TROUBLE , kaz brekker

xix. all we want is the neshyenyer.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

KAZ'S GENUITY LAY IN his craftsmanship, Echo often thought. Plans schemes, revenge, if he planned it, there was little that could stop it's mechanisms from turning. But when he told her to lie on the ground and play dead, Echo had to admit she was a little sceptical. Some might call it begging fate. Echo just called it a horrendous ache in her spine.

But, as with most things, genius prevailed. Echo Caddel soon found it was mighty easy to pretend to be a thing when that thing lay in firmly somewhere in your near future.

Lie still. Play dead. Genius was notoriously hard for the ordinary to understand.

Everything about him was hard to understand. Echo had known Kaz Brekker too long to expect fanfare or celebration or accolades but - really - could she be forgiven for expecting something of note after her recent dance with death? She'd done it for them. She'd staunched the flow of the poison for them and the only person who refused to acknowledge her was the one who stood togain the most. Perhaps his money would make him happier than any sacrifice she could make.

Her dream was nothing more than a cruel jest.

And to Echo's pleasant surprise, she was a marvellous corpse.

When Ohval entered, as Kaz knew she would, Echo's five senses scrambled to recover the loss of the sixth. She could hear the sliding doors grind against the floorboards, dull and muted and distant with the one ear her sister had been kind enough to leave functioning. Echo could feel the air, once stagant and thick, emboldened by the outside breeze as it brushed across her cheek. In the darkness, she tasted the salty tang of the poison and fought a soldier's fight to quench the suffocating desire to cough her lungs up onto the floor.

But what she didn't hear, was Inej's descent from the rafters. No one heard Inej if Inej didn't want them to hear her - or so the mythos decreed.

But as Ohval turned on her heel and sent a kick to Inej's chest that made the Wraith let out an audible oomph, Echo realised the limitations of Kaz Brekker's genius.

Grisha. She couldn't blame him though, he was only human.

It seemed Ohval Saran's cold, icy exterior was, in fact, a cover for a colder, icier interior. She was as rigid as the metals she commanded, with hands that moved like Echo's father's had done, when he mended her book, her clothes, her trinkets. Fabrikators were an odd sort, barred from the Seoncd Army and left to command the innovation and technologies of war. From the brief glimpses of combat Echo spied, as she ducked and moved through the shadows of Saran's courtyard, the Darkling was a fool. She always knew Fabrikators could be powerful. She did not know they could be so deadly.

With a clench of her slender, white fingers, Ohval controlled the movement of Inej's limbs by the knives in her palms. The Wraith struggled and pulled against the commands but before Echo could do something stupid like try and help, Kaz prodded her in the arm with his cane so hard she thought the thing would drop off.

"Watch it." She muttered, rubbing the increasingly numb area with the palm of her hand.

"They can deal with it." His reply was brisk, unbothered. "Keep moving."

And because scheming was wholly Brekker's forté, and at that present moment her lungs were fighting to hurtle themselves into the midnight air via her mouth, Echo obliged.

But, with lip-curling rage, Echo realised she could have avoided all of this - the uncertainty, the doubt. She alone had the power to sniff out the grisha that did not want to be sniffed, those who did not walk around douse in paraffin oil or resisting any suspicious touch. If a lifetime of mockery and wrath had not made her hate the very latent power that settled in her marrow, she might have even been useful. Now she was just a walking corpse.