Folding the Sky

-25-

It didn't take Sorin very long to find Liesel—as a cat, his nose was sharper in a way it wasn't when he was human, the once indistinguishable mass of scents separating themselves into individual, identifiable threads. All he had to do was follow the right one, the one that smelled of wool and lemon soap, of home. He followed it to one of Sinje's many narrow alleyways, just a few blocks away from the charred remnants of Bem's Market.

    Liesel's eyes caught on him as he dropped from the rooftops, paws silently kissing the ground. Immediately, her face flashed with recognition. "Sorin," she started, and laughed. "Sorin, you're alright!"

    He stopped, stretched, shook himself back into his human skin. "Are you hurt?" he demanded, eyes raking the scene. He didn't note any scratches or bruises, no blood whatsoever. The only evidence of wrongdoing was the thick bands of ice that bound her wrists together and her feet to the cobblestoned ground.

    "No, I'm not. I'm fine—"

    Sorin glared at her, his lips curling into a scowl. His voice was acid, sizzling on his lips. "I'm serious, Liesel. Did they hurt you?"

    She swallowed, her eyes so round Sorin could almost see the whites around her dark irises. She shook her head, tossing her already mussed hair about her face. "No," she said again, her voice softer. "I promise; they didn't. One of them...one of them looked into my memories somehow, but they didn't hurt me."

    Sorin cursed under his breath, kneeling, letting his nails sharpen into claws. He could see her face now, the false kindness woven into her eyes. "Zuri," he hissed, attempting to saw away at the ice. "It must have been her. She did the same thing to me."

    "Zuri..." Liesel repeated in wonder. "That name. You mentioned it to me earlier."

    The ice was coming away in tiny, meaningless crystals. Sorin retracted his claws with a tired exhale, and stood again. "You're right," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm as he searched around the nearest dumpster. He returned a moment later with an old, rusting hammer, the wooden handle half-rotted. "I did mention it to you, when I told you we had to go and you didn't listen to me."

    Liesel frowned, and Sorin groaned, because he recognized that look on her face: that overly thoughtful, empathetic expression that meant she was about to say something as saccharine and smothering as tree sap. "I'm sorry, Sorin. I thought—I don't know. I should've listened to you."

    "Just now realizing that, are you?" Sorin snapped, and before Liesel could say anything more, he tightened his grip on the hammer and told her, "Don't move unless you want some broken limbs."

    She went still, and Sorin grunted, bringing the hammer down in the slim gap between Liesel's ankles. The ice cracked and shattered, forming a pile of ice chips on the ground that crunched beneath Liesel's boots as she stepped forward.

    "Hands," Sorin ordered.

    "Be careful." Liesel held them out in his direction. "I need my fingers."

    He tried to force a smile, which became a grimace. "I'll try my best."

    He gave the ice around her wrists a gentle tap at first, and when that resulted in nothing more than a dent, he drove it down with more force. That time, the ice cracked enough that Liesel could pull her wrists apart, shaking the ice from her hands with a shudder.

    "You sure you're okay?" he asked again. He knew Liesel, after all, and he knew that her exhausting devotion to other people's care didn't always include herself.

    She nodded again, brushing the last of the ice crystals from her skin and looking up at him. "She looked into your memories too, you said? So that's how they figured out our relation to Vernon?"