Evaluate. Judge. Act.

The young man let the words echo like a second heartbeat.

He did not allow himself to acknowledge the possibility that he was going to die here. Not even as he slipped on blood, stumbled over bodies, mentally counted the men and women that had followed him into the city but would not follow him out. Not even as possibility crept closer and closer to certainty.

He was twenty-one years old. He had been in too many battles to count. But this? This wasn’t a battle. This was a slaughter.

Evaluate. Judge. Act.

He pressed his back against the outer wall of a townhome, peering around the corner down a narrow city street. The roads were densely populated with crooked little houses that squished up against each other. Terrified faces peered from within them. Mothers tore their children away from the sight of steel and magic and fire mingling in a terrible, deadly dance.

Deep beneath his thoughts, the voice chuckled.

Shut up, he told it, and launched himself back into the fight. He flew through the streets, whispering to the flames beneath his breath, coaxing them to him. They complied eagerly, furling around his hands and up in his arms in spirals. He yanked them out of houses and off the streets, away from thin skin and fragile bones.

But there was too much. It consumed his energy and his focus. So much so that he didn’t even have time to evade when a sharp pain split his back. The warmth of blood melded with stinging, salty sweat.

Act, act, act.

He grit his teeth and spun in a well-practiced counter before the rebel could land another strike. The body hit the ground in a clumsy tangle of limbs. He didn’t look at her face, grateful that it was covered by a mass of curly brown hair.

As if awakened by the smell of fresh blood, the voice leapt inside of him. Kill it! it hissed, throwing itself against the surface of his thoughts like claws gouging at a door.

No—

He paused a split second too long. A force collided with him, knocking him back into an alley. Instinct kicked in. His hands were already drawing his blade, poised at his attacker’s throat before he even turned his head to see—

“Don’t you dare kill me.” A warm, familiar voice murmured against his ear. “There are hundreds of rebels here who would love to do that instead.”

That voice. It was, in that moment, the most beautiful thing the young man had ever heard.

He exhaled a silent sigh of relief, dropping his dagger as he turned. “Where the hell did you go?”

The young woman greeted him with an unwavering, steely gaze. Her irises were so fair that they melted into the whites of her eyes, leaving pinpoint dark pupils watching him in an assessing stare. Soot and blood painted her cheeks, her white braids tangled and dirty. A coat hung from her shoulders that had once been blue. Now it was so spattered with red that it edged on purple, the stains crawling over the crescent moon insignia on her lapel.

The sight sent his heart lurching to his throat. “How much of that is yours?”

“How much of that is yours?” The woman grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around.

“That bad?”

“Very bad.”

“Wonderful,” he grumbled. He’d hoped the wound wouldn’t be as deep as it felt.

She turned him around, hands still gripping his arms, her face inches from his. “You’re bleeding a lot. You don’t feel that?”

Not anymore. He shook his head. The movement tilted the floor, as if the world was a ship preparing to capsize.