Chapter 4

A small patched boat bobs at anchor, its stern painted with a crooked name: THE KETTLE. On the beach the crew sleeps around a dying fire. Marka snores like a landslide. Drekk sleeps hugging his spyglass. Vigolas sleeps sitting up against a rock with his coat wrapped tight around himself, both arms crossed over the lining like a dragon on a hoard.

rifle across his knees, Mingus's head in his lap. Ysel sits apart on a rock, hood up, perfectly still. Whether she is asleep or awake is impossible to tell.

One ear lifts. He looks up at the Kettle's mast.

Empty. Only the lantern swaying.

lying in the sand right beside Vigolas.

The log is gone. Crouched exactly where it lay is ROUGEINA: crimson hair, barefoot, eight thin blades crossed on her back.

High on the mast, where she was, the driftwood log is now wedged against the lantern.

Where she stood, a faint silver-rose silhouette of her lingers in the air like a heat-ghost, slowly fading.

(No caption. The image teaches it: she traded places with the log, and she left a trail.)

sliding into the lining of Vigolas's coat, fingers walking along the seams, counting, looking for one particular shard.

Vigolas's hand clamps around her wrist. His eyes are still closed.

emerald, already grinning.

She looks past him at the campfire. Blink. He is now holding a burning branch instead of her wrist, and she is standing on the far side of the fire.

Marka is on her feet with the anchor. Drekk shouts "NOT THE BOAT!" at nobody in particular. A black panther pours out of the darkness and settles between the crew and the fight like a lowered gate, its tail flicking.

rifle half raised. The ghost of Ivar appears on the barrel, very serious for once.

Rougeina draws two of her eight blades and moves. It is a dance: a spin, a step, a turn on one bare heel. Every movement is a cut, and every cut is aimed precisely, never at anything Vigolas needs.

Vigolas dodges by inches, laughing, ducking, rolling through the sand. His coat sleeve is shredded, his hair is clipped, there's a line across his cheek.

The world goes grey and gold. Her blades are dull silver: cheap. The panther glows warm: loved, but not his. And her eyes keep flicking to one single point in his coat, where one shard glows brighter in her gaze than all the others combined.

understanding.

He raises an open hand toward her. Green lightning flickers around his fingers.

frozen mid-word. A flash panel inside his head: the wreck of his ship on the beach and the blank where her name used to be.

That half-second of hesitation is all she needs.

in her hand. Inside it: the soldier-woman being forced into a body too old for her. The label burns: ROUTED BY ORDER OF ARCHITECT THREE.

eyes going wide. He has held that shard before. Ch. 3: he put it back.

Rougeina steps away from Vigolas and lowers the blade.

rubbing his throat. Not afraid. Offended.

For the first time her voice is not steady.

The fire crackles. Nobody moves. Marka slowly lowers her anchor.

The panther pads across the sand to Kompis and drops something at his feet: a glass shard, wet from its mouth. His own file. KOMPIS · K-II · ASSET OF ARCHITECT THREE. It had been in his hoodie.

white. He puts his boot over it before anyone else looks down.

She says nothing, and she doesn't have to. She knows what he is.

She looks up at a boulder far up the cliff. Blink. She is gone. The panther melts into the dark after her. On the beach, a line of fading silver-rose silhouettes leads up the cliff like footprints made of ghosts.

He looks at the fading trail, and the grin comes back slowly.

picking his file up off the sand when nobody is looking. Mingus leans against his leg.

Mingus's tail thumps once against the sand.

Below Rougeina's trail, a line of white Sentinel lanterns is climbing the cliff path. They are following the silver-rose ghosts too.

A Trisdel gate-warden kneels and touches a fading silhouette with a gloved hand. It fizzles under his fingers like a spark.