I sat on the ground to escape the smoke. Cion dropped the flap and followed suit, facing me. The room wasn’t long enough that we could both keep our legs extended, so I curled mine in close to my chest.

I waited for Cion to speak, but he seemed in no hurry. He tucked the pillow behind his torso. His head fell back against the wall, and he closed his eyes. Although I’m not sure how he could stand it. The small bumps and spikes of the rock wall dug into my skin, and I kept shifting position.

The silence in the room was accented by the crackle of the torch as bits of fire shot out and fizzled.

“Why won’t you talk about Rodric?” I finally said.

He opened his eyes. “It’s not that I won’t talk about him,” he said. “It’s that I don’t know where to begin.”

“You could start with how Rodric knows so much about you.”

He sighed. He ran both hands through his loose hair, pulling the tangled strands away from his face. He looked younger in the torchlight. The shadows played across his high cheekbones, making them appear more sunken in than they did in direct sunlight. “Rodric used to be one of us.”

His words were so simple. Individually, they made sense. Together, they refused to adhere in my mind. “Rodric couldn’t have been a Desert Boy,” I said. “He hates you.” He was the only person I’d ever known who hated them as much as I had.

“You don’t think he stumbled out of the desert knowing how to fight like that, do you?”

He’d never really said where he’d come from besides the desert itself. I always assumed it meant he must’ve come in with one of the caravans. But thinking about it now, I knew it was untrue. No one takes a caravan into the city. Everyone was trying too hard to get out.

I put a hand down to steady myself as another thought ripped through me. Suddenly, it felt like the flap was preventing any fresh air from coming in, and the room had gone stale. I clenched my fist around the edge of the rug for something to hold on to. I forced myself to meet Cion’s gaze while my stomach collapsed inward, sucking what little breath I had with it. “You trained him.” It came out as a statement, but I so desperately wanted it to be a question. A question whose answer I didn’t already know.

He nodded. A simple, unassuming nod, as though he hadn’t just thrown away all our plans. “Cintric trained us both until he left. Then I took over.”

He’d probably spent years training Rodric. I had less than a month. There was no way I could compete with Rodric. I’d been hoping to show up with an arsenal of new moves. I had no advantage now. He would know them all.

“Were you planning on telling me this?” I asked. I leapt to my feet. The heat from the torch dripped downward and the smoke clouded my vision.