The Right to Die | ✓ Amby Winner 2023

26. The Right to Serve

"Good." He turned his face back to the house. "I want you to invite everyone who's competing in the Trial, every one of them who might be halfway sympathetic to us, everyone whose family has ever lost something to the Tsaright or the Magnate."

Sviya choked. "That's a long list, M'yu."

"You said we had eleven hours. Can you make it happen or not?"

"Evriss made it sound like you don't have enough money for that kind of feast."

"It's not the money that matters," he said, as beams fell and women cried and the rain washed everything away. "We'll get by."

Nodding slowly, she said, "Then I'll make it happen."

She started to turn, but M'yu stopped her. "One more thing. I need Ruslan."

She shook her head. "Ruslan hates you."

The fire cracked and died down to smoldering embers. "I know."

* * *

As his people picked through the wreckage a few streets over, M'yu knocked on the door to the House of Mercury. His stomach tied itself into knots, but he held himself straight. He came with information. He came with a plan. 

He swallowed as the butler showed him into the parlor. The room looked like the inside of a knife, all hard-edges and swirling metal. A chandelier cast a silver-blue glow over everything, its glittering, sharp pendants pointed down like threats. The butler left, and M'yu stood with his fingers curled around a hard chair's back. Mercury swirled beneath the glass top of the coffee table, promising chaos. The metal of the chair slipped beneath his clammy hands. This was too big of a gamble. He had no idea how Ruslan was going to react.

He had no way to control him.

But everything had been spinning out of control for a long time. Ever since he got cast out of his home—since he got himself cast out of his home—life had been one desperate attempt at putting the world back together. He'd lied and told himself that if he said Control hard enough, he would have it. But he'd had no control when Aevryn had freed him, either time. He'd had no control in the Prav'sudja, despite having their defenses laid out in his hands. Even his own plans, his hope for a new world, they had been ghosts of Karsya's revenge, breathed to life as he searched for something, anything to believe in. He'd never had any power in his own life, much less in the Cap's world. 

M'yu closed his eyes, released his death grip on the chair, and did his best to ignore the obstacle course his heart was running.

A door clicked shut, and M'yu's eyes snapped open. Ruslan stood there, hands in his tailored pockets, hair askew. "Did you come for another beating?"

M'yu stepped away from the defense of the chair and said carefully, "If that's how you'd have it."

Ruslan scoffed. "Careful what you wish for, snipe. I might just take you up on it." He leaned against the back of a chair. There was something in his eyes, or maybe in the way his shoulders sagged even as the rest of him stood alert and watching, that reminded M'yu, for the first time, of a Gloamer kid.

Hesitantly, M'yu settled into one of the chairs. "I thought we might talk."

Ruslan watched him from across the table. Flatly, he said, "If my master finds you here, he'll kill you."

"I know."

"You should have died in the Prav'sudja."

"I know."

"Then why are you here? Rot it all!" Ruslan's face twisted. "Haven't you caused enough trouble?"

M'yu flinched back.