Chapter One
SOPHIE FOLLOWED BEHIND the horse-drawn cart that her group had looted from the bandits’ camp and eyed the bindings around her hostage’s wrists. Toole twiddled his fingers about playfully as if he knew she were watching and was trying to make her paranoid that this performance was all some sleight-of-hand trick to escape. His occasional smirk bobbed up and down with the uneven road to Dioled--a village that was surely nothing more than the nearest prison to this thief.
Her partner, Logan, staggered back from his position beside the cart and nudged her. His tattered clothes and the dirt caked in his skin reminded her of how they all must have looked, shambling along that road like plague-bearers in pilgrimage. He licked his dry lips to whisper, a scab glinting with a more vivid red where the bandits had split them open. “He’s not a threat anymore, you know.”
Sophie shook her head. “Then why are you afraid he’ll hear you talking about him?”
Logan shifted his jaw in consideration and then shrugged off her question. His hand griped the hilt of the dagger he had stolen from Baerik Silvertongue, the bandit leader they had left in a cage back at their woodland hideout.
From the way he toyed with it, Sophie knew he was concerned mostly with the enemies they didn’t have in custody, not Toole; but if Toole were to escape, Logan clearly didn’t want to be the first target on the man’s list.
“Deadliness isn’t something you can just tie up,” he finally said.
Sophie studied the nimble fingers still dancing below the wrist-restraints.
They approached a hill, and Caleb fell into step with Sophie. She expected the Dioledian to thank them yet again for rescuing their group, but instead he only arched his hand like the crest of an arrow, cutting forward over the scenery and saying, “Dioled is only a short distance from the top there. Not much farther until we’re all in our own beds.”
He cleared his throat. “Thanks to you two, of course. I’m sorry you’re still so far from home.”
Home.
Sophie had to stifle her urge to laugh at that word with a cough. She was more excited to see Dioled than to ever return to the Ether Edifice and the other splicers who rejected her or wrote her off as just a failure. She cast a short glance at Logan, wondering if he still thought about her as some useless excuse for a partner in this recruiting mission.
Toole caught her looking, his head twisted to the side, eyes tracing the gap between the two splicers that had captured him. That smirk now felt as if it hid his criticism of the pair. This bandit knew Sophie had spliced energy with him back in the cages--a telling fact; the implications of which she didn’t want to think about. It also seemed that he somehow knew that Logan was oblivious to the truth.
Toole was a splicer--the only one from whom Sophie had ever successfully drawn power.
Before she could even decide if it was a mistake, she had already lowered her stare, probably confirming his unspoken suspicions and questions.
Yes, she thought. I’m hiding it from him. And it’s in your best interest if you follow my lead.
That thought didn’t do it justice though, and she knew that. She squinted against the sun and took some comfort in the distraction. The light was too bright to see anything clearly; the rays suffused into a blur.
Logan wouldn’t even be able to tell that she had locked him in her sights, questioning if her desire to run away had become more than an option now. Maybe it was her only choice. After all, she was hiding just by keeping her splicing with Toole a secret.
What if this meant that she was more akin to Toole than Logan, more like a bandit than a true splicer? That’s what splicing was--the ability to bind energy with other people with whom you shared some kind of connection.
She couldn’t deny that. After wanting to be a splicer for so long, her success was now spoiled by the reality of it. The way her aura had ignited and burst in the bandits’ cages disturbed her, considering the fact that she had yet to succeed at splicing with her trained peers like Logan.
She had to focus to keep from showing her concerns as they finally reached the hilltop and looked at the landscape and then at one another. Everyone was relieved at the sight of Dioled except Sophie. She would have to make her decisions sooner than she had thought.
Caleb returned and crossed his arms, shifting his shoulders back and his chest toward the panorama as if it had bolstered him, filling his lungs with the hearth smoke from familiar chimneys, straightening his posture like the rigid architecture of his home.
Sophie felt a slight urge to mimic him. She wanted the feeling of a homecoming, too.
“It’s not much to look at,” he said, visibly impressed by it all, despite his words.
“I’m sure it’s your favorite place in the world though,” she said.
Caleb nodded. “Once you splicers can convince them to make an alliance, you may even feel like this isn’t just another job.”
That comment was enough to snap Sophie out of her counterfeit notion of belonging.
“Maybe,” she said, and she marched forward, ahead of the cart and the group now.
“Wait.”
Caleb caught up with her and then put his hands on his hips as if they were trying to test whether he was ready to proceed or not. The others surrounding the cart had begun to break for the moment as well. Sophie made sure he could see that she wasn’t slowing, and Caleb signaled for the cart to move onward.
She heard his footsteps slashing through the tall blades of grass as he drew close again.
“Hold on, Sophie.”
She paused. “We should get these people home. You can let us worry about changing public opinion later.” She tried to hide her bitterness because she knew it was a bit of an overreaction, but whether or not he had detected it wasn’t clear. He seemed to ignore it if he had noticed.
“I only wanted you to know that I’m on your side.” With his thumb, Caleb pointed casually over his shoulder toward the cart. “Of course,” he said, “everyone will surely be on your side just for bringing one of these wretches into our custody.”
Sophie tensed, almost losing the rhythm of her determined march. Apparently, the Dioledians weren’t aware either that she had spliced with Toole to save them all. “What will they do to him?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Caleb scratched at his hair--a ghost of evidence. Sophie suspected that there was something he wasn’t telling her, digging its way out and revealing itself in his quirks. “You won’t have to deal with him anymore.”
Her nostrils flared unintentionally, and smoke traces from the village now brewed inside her with a scent of oppression, reminding her of the spiral of torches scaling the steps of the Ether Edifice, where she had felt like a prisoner herself.
She could feel some sense of doubt rising within her, like the pressure of her tongue behind her teeth as she questioned if she should continue focusing on her duty as a splicer or if she should take this opportunity to ensure that she would never return to the life she had fled.