“Blood.” The Beckman fight. Twenty-nine days have slipped by as I shoved it to the back of my mind. Now, tomorrow, I’ll be facing him. “I never want to see another cage caster.”
“We just spent the night together and you don’t want to see me again? That’s rough, Smoke.”
“We didn’t spend the night together,” I huff. But it feels like air is trapped in my chest—awkward, light, flustered.
He gestures to the rubble of shingles and the twigs of our skygliders. Hubris the Second didn’t have a long life.
“Shut up.”
He laughs. His side must not be that painful.
I stand and brush off the dust. “We’re going to have to fix this roof.”
“And I need to fix my kurta.”
After mending the roof and sewing his kurta with a flourish of green magic, we descend into the street. I need to get home, but I need something else first. Can’t exactly sneak into my room without a skyglider. And I’m not walking through the palace doors looking like this or without Hubris. My parents aren’tthatbusy.
It’s an average market day, which means within seconds a swarm of colors and people ambush us. The younger generation of Belwarians wears flying pants, with bright kurtas for males, and blouses and wraparound skirts for females. Saris and vests are still in abundance among the older, more traditional crowds. After that it’s a jumble, with Pire Island’s heavier cloaks and duller coats, Agsa’s pastel palette, and Naupure’s clean lines and silks.
My burnout disengaged the swirls of purple barrier magic infused into my Red Woman uniform. Now, Kalyan and I both look like black fortes infatuated with their own color. I’m not saying we stick out like sore thumbs, but we should get out of here as soon as possible. Wanted posters line the shop stalls.
“We’re going to need skygliders,” Kalyan says.
“I know a guy.”
He arches an eyebrow. “Youknowa guy?”
“What? You don’t?” Having a good skyglider guy is one of the reasons I’m still alive. I mean, Hubris died because I splintered it into a thousand pieces and stabbed a Vencrin. Hubris the Second created enough resistance for us to survive last night’sfall.
“I’ve had only three skygliders my entire life,” Kalyan says.
I stop, actually halt in place. The streets keep churning with people alongside me, but I’m at a standstill. It takes a second for Kalyan to realize and swing around. “What?”
“Three skygliders?Three.” Maybe I misheard. He could have said thirteen or even thirty.
“Yeah, three. How many have you had?”
I flounder, but regain a scrap of composure and reengage with the flow of foot traffic. “Ah, a few more.”
He eyes me. I’ve made a fatal error, I know because he starts grinning. “Smoke?” He elongates the vowel.
“We have actual important things to talk about. Like what we should be doing next.”
“Yeah, and we can discuss that as soon as you answer this one question.” He guides me to a stop in front of a silken fish stall. An Untouched vendor with a booming voice calls to us, thrusting scales and the pearly white flesh outward. “One pound one silver,” he pitches.
Kalyan, like any practiced shopper, ignores him. “How many?”
“What are you willing to do for this information?”
His head tilts as if my embarrassing myself acts as proper currency in his book. “What do you want?”
So many things. For us to not have failed last night. For my fight with Beckman to not be tomorrow. For the world to give us more time. Givememore time.
I can’t voice a single one.
“The skyglider shop I like is only a block away.”
Mittal and Muni’s is your typical skyglider extravaganza. Skygliders, condensed down to their stump form, dangle from wooden pegs. In the far left corner the walls bend and shoot upward for three stories like a hollowed-out tree trunk so customers can test out different skyglider designs.
