They ran like the demons and djinn were chasing them; stumbled, but didn't stop, even as an explosion rocked the shaken world of the elite and riches fell to ruin. His friend shouted, defiant, calling for the already lost and gone. Hoping against reason, and running towards gunfire.

None of Shoshenk's guards noticed the two teenagers, and why would they? They were too busy fleeing. The underworld was used to upheavals, even under Niska. Their boss presumed dead, the guards had little reason to linger. A couple of ragged yatim did not warrant much attention, not compared to a regiment of Alliance soldiers that would be looking for convenient scapegoats.

Behind them, party guests still out on the balcony were quickly becoming disorderly and agitated, demanding to know what was going on. They ignored the turmoil, passing suites, fallen masterpieces and shattered ceramics around overturned pedestals. The hallway looked like a war zone, for once resembling the city not three miles distant.

The door had been blown off it's hinges; blackened, pitted with shrapnel, still smoking, not much different from the state of the room it had come from. There actually wasn't much blood; usually, there never was. Burns, mostly, some shrapnel wounds. There was a swirl of it, splattered on the hardwood, that led them to the small huddled shape that was once their scout. The boy laid twisted, bones broken, ribs crushed, one of his arms ending in tattered shreds.

Roach. They thought that he'd live through anything, small enough and young enough that he could hide from this, escape when it was all over. That they could keep him from getting involved.

When they'd found him during their own escape, they released him from the cage where he'd been kept like a mad dog, and, weak from abuse, the boy had tried to attack them. Niska had trained him as a thief and an assassin; it was all he had known. Gavril, messenger of God. It had taken them months to get past the snarling wild child. For him t