An Ember in the Ashes(112)

“Thoughts are complex,” he explains. “Messy. They are tangled as a jungle of vines, layered like the sediment in a canyon. We must weave through the vines, trace the sediment. We must translate and decipher.”
Ten hells. What does he know about me? Everything? Nothing?
“Where to begin, Laia? I know your every sinew is turned toward finding and saving your brother. I know your parents were the most powerful leaders the Resistance ever had. I know you’re falling for a Resistance fighter named Keenan but that you don’t trust him to love you back. I know you’re a Resistance spy.”
“But if you know I’m a spy—”
“I know,” Cain says, “but it matters not.” Ancient sadness flares in his eyes, as if he’s remembering someone long dead. “Other thoughts speak more clearly of who you are, what you are, in your deepest heart. In the night, your loneliness crushes you, as if the sky itself has swooped down to smother you in its cold arms—”
“That’s not—I—”
But Cain ignores me, his red eyes unfocused, his voice jagged, as if he is speaking his own innermost secrets instead of mine.
“You fear you will never have your mother’s courage. You fear your cowardice will spell the doom of your brother. You yearn to understand why your parents chose the Resistance over their children. Your heart wants Keenan, and yet your body is alight when Elias Veturius is near. You—”
“Stop.” It’s unbearable, this knowledge of me from someone who isn’t me.
“You are full, Laia. Full of life and dark and strength and spirit. You are in our dreams. You will burn, for you are an ember in the ashes. That is your destiny. Being a Resistance spy—that is the smallest part of you. That is nothing.”
I scramble for words but find none. It is wrong that he knows so much of me and I know nothing of him in return.
“There’s nothing to me that is worth anything, Laia,” the Augur says. “I am an error, a mistake. I am failure and malice, greed and hatred. I am guilty. We are, all of us Augurs, guilty.” At my confusion, he sighs. His black eyes meet mine, and his description of himself and his kindred fades from my mind like a dream upon waking.
“We are here,” he says.
I look around uncertainly. A quiet street stretches in front of me with a row of identical houses on each side. The Mercator Quarter? Or perhaps the Foreign Quarter? I can’t tell. The few people on the streets are too far away to recognize.
“What—what are we doing here?”
“If you wish to save your brother, you need to speak with the Resistance,”
he says. “I have brought you to them.” He nods to the street before me. “Seventh house on the right. In the basement. The door’s unlocked.”
“Why are you helping me?” I ask him. “What trick—”
“No trick, Laia. I cannot answer your questions except to say that for now, our interests align. I vow to you by blood and by bone that I do not deceive you in this. Go now, quickly. Time will not wait, and I fear you have little enough as it is.”
Despite his calm expression, there’s no mistaking the urgency in his voice.
It fans my own unease. I nod my thanks, wondering at the strangeness of the last few minutes, and go.
***
As the Augur predicted, the back door to the house’s basement is unlocked. I take two steps down the stairs before a scimpoint meets my neck.
“Laia?” The scim drops, and Keenan moves into the light. His red hair sticks up at odd angles, and a bandage wrapped haphazardly around his bicep is stained with blood. His freckles stand out jarringly against the sick paleness of his skin. “How did you find us? You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe for you. Quick”—he glances over his shoulder—“before Mazen sees—go!”
“I discovered an entrance to Blackcliff. I have to tell him. And there’s something else—a spy—”
“No, Laia,” Keenan says. “You can’t—”
“Who’s there, Keenan?” Footsteps clump toward us, and a second later, Mazen sticks his head in the stairwell.
“Ah. Laia. You tracked us down.” The older man shoots a look at Keenan, as if he must be responsible for this development. “Bring her.”
The tone of his voice raises the hair on my neck, and I reach through the slit in my skirt pocket for the dagger Elias gave me.
“Laia, listen to me,” Keenan whispers as he ushers me down the stairs.
“No matter what he says, I—”
“Come now,” Mazen cuts Keenan off as we enter the basement. “I haven’t got all day.” The basement is small, with crates of goods in one corner and a round table in the center. Two men sit at the table? unsmiling and cold-eyed—Eran and Haider.
I wonder if one of them is the Commandant’s spy.
Mazen kicks a rickety chair in my direction, the invitation to sit obvious.
Keenan stands just behind me, shifting from foot to foot, an animal ill at ease.
I try not to look at him.
“Well now, Laia,” Mazen says as I take a seat. “Any information for us? Other than the fact that the Emperor is dead.”
“How did you—”

“Because I’m the one who killed him. Tell me, have they named a new Emperor yet?”
“Yes.” Mazen killed the Emperor? I want him to tell me more, but I sense his impatience. “They named Marcus. The coronation is tomorrow.”
Mazen exchanges glances with his men and stands. “Eran, send out the runners. Haider, get the men ready. Keenan, deal with the girl.”