The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(77)

“Lenau passed last night,” she said to him. “We buried her in the jungle.”

I kept my distance, though Mephi did not share my hesitation. He bounded forward and slipped his head beneath the hand of the man closest to the light. The man laughed and obliged, stretching out his gnarled fingers, rubbing Mephi’s ears.

“It’s been happening to more of us,” Gio said. His voice echoed across the cavern. “This is the fate that awaits many of the Empire’s citizens. Not death at the hands of the Alanga, but death at the hands of the man sworn to protect us.”

I’d seen the shard-sick, cloistered in the corners of houses, cast aside in alleyways. Sometimes, it had been a person I knew. I stood there, unsure of what he wanted me to say, unsure of what I wanted to say. But I knew what he would say next.

“You can help us.”

Everyone – always grasping, always wanting more, always needing more. I didn’t have it to give. My fingers slipped on my staff, my hand grown slick with sweat. I was a liar, but I kept my promises. And I’d promised Emahla I would find her. “The blue-sailed boat,” I managed.

Gio nodded. “Yes, I know you’re looking for it.”

“You’ve set spies on me?”

“I didn’t need spies. Only ears. You’ve not made a secret of your search.”

One of the men coughed. His eyes were sunken, his skin stretched over his cheekbones like tanning leather. I tried not to stare. The man was withering away. My fingers itched. I wanted to touch the scar behind my ear – the scar where the soldier had struck me with his chisel. I’d told my mother and father and no one else. “I didn’t take bone,” the soldier had whispered, his breath hot against my ear. “I know what happened to your brother and I’m sorry.” He’d held a shard of bone in his hand – not mine. “They’ll find out someday, but today isn’t that day.” And then he’d pushed me toward the other children, weeping and bleeding, waiting for their mothers or fathers to bandage them.

No one had saved my brother. Even if he hadn’t died, he might have been one of those bodies on the pallets, wasting away as his shard was used.

“Care to tell me your thoughts?” Gio’s voice broke through the memory.

“No, not really.”

He sighed. “So you don’t want to join the cause. But tell me this: what happens after you find the blue-sailed boat?”

I’d find Emahla. I’d go home. “It doesn’t matter.”

“A person who can’t see a future doesn’t have a future,” Gio said.

“Is that a proverb? One of Ningsu’s?” I turned away from the sick men and women, gesturing for Mephi to follow. But Gio followed me too.

“No,” he said. “Someone I knew once said that. She was right.”

I looked at him sidelong, studying his face. A scar ran over the milky left eye, interrupting the line of his brow. Despite the gray hair and the lines of his face, he somehow didn’t strike me as old. Not as old as he looked anyway. “What’s your story? You apparently know mine.”

He reached down to scratch Mephi’s head absentmindedly. Mephi chirped and bumped his knee. Oh, so they were friends now? “It’s long,” Gio said, “and mostly uninteresting. Suffice to say, I thought I knew my destiny. I thought I knew what was right. But I made mistakes. A good many of them. I’m just trying to set things right, and to find people who will help me do that.”

I held my hands out, as if to show a beggar I had no coin. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Gio nodded. “It seems perhaps I am. But what will you do, Jovis, when the shards of your family are put into use? The shards of those you care about?”

My heart felt like a stone, sinking into the depths of the Endless Sea. “Who says I care about anyone?” I was a good liar, but this lie sounded hollow even to me.

“Gio,” one of the women called from her pallet.

He turned to tend to her, lifting her head to help her drink. Who would help my parents if they both fell ill? Maybe the Shardless Few would serve that duty since I was absent, chasing Emahla across the Endless Sea. They would be better family than I was. I pushed the bitter thoughts aside and slipped away. Mephi padded silently at my side. He said nothing as I took a lamp from the wall and strode back down the passageway we’d come. I knew he was bursting with questions, just as I was, but I didn’t trust the room they’d assigned me as a place to speak. So I crept through darkened corridors, the echoing voices fading behind me.

The lamplight disappeared down the ends of hallways, receding into emptiness and silence. Gio’s questions drifted from my mind, replaced by my own. “There aren’t any doors that I can see. How far do you think these go? How deep?”

Mephi wove around my legs, stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t know.”

Of course he didn’t. “I was just thinking aloud,” I said. “His scouts didn’t just find this place. He knew about it some other way.”

I swung the lamp around the corridor. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear voices, though I could not hear what they said. The air here smelled like earth and ice.

“Like him,” Mephi said.

“Of course you do. He talks about saving everyone, about making everything better. But do you know how often that works? Setting up a Council with representatives from each island? People want simple solutions. When this all began, people thought the Sukais would save us. Instead, they’ve enslaved us all. I need to look after me and mine. And that means finding my wife. If bringing in a new world order means so much to you, why don’t you stay here with him?” It was a stupid thing to say, petty, and even saying the words aloud felt like tearing my heart into two. I didn’t know how to take them back.