Chapter Text
She heard the baby’s cry.
Although she wasn’t entirely sure she could call it a “cry.” It was more of a whimper, a soft murmur that became more insistent the more it was ignored by her mother.
The little one demanded food, warmth, attention. Arms to shelter her and make her feel safe, but for Jinx it was like hugging a rosebush and driving the thorns into herself, all at once.
Or at least that was how it had been during the first weeks of Isha’s life.
Isha. Isha. Her beloved Isha.
Those sweet honey-colored eyes that came into the world to change her life. To make it better and harder in equal measure —sometimes one more than the other—. Even so, she would never be capable of trading her for anything. Not even if she could see her parents again, or Silco, or any of her dead brothers. She wouldn’t trade Isha for all the treasures an ancient divinity might offer.
Not Isha, nor Kyan.
Her daring Isha and her gentle Kyan.
Kyan, the fleeting blue light that almost left her before reaching her arms, before opening her eyes to a raw, cold world—just like the skin that covered her the day Jinx brought her into the world, wrapped in her own cries and the choked screams of her mother who was desperate to bring her back to life.
Ekko was an angel who, without knowing why, wished to fulfill Jinx’s desires. Who, without realizing how deeply she longed for it, did the impossible to bring her daughter back to life.
A small girl, tiny. The pink-eyed treasure of a family determined to protect her tooth and nail.
The war back then had seemed almost endless. Terribly eternal.
But it ended, leaving them with enough freedom to live.
The morning sun caressed Jinx’s pale skin. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply when the breeze of clean air reached her lungs. The single bluish braid that fell over one of her shoulders in bold waves rested beneath her chest. She no longer had to keep memories or mourning in a tangle of hair that dragged across the floor; now she only styled it the same way she styled her daughters’.
She sharpened her hearing, shivering as she remembered what she used to do it for in her reckless youth: finding enemies, chasing Firelights, surviving the Lanes.
And she heard short footsteps approaching her with urgency.
Tiny hands clung to her thin fingers and tugged at them. Jinx smiled with her eyelids still closed, then slowly lowered her gaze to her daughter.
Kyan looked at her with wide, curious, shining eyes. Just like hers—but innocent, without a gram of malice, pain, or hatred. Eyes that had not been touched by the cruelty of the world that Jinx herself had worked to beautify for her.
She lifted her into her arms with a wide smile and brushed her nose with the tip of her own. Five years had passed since Kyan first saw the light of the world, and she still fit perfectly in her mother’s arms.
“Where were you, little bug?” she asked in a sweet, high-pitched tone reserved only for her and Isha.
The girl smiled at her mother’s playful touch and pointed behind Jinx. Isha took a stalking stance and lunged at her, sharpening her feline eyes before ambushing Jinx with a kiss on the cheek.
“You took your time, little trouble,” she teased, pressing her nose into the neck of the older of her daughters and tickling her. “Feels like I’ve been waiting for you for centuries.”
She placed one at each of her sides and gripped their hands tightly. In front of them stood Piltover—or what it had become: a mixture of its revolutionary grandeur and the effort they made to adapt to Zaun as its equal.
In front of them. Beneath them.
Jinx slid the soles of her boots over the concrete tiles; the edge was close, and the next roof didn’t seem too far from the one beneath their feet. Kyan took a shaky step back while Isha stepped forward, her impatience halted by her mother’s grip.
The young woman drew a calm smile, trying to soothe the nervousness of the youngest of her daughters. Isha peeked over her mother’s shoulder and did the same. Her smile ended up giving Kyan the confidence and security she needed.
Jinx straightened again, tightening her hands around those of her daughters.
And she jumped into the void, catching in her chest the rush of adrenaline she had stopped feeling after the war ended.
Life was simpler when her babies, somehow, were still… babies.
But the years pass. Time moves like a river that slips through Jinx’s fingers without mercy, without a farewell—faster than it seems. Silent. Taking everything in its path. Carrying away the innocence of her daughters, the way they admired her like a war hero, a leader, a revolutionary, a mother.
Jinx slid her fingers over the wood. The office had remained exactly as she remembered it. The dusty sofa, the old desk, and the chair behind it that had never been occupied again since Silco’s death.
“Today is Isha’s fourteenth birthday,” she mentioned, as if someone were listening behind that imposing velvet backrest. But she received no answer other than a cutting silence. “You missed fourteen years of our lives. Nine of Kyan’s… I should hate you for that. For leaving the three of us alone.”
The office remained in a gloomy silence, just as she remembered from that time when, pregnant with Kyan, she came to him for advice—to demand help about the war and about how to be a mother.
This time was no different.
Once again, she was speaking to the dead.
“Now I feel as old as you were when you found me, when you found… Powder,” she continued, a bitter taste in her throat. “I guess that makes you even older, like Vander. Though with him it’s hard to tell—you know, because of the hair… and the fangs. Vi’s the one taking care of him now. Or he’s taking care of her. Honestly, I’m not sure.”
Her gaze wandered across the office. The aged tapestry, dull with the passing years, was hidden behind a wall of sheets of paper. Colorful, disproportionate drawings that her daughters used to make as a gift for their grandfather.
Jinx took the most recent one, the one lying on the desk. Kyan had made it with every shade of blue she could find at home, along with a few green brushstrokes she used to trace Ekko’s silhouette. The girl was the one who made the most drawings for him; she wanted her grandfather to witness how much his granddaughters had grown.
At first glance, it seemed like Kyan was the only one who visited that attempt at an offering to Silco, but Jinx could swear she had seen Isha enter and leave the office more than once in the last few days. The girl missed him more than she liked to admit.
“She would’ve loved to meet you,” she murmured, pinning the drawing onto an empty space on the tapestry. “And you would’ve adored her. Though she looks like her father. She’s brave, but cautious, and much more docile than Isha. I guess that’s the result of growing up in the world Mom—and all of you—always dreamed of creating.”
Jinx dropped into the chair in front of the desk with a heavy sigh. Nostalgia sent a shiver down her spine. For a second she saw Silco sitting carelessly in that huge empty velvet chair, looking at her with the single green eye that—rather than judging her—patiently searched for a solution to all her problems.
“The truth is… Isha is the reason I’m here,” she let out with a shrug.
She expected a scolding that clearly never came. As if Silco could rise from the ground and say: "I told you so. I told you to get rid of her the moment you found out about the pregnancy".
Of course, those were only her thoughts. Because Silco loved Isha. Silco would have fixed both their lives with the snap of his fingers. Silco would never have put her in the middle of a battlefield.
“Things are getting complicated with her,” she continued, anxious fingers drumming on her thighs. “It’s like neither Piltover nor Zaun are enough for her. She’s always been curious since she was a baby, but now that curiosity has put her in danger so many times…”
She lifted her gaze to the back of the chair, expecting that at any second Silco would turn in it and look at her with those stern eyes that never quite scolded her enough.
“How did you do it with me? It couldn’t have been easy… I blew up everything I touched. Isha is amazing—she’s done things I only managed to do when I was twice her age, and that… terrifies me. I know there’s no war or danger anymore, but she’s no longer a baby I can keep safe by my side… she’s not my baby anymore.”
She fell silent, staring at the chair from beneath her brows, just as she would have looked at Silco if he were there.
She knew perfectly well what he would have told her in the end: "Just because she’s not a baby anymore doesn’t mean she’s stopped being your daughter, or that she no longer needs your protection—but you must learn to trust her… the way I trusted you."
She had already obtained the answer she longed for. She hadn’t even needed to come all the way there to resolve it. But it was more comforting to believe that Silco, somehow, had illuminated the path for her to reach that conclusion.
The door burst open, the dust kept for years shot into the air, and Jinx had to squint to keep the dirt from hurting her eyes. Sevika stormed in, practically fuming.
“Jinx, damn it! Your brats again!”
She carried Kyan over her shoulder like nothing more than a sack of dirt, while forcing Isha to walk ahead of her. The girl kept her brow furrowed, occasionally glancing sideways at Sevika with a hostility the woman had only ever seen in her mother’s eyes, back when she had still been a reckless teenager.
Sevika was so used to the chaos that Jinx had once been that Isha didn’t worry her too much now.
When they stopped in front of their mother, both girls fixed their eyes on the ground. Jinx looked down at them from above, her chin high and her magenta eyes blazing.
“Main Street is a complete disaster! Paint bombs! They threw paint bombs everywhere!”
Jinx bit her lips to hold back the laugh that would have embarrassed her trusted ogre.
“If you don’t do something, next time I’ll hang both of them by their ankles from the very top of the Piltover Tower,” Sevika threatened.
Jinx sighed. As her daughters grew, she understood Silco better and better. Dealing with her own chaos in a compact size wasn’t easy.
Much less in pairs.
“Listen—”
“No. You listen,” Sevika cut in, pushing past both girls to stand in front of Jinx. “I know that for you all of this is still a game, but you have to be more mature. You’re their mother. They still can’t understand the damage they can cause. What would’ve happened if they had killed someone? Or if they had killed each other?”
She released the last question while restraining the anguish in her voice. Jinx always pushed her buttons, but she had never thought her version as a mother would be even worse than her reckless teenage self.
Especially because now she wasn’t just risking her own life, but also the lives of those girls who—though it was hard for Sevika to admit it—she felt a protective affection for.
Perhaps inherited from Silco.
Jinx swallowed hard, trying to fake a carefree smile so as not to give her the satisfaction—much less in front of her daughters.
“They were just paint bombs,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
Sevika pulled one of the grenades from her pocket—one she had recovered from the wreckage of the chaos caused by Jinx’s girls. It was identical to the ones the young woman used to make in her youth—and tossed it toward her.
“What would’ve happened if the mechanism had been slightly different?”
Jinx went still, her lips tightening into an uncomfortable grimace. Her wide eyes reflected the shadow of a memory filled with agony.
Sevika exhaled, her gaze drifting to the ceiling.
Her relationship with Jinx hadn’t always been good, but that didn’t give her the right to revive the ghosts that had haunted her all her life.
“They don’t know what it means to repeat history. But you do.” She jabbed her chest with the tip of her finger. “Put your feet on the ground and keep those girls from walking the same road you were forced to follow.”
Jinx bit her lower lip, holding back her irritation. Normally she would never have let Sevika talk to her like that, but right now she was at a disadvantage.
Kyan pushed her way between the two women and stood in front of her mother, looking at Sevika with defiant, slightly watery eyes.
“Please, Vika, don’t scold Mommy anymore,” the girl’s voice turned high, and her eyes seemed to grow bigger and glassier. “Isha and I were the ones at fault.”
Sevika—who had never been able to resist the effects of Kyan’s pleading gaze—took a step back. But she didn’t take her burning eyes off Jinx.
“You owe Renne one,” she mentioned. “She had to convince the Prime Minister not to cut ties with Piltover. She promised it wouldn’t happen again, so it’d better not happen again.”
Jinx pressed the remains of the homemade grenade against her chest. A shiver ran down her spine. She drew in a sharp breath and crouched down to Kyan’s height. The girl immediately turned and wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck.
“We’re really sorry, Mommy,” she sobbed. “We promise it won’t happen again. Really, really!” Without letting go of Jinx, she turned her gaze toward her sister. “Right, Isha?”
The older girl flinched, watching her mother from beneath her brows. Shoulders hunched, almost hidden inside her own skin. But she didn’t nod; from a mile away it was clear she was upset.
Jinx gently separated Kyan from herself and drew a crooked smile to reassure her.
“Bug, why don’t you go with the ogre and help clean up her mess? She’ll probably need some extra hands,” she teased.
Kyan nodded with a grin from ear to ear that lit up her whole face.
“Damn it, Jinx,” Sevika complained. “Do I look like a damn babysitter to you?”
Smoke was practically starting to come out of her ears when Kyan took a step toward her. The girl rummaged in the pocket of her overalls and extended a candy to her with a distressed look.
“I’m sorry…” she murmured in a tiny voice.
Sevika swallowed hard. For Kyan it had been much easier than for Isha to win her heart—not because of any kind of preference, but because of the moment and the way they had come into the world.
When Isha was born, half of Zaun was hunting her and the other half was protecting her. Including Silco and his men. Kyan, on the other hand, no longer had Silco’s protection, and half of his men had also stopped being loyal to Jinx. Even though, for everyone, the girl was starting to become some kind of “savior,” it still wasn’t enough to keep her daughters safe.
Much less from Singed’s new target.
Sevika knew that the younger girl needed a protection that had been denied to her since the death of her grandfather.
And as if that weren’t enough, Kyan had gone out of her way to earn the woman’s heart.
The girl, like Isha, had inherited her mother’s intelligence, so learning to speak had never really been a challenge for her.
She had even learned sign language at a very early age—the language everyone at home knew thanks to Isha. For her, it was much more fun to communicate that way with her sister when their parents weren’t looking.
Mischief was always more interesting when Mom and Dad didn’t know about their plans.
That was precisely the reason Jinx had found herself in the damned position of asking Sevika to look after them.
It wasn’t easy. But no one understood Jinx the way Sevika did. For better or worse, the two of them were bound in a bizarre way.
When Kyan was still very small, she had a hard time pronouncing Sevika’s full name—or anyone else’s, really. Only Isha had the privilege of being called correctly by her sister. Of course, that was because the little girl never stopped repeating her name while crawling after her all over the tree, until she was finally able to start running after her.
When Mom and Dad were summoned by the new Council of Piltover and Zaun, Sevika stayed in charge of the girls until they returned.
The security at home wasn’t bad. Many Firelights had decided to stay while others left to live in the new Piltover. So the tree remained under watch—by Ekko’s and Scar’s own orders, since they didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the supposed peace now surrounding them.
Aftereffects of the battle and of a lifetime at war, they supposed.
Isha usually took care of her sister when the adults weren’t around. She did it more out of her own will than by instruction from her parents. But she was still a child, so sometimes the task was too much for her.
That night—the first night Mom and Dad left them alone, at the tender ages of seven and two—Sevika was in the tree, at the very top, keeping watch while everyone slept.
She didn’t trust Zaun’s new peace either.
Isha had fallen asleep from the exhaustion of a whole day playing with Mama. Kyan, freshly fed, also dozed peacefully beside her sister.
Jinx had left thinking they would stay that way all night, but she was wrong (as was her habit when it came to her daughters).
Kyan was the first to wake when she felt the cold and the absence of her mother. In the end, she was still a baby, and—unlike Isha—she had never woken up without finding her beside her.
She sat up clumsily and hopped down from the mattress.
“Mommy…?” she whimpered, holding back the tears already welling in her eyes.
She looked under the bed and behind the mahogany dresser, but Jinx never appeared. Then she sank to the floor and began to cry inconsolably.
Isha woke immediately and ran to her, thinking she had fallen and might be hurt. But no—Kyan just wanted her Mama.
The older girl tried to calm her down, but fear had already taken hold of the little one, and there was nothing her sister could do to soothe her at that point.
A young Firelight rushed into the room as soon as she heard the noise. Jinx had been very clear about her daughters’ safety, so they never left the room too unattended once the girls went to sleep.
She picked the baby up and rocked her, trying to lull her, but Kyan didn’t give in. In fact, her crying grew even more shrill—so much that Isha had to cover her ears to keep from running away.
The next second, Sevika stormed in like lightning. As soon as both girls noticed her, their eyes lit up. Kyan didn’t stop her pained sobbing, but she did stop wailing. She stretched out her little hands toward her and began calling to her with glassy eyes.
“Vika! Vika!”
The woman felt a tightness in her chest the moment she heard that innocent little voice calling her. Of course she cared about her—even if she hated admitting it, especially in front of Jinx—just as she cared about Isha.
Just as she cared about… Jinx.
After that, Kyan refused to leave her side the entire night. That was how Sevika ended up with a new job within the little family.
Jinx also adopted a new attitude toward her. She didn’t abandon her sarcasm or her usual humor when it came to Sevika, but she did, to some extent, abandon her hostility.
Now she understood that Silco hadn’t left her completely alone.
Jinx trusted her. She hated trusting her. But she did it anyway—perhaps too much.
That was why she believed her when she said what her daughters had done was dangerous.
Sevika snorted, resigned, and extended her hand toward Kyan. The girl grabbed it enthusiastically and left the office skipping happily while tugging at the woman’s mechanical arm.
Soon only Isha and Jinx remained facing each other. The young woman looked at the grenade one last time and placed it on Silco’s desk. Then she stretched her hand out to her daughter. After one or two insistent gestures, Isha finally handed over the earplugs she had been wearing.
Jinx knew very well that the only way Isha could endure the noise of explosions was thanks to them.
“You did something new,” she stated, her tone darkening. The girl averted her gaze to the floor. “We already talked about this, Isha. We agreed it was dangerous to try new engineering. What would’ve happened if you had miscalculated? What if it had really exploded with you and Kyan there?”
“But it didn’t!”
“That’s not enough!” Jinx exclaimed, slamming her fist against the wood. The skeleton of the grenade jumped. “Isha, understand. This is dangerous!”
“You did worse things when you were my age.”
Jinx took a step back. She had never thought her daughter would play that card so soon.
“The life I lived was very different from the one you live,” she said. “I don’t want you to follow in my footsteps. Not like that. I want you to carve out your own path, and this…” —she gestured toward the device with her gaze— “…is not what you need.”
“And what about everything you taught me when I was little? To run. To fight. To be brave.”
“You’re not being brave by risking your life and your sister’s like this! Besides, back then I did it because it was necessary. We were at war, we had to defend ourselves, but that’s not the case anymore. Now you and Kyan have the chance to live better—do you want to waste it? Did you forget what it was like to have to run through the Lanes with bullets grazing our feet?”
Isha frowned and lowered her gaze. Jinx sighed and stepped forward to stroke her daughter’s cheek with a gentle touch.
“I know you’d hate it if Kyan had to live through the same thing. And I couldn’t bear losing you or her. We have to preserve the peace that exists now between the topsiders and the Undercity. And avoid creating problems…”
“But you’ve always loved creating problems.”
Jinx smiled, holding back a nostalgic grimace.
“Yes, but creating problems now would mean putting you two at risk,” she replied, brushing Isha’s bangs behind her ear. “And I love you two more.”
From the very first moment Isha moved inside her womb, Jinx had never felt regret for choosing to keep her. And even though things had been slightly different with Kyan, she didn’t regret clinging to her with tooth and nail either—even in front of Ekko himself.
The door opened again. Jinx cursed silently; it was obvious she would have a long conversation about privacy with her family after that. Ekko poked his nose in, and the young woman immediately noticed the mass of white dreadlocks tied in a high ponytail that, for some reason, he had insisted on keeping when he began to feel like 'a real adult'.
Isha looked at her mother from beneath her brows. Jinx sighed in resignation and allowed her to leave the office.
“Flea,” she called once Isha had turned around. Jinx grabbed the remains of the grenade from the desk and tossed them into her hands. “Put it somewhere safe.”
When Isha left, closing the door behind her, Jinx dropped onto the sofa. Her limbs stretched out completely and her neck resting over the back, letting her head hang into the empty space behind it.
“It’s just a phase,” Ekko commented with a hidden smile. “Relax.”
“An eternal phase?” Jinx asked. Ekko smiled and sat down beside her. “Sometimes I just wish she would go back to being that tiny little girl I fell in love with the very second I saw her. The innocent kid who followed me everywhere without stopping.”
“She wasn’t going to stay a child forever, Jinx.”
“She was so little back then to remember what this technology did to us… or to understand the war,” she sighed. “I just want her to enjoy the life she has now—the one that cost us so much to get for them.”
“That’s going to be hard if you don’t explain it to them in detail.”
“I’m not going to tell them the details. I can’t ruin…”
“…their favorite bedtime story?”
Jinx drew something that tried to be a smile and looked at the archaic lamp hanging from the ceiling by nothing more than a plastic-coated cable.
“Now it’s easier to sleep… I just want everything to stay like this. No more war, no more… death.”
She covered her face with both hands, trying to steady her breathing. Ekko placed a firm hand on her thigh.
“Well, love, if you keep hiding the real hardships we went through, maybe they’ll keep believing it wasn’t as bad as you say. Maybe that’s why Isha is so obsessed with the idea of proving that we still deserve more than just a simple truce between the two cities.”
The young woman clasped her husband’s hand with both palms.
“Isha has no idea what that truce means for everyone in Zaun. And there are definitely things I want to forget. Don’t you?”
Ekko clenched his free hand into a hidden fist. The memory of Kyan—barely a newborn—abandoned by him in that meadow of the Herald, surrounded by yellow flowers and a handful of brainless followers who had almost taken her away from him forever, came back like a stake driven into his chest.
An action that, even now, nine years later, still haunted him.
“Sometimes you have to make mistakes to learn from them,” he said, freeing the knot that had formed in his throat. “And we have to give our daughters that same chance.”
Ekko’s warm fingers contrasted with the cold on Jinx’s cheek.
“At least we can take comfort in the fact that if they fail, we’ll be there to support them. They’re not alone. They never have been.”
Jinx smiled, resting her face in the boy’s steady grip.
“I hate when you make me admit you’re right.”
Arguing with Mom had become routine. Mostly because Mom didn’t trust Isha’s vision of her new lifestyle.
The girl didn’t entirely trust the people of Piltover, either, nor was she satisfied with the new arrangement both cities maintained. Deep down, Isha truly felt that the Pilties didn’t give real importance to her parents or to all the people who had died in the war against the Herald. She hated that Mom didn’t see it the same way she did, even though Mom had been the one who had instilled that way of seeing life in her.
They had never truly argued. Neither of them had quite enough courage to cross certain lines and, although the words spoken by her mother had never ceased to be sweet, she had stopped perceiving them that way. Maybe that was something Mom didn’t entirely understand.
It wasn’t that she had stopped loving her. After all, it had always been them—just the two of them—against the whole world. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. Mom had to start accepting that.
She heard a thud behind her.
Isha didn’t even bother to look for the source. She knew it was her sister—who else could it be?
Kyan had crashed straight onto the floor as soon as she came through the window that served as the door to that old hideout. She made an effort to stand without showing too much of the pain from her scraped knees.
“Was Mom… very hard on you?” she asked with a gentle, distressed voice.
Isha shook her head immediately. She kept her eyes on the skeleton of the grenade her mother had returned to her. She was determined to make it work this time.
Kyan wandered around the place. The old walls, covered with metal plates, seemed ready to fall apart. An aged fighting robot, barely held upright by a spring base, stood in one corner of the room. Behind it, a scoreboard spelled out four names in order:
Violet.
Powder.
Claggor.
Mylo.
“What is this place?”
“An old hideout of Mom’s. We used to come here when I was smaller, but one day we just stopped.”
“Why?”
“Gray.”
Isha answered without going into much detail. But instead of clearing things up, Kyan looked even more confused. The older girl let out a heavy sigh.
“I get that you don’t remember it. It stopped existing a few years ago. Before that… it was a weapon the people from the upper city used to keep control over us. It was a nauseating gas that would suffocate you in no time. Mom hated it.”
Kyan frowned. It wasn’t her style to dig too deeply into things that frightened her—especially if they had stopped happening long ago. She turned her gaze back to the names on the wall.
“And those people… do you know them?”
Isha kept her amber eyes fixed on the name 'Powder.' Hundreds of memories rushed into her mind—more than she could ever tell her sister. She knew that Powder well, as well as the effect that name had on her mother.
“They must’ve been friends of Aunt Vi and Mom when they were kids.”
She said it in an attempt to avoid the subject.
“They were our brothers.”
Isha and Kyan both flinched when they saw Jinx stepping through the entrance of their little hideout.
“You’ve improved this place,” the young woman noted with a hint of pride in her voice. “Not bad.”
Kyan smiled smugly. Isha remained calm, discreetly moving her new project behind her back.
“Where are they now, Mom?” Kyan asked. Curiosity about her mother’s past was practically spilling out of her eyes.
Jinx swallowed hard.
“They died when we were kids.”
Isha froze. She looked at her mother from beneath her brows. A deadly silence flooded the room.
“It’s okay…” Jinx spoke. “It was a long time ago. In an accident.”
“An accident…?”
Jinx dragged her feet across the hideout, brushing the shooting bar with the tips of her fingers—the one where she used to compete with Mylo.
“A homemade bomb. It was my fault,” she murmured, almost inaudibly, her voice so broken it felt like splinters were lodged in her tongue. “I… miscalculated.”
Isha lifted her gaze to her. The light in her pale eyes dimmed for a moment. Her hands began to tremble, and soon her grip on the grenade turned clumsy.
“That’s why I want you to be more careful,” Jinx continued. “I know everything seems unfair right now. But we fought hard to get here. I don’t want to keep living in war. Don’t ask me to endure seeing you in danger… again.”
Kyan stepped toward her, clutching at her clothes to catch her attention.
“Mommy…” she sobbed, eyes brimming with tears.
Jinx crouched down to her height, running her fingers through her blue curls.
“I’d sacrifice the whole world just to keep you safe,” she said, her gaze taking on an imposing magenta glow. “I’d kill anyone who dared hurt you. You know that, right?”
Kyan nodded more to agree with her mother than because she fully understood her words. Isha watched her intently. Their gazes met.
Memories of all those years fleeing through the Lanes, surviving the Fissures, all the thugs under the chem-barons who had died so the two of them could live. So many deaths, so much pain. They both shared that same history, and they always would.
Isha nodded, certain she knew her mother well enough to understand exactly what she was capable of.
Jinx took a breath to ease the tension.
“Besides,” she added, “I don’t want to prove Sevika right again.”
Kyan let out a playful giggle and wrapped her arms around Mom’s neck so she would pick her up.
“I made a lot of mistakes when I was a kid, and I regret every one of them,” Jinx continued. “That’s why I want to keep you from going down that same road. I know you have to learn things on your own… I just want to keep you alive.”
Isha stayed where she was. She had always been empathetic toward her mother. She had always understood her pain. But now she couldn’t help feeling that Mom was hiding far more than she seemed.
The feelings tangled in her chest until Jinx took her hand and, with a smile that still held Kyan in her arms, gently stroked her cheek.
“There are memories that are better left in the past,” she said. “But if you have doubts about… anything, I promise I’ll answer them. Just don’t—”
Jinx clung to the hope of what Violet had once told her: that she was capable of fixing anything. Maybe the relationship with her daughter wasn’t completely broken. Not as much as it seemed—maybe it just needed a little oil and a few gears tightened.
“I just won’t put our lives at risk.”
Isha finished the sentence, with a smile she placed into Mom’s cold palm.
“Smart girl, just like your mother.”
Bitterly, Jinx realized that life was no longer what it used to be.
A new stage was about to begin. Deep down, she only wished it would be simpler than the first one had been.
When Jinx and the girls left the hideout behind, a tracker slipped through the shadows and dust.
She stalked the mother who had just left and the two girls she carried warily at her side. She took the grenade Isha had left half-finished on the worktable and slipped it into the satchel slung across her chest.
She pulled a compass from her pocket, calmly turned the hands counterclockwise, and vanished.
Isha had begun to become a target.
But Mama would never allow her to become prey.
She would burn the whole world first.