Page 71 of Flames and Blood

“You’re not nothing now.”

“No. Now I look like exactly what I am, and people check twice. I miss the version of the job where they didn’t.”

“I like this version of you fine,” she says, and then pinches her lips together, frowning.

“Careful,” I say. “That’s twice tonight you’ve said something honest by accident.”

“I’m tired. It lowers my defenses.” She yawns, wide, and doesn’t bother hiding it. “Ask me something else. Something easier.”

“What’s your grandmother’s name?”

“Ilaria. She’d have liked you. She liked anyone who could tell her something true without dressing it up first.” Her head tips back against the seat. “She used to say a lot of things that took me a long time to understand. I realize that there was wisdom in almost everything she said. I just needed to work it out.”

“Did you work it out?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it took years.” She sighs. Yawns again. “Sometimes I figured I’d get it eventually if I was patient.” Another yawn. “I miss her. And I—”

She stops.

Her head’s tipped all the way to one side, against the window. I hear her breathing change before I look. It slows, catches once, and goes even.

She’s out, mid-sentence. One day upright, after everything, with the drug still going out of her. Her body has stopped taking instructions.

I don’t wake her.

I drive.

The road runs straight and empty in the headlights, wet at the edges, nothing else moving on it this time of night. The heater ticks. The tires make one long sound that doesn’t change.

And the cab is full of her. Soap, and warm skin, and dragonfire. She’s put out warmth since the moment she got in, and I’ve had the window cracked for hours to make it easier for myself.

I watch the odometer. Aurora is four hours out at this speed. Three and a half if I push it.

I don’t push it.

In all the years of this work, I have never once wanted a drive to take longer than it needed to. Every job I’ve ever run, I wanted done as soon as possible. Tonight I could drive in circles for a week and call it diligence.

I don’t examine that.

I drive.

Somewhere past the third hour, the land opens up and lights show along the horizon, low and scattered, and then a gate, lit white, with two guards on it who are already watching my headlights come up the road.

Aurora.

Kalli’s still asleep. In a few minutes I’m going to have to wake her, walk her through that gate, and hand her to people who are going to look at who she is and start making plans about what she’s for. Her own kind. Councils. Men who’ll decide things for her the way they always have.

I haven’t thought once, until this exact second, about what handing her over is going to feel like.

I slow the truck at the gate and tell myself it’s for the best.

Chapter 17

Kalli

I expected offices. Desks, hallways, a man behind a window checking a list. The primary outpost of the Aurora Collective is nothing like that. The road runs into the side of a mountain. Steel doors seal behind the truck. Then there’s a hall cut from rock, with warm light in it.

People live here. It isn’t a building people only work in.