A Torch Against the Night Read Free Page A

knocking down two approaching rebel fighters as I go, and aim for the next street over. But fire rages there, spreading rapidly, and bodies litter the ground. I grab Laia’s hand and race toward another side street, only to find that it is as brutalized as the first.
    Above the clang of weapons, the screams, and the roar of flames, Serra’s drum towers beat frenziedly, demanding backup troops in the Illustrian Quarter, the Foreign Quarter, the Weapons Quarter. Another tower reports my location near the governor’s mansion, ordering all available troops to join the hunt.
    Just past the mansion, a pale blonde head emerges from the debris of the collapsed tunnel.
Damn it.
We stand near the middle of the square, beside an ash-coated fountain of a rearing horse. I back Laia against it and duck, desperately searching for an escape route before the Commandant or one of the Martials spots us. But it seems as if every building and every street adjoining the square is aflame.
    Look harder!
Any second now, the Commandant will dive into the fray in the square, using her terrifying skill to tear a path through the battle so she can find us.
    I look back at her as she shakes the dust off her armor, unmoved by the chaos. Her serenity raises the hair on the back of my neck. Her school is destroyed, her son and foe escaped, the city an absolute disaster. And yet she is remarkably calm about it all.
    “There!” Laia grabs my arm and points to an alley hidden behind an overturned vendor’s cart. We crouch down and race toward it, and I thank the skies for the tumult that keeps Scholars and Martials alike from noticing us.
    In minutes, we reach the alley, and as we’re about to plunge into it, I chance a look back—once, just to make sure she hasn’t seen us.
    I search the chaos—through a knot of Resistance fighters descending on a pair of legionnaires, past a Mask fighting off ten rebels at once, to the rubble of the tunnel, where my mother stands. An old Scholar slave trying to escape the havoc makes the mistake of crossing her path. She plunges her scim into his heart with a casual brutality. When she yanks the blade out, she doesn’t look at the slave. Instead, she stares at me. As if we are connected, as if she knows my every thought, her gaze slices across the square.
    She smiles.

CHAPTER THREE
Laia
    T he Commandant’s smile is a bloated, pale worm. Though I see her for only a moment before Elias urges me away from the bloodshed of the square, I find myself unable to speak.
    I skid, my boots still coated in blood from the butchery in the tunnels. At the thought of Elias’s face afterward—the loathing in his eyes—I shudder. I wanted to tell him that he did what he had to do to save us. But I couldn’t get the words out. It was all I could do not to retch.
    Sounds of suffering rend the air—Martial and Scholar, adult and child, mingled into one cacophonous scream. I hardly hear it, focused as I am on avoiding the broken glass and burning buildings collapsing into the streets. I look over my shoulder a dozen times, expecting to see the Commandant on our heels. Suddenly, I feel like the girl I was a month ago. The girl who abandoned her brother to Empire imprisonment, the girl who whimpered and sobbed after being whipped. The girl with no courage.
    When the fear takes over, use the only thing more powerful, more indestructible, to fight it: your spirit. Your heart.
I hear the words spoken to me yesterday by the blacksmith Spiro Teluman, my brother’s friend and mentor.
    I try to transform my fear into fuel. The Commandant is not infallible
.
She might not have even seen me—her attention was so fixed on her son. I escaped her once. I’ll escape her again.
    Adrenaline surges through me, but as we turn from one street to the next, I stumble over a small pyramid of masonry and sprawl onto the soot-blackened cobblestones.
    Elias lifts me back to my feet as easily as if I’m made of feathers. He gazes ahead, behind, to the