Page 33 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“Really.” Ky blows out a breath. “Interesting. And not a little frustrating. Your timing fucking sucks, Taj.”

“My timing seems pretty stars-damned good from where I’m sitting. You’d prefer I turned up tomorrow?”

She looks thoughtful. “True. You probably wouldn’t get much out of my strangled corpse. But what I mean is, if you’d done your thinking a little faster, then events might have taken a different turn.”

“Hard for me to know that when you haven’t told me anything,” I snap, a little defensive. “Is it my turn yet?”

Ky raises her eyebrows. “Go ahead.”

“Who are you?”

She smiles. “Kycilea Tranto. I told you.”

I grit my teeth. “No, I mean—what the fuck is going on? Who was that guy Star killed? Why do you have a Hod pass? Why do you think there are assassins after you? And—”

Ky holds up a hand, chuckling. “All right. All right. I get it.” She takes a deep breath. “Let me see if I can give you the short version.”

THIRTEEN

My family,” Ky begins, “as I said, is one of the Council families on Hod. You know what that means?”

“Just that the Council is in charge of the Arbiters. And everything else.”

“It’s not a bad summary. There’s about a dozen families that have seats. We spend most of our time trying to undermine and bankrupt each other.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Quietly despising the neighbors is a traditional Hod pastime,” she says. “Anyway. After my mother died, it was just my father and me. We had money and connections, which made us powerful, but also a tempting target. And somebody got tempted. My father was assassinated.”

She says this with such calm, as though it were a mildly unpleasant but indisputable fact. I’m watching her eyes, though, and I can see what it costs her to bring it up. Her voice, outwardly flat, has a hollow undertone.

“I’d have thought you had”—I wave a hand vaguely—“guards. Protections.” I can only imagine what Hod money can buy in terms of security.

“We did,” Ky says, and now her voice turns bitter. “Our head guard was a man named Gestian. He served my father since before I was born. Taught me to fight. He’s practically my uncle.” She swallows. “He was part of the assassination.”

“Oh.”

“What was supposed to happen next was that I would recognize my impossible position and quietly submit to one of the other families, who would absorb our holdings. Probably the Dreikins; Devon Dreikin is an avaricious motherfucker. I’d be married off and, likely as not, quietly disposed of once everyone forgot about me. Since I didn’t find any of that appealing, I grabbed what I could carry and snuck down to Yesod.

“That leaves them in a bit of a bind. They can’t officially loot my father’s corpse with me still around, unless they can lean on me to give my permission. On the other hand, everyone knows the lower tiers are dangerous. If I were to turn up conveniently dead, that would solve everything. So. You know. I’m a little jumpy. Following so far?”

I’m a little startled at the idea of placid Yesod as a murderous hellhole. “More or less. What about Pader?”

“Pader Cavcante.” She lets out a long breath. “Pader was supposed to be my way out. He is—was—heir to a Yesod family that’s done very well for themselves. The Cavcante are probably richer than some Hod families by now, but you can’t move up a tier just by making a fortune. The Council has to approve new immigrants, and the Council thinks everyone not born on Hod is a half step from a crazed cannibal.

“But if you marry into a Hod family—a Council family, no less—then things get a lot easier. A foot in the door, so to speak.”

“You were going to marry him?”

Ky sighs. “In my defense, it sounded like a good plan. I need money and protection; they’ve got both, and they need a way up to Hod. Win-win. Weslai told me that Pader understood this was going to be an in-name-only thing; he already had plenty of girls. They put me up in that house while we were negotiating. Then we finally got to spend some time with each other and… well. You saw what happened.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“So I just made a whole bunch of nasty enemies.”

“You probably don’t have to worry about it. Nobody knows you were there except me, and they’re hardly likely to listen to what I have to say. But now I’ve got one of the richest families on Yesod—who are, it hardly needs to be said, a bunch of murderous crooks—coming after me, and Gestian and the Council assassins and the Arbiters and probably the cats and dogs for all I know.” She flops back down on the bed, face-first. “Starting to think I should just jump into the Heap and be done with it.”