Bashira needed a drink. She leaned against the smooth wood of a creaking mid-city home, the alleyway around her dark and empty. Everything was so loud in this withdrawal confusion. The Emperor’s voice seemed to boom above the crowd gathered to hear him, screaming into the night, the people screaming back in cheers or anger, she couldn’t tell. It reverberated around her skull the same way a blow to the temple did. To say it hurt would have been an understatement—Bashira’s head was an agony of splintering bone-chip explosions. The guards were probably still looking for her, but she’d lost them back in the southern quarter, not far from the platform where Long Hiuping’s death had been arranged. They’d never find her in this press—not with so many people and costumes and visitors. Even her unusual height would fail to give her away next to the towering forms of Mokeu and Zauri festival-goers. She was safe. But only for this one precious night. One night to find the General and clear her name. And her body was shaking, trembling against the wall she was half-using to hold herself up. Gods, she [i]knew[/i] it wasn’t that cold, but her teeth were shaking, her hands numb at the tips of her unsteady fingers. Bashira had to clutch her hilt to keep her hands still, had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. She had already emptied the contents of her stomach in a similarly queasy dark alley. [i]Come on![/i] Bashira pushed herself up from the wall and jumped at the sound of her decorative pauldrons scraping against the side. She was all razor knife-shard edges, a volatile collection of open nerves. Fuck, she just needed something to blunt this barrage, to deaden the pain and the impossible whetted points of the world around her. But if she did, if she turned from her quest to save herself this pain, then she would never complete it. She’d be lulled into comfort or misplace time, and her opportunity would be lost. She shivered and shook her head, forcing herself to breathe, to stop panting like a goddamn dog on the palace steps. Fuck! She didn’t want to have to [i]do[/i] this! Why did the General have to intervene? Why did that idiot noble boy have to die?! She swallowed down a sob and shook the tears out of her eyes and berated herself for being such a goddamn [i]child[/i]. She wasn’t her father. She could do this. Bashira plunged into the crowd, flinching at every accidental touch from a raving stranger or every glance of a uniformed guard. She had let down her dark mass of black hair and hung her demon half-mask from her belt, but she still felt too fucking recognizable in this awful red and black dueling costume with all its ribbons and silk and gold-colored edges. And she was so cold—must have been blue-lipped by then— and why was she doing this anyway? What use would finding the General even be? He had [i]wanted[/i] this to happen. He had promised something would, that if she stepped on that platform again she would never duel again. He’d gotten what he wanted. He’d not clear her name. She ought to have just run, gotten out of the city, made herself a name in some other place with some other ring of fighters. She’d cut her hair short. Change her name. She just needed a drink first, something to cut down all this fucking [i]noise[/i], and she’d be able to get herself free. But the crowd changed. Arrows zipped like bees overhead, screams rending the air from the direction Bashira had been heading in, the direction of the emperor and the general and all the nobles and officials who’d gathered close to hear the speech. A bolt skittered off her left pauldron and sunk deep into the meat of a young boy’s back, his yell choked off in an unceremonious gurgle. It bobbed, that bolt, a dancing, feathered end blooming red around the shaft in widening concentric circles. The woman next to him keened, low and horribly [i]animal[/i], and she scrambled at his shoulders, his arms, trying to hold him close but losing the battle against his rapidly sinking weight. The crowd devolved into chaos, frightened spooked-horse-eyed people screaming names, running in different directions. They buffeted Bashira like debris in a riptide, and she stood in the center of it all, trying not to shake, trying not to let her teeth chatter. Was this real? Had the world sloughed off all its rules like dead skin, or would she wake again, reach for the bottle, shatter it into a gray-lit room? There was a flash of weapons. A man rushed Bashira, and she moved off instinct, off the muscle memory of a decade of professional swordplay and the long years before that of agonizing practice. She unsheathed her sword. “I don’t want to kill anyone!” The man smiled, mouth too wide beneath eyes of serpentine green. His voice came like a symphony of hisses, and he moved like the weighted end of a whip. “Then [i]die[/i]!” Bashira flipped her sword from its guard position and let him run himself into the point. His body made it heavy, blood slick. It was too loud to hear the dripping. She stumbled forward, and the crowd surged, and this time, Bashira was caught within it, borne along in this writhing wave. More fighters came at her, people in peasant dress that hung ill-fitting from wiry frames. Bashira killed them, too, because she still didn’t want to die. She craved a less permanent annihilation—only half out of her body—and her city had lost so much definition to smoke and flame and darting blade that none of this felt quite real. These people—were they people?—weren’t trying to kill her, weren’t dying. Any moment she would wake, and it’d be exhibition day with its forms and procedures, comforting even in its decline. The palace steps rose up before Bashira without her entirely knowing how she had reached them. She was shaking more now, less from cold and more from hypersensitive adrenaline that had never touched her fights before. She was bleeding—was she?—down her left thigh. And where they came for her—did they?—they died.