Wayfarer

“Ugh,” she said, crossing her arms and turning away. “I knew you’d be revoltingly sentimental about this.”

“Forgive the presumptions I made about your character on our first meeting,” Li Min said. “I see the sort of person you are now.”

“Yeah, a bleeding idiot,” Sophia muttered.

“Are you hurt?” Li Min asked. “Beyond what we can see?”

The smell of warm wax coated the air, clearing the lingering touch of decay in his throat and lungs. Nicholas turned back to see if there was a way of barring the door behind them—there was. He slid the latch into place, fully ignoring the voice that told him it wouldn’t be enough.

“I saw something,” he told them, instead of answering her. “I need to know…I need to understand what it was.”

“You saw him. The Ancient One,” Li Min said, as if his face alone had revealed it. “He allowed you to live?”

In that moment, when he’d met the man’s gaze…there was no other way to describe it, save to say that Nicholas had felt acutely aware of his own years, how they might fit inside the man’s palm.

“He called them—the Shadows—away,” Nicholas said. “I haven’t the faintest notion as to why.”

“I did not know he was capable of mercy.” He did not, for one moment, enjoy the flash of fear he saw trespass on Li Min’s face. She continued in a hurry. “Something more is at play here. Where is it that you hope to go? Are you still hoping to find the last common year?” She swiped the back of her hand against her forehead, smudging the blood and dust there. Her hands were covered in liquid so dark, it almost looked black.

Blood, he realized. That was the travelers’ blood. In the rush of their fight and flight, he’d neglected to spare more than one horrified second thinking of the Ironwood travelers who had been killed and left for them to find. Their lives had been reduced to splatters of gore, and they’d become nothing more than a way to taunt the next victims. These Shadows could have done the same to any of them, and that put their odds of surviving this in rather stark terms.

“Yes,” he told her. “Did you learn what it was?”

“1905,” she said, with a look that hinted that she had known the whole time. He was too ravaged by pain and apprehension to care much in that moment. “We can take the passage upstairs, the one that leads to Florence. From there, it will be a voyage, but it should not take more than a few days—”

“What the hell is wrong with your arm?” Sophia interrupted. Without preamble, she reached up, gripping his right wrist and using it to haul herself, at last, to her feet.

Nicholas looked away. “It is only sore—”

“You haven’t moved it once!” He could see that Sophia had dug her nails into his hand, but could not feel it. “What—you mean it’s the ring?”

Her voice was rising in pitch, and she looked as if she wanted nothing more than to pull the arm out of its socket and beat him senseless with it.

“The Belladonna’s poison,” Li Min said, taking a turn at lifting his arm and turning it to and fro, as if reading a map. “If you do not complete her task, it will eventually travel to your heart and cause it to seize in the same way. What did she ask of you?”

“To kill Ironwood,” Sophia said, before he could.

“But why?” Li Min asked, her tone hushed.

“Have you met him?”

“Enough,” Nicholas said. “We can discuss it along the way to 1905.”

“Yes, please,” Sophia said.

Li Min drew the hood up over her ears, obscuring most of her face from view. “Niceties don’t suit you.”

They suit almost the entirety of the world, Nicholas managed to think, not say.

“This way, then.” Li Min urged them forward again, her cape fluttering down the hall.

“You need to do this,” Sophia ordered him as they followed. “You can’t trade your life for the old man’s. It’s not worth it. Half the world would throw you a parade for it.”

“Like you’ll kill the men who harmed you?” he asked.

She turned, staring straight ahead, her jaw set. “That’s different. I won’t die if I never find those roaches. If you won’t do it, I will. The day Cyrus Ironwood gets what he wants is the day my corpse is lowered into its grave.”

Ironwoods, he thought, shaking his head. Always so eager to shed their own blood.

“What happens when the old man is gone?” he asked. “Will you step up as heir? Expect the other families to fall in line behind you?”

“All I care about is wiping that smear of shite off the face of this earth, and salting the ground that grew him,” she snapped. “Whatever becomes of the families when he’s gone is up for someone else to decide. I want no part of any of this anymore.”

She wants to be free of this. The one person he saw as being an emblem of everything the family stood for wanted nothing more to do with it. Remarkable.

Li Min slowed as they reached the next imposing door, pressing her ear against the rough, dark wood. She glanced back, nodding to Nicholas, then pushed the door open, revealing a set of steps that spiraled up out of sight.

Nicholas started forward, only to stop again at the sound of a voice floating down to them. He drew Sophia back into the shadows of the nearest wall, his mind trying to spin up possible explanations for what they were doing down there—to be caught now, and in their bloodied appearance—