Ten steps away, a girl stepped out from behind a house with a knife in her right hand and a jackal’s blood-drenched jaw and teeth tattooed along her left forearm.

“Paying us a visit?” she asked, stopping in front of Aina.

Aina shrugged, keeping her features indifferent. Someone approached from behind, their footsteps quiet, but noticeable.

“Just out for a stroll,” she said with a small smile. She could take out this grunt with a knife through the ribs in seconds, but that would break the tenuous peace between the Jackals and the Blood King. They could threaten and antagonize each other, but if she actually killed one of them, all hell would break loose. No, she had to find a different route of escape.

The air shifted behind her. She spun to find a gun aimed at her chest by a boy twice her size. She sidestepped him, but the girl grabbed her roughly and pushed her into the rusted wall of a house.

The pair boxed her in. Aina allowed a small trace of fear to light up her eyes so they would think they had the advantage, convincing enough that even her boss would be proud. She had seen the girl around the city, and she recognized the boy; he’d been on the streets around the same years that she had been. Once, they’d even fought over a scrap of metal to sleep under. He’d beaten her in that fight, but he wouldn’t win now.

“Should I take an eye for this violation, or should we beat her and paint her blood on her boss’s door instead?” the girl asked her friend. “Which do you think would leave the brighter impression?”

Before she finished speaking, Aina moved. She grabbed the boy’s wrist and slammed it into the wall. The gun fell from his grasp. He lunged for it, but she kicked him in the shins with her steel-toed boots. The girl tried to plunge her knife into Aina’s side, but Aina blocked the attack with her own blade and punched the girl in the stomach with her other hand.

She fled, with their footsteps pounding behind her. She reached the gap between houses, passing the little boy, who hardly blinked at the scene in front of him, and slipped through the gap to reach a neutral street. Seconds later, the footsteps faded.

Running from fights might make her look weak, but starting a gang war wasn’t part of her job tonight, and she still had work to do—work that no one, especially not the Blood King, could know about.

She left the Stacks, ascending the sloped hills until she reached the city’s Center. Pollution blocked out most of the stars above, but electric lights in shop windows lit the streets here. Coughing on the smoke-tinged air leaking over from the assembly plants and steel mills, Aina veered east. Men and women from the textile factories shoved past her with hands dyed purple and black, jostling against the rail workers who limped from the train station wearing dirt-covered overalls. It was a thick, sweaty mess of a crowd, but some people noticed the blood on her clothes and gave her a wide berth. Most were too exhausted and so used to Kosín’s violence that they barely glanced at her.