Getting to the wall, even getting past the wall was the easy part. The noisy mass of city-slicker guards stumbling beyond the walls in all their armor was no problem to avoid, and they moved even slower than Daivad had anticipated. As for getting past the wall, he used the same trick he’d used to sneak around Broken Earth a million times. He found a drainage grate and pried it open enough to fit his shoulders through.

The hard part would be actually tracking the kid down, and the harder part would be convincing her to come with him. But at least he knew where to start. Nyxabella said they’d freed her from the holding cells at the East Gate. He wasn’t eager to return to the scene of his own crime, not now that it was crawling with people trying to clean it up, but at least that made it easier for him to blend in.

It was fucking torture, being here in this city, people pressing in on him from all sides, broken buildings stacked above him—and he couldn’t even put his hood down to get some air.

For a good half hour after he got as close to the gate as he could, trying and failing to make himself look small, he thought it was useless. With all these people, the smoke from the fires still in the air, there was no way he was going to be able to pick up her scent from hours ago. He nearly gave up three different times, but it was the image of the kid in a ball at the bottom of those stairs, followed by an image of Richard grabbing Nyxabella by the throat that turned him back around all three times.

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But this wasn’t working. He couldn’t just leave, but he also could stand here in the middle of this mess he, Ben, and Kure had made and wait for someone to finally notice who he was. So he left what was left of the East Gate and went one block down, and started there, making a zig-zagging arc around the gate in the slightly quieter streets where he could actually pick one scent apart from another. This went on for another hour, the sun well up into the sky now—but there. At first he thought it was just wishful thinking, that he was imagining the familiarity of the scent that tickled his nose. But with another deep breath, lips parted, he was sure.

It quickly became apparent that the kid had had absolutely no plan when she’d started running. And from the adrenaline and fear in her scent, he was sure she’d been running. At first, she ran in a straight shot as far from the gate as possible—but once she’d gotten nearly to the forum, she took a hard left for several blocks. And then … there was no rhyme or reason to her path after that. Her trail was thin enough that he doubted she had stopped at any of these random alleys and side streets. A few times her path crossed over itself, confusing the hell out of Daivad’s nose.

He didn’t know how long he was wandering through this cursed city chasing what might well be a ghost, ducking aside every time he heard the clank of metal.

And then, quite clearly, Daivad heard a sound that could be only one thing.