Scavenge the Stars (Scavenge the Stars #1)(92)

“I’ve been here for a couple of weeks, trying to connect the pieces,” he said.

“Wait, you’ve been here for weeks and didn’t try to find me?” the girl said.

“I did try to find you! In fact, I heard there was a sale for a Vault belonging to the name Chandra and I stopped by to see if there was a connection to you.” He shrugged. “But when I got there, it was being raided by some men. I grabbed some random papers they’d hauled out, just in case, but I haven’t had time to look them over yet.”

She swallowed. “You…You must have just missed me.”

“I’ve been looking for you all day. Didn’t realize you’d show up here.” He held out his hand, and the girl briefly took it with a weak smile. “Anyway,” he went on, addressing Cayo, “the final piece fell into place once the prince died. I did some digging, tracked various transactions, and found that the deaths all had something specific in common.”

Roach peeled back the layers of the folded handkerchief, revealing a flat black disc.

“Counterfeit currency,” Roach said. “They’re not just painted gold—they’ve been alchemically altered. And the substance coating them has properties that cause ash fever.”

Cayo reeled, and not-Yamaa gasped. Roach solemnly wrapped up the disc and returned it to his pocket.

That meant his father wasn’t just the cause of the counterfeit, but responsible for an illness that had already taken lives. Would very likely take his sister’s life. Kamon Mercado wasn’t merely a criminal—he was a murderer who had brought death upon his own daughter.

But that still didn’t explain one thing. Cayo felt for the disc in his pocket and held it out to the girl he had kissed in the rain, the girl who had convinced him to turn in his father.

“Were you in on it?” he asked, his voice low.

She frowned as she stared at the disc. “What—”

“Romara. You gave her a coin, didn’t you?”

She looked like she would be sick. Silently, she nodded.

“What were you doing with counterfeit money, other than pretending to be nobility? Are you working with my father?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Then tell me the truth!”

He hadn’t meant to shout it, his voice ringing across the deck and over the water. Roach looked at the docks worriedly while one of the women swore.

The girl took a deep breath and met his gaze. “The man who kidnapped you and your sister. His name is Boon. He enlisted me—and these three,” she said, gesturing to the others, “to help him carry out his plot for revenge against your father, who made him Landless.”

The Kharian man crossed his arms with a stormy expression. “Wish I’d caught the bastard. He’d be much worse off than Landless.”

“Boon sent me here with his money, but I didn’t know it was counterfeit. I didn’t know that it…” Her eyes drifted to the companionway, where Cayo had taken Soria.

Then she frowned and turned back to Roach. “You said there are cases of ash fever showing up in the Rain Empire. How is that possible, if the counterfeit is localized to Moray?”

“It’s not as localized as you think. Part of my research led me to this man, Mercado, and I found that he’s been sending money there for the past few years. Apparently, he has debts he needs to pay off, although I couldn’t find the exact source of those debts.”

Cayo shook his head. “What do you mean, he was sending money? It’s illegal for any merchant in Moray to have dealings with the empires. We’re supposed to stay neutral.”

Roach laughed, and it grated against Cayo’s ears. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but nearly all of Mercado’s estate belongs to the Rain Empire, and about a quarter of Moray as well. Coin has been flooding out of the city, and hardly anything is coming in. The city is broke.”

“But that means…”

The young man nodded. “If Mercado is taken down and the counterfeit revealed, Moray will become economically dependent on the Rain Empire. It’ll force an end to neutrality, and likely bring the Sun Empire to your shores. It’ll mean war.”

Cayo drifted back, as if to avoid the words. The consequences of his father’s actions. His heart was a dull weight in his chest, dragging him down, down, until he thought he would merely fall through the floorboards.

He moved to the railing, gripping it in his hands. The others went on talking behind him, but the girl came up to his side, cautious.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For all of this.”

He didn’t bother to look at her. “Who are you, really? Why were you working with that man?”

She sighed and leaned her elbows on the railing. “I suppose I should start by saying that my name isn’t Yamaa. It’s Amaya Chandra.”

Cayo repeated the name silently, his lips shaping the unfamiliar sound.

She told him her story: how she had grown up in Moray until her father was killed and her mother sold her to a debtor’s ship. Her years diving for pearls and doing whatever it took to survive. She stared at her wrist as she spoke, and for the first time he noticed a small tattoo of a knife.

Fitting, he thought, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

She explained how she met Boon, and how they had prepared to ruin his father’s name. How she had been instructed to use Cayo, but that she had realized he wasn’t part of his father’s plans, how she had tried not to drag him into it. If she hoped it would soften him, she was wrong; it only cinched his bitterness tighter.