"Nix! You’re later than usual today. Something happen?”

  Nyx suppressed the urge to correct the man on her name. It wasn’t something she wanted people to know about, no matter how much her soul desired to be called properly.

  “I went to meet with a couple of friends,” she said. “The overseers wouldn’t let me in.”

  After almost a week without having seen them, Nyx had finally learnt where Dan and Ari had been relocated. She’d tried to meet with them, but she’d been turned away at the doors.

  “Ah.” The short shop-owner nodded in understanding. “The lockdowns are still in effect, then? You were lucky to avoid getting stuck in those metal boxes, I say. Nothing beneficial comes from hiding away from the world. They should let all the kids out already. Why, when I was a kid, I was diving in corruption so thick you could swim in it.”

  “You were, huh?” Nyx doubted the slightly pudgy man had ever felt worse than it was now, with the Dark Star amplifying the corruption everywhere.

  “Of course! I may have settled down and started my own business, but Old Arc?hei here was once a prime harbinger candidate, like yourself. I couldn’t handle it.” He let out a laugh as if it were a nostalgic tale, rather than an admittance of failure. “But I did learn a thing or two that helped me survive and make my business flourish.”

  Nyx glanced up at his ‘shop’. Compared to all the other establishments in the open archway that was the main entrance into the Biovault, Archei’s was closer to a run-down stall than a proper shop. She’d chosen to sell the vitiate hearts to him because he wasn’t linked to the cults — at least not directly — and he hadn’t tried to immediately scam her like the other two places she’d tried.

  Though, she wouldn’t be surprised if he was still majorly undercutting her… but he’d not asked questions. That itself was worth it.

  Despite all that, she couldn’t imagine the knowledge he’d gained would be all that useful if this was all he had to show for it.

  “What sort of things?” she asked.

  He let out another laugh. “Come Nix, you can’t expect me to give away my secrets so easily. Old Arc?hei has worked hard for them.”

  Nyx rolled her eyes and took a step away. He couldn’t be more than thirty, and he was determined to call himself an old man. The owner of the store besides him was twice his age.

  She readied herself for her daily jog to the forest depths beyond where most dared, but Archei stopped her.

  His eyes had found something over her shoulder, and as she turned to look, he continued. “I will give you one lesson; avoid groups like that. Don’t sell to them, don’t interact with them, and don’t dare get in their way.” Archei’s voice was grave now.

  She found the focus of his sight: a group of five cultists strode through the plaza; ignoring all around them and focusing entirely on reaching the Biovault. Each of their hands lay on their flesh and steel weapons.

  Fleshsmiths.

  “You can tell by the look in their eye,” Archei continued. “They’re on a mission. If there’s one lesson you should learn, it is to avoid any harbinger when they are like that. Interrupting one in the hopes of a sale will have the flesh collectors coming for you.”

  As he said, the crowded market opened a path for the small group. None dared approach. Nyx was tempted to cast her sense out and feel for their names, but if she was unlucky enough to come across one that could detect her touch like Ep’Nanorschi, then everything could be over in the blink of an eye.

  Soon, they were gone, and Nyx decided it was best to wait a few minutes before entering the Biovault after them. It would be only a few more days before she could afford a weapon. Just a few more bags of vitiate hearts.

  Nyx had not yet decided what weapon she wanted, but it had been narrowed down to either a rapier, or a set of butterfly swords. Considering all her power was in her fingers and wrists, she figured they would be the better options. The short butterfly swords would be perfect as a cover for the wounds she could inflict against the creatures she fought, but they would also perform exactly as her claws did. They would be a tool of deception, and nothing else.

  The rapier was the complete opposite. It gave her the option of range on top of how close and personal she could get with her claws. The weapon might take some time to learn, but it was almost certain to become beneficial in a way the misleading butterfly blades could not. But that highlighted the main problem; a rapier was a thrusting weapon, and her claws left slashes when they didn’t cleave.

  “Before you head off for today, let me make you a deal,” Archei said, snapping her out of her thoughts. “I’ll pay twenty times what I have for the hearts if you bring back a live specimen.”

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  “Twenty… couldn’t you have said so days back?”

  “You want me to feel responsible for some kid’s death?”

  Nyx stared at the man for a moment. “You didn’t oppose me going into the vitiate region of the forest.”

  Archei shrugged, his pretence at being kind and caring shattered along with it. “Alright, you got me. I cared more about losing a supplier. It’s hard to get much of anything that isn’t immediately snapped up by the cults. I figure you’ve proved yourself capable enough not to die while capturing one.”

  The thought of needing to only take out one of those beasts to get a day’s worth of funds was almost too good to pass up… but capturing one of those things alive? She would be risking another explosion. She hadn’t failed to stop them exploding since the first one. It was a simple matter of killing them before the healing effect of vitiate put too much strain on their bodies. But capturing them meant falling back into that possibility.

  “Forty times,” Nyx said.

  “What?”

  “Forty times the price of a heart.”

  “Don’t fool yourself kid. Why would I pay that much for a basic vitiate beast?”

  “Because otherwise its not worth my time.” Nyx shrugged. “As you’ve said, I’m an aspiring harbinger; my main goal is to fight as many beasts as I can. If I need to capture one without allowing it to explode, then transport it all the way through the forest, I want to be properly compensated. And I’m sure you know how feral the beasts can get.”

  Archei winced. Clearly he’d been expecting her to be a bit more foolish than she was. “Twenty five.”

  Nyx shook her head. “Forty.”

  “Thirty. My final offer.”

  “I’m not budging.” Her primary goal wasn’t money, after all. It was the power to take on the cults. Say it took half a day to capture and transport a living beast, that was half a day she couldn’t spend improving herself.

  The man groaned and tilted his head back to glare at the massive metal arch overhead, as if that would help him.

  “Fine,” he said, dropping his head to lock eyes with Nyx again. A scowl crossing his face. “But nothing worthless. Only infected creatures above thirty kilos.”

  Ugh, that’s going to be a pain to carry.

  “Alright,” she said, turning to leave. “I’ll be back later.”

  She heard grumbling, but she paid him no mind as she made her way to the Biovault.

  There were thousands of people around, and no matter how Nyx tried to tell herself she was stronger than she used to be, the numbers surrounding her put her on edge. It reminded her too much of her last moments before death. There were too many eyes around, ready to spot her mutations at the first mistake she made.

  Her wings strained against the fabric of her new robe. They wanted to carry her away. She wanted to fly off and leave these countless people behind. Unfortunately, doing so would only give herself away.

  As she hurried through the plaza, the massive archway widened into the vast cavern of the Biovault. The shops dispersed only for tall glass cylinders to take their place. Within each, grew all the fruits, vegetables and spices that sustained the people of Coral. There were hundreds of the towers. All stretching between the ground and the ceiling. All arrayed in a perfectly repeating pattern for kilometres.

  Not wanting to waste any time, Nyx leapt into a jog through the corridor of biotowers.

  The Biovault was one of the most wide-spanning regions in the depths, and naturally had the most entrances. A vast majority of which where either secret or undiscovered. If she wanted, she could use the entrance closer to Tarchon’s place that Little God showed her, but then she wouldn’t be able to sell the vitiate hearts. Plus, she felt it better to keep hidden for emergencies.

  Even as she took the shortest path she knew to reach the vitiate infected area, it still took a long time before the number of workers reduced.

  With a mix of tech and ritualised automation, the biotowers needed almost no human interaction. But there was still an immense amount of work required to keep them running and corruption-free. That wasn’t to mention the guards the cults placed around their own collections.

  Finally, Nyx knew she was approaching the forest when soil replaced the hard alloyed surface that made most of Coral’s floors. She ran past a shattered biotower. At some point far in the past, its innards spilled out and drowned the formerly sterile surface with life. More and more of the towers had met the same fate, until Nyx ran through nothing but forest and all sign of man-made construction was gone.

  “There are no eyes.”

  As soon as Nyx heard Little God’s confirmation, she lifted her robe and snapped her wings wide. No matter how long she had them, the sensation of being bound never became easier. It reminded her far too much of the Fleshsmiths’ chains that confined her so long.

  Nyx shot through the air to get far away from people as soon as she could. There was still that lingering sense that she was missing something, but flight felt so good it was easy to push the discomfort aside.

  Considering Archei accepted that price, there was no way she would miss out on such an opportunity. Even if she would struggle to carry a creature that approached her own body weight — not to mention the added difficulty of it being feral — it wasn’t even a question that she would attempt it. She needed the money.

  Weaving through the trees, it took her no time at all to come across the first vitiate beast. The rabbit lunged for Nyx’s throat instantly. The little buggers were quick, and if she hadn’t been keeping an eye on where she was flying, the small mammal would have cut through her tender flesh with ease.

  Instead, all that met the rabbit was the hard chitin of her pincer.

  A half-dozen chunks of flesh sailed through the air behind Nyx, but she didn’t stop. Even if the rabbit’s heart remained intact, Archei wouldn’t accept something so small.

  Nyx cut through a dozen more creatures as she flew through the forest; all too small for what she needed, but some had hearts worth stopping to collect. Compared to just days ago, the task of killing the vitiate had become a chore. Her improved coordination between wings and claws made even the stronger infected beasts fall in an instant. It was simply a matter of getting close and cutting off their heads.

  She was ready to push into the deeper part of the forest and find some larger beasts, when Little God spoke up. “Observers approach.”

  Nearly faltering right after take-off, she recovered and landed again. As quickly as she could, she tucked her wings away and covered her third eye. She pulled out the ritual knife from her robe and relied on the natural toned nail-paint to hide the nature of her claws.

  All too soon, they arrive.

  Fleshsmiths.

  Five of them. The same ones she’d been told to avoid not an hour ago.

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