The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

about the guns. Luca had kept that secret between her and Touraine alone. She hadn’t even told Gil.

Perhaps it was time for him to know her dashed hopes in full.

Luca took a deep breath to steel herself. “They made a deal with me. Not just for workers’ agreements and land ownership. They wanted guns. I said I would give them some if and only if they gave us magic.”

Now she didn’t even have the incriminating papers. They were lost in the smoking den for anyone to find and throw at her uncle’s feet.

Gil’s face was implacable. The concrete of it held no softness at all. “Luca. Luca, my dear, what have you done?”

So quickly, she was a desperate teenager again, trying to lift a sword too heavy for her strength. Mastering Qazāl was outside of her strength. The thought was a thorny vine curled tight around her chest and pricking at the thought that rested always at her core: that ruling Balladaire was also outside of her strength. And if that was true, then who was she?

She willed the cold walls to slam into place. She dug at the resentment she tried to keep buried and let it color her voice, too. Anger was better than this fear that made her want to hide in her rooms and weep. Anything was better than watching her work crumble around her.

“This would have worked, Gil,” Luca whispered. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Now they’ll never trust me again.”

“Your father—” He dropped the sentence with a sigh.

Always her father with him. With her, as well. Balladaire had no religion, but she worshipped a dead man whose image she held in her mind, distorted and blurry with time and bolstered with imagination. It wasn’t just his image she had distorted and reinforced with her own visions.

Luca looked out the window again. They were in the New Medina, and the streets were almost peaceful, as if the Old Medina wall were a border between two nations. Perhaps it was. It was only almost peaceful, though, because the quiet was a brittle sort—the silence of held breaths and hands clasped over mouths.

She reached for the screen again, daring Gil to stop her. “To the compound, please. Not the Quartier.” She closed the screen again and settled back. “I’m going to speak to the general.”

Touraine had gotten top marks on the military written tests as a child in Balladaire. She knew the statutes and the drill formations. She’d learned unwritten rules, too, the instincts that kept you alive.

The first of the unwritten rules that she broke was feeling relief as Sands crowded that narrow street. Relief meant you’d let your guard down. But what else were you supposed to feel when the soldiers who’d had your back for years found you with your back against a wall?

And then Tibeau swung at her with his baton. She held her empty hand out.

“Tibeau! It’s me, you fucker!” Pulled her scarf down. “There are civilians inside. Help me.”

Blackcoats and Sands scattered up and down this street and the next, and finally—finally!—Jaghotai’s fighters were cartwheeling in with their flying kicks to defend their own people.

Tibeau pulled back his next blow in confusion. “You’re a rebel.”

“Not exactly. We can talk later.”

“This is treason.”

She held his eyes, warm and brown. What she had done was treason, in so, so many ways.

There was a reason Djasha called Cantic the Blood General. What brutal efficiency. She would get the guns back, yes, and any rebels in the nearby districts. And any kid who looked likely to fight back in the next five years. She would terrorize innocent civilians into giving up their neighbors. Touraine knew better than most the bargains you could strike to spare what was dearest to you.

Maybe this would be enough. Cantic would crush the rebellion. Scare the whole colony into submission. Save Touraine’s soldiers from one enemy, at least.

And yet here she was, fighting for the other side. Because it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, she thought. The civilians were supposed to be safe. There wasn’t supposed to be blood.

“I know,” she said.

Tibeau nodded, his grin quick and troubled. “Treason it is.”

“Excellent. Let’s help.”

The city was in chaos now. Young Qazāli had begun fighting back against the blackcoats and the Sands, some of them doing the peculiar kicking dance that Jaghotai had done the night before.

Touraine pointed to a pair of blackcoats dragging a kicking Qazāli man. They stole up behind them, Touraine with her knife and Tibeau with his baton. The thud on the blackcoat’s skull made Touraine shudder, even as she knifed her own blackcoat in the ribs.

Then Tibeau seized up, yelling in pain. The choking gurgle of his blood in his mouth was louder than it had any right to be. The blood trickled into the shadow of his beard. So late in the day for him to be unshaven. Maybe he’d had the day off and he hadn’t planned on leaving the guardhouse at all.

Touraine hit the new blackcoat in two steps, barreled him to the ground. His bayonet slid from Tibeau’s guts, flung Tibeau’s blood on her. His blood. Her knife underneath her, between her and the blackcoat, in his guts, now his blood. Tibeau behind her. She didn’t look back. She had seen that glassy look too many times before.

Pruett, sprinting out of nowhere to his side, musket held like a quarterstaff in front of her, bayonet bloody. Whose blood?

Blood everywhere.

Touraine lurched over. “Is he—”

“Fuck off.” Pruett shouldered her away, but Touraine shoved back and knelt beside him. Stupid to stop without cover, to sit here and wait to get shot in the head, to let him stop—

“Beau.” Pruett pushed his hair back from his forehead, cupped his cheek. She flicked his eyelids up.

Pruett pulled his jacket open and swore. A great red slit in his belly. His slick, pale guts slopped over the edge. Split with a smell like shit. Touraine’s gorge rose, and she focused back