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

close to sharing what Touraine had shared with Pruett and the other Sands. No one but a Sand could understand where she came from.

She almost told Pruett about Jaghotai. Almost. What would she have said? I met my mother. We hate each other. She’s tried to kill me. She hates all of us. I don’t want her, but she’s here. She’s real.

The disgust in the suck of Pruett’s cheeks was too strong. Pruett had made no secret of what she felt about her own family, wherever they were, somewhere in the east of the broken Shālan Empire. She’d been sold by her own parents, and she was smart enough to know it, even as a kid. She didn’t like Balladaire, but she didn’t have high hopes about home like Tibeau did. Touraine understood that much. It wasn’t the sort of thing you forgave. Touraine and Jaghotai would probably murder each other if Touraine didn’t leave, but at least Jaghotai seemed almost as angry at the Balladairans for taking the Sands as she was that Touraine had come back.

Instead, throat thick, Touraine asked, “How is everyone?” She couldn’t ask the real question: Does everyone hate me?

“If you gave a ripe shit, you’d never have left.”

“I left for you.” Desperately, grasping. “I betrayed her and the rebels for you.” She had risked her life, an entire city, for them. For Pruett.

The other woman cocked her head sharply. “What do you mean?”

Touraine swallowed and shook her head. To tell the truth would mean confessing that her gamble had cost her Tibeau, as well.

“I’m here now. I am.”

“No. What the fuck do you mean?” Pruett yanked her roughly by the shirt.

Touraine looked down at Pruett’s fist clutching rough linen. The conviction that had kept her going up to this point had died with Tibeau. All she wanted to do was sink into Pruett’s arms like she had three months ago.

“I told Cantic that the rebels had guns,” Touraine mumbled. “Luca wanted peace; the rebels wanted peace.”

Pruett’s eyebrows knit together, and her lip curled in confusion. “What? If they wanted peace, what the sky-falling fuck happened?”

“I sold them out to Cantic.” Touraine hung her head. Her throat tightened, and the words were hard to get out. “Luca was going to give them guns, and then… that’s what you would have been up against. I couldn’t let that happen.”

Pruett’s hands went slack on Touraine’s shirt. Horrified? Surprised? Her wide eyes were bloodshot, supported by sleepless bruises underneath. “You can’t be sky-falling serious.”

“Why not? You just said it—neither side gives a sky-falling shit about us.”

Pruett exhaled sharply through her nose and shook her head. “So I did. Anylight, your princess is just as Balladairan as the rest of them. So the peace probably wasn’t going to last.”

Touraine didn’t like the new, wary way Pruett watched her. “What do you mean?”

“We have the honor of enforcing your lover’s new curfew laws.”

“They must be Cantic’s. Luca loves her grand ideas of noble rule too much.” Oh. An accidental slip of intimacy.

Pruett’s face darkened. “You don’t know her well, then.”

“And you do?”

“She announced it herself. Looked none too pleased with your rebel friends. Do they know what you’ve done?”

Why would Luca be angry with the Qazāli? The Balladairans had started this and Luca knew it. Unless she thought a rebel had leaked the information about the guns. And the rebels… Touraine hoped that they thought Luca was behind the betrayal. If the truth got out, she was dead.

Pruett took her silence with a knowing nod. “Seems like you made a good play. Time for me to get back.” She tipped her field cap to Touraine and brushed past.

Touraine’s heart pounded in her chest. Her last tether slipped out of her hands. She grabbed frantically for it. “You could have killed me now, if you hated me that much.”

“Well, I fucking didn’t, did I?” Pruett’s voice broke a little before the edge came back. “You sank too low, Tour. If you want to help us, leave us alone. It’s hard enough to live with the Balladairans, and it only gets harder when the rebels get bolder. We have to show the officers we aren’t sympathizers.”

“So come with me. We’ll run—”

“You mean desert. And die like Mallorie? Like Tibeau? All of us?”

“Just you and me.” Touraine hated herself for even saying the words, but she hated the idea of being alone even more. She finished half-heartedly, her voice cracking: “Steal a couple guns—”

“Stop, Tour. Just stop.” Pruett sighed and her body sagged. “Sky above. You almost sound like Beau. Give you one last bit of advice, Lieutenant.”

Touraine clung to the way Pruett caressed her old rank with the same wry lilt as before. No, not the same. Not quite.

“Everyone else thinks you’re dead. The officers, the princess, the Sands. Keep it that way. Get the fuck out of here.”

And then Pruett walked off, hands in her pockets, baton jostling with her hip. She didn’t look back at Touraine once.

CHAPTER 28A LINE IN THE SAND

Pruett was right. As usual.

And it hurt. As usual.

As she bought two big water bags with a whole sovereign, Touraine told herself she wasn’t running away. She was free now. She had cut her ties to both Balladaire and Qazāl in one brilliant moment, and she was going to take advantage of that.

Never mind that she’d blown her life apart with canister shot—shredded it into bloody tatters. Never mind that she would never go back to Balladaire, not to thick trees and snow, not to the compounds where she’d grown up.

She hated herself for missing the thunderstorms and the gray stone walls. They hadn’t felt like a prison. She hated herself for thinking—hoping, trusting—that Balladaire would reward her one day, that Balladaire was ultimately fair. How she had absorbed the cruelties, made excuses for them, thinking if she were just a better soldier, more Balladairan than not… Tibeau had been right the whole time, and now he was dead.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to