“Aren’t you gonna go after him?”

  I looked down at my bloody robe—the silk of my guise had stitched back together—and back up at Azalea. I’ll think about that later. “No. We don’t have time. Even if he’s actually dangerous, and he makes it out of this territory alive, he has no reason to threaten us. Not like the cultivator who escaped.”

  “Then let’s do less talking and more walking.” She bent down and, pulling her sleeve up over her fingers, picked up a fingernail-sized red shard. She gestured at me with it. “This enough?”

  As I healed, I felt more stored vitae draining, and it took more than passing effort not to see Azalea as prey.

  “Two more,” I replied, then turned away from her and to the other miners. “I cannot guarantee you are free to go now, but it is my hope this horrid operation will be shuttered within the month.”

  There was so much more I wanted to say, but the mask of anonymity was vital at this juncture. Not like I could break it now anyway, I soberly reminded myself. As much as I wanted to help these people…

  “Where are we?” someone asked.

  Not in the tone of a person robbed of their senses, but in a very matter-of-fact way.

  “You’re at the edge of the Northern Mountains, in the remote reaches of the Duchy of Graystone.” I paused, gathered my thoughts, then continued in a louder voice, “There is safety to the southeast. Whoever comes here will doubtless check the river, but I do not know full well the safety of the forest and hills.”

  “You’ve doomed us all!” someone shouted.

  “They’ve saved us!” another fired back.

  Azalea and I took the chance to slip back up the tunnel while they argued. If I could seal this place, prevent anyone else from taking what had formed here, I would do so in a heartbeat.

  “What should we call this stuff?” Azalea asked, patting a hidden pocket.

  I tried not to think about the demon’s voice in my head and its parting words. “They must have a name for it.”

  “Right, but we should make our own!”

  I huffed. “Why?”

  “Well that’s because—”

  “No.” I stopped. “Why must you be like this?”

  She blinked at me.

  “Why can’t you ever take anything seriously?” I wanted to slap her. “You almost died back there!”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Would you rather I panic?”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “Then don’t worry about it!” Her smile was fake.

  I swallowed and looked away, not willing to war my now-gnawing hunger versus Azalea’s inanity. “Fine. For now. Let’s find what information we can—I doubt we’ll be so lucky as to find distribution records, or what this red stone used for, but we ought to try.”

  “Bloodstone,” Azalea said. “You said something about blood right before we were attacked, and it’s about the right color.”

  “Fine, bloodstone.” I was in no mood for her games.

  We passed several of the indentured miners on the way out of the tunnel. Ahead of us, Enic was ushering a small group into the boat we’d noted earlier. Predictably, Reedy-Voice was nowhere to be seen. No one was shouting, not just yet.

  For just a moment, I debated stopping Enic from leaving as he pleased. Something about that man lingered at the back of my thoughts; just what had he done? Many cultivators—most cultivators, in fact—didn’t consider mortals. To the nobility, there was always at the very least a level of detached consideration. To the sects? Mortals and insects held the same weight in the minds of ancient masters. Would that they considered their own advice about the smallest of insects and the most dangerous of stings.

  I watched the boat slip into the river as Azalea and I checked the building I thought might have been the foreman’s office. Behind us, up from the tunnel, shouts and whoops kicked off a raucous uproar. I had to fight the urge to take charge and direct the crowd.

  “They’ll be fine,” Azalea said as she closed the door behind us, blunting the edge of the shouting.

  I shook my head. “Don’t. I know they won’t be.”

  “I’m sure some folks know how to handle themselves and the rest will fall in line. It’s not your job. The others can get those chains off and take the barges.”

  “Azalea,” I warned.

  She shrugged and started poking into the different rooms down the one narrow hall. This place was small, with a front room that served as kitchen, dining, and sitting room all in one. A finished game of cards lay out on the table—two players—and I could smell the remnants of a well-spiced meal.

  All told, the place had four rooms beyond the main initial room, carved into the rock. Three had clearly been in recent use, and the last looked like one of the bedrooms at my family’s winter estate: ill-used and far too ostentatious.

  One of the occupied rooms had a small, wall set vault. The wall being stone and the technique layered over it prevented so much as the thought of breaking in. At the very least, I could tell it was beyond the capability of someone like Kobel.

  “Damn.” Azalea whistled. “You got a plan to bust that open?”

  I hissed. “No. And we don’t have the days any plan I did come up with would require.”

  “Let’s check around some more then. Maybe someone left something they shouldn’t have just lying around.” She rolled her eyes at my glare and kept going. “Just because you keep everything tidy doesn’t mean the rest of us do.”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “I’ve seen your room at the sect,” I admitted.

  She thrust a finger at me. “Exactly! And that’s why…” she threw the covers of the nearby bed back and glanced underneath. “Damn.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, nothing here. I assumed Kobel’d have something rotten under there, but oh well.”

  I tilted my head. “Like what?”

  Azalea laughed in response. “I’ll check Cass’s room, unless you want to check a girl’s room?”

  “I don’t see why…” I trailed off looking through the cracked door. Various things, smallclothes included, were draped on the bed and strewn across the floor. I coughed. “Right, you… look through there. When… before she died, she seemed corrupted. Don’t touch anything you don’t know is safe.”

  Azalea paused just inside the door. “I will… thanks.”

  That’s… oddly sincere. Truthfully, I didn’t give much thought to it and focused instead on searching the last room. It had nothing of note. In fact, the room was so tidy, so devoid of personal effects, that my worry only grew.

  Who was Reedy-Voice? If he was part of the same sect as Cassytha, Kobel, and us, and the sect itself was backing this—a conclusion that was getting worryingly more and more likely—then Azalea was as good as dead.

  A pit had formed in my stomach by the time I finished giving the other rooms a once-over and walked back to the main room. By now, crashes and the sound of scuffles had joined the shouting outside. Something about keys for chains. Two people burst through the door, took a long look at me, and quietly left.

  Would them looting this place help or hurt my case to Father? Did I have enough evidence?

  “You’re scary as always at least,” Azalea said as she walked back into the main room. “Are you… comfortable?”

  “What do you mean ‘scary as always?’” I fixed her with a serious look, but her red eyes betrayed nothing. “As for comfortable, I have been stabbed, bludgeoned, and burrowed into by parasitic vines. Not to mention, the more we look into what’s going on here the larger this operation seems to become. So no, I am not ‘comfortable.’”

  Azalea sighed. “Your glare makes you look like you’re about to take someone’s head off. And it’s rarely less severe than that. If it makes you feel better about comfort, I can’t heal like you do.” She rolled her shoulder and winced. “When my vitae runs low, I’m going to be out of it for a few days.”

  “Again, my apologies for hurting you.”

  “Take responsibility if I need help, and I’ll forgive you.”

  “Of course,” I responded easily. “Did you find anything? Unfortunately, the others’ rooms had nothing of note.”

  Her eyes flashed and her smile widened. “Oh, I did. In fact, I was just coming out here to get you.”

  She turned back inside and I followed.

  “You told me not to touch anything—look at how good I’m being about that,” Azalea preened. “Because what she had in her not-so-secret drawer”—she threw open the door to Cassytha’s room—“is a lot more than just suspicious!”

  Immediately, my eyes shot to the mess strewn about the room. Smallclothes included. Before I could get embarrassed, however, I smelled a familiar sort of vitae.

  “Smelled” might be the wrong word—I was still getting used to this new sense. Anything to do with my… the demon who’d corrupted me stuck out, hints of iron and rage. Azalea and the other cultivators were different. No special flavor so to speak, just bright power. Probably blocked by techniques that would suppress someone’s aura, about all I could tell was weaker, stronger, or significantly stronger.

  It seemed like I blinked before I found myself staring down into a cubby hollowed out from the stone. There was a sealing technique, but it was inactive, hinged wood and faux stone door hanging open like a tiny bank vault.

  Inside sat the poorly organized contents of a portable alchemy kit, recently cleaned, and a small vial with smattering of dark red dust at the bottom.

  “Silk?” Azalea asked. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I nodded absently, not bothering to correct her on the name even though no one else could hear us. The vial was a familiar sort, of a type I’d handled many times before. Funny how the same sorts who decried the sort of manufacturing processes the non-cultivators used still took advantage of the products when suitable.

  “Don’t suppose there’s enough there to work with?”

  I shook my head, then froze. “Wait… what?”

  “To try to make more!”

  I shoved an arm in the way of her grabbing for an the alembic. “What are you doing?”

  She pouted. “You said you were on the same page!”

  “I did not!”

  She slipped through and grabbed it. “I remember some of my lessons. I’d bet she left instructions for herself somewhere around here. If we’re lucky there’s more ingredients in the kitchen.”

  “Absolutely not. No. We’re confiscating this vial and leaving before whoever sealed that safe comes back.”

  “Please?”

  “There’s not enough bloodstone powder left.”

  “You said the thing!” Her smile quickly inverted. “Hey, how do you know that anyway?”

  I hissed. “Instinct.”

  “Liar.”

  I raised a single eyebrow.

  Azalea huffed. “I can tell!”

  “You absolutely cannot.”

  “Can too!”

  “You’re just picking it up from context.”

  “So you are lying!”

  I placed my palm over my face. “We know it’s ground to powder and used for alchemy, which makes sense if it has even some of the power his blood that did this to me does. We know they’re taking the ore by barge out of here, and they’ve got to have some way to reliably smuggle that much weight smelling that strongly of demonic vitae to wherever this is normally processed. Because Cassytha’s little home job here was hidden, which means there’s no hidden grinding place here or she’d just steal from that.

  “Ergo, we know enough to take this to my father and figure the rest out.”

  “What if wherever they grind the ore up and do the alchemy is hidden too well? What if we find another key ingredient and trace that one’s supply chain?”

  I thought for just a second. “Fine, but let’s be quick. You look for a recipe or anything out of place and I’ll see if she missed anything when she cleaned the set.”

  “Sure thing!” Azalea stuck her thumb out and immediately began flinging smallclothes across the room.

  A minute or so of frantic searching on Azalea’s part and methodical investigation on my part turned up exactly one clue: another vial with a stuck-on residue that had been missed in the cleaning. I had no techniques to determine its nature, nor any modern equipment to try a mundane avenue. Still, I placed it in a different pocket than the stoppered bloodstone dust vial.

  By this point, lingering fear of us had been overridden by desperation, and several miners were tearing apart the front room. About half of them froze when we came in from the back hallway.

  I stepped in front of Azalea and spoke before she could, offering what I hoped was a warm smile. “Do you need help freeing the barges?”

  A few nodded, so I tossed them the now-useless ring of keys Azalea had poached. One man fumbled and caught them.

  “Thank you. I don’t know where we are or where we’ll go, but thank you.”

  I paused at the door, Azalea already through it and sauntering toward the cliff despite her injuries. “Follow the river, but don’t stay on it for more than a day—maybe two. You’ll find some remote settlements if you keep southeast for… a week maybe?”

  Brows furrowed, whispers of food shot back and forth, and I left without a further word. A younger version of myself would have wanted to stay, to try to help. As I was now, I knew that stopping this at the source was the best chance.

  And if whoever came to check on this place was who had created that technique keeping the wall safe secure, and if they bumped into a large, obvious group traveling the remote forest, I’d be a smear on the ground before I sensed their presence, demon or not.

  I had to get home and tell Father. Outside, I clenched my fists and stared down at the stoppered vial in my hand. At the bottom of my vision, the gentle swell of my chest reminded me of an even more pressing problem.

  I needed to find a way to become Slate again. I can’t stay as Silk.

  Anxiety ate at me, acute and nauseating, as Azalea and I climbed the cliff wall and stole off into the evening light.