𝐀 𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐋𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐃//𝐊𝐚𝐳 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐤𝐤𝐞𝐫

𝐗.

CHAPTER 10

Times Have Changed

     If Brynn was going to die, she hoped it would happen soon. Not because she wanted to leave her friends, or even to get rid of the pain. It was the tomb. The smell was overwhelmingly putrid, the scent of death one that Brynn never wanted to smell again. And if she could have gotten up to leave, she would have.

She had no idea when Jesper and Wylan came back, just that when Nina and Matthias arrived back at the tomb, she noticed the wall of wanted posters with the faces of her friends on it. Hers was noticeably missing, along with Nina's and Sasha's.

"Van Eck probably thinks you're not going to live for much longer," said Jesper. "But he doesn't know you like we do. You're a fighter."

"Spare me," groaned Brynn, wishing she could hit him. But even talking hurt like a pile of rocks in her throat, so maybe that wasn't the best idea.

For the past few hours, all she heard from the crew was about how she was a survivor, and therefore she would survive. If that was true, it didn't feel like it. Brynn felt like she was dying, slowly but surely, her insides twisting and turning inside out.

The plan was set. Inej and Nina were going together to Sweet Reef where Inej would walk the highwire between the sugar silos and place the weevil in to destroy the sugar. Sasha would go with Kaz and Wylan to Van Eck's mansion to break into his vault and steal his seal for the letter to get the Grisha out of Ketterdam. Apparently, she'd helped create the weevil that Inej would put into the silos at Sweet Reef.

Brynn was going to stay with Jesper, Matthias, and Kuwei in the tomb until everyone came back. Then, from there, it should have been easy sailing. Assuming Brynn would survive parem, of course.

The craving for parem was there, always in the front of Brynn's mind. She hadn't bothered to ask who had it, even if they still had it. Before anything had gotten too bad, she'd made Kaz promise not to give her any, no matter what. Kaz probably wouldn't have budged, anyway.

The knowledge of that helped Brynn realize that asking for the drug was pointless, even if she wanted to throttle someone into giving her parem.

"So, what do you think will happen after you survive this?" asked Jesper, kneeling down to sit next to Brynn on the ground. "Nina's different, that's for sure."

"How different?" Brynn wondered.

"I'm not sure, but I think she choked a guy to death with a cloud of dust at the lake house."

Matthias shook his head. "I don't understand it," he said. "A cloud of dust? She controlled shards of bone today—she could never have done that before parem. She seems to think the change is temporary, a residual effect of the drug, but..." He turned to Kuwei. "Could the parem alter a Grisha's power? Change it? Destroy it?"