The tugging sensation is back, bidding me into the streets and Izzy’s orders peel away from me like dead skin. I am called. That is the way of it. By the time I realize what I’ve done, I’m already halfway down the slope. Deep scores line the ridge-wall in my wake, and I enter the city again unchallenged. The streets are near-empty, save a few stragglers fleeing the chaos. I follow the pressure, the pull, obediently until I’m soaking in power.

  I pad barefoot into the charged rubble of the arena.

  Gilded arcs of light consecrate the pit, shrieking the sand into iridescent gss veins. They crunch beneath my toes, drinking my blood. From this angle, I see them all gathered, craning forward, their curiosity crooning them close to the spectacle. I slip between the sck-jawed rodents for a better look. Anyone with a spine has already obeyed the fear. After all—

  A man is dead.

  Not just any man, no. A mighty one. I know his markings as any Thespan-born would. A single white wolf’s paw, stamped on his breastpte, now smokes, malformed into something unrecognizable to outsiders. But, we know it. The Ulfrengr, maw of the death-drunk, greatest of the lessers, lies boiled bald in a puddle of his own skin! Our ughter takes the quiet and chars it bck beside him. No one else joins us, honey on our tongue.

  “She’s cooked the bloody mutt, then!?” Our ughter turns deep and full of gristle.

  That’s not my voice.

  Trembling eyes snap to me, mine among them. It’s like I watch from the stadium seats, a spectator in my own body.

  “Oh, don’t be rude now, dies and gentlefolk! Is this not what you crave most?” I pce a fist in our chest with a fir of theatrics. “Hail to the new master of the pits, lord of shackled death, The Ulfrengr stalks into eternal night!”

  …And it is a small girl!

  Izzy, where is Izzy?

  …She would love this.

  She would hate it.

  I breach from the undertow of Her sadism and steady my mind. Only now do I see the girl, dangling, chained to a boulder twenty times her size and soundly unconscious. The stares that once felt like praise sour into something wet and heavy. It’s like a gmor has broken. I feel the warhammer’s head kissing my spine. I don’t even remember taking it. But it craves py.

  The crowd collectively gasps as I hoist the hammer to my shoulder. Cowards. They see my strength, hear my rattling utterances, they know I am beyond natural. I pound the gss and sand beneath me into a mural of bloody runs as I close the distance to the girl. My father would be proud. The girl’s golden hair still radiates skittish energy.

  “Demons!” The bravest one yells. From behind the rest, of course.

  I raise the hammer high over the girl, ignoring the castigations of a mad prophet.

  Her strength pulses through my limbs now, the drumming no longer confined to my skull. Unbothered by the weight, I bring the hammer down and shatter the chains, catching the girl in the crook of my elbow. I sling her over my shoulder. The choice is mine to make, but somehow it feels ordained. I don’t like that.

  The guards and convoy soldiers are the first to regain themselves. I watch them straighten, slow their breaths, falling back on instinct and time spent in wilder pces. One calls out the formation and they form lines, movements made in the memory of training. Sweat beads on their brows as if they know what I am. They don’t falter when I fixate on the throbbing in their necks.

  I can see it in the way they hold their weapons. They’ve seen some horrors. Perhaps the kind that sticks in the ale-sick dreams of a warrior, but that’s all. Our horror is another thing entirely. It is the kind that hides in the smile of a lover at midnight. The kind that glides under a boat sitting on a bck-gss river. The butcher’s nightmares. We are the horror you know is coming, but cannot see.

  They are not prepared and never will be.

  A stroke of rust catches in the corner of my eye just beyond the glow of ntern light. Izzy. She’s here, and I find that I am gd. We want her to see this.

  The man who speaks for them is easy to spot. His armor is brighter, voice louder, and his shoulders are squared in prayer that they might undo me with bravado alone. He tells me to surrender. I have heard this tone before. Always the same! One part threat, one part plea. It is the sound of a man used to getting what he wants. I offer a denial, because I love to disappoint, but not loudly. We don’t need to be loud.

  “You die st,” I say, my teeth pulsing to points. “In the end, your belly will burst, swollen with your men’s blood. Oh—and one pig-snouted gash. Apologies.”

  He says they do not fear me, or something, I don’t bother to hear it. I don’t need to. His heart tells another tale. Arrhythmia. I chuckle. A leader with a frail heart? This cannot possibly be all Ithek can muster.

  I take a few steps toward him, a broken grin stoned on my face. “The steel on your breast will not keep me out. It is a casket. I will seal you in it myself.”

  The commander barks out some empty defiance. More theater! But it works. The men bolster under the words. A learned response, but effective. They jolt to action at his call. Their formations are slow, clunky, but drilled into them. Aging knees draw my eyes, they give the encirclement an off gait. I let them finish. It’s only polite.

  I take a moment, breathe deep. Overwhelm fttens my glee as I notice many new scents, things I’d never caught before. The tang of metal and blood, greasy skin sitting in armor. My ears fill with cttering, the tangle of weapons and pumping hearts and nervous swallows. I shut my eyes and pick through it all.

  From the mire of sensation, I taste a man’s courage.

  A spear whistles by my ear as I turn my head. The fool caves in as I drive the hammer into his chest, the metallic keening of his pte tearing the wind apart.

  Never break the line.

  All at once my senses snap into a tight, unified cord. I pull it and it thrums, letting me see only what I want. And what I want is more—fucking crushed and bashed and wailing—but then I see Izzy through the terror-filled mass. She’s staring. Whatever part of me still lived in her eyes is gone. No disgust, or hate. Absence I can only describe as a necrotic wound.

  We don’t kill the others.

  I break my lust and I run to her.

  The girl is dead weight in my arms as we flee, limp with half-waking twitches. Izzy grips my arm and pulls me down the lower corridors. Boots thunder behind us as we pass Luca, pulling him into our stampede. We don’t know where we’re going. There is no pn, no escape route, but Izzy is with me, so if ever there was a day to die, it is today. Every turn conjures the halls of Gaelin’s estate. It’s like six years past, our rush to freedom, all repeating again.

  A locked gate halts us a moment before I smash it open, spilling us out into the streets. More boots pound at us from around the structure, pouring also from the guardsmen’s towers near the southeastern gate. It leaves us only one option. Rush deeper. Down the gullet of Ithek.

  “I told you not to fucking come down here!” Izzy shouts between ragged breaths. “Either they kill us or you do! We’re going to die for a shitty trader!”

  Probably.

  “She’s just a child! Younger than we were when—

  “For fuck’s sake!” Luca’s scream cracks. “Just run!”

  I have never seen so many soldiers in all my days. I have never felt so outnumbered. They come like fire-fed ants from a corpse’s mouth, endless, armored, faceless. The alleys drown in them. Ahead, they form a barricade at the crossroad leading west, and She fills my guts with bitter amusement at their struggle. Much as I hate it, the list of options is thin.

  If I call Her, will She come?

  Immediately, I feel her beckon, a twisting nod in my chest like a hooked finger.Before I plunge into the thought, a wooden vessel, squat and narrow like some river-borne corpse, drags itself from the sky and scrapes along the cobbles in front of us. The keel moans into the timeless stones of Ithek. Splinters burst outward. The thing barely steadies to match our pace before a hand reaches down to Izzy.

  A flying fucking boat and—Thalion.

  Thalion’s face registers me all at once in feverish surprise. The many questions smother our words and my two lives split down the middle. I throw the hammer aboard and toss Izzy up ass-first. He dodges the heavy iron and catches her before she cracks her skull. I shove the girl into his arms and unch myself to the deck, dragging Luca by the colr. We skid aboard, stumbling as the ship kicks from the street like a bucking horse. It lifts hard and crooked, catching too much wind on too little frame. Luca sms into the rotting deck and slides back. I catch his ankle so we don’t lose my only chance at salvation.

  “Every god be damned, I don’t know how to fly this,” Thalion grits out over the whirring madness. “Any of you fluent in advanced Thespan runic? No? Grand.”

  Izzy, holds the aspect-trader tight, worry in her words, “Cat, your brilliant fucking brain—anytime now would be nice!”

  “Shit, the wheel’s locked!” Thalion yanks with both hands. It won’t budge.

  Steering’s out. I look at the strange console, full of interlocking runes. They form channels. I see the structure, how it’s supposed to work. Right combination, controlled movement. I work through a few phrases, but they feel coded, geometrically. Like someone speaking in riddle. I can’t solve it.

  Luca moves like he’s possessed and sms into the console as we scrape the ground again. The runic console glows faint, pulsing like a dying heart. He studies the glyphs in silence, tracing each one with hesitant method until he finally speaks.

  “What is this symbol!?”

  My eyes barely pass over it. “Uh—I—I think it means—a sheen, or glimmer! Yes!”

  Luca snaps the rune into pce. It clicks with a mechanical groan, and the ship shudders underfoot. Thalion jerks the wheel. It finally gives.

  “She loosens her blouse.” He grins, “Well done, foreigner!”

  He wrenches the vessel left, just enough to swerve wide of an overturned wagon. Crossbowmen appear behind the barricade and others mount the wall-tops. They release projectiles in percussive unison.

  “BOLTS!” Izzy shouts.

  I throw my body over them, a serrated bit of metal burying in my arm near the shoulder. A sharp breath escapes my lips. I clench my teeth down and I yank the bastard out. She thinks I deserve it.

  Ahead, the barricade divides, letting us pass. Worse is coming. Atop the gate a mounted ballista readies its answer. Fmes bathe the great, hungry arrow.

  “We need more height,” Luca shouts over the wind. “The console is dead.”

  Izzy’s eyes fsh toward him. “Figure it out or we sptter!”

  Before he can answer, the girl jerks awake. She lunges to the console. Her hands settle on the rune-board like they know it. The moment her palms connect with it, the same golden arcs from before skitter over the runes, lighting them all in brilliant fres.

  Luca slides a few pieces around and a pulse roars beneath our feet, throwing the ship skyward. The girl colpses into Izzy’s p, and Luca grips the controls, teeth gritted as he redirects the surge through the flight veins.

  Too te.

  The fming arrow flings from the ballista. It grazes the stern in a cataclysmic eruption. Wood splits and the fmes burst out. I shield Izzy and the girl in my arms again, because I don’t know what else to do. There’s no time. Heat sears down my ribs. Smoke fills my throat again, something I’ve grown accustomed to, but still—I hold.

  She stirs wildly in my ribs. The air charges violently. The girl’s eyes snap open, bright as the rising dawn. A new kind of bolt answers called from the ruins of the heaven. It sms the ballista with righteous wrath, and the war machine is torn from this pne. We speed past the gate and we’re out of the city limits.

  Charred pieces rain from the sky. The girl sobs into Izzy’s chest, trying to vanish within her.

  Even the light subjugates us now.