Some of the streets of the Jackals’ territory and the Blood King’s pressed against one another, leaving tensions fierce whenever someone trespassed. The Jackals had tested her boss’s patience by paying the baker, and she was here as a reminder that messing with the Blood King was the quickest way to get your throat cut in Kosín. The only question was whether they would risk angering him further by coming after her for walking and killing on their streets—and whether they were stupid enough to try to fight her.
Neutral territory was close, marked only by the dead end ahead with a narrow, weed-choked gap between two houses. If a lifetime here hadn’t taught her which streets were safe, she’d have died years ago. A little boy sat in front of one of the houses, twisting gold and silver wires into designs to be peddled for coins in the richer districts. Aina kept her eyes on the gap, counting down the seconds until she could reach it and move on to her next job.
Ten steps away, a girl stepped out from behind a house with a knife in her right hand and a jackal’s blood-drenched jaw and teeth tattooed along her left forearm.
“Paying us a visit?” she asked, stopping in front of Aina.
Aina shrugged, keeping her features indifferent. Someone approached from behind, their footsteps quiet, but noticeable.
“Just out for a stroll,” she said with a small smile. She could take out this grunt with a knife through the ribs in seconds, but that would break the tenuous peace between the Jackals and the Blood King. They could threaten and antagonize each other, but if she actually killed one of them, all hell would break loose. No, she had to find a different route of escape.
The air shifted behind her. She spun to find a gun aimed at her chest by a boy twice her size. She sidestepped him, but the girl grabbed her roughly and pushed her into the rusted wall of a house.
The pair boxed her in. Aina allowed a small trace of fear to light up her eyes so they would think they had the advantage, convincing enough that even her boss would be proud. She had seen the girl around the city, and she recognized the boy; he’d been on the streets around the same years that she had been. Once, they’d even fought over a scrap of metal to sleep under. He’d beaten her in that fight, but he wouldn’t win now.
“Should I take an eye for this violation, or should we beat her and paint her blood on her boss’s door instead?” the girl asked her friend. “Which do you think would leave the brighter impression?”
Before she finished speaking, Aina moved. She grabbed the boy’s wrist and slammed it into the wall. The gun fell from his grasp. He lunged for it, but she kicked him in the shins with her steel-toed boots. The girl tried to plunge her knife into Aina’s side, but Aina blocked the attack with her own blade and punched the girl in the stomach with her other hand.
She fled, with their footsteps pounding behind her. She reached the gap between houses, passing the little boy, who hardly blinked at the scene in front of him, and slipped through the gap to reach a neutral street. Seconds later, the footsteps faded.
Running from fights might make her look weak, but starting a gang war wasn’t part of her job tonight, and she still had work to do—work that no one, especially not the Blood King, could know about.
She left the Stacks, ascending the sloped hills until she reached the city’s Center. Pollution blocked out most of the stars above, but electric lights in shop windows lit the streets here. Coughing on the smoke-tinged air leaking over from the assembly plants and steel mills, Aina veered east. Men and women from the textile factories shoved past her with hands dyed purple and black, jostling against the rail workers who limped from the train station wearing dirt-covered overalls. It was a thick, sweaty mess of a crowd, but some people noticed the blood on her clothes and gave her a wide berth. Most were too exhausted and so used to Kosín’s violence that they barely glanced at her.
The air grew colder as she left the crowds and entered the quieter east of the city. She passed the smudged-gray apartment buildings, their windows lit with candles instead of electricity, then checked that no one was watching as she crossed a rusted bridge spanning the Minos River.
A few miles of weed-choked train tracks and muddy fields spread toward the forest on Kosín’s outskirts. Far beyond the trees, mountains edged the horizon, blue and curving like ocean waves. She walked fast, needing to get to the mines and then back into the city before all the shops closed for the night.
While the mines produced diamonds meant to be sold as jewels, plenty of the workers here were involved in the illicit trade of rough diamonds used in blood magic. Prior to the civil war fourteen years ago, many people in their country had worshiped the Mothers, two goddesses named Kalaan and Isar who had blessed the Inosen—the faithful—with the magic of blood and earth. After the war and the rise of industrialization, worship and the use of magic had been outlawed. But a few hundred Inosen were left, their faith buried in Kosín’s poorest districts. Even though they hid, Aina knew they were there. They were the ones buying her rough diamonds, after all.
The sound of drills soon reached her ears. A half mile later, she approached the fringe of the forest and took in the open pit of the Hirai Diamond Mine.
With a seven-million-carat yearly production rate, it was the richest diamond mine in the world. No matter how many times she saw it, descending into the earth with different levels cut into it like tree rings, the surrounding fields crisscrossed with pale beige roads and ore-filled crates, the pit never failed to impress her. It stretched farther than she could see. Employment and production had increased dramatically ever since more rare diamonds had been discovered in it.
A few supervisors nodded at her as she approached. She waved to one of them, a man whose name she’d forgotten the minute he’d told it to her. Next to him was a large crate loaded with gray, grain-like ore.
“Miss Solís.” His smile was nearly toothless. “You’re back again.”
“Your goods?”
He took in her bloodstained clothes with a concerned frown. “We have water if you want to wash up.”
“Your goods?”
With an exasperated shake of his head, the supervisor approached a toolbox at the foot of the crate. He withdrew a small scale and worked with his back to her. When he returned, Aina slipped him coins to keep quiet about their transaction, then held out a hand.
A stream of rough diamonds cascaded onto her palm. She tilted her hand so moonlight shone on their varying opaque and translucent surfaces. The gems were fresh from the earth, still dull in sheen and needing cut and polish to be sold anywhere as jewelry. But they would work fine for magic.
“Not jewelry-shop quality,” the supervisor began, “but as long as they’re not entirely opaque, they’ll work for your purposes.”
She glared at him. “They’re not for me.”
“Then they’ll work for whoever you sell them to,” he said with a wink.
Smiling, she dropped the diamonds into a hidden pocket of her jacket and walked away—tossing her bloodstained scarf over her shoulder as she did.
Anyone except a certified jeweler caught with a rough diamond would be executed in the street, as was the law since the war. And if her boss ever found out about her diamond sales, he’d kill her for not giving him a cut of the earnings. He’d saved her and turned her from a helpless street kid into a feared killer, but she wanted more.