THE PRISON HAD long since fallen silent when Sajda crept from her room, closing the door quietly behind her.
Her body trembled with fatigue, but she couldn’t bear to sleep yet. The remains of the creatures from the day’s combat had been skinned, chopped, and turned into meals for either the remaining beasts or the prisoners. New monsters had been commissioned from the bounty hunters on Llorenyae. She’d scrubbed some of the arena floor and dragged the bodies of those who’d died to the center of the arena for the warden to deal with in the morning. And of course she’d lost her mind and defended Javan and then agreed to help him gain allies.
She wasn’t sure she’d made a good decision. She’d spent the last two years ignoring Hashim’s speculative gaze and disgusting suggestions. Shrugging off his questions about why the warden made her wear cuffs. Keeping him in line through an occasional show of power and the composure she borrowed from the prison’s stone. She didn’t need him to decide she was his enemy.
His eyes already lingered on the runes carved into her iron cuffs. Some days he stared so hard at her while the magic was stinging her blood that she feared the power trapped within her was branded on her skin. She’d met prisoners like him before, and it always ended the same. A confrontation far away from the guards and the warden. A show of dominance and aggression that required her to call on her elven speed and strength just to survive.
She’d endured it all. Years and years of whispers and stares. Of offers and threats. Of violence spilling over, outside the arena.
She’d survived.
And she’d keep on surviving until she could learn how to survive in the outside world too. How to get the cuffs off.
How to escape, not just Maqbara but any hint of the slave she’d been.
Her boots didn’t make a sound against the stone floor of level five as she crept past the cells, circling the arena below until she came to the staircase that was nearly opposite her little room. Moonlight drifted in through the skylights above and gleamed against the iron bars of the cells. Sliding into the narrow staircase, Sajda listened carefully.
The quiet snores of prisoners. The faint whisper of the desert wind scouring the ground far above her. But no footsteps. No warden hunting for a prisoner who’d failed to return to his or her cell at twelfth bell.
Satisfied that she was alone, Sajda climbed the steps, pausing at the landing on each level to listen for footsteps. When she reached level fifteen, she turned left and moved silently down the line of cells, many of which stood empty, waiting for new prisoners to be swallowed by the dark depths of the prison. She paused briefly beside Javan’s cell, though he was nothing but a dim outline beneath the blanket on his bed, before moving on. The aristocrat who claimed to be the true prince might be able to help her learn how to survive outside Maqbara, but his belief that she could somehow help him survive the next three rounds of competition was optimistic bordering on foolish. Maqbara crushed the innocent and the good. He’d be no different.
Still, she hadn’t turned him down. Even though it meant declaring war with Hashim. Tarek was the closest thing to family she had, and he rarely asked her for anything. She hadn’t had the heart to tell him the pretty aristocrat with the earnest sense of honor and duty was beyond saving.
At the opposite end of the landing, she came to a small supply closet whose door stood permanently ajar, one broken hinge hanging askew. A few empty buckets, a mop, and several dusty chests filled with old bedding lined one wall. The ceiling had a deep crack running across it, a fissure just a few handspans wider than Sajda’s waist. The walls were stained with water that had leaked into the prison during the last monsoon season, and small eddies of dirt covered the floor.
Sajda entered the room and dragged the door as close to shut as it would go. Then she pulled one of the chests into the center of the floor, careful to move slowly to avoid the scrape of wood sliding over stone. Another long minute of listening to be sure no one was coming to discover her, and then she climbed onto the top of the chest, crouched, and leaped for the crack in the ceiling.
Grabbing the edges of the crack, she swung her body up and through, keeping her head low to avoid banging it on the enormous support beam that helped keep the city above from crashing into the prison below. The first time she’d tried crawling into the ceiling, she’d been nine, and even with her magic giving her strength, she’d had to stack two chests on top of each other to make the leap possible. She’d been so sure she could find a way out of Maqbara and into the world above if she followed the support beams long enough. If she explored hard enough.
She hadn’t found a way out.
But she’d found something almost as good, and it had sustained her through hundreds of lonely nights.
Crawling out from under the support beam, Sajda half stood half crouched to avoid hitting her head and began moving swiftly toward the far corner of the prison. Dipping her hand into her pocket, she took out the rock fragments from the morning’s tunnel excavation and let them fall to the floor where they’d never be noticed. The darkness here in the upper recesses of the prison was impossible for a human to navigate without a torch.
But Sajda wasn’t a full-blooded human, and her eyes found gradients within the darkness. Shadows that were a faint shade darker than the air around them showed her where the vertical support beams stood. The beams across the ceiling were solid black stripes against a lighter canvas of the same black. She moved quickly, avoiding pillars and ducking low when necessary, until she reached the corner farthest from the supply closet.
Here, the darkness was bathed in the silvery sheen of the stars that shone through a skylight—the only one outside those that were placed above the corridors and the arena. Sajda wondered if the original plan for the prison had included a larger building. Or maybe skylights over the staircases. Whatever had happened, she was grateful for this abandoned window to the heavens.
The light illuminated the corner, spreading out to nearly the size of Sajda’s room. She’d brought blankets and pillows years ago to create a tiny oasis of comfort for herself. Crawling onto the neatly layered blankets, she eased her head back against a pillow and stared at the blue-black sky above her.
The stars were scattered across its surface like handfuls of silver-white jewels. Sajda searched the velvet sky, finding the patterns of the stars that were visiting her at this hour of the night. There was the trio of brilliantly glowing jewels lined up in a row like a drawn sword.
She traced her eyes over the dusting of stars that spread out from the trio and imagined it was shards of broken glass. The remnants of a cage the sword had destroyed. Farther to the right, seven medium-size stars could be a person fleeing if she connected the dots.
She liked to think it was the warden, and that if she could just concentrate hard enough, the trio would become the weapon she needed to destroy the cuffs and leave Maqbara forever.
The group of stars seemed to grow brighter, their silvery glow rushing down from the heavens to linger on her skin. Her magic stirred, an impossible hunger that scraped at her skin until she thought she’d go mad from the want of it.
Lifting her hands, she reached for the starlight, tangling her fingers in the glow and letting her magic absorb the power—cold and unbearably distant. It sank into her, a beauty that tore something inside until tears slipped down her face and her breathing came in ragged bursts.
It was homesickness, though the stars weren’t her home.
It was a sense of deep connection, though the stars were unknowable.
It was the closest thing to freedom she could find.
Turning from the trio, she searched until she found her favorite. A tiny prick of light at the far edge of the sky she could see. The star was more blue than silver, and it didn’t rotate through the sky the same way the others did. Sajda thought maybe it was another land full of people. What would it be like, living so far from this kingdom of blood and broken promises? If she could get to the tiny blue star, would Akram glow in the distance? Or would it disappear and take all her heartache with it?
Would the faint memory of her mother’s face as she told Sajda to be good and show off her ears so someone would offer a generous sum fall into the endless darkness of the night sky, never to haunt her again? Would the taste of fear, chalky and bitter, leave her mouth forever?
Maybe on the tiny blue star, mothers didn’t sell their little girls. Maybe dark elves weren’t feared by good people and used by bad. Maybe there, she would be loved.
Slowly lowering her hands, she stared at her fingers. At the silvery sheen that seemed to glow from within her. Her wrists ached beneath her cuffs, but she didn’t care. She was home when her magic consumed the starlight, and that was worth any pain she had to endure.
She lay on the blanket for an hour, watching the silver-white jewels slowly spin past her skylight. Letting the glow tangle with her magic and wound her with its cold perfection. Feeling the icy, untouchable essence of the stars fill her and lend her the strength to eventually make her way back to the supply closet. Back to the staircase. And back to her little room on the fifth level.
One day, she’d break the cuffs and get out of Maqbara. And when she did, she would find someplace far from people who could hurt her. Someplace under a vast, unknowable sky. And she would be home.