Chapter 3 – Now

Now.

Alice wrenched her wrists apart. The rope snapped with a dry, fibrous crack, the sound of something that had been holding on by habit rather than strength, and her hands were free.

She didn’t think. Thinking was a luxury that belonged to people who had more than one option, and Alice had exactly one. She surged upward, drove her shoulder into Miller’s midsection, and wrapped her left arm around his neck before his brain had finished processing the fact that the girl in the corner was no longer sitting down.

Her right hand found the exposed skin of his wrist, the gun hand she needed to pin. She pressed her palm flat against it and pushed.

The heat came faster than it ever had in any lesson.

Miller’s skin blistered on contact. The flesh beneath her fingers went from warm to searing in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and the sound he made was not a scream. It was older than that—raw, guttural, from the part of the brain that existed before language

“Don’t move!” Alice hauled backward, trying to drag him between herself and the room, trying to make two hundred pounds of thrashing man into a wall she could hide behind. Her voice came out high and cracked and nothing like the imperious tone she’d used ten minutes ago. “Nobody move!”

Miller was not cooperating.

He was not a target. He was not a hostage. He was a panicked animal with a brand searing into his wrist, and his body was doing what panicked animals did. He was thrashing, bucking, and throwing himself in every direction at once to escape the source of the pain. An elbow caught Alice in the ribs. The impact drove the air from her lungs in a single, involuntary gasp, and her grip on his neck broke.

He spun. She staggered. The pistol in his belt caught on the buckle as he twisted, tore free, and clattered to the stone floor between them.

The gun skittered across the flagstones, spinning once, and stopped two feet from Alice’s hand.

She dove for it.

Her fingers brushed the grip. It was cold metal, oil-slick, the checkered pattern biting into her palm—

“Hold it.”

The voice was calm.

The sound of the hammer cocking was the loudest thing in the room. It was louder than Miller’s sobbing, louder than the rain, and louder than the blood drumming in Alice’s ears. It was a small, precise mechanical sound, and it meant that the distance between Alice and the rest of her life was the width of a trigger pull.

She froze.

The Leader was standing five feet away. His arm was extended, the borrowed revolver aimed at the centre of her forehead with the steady, unhurried precision of a man who had done this before and did not find it difficult. The barrel was a dark circle, a period at the end of a sentence. Behind him, the other men had their weapons raised. Two shotguns and a revolver were all pointed at the corner where Florence was pressing herself against the wall.

Alice’s hand hovered over the pistol. Two inches. She could close two inches in a fraction of a second.

She would be dead in less than that.

“Well.” The Leader tilted his head. His gaze had dropped to Alice’s right hand, where the skin was still faintly luminous, the air above it rippling with residual heat. The cherry-red glow was fading, but slowly, and in the dim room it cast enough light to throw small, trembling shadows against the wall. “A mage.”

He said it the way a man might say a forgery or a complication, with interest rather than alarm. The gun did not waver.

“A budding pyromancer. That puts a whole new price tag on your head, Duchess.”

He gestured with the barrel. A small,It tight motion. Wall.

“Back. Slowly.”

Alice’s lungs were burning. Her ribs ached where Miller’s elbow had connected, and her right hand was throbbing—hollow, spent, the pain that came after pushing heat past what her reserves could sustain. She swallowed. The bile sat at the back of her throat, thick and sour, the taste of a plan that had failed.

She shuffled backward. One step. Two. Her shoulders found the cold stone beside Florence, and the wall took her weight. She stood there with her hands visible and her options exhausted, and the understanding settled into her chest like a stone that she was going to die in this room.

Miller was on the floor, curled around his wrist, the branded skin weeping fluid. His voice had degraded from screaming to a sustained, keening moan punctuated by bursts of language that were mostly profanity and partly prayer.

“Kill her,” he managed, through teeth clenched so tight the words came out in shards. “Boss. Kill her. Look at my hand. Look what she did. She’s a witch. She’s too dangerous to—”

“Calm down, Miller.”

“She’ll burn us all! You can’t keep her! You can’t—”

“I said calm down.” The Leader’s voice hadn’t changed register. He was still looking at Alice with the same tilted, appraising expression, running calculations behind eyes that were colder than the room. “He has a point, you know,” he said, addressing Alice directly, conversationally, as though they were discussing a change in travel plans. “I considered alternatives. Breaking your fingers. Your legs. But pyromancers are tricky. The literature is quite clear on that point. You don’t need hands to start a fire, and after that little performance, none of my boys are going to volunteer to get within arm’s reach.”

He sighed. It was genuine—the exhalation of a man who found the cleanest solution distasteful but necessary.

“Too much variance,” he said. “I’d rather not gamble. And to answer your earlier question regarding the freshness of the merchandise,” he shrugged his gun-arm shoulder in a small, apologetic motion. “It seems our Clients are not as particular as I implied.”

The meaning of the words arrived a half-second before the fear.

Alice felt the blood leave her face. It was a physical sensation, a draining and a withdrawal, as though her circulatory system had decided to abandon the extremities and retreat to the core. The Leader’s expression had settled into something that was not anger or cruelty, but simply the face of a man who had finished his arithmetic and arrived at a number.

“Please.” Florence’s voice came from beside her, small, cracked, and barely a voice at all. She stepped forward half a step, her bound hands trembling in front of her. “Sir. You don’t have to do this. We can—”

The Leader looked at her. He looked at her the way he’d look at a fly. Brief. Dismissive.

“A man’s got to do what he’s got to do, sweetheart.”

He pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flash turned the room white.

Alice flinched. Her eyes closed. Every muscle in her body contracted simultaneously, bracing for the impact that would end the bracing. In the fraction of a second between the flash and the expected darkness, she thought of nothing. Not her family, not her name, not the fire she had spent ten years failing to light. The mind, at the end, was emptier than she had expected.

The darkness didn’t come.

Instead came a sound. Sharp, metallic, impossibly wrong. It was the ping of a hammer striking an anvil, bright and percussive, a sound that did not belong in the same room as a gunshot. Immediately after came a second sound. It was wet, thick, the tearing of something that should not have been torn.

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Alice opened her eyes.

Florence was standing in front of her.

She had moved. Alice didn’t know whether it was before the shot, during it, or in the impossible sliver of time between the trigger pull and the impact. But Florence was there, directly between Alice and the barrel. Her body was squared, her shoulders set, her posture carrying the unconscious geometry of someone who had placed themselves in a doorway and intended to fill it.

There was a tear in the shoulder of Florence’s dress. It was a small, smoking hole with the fabric singed at the edges, and through it Alice could see skin that was not skin. The surface was grey and dull. It was metallic. It had the flat, dense sheen of gunmetal, and as Alice watched, it rippled. A slow, liquid shimmer moved across the exposed patch like a shudder before fading, the grey receding, and the flesh returning to its normal colour as though nothing had happened.

To the right of the table, Jenkins was dying.

He had dropped his revolver. His hands were at his throat, his fingers sunk into the flesh on either side of his windpipe, trying to hold closed something that would not close. The blood came up between his fingers in dark, arterial pulses. It was not bright red but deep, almost black in the dim light, the colour of blood that had been carrying oxygen a moment ago and would never carry it again. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He made a sound that was not a word, and then his knees folded, and he went forward into the dirt, and the sound stopped.

Florence was staring at the blood.

Her head had tilted in a small, involuntary motion, taking the angle of someone listening to a sound no one else could hear. Her lips were parted. Her eyes had fixed on the dark pool spreading beneath Jenkins’s body with an intensity that did not look like horror. It looked like attention.

The room was silent. The Leader’s revolver was still extended. A thin curl of smoke drifted from the barrel. His composure, which had survived the explosion on the road and the death of Cole and the knife work on the merchant couple without so much as a crack, was gone. His mouth was open. His eyes were moving between Florence and the dead man on the floor, trying to connect the two, trying to build the chain of causality that linked a bullet fired at one girl to a hole in another man’s throat, and finding no links that fit.

Alice did not waste the miracle.