“I’ll get her back,” I tell Clay firmly. “Just . . . give me a few weeks. A moon. Don’t tell the General we spoke, or Bay and the others will be at risk. Can you promise me that?”
Clay bites his lip, nods. “I’ll check in with you each time I pass through. Maybe soon you’ll have good news.”
He staggers for the market with his rickshaw, not bothering with a proper goodbye. I’ve given him terrible news while he’s given me the opposite. Sure, my pack remains ilked-up and working the General’s fields. Vee is a prisoner as bait. Bay is still held hostage in that nursery. But the executions have been paused. I don’t have to worry about one of them dying every third day, which means I can push to Zuly’s at a safe pace. If she can read the map, I’ll have time to think up a solid plan, figure out a way to use the info to barter my pack free.
I sprint for Cleo’s and find her at the table with Saph, both of them snickering through mouthfuls of their lunch.
“Where’s Asher?” I ask.
Saph stifles a laugh. “I stopped by to see him over my break. Let’s just say he’s got his hands full.”
I frown, mostly because I don’t know what she’s talking about but maybe also because the thought of them chatting between shifts makes my stomach twist in ways I don’t like. “Full how?”
“With shit,” Saph says.
“Literally,” Cleo amends.
“There are these raised slats that extend across the saltpeter beds,” Saph explains. “You stand on them when you turn over the manure and straw. They’re narrow, kinda wobbly.”
Asher has never been the most sure-footed. “He fell in, didn’t he?”
The sisters glance at each other and burst into laughter.
“Happens to someone every few weeks,” Saph says between gasps. “Never gets old, though.”
* * *
The horrific stench of the saltpeter beds puts sulfur harvesting to shame. I had nothing to complain about on the boardwalks.
Nose scrunched, I walk through the first facility, asking after Asher. Someone tells me he was working at the third bed, but when I arrive there, he’s nowhere to be found. A pair of workers who are turning over the manure with long rakes mention a changing room in the rear of the building. I thank them and dart off, passing a wash area that reeks of shit before the hall dead-ends at a curtained doorway. I grab the fabric and burst through, finding a clean but shirtless Asher drying his hair with a threadbare towel.
He twists, turning his back away from the doorway and holding the towel in front of his chest. The moment he sees it’s me, the fear in his eyes shifts to annoyance. “Gods, Delta. You don’t just barge in on someone like that.”
I eye the clean pants he’s wearing, the pink-scrubbed skin of his arms. “And you’d think someone with a secret branded on his back would put his shirt on first, not his pants,” I hiss quietly.
“Guess I’m lucky it’s just you then,” he says, and goes back to drying his hair. “Nothing you haven’t seen.”
Yet that couldn’t be further from the truth, because as he lifts the towel to dry his hair, I can see his time at Bedrock as plain as day. Long, pale scars mar his stomach and chest, overlapping, crisscrossing. Too uniform to be from a whip. A hot poker, maybe. A blade.
“They couldn’t very well mess up my back,” he says, catching me staring.
I want to ask him how it happened. Was it all at once or was it one burn a day for the course of many? Did they do it before they got him on sleeping ilk or after? I want to ask why he didn’t tell me. But all I can do is follow the scars as they stretch across his chest, my heart aching for him. Is this what would have happened to me if I hadn’t escaped the General so quickly? Would our fronts have matched just like our backs?
He’s broader now than when we were kids. Stronger, too. My eyes find lines of strength among his scars. On his arms, his chest, his stomach. There’s a V of muscle cut off by his pants.
My cheeks flush, and I don’t know where to look. His face, the floor, my hands—none of it seems good. Asher rubs his mouth, trying to hide a smile behind his fingers. Then he turns for the wall, lifts his shirt from a hook.
I freeze at the sight of his brand. “Stop!” I practically yell. “Don’t put that on.”
With his arms threaded through the sleeves and the shirt still held to his chest, he glances over his shoulder. I walk toward him in a trance. I never got a good look at his brand that day when we were kids. Never got a good look at it ever. But now, standing so close . . .
“Delta?” he whispers.
I’m a hand’s width from him, studying two Old World symbols on his left shoulder blade. I have two in this same spot. Es, the Oracle had called them. But the symbols on Asher are not Es. One is partially curved, the other made of three sharp lines.
I raise a finger and touch the pale, puckered skin on his back.
He sucks in a breath.
“Sorry,” I murmur, but I let my finger trace the Old World marking, mesmerized. Asher shudders, his skin prickling beneath my finger, and twists abruptly to face me.
I step back.
His throat bobs.
Something hangs between us, heavy and dangerous.
“Asher, can I trust you?” I ask quietly.
“Yes,” he says immediately. “Always.”
“With my life?”
“Yes, of course. Why would you even ask that?”
“‘Show it to no one,’” I recite. “‘Unless you trust them with your own life, keep it hidden. Always.’”
He frowns. “There’s nothing to hide from me. We’re the same where that’s concerned.”
“We’re not.”
He stares.
“I saw what they copied off me in Bedrock. And I just saw your back. Part of your brand is different. Here,” I say, walking behind him and touching the strange symbols on his left shoulder blade. He sucks in a breath again, and it makes my heart beat faster.
“Is that it?”
I swallow, try to ignore the moths in my belly. “And here.” I trace my finger down the planes of his back to the shallow curve above his waistband. “Maybe here?” I pull my hand away. “I don’t know. It’s similar, really similar, but I think it’s different.”
I toe the dirt floor of the changing room. It’s loose enough to track footprints.
“Stay there,” I say, and I start copying his brand into the floor the way the Oracle had copied sections of my brand into her tray of damp earth.
“Have you lost your mind?” he whispers when he realizes what I’m doing.
“We’ll clear it before we leave.” I peer out through the curtain. The muffled chatter of the people raking the beds can be heard, but there’s no one in the hall. I cinch the fabric tight and finish my work.
“Done,” I tell Asher.
He turns and surveys the markings on the floor. “It’s just a bunch of lines.”
“Maybe. But maybe not.” I slide off my jacket and toss it aside, then pull off my scarf, lift my overshirt over my head.
Asher stiffens as I grab the hem of my final layer. “What are you doing?”
His question makes me pause.