Page 11 of Last of Her Name

Because far, far more electrifying is the finger Mayor Kepht is pointing.

At me.

The chamber falls silent.

I feel every eye like a laser trained on my face. Ivora, Mischina, my friends—they all draw back as if I am contagious. Only Clio remains, fingers locked around mine. But I’m still watching Mayor Kepht, or rather, that accusatory finger, that finger more terrifying and deadly than any gun.

“She’s the one you want,” he whispers again, and then he drops his hand and looks away.

“No!” my mother calls out. “That isn’t true. She’s our dau—”

She cuts off with a pained grunt, and I whirl, seeing the vityaze who punched her stomach raising his fist again. My father steps between them, hands up, trying to block any more blows. Mom swears, her eyes wild as she shakes her head at me. I fight the urge to run to them, knowing sudden movement now would only exacerbate the situation tenfold. Dread seeps through me, turning me to stone.

I look from my parents to the direktor and find myself trapped in his gaze as his attention narrows on me. The air seems to harden around me like cement, locking me in place, weighing me down. The rest of it—the crying girls, the shouting parents, Mayor Kepht’s accusation, theimpossibilityof what he’s saying—I can barely grasp. For now, all that matters is that Alexei Volkov is looking at me and me alone, as if we two were the only people in the hall. So far, I’ve only been spectating at this twisted circus; now I find myself shoved with no warning into the lion’s pit.

But I’m not alone. I’m not the only one in danger.

“Get away, Clio,” I whisper.

She shakes her head. “You wouldn’t leaveme.”

“Clio,go.” Whatever’s about to happen, I can’t let her get mixed up in it.

Her hand locks around my wrist. She looks at me, eyes blazing, and whispers, “No.”

I push her, hard. She stumbles away, eyes widening with shock.

“Get away from me!” I shout at her, as tears burn hot in my eyes. “Get as far away from me as you can! I don’t want you here!”

She slips away, face pale, as the vityazes close in on me. I have nowhere to run. No escape, no weapon. I lose sight of Clio altogether. I hope she finds my parents, that they can keep her safe.

“You, girl,” Volkov says. “Come here. Don’t be afraid. I will not harm you.”

He’s going to kill me.

Whatever the direktor says, I don’t believe him. He’s going to kill me and I’ll never get the chance to explain the truth. That I’m not what they think I am. I can’tpossiblybe. I’m so terribly ordinary. Just Stacia Androva, just a vintner’s daughter, an apprentice mechanic, a nobody. I could explain that to them, I could make them understand, if I could just find my voice. But I can barely see straight; the room closes in around me. I feel myself shrinking, vision shrinking to a point. This is all wrong, wrong,wrong.

“Alexei!”

My mom’s voice rings across the room. I stiffen, then whirl to see her pushing her way forward. Dad is behind her, eyes intent on the direktor.

Alexei.She called him Alexei, his first name.

“Elena?” says the direktor, his eyes widening a little. Then, for the first time, I see a glint of real emotion touch his gaze: fury.“You …”

He knows my parents.

The room tilts around me, and then my mom shouts: “Stacia!Run!”

She grabs the vityaze’s gun from his belt and shoots, aiming for Alexei Volkov, but the vityaze throws himself in the way, taking the energy bolt meant for the direktor. He drops, and my mom curses, firing again, but Volkov is already moving behind a wall of his own men; the shot goes wide.

The hall erupts into chaos; I lose sight of my parents as the sound of gunfire erupts, the vityazes shooting into the crowd. Volkov shouts, his words lost in the noise. Everyone is screaming, bodies are colliding. The crowd of parents crashes into the wall of vityazes. Hands reach for daughters, trying to pull them to safety, only to be ripped apart by searing bolts from the vityaze guns. A terrible smell fills my nose, and I realize with a sickening twist that it’s the smell of burnt flesh.

For a moment I cannot move, shock immobilizing my every atom. But then someone bumps into me—a vityaze, reeling from a punch thrown by someone’s dad—and I burst into motion, my hands closing around his staff. We’re nose to nose. I can see through his red helmet to his green eyes, which are wide and surprised. He’s younger than I’d have thought. He twists the staff hard, but all the climbing and running I do in the hills behind Afka have made me strong, and I wrench the other way, almost getting the staff free—

Then the wall behind Volkov explodes.

I’m thrown off my feet, landing hard on my back as the glass dome overhead shatters. Instinctively I curl up, hands over my head as glass and plaster crash all around. Smoke and dust fill my lungs, and I gasp for breath, ears ringing, stars dancing in my eyes. Dimly, over the high note singing in my skull, I can hear screams, but I’m too disoriented to tell whose voices they are. And the air is too thick with smoke to see anything at all. Someone stumbles past me, little more than a vague, sobbing shadow.