Page 170 of Nikolay

“It is a truthful one.”

“He has constituency.”

“He has delusion.”

“He also has votes.”

“Then the votes are ill-bred.”

Taras exhaled softly through his nose, which in him passed for laughter if one was charitable. “You do understand that your visible contempt is not always politically useful.”

“My hidden contempt is apparently insufficiently educational.”

We moved past the largest planter near the corner of the path, a broad terracotta thing planted thick with desert sage at the base and bougainvillea climbing a concealed trellis in a spill of dark leaves and late-season blossoms. The brick beneath my shoes still held some of the day’s heat. Somewhere out on the boulevard, tires hissed.

“I attend those sessions,” I said, “because leaving lesser minds unsupervised encourages innovation.”

“An attitude that explains much about your popularity.”

“Popularity,” I said, “is for entertainers.”

That was when the figure lurched out from behind the planter and collapsed directly into my path.

She did not stumble so much as fail.

One second the walkway ahead was clear. The next, a body emerged from the shadow in a wavering half-step, struck the edge of the brick with one knee, and went down hard enough that I heard skin meet grit. My guards moved instantly, one from each side, fast and efficient, and already reaching.

I stopped them with a single raised hand.

Both men halted at once, though not without readiness hardening every line of them. Taras stopped beside me. I felt rather than saw his attention sharpen.

Only then did I step forward.

A woman. Auburn hair in long, matted tangles that might once have held wave or softness and now only held neglect. Her clothing hung from her rather than fit—a thin shirt, dark with dirt at the collar and hem, and shredded trousers that had been too loose even before whatever had happened to her began devouring her from the bones outward. She was so emaciated that the shape of her collarbones cut sharp through the fabric like blades pressing from within. Her wrists—Christ—her wrists were raw, abraded all the way around, the skin reddened and broken in narrow bands that needed no great imagination to interpret. Fresh restraint. Recent enough that I felt my pulse change.

She pushed up on one trembling hand and failed to rise. Dust marked her cheeks. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, as if even the act of crossing whatever distance had brought her here had cost more than she possessed.

I crouched.

Her face lifted.

Hollow-cheeked. Mouth dry. Navy eyes too large in the ruined thinness of her face, glassy not with fever exactly but with the compounded exhaustion of hunger, fear, and whatever terrible vigilance had kept her moving when any sane body would have shut down. Human, I thought at first glance. Or close enough to it that no supernatural trait announced itself ahead of the misery.

“Help,” she whispered.

The word scraped out of her as though her throat objected to being used again.

“I have you,” I said.

It was not comfort. It was fact.

Her gaze searched my face with desperate, disbelieving concentration, as if she were trying to determine whether I was real or merely the final hallucination available to a body collapsing in public. Then her lips parted again.

“Blood slave.”

Everything in me went still.

Cold did not belong naturally to my kind, not in the human sense. Yet my blood turned with such abrupt chill that for one beat the desert evening might as well have been winter.