Notes on the Chapter

Harylas - Macedon's capital city
Ecclesia - the part of Macedon's democracy that handles noble and military concerns.
Monokeros - Eden's version of a unicorn—it is carnivorous, and the army wants one because its blood is able to cure wounds.
‘hilts - slang for "sword-hilts," Macedon’s currency; has a raised sword-hilt shape on it.
Kada - POV character; a seven or eight year-old girl living in Harylas. She is a helper in the hospitals, as there is a plague in the city, caused by the infected body of one of Keihyn’s friends who died when he was bitten by a monokeros.

"Give me your knife." Kiar ducked under the monokeros and dug his blade under its hoof to help it get free from the nail. The monokeros pulled and whined, out of the wall, and Keihyn caught its halter. Kiar appeared a moment later, and in a display that turned my stomach (even me—and I was a rat-eater), the monokeros patched together its bloody foot and healed.

Keihyn's face was a lovely shade of yellow.

I changed my mind about it. "That’s a disgusting, nasty animal."

"It's going to save the city."

"How?"

"Just keep walking. We need to get it out of sight," he said without explaining, which was just as well, because I liked Keihyn, and I for now I didn't want to know the answers to any of my questions.

The silence loomed.

"My name is Kada," I said. It was a good name. "You're probably wondering why I have a name like a rich person, when I’m poor. My parents might have been rich or something, once—I don't even think they were from Macedon, because I can't hear people's emotions. But I'm a street child now. All my friends live on the streets."

"You're in good company, Kada," said Kiar. Their names and the way they walked (fast and careful, instead of the tiptoeing shuffle of rich people) marked them as street people, like me.

We were heading into the oldest, centre-most part of Harylas, where the sickest of the sick were crowded. The eerie, thrumming whine became discernible as the night noises of the three hospitals. The plagued people only usually only screamed right at the end when the plague was eating their spines. We were in the middle of another wave, though—lately I had been sleeping with cotton stuffed in my ears. I pointed down the street that led to the hospital.

"Do you want to go straight there? I know how to get there because I steal food from them, usually. I can pick the locks for you.'

"No," said Keihyn hurriedly. "Let's find shelter for tonight and hide the monokeros. We can always go there tomorrow." He was nervous and stalling—I could tell.

"Follow me, then." I slunk into an alleyway, leading the way through lead gutters that had been clogged for weeks and puddles of fluid that weren't mud and weren't water. Magpies scattered angrily out of our path, feasting on dead things. "And remember to look up sometimes. People throw nasty things out of their windows." The army spent thousands and thousands of 'hilts on Harylas, but the middle of the city never got better. The cobbles stayed new, the river stayed clean, and the people stayed poor.

Near the middle, there was an abandoned stable. I slept there a lot, warm under the hay. The owner had put lots of clever, expensive locks on the wall around it, but I had picked them all, and let myself in whenever I wanted.

The exhausted monokeros allowed itself to be led into a stall with only a few half-hearted snaps at Kiar's hands. He knotted the rope once, twice, three times. The monokeros folded its legs under itself and knelt in the hay, looking up at us with its deep, dark stare. I was almost sorry for it, except that its eyes gleamed liquidly with a faint, murderous hunger. Its flank was warmer than the hay, so I rested my head on it. It nosed at my hair and tried to kick me, but it was full of horsemeat, and sleepy, and didn’t get very far. The two men had curled up unashamedly with each other to keep warm in the hay. I curled up suspiciously in my corner, surrounded by my collection of odd ends. Everything I owned was either warm, edible, or good for killing things: a cloak that doubled as a blanket, a shard of painted glass, two magpie eggs, and a rope. The birds burbled softly outside, trying to sleep in the midst of the loud, long night. Plague usually finished with people near the end of the night, which meant it was nearly morning. They dropped them into the river usually between the early morning hours and midday. In the morning, everyone shivered and shuddered indoors, too afraid to get food, waiting for the wind to blow away the funny smell of bodies.

I was up and wide awake while the sun was still sleeping in the north.

"Wake up, wake up!" I kicked the sleeping Kiar, and he brushed me off like a fly. Keihyn responded better, after I gave him a boot in the throat. "Up, lazies," I ordered. "Don’t you want to take your monokeros to the hospital?"

Kiar balked, and he and Keihyn eyed each other. "Perhaps we'd better not go to the hospital today either," ventured Keihyn. "They'll tear us apart, limb from limb, if they see us with that thing."

"Limb from limb," Kiar agreed.

"I’m going to go," I said. "And I'm going to tell them about you too."

"No!" said Kiar. "Do you want to get us killed?"

"That depends. People give me money and all sorts of things when I tell secrets."

"The army,” pleaded Kiar. "Let's just give them the monokeros, like they wanted, and then get our money and not try to be heroes or save the city. Two thousand 'hilts is plenty of money to get us safely out of the city before we get sick with plague ourselves."

"No," I said, at the same time as Keihyn, but he cut me off. "We'll go, but we're not just going to take our 'hilts and leave. Can't you see the opportunity? In the next stall there is an animal that is not only strong enough to halt the plague, but is valuable enough to get us whatever we want. Liak is dead—his obligation to the army is over. The monokeros is ours now, and we can make the army pay whatever we want to get it. And they will—you know they will. They'll be falling over themselves for it."

I left them to their arguments and went to the next stall. The monokeros was just tall enough to rest its head on the top of stall wall, at eye-level with me. It had very intelligent eyes with long, wide pupils and starving, yearning irises. It blinked curiously at me and tried to chew at the knots on its teeth. I patted its nose and let myself into the stall, and curled up in its warm, soft fur until morning.

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