Sabaa Tahir

Every button of her ebony shirt gleams with the shimmer of a serpent’s eyes.

“Look at me,” she says. I force myself to obey, instantly paralyzed as I meet her gaze. Looking into her face is like looking at the flat, smooth surface of a gravestone. There isn’t a shred of humanity in her gray eyes, nor any evidence of kindness in the planes of her masked features. A spiral of faded blue ink curls up the left side of her neck—a tattoo of some kind.

“What is your name, girl?”

“Laia.”

My head is jerked to one side, my cheek on fire before I even realize she’s struck me. Tears spring to my eyes at the sharpness of the slap, and I dig my nails into my thigh to keep from running.

“Wrong,” the Commandant informs me. “You have no name. No identity. You are a slave. That is all you are. That is all you will ever be.” She turns to the slaver to discuss payment. My face is still smarting when the slaver unhooks my collar.

WANTED:

REBEL SPY . . . SCHOLAR THIEVES . . . RESISTANCE HENCHMAN . . .

REWARD: 250 MARKS . . . 1,000 MARKS.

“These are the faces of every Resistance fighter I’ve hunted down, every Scholar I’ve jailed and executed, most before my tenure as Commandant. Some after.”

A paper cemetery. The woman is sick. I look away.

“I will tell you the same thing I tell every slave brought into Blackcliff. The Resistance has tried to penetrate this school countless times. I have discovered it every time. If you are working with the Resistance, if you contact them, if you think of contacting them, I will know and I will destroy you. Look.”

I do as she asks, trying to ignore the faces and letting the images and words fade into a blur.

But then I see two faces that will not fade. Two faces that, however poorly rendered, I could never ignore. Shock courses through me slowly, as if my body is fighting it. As if I don’t want to believe what I see.

MIRRA AND JAHAN OF SERRA

RESISTANCE LEADERS

TOP PRIORITY

DEAD OR ALIVE

REWARD: 10,000 MARKS

Nan and Pop never told me who destroyed my family. A Mask, they said. Does it matter which one? And here she is. This is the woman who crushed my parents under her steel-bottomed boot, who brought the Resistance to its knees by killing the greatest leaders it ever had.

“If you cross me”—the Commandant holds my eyes relentlessly—“you’ll join the faces on that wall. Do you understand?”

Ripping my gaze from my parents, I nod, trembling in my struggle not to allow my body to betray my shock. My words are a strangled whisper.

“I understand.”

“Good.” She goes to the door and pulls on a cord. Moments later, the one-eyed girl appears to escort me downstairs. The Commandant closes the door behind me, and anger rises in me like a sickness. I want to turn around and attack the woman. I want to scream at her. You killed my mother, who had a lion’s heart, and my sister, who laughed like the rain, and my father, who captured truth with a few strokes of a pen. You took them from me. You took them from this world.

But I don’t turn back. Darin’s voice comes to me again. Save me, Laia. Remember why you’re here. To spy.

Back in the empty kitchen, I place the tray in the sink and collapse at the worktable, letting my head fall into my hands. I’m too numb for tears. It occurs to me then that the Commandant’s office door is probably still open, her papers strewn about, visible to anyone with the courage to look.

Commandant’ s gone, Laia. Go up there and see what you can find. Darin would do it. He’d see this as the perfect chance to gather information for the Resistance.

But I’m not Darin. And in this moment, I can’t think about the mission, or the fact that I’m a spy, not a slave. All I can think about is the throbbing in my back and the blood soaking my shirt.

“We should check the— What, damn it?”

The tapping grows insistent, and I turn, intending to tell off the Cadet. Instead, I’m faced with a slave-girl looking up at me through impossibly long eyelashes. A heated, visceral shock flares through me at the clarity of her dark gold eyes. For a second, I forget my name.

I’ve never seen her before, because if I had, I’d remember. Despite the heavy silver cuffs and high, painful-looking bun that mark all of Blackcliff’s drudges, nothing about her says slave. Her black dress fits her like a glove, sliding over every curve in a way that makes more than one head turn. Her full lips and fine, straight nose would be the envy of most girls, Scholar or not. I stare at her, realize I’m staring, tell myself to stop staring, and then keep staring. My breath falters, and my body, traitor that it is, tugs me forward until there are only inches between us.

She walks carefully, gingerly—the Commandant must have whipped her recently. And yet she doesn’t hunch or shuffle like the other slaves. The straight-backed grace with which she moves tells her story better than words. She’d been a freewoman before this—I’d bet my scims on it. And she has no idea how pretty she is—or what kind of problems her beauty will cause for her at a place like Blackcliff. The wind pulls at her hair again, and I catch her scent—like fruit and sugar.

Not wanting to turn my back on the Snake and the Toad, I let them go ahead of me but immediately regret it. The slave-girl stands in the shadows near the stairs, and as Marcus passes her, he reaches out and yanks her close. She writhes in his grasp, trying to break his iron grip on her throat. He leans down and murmurs something to her. I reach for my scim, but Helene grabs my arm.

Ahead of me, Marcus laughs and releases the girl, then follows Zak down the stairs. The girl gulps down air, bruises blooming on her neck.

Help her, Elias. But I can’t. Hel is right. The risk of punishment is too great.

“Right. You work for the Commandant?”

I want her to say no. I want her to say that my mother roped her into this. I want her to say she’s assigned to the kitchens or the infirmary, where slaves aren’t scarred or missing body parts.

But the girl nods in response to my question. Don’t let my mother break you, I think. The girl meets my eyes, and there is that feeling again, low and hot and consuming. Don’t be weak. Fight. Escape.

A gust of wind whips a strand free from her bun and across her cheekbone. Defiance flashes across her face as she holds my gaze, and for a second, I see my own desire for freedom mirrored, intensified in her eyes. It’s something I’ve never detected in the eyes of a fellow student, let alone a Scholar slave. For one strange moment, I feel less alone.

At the back of my mind, Darin’s voice grows fainter: Find something, Laia. Something that will save me. Hurry.

No, another, louder part of me says. Lay low. Don’t risk spying until you’re certain you won’t get caught.

Which voice do I listen to? The spy or the slave? The fighter or the coward? I thought the answers to such questions would be easy. That was before I learned what real fear was.