He glances at me. “At what?”
“Leading a rebellion.”
He lifts his brow slightly, like the answer should be obvious. “You expected otherwise?”
I grin despite myself. “No.”
And that’s the problem.
Because the more I watch him do this—the planning, the listening, the quiet confidence that makes people stand a little straighter around him—the harder it gets to pretend I don’t understand why half this world would follow him.
Or why the bond between us refuses to let go.
CHAPTER
THREE
The citynever quite surrenders to the darkness at night. It glows.
Lanterns burn along the upper bridges, casting long reflections across the canals. Strange moss clings to stone walls where the older parts of the city have begun to crumble, its faint green luminescence bleeding into the alleyways like ghost light. Even the sky refuses to go properly black. A dull copper haze hangs above the towers where distant storms pulse beyond sight, turning the clouds into something restless and bruised.
It means shadows behave differently here.
They move.
They breathe.
And if you know how to use them properly, they hide you better than any cloak.
The warehouse is quiet when we begin. It’s not empty—there are always a few people sleeping in the upper lofts—but it’s conspicuously quiet in the way places become when everyone inside understands that something important is about to happen.
Five people wait near the trapdoor.
They stand close together, instinctively forming a small island of bodies in the dim lantern light. Even after years of doing this, I can still spot the newcomers immediately. Their posture gives them away—the hardening in their shoulders, how their eyes track every shadow as if expecting danger to crawl out of the walls.
A Strizter, one of the taller of the canal-dwelling species with mottled blue skin, stands slightly apart from the others, the gills along his neck flexing faintly as he breathes the damp air of the warehouse.
The other two adults are a bonded pair.
Human and Glowranth.
Between them, tucked almost invisibly under their arms, are two children.
The older one—maybe eight, maybe nine—tries very hard to stand straight like the adults, chin up and jaw firm. The younger girl clings to a blanket that has probably crossed three different worlds before ending up here. She clutches the worn fabric like it’s the only stable thing left in the universe.
I crouch down in front of them, trying to appear smaller and nonthreatening.
Funny how easy that still comes. Old habits and old lessons are hard to forget:Keep your voice calm. Keep your hands visible. Don’t give anyone a reason to decide what you are.
“All right,” I say quietly. “We’re going for a walk.”
The boy studies my face with the careful seriousness of a child who knows they’re part of something important.
“Through the tunnels?”
“Through the tunnels.”
His sister peers around her mother’s leg, eyes wide. “Are there guards down there?”
