Theo is a keen observer. It’s how they’ve survived this long.
It’s how they know what Griff is doing, harsh words and tougher truths to entice Selah Kleios over to their side. It’s how, despite her historically loose relationship with things like facts and the truth, they know somehow that Griff isn’t lying about what the Iveroa Stone really contains. It’s how, an instant before the throwing star would have hit its target, they know to throw their body across Arran’s and pull him to the ground. The bladed star whirrs overhead, burying itself deep into the side of the berthed sloop instead.
“What—” he just starts to say, but by then the answer is already clear. The Intelligentia must be doing patrol on exits from the underground in the wake of the massacre, and they’ve lingered here too long.
At a glance, Theo counts seven blackbags in all. Seven—no, nine. Two on the water, silent shadows on skiffs. Two more on the wharf, to block any retreat. Four more still, clopping down the dock, the Chief General Blackbag himself at their head.
Shouts break out around them, the opening scuffles of a fight just getting underway. Griff, her concealed blades and brass knuckles at the ready. Tair, flipping the prybar from the underground into her hands with extraordinary grace. Quintus Kopitar, shouting, “Arrest them! No casualties! Take them alive!”
Oh, that’s how he wants to play this?
Game on.
One of the blackbags off the skiff makes the jump across the gap onto the dock, and Arran turns around to land a fist square against the man’s jaw. Theo winces. That’s how knuckles get torn. But now Arran’s landed two, three more blows and the blackbag keels back into the water with a satisfying splash.
Tair, taking on two blackbags to one. Griff, holding Kopitar himself at bay with a smile on her face, like she’s been waiting for this moment all her life. That leaves a blackbag still for each of them, the two on the wharf and the one still on the water too far out of reach. Theo shifts their weight, and reaches for the familiar comfort of their favorite ring knives. But their target is looking up, and then an angry shout rings high above the fray.
Because Selah Kleios doesn’t know how to fight, and Selah Kleios has sought higher ground.
The abandoned sloop is lower in the waterline than it should be, but it still looms high above the skirmish. She’s pulled herself up the rope ladder rotting against its side, and a sharp-featured woman with a bright orange bun is now halfway to following suit.
Arran lurches forward, but they grab his hand. “I’ve got this,” they shout, and shove the pistol they took off Miranda back in the woods of Breakwater into his hand. They had to stash it before going down to the pits, but seeing it now in Arran’s hand makes them feel better, somehow. “You take the one on the water. We’re gonna need that skiff if we want to get out of here.” And at his hesitation, eyes still fixed high on his little sister—“Go!”
They don’t need to tell him again.
Arran elbows an incoming officer out of the way and swings himself across to deal with the one on the skiff. Theo forces themself to tear their eyes away, to grab onto the fraying rope ladder and climb up after Selah and the orange-haired blackbag. They make it to the top of the waterlogged deck just in time to find themself at one point of a three-way stand-off.
Selah, hands wrapped in the foredeck rigging, like she might try escaping further up. The officer, sword in hand, daring her to move another inch. And Theo, ring knives at the ready, who’d like to see her try.
“Wait!” they call across the deck to Selah. “Don’t move.”
Because more wooden boards have cracked and fallen away than they had anticipated from the pier, and more want to give way underfoot. One wrong step and any one of them could go crashing down through the structure beneath. Theo scans across the deck, eyes squinting in the dark, searching for the telltale signs of a board that’s still structurally sound.
Got it.
“Listen to your friend,” the blackbag says, and creeps forward slightly, testing out the board in front of her. “The boss wants you alive, but he didn’t say a thing about unharmed.”
One more step, that’s all they need, and . . . there.
The blackbag steps onto the board, the one that’ll carry them both, and Theo doesn’t waste a moment. They launch themself forward in an instant, balanced on the mere space of half a foot, and fast enough to hope their velocity will make up for it if they’re wrong. A half-second of falling through air and they have the woman caught in a lockbind, her throwing stars falling through the skeleton of the sloop along with the rotten boards to either side.
But not the board they’re standing on.
That one holds.
Theo doesn’t give her the satisfaction of last words. They pull her close, back flush against their chest, and drive the knife up from under the blackbag’s chin. It’s easy. It’s not personal. It’s the most personal thing in the world. Retching on her own blood, the woman shudders, then stills, and Theo pulls the blade back out from her skull and lets her fall away, crashing through the sloop and down into the water below.
“Come on,” barks Theo, and throws out their hand.
Selah doesn’t hesitate. She takes it, and they pull her close, and edge down the single wooden board back to the dock-side rail of the boat deck. Griff is still down there, surrounded by fallen bodies—Kopitar there among them, his own sword through his throat—and taking on the final two blackbags with her bare hands. Arran’s got control of the skiff, is steering it around closer to the pier. And Darius Miranda is climbing over the side of the sloop, another Cohort regulation sword acquired from somewhere and pointing right at their heart. Where in the savage Quiet did he come from?
Theo backs up on instinct, putting themself between him and Selah. They have to hand it to him. He might look like death, but the man just refuses to die.
“You brought friends this time.”
“I learn from my mistakes,” he says, and for a man with a concussion, his gaze is remarkably sharp. They still wouldn’t trust him with that blade. “So. This is where we stand, is it? Theodora Nix.”
They hesitate, just for the briefest moment. Because Darius Miranda is a man who stands for everything Theo finds abhorrent in this world, who defends it as infallibly right. Because they hate him, but they can’t shake the itch that there’s something else hiding in the barest tremor of his voice—Respect. Regret.
“Yes,” they answer, one eye on the fight below where Arran is coming around, one eye on the wounded animal in front of them. “This is where we stand.”
And they grab Selah around the middle, pulling her bodily to the side as a single, clear shot rings out. Darius Miranda goes down hard, for the third time that day, and in the space across his shoulder blades, dark blood seeps in generous blooms.