The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(75)

“You’re not making sense. What do I do?” I reached out and then stopped, my hand hovering above his shoulder. I wasn’t sure if touching him would make things worse. I wasn’t sure what was happening at all.

He gripped my shirt with weak fingers. “Hide me. Please.”

Why had he come to me? Was I truly the only person he felt he could trust? I swept my gaze over the room. A wardrobe stood in the corner, and there was under the bed – though I’d hidden the journal there. “The wardrobe,” I said. I’d have to figure everything out once he felt safe.

He sagged with relief, his hand still gripping my shirt. “Thank you. I’m sorry for all the times I was cruel to you, I really am.”

“Don’t.” Every word seemed to cost him. I put an arm around him and let him lean on me as he stood. Beneath my hand, I could feel his ribs. He gasped a little as he stood, and his ribs gave beneath my fingers as though they were sponges and not bones. He was disintegrating before my eyes and beneath my touch. Was he ill again? And why didn’t he want my father to help him? “Bayan, maybe we should—”

“There you are.” Father stood in the open doorway, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, his fingers grasping his cane. His arms were rough and thin as the dried-out husks of dead branches. A construct stood behind him, a hulking leathery-skinned creature with an ape’s face and fingers. “Bayan is sick,” he said. “I’m taking him with me.”

Bayan sagged in my grasp and said nothing. I felt my father’s gaze on me, waiting for me to let Bayan go, to step away. I should have. Instead, I cleared my throat. “He said he doesn’t want to go with you.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He has a fever and it’s making him delirious. Ipo, gather the boy.”

Though his skin felt soft as uncooked dough, Bayan did not feel warm to the touch. The leathery-skinned creature strode into my room, its arms outstretched. What could I do? If I denied my father now, I had no way to fight him.

“Please no,” Bayan rasped out. “The memory machine.”

The memory machine? But I couldn’t ask questions with my father standing there. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I let Ipo take him from my arms, a vise about my heart. “Don’t hurt him,” I said to my father.

He looked at me as though I’d grown another eye. “He’s my foster-son. Why would I hurt him?”

But the incredulity in his face was cold. There was something about the way he looked at Bayan, the way he looked at me . . . I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t fondness or hate, or any emotion I knew. “Just be kind to him.”

Father limped to me and before I could move away he had taken my chin in his free hand. “Who are you to tell me what to do?” He sounded angry; he sounded hopeful. The heat from his hand suffused my cheeks. His gaze roved over my face, from my forehead to my eyes to my mouth.

I parted my lips to speak and felt him lean in closer. “I am Lin.”

He let go of me abruptly. Father turned and strode away, Ipo following behind with Bayan in its arms. “I’ll let him know of your concern when he wakes up.”

The door shut behind them, and I curled my fingers into fists. I wasn’t sure what about my answer had displeased him. This time, though, I wasn’t sure how much I cared. I went to my bed and found the keys I’d stolen and replicated, slipped between the mattress and the frame. I grasped the one for the bone shard room.

I’d rewritten one of my father’s highest constructs. Now for the last three.





28





Jovis


Nephilanu Island

I tapped the end of my staff against the cavern floor, wondering if it would hold. The power thrummed in my bones, waiting to be unleashed. Would the walls cave in, the stone and earth fall upon our heads? Should I risk it?

And Gio, that smug bastard, just waited. He held his sword at the ready, and I’d felt the flat of that blade more than once. The man was old, but surprisingly spry. He smiled. “The point of this exercise is not to hurt me or anyone else by accident. Take me to the ground, but don’t hurt me.”

I huffed out a breath. “If I can’t hurt you, what am I supposed to do? Dance with you?”

Gio stepped to the side, giving me the narrow view of his body. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Don’t raise an alarm. Keep your actions quiet.”

I swung the end of my staff at Gio’s legs and he parried. He gave me a reproachful look. “Now everyone has heard the clash of steel against steel. I know you’re a threat. I shout for help. You’ve failed.”

I wasn’t sure what he was expecting me to do. In the corner of the hall, Mephi sat by the hearth and watched, his chin against the floor. He met my gaze when I looked to him, but offered nothing more than a yawn. I’d asked him not to speak in front of the Shardless, an order that he obviously found onerous.

“Try again.” Gio turned his back to me. “I’m a guard in the halls of the governor’s palace. How do you get past me?”

I tapped my staff against the floor.

He looked over his shoulder. “You get my attention?”

“I bribe you,” I said.

He cracked a smile. “Bribing a guard when you’re in the middle of the governor’s palace? A bold move.”