“Anyone who trains has an advantage over someone who doesn’t,” said Roxa matter-of-factly, as Mi swivel-kicked the pad again. She raised it up, and Mi, panting hard, jabbed it twice with her fist, then came back to guard. She could barely keep her arms up anymore. Roxa was a merciless trainer.

  “Good enough.” Roxa let the pad drop. “Drink some water and then we’ll do some grapples.”

  Mi stumbled over to the water jug and caught her breath between swigs. They had been trading off with the pad, taking turns, but Roxa was only lightly winded. Mi passed her the water and wiped her mouth with the back of her sore hand.

  “Can I really have an advantage over someone twice my size?” Mi panted.

  Roxa shrugged. “I do.”

  Mi gave her a look.

  “You don’t have as much reach as I do,” Roxa admitted. “You’re quick, though, and instead of targeting their torso, you’ll be attacking what they put inside your range—their limbs, mostly. That’s why we’re focusing so much on your footwork, so you can dance around at the edge of their reach. I’m hoping that adding some fist spurs to your jab and your cross will let you slice their hands apart every time they try to strike you.”

  Mi frowned. “Fist spurs?”

  Roxa went to her coat and pulled out a pair of extremely short, triangur bdes, ending in T-shaped handles. A series of thick rings formed a knuckle guard. Mi hefted one—not that heavy, considering her arms were still trembling—slid her fingers through the rings and closed her fist around the handle. She tried a few jabs with it.

  Roxa nodded approvingly. “Let’s do some shadow-boxing with those, and we can catch up on grapples next time. That way you can start carrying the spurs.”

  Mi stared at the spurs in her hands. Ever since the ambush in the greencourt, and the cold realization that, in the course of pursuing her grievance with Roxa, or just in making her cruel and stupid point, Penelope had never meant for Mi to survive, a grim sort of fury had been smoking and smoldering in her chest.

  Rage. An old friend. Mi knew from childhood experience that the bitter alchemy of transforming rage from poison to medicine began with acknowledging it. Starting to train with Roxa had helped. It was a beginning, at least. Mi’s test private projects in the alchemy bs, covertly synthesizing substances more lethal than sensory weapons, had continued the process.

  Holding and feinting with the puncturing tips of these bded weapons, though? It was beginning to feel more and more real that she might actually have to strike with the aim to kill. But what if the precipice of the moment came, and she couldn’t?

  Mi thought of mother Pazo, as strong and unbreakable as sunlight. She remembered her mother’s warm hand in hers on the day they had taken a walk together, out of the city, to the burial mounds covered in wildflowers, raised over the honored dead who had fallen in the ancient uprising.

  The sea breeze blowing hair into her mouth when she asked her mother some question. The musical lilt of tiny birds chirping, swooping and alighting on stems.

  Pazo Finnochio’s eyes were full of dark fire, as she watched the shifting shapes the wind made in the grass, and Mi knew in a deep and wordless way that her mother was gazing through time.

  “There exist, walking under the sun like you or me, entire hives of those who wish to turn other people into objects—have already done so, in their own minds. They think nothing of treating living bodies of flesh as if they were made of unfeeling cy.”

  She paused. Mi could hear the subtle, tensing flex of emotion in her voice. The air itself resonated with a charge, a pressure. “I have never understood what attracts men to such bleakness of power.”

  Pazo looked down at Mi and it came to Mi that her mother was someone who could walk through the longest desert and keep walking.

  Pazo took a deep breath. “To stay passive in the face of those viotors is to drink slow poison, and to offer it unquestioningly to those still unborn.”

  She raised her chin to the rolling grassnds, humped with riotously green and living burial mounds as far as Mi could see. “Let me be stripped of a mother’s honor and reckoned by all my ancestors, if ever I teach you to make your peace with the bootheel.”

  The many-voiced bells of the city down in the valley overpped and mingled with her words, and Mi imagined all her mother’s mothers speaking together at once. A tiny, scarlet-winged bird fluttered to a stem almost within arms reach, and clung there, swaying.

  Pazo often went walking among the mounds, usually alone.

  Years ter, in the days before Mi boarded her ship to Harmine, mother and daughter walked there again.

  “Here,” Pazo’s eyes fshed with pride and concern. “You’ll need this.”

  Mi took the cloth wrapped bundle. It was a bell, no rger than the size of her fist, with a smooth handle of dark wood. She traced with her finger the swirls that blossomed cloudy in the silver-white metal.

  “How did you…?” She gnced up at her mother.

  Pazo took in the sight of her daughter face’s with pleasure. “My old shipmate, Venzi, took it off a wealthy merchant st year. She said he didn’t even know what it was and couldn’t enjoy it anymore anyway, and she agreed that your need befits its purpose. It’s good Kallish bellmetal, and well-wrought.”

  Mi’s heart was swelling. There was no greater cim of belonging, nor of trust. She swung the bell in a glittering arc, and they both listened to the fine shiver of the song wave breaking and reforming perfectly, like bzing sand, until it trailed away. The wind made ceaselessly moving shapes in the tall grass that covered the burial mounds around them. All the wildflowers had gone to seed.

  “This way, you’ll take a little of our harmony with you,” Pazo observed. “It could save your life there. Don’t hesitate to use it, when the time comes.”

  Mi nodded, blinking away tears. “I won’t hesitate.”

  Pazo smiled. “I know.”

  Mi was wearing her tiny frown. Roxa watched her quietly, until she looked up.

  “Show me.” Mi took a deep breath. "How to use these."

  ~ ~ ~

  “Roxa?” ventured Mi carefully.

  “Mm?” Roxa passed her a steaming mug, which Mi took with both hands, then sat down with her own.

  “Remember that, um, b assistant you bribed?”

  “Yup.” Roxa grinned over the rim of her mug. “The one whose eyes were just begging for it.”

  The serious line of Mi’s mouth curved, and she rolled her eyes. “Yes, that one.”

  Roxa waggled her eyebrows provocatively. “Want me to dowse her out?”

  Mi twisted her mouth wryly. As usual, Roxa was several steps ahead. “I don’t know for sure that she’s a tea girl, you know, but…”

  She took a deep breath. Mi hated the way her heart beat faster, the way her internal arms cnged, the new fear that was pressed into any mention of tea girls. She hated the new reluctance her mouth had acquired, the way it desperately tried not to say those words aloud.

  Feeding her hatred was a vast sense of loss. Before this year, she hadn’t even had to imagine living this way, going stealth, fearing to name herself. It crushed everything that had nourished her, all her precious memories of sisterhood, into an airless, soundless, lightless crate of contraband.

  Mi knew, as a rassa child, what it was like to be cast alone into a bleak desert of shame. To anticipate in advance the way that others would turn away from her, because of who she was. But that unbearable burning sensation had never been connected to her gender before. She had never thought the Imperiat could make her feel ashamed of being a tea girl.

  Before, when Mi named herself, named to the world the way she listened to her body’s wordless wanting, and id cim to what it meant, there had been only affection curled into that naming. Only care and belonging.

  They are taking that from me, she thought. Pressing it out of the world in every moment they keep me silent. She wanted to hiss and spit and bite. She wanted to weep brokenly.

  Instead she took a deep breath. “…But yes, actually.”

  After a pause: “But probably not for the reason you’re thinking.”

  “All right.” Roxa, bless her heart, had let her pyfulness drop. “If she sees me, she’s likely to run, though.”

  Mi nodded. “We would need a pn. But…I want to throw her a lifeline, Roxa.”

  Her friend frowned thoughtfully.

  “It might well put me at risk,” Mi said simply, “but still. I must.”

  “To offer her protection, support?” Roxa raised her eyebrows. “You know we can barely protect ourselves right now, yes?”

  Mi nodded seriously. “I can’t let her just get caught, alone. I have to try, at least. Even if I fail and we both get hunted down.” She took a deep breath and her exhale was full of tiny tremors.

  Warm green eyes sought and found her own, then Roxa reached for her hand and Mi csped it gratefully. The taller girl squeezed for a long moment, her lips pressed together in a firm line, her jaw set.

  “Okay. But until we can actually count on her to keep her mouth shut, we cannot shy away from bckmailing her for her silence. We need to hold something over her head that will compel her, in order to protect ourselves. Her most vulnerable secret, if we must. You in particur cannot afford not to do that.”

  “I know,” said Mi reluctantly, “and I can’t just tell her that I’m a tea girl, too. At least right away.”

  Roxa looked pained. “Mi…I think we need to assume that if we noticed her, then someone else has, too. There are many here who wouldn’t hesitate to hang her out to dry immediately, but I’m sure that most would see an opportunity and be tempted to hold her secret over her head for their own purposes. Even if she appears to be uncompromised, she may already be under someone else’s controlment.”

  Roxa hesitated. “It may never be safe to make yourself vulnerable to her like that.”

  Mi had set down her mug. She stared at her hands, resting on her thighs. “If we can offer her friendship, while keeping ourselves protected, we all may be able to find a way to unsnare each other from this vile, compulsive game of power and control.”

  She looked up, and the dark gleam in her eyes jolted Roxa’s heart. “Just as you and I have.”

  Roxa’s cheeks dusted pink. She leaned her head on one hand and gazed into Mi’s warm eyes, biting her lip unselfconsciously.

  Mi arched an eyebrow. “What, no witty retort? Surely there’s a dirty joke in there somewhere.”

  Roxa shook her head in apparent wonder. She still looked bashfully smitten.

  Mi leaned forward, a satisfied little smile pying on her lips, pnted her hands on either side of Roxa, and stroked her cheek against the side of her friend’s face.

  Roxa sighed dreamily and nuzzled her right back. She inhaled sharply as Mi caught her bottom lip with a hungry mouth. Their tongues met and danced, slow and sweet.

  After a while Mi leaned back, eyes fluttering open. Roxa stretched like a cat, grinning. They smiled zily at each other, both savoring the honeyed magnetism unfurling and blossoming and rippling between them.

  Mi sighed happily.

  Roxa reached out and brushed her thumb along Mi’s nape. “Lucky me,” she murmured softly, watching her friend arch in response.

  “Mmhmm,” agreed Mi, her eyes alight. “So. Haven’t we freed ourselves from the threat of each other? At least in the way this pce seeks to entrap us all, and force us to seek advantage over one another. Admit that it is possible, Roxa!”

  Roxa only sighed in admiration. “Keep speaking like this, and I will admit to anything.”

  Mi rolled her eyes, her heart rising like a sun. “Just dowse her, you loon.”

  Roxa jumped up and started going through her desk drawers. “It’s in here somewhere. I made it weeks ago,” she muttered.

  “Found it!” She hefted a jar and gnced at the long, dark hair inside. “Oh, um, Mi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Ah, well—no.” Mi’s cheeks colored. “I’ve been calling her Petrel in my head.”

  Roxa gnced at her, amused. “Petrel?”

  “A seabird.” She smiled fondly. She had so many memories of watching their uncountable flocks, wheeling and diving above the harbor. “Their young look like little balls of fluff.” Mi shrugged. “She reminds me of a hatchling.”

  Roxa chortled. “Cute. All right, here we go.”

  Casting the spell was the work of a moment. They both watched the string jerk as it came suddenly alive, and swivel to point at the wall.

  Roxa frowned as it flickered and stabbed, trembling with an energy that boded proximity. “Well, this can’t be right…”

  ChaoticArmcandy