An Ember in the Ashes(32)

But there’s so much now that she doesn’t know. My loathing of the Empire. How desperately I want to be free of it.
We aren’t kids anymore, laughing over shared confidences. We never will be again.
In the end, I don’t answer her question. She doesn’t answer mine. Instead, we sit without words, watching the city, the river, the desert beyond, our secrets heavy between us.
XIII: Laia
Despite the slaver’s warning to keep my head down, I gaze at the school with sick wonder. Night blends into the gray of the stone until I can’t tell where the shadows end and the buildings of Blackcliff begin. Blue-fire lamps make even the bare, sand training fields of the school seem ghostly. In the distance, moonlight glimmers off the columns and arches of a dizzyingly high amphitheater.
Blackcliff’s students are on leave, and the scrape of my sandals is the only sound to break the sinister quiet of the place. Every hedge is squared as if by a plane, every path is neatly paved without a crack in sight. There are no flowers or blooming vines crawling up the buildings, no benches where students can relax.
“Face forward,” the slaver barks. “Eyes down.”
We head for a structure crouching on the lip of the southern cliffs like a black toad. It’s built of the same brooding granite as the rest of the school.
The Commandant’s house. A sea of sand dunes stretches below the cliffs, lifeless and unforgiving. Far beyond the dunes, the blue jags of the Serran Range cut into the horizon.
A diminutive slave-girl opens the front door of the house. The first thing I notice is her eye patch. She’ll disfigure you in the first few weeks, the slaver had said. Will the Commandant take my eye too?

Doesn’t matter. I reach for my armlet. It’s for Darin. All for Darin.
The inside of the house is as gloomy as a dungeon, the smattering of candles providing little illumination against the dark stone walls. I look around, glimpsing the simple, almost monkish furnishings of a dining room and sitting room before the slaver grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls on it so hard I think my neck will break. A knife appears in his hand, its tip caressing my eyelashes. The slave-girl winces.
“You look up one more time,” the slaver says, his hot breath foul in my face, “I’ll carve out your eyes. Understand?”
My eyes water, and at my rapid nod, he releases me.
“Stop blubbering,” he says as the slave leads us upstairs. “Commandant would rather put a scim through you than deal with tears, and I didn’t spend one hundred eighty marks just to throw your corpse to the vultures.”
The slave-girl leads us to a door at the end of a hallway, straightening her already perfectly pressed black dress before knocking softly. A voice orders us to enter.
As the slaver pushes the door open, I get a glimpse of a heavily curtained window, a desk, and a wall of hand-drawn faces. Then I remember the slaver’s knife and pin my eyes to the floor.
“It took you long enough,” a soft voice greets us.
“Forgive me, Commandant,” the slaver says. “My supplier—”
“Silence.”
The slaver swallows. His hands rasp like a snake’s coils as he rubs them together. I stand perfectly still. Is the Commandant looking at me? Examining me? I try to look beaten and obedient, the way I know Martials like Scholars to look.
A second later, she is before me, and I jump, surprised at how silently she’s come around her desk. She’s smaller than I expect—shorter than me and reed-slim. Almost delicate. If not for the mask, I might mistake her for a child. Her uniform is pressed to perfection, and her pants are tucked into mirror-bright black boots. Every button of her ebony shirt gleams with the shimmer of a serpent’s eyes.
“Look at me,” she says. I force myself to obey, instantly paralyzed as I meet her gaze. Looking into her face is like looking at the flat, smooth surface of a gravestone. There isn’t a shred of humanity in her gray eyes, nor any evidence of kindness in the planes of her masked features. A spiral of faded blue ink curls up the left side of her neck—a tattoo of some kind.
“What is your name, girl?”
“Laia.”
My head is jerked to one side, my cheek on fire before I even realize she’s struck me. Tears spring to my eyes at the sharpness of the slap, and I dig my nails into my thigh to keep from running.
“Wrong,” the Commandant informs me. “You have no name. No identity. You are a slave. That is all you are. That is all you will ever be.” She turns to the slaver to discuss payment. My face is still smarting when the slaver unhooks my collar. Before walking out, he pauses.
“May I offer you my congratulations, Commandant?”
“On what?”
“On the naming of the Aspirants. It’s all over the city. Your son—”
“Get out,” the Commandant says. She turns her back on the startled slaver, who quickly retreats, and settles her gaze on me. This thing actually spawned? What kind of demon had she whelped? I shudder, hoping I never find out.
The silence lengthens, and I remain still as a post, too afraid to even blink.
Two minutes with the Commandant and she’s already cowed me.
“Slave,” she says. “Look behind me.”
I look up, and the peculiar impression of faces I’d gotten when I first walked in resolves itself. The wall behind the Commandant is covered with wood-framed posters of men and women, old and young. There are dozens, row after row.
WANTED: Rebel Spy...Scholar Thieves...Resistance Henchman...
REWARD: 250 Marks...1,000 Marks.
“These are the faces of every Resistance fighter I’ve hunted down, every Scholar I’ve jailed and executed, most before my tenure as Commandant. Some after.”