Page 24 of Practical Boots
"Listen to me," she said softly. "I don't give one good goddamn shit about what you do in the Torn. Play your politics here all you like. Rise through the ranks, get stabbed in the back, fall to the muck, and do it all over again. I really don't care." Cat leaned across his desk at him, jabbing one finger toward his World-and-Waste-stained finery. "But if you ever cross to the World again, if you ever threaten that which I've vowed to protect, if youeveragain besmirch the value of your own oath, you will discover I have allies, Father. You'll discover that I have power you can't even dream of. And you'll discover that I have little enough love for the Torn that I will raze it all in order to end you. Do not ever again imagine that I might be your puppet, you shit-heeled coward."
Her father, his voice low and trembling with rage, said, "You should not speak to me this way."
Cat took an Artifact from her pocket and held it up between her fingertips. A ring: hawk's eye, polished green with streaks of yellow, set in silver shaped from the Waste. Below the stone, a blood-filled hollow with a cunning pricking mechanism, to pierce skin and force a single drop into aelfen veins. "If you want to be able to tell lies, I'll speak to you any fucking way I want to."
Watching him decide was a delight that would warm her at night for years to come. Greed warred with pride and—as Cat had known it would—won. He reached to pluck the ring from her fingers, and she deliberately dropped it on his desk.
His reflexes were much worse than they should have been, and she heard the heavy Artifact bounce once, as shesteppedaway from the Torn.
* * *
Cat stood in the Waste a long time, listening to its oppressive silence, feeling its nothingness ghost across her skin. She knew where she was, within it; she always did. Her boots could take her anywhere with just a step or two; they always had.
But she had never had the opportunity to simply stand and feel and think, before. She had always been in too much of a hurry, trying not to get caught. Skirting around the edges of what was rightfully hers to traverse: she'd earned that, by surviving in the first place.
And now she'd earned the chance to actually enjoy what she'd proven herself worthy of. Not many others wanted to hang out in the Waste. None of them wanted to, if they'd been shoved into it the way she'd pushed her father in. She wouldn't have lost any sleep if he'd gotten lost here, but she'd been fairly certain he'd find his way out again, even without a map.
Savos had a map. A simple one, one that led back and forth to the Torn, although the Torn itself refused to remain in exactly the same place, always falling, slowly, farther away from the World. That had gotten Savos in trouble with the elemental; she would have to adapt, or the Torn would, without remorse or regret, wreck her.
Cat's map was so much more. Every step she'd taken, every path she'd traveled, lay burned into the back of her mind, but it meant nothing unless laid over the stuff of the Waste itself. It lay before her now, silver cords that traveled every which way across the emptiness. To her eyes, they were all but labeled:thatcord led to Los Angeles, and the tiny thread off of it led directly to Grace's house.Therelay New York, and all the networked shortcuts she'd taken back and forth across it. Andthiswas the first step she'd taken with her boots, and its opposite end was the second. It gleamed a darker shade of silver at the far end, reaching out of time. The paths crossed themselves like snowy footprints on a field, but each of them told a story of its own to Cat.
Each of them, laid bare like this, finally truly showed her where she'd been.
The silhouette of a woman in her father's study told her where she needed to go.
Smiling, Catstepped.
