An Ember in the Ashes (3 page)

“No,” I whisper. But they are right, these shadows. I left Darin. I abandoned him. The fact that he told me to go doesn’t matter. How could I have been so cowardly?

I grasp my mother’s armlet, but touching it makes me feel worse. Mother would have outfoxed the Mask. Somehow, she’d have saved Darin and Nan and Pop.

Even Nan was braver than me. Nan, with her frail body and burning eyes. Her backbone of steel. Mother inherited Nan’s fire, and after her, Darin.

But not me.

Run, little girl.

The shadows inch closer, and I close my eyes against them, hoping they’ll disappear. I grasp at the thoughts ricocheting through my mind, trying to corral them.

Distantly, I hear shouts and the thud of boots. If the soldiers are still looking for me, I’m not safe here.

Maybe I should let them find me and do what they will. I abandoned my blood. I deserve punishment
.

But the same instinct that urged me to escape the Mask in the first place drives me to my feet. I head into the streets, losing myself in the thickening morning crowds. A few of my fellow Scholars look twice at me, some with wariness, others with sympathy. But most don’t look at all. It makes me wonder how many times I walked right past someone in these streets who was running, someone who had just had their whole world ripped from them.

I stop to rest in an alley slick with sewage. Thick black smoke curls up from the other side of the Quarter, paling as it rises into the hot sky. My home, burning. Nan’s jams, Pop’s medicines, Darin’s drawings, my books, gone. Everything I am. Gone.

Not everything, Laia. Not Darin.

A grate squats in the center of the alley, just a few feet away from me. Like all grates in the Quarter, it leads down into the Serra’s catacombs: home to skeletons, ghosts, rats, thieves . . . and possibly the Scholars’ Resistance.

Had Darin been spying for them? Had the Resistance gotten him into the Weapons Quarter? Despite what my brother told the Mask, it’s the only answer that makes sense. Rumor has it that the Resistance fighters have been getting bolder, recruiting not just Scholars, but Mariners, from the free country of Marinn, to the north, and Tribesmen, whose desert-territory is an Empire protectorate.

Pop and Nan never spoke of the Resistance in front of me. But late at night, I heard them murmuring of how the rebels freed Scholar prisoners while striking out at the Martials. Of how fighters raided the caravans of the Martial merchant class, the Mercators, and assassinated members of their upper class, the Illustrians. Only the rebels stand up to the Martials. Elusive
as they are, they are the only weapon the Scholars have. If anyone can get near the forges, it’s them.

The Resistance, I realize, might help me. My home was raided and burned to the ground, my family killed because two of the rebels gave Darin’s name to the Empire. If I can find the Resistance and explain what happened, maybe they can help me break Darin free from prison—not just because they owe me, but because they live by
Izzat
,
a code of honor as old as the Scholar people. The rebel leaders are the best of the Scholars, the bravest. My parents taught me that before the Empire killed them. If I ask for aid, the Resistance won’t turn me away.

I step toward the grate.

I’ve never been in Serra’s catacombs. They snake beneath the entire city, hundreds of miles of tunnels and caverns, some packed with centuries’ worth of bones. No one uses the crypts for burial anymore, and even the Empire hasn’t mapped out the catacombs entirely. If the Empire, with all its might, can’t hunt out the rebels, then how will I find them?

You won’t stop until you do.
I lift the grate and stare into the black hole below. I have to go down there. I have to find the Resistance. Because if I don’t, my brother doesn’t stand a chance. If I don’t find the fighters and get them to help, I’ll never see Darin again.

B
y the time Helene and I reach Blackcliff’s belltower, nearly all of the school’s three thousand students have formed up. Dawn’s an hour away, but I don’t see a single sleepy eye. Instead, an eager buzz runs through the crowd. The last time someone deserted, the courtyard was covered in frost.

Every student knows what’s coming. I clench and unclench my fists. I don’t want to watch this. Like all Blackcliff students, I came to the school at the age of six, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve witnessed punishments thousands of times. My own back is a map of the school’s brutality. But deserters are always the worst.

My body is tight as a spring, but I flatten my gaze and keep my expression emotionless. Blackcliff’s subject masters, the Centurions, will be watching. Drawing their ire when I’m so close to escaping would be unforgivably stupid.

Helene and I walk past the youngest students, four classes of maskless Yearlings, who will have the clearest view of the carnage. The smallest are barely seven. The biggest, nearly eleven.

The Yearlings look down as we pass; we are upperclassmen, and they are forbidden from even addressing us. They stand poker-straight, scims hanging at precise 45-degree angles on their backs, boots spit-shined, faces blank as stone. By now, even the youngest Yearlings have learned Blackcliff’s most essential lessons: Obey, conform, and keep your mouth shut.

Behind the Yearlings sits an empty space in honor of Blackcliff’s second tier of students, called Fivers because so many die in their fifth year. At age eleven, the Centurions throw us out of Blackcliff and into the wilds of the
Empire without clothes, food, or weaponry, to survive as best as we can for four years. The remaining Fivers return to Blackcliff, receive their masks, and spend another four years as Cadets and then two more years as Skulls. Hel and I are Senior Skulls—just completing our last year of training.

The Centurions monitor us from beneath the arches that line the courtyard, hands on their whips as they await the arrival of Blackcliff’s commandant. They stand as still as statues, their masks long since melded to their features, any semblance of emotion a distant memory.

I put a hand to my own mask, wishing I could rip it off, even for a minute. Like my classmates, I received the mask on my first day as a Cadet, when I was fourteen. Unlike the rest of the students—and much to Helene’s dismay—the smooth liquid silver hasn’t dissolved into my skin like it’s supposed to. Probably because I take the damned thing off whenever I’m alone.

I’ve hated the mask since the day an Augur—an Empire holy man—handed it to me in a velvet-lined box. I hate the way it gloms on to me like some kind of parasite. I hate the way it presses into my face, molding itself to my skin.

I’m the only student whose mask hasn’t melded to him yet—something my enemies enjoy pointing out. But lately, the mask has started fighting back, forcing the melding process by digging tiny filaments into the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl, makes me feel like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ll never be myself again.

“Veturius.” Hel’s lanky, sandy-haired platoon lieutenant, Demetrius, calls out to me as we take our spots with the other Senior Skulls. “Who is it? Who’s the deserter?”

“I don’t know. Dex and the auxes brought him in.” I look around for my lieutenant, but he hasn’t arrived yet.

“I hear it’s a Yearling.” Demetrius stares at a hunk of wood poking out of the blood-browned cobbles at the base of the belltower. The whipping post. “An older one. A fourth-year.”

Helene and I exchange a look. Demetrius’s little brother also tried to desert in his fourth year at Blackcliff, when he was only ten. He lasted three hours outside the gates before the legionnaires brought him in to face the Commandant—longer than most.

“Maybe it was a Skull.” Helene scans the ranks of older students, trying to see if anyone is missing.

“Maybe it was Marcus,” Faris, a member of my battle platoon who towers over the rest of us, says, grinning, his blond hair popping up in an unruly cowlick. “Or Zak.”

No such luck. Marcus, dark-skinned and yellow-eyed, stands at the front of our ranks with his twin, Zak: second-born, shorter and lighter, but just as evil. The Snake and the Toad, Hel calls them.

Zak’s mask has yet to attach fully around his eyes, but Marcus’s clings tightly, having joined with him so completely that all of his features—even the thick slant of his eyebrows—are clearly visible beneath it. If Marcus tried to remove his mask now, he’d take off half his face with it. Which would be an improvement.

As if he senses her glance, Marcus turns and looks Helene over with a predatory gaze of ownership that makes my hands itch to strangle him.

Nothing out of the ordinary
,
I remind myself.
Nothing to make you stand out.

I force myself to look away
.
Attacking Marcus in front of the entire school would definitely qualify as out of the ordinary.

Helene notices Marcus’s leer. Her hands ball into fists at her sides, but before she can teach the Snake a lesson, the sergeant-at-arms marches into the courtyard.

“ATTENTION.”

Three thousand bodies swing forward, three thousand pairs of boots snap together, three thousand backs jerk as if yanked straight by a puppeteer’s hand. In the ensuing silence, you could hear a tear drop.

But we don’t hear the Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy approach; we feel her, the way you feel a storm coming. She moves silently, emerging from the arches like a fair-haired jungle cat from the underbrush. She wears all black, from her tight-fitting uniform jacket to her steel-toed boots. Her blonde hair is pulled, as always, into a stiff knot at her neck.

She’s the only living female Mask—or will be until Helene graduates tomorrow. But unlike Helene, the Commandant exudes a deathly chill, as if her gray eyes and cut-glass features were carved from the underbelly of a glacier.

“Bring the accused,” she says.

A pair of legionnaires march out from behind the belltower, dragging a small, limp form. Beside me, Demetrius tenses. The rumors were right—the deserter’s a Fourth-Yearling, no older than ten. Blood drips down his face, blending into the collar of his black fatigues. When the soldiers dump him before the Commandant, he doesn’t move.

The Commandant’s silver face reveals nothing as she looks down at the Yearling. But her hand strays toward the spiked riding crop at her belt, fashioned out of bruise-black ironwood. She doesn’t remove it. Not yet.

“Fourth-Yearling Falconius Barrius.” Her voice carries, though it’s soft, almost gentle. “You abandoned your post at Blackcliff with no intention of returning. Explain yourself.”

“No explanation, Commandant, sir.” He mouths the words we’ve all said to the Commandant a hundred times, the only words you can say at Blackcliff when you’ve screwed up utterly.

It’s a trial to keep my face blank, to drive emotion from my eyes. Barrius is about to be punished for the crime I’ll be committing in less than thirty-six hours. It could be me up there in two days. Bloodied. Broken.

“Let us ask your peers their opinion.” The Commandant turns her gaze on us, and it’s like being blasted by a frigid mountain wind. “Is Yearling Barrius guilty of treason?”

“Yes, sir!” The shout shakes the flagstones, rabid in its ferocity.

“Legionnaires,” the Commandant says. “Take him to the post.”

The resulting roar from the students jerks Barrius out of his stupor, and as the legionnaires tie him to the whipping post, he writhes and bucks.

His fellow Fourth-Yearlings, the same boys he fought and sweated and suffered with for years, thump the flagstones with their boots and pump their fists in the air. In the row of Senior Skulls in front of me, Marcus shouts his approval, his eyes lit with unholy joy. He stares at the Commandant with a reverence reserved for deities.

I feel eyes on me. To my left, one of the Centurions is watching.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
I lift my fist and cheer with the rest of them, hating myself.

The Commandant draws her crop, caressing it like a lover. Then she brings it whistling down onto Barrius’s back. His gasp echoes through the
courtyard, and every student falls silent, united in a shared, if brief, moment of pity. Blackcliff’s rules are so numerous that it’s impossible not to break them at least a few times. We’ve all been tied to that post before. We’ve all felt the bite of the Commandant’s crop.

The quiet doesn’t last. Barrius screams, and the students howl in response, flinging jeers at him. Marcus is loudest of all, leaning forward, practically spitting in excitement. Faris rumbles his approval. Even Demetrius manages a shout or two, his green eyes flat and distant as if he is somewhere else entirely. Beside me, Helene cheers, but there’s no joy in her expression, only a stern sadness. The rules of Blackcliff demand that she voice her anger at the deserter’s betrayal. So she does.

The Commandant seems indifferent to the clamor, fixated as she is on her work. Her arm rises and falls with a dancer’s grace. She circles Barrius as his skinny limbs begin to seize, pausing between each lash, no doubt pondering how she can make the next one more painful than the last.

After twenty-five lashes, she takes him by his limp stalk of a neck and turns him around. “Face them,” she says. “Face the men you’ve betrayed.”

Barrius’s eyes beseech the courtyard, seeking out anyone willing to offer him a shred of pity. He should have known better. His gaze collapses to the flagstones.

The cheers continue, and the crop comes down again. And again. Barrius falls to the white stones, the pool of blood around him spreading rapidly. His eyes flutter. I hope his mind is gone. I hope he can’t feel it anymore.

I make myself watch.
This is why you’re leaving, Elias. So you’re never a part of this again.

A gurgling moan trickles from Barrius’s mouth. The Commandant drops
her arm, and the courtyard is silent. I see the deserter breathing. In once. Out. And then nothing. No one cheers. Dawn breaks, the sun’s rays tracing the sky above Blackcliff’s ebony belltower like bloodied fingers, tingeing everyone in the courtyard a lurid red.

The Commandant wipes her crop on Barrius’s fatigues before returning it to her belt. “Take him to the dunes,” she orders the legionnaires. “For the scavengers.” Then she surveys the rest of us.

“Duty first, unto death. If you betray the Empire, you will be caught, and you will pay. Dismissed.”

The lines of students dissolve. Dex, who brought the deserter in, slips away quietly, his darkly handsome face slightly sick. Faris lumbers after, no doubt to clap Dex on the back and suggest he forget his troubles at a brothel. Demetrius stalks off alone, and I know he’s remembering that day two years ago when he was forced to watch his little brother die just like Barrius. He won’t be fit to speak with for hours. The other students drain out of the courtyard quickly, still discussing the whipping.

“—only thirty lashes, what a weakling—”

“—did you hear him gasping, like a scared girl—”

“Elias.” Helene’s voice is soft, as is the touch of her hand on my arm. “Come on. The Commandant will see you.”

She’s right. Everyone is walking away. I should too.

I can’t do it.

No one looks at Barrius’s bloody remains. He is a traitor. He is nothing. But someone should stay. Someone should mourn him, even if for a moment.

“Elias,” Helene says, urgent now. “Move. She’ll see you.”

“I need a minute,” I reply. “You go on.”

She wants to argue with me, but her presence is conspicuous, and I’m not budging. She leaves with a last backward glance. When she’s gone, I look up to see the Commandant watching me.

We lock eyes across the long courtyard, and I am struck for the hundredth time at how different we are. I have black hair, she has blonde. My skin glows golden brown, and hers is chalk-white. Her mouth is ever disapproving, while I look amused even when I’m not. I am broad-shouldered and well over six feet, while she is smaller than a Scholar woman, even, with a deceptively willowy form.

But anyone who sees us standing side by side can tell what she is to me. My mother gave me her high cheekbones and pale gray eyes. She gave me the ruthless instinct and speed that make me the best student Blackcliff has seen in two decades.

Mother.
It’s not the right word.
Mother
evokes warmth and love and sweetness. Not abandonment in the Tribal desert hours after birth. Not years of silence and implacable hatred.

She’s taught me many things, this woman who bore me. Control is one of them. I tamp down my fury and disgust, emptying myself of all feeling. She frowns, a slight twist of her mouth, and raises a hand to her neck, her fingers following the whorls of a strange blue tattoo poking out of her collar.

I expect her to approach and demand to know why I’m still here, why I challenge her with my stare. She doesn’t. Instead, she watches me for a moment longer before turning and disappearing beneath the arches.

The belltower tolls six, and the drums thud.
All students report to mess.
At the foot of the tower, the legionnaires heave up what’s left of Barrius and carry him away.

The courtyard stands silent, empty except for me staring at a puddle of blood where a boy once stood, chilled by the knowledge that if I’m not careful, I’ll end up just like him.