Natasha Van Doren is a shadow summoner. She bides her time and resides in darkness, feared and esteemed by Ketterdam's civilians, a ghost . She cons Kaz Brekker into joining a heist he can't refuse and with thirty million kruge on the line, the crow...
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"ALESSIA."
Natasha forced her hands through the thick metal bars, the bones in her wrist buckling painfully. Her voice had become hoarse, crackling like the final embers of a burning bonfire. She could feel her knees becoming weak.
Prisoner Eleven.
The words were painted sloppily in black paint, scratched in several places and caked in slime and ash. Calling Alessia Ivanov the forgotten would have been kinder. It would have meant a little more than a number.
She clouded the small space around her with a high rising arch of darkness, dappled light soaking in through the unfilled cracks.
Natasha set to work instantly, twisting a silver pin out from her hair and straightening it into a line with her teeth. She pushed it down securely with the tip of her tongue, wiping it on the back of her sleeve.
Ivanov lay face down her bed, her once shimmering black hair cropped into thatches on her skull. Through the thin orange garments, Natasha could see each vertebra of her spine.
She refused to believe the girl was dead. Her body was limp, tossed against the potato sack rags like a dishrag doll. Yet her ribs knocked with life, Alessia's throat hacked with raucous coughs, startling Natasha as she poked around the lock with the silver pin.
Hellgate was designed to withstand thief's - that much Van Doren knew. The Kerch government imported fabrikator made Grisha steel for their locks - used on some of their most valuable prisoners. What was one of these doors doing guarding a teenager?
She exhaled furiously as the silver pin snapped, dropping to the floor with a quiet jingle. Natasha held the shattered pieces between her forefinger and thumb before casting them back onto the floor irritably. She refused to leave Ivanov behind. To hell with Kaz and his orders.
Natasha breathed a shaky gasp of air, adrenaline buzzing in her fingertips. She had never attempted the cut. Growing up she heard of its tales, how the darkling had severed the body of Frejdans who had tried to kill the sun summoner.
How could something so dark crackle out the fingertips of someone so young?
She sniffed back a suffocated moan, eyes darting from her blistering darkness around Prisoner eleven's cell and towards the helpless girl hidden behind a sheet of metal.
Van Doren had grown up with Ivanov by her side. They were more than friends - soulmates. They understood each other deeper than intellectual thought, without the reasoning of the simple sciences. They simply knew. It was what set them apart.
Your pathetic - the voice sneered. It rang in her eardrums, and as Alessia moaned in her sleep - Natasha dared to think she heard it too. Your so-called soulmate has been in Hellgate, and you didn't even know.
