Page 20 of City of Stone and Silence

“You didn’t,” she forces out between gasps. “Come on.”

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” I mutter, looking down into the tub.

“So you thought, hey, I’ll take my shirt off, maybe that’ll help?”

“I didn’t take it off. And it worked, didn’t it?”

“You should try that on Grandma the next time she doesn’t like how you’ve folded the bedsheets.”

She comes up for air, and I hurl a wet rag in her direction. She dodges, still giggling.

“Well,” she says. “He’ll definitely remember you, at least.”

“Maybe.” I poke at the sopping sheets with my stick. “I think—”

“Tori!” Hasaka, the doorman, appears in the laundry entrance, panting for breath. His face is white.

I drop the stick. “What’s wrong?”

He hurries closer, lowering his voice. There’s no one else in the laundry, but voices carry in the old building.

“It’s old Sewagauri,” he says. “He’s gone off again. Ichi was trying to bring him his medicine, and he just snapped.”

“Is Ichi all right?” I ask.

“A little singed, but he’ll be fine. But we need your help before Sewa hurts someone.”

I glance at Kosura, who makes a shooing gesture. “Go. I’ll finish up here.”

Hasaka shifts from foot to foot in anxiety. I drop the stick and follow him, out to the exterior stairs, hurrying down groaning, rickety steps to the first floor. From there we take another, internal staircase to the basement, an earth-walled cavern stuffed with sacks of rice and other essentials. Working by the faint light spilling from the stairs, Hasaka leads the way to the far corner, where a dirty, half-height door is mostly hidden behind several stacked barrels of lamp oil. It looks like nothing much, maybe a closet, sealed with a rusty iron padlock.

Hasaka unlocks this, and it slides open without the squeal you’d expect. Beyond the door, there’s a stone-lined passage, broad and well-lit, ending in an iron staircase spiraling upward. We hurry over, crossing under the street outside the hospital, and I imagine the drunks wandering a few feet above our heads.

The staircase leads up into the central yard of another derelict tenement. From the outside, it looks abandoned, door boarded over and plaster crumbling. Inside, though, the courtyard is clean, with well-weeded beds of flowers and raked gravel paths. Windows looking into the lightwell reveal that the rooms are in good repair, too, with fresh floor mats and clean, whitewashed walls.

For the most part, the mage-bloods Grandma shelters hide in plain sight, as patients or assistants at the hospital—Hasaka is one of these, I know. People the government is actively searching for, though, need somewhere to lie low. For them, we’ve converted the first few stories of this building into a safe house, with several unobtrusive entrances.

A young woman with an old, ugly burn scar across the right half of her face is waiting by the door, wringing her hands, and she hurries over at the sight of us.

“He won’t let anyone near him!” she wails. “Geraya tried talking to him and he set the curtains on fire.”

“It’s all right,” Hasaka says. “Tori can always get him to calm down.”

I swallow an acid taste and nod, trying to look reassuring. The woman looks me over uncertainly. Her right eye is incongruously bright in the melted ruin of its socket.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“Second floor,” she says. “Come on, before he burns the place down.”

The second floor is mostly apartments converted into single-room residences. Old Sewagauri’s room is at the end of a hall, where a former parlor has been made into a common area with several apartments letting on to it. A small crowd of people are gathered at the junction, trying to peer around the corner. Many of them are my age or younger—one of the biggest groups that stay in the safe house are boys and girls who haven’t learned to control their powers. Older teens and adults are mixed in, those lying low until the guards give up the hunt for them, and a few who, for whatever reason, can’t take work at the hospital.

Old Sewagauri is one of the latter, obviously. I wave my hands to shoo some of the younger children out of the way, and Hasaka busies himself trying to drive the crowd back, without much success. Glancing around the corner, I see a lot of smoke and not much else, though deep in the heart of it there’s a sullen red glow. Reaching out with my mind, I can sense Sewa, lost in a torrent of bitter, stinging fear and rage.

“Sewa?” I raise my voice. “It’s Tori. Can you hear me?”

His fear flares, and his cracked voice calls back. “Go away! Leave me alone!”

“I just want to talk to you.” I motion to Hasaka to keep the others away, and slip around the corner, creeping down the corridor. “Can we talk?”