Witness

5 - At the Crossroads

While the others prayed inside the Wayshrine for guidance, I sat on the steps outside, keeping watch. Blood dripped down my hands from where my knuckles had split during the fight, stinging crimson reminding me I was alive. As the adrenaline faded, I leaned more and more against the doorframe beside me. Fighting always seemed a desperate exhaustion kept at bay by the wired fear of death and the strange intoxication of life.

I still had the smokestick from Isidoros at the corner of my mouth, dribbling foul ash down the front of my dirty, spattered jacket. It was military surplus anyway, something tough enough to protect from knife or broken bottle slashes. Perhaps the blood added character to the dull desert brown.

So much had happened in such a short time. I rubbed at my split lip, wincing when it stung.

Footsteps behind me announced Sostrate before she arrived, the sound of her steel-toed boots coming up the stairs echoing off the stone. She'd been on the lines enough to know how often police liked to stomp feet flat with their own heavy treads. I flicked the smokestick away, watching it trail its smoke in a sudden arc. It disintegrated on contact with cement.

She took a seat beside me, still smelling of sweet incense from inside the Wayshrine. I felt dirty and sullen next to her, absent the regal bearing that she brought with her everywhere. What did I know about a solution to all of this? Six weeks ago, I was a literature student at the Akademia, chasing my sister around the house to make sure she ate before going off on her wild escapades. Dependable Karsa, patient Karsa, boring Karsa, weak Karsa.

How true were those now, with this demon living in my chest? It frightened me how quickly I had become a person I doubted even my parents would recognize.

Sostrate put a hand on my back. "I know you have come out of loss and anger, Karsa." Her voice was soft and understanding. It was an empathy that sprang from her own pain, from the absence of a little boy who had encountered the wrong people one night. "There must be more to it than that."

"What do you mean?" My voice still rasped from the smoke.

"We are not just doing this for our past, Karsa. We are doing it for our future. This will only become more difficult and I need to know that your head is in the right place."

I shifted to look at her with tired eyes, red-rimmed from tears only gas could make fall. "I am out of hope, Sostrate."

"I am not asking for hope," Sostrate said firmly. "That is only Heaven's to grant. I want a commitment from you that you will do things because they are necessary or because they are right, and for no other reason. The hardest part of what is coming will be to place your anger aside, but if you do not, it will blind you like sand blown into the eyes."

"It is like a poison tree growing from my heart. The roots run deep. I cannot simply shake it off."

Sostrate took my hand in hers and pulled out a bottle of water. She used it to rinse the blood and dirt off one, then tended to my other hand the same way. "Then learn to trim its branches into a useful shape."

I held still as she washed my hands and then bandaged them carefully. "What is the next step?"

"Many of us maintain some armaments, but we will need a better stockpile and a source of ammunition. Some of those who came are engineers, more than capable of manufacturing other things that may be necessary. We have two medics as well, who will need supplies."

I frowned. "We won't be able to get weapons without money. A lot of money, for someone to sell to Lathraí troublemakers. The same can be said of everything else."

"True." A certain gleam struck Sostrate's eye. "We will have to move to rather unorthodox methods of financing our plans. How willing are you to break the law, Karsa?"