Page 56 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

“In the back. He’s taken it for his bedroom.”

I stride past Berun, and he turns to follow me, almost skipping to keep up.

“Um,” he says. “Do you know what’s going to happen to us?”

“Not yet,” I growl, and push aside the curtain.

Ahdron’s “bedroom” is just another metal space with a blanket and cushions on the floor. I suppose the sacrifices to Soliton don’t include a lot of furniture. He’s sitting with his back to the wall, a clay jug in one hand, and he grins at me as I come in.

“Isoka,” he says. “Gods be damned. Or should I call you Deepwalker now?”

“‘Isoka’ is fine,” I tell him. He looks much as he did before we left to fight the hammerhead, though his hands are wrapped in bandages. Powerburn, I assume. He really was trying to kill the thing.

“I didn’t think…” He shakes his head. “You can’t blame me for not expecting you to come back from that.”

“I wasn’t so optimistic myself, to be honest.”

I watch his eyes search my face, hesitate for a moment on the new marks, then move on. “You’re all right?”

“More or less.”

“And you want to know where we stand,” Ahdron says. He takes a pull from the clay jug. “As you can see, Pack Nine’s circumstances have improved.”

“No doubt the Butcher was grateful to you for coming home without me.”

“She would have been happy if we’d all died down there,” he says. “But since we didn’t, and since you killed the hammerhead, she’s happy to take advantage of our success. I’m not sure if she and I are entirely square”—he takes another drink, and I get a whiff of alcohol—“but we’re not on probation anymore.”

“What did you do that made her so angry, anyway?”

He shrugs. “Rutted the wrong girl. How was I supposed to know she had her eye on her?”

I had figured it was something like that. Men like Ahdron are always letting their pricks get them into trouble.

Quit stalling, Isoka.

The problem is that I can’t hate Ahdron. He acts like a bully because a bigger bully is sitting on his back, a situation with which I’m intimately familiar. He was probably earnest about helping me, even if it mostly meant helping himself. At the very least, he’s not actively trying to get me killed.

And I’m about to cut his legs out from under him. Or kill him, if it comes to that.

Oh, well.

“—I think we can keep working our way up,” he’s saying. “Now that we’re off probation, we can choose our own targets, and between you and me we should be able to make a lot of scrip quickly. That might let us bring in another—”

“Shut up and listen for a minute,” I tell him.

He pauses, eyes narrowing. “Someone wants you to leave?”

I shrug.

“The Butcher won’t stand for it.” He cocks his head. “Are you going to do it?”

“No.”

“Good choice. They may say they can protect you, but—”

“I’m not leaving. I’m taking the pack.” I fix him with a stare. “Consider this my formal challenge.”

There’s a long silence.