Seven Dials is overrun, when they cut back through this time around. Arran might be anywhere now, but Selah seems to think they’re most likely to find him in a room over a Paleaside taberna. It’s the first place to look, anyway, except that they can barely pass through Seven Dials in the first place to find out. The district’s packed to overflowing with a furious buzz that grows and grows as they move south, and the avenues get narrower until they’re standing there, Tair and Selah, and it’s not a riot. Not yet. Not like they’re murmuring about up in the Arborem behind their tall trees and private sentries, over their worried cups of tea.
They arrive where the crowd bottlenecks into the depths of Longewild Acre, one of the eponymous dials, and they’re still far, much too far away from the center of the district, where they need to pass through. People are shouting, banging on tin kitchen pans and wooden boards and the red clay bricks of passing buildings—trying to move as one, up through Seven Dials toward the Regio Capitolio, up to where justice ostensibly lives. Only no one’s moving, brought to a standstill by something loud and unseen up ahead.
“What’s happening?” Selah asks the man in front of them, a wiry, muscular type with oil-stained hands that have probably never been this far updistrict. He shrugs, barely glancing down at her. Helpful.
“Come on,” Tair says, and plunges into the fray, Selah’s hand tight and sticky in hers.
At first it’s a matter of weaving through bodies, ducking down to find the spaces between in that zigzag way Ibdi taught her not so many years ago, the clunk of both atlas and Iveroa Stone heavy against her hip. Then the bodies begin to break up, and Longewild Acre opens out to the central roundabout, and it becomes clear that what’s happening is chaos.
Gone is the tranquility of the morning, because this is where the Cohorts have chosen to make their stand. This is where they’ve decided to stop the influx of downdistrict rabble coursing upward from disturbing the north end’s comfortable peace. The blockade of green uniforms stretches three dials across and several officers deep, while their comrades-in-arms do what amounts to little less than battle with the citizens of Luxana.
Here a Publica officer shoves a gray-haired woman to the ground, and six strangers run to help her up. Here two men, teenage boys really, smash the windows of a brownstone and are mown down by a blackbag on horseback. Someone sets off a firework, a scatter of erratic gold, leaving a trail of black smoke in its wake.
All this for you, Xochitl, thinks Tair, rooted to the spot where she stands amidst the violent fray. Then—No. You were the final straw.
“Tair,” shouts a voice that belongs to Selah, somewhere to her right, somewhere cutting through amidst the yelling and the running and the breaking glass. “Tair, we have to move.”
And then she’s being pulled, running behind Selah, left hand clasped tight once more in hers, and a flying bottle of something narrowly misses her, and they can’t go back the way they came. The crowd is pressing in too thick and fast and they’re being pushed toward the barricade. Glass is flying, catching in her hair, and she doesn’t know which way they’re darting or why they’ve changed directions, and then a horse rears up out of nowhere and Selah’s stuck to the spot, staring upward like she’s never seen anything like it in her life. So now it’s her turn to pull Selah away, she doesn’t know where just away, except then she turns and she’s face to face with a blackbag and her heart stops for that split second between realization and fear because that unforgiving black baton is sailing through the air, toward her head, about to crack into her skull and—
Someone barrels into her and she’s stumbling sideways, but the nightstick never meets its mark. It hits Selah instead, sending her sprawling to the ground after taking the hit that was never meant for her.
Tair can’t think straight. She heaves her back up she can’t stay down there she’ll get trampled down there there’s blood there’s blood, and there’s an opening just like Ibdi taught her to see, just there, and she just realized she lost her cruiseboard somewhere in the fray but Selah’s hand is still in hers and that’s more important, that’s all that matters, they have to keep moving and—
They’re out of the roundabout.
Back down one of the dials—not Longewild Acre, someplace else, veering east maybe.
Down one of those winding streets that connect the main roads.
It’s darker here and older somehow and her heart is pounding so hard she can feel it at the base of her throat, and they can tuck themselves into an alcove as stragglers run past and Tair can finally get a proper look at Selah.
Blood trickles down in a steady trail, down from somewhere above her hairline, streaking her face and painting her once-persimmon duskra darkest red, and Tair can’t see how bad the damage really is. She isn’t trained for this. She doesn’t know. She’s completely useless. Completely helpless in the face of Selah’s reckless nature, the part of her that will always run headlong into danger to push someone else out of its way.
Skin thrumming with it, Tair holds up three fingers and asks, “How many?”
“Three. I’m fine.” Her voice is shaking.
“No, you’re not,” she snaps, anger mounting. “You’re a godsdamn mess.”
The stolen service blacks are still in her bag, alongside the Iveroa Stone—unmarked and unmarred, thank Terra—and she tears a strip away from the tunic. Selah hisses when she presses it to her temple. She wishes she had an antiseptic, water even. Something to wash the blood away. Some way to be more gentle. But it’s not her nature. She only has what she has.
“Always the fucking hero,” Tair grits out, wiping away as much of the red-black mess as she can and wondering if Selah understands, actually understands that she’s capable of getting hurt. That she’s capable of dying. That her perfect storm of ego and loyalty and sense of righteous justice can’t protect her from nightsticks and charging horses and the million tiny things that threaten to tear the two of them apart. That she is confident, and kind, and good, and ridiculous, and still believes in the best in people, even after everything. That these are the things the world will always seek to destroy.
She rips another, longer strip from the stolen tunic, and it’s satisfying, pouring this frustration and the growing tremor in her hands into something she can ruin, though she does try to exercise a bit more care as she winds it around Selah’s head. It won’t stanch the flow by much. Selah needs proper medical care before the blood dries and sticks to the makeshift bandage. But it’s what she can do.
Selah is staring at her, she realizes. Has been watching her steadily all this time while she worked, something focused and intent in her gaze, and Tair suddenly feels wildly exposed.
“What?”
She shrugs, and says nothing.
“What?”
The corner of Selah’s lip quirks upward and okay no. She doesn’t get to do this. Doesn’t get to sit there quiet and solid and knowing and Tair is angry she is so so angry and it’s all Selah, it’s always been Selah and she could have died and it would have been no one’s fault but Selah’s. And Tair would never have gotten to know for herself what this really was between them, with the long years stretching out behind. And it’s the way that Selah’s face is tilted up just slightly, the way the sun is slipping through the afternoon sky and her face is red with blood but there’s also the wind and Tair wants.
She’s used to wanting. She’s not used to taking.
But here, in a back alley of Seven Dials in the midst of a growing riot, Selah is looking at her like she already knows, and Tair is done with denying herself.
So she takes her wrist and then Selah’s mouth is hot against hers and it’s instinct. Fragile and shaking and fierce, like all that anger was just waiting to turn, and she feels something in herself release, something that she never knew she was holding back. Selah’s mouth is hot against hers and her hands are in Tair’s hair and gripping at the back of her shirt like she might disappear otherwise and Tair thinks she just might.
But it’s the way the leaving feels. Something she never let herself fully know. Something like how they can have lived like this for so long, and never said anything about how much it hurts sometimes. How a person can love and love from so far away, how they can muddle through this and come out alive and breathing and full of the world.
In the space between, they’re just breathing against each other’s mouths, and then Selah turns her head just a little so it’s lips to the corner of her mouth. It’s cold and beautiful. Strange and strong. And Tair’s stomach twists when Selah smiles at her, just a little, their fingers still warm and entwined together.
All right, she thinks, forehead resting against Selah’s, leaning into the arms that wrap Tair in against her smaller frame. Here we go, then. Here we go.