaining hands together. She had to focus on that fact – that tying these hands would allow them to remove the boulder. Every so often she had to stop to wipe the sweat from her brow and to still her trembling hands.

“Sand,” Coral said from atop the boulder, “what do we do now? We have the boat; we have its captain captive.”

Sand stood, her legs weak. On the horizon, the waves crashed against the reef. “We figure out how to escape.” She wiped her palms against her shirt. “And call me Nisong.”





40





Lin


Imperial Island

Something scratched at the shutters. I turned over in my bed, my eyes still bleary. I’d spent half the night on the floor by the door before dragging myself back to bed and crawling beneath the covers. Everything felt hopeless. My father had made me. He knew every aspect of who he wanted me to be.

My dead mother.

No, wait. She wasn’t my mother. And he wasn’t my father. He was the Emperor. I was Lin, but I was not the Emperor’s daughter. I burrowed beneath the covers. I didn’t know what I was.

The scratching sounded at the shutters again, followed by squeaking.

It was Hao, the spy construct I’d rewritten. I could see the shadow of it between the slats. Automatically, I reached for the drawer where I kept the nuts and pulled one out. Dragging myself from bed seemed easier when I was doing it for someone else. The little spy construct stopped scratching as I approached the windows. I slid the nut between the slats. Little claws tickled my fingertip as the construct took the nut.

My father would never love me in the way I wanted or needed him to. The grief of it filled me, overflowed. It felt like a wound that would never close. All my life I’d spent trying to earn his approval, and the only way I could have done so was by being someone else.

My construct outside squeaked again.

Dutifully, I retrieved another nut and fed it through the shutters. My freedom was so close. Sunlight shone through the gaps in the shutters, scattering barred light across my skin. If I could only just—

The door was locked.

Something jolted inside me. But when had I ever let that stop me? My father’s room had been locked. All the doors in the palace had been locked. I’d still found my way through them. What was I doing, moping in this room? There had to be a way out.

The only thing I had to look forward to now was the Emperor “fixing” my memories, making me into some pale facsimile of his late wife. I’d lose myself anyway.

I slammed a shoulder against the door. The wood had no give to it. I tried pulling at the handle; I tried throwing a chair at it. I only managed to scratch the wood. I tried the shutters next, pulling and pushing at them, trying to break them. I pried at the wood slats until my fingers ached.

There had to be a way. There was always a way. I sat back on the bed, trying to think of a solution. I was locked in here alone, without any means to escape.

A scratching sounded at the shutters again. The spy construct, asking for another nut.

It was still there, even after I’d been flinging chairs about the room. Hope surged in my breast.

“Wait right there,” I said to the spy construct.

I took another few nuts from the desk drawer. Hao would obey my commands without them, but the nuts had brought the construct back to me at this critical time. Perhaps they would provide extra incentive.

I held the nut so the construct could sniff it. “Hao, tell me how the shutters are locked.”

Hao sat on its haunches, whiskers twitching, clearly confused.

I tried again. “These shutters. What is on the outside?”

“Outside the shutters is the palace, and the palace grounds, and the city, and the island—”

“Yes, I know.” I squeezed my eyes shut. There had to be a better way to ask. Numeen and all his family had given their lives. They’d believed I would help them. The least I could do was to make sure they’d not died in vain. “Tell me, other than the corner furnishings and the hinges, is there anything else attached to the shutters in front of you?”

A long silence.

For a moment, I thought I’d confused the poor beast again, but then Hao spoke. “There is a bar.”

I pressed my nose to the slats, trying to see it. “Can you lift it?”