An Ember in the Ashes. Sabaa Tahir
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alone.
As the sun rises, I find myself in an empty building deep in the oldest part of the Quarter. The gutted structure crouches like a wounded animal amid a labyrinth of crumbling dwellings. The stench of refuse taints the air.
I huddle in the corner of the room. My hair has slipped free of its braid and lays in hopeless tangles. The red stitches along the hem of my shift are ripped, the bright yarn limp. Nan sewed those hems for my seventeenth year-fall, to brighten up my otherwise drab clothing. It was one of the few gifts she could afford.
Now she’s dead. Like Pop. Like my parents and sister, long ago.
And Darin. Taken. Dragged to an interrogation cell where the Martials will do who-knows-what to him.
Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after. The moment Darin called out – that was such a moment. It was a test of courage, of strength. And I failed it.
Laia! Run!
Why
A flicker of furtive movement in the shadows catches my attention, and the hair on my nape rises. A rat? A crow? The shadows shift, and within them, two malevolent eyes flash. More sets of eyes join the first, baleful and slitted.
Hallucinations,
Hallucinations or not, the shadows look real. Their eyes glow with the fire of miniature suns, and they circle me like hyenas, growing bolder with each pass.
‘We saw,’
‘No,’ I whisper. But they are right, these shadows. I left Darin. I abandoned him. The fact that he told me to go doesn’t matter. How could I have been so cowardly?
I grasp my mother’s armlet, but touching it makes me feel worse. Mother would have outfoxed the Mask. Somehow, she’d have saved Darin and Nan and Pop.
Even Nan was braver than me. Nan, with her frail body and burning eyes. Her backbone of steel. Mother inherited Nan’s fire, and after her, Darin.
But not me.
Run, little girl.
The shadows inch closer, and I close my eyes against them, hoping they’ll disappear. I grasp at the thoughts ricocheting through my mind, trying to corral them.
Distantly, I hear shouts and the thud of boots. If the soldiers are still looking for me, I’m not safe here.
Maybe I should let them find me and do what they will. I abandoned my blood. I deserve punishment.
But the same instinct that urged me to escape the Mask in the first place drives me to my feet. I head into the streets, losing myself in the thickening morning crowds. A few of my fellow Scholars look twice at me, some with wariness, others with sympathy. But most don’t look at all. It makes me wonder how many times I walked right past someone in these streets who was running, someone who had just had their whole world ripped from them.
I stop to rest in an alley slick with sewage. Thick black smoke curls up from the other side of the Quarter, paling as it rises into the hot sky. My home, burning. Nan’s jams, Pop’s medicines, Darin’s drawings, my books, gone. Everything I am. Gone.
Not everything, Laia. Not Darin.
A grate squats in the centre of the alley, just a few feet away from me. Like all grates in the Quarter, it leads down into the Serra’s catacombs: home to skeletons, ghosts, rats, thieves … and possibly the Scholars’ Resistance.
Had Darin been spying for them? Had the Resistance got him into the Weapons Quarter? Despite what my brother told the Mask, it’s the only answer that makes sense. Rumour has it that the Resistance fighters have been getting bolder, recruiting not just Scholars, but Mariners, from the free country of Marinn, to the north, and Tribesmen, whose desert-territory is an Empire protectorate.
Pop and Nan never spoke of the Resistance in front of me. But late at night, I heard them murmuring of how the rebels freed Scholar prisoners while striking out at the Martials. Of how fighters raided the caravans of the Martial merchant class, the Mercators, and assassinated members of their upper class, the Illustrians. Only the rebels stand up to the Martials. Elusive as they are, they are the only weapon the Scholars have. If anyone can get near the forges, it’s them.
The Resistance, I realize, might help me. My home was raided and burned to the ground, my family killed because two of the rebels gave Darin’s name to the Empire. If I can find the Resistance and explain what happened, maybe they can help me break Darin free from prison – not just because they owe me, but because they live by Izzat,
I step towards the grate.
I’ve never been in Serra’s catacombs. They snake beneath the entire city, hundreds of miles of tunnels and caverns, some packed with centuries’ worth of bones. No one uses the crypts for burial anymore, and even the Empire hasn’t mapped out the catacombs entirely. If the Empire, with all its might, can’t hunt out the rebels, then how will I find them?
You won’t stop until you do. I lift the grate and stare into the black hole below. I have to go down there. I have to find the Resistance. Because if I don’t, my brother doesn’t stand a chance. If I don’t find the fighters and get them to help, I’ll never see Darin again.
By the time Helene and I reach Blackcliff’s belltower, nearly all of the school’s three thousand students have formed up. Dawn’s an hour away, but I don’t see a single sleepy eye. Instead, an eager buzz runs through the crowd. The last time someone deserted, the courtyard was covered in frost.
Every student knows what’s coming. I clench and unclench my fists. I don’t want to watch this. Like all Blackcliff students, I came to the school at the age of six, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve witnessed punishments thousands of times. My own back is a map of the school’s brutality. But deserters are always the worst.
My body is tight as a spring, but I flatten my gaze and keep my expression emotionless. Blackcliff’s subject masters, the Centurions, will be watching. Drawing their ire when I’m so close to escaping would be unforgivably stupid.
Helene and I walk past the youngest students, four classes of maskless Yearlings, who will have the clearest view of the carnage. The smallest are barely seven. The biggest, nearly eleven.
The Yearlings look down as we pass; we are upperclassmen, and they are forbidden from even addressing us. They stand poker-straight, scims hanging at precise 45-degree angles on their backs, boots spit-shined, faces blank as stone. By now, even the youngest Yearlings have learned Blackcliff’s most essential lessons: Obey, conform, and keep your mouth shut.
Behind the Yearlings sits an empty space in honour of Blackcliff’s second tier of students, called Fivers because so many die in their fifth year. At age eleven, the Centurions throw us out of Blackcliff and into the wilds of the Empire without clothes, food, or weaponry, to survive as best as we can for four years. The remaining Fivers return to Blackcliff, receive their masks, and spend another four years as Cadets and then two more years as Skulls. Hel and I are Senior Skulls – just completing