The headache faded slowly, the nail in his forehead easing back out over the space of several minutes while Nathan sat with his back to the wall and breathed.
Kira had settled a little way off, close enough now that she wasn’t hugging the far corner, far enough that she could bolt if she decided she needed to. She kept the apple in both hands. She still hadn’t eaten it. She just watched him, wary and steady, the way a stray watches a person who’s fed it once and might yet turn out to be like all the others.
Nathan let the silence sit for a while, because pushing her never worked.
Then he glanced over.
"You don’t say much, do you," he said again, gentler this time, not really expecting anything.
Kira looked at the floor.
He let it go and turned his eyes back to the gap where the shutter used to be, out at the failing grey light over the ruined roofs. He had what he needed. A face, a place, a night. Now he needed a way from the low quarter up into the middle district, past the checkpoints, without a token or a name or a single honest reason to be there, and he was turning the problem over when a small voice cut across it.
"I..."
He looked round.
Kira had lifted her head. Her jaw was working, her hands twisting the apple, and she was staring at a point somewhere near his knees with the fierce concentration of someone forcing a door that had been shut a long time.
"I..." She swallowed. "I school didn’t."
The words came out tangled, in the wrong order, tripping over each other, and then she stopped, red-faced, as if the effort had cost her everything she had.
Nathan blinked.
And then, before he could stop it, he laughed.
It wasn’t cruel. It just got out of him, the first real laugh since the temple, since before any of it, surprised out of him by the sheer scrambled earnestness of it. It felt strange in his chest, almost painful, a muscle he’d forgotten he had.
Kira’s face went scarlet.
She whipped her head away from him, pulling her knees up, mortified, glaring at the wall with her ears burning.
"No—wait." Nathan got hold of himself, lifting a hand. "Kira. I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you." She didn’t turn back. "I mean it. I’m sorry. That was rude of me."
Slowly, grudgingly, she cut her eyes back at him. Still glaring. But listening.
"I know what you meant," he said. "You never went to school. That’s what you were telling me. Right?"
A tiny, stiff nod.
"There’s no shame in that." He said it plainly, no pity in it, because pity would have sent her straight back into her shell. "Half the low district can’t read. My mother couldn’t, not really. It doesn’t mean anything about you."
Kira’s grip on the apple loosened a fraction.
Nathan looked at her for a moment, at the badly cut hair and the too-thin wrists and the way she’d just spent what was clearly an enormous act of courage to tell him one broken sentence.
"Tell you what," he said. "I’ll teach you."
Her head came up fully.
"Reading. Words. Putting them in the right order." He shrugged one shoulder. "I’m not a scholar, but I know my letters. My mother made sure of it, even when we couldn’t afford much of anything else. It’s the one thing she’d have wanted me to pass on."
Kira stared at him, and something moved behind her wary eyes, something Nathan hadn’t seen there yet. Her whole small face had opened up, wide-eyed, almost disbelieving, like he’d offered her something she hadn’t known was allowed to be wanted.
"Truly?" she whispered. It was the second thing she’d ever said to him.
"Truly." He let a corner of his mouth lift. "We’re going to be stuck together a while, by the look of it. Least I can do."
For a heartbeat he thought she might smile.
Then something crossed his face, and he added, more carefully, "Not right away, though."
The light in her eyes dimmed a little.
"There’s something I have to do first," Nathan said. "Somewhere I have to go, in a few days. It’s important, and it’s the kind of thing I have to do alone."
He kept his voice even. He wasn’t going to tell her the rest of it. He wasn’t going to explain that the thing he had to do was walk into a tavern in a district he had no way of reaching and put his hands around a man’s throat, or that the man had killed the same people, in the same house, on the same night, that had put the scar across his own neck. She’d seen enough death for one week. She didn’t need to know he was going looking for more.
"After that," he said, "when it’s done and we’re somewhere safe. Then I’ll teach you. Every day, if you want."
Kira held his eyes for a long moment, weighing it, weighing him, the way she weighed everything.
Then she nodded, and drew her knees back up, and, at last, took a small careful bite of the apple.
Nathan let out a slow breath and leaned his head back against the wall.
’A few days.’
The tavern would still be there. Nolan would still be there, next week, same table, spending his coin on ale he didn’t drink, thinking the world couldn’t reach him. Nathan had all the time he needed on that end.
The problem was the district.
The middle quarter sat above the low one behind a wall and a gate, and the gate had guards, and the guards wanted a token or a trade-mark or a master’s seal, none of which a barefoot low-district boy with a dead man’s coin purse was going to produce. He could try to slip a checkpoint. He’d probably get himself grabbed, and a boy who got grabbed got questions, and questions were the last thing in the world he could afford right now.
No. He needed to go up the easy way. The invited way. He needed someone with a reason to be crossing that gate, and a reason to take him along, and no reason at all to ask what he wanted on the other side.
Nathan turned it over, and slowly, a name surfaced.
A face he knew. A friend who’d walked out of that temple with a mark of his own and a whole future in front of him, who by now would have every reason in the world to be moving between the districts like he belonged there.
The corner of Nathan’s mouth curved.
’Jerry.’