Author's Note: You guys, thank you so much for your kind reviews, and for coming all the way over from AO3! I promise that future updates will be cross-published there from now on. Give me a bit and I will make it so.

Glossary:

banya - bathhouse

kefta - garment worn by Grisha

2

"Alina."

She had both anticipated and dreaded this moment. As if she didn't have enough already to dread and anticipate that morning, Alina Starkov revolved to meet her fate.

Saints. He was taller than her. She had sized him up while held hostage in the banya, and had actually entertained an optimistic expectation of them being the same height. But that condescending half-smile hung over her like an ill moon, and she was forced to gaze up into the wolf-gray eyes of the Grisha from the bathhouse.

"Do I know you?" She was coolly polite as she fumbled for some explanation for his being there. She was standing in the First Army mess line, trying to summon some appetite for what might very well be her last meal. Further off, she was acutely aware of Mal sitting with Mikhael and the other trackers.

"Do you really want my answer?" the Grisha asked her.

She recalled his own words to her the night previous. "Not particularly."

Evidently he remembered too. His lips twitched, but in the wrong direction; his vague smile was looking less than discouraged.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded in a more furtive whisper. "Where's your kefta?"

"You didn't seem concerned with its whereabouts last night."

Her face burned, more from her sudden awareness that they were being stared at than anything. She sensed it with every fiber, suddenly, that Mal was among those spectating; she didn't dare turn around and be proved right. The truth was she was terrified that she seemed to have caught this Grisha's notice. Her first guess was that he was a Squaller, or a Heartrender — maybe that explained why her heart beat so irregularly in his presence. Maybe he was doing it to her himself.

Or maybe he was the actual Devil, in which case she supposed he'd be Inferni.

"What are you doing here?" she repeated again. Her interrogation wasn't off to a stellar start, but she refused to give ground. "Are you spying for him?"

"For who?"

"For who else? For the Dark — "

That got a reaction, and she hadn't even made it through the whole appellation. The Grisha yanked her from the line. She was still carrying her empty plate with her as he towed her away. In the near distance, she saw Mal stand abruptly. Please, Alina pleaded silently for him to come to her rescue, but the last thing she saw was Mikhael whispering something to him, and Mal slowly sitting back down.

No. No, no, no. She needed to get to Mal immediately to correct whatever record was being made without her. She needed to spend these last precious daylit hours with him, and not in some forced association with this forceful stranger.

Alina finally managed to jerk her arm free, but had no illusions that she escaped by her own power; the Grisha let her go. "Well?" she demanded. He had pulled them into one of the corridors between tents. Every other member of the First Army was either at breakfast, or getting a head start on packing up their gear. This part of the encampment tended to smell like the designated area the soldiers used to relieve themselves late at night, but she tried not to think about it.

She expected the Grisha to look chastened by her invocation of his master; really, the man who rode in the black carriage was master of them all by virtue of his status and power. Instead, he turned to her with such a grim look that Alina fell silent at once. There was more going on here than just a Grisha satisfying his curiosity or fulfilling some dare. Maybe she had been treading too close to the truth after all with her accusation.

"I am personally unfamiliar with the members and makeup of this regiment." He surprised her by giving a straightforward and serious answer. "I had to see for myself if they were all as undisciplined as you."

Alina scowled and knit her arms. "Excuse me? You can't claim to know that I'm undisciplined."

"Can't I?" The penetrating quality of his gaze threatened to make her flush all over again, especially when she realized he was openly noticing how she had improperly buttoned her uniform that morning. She wanted to maintain some level of defiance and leave it, but she gave in; she hastily rebuttoned her collar while he observed her.

"Why do you care so much anyway? If one of us strays too far?"

"Because straying too far costs lives on the Fold." His words were like a dispassionate slap to her face; worse, Alina knew she deserved to hear them. "And that impacts all our chances."

"I'm sorry," she blurted. "For walking in on you last night. I should have never… I would have never been there normally." She couldn't bring herself to offer a better explanation, but she had to make at least that much known. She wasn't an exemplary soldier, and nothing near a cartographer of any acceptable level of ability, but she knew where she belonged. And she wasn't fool enough to think it was anywhere near his world — unlike other Keramzin orphans she knew and could mention.

"Such small concerns." The Grisha fixed her with a strange, unfathomable expression, as if viewing her from across a vast distance. "I almost envy you."

"I'm trying to apologize to you!" she stated. "Why can't you — "

"And I'm telling you that apology is wasted," he dismissed her. "Do I seem shy to you at all?"

"Saints. No."

He smiled like the abyss. "I suppose I used to be. I once allowed someone else to take me unawares under similar circumstances. But that was a long, long time ago."

Even as a mapmaker, she found it impossible to navigate his expression. Then why did it also strangely feel as if his words resonated with her? She knew that in other countries, the Grisha were persecuted as well as feared. Just because this boy socially outranked her now — easy enough to do, given the nobody she was — didn't mean he always had. Maybe they would never have the chance to know each other's history, but that didn't mean they weren't about to share the dangers of the Shadow Fold.

She turned her empty plate over in her hands anxiously; its tarnished surface caught the morning light and threw it across a nearby flap of tent canvas. She wanted to ask him all that he knew, suddenly: how many skiffs he had seen lost, what the volcra were really like. If he was a Corporalnik, maybe he would even know the remedy for her aching heart.

"How is it possible that you already appear dirtier than you did yesterday?" The Grisha had questions of his own.

And just like that, all fellow feeling vanished. She was sure the dirty look she shot him in that moment only made matters worse for her appearance. "It's an innate talent of mine. Let me know when the King recognizes it as a Small Science."

The Grisha's smile turned brittle. "The King wouldn't recognize a Fjerdan assassin if he came to court dressed as a dancing bear."

Alina had never in her life heard anyone speak about King Alexander that way. Even her protective grime couldn't conceal her stunned expression. "You shouldn't — "

"That's what frightens you? My brand of patriotism?" He considered her. "Believe me when I say there are none more patriotic than me."

The strange thing was, she did believe him. Whatever his idea of patriotism was, she believed that he abided by it, at least. That didn't mean that their ideas didn't differ.

"You would fair terribly at Court," the Grisha mused. "Your face betrays everything you're thinking."

Before she could marshal a retort, he surprised her by removing his glove, and raising a finger to hook a lock of her hair back into place. Alina clutched her plate like the world's most ineffectual shield as the Grisha resettled the rogue strand behind her ear. All the better to see the face that dares never to appear at Court, she thought mutinously. She hated that her first instinct was to lean into that unexpected touch. There were so many nights of her life, especially these past two years, that she had longed for someone else's hand to caress her like —

The embarrassing, subconscious turning of her head brought unforeseen consequences. The boy's crooked knuckle brushed her cheek as he retracted it; then he froze.

Alina felt something alien uncurl inside her — not where he touched her, but somewhere deeply entrenched, in a place she had no name for. It might have been her chest, or her stomach. Where was the soul housed in the human body? The closest thing she knew to compare it to was the day she realized she was in love with her best friend.

Mal. A surge of panic flooded through Alina, and she tried to shy out from beneath his touch. The Grisha also looked startled. Did he feel it, too? Whatever it was, he was indisputably its conduit, and he wasn't so fast to retreat. He forced the acquaintance suddenly; he cupped her cheek with his whole hand.

Alina dropped her plate.

"What are you doing?" It was a miracle she could form the accusation, much less stammer it aloud. Everything inside her was in revolt with his hand upon her. Retreat, a voice within commanded, as an enemy clarion call swelled inside her. Hide. Make yourself small, or you'll never see the one you love most again.

"What are you?" The boy decapitated the question and served it back to her. It seemed nonsensical — she wasn't doing anything. She realized, almost deliriously, that she was fighting with her whole soul to do absolutely nothing at all.

And she was losing.

"Alina?"

The Grisha pulled away, and the spell broke. Alina stepped back and turned to see Mal: broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, raptor-eyed. Every familiar line of him was pulled taught as a bowstring, but her name on his lips was a question: are you all right? "The mess tent's packing up," he told her.

"I wish you both success in your crossing," the Grisha bid them formally as he withdrew. He was gone almost before she could turn back around again.

"Alina, who was that?"

The expected question came before they were clear of the tents. Her head was still spinning with everything, she hadn't even realized she was being pulled along again by the arm. How could she not have noticed it when Mal touched her? Was her heart really that fickle? Was it because Mal's hand on her now was nothing compared to what she had felt when the Grisha boy touched her?

"I don't know who he is." Alina shook her arm free from him. Sometimes she thought he didn't know how strong he had become in just a few short years.

Mal rounded on her. "Where were you last night?"

"What?" Alina stared. She was bewildered by the question, but more bewildered by the intensity of his tone.

"Mikhael says he saw you by the Grisha tents."

Her blush reared at the implication. She had stayed away so long because even after her encounter at the bathhouse, she had caught Mikhael lurking — and eventually dozing — outside the entrance to her own tent. "Where were you last night?" She regretted the question the second it left her own mouth. She felt a sharp twist of foreboding in her gut as Mal looked away.

"I saved you breakfast."

"Wait. Mal — "

"I don't want to fight with you, Alina. Not today."

"I don't want to fight either!" When had Mal of all people become so bone-weary? Was she the one who made him this way? One thing was for certain: Mikhael was entirely to blame for their present argument.

Mikhael, and that Grisha boy.

"Mal, I have no idea who he is," she insisted.

"But he's Grisha, right?"

"Does it matter?" Alina didn't want to waste any more time dwelling on her strange encounters. She definitely didn't want to speculate on the heady rush that had overtaken her when the stranger touched her. Touched her. Had things really gotten that bad? Was she really that pathetic? Other orphans in the home had craved affection to a self-destructive degree, and would likely still spend all their adult lives seeking it. Not her. She didn't need anything or anyone except Mal, and she was learning to live most hours of her day without even him.

"I didn't spend the night with him," she blurted. And there it was: his unspoken accusation finally out in the open.

"It's none of my business, Alina." Mal turned away. Maybe he was embarrassed. Well, he should be. He deserved to look at least as shame-faced as she felt.

Or maybe he just didn't believe her.

Alina packed her anemic possessions and eventually joined the procession making its way down to the drydocks. She sought Mal out in the crowd as always; she was surprised when he found her first, reappearing at her side as if he had never left it. As if separation wasn't becoming the rule between them. Alina couldn't help the hopeless flutter her heart gave. She tried on a wobbly smile for him, and was rewarded with the promised roll from breakfast. She had no appetite, but ate it anyway; it was a necessary requirement of their ceasefire. When Mikhael passed by with Dubrov, she resisted the compulsion to stick her tongue out at him.

But any victory she felt fast extinguished as her attention turned toward the Unsea. The Shadow Fold hung before them, a dark curtain drawn across a nightmare world she could have no possible conception of outside of illustrations. Fresh terror at the reality of what awaited them stole over her, and she sought the comfort of Mal's hand without thinking. His reciprocal squeeze was meant to reassure; Alina wanted to be reassured.

Why, then, did thoughts of another's touch intrude again now? She willed Mal's hand to demonstrate the same power over her. She willed it so much that it almost made it true.

They both saw it the moment the Grisha boy reappeared. When he reappeared, he was wearing all black.

Alina gave a hysterical laugh. She turned to Mal in time to see the color drain from his face.

"Now do you believe me?"