“No—well, on the street for five minutes, if that counts,” she said, trying to still her protesting heart. She needed him to love her, but he needed her for a sounding board, a sieve that would sift apart his anger; that had often been true. “What did he say to you?”

He laughed shortly and tossed up his hands. He moved through the apartment like a fallen angel across unsanctified ground—graceful, feral, and lawless. His skin was the color of apricot, and his hair raged with the hues of flame, and he did not belong in this place, and it could not hold him. Kit watched him and felt again that rogue desire.

“He was furious about the medical building, for one thing. As of course I knew he would be! It was nothing but the same argument between us. I say he does not do enough to force back the blueshi bastards. He says I endanger everything with my wild tactics. If that was all he had to say, I wish he would have stayed home.”

“I think he came to discuss you with Ariana Bayless and see how he could get you freed from here.”

He had thrown himself against the wall and now stared at her moodily. Even from across the room, his eyes were an electric green, snapping with lights from those interior fuses. “He did not seem to think Ariana Bayless was in any hurry to let me go.”

And did you think she would be? Kit wanted to cry. Did you think you could attack her city, endanger her people, dare her to punish you, and then find her eager to set you back on her streets again? She understood Jex Zanlan right down to his toes, oh yes, and she knew what fevers drove him to shake his fist in the collective indigo face and scream out against injustice. But she could not agree with his methods and had said so. And received the full force of his fury in her turn. So she had learned to be careful about when she challenged him, though it cost her something to hold her tongue.

“Did he think he would be able to make a deal with her at all?” she asked neutrally instead.

“A deal,” he said scornfully. “The deal he should be making is telling her there will never be peace in this city until the indigo abandon all plans for this so-called Carbonnier Extension. What he should be telling her is, no matter what dire punishment she flings down on my head, the gulden will not yield another scrap of land to blueskin imperialism. He shouldn’t be making a deal for my freedom. He should be forcing her to withdraw her armies from gulden land.”

“I don’t think they’re armies,” Kit said. “I think they’re construction workers.”