“Stop kicking me!” My useless guide tried to scamper away from me. It wasn’t working. I was faster than him, more agile, and viciously mad like only my mother could be. Not that I had ever known my adoptive mother. She’d died shortly after my adoption. But my father’s stories of her were legendary, even accounting for his tendency to embellish. She was the woman who led three refugee caravans from Sig to Onda.

I was being kind in my treatment of this bloody moron. My mother wouldn’t have resorted to kicking and screaming. She’d have skinned him alive. The dirty rat had fallen asleep during his watch. We could have both been dead; that we weren’t was a miracle.

This was literally his only job, the only reason I tolerated the babysitters my father saddled me with. You couldn’t survive out here without someone to keep watch while you slept. If it wasn’t for this I’d get rid of all of these guides at the start of my trips instead of at the end of it.

He was risking everything. I had never gotten this far without needing to retreat. For the very first time, it felt like I might just find it. This would be the trip where I succeeded. No one was going to stop me. Not my father, not some frilly pink Zee, and most definitely not this asshat of a guide.

“Oh…” In his attempts to escape my ire, Haver had stopped dancing about the room we had slept in and had darted out the door. That’s where he was standing now, blocking the way like the idiot he is.

“Don’t just oh me! At least have the decency to apologize.” I kept kicking but got no further reaction out of him. Stupid runty little legs. Stupid giant of a man. He merely pointed and repeated his little “Oh.”

I wriggled my way in between his arm and the doorway to look where he was pointing at. One Zee lay on the ground in the middle of the room, cut open like a fish fillet. Another one had been hammered to the open door on the other side. That one’s legs dangled uselessly above the ground. The curved blade jammed through its chest and the door was the only thing keeping it aloft.

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Either my hopeless guard had been sleepwalking or … I sighed, retreated to our sleeping spot, shouldered my backpack, and took out my two axes. Stomping past the halfwit I dumped his own gear in his arms and took the lead. This carnage wasn’t the work of my useless joke of a protector. Someone else had played the part of guardian angel in his stead. I wasn’t going to wait around till the mystery benefactor came back.

I cautiously stuck my head out of the open front door, the one with the dead Zee dangling on it. The street outside was deserted. I stepped out, only to spot pink from the corner of my eye.

I whirled around and darted further into the street, twin axes at the ready. Unintended, an “Oh shit!” escaped my lips.

It was the frilly pink Zee girl. She was leaning against the wall, right next to the door, using a knife to pick something out from between her teeth.

“Oh shit…” I muttered once more.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. We... well okay, she had ditched us three days ago when we’d refused to share food around a fire. We hadn’t seen her since, hadn’t seen a single Zee since. I thought we’d lost her. Had she been tailing us?

Almost as if she could read the shock and apprehension painted onto my face she gave me a withering glare. That was of course the moment an overly useless Haver darted out.

“Ava! Are you al—” He noticed the Zee, turned white as a sheet, tripped over his own feet, and flopped to the ground in a tangle of uncoordinated limbs.

While the nitwit was cursing and picking himself up, the Zee girl reached out across the door and pulled the dagger out of the Zee she had pinned there. The corpse fell to the ground with a sickening moist squelch. Definitely not mimicry.

I took a cautious couple of steps back, placing the still-recovering Haver in between her and me. I had the sinking feeling that even uncoordinated and shambling, she was better with those daggers than I was with my axes.