“He wasn’t too high ranked, but he was influential. Revolutionary type. Wanted to change things up. So they made an example of him. The Peak—that’s the leader—had her gag him with his own belt. Then she tied him to a chair and slit his throat in front of the whole Spur.”

Silence settled like a curtain between them. A gust of sour wind wafted down the street, blowing a ragged bit of cloth across the cobbles. The cigar’s taste no longer interested Anji.

“How could she do something like that?” she finally said, her voice cracking.

Jared exhaled a plume of smoke. “She was too involved,” he said. “By the time they’d asked her to do it, she would have done anything. That’s the trouble with the Spurs. No matter how terrible your Peak, no matter what they might ask you to do, they’re your blanket against the cold. They’re your source of security. I bet she didn’t even see him as her father at the time, just another thing she was commanded to do. Another task assigned to one in a score of lowly Nails, on pain of having to sleep in the street, of being turned out by your friends. Living on the edge of everything like that for so long, you do what’s best for you and no one else. I tell her every time she comes out this way, which isn’t often, mind you, that we have plenty of space for her. I think something keeps her in Linura. Maybe it’s the crowds. The noise.”

Anji huffed out the last of her cigar and smashed it underfoot. It hissed as it went out. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

Jared ran a finger along his pursed lips.

“I just thought you should know who’s doing it,” he said.

“Doing what?”

He gave her a bemused look. “Killing you.”

Anji didn’t say anything, just followed his gaze around the dilapidated street. She drew her coat tighter against the wind.

“She’s just another person,” Jared continued, flicking out his cigar’s tip. He scraped his shoe over the glowing cherry and stooped to pick Anji’s butt off the stones and stowed it into his pocket.

“Yeah, and so am I,” Anji said, hating how petulant she sounded. She crossed her arms. “And I don’t much like the notion of my skin being peeled off.”

He hummed an affirmative as he stood back up, and Anji realized as they stood close together under the inn’s warped wooden eaves how tall he actually was. She took an unconscious step back.

“Why are you being so kind to me?”