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I let out a slow breath. Pa doesn’t need me, and worse, I’m not sure he’d even like having me around. Amma’s right. I ought to make my own choices.
I don’t need him.
She pulls back, ducking her head to hide her expression from me. “I need to start dinner—”
“I’ll stay,” I say. “I’ll tell Pa, and then I’ll come back. For good.”
She rests her hand on mine and squeezes once before she lets go.
Alone on the landing, I drain the last of the sundust tea. It takes me only minutes to set the room to rights and to grab my waxed mosscloth shawl from my room. I leave unpacked my two changes of clothes and book of fairy stories. They’ll be here when I come back.
I bundle up and make my way out.
My fingers tingle, like they’re waking up from being numb, and I wrap them around my neck. Sometimes I can feel the shadow of the choices Ma and Pa made like fingers around my throat.
My ma was a woman with a plan. She feared nothing, not the Storm, not the Regia. She spoke out when it would’ve been better to stay silent, decrying how little the Regia cared for us in the fifth ring. She publicly denounced what folks only whispered in private, that we ofthe fifth were just human buffer, another wall against the Storm if the ones of stone and ikonomancy fell.
And people listened.
The Regia’s meant to protect us all from the Storm, even the poor, the tired, the cursed. That’s what it means to bear the Regia’s mark. When the golden ikon is tattooed onto the skin of one of the royal bloodline, the Great King grants them power, immense power. The only power that can hold back the Storm.
But for over a century, the Storm has only grown stronger—and the Regias have grown only weaker.
Ma led all those who listened in a fight against the last Regia, Prince Dalca’s grandfather. Pa was always at her side, armed with ikonomancy the likes of which no one had ever seen. They overthrew the Regia. But before any real change happened, the Wardana caught her.
They gave her one last choice: death by the hangman’s axe, or death by Storm. She chose the Storm.
My father chose to run, with me in tow. He’s been running ever since.
So have I. I’ve chosen nothing for myself; I’ve let his fear keep me small. I’m not a fool—I know his fear has also kept me safe. Is it wrong that I want something more?
My thoughts drive me away from the edge of the fifth and toward the boundary wall that separates us from the fourth. It’s only a matter of a few hundred feet, but even this little distance from the Storm relaxes the tension in my shoulders. I pull back my shawl and recognize the same easing reflected in the faces around me.
It takes me the good part of an hour to get to the white iron gates that lead from the fifth to the fourth. There are four sets of gates: theblack gates to the north, the white gates to the east, the golden gates to the south, and the crimson gates to the west. The golden road is the only one that leads to the first ring, all the way to the Regia’s palace. The rest of them stop at the second ring.
Amma told me there used to be a reasoning to the colors; merchants and tradespeople from the fifth once took the crimson path, farmers from the sixth ring took the white, students from every ring took the black, and the gold was for the high ringers to descend. The Wardana fly right over it all, naturally.
Guards in gray uniforms stand at either side of the gates, watching the messy queue of people intending to cross. Their chests are puffed out, their cruel eyes watching for a petty excuse to exercise their power. I suppose they’ve got to get their respect somehow, when everyone knows they wear gray because they failed to earn Wardana red.
Every now and then, they pull someone aside and question them. But no one needs transit papers to go up to the fourth, where the markets are. Security is tighter at the crossing into the third ring, as it’s home to the Wardana headquarters, the old entertainment district, and the residences of people with more means than most, but still less than those who live in the second. I’ve never been higher than the fourth.
I duck my head and shuffle my way forward through the white gates, up the ash-colored stairs and into the fourth. A guard with a drooping black mustache frowns in my direction. “Hey, you!”
I jump, heart racing. Before I can say anything, he comes at me, and darts right past, seizing the arm of a sandy-haired kid behind me.
I take the rest of the stairs by twos, without looking back.
At the top of the stairs begins the Pearl Bazaar, so named for its proximity to the white gates. Stalls line the walkway, filled with merchandisemeant to appeal to fifth-ringers; rolls of pre-waxed cloth, ikonlamps proclaimed to last a decade, mancer-made drying powder to sprinkle around the house to keep the damp out, amulets meant to ward off the Storm that do little other than give false hope—they sell just about every household need and then some. But there are no pearls here, and neither is there a single grain of food.
Apart from the stormtouched, most people qualify for rations to get bags of mancer-made food every month. But it’s never enough. It may start out as just enough, but by the time bags move from the ikonomancer stronghold in the third, through the fourth, into the fifth, so many hands have dipped inside the bags that what’s left is painfully little.
Above, the circle of sky framed by the Storm grows dark, slipping from a violent sunset red into deep dusk. I count the hours till I’m meant to meet Pa. There’s still a half hour to spare, but I make my way to the meeting place, a little old shrine that sits just past the outer crush of the bazaar. Pa used to take me to it when I was small, and I trace our old steps through stall-lined streets.
The ikon-powered streetlamps of the fourth flicker on, and almost at once, tired-eyed refugees from the long-gone sixth ring and the lost streets of the fifth cluster around them. I can’t blame them for wanting a little light to ward off the shadows. At night, the darkness can be absolute. Only the circle of sky saves us: the little pinpricks of starlight stave off the feeling that we’re all trapped in a cave where a monster prowls, where there’s no way out, where there’s only the wait until it gets us.
The walkway opens up into a wide courtyard. The dome-shaped shrine sits on a raised platform in the dead center. The iridescent stoneshines even in the night, reflected a hundred times in the fountain at its base. A crowd of hungry-eyed people cluster around it, waiting. Some are here for faith; others come for food.
Two brown-robed priestesses walk through the crowd, struggling under the weight of a massive, steaming pot. Another priestess with hollow cheeks rings a bell, and the hungry line up for a bowl of steaming, spiced stew. The doe-eyed priestess doing the serving throws in a kind smile free of charge.
