I leave Wyn at the little house, refusing his offers to come with me. For all that Jun helped me and said he forgave me, I can’t forget the look of terror on his face in the alley after I dragged him with me into Kahge. The way he said the word monster. It sits like poison in my chest, how frightened of me he was once he’d seen the truth about me with his own eyes. I want so badly to believe that he trusts me, that he would turn to me for help, that there could still be something between us. So I don’t stop to ask myself how likely it really is—not until I burst into Old Thien’s and see Pia, her booted feet up on the table.

She swings her legs down to the floor and gestures with a gloved hand at the seat across from her.

I don’t dare vanish, and so I sit down opposite her. Blast, blast, blast. If she knows about this place…if she knows about Jun…she’s been following me. I should have known she wouldn’t just be sitting around in that hotel. Thank the Nameless I always vanish in Nanmu. At least she can’t know where Mrs. Och’s house is—where Theo is.

“Have you made up your mind?” she asks.

“What?”

“I know you aren’t going to give up the boy, of course. But you could still give yourself up. Then Casimir would go on chasing Mrs. Och around the world, and there’s no guessing who might prevail, but it wouldn’t be your problem anymore. You’d have gold, adventure, freedom of a kind. Better than being broken. I’m hoping you’ve thought it through.”

“I’ve had a fair bit going on since I last saw you,” I say.

“So it would seem,” she says, looking me over. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it back at all last night, the way you were bleeding. And yet here you are, walking in as if you’d never been harmed. Remarkable.”

“I’m not going to work for Casimir,” I say.

The goggles whir but her expression does not change.

“I’m not working for Mrs. Och anymore either, as it happens,” I add. “I was a bit too independent for her liking. I’ve been sacked. So I reckon I’m out of this business altogether.”

She gives a shattering little laugh—it sounds like thin glass hit with a stick.

“You’ll never be out of it. Not now that Casimir has seen what you can do.” She leans across the table toward me. “What happened to you? You disappeared, and you came back bleeding. I thought it was a kind of visual trick, the disappearing. But you went somewhere and something hurt you, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

I half want to tell her. She wouldn’t stare at me in disbelief or horror. She would not be frightened, appalled, sickened. But I keep my mouth shut.

“Shey could help you, if you need help,” she says.

I shudder, remembering the sad-faced, hunchbacked witch.

“I shot her a few times.”

“She wouldn’t hold it against you.”

“Like you don’t hold it against me, the way I stuck a knife in you and left you for dead?”

She smiles.

“I am not interested in vengeance, Julia. I am done with the whirlwind.”

The image of Haizea, bleeding-eyed, her teeth bared, rises up in my mind.

“Done with it?”

My head is spinning, but she sits back, suddenly chatty and relaxed. “I had my chance with it. Casimir understands vengeance, and he can be generous. He indulged me, gave me a part to play in the destruction of the Sidhar Coven. There was a satisfaction in it, I won’t deny. I made my keepers crawl. Some of them I left for dead, and some of them I left with pain and nightmares. But it is an ugly sort of work. The whirlwind has no end.”

Casimir. If I had the chance, if I had the power, what would I do to him? Casimir, who drowned my mother. Casimir, who broke my hand and nose. Casimir, who took Theo. But it was me who took Theo. That was me.

“Those who terrorize the weak so rarely imagine the day when their victim might grow to be strong. I even found the man who came to me when I was small, the one I told you about, who took from me things I didn’t yet know that I had. He loomed so large in my memories of him, and yet when I found him again, he was an ordinary-size man, getting on in years, with bad teeth, ill health, and a wife who despised him. He was puny and cowering. I let the whirlwind rise. I let it tear him limb from limb and scatter the pieces of him far and wide. There is no right or wrong in the eye of that storm, only the power of it, only the certainty of what it will do, that nothing in its path can stop it. But it is a powerful thing to contain within oneself. If it does not tear you apart, at least it leaves you changed. It empties you out as it does its work. I would say that, yes, there is satisfaction in it, even a kind of joy, but less than you would think, and afterward, well…the landscape is changed. Everything that used to matter has been blown apart. There is so much vacant space and nothing to replace the fury.”

I don’t want to sit here chatting with Pia about what a lunatic she is, and yet I find myself riveted all the same.

“Do you regret it?”

“No. But I have had my fill of it. I have had my fill of strife and rage and even hope. This, here”—she folds up the bottom of her glove and flashes the disk of hot metal on her inner wrist at me—“this is the closest I have come to knowing peace. The freedom from choice. You might find it a relief.”

I shake my head, my insides shriveling. “I’d die before I let him take me like that.”

“You know as well as I do…no, not quite as well as I do, but even so, you know that there are a great many things worse than death, and that you will submit to Casimir rather than undergo them.”

The silence stretches between us.

“What do you intend now that you are no longer in Mrs. Och’s employ?” she asks.

“I’ll figure something out.”

“Last chance, Julia. Please consider carefully. Am I to tell Casimir that your answer is no?”

“You can tell him whatever you bleeding like,” I say, getting up.

I am at the door when she says, in a sort of drawl, “Before you came to Tianshi, I’d almost forgotten that you had a brother.”

I freeze.

“The cripple,” she says. “Was it Scourge?”

I turn toward her slowly. Her hand is on her knife, ready for me.

“What have you done to him?”

“Nothing. I expect he’s out having a good time with his girl. Pretty, isn’t she?”

“Stay away from him.” But my voice shakes badly when I say it.

She shrugs. “Your friend Jun, though…he is easier to follow than you are. You have this irritating habit of suddenly disappearing. I gave Count Fournier’s address to Lord Skaal as a gesture of cooperation. He’s been looking for anyone who helped the princess. So if you happen to find that either of them has been harmed, it was not by me. Not directly, in any case.”

I pull the door wide and run.