It had yielded interesting discoveries over the months of practice since Kip left, if not the ones she was looking for. First, with a cloud of paryl gas surrounding her, Teia became the next best thing to a superchromat. The gas itself was a filter like polarized glass. It filtered blues into the perfect blue for making blue luxin, filtered reds into the perfect red for making red luxin, and so forth. If she held a bubble of paryl gas perfectly so that it covered one eye, she could look at any luxin and tell how well it had been drafted: if it looked and felt exactly the same to each eye, it had been drafted perfectly, and therefore probably by a superchromat.
She was sure there were handy applications for her discoveries, but she wasn’t sure what they were, and there was no one she could really ask. The only one she’d really come up with was that, if she remembered to draft a paryl cloud, she could now differentiate red and green. She still couldn’t see them as different, though, so it was a cold comfort.
One day she was sitting on the floor of the practice room. Always fearful of interruptions, she’d run through the obstacle course a few times first to work up a sweat, and now she sat as if winded, wearing her skimpiest workout attire. The point was to have as much skin exposed as possible. She had to feel the colors, and dammit if that wasn’t taking a lot of practice. So she sat on the floor, nearly naked but sweaty, so that if anyone came in she could pass for someone just cooling from her exertions.
This new life of hers was always lies and preparations for lies.
She had her eyes closed and a headband functioning as a blindfold, every sense attuned to the blue (perhaps?) light, when she heard a hiss as of escaping gas. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed the headband back up her into unruly hair. She grabbed her tunic and looked toward the door.
Nothing.
She widened her eyes to paryl and saw paryl gas dissipating. Teia jumped to her feet, pulling on her tunic, eyes darting to the master cloak hanging on its hook by the door. She expected that paryl gas to come questing out toward her. It had to be Master Sharp looking to see if she was in the room.
But it did nothing instead.
She moved to the door, and heard only retreating footsteps. She pulled on long trousers and, after one moment of indecision, grabbed her cloak. There was someone disappearing down the hall. Not Master Sharp. But at her feet, there was a wineskin. Its spout had been pushed under the door, and then it had been stomped flat, expelling the paryl gas within. Teia picked it up. In tiny script, but undoubtedly Master Sharp’s hand, there was one word: “Follow.”
Oh hells! Here it was. Finally.
Swallowing hard once, Teia ran on silent feet after the man. She caught sight of him quickly. She’d been right. It wasn’t Murder Sharp. Just a slave. He had a paryl mark floating above him, invisible to anyone’s eyes except Teia’s.
The man walked to the servants’ stairs, and up. Teia followed at a discreet distance. In the entrance hall, his paryl mark abruptly blinked out.
It happened, of course. Paryl was so fragile that the slightest brush would usually shatter it, and that was especially true of the lighter-than-air gel marks appended to targets. Teia kept the man in sight, but within moments the mark bloomed over a slave woman.
What the hell?
Teia followed the woman as she headed outside. Teia put on her dark spectacles so she could continue glancing in paryl intermittently in the bright light without blinding herself. Mercifully, she didn’t look out of place with them on. It was a bright, blustery, cool day. Distant clouds dotted the heavens like harbingers of the autumn coming on.
Just after the Lily’s Stem, the paryl mark passed from the slave woman to a merchant heading down a side street.
This time Teia was ready. Marking someone with paryl required that the paryl drafter be nearby.
But Sharp was either being terribly devious, or he was using his own shimmercloak, because Teia never saw him.
Eventually she ended up in front of a tiny, run-down house in the Tyrean quarter with a paryl “Enter” written on the door.
Drawing a surreptitious dagger to conceal behind a wrist, she knocked.
It opened and Sharp grinned at her through his exquisite white teeth. He beckoned her inside, but made her step close past him. Orholam, how he made her skin crawl. He sniffed as she slipped past him.
He closed the door. “Are we forgetting our mint?” he asked. “Not to mention the parsley.” He took her face in his hands, his manicured fingers on each of her cheeks, angling her chin up, a gesture all too intimate for her taste. He smelled her breath. Grimaced as if she’d farted straight in his face. Slapped her gently.
The gentleness made it almost worse.
“You know what we do, Adrasteia?” he asked. “Stealth. Stealth is what we do. Well, it’s the necessary building block for what we do. You know what’s not stealthy? Haltonsis. Haltonsis isn’t sneaky, Teia. Might as well chew garlic.”
He meant ‘halitosis.’ Moron.
But Teia didn’t say anything. Moron Sharp might be, but he was a dangerous one.
Moron Sharp.
Teia almost grinned at her new mental nickname for him. She couldn’t be afraid of someone she had a stupid nickname for, right?
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I, um, I did it on purpose. I’ve been wondering if you were ever going to check in with me again. So I thought it’d be funny if when you did, I had stinky breath.”
“Cute,” he said. “Don’t be cute.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
He slugged her in the stomach. She dropped, gasping. He grabbed a handful of her short hair and drew back a fist. But then he paused. He pushed her lips around, looking at her teeth.
“Ah, that’s right,” he said. He ran a tongue around his own teeth and let her go. “Sit.”
There was only one small chair and a small bed in this room. There was a coil of rope hanging off the back of the chair. All Teia’s old fears came alive at the sight of it, but she sat. What could she do against Sharp anyway?
He bound her to the chair expertly, quietly whistling to himself. Excellent whistler. After he finished, he looked at himself in a tiny mirror on the wall. He checked his dentures, mostly, moving his jaw this way and that, smiling broadly or just cocking his lip up to reveal a tooth in a faux grin, looking at the teeth from different angles.
“We have a problem,” he said, not turning from the mirror. He touched a dogtooth with his tongue. “You didn’t tag anyone for me to kill.”