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

lie down in the desert and let whatever rabid beasts lived there take what they wanted of her.

Instead, she put one foot in front of the other.

None of her life in Balladaire—none of her life for Balladaire—had been hers. It hadn’t really been a life. She could find a life somewhere else.

It was better for her to be dead to Balladaire, and she didn’t know a star-blinded shit about the Qazāli. A night of dancing, barely enough of the language to get herself to a toilet.

So she would head south. There were people who lived in the mountains, out of Balladaire’s reach and Qazāl’s. It was as good a place as any to start over. She bought another scarf on the way out and wrapped it around her face. Better to be safe in anonymity. Hit the southern road and hail a ride with one of the caravans to the next town, where she would stock up on more provisions. For now, all she needed was good boots and old calluses, and she still had both of those.

She left El-Wast through the Mountain Gate, the southernmost gate in the New Medina wall, but as soon as she walked through it, she froze, legs numb from no small terror. She looked back to the city.

No one came after her. Will this be my life, she wondered, always looking over my shoulder?

No. She was dead.

Even dead, she marveled at the outer wall. The intricate stonework curled in Shālan script. She couldn’t understand a word, but she gaped nevertheless before she stepped into the wild desert.

Which wasn’t wild desert at all, not exactly. The acres of yellow earth that stretched east from the Balladairan compound were tent slums to the south. She had seen them the night Luca attempted to go to the Cursed City. She wondered how Guérin was recovering. She definitely didn’t wonder if Luca thought she was dead, too.

Lean-tos that would collapse—were collapsing—under a stiff wind and proper tents alike were wedged on either side of what Touraine would have called the slums’ main road, a winding split that wove through this growth on the city’s back. She followed it.

She’d never seen slums in Balladaire. Here, they were like a village. People shouted to each other, faces covered with hoods and veils or scarves against sun and sand. Some of them wrangled children; some laundry. Children raced around her feet with none of the malice they reserved for the blackcoats in the city. A woman pounding a lump of dough on a wooden plank nodded to Touraine as she passed.

Touraine had never lived a domestic life. Never even seen one. So she’d never dreamed of one. Pruett and Tibeau were her only household; training and recovering and fighting, their daily chores.

What she wouldn’t give to punch that big man one more time.

She spun around at a yank on her shirt. Three wide-eyed children with knobby bones grinned at her. One boy held another on his shoulders.

The boy riding on his friend’s shoulders asked something in Shālan, holding both his hands out in a supplicating gesture, as if he were begging the sky for rain. Which, maybe he was. Touraine recognized the word for water, at least.

“Maybe,” she answered wryly in Balladairan. She could spare at least a little. And the bags would be lighter.

They didn’t even flinch at the language change. The third one changed with her. “We’ll carry your bag!”

So she pulled the bag off, and they cheered before taking a drink. The smallest one probably weighed as much as the bag, but he fended her off when she tried to take it back.

They followed her, chattering and singing through the slums, and her entourage of children grew. A child would take a drink from the water boy and skip along beside them. Touraine should have been irritated. She’d spent a lot of money on that water. It would be half gone before she got to the main road.

Instead, she let a little girl grab her by the hand and twirl underneath it, a tiny parody of the dances in the dancing circle.

At the edge of the slums, the desert she was expecting rose out of the scrubland and stretched farther than she could see. The lone road was bordered on either side by scrappy bushes fighting the desert heat to grow, barely more than tufts of grass. Rocks littered the ground randomly, some just knuckle-sized pebbles, others the size of a grown man’s torso, and it went on like that, flat and flat and flat until suddenly sharp hills rose up, too far away for Touraine to tell if they were sand dunes or not. Somewhere to her right, in the west, the river continued to wind to the south, but it and the lush mud and farmland it supported were out of sight.

It was just her and the desert.

And the children tagging along.

In the empty stretch of dirt just ahead of them, a group of older children, caught in the awkwardness between soft-cheeked childhood and gangly adolescence, jumped and shouted in imitation of Jaghotai’s fighting dance. One girl fought three boys at the same time. Her long braid whipped like an afterthought behind her body.

“Who’s that?” she asked the kids, pointing.

The little girl holding on to Touraine’s hand answered in Shālan and thumbed her chest with pride. A relative, maybe, an older sister.

Touraine didn’t completely understand, but she nodded like she did, and sat down to watch them fight.

The other children sat around her or play-fought, imitating the older ones.

That could have been me.

Here. At home. And she had lost that. The fighting girl, or at least, a girl like her, could have been her child, and that had been taken from her, too. She fought the tears until she couldn’t anymore.

“What’s wrong?” the water boy asked, still clutching his charge.

“Nothing, nothing.”

When the older ones stopped fighting, they walked over to their audience, sweaty and radiant. Touraine had never seen anything so beautiful.

“You’re an excellent fighter,” she