Lio’s was bare and regimentally tidy. A small oil painting of the Sanctuary hung from a rusty frame by her bed. The picture of the white farmhouse was the only thing that suggested the room was occupied.
Sylah clutched her satchel as she fell onto her bed. Thoughts of the Sandstorm swirled like a hurricane through her mind. Guilt and shame seeped into tears down her cheek.
How could her mother so willingly forget Papa? She had always been one of the fiercest supporters of the cause, had forever seen Sylah as the asset she was.
Sylah’s bed crackled beneath her as she shifted heavily on the straw. The stuffing needed changing, but she hadn’t gotten around to it for…mooncycles? It might have been a year, she wasn’t sure. Her fingers slipped under the eru leather cover of her satchel to the seed packet within. She instantly felt safer.
Something in the bag scratched her hand. She pulled it out, and she cursed as a thin red line of blood blossomed on the edge of her finger. Three fights in the Ring and not a drop spilled, but a paper cut brings down the almighty Sylah.
She stuck the finger in her mouth and rummaged in her bag for bandages. She always carried them. The wound didn’t warrant it, but society did.
Once her finger was tightly bound, she pulled out the offensive culprit.
“I should have traded you for more seeds,” she hissed at the map. At that present moment, she couldn’t recollect why she hadn’t. She unrolled it and looked at it one more time, the tear along the edge more intriguing than ever. Did she now collect broken things?
“Sylah?”
Sylah rolled up the map and tucked it in her bag.
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me.” The reply was out of Lio’s mouth before she could stop it. She entered Sylah’s room and exhaled. Started again. “I know we don’t share blood,”—her mouth twisted in distaste—“but you are my daughter, and I think…I think I have wronged you.”
Sylah had no words.
“Close your mouth before you catch a fly.” Lio moved onto the bed next to Sylah. “After everyone died, I thought it was over. I didn’t push you like I should have.” Lio laughed a sharp and painful sound. “We hadn’t even completed your training, we still didn’t know how to teach you to bloodwerk. We needed an Ember to teach you, but Azim couldn’t bear the thought of asking one.”
“And the Sandstorm does now?” Sylah leaned forward. If they knew how to bloodwerk, maybe they could teach her?
Lio shook her head once. “No, but Jond says they have a plan. They’ll figure it out.”
Sylah snorted. “Sure, because it’s that easy.”
Sylah thought of the paper she had traded one dull afternoon in the Maroon followed by an evening spent with a piece of charcoal and a runelamp. She had then pierced her skin with a stick and tried to replicate the bloodwerk language, to no avail.
A frown rippled across Lio’s face. “Anyway, as I was saying.” Another exhale. “It was wrong to turn our backs on everything we stood for. I think you should enter the Aktibar. It is time we had someone with a Duster’s heart ruling this empire, even if it can’t be one of us.”
“It could be Jond.”
A quirk of the eyebrow, no response.
“He’s been training for the last two years.” Sylah played with a loose piece of straw in her mattress.
“So have you.”
“I—” Sylah swallowed the lie. “You know about the Ring.”
Lio snorted. “Of course, I’m not a fool. You get fired from every apprenticeship you get, but still come home with enough slabs to buy the food.”
The piece of straw pulled apart in Sylah’s hand. She noticed her fingers were quivering; it was time for another joba seed.
“No one can replace Papa Azim.”
“No.” Lio patted Sylah’s lap with a stiff hand. “No, they can’t. But that doesn’t mean this new revolution can’t pick up where he left off.”
“Do you really think that?”
Lio rubbed her razor-thin brows. “Papa Azim had a way of bringing people together through their oppression. He identified it, harnessed it, and used it to fuel us to develop a better tomorrow. But the collective pain wasn’t anything new. Dusters have wanted to reclaim the power of our community for a long time.” When Papa preached, you could hear the capital letters. Reclaim. Power. It gave the words purpose. Sylah heard them now in her mother’s speech.