He kissed me. I let him. Put my hands on his chest, as if to push him away, and then just let them rest there. And then I kissed him back. Hungrily, until he pulled away.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“We need to get out of here,” he said, sliding down to sit in the straw. “Me and Ash. It’s not safe for her, and it’s not safe for your family.”

I sat too. “Yeah.” And then I remembered the burlap sack I’d dragged in with me, and handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

“A present,” I said. “For Maraud. Give it to her.”

He opened it up, and then winced at the smell, and then laughed. “Here, girl,” he said, and hoisted up the coelacanth steak I’d purchased. She ate it greedily, exactly like I’d eaten my fish kebab.

“Ash’s personal guard,” I said, because this one detail had been bugging me ever since I regained my memory of Ash in the High Tower. “The nine soldiers.”

Niv frowned. “Yeah?”

“What happened to them? They were trained to be by her side until the end of her life or theirs.”

“Well, then—it sounds like you already know what happened to them,” he said.

“They died?”

“I assume so. The truth is, nobody knows. But they vanished. One rumor is, they were executed by the Palace, because one or more was going to betray Ash—but I don’t believe that. I know those women. They adored her. Another rumor is, Ash killed them herself. By accident—she attempted to access her power, and it overwhelmed her. Went haywire.”

“She had a freak-out,” I said, thinking of my own blackout moments. “When they disappeared—was it around the Night of Red Diamonds?”

Niv nodded. “It was that same night.”

Neither of us said anything for a long, long while. We had spent our whole lives protecting Ash from the outside world. It never occurred to us that the world would need protection from her.

At our feet, on the cover of the Clarion, Darkside Police Commissioner Bahrr had his hands on his hips. He wore a polo shirt and seersucker shorts.

“That asshole,” I said. “What’d he do now?”

“Eyewitnesses described a secret meeting that took place between Commissioner Bahrr and the Shield.”

“Are you serious?” I said, eyes widening. “That’s huge! That proves—”

“Not really. He played it off, said they were just meeting ‘to coordinate efforts for the annual Unmasking Day celebration.’ And also he ‘denied all involvement in the growing Destroyer movement.’”

“Of course he did.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about Ash’s eyes, in that vision of the other side that I’d seen. How they held pain and anger I knew nothing about. How she was my whole world, and I didn’t know what to do to help her. How helpless that made me feel.