The Tower of Blood and its monarchy fell, and became the Tower of Steel, run by the oligarchy. The ban on technology became a ban on worship and magic instead, and many believed that in the violence of the war and its aftermath, the Mothers had abandoned Sumerand and its people to suffer in the mess they’d made.
“Just kill them already,” Aina said, jumping down and rubbing away the tension from her wrist.
“When heretical beliefs disrupt our workforce and put visitors to our country in harm’s way, it becomes clear why such discipline is necessary,” Bautix drawled, his voice never tiring, his lungs never seeming to need air as he spewed ultimatums. “Magic users violate public order and safety. Magic unchecked is magic that has the opportunity to bring our country to ruin once more. When diamond smugglers undermine the economy for their own profit, we all suffer.”
Turning away, she counted down the seconds to the execution while the general’s voice rang out above the crowd’s whispers and murmurs. As he went on, her mood jumped between indifference and anger. She leaned against a cold lamppost and stared between the shoulders of the gathered crowd. But her eyes were drawn back to the rust gathering on the lamppost. Bathed in the sparkling gold lights of a nearby shop, the rust looked like dried blood.
Bautix smirked as he spoke the words that had become famous in the years after the war; the words he always said before a public execution: “Let it be known that our goal is to progress, not to regress.”
His statement was punctuated with two gunshots, each one banging against her eardrums like an avalanche. She clenched her jaw, but tried not to react in any other noticeable way. Gunshots, whether they were fired near her or at her, brought her back to the night her parents collapsed in front of her. She could usually shove the fear aside, and it didn’t bother her when Teo used his guns, but executions of diamond smugglers and magic users always brought her too close to the memories she’d tried to push away.
“All right, show’s over,” said Teo, turning to leave.
The crowd began to disperse. People spoke in hushed voices, some trembling as they glanced at the dead men. But as the Diamond Guards began to clear away the bodies, people returned to what they’d been doing before. Aina shook her head. She might move on from death easily, but she didn’t forget it—not after her parents had died for daring to believe in a power higher than steel and the coin it wrought. Her heart ached for a moment, but she ignored it to get back to work.
“Wait.” She grabbed Teo’s elbow, her eyes fixed on a slim figure with a stack of books carried under his arms. “I see him.”
Kouta Hirai was a tall, lanky man in his early twenties with blue-black hair that fell below his ears. He might be mistaken for a student, but everyone in Sumerand knew he wasn’t in school anymore; he managed one of the country’s wealthiest enterprises. Just then, he’d stepped out of the bookshop where Aina had been spying on him, cast a single glance of disgust at the execution and dispersing crowd, then turned right. His guards followed him out of the shop a moment later.
She and Teo slipped away from the scene, pushing past the spectators and following the Hirai heir to Rose Court at a slight distance so as not to draw attention to themselves. They soon crossed a street crowded with horse-drawn carriages. Benches surrounded a garden of willow trees and rosebushes that lined a path toward a pond at the center.
One of Kouta’s bodyguards masqueraded as a businessman eating lunch on a bench, but through his shirt, Aina saw the outline of a gun. Two more guards stood at a corner, pretending to admire the garden, but their eyes were trained to watch for any threats. She couldn’t simply throw a dagger from here and walk away whistling. Any one of those guards would jump in front of a blade to protect her mark.
Kouta sat on a bench near the center of the garden, reading a stack of documents now. She wondered at what age he’d learned to read, remembering how she’d only picked up the skill at fourteen after Kohl had thrown enough books at her to get her to learn.
“You can’t be a great assassin if you’re illiterate, Aina,” Kohl had said when she’d finally thrown a book back at him.
“Why not?” she’d asked. They were sitting at a small table in the training room. Two other employees of the Dom sparred with each other, using techniques Kohl had taught them to take down bigger opponents. She itched to run over and join them, beat them, prove herself.
But Kohl’s hard sapphire eyes pinned her in place as he tapped the book in front of him. “Because you can’t be an effective assassin if all you do is swing around a knife. What makes an assassin different from any other killer?” Without waiting for her to reply, he said, “Assassins don’t get caught. You find your mark and take them out, leaving the least amount of bodies behind as you can. You are efficient; you are fast; you are flawless. So you need to make people think you’re something else. You’re an aristocrat, a bartender, an artist, and you have no idea how that man just slumped over in his chair with a dagger sticking out of his neck. Sometimes that’s the only way to reach a target. Not through a window or up a drain, but through the front door, as someone they would never suspect. To pull that off, you need to research. You need to read.”
“I can read a room,” she’d replied instantly. “And my marks. I know who will fight back, who will beg, and who will freeze up and wait for me to strike. That should be good enough.”
Before she was done speaking, he’d opened the book to the first page and shoved it in front of her.
“Who taught you to read?” she’d blurted out, partially to continue avoiding this lesson and partially because she was curious. Had he grown up reading, or had he learned at a later age like she had?
“My old boss taught me.” His gaze had flicked to the vulture tattoo on his forearm. “My parents were illiterate. After they got arrested and I was on my own, I joined the Vultures, and reading was the first thing he made sure I knew how to do.”
Her brow had furrowed. “Why’d your parents get arrested?”
Instead of answering, he’d shoved the book closer to her and tapped the top of the page. “Read.”
For Kouta Hirai, reading was just another thing he could take for granted, something he’d grown up with. Shoving down an intense feeling of having been cheated, she waited for him to finish. Finally, an hour later, he placed his stack of documents into his bag.
“Let’s follow him home and figure out the rest of our plan,” she proposed to Teo as Kouta stood. His guards immediately flanked him.
A loud, girlish voice sounded nearby, and Aina had to fight the urge to whip out a knife.
“Your scarf is really pretty!” squealed the young woman from a few feet away. She wore a silk blue dress and gems at her ears that indicated how rich she was. One of Kouta’s guards turned around, so Aina put a smile on her face and pretended to be intrigued by what the girl was saying.
She’d bought the scarf as a joke when the shop had run out of red ones and only carried white, so she decided to dye it herself with blood. The redness had faded to a rust color she wasn’t very fond of, but apparently this girl liked it.
“Thank you!” she gushed as the guard turned back around and left with Kouta; time to follow. “You’ll never guess how it got this way.”