Together, she and Kiran made their way back through what was left of the remnant camp. They did not bother searching out the bag of supplies. It had likely been trampled or burned, and if not, whoever found it was welcome to it.

What Aurora needed now was …

Well, she needed home.

But home did not look or feel much like home anymore.

She had Kiran though, and that was close. She leaned heavily into his side as they walked, wanting to run away to their tent and hide from the world and forget everything that had happened. But she knew she would never forget those screams. Not for as long as she lived.

Nature is the cruelest of masters.

—The History of Stormlings

3

The next day they were back in the camp at dawn. There had been a long thunderstorm that lasted most of the night, and the camp looked even worse than when they had left it the day before. Flooded and burned and smashed, it was hard to see anything of the meager existence the remnants had created. The plan today was twofold. They would help as much as they could while continuing to gather information, and they planned to spend the day observing the guards, making notes, looking for patterns.

The group had gleaned a fair amount of information the day before, but none of it specific enough to help them do the impossible—break into the city. And that was what they would have to do. Duke had managed to find out that the previous guard that the crew used to bribe for entry into the city was dead. And none of them thought it worth the risk to approach any of the Locke soldiers.

So instead, they would watch and learn and wait for their opening.

They set about helping to restructure what had been demolished, but mostly they were just gathering debris, sorting through to find what was usable and what was not. Aurora had been working just long enough for a sheen of sweat to gather beneath the layers she wore to hide her identity and the distinctive skyfire storm that showed on her chest, making her uncomfortable despite the morning chill, when she began to sense that something abnormal was happening.

She, like everyone else, had been surreptitiously watching the soldiers that guarded the gate. She pondered where they had gone yesterday during the madness of the skyfire attack. Had they been caught up in the crush of bodies too? Or had they managed to slip inside the city walls somehow? If so, that might be an option they could look at for entry. A storm certainly provided a natural diversion.