“Preparations are nearly complete for the move through Carakhte, I will be ready to join you soon, dear father…”

-Missive from Zhiren to the Emperor

Kurikuneku

“It’s almost time for the rendezvous.”

Kotire heard Ranotia’s words but didn’t react, flipping a coin between her fingers. The head of the emperor danced from her thumb to her little finger and back again, the coin’s opposite face occasionally showing the seal of the Holy Alchemical Society. From her corner of the bar she had a direct view to each of the place’s few windows – though they were all boarded up, still she watched. The door was shut, and had remained shut for hours. This did not stop Kotire from resting her hand near the trigger-guard of an Invictan-issue sidearm. Between her and the wall sat Henryk, fiddling with a nearly-empty glass of imported wine.

From his chair by the untended bar, Ranotia called back to Kotire: “Hey. You heard me, right? Our cell outside is going to be in place in a few hours. We need to get out of here quickly.”

“What about Devraj?” Kotire murmured, flipping the coin between her fingers.

“What about him? You really want him with us, after what he did?”

“He’s Adma, isn’t he?” Kotire let the coin come to a rest, placed her hand on the floor. The clap of the metal coin against the wood floor startled Henryk more than it should have. “The Society’s onto him, after him. Only reason we haven’t been caught yet is because of his connections.” Kotire gestured toward the hallway leading toward the back room – a hallway similar to, though not identical to, the hall of the bar that they’d first crawled into from below the city seasons ago. “They want him dead almost as much as they want us dead. Why shouldn’t we take us with him?”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” Henryk murmured, “Hakios is dead because of him, and I nearly got caught myself. If he hadn’t been compromised…”

Kotire picked the coin up and continued to flip it between her fingers. “It wasn’t exactly his fault. This thing right here?” She held up the coin, gleaming between her fingers. “He couldn’t have known how to fool the tracker. He had to protect himself. I can’t exactly blame him.”

“This isn’t much like you, Kotire.” Ranotia’s voice fell a little, and he spoke quiet even though there was no one else in the room – no one awake in the building, at this hour, either - to overhear. “I would think you’d be eager to hurt people who’ve hurt us, right?”

“There’s only one person I want to kill,” Kotire muttered, placing her left hand on the sidearm beside her while the coin continued to dance in her right. “Everyone else along the way is just collateral damage, nothing to be proud of.”

“How noble of you…” Ranotia laughed, a short laugh, hardly amused at all. “At least you can tell yourself that.” He slid his knife across the bar, leaned and reached out and grabbed it by the hilt and dragged it back to him, slid it away from his body again. “Just face it, Kotire. The mission is a failure. We lit the powder keg, and instead of blowing up, it fizzled out.”

Kotire groaned and looked down at the floor. “There’s got to be some way to make people act. The Holy Alchemical Society killed civilians. And after a few days of unrest everybody just went back to their normal routines, as if it never happened…”

Henryk shook his head. “A society indifferent to death can’t stay angry for long, Kotire. You’ve seen them. There’s still people starving here, but no amount of outside agitating is going to make them turn on the Alchemicals, because they know their place.” Henryk slowly stood up, shakily. His legs nearly buckled beneath him, but with hesitant steps – painful to even watch – he crossed the room to the opposite corner and pulled aside the curtain from the window for a moment. The light stung, but Kotire shielded her face with a hand and looked out at the city. Over the rooftops and the neon and the glamor of the city, over the narrow-street neighborhoods and the roofs with lines of drying laundry hanging from them. Over and past the towers of wealth and the towers of poverty, standing side-by-side, arm-in-arm, there stood the greatest structure of them all, a spire reaching so high it seemed almost thin and needle-like in spite of its size.

“What do you suppose we’d have to do to turn a city against the likes of that?”

Kotire didn’t stand, but picked up her sidearm, gesturing toward the window. Though her finger stayed far from the trigger, she saw how Henryk was startled. “Show them how little they’re worth to that flesh-hungry tyrant. This isn’t over, we’ve only just started, what’s to say we can’t show them all what they really are to him?”

“It’s over, Kotire.”

Just then there came a knock at the door, followed almost immediately by the turn of the knob. Kotire recognized the symbol, but still by instinct pointed her gun toward the door. She saw the shake of Ranotia’s head from her peripheral vision, and her hand shook. The barrel of the gun lowered as the door opened and Devraj stepped inside.

“It took some doing to get them off our trail,” Devraj said without ceremony as he closed the door and bolted it behind him. He caught Kotire’s eye and stared a little longer than normal, eyes never quite making contact with the gun in Kotire’s hand. “Beren either thinks you’re already out of the city, or he knows where you are, in which case we’re all about to make some lovely new friends.”

“Alright,” Ranotia said, standing up. “We’re going. Devraj, you should make yourself scarce, lay low for a little while. Try to stay out of trouble with the Society. Things are going to change soon enough, with or without us.”

“Yeah,” Devraj muttered, not making eye contact with Ranotia. “It didn’t work out. Sometimes that’s just how things go.” Kotire watched Devraj’s face from where she sat against the wall, seeing how his eyes stayed fixed on the floor, or how he glanced over at Henryk or Kotire, but never at Ranotia himself, never at the captain.

Tired as she was, Kotire felt at the edge of a dream. A memory threatened to intrude – a memory of the scout Arshay, who’d died so long ago and left his mark on Kotire’s mind from a hundred miles away. He was trekking through the mud, and Kotire could feel the wet on her boots, on her legs. She stared up at Devraj, unable to look away as the big man muttered to himself.

“We’re going to win some day,” Ranotia cut in. “Everyone we’ve lost, we lost working toward that goal. Believe it. We’re going to make it happen. This empire can’t stand forever – no empire does.”

“Yeah,” Devraj muttered. “Sure. Just get out of here. And stay safe.”

Ranotia stood up, and Henkyk crossed the room to join him. Slowly, Kotire stood up as well, but she didn’t face the others – she faced the door, gun held tight in her hand.

Ranotia stared from the door. “Kotire. We’re going. Our people are going to be in place by the time we get there, no point in waiting here forever.”

“I’m going to the Tower of God,” Kotire said, still staring at the window although the sheet had fallen back into place to cover her view.

Henryk nearly choked at that. “You can’t be serious, Kotire. You’ll never reach it.”

“I’ll try. At least I’ll send a message to them.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Ranotia said. “We’re getting out of here with or without you, Kotire. The mission’s over. Look at this city – you really think this place is going to blow? We lit the fuse, we kicked the nest of vipers, and nothing happened.”

“That’s why I’m going to take things into my own hands. I don’t care if you join me or not.” Kotire tucked the gun into a holster and covered it with her shirt, adjusting the Invictan breastplate over it and stretching out her hands. “Besides, what about the North? We have our mission.”

“Forget about the North,” Ranotia said with a scornful laugh. “Mirshal has denounced the Adma.”

Kotire blinked. She thought of the long talks on the radio, those two Mirshal Sowers in Kivv she’d spoken to during the days in the camp. It seemed so long ago now, after all these many weeks in the city, trying and failing to bring about an internal revolution. Arien and Aleks were their names, weren’t they? She’d nearly forgotten. “Mirshal denounced the Adma? Why?”

“That’s terrible timing,” Henryk said. “Don’t we have cells working on the city defense?”

“Unofficially,” Ranotia said, “yes. That’s the latest word, at least.”

Devraj nodded. “All my sources outside the city say that Mirshal is only giving unofficial support to the Adma from now on. The rumor is that some of those higher-up in Mirshal had the move arranged because they think they can avoid a larger war with the Empire, as long as they just hold out in Kivv when the armies come for them.”

“That won’t work,” Ranotia said. “It’s going to be an all-out attack. Practically the Empire’s entire military might leveled against one city. How are they going to hold without acknowledging they’re at war - they’d have to win! And our cells in the north won’t be as effective helping them if relations between us and them are closed.” Ranotia leaned against the doorway. “We don’t need the North. Let them burn if they want to, for their pride and their principles. We do not need them.”

“I don’t understand how this happened,” Kotire whispered. “But we have the chance to kill the Emperor now, make sure he never hurts anyone else again! That’s what we need to do. That’s the only thing that matters.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kotire,” Ranotia said. “You’ll solve nothing. We’re leaving.”

“Fine!” Kotire stage-whispered. Red in the face, she would have shouted if she weren’t afraid of waking and alerting somewhere in an adjacent building or below her. “I don’t need you!” Fist clenched, she stepped back, away from Ranotia, past the crossed-armed Devraj. Henryk wouldn’t meet her eyes, his face like that of an old man at the grave of his child. “I don’t need any of you! I’ll handle everything myself…”

Ranotia closed his eyes. “Goodbye, Kotire.” And he turned and went down the hall and was gone.