“I don’t know,” he said quietly. He sighed. “This is not a good place for me. There is little left for me here. I will return to Rabatha soon. I suppose I…I am here to see if you want to return with me.”

And then what? my heart screamed at him. Return for what? Return to what? My training was over. My few promising contacts were lost, and I saw no way out of the factories. If I even made it far enough into the Empire to get conscripted into the factories. There was a good chance I would be detained at the border this time. I had nothing to bribe the Qin with. My voice locked in my throat. I stared at him for a long time. I felt a hard-edged, wild anger in me; the kind of anger that only comes from a well of urgent love.

“I will think on it,” I said. I said it in his voice, exactly the way he’d said it to me weeks before.

Dirva raised his eyebrows. Again, he studied me like he’d never seen me before. I had a moment of uncertainty then—was I really that different now? What did it mean to be different? What did it mean that I felt largely the same? If I couldn’t tell, maybe I’d lost my footing. Maybe I still needed him. Maybe I still needed the Empire.

“Yes,” he said. “You should think on it. I will be at Liro’s until the end of the month. I will be there if you need to speak again,” he said.

Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

When I came back inside, Sorcha wanted to know everything that had happened. I told him. Sorcha is a very canny man, a man who has an instinctive knack for other people. He has always asked me probing questions, ones to which I have no answers. And I know he had a host of them, and because I felt very raw just then, I decided to head them off. “Let’s smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke a lot.” And we did.