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Summary: Chapter 20
Inej manages to stop her fall into the silo and turns to confront her attacker, Dunyasha or the White Blade, an assassin hired by Van Eck. They fight and Inej quickly recognizes Dunyasha’s technical superiority. Equally important, Dunyasha relishes the prospect of killing Inej, her prey. Inej scrambles to the high wire and is startled when Dunyasha follows her. The assassin throws metal stars at Inej and then disconnects the magnet holding the high wire to the silo, causing Inej to fall a second time.
Summary: Chapter 21
Rollins’s presence disturbs Kaz, as it aways does since he had swindled Kaz and his brother years earlier when they first arrived in Ketterdam. Rollins admits to working with Van Eck, who approached him after Kaz kidnapped Alys. Rollins chuckles that Van Eck doesn’t understand how Kaz thinks—but he, Rollins, does. Rollins also taunts Kaz by saying that someone has been sent to kill Inej. Soon, all the members of Kaz’s gang will be dead. As Rollins talks, Kaz removes a vial of acid from Wylan’s pocket. While Rollins focuses on Van Eck’s seal, Kaz drops the vial to the floor. The powerful acid eats through the wood instantly, dropping Kaz and Wylan onto Van Eck’s dining-room table. They dash out of the room, followed by Van Eck’s guards, but manage to escape onto their boat. Kaz decides to go to Sweet Reef to make sure Inej is okay, vowing to disembowel Rollins if she isn’t.
Summary: Chapter 22
The Dime Lions enter the silo area, looking for Nina. Even as she watches their approach, Nina notices that someone is pursuing Inej. Frantic to help her friend, she pretends to use her powers, but the Dime Lions seize her. Remembering the boat of corpses she spied upon arriving at Sweet Reef, Nina reaches for her new powers and animates the dead bodies. As the corpses lurch toward them, the Dime Lions flee in terror. Nina then instructs the corpses to hold a net for Inej, and they are in place to catch her when she falls from the silo. Dunyasha also flees the corpses, promising Inej their next encounter will end differently. In a moment, Kaz and Wylan arrive, relieved to find the women alive. Nina observes that Inej and Kaz look at each other as if they were seeing land for the first time after a shipwreck.
Summary: Chapter 23
Wylan recalls how he began working with the gang. During his first weeks in the Barrel, he hid in a cheap hotel and worked at a tannery. Familiar with everything and everyone in the Barrel, Kaz found him and sent Jesper to enlist Wylan’s bombmaking skills. Though he refused at first, the regular arrival of letters from his father intimidated Wylan and he accepted the offer of work.
Back in the present, the group has taken refuge in Colm’s hotel, where they plot their next move. From the hotel’s clock tower they see that the Barrel’s gangs have been inducted into the stadwatch. The situation feels hopeless and Kuwei suggests he surrender. Kaz replies that this won’t solve the problem because Van Eck wants Kaz to pay personally, so he proposes to surrender himself instead. Again the gang objects. Tensions are running high, however, and Jesper and Kaz begin to argue. As their exchange becomes more heated, Kaz reveals that Jesper made a mistake that compromised them with Van Eck. He then calls Jesper “Jordie,” his dead brother’s name. No longer able to contain their emotions, they begin to fight physically. Colm intercedes, threatening to tan Jesper’s hide. Kaz vows he will neither hide nor play Van Eck’s game. Instead, they will allow Kuwei to put himself up for sale.
Analysis
Dunyasha is a foil to Inej. Where Inej is a student of her own fear, Dunyasha rejects the lessons fear might teach. Skilled and unfearful, even arrogant, Dunyasha shares many of Inej’s talents, such as her stealthy approach and her lightness of foot. However, her demeanor differs from Inej’s since Dunyasha believes in fate, behaving almost as if her actions are preordained by a higher power. The intensity of Dunyasha’s security, her chattiness, and her belief in fate combine to make Inej surmise that Dunyasha contains a degree of madness. Inej believes that her opponent’s lack of fear is an inappropriate response to a dangerous world and indicative of a warped view of reality. Even if Dunyasha’s training and fearlessness gives her some advantages, Inej’s ability to adapt and learn helps her keep her head. Inej realizes when she’s outmaneuvered and does her best to change the game to her advantage.
Where people are concerned, Kaz has two weaknesses: Inej and Pekka Rollins. When dealing with each of them, but for different reasons, Kaz makes mistakes. He has trouble thinking clearly around Rollins because his hatred for him is overwhelming. When dealing with this man, who is his chief adversary, Kaz’s usual ability to find a way out of any situation weakens. In some ways he regresses, returning to the younger, less skilled, and ruthless version of himself whom Rollins almost destroyed. This is because, facing Rollins, he recalls the child who had everything taken from him, and is filled with panic and unmanageable rage. With Inej, by contrast, it is love, not hate, that hinders Kaz from thinking clearly. When she is in danger, or when Kaz imagines she might be, he struggles to focus on anything but rescuing her. When Kaz imagines that Rollins has harmed Inej, he decides he would rather abandon his long-held plan for revenge to violently murder Rollins instead. This is a crucial revelation about Kaz as a character, as it shows that he puts a greater value on love than on hate.
Nina’s new powers grant her an intimate understanding of death and allow her to use death’s power as a weapon. When she had her old power, Nina could feel other people’s heartbeats and the flow of their blood, and she recognized the power of life in others because she had it within herself. In the wake of her experience with parem, she senses a colder, darker power that seems to run through her as it does through corpses. Her proximity to death when in the throes of parem stayed with her and transmuted her Grisha power into something new. She repeatedly refers to how cold this power feels, describing it as a “deep cold” and “fast-flowing winter river.” This echoes Matthias’s dream, in which he fears for Nina’s life in the killing winds of an ice-cold landscape. But whereas Matthias fears death in the wake of Nina’s experience with the drug, Nina finds that death itself is actually a force that she can wield as a weapon, a force that, ironically, keeps her alive.
