Thank you, Jeran, I think to myself, for being so fluent. “It’s not ours,” I reply. “It was a tradition from Carreal. When Karensa overtook that country decades ago, they found their solstice festival so enlightening that they decided to adopt it.”

Jeran’s lips tighten. He stares as we walk the main thoroughfare and pass the hundreds of stalls lining the wide avenue. “Was it always this contentious?”

At his words, I glance over to what he’s looking at. Jeran’s attention is fixed on a smear of black paint scrawled against the marble base of a sculpture along the thoroughfare.

It’s the Premier’s seal, consumed in flames.

Another sculpture nearby has been vandalized too, painted in scarlet and smudged with angry words.

KARENSA IS DEAD

I blink, stunned for a moment into silence. “No, that’s new,” I murmur.

The news of occasional unrest in the city is familiar to me; my superiors used to do plenty of rotations here, spying on potential rebels and arresting those who seemed suspicious. But this kind of open rebellion? I’ve never seen that.

Jeran stares for a moment longer, taking stock of which sculptures have been damaged. “Can you sense Talin at all here?” he asks.

The mention of Talin sends a wave of new fear through me. Her heartbeat had accompanied me for the entire train ride, but now it seems to flicker in and out, some of the vibrations lost among the noise and chaos of the festival. Whatever emotions she might be feeling right now, I can’t sense them. She must be holding her thoughts tight.

I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I admit. “She’s in the city. That’s all I can tell.”

The memory of her last night comes back to me now. Part of me still believes that our entire conversation had just been a dream, but it seemed so sharp, so unwavering even after sleep that it must have been real.

Jeran glances sidelong at me. “Do we know how long her mother has been in her current location?”

My mother, Talin had told me through our bond, and her voice had sounded so sharp, so desperate in its sadness and fury, that I can feel the stab of her pain even now. Talin works for the Premier solely because of her mother. I know the agony of that trap.

“Nearly a week,” I answer in a low voice. “She’ll stay there for another week. Then Constantine will order her moved again, depending on his pleasure or displeasure with Talin.”

Jeran winces. Is he thinking about his own father? I wonder. But when he speaks, he just says, “Then we’ll need to figure out where she is soon. How would we start a search like that?”

I look around at the festive scene. Where could we even begin? “Talin said the Premier decides the location on his own,” I whisper as we slide past a crowd gathered around a street performer. “But without consulting anyone else, the day before her mother is moved. That means we have a slim window to find out ahead of time where her mother is going to be transferred. That window is our only shot at freeing her.”