If you have ever lived in a city, then it will not surprise you to hear that even Imre had its dark, secret corners—places where sweet-eaters got their fix and pawnshop runners acquired dubious wares, where a rough tussle in a straw bed only cost a drab and copper hawks and street children could settle their debts.

Pike marched us through a labyrinth of back alleys. After the shock of the last several minutes, the walk was surprisingly pleasant. By the time we stopped, I had settled into the Heart of Stone.

I evaluated our situation impassively. Pike had chosen a wide-mouthed alley that tapered jaggedly at the back. It was the sort of unsettling architecture one only encounters in the tangle of streets that sprout organically from cities that have outgrown the land on which they were built. I guessed we were butting up against the river just south of the old stone bridge to the University.

It was a moonless night. The alley was lit by the dancing light of a half-dozen tenement windows. The wind was bitingly cold. It swept through the narrow passage and ricocheted off the walls, forming a vortex at the tight apex twenty feet from where we shifted restlessly, waiting for the silence to break. I cocked my head to the side, listening. I sunk from the Heart of Stone into Spinning Leaf. The transition had become easier in the last few months. These days, I was never far from the name of the wind.

There. I suppressed a smile.

The seconds stretched on without event. The nervous energy that surrounded us built into a torrent, until I was certain it would shatter the air. I wondered at the delay. Why was Pike hesitating? Perhaps he had never killed a man.

Nat broke the silence with a whispered curse. He pulled a bent cigarette from one pocket of his cloak and a matchbox from another, lighting up with shaking fingers.

"Tehlu's tits and teeth," Pike snapped. His voice echoed off the walls of our narrow cage.

Nat blushed. "Sorry, Pike. It's just it calms my nerves."

Suddenly, I smiled. "I hear you, Nat. Hell, I could use a cig myself. I don't suppose you'd spare one for a dead man?" I grinned over my shoulder at Pike. "Unless you're afraid of a little fire?"

Pike spat. "I ent afraid of nothin'. Give him the cig, Nat." Pike drew closer and breathed in my face. "I'll feed it to him while I'm gutting him alive."

I just raised an eyebrow and strolled over to Nat. Pike trailed behind, his knife still pointed at my spine. Nat handed me the cigarette, which I held out for Pike to light. For all his talk, he knew better than to hand me a box of matches. He lit the cigarette, then thrust the match into the folds of my shaed, hoping I suppose to light it on fire.

Nothing happened, of course. Nothing, except that the spent match fell into one of the dozens of pockets lining my cloak. Pike grunted in disgust and turned away, gesturing for his boys to surround me. I used the moment's reprieve to lift the matchbox from Nat's cloak, tucking it into my sleeve.

I took a deep drag on the cigarette as Pike and his boys formed their circle. Smoking was a foolish habit I'd never been able to afford. Still, pretenses were pretenses. And it was, at Nat had said, good for the nerves. I felt detached, even peaceful, though whether it was the scutten, the nicotine, or the hypnotic calm of Spinning Leaf, I couldn't say.

I turned to face Pike. "You know your problem?" I asked conversationally. I emptied the matchbox into my cloak pocket with my free hand and sucked in a burning mouthful of smoke. I looked the older boy square in the eye and exhaled in his face. He blinked away the smoke with a curse. A fleeting diversion, but it bought me time to palm a match and toss it at his feet.

"Your problem, Pike," I continued, "is think you think there are only two sorts of people in the world. Rich people and poor people. People with money and people without."

I paced a wide circle around the alley. Every eye was on me. I was a trouper on the stage, at the climax of my act. Pike just didn't know it yet. "You're right, of course." I continued. "There are only two types of people in the world. But money has nothing to do with it." Each time I passed one of Pike's boys, I dropped a match.

I grinned harshly and dug my fingernails into my palm, drawing blood. "Would you like to know the difference, Pike? What separates people like you from people like me?"

Pike spat.

I laughed. It was a faen laugh, rich and high and wild around the edges. I leaned in close, brandishing the cig in Pike's face. "It's power, Pike. Power." I pulled back, turning this over in my mind. "Well, knowledge and power. Knowledge is power, as they say."

Pike laughed and spread his arms wide. "You want to talk about power? Look around you, Nalt."

I snorted derisively. "Believe me, I am. Five street thugs, four dull knives, and not one brain between you. That's not power, Pike. This … this is power."

I closed my bleeding fist around the spent match and called the name of the wind.

The open shutters on either side of the alley slammed shut, pitching us into total darkness.

I focused my Alar on the link between the match in my pocket and the one under the boy holding Fela. It flared to life and I dashed forward, using the brief flicker to find the boy's neck. I extinguished the light before yanking him towards me by the collar, driving my dagger into the soft flesh of his diaphragm.

"Run!" I shouted, dropping the burbling corpse to the ground and charging at the boy holding Sim. I flared a second match just long enough to catch the terror in his eyes before I slit his throat. Inelegant, but it would do.

I grabbed the boy's knife with my free hand and pushed Fela towards the entrance of the alley. She seized Sim's good arm and finally they were running. I prayed they hadn't seen what I had done.

I prayed they would never know what I was about to do.

One of the other boys tried to escape. I dropped him with a flared match and a dagger between his shoulder blades. The match caught his cloak on fire, bathing the alley in warm light and the all-too-familiar stench of burning hair and flesh.

The burning body blocked the entrance to the alley, trapping me in with Pike and Nat. Deep in the Heart of Stone, I felt only the briefest stab of pity when I seized Nat's struggling body to my chest and snapped his neck between my hands.

I lowered him to the ground and turned to Pike. He stumbled, staring at me with primal fear. I imagine now how I must have looked, my wild red hair bathed in firelight, my eyes dark with cold rage, my cloak flaring in the wind, my shirt sprayed with blood.

Pike backed away, brandishing his knife at me feebly. As if it made a difference. I was wind and fire, fury and thunder. I was Kvothe the Bloodless, marked from birth by demon's blood. I wore Felurian's darkness as my cloak. I had faced the Chandrian twice and lived. Pike was nothing but a sniveling, wretched boy. Nothing but the nightmare of my childhood.

I drove him to the back of the alley. When his shoulders hit the brick of the far wall, I expected him to beg for his life. To his credit, he did not.

"You bastard-," he whispered. I knocked the blade from his trembling grip and closed my fingers around his throat, choking him off. I slammed him against the wall, holding his body against mine as it jerked wildly. My lips pulled back over my teeth in a feral grimace. My eyes bore into his. I wanted to see the light in them die.

A sharp pain bloomed in my stomach. Surprised, I glanced down to see a rusted bootknife jammed in my gut. I growled against the pain, tightening my grip.

I wish I could say I took no pleasure in the final erratic spasms of his failing body, the weakening of his pulse beneath the sensitive tips of my trouper's fingers. But that would be a lie.