As I rubbed my face, Aros lifted me up and into his arms. “Quiet,” he murmured into my ear, before he moved with his brothers backwards, right into the shadow of a huge house. “Minateurs on patrol.” The seduction-gifted sol added, before wrapping a hand around my mouth.
Come on, I wasn’t going to talk. Probably not anyways.
His chest moved in a silent laugh, his arm wrapping around me a little tighter. I rested against him, allowing the calming nature of his closeness to soothe my rough edges. I seemed to be more rough than smooth right now, and any comfort was good.
I finally picked up the sound of the patrol, a good five clicks after the Abcurses. I was totally built for this world of stealth. I was a little surprised that they were hiding, though. That didn’t seem like their style.
Coen answered that question once the five guards were past, and we were moving again. “We don’t want Elowin to be warned of our approach,” he said, his voice brittle. “She’ll run again and I’m not in the mood to track her down.”
Yeah, me either. No mood for that.
Siret was back in his position of Point, and from there he cut a straight path to the entrance of a skyreacher.
Holy crap! Emmy was going to lose her mind when she heard about this.
“Don’t let it collapse on me,” I pleaded, my voice a little high as we walked through the door. Or stalked, more accurately. We were all badass again, stalking and shit. Elowin was going down. I would be the sixth in line to take a shot at her … no need to go first, Point had already been claimed. We approached a large, polished cage, and I found myself distracted by the dweller who was standing beside it, his hand resting on a huge, wooden pulley. I was staring at him because he was by far the biggest dweller that I had ever seen. He had muscles upon muscles, and height to go with it. I might have even mistaken him for a sol, except that other than his size, he was typically plain-looking. His clothes were dull and modest—and he was staring back at me, I realised.
I glanced down at myself, at the clothes that were far too fancy for a dweller, even though they were simple and dark-toned. The material was still sol-quality, meaning that the boys had robbed some poor girl who was around my height and stature, or else the clothes were another manifestation of Trickery’s magic. Which was actually a little weird … because that meant that he had designed my underwear. Actually, it was weird in either scenario, because the alternative was that I was wearing some other girl’s underwear.
Muscle Dweller was still staring at me, his mouth popped open a little bit. It must have been obvious that I was a dweller. It was probably the wild curls that hadn’t been brushed in a few sun-cycles, and the way I barely even topped the triplets’ shoulders, even though they were shorter than the twins.
“Eyes on the wheel, dweller,” Coen snapped to Muscle Dweller, herding us into the cage.
“And eyes on us, Willa,” Siret added. He sounded serious, which was a new tone for him.
I gave him a surprised look, but he only met my eye stubbornly. Challenging me to argue with him. Well … I wasn’t going to argue with him before, but he challenged me, dammit. I opened my mouth, ready to shoot off some retort, but the cage chose that moment to lurch, and I tumbled sideways into Rome. He looked down at me, planting a hand on my shoulder to keep me steady as the cage began to rise. I tried not to squeal, but some kind of a sound must have escaped me, because one of the crazy sols stuffed into the cage with me laughed.
“She’s never been in a cage before,” Yael noted, sounding amused.
“I’ve been in plenty of cages,” I returned, huddling into Rome so that I didn’t accidently fall out of the cage—even though I probably wouldn’t fit through the bars. “I got stuffed into a cage by my mother that time a visitor came over to talk to her in private, and Teacher Fern used to lock me in a cage every time we had physical fitness classes. She wasn’t allowed to actually ban me from the class, since attendance was mandatory … so she just put me in a cage in the middle of the back field, and all the other kids ran laps around me—”
“You’re getting off-track again, Rocks,” Coen interrupted.
“Right.” I shook my head. “Point is, I’ve just never been in a moving cage, because cages aren’t supposed to move!”
“It’s how you get to the higher rooms.” Rome’s voice rumbled through his chest, vibrating against my cheek, and I turned my face up a little to look at him.
His hand slipped from my shoulder to the middle of my back, pressing me closer for a moment, before his gem-like eyes flicked away.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “Are we going to wait outside her home for her to leave and then … what?”
“We don’t wait. We break in, and then we kill her,” Coen informed me stoically.
“What?” I managed, choking over the word. “I thought you were just saying that. Like being dramatic and stuff.”