While the others prayed inside the Wayshrine for guidance, I sat on the steps outside, keeping watch. Blood dripped down my hands from where my knuckles had split during the fight, stinging crimson reminding me I was alive. As the adrenaline faded, I leaned more and more against the doorframe beside me. Fighting always seemed a desperate exhaustion kept at bay by the wired fear of death and the strange intoxication of life. 

I still had the cigarette from Isidoros at the corner of my mouth, dribbling foul ash down the front of my dirty, spattered jacket. It was military surplus anyway, something tough enough to protect from knife or broken bottle slashes. Perhaps the blood added character to the dull desert brown. 

So much had happened in such a short time. I rubbed at my split lip, wincing when it stung. 

Footsteps behind me announced Sostrate before she arrived, the sound of her steel-toed boots coming up the stairs echoing off the stone. She’d been on the lines enough to know how often polizí liked to stomp feet flat with their own heavy treads. I flicked the cigarette butt away, watching it trail its smoke in a sudden arc. It disintegrated on contact with cement. 

She took a seat beside me, still smelling of sweet incense from inside the Wayshrine. I felt dirty and sullen next to her, absent the regal bearing that she brought with her everywhere. What did I know about a solution to all of this? Six weeks ago, I was a literature student at the Akademia, chasing my sister around the house to make sure she ate before going off on her wild escapades. Dependable Karsa, patient Karsa, boring Karsa, weak Karsa. 

How true were those now, with this demon living in my chest? It frightened me how quickly I had become a person I doubted even my parents would recognize. 

Sostrate put a hand on my back. “I know you have come out of loss and anger, Karsa.” Her voice was soft and understanding. It was an empathy that sprang from her own pain, from the absence of a little boy who had encountered the wrong people one night. “There must be more to it than that.” 

“What do you mean?” My voice still rasped from the smoke. 

“We are not just doing this for our past, Karsa. We are doing it for our future. This will only become more difficult and I need to know that your head is in the right place.” 

I shifted to look at her with tired eyes, red-rimmed from tears only gas could make fall. “I am out of hope, Sostrate.” 

“I am not asking for hope,” Sostrate said firmly. “That is only Heaven’s to grant. I want a commitment from you that you will do things because they are necessary or because they are right, and for no other reason. The hardest part of what is coming will be to place your anger aside, but if you do not, it will blind you like sand blown into the eyes.” 

“It is like a poison tree growing from my heart. The roots run deep. I cannot simply shake it off.”

Sostrate took my hand in hers and pulled out a bottle of water. She used it to rinse the blood and dirt off one, then tended to my other hand the same way. “Then learn to trim its branches into a useful shape.” 

I held still as she washed my hands and then bandaged them carefully. “What is the next step?” 

“Many of us maintain some armaments, but we will need a better stockpile and a source of ammunition. Some of those who came are engineers, more than capable of manufacturing other things that may be necessary. We have two medics as well, who will need supplies.”

I frowned. “We won’t be able to get weapons without money. A lot of money, for someone to sell to Lathraí troublemakers. The same can be said of everything else.” 

“True.” A certain gleam struck Sostrate’s eye. “We will have to move to rather unorthodox methods of financing our plans. How willing are you to break the law, Karsa?” 

I inhaled deeply, considering that for a moment. “The law has been trying to beat me into the pavement every day for weeks. I do not care what they think of me.” 

“And what about what they will do to you if they capture you?” Sostrate spoke more seriously, red-tinted hair falling into her face. “Your fate may be the same as Endeis’s. Can you do that to your family?” 

The question stabbed me at the root of my heart. It was something I had never stopped to think about in the clashes, head clouded with anger and fear. Now, it was as if the universe had given me permission to think of them for the first time since the night after the bombing. Tears bubbled up, but I pressed my hands to my eyes to hold them back. “I don’t know.” 

Sostrate pulled me into a fierce hug. “You should at least go see them. If you wish to fight with us, do not tell them what you intend. Just say your goodbyes. If this is too much, stay with them in Helike and try to keep your head down.” 

My breathing stuttered, but I forced it to calm as much as I could. “There are still checkpoints everywhere.”

“I know a farmer who sometimes smuggles people back and forth, under his goods. It is a cramped space and uncomfortable, but he is a good and trustworthy man.” She unwrapped her arms and squeezed my shoulders. “I do not want you unless you are committed to see this to the end, Karsa. This is not a decision to be made in the heat of the moment, for it must last even when that has cooled.” 

With the condition of the winding mountain roads, it would be a day to Helike, maybe more if the driver worried about his tires or the traffic picked up. Selling his travel would surely be easy: Vlástisí, the province Helike sat in, was mostly farmland and pasture. Thinking on it at that moment, staring down at my bandaged hands, I had never been more homesick.

Yet even then I knew I was sick for a place and time that could only exist behind me. But that is the nature of loss, no? You want to unravel it all and begin again, like a fisherman untangling his nets. It doesn’t matter that to do so is impossible.

I swallowed thickly. “If he can get me to them, can he get me back?” 

“He’ll have to pick up some cargo or passengers to make the trip back worth doing anyway, which usually takes a day or two in Helike. Keep in touch with him and let him know if you want to return. He can be your ride.” Sostrate gave me another squeeze. “He has done this for us many times. Come, let’s take a walk and I will introduce you. His nephew’s house isn’t far.”

I rose to my feet and offered Sostrate my hands. She accepted the help, as beaten as I was but with enough years between us that she felt the bruises more deeply, healed more slowly. She was thirty-six that year, ten beyond me…not that I could spring up after a polizí beat down and feel fresh as the morning dew either. 

I glanced over at Sostrate as we walked. “So what is his story? It seems risky to smuggle.”

“We are always having shortages of something with how goods are moved normally. He can make a lot of money if he takes trips like these. He has his nephew’s wife and children to support, so even a task of moving a fugitive is worth it when compensated well.” 

“What happened to his nephew?”

Sostrate sighed. “He died two years ago. His flu became pneumonia. He couldn’t stand the idea of putting his family through the expense of the hospital and thought he would get better again soon. By the time he was weak enough that his wife forced him to go….”

I heard the unspoken: What could they do? 

It was a familiar calculus to everyone. Unless you were lucky enough to have someone with knowledge in your friends or family, the cost of hospital stays felt like fiendish bargains, your health at a terrible price. Sometimes the debts crushed patients into oblivion within months. Seiaa was particularly bad in that regard.

I sighed quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“If they had been able to transfer him to the general hospital, he might have survived,” Sostrate said. Her lips twisted with a bitterness I knew well. “So much for separate but equal.” 

The words hit me hard, reminding me Seisa was not a city with sympathy for its lowest citizens. The Aristonian Laws were most harshly enforced there, a segregation that almost defied description. It was this thing alive inside every heart, a demonic taskmaster who told you where you were welcome or not. It was hard to believe that a hundred years ago, it had all belonged to the Lathraí.

Three streets down, Sostrate pointed out the house. We were still in our territory, in a neighborhood where polIzí would only come with a strike team. Weathered green paint flaked from the house’s trim, abused in the front by the branches of a myrtle tree that rattled even in the slightest wind. It exhaled age that silently spoke of all the love and care put into maintaining it. The street was rutted and filled with potholes, dirt built up on the street corners, but the little garden here burst with sprays of floral color. 

In a creaking rocking chair on a sagging porch was the man himself, smoking his pipe with all the venerable calm of Father Time. The driver gave us a friendly wave. “Sostrate, good to see you. Do come in.”

Sostrate opened the little gate, more there for show than anything else. “Good evening, Alkaios. We were hoping you could give my young friend here a lift to Helike, without her presence being remarked on.”

His face creased into a smile, as wrinkled as a dried apple. “Of course. Happy to help.” Alkaios held out a rough hand to me. “Any friend of Sostrate’s is a friend of mine.”