“Those will match my new toys,” Aina said, drawing the four diamond-edged knives she’d taken from the guards.

Kohl turned toward her, his sapphire-blue eyes hard and piercing. Her smile wavered a little. For a moment, she feared Kohl might reprimand her for taking weapons that would make it obvious who she’d stolen them from—these knives were the symbol of the Diamond Guards, and no regular street thug could afford them.

But then he’d nodded approvingly. “You’re turning into a good Blade, Aina. We fought well together.”

She’d nearly burst with pride and had to contain her smile the entire way back to the Dom.

They fought well together, and they knew each other better than most people knew them. She met his gaze in the train station’s tower for a moment longer. While she was leaving a fight against Tannis, bleeding, and trying to lay low as the whole city searched for her, Kohl stood out in the open and unafraid, as always.

Just like that, he was gone. He turned and disappeared, and the heat of his gaze simmered away. A chill crept up her spine in its absence. They weren’t so close anymore, now that she’d failed.

“What are you looking at?” Ryuu asked.

Instead of answering, she gestured toward Teo. They jogged in silence to catch up, then stopped outside of a wide, one-story home constructed of mud brick with a rusted metal sheet as the door.

As Teo knocked lightly, Aina’s eyes trailed to a boy lying on the ground nearby. He was young, no older than twelve. He lay on his back, eyes half-open, one hand holding a plastic bag to his nose and mouth. The other hand hung limp in the dirt. When the boy breathed in, Aina could almost smell the vapors herself. She knew how it felt, the sensation of letting go. The boy dropped the hand with the rag to the ground and stared at his own feet for a moment. Then he closed his eyes, chest rising and falling in such slow breaths that it was a surprise each time.

Her skin itched at the sight. Even years later, her mind unhinged and craved a simple sniff of that powerful glue, the one drug street children could attain in plenty. Lying on the street, clenching a bag filled with glue, watching the world spin as her breaths grew dim … the eyes of the people who passed her by, the dogs that sniffed at her … it had made her tired, confused, weak; it made her breaths come short and quick, threatening to rob her lungs of air. But it had also been a temporary euphoria that pulled her away from the body that sensed pain and loss and hunger. It also stole memories, so sometimes she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten wherever she was or what she’d been doing right before. It pilfered older memories too, until the images of her parents’ faces had faded to dull blurs, and her roughest nights on the streets felt like a story she’d heard rather than something she’d experienced herself.