Despite that, there remained a simmering tension between them as silence descended in the tunnel. Their shoulders touched, connecting them. He smelled like the forest after a spring rain. Without meaning to, she found herself leaning closer, hoping he wouldn’t move. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and caught him looking at her.

Her heart pounded, and between the beats, she told herself over and over that Ryuu wasn’t Kohl. Ryuu wasn’t the person who’d given her a way off the streets and a chance to reach for more than what she’d been given.

She shoved aside the doubts and steadied her breaths to fall asleep. She looked away from Ryuu and closed her eyes, but didn’t move her shoulder away.

Tomorrow they’d break into the Tower’s prison and free Teo, and then go back to searching for Kouta with the threats of Kohl, Tannis, and the Sentinel’s reward for her capture hanging over them.

But for a few hours, she could pretend they were the same in their loss and loneliness, and that this warmth between them would persist even after they found his brother. For tonight, at least, that warmth would drive away the darkness surrounding them.

27

A loud, intrusive sound woke Aina after only a few hours of sleep. For a moment, she was back in the alley, Kohl’s fist slamming into her skull with a jolting thud.

But the noise was just a drill being used in the subway tunnels parallel to this corridor. Raurie had already stood and put away their candles as Ryuu rose. He withdrew from his pack a paper bag carefully taped closed. With a small knife, he cut the tape and unrolled the paper to reveal a handful of black sticks tied together. A long black string hung out from the end of them and unfurled as he held up the dynamite.

“We need to tie this to the grate,” he said, tilting his head back to look at the wide grate blocking off the vent. “There’s a thin rope in Raurie’s pack we can use for that. When I light the string with a match, it’ll burn up, giving us enough time to get away before it blows. The construction should cover the noise.”

“I’ll do it,” Aina said in as brave a voice as she could manage, but the drills and the shouting from the subway tunnel nearly drowned out her voice. Squaring her shoulders, she approached the handholds in the wall and stared up into the ventilation shaft.

She hated the darkness. People could sneak up on you in the dark and snuff out your life with the press of a trigger. She preferred to navigate Kosín by the grit of its streets and the height of its roofs than the depths of its shadows. Now she had to crawl into the darkness above, deep into the ventilation shaft and into the prison cells that she’d tried to avoid since she was a child.