“Get inside!” she snapped at the sight of the two of them. “Fool boy. What if someone followed you?”
“Don’t think they did,” Gyre said. “Auxies are busy.”
“I thought you were caught for sure, or dead.” Lynnia slammed the door and started pulling the curtains, her bad leg dragging behind her. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Gyre blinked. His head was still pounding, and his scar throbbed. “What do you mean?”
“At the tunnel, you plaguing moron!”
Gyre frowned. “Nothing happened at the tunnel. Kit and I got … we missed the rendezvous. I thought Yora would call everything off.”
“You …” Lynnia stopped, facing the last window, and didn’t look around. “Oh, Chosen defend. You don’t know, do you?”
Gyre’s throat went tight. “Know what?”
“The tunnel was an ambush. Yora’s dead, Gyre.” When she turned to face him, her face was tight with fury. “A lot of the others, too. The rest are in the dux’s cells. Sarah’s with them, I hear, but they don’t expect her to survive.”
“Yora’s …” Gyre swayed. “She …”
“Where were you?” Lynnia stalked closer. “You didn’t even know? Gyre, what have you done?”
Gyre staggered back against the door, the room spinning around him. Lynnia was saying something, but he couldn’t parse it. She hurried forward, taking Kit out of his arms, but made no effort to assist Gyre as his legs gave way and he slipped to the floor.
*
When he woke, he was in his own bed, and Lynnia was working at his table by the light of a lamp. The nighteye had worn off at last, but his good eye still ached from the abuse, and his scar pulsed with a deep, throbbing pain. He tried to sit up, which set his head spinning again, and he settled back on the pillow with a groan.
“I’d stay put a little while longer,” Lynnia said without looking up. “You’ve got some quickheal in you, but that’s quite a bump on your skull.”
“I gathered.” Gyre found a mug of water on the bedside table, lifted it carefully, and drank. “Is Kit all right?”
“She will be. She was in worse shape. Splinted the fingers and gave her some bone-break potion. It looks like she fell off a plagued roof.”
“That’s more or less what happened,” Gyre said. He paused. “Yora’s really …”
His voice trailed off into silence, which stretched on for what felt like an eternity as Lynnia’s pen scratched over a ledger book. Eventually the old alchemist sighed and turned her chair around.
“That’s the word on the street, and I don’t see any reason to doubt it,” she said. “Nobody who went to the tunnel with her came back, and some of them are definitely in the dungeons. Raskos proclaimed a great victory over the criminals and smugglers.” Her eyes narrowed, gaze pinning him to the bed. “I also hear that Raskos’ private treasure horde nearly burned down. Some kind of fight there.”
Gyre swallowed. “What do you want me to say?”
“You don’t need to say anything.” Lynnia got to her feet, stretching her bad leg with a wince. “Yora was … Did you know I helped her father, in his stupid little war?”
“She told me that once,” Gyre said.
“After he died, those of us who were left felt … responsible for her. I helped her as much as I could.”
“I thought you believed in her cause.”
“It gets harder to believe in causes when you get old,” Lynnia said. “It’s all I can do to believe in people. I believed in you, Gyre, when you washed up on my doorstep. I introduced you to Yora because I thought you could help each other.” Lynnia sucked in a deep breath. “And you left her to die.”
“I didn’t—” Gyre struggled until he was sitting up, head pounding. “She wasn’t supposed to—”
“Save it. Yora always knew you weren’t in it to help anyone but yourself and find your plaguing Tomb, but I didn’t think you’d just cut and run when the time came.”
“What makes you think I’d have been able to help Yora if I’d been there?” Gyre shot back, pressing one hand against his ruined eye. Pain spiked in his head. “Maybe I’d just be dead with the rest of them.”
“Maybe that would have been better,” Lynnia said, voice cracking.
They stared at one another in silence.
“You need to leave the city,” the alchemist said quietly.
“How long until Kit is fit to travel?”
“You’re not going to abandon her too?” Lynnia snarled. “I suppose you still need her, don’t you?”
Gyre tried to keep his voice steady. “Once she can move, we’ll leave. You won’t see us again.”
“Good,” Lynnia said. She turned away from him, and a measure of professional detachment returned to her tone. “She should wake up anytime. I’d wait until tomorrow evening to get moving.”
“Until tomorrow evening, then.” Gyre hesitated, and Lynnia walked away, bad leg dragging. “Thank you, Lynnia.”
The alchemist snorted and slammed the door behind her.
*
Eventually, with the quickheal doing its work, the pounding in Gyre’s head subsided. He managed to make it to the washroom at the end of the hall, and after a long piss and the chance to scrub the last of the bloodstains from his face, he felt better.
He found his mind already back at work, planning the next step. It all depends on where they took the Core Analytica. From Lynnia’s description, it sounded like there had been considerable chaos at the warehouse, and it was just possible no one had realized its importance. But Maya would have brought my pack back with her, so it’s probably in the Spike by now. That made things harder, but not necessarily impossible—
Halfway down the hall, outside the guest room door, he paused at the sound of sobbing.
The only person who could be in that room was Kit. But the idea of Kit crying—Kitsraea Doomseeker—seemed about as likely as taking a stroll to the moon. She’d barely flinched at the charge of an ancient ghoul-construct, and laughed at the prospect of being caught by Raskos’ Legionaries.
He hesitated, then rapped at the door.
“I’m still not hungry.” It was Kit’s voice.
“It’s me,” Gyre said. “Can I come in?”
There was a long pause. “I suppose.”
He opened the door. Kit was sitting up in the spare bed. She wore nothing but a thin shift and a collection of bandages, one wound around her head, another swathing her broken fingers, and several more covering a variety of cuts. Bruises were blooming across the right side of her body, and her eyes were red and puffy.
“You carried me back here?” she said.
Gyre nodded and closed the door behind him.
“I admit I expected to wake up in a prison cell,” she said, pulling her knees to her chest under the blanket. “Or not at all. Did you kill that centarch?”
Gyre gave an involuntary laugh. “Not even close.”
“Then what happened?”
“She let us go. It’s … a long story.”