He stood her to her tiptoes and walked her straight to the wall, still lifting higher, so she had to strain higher simply to breathe. On reaching the wall, he lifted her off her feet and settled the rope over a hook.
Teia gagged. The many ropes around her neck weren’t a noose designed to choke the life out as quickly as possible, but they were holding her entire weight. Her elbows were bound behind her back, and her feet bound together, straining to reach the floor.
Sharp’s frowning face came into view as her body turned. “Thought I estimated that right,” he said. He examined the ropes behind her back in no apparent hurry to save her fucking life, thank you very much. With a finger, he thrummed the ropes here and there, checking the tension.
“What’s this? You gettin’ fat?” he asked.
She choked.
He blew out a breath and stepped behind her, his fingers tugging.
It was her chance. He wasn’t looking at her eyes.
But he was already done. Her toes brushed the floor, and then touched. The first hiss of air slipped into her lungs, and then a slow but adequate breath. The ropes around her diaphragm didn’t allow a full gasp, heightening the sensation of suffocation. But Teia’d learned something of torture, and she knew that sometimes the mere suggestion of suffocation was far better than the reality of it.
Teia breathed, and did nothing but breathe.
He was looking into her eyes again before it occurred to her to draft. She’d missed her chance. He was too strong for her. Too canny.
How do you move too fast for fear to follow when you can’t move at all?
“I told you, Adrasteia. Disobedience isn’t an option with the Order. I told you . . .” With eyes cold as the deep currents under her feet and brittle voice cracking like springtime ice under her, he said, “It’s the Order of the Broken Eye, not the Suggestion of the Broken Eye.”
She couldn’t bear his disgust, or for him to see her fear.
Looking away in defeat, she saw this wasn’t his lair. He had none of the accoutrements that would suggest it was even a safe house. It was just an empty dump. Except that he’d spread out his gear on the floor and there was a sheaf of parchments lying on his carefully folded shimmercloak.
Next to the parchments, which were bent from having been rolled, she saw a green or red ribbon.
“Recognize those?” he asked.
The White’s papers. They were what had gotten Teia into all this.
She shook her head.
“You naughty, naughty girl,” Murder Sharp said, like she was a dog who’d shat on the rug. “I got suspicious when you insisted on taking them. You were her cat’s paw all along, weren’t you?”
He’d seen her eyes stick to that package. She’d given herself away the day they’d kidnapped Marissia? Damn, damn, damn. “Why do you have them?” she asked carefully. Speaking wasn’t fun with this much pressure on her throat. “I thought the Old Man owned you, heart and soul, blood and bone.”
“I never disobey an order the Old Man gives. But sometimes it’s weeks between when we can meet. Months. We can’t be too careful. So I had to open the papers to make sure there were no traps, or plans we needed to know immediately. And then . . . I got curious.”
“And?”
“And what I found . . . troubled me. But you have no idea, do you?”
“About what? I’d love to hear it.” If only to stay alive a bit longer, thanks.
“They murder people. Just like we do—to keep power, you know? Your precious, righteous Spectrum, and I don’t just mean Andross Guile. At first I felt such glee, reading Orea Pullawr’s explanation in her own hand, the last confession of a woman who pretended to be so holy. Perhaps when I came to kill her, I was the hand of justice come to repay her many sins. She struck such a mournful tone. So apologetic. So desperate to explain. I despised her. But then I read more.”
He scrubbed his hands through his short, fire-red hair and sat down on a footstool. It was the only furniture in the house, if a house it was.
Sharp lit a candle with a finger and thumb and a bit of sub-red. It hissed and spat oddly. He peered closely at her, and she knew that if she flared her eyes to paryl, he would kill her instantly.
“In the past two years,” Sharp said, “I’ve seen the Chromeria try to do things the old way, balancing the colors by decree. Telling the reds to draft more, the blues to draft less, waiting a year. Seeing how many storms kill people where, and what happens to the crops or the animals or the forests here and there and everywhere. Everyone gets poor, people starve to death, and the storms rage anyway. Only . . . a bit less frequently. But if that’s the only way to save things, even if everything else they say is lies, even if the Chromeria’s being led by hypocrites and monsters . . . what if their way really is better? Better to kill a few here, where they feel it, than to let hundreds or thousands die throughout the satrapies, isn’t it? We Braxians, we say our way’s better: assassinate a few to save many, but how’s that make sense? If the Chromeria is doing it all wrong, I suppose, turning Atash into desert so Tyrea can bloom, that’s bad, right? But the records show we did the same. I mean the opposite. All we did was make sure that the thousands who died weren’t ours. Who’s the monster then? Maybe our way was best against the nine kings, but now?”
Sharp was not a good storyteller. Teia couldn’t even tell when he was referring to which side.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Teia said. “Can you start from the beginning?”
He shook his head, paused. Checked a denture as if it had felt loose.
“The Order ruined me,” Sharp said. “Lied to me. Broke me in the worst way—they made me break myself.” He reached into his mouth and took out his bottom set of teeth. He sat on the little stool and squinted at the teeth in order. With a tiny brush, he scraped away some tiny imperfection, wiggled a canine. He clucked his tongue between his jagged natural teeth, displeased, and tended to the rest of the dentures.
But he kept glancing up, noting her eyes at unpredictable intervals. She couldn’t draft without getting caught. Dammit. She had to wait until he was more distracted.
He said, “It’s a funny thing, you know, you and I.”
“How’s that?” Teia asked.
He hadn’t looked up in perhaps a count of ten—as if he were daring her to try to draft. That she hadn’t dared—that she might have missed her last chance through her lack of courage was infuriating, sickening, terrifying.
He dried the dentures and daubed paste from a jar along the length of the teeth channel with a tiny brush. Then he glanced over, quickly.
“It’s funny that we both kind of want to be the other person—but only kind of,” Sharp said. “You want to be a master of paryl. A killer. You’re a brittle weakling, and you want to be strong. You want to be scary. But only kind of, because you don’t want it badly enough to do what you need to become who you want to be. Me, I’m strong, but . . . I kind of want to be a traitor like you.”
It was like a rope thrown toward a drowning woman.
“It’s never betrayal to do what’s right,” Teia said.
He barked a laugh. “Think the Old Man would agree?”
“It’s not too late for you,” Teia said.