“Kip,” Cruxer said. “You have any advice?”
Kip looked at Cruxer, shocked for a moment. Cruxer was a thousand times the man Kip was, and he was asking Kip for advice?
“ ’Course he doesn’t. Just cause he’s Guile’s get doesn’t mean he’s got half the brain his father does,” Aram said.
“Head three blocks north and five blocks up, and go from there,” Kip said quickly, flushing.
Cruxer said, “That’s not exactly a straight route, Kip.”
“Not straight? It’s about as crooked as it could be,” Erato threw in. “I don’t want to be in these slums any longer than I have to.”
Trainer Fisk handed Kip the coin purse. “Go when you’re ready,” he said.
All of the approaches to this little wide spot between the houses and the wall were dark and narrow. There were men down every way, and no way to tell which curious eyes were hostile. Kip didn’t see children, and there were few women. He guessed that meant the people here knew trouble was coming.
“Let’s go,” Aram said. “Straight south and we can cut to the main streets in just a few blocks. Come on!”
“It’s not the distance that’s the problem,” Kip said.
“Kip, you gotta give me a better reason than that,” Cruxer said. “We’ve gotta move. The longer we wait, the more time we’re giving—”
“They’re right, Kip,” Teia said. “We only have to run a few blocks.”
“I’m with Aram,” Cruxer said. “Let’s go! Wedge formation, don’t let anyone within arm’s length of Kip!”
They pulled Kip into a jog, and then suddenly he stopped.
“I’m the Color,” he said.
“No shit,” Aram said. “So stop making yourself an easy target!”
They all skidded to a halt, eyes skipping from the men in the alleys ahead of them and going to Kip, who was acting insane.
“You’re protecting me,” Kip said.
“We’ve established that. Two blocks, two!” Cruxer said.
“We could carry him,” Lucia said.
“We’d give up two fighters to do that, at least.”
Kip was the Color. They were his guards. They had to protect him. It was that simple. It wasn’t a matter of who was the best, or smartest, or who had the highest rank, it was a matter of who was in control. And that was Kip. He was not only in control, he was right.
So he turned and ran the other direction.
More than one oath followed him—words hot enough to blister his ears—but he wasn’t listening. In moments, they had surrounded him once more. They jogged past a puzzled-looking Trainer Fisk and the rest of the scrubs.
“It’s the gangs,” Kip said as they caught up with him. “We’ve got the Tyrean gangs to worry about first. We cut north three blocks, and we’ll cross into Ilytian neighborhoods. Then we cut over into the markets, where the guards don’t care where you’re from, they don’t want big armed gangs coming through regardless. We skip back and forth between gang territories, and they have to worry about each other instead of about us.” He huffed. It was hard to talk while running. “Cruxer, give me your spectacles!”
The older boy handed him his blue spectacles. Kip held his own green spectacles up to his eyes first, and stared at the whitewashed buildings. Filling halfway up, he pressed that luxin into his right side, and drew in blue luxin and held it in his left arm.
He wasn’t prepared for what it did to him. The calming, cool rationality of blue hit the wild restlessness of green like cavalry lines crashing together.
“Cruxer, you lead, you take it,” Kip said. He was blinking rapidly, shaking his head. His temples were knotting up, an instant headache blossoming, radiating down his neck. With an effort of will, he tried to separate the luxins within him.
The alley ahead darkened as five men suddenly appeared, blocking it. They were armed with clubs and chains. The scrubs crowded ahead of Kip, blocking his firing lanes.
“Move or it’s on your own heads!” Cruxer shouted. He didn’t slow. The thugs blocking the alley didn’t move.
“One and two!” Cruxer shouted, calling out his targets.
“Four!” Lucia said.
“Three!” Aram said.
“Five!” Teia said.
Which, of course, left Kip doing nothing.
One was the biggest, a fat, hairy brute who took up the center of the alley. He stood flat-footed, head-on, certain that these children would slow down. He must have weighed at least twice as much as Kip. He raised his club.
Cruxer sped up at the last second, turning to do a slippery side kick, left foot crossing behind his right, and then his right stabbing out with incredible force. It was a hard kick to do quickly when standing still, but its power was without equal. Kip had never seen anyone even try it when running.
But the kick was beautiful. It caught the fat man in the center of his chest and lifted his entire flabby mass off the ground, blasting him backward as if he’d been hit by a cannon blast of grapeshot. His descending club went spinning harmlessly away, and Cruxer was already uncoiling again. A spinning back kick, effortlessly high, his heel crashing across the neck of number two—who went down in a heap, smacking himself with his own chain.
Teia slowed down from her run before reaching her skinny opponent, but she acted almost as quickly, feigning a punch at the man’s face, then kicking him in the groin. As he hunched over instinctively from the pain, his face met her rising knee with explosive results.
Lucia tried to engage her own target, but that man was more worried about Cruxer. Cruxer caught the man’s descending club in an X block, brought his hands down to grab the man. But the thug snatched his hands back too quickly, barely holding on to the club.
It didn’t matter. Cruxer connected one of his shin-strikes across the man’s leg. The man went down, howling. Cruxer was on top of him in a moment, standing with one foot trapping the man’s foot, and his other foot on the man’s knee. He could cripple him in an instant just by shifting his weight.
Instead, Cruxer looked over to the rest of them. Kip hadn’t even seen how Aram had dealt with his opponent, but the man was down. None of the others looked like they were going to put up any more fight.
Cruxer grinned, wild, elated, charming. It was the look of a boy who can’t believe that all of his training actually works. That he is become what he has always hoped to be. It was, Kip knew, an innocent look. He felt a gulf open between him and the older boy. Cruxer was a warrior-in-training, but he wasn’t a warrior yet. Cruxer would be an excellent warrior, but he was also a good man. He wouldn’t lose his excellence, but he would lose this joy when he saw heads explode, when he watched friends try to hold in their life’s blood as it pumped out of their guts, when he listened to his enemies whimpering and shivering as they died too slowly.
“Let’s go!” Cruxer said. “Lucia, you guard the back next time.”
“Give me shooting lanes next time,” Kip said. “I’ve got luxin.”
They ran on. Kip was getting tired, but he realized that just a few months ago he wouldn’t even have been able to jog this far. Now he was keeping up with the others. He’d still be the first to tire, and the first to quit, but he wasn’t quitting yet.