Page 13 of Dead Drop

"I'm training you."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

I almost smile. She's the sharpest thing I've made in four years of making sharp things. She reads me the way I read territory markers—for the same reason: the information keeps her alive.

"Go eat," I tell her. "Double rations tonight. You earned it."

She goes. I stay in the training yard and run the sequences alone—in the flat white light, the concrete under my boots, my own breathing the only sound. I run them until my arms burn. The anger has somewhere to go that isn't a plan Dov won't authorize.

Twelve days later, I wake before dawn to an empty cot.

Not mine. Petra's.

I know before I'm fully awake. The way you know a sound was wrong before your brain finishes processing it—the absence of her breathing across the room, the silence of a space that should contain a person and doesn't.

I sit up. My hand finds my blade in the dark. My eyes find her cot.

A gilded flower.

Gold petals, pressed flat, laid on her pillow with the deliberate care of someone leaving a receipt. The same gold as the flowers in the collection room. A calling card.

The Ordained took her in the night. They walked into New Reach, past the wall, past the gate watch, past every security measure I've spent four years building, and they took my best fighter from the cot six feet from mine while I slept.

They left the flower because they wanted me to know it was deliberate. Not a snatch. A message.

You declined. This is what declining looks like.

I sit on Petra's cot. I pick up the flower. The petals are thin and cool between my fingers—fragile in a way that living petals aren't, the moisture pressed out of them, the gold preserved but the life gone. Petra's cot still holds the warmth of her body. The blankets smell like the rough pine-tar soap from the supply building that everyone uses because it's the only kind we make.

Sixty seconds. I give myself sixty seconds.

In those sixty seconds something happens in my chest that is not grief and is not rage. It is both of those things at once—a stabbing below the sternum that goes in clean and doesn't pull out.

Petra's face. The way she held her blade—loose grip, relaxed wrist, the way I taught her. The way she said those aren't mutually exclusive with that edge of humor that meant she was paying attention. She was always paying attention.

Sixty seconds. Then I stand.

I find how they got in: a bribed gate watch member on the night rotation. Not one of mine—one of Garron's, a third-year named Beck who owed the Ordained for medicine they'd givenhis mother. The same economy. The same elegant loop. They give you something you need, then they own you.

I don't confront Beck. I adjust the rotation to exclude him and store the information for later.

Dov is in the council room. He's already heard. His face tells me everything.

"They started it," I say. My voice is flat. Controlled. The bright thing in my chest is not in my voice. "I'm finishing it."

He doesn't try to stop me.

Four days of preparation. I don't sleep. I eat when I remember to, which isn't often. I check routes. I sharpen blades. I run scenarios until they stop being hypothetical and become a series of decisions I've already made.

On the fourth night, the Ordained move first.

5

ADA

They come at dawn.

Not Brother Lief's delegation—Ordained soldiers, twenty of them, in dark tactical gear instead of white cloaks. The gilded bloom on their chest plates is the only marker. They hit the eastern gate simultaneously with a signal jammer that kills our comms network in the first thirty seconds.