“Well done. You told them my name?”
“I told them you are Bloskin, a Blackhat Bronze Rose. I told them you knew their mother.”
Michel squinted at her. “Are you a Blackhat?”
“An Iron Rose. But I don’t have it with me. It’s hidden.”
“Good. Don’t show that Rose to anyone. It’s too dangerous. Why didn’t you leave the city during the invasion?”
Kazi glanced back into the street, taking a half step away from Michel. He could practically feel her distrust. Blackhats were the Lady Chancellor’s secret police. They were inherently distrustful but should always be able to count on each other. The invasion and subsequent occupation had changed all the old rules. “You don’t have to tell me anything about yourself,” Michel reassured. “I was just curious. We all have our reasons.”
“Yes, we do,” Kazi said, her tone standoffish.
Michel needed trust right now, people he could depend on. But his list of trusted contacts was pitifully small, so why should hers be any longer? If he wanted to know more about Kazi, he’d have to ask their mutual contact. “Get out of here,” he said. “Get some sleep. There will be more families tomorrow.” He grabbed her sleeve as she turned to go. “Cover your head. Your hair stands out in the darkness. Also, careful of the patrols. They’re changing up their routes.”
He waited until Kazi had headed back toward the secret paths up to the Landfall plateau, before crossing the street and entering the alley she’d emerged from a few minutes prior. The alley was littered with old crates, barrels, and other refuse, and he couldn’t immediately pick out anyone hiding there.
“I’m Bloskin,” he said in a loud whisper. “Kazi has gone home. You’re with me now.”
Slowly, figures emerged from their hiding places. The first was a man, medium height with long, dark hair under a flatcap. He held a bundle in his arms, which Michel quickly realized was a child, no more than a year old. Five more children of various ages followed.
“Kazi said you know my wife,” the man whispered urgently.
Part of Michel’s job as a spy had always been knowing when to tell the truth and when to lie—and when to walk the gray places in between. “I don’t, actually. I don’t know who you are, except that your wife is a Silver Rose, and we need to get you out of the city. That’ll have to be good enough, unless you want to risk the Dynize purges.”
The children huddled around their father, who seemed at a loss. He looked around at the waiting faces before finally nodding at Michel. “We don’t have any choice but to trust you. But this is my family. If you so much as—”
“Don’t threaten me,” Michel said with a tired sigh. “It’s childish. You can either let me do my job, or I can go find somewhere to sleep. Now, are we getting you out of the city or not?”
“Is Bloskin even your real name?” the father asked. Michel could hear the tension in his voice, and he wished that for once this process could be simple.
“No, and I suggest you not tell me yours.” Michel squinted at his pocket watch, trying to discern the time in the darkness. “Kazi got you here late, so if we’re going to go, we need to do it now. Make a decision.”
The father’s mouth formed a hard line. “We’ll go.”
“Right, follow me. And no one make a peep.”
Michel led the family back the way they’d come and began to cross streets and duck through alleys in a pattern that might look to an observer to be entirely random. They crisscrossed their own path several times, but he led them steadily north through the suburbs until the streets began to widen and the tenements and stores began to thin. They were soon among small, two-story houses, ducking through one of the many Palo quarters of the city, where the streets weren’t cobbled, the gutters were filled with trash, and the Dynize patrols were fewer.
For eight nights Michel had done a variation of the same route—carefully planned out during the day—and managed not to cross paths with a single Dynize patrol. On this night, however, the patrols were constant and the group was forced to hide almost every hour.
They waited for the third of the patrols to pass by, crouching beneath one of the stilted houses on the floodplains north of the city. Over a hundred strong, and led by a soldier whose breastplate was lacquered black, the patrol carried torches, which they thrust into the alleys and under the houses as they went, and Michel quietly urged the children to move farther into the darkness.
“They’ve changed the routes,” Michel whispered to the father. He swore to himself and listened to the ticking of his watch in his breast pocket, knowing time was running short.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Could be they’re getting wise to people leaving the city. Could be that they just change their routine every week or so. Either way, it’s going to be more and more dangerous to leave the city from here on out.”
“Are we going to be able to get out?” There was a tinge of desperation to the father’s voice.
Michel hesitated. If he was smart, he’d leave the seven of them here to try and make it on their own. He’d flush his safe house in Upper Landfall, cut off his contacts with Hendres, Kazi, and anyone else, and find the deepest hole in Greenfire Depths to wait out this occupation.
He didn’t need to help these people. His own mother was safely out of the city, and as a spy he’d never been close to anyone else.
But despite his alternate loyalties, he didn’t believe anyone deserved to be snatched up by foreign occupiers, least of all children.
“You’ll get out,” Michel finally said. “But we have to move fast.” The patrol passed, and Michel led the family out from beneath the stilted houses. He picked up the smallest of the children, cradling her face against his neck, then began to hurry them all along at a quicker pace. They crossed the sandiest, deepest part of the floodplains and entered the fens. The wetlands were bisected by hundreds of drainage ditches built by convicts in the labor camps. The ditches made poor highways, but it kept them out of sight of the road as they moved farther and farther away from the city.
Wet, muddy, and stinking, the group emerged on the opposite side of the fens and crossed the final highway before the coastal plains became cotton and tobacco fields for as far as the eye could see. As in the city, patrol frequency out here had increased, and it wasn’t until Michel and his charges were hiding in a farmer’s shed on the northern side of the highway that he allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief.
Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten. It would be daybreak soon, and that would complicate his return to the city. He glanced at the small faces huddled in the shed, and then at the father, whose eyes were tired and his expression bleak. “How much farther?” the father asked.
“Until what?” Michel responded. “Safety? Long time until then.” He heard the bitter note in his voice and silently scolded himself. He was here to help, not deepen the man’s fears. “Sorry,” he said in a gentler voice. “This is as far as I take you. I’ve got to get back before it’s light. You’ll head about two miles due north. There’s a farmhouse with distinct yellow paint on the east wall. They’ll hide you for a day, and tomorrow night get you to a carriage that will take you along the back roads and safely out of range of the Dynize patrols.”
There was a long silence, and Michel could see the man steeling himself to try and herd six children across two miles of open land before the sun came up. Michel didn’t envy him the task.
“How can I thank you?” the father asked.
The question surprised Michel. Most of these smuggled families were so exhausted by the trek that good-bye was a simple nod and then disappearance into the dark. “Just … if you find your wife, or reach the armies, or the Lady Chancellor or anyone, you can tell them that people are still fighting in Landfall. And we’d rather not be abandoned.”