Chapter Eight · She Decided to Strike First
1020 Words
The assassination attempt came at a moment she never expected.
Not at night. Not in a secluded corner. Not when she was alone.
It was morning. In the market. While she walked through the island’s central bazaar alongside a dozen other people.
Suyan had left her quarters that morning for something simple — ink, paper, a few old books she hadn’t been able to find in the Island Lord’s library. She wore plain gray robes, her hair tied back without ornament, looking like nothing more than a junior clerk — the kind of person no one would think twice about.
She didn’t know how long she’d been followed.
The market was lively. Vendors calling out their wares, the back-and-forth of haggling, children darting between stalls — all of it blending into that familiar, disarming noise that made people lower their guard. Suyan walked slowly, her eyes lingering on one booth after another, occasionally stopping to ask a price but mostly just looking.
She didn’t notice the man at the edge of the crowd.
He wore a dark blue jacket, probably in his mid-thirties, with a thin scar running from his right ear to his chin. He stood beside a fishmonger’s stall as though waiting for someone, but his eyes — his eyes never left Suyan’s back.
Suyan crouched down at a book vendor’s stall, flipping through a yellowed volume.
The book was about tidal prediction, written in an outdated style, many of its theories long since superseded by newer research. But she read it carefully anyway — because she knew that old things sometimes held truths that new things had been designed to bury.
She was about to set the book aside when she felt it.
A strange chill, climbing up from the base of her spine.
Her body moved before her mind could catch up — she stepped to the left, and almost simultaneously, a blade came flying from behind her. It grazed her right shoulder and buried itself deep in the stack of books in front of her.
Three inches into wood.
If she hadn’t stepped sideways, that blade would have gone through her heart.
The market went silent.
Then came the screaming.
Suyan turned. The man in the dark blue jacket was gone — the space where he’d been standing was empty, and even the fishmonger hadn’t seen which way he’d run.
She looked down at her shoulder. The fabric was torn, revealing the layer beneath, but there was no blood. The blade had only grazed the cloth.
“Counselor Ah-Yuan! Are you all right?!”
One of the compound guards came running — he’d been patrolling the market and had rushed toward the commotion.
Suyan didn’t answer immediately.
She was still processing what had just happened.
How had she dodged?
She hadn’t seen the blade. She had only felt it — something surging up from deep within her blood, an instinct that had acted before her consciousness could engage.
Had she felt this before?
Once.
She was seven years old. The Thirteenth Island was still whole. She’d snuck out of the house to play on the cliffside, slipped, and started to fall. She thought she would die — but in the instant of falling, she felt —
The sea moved.
Not a wave. Not a tide. Something deeper. Something internal. As if the ocean itself had reached up and pushed against her fall, slowing her just enough to let her grab a vine on the cliff face and pull herself back up.
She’d never told anyone.
She’d assumed it was coincidence.
But now, standing in the noisy market, staring at that blade buried in the books, she knew it wasn’t coincidence.
It was her blood.
It was the Thirteenth Island’s bloodline — a force deeper and more dangerous than tidal sensitivity.
A force that could touch the physical world itself.
When Suyan returned to the Island Lord’s compound, Omid was already waiting in her room.
He sat in the chair by the desk, posture casual, but his eyes were sharp. He watched her enter, let his gaze rest for a second on the torn fabric at her shoulder, then looked away.
“You’re hurt?”
“No.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Too many people in the market. He vanished into the crowd.”
Omid was silent for a moment.
“Any suspicions?”
Suyan looked up at him.
“Someone wants me dead.” She said. “And they’re intelligent — they chose daytime, in a crowd. Even if they failed, it would be easy to disappear.”
“Any leads?”
Suyan thought through what she knew — Lord Zhao’s death, the tide-breath poison, Lord Jiang’s warning.
“One.” She said. “But I’m not sure how the pieces connect yet.”
Omid watched her for a long time.
The scrutiny was uncomfortable — not threatening exactly, but evaluating. As if he were measuring whether she was still worth keeping alive.
“What happened today,” Omid said, “won’t leave this room.”
Suyan’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Why?”
“Because if you die in the market, it’s a complication for First Island. But if there’s an attempted assassination and everyone knows — then you become a destabilizing element. A piece anyone can use.”
His tone was flat, but underneath it Suyan heard something else.
He was protecting her.
Or rather, protecting an asset.
The difference mattered, but she wasn’t sure yet which one she was.
“I’ll find out who did this.” Suyan said.
“How?”
“The man who tried to kill me — the blade he used wasn’t ordinary. There was a mark on the hilt. A half-circle with a dot at one end.”
Omid’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
“You’re certain?”
“Certain. I only saw it for a moment, but I remember.”
Omid rose and walked to the window, turning his back to her.
“That mark,” he said quietly, “is the sigil of Ninth Island’s shadow corps.”
Suyan’s pulse ski
…(truncated)…
- Writer
