Release from Service

Would you kill a child?

That is one of the questions they ask you. The Recruiters pay attention to every aspect of how you respond. Do you recoil in shock? Twist your face in revulsion? Do you pause and consider the question, and, if so, how long do you take before responding? They measure these things, noting every tic and breath and word choice. You can lie, of course, and they measure that, as well. Is your lie convincing? Do you glance to the left? How much conviction is in your voice?

For most, Would you kill a child? is a difficult question.

I answered immediately. Worst of all, I meant it.

1. ARRIVAL

I arrive in the island city of Xu on a perfect morning. One with blinding tropical sunshine pounding down from a cloudless blue sky. The Mantis keeps the cowl on his cloak pulled over his head and pays no attention to the weather; the only thing that ever interests my master are people, and then only in a distant, clinical manner. He leads me through a bustling waterfront of sailors and landsmen, where dockworkers load barrels of molasses and hogsheads of beef and piles of timber onto merchant ships bound for the mainland. This is his home city, but my first time in an island colony, and while I’m accustomed to the heat, I’m not used to such humidity. Sweat beads across my scalp and soaks my shirt, making my skin chafe where my twin blades sit in their inverted sheaths against my back. I could remove the cloak draping my shoulders, but that would expose my blades and hint at what I am. Anonymity is a powerful weapon—that was the first lesson my master taught me.

The Mantis brings me to a rooftop overlooking a central plaza. Crushed basalt cobblestones pave the square, a striking feature unique to the volcanic islands. A twelve-foot statue of a regal-looking man in flowing robes dominates the middle of the space. At the far end is the mansion of the Tyressry of Xu, a man with the family name Kaab. I don’t know his given name, only that he is one of the Kyo’Vyar, the People of the Eye, and the administrator of this colony. He must have failed in some extraordinary capacity for his peers to send for us.

The Mantis hands me the telescopic lens he keeps in his pouch. “What do you see?” he says.

I let my eyes scan the plaza below, then double-check with the lens. “A pair of couriers moving past the statue. An elderly Kyo’Rusalk just below us selling folding hand-fans. A half-dozen pedestrians entering the square from the south. There is a beggar crone sitting against the building at the western edge, two sentries with muskets guarding the stairs leading to the mansion, and a garden keeper watering the boxed plants on the terrace. The gardener moves like a dancer, meaning he is likely a bodyguard with training.”

My master waits for me to finish. When I say nothing further, his hand snaps out from beneath his cloak and cracks across my face. I reel from the blow, pinpricks of light blooming in my vision like stars. Blood tastes tacky and metallic in my mouth.

I’ve missed something.

The Mantis watches me. There is no malice in his gaze. No passion, no anger. Just curiosity tinged with annoyance.

I wipe my mouth and reassess the people below, checking each with the lens. The vendor, the guards, the old beggar crone … Her hands are wrong.

An elderly beggar living in the isles would have hands the color of dark bronze, veins like tree roots and dirty fingernails. This woman’s hands are clean, calloused but young. Otherwise, her disguise is flawless. Her face remains hidden underneath a wide hood, silver strands of hair dangling out the front. She wears a filthy robe and sits on a shred of sailcloth, her back against the side of a building, head drooped and posture off-kilter as if she suffers a bent spine. She holds a chipped bowl out before her.

“That isn’t a beggar,” I say.

My master slides his gaze back to the square. Had I missed it a second time, he would have dismissed me back to the ship.

“You should know,” the Mantis says. “She is an acquaintance of ours.”

The fact that this revelation doesn’t come with a slap means he didn’t really expect me to know, but he does expect me to figure it out. I suppress my frustration. The Mantis is one of the oldest of the Kyo’Assyn, second only to the Moth, and his lethality is legend. What he is not, however, is forthcoming.

I can’t see the woman’s face, so I scour my memory. I’ve forged few relationships in the decade since my recruitment. There have been some few marks that required intimacy, but they are all dead. There is my family, who I haven’t seen in years, but those hands are too young to be my mother’s, and while my sister would be of an age, she lost the tip of one middle finger to a falling boulder when she was eight, and this woman’s hands are whole. Not a family member, then. That left the other Kyo’Assyn.

The People of the Carapace number only seven, plus their apprentices, and only among each other do they form any real kinship. My master is a step beyond this; I believe the Mantis incapable of friendship. He is endlessly curious, but behind his cold scrutiny there is only more coldness, as if he is not a man but a golem made from clay, a thing built and not born. His peers afford him distance, but great respect.

I have trained with a choice few of those peers, a regal pyromancer called the Firefly and a surgeon-trained killer called the Locust, and I’ve heard descriptions and stories of all the others. The Mantis would, on occasion, take their apprentices to co-train with me, as well.

One pupil, a girl my own age apprenticed to the Firefly, joined us several times. She was the daughter of a trade magistrate and one of the People of the Eye, and in our first interactions she intimidated me. As apprentices, we were both of equal caste, but in those first years I was still in the mindset of a villager and saw her as a rich aristocrat from the capitol. The Mantis pitted us against each other in a series of training exercises. She beat me three times before my master said that if I lost again, he would release me.

I remember those hands clearly, now.

“That is Jen’lyn Reed,” I say.

The Mantis gives a shallow nod within his cowl. “She arrived in Xu with the Firefly ten days ago.”

The Firefly is an older version of her apprentice, a lady of court whose delicate manner belies her penchant for fire and explosives. I scan the square a third time but do not see her.

“Are we to assist them in eliminating the Tyressry?” I ask. The Kyo’Vyar would sometimes send more than one Assyn for a difficult assignment. Eliminating the administrator of Xu might qualify.

“No,” the Mantis says. “And you won’t find the Firefly. Jen’lyn killed her master just after they arrived.”

I look sharply at him. “What?”

He makes a thin-lipped frown. “Jen’lyn is the primary reason we are here. We must perform a release from service.”

2. RECRUITMENT

Nine years ago …

“Ty’rin Dovu,” the first Recruiter said. “That is your name?”

“It is,” I said.

The Recruiter wrote something in her book. Her pinched brow and pointy nose reminded me of a headmistress who enjoys disciplining children more than instructing them. She hadn’t stopped scribbling in her leather-bound tome since we sat down.

The other three Recruiters stared at me across the table with near unbearable scrutiny. Then, they started their examination. The two sitting beside Scribbling-woman were twin brother and sister. They asked all their questions in tandem, one acting bored and the other engaged. Every few minutes, and without any apparent cue, they would switch personalities. The fourth Recruiter was plain-faced and balding. He never blinked.

The Recruiters’ questions came at me without rhythm. Sometimes they indulged long stretches of silence between each question, other times they allowed me barely a breath before launching their next inquiry. They asked my opinion of the government; what I thought of the caste system; did I hunt for food; did I lick my blood from a cut? The topics ranged all over the place. Some questions were political, some were logical, some made no sense whatsoever.

According to my father, Recruiters for the People of the Carapace rarely visited interior villages. They usually stuck to the big coastal cities or the island colonies, and recruitment only occurred when one of the Assyn needed an apprentice. I was of an age to begin apprenticeship, and this was a rare opportunity for one of the Wosyn to jump to a higher caste, but only if I answered their questions correctly—more correctly than the thousand other candidates across the Imperiate.

I did my best to speak evenly, with no emotion showing on my face, trying to mimic my questioners. I kept my hands stuffed in my vest pockets, clenching and unclenching the knickknacks within: a polished garnet, a firecracker, the torso to one of my sister’s dolls.

My parents sat with us in the beginning, but the Recruiters didn’t allow them to speak. I think the Recruiters wanted to see if I looked to them for answers. My parents could not hide their fidgeting, my mother dry-washing her hands over and over, my father bouncing one knee. After the first half hour, the Recruiters ordered them to leave. Then it was just the five of us sitting around the scuffed table in my family’s one-room hut, me on one side and them on the other, a single whale-oil lamp between us. The Recruiters had brought the lamp. No one in my village could afford whale oil.

At one point, my brother Ray’fin burst through the door proffering a frog and squealing with an exuberance only a three-year-old can muster. My mother bolted in a second later. She snatched up the boy and murmured apologies. The Recruiters took this in stride. They never looked upset or disapproving or pleased. They provided nothing to indicate what they thought of me.

“Why do you wish to be Kyo’Assyn?” Scribbling-woman asked.

“To escape life as a village farmer,” I answered honestly.

“And what will you forgo to achieve that end?” one of the twins droned. His sister leaned forward and followed with, “Would you leave behind all your possessions and passions to become a mere instrument?”

“I have nothing worth holding onto,” I said, and that was also true. I couldn’t stand this nameless village on its way to nowhere. I resented my unambitious parents, my simple neighbors, my life of dirt and toil. My siblings were the only ones I might miss, my little brother adorable in his innocence, my gentle sister sweet as summer lilacs. But like everyone in my community, they were stuck here, their future written. Ray’fin would take over my parent’s homestead. Sun’rie would marry some neighbor’s son and bear four to six children, who would then labor in the fields until old enough to bear children themselves and perpetuate the cycle. The people here tilled, they planted, they harvested; and then they did it again, twice a year, every year, until hardship and old age ground them into dust.

I’d recently begun to wonder if I would make it to adulthood before I killed myself.

The plain-faced Recruiter knitted his fingers. He said, “Do you know the purpose of the Kyo’Assyn?”

“The People of the Carapace are the Imperator’s armor of blades,” I said. It was the beginning of a maxim picked up by every child in every huddled conversation on every playground across the continent. “They are the shadows cast from the light of the Imperiate. They are the whispers that prevent screams, the knives that cut away rot, the shepherds that cull the herd. They are the seven that serve and the shields that are swords.”

All four Recruiters just stared at me. So, I added, “And they do this by killing people.”

Plain-faced man cocked his head to the side. “And who is it you think they kill?”

“Exactly who they’re told to,” I said.

Scribbling-lady paused her writing. Plain-faced man unknit his fingers, then gave her a single nod.

She made a final mark, closed her book, and all four Recruiters stood. I stood with them. She said, “Ty’rin Dovu, we hereby raise you to the People of the Carapace and apprentice you to the Mantis.”

“Wha—I am? I mean, you do?”

She pulled a fine dagger from her belt and placed it on the table, then pointed at Plain-faced man across from me. “Your first assignment is to terminate this man. Now.”

It was a test. I didn’t hesitate, nor did I immediately go for the dagger. Instead, I dropped my firecracker into the oil lamp, grabbed the dagger, and sprinted to the opposite end of the room.

The fiery explosion wasn’t large, but it was hot enough to sear a man’s face should he catch it wrong. The miniature bomb blew apart the lamp and set fire to the table. All four Recruiters jumped back, the twins cursing, Plain-faced man shielding himself with his cloak. At the opposite side of the house, I turned and flung the dagger at him with all my strength. They would not expect a village boy to know how to hurl a dagger; it is a difficult skill, especially with a weapon not balanced for throwing. Even so, it was a good toss; I’d been practicing on rats and ground-squirrels ever since I’d found my father’s skinning knife—anything to avoid farm chores.

Plain-faced man reacted faster than I’d ever seen a person move, slapping away the dagger with a curved short-sword seemingly pulled from thin air. A second blade whirled across the room and thumped into the log wall behind me, quivering beside my throat.

My parents burst into the hut, staring wild-eyed at the scene. My mother grabbed a blanket and beat at the flames on the table. My father prostrated himself before the Recruiters, begging forgiveness. All four ignored him.

“The Firefly would enjoy this one,” Plain-faced man said. “A pity she took an apprentice last month. Regardless, I did not expect that. I will take him and see how he does.”

Scribbling-woman sniffed at the smoke filling the room, then reopened her book and made a note.

The man returned his blade to a hidden sheath on his back, then crossed the room. He pointed at the identical blade stuck in the wall. “Take it. Once we reach the capitol, we will forge you a twin to match it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you taking me to the Mantis?”

He pulled the cowl up on his cloak. “First lesson, Ty’rin: anonymity is a powerful weapon.”

3. INQUIRY

Jen killed her master?” I say, incredulous. “That’s impossible.”

“The Firefly was as mortal as anyone else,” the Mantis says.

“But Jen had to know there would be repercussions.”

“Yes,” the Mantis says. “Yet she killed her anyway. I have confirmed with several sources. Now Jen’lyn waits here, in plain sight.”

To say she waited in plain sight was a bit inaccurate; to passersby she appeared a bent and broken vagabond. To one of the Assyn, however, she sat woefully exposed. It didn’t make sense.

“So why?” I ask. “What is she doing?”

“That is what you will find out,” the Mantis says. “It is not without precedent for an apprentice to murder her master prior to retirement. Impatience often leads to recklessness. However, Jen’lyn’s subsequent behavior does not fit that narrative. I would know what motivates her recent actions.”

“And you want me to just go down and ask her?”

“She may open up to you. Intimacy also leads to recklessness.”

I feel my face reddening. “When has Jen ever been reckless?”

“Only once that I have witnessed,” he admits, “when she became involved with you.”

I wipe sweat from my brow to hide my discomfort. “All right, say she does explain herself, then what?”

“Then, Ty’rin, we do what we came here to do.”

This preamble is to sate my master’s curiosity. I know this. I don’t know why I asked.

The thought of killing Jen settles on me like a slow sickness. It leaves an ache, like the weariness that comes with too little sleep. I accept it—I’ve come too far to shy from my purpose—but this will be difficult, and not just because she is a trained killer.

“Find out what you can,” the Mantis says, “but do not try to release her on your own.”

“Where will you be?” I ask.

“Watching.”

I sigh, my master forthcoming as ever.

I make my way down to the street. More and more people trickle into the square, colonists on their way to the docks and petitioners hoping for an audience with the Tyressry. I take my time crossing the expanse, boots crunching on black stones, casual, unhurried. Just another traveler from the mainland. Perhaps one of the People of the Hand in search of new merchandise for trade in the capitol, or a government messenger waiting for a reply to some missive. This is how I present myself, though I do not doubt Jen notices me as soon as my feet touch the cobblestones.

She remains sitting as I stroll near, her head bowed, bowl lifted in supplication. She smells of sweat and offal, but that is mostly her robe. I sit down beside her and lean back against the building.

“You split your lip,” she says.

“You smell like a privy.”

I can’t see her face, but I feel her smile underneath her hood.

“I’m glad you’re here, Ty.”

“I’m not! The islands always this humid? Place feels like a damn steam tent.”

“You know,” she says, “for someone born a farmer, I’m always amazed at how much you whine.”

I shrug. “Well, I wasn’t a very good farmer.”

I feel her smile again.

“I miss humor,” she says. “Before my recruitment, I used to share jokes with my ladies-in-waiting. We had code phrases so my mother and her sycophants wouldn’t know we were mocking them. It remains one of the few aspects of my childhood I don’t despise.”

It always strikes me how much Jen and I have in common, despite coming from opposite ends of the caste hierarchy.

“Are you comparing me to a lady-in-waiting, Jen?”

“Don’t be foolish. You bellyache far too much for a lady-in-waiting.”

My turn to smile. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her playful jabs. “So what are we doing here, Your Radiance?”

“You are here to kill me.”

I consider how best to respond. “No,” I say, “the Mantis is here to kill you. I’m just here to chat.”

She emits a soft sigh. “I hope that’s true, Ty. You are my only chance.”

Her only chance? What is that supposed to mean? She has no chance of surviving this day, no matter what has transpired between us. I am no lifeline. Despite my fondness for her, I won’t hesitate to plunge a blade through her eye should my master order it. She must realize that.

“Jen …” I begin.

She interrupts me. “Do you believe in redemption, Ty?”

I am good at dealing with the unexpected, but this segue takes me off guard. “Redemption from what?”

“From the sorrow and emptiness we leave in the world.”

“That is the most naive thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Is it? Tell me, how many people have you killed?”

Again, the question surprises me. “I have no idea.”

“Yes, you do. You know exactly how many.”

Fourteen people, plus one. The number comes unbidden. I keep it to myself.

Jen sets her bowl down, does not lift her head. “I have killed twenty-nine people. Eighteen men, eight women, and three children. The first twenty-four didn’t bother me. We Assyn are instruments, are we not? The knives that cut away rot, and all that.”

“So our creed states,” I say. “What happened with the last five people?”

Jen takes her time answering. “My supposed Trial came last year. The Trade Administration voted out Mother, and her former compatriots decided she knew too much to live. They thought matricide an appropriate test of my loyalty.” She makes a snorting sound beneath her hood. “None of them realized how much I despised Mother. Killing that abusive bitch was easy. I even made certain she saw my face, just before the firework under her carriage exploded. She was number twenty-four.” Jen’s voice is an octave lower than normal, almost a growl. I’ve no doubt she would go back and kill her mother again if she could.

“The next marks were my real Trial,” she continues, “though only I know it. I terminated a seamstress and her three children, children sired by a tax minister who decided he didn’t want evidence of his past infidelity. At my mistress’s instruction, I set fire to their shack and burned them alive.”

I am reminded of a time I tripped and fell against the iron cooking-stove built into the back of my parent’s hut. I was maybe four years old, and it remains one of my earliest memories. One I would forget if I could. I keep my face neutral, and say, “Sounds like you completed the assignment.”

“I did,” Jen says, “but I failed the Trial. Because those four, they bother me. They were not rot.”

“You have lost resolve,” I say. It’s a cold statement, but the work we perform requires detachment. No one appreciates that more than I.

“Maybe,” Jen says. “Or maybe I found something. What do the dark-haired peoples in the north call it? A soul, I think?” She laughs as if this is funny. “Did you ever think I would say such a thing?”

“No.”

“Me neither. But then, never before have I been unable to sleep for the screaming inside my head. I can hear each of them: the mother, her teenage daughter, her two young sons; each of their voices distinct, all begging and pleading and crying inside my skull.”

I know the voices. I’ve built walls to silence them.

“If that is how you feel,” I say, “then maybe this is for the best.” Jen’s walls have crumbled. It saddens me, but there is nothing I can do for her.

“It is,” Jen says. “I knew for certain when I terminated my twenty-ninth person—killing my own mistress does not haunt me.”

“So you want to die, is that it? Is that why you waited for us to come for you?”

Jen answers with a question of her own. “Did the Mantis tell you why the Firefly and I came to Xu?”

“Not in so many words, but if I had to guess, the Kyo’Vyar placed a mark on Tyressry Kaab.”

She nods. “That is what I thought, too. It wasn’t until we arrived that I learned the real reason.”

“So … the Tyressry wasn’t your target?”

“Oh, he was the target,” Jen says, “but the Vyar did not mark him.”

“I don’t follow, Jen.”

“Tyressry Kaab committed a grave transgression, and his fellow Kyo’Vyar want to send a message.” Jen looks up finally, and I’m shocked to see tears in her eyes. “They sent us to kill his infant son.”

4. TRAINING

Five years ago …

The dart lanced into my left buttock. I swore and ripped it free.

She wasn’t in the fountain. I’d thought for sure she lay in the fountain.

I raised my hand to acknowledge the hit and looked back down the busy street. My mark emerged from one of the barrels stacked against the cooper’s shop. I had checked behind the barrels as I stalked past but didn’t think to look inside them.

I sighed and leaned against the fountain lip, annoyed at my mistake and nauseated from the reek of the city. The smarting in my backside made me wince.

Jen’lyn tucked her blowgun up her sleeve as she approached, her eyebrows lifted in that smug manner of an opponent who’s beaten you and intends to passively rub your nose in it. “The fountain?” she said. “Really?”

“Thought you were hiding within the pool.” I realized how stupid it sounded as I said it.

She sat on the basin next to me, made a show of looking down at the water. “Not sure how I’d get in and out of there unnoticed.”

“I could do it,” I said. I’d no idea how.

“You upset? You get petulant when you’re upset.”

“You shot me in the ass.”

She patted my shoulder in mock empathy, then leaned in and whispered, “Maybe I can make it up to you tonight. If, that is, your master doesn’t pummel you worthless.”

As if on cue, the Mantis appeared among the street pedestrians. He wore the attire of a merchant of middling means, a once-valuable long-vest that was now thin and soiled, good boots with a hole in one toe, a cane to aid a fake limp. No one looked twice at him.

He leveled his unblinking stare at me. “You are dead, Ty’rin.”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Why?”

“She knows the city better than me.”

“Is that a reason or an excuse?” The Mantis wore an expression of cool disdain I’d come to know as dissatisfaction. In the four years I’d been with him, I’d never seen him angry. Only unimpressed. Such moments of disappointment were dangerous for me.

“I dismissed the barrels because I could not fit inside one,” I said. “But Jen is half a foot shorter and forty pounds lighter. I hunted her as if I hunted myself. I should have thought as my mark thinks.”

The Mantis accepted this. He would allow a mistake, but only once, and only if I reconciled it.

The rest of the day’s lessons involved walking the streets of the capitol, memorizing walkways and hidden alleys, identifying bottlenecks, learning approaches, and tailing random targets. Jen’s errors were fewer than mine, but I did not resent her. Quite the opposite: I’d come to enjoy her company—even when she killed me.

That night I climbed onto the roof of our inn to sit underneath the rising moons. The capitol was not as hot as my village out west, but it stank with a cloistered stuffiness. Pigs and rotting wood and heaped sewage and endless body-sweat piled atop one another in an effort to offend my nostrils, the effect of thousands of people all crammed into a city not three miles wide. The stench became slightly more tolerable up on the rooftops.

I sat on the sloping tiles and wetted an oilcloth, then ran it over each of my twin blades. They were my favorite weapons, somewhere between a dagger and a short-sword. Each was thin and curved, forged with a single edge and almost no cross guard, identical to the pair my master carried. The Mantis had designed them to kill quickly and with stealth. We Assyn do not fight battles, he taught. We do not fight at all. We terminate threats to the Imperiate in the most efficient manner possible. The twin blades and the blowgun were my master’s preferred methods—each of the seven had their specialties—but poison, arson, suffocation, musketry, all were on the table when terminating a mark. Stealth and anonymity remained our best weapons, but for myself, the twin blades were a close second.

A shadow materialized atop the roof edge to my left. I kept oiling my blades as if I hadn’t noticed. The shadow slid across the tiles, moving behind me.

“If you’re going to impale me with another dart,” I said, “I’d prefer you stick my shoulder. Sitting is rather uncomfortable right now.”

Jen cursed under her breath. “You heard me climbing.”

I pointed at the three moons rising in the eastern sky. “Caught your shadow as you crested the rooftop. You needed to approach from farther west.”

“Ugh,” she groaned, plopping beside me. “Amateur mistake. I must be overtired.”

“Whose fault is that?”

She smiled at me, violet eyes catching moonlight and taking my breath away. “Haven’t slept enough the past few nights, for which I accept fifty-percent blame.”

I schooled my body with an effort of will. “Do not think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Oh? What am I doing, village boy?”

“Practicing. The Firefly is a seductress. She uses her beauty and charm to get close to a mark. She teaches you to do the same.”

“Did you just call me a harlot?”

“I called you beautiful and charming.”

Jen laughed. “Good save. And we’re certain I am the one doing the seducing here?”

“I’m not following you up onto secluded rooftops in the middle of the night.”

She pursed her lips and considered me for three heartbeats. “I’ll give you this: you’re perceptive for a bumpkin farmer from the countryside.”

“The Mantis didn’t pick me for my knowledge of turnips.”

Jen lifted her palms. “So I’m practicing. And you know I’m practicing. Doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.” She touched my forearm with the tip of her little finger. “And don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it.”

I took a deep breath. “As long as we both know what this is.”

“You afraid you’ll wind up engaged?”

I narrowed my eyes at her.

She said, “I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not the marrying type.”

I set my blades aside. “What I’m afraid of, Jen, is that at some point they’re going to test us. The Mantis keeps hinting at it, calls it the Trial of Devotion. We’ll need to prove ourselves willing to take out any mark assigned to us.”

“A test?” Jen said. “All they ever do is test us.”

I shook my head. “This is just training. The Trial will be a different kind of test. A mark we won’t want to kill. If we fail, they will release us from service. If that mark turns out to be you, I must be able to follow through.”

Challenge flashed across her face. “For your sake, you better hope it’s not me.”

“That’s the problem, Jen. I already hope it’s not you, and not because you’re good with darts.”

She peered at me without speaking for long enough to make it awkward. Finally, she bit her lip and said, “We’ve chosen our path, Ty. I will terminate any mark the Vyar assigns me. That is the deal I made to escape my mother’s tyranny, and it includes you. Until then, I take my enjoyments where I can.” She touched my arm again. “I expect you to do the same.”

“Are we still talking about killing each other, or something else?”

She leaned close to nuzzle my ear. “Take your pick.”

It was too much for me. I could partition my feelings, hold a part of me separate to do what I must, should that day come, but I was not a golem like the Mantis. I needed connection, to feel something for someone who wasn’t a mark or a master. I needed someone who understood the loneliness.

Jen’lyn acted casual, but I knew she felt that same need. I only hoped our masters wouldn’t use it against us.

5. DISILLUSION

His son?” I exclaim.

Jen gives a sad nod. “The Kyo’Vyar sent us here to kill a baby, Ty.”

I slump back against the building. An image tries to push its way forward in my mind. A cherub face filled with innocence. I slam the mental door shut.

“Why in the world would the Vyar mark a baby?” I ask.

Instead of answering, Jen rises to her feet. I join her, hastily signaling behind my back for my master, wherever he is, to HOLD.

Jen says, “Will you walk the square with me?”

“As you wish.”

We begin a slow circuit of the plaza. Perhaps Jen hopes to glimpse the Mantis along the rooftops. He is likely up there somewhere, but I do not see him.

“The Vyar marked the baby as punishment,” Jen eventually says. “Tyressry Kaab stepped outside his caste, and you know how the People of the Eye respond to things like that.”

“Yes, but marking an infant for death is harsh even for them.”

Jen scoffs. “And you call me naive. You don’t know them the way I do. The caste hierarchy is everything, and those beneath them are dispensable. A single life in a lower caste means nothing.”

“But the Tyressry is also Kyo’Vyar,” I say. “His son would be, too.”

“You’re not listening. I told you, Tyressry Kaab stepped outside his caste.”

I realize what she means. “The baby’s mother is of lower birth.”

“Kyo’Wosyn,” Jen confirms. The People of the Blood. They are the lowest caste, the Imperiate only considers foreigners beneath them. The Kyo’Wosyn are the tradesmen: the cobblers, the coopers, the rope-makers, the blacksmiths. They are also the farmers. My former caste.

We move past the central statue, a granite carving of some great Imperator, or maybe a former Tyressry, I can’t really say. He wasn’t Kyo’Wosyn, whoever he was. No one carves statues of Kyo’Wosyn.

“They must consider the child an abomination,” I say. “Still, the worst they would do would be to remove the Tyressry from office. Strip him of wealth and reputation. They wouldn’t go so far as to kill the child. There must be more to this.”

“There is,” Jen says. “Tyressry Kaab didn’t just impregnate some country girl. He married her.”

I lift my brows at that. An administrator having an affair with someone of lower standing is far from accepted, but nor is it unprecedented. Any resultant child led to disgrace, but again, nothing that warranted our presence. For the Tyressry of a city to wed a Kyo’Wosyn … That is unheard of.

“I didn’t believe it either,” Jen says. “But then I investigated and yes, Tyressry Kaab fell in love with a young farm girl, married her in secret, moved her into his estate, and then conceived a child. The other Kyo’Vyar want to make an example of him.”

The old woman selling hand-fans cackles at us as we walk past her stall, trying to woo me into buying one of her “lovelies.” A fan would feel nice in this heat, but I want both my hands free. I wave her off and say, “Marking a child is savage. I won’t pretend otherwise. But we may not choose our marks, Jen. You know this.”

“That is exactly what the Firefly said. Right before I killed her.”

Underneath my cloak, I shift an arm back, ready to draw a blade should she make a move.

Jen notes the subtle change. “You’re still not listening,” she says. “I’m not going to kill you, Ty. You are going to save me.”

“I’m not, Jen.”

She reaches out, deliberately slow, and touches my arm, just as she did five years ago. “I believe you’ll try.”

I step out of reach. “You know I’m beyond sentimental trappings. What makes you think I would, even if I could?”

“Redemption, Ty’rin. I know what happened in your Trial.”

6. TRIAL

Three years ago …

“Master, what are we doing here?”

“This place does not please you?” the Mantis asked.

“Please me?” I said. “You’re asking if I’m pleased you brought me to this worthless collection of hovels in the middle of this worthless backwater province? No, nothing about this hole of a town pleases me.”

Grime-caked homes lined both sides of the muddy wagon ruts that served as the main thoroughfare, most houses no larger than a single room. A few shops broke up the proceedings: a basket-weaver here, a thatcher on the corner. This backward town was so far behind the times the homeowners still used thatched roofs. People in dun clothing huddled in small groups amid the drizzling rain, conversing about the weather, wasting-sickness in someone’s flock, a shortage of good brass, more about the stupid weather. No one hurried anywhere. No one had anywhere important to be.

We passed a stake in the ground tacked with a ragged sign stating: Town of Dorin. In an earlier life, I’d lugged my family’s soybean and turnip crop past this sign twice a year. Five miles dragging a loaded cart across the countryside, just to hand it off to some oily snake in merchant’s clothing who looked at me with a disdain often reserved for rats and cockroaches.

I hated Dorin.

The Mantis didn’t address my complaints. Instead, he said, “Do you know why there are only seven Kyo’Assyn?”

I took a deep breath, considered the question. “Conformity to the balance of sevens,” I guessed. “Seven castes, seven great cities, seven People of the Carapace.”

“Partially,” my master said, “but there are more practical reasons.” He didn’t say what. He waited for me to work it out on my own.

“The same reason we may never select a mark,” I reasoned. “We are a caste of shadows trained to kill. In greater numbers we might pose a threat to the Vyar.”

The Mantis nodded. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled, an indication I’d impressed him. “Very good. But there is a third reason, even more practical than that.”

I worked through what I knew of my caste. Seven instruments of death: The Mantis, the Moth, the Locust, the Firefly, the Spider, the Wasp, and the Beetle. Each one specialized, each one a master of the trade. Only the People of the Eye and the Imperator himself stood above us. We’d spent years learning our work, moving about the Imperiate and the outside world with silent impunity, never wanting for food or money or resources, everything provided.

The Mantis and I strolled past the blacksmith’s forge as I rolled these things over in my mind, the sound of hammer-strikes banging into my ears. The man working the bellows was a skinny, sweat-covered youth, the one at the anvil older and covered in burn scars. In their shop hung horseshoes and farm implements, some metal cookware, a few wagon axles. Across the street, a bakery offset the blacksmith’s stench of charcoal and hot metal. In dryer weather, the baker would likely be displaying her loaves.

“Economics,” I eventually said. “We provide a service, but we do not contribute to the economy. We are expensive.”

“Correct,” the Mantis said. “We are a standing army outside the military, but like any army, we cost a great deal. The more specialized the soldier, the higher the cost, and we are the most specialized soldiers in the world. Between the army and the navy and the extravagances of the Vyar, the Imperiate cannot afford a large number of Assyn.”

“I understand,” I said. What I didn’t understand was what any of this had to do with Dorin. I didn’t say as much though. The Mantis never rambled—he would make his point soon enough.

We entered the town square, a swampy, open space with a circular stone well in the center. We’d dressed as poor farmers, maybe a father and son from some outlying homestead, our cowls pulled up against the spitting rain. The townspeople didn’t give us a second glance.

The Mantis said, “You are an investment, Ty’rin. A tremendous expenditure of time, energy, and resources. Like any investment, you come with risk. The Vyar wish to mitigate this risk as much as possible. The recruitment process is the first stage of mitigation. My tutelage is the second. We are here for the third.”

I grasped his meaning. My mouth went dry.

The Mantis stopped at the well and placed his hands against the stonework. “What do you see?”

I answered without thought. “Two village women ten points to the east, leaving the square. A middle-aged man lugging firewood due south, coming toward us. A maid and a child taking shelter underneath that wayward pine at the edge of …”

The maid was missing the tip of her middle finger.

Sun’rie was no longer the child I remembered, instead a young woman of sixteen. Her smile remained the same though, a radiant sweetness that lit the world around her. She beamed down at my little brother, wiping dirt from his face where he’d splashed through a mud puddle. Ray’fin had grown into a cute boy of nine, chubby in the cheeks and still full of energy. They both wore traveling cloaks, Sun’rie holding a covered wicker basket, Ray’fin clutching a soggy stick like a sword. They must have traveled to Dorin that morning to purchase supplies, bread from the baker, maybe.

“When a Kyo’Assyn feels an apprentice is ready,” the Mantis said, “he or she will petition the Kyo’Vyar for a mark of sufficient challenge.”

“Sufficient challenge,” I whispered. I could not take my eyes off my siblings.

“This challenge is not one of skill,” the Mantis said, “but one of conviction. This is why we call it the Trial of Devotion.”

“You petitioned for a mark on my family.”

“I may not choose the mark,” the Mantis said, “but I may make recommendations. Do you consider my recommendation cruel?”

The question was part of the Trial. An assessment of how I would react, just like during my recruitment. I answered honestly. “Sun’rie and Ray’fin are no enemies of the Imperiate. They pose no risk to anyone or anything. Marking them is malicious, nothing more.”

“I agree,” the Mantis said.

I turned to look at my master, trying to understand. He dug into his satchel and produced a stoppered waterskin and a blowgun, setting both on the lip of the well. He removed the stopper from the skin and positioned it upright, so the contents wouldn’t spill. A foulness like a midsummer latrine wafted from within. The Mantis then produced a blowdart capped with a glass vial. The dart’s steel tip rested within a thimbleful of milky liquid.

“Your assessment of this town is accurate,” the Mantis said, removing the dart from the vial and loading it into the blowgun. “It is useless to the Imperiate. In fact, it is more than useless. It is a drain. The cost of sending the Kyo’Rusalk out here, purchasing the harvest, and then transporting it back to the nearest city is more than the crops are worth.” He set the loaded blowgun back on the lip of the well. “One remedy is to simply stop sending the People of the Hand out here. Allow the farmers and tradesmen to keep what they produce and utilize a barter economy. However, that separates them from the Imperiate and sets a dangerous precedent. Thus, the second option is to eliminate them.” He pointed to the waterskin. “A gift from the Locust. The blood of a diseased cow mixed with the excrement of a man dying of cholera. Drop it into the well, and it will wipe out a majority of this—how did you put it?—hole of a town. The suffering will be great and prolonged, but the Locust knows his pestilence. Do you consider this course of action cruel?”

I regarded the bag of slow, indiscriminate death. The reek of it made me gag. “I do.”

“Ah,” the Mantis said. He indicated toward the blowgun. “A second gift, this one from the Spider. She extracts the poison from a tiny octopus found in the island colonies. A coated dart will cause paralysis within twenty seconds, unconsciousness within a minute, and death within five. Quicker in a child. It is a painless and merciful end.” He lifted his chin toward my brother and sister. “The young boy or the town. The choice is yours.”

My jaw trembled. I felt too hot, suffocating within my oilskin cloak. The Mantis watched me, soaking up my every physiological reaction.

The local with the firewood labored past. He gave us an affable nod. My master transformed into a man to return the greeting, his empty face suddenly open and friendly, making some jibe about lazy youth these days unwilling to work in foul weather. The local man laughed and said he’d voice as much to his sons when he got home. He then continued on his way. As my master turned back to me, the amicable good humor sloughed from his face like rainwater, replaced by the hollowness of the golem, a creature knowing no joy, nor sorrow, nor mercy.

“How can I have a choice?” I croaked, barely audible for the ash in my mouth. “We never choose. Ever. That is the central pillar of our creed.”

“No,” the Mantis said. “That is a fiction. We always have a choice. We are instruments of the Kyo’Vyar, but we are mortal instruments, every one of us, and so we choose the weapon we will be. We can be a blunt explosive or a hidden blade. We can refuse our duty altogether. There is nothing stopping us, only the consequences of our actions. Will you be the blade and place the betterment of this community—a place you despise so much—above some sense of fraternal kinship? Or will you be the blunt instrument of carnage, exerting mass cruelty to spare an innocent boy? This choice is the Trial.”

“And if I refuse to be either?” It was an absurd question. I already knew the answer.

“I will release you from service, and you will leave this world a man of principle, instead of an instrument of death. I will then terminate both your brother and the town of Dorin. The Kyo’Vyar will know the fruits of their investment, Ty’rin. As will I.”

There was another option. I could attack my master, a course of action he would no doubt be ready for. I would lose, and then die. So would Ray’fin and the people of Dorin.

Across the town square, Ray’fin giggled as he played at fencing with his soggy stick, whacking playfully at my sister’s legs. Sun’rie rolled her eyes. She deflected his blows with her basket and picked up a stick of her own, returning his attacks with equal energy.

Would you kill a child? the Recruiters had asked me. I’d answered immediately. Worst of all, I meant it.

The dart struck Ray’fin in the neck, right at the carotid artery. He issued a short scream, more a squeak of surprise, really, but to my ears it was a wail of purest agony. It bored into me like a fetid arrow, drilling into the pitch-black stone that had once been the heart of a simple village boy.

7. CHOICE

If you know about my Trial,” I say to Jen, “then you know I passed, and I cannot help you now.”

We complete our circuit of the plaza and stop back at Jen’s bedding of sailcloth. She lowers her hood to allow the sun to reach her face. I wince at her movement and signal again for the Mantis to HOLD. I don’t know where he is, but he either sees my signal or believes there is more to learn, because no dart or blade strikes Jen down. He won’t wait much longer, though; more people enter the plaza every minute. While a crowd can be useful in some operations, here, a press of people get in the way.

Jen looks skyward. The morning rays illuminate a tired but still beautiful face. “I asked if you believe in redemption, Ty, because I have to believe in it. I have to believe we can be more than what they make us.”

“You think I should feel guilty, the same as you.”

“I think they select us for our desire to escape, teach us how to kill, then remove any vestige of remorse. I wonder if we can rediscover that remorse once it’s gone.”

“It would seem you are proof we can,” I say.

“I failed my Trial, Ty. The remorse is all I have now. I am talking about you.”

“A Kyo’Assyn cannot be remorseful.”

“And what are we then!” Jen says, turning fierce. “Are we to be unfeeling weapons who murder at the whim of gluttonous tyrants? The Kyo’Vyar do not use us to protect the Imperiate. They use us to protect their own positions of power!”

Nothing she says is untrue. To say we serve a greater good is to be blind to the flaws of our puppeteers. Nevertheless, the Recruiters were clear on the sacrifice required to become Assyn. We joined this caste willingly.

“We agreed to be weapons of the Vyar,” I say. “You to escape the prison of your station, me to escape the tedium of farm life. It was selfish, and the balance is that we must kill who we’re told.”

“Then let us be selfish,” Jen says. “Your master is a dog who bites on command. So was mine. But we don’t have to be. We can choose to be something else.”

I remember a dreary day in a town a thousand miles west of here, where a boy and his sister played among the puddles, and I made a choice.

“It is too late for me, Jen,” I whisper.

“Then why do you still hear your brother’s voice when you close your eyes?”

I take an involuntary step back. How could she know that? I have buried it, layered stone and mortar over that scream until it is no more than a distant hum in my subconscious. Hidden from everyone, even myself.

Jen’s eyes widen at my reaction, and I understand the gamble she made. She didn’t know, she guessed. But she guessed correctly.

“I waited here in Xu,” Jen breathes, “because for a job as difficult as a release from service, I knew the Vyar would send an Assyn familiar with the islands.”

Someone familiar with Xu. Who more familiar than one who hails from here? “You knew they would send the Mantis.”

Illustration by Emerson Rabbitt

“And with him, you.”

A small crowd now occupies the plaza, nearing a hundred people. Petitioners wait at the bottom of the stairs. Everyone looks to the mansion. Tyressry Kaab must make an announcement each morning before hearing petitions.

Jen squints at the sun’s position once more. “It is time.”

The tall mahogany doors to the mansion creak open. “Time for Tyressry Kaab to make his appearance?”

“Time to discover if such as us can find redemption,” Jen says. “Ten days ago, I stood in this very spot, at this very time of day, waiting for my mark to appear. I chose to terminate the Firefly instead.”

“You said the Tyressry wasn’t your mark.”

“Tyressry Kaab doesn’t make the morning address. His wife does. Your nephew never leaves her arms.”

The world stops. My peripheral vision blurs, and it is as if I look down a long tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, my sister steps from the doorway onto the landing. Sun’rie is now nineteen and thicker in the waist, but still stunning in a belted gray gown and gold marriage choker. She cradles a bundled baby in her arms.

My sister walks to the top of the stairs, smiling and nodding as the people clap for her. My mouth goes dry, just like the last time I saw her. She doesn’t see me at the back of the crowd.

Whatever power my sister has over the Tyressry has spread to the citizens of Xu. They adore her—I can see it even before she speaks—and I understand why. She stands with authority but not arrogance, her face displays an honesty never witnessed among the People of the Eye, an earnestness that says she sees you, understands your plight, and is on your side. She is the epitome of what the Kyo’Vyar fear, a rising lowborn with the charisma and intelligence to inspire the masses, and she has an unprecedented platform in her marriage to a Tyressry.

Beside me, Jen’s dirty robe falls to the ground. Underneath she wears black cotton breeches and a tight-wrap shirt, a utility belt of pouches and throwing-daggers, a thin short-sword in a downward facing sheath on her back, incendiary grenades strapped to one thigh. No hiding now. No one except the People of the Carapace carry weaponry like that. Even if the surrounding patrons don’t recognize her as Kyo’Assyn, she stands out. It is a move to force my hand.

“I was to hurl a firebomb at your sister during her morning address,” Jen says. “An example to anyone who thinks to move above their station. I chose to hurl it at the Firefly instead.”

Sun’rie is orating now, telling a story of hardship and loss, of striving for more. It is a story of hope. Her voice is strong, maternal, resonant. The Vyar will never allow her to live.

Jen is trembling, her face flushed and her breathing fast. She knows the Mantis’s death stroke will come any second. She plays her last card.

“I have loved you since the night on the rooftop, Ty’rin. For I am a woman, not an instrument. I did this for me, and for the hope of what I saw in you that night. This is your true Trial of Devotion. Now. Choose.”

I have heard some few speak of the sensation that time slows during a near-death experience. Of the sense that during moments of great consequence, the universe pauses to appreciate the gravity of what transpires. I look now at Jen’lyn and know something similar, my heartbeat drawing out in an aching boom. It pounds my chest like some great slow-ringing bell, the air around us too heavy, the sunlight too bright. I realize then that this woman, who is no tool nor slave nor beast, is the single most courageous person I have ever known.

She is also an utter fool.

Time snaps back into cadence and I draw my left-hand blade in a blur, the draw itself an attack, slicing toward Jen’s neck in a move perfected over a hundred hours of practice.

She never breaks eye contact. Even when the flat of the blade slaps against her carotid artery and the poison dart pings off the steel. She’s foolish to think I knew how the Mantis would attack—he’s never so forthcoming. Still, one does not spend nine years studying every move a man makes without learning his preferences.

Jen releases the breath she’d been holding and a look of joy I’ve never seen fills her violet eyes. Her smile is empyreal. “Good choice, village boy.”

With an effort, I break my gaze and follow the dart’s trajectory. The Mantis leans against the statue base to my left, in the middle of the square, his gray cloak making him near invisible against the weathered granite of the monument. He lowers his blowgun with an expression of puzzled shock, quickly replaced by irritated disappointment.

“Only if we survive the next twenty seconds,” I say.

8. CONSEQUENCE

Now …

The blowgun vanishes up my former master’s sleeve, and he draws one of his hidden twin blades, held in a reverse grip. He pushes off the statue and walks toward us.

There is no bravado in his approach. No salute or swaggering challenge. Such things are the conceit of storytellers. The Assyn do not fight, the Assyn kill. I can draw-cut a slice to someone’s liver and then hide the blade before my mark feels the wound, but I do not know any defensive parries or how to disarm an opponent. This duel will not be a prolonged affair.

“Any chance you’ve hidden a pistol on you?” I say to Jen.

“Afraid not,” Jen says.

“At least he isn’t carrying one either.” If he did, he would’ve shot one of us by now.

“What is that woman wearing?” someone in the crowd says.

“Is that chap holding a sword?” another says. People are beginning to notice us.

I know better than to suggest running. We might escape, but the Mantis would hunt us, then terminate us unseen. This is our best chance, with the man before us, in the open.

“He’ll go for me first,” I say to Jen. “It will be your best shot.” I have no illusions of surviving the attack myself. I am fast and skilled; the Mantis is legendary.

A slow-match flares in Jen’s hand. “I can give you a chance.” Her eyes flit to her feet and back.

“Guards!” a woman yells. “Those two carry swords!” Commotion among the people nearest us. Surprised murmurs, people backing away.

The Mantis continues his silent advance. Twenty paces away. I know he wonders what we will do.

Fifteen paces. My sister halts her speech.

Ten paces. Behind us, a deep voice yells, “You there! Get down on—”

Jen drops the burning match into her collection bowl, the one she’d proffered as a beggar. Not an empty bowl, but one with a trio of black-powder cartridges and sharp obsidian pebbles in the bottom. She times it perfectly. At the first hissing flare, her foot shoots forward, kicking the bowl away from us and straight at the Mantis.

The smoky bang rips across the square; men and women scream and cover their heads. The Mantis lifts his cloak against the blast, turning his face from the flying stones. The explosion is loud and flashy, but not lethal. It is a distraction. I let fly my blade in an underhand toss aimed at my former master’s throat. It is a throw he cannot see for the blinding smoke between us. It is a throw to save my life, the life of Jen, and the life of my sister and her newborn son. A throw for a chance to be something else.

And just like nine years ago, the Mantis counters it.

He moves with impossible speed, his sword flashing in an arc to deflect my blade and his other arm snapping forward in a throw of his own. The second of his twin blades twirls in the air and strikes me in the chest, right at my heart. It would kill me if I’d remained five paces away, but I jumped forward as I threw, leaping into acrid smoke. Instead of the blade tip, the hilt slams into me, making me grunt. I don’t slow. Three running strides and I’m there, slashing out my second blade. I do not expect to hit him, he’s simply too fast, but he must sidestep to avoid my attack. I roll as I miss and the Mantis’s counter-slash nicks across my hairline. Had I not gone low it would have cut my neck. I come out of my roll and feint, but don’t lunge. It’s enough to make the Mantis twitch to the side. And there, in that second, we both know. Jen and I have him flanked. Time slows again.

The next dragged-out moment lasts a fraction of a heartbeat, but I see it unfold with perspicuous clarity. The Mantis blinks and I see his face change. A constricting of the eyes, a whisper of a smile. I like to think he feels a measure of pride for me, but with him it is impossible to tell. The fleeting moment passes, and the Mantis twists to avoid Jen’s throwing-dagger whistling past his shoulder. The dodge leaves him unbalanced, and he is unable to escape my follow-up strike, slashing deep between his ribs. People run and scream around us, Jen’s explosion eliciting a general panic. The Mantis staggers and I dance back as some youth barrels into him, spinning him full around, and then Jen’s second throwing-dagger thumps into his back.

My former master falls to a knee. Blood gushes from his side as his blade drops from his fingers. He looks at me with his forgetful face and coughs blood onto his chin. He slowly shakes his head, until Jen’s third dagger skewers the back of his neck and he topples forward onto the cobblestones, released from service.

9. REDEMPTION

Would you kill a child? For me, the answer was clear. The truly difficult question would have been: And can you live with yourself afterward?

Both these questions are unfair, of course. No one can know such a thing until he or she faces it. I look down at the man who made me what I am, and I wonder whom he killed during his own Trial of Devotion, if it made him into the golem I knew. I wonder if I would have become the same, if not for Jen’lyn.

The plaza clears of people. Only the elderly fan merchant and the guards remain, the old woman gaping at us as if we are creatures risen from some nightmare, the guards stepping carefully toward us, three of them now, muskets at the ready.

“On the ground, both of you!” a deep voice yells.

Jen and I square to face them.

The one who spoke freezes. “Kyo’Assyn,” he whispers.

The new guardsman, a kid no more than fourteen years old bearing scars on his cheeks, waves his gun back and forth between the two of us, while the third sentry, a sweaty fellow who’s forgotten to pull back the hammer on his flintlock, stammers, “Wh-who are you? Identify yourselves!”

“He is the ghost of a boy I once knew,” Sun’rie says from behind him. She didn’t flee at the explosion like everyone else. Instead, she descended the stairs, baby still bundled in her arms. “It is you, isn’t it?”

I swallow the lump in my throat. Force myself to look her in the eye. “Hello, Sun.”

She pulls her child protectively close. “Ty’rin. Why … why are you here?”

I have only one answer. “To perform a release from service.”

She looks at the body beside me, blood soaking the stones at my feet. “That man’s?”

I shake my head. “My own.”

She is very still. “Was that man Kyo’Assyn?”

I nod.

“Is he the one who killed Ray’fin? I know the Assyn are responsible; I dug the poison dart from Ray’s neck. Is that the man who did it? Was it because of you?”

I can lie and spare my sister the knowledge of my fratricide. It might be a mercy. In a sense, it would only be a half-lie, for while the Mantis did not shoot the dart into my brother’s neck, he did orchestrate the mark. The Assyn flourish in this murk of misdirection and half-truth, but I am no longer Assyn, and there can be no redemption in a half-truth.

“No, Sun,” I say. “It was the other way around. I killed Ray because of him.”

Pain moves across her face in a rippling wave. A wash of betrayal and horror that starts at her left eye and moves in a diagonal down her nose and jaw, stopping at the right corner of her chin. Something cold follows. A pitiless hardness I don’t recognize on the sweet girl remembered from my youth.

“The Mantis gave him an impossible choice,” Jen says. “He sacrificed your brother to save an entire town. Today he sacrificed his future to save you and your—” Jen stops. Something is wrong.

What do you see? My sister stands beside her three guards, her son cradled in one arm, her other hand placed over top. One guard remains awestruck by the sight of us, the third remains nervous, but the newcomer in the middle is different. The scarred young teen has his musket trained on Jen, a determined calmness about him. The elderly woman selling fans is … no longer to my right.

The youth taps the stock of his musket twice with his finger, a signal. Movement behind me.

A shot cracks across the square. Not from the guards but from the mansion beyond. A musket ball shrieks past my ear and I crouch instinctively. Behind me, the fan-seller halts in petrified stillness, a tessen war fan with sharpened iron spokes poised to decapitate me. She then crumples to the ground.

The Moth. Sometimes the Kyo’Vyar send more than one Assyn for a difficult task. A task such as a release from service. But if that is the Moth, then her apprentice—

“Jen!”

A second shot splits the air. Jen hops backward. Her face is bloodless. She stares straight ahead into the blue gun smoke curling in front of her.

No. Please no. Not after all this. Not her.

Jen doesn’t fall. Instead, the youth with the musket collapses, a gaping hole passing through both temples. Beside him, Sun’rie points a smoking pistol, a second flintlock in her off hand. The cloth wrap swaddling her supposed child pools at her feet, a ceramic doll’s head rolling across the cobblestones.

The two remaining guards are as confused as I feel. They swing their guns about wildly. Sun’rie catches the barrel of one, points it at the ground. “You have stumbled into Kyo’Assyn business. Go home. Forget everything you saw here. Do not speak of this. Ever. Am I understood?”

The chill in her voice does not belong to my sister. Nor do firearms. The two guards drop their weapons and run, all too happy to get away from this hard-eyed killer who swaddles flintlock pistols like a baby.

Jen is first to speak. She states what must be truth, though I can scarcely believe it. “Sun’rie, you are an apprentice, as well.”

“A talented one,” announces a man at the stair-top. He holds an exceptionally long musket, sharpshooter sights attached to the barrel. He descends the stairs and I recognize him as the gardener from the terrace. The one I remarked moved like a dancer. He is a lanky man maybe ten years my senior, and he exhibits a wry intelligence I could not appreciate from distance. His is the careful boldness of one who has overcome many trials, a confidence born of experience and streaked with gallows humor.

“Tyressry Kaab,” Jen whispers.

The leader of Xu pauses next to Sun’rie and touches her elbow, a tender question in his gaze. She gives a weak smile and small nod. Yes, I’m all right. He then rests his long musket across his shoulder, takes the unfired pistol from Sun’rie’s hand, and walks past me to where the Moth twitches on the ground.

“Be glad neither of you co-trained with this sadistic hag,” he says, glaring down at the woman. “Back when I co-trained with her, she made me paint her precious fans with my very own blood. Can you believe that? Cut me to ribbons for no other reason than to watch me suffer, then amused herself as I decorated her weapons with my own lifeblood.” Tyressry Kaab waves a finger toward the young man Sun’rie shot. “Believe me, we did that poor fool a favor. She exsanguinated her last two apprentices.” He then leans over the Moth, whispers something I cannot hear, and shoots her in the face.

Tyressry Kaab is a sharpshooter who trained with the Assyn. Now he has an apprentice of his own.

“You are the Beetle,” I say.

He straightens and waves gun smoke from his face. “And you are my brother-in-law. I’ll admit, I did not know how this introduction would play out, and I certainly didn’t foresee all this, but I think it is a pleasure to finally meet you Ty’rin.” He performs a flawless court bow, then turns to Jen. “And of course, the spirited apprentice to the Firefly. I was half a breath from putting a lead shot through your heart before you decided to throw that incendiary at your master. You saved me a good deal of trouble, little miss firebrand, and for that, you have my thanks.” He executes a second court bow.

Jen answers my question before I ask it. “I didn’t know, Ty. I knew she was your sister because you told me about her hand. That’s all.”

“Anonymity can be useful,” the Beetle says. He jerks his head at the body of the Mantis. “I’m sure that old sociopath taught you two something similar.”

“How?” I demand. “How are you here, Sun’rie?”

“I’m here because of you,” Sun’rie says. “Mother and father died from typhoid four years ago. I don’t know if you know that.” I didn’t. “Then, after Dorin, I couldn’t just stay in that house, alone and helpless after losing everyone. I traveled to the capitol and petitioned the Kyo’Vyar for an apprenticeship.”

I turn to the Beetle, unbelieving. “And you took her?”

“She had a good pedigree,” he says, “and who would think this gentle hummingbird capable of pulling a pistol? She’s perfect.” He makes an abashed grin. “Turns out, I didn’t realize how perfect.”

“What does that mean?” Jen says.

The Beetle lifts an amused eyebrow at her. His eyes flick to me, back to her. “You of all people should know, firebrand.”

“You really did fall in love with her,” I say.

The Beetle winks at Sun’rie. “Utterly forbidden, such a thing.” He rejoins my sister, and the look they share is the same one my parents shared when we attended a neighbor’s wedding. It is the same look as I saw my mother give my father when they walked through the wildflowers that lined the fields after a good rain, the same look my father gave my mother when she announced she was pregnant with Ray’fin.

“And the child ruse?” I ask.

“It’s not a ruse,” Sun’rie says.

The Beetle places a hand on her belly. “He won’t join us for another three months, that’s all.”

“She won’t join us for three months,” Sun’rie amends, and for a moment, the girl I remember is back, beaming like a clear sunrise.

The Beetle chuckles. “We’ll see.”

“You were waiting for Ty’rin,” Jen says, “weren’t you? You knew the Vyar would eventually send the Mantis after you, so you waited out in the open, just like me.”

The Beetle huffs. “Until this morning, I’d no idea what you were doing here. You suddenly turned on your master and then inexplicably hung around like a bad cough. Sun insisted we wait to see what you’d do once Ty’rin arrived. A rather reckless insistence, I thought, but as usual, she made the right call.”

I look to my sister. “And why were you waiting for me, Sun? Was it so you could kill me?”

“Honestly,” she says, “I don’t know. Maybe. I only knew that if I went into hiding before we spoke, I might never have this chance. To shoot you or turn you, to learn the truth about Ray, I’m not certain what I expected. But I knew I needed closure.”

I struggle to keep my voice steady. “I killed him, Sun. I put that dart in his neck while you two played in the rain. I can never take that back.”

Sun’rie closes her eyes. “The Recruiters asked me about killing a child during my interview. Right when they asked, I knew. Not that it was you, specifically, but that you were there in Dorin that day. And I knew how I would have to answer their question in turn.” She looks at the body of the young teenager she gunned down. “I do not forgive you, Ty’rin. I will never, ever forgive you. But I do understand the choice you faced.”

It is more than I deserve. Guilt and relief flood through me in a river, for part of me wants her condemnation. I deserve a musket ball through my own temple as much as that youth, and if she were to decide to execute me right here, I would not protest. I cannot forgive myself, either. I am beyond forgiveness, but between Jen and my sister, perhaps I can know some degree of the hope Jen feels. A hope to be something else.

“The Vyar won’t stop,” I say. “If anything, they’ll come after you even harder. The Locust, the Spider, and the Wasp are still out there.”

“Formidable opponents, all three,” the Beetle says. “Though Sun is rather formidable herself, and if you will permit me the boast, I did not become the Beetle simply because I am a good shot. Now, should my Assyn-trained brother-in-law and a certain dagger-throwing pyromancer join us, well … that would give even the most capable killer pause for consideration. Also, I am not the only one fond of Sun’rie. You saw how the people respond to her. She speaks words dangerous to the Vyar. Words like equality and revolution. If spoken in the right way, there are those who would join the four of us.”

The four of us. It sounded like a family. Something I ran from nine years ago, then nearly destroyed. How I missed feeling part of a family.

“I say four,” the Beetle continues, “but that is soon to be five. And our son—”

“Daughter.”

“—could use an overprotective aunt and uncle.”

Jen takes my arm. She has already made her choice.

Each of us climbs our own tree, following branches that twist and split and split yet again, pushing into a canopy and intertwining with those of others, none of us certain where they lead. My path forked into darkness, and much as I wish it, I cannot climb back down the tree. I can only take another fork, one pointing a different direction, knowing that down this path lie remorse, and heartache, and just maybe, should I be so fortunate, something treasured by men and unknown to golems. Something like family.

My sister and her husband look to me, their final question implicit: Will you help protect our child?

I answer immediately. Best of all, I mean it.