“Just give me a moment,” said Anji, eyes still closed.

“Shit!”

Anji opened her eyes at the word, wincing at the bright light already peeking out among the blanket of gray clouds. The Hawk stood at her side, hands on hips, jaw locked tight. Anji followed her gaze.

Molli’s body lay in a bloody tangle across the ruined camp. White bone stood out amongst a mangled pile of brown hair and fibrous lumps of muscle and sinew. Anji’s stomach lurched. She held a hand to her mouth, manacles clinking, then bent double and retched onto the mossy rocks. Tears stung her eyes as she spat out a string of bile, then she pictured the swarm of spiders burrowing from the ground once more and vomited again as the Hawk kicked at a tuft of grass.

“Shit!”

Chapter 11

11

Anji had a cat years ago.

It wasn’t her cat, exactly, but she named him Oliver and claimed him just the same—nobody else ever came calling for him.

Oliver was entirely black, save for a spot of white on his chest. Anji had no clear memory of finding him—he had simply appeared one day atop the basement steps, mewling and slinking back and forth across the stone. Her parents forbade her from bringing him inside and refused him food, grumbling about the added expense. But her father never kicked at him or scolded Anji for cradling him in her arms, though many of Mudtown’s stray animals were infested with fleas. She’d even spotted her mother bending to scratch his head once as she’d left for work.

Oliver began to learn Anji’s routine, following her to school (before Rolandrian had the schools closed down), trailing behind her and her father on their way to the docks so she could see him off for the day. Mudtown’s streets were chaotic with traffic, but Anji could always spot the cat’s tail bobbing through the tangle of legs and carts.

This went on for some time, until winter settled on Linura—one of the harshest in living memory. A garrison of Mudtown’s denizens had been formed to scrape mounded snow off the roofs of houses and shops. Even the factories came to a standstill as the remaining population worked to rid the streets of ice. Anji and her parents had huddled together in front of their tiny hearth as the heat was sucked into the cold brick walls rather than their bodies. The poorest died where they slept, crammed into alleys, some lucky ones sleeping in crates, while others battled with the exposure.