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Inej was on the roof crying again.
It was ridiculous, Kaz thought as he tidied his room more aggressively than necessary. This was not her first kill. She’d been working for him for eight months now. Her body count might not be as high as most of the Dregs, but surely she ought to be past this sort of thing. He’d killed more people than she had by the time he was twelve and it had never driven him to sit on a roof whimpering while other people were trying to enjoy some damned peace and quiet.
“Shut the fuck up,” he groused, but he said it too quietly for her to hear.
He wasn’t actually afraid of her disapproval. It just annoyed him. And she was annoying enough already, with her sarcastic comments and her morals and the way her eyes sparkled knowingly at him when he was trying not to smile.
Another sob from the roof. He slammed a drawer shut and limped angrily to the window, leaving his cane behind. He unlocked it, wrenched it open, and pulled himself onto the ledge. He could see Inej from here, sitting with her legs curled up to her chest, hands tightly gripping the now cleaned and sheathed knife she’d used to make the kill.
“Wraith,” he said curtly. She ignored him. “Wraith.” He waited a moment– no answer– then heaved a sigh. “Inej.”
A sniffle. A cold salt breeze cut in from the harbor as she turned her head to look at him. Her face was tearstained and blotchy, and should have been ugly. Kaz swallowed his inconvenient emotions.
“Why do you still get so… like this about killing?” he demanded gruffly.
“All life is sacred,” Inej told him, and he gave her an exasperated look as he dragged himself further onto the slanted roof to sit a foot or so below her. It was a little tricky to get there relying mostly on the strength of his upper body, but if Kaz had not been far too comfortable clambering around roofs in the first place, he would still have two good legs. He managed.
“There’s nothing sacred about it, and kind steel to the throat is a better way to go than some," he argued, slightly out of breath. "He could have drowned in the canals. Been crushed in machinery. Drunk from a tainted well and spent his last hours shitting his life out in agony. Think of it as having done him a favor.”
Inej very pointedly looked away from him, rejecting his logic without a word. He waited for another moment, then sighed.
He didn’t get it. Inej was the toughest person he’d ever met. She’d endured the horrible innuendoes some of the Dregs had thrown at her when she’d first joined them without so much as acknowledging their existence. When she’d badly burned her hand on the inconveniently placed stovepipe in the Slat– Jesper had joked once that a burn scar from that pipe was the real Dregs tattoo– she’d been back scaling walls, jaw tense with pain but not flinching from gripping or putting weight on it, the next day. She’d survived Heleen, for fuck’s sake. Why was she so torn up over killing a stranger? The podge had been a Dime Lion enforcer; he’d probably deserved it.
The hell with it, she already despised Kaz anyway.
“Why is this the thing that makes you cry? Not being sold by a slaver or all the sick things that were done to you at the Menagerie? You’ve been through all that and you hold onto who you are, your faith, your determination… why does putting a knife in one useless idiot make you go to pieces all the sudden?”
“Because killing him was my choice, my action, and I have to bear the weight of it alone, and–” Inej’s voice cut off. She was smothering a sob in her sleeve, because he hadn't been able to leave well enough alone.
Kaz clenched his jaw slightly and told himself it didn’t matter. He’d already known he was a monster for a long time. Hurting Inej’s feelings was the least of his crimes. “And how does that make it harder than any of the other things you’ve had to bear alone?” He found himself gesturing inarticulately, and forced himself to still his hands.
“Because I haven’t had to bear the other things alone!” she burst out. “You aren’t Suli. You don’t understand. You can’t understand.”
Kaz was silent for a moment. “You mean… your Saints?” he conjectured.
“No, Kaz. Not my Saints. My people.” Inej stared out into the night.
“How can they help you, when you’re here and they’re…” he trailed off, because of course she was here and they were in Ravka, obviously , and Inej knew that far better than he did. “What do you mean?” he amended.
Inej was quiet for a few breaths, then she spoke. “What do the Kerch believe about enduring hardships? How do… how do Ghezen and your ancestors help you with it?”
Kaz shrugged. “They don’t really. Our ancestors are dead; either they left us something to work with or they didn’t. Ghezen rewards industry and balances every bad fortune with a profitable opportunity. Or so his ministers tell us.” His mouth twisted with bitter irony. “Of course, if we misjudge an opportunity or don’t have the strength or the resources to take it when it’s offered… well, we must not be trying hard enough. Ghezen rewards those who put in the effort, after all.”
He remembered his brother taking him to the Church of Ghezen once they had lost their rooms in the boarding house. A homeless child could get one bowl of porridge a day there if they were able to recite their prayers. They hadn’t fed Jordie. He’d been old enough to work, if only just, and they didn’t believe in rewarding idleness. The women who’d worked there had made much of Kaz and praised his memory when they taught him a new prayer or hymn and he was able to repeat it back to them perfectly. They had told him that if he worked hard, Ghezen would surely lift him out of his circumstances, because he had the makings of a fine man of business.
They hadn’t fed Jordie, and the fever had taken Jordie first. He had never forgiven them for that.
Ghezen had offered Kaz no opportunity to become a man of business, but he’d never really expected it. Instead, Kaz had wrested every opportunity from Ghezen’s unfeeling hand.
“And that’s what you believe about victims? That they just… missed their chance or they’re waiting for better luck to balance it out? That they have to drag themselves out of their pain alone?” Inej turned her head to look at him, slightly scandalized.
“I guess?” Kaz thought about the stories he’d been taught as a boy, about Hardworking Piet who’d saved his father’s mill, Dishonest Gervaas who had lost his undeserved success when his pious servant exposed his crimes, and Clever Bettje, who started a tailoring shop when her husband left her, becoming so wealthy that she had men vying for her hand in marriage. All of the heroes had relied on themselves and their skills and, as Inej had put it, dragged themselves out of their pain alone.
That was how life was. You dragged yourself out from the darkness, or you stayed and made the darkness a part of you. No one helped you. You were expected to help yourself.
“Is that what you think about me? That when I spoke to you that day in the Menagerie, I was taking an opportunity, and I had earned the chance you gave me to get out?” Inej sounded angry now, and Kaz flinched because he had not meant that at all.
If anything, it had been he who had taken the opportunity that she had given him, and he told her so. She looked even more offended now.
“People are not opportunities.” Her voice was tight. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“You could explain it to me,” he said a little hesitantly.
“Would you listen? Really listen and not just shoot me down with dark little comments about how everything is terrible and everyone is alone and you know how the world works?” she demanded. He looked down.
“I’d listen,” he promised quietly.
She seemed mollified by that. She was toying with the knife now, turning it over and over in her hands instead of clinging to it like a lifeline. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?
“The Suli have been outcasts for hundreds of years,” Inej began. “So when something terrible happens to one of us, it’s not just happening here and now. These things have been happening to our people for generations. So when you suffer anything– insult, violence, rape, hunger, cold– it’s not just you. Your ancestors, your cousins, your parents, your unborn children, they are all there with you, helping you to bear the burden, because it’s something we all bear as a people.”
Kaz’s brow wrinkled. “How, if they don’t know what it is you’re enduring? If you can’t… speak to them? Get help from them?”
“I don’t need to speak to them for them to know. And they do help me,” Inej said quietly, seriously. “Imagine you’re carrying a package and someone pushes you over and knocks it from your arms. It’s not just you getting up and picking up the package. There are other hands there, helping you back to your feet, lifting the weight of it with you, all the other Suli who’ve had to do the same thing.” She paused, shook her head. “So yes, I was enslaved. I was used and degraded and taught to please the men who did it, and that’s a sad thing, a terrible thing. But it’s no more than so many other women of my people have endured and are still enduring. It’s not my pain to carry alone. No one carries the weight alone. Every time I got up after a client left, my sisters, my brothers, my grandparents– all the Suli who have suffered or will suffer the same thing– all of them got up with me. We cleaned up, straightened our clothing, and faced the world again with our heads held high. All of us, together.”
“They wouldn’t see you differently because of your time at the Menagerie,” Kaz realized softly. He hadn’t assumed otherwise, not exactly, but he’d considered it a possibility. A lot of the girls he’d known on the streets wouldn’t have been welcomed back home, not after they’d sold themselves the first time. Not even the ones who'd had no other choice.
Inej laughed sadly. “They would hold me and mourn with me, and they would celebrate my homecoming. Suli women are stolen and raped by shevrati men all the time, Kaz . It’s a fact of life. There’s no shame in it. They'd be sorrowful, but they wouldn’t be surprised. I think something like that happened to my grandmother when she was younger. She talked to me when I had my first courses about what could happen if I went off alone in the cities or villages, and how to hide my soul inside my body while it happened. She told me what time of night men slept most deeply and how to know by their breathing when it was safest to creep away. She taught me the herbs to take to keep from getting with child, after.”
Kaz felt a stirring of anger in his gut. “Who teaches a girl to endure rape without fighting back?” he managed to say.
“Who teaches a girl how to take a punch in the face without her teeth being broken?” Inej shot back. “People like you, Kaz, people like us . I come from centuries of survivors, of people who don’t have the luxury of trusting that the worst won’t happen. My grandmother never taught me not to fight back. She taught me what to do when fighting back wasn’t enough. Because it isn’t enough, not when you’re small and outnumbered and from a people who no one cares enough about to protect. If being beaten meant we lost who we were, there’d be none of us left.”
Inej drew the blade from its sheath and the light of the half-moon glinted off it through the thin, damp fog.
“We endure. We rise. We keep going. And we remain ourselves.”
“And you don’t carry the weight alone,” Kaz said softly.
“That’s right,” Inej said, her voice resonating with a powerful certainty. “None of us carry the weight alone.”
People like you, she had said. People like us. Survivors.
What must it be like, he wondered, to have that kind of unshakeable knowledge that you had a home to go back to, no matter what had happened to you? To feel that those who had died would love you and help you to get back up again rather than be disappointed in you for not having done enough? To see the things you had lost as shared tragedies rather than debts to repay or obstacles you had to rise above to prove your worth?
If he’d grown up with the knowledge that dozens of his ancestors had crawled from harbors and fought tooth and nail to survive on the streets, would he have been stronger for it? He thought he might have been.
“So why is killing different?” he asked. “Your people were probably forced to kill, too.”
“I wasn’t forced to–” Inej began.
“Bullshit.” Kaz cut her off. “We both know if you weren’t still an indenture, you wouldn’t be doing any of this.”
Inej shook her head stubbornly. “Killing to protect your family isn’t the same as killing for a gang.”
Kaz just raised an eyebrow. “You think none of your ancestors ever joined a gang to survive? You said yourself they didn’t have the luxury of anyone to defend them. That’s what gangs are for. ”
She was quiet for a long time. Kaz waited. The chill of the air made his leg ache fiercely, but he ignored it.
“You’re right,” she said at last, softly. “Maybe… they might understand.”
“They’d understand better than mine,” he said under his breath, not meaning for her to hear, but she heard anyway.
“Aren’t the Dregs the same to you, though?” Inej asked, turning to look at him. “Maybe they’re not your kin, but someone taught you to survive and keep fighting, and now you teach us. Per Haskell may run the gang, but you made us a caravan.” She smiled faintly. “You’d make a good Suli if you weren’t a scheming, money-obsessed heathen.”
Kaz raised an eyebrow at the barbed compliment, one corner of his mouth kicking up. “Yeah? You’d make a good Barrel girl if you learned to chew jurda and swear.”
“I’m being serious, Kaz,” she reproached him.
He looked up at her perched on the roof tiles, blade in her hand, the lights and fog of Ketterdam lighting her features. Survivors. “I know,” he said. “So am I.”