Girls Across Worlds (Ranger Paraversum Book 4) by Vesna Kurilic

Author:Vesna Kurilic [Kurilic, Vesna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shtriga
Published: 2022-10-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

“The balcony!” Lina hissed.

She saw Zarevich grab something from the murdered boy’s desk and push it deep into a pocket, but then she was rushing out onto the balcony and looking down, right until Zarevich reached her and leaned across the railing, following Lina’s gaze.

“Is that…?” he asked.

“The costume department’s trailer, apparently.” Lina took another, longer look at the rolls of fabric stacked one on top of another. A dark-haired boy smoked against the trailer, turned the other way, trying to look all tough for the newspaper stand girl across the alley at the side of the theater. “I’ve got a bad idea, Mr. Zarevich,” Lina said.

“Beats getting killed any day, Miss Malnar.” He offered his arm to Lina. “Quickly, now. We can shave at least a couple of meters from your fall,” he added at her suspicious look.

She pursed her lips and took his hand.

The door to the office shattered with a shriek of old wood and self-satisfied bellows in Italian.

Getting hauled down from a balcony proved easier than Lina would’ve ever imagined, and faster, which made it no less frightening, especially once booted feet started stomping through Kusturin’s office. She landed on the rolls of fabric without a sound, but the boy still turned to see what the noise was about. Lina smiled at him—he almost smiled back—until Zarevich’s inevitable weight fell down into the pile behind her and tipped the small cart over to the background music of curses in Italian and Fiumanish.

When a big hand found Lina’s forearm in the chaos, instead of dragging herself free, she leaned into it and used Zarevich’s stability to get free of the flowing fabric cascade—the brocade was as cheap as it looked from up close, and it itched—and stumbled after the other Cartographer across a square, a street, and another, smaller square, until the blissful quiet of the old city core swallowed them.

From then on, it was only a matter of moments before Lina’s dead run through the narrow hive of streets separated her from Zarevich, losing their pursuers in the process, too.

She reached the Capuchin church in a handful of minutes, uncontested, but the echoes of the hunt followed her from the back alleys.

Zarevich, despite his build and fashion choices, was fast. Faster than any bear, Lina supposed—being born and raised between two big cities, she hadn’t exactly had the chance to see many beasts of the kind, not in person—and she only had to wait for him a few seconds until she could bar the Capuchin basement door behind them. Zarevich dragged an overflowing crate against the door on his own, just in time; next thing she knew, there were angry shouts from the outside, quickly joined by thudding and stomping against the ramshackle basement door.

By the time Lina found the right coordinates and forced the portal open in the crypt, a few shots had been fired from the outside, and a few dots of bright sunlight had illuminated the dusty storage space behind her back. “Zarevich!” she shouted.

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