I rushed out into the desert, but I heard soft, sandy steps behind me and Saba put herself in front of me, a pleading look on her tearstained face.

“Please, don’t try to stop me, Saba. I can’t stay here.”

I tried to get around, but she cut me off again. She gestured, but it was too dark out to tell what she was doing. Even if the moon had been brighter, my mind was so chaotic I couldn’t process anything. All I knew was that I was panicking, a leveled panic full of adrenaline, familiar as the back alleys back home. I had learned to perfect that panic, because my survival depended on it. It turned friends into enemies, and my empathy was gone faster than one of Magnus’s chocolates could melt in my mouth.

Fight or flight, Andi?

Saba was pushing me toward fight.

“If you try to keep me here by force,” I warned, taking a few steps back as I touched the knife in my pocket, “your limbs will have to drag themselves across the desert to get to you.”

Saba gestured again, but it involved pointing toward the castle. That was enough of an indicator.

Fight.

But before I could do anything, Saba scooped me up over her shoulder.

“No!” I cried, and immediately started kicking.

“Scream your lungs out,” Jember had always said. “Don’t make it easy for them. If they get you where they want you, you’re as good as dead.”

So I screamed, wordlessly, trying to aim the sound at her ear, and kicked. She had no hair to pull, no flesh to dig my nails into, but I managed to get my knife from my pocket and stab her in the back. I felt the break of pottery, my knife easily piercing through. I cocked back my knife to stab again, but my body went backward instead as Saba dropped me onto my back in the sand. I think Saba had learned from our last fight, because she quickly shoved me onto my stomach and pinned my arms to my sides. This time when she picked me up she held me out at arm’s length, facing away from her.

And then she kept walking. My kick couldn’t reach her effectively this way, but I kept kicking. Kept screaming. Kept throwing my weight in different directions, forcing her to grip me tighter. My scream was cut off by a sob. God help me. Any tighter and she’d break my bones.

As she stepped through the doorway, Saba shifted to hugging me against her body with one arm, and I took the opening to throw my head back into her face. There was a frightening, though at the moment satisfying, shinctk. Something skimmed past my shoulder and cracked on the floor, but it didn’t stop Saba’s task of forcing me to sit on the stairs.