Thunder burst. Rain began to fall. We did not stop running. Through crowded, noisy streets, down narrow, lonely alleys. Long after we knew we lost them. I’d never run so far before in my life, and although Ash had gotten a ton of bad-ass warrior training once upon a time, she’d also spent four years sitting still. So I don’t know where all that stamina came from. Fear, partly, but more than that. From our clasped hands, I think.
Ash and me, we made each other better.
Finally, we arrived at the stable where we’d left Maraud. The place had the sweet coffee stink of dragon droppings, and under that the smell of bleach.
“Cops stood by and watched,” the attendant said, talking to her coworker, when she handed me the reins.
“Watched what?” I asked, wishing immediately that I hadn’t.
“Attack on the Underbridge,” the woman said. “Biggest one in ten years, they’re saying.”
Radha. Connor.
“Hundreds of Destroyers,” the stranger continued.
She looked at me. I looked back. Both our faces were rigid masks.
We didn’t know each other. Maybe she was an othersider; maybe I was a Destroyer or a sympathizer. Maybe we would have been friends; maybe we hated each other. But we were both scared.
“Thank you,” I said, and smiled, and she smiled back.
Ash switched on the little radio the woman had given us. Steered the dial through a sea of static until we arrived at a polished voice saying—
Multiple eyewitnesses report hearing the attackers call out for the Refugee Princess, who they believe was in hiding at the shantytown, and who may have been the target of the raid. . . .
All the air went out of me.
“We abandoned them,” I croaked.
I tried to say something, and couldn’t. Tried to take a breath, and couldn’t. Collapsed into coughing.
“Let’s go,” Ash said. “Solomon, let’s go.”