The guardian’s dark eyes simmered with rage. If anything, the pressure
he applied to my windpipe intensified. “You have any idea how hot it is
down in the palace cells during reckoning, thief? No water? No clean air?
The reek of rotting corpses is enough to make the high executioner vomit.
You’ll be dead within three hours, mark my words.”
The palace cells were a sobering thought. I’d been caught stealing once
before and had been sent down there for a grand total of eight minutes.
Eight minutes had been enough. During reckoning, when the suns, Balea
and Min, were at their closest and the afternoon air shivered with heat,
being trapped below ground in the festering sore that passed as a prison
beneath the immortal queen’s palace would not be fun. And besides, I was
badly needed above ground. If I didn’t make it back to the forge before
dusk, the deal I’d spent hours brokering last night would fall through. No
deal meant no water. No water meant the people I cared about would suffer.
Much as it irked me, I submitted. “Lissa Fossick. Twenty-four. Single.”
I winked at him, and the bastard squeezed harder. Dark hair and blue eyes
weren’t common in the Silver City; he would remember me. The age I’d
given him was real, as was my pathetic romantic status, but the name I’d
provided wasn't. My real name? No way I was handing that over without a
fight. This bastard would shit himself if he realized he had the Saeris Fane
in his grasp.
“Ward?” the guardian demanded.
Gods alive. So insistent. He was about to wish he’d never asked. “The
Third.”
“The Thi—” The guardian shoved me down onto the blistering sand,
and super-heated particles scorched the back of my throat as I accidentally
breathed them in. I sucked my next breath in through the sleeve of my shirt,
but filtering out the sand that way only did so much; a couple of grains
always worked their way through the fabric. The guardian staggered back.
“Residents of Third Ward are quarantined. Punishment for leaving the ward
is—is—”
There was no punishment for leaving the Third; no one had ever done it
before. Those unlucky enough to find themselves scraping out a living in
the dirty back alleys and stinking side streets of my home usually died
before they could even think about escape.
Standing over me, the guardian’s anger shifted into something closer to
fear. It was then that I noticed the small plague bag hanging from his belt
