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He knew they were coming. If not the Lime Men, someone else would. It’s only common sense. He told Vernon he should just accept whatever terms Yaselle laid out, but Vernon didn’t want to listen. The others didn’t either. How could he explain that she would be the lesser of two evils, if there were such a thing in this world? How could he explain to children raised to con the game-master that most games are not played to be finished at all? They just end.

The Lime Men are brutal. Cliff-Man wasn’t wrong when he said that the gangs of Mecraentos City were more vicious and cunning than given credit for. In the other Cities, they are seen just as byproducts of the general poverty—and they are, but he has slowly surmised that they control an entire underground ecosystem, one that the Garnets have yet to grasp yet.

For some reason, they seem unaffected by the plague at all. They demolish the cave which he lived in when he first ventured the City. They follow the Garnets with their guns blazing and their high carriages, who scramble around the City with imprecise feet and a panicked air. He does what he can to keep the Lime Men off their trail.

Vernon heads straight back to their original warehouse.

“Stop it,” he calls to Vernon. “Minee is safer!”

Vernon keeps on.

“Siké,” he curses.

The shipments stolen from the Damaskragan ship are still with Michie. The fact that the Garnets accomplished such a high-risk job is an accomplishment, he wants to tell Vernon. It was only their willing ignorance to keep the Illuminated One in their midst which ignited the spark of their downfall tonight.

Instead, he runs back into the heart of the flaming cave.

Two Lime Men are still alive. They are bulky, their plague marked on them like proud tattoos. Both have pitch-black eyes, like his own—a feature he knows to be a mark of those descended from the Javimoe Desert people. When they see him, they charge. One has clearly physically enhanced muscle, while the other opens his mouth and a long, spiking tongue slips out.

He turns around. With feet which have done this thousands of times before, he clambers up the side of a plague-ridden tree which infests the cave, so that he is a dozen legs over the Lime Men.

He lights another arrow from his perch and aims true. When they try to climb the tree, he shoots one in the back three times. These two are not agile or lean enough to be secure in the fragile branches.

They look at him like rabid animals, relishing in their blind power. Their blind following of whoever told them that the Illuminated One was worth more than their two lives together. He shoots the second in the eye.

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His back muscles are sore and his fingertips bleed because of the weight of the bow and the coarseness of the strings, but he hardly feels it. He coughs as the smoke tries to suffocate him, his eyes wet and stinging.

He clambers up to the top-section of the cave. It is buried into a small hill on the edge of the City. It does not look natural. Indeed, it looks as though it were a result of an explosion.

Hidden within a hollow log, he pulls out a terrified little boy with wide, pale eyes.

“Hello, Heish.”

The boy is clearly of noble blood. With healthy tanned skin and dark hair, his cheeks are full and flushed. He does not have any bones exposed. A good specimen of a child.

The boy cries and has been crying for quite some time. He has probably not been in the midst of so much violence before this last week—probably didn’t even think this amount of bloodshed was possible anywhere besides a Slaughter House. And, even then, a Slaughter House is ethical.

He carries the boy in his arms as he clambers back down into the mouth of the cave.

“Sit down,” he tells Heish once they are on the ground. The boy, of course, is obedient. It’s the only thing to be taught by the Bundala in the Fortress. Heish just coughs and cries silently.

The smoke is bad but not abhorrent. It just is, as most things are.

He always searches for bodies. A habit from his work over the cycles. He closes the eyes of the dead Lime Men.

He finds the dead fascinating. He can spend hours just staring at a rotted body, coming up with its life story based on its clothes, the cuts on its right arm, the size of the coin pouch in its pocket, if it has been chained or not. He is not sure how much time passes, looking at this dead Lime Man, for his mind wanders, putting together memories and images from long ago and reflecting on this man. He has red-hair, like his own, but it is clearly dyed, unlike his own. He pokes the cheek of the dead man. Then he grabs its hand. He takes out one of his arrow-heads and stabs the wrist. He leans down and drinks from the open vein—it is hot.

It is a custom of his people to drink the blood of the wrist when killing a mark.

Here, in this City, they consume all of the body—nothing left unused or untouched. But that is because they have not mastered the art of plague-crop and fasting.

There is another body, shrouded in the gray.

“Damn,” he whispers, seeing that the body is that of a young girl. Curly-haired and once bright-Souled.

He doesn’t know her name, but she was one of the girls that swam her friends to the red Damaskragan ship. The tall one. She seemed kind.

Three bullets to the head. The forehead. The cheek. The eye socket. Precise and clean.

He knows that the Garnet children will be devastated by this because that is another thing that just is. Grief is as inevitable as this violent meeting was. He closes her eyes and carries her body, setting it besides Heish.

Heish flinches but does not try to scramble away. In less than a week, he has become as insensitive to death as all those beyond the Walls are.

“The Rubies want you for some reason, for something important, according to Yaselle,” he says. “She went through a great deal of effort to grab you from the Five Pitters. Do you know why?”

The boy shakes his head.

“Okay. Well, you’re going to come with me to rest with my new companions. Are you part of the Court? No? Your family? Well, I have a few questions for you. Do you know what a Washer is? Come.”

END OF ASH AND STONE.