The soldier looked at the four unconscious boys sprawled across the ground. Then his gaze shifted to Ozair, bloodied and breathing hard, and finally to Elina, who still held the cloth she had been pressing against Ozair's head.
Only then did he look back at the boys.
"Big Lore Academy students..." the soldier said quietly, recognizing the uniforms.
Neither Ozair nor Elina answered.
The armor, the spear, the calm authority in the soldier's stance, all of it registered at once, and with it came the sudden realization that this conversation could turn very bad very quickly.
The soldier stepped forward.
"We didn't do this," she said, her voice shaking. "Those boys — those men — were the first to attack us. We were just passing through."
"Save the explanation for the Guard Station," the soldier said. His tone wasn't unkind, but it carried the finality of procedure.
Elina's eyes widened. "We're not criminals," she pleaded. "We were attacked."
The soldier reached behind his shoulder plate and pulled out a set of chains. Ozair forced himself upright despite the pain and stepped in front of Elina, moving her behind him protectively.
"Sir," Ozair said, "I'm the one responsible for what happened here. She had nothing to do with it. Whatever you need to do, you do it to me."
Elina's hand shot out and grabbed his sleeve. "You idiot," she hissed. "Don't be a martyr."
"I'm saying what's true."
"Both of you are coming with me," the soldier said. "That's the end of it."
He grabbed Ozair's wrist, the chain already coming forward, the link almost closed, when shouting erupted from the main road beyond the passage.
Several voices at once, fast and getting louder.
Then three people sprinted past the gap at the end of the passage with six soldiers chasing after them, shouting for them to stop.
The soldier's head snapped toward the sound, and his grip loosened.
The chain slipped free.
Ozair and Elina were already running in the opposite direction—left, away from the noise, the soldiers, and the unconscious boys, sprinting down the passage toward wherever it led.
The soldier shouted after them, but they didn't stop.
They burst into a side street and kept running, Ozair breathing hard but still moving, Elina matching his pace easily.
"Are you sure?" Elina gasped as they ran, half-supporting each other. "This is the right choice?"
"We don't have another one," Ozair panted. "Not if he catches us here."
Behind them came the soldier's footsteps, then something else, a sudden controlled burst of movement that was far too fast to be normal.
Ozair glanced back.
The soldier had crossed nearly thirty feet in a single motion, some combination of jump and technique that carried him forward with impossible speed.
His spear stayed raised in one hand while the other shot forward, and a focused surge of wind blasted from his open palm, throwing dust, cloth, and loose debris violently down the street.
Ozair grabbed Elina and threw them both sideways around the corner at the passage end and the wind surge went straight forward, missing them by the width of the turn, and hit whatever was ahead of it instead.
They landed, found their feet, and ran.
"Did you see that?" Elina whispered, her body pressed tight against his.
"He used wind," Ozair answered, every syllable a tiny shock. "He used—like us. How can they—did Atsal give them power too?"
"That can't be," Elina breathed. "It must be something else, a different kind of power, or a tool."
They took two more turns, found a low roof reachable from a stack of crates against a wall, and climbed up without stopping to question whether it was a good idea.
From the rooftop, they watched soldiers spread through the streets below, moving through alleys and checking doorways with practiced coordination.
Ozair dropped flat near the edge, and Elina settled beside him. Both were still breathing hard, but for the first time since the chase started, they had a moment to think.
"We need to get back to Haqi's shop," Ozair said.
"Agreed."
"I just don't know where it is from here."
Elina glanced around the city, studying the streets below before pointing into the distance.
"That gate," she said. "At the end of the main road. That's the one we entered through this morning."
Ozair followed her finger. She was right.
"We came through there, turned right, stayed on the main road, then turned left at the fabric stalls. Haqi's shop should be on that street."
Ozair stared at her. "You figured all that out from one trip?"
"I was paying attention."
"I was there too and I remember absolutely nothing."
"You were distracted by wind chimes."
He had nothing to say to that.
They waited until the soldiers in the street below moved further along, then came down from the roof carefully and moved in the direction Elina had pointed, staying close to walls, keeping their pace steady enough to look purposeful without looking rushed.
Beneath the city, in a quieter kind of silence, Mayo sat in the corner of his cell with his knees pulled close, staring at the small window near the ceiling where angled sunlight suggested the afternoon was already passing.
He'd been trying to understand how any of this had happened.
Every time he replayed it in his head, it ended the same way. He had fallen down a slope in the dark, run from a snake, and wandered through a forest in a world he had barely entered before armored strangers appeared out of nowhere with chains, horses, and the absolute certainty that he was dangerous.
He replayed the Guard Station.
They had dragged him in through a side entrance—not rough, exactly, but not gentle either—and the man behind the main counter had looked up from whatever he was doing and watched them bring Mayo across the floor.
"Who's he?" the man behind the counter asked.
The soldier beside Mayo smiled faintly. "One of the kidnappers."
The room went quiet. The man behind the counter and the others beside him looked at Mayo differently now, no longer as a stranger, but as something far worse.
The man behind the counter came around and stood in front of Mayo and looked at him for a long moment. "He doesn't look like a kidnapper."
"Don't go by the face, he's obviously a bastard," the soldier said.
The man behind the counter studied Mayo a moment longer, unconvinced but unwilling to question the arrest. "Report this to X-Marshall. Now."
After that, they threw Mayo into a cell, the door shut, and the rest of the night disappeared behind iron bars.
He slept badly, woke to soldiers who ignored his questions, and soon found himself locked inside a wooden cage rattling through the city.
A cloth covered the sides, blocking everything except scattered sounds from outside. His stomach was empty, and the chains had left his wrists sore.
Then the cloth came off, and Mayo forgot how to speak for a moment.
The Garrison was massive, built less like a building and more like a statement. Thick stone walls, towers at every corner, soldiers visible everywhere he looked.
They walked him through the Garrison with a hand gripping each arm and brought him into a room with a white wall on one side, several strangers inside, and a large dark box with a lens pointed toward him.
He was still staring at the strange box in confusion when he noticed the girl standing beside it.
She stood, slightly turned to the side, calm and composed. For a moment, Mayo forgot where he was.
She was easily the most beautiful person he had seen since arriving in this world, maybe the most beautiful he had ever seen at all.
The realization hit him so suddenly he felt heat rush into his face.
Before he could process any of it, a bright flash burst from the box. Mayo flinched and squeezed his eyes shut.
Her voice said clearly and without emotion, "The criminal's photograph has been taken. You can bring him."
Mayo opened his eyes. "Criminal? What criminal? What's my crime?"
Nobody answered.
Hands tightened on his arms and guided him back out, through another door, down another corridor, until the cell returned and the hours slowly passed beneath the small window above him.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
"How did I end up in prison?" he said to the cell. "How did I become a criminal?"
From across the corridor, from the darkness behind the bars of the opposite cell that Mayo had barely noticed before, a man muttered to himself. "He's not one of us—of course he's not." A soft laugh followed
Mayo's hands came down.
He looked at the opposite cell. Someone was sitting in there, deep enough in the shadow that he was a shape more than a person.
"Who's there?" Mayo said.
"Someone who has been here longer than you," the man said. "I'm one of those Glimmers who kidnapped the princess, and you're one of us who did that too, hey?"
Then he laughed again.
Mayo looked confused for a moment. Then he quietly repeated the word.
"Kidnapped..."
And suddenly he remembered the man who had arrested him last night calling him one of the kidnappers.
Only then did Mayo finally understand the crime they thought he had committed.
"No," Mayo said quickly, shaking his head. "No, no, I didn't kidnap anyone. And a princess? I never took anybody. I don't even know what a Glimmer is. I only got here last night. I was walking through the forest, then suddenly soldiers came out of the dark and chained me to a horse."
A silence.
"Wrong place?"
"Wrong everything."
Mayo looked at the window above him, the rectangle of light that told him the day was continuing without him in it. "A princess? Glimmers? A kingdom—what the heck is happening?"
Somewhere in the city above this floor, Mina and Toviro and Aryan and Elina and Ozair were doing whatever they were doing, not knowing where he was, possibly not knowing he was gone.
He pressed his back against the wall and looked at the ceiling.
"Toviro, Ozair, Aryan, Elina, Mom," he said quietly. "Please, get me out of this mess."
At Haqi's shop the afternoon had gone slow and worried.
Mina had asked Toviro and Aryan the moment they came back, reading the answer in their faces before they said a word.
"We couldn't find a trace of him," Toviro said. "We covered every official street in the quarter."
Mina said nothing. She looked at the table.
Aryan crossed to her and said, "We will find him. That's not a possibility. It is what happens next." He held her gaze until she nodded. "I promise you that."
"Thank you, Aryan."
He straightened and looked at Toviro. "Ozair and Elina still aren't back."
Toviro turned to the window. The market outside was thinning toward the end of the trading day, the crowd lighter now, the noise reduced.
"I hope they're not in any trouble," he said.
Then his eyes found two figures moving through the remaining crowd toward the shop.
One tall, one smaller, both moving with the careful pace of people who had recently been somewhere they should not have been and were now very happy to be somewhere else.
Ozair had dried blood above his ear and the particular expression of someone who had had an eventful afternoon and was choosing not to lead with that information.
Elina looked tired in the specific way of someone who had spent several hours being pulled in directions she hadn't chosen.
They came into the shop and Mina looked at the blood on Ozair's face and opened her mouth.
"I'm fine," Ozair said. "But we found something. And it's not good." He looked at Toviro. "We need to talk."