She was almost there, one step closer to killing Kouta and getting her life back under control.

Ryuu held out his hand to help her when she reached the top of the ladder. Taking his hand, some of her sense of triumph faded.

“Almost there,” he said with a small smile as he pulled her over the lip of the door into the new tunnel. Somehow, even after they’d been drenched in rainwater, he still smelled like a forest.

Giving him an awkward nod, she turned to help Raurie and Teo up the final rung and over to solid ground.

She couldn’t let Ryuu’s kindness deter her. Steels like Ryuu always said they would help you—then they gave you a job and got you killed while doing it. She refused to let this rich boy with a heart change her mind or do the same to her.

But he’s not just a rich boy with a heart, she told herself. He’s been hurt by this city nearly as much as me.

He helped me rescue Teo when he could have insisted on abandoning him.

He laid a blanket on me while I slept.

And he believed she would have been a good person if she’d had another childhood, when she’d never seen the point in wondering that herself.

As they sat to catch their breath, shivering in soaking clothes and in the cold air of the new tunnel, she remembered the promise she’d made to herself and to kids like her years ago.

She would rise up. She would prove that good things could happen to girls like her, girls from nothing. For all the children who froze on Kosín’s streets at night in the rain and snow, who didn’t have a mansion, servants, and an older brother to protect them while they mourned.

She’d never allow a Steel to take that goal from her, no matter how kind they proved they could be.

32

After walking half a mile through the subway tunnel, a new cavern opened ahead.

The train yard spread away in front of them. Hundreds of train cars gathered in clusters, some sitting far back near the curving edge of the cavern where they were shrouded in shadows.

This place was similar to the train yard near the Tower, but without the noise of construction. No platforms had been built here yet. For a few minutes, they stood at the edge of the cavern and searched for some sign of Ryuu’s brother.

“That one has lights on inside,” Aina said after a minute, pointing through a gap in the train cars ahead.

Golden light poured through the windows of one train nestled in the center of all the others. It was composed of three cars, each one lit up. Other train cars were poised around it like scattered dominoes.

Raurie took a step forward, but Aina put a hand on her shoulder and leaned close to whisper, “There are guards around it, see? It’s hard to tell with all the other cars in the way, but I think I see three. Maybe more behind the train. The vision only showed him sitting alone in the car. It didn’t show how many guards he might have in the surrounding area.”