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The cargo hold of the narrowboat was damp, slimy and smelled strongly of fish. Nina hunched against the wall, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She could hear the water lapping against the hull just a few inches from her head. They were traveling down the canal away from Ketterdam at an excruciatingly slow pace, but she tried to focus on how far they’d come. That was difficult when distance was the only thing between them and death, and she had spent the whole trip hidden among barrels of salted fish with no idea how far they’d come.
Matthias was curled up on the floor next to her, with his face turned towards the side of the boat. Nina was fairly certain he was asleep. She envied him his ability to escape the reality of their situation by sleep. She was so wired she didn’t think she’d ever sleep again. She was left staring at the walls and trying not to think about everything that had gone wrong.
Kaz shifted on the floor across from her, and she turned. The single bone light she’d had in her pocket when everything had gone to crap gave off just in light to see him drag himself into a sitting position.
“Lie back down,” she whispered. It was the first words any of them had spoken in hours and they sounded like she was screaming at the top of her lungs after all the silence. “You need to rest.”
“I’m fine,” Kaz said. His voice was even rougher than usual, like he was holding back a cough. In the green gloom Nina could see the sheen of sweat coating his face and slicking back his hair. He was trembling.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“I said I was fine,” he snapped, wiping his face on the sleeve of his coat.
“I think you have a fever,” Nina said. “Your wound must be infected.” It was far too soon for the wound to be infected, though, and that was what scared her. They still didn’t even know where Van Eck had even gotten a parem-addicted Corporalnik from, let alone what that Grisha done to Kaz on the mercher’s orders. Nina hadn’t even seen the wound, because Kaz once he’d regained consciousness he wouldn’t let her and Matthias anywhere near him. He’d never been much for physical closeness—the only people who didn’t learn that quickly after meeting Kaz were fools—but it turned out that when he was injured he got even more prickly than usual. She knew he’d done some cleaning and bandaging on his own, but she had no idea how thorough a job he’d done or if he needed stiches. If that Heartrender had really done something to hurry on the spread of an infection—it was something Heartrenders could do under normal circumstances, albeit not quickly, so it would make sense that one on parem could do it quickly—then that would become even more vitally important that she saw the wound as time went on.
“Don’t worry about it,” Kaz ground out. “If you need to worry about it, I’ll let you know.”
“That’s not a possibility, Kaz,” she said. “I’m your friend, of course I’m going to worry about you.”
He didn’t respond, so she fished the canteen out of the small bag of supplies she’d stolen in the plague panic before they’d boarded the narrow boat and held it out to him. “Here, have some water. We don’t want you getting dehydrated.”
Kaz looked at the bottle with open distaste for a moment before reaching out and taking it from her. It did not escape her notice that he was very careful to keep their fingers from touching. He took a small sip and made a face, looking queasy.
Nina leaned back against the wall again and watched him. She was still a bit hazy on what exactly had gone wrong in the Church of Barter to turn their audacious but ultimately possible plot into such a total failure. Matthias had filled her in on the shape of it as they’d fled through the streets of Ketterdam, dodging panicked civilians while lugging a mostly unconscious Kaz between them. Things had been going well before the parem-addicted Heartrender had shown up. Kaz, Matthias and Kuwei had been captured and Kaz had been injured at some point in the fray, though Matthias couldn’t say where. Van Eck had ordered Kuwei to be taken away while sending the Heartrender to torture Kaz.
“You saved us,” Matthias had told her when he’d gotten to this part.
“How did I do that?” Nina—who hadn’t been anywhere near the Church of Barter while all this was going on—had asked.
“The plague sirens,” he’d told her. “They worked just like Kaz said they would. I don’t think we’d have stood a prayer without them.”
He’d explained that when the plague sirens had started going off, the church had descended into panic and Van Eck had ordered the Heartrender to protect him from being crushed by the panicked crowds. That had given Matthias enough of an opening to break free of his panic-stricken guards, grab Kaz and flee.
None of them knew exactly what had happened to the rest of the crew. The last Matthias had seen of Jesper and Inej, they’d been fighting their way through the crowd towards Kuwei. Inej had screamed to Matthias to take Kaz and run, and he’d obeyed her. He had no idea where Wylan was, but Van Eck hadn’t known where he was either, so Matthias was fairly confident Wylan had escaped in the initial panic of the Heartrender’s arrival.
Trying to wait to find the others again when the whole city had been firmly shut against them for seemingly good had been pure foolishness. Once Kaz had regained consciousness, they’d stowed away on this narrowboat which was making a break out of the city before the stadwatch closed the canals to contain the “plague.” They could only hope the others would have the same idea that they’d be able to regroup someplace outside the city.
Kaz took another careful sip of water. He was holding himself very still, which told Nina all she needed to know about how much pain he was in. She cursed the loss of her powers. For a few minutes before everything had gone to shit she’d be content with her new abilities, now she just wished she could heal Kaz’s wound and lower his fever.
“I really would feel better if you lay back down,” she said as gently as possible.
“I need to think,” Kaz said without looking at her, he wiped sweat off his forehead again. “We can’t let Van Eck win, but we’ve been stripped of most of our advantages. They’re probably rounding up the Dregs as we speak, assuming they’re not too scared of the plague.”
“You can always pull some more money out of somewhere, can’t you, Demjin?” Matthias asked, shifting onto his stomach. For the first time Nina realized that he might not have ever been asleep, and might have just been spending the last few hours spiraling just like she had.
Kaz took another sip of water and made a face. Nina got the impression he was trying to put off answering.
“I actually can’t,” he said slowly, like each word was being dragged out of him. “I had some kruge stashed behind a brick in the back wall of the Crow Club, but beyond that I’m flat broke.”
They stared at him. “Really?” Nina said. “You mean to tell us that you, Kaz Brekker, Bastard of the Barrel, don’t have any more properties of questionable value to dip into?”
“No,” Kaz said. It sounded like it cost him something to admit it.
“Why didn’t we get that money before we left the city?” Matthias asked. “We could use it.”
“Inej knows where it is,” Kaz said. He didn’t say anything else, and Nina realized he’d deliberately left the money behind for Inej. That was kind of sweet, in a distinctly Kaz Brekker sort of way.
“We need a plan,” Matthias said after a while. “A plan to find the others. A plan to take back what’s ours.” It was surprising to hear him talk that way. He was so different from the boy they’d broken out of Hellgate only a few months before.
“I’m working on it,” Kaz said. That might have been more reassuring if he wasn’t shaking and soaked in fever sweat. At some point during the conversation he’d started visibly swaying as well. For the first time, she seriously considered whether it was possible for Kaz Brekker to die from something a mundane as an infected wound. It was not a pretty thought.
“At least, work on it while lying down,” She said. If he’d been anyone else Nina would have simply grabbed him and forced him to lie down, but she was fairly certain he was still capable of murdering her in this state, so she didn’t try. “Please, Kaz.”
He looked at her for a second, then sighed and lowered himself back down onto the slimy floor of the narrowboat, grunting in pain. He raised an eyebrow at her. “Happy now, Nina, dear?”
“Somewhat,” Nina took the canteen back and rummaged around in their bag until she found a length of spare bandage to wet with water. She held it out to him. “Here, put this on your forehead. You should probably take some of your clothes off too. We need to get that fever down.”
Kaz gave her a murderous look which she returned with one of her own. After a moment he grudgingly took the bandage and rested it across his forehead. It was a little ridiculous to see him like this. He didn’t even loosen his tie, though.
“I’ll be completely honest,” she said, “once we get off this boat, I think our first course of action should be to get you a doctor. This infection came on way to fast. I’m worried.”
“Even if you do have a point,” Kaz said, which wasn’t exactly a concession, but as close to one as she was likely to get. “That’s not exactly a possibility. How do you plan to explain who I am and what happened to me?”
Unfortunately, he was completely right.