Book 2, Chapter 53

There was no way I was going to catch up to Juby on foot, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have to. Shadow leap had some sharp limitations, one of which was being able to see where I wanted to jump to. Normally, that would limit me to line of sight jumps only, but it was possible to combine it with a scrying spell to pick out destinations outside of the spell’s normal reach.

I was already scrying on Juby anyway, so it was a simple task to walk into the shadows in the dormitory and pop out of the side of a building a hundred feet ahead of the fleeing child. Then I just waited for him to jog my way, then stepped out of the darkness in front of him. He was so busy paying attention to the street behind him that he didn’t even see me. If not for my shield ward, he would have bowled me over and probably kept going.

As it happened, I felt a spike in the speed the ward was draining mana as it deflected the impact, and Juby bounced off me to land flat on his back. I leaned over and offered him a hand up. “At least you’re running in the right direction,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”

“You – but… How?” Juby sputtered.

I pulled Juby back to his feet and then let my staff vanish back into my phantom space. Hopefully this next part would go smoothly enough that I wouldn’t need to spend any more mana. I’d been rather liberal with it today, and it was getting to the point where I was wondering if there might be a third monster fish for me to hunt.

“I thought you said you didn’t want to work for Blue Rat’s crew,” I said. “But here you are anyway.”

“Well, it’s not like I had much of a choice,” Juby said. He scowled down at me as he dusted off his backside. “You refused to help us with all your fancy magic.”

“Fair enough. But when Blue Rat started looking for information about me, you sold me out.”

Juby’s face paled and he quickly stammered out, “N-no. It wasn’t like that.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “I’m not mad. You did what you needed to survive. But here’s the thing. You took the easy way out. Saved your own skin at the cost of someone else’s. You just thought it’d be me.”

He must have decided there was no point in trying to deny it, because all he said was, “And so what? It’s like you said, I did what I had to do. It wasn’t the easy way. It was the onlyway.”

While we talked, I’d been steering us back toward the wreckage left over from my running fight with Monolith and Swarm. It was spread out across a few blocks, and it’d be another minute before we got to the edge of it, so I held off making my point.

“It wasn’t the only way. You could have lied. Or you could have run. You gave in to Blue Rat’s gang and joined up because you figured if you went willingly, you wouldn’t have to stand up for yourself. And when they wanted that information, I bet you gave that up just as quickly, didn’t you?”

“I’m not like you,” Juby said. “I don’t have magic. I can’t make the adults do what I want. It’s not fair to expect me to do all the things you would do.”

“No, I don’t expect you to wave a hand and kill them,” I said. “Of course not. But you had other options besides joining up with them. There were risks, yes, but did you even try anything else? Or were you too afraid of getting caught and beaten or killed?”

“Like I said, so what? I’m sorry I had to rat you out, but you came out of it just fine. No harm done.”

“To me,” I said. “No harm done to me.”

“You can’t blame me for all those guys you killed! If you’re so great, why didn’t you do something else instead of just magicking them all to death?”

“Oh, no, you misunderstand,” I said. “I’m not talking about the mages who came after me or those thugs from your gang.”

We turned onto the street that had the orphans’ hideout on it. It wasn’t much of a sanctuary anymore, not after the street-facing wall had been almost completely removed. Monolith’s body was still on the street, still staining the ground around it red. It wouldn’t be much longer before the wind scoured the coating of dried blood away.

“That guy,” I said, pointing to the corpse, “is one of the cabal mages. Maybe you met him. Twice as tall as me, looks like a pile of muscles stacked on top of one another. Shaved head.”

Juby nodded mutely. I’d expected as much. Someone had to have made a connection between this specific pack of street kids and me, and Juby was the obvious link. We were around the edge of Blue Rat’s territory, not quite outside his reach, but not close enough to his operations that I thought he could have been the one to point the Wolf Pack’s hunters in this direction.

It was easy to picture Juby volunteering information about me when Blue Rat started asking questions about who had taken out that enforcer tower near the east wall. He’d been sent with the group that had intercepted me for my initial chat with the gang leader, after all. When the cabal sent out a pair of their inner circle to ask some very pointed questions, I imagined Juby hadn’t been given much of a choice about answering them.

I didn’t hold it against him. We weren’t friends. He had no reason to protect me, but I suspected he hadn’t thought through the consequences of telling them where he’d had dealings with me at. The wheels were turning behind his eyes now, though. As we walked toward Monolith’s corpse, his gaze strayed to the side, to the busted wall and the blood stains on the street.

“This is what you gave that man,” I said, stopping in front of the hole. From street level, it was hard to see the floor of the building, but that just meant Juby didn’t have to see the bodies. The blood on the walls told the tale well enough. “He came here and started killing your friends trying to get more information. I guess he didn’t like their answers.”

“It’s my fault,” Juby breathed out, so low I almost didn’t hear him. “I did this.”

“No!” I said sharply. “You didn’t kill your friends. Don’t ever think that. That man lying dead in the street behind us is responsible for this. But you enabled his actions by being careless and selfish. I don’t blame you for this outcome. I’m telling you that you could have prevented it if you’d made different choices. That’s not the same as it being your fault.”

“They’re all dead,” Juby said. “Bliyo, Nevin, Kag… all of them.”

“Probably not all of them,” I cut in. “I’m not sure how many of you there were, but I think at least some of them escaped. This is why I brought you here – not to punish you, but to make you aware of the consequences of your actions and give you a chance to gather up the survivors.”

“And then what? We find a different empty building to huddle up in while we try not to starve, waiting for some asshole with too much magic to decide we’re inconvenient?”

“How do you feel about leaving?” I asked.

“What? The city? Sounds like a good way to get eaten alive.”

“What if I could take you somewhere else, to a safe place?”

“I’d ask what’s in it for you, because chances are I can’t afford your price.”

“Let’s just say you’re not the only one who could have avoided this outcome by making different choices,” I said. “I’m not going to force you to do anything, Juby. If you want to walk away from me right now, that’s fine. Go back to Blue Rat, or take your chances out on the street. I won’t blame you. All I’m offering is a chance to have a different future.”

I picked up a pebble off the ground and held it up while I enchanted it with a shielded scry beacon, one that only I’d be able to find casually. “Here, how about this? You take this with you. It will let me know where you are. Go find your friends, everyone who’s still left. Tomorrow morning, I’ll come to you, and you can tell me your decision. Or throw it away and find some new corner of the city to hide in where you’ll never see me again. Your choice.”

Juby reached a hand out to pluck the pebble from between my fingers, but froze halfway there. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

“What would you like to hear?” I asked. “If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t need to do anything so convoluted. If I wanted to chase down anyone Monolith missed slaughtering, I could do that myself.”

I understood where he was coming from. The default reaction to a generous offer from somebody in his position was to try to figure out where the hook was in it before biting down. No one just gave street kids anything, and if it didn’t appear to be a trap, chances were that just meant they couldn’t figure out what the angle was.

The problem there was that there wasn’t anything I could do to overcome that mindset, not without investing a huge amount of time into integrating myself into their group. I would have to prove I was one of them, day after day, and even then, a savvy street urchin knew to trust his fellows only so far. Plenty of homeless kids would stab one another in the back to get ahead.

My only recourse was to present Juby with the argument that there was absolutely nothing for me to gain from the interaction. I doubted he’d believe me right now, but maybe once he had some time to think about it while he was searching for the rest of his friends, he’d accept my words as the truth.

“Take the pebble,” I said. “Stash it somewhere safe if you don’t want to carry it with you. Go back to your friends. I already told Blue Rat’s head of security to consider you permanently gone if you don’t come back in the next few hours. If anyone asks her, I killed you in retaliation. They’re not going to come looking for you. So there are your options. Go back to the gang, go find your friends and try to carve out a new home somewhere else, or let me take you away from the city to a safe haven.”

Pragmatically speaking, it would be best for me to abandon Juby and the other kids to the whims of fate at this point. There was little they could do today but be a drain on my resources, especially since teleporting them back to the new settlement I was starting would use up practically everything I had left, but I could stand to take a few more days away from Derro to recover my strength. Killing two cabal mages was good progress for how long I’d been back in the city, but now I was getting dangerously low on mana.

I’d do it anyway, if they agreed to it. Food would be an issue at first, but we’d figure it out. Maybe I could buy or steal some supplies in Derro, or just hunt something up myself. That valley had to have some edible wildlife in it. That was assuming the orphans took me up on my offer, which was still very much up in the air.

I placed the pebble in Juby’s open hand and pressed on his fingers to curl them up. Then I let go and walked away. “It’s your decision,” I said as I left.