POV: Serina
He tells her to wait at the alley mouth.
She wants to argue. She does not argue. She has spent seventeen years learning which battles cost more than they win, and standing here, looking at the east block wall with its guards and its lit torches and its very official iron gate, she knows she is not the useful variable in this equation.
She presses herself into the shadow between two buildings and watches him walk toward the gate like he was invited.
The first guard notices him at thirty feet.
She can see it in the way the guard's posture changes, hand going to his baton, the small shift of a man deciding whether to speak or shout. He chooses to speak. She cannot hear the words from here. She sees Kael stop. She sees him say something. Short. Maybe five words.
The guard steps back. Not like he was told to step back. Like the idea of not stepping back stopped making sense.
The gate opens.
Kael walks through.
The guard stands at his post, baton still at his side, and his eyes go somewhere that is not the gate and not the street and not anywhere Serina has a name for. She watches him for ten full seconds. He does not blink.
She looks back at the gate.
It has been two minutes.
She counts her heartbeats because it gives her hands something to do. The mark on her wrist is warm steadily, evenly, the way something warm is warm when it is working. She does not know what that means yet. She does not have room to figure it out.
She keeps counting.
At four minutes and some change, Kael comes back through the gate.
He is carrying Pip.
She moves before she decides to move. Across the street, into the torchlight, and she does not care about being seen right now; she cannot care, because Pip is wrapped in a coat that is not his, his head against Kael's shoulder, his face too pale, and his breathing the shallow kind that has been keeping her awake for the last four nights.
"Give him to me," she says.
Kael looks at her. He transfers Pip without comment, adjusting the weight with a practicality that suggests he has thought about how she will need to hold him, and she gets her arms under her brother and pulls him in and he is warm fever-warm, too warm, but breathing, but here, but here and she puts her face against the top of his head and breathes him in.
She does not fall apart. She is not going to fall apart. She saves it up, presses it into a small, tight place behind her sternum where she keeps everything she cannot afford yet, and she breathes in, breathes out, and stands up straight.
"Rina," Pip murmurs, without opening his eyes.
"I've got you," she says. Her voice comes out even. She is very proud of it.
"Knew you'd come." His head drops more heavily against her shoulder. He is asleep again before she can answer.
She does not look at Kael. She is looking at Pip's face, checking the things her hands always check without asking: the temperature at his forehead, the rhythm of his breathing, the color of his
lips. Fever still high. Coming down slightly, maybe. Hard to tell in torchlight.
"The coat," she says. "It is yours."
"He needed it," Kael says.
"I will return it."
"You do not need to."
She finally looks at him. He is watching her with an expression that she cannot read entirely level, attentive, the way you watch something you are still deciding what to think about. Not cold. Not warm. Just very present.
"You didn't ask me how," he says.
She shifts Pip's weight to her other arm. "I'll ask when it matters."
Something moves in his expression. Small. She files it away before she can identify it.
"The guards," she says. "Are they"
"They are fine. They will not remember this night. Not him, not me, not you." He pauses. "They will have a headache in the morning."
"That is almost considerate."
"I was not trying to be considerate. I was trying to be efficient."
She almost says something to that. She decides against it. She has Pip. She has two days before she was supposed to lose him, and she has him now, and everything else is secondary to getting him somewhere safe and warm before his fever tips the wrong direction.
"I need somewhere to go," she says. "Our rooms are not safe anymore. They will check there first when they notice he is gone."
"I know where to go," Kael says.
"You have been sealed in a mountain for a thousand years."
"The bond line knows things," he says, the same way he said it on the mountain. Factual. Unarguable. "There is a woman. Mid-ranked. Lives above the cobbler's shop on Wren Street. She has been helping unranked children for three years, and no one official has noticed yet."
She stares at him.
"The bond line told you that."
"It told me you would need somewhere safe. It found the nearest option." He looks at her. "Whether you trust it is your decision."
She thinks for exactly three seconds. She is a person who has made fast decisions her whole life, because slow decisions are for people who have the luxury of waiting, and she has never had that luxury.
"Wren Street," she says. "All right."
She turns to go.
Behind her, from the direction of the east block, high and sharp and cutting straight through the quiet:
A horn.
One long blast. Then two short ones.
Her blood goes cold. She knows the pattern. Every person who has lived in the Dregs long
enough knows the pattern. One long, two short. Not a routine check. Not a shift change.
Prisoner missing. Alert active.
She turns back to Kael. He is already looking at the block, head tilted slightly, eyes doing something she does not have a name for yet.
"You said they would not remember," she says.
"The guards I passed would not." His voice is even. "There was a clerk on the upper floor. I did not pass him." He looks at her. "Someone noticed faster than expected."
Pip stirs against her shoulder.
She pulls him closer and starts to run.