Page 41 of The Gilded Ones

I flip through the pages, names flying past – Aada, Analise, Binta, Katka, Nirmir, Tran… When I get to the U’s, I slow down, my heart hammering in my chest. Mother’s name was an uncommon name in Irfut, but what if it is the opposite here in Hemaira? What if there are several women with her name and I can’t tell which one is hers? But, no – every Shadow has a different identification badge listed under their entry. I should be able to recognize it once I see it.

I continue flipping until finally, I’m at the last few names. Ua, Uda, Ukami, Una, Uzad, Uzma. I stop, flip the pages back, my breath short. I didn’t see Mother’s name. I flip again and again, but no matter how many times I turn the page, the result is the same.

“She’s not there,” I whisper, tears blurring my eyes. “She’s not there.” I walk to a corner and slump on the floor, defeat weighing on me.

All these weeks, I’ve been imagining finding Mother’s name, getting answers to all my questions about what she was – what I am. But there are no answers, because she was never here. I made up an entire fantasy in my head to distract myself from the fact that I’m just a—

“Deka, look! She’s here!” I jolt up as Britta calls excitedly to me. She’s standing beside the book, pointing to a page. I didn’t even notice her walk over. “I found her! She was here a year earlier than Isattu thought.”

“What?” I gasp, surging up.

“‘Umu of Punthun, nine years old, dark brown skin, black eyes, short brown hair, Othemne tribal markings, two on each cheek. Identification badge: Golden necklace, umbra inscribed.’”

I suddenly forget to breathe. “That’s her…” I say raggedly, tears searing my eyes as I look down at the entry only a paragraph long. “She was here. She was a Shadow…”

The confirmation of everything I’ve suspected is too much to bear, and I begin crying, great big tears falling down my cheeks.

“Oh, Deka,” Britta says, hugging me.

As she holds me, Katya reads on. “‘Retired after fifteen years of service due to personal reasons.’” Then she stops.

“What else does it say?” I urge.

Katya shakes her head. “That’s all there is.”

All there is? My eyebrows gather. “That can’t be all. What about what she was like? What she studied – did she have any special characteristics?”

“Special characteristics?” Katya frowns. “No, that’s all it says.”

“Let me see.” I wriggle out of Britta’s arms and look down at the entry, chest tightening even further when I see it’s just as Katya said. There’s nothing more. No mention of any abilities, no further entries, nothing.

My chest tightens again. What about the tingling, the ability to sense deathshrieks? What about the way my eyes and voice change when I’m around those monsters? I thought the Heraldry would have answers, but there are none here – nothing that can help me at all.

I’m right back where I started, and even worse, my first lessons with deathshrieks are only a few weeks away.

As I walk towards the armoury later that evening, I’m in such a mood that I don’t even notice the smell of blood coating the air. It takes a scream – wretched and all too human – to return my thoughts to the present. Britta and I look at each other, eyes wide in the growing darkness. We both know what that scream means. A new raiding party must have returned from the outskirts of Hemaira without killing their required quota of deathshrieks. The novices who didn’t kill their share are being flayed.

I’ve glimpsed it numerous times over the past few weeks: Matron Nasra peeling skin from novices’ backs as easily as she would from a citron. I’ve seen the golden blood dripping, heard the pitiful cries of the girls unlucky enough to be punished, and then the silence, the awful, awful silence.

“Suffering makes demons stronger,” the matron always explains, a macabre smile slicing her lips. If that’s the case, all the alaki in the Warthu Bera must be hardened to the point of steel.

Another scream splits the air, and my hands clench into fists, the skin on them stretching so tight they could split. First, Mother’s uninformative entry in the Heraldry, and now this. What more will I have to endure before this miserable day ends?

“Don’t listen to it,” Keita says, glancing at me as he marches onward, a bundle of wooden atikas – our long, flat practice swords – in hand. He and two of the other uruni are helping us return them to the armoury before they go back to their barracks. “Just push it to the back of your mind.”

His words set my skin boiling with anger. Even though we’ve settled into an uneasy truce, Keita is not my friend. Very few of the boys are. After what happened during the run, they’re wary of me and the other girls, frightened of our power. Now they know how much greater our strength is than theirs – and that it’s only going to continue growing.

“Easy for you to say,” I reply, turning to him. “You’re not the ones being flayed.”

“We’re not the ones who can regenerate,” Acalan, Belcalis’s uruni, sniffs. A tall, burly Northerner, he has a sour, pious look that reminds me of Elder Durkas when he’s feeling especially sanctimonious.

“Even if that were the case,” Britta humphs at him, “which it’s clearly not, ye lot still wouldna be punished, an’ ye know it.”

“It’s true,” Katya agrees. “They never punish the boys. Even when girls die.”

“But Oyomo forbid a recruit tastes infinity,” I add. “That’s when every girl in the raiding party is flayed.”

“So, what, you want us all to bleed now?” Acalan sneers. “You want us to suffer like—”

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