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Summary: Chapter 11
Inej and Kaz walk together in silence as she worries about the others. They take refuge in one of Kaz’s safehouses, an abandoned linen factory. She remembers her fear that Kaz wouldn’t trade Van Eck for her if she were broken. Kaz, however, asks if Van Eck hurt her, and she says no. He tells her to rest and leaves.
When Inej wakes, Kaz takes her to the Black Veil, where they reunite with the rest of the gang. Nina, Mattias, and the others tell Kaz and Inej of the winged Shu warriors. Kuwei explains that the Shu government forced captured Fabrikators who were high on parem to do experiments before they died, altering humans to make them better soldiers. Jesper surmises the Shu warriors could smell Grisha.
Kaz reveals his plan to get the money Van Eck owes them. He explains that he has purchased sugar shares with money he got from selling his shares in the Fifth Harbor and Crow Club to Pekka Rollins. The gang is astonished that Kaz is willing to risk so much. He says that they will destroy Van Eck’s sugar, stored in ten silos, with a chemical weevil created by Wylan and Kuwei. Not only will Kaz’s sugar stock thus rise in value a great deal, but Van Eck will lose all the money he had invested in the commodity. Further, Kaz plans to frame Van Eck by blaming him for the weevil damage, thus ruining his reputation among the city’s most powerful merchers. The plan is risky, however. To get the weevils in the tall, narrow silos, Inej will need to scale them, open their roofs, and then walk across a wire from silo to silo. The gang is concerned that she’s still too weak from being held captive, but Kaz insists the job must be done soon. He also insists that she should have a net, which she vehemently rejects. As they discuss the plan, Nina and Inej demand that the plan should also include efforts to free the city’s remaining Grisha, who are in hiding to avoid being captured by the Shu.
Summary: Chapter 12
Inej and Kaz go to the Knuckle to check on Per Haskell, the head of the Dregs, who is growing restless in Kaz’s absence. Kaz assures Haskell that he has everything under control: a large payout is coming his way soon. Haskell tries to recall Inej into his service, but Kaz says that he needs her and, besides, she no longer belongs to anyone. She disappears before either man can address her directly. When she rejoins Kaz after the meeting, they decide to check on Van Eck to make sure he is unaware of Kaz’s schemes. Even though he knows that breaking into Van Eck’s house is a one-person job, he insists on going with her to the house. But once there, Inej tricks him and proceeds alone, leaving Kaz both annoyed and amused at the same time. She returns with nothing unusual to report, noting only that the mercher has installed new locks on his windows. Kaz admits he is worried about Inej and the upcoming assignment, but she reassures him. She decides to reveal that Van Eck had threatened to break her legs when she was captive and asks the question that haunts her: whether Kaz would have rescued her if she were no longer the Wraith. He replies that he would have come, and that if he couldn’t walk he’d crawl to her, because no matter how broken they were, they’d always fight together.
Analysis
Kaz’s plan to exact vengeance upon Van Eck turns the dynamics of the market against someone who usually wields the market’s power against other people. Merchants like Van Eck have built their fortunes from stockpiling goods, artificially raising prices for others by manipulating supplies. The ten silos of sugar are physical representations of the way Van Eck has hoarded resources and created his personal fortune by fleecing others. Kaz’s plans reveal the gluttony of the market system by using its rules against the system itself, as the merchers regularly do throughout the novel. The references to market manipulation gesture outside the world of the Grishaverse to modern capitalism, particularly to the ways that capitalism benefits large corporations and the wealthy by passing costs on to average consumers. The gang’s ingenuity, and particularly its ability to use limited resources to take on major sources of power (including political power in Six of Crows), offers a commentary on the kinds of power that all individuals can wield against markets and other forces that seem unstoppable. Corruption can be stopped if people are determined, organized, and well-informed about how markets work.
Commercial corruption is often coupled with forms of ethnic discrimination and cruelty. Across the Grishaverse, Grisha like Nina are hunted by Fjerdans or indentured in Ketterdam. Inej, too, was kidnapped and enslaved in a brothel, although the Dregs had “acquired” her before the start of the duology. The trauma of this experience endures and is triggered when Inej spies a billboard advertising exotic spices. Its phrase—“Rare Spices!”—reminds her of how women were treated like commodities to be sampled in the pleasure house. Suli people, like Inej, are still bought and sold as slaves and are even explicitly equated with commodities. Though Inej is no longer enslaved at the pleasure house, she still reacts viscerally when she sees the sign. Her liberty had to be purchased, so there is always a risk that it could be taken away again. The constant reminders of the degradations inflicted on her fuel her desire to get revenge on the slavers and her commitment to get the gang’s money from Van Eck. Similarly, the Grisha do not have full rights as human beings and are often hunted, enslaved, and experimented on. The reason the gang is in hiding is the need to protect Kuwei and his knowledge of parem, as many nations are vying for control of the drug his father created, all with the aim of turning Grisha into weapons and tools. The gang is one of the few forces in the novel that regularly stands against oppression, with Nina and Inej serving as the most vocal proponents of freedom and justice, as when they insist on altering an already complicated plan to include saving Grisha.
Inej and Kaz regularly struggle to communicate clearly with each other, which complicates and stalls their budding romance. Both characters are guarded in different ways and hold themselves back from the other. For example, when they are finally alone together after Inej’s capture, the silence between them “spreads like a stain,” suggesting that their lack of communication mars their potential for closeness. Inej remains confused about Kaz’s feelings for her, unsure if she is just a tool to him, his useful spider, or if he harbors deeper feelings for her. This causes her to distrust him, as demonstrated when she remains evasive about the degree to which Van Eck abused her when he held her captive. Kaz, too, holds back and makes decisions for Inej without consulting her, such as when he unilaterally decides she’ll do her wire walk with a net. He does this because he can’t bear to see her harmed, but had they spoken to each other, he would have known that a net might increase the likelihood that she will fall. Because both characters opt for silence, they both spend much of their time trying to guess what the other person needs or feels, which ultimately impedes their connection.
