Category: News

To His Highness King Gnottingham Catchfly III, Lord of Starlight, He of the Two Moons, Ruler of the Night Blossoms,

The Meekos territory expedition was an enormous success. Eighteen specimens of wild stinging and non-stinging fairy were collected and documented for the first time in their egg, larva, chrysalis and adult-life stages. I also gathered four interesting species of spiked scuttlers that I anticipate will interbreed well with our indigenous species in the laboratory (ref. attached sketches).

I hypothesized previous to this expedition that further research would result in stronger fighting fairies with venomous stings, but deep in the Meekos jungle I made a fascinating discovery: a radioactive crystal substance that causes unique metamorphoses in the local flora and fauna. Since the last expedition three years ago, the plant life has grown at an astounding rate, far faster than possible according to the laws of evolution, and more dangerous. The Meekos have used this powerful crystal to their militaristic advantage, growing an arsenal of poisonous spikes, sticky tanglers and exploding bulbs. It took one hundred generations to breed our giant beetle cavalry, but the uneducated Meekos have managed in a few short years to create plants sentient enough to serve as ludicrous bouncing vehicles. The fairies have taken to it as well, using crystal splinters and gems as decoration; their ongoing exposure to this substance and its radiation has affected the fairies in coloration, bioluminescence and increasing size. Further study and dissection may yet reveal many more variations.

The possibilities of this mysterious crystal are immeasurable. I’m afraid I quite overburdened my expedition with samples of it. With your highness’ permission (and generous funding), I shall proceed forthwith to my laboratory for intense experimentation for the practical application of this crystal. I believe another expedition shall soon be in order for the purposes of biomonitoring and mapping the limits of the expanding Meekos territory.

We lost several soldiers in minor scuffles with the Meekos savages, but we can all agree that is a small price to pay for science, yes?

My thanks for your continued patronage, my king.

Signed, your loyal subject,

Flitwick “Flicker” Stingsplatter IV, Doctor of Entomology

“Shoo Ethel, shoo, you damnable ingrate,” lectured Flicker, swiping at one of his fuzzy ears.

Out of the ear flew a fairy. “I like it in there,” she whined. “It’s warm. Plus I’m not an ingrate. I have a spine. That’s some science you taught me.”

“Ingrate, I said, not invertebrate,” explained Flicker as he held a second fairy down on an examination table. “Ingrate means ungrateful, which you are, and if you do not stop your incessant ear tickling I shall lock you up with the others, or pin you to the board.” Flicker nodded his snout toward the shelves of stoppered jars. In the fairy laboratory were jarred fairies of all kinds: Majestic Violet Bottlewhispers and Heart-faced Bandyhoos glared at one another through the curved glass while a Spotted Dandywing napped with her toes in her mouth. Furious at her captivity, a Crystal-eyed Wiggler bonked her pink head against the cork stopper, her belly blinking green and gold light. A larger terrarium housed an air sprite named Loo who spent her days finger-combing her long hair and gazing at her reflection. Many more were posed and pinned to boards on the walls, sorted taxonomically, named and labeled with care by Flicker himself. There was another laboratory dedicated to termite mounds and a soundproof chamber where the noisiest crickets were stored; running along all the ceilings was a flat glass-walled ant farm; a sandy lab was full of burrowing scorpions; and smoke could be piped into the beehive yard to put them to sleep during comb examinations.

All available wall space was covered with Flicker’s drawings, notes and blueprints.

Ethel, a Bulbous-bottomed Gigglefly, stuck her tongue out at the captive fairies and floated to the beetles and scuttles, her fangs dug deep into a mealworm, her oversized golden wings battering the air with a buzz. Her bum squished down onto the hard back of a small beetle; it spun in circles with annoyance. Dozens more, displaying a rainbow of colors and sizes all the way up to the Bleekos’ mount size, scuttled around wire cages. Ethel petted her ride’s spikes and horns until its course straightened. “The new beetle eggs are way bigger than the old ones,” she said.

“An astute observation,” said Flicker. He bent over the Striped Whistler fairy, spread one of its wings out wide with a tweezer and swept a tiny brush across it. “I must breed mounts big enough for the new weaponry I’ve devised. With this crystalline material I discovered in the Meekos territory, years of breeding can be accomplished in a matter of days. Days, Ethel!”

Ethel rode her little beetle up a wall and along a blueprint, peering at it while crunching down on her worm. “What’s this gumball machine for?”

“That is not a gumball machine. It is a fairy launcher.” Fairy dust swirled away from Flicker’s brush, then burst into flame with a puhhh sound, singeing the scientist’s cheek fur. He cursed and the fairy sneered at him. “You… you… Lucy, darling, you must stay still while I collect the dust and stop igniting it, or the Bleekos army shall not have the weaponry it needs for the border wars.”

“Why would you launch fairies?” cried Ethel.

“Fairies are quite useful weapons,” muttered Flicker. “The stinging, the choking dust and the hypnotic effect of the light patterns have destroyed many a malevolent Meekos.”

Ethel dismounted and flew back into Flicker’s ear, having forgotten all about his earlier threat. “Why are the Bleekos at war with the Meekos anyway?”

Flicker continued, with great concentration, to sweep Lucy’s wing dust into a test tube. “The Meekos are an abhorrent race of nefarious plant life. Creepy daytime creatures who use photosynthesis to abuse civilized, educated nocturnal life. Get out of my ear.”

Ethel ignored him, pulling the sides of his ear around her like a cozy blanket. “But who started it?” she yawned.

“I don’t… Nobody knows really… What would you know of the intricacies of interspecies politics? We are at war because we have always been at war, as the moon wars with the sun.”

But Ethel did not answer, and her snoring resounded around Flicker’s brain.

“Another expedition is what I need,” whispered Flicker, so as not to wake her. “I must have more crystal. Then the moonlight shall prevail.”

“And then I went like, Pow! Pow! Pow! with sunbeams, and the baddies were running around in circles – all blind – and they bonked their heads together, and fell down kicking their stubby little legs and whining like babies!”

Petal’s little fists smash together, mimicking the monster heads. The munions watch with wide eyes, mouths gaping, as her fingers wiggle like monster legs.

Petal plucks at the wayward tendril of a rattan plant so tall that they call them Ent’s Walking sticks. She winds it around a nearby smilax vine, so it will get more sun. “The monsters out there are big. Bigger than all of you on toppa one another. Can’t kill ‘em with just a few sun blasts.”

The arsenal is abloom. Bugs sing in the shadows; fat palms unfold atop the rattan. Super poisonous bleeding heart flowers burst out of thorny stems. Stinging Bushes, their leaves hairy with glass-like spikes, bump up next to the Sleepies and the Sneeze Weed and Wait-a-Whiles. This is Petal’s favorite garden, a free-for-all of spines, spikes, and prickles. In the distance is the rhythmic sound of a guardian ent circling the Meekos village. Three munions follow Petal about, bouncing and orbiting her, as always.

“We will eat them up if you take us! You could enchant us up out of the bramblethorn seeds!”

“You know what happened last time.” Petal sighs and looks at her feet, her sprout drooping in shame. “Nothing.”

“Maybe if you try harder!”

“Yes, just concentrate super-duper hard!”

She plops down and closes her eyes. Her forehead bunches up. She gathers all the sunbeams, just like before. Heat builds up in her hands, and the munions cheer and spin in frantic circles. Finally, it’s too hot to bear; she lets it go with a shriek. Purple Solanum petals explode into the air, and then…

Boom!
Boom!
Boom!

When all is calm, she is standing alone in a rain of purple blooms and dew bubbles, three little bramblethorn seeds where the munions had once been.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” Then she wonders…

Maybe if she has explosives, she can beat up any of those jungle baddies. They’ll send her to scout all the wells! She’ll be a hero!

With a shout, she blasts a sunbeam into the still-smoking bramblethorn seeds, and:

Pop!
Pop!
Pop!

Out comes the three munions, good as new. “What happened!” “You farted!” “I did not, I went kablooie!” “That’s what I meant!” “That’s stupid!” “No, you’re stupid!”

Petal whistles, and her lotus flower bounds back to her. “Come on, munnies,” she says in a brand-new, commanding voice. “We are going outside.”

Out! Out! Petal takes us to the outside places today! You don’t get to come. You’re just a dumb giant ent. You have to stay here and guard the hatchery… but we three get to go out when Petal scouts! Ha!

You never saw the far outside place. There are not so many seeds and sprouts. Things don’t all grow from the ground. There are creatures that make shiny magic and there are glow-glow crystals that we bring back and plant in the earth. It helps grow new brothers for you!

And there are baddies! Baddies are favorite.

Yes! Favorite! Petal says we can eat the baddies. Chomp! Chomp! We take big bites from the baddies. We eat and they fall down and then when we are very full we get to nap in the bramblethorn. Also Petal throws the sun at the baddies. Sparkle, pow!

What’s that? You say Petal can’t throw the sun?! …that the sun is way up high, maybe three ents higher than you? She does throw the sun, and then the baddies run. Don’t call me stupid! You’re stupid! Ents are stupid! Yes, ents are the stupidest.

Sometimes we go boom. Can you go boom, mister ent? Didn’t think so.

All three of us. Boom! Boom! Boom! Even more roasted baddies. Then Petal grows us back again.

She is the best Meekos scout ever. One day she will grow more things. Maybe big, dumb ents.

You stay here, big dumb ent. You protect the village, and we will go chomp!

“And then I went like, Pow! Pow! Pow! with sunbeams, and the baddies were running around in circles – all blind – and they bonked their heads together, and fell down kicking their stubby little legs and whining like babies!”

Petal’s little fists smash together, mimicking the monster heads. The munions watch with wide eyes, mouths gaping, as her fingers wiggle like monster legs.

Petal plucks at the wayward tendril of a rattan plant so tall that they call them Ent’s Walking sticks. She winds it around a nearby smilax vine, so it will get more sun. “The monsters out there are big. Bigger than all of you on toppa one another. Can’t kill ‘em with just a few sun blasts.”

The arsenal is abloom. Bugs sing in the shadows; fat palms unfold atop the rattan. Super poisonous bleeding heart flowers burst out of thorny stems. Stinging Bushes, their leaves hairy with glass-like spikes, bump up next to the Sleepies and the Sneeze Weed and Wait-a-Whiles. This is Petal’s favorite garden, a free-for-all of spines, spikes, and prickles. In the distance is the rhythmic sound of a guardian ent circling the Meekos village. Three munions follow Petal about, bouncing and orbiting her, as always.

“We will eat them up if you take us! You could enchant us up out of the bramblethorn seeds!”

“You know what happened last time.” Petal sighs and looks at her feet, her sprout drooping in shame. “Nothing.”

“Maybe if you try harder!”

“Yes, just concentrate super-duper hard!”

She plops down and closes her eyes. Her forehead bunches up. She gathers all the sunbeams, just like before. Heat builds up in her hands, and the munions cheer and spin in frantic circles. Finally, it’s too hot to bear; she lets it go with a shriek. Purple Solanum petals explode into the air, and then…

Boom!
Boom!
Boom!

When all is calm, she is standing alone in a rain of purple blooms and dew bubbles, three little bramblethorn seeds where the munions had once been.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” Then she wonders…

Maybe if she has explosives, she can beat up any of those jungle baddies. They’ll send her to scout all the wells! She’ll be a hero!

With a shout, she blasts a sunbeam into the still-smoking bramblethorn seeds, and:

Pop!
Pop!
Pop!

Out comes the three munions, good as new. “What happened!” “You farted!” “I did not, I went kablooie!” “That’s what I meant!” “That’s stupid!” “No, you’re stupid!”

Petal whistles, and her lotus flower bounds back to her. “Come on, munnies,” she says in a brand-new, commanding voice. “We are going outside.”

Out! Out! Petal takes us to the outside places today! You don’t get to come. You’re just a dumb giant ent. You have to stay here and guard the hatchery… but we three get to go out when Petal scouts! Ha!

You never saw the far outside place. There are not so many seeds and sprouts. Things don’t all grow from the ground. There are creatures that make shiny magic and there are glow-glow crystals that we bring back and plant in the earth. It helps grow new brothers for you!

And there are baddies! Baddies are favorite.

Yes! Favorite! Petal says we can eat the baddies. Chomp! Chomp! We take big bites from the baddies. We eat and they fall down and then when we are very full we get to nap in the bramblethorn. Also Petal throws the sun at the baddies. Sparkle, pow!

What’s that? You say Petal can’t throw the sun?! …that the sun is way up high, maybe three ents higher than you? She does throw the sun, and then the baddies run. Don’t call me stupid! You’re stupid! Ents are stupid! Yes, ents are the stupidest.

Sometimes we go boom. Can you go boom, mister ent? Didn’t think so.

All three of us. Boom! Boom! Boom! Even more roasted baddies. Then Petal grows us back again.

She is the best Meekos scout ever. One day she will grow more things. Maybe big, dumb ents.

You stay here, big dumb ent. You protect the village, and we will go chomp!

To His Highness King Gnottingham Catchfly III, Lord of Starlight, He of the Two Moons, Ruler of the Night Blossoms,

The Meekos territory expedition was an enormous success. Eighteen specimens of wild stinging and non-stinging fairy were collected and documented for the first time in their egg, larva, chrysalis and adult-life stages. I also gathered four interesting species of spiked scuttlers that I anticipate will interbreed well with our indigenous species in the laboratory (ref. attached sketches).

I hypothesized previous to this expedition that further research would result in stronger fighting fairies with venomous stings, but deep in the Meekos jungle I made a fascinating discovery: a radioactive crystal substance that causes unique metamorphoses in the local flora and fauna. Since the last expedition three years ago, the plant life has grown at an astounding rate, far faster than possible according to the laws of evolution, and more dangerous. The Meekos have used this powerful crystal to their militaristic advantage, growing an arsenal of poisonous spikes, sticky tanglers and exploding bulbs. It took one hundred generations to breed our giant beetle cavalry, but the uneducated Meekos have managed in a few short years to create plants sentient enough to serve as ludicrous bouncing vehicles. The fairies have taken to it as well, using crystal splinters and gems as decoration; their ongoing exposure to this substance and its radiation has affected the fairies in coloration, bioluminescence and increasing size. Further study and dissection may yet reveal many more variations.

The possibilities of this mysterious crystal are immeasurable. I’m afraid I quite overburdened my expedition with samples of it. With your highness’ permission (and generous funding), I shall proceed forthwith to my laboratory for intense experimentation for the practical application of this crystal. I believe another expedition shall soon be in order for the purposes of biomonitoring and mapping the limits of the expanding Meekos territory.

We lost several soldiers in minor scuffles with the Meekos savages, but we can all agree that is a small price to pay for science, yes?

My thanks for your continued patronage, my king.

Signed, your loyal subject,

Flitwick “Flicker” Stingsplatter IV, Doctor of Entomology

“Shoo Ethel, shoo, you damnable ingrate,” lectured Flicker, swiping at one of his fuzzy ears.

Out of the ear flew a fairy. “I like it in there,” she whined. “It’s warm. Plus I’m not an ingrate. I have a spine. That’s some science you taught me.”

“Ingrate, I said, not invertebrate,” explained Flicker as he held a second fairy down on an examination table. “Ingrate means ungrateful, which you are, and if you do not stop your incessant ear tickling I shall lock you up with the others, or pin you to the board.” Flicker nodded his snout toward the shelves of stoppered jars. In the fairy laboratory were jarred fairies of all kinds: Majestic Violet Bottlewhispers and Heart-faced Bandyhoos glared at one another through the curved glass while a Spotted Dandywing napped with her toes in her mouth. Furious at her captivity, a Crystal-eyed Wiggler bonked her pink head against the cork stopper, her belly blinking green and gold light. A larger terrarium housed an air sprite named Loo who spent her days finger-combing her long hair and gazing at her reflection. Many more were posed and pinned to boards on the walls, sorted taxonomically, named and labeled with care by Flicker himself. There was another laboratory dedicated to termite mounds and a soundproof chamber where the noisiest crickets were stored; running along all the ceilings was a flat glass-walled ant farm; a sandy lab was full of burrowing scorpions; and smoke could be piped into the beehive yard to put them to sleep during comb examinations.

All available wall space was covered with Flicker’s drawings, notes and blueprints.

Ethel, a Bulbous-bottomed Gigglefly, stuck her tongue out at the captive fairies and floated to the beetles and scuttles, her fangs dug deep into a mealworm, her oversized golden wings battering the air with a buzz. Her bum squished down onto the hard back of a small beetle; it spun in circles with annoyance. Dozens more, displaying a rainbow of colors and sizes all the way up to the Bleekos’ mount size, scuttled around wire cages. Ethel petted her ride’s spikes and horns until its course straightened. “The new beetle eggs are way bigger than the old ones,” she said.

“An astute observation,” said Flicker. He bent over the Striped Whistler fairy, spread one of its wings out wide with a tweezer and swept a tiny brush across it. “I must breed mounts big enough for the new weaponry I’ve devised. With this crystalline material I discovered in the Meekos territory, years of breeding can be accomplished in a matter of days. Days, Ethel!”

Ethel rode her little beetle up a wall and along a blueprint, peering at it while crunching down on her worm. “What’s this gumball machine for?”

“That is not a gumball machine. It is a fairy launcher.” Fairy dust swirled away from Flicker’s brush, then burst into flame with a puhhh sound, singeing the scientist’s cheek fur. He cursed and the fairy sneered at him. “You… you… Lucy, darling, you must stay still while I collect the dust and stop igniting it, or the Bleekos army shall not have the weaponry it needs for the border wars.”

“Why would you launch fairies?” cried Ethel.

“Fairies are quite useful weapons,” muttered Flicker. “The stinging, the choking dust and the hypnotic effect of the light patterns have destroyed many a malevolent Meekos.”

Ethel dismounted and flew back into Flicker’s ear, having forgotten all about his earlier threat. “Why are the Bleekos at war with the Meekos anyway?”

Flicker continued, with great concentration, to sweep Lucy’s wing dust into a test tube. “The Meekos are an abhorrent race of nefarious plant life. Creepy daytime creatures who use photosynthesis to abuse civilized, educated nocturnal life. Get out of my ear.”

Ethel ignored him, pulling the sides of his ear around her like a cozy blanket. “But who started it?” she yawned.

“I don’t… Nobody knows really… What would you know of the intricacies of interspecies politics? We are at war because we have always been at war, as the moon wars with the sun.”

But Ethel did not answer, and her snoring resounded around Flicker’s brain.

“Another expedition is what I need,” whispered Flicker, so as not to wake her. “I must have more crystal. Then the moonlight shall prevail.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here today.” The general’s long shadow stretched into the hangar from the rolled-up garage door.

Skye peeked out from the cockpit of a mech with half its front armor blown out, metal blackened and curling in from the impact point. With a screwdriver between her teeth, she tossed a charred actuator onto the ground and called out, “I’m glad you’re here, Appa. I want to show you my plans for the decommissioned exosuits.”

“You promised your mother.”

“The engines are okay. The shields cause all the issues.” She hunched down behind what was left of the front armor, only slices of her showing in the blasted-out hole. “Every new generation of these machines, we add more armor, which means more weight, which means bigger engines and more crystal power …”

“…which means more dependence on the crystal mines, which means more war.” The general’s face was hard-lined, but his eyes and voice softened. “This is not the time for this discussion.”

“The mechs take fire because they’re too slow.” Loosened screws tink-tink-tinked to the ground, then Skye kicked at the wrecked armor from the inside. “We’re going about it the wrong way. We need … more… mobility.” A word for every kick with her combat boots, until the front armor crashed to the ground, exposing her in the cockpit. “We should be going lighter on the mechs and heavier on the firepower. I put the 25-millimeter autocannons on this one. With the vectored thrust jet nozzles on an integrated airfoil on the back, it’s light enough for halcyon-tipped rockets. I know it’s a risk, but …”

“Skye. She is coming.”

“Where? Here?”

“Ah. Here she is. Go to work, people.” A dozen clattering footsteps accompanied a shrill voice from the garage door. Two men dragged a full-length mirror to a workbench. A dressmaker and his assistants, pins poking from their pressed lips, set up a mannequin. The manicurist, hairstylist and makeup bot took over the workbench. The voice followed behind, barking out orders; it belonged to a small woman with tall, upknotted hair and black eyes. “Mind the grease. That silk cost more than your monthly wages.”

“Umma, what are you doing here?” Skye whined, slumping in the cockpit.

“Your name will be chosen from the tiles tonight. Get out of that thing.” Skye’s mother stood next to her husband at a stern parade rest.

“I don’t want to be chosen. There’s a war happening.” But Skye obeyed, climbing down to join the crowd, casting a betrayed glance at her father.

He shrugged. “There is always war. You cannot be a soldier forever.”

“I’m a pilot, Appa. And I’m the best pilot you’ve… ow!” She winced as the makeup bot attacked her eyebrows with tweezers. The manicurist sat on a stool beside her and clucked under her breath at the broken nails and calluses. The hairstylist pulled Skye’s hair out of its knot and yanked through the tangles with a comb.

“No black around her eyes,” Skye’s mother said to the makeup bot. “It makes them small. And overdraw her lips; they are too thin.”

The makeup bot bowed and rummaged through its box of powders and creams while Skye scowled. “What happens if you’re lucky tonight, and some high-placed family chooses me for their son? What will he say when he sees me without all this stuff on my face?”

“A fish is not kept the same way it is caught.”

“Great,” grumbled Skye. “So men are fish.”

“Gold rings and orchids for her hair,” mused Skye’s mother, peering down at a velvet-lined box of decorations. “You know, Skye, Baron’s mother will choose a tile tonight.”

Skye went still. “She … she would never choose me. There are many highborn girls in the tiles this year.” The hairstylist stood on a stool behind her and pulled Skye’s hair into braids, weaving in the rings.

“The politics of the choosing are complex. A choice for the general’s daughter would send a message,” replied her mother.

“It would be an overt act of war not to join Baron with one of the marriageable girls of Silk or Tiger House.” The general’s brow wrinkled with worry.

“If it is war they want, my new mech design will win it.” Skye’s flight jacket was removed, and the dress draped around her. The dressmakers knelt, pins sticking out from their mouths, to correct the hem.

“Stand up straight,” barked her mother. “Your overcoat will be hemmed too short.”

Skye strafed her way through the dense crowd of nervous girls surrounding the choosing table where the silver tiles laid, each engraved with a name. The marriageable young men crowded in corners playing Yunnori and howling at the results, seeming to care little for the outcome of the Choosing, but the young ladies ran their fingers over their own names and gossipped about which girl the house mothers would choose for their sons in the ceremony. Skye closed one eye and targeted the smug first daughter of Tiger House, a pretty girl named Nari. Around one delicate wrist, Nari held the velvet leash of a drugged and declawed tiger that blinked with confusion at the guests.

“I hope you are chosen by a good house, Skye,” she said. “It would disrupt the tedium of these things if a house mother cooked up a surprise.” It was well known that a daughter of Tiger House was a wise diplomatic choice for Baron Silver. Tiger House had been at all-out war with Silver House that year; destroying  much of the Silvers’ cavalry of mechs …

… but with Skye’s renovations …

A finger jabbing into her spine straightened Skye’s posture. Her mother had shadowed her all night, correcting with bruising pokes and hissed instructions. Skye plastered a disingenuous monster of a smile on her face and neglected to answer, choosing instead to hold Nari’s lazy gaze until the high-born girl looked away.

“I need air,” Skye said to no one in particular. She hid two honey pastries in the sleeve of her overcoat on her way outside to the dark balcony. In the far distance, down the great hill upon which the Silver House stood, past the outlying village, past the farmland and minion camps, the crystal mines glowed a calm, eerie blue in the night sky. She stuffed a pastry whole in her mouth.

“You smell of grease.”

Baron stepped close behind her, his words tickling the skin on her neck. He plucked the other pastry from her hand and popped it into his mouth. He wore the silver-embroidered robes of his house and his knuckles were crowded with silver rings. He wore his wealth as was fitting; after all, it was his great-grandfather’s mining that had unearthed the powerful crystal. Other houses had vied for it, battled for it and died for it, but Silver House had held it.

“You’re mistaken,” Skye said, crossing her arms in an act of defiance meant to calm her shaking. “It is the latest perfume. All the ladies are wearing it this season.”

“I do like your hair.”

“I plan on doing it up like this every morning from now on.”

Baron rested his forearms on the balcony wall. “It seems not so long ago that you and I were children together, playing while our fathers pored over maps, or planned jungle battles …”

“And soon your father’s battles will be yours.”

“It is absurd that so many have died for those glowing blue stones.”

Skye peered out at the mines in the distance. “What happens when the mine is depleted?”

“We will own nothing but a pile of empty crystals, their power drained long ago in our war machines. We will dig farther into the farmland, feeding fewer people every year.”

Skye could not look at his eyes. She stared instead at his hands, at the scars from fighting that crosshaired his knuckles. “My father is collecting information about powerful energy wells where crystals may be recharged,” she offered, but Baron shook his head.

“The wells are too far to be of use to us. There are times I wish that the mines would disappear. Then, we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony.”

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye. She covered Baron’s hand with one of hers and jolted with the electricity of it.

“Yes.” Baron turned his hand under hers and opened it. In his palm, a shining silver tile nestled. Skye inhaled the honey from his breath as she drew her fingertips over the tile, over the deep groove of her own name on it. “One day, the army will be mine, and I will need you to be my general.” He curled his fingers around the tile, gripping it, as Skye shivered. “Sometimes, despite everything, a man must choose for himself.”

“The Silver family is honored to choose…”

Skye stepped forward, trying to catch Baron’s eye, as his mother reached toward the tile table.

“… Nari Tiger.”

There was only one astonished gasp in the crowd when Nari’s tile was plucked up. Baron’s eyes did not waver from his newly chosen bride-to-be. Skye’s own tile was still encased inside Baron’s fist, to be chosen that night by no one. Realization gathered like rocks in her throat.

I will need you to be my general.

He hadn’t said wife.

Skye dissolved backward into the crowd, then sprinted out the door and down the hill alone, into the deep night, yanking the rings from her hair. She ran to run, something primal within her chest demanding escape.

At the giant rolling door of the hangar she stopped, her hair wild around her face. Another girl might have gone home to weep into her mother’s arms, but Skye had always felt more at home in the garage with her father, fixing things or, when she was little, breaking them.

It felt good … No. Nothing felt good, but it felt right to get out of the hanbok, to tie her hair up the way she liked it, to rub off the makeup. The familiar grease and gunpowder smell of her jacket soothed her. She climbed up into the mech she’d reappropriated to figure out how she’d ever show her face among the other pilots. How she’d apologize to umma for running out like a minion on fire.

But she could only think about what Baron had said.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

In the quiet, dark hangar, encased in the machine, Skye heard his voice as if he were still close by.

…we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony…

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye.

Baron no longer had a choice, but there was a way she could choose for him.

She powered up the mech, pulled on her gloves, and gripped the handles. Before anyone could stop her, before she thought long enough to stop herself, she walked the mech outside.

Despite the humiliation of the night, despite the gravity of what she was going to do, driving the lighter mech was a thrill. So agile, so fast. She avoided the main gate — unauthorized use of a mech was still a crime, general’s daughter or no — and tip-toed the mech through the minion camp. The beasts slept in haphazard piles, their snores warbling; they were known for brute toughness and obeying orders, not thinking fast, so they gave her no trouble. She shot over the security gate, zig-zagged through a mandarin orchard, hovered over rice paddies and cabbage fields. Here and there laid the rusted and broken remains of rice transplanters and plows, the first machines that had evolved into blasthole drills and frontloaders when Baron’s ancestors had struck silver. When they’d hit crystal, and the other houses discovered the power of the halcyon within the crystals, the mining machines had been repurposed for war. Farmland gave way to trampled dead battleground, brown with bloody mud.

The mech glided over coiled barbed wire and then landed, strong as an eagle perching, on the reinforced wall. Ball-shaped security bots buzzed around her, scanning the mech code, then her retinas.

“Pilot seven-zero-five, you are not authorized for the use of decommissioned mech one-eight-six-four. Please return to headquarters immed-”

With a squeeze of the trigger, Skye strafed to the left and fired. One by one, the bots burst apart and fell, crackling, to the mud.

Staring down into the glowing blue, she flicked a switch to arm the missiles.

“Okay.” She patted an autocannon. “Let’s end this war.” The jet nozzles activated. The mech rose, then hovered over the mine.

The first missile shot deep inside.

The explosion rocked the ground and blasted out millions of tiny crystal shards. Skye ducked behind her arms as the shards pinned themselves into her jacket, poked her legs.

There was no time to lose. She had to complete her mission before anyone could stop her. She strafed and fired, let loose salvo after salvo of missiles, rained death from above into the mines, destroying the crystals that had powered a civilization for generations. The halcyon power that so many had fought and died to possess bloomed into the night sky, then dispersed into the night air.

Baron rolled up the door to the hangar’s private garage. The glowing blue of his skin illuminated the Heavy Armor Rapid Deployment armor parked inside. It had been commissioned for his family’s new alliance, with helmet and joints sculpted into roaring tiger heads, power amplification haptic controls and reinforced plating built to withstand heavy kinetic rounds. He pressed his thumb to the lockpad and the exoframe opened with a quiet hum.

He realized then that he was still holding the silver cage. He lowered it down and swung open the door. The goose lectured him with furious honks before escaping out of the hangar.

~

At the Choosing, a servant had handed the large silver cage to him and guided him with deep backward-walking bows to the line of betrothed young men. Inside the cage, an angry goose flapped and hissed. The other grooms held wooden geese, representing the bird’s tendency to mate for life, but Baron’s mother had insisted that her eldest son have a live goose to present to his future in-laws.

It seemed to bother no one that the goose had been taken from her lifelong mate for the purposes of the ceremony.

Some of the betrothed young women forced their gracious smiles, their sad eyes darting across the room to the men they’d hoped to marry. Nari Tiger’s expression gave away nothing as she bowed before his parents with her two cupped hands full of chestnuts and dates, symbolizing the many children she would bear for him. Baron supposed he’d never know whether he’d been her first choice. It didn’t matter.

“The fireworks are early!” cried Baron’s mother in dismay, pointing at the windows, and a greedy murmur sounded among the guests as they crowded to get outside. Baron’s father chuckled, taking his son by the shoulders and guiding him along with the crowd.

“Your mother will have the pyrotechnicians beheaded,” he murmured.

“As well she should,” said Baron. “The other mothers watch for any mistake.”

They were met at the door by the general. “Sir,” he said, leaning in close to Baron’s father, “it is not fireworks.”

The three men stepped outside together, watching the night sky light up over the distant crystal mines.

“Who would attack the mines?” whispered Baron’s father.

“No one on the peninsula,” said the general. “but the Tigers…”

“They are united with us now.”

“And they do not have this kind of firepower.”

The sky burst with blue fire and smoke billowed up from the source of the land’s only power, its only wealth. “No,” said Baron as understanding sank down his spine. “But we do.”

The general locked eyes with Baron and he turned around, scanning the room for someone he would not find.

Out of the house Baron went, into the smoke roiling with tiny crystal splinters that slid under his skin and glowed blue. Behind him, the families gathered, their growing panic a low murmur. He followed the trail of wilted orchids, loose screws and gold rings to Skye’s repair lift. The blue overcoat Skye had worn to the Choosing lay crumpled there.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

~

He placed his rings and silver-threaded overcoat aside and settled into his exosuit. It locked into place around him, helmet last, the HUD blinking awake as the skydoor whirred open. The jump jets activated with a vibrating rumble that chattered his teeth. He bent his knees and the exoframe bent with him, a powerful extension of his every move; he jumped, launching through the skydoor, high over the hangar, high enough for his visor to register in infrared the scramble of minions in their pens, the burning mines, and all the way at the shoreline of the peninsula, one lone heat signature where he’d known she would be waiting for him.

As always there was a moment when he wished he did not have to come back down.

“Sierra Kilo Yankee Echo,” he said, “do you copy?”

Baron sailed over the orange groves and landed hard on the jagged cliff that overlooked islets surrounded with docked fishing boats. The stone ground split under the weight of his exoframe, sending loose stones tumbling down to the sea. Skye waited there in her renovated mech, guns aimed at the tiger’s mouth framing his helmet.

He lowered the barrel of his grenade launcher. The HUD on his visor targeted around Skye’s face and identified her by name and rank; the serial number of her decommissioned exosuit threaded along the bottom.

“You humiliated me,” whispered Skye; her canned voice echoed from his radio through his helmet.

“Any woman can be a wife.” Baron’s tone was angrier than he’d meant. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot.”

“I thought you wanted to end the war.” Skye glared at her own reflection in his visor, then jammed her elbow back into the throttle; the airjets switched on and lifted her off the ground.

“You have three seconds to exit the vehicle with your hands up,” grunted Baron. “Three.”

“You always said you were afraid you’d never leave the peninsula.” She set the target and the rockets locked into position.

“Two.”

“You told me that war has kept our people ignorant of the outside world. I thought you wanted to change that. I thought you wanted to change it with me.”

“One.”

A mortar shot from Baron’s launcher and the night erupted in blinding light. From inside his helmet the muted explosion was a deep bass roar. The place where Skye had stood was a black blasted hole in the ground.

As the smoke cleared, he took heavy steps to the jagged edge of the cliff and opened his visor. He unclenched his armored fist and looked at the tile there, the one with her name. “I wanted you,” he said to no one. He couldn’t look down. Instead, he turned his wrist to drop the tile over the edge.

“Then you should’ve chosen me.”

With a whoosh, Skye’s mech darted out from behind him and hovered in the air just over the cliff’s edge. Balancing on one foot and holding on with one hand, Skye reached out and snatched the tile out of the air, then dashed back to land at his flank before his HUD could register her movement. He turned, clunky and slow compared to her sleek, open-faced exosuit, lowering his visor just in time to catch a bullet in the glass. A jagged crack formed through her name in the HUD as she let loose with a forward barrage of bullets that pinged off his armor. One embedded in his power panel and set off alarms; his HUD wavered and blinked as she swung around to his back and shot off one of his energy packs; the crystal batteries leaked blue down his leg armor.

“What did you do to that exosuit?” he transmitted.

Her crackling laughter echoed in his helmet. His jump jets activated just in time to escape a rocket artillery strike; the missiles exploded into one another below him. Through the heavy smoke he lobbed down mortar after mortar but he’d lost too much energy to maintain the jump; he crash-landed, rolled onto his side and punched at the pressure-sealed neckring until his helmet came loose. A hundred yards off, Skye’s mech stumbled and shot without aiming into the smoke; her stabilizers were cooked.

Baron overrode the emergency shutdown and triggered the ion cannon, aimed it to where Skye’s mech wobbled. From his helmet, where the HUD blinked with the target coordinates, he heard her voice through the radio. “Baron,” she whimpered. “I’ll fix it. I’ll search for the energy wells. Let me go and I’ll find the tech. I’ll fix it …”

Baron slammed into her and the two careened off the cliff’s edge, his jets on full blast, the ion cannon projecting its devastating beam back to the target location, detonating everything between the cliffs and the groves.

Holding on to one another, their crystal-splintered faces grubby with smoke, their mechs leaking and broken, they coughed and laughed.

“We’ll find the wells together,” he said, watching the ground’s slow approach. “But the mechs are wrecked.”

“I’ll fix that too,” said Skye, and pressed her tile back into his hand.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.

“I do not need your permission to buy a goat,” Julia said. “Goat milk is delicious, and we can make cheese.”

They’d been arguing all evening. Ardan was hunched over his power gauntlet, sanding down the edges of a grill he’d removed to improve air flow. Outside in the yard, a goat shrieked into the moonless dark. “Goats stink and scream like fiends,” he grumped. “It hasn’t stopped for an hour. How will the twins sleep?”

“The kids need a pet. Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“And who will make this alleged cheese? When have you ever made cheese, your highness?”

“I could make cheese!” Julia shouted. She stomped out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her, the goat’s cries dramatizing her exit.

Celeste toddled out of her room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Dadda? Is Mamma alright?”

She had her mother’s accent. Ardan plucked up the toddler in his unarmored arm and kissed her cheeks. “Mamma is being ridiculous.”

“What is ridick oo luss?”

“It means she brought a goat home without talking to me about it.”

“I like goats.” This from Vox, who wandered in after his sister. He seated himself on his father’s foot, wrapped his arms around Ardan’s leg and rode along as Ardan took Celeste back to bed, staring out the window toward the screams.

“You like the idea of goats. None of us actually know how to care for a goat.”

“There’s a baby crying outside,” said Celeste, half asleep.

“It’s the stupid goat,” said Ardan, planting her back in her bed.

Vox uncurled himself from his father’s leg. “He’s afraid,” he said. “Maybe lonely.”

“It’s a she, Vox. At least I hope it is a she, or your mother’s dreams of cheese are –”

Ardan paused, turned toward the window.

The goat had stopped screaming.

His adrenaline spiked.

“Hide, both of you. Do not open the door.”

There was no time to make sure they obeyed him. He ran to his bedroom. “Julia,” he hissed at the bedroom door. “They’re here.”

Julia opened the door. Her face had gone white. “Now?”

“Outside.”

The armor stood in pieces around the front room in various states of renovation. Tools littered the floor. “Legs first,” he grumbled, stepping into the sabatons. Julia scrambled to her knees in her nightdress, a poor but necessary replacement for a proper battle squire. She pinched her fingers on the knee clamps, struggled under the weight of the chest pieces.

The button panel whirred and crackled with static, then burped out: “System. Offline.” Ardan slammed his left fist onto it. “Worthless damn power source on this model…”

“Shh.” Julia’s hands were black with oil, her face smudged as she attached the generator to his back and connected it to the power gauntlet. She stared out the door, into the hall. There was no sound. No disturbance. No goat. “Are you sure they’re…”

“System. Online.”

Glass broke. Ardan turned sideways in time for a metal arrow to slice a scratch through his breastplate, just under his chin, and thud home in the wall opposite the front window. Ardan cursed and squared up, the wood floor creaking under his armored weight. “I’ll watch the front door.”

“But your cannon arm!”

“It’s useless, unless you want me to blow up the house. Stay behind me.”

Julia closed her eyes, turned her palms upward. “I’ll protect you,” she murmured, her voice dreamy, green light forming in her hands.

Ardan winced away from the twisted-guts feeling that magic always gave him. “I can handle myself,” he grunted.

A forearm appeared over the window, decorated in an archer’s gauntlet, and then the archer herself swung inside. Another woman followed and drew her sword. More came in behind her, magicians and assassins, all wearing the same insignia.

“Stormguard!” he yelled, but Julia was lost inside her trance, eyes rolled back.

Ardan’s armor groaned and buzzed as he moved forward, painfully slow, but he was grateful for it when the Stormguard attacked. They moved in tandem, each with a weapon they’d held since childhood. He ran forward, energy buzzing through the armor, propelling him, heating the metal to burning, steel cracking against the breastplate. When he backhanded the archer across her face, he left a burn mark. She crumpled, her bow clattering to the floor.

The others raised shields of wood, metal and magic to counter Julia’s trance and Ardan’s assault. He stomped forward and plowed into them, knocked them from their feet, sent them flying in a crunch of bones to the wall. Their blood spattered the divan. They rolled in shattered glass, discarded weapons and their own knocked-out teeth. He could not resist every attack: Blades sliced through his unprotected arm and his cheeks; magic stung and froze him with deafening whipcrack sounds. But he was a wall between the enemy and his wife, and all the while, he felt warmth coming from her, a blanket that enveloped him, closed his wounds, melted the ice and gave him strength. It churned his insides, these unnatural talents, but he’d deal with the sick when his family was safe.

Then, the blast.

All went silent and cold. His teeth clamped shut. A shock pulsed up through his legs, his arms, his throat. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t blink. Paintings slid from the wall and the bolts fell from the front door. He could hear the static noises from his armor display, the groans from the pile of wounded Stormguard, but he could not move. He could only watch as the front door opened and the last of the Stormguard stepped inside, as if invited. She surveyed the room, then snapped her fingers at two of the guard who were scrambling to their feet even as Ardan struggled to move. She pointed to the twins’ room and the two guards sprinted that way.

The woman walked from the door, past Ardan as if he didn’t exist, to Julia, who stood frozen in her nightdress and bare feet.

“Catherine,” gasped Julia.

“Such a shame,” whispered Catherine as she pressed her sword against Julia’s chest.

Ardan’s heart pounded out one beat. Another. Air filled his lungs and he coughed. To his right, the two Stormguard emerged carrying the twins, stunned as rigid as he. The other Stormguard rose, some shakily, some bleeding, all stone-eyed and with a firm grip on their weapons.

To his left, Julia stared into Catherine’s eyes.

His heart beat a third time.

In another heartbeat, his children or his wife would be dead, depending on which way he ran.

He ran.

The general’s sword, turned sideways, slid easily between Julia’s ribs. Her last breath was his name, and with it came the last otherworldly green swirl of her magic. It hit him, Julia’s last gift becoming part of him, wrapping around his insides, giving him the burst of strength he needed. Ardan wrapped the twins up in his arms and crashed out of the window. The two Stormguard who had taken the children lay unconscious. There hadn’t been time to kill them… or to hold his wife as she died.

He fled from the house into the dark, past the poor dead goat, whose screams had been silenced by one well-placed arrow through the throat. The children remained silent, in some lucky instinct, leaving the questions to the night owls in the trees.

“Stop swinging.”

From the top car of the rusted-out Carnie Wheel in the abandoned amusement park, Celeste gazes down at the mismatched buildings and colorful blinking lights of Taizen Gate. Up there, she can almost forget what it’s like to bump through the crowds, her fingers curled up tight in her brother’s so as not to lose him. How the merchants shove dead fish and live chickens and beeping gadgets in her face in the markets. How she never sleeps well thanks to the MECHANIC sign over her father’s garage that pulses red through her curtains. How the few stars that appear above the bright city call to her.

Vox grins, not even holding on, shifting his weight back and forth hard. “What? Like this? Is this what’s scaring you?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Because if you’re scared, I’ll stop.”

“Shush.”

During the day, she keeps one hand buried in her pocket, a warm sphere of light like a marble clenched in her fist. Just to feel right.

“Admit you’re scared and I’ll stop.”

“When you fall, I’ll laugh.”

Above the noxious halcyon smog that burps its way out of Boiling Bay, the sun sets in dirty oranges and reds. Through the haze that roils a mile inland, giant churn cranes wander, their heads poking up above it to breathe, making swirling valleys that fold in on themselves and disappear. By nightfall, the ground will be packed with the Taizen teenaged underground, shoulder to shoulder, cheering through gas masks. Atop the Carnie Wheel, though, the twins breathe easy.

The amusement car creaks and moans as it swings. “Do you think they’ve found us?” asks Celeste. Everyone in the Taizen underground knows when “tourists” arrive. They try to be stealthy, but no matter how well they imitate the fashion, no matter how good their accent, when they start asking questions, locals spread the word. And when they have rune tattoos, or the sulphur-smelling snap of magic about them, the back tables of the tea rooms buzz with talk, none of it friendly.

“I hope so.” Vox shrugs. “Tired of hiding anyway. Let them come. I want to look in their eyes.”

“You want revenge for Mamma.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want us safe, same as Dad.”

“Safe is no fun.” Vox takes up the swinging with renewed violence. Celeste’s annoyed protests resound below the smog.

THE MASKER RAGE

 00:00.05

It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.

At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.

But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.

Five seconds.

Celeste’s mind wanders.

00:00:04

For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.

“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”

00:00:03

Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.

The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.

“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and

let

go.

The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.

Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.

00:00:02

The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.

As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.

“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.

Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.

Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,

“STOP!”

The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.

00:00:01

Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.

00:00:00

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.

“Command?” responded the computer voice.

“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

*

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.

Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.

And now, his children were falling.

Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

*

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.

Damn it, Vox.

Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.

Celeste!

Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.

Over my dead…

White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.

Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.

“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.

“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.

The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.

Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.

“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”

“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.

Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.

Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.

A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

So we’re headed out of Boiling Bay at top speed, right? Carnie Wheel cars are coming unbolted and like BAM-CRUSH smashing to the left and right of us, and the Stormguard chase after us with these shields that make this ZAP-BZZT-ZAP-BZZT sound, and we’re taking fire over those shields, like magic bolts are slamming into people, and a fireball goes WHOOMSHHHHH through us and creates this freaking puddle of flame that we have to jump over. Dad’s armor is overheating, and this old Gythian war mage who’s doing all the talking is like, “We must escape to the barge!” and Dad’s like, “My daughter will have nothing to do with your old-world politics!” and I’m like, “Can we discuss this later when we aren’t, you know, about to die?”

We race down this old creaking dock toward the RAAAAAHHHHHRRR of these titanbacks that pull the barges. While the soldiers yank on the ropes to float a beast close enough for us to board, the Stormguard march closer, singing a creepy war song. An arrow goes SHTOOMP into the spine of the guy next to me. What’s left of the first line of Gythian defense stabs at the shields like zzzppttt–zzppptt, and Celeste holds my elbow and leans in.

“Do the thing,” she says. Then she smiles at me like everything isn’t chaos, like it’s just us on top of the world again.

So I gather up all the sound I feel. The titanback’s mouth yawns without a sound. The water doesn’t lap-lap-lap against the dock. This energy I’m gathering, it sucks up the Stormguard’s song. The flying arrows don’t whistle. The fireballs don’t crack. The Gythians yelling orders and instructions, they’re silenced. I grab it all, every sound I can find, and ball it all up into my hands. It feels like a beating heart.

I aim it, then I let it go.

It blasts in waves like WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB right at the line of Stormguard. Then the Gythians go to town on those dangerous dames, slice-n-dicing, and the Stormguard retreat, Gythians chasing after them.

I’m expecting accolades, like at least someone could act impressed? But the titanback burps out this big noise and the war mage is already trying to get Celeste onto the barge. Dad isn’t having it. He grabs Celeste back by her wrist. “She isn’t going,” he says.

The war mage goes on about how Celeste has to fulfill her destiny and take the throne blah blah blah, but Dad is having none of it. He even fakes a punch at the Gythian mage to make him flinch. Dad says the Storm Queen is threatening their dying civilization and they think throwing Sis at the problem will fix it. Celeste and I are like whoa. We learned about the tyrant queen in school, how her armies mow down and pillage other cities, killing dissenters and kidnapping talented kids to be raised as Stormguard soldiers.

It gets crazy-tense, and everyone’s talking about what’s best for Celeste. But it feels like my future’s being decided too. And I got a decision to make…

“If there is a way to end her tyranny, shouldn’t I do it?” Celeste says in that calm way that always winds Dad up even worse.

“Your mother thought she could supplant the Storm Queen with technologist help, and look what happened to her.”

Wrong thing to say to Celeste. The girl is hella stubborn on the subject of Mom. “I love you, Dadda, but I won’t ask permission. They’re my people.”

“And you are going to save them, your highness?” Dad scoffs.

“Dad.” I put my hand on his arm. He shakes me off, so I put it back. “Listen.” And I let him hear.

An echo comes from all around us, a voice from a long time ago. It says,

“The kids need a pet.”

Dad spins around, staring all wild-eyed around the dock. “Where…”

“Are you dropping metal shavings on my divan?”

“Julia?” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve heard him say her name since that night.

Then I play Dad’s voice from that night, the part where he’s yelling at Mom.

Dad freezes, his mouth a little open.

“Dad,” I say again. “Celeste is gonna go. This could be the last time you see her. You really want this to be the last conversation you two have?”

There’s this long awkward silent moment where it would be cool of him to say, You’re right, Vox, but no. He just gathers Celeste up into a big metal hug. “You’ll always have me,” he says. He’s the first on the barge, then he helps Celeste get on.

“You’ll always have me, too,” I say while hopping onto the barge, though no one hears me, it being such a weepy father-daughter moment, but whatevs.

I’m the only one who hears the last echo, just a whisper, as I’m following my family out of Boiling Bay:

“Such a shame…”

*

There’s all these rumors and tales about how Celeste is gonna challenge the throne of the Storm Queen (which is still weird for me), and they’re all epic, about how the Gythians and the Stormguard found out where Dad was hiding her, and they battled it out, and the Gythians took us here to the Halcyon Fold to recruit heroes to her cause, and now she’s dropping stars and taking names. But they leave out all the cool stuff I did. At least now you know the full story… and it’s not the last you’ll hear from me.

“You aren’t supposed to be here today.” The general’s long shadow stretched into the hangar from the rolled-up garage door.

Skye peeked out from the cockpit of a mech with half its front armor blown out, metal blackened and curling in from the impact point. With a screwdriver between her teeth, she tossed a charred actuator onto the ground and called out, “I’m glad you’re here, Appa. I want to show you my plans for the decommissioned exosuits.”

“You promised your mother.”

“The engines are okay. The shields cause all the issues.” She hunched down behind what was left of the front armor, only slices of her showing in the blasted-out hole. “Every new generation of these machines, we add more armor, which means more weight, which means bigger engines and more crystal power …”

“…which means more dependence on the crystal mines, which means more war.” The general’s face was hard-lined, but his eyes and voice softened. “This is not the time for this discussion.”

“The mechs take fire because they’re too slow.” Loosened screws tink-tink-tinked to the ground, then Skye kicked at the wrecked armor from the inside. “We’re going about it the wrong way. We need … more… mobility.” A word for every kick with her combat boots, until the front armor crashed to the ground, exposing her in the cockpit. “We should be going lighter on the mechs and heavier on the firepower. I put the 25-millimeter autocannons on this one. With the vectored thrust jet nozzles on an integrated airfoil on the back, it’s light enough for halcyon-tipped rockets. I know it’s a risk, but …”

“Skye. She is coming.”

“Where? Here?”

“Ah. Here she is. Go to work, people.” A dozen clattering footsteps accompanied a shrill voice from the garage door. Two men dragged a full-length mirror to a workbench. A dressmaker and his assistants, pins poking from their pressed lips, set up a mannequin. The manicurist, hairstylist and makeup bot took over the workbench. The voice followed behind, barking out orders; it belonged to a small woman with tall, upknotted hair and black eyes. “Mind the grease. That silk cost more than your monthly wages.”

“Umma, what are you doing here?” Skye whined, slumping in the cockpit.

“Your name will be chosen from the tiles tonight. Get out of that thing.” Skye’s mother stood next to her husband at a stern parade rest.

“I don’t want to be chosen. There’s a war happening.” But Skye obeyed, climbing down to join the crowd, casting a betrayed glance at her father.

He shrugged. “There is always war. You cannot be a soldier forever.”

“I’m a pilot, Appa. And I’m the best pilot you’ve… ow!” She winced as the makeup bot attacked her eyebrows with tweezers. The manicurist sat on a stool beside her and clucked under her breath at the broken nails and calluses. The hairstylist pulled Skye’s hair out of its knot and yanked through the tangles with a comb.

“No black around her eyes,” Skye’s mother said to the makeup bot. “It makes them small. And overdraw her lips; they are too thin.”

The makeup bot bowed and rummaged through its box of powders and creams while Skye scowled. “What happens if you’re lucky tonight, and some high-placed family chooses me for their son? What will he say when he sees me without all this stuff on my face?”

“A fish is not kept the same way it is caught.”

“Great,” grumbled Skye. “So men are fish.”

“Gold rings and orchids for her hair,” mused Skye’s mother, peering down at a velvet-lined box of decorations. “You know, Skye, Baron’s mother will choose a tile tonight.”

Skye went still. “She … she would never choose me. There are many highborn girls in the tiles this year.” The hairstylist stood on a stool behind her and pulled Skye’s hair into braids, weaving in the rings.

“The politics of the choosing are complex. A choice for the general’s daughter would send a message,” replied her mother.

“It would be an overt act of war not to join Baron with one of the marriageable girls of Silk or Tiger House.” The general’s brow wrinkled with worry.

“If it is war they want, my new mech design will win it.” Skye’s flight jacket was removed, and the dress draped around her. The dressmakers knelt, pins sticking out from their mouths, to correct the hem.

“Stand up straight,” barked her mother. “Your overcoat will be hemmed too short.”

Skye strafed her way through the dense crowd of nervous girls surrounding the choosing table where the silver tiles laid, each engraved with a name. The marriageable young men crowded in corners playing Yunnori and howling at the results, seeming to care little for the outcome of the Choosing, but the young ladies ran their fingers over their own names and gossipped about which girl the house mothers would choose for their sons in the ceremony. Skye closed one eye and targeted the smug first daughter of Tiger House, a pretty girl named Nari. Around one delicate wrist, Nari held the velvet leash of a drugged and declawed tiger that blinked with confusion at the guests.

“I hope you are chosen by a good house, Skye,” she said. “It would disrupt the tedium of these things if a house mother cooked up a surprise.” It was well known that a daughter of Tiger House was a wise diplomatic choice for Baron Silver. Tiger House had been at all-out war with Silver House that year; destroying  much of the Silvers’ cavalry of mechs …

… but with Skye’s renovations …

A finger jabbing into her spine straightened Skye’s posture. Her mother had shadowed her all night, correcting with bruising pokes and hissed instructions. Skye plastered a disingenuous monster of a smile on her face and neglected to answer, choosing instead to hold Nari’s lazy gaze until the high-born girl looked away.

“I need air,” Skye said to no one in particular. She hid two honey pastries in the sleeve of her overcoat on her way outside to the dark balcony. In the far distance, down the great hill upon which the Silver House stood, past the outlying village, past the farmland and minion camps, the crystal mines glowed a calm, eerie blue in the night sky. She stuffed a pastry whole in her mouth.

“You smell of grease.”

Baron stepped close behind her, his words tickling the skin on her neck. He plucked the other pastry from her hand and popped it into his mouth. He wore the silver-embroidered robes of his house and his knuckles were crowded with silver rings. He wore his wealth as was fitting; after all, it was his great-grandfather’s mining that had unearthed the powerful crystal. Other houses had vied for it, battled for it and died for it, but Silver House had held it.

“You’re mistaken,” Skye said, crossing her arms in an act of defiance meant to calm her shaking. “It is the latest perfume. All the ladies are wearing it this season.”

“I do like your hair.”

“I plan on doing it up like this every morning from now on.”

Baron rested his forearms on the balcony wall. “It seems not so long ago that you and I were children together, playing while our fathers pored over maps, or planned jungle battles …”

“And soon your father’s battles will be yours.”

“It is absurd that so many have died for those glowing blue stones.”

Skye peered out at the mines in the distance. “What happens when the mine is depleted?”

“We will own nothing but a pile of empty crystals, their power drained long ago in our war machines. We will dig farther into the farmland, feeding fewer people every year.”

Skye could not look at his eyes. She stared instead at his hands, at the scars from fighting that crosshaired his knuckles. “My father is collecting information about powerful energy wells where crystals may be recharged,” she offered, but Baron shook his head.

“The wells are too far to be of use to us. There are times I wish that the mines would disappear. Then, we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony.”

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye. She covered Baron’s hand with one of hers and jolted with the electricity of it.

“Yes.” Baron turned his hand under hers and opened it. In his palm, a shining silver tile nestled. Skye inhaled the honey from his breath as she drew her fingertips over the tile, over the deep groove of her own name on it. “One day, the army will be mine, and I will need you to be my general.” He curled his fingers around the tile, gripping it, as Skye shivered. “Sometimes, despite everything, a man must choose for himself.”

“The Silver family is honored to choose…”

Skye stepped forward, trying to catch Baron’s eye, as his mother reached toward the tile table.

“… Nari Tiger.”

There was only one astonished gasp in the crowd when Nari’s tile was plucked up. Baron’s eyes did not waver from his newly chosen bride-to-be. Skye’s own tile was still encased inside Baron’s fist, to be chosen that night by no one. Realization gathered like rocks in her throat.

I will need you to be my general.

He hadn’t said wife.

Skye dissolved backward into the crowd, then sprinted out the door and down the hill alone, into the deep night, yanking the rings from her hair. She ran to run, something primal within her chest demanding escape.

At the giant rolling door of the hangar she stopped, her hair wild around her face. Another girl might have gone home to weep into her mother’s arms, but Skye had always felt more at home in the garage with her father, fixing things or, when she was little, breaking them.

It felt good … No. Nothing felt good, but it felt right to get out of the hanbok, to tie her hair up the way she liked it, to rub off the makeup. The familiar grease and gunpowder smell of her jacket soothed her. She climbed up into the mech she’d reappropriated to figure out how she’d ever show her face among the other pilots. How she’d apologize to umma for running out like a minion on fire.

But she could only think about what Baron had said.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

In the quiet, dark hangar, encased in the machine, Skye heard his voice as if he were still close by.

…we would have no need of mechs and tanks, nor the filthy minions, nor this ridiculous choosing ceremony…

“The choice would be ours,” whispered Skye.

Baron no longer had a choice, but there was a way she could choose for him.

She powered up the mech, pulled on her gloves, and gripped the handles. Before anyone could stop her, before she thought long enough to stop herself, she walked the mech outside.

Despite the humiliation of the night, despite the gravity of what she was going to do, driving the lighter mech was a thrill. So agile, so fast. She avoided the main gate — unauthorized use of a mech was still a crime, general’s daughter or no — and tip-toed the mech through the minion camp. The beasts slept in haphazard piles, their snores warbling; they were known for brute toughness and obeying orders, not thinking fast, so they gave her no trouble. She shot over the security gate, zig-zagged through a mandarin orchard, hovered over rice paddies and cabbage fields. Here and there laid the rusted and broken remains of rice transplanters and plows, the first machines that had evolved into blasthole drills and frontloaders when Baron’s ancestors had struck silver. When they’d hit crystal, and the other houses discovered the power of the halcyon within the crystals, the mining machines had been repurposed for war. Farmland gave way to trampled dead battleground, brown with bloody mud.

The mech glided over coiled barbed wire and then landed, strong as an eagle perching, on the reinforced wall. Ball-shaped security bots buzzed around her, scanning the mech code, then her retinas.

“Pilot seven-zero-five, you are not authorized for the use of decommissioned mech one-eight-six-four. Please return to headquarters immed-”

With a squeeze of the trigger, Skye strafed to the left and fired. One by one, the bots burst apart and fell, crackling, to the mud.

Staring down into the glowing blue, she flicked a switch to arm the missiles.

“Okay.” She patted an autocannon. “Let’s end this war.” The jet nozzles activated. The mech rose, then hovered over the mine.

The first missile shot deep inside.

The explosion rocked the ground and blasted out millions of tiny crystal shards. Skye ducked behind her arms as the shards pinned themselves into her jacket, poked her legs.

There was no time to lose. She had to complete her mission before anyone could stop her. She strafed and fired, let loose salvo after salvo of missiles, rained death from above into the mines, destroying the crystals that had powered a civilization for generations. The halcyon power that so many had fought and died to possess bloomed into the night sky, then dispersed into the night air.

Baron rolled up the door to the hangar’s private garage. The glowing blue of his skin illuminated the Heavy Armor Rapid Deployment armor parked inside. It had been commissioned for his family’s new alliance, with helmet and joints sculpted into roaring tiger heads, power amplification haptic controls and reinforced plating built to withstand heavy kinetic rounds. He pressed his thumb to the lockpad and the exoframe opened with a quiet hum.

He realized then that he was still holding the silver cage. He lowered it down and swung open the door. The goose lectured him with furious honks before escaping out of the hangar.

~

At the Choosing, a servant had handed the large silver cage to him and guided him with deep backward-walking bows to the line of betrothed young men. Inside the cage, an angry goose flapped and hissed. The other grooms held wooden geese, representing the bird’s tendency to mate for life, but Baron’s mother had insisted that her eldest son have a live goose to present to his future in-laws.

It seemed to bother no one that the goose had been taken from her lifelong mate for the purposes of the ceremony.

Some of the betrothed young women forced their gracious smiles, their sad eyes darting across the room to the men they’d hoped to marry. Nari Tiger’s expression gave away nothing as she bowed before his parents with her two cupped hands full of chestnuts and dates, symbolizing the many children she would bear for him. Baron supposed he’d never know whether he’d been her first choice. It didn’t matter.

“The fireworks are early!” cried Baron’s mother in dismay, pointing at the windows, and a greedy murmur sounded among the guests as they crowded to get outside. Baron’s father chuckled, taking his son by the shoulders and guiding him along with the crowd.

“Your mother will have the pyrotechnicians beheaded,” he murmured.

“As well she should,” said Baron. “The other mothers watch for any mistake.”

They were met at the door by the general. “Sir,” he said, leaning in close to Baron’s father, “it is not fireworks.”

The three men stepped outside together, watching the night sky light up over the distant crystal mines.

“Who would attack the mines?” whispered Baron’s father.

“No one on the peninsula,” said the general. “but the Tigers…”

“They are united with us now.”

“And they do not have this kind of firepower.”

The sky burst with blue fire and smoke billowed up from the source of the land’s only power, its only wealth. “No,” said Baron as understanding sank down his spine. “But we do.”

The general locked eyes with Baron and he turned around, scanning the room for someone he would not find.

Out of the house Baron went, into the smoke roiling with tiny crystal splinters that slid under his skin and glowed blue. Behind him, the families gathered, their growing panic a low murmur. He followed the trail of wilted orchids, loose screws and gold rings to Skye’s repair lift. The blue overcoat Skye had worn to the Choosing lay crumpled there.

There are times I wish that the mines would disappear.

~

He placed his rings and silver-threaded overcoat aside and settled into his exosuit. It locked into place around him, helmet last, the HUD blinking awake as the skydoor whirred open. The jump jets activated with a vibrating rumble that chattered his teeth. He bent his knees and the exoframe bent with him, a powerful extension of his every move; he jumped, launching through the skydoor, high over the hangar, high enough for his visor to register in infrared the scramble of minions in their pens, the burning mines, and all the way at the shoreline of the peninsula, one lone heat signature where he’d known she would be waiting for him.

As always there was a moment when he wished he did not have to come back down.

“Sierra Kilo Yankee Echo,” he said, “do you copy?”

Baron sailed over the orange groves and landed hard on the jagged cliff that overlooked islets surrounded with docked fishing boats. The stone ground split under the weight of his exoframe, sending loose stones tumbling down to the sea. Skye waited there in her renovated mech, guns aimed at the tiger’s mouth framing his helmet.

He lowered the barrel of his grenade launcher. The HUD on his visor targeted around Skye’s face and identified her by name and rank; the serial number of her decommissioned exosuit threaded along the bottom.

“You humiliated me,” whispered Skye; her canned voice echoed from his radio through his helmet.

“Any woman can be a wife.” Baron’s tone was angrier than he’d meant. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot.”

“I thought you wanted to end the war.” Skye glared at her own reflection in his visor, then jammed her elbow back into the throttle; the airjets switched on and lifted her off the ground.

“You have three seconds to exit the vehicle with your hands up,” grunted Baron. “Three.”

“You always said you were afraid you’d never leave the peninsula.” She set the target and the rockets locked into position.

“Two.”

“You told me that war has kept our people ignorant of the outside world. I thought you wanted to change that. I thought you wanted to change it with me.”

“One.”

A mortar shot from Baron’s launcher and the night erupted in blinding light. From inside his helmet the muted explosion was a deep bass roar. The place where Skye had stood was a black blasted hole in the ground.

As the smoke cleared, he took heavy steps to the jagged edge of the cliff and opened his visor. He unclenched his armored fist and looked at the tile there, the one with her name. “I wanted you,” he said to no one. He couldn’t look down. Instead, he turned his wrist to drop the tile over the edge.

“Then you should’ve chosen me.”

With a whoosh, Skye’s mech darted out from behind him and hovered in the air just over the cliff’s edge. Balancing on one foot and holding on with one hand, Skye reached out and snatched the tile out of the air, then dashed back to land at his flank before his HUD could register her movement. He turned, clunky and slow compared to her sleek, open-faced exosuit, lowering his visor just in time to catch a bullet in the glass. A jagged crack formed through her name in the HUD as she let loose with a forward barrage of bullets that pinged off his armor. One embedded in his power panel and set off alarms; his HUD wavered and blinked as she swung around to his back and shot off one of his energy packs; the crystal batteries leaked blue down his leg armor.

“What did you do to that exosuit?” he transmitted.

Her crackling laughter echoed in his helmet. His jump jets activated just in time to escape a rocket artillery strike; the missiles exploded into one another below him. Through the heavy smoke he lobbed down mortar after mortar but he’d lost too much energy to maintain the jump; he crash-landed, rolled onto his side and punched at the pressure-sealed neckring until his helmet came loose. A hundred yards off, Skye’s mech stumbled and shot without aiming into the smoke; her stabilizers were cooked.

Baron overrode the emergency shutdown and triggered the ion cannon, aimed it to where Skye’s mech wobbled. From his helmet, where the HUD blinked with the target coordinates, he heard her voice through the radio. “Baron,” she whimpered. “I’ll fix it. I’ll search for the energy wells. Let me go and I’ll find the tech. I’ll fix it …”

Baron slammed into her and the two careened off the cliff’s edge, his jets on full blast, the ion cannon projecting its devastating beam back to the target location, detonating everything between the cliffs and the groves.

Holding on to one another, their crystal-splintered faces grubby with smoke, their mechs leaking and broken, they coughed and laughed.

“We’ll find the wells together,” he said, watching the ground’s slow approach. “But the mechs are wrecked.”

“I’ll fix that too,” said Skye, and pressed her tile back into his hand.

Staying in shape while out in the field is a simple matter of discipline. Here’s how SAW stays shredded even while deployed out in the jungle.

DO YOU EVEN LIFT?

Fill ammo cans with sand to get your curls, rows, and bench press. Do pullups off the turret guns. Military press your weapon.

Living in the field is no excuse for skipping leg day. Carry the ammo cans during walking lunges and step-ups. Knock down jungle trees, sit beautiful women on both ends, hold on shoulders and squat.

TURRET DRAG AND PUSH

Tie a rope around the base of a turret. Tie the rope around your waist and drag the turret. Drag it forward for 50 meters, then untie the rope from your waist, turn around, and drag the turret backward with your hands for another 50 meters. Move to the other side of the turret and push forward the last 50 meters. Turn around and repeat.

(Note: if you’re a wimp beginner, start with a large tire.)

MINION CATCH, CARRY, SLAM AND TOSS

Just holding these squirrely buggers is a core workout! Catch one big minion or two small ones; for High Intensity Interval Training, farmer-carry them back to HQ. Press overhead, keeping elbows out, knees slightly bent, then use the whole body to slam them onto the ground at your feet.

Pick up and repeat until they no longer wiggle, then get new ones. For ever more explosive power, throw the minions from the overhead position, sprint to them, pick up and throw again.

Keep this up and you too can achieve SAW’s ripped physique even while deployed!

Look at that, Mister Mayor, we seem to have drawn a crowd with this misunderstanding between us. Allow me to explain again: My mission was to eliminate a monster that had been tearing up your jungle treehouse town, here. You said it’d be a simple setup. One-day operation: I pick up the target’s trail, run it down and bounce back across the border before anyone knows I’m there.

I fixed on the target’s position thirty klicks outside town. It used the trees. Jumped out at me from 10 meters up, dug into my back. The enemy appeared to be some kind of female human-cat hybrid moving on all fours, with steel claws on her feet and hands. I engaged her in combat, but she pinned me down, ripped the arms clean off my shirt, jumped on my weapon, got herself a mean brass hickey on her foot and howled. I popped smoke before she could give me a free appendectomy, hunkered down into a secure position 50 meters off and laid suppressive fire on the area. I blew the leaves off every tree for 100 meters and couldn’t find a thing. Not a trace. No blood, no body. I hit nothing.

That’s why I loaded Gracie here with explosive shells and lit up the enemy’s base of operation. Nothing could’ve lived. Not at that range. I understand that the ensuing smoke and the destruction of the roads has made business difficult for your citizens, but no one said it was a hush operation. The beast in question has not surfaced in 72 hours, so she is presumed dead and my mission is accomplished. And that, Mister Mayor, is why you are in a choke hold pending payment to me in the amount of 500 gold or equivalent crystal.

Before it surfaced, the ground rumbled intermittently for hours, tearing cracks in the walls and streets of the city, and from these cracks leaked foul-smelling steam. There was a great rhythmic pounding the last hour of sunset, so powerful that the people’s hearts beat along with it.

The soldier stood in an alley outside the city walls, just hours away from retirement, one palm on the wall, relieving himself. He’d rolled everything he owned into his rucksack, including his paltry final payment. If the ground opened up and took that ruck he wouldn’t miss it, and no one would miss him. His platoon was down south, fighting without him, and at midnight he’d be a civilian for the first time in his adult life. His paperwork had been submitted and filed, his weapons and armor turned in. The night the churn monster punched its powerful limbs through the surface of the sea, the soldier’s military tattoos were well faded.

He was only there at the harbor long enough to catch a ship home – though he had no one to go home to – but the earthquakes had caused rogue waves that anchored the ships. People had been screaming for hours, their houses falling down around them, fires bursting out, loved ones falling into the places where the ground opened up. Not his problem. If he managed to get out of there, it would be the first time he’d escaped from a burning city he hadn’t lit up himself.

When the wall shook under his hand and crumbled, he sighed. A deafening crack sounded from inside the building, then the roof caved in. Toward the harbor, a bonfire burned out the stars. Seemed getting out of this town would take some doing. Abandoning his ruck, he walked toward the burning like he’d been trained to do. He didn’t have anywhere else to be.

People panicked, trampled one another to get away from the sea. He dodged civilians, then he shouldered past guards who had fled their posts at the wall. The closer to the burning he got, the more he had to climb over debris and wounded people. Smoke clogged his throat and eyes. He breathed easier after taking the mask from some unlucky local peacekeeper who’d fallen off the wall.

When a whale came flying over the wall, landing in a wet, bloody slam on the street behind him, he knew this was more than seismic activity. Earthquakes don’t throw whales.

The soldier climbed high as he could on what was left of the abandoned wall and surveyed the scene. Whatever remained on dry land burned. The harbor had split in half and the sea poured through the new fissure, lapping its tongues against the wall. Water sucked downward in the places where the sea floor had cracked, and from those cracks came… arms? tentacles? Visibility was minimal through the smoke. The limbs coiled around cannons from a nearby ship’s broadside gun deck, pried them loose and threw them at the city.

Looking down, swaying in the wind, the soldier saw the sea dump downward in the middle of those tentacles, and from it emerged the head of something giant and angry.

The night sky roiled with smoke from above. A fleet of airships hovered low, dropping everything they had on the monster. Bombs exploded on the thing’s face and it sank under the sea, roaring in the low-pitched sound of nightmares. It soon resurfaced with a vengeance. A tentacle burst skyward, coiled around the stabilizer spar of the nearest airship and brought it down. The doomed ship fell with the same trajectory as the whale had, crashed nose-first on what had once been a thriving harbor, and burned.

The airship’s survivors rolled out onto the shambles of the harbor, extinguishing the fire from their uniforms, dangling broken limbs. The masked soldier tripped and fumbled down the harbor side of the wall, loose bits of it rolling under his boots, then ducked a flaming projectile. A worthless propeller continued to spin as he raced through the wreckage toward the mounted squad automatic weapons on deck. There was only one not cracked in half or on fire. He kicked the mount loose, yanked the weapon free, hauled it up over his shoulder and sidestepped across the narrow gangway to a topmost vantage point.

There, he found himself eye to eye with the churn beast. The largest eye was as big as the soldier was tall. Its mouth yawned open, fish flopping over its seaweed-wrapped tongue.

The soldier had never stared down a creature like this, but danger was danger – and all danger required running or fighting. With the airship burning away below him, there was no escape.

He aimed the weapon down into the gullet of the leviathan and fired the explosive shells. The kickback near knocked his shoulder out of its socket. The beast spasmed, whined, retreated under the steaming water, then exploded upward with a roar. There was nothing to do but fire… and fire… and fire fire fire until all the shells had been deposited into the belly of the beast.

The airship’s flames licked at his boots as the shells exploded in the throat of the monster, cutting off its roars. Underwater booms melded with the sounds of airship propellers and wood cracking under the threat of fire. The monster twisted, whined, retreated and flopped its tentacles onto the water, sending seawater spraying.

So his last moments alive would be like this. Wasn’t a bad way to go, all things considered. Holding a big freaking gun. Maybe the smoke would choke him out before the pain got too bad.

That’s when he saw the rope coming out of the haze by his face, dangling from one of the airships above.

He laughed. So the world wasn’t done with him yet. SAW rested his new weapon over his shoulder, grabbed onto the rope with the other fist and let the ship pull him up while the rubber of his boots melted in the flames and the monster disappeared, sinking into the deep.

The Grangor people stood watch on a high icy shelf to watch the flames swallow the winding spires of Trostan. Smoke glittered around their faces and clogged their lungs as the city that had been the heart of the Gythian crystal trade turned into the mouth of hell. They threw Gythian gold down into the crevasse for safe passage for the dead. The coins had become, in one day, useless anywhere within a hundred miles.

The wise ones gathered in a snow-dusted cluster and thumped their staves on the ground in the ancient story rhythm. With a judgmental lick of his one tusk, the eldest began the first Telling of the story that would be told and retold for generations:

“It was Trostan once, but soon it will be forgotten.”

“The wise ones knew,” they sang in chorus.

“Humans came to tear holes in the glaciers. They came to rip the crystal from the earth. They came to drink of the well,” continued the next-eldest in her shrill tone.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Our trophy-hunters traded with humans for steel,” called the next.

“The wise ones knew.”

“The city collapsed under its own greed,” crooned another.

“The wise ones knew.”

“Their ancestors lie too far to carry home their souls,” wailed the eldest.

“The wise ones kn…”

An icy blast from the peak above trembled the ground and broke their song. “Sisuuk!” screamed a Mother, gathering her kits close. All eyes turned away from the flames to look upward. Instead of an avalanche, though, what came forth along with the freezing wind was a man, his spine bent with age, spotted skin fragile as onion layers. His claw-like hand gripped a staff. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt of a Grangor. Though none of the Grangor had seen him before, they all knew of the elusive recluse. Reim, they called him, master of ice, devourer of Grangor, terror of the Kall Peaks. Though they outnumbered him by many dozens, the Grangor backed away, weapons at the ready, while the ice mage exhaled enraged breaths that crystallized into frost.  

“Where is the boy?” he growled.

“His mother knows,” replied the eldest, but it was only an expression among the Grangor. It meant that a thing could not be known.

With a sneer, Reim turned away from the Grangor and walked the path down the mountainside, grumbling to himself all the way. The river that bordered the burning city flowed black with ash. Reim struck his staff on the ground and the flowing water froze in place. He shuffled over it, coughing and hacking, into the city, waving his staff in irritation at the fires as he passed them. They sizzled and hissed into frozen, charred kindling.

“Kid!” he called. “Hey kid!”

The city had bustled with trade and travelers that morning; now, only the livestock raced away from their burned enclosures to the rivers at either side of the basin.

The mage choked the fires under his conjured frost one by one, leaving destroyed homes and businesses under thick sheets of ice, by turns calling out and mumbling to himself. He stopped to roll his eyes at the mage tower, resplendent in its ancient Gythian spires, the center of Trostan’s government. The top third had collapsed; the rest was a scorched husk of its former magnificence. This, too, he left frozen behind him. Round the town he traveled, tension rising in his voice. “Hey kid, you’re late! Where’d you get off to?” he continued until he reached the halcyon well at the center, the only thing unaffected by the flames. Noxious fumes rose from the burnt detritus of Trostan, drowned under ice. There, at the well’s edge, was a small woman with her face buried in the furry shoulder of a much larger Grangor. In one hand, she held a lantern that cast eerie shadows in the swirling ash.

“Ay!” shouted Reim with an annoyed clearing of his throat.  “Who’s in charge here!”

The woman turned her soot-stained face, mapped with tears, toward the stranger, revealing the singed remains of the robes of a High Mage of Gythia. Her shoulders rolled back, her chin tilted up, and though she was much smaller than the other two, the answer to Reim’s question had been answered.

“The boy,” he demanded.

The woman shook her head and held the Grangor’s forearm for support. “He’s gone,” she answered, then looked up at the Grangor’s chubby face. “Everything is gone.”

A teenaged boy stood at the mouth of the cave, ice axe in his gloved hand, steel spikes buckled to his boots, furs wrapped round everything but his dark eyes. It had been more than a decade since the last daring hopeful had attempted to maneuver through the steep tunnels that wound upward inside the glacier atop which Reim, the ice mage of legend, made his home. It had been much longer since anyone had been granted an audience.

“She will kill me if you don’t come home,” said his stout Grangor companion.

“I’ve climbed scarier things than this.”

“It isn’t the climb that worries me. It’s what’s at the top.”

The boy patted the Grangor on his snow-dusted shoulder, then began his slow, slippery ascent.

When the boy popped his head out at the top, struggling for breath, he was eye level with a pair of furry boots. The famed ice mage himself waited, ripping apart pine cones and munching on the nuts. “Magister!” cried the boy, holding up one hand for help, “I have come to learn from you.”

“Lesson one,” grunted Reim, planting a boot in the center of the boy’s forehead. “Leave me alone.” With a little nudge, the boy slid back down the icy tunnel on his belly, his oofs and thuds echoing along with the mage’s laughter, all the way down to the Grangor’s feet.

“Um,” said the Grangor.

“I’m fine,” gasped the boy, and began again.

When he reached the top, he found Reim sitting by his tent cross-legged, eating lichen out of the first stomach of a half-frozen reindeer. “Magister,” he said, rising to his feet, “I have heard great tales of your magic.”

The mage chewed with his mouth open.

“I am Mageborn. I have reached the ninth level of Gythian mage discipline. I have passed the test of the Grangor hunter.”

Reim’s fluffy white eyebrows did not rise with interest.

The boy lost patience. “Or maybe you’re just a crazy old man. Maybe the wise ones tell the stories of you just to scare the kits.”

Reim pressed one finger to his nostril and honked a frozen booger out onto the boy’s cheek.

Insulted, the boy descended through the tunnels again. The Grangor sat by a little fire.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said the boy.

“Trying again?” replied the Grangor.

“Yes,” said the boy, and climbed again.

This time, he knelt in the snow before the ice mage. He unwrapped the furs from his head and pressed his face into the puffy new snow on the ground. “Magister,” he said, his words muffled, “I read about what happened to your son. Please help me to avoid his fate.”

Reim ignored him and went about his day. He gathered meat from his traps and snares. He ate. He napped. At sunset, he kicked the boy on his shoulder. “You want hypothermia?” he yelled in the deaf way of old men. “Come inside, you idiot!”

In a tent made of Grangor skins and tusks, Reim waited until the boy’s teeth stopped chattering.

“What’s your name!”

“Samuel,” said the boy.

“And you consort with the filthy cats?”

Samuel’s shoulders tensed. “The Grangor people are …”

“… are not people. And passing their little test won’t grow fur on your butt. So what are you?”

“I am Gythian. The Mageborn son of Archmage Lora, head of the war division of the mage guild …”

“You’re as Gythian as you are Grangor.”

“I can trace my bloodline back for ten Gythian generations.”

“Yeah? Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?”

Samuel’s eyes dropped. “I … I have been fostered in Trostan since I was four.”

“Then the servant who dumps your grand archmage mother’s chamberpot is more Gythian than you are.” Reim hacked out a laugh. “Mageborn. Bred like a dog. When Gythia finds something that doesn’t work, by golly they stick to it.”

“Your son was Mageborn,” whispered Samuel.

“If you don’t wanna end up like my son,” said Reim, closing his eyes, “don’t bother with the tenth level of Gythian mage discipline. Swab the deck of one of the ships hauling crystal out of Trostan. Tend one of those balmy Lillian vineyards. Heck, collect creature eyeballs with those walking furballs. Forget about magic, and forget about Gythia.”

“But my mother …”

“… didn’t want you, or she would’ve raised you.”

The snow-blanketed silence filled the tent.

Reim opened the flap of the tent. “Go home,” he grumped.

Resolute, Samuel crawled outside and wrapped the furs back around his face. The soupy gray sky flashed with green and red streaks of light.

“And be back at dawn!” bellowed the ice mage.

Samuel grinned back at the tent as the flap fell closed.

On the muddy shore of Trostan, Lyra watched a Grangor search expedition wind their way through the ghost town, past the glowing blue well of power and up the glacier trail. For days they had sorted through the smoking rubble, rubbing ash away from the faces of the dead, hearts in their throats, but Samuel had not been found.

The old ice mage shuffled up beside her, leaning his weight on a staff, one bushy eyebrow raised. “No one’ll blame you if you don’t go back.”

Lyra didn’t hesitate. “I am Gythian.”

“Uh huh.” Reim made the blah-blah motion with one gnarled hand.

“It’s time,” she said.

Reim stretched out one arm; from his palm, a spinning ice ball formed. Lyra’s breath froze in her throat. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Frost leapt from Reim’s fingers; icicles formed on his beard; ice coated his staff and he slammed it into the mud. The ground shook as an ice spire shot up at the center of Trostan, spearing the sky, sealing the well.

“Your turn,” said Reim. “Shut it down.”

The spellbook blinked and fluttered open between her hands; the ancient words dropped from her mouth. The city’s magic borders scrolled away from the sky, fluttered in the air and returned to the book. Held back for decades, roiling clouds fled down from the peaks, flooding the destroyed city, releasing snow in fat flakes that blanketed the seared wreckage in blinding white.

The mages boarded the last of the ships. From the stern, Lyra hugged her spellbook to her chest and watched the expanse of her life’s work shrink away into the distance. It had begun as a frozen camp for miners, thieves and get-rich-quick schemes, but within Lyra’s protective barriers, it had become a pocket of color in desolate white. Gythian settlers had filled it with spires, sculpture, vegetation, legitimate trade and proper jurisprudence. The mage tower of Trostan, though a shadow of the one at home, had been all her own, its rounded walls lined with books and art, now ash.

~

Twenty years and some earlier, the view from the prow of the icebreaker ship, with its strengthened hull crunched up against what would soon be the port of Trostan, was of white and more white, sandwiched between a cruel gray sky and a choppy gray sea.

The fateswoman’s dour mouth twisted under her white hood as she dumped the divine doves out of their gilded cage without ceremony. When they flew into the masts, she proclaimed it a positive augur as she’d been paid to do. The reading of the fates mattered not at all to Lyra, but the surrounding ship decks were packed with lower-born citizens who would not have disembarked without a good augur. These explorers and miners had settled this forsaken and frozen area of the Kall Peaks, where only Grangor had roamed before crystal had been found. High above, on the ledges of the mountains, the cat-beasts themselves watched. If Lyra succeeded, more ships would follow from Gythia with future Trostanians: architects, merchants, artists, agriculturalists with their seedlings and livestock, more miners and equipment and shipbuilders, teachers and physicians for their children.

Lyra huddled under a red fur cape that would have commanded respect were it not soaking wet. Spring in the Kalls meant sleet, a sleet that slammed into the sea at such a volume that her speech about the glory of the empire and hope for a future of affluence was abandoned.

Never before had so many eyes laid upon her. Never before had so much responsibility rested on her shoulders. Never before had she wished for failure.

“If there is a day for it, let it be today,” she muttered.

“What?” bellowed her Grangor guide. Though covered in fur, he seemed no worse for wear; the wetness slid away from him and his toothy grin triumphed over the storm.

“I had a speech prepared,” she yelled back. “I don’t think they’ll hear it!”

“May as well just do your thing!” The Grangor’s claws clasped together over his generous belly.

Lyra focused her gaze on the glowing glacier, all else falling away. She sank a deep, cold breath into her lungs and held it there, warming it, before releasing it out in a fog. “Come, Ambrosius,” she whispered, and her spellbook fled away from her cloak to float by her upturned palm. His eye rolled up as she whispered the words that appeared in runes on his pages. Another deep cold breath and the sleet sizzled when it struck her, and then her crimson fur cloak warmed and dried, then her hair, and she gathered the warmth between her hands and wished, as always, that she could hold it forever. Her arms spread wide and light flooded from her fingertips. Warm curved barriers formed at the borders of what would soon be Trostan, and the sleet fell around these wards like water around a glass globe. The clouds dissolved within her warm bulwark, the people turned joyful faces toward the sun, and the great glowing Halcyon-infused glacier began to crack and drip and flow into what would be known, for the next generation, as the twin rivers of Trostan.

Remarkable, Lyra thought, how quickly the settlers had mixed Gythian with the rough syllables of the Grangor tongue to create the language of Trostanian. Lyra never deigned to speak it, but understanding Trostanian was essential in the multicultural port town, no matter what garish throaty things it did to the lyrical Gythian syllables. Only five years ago, her barriers had melted the Halcyon glacier and already the settlement had become a growing, respectable town. Dockside inns filled to bursting with taxpaying travelers seeking their crystal fortune, adding their native nomenclature to the evolving language. On the docks, sailors called to one another in fluent Trostanian as they passed crates down the ramps from the ships’ tenders to the docks.

Lyra, escorted by her Grangor guide, disciplined her expression into sobriety, but her eyes shone as they darted around the dock. Golden-cloaked Gythian soldiers emerged from a tender hefting ornate chests and crates. With an impatient but formal gesture of greeting she approached the most decorated of the soldiers, a silver-templed man holding the hand of a small boy. “I was told my replacement would be of the mages, but I suppose Trostan can be held well enough by the army now that it’s operative,” she said. “You and your son are welcome here.”

“You’re mistaken, Lady Lyra. Your replacement is of the mages.” The soldier guided the boy forward by his shoulders. “Archmage Lora bade me deliver him to you and memorize her message.”

Lyra’s heart sank along with her eyes as she gazed down at the boy, resplendent in a night-black fur cloak far too large for him, his terrified dark eyes widened with hope. “Deliver the message, sir.”

“‘Greetings, Battlemage Lyra,” snapped the soldier. “‘The Mage Guild of Gythia is pleased to present Samuel the Mageborn, son of Archmage Lora the Mageborn and Scholar Titus the Mageborn, to be fostered and educated under your wise tutelage until such time as he comes of age and can take your place in the governorship of Trostan.’”

“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.

“Politics,” said Lyra through a wound-tight jaw. “Or a cruel joke.”

The Grangor hunched down. “Welcome, Sam. How old are you?”

The boy held up four fingers.

“Four winters old! Such a handsome big boy you are.” The Grangor mussed the child’s hair.

“Lora has banished me to Trostan for fourteen more years.” Lyra coughed out a laugh. “She still fears me.”

“We’ll make you up a room in the mage tower, Sam,” said the Grangor. Without ceremony he swung the boy up onto his shoulders and the soldiers followed them into town, leaving Lyra to stare off into the warm sea of her memories.

~

In Gythia, the onshore cold from Bladed Bay breezed the curtains in Lyra’s mage tower apartment. Back then, Trostan was a stratagem, a hope for Gythia’s post-war recovery effort. Before she experienced the ice storms of Trostan, Lyra thought this breeze unbearable; she rolled over in bed, smooshing her face into Titus’ chest to escape it. “Hold me,” she mumbled into his skin. “I’m cold.” He slung one leg over her waist, making her giggle. “Useless, you are. Now I’m overheated just on this spot. Get off me and I’ll make tea.”

He held her down, sliding a steel letter opener through the wax seal of a scroll. “If you wanted to escape, you’d turn me into a toad or something, Miss Battlemage.”

“No need,” she said, arching up for a sour morning kiss. “I trust you.”

“That is your first mistake. Ooh,” he said, drawing the sharp point of the letter opener down her side, “It’s from the Archmage. You are important now.”

“Your envy is unattractive.” Lyra shivered and smiled, inhaling the sweat and sandalwood scent of him. “What is that?”

“A letter came for you with breakfast.”

“If it is for me, don’t you think I should open it?”

He held the scroll out of her reach. “Battlemage Lyra of the Mage Guild, blah blah … immediate deployment to the Kall Peaks to establish the colony of Trostan …”

“They’re sending us to the Kalls?” Lyra reached for the scroll, but Titus held fast to it, his brows knitted.

“Your petition of marriage to Scholar Titus the Mageborn is heretofore denied due to the arrangement of marriage to …”

Lyra rolled over him and snatched the letter from his hands; wax bits scattered onto the bed. “.. to Lora the Mageborn,” she mumbled. “There’s been some administrative error. Someone mistook my name for Lora’s. This has happened before.”

“You are not Mageborn.” Titus drew her close. “You knew they might choose to arrange my marriage. The Guild wants …”

“… Mageborn children,” she said. “But I went through all the proper channels. I filled out the forms. I thought ….” She held his ears in her hands, pressed her forehead to his. “We do not have to obey. We can be farmers in the provinces. We can disappear in Taizen Gate.”

“You have worked since childhood to rise in the guild’s ranks. I will not allow you to give up everything you worked so hard to accomplish,” he said, burying his face in the plum tumble of her hair. “We are Gythian foremost.”

She soaked his neck with silent tears, her fingers clawing into his shoulders.

Samuel emerged from his rented island room sullen, his cheeks gaunt, dressed all in black. He walked past hammocks where the locals napped away the hot afternoon, couples snoring together in a tangle of limbs, mothers curled around little children like shells around peas. Away from the dwellings he found a handful of goats gnawing on shrubs; honeybees dove through tall bamboo to rummage inside of flowering beans, zucchini and asparagus. In the garden it was difficult to believe that the island was the shell of the giant and ancient titanback named Archelon, floating his annual way around the world.

He followed a path through the tide pools where barefoot children sprinted over the slick bone surface, squatting to inspect the bright slugs, limpets, anemones, sea slugs and stars. A small child held a sea urchin in one hand, drawing out meat from its belly with deft fingers and slurping it up as he watched Samuel step with care. Older children looked after nests of eggs larger than their heads.

At the highest point of the island, the smell of food cooking set his stomach to growling. Locals milled about, poking at a grill, laying out baskets, cleaning up children. A giant carp smoked to a golden brown crisp on smoldering coals laid in the center, its stuffed belly open; clams and oysters and heaps of pickled seaweed lay in steaming piles around it.

“Take cover, ladies. A raincloud approaches,” called a voice, followed by ladies laughing. “Join us, Samuel.”

Blossoms drifted down from a cherry tree under which sat a large man, two women and a basket of food. The three wore sarongs; the man’s was fuschia and wrapped round his waist. One of the women shaved his head with a straight razor. The other sat cross-legged, her hand outstretched, as the man manicured her nails.

Samuel paused in an awkward half-step before sitting at the edge of the shade. “I am afraid I do not know you.”

“You need not fear. I am Lance,” said the man. The woman pushed his ear forward to shave behind it. “Eat honey and cheese. It will sweeten you.”

“I will not eat today,” said Samuel.

“Are you sick?” asked the woman with the straight razor.

“No,” said Samuel. “Fasting preserves power and increases discipline.”

“You have all the rest of your lonely life to starve,” said the man. “How many days will you have for licking honey from the fingers of a beautiful lady?”

Samuel turned his blushing face away from the manicured woman, who dipped a finger in the honeypot with a sly smile. “Is she not one of your wives?”

“People are not possessions,” replied Lance.

“Are these not your children?” sputtered Samuel.

“The children belong to everyone, or rather, we belong to them.” The woman folded away her razor and a little boy slipped down from a branch onto Lance’s shoulders. “You will break your fast today, Sam. If you argue, we will take offense.”

“I prefer Samuel,” he said, but he could not refuse. He deposited a bit of fish into his basket and plucked meat from the fragile bones with his fingers like the others. Children crawled up on his legs and asked incessant questions. Lance made no move to save him from the onslaught, and before long Samuel could not help but chuckle.

After they had eaten, the crowd walked the long pathway down to the shell’s edge to watch the sea trolls hunt. They herded seals and held them under, drowning them before tossing them high in the air and catching them in their giant maws.

“I would not allow the children so close to those hunters,” said Samuel.

Lance kept an arm around Samuel’s stiff shoulder as though they were old friends. “The trolls come ashore once a year to lay eggs, and we care for them. In return, the trolls protect Archelon’s soft underbelly from predators, and we play together. Come, watch the jousts.”

At the shell’s edge, past the long line of docked barges, men tied woven saddles to the beasts’ great heads. Wearing bamboo armor and shields and wielding rattan lances, the men mounted the trolls and charged, their lances crashing into one another’s shields with startling cracks. Lance was the best of these knights; he took to the saddle as if born there, sending one opponent after another splashing into the water, his powerful arm locked around his weapon, a frightening grin spread across his face. His troll roared its pleasure and sprayed the onlookers with a wall of water from its slapping tail.

After the jousts, Samuel and Lance watched the moon rise together while the others wandered away. “How do you like our home?” asked Lance.

“It will not last,” said Samuel. “Archelon will not live forever.”

“The rings round the scutes tell us that Archelon has lived at least a thousand growth seasons, and he swims stronger than ever.”

“All things die.”

“Have faith, Sam.” Lance clapped the young man on his shoulder.

“That is no answer.”

“And yet, it is ever the correct one.”

On the last day of his months-long journey, Samuel dove to look into the eye of Archelon. Lance waited on shore, remembering the day that he had passed this same test: the eye gleaming at him, far wider than he was tall. When Samuel surfaced, gasping, Lance hunched down to help him out. “Did you gaze into his eye?”

“I saw it, and it saw me,” said Samuel, drawing on dry clothes.

“What did Archelon say to you?”

Samuel’s brow cocked. “I do not speak whatever burbling beast language he speaks.”

“You heard nothing in your heart?”

“I also do not speak whatever burbling beast language the heart speaks.”

“Well enough; you have presented yourself to Archelon and so you are one of us. Come.” Lance led him around the shell shore, pausing to rub the heads of sea trolls when they poked through the surface. “Archelon is too large to swim through Bladed Bay. At dawn, I shall escort you to the city by barge.” In the Gythian language he continued: “Your destiny is also mine.”

“I did not think to hear that language from an Archelion,” said Samuel also in Gythian, his words cutting sharp corners. On the docks where the barges hung, children took air in little sips before diving for pearl oysters, dripping nets dangling round their necks.

Lance led Samuel inside the cabin of one of the barges. “Long ago, when I was a young man, a Gythian like yourself bought passage on Archelon to see the world during his last year. He was a knight with a good heart.”

“Nothing like me then,” said Samuel.

“He taught me to wield the lance and shield and live by the knightly tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character.” A beatific light shone in Lance’s eyes. “And he told me about the city’s rich history of music and passion, enough beauty to inebriate the soul.”

“Did he forget about the wars, corruption and ruthless politics in his dotage?”

“It is true; there is much in the world to be set aright. How can I stay on Archelon when my duty is elsewhere? Look: When my teacher passed on, he gave me these.” Lance lit candles round the cabin and, as the light flickered a warm air of the sacred, opened a hidden compartment under the floorboards where armor, shield and a lance laid in repose. “Since then, I have made it my life’s work to collect Gythian artifacts.”

He hefted up the shield to display, but Samuel rifled through a neat pile of kitchen tools, a bronze candelabra, long-outdated maps and recipes, plumed carnival masks and a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He plucked up a rusted garlic press, snapped it open and closed. “Beautiful shield, and not a scratch on it,” he said. “Your fabled knight did not see enough battle to find those tenets difficult.”

“War is not the whole of a knight,” said Lance, unwavering. “I vowed to one day protect a Gythian, and in doing so earn knighthood for myself.”

“I do not need protecting.” Samuel threw the garlic press back to its spot. “I am not the Gythian of your dreams. I have not even seen the city since I was four years old.”

“You are he. I know it.”

“You do not know me, and you do not know Gythia, for all of your careful study of its garbage. Who bakes the best crusty rolls on Via Lucia?” Samuel grabbed up a book and paged through it fast. “The knighthood is just old families clinging to faltering fortunes. It has nothing to do with … what was that ludicrous list? Justice, honesty, decorum …”

Lance took the book from Samuel’s hand as if handling a sleeping baby. “That ludicrous list has everything to do with me.”

And so, at the first gray light, Samuel sat on Lance’s barge, folded in bad posture inside his dark cloak. Lance, wearing the full armor of a Gythian knight, steered the sea troll that pulled the barge through the treacherous black-toothed mouth of the city. The mist parted and a rose-gold light bathed the gleaming fountains and sculpture, the towers and spires, the churning water wheels. Lance’s breath caught in his throat; tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. His plain barge pulled up to the dock between luxury steamboats where a grand reception of dignitaries in elegant finery waited.

Samuel moved like an unwilling shadow behind Lance’s great steel bulk as they disembarked. Lance held up his hand in greeting, but all eyes locked on the hooded young man. The woman in the center stepped forward, one hand heavy with rings appearing beyond long silk sleeves to show her palm in proper greeting. “Welcome home, Samuel,” she said. “We feared the worst.”

“My thanks, Mother,” said Samuel.

Samuel returned to his room at sunset to find Lyra there, staring at the collection of ceremonial Grangor headdresses he’d mounted on one curved wall. He dropped his dripping snow gear on the floor and fell back on his unmade bed, flopping one arm over his eyes. “So there will be a lecture tonight,” he muttered. “Safety or obligation?”

Lyra picked her way with care across the disaster of stacked books, maps and papers, giving a wide berth to the skeleton of the mammoth seal Samuel had speared at his Grangor hunter trial. “Did you… eat this creature?”

“The tribe feasted after the trial. I ate the right flipper and the chief ate the left.”

Lyra shuddered. “I shall have your room cleaned. There is a spider above your bed.”

“It’s a sleep-spider. It gobbles up dreams and spins webs in the shapes of those dreams. I took it from the Netherworld. Don’t touch it.”

Lyra’s eyes blazed. “I told you not to dabble in the Netherworld. The nightmares and phantasms …”

“And dreams and ghosts and Valkyries. Magister Reim …”

“And I told you to stay away from that crazed old man. Is that where you were all week?”

Samuel chuckled, his arm still covering his eyes. “Add that to your list of disappointments. I have given up trying to please you. I rather think you are incapable of pleasure.”

“You do not have the luxury of adolescent insolence.”

“The obligation lecture, then.” Samuel responded with an exaggerated yawn.

Lyra exhaled through her nose, eyes closed, collecting herself. “No. That is the Archmage’s duty now.” She dropped a heavy but small steel machine onto the bed next to him and he removed his arm from his eyes to squint at it.

“What is that contraption?”

“It came with the latest shipment. They have managed to make holograms work, thanks to infused Trostanian crystal. They’ve had holographic messages in Mont Lille for years …”

“… and in Campestria far longer.” Samuel sat up in his bed to inspect the box.

“It is progress nevertheless, so our efforts here are not in vain.”

“Well then, let us see what my mother deigns to say to me.”

“Samuel.” Lyra rested a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was awkward and made them both flinch. “I think … I do not know if this message …”

“Don’t worry, Lady. I am not an orphan harboring dreams of mommy bestowing affection on me after fourteen years of no word.” Samuel snorted. “The Magister said I was bred like a dog.”

Lyra was quieted by that. She focused her gaze on the message box, her violet curls falling to hide her expression while Samuel hit the button with his fist. The platform buzzed with blue light that broke and spat before it came together to form a face. The Archmage’s face. He had no memory of it, and there was no color to her eyes, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Samuel.” The sound crackled with static. “Lady Lyra has kept me informed of your progress. Well done on passing the first nine disciplines. The Mage Guild depends on you passing the tenth. You shall return home to prove your worth in the final test before your formal induction into the guild. I trust Lyra has prepared you well.”

Home. He almost missed what came after.

“After you have received your rank, you shall be positioned as governor of Trostan and lead the effort to move the Grangor population to the frontier. You shall see to the expansion of our crystal mining in the Kall Peaks. Your rapport with the Grangor beasts will be essential to this effort. You shall return to Trostan with whatever contingent of troops you deem necessary to assist you.

“Our guild and our empire depend on your success, my son. With your help, Gythia shall return to its former glory.”

The picture blinked out of existence and Samuel stared at the place where it had been. “Move the Grangor population,” he breathed. “Has she ever met a Grangor?”

Lyra clasped her hands inside her long sleeves. “If it is necessary …”

“They won’t go. I have seen their souls in the Netherworld. They are rooted to this land by blood and ritual and the hunt.”

“You sound like one of them,” said Lyra, her tone measured.

He stood and paced the room. “I’d have to kill them all. My mother wants me to kill them all.”

“You are Gythian.”

Samuel whirled to face her. “Why should I have to explain to you that this is wrong?” he cried, and the words spilled out of him in a dark magic that formed into a treacherous churning orb that surrounded them both.

Inside the orb was the deep cave-dark of nightmares. Nothing Lyra had taught Samuel of Gythian magecraft explained that darkness, or the weakening beat of her heart. She snapped awake without realizing she’d been asleep, gasping and shaking, and whispered the words of warding. A green glow shone through the blackness, drinking it in, dispelling it.

Above the bed, the sleep-spider wove into its web a shimmering silken depiction of Trostan in flames.

Bright-plumed Titanbeaks pulled the mages’ litters through the Gythian streets: the Archmage in her own, Lyra and Magister Reim in the next. Lance insisted on riding in the third with Samuel; he craned his head out of the curtained window to gape at the complex of short military towers and training yards sprawled against the great obsidian wall, then the closed-up and somber Ministers’ Tower, the Cartographers’ Tower with its landings and patios housing all sizes of telescopes and finally the Mage Tower, taller by a hundred feet than any other and wide as a city block. It was adorned around each level with golden sculptures of past Archmages, each holding the ancient wand named Verdict.

Samuel entered the tower under the hard golden gaze of his sculpted mother and followed his escort into the grand center theater. The acrid taste of unfamiliar magic stung his tongue. Lyra and Reim stopped Lance from following; the three stood by the door.

A walkway edged with sculpted obsidian pillars led to two stone platforms, one higher than the other. Samuel stood on the shorter; atop the high platform stood the guild’s top-ranking mages, the Archmage at the fore, her robes removed to reveal the somber black lace vestments of judgment. “Samuel the Mage Born,” she said, her sugared tone echoing in the immense room, “your tenth trial begins now. If you pass, you shall receive your rank in our guild.” She stretched Verdict forth. “I hope you are prepared.”

Samuel pulled from his belt the wand named Malice. “So I am not to answer for disobeying you, Mother? For burning down Gythia’s hopes? Does it trouble you overmuch to acknowledge the failure of your bloodline?” He spun the wand between his fingers before clenching it in his fist.

A shadow fled from Verdict and landed in Samuel’s periphery a split moment before pain flooded his belly. He whirled to face his aggressor and stared into his own face, at Malice pointed at his own torso. There was no time to register this ultimate betrayal before his shadow double flanked and shot again.

~

Lance lunged forward only to slam full-force into a shimmering green wall.

“For every action, there is a consequence,” said Lyra.

Reim watched the fight, expressionless, white-knuckling his staff.

~

A rushing water sound filled Samuel’s ears. He circled to the right and his shadow self mirrored him; there was a flash, and a sting bloomed on Samuel’s leg, a pain that sank to his bones. He curled his tongue around the words of power and a burst of magic fled from his wand, missing the shadow by a breath. He dove and spat out another word: “Uruz!” Another shot just missed the shadow’s neck. The shadow returned the blasts and Samuel dodged. They traded dark magic fire until the platform was a blinding shower of light. He could not outwit himself.

But the shadow could not learn.

He feinted right and leaped away from his double, springing to the nearest pillar, cracking his ribs, two fingers curled around the canine teeth of a carved lion’s head. With the half-second he’d bought, he pulled himself up to crouch atop it.

“Kenaz,” he cried, and the air wavered, and around him were the souls of ancient mages, thousands of them with hollow eyes watching, and the darkness of the Netherworld enveloped him as he leaped. Light flashed from Malice and the shadow crouched, spun wrong and caught the full force of the spell in its back.

When the dark had dissipated, Samuel stood alone on the platform. The Netherworld, having been opened, lurked close, the phantasms murmuring hate and promising justice. Above, the Archmage extended Verdict again.

“So you present a test no one can survive to save yourself the embarrassment of convicting me.” Samuel’s bitter laugh seized as he held his broken ribs. “That is how Magister Reim’s son died, isn’t it? He asked too many questions.”

“If it is so,” said the Archmage, “then you should concentrate on succeeding.”

A second shadow fled from Verdict, forming beside Samuel. He slid back, Malice held in his fist like a blade, his eyes narrowed at his new opponent –

– and his arm dropped as he flinched away from the little boy who looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes: Samuel, as he’d been fourteen years past when he entered Trostan for the first time, Malice far too big for his little hands.

“Such poetry,” mocked Samuel. “I suppose I shall face my wise old future self next?”

“You shall have no such future if you fail,” called the Archmage.

Samuel sidestepped the shadow boy’s fumbling shots with ease. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes.

“I would rather fail,” said Samuel, and released the phantasm that twisted and curled into the skull-shape of nightmares, sailing around the shadow child and then the mages high above, lulling them all to sleep. The shadow disappeared and the Archmage fell.

~

The shimmering wall dropped. A spinning, churning hole appeared in the walkway by Lance’s feet.

“Go,” choked Lyra behind him. “Go!”

~

The Archmage landed in Samuel’s outstretched arms, slamming him to the floor. His shoulder dislocated from its socket, sending shocks of pain through his arm and spine. He snatched Verdict away from her, rolled away, yanked his shoulder back into place with an agonized gasp, then stumbled to his feet. “Where is she?” he screamed.

“Who?” gasped the Archmage, blinking, disoriented.

“Gythia’s little creature.” He bent over her, spitting the words into her face. “Trostan wasn’t the only iron you had in the fire. Where is the Storm Queen’s niece?”

The Archmage flinched away. “Gathering allies,” she whimpered. “The Halcyon -”

Samuel sneered and aimed both wands at the Archmage’s face. “Well done, Mother.”

Armor clattered as the knight rolled into position between them, weapon at the ready, shield high. Samuel stepped back, wands crossed in front of him.

“Reconsider, my friend,” growled Lance.

Samuel’s grim mouth cracked into a smile. “You are better than Gythia ever was,” he said, and fell back into the churning portal.

Reim stood at the portal’s source, palm out as Lyra’s face turned blue. Icicles hung from her ears and hair. Her book, encased in ice, laid useless on the floor. Samuel tumbled from the portal’s source at his feet, struggling for breath as he looked up at his teacher’s distressed eyes.

“Magister,” he whispered.

“Run, you fool.”

On the unkempt path along the mangrove-lined river, overgrown with vines and flowers, the paladin in his gilded ceremonial armor cut an imposing figure. A dozen warriors and several local guides marched behind him; explorers brought up the rear, sketching, collecting samples and taking notes. The paladin’s wide-eyed young daughter gripped his outstretched finger with her whole small fist.

“Do you like the islands, Grace?”

At six years old, this was her first trip outside of Gythia, and the foreign tropics were a dizzying delight. Wherever there was soil, color burst through. Flowers as big as her head called hi! hey! hi! Exotic birds showed off their plumage and screeched to make sure she looked. Even the mosquito swarms shimmered.

“Yes,” she answered, her tone solemn. “This must be the prettiest place in the world.”

“These shall be the Grace Islands, then.” Her father waved his arm in an arc to indicate the half-moon shape of the archipelago. “Make a note of it,” he called over one shoulder, and a mapmaker scribbled in her journal.

Grace stared in reserved wonder at her surroundings while her father named the flora and fauna as though he’d created it all. The locals wore colorful sarongs and flowers in their hair. They waved and never ceased smiling. One of them fed plums to a young macaque that perched with hungry obedience on the little girl’s shoulder.

“These are nice people,” observed Grace.

“Peace and kindness is embedded into their culture. They even file down the sharp teeth of adolescents to remove their violent nature.”

Grace touched her own teeth. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh yes.”

“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”

“Oh, dulcissima! A man may be a better hunter than a tiger, but he would be a fool to tell the beast how to hunt on its own land.”

“But these are people.”

“Yes, they are people,” mused the paladin. “Of a kind.”

Grace stopped short, wavering on her feet. The world around her brightened at the edges. The monkey leaped away and the retinue came to a halt.

“Papa?” she whimpered.

The paladin held her steady by the shoulders. “Do not fear. Tell me what the light shows you.”

Grace shivered as a great wall of ice rose up, blocking their path. Where the path forked toward the river, a wall of fire blazed upward, spitting embers and burning her cheeks. “Ice and fire,” she whispered.

“Which way is the fire?”

She pointed to the river and the vision ended, the walls only tricks of the light.

The procession moved single-file onto the stone steps leading across the river. In the center of the water stood a temple.

A guide intercepted them. His smile never wavered, though his voice was strained. “Sir,” he said, bowing low, “visitors do not cross here, Sir. Danger, Sir.” He held out his arms, revealing rippling burn scars.

“Stand back,” said the paladin. He rested a hand on the guide’s shoulder, and when he lifted it, a hand-shaped spot of healed flesh remained.

The temple was made of stone. The mangroves growing over it were scorched. The buzzing mosquitos and bickering monkeys stayed away, so that the temple was cloaked in eerie quiet. At the temple’s entrance a local boy appeared, perhaps a year younger than Grace. He wore only a sarong around his waist, so that gruesome scars and new welts from burns showed all over his chest and face.

“This boy speaks fire,” whispered the guide. He stared in wonder at his shoulder as the healed skin spread down his arm. “His name is Reza.”

“He’s hurt,” said Grace.

The paladin guided Grace forward, toward the boy. “Go and do as you have learned.”

Grace stepped across slick stones to the temple with care, leaving her father behind. She greeted the boy with a Gythian hand gesture and he flinched.

“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, gentle but firm. She rested her palms on the boy’s face. The light burned at the top of her head and she guided it down, as her father had taught her, down through her head and throat, flooding her heart and belly and arms and then escaping through her fingertips. The light swelled and the boy’s eyes grew wide. Down to his shoulders her hands slid, leaving behind smooth, healed flesh. The light traveled down his body, enveloping him with its warmth. “There,” she said when she had done. She was tired to her bones from the effort, but the boy’s burn scars and welts had disappeared, leaving behind a dazzling, dark beauty. “That’s better.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, or cry or laugh; it couldn’t be known, for what came from his mouth was a trail of fire, just like in Grace’s vision, spurting sparks and raining ash.

The paladin’s light shield burst into being between her and the boy just in time. The flames beat against it but could not penetrate. The boy’s mouth shut and his eyes filled with ashy tears as the paladin approached.

“The Mageborn must be trained to the proper use of their power, just as you, born to the light, have learned to control your visions,” he said, patting Grace’s red braid. “Until we deliver him to the mages, you must care for him like a sister.”

“My brother.” Grace took the boy’s hand. “I shall name you Titus.”

Grace woke in the dark, her greyhound nuzzling its wet nose into her foot. Rolling the morning stiffness from her shoulders, she made her way to the empty training yard in the first rose light of dawn, the greyhound following at her heel. She selected a heavy mace from the weapon rack and moved through a warmup flow, swinging it in slow, controlled circles in front of her body and then behind her back, changing grip and direction, then progressed through lunging battle forms. Her mind stilled as she put her body through the old disciplines. In this way, she had learned long ago to control visions, to bid them come when she wished. Her consciousness flowed with her breath, up and up, the training yard falling away, up and then out.

At first there was only a sound, that of a young man crying out words of power, and then there was a darkness that split apart the air. From that darkness came tortured beings, phantasms, dead things with white eyes yearning for freedom. The Nether, a place of nightmares, the absence of life and light, called forth by a mage.

Grace danced through the mace flow, blind to the world around her, her eyes rolled up, and forced the vision forward. Show me he who opened the Nether, she said without saying, and the vision changed – but instead of a mage, she saw a knight wandering the city’s twisting alleyways in the dark. He was a stranger in Gythian armor, bearing a shield and a lance, braving the sea-cold wind without tiring, asking locals for the whereabouts of a wayward boy. Grace watched as he paused to admire the ancient towers, to stare at torchlit fountains and, in the minutes before dawn, to breathe in the smell of the day’s first bread baking.

Grace ended the mace flow and shook off the vision. A silent cluster of acolytes in robes and cowls filed out to the yard and went to work trimming the rose bushes, brushing and raking the clay and sand yards, and skimming the surface of the battle pool with a net. The mace landed in Grace’s palms with finality and acolytes scurried to bring water and towel the sweat from her brow.

“There is a man at the gate,” said Grace, sitting for her breakfast. “Bring him to me.”

Grace’s visions were not questioned. A few moments later the stranger from her dream was led to her table. He stared at the training yard with open-mouthed awe, his eyes beatific as an icon, while his shield and lance were presented to Grace for study. “These were Gennaro’s,” she said. “Did you know him?”

The man met Grace’s eyes with a wide smile and an ease that few possessed in her presence. “Gennaro was my teacher. He journeyed to the next world on the back of Archelon and passed his possessions to me.”

Grace handed the shield to an acolyte. “Then we mourn together. Gennaro was a good knight, and a friend of my father’s. Do you, then, seek knighthood?”

“That was my reason for coming here,” said the man, and all at once he seemed tired down to his soul. “I found a mage and swore to protect him, to prove myself worthy. But his tenth trial was designed to kill him, and I could not do as I promised.”

“So he is dead.”

“No. I don’t know.” The man sighed. “He did something I could not understand.”

“He opened the Nether,” Grace whispered.

“He tried to kill the Archmage. His own mother.”

“His mother?” Grace’s heart fell.

“I stopped him, and he fled. So I must find him, and right this wrong, so that I can fulfill my destiny.”

Grace stood, and even without the splendor of her ceremonial dress she was an imposing figure, the sunlight enveloping her. “What is your name, warrior?” she said in a low tone.

“Lance,” he said, his voice withered with shame. “Lance of Archelon.”

“On your knees, Lance of Archelon.”

The man knelt, prepared for punishment. Instead, he felt the woman’s palm on his bare head. Warmth flooded down his spine, and with it, a peace he had not known since he was a babe in his mother’s arms.

“With valor and bravery you saved the life of the Archmage,” she said. “You kept watch in the night. Do you swear to live by the tenets of justice, courage, mercy, decorum, honesty, honor, loyalty and character?”

“I do.” His words cracked with emotion.

“Then you are welcome in my guild and in my country. Rise, Lance, Knight of Gythia, in the name of the Light.” Grace smiled and her hand dropped. “Go and rest. This is now a matter for the office of the paladin.”

He wept his thanks as the acolytes guided him away. Grace’s attendants hovered close.

“Shall we call upon the Archmage, Domina?”

“No.” Grace turned and strode toward her chambers, the greyhound at her heel. “Find my brother.”

Knuckles throws the townie kid outta the Mister’s wagon and us Carnie Kids, who know better than to bother the Mister, sit off aways chortlin.

“Stupid kid thinks he’s gonna join the carnival?”

“Maybe he’s a juggalah or a rope walkah?”

“He can’t do nothin.”

The townie’s just a scruff of a thing, skinny and short, ‘bout eight years old. He snorks his snot-nose and glares at us. “I can do stuff,” says him, and opens up his hand. Knuckles’ watch gleams on his palm.

Us kids consider deep the consequences of having Knuckles’ watch in our possessions.

“Aight,” says we, “you can do a showoff.”

We take the orphan over to the outskirts, the small tops and wagons with the geek displays. Us not in town selling townies firecrackers and lifting wallets are wrangling glo-glo-girls into the red lanterns that’ll be strung up for tomorrow’s Red Lantern Festival. Townies line up early at the gates cuz the carnies throw the best bash, plus out of town you can’t get nabbed law-wise for possessing explosives.

“Most important thing you gotta do to be a Carnie Kid,” we tell the orphan, “is showoffin.”

“Rules for showoffin are, don’t be boring, and all stories are true.” We nod along with the sacred words.

With a hella whoosh the ring rolls in, our boss danglin in the center by his tail, eye level with the little townie, us kids hollerin his arrival: Oz-O! Oz-O! Oz-O!

“One time I got hungry!” yells Ozo in the townie’s face. “So hungry, the sun looked like a delicious peach. So I bounced so high that I grabbed it right out of the sky. But everything went dark, so I threw it all the way back up!” He kicks off and hunches down by the townie kid while his ring settles. “Your turn.”

The townie kid sucks on his lip. “I … uh … well … I stole a … a …”

“Boooooring,” calls one of us, then more, then the whole choir. We don’t have time for stutterererers. “Boooooring!”

“My parents were giants,” says Ozo. We all hush and lean in, ’cause not no one showoffs like Ozo. “Bigger than the big top. I was the giantest monkey baby in the world. But one morning, Dad ripped a fart that blew away a whole village.” He pauses while we giggle. “Unlucky for us, a wizard-woman in that village was so mad, she cast a spell that shrank me all the way down to this. Momma couldn’t take care of me no more without crushing me, so she gave me to the carnival.” Ozo’s fuzzy head shakes so sad that we are all sad too. “But she left me her wedding ring,” whispers Ozo, and holds up his ring.

“Daaaang,” says we, clappin.

“My dad ran off,” blurts the townie orphan, “and Mom cleans houses.”

“Oh yeah?” says Ozo, spinnin the ring under his palm at his long, long arm’s length. “Well my dad was the pet of a raja. The raja wanted a son sooo bad that the rana got pregnant with my dad, hoping the raja wouldn’t notice.”

We all bust up, but the townie kid’s got a sourpuss. “You said your parents were giants,” he sputters.

“Did I?” Ozo shrugs and looks up to the sky, starts hula hoopin so we’ll watch all mesmerized. “True story is, I never had no parents. I was born from a magic banana. Ate my way out and fell off the tree, all alone.”

“None of that’s true,” cries the newbie.

The townie gets shoved for that. “All stories are true, buttnugget!” we yell, and we’re about to riot, but Ozo throws his ring out, knockin the townie down flat on his snot face. Ozo hunkers down over the kid with his head cocked sideways and says something real quiet. The closest of us lean in.

“Wish I had a momma to sit home worried about me,” he says. “Go home.”

“Yeah, go home to your mommy!” we say, draggin the townie off to the gates.

Ozo stays back to watch the decorations go up from inside his ring, hanging on with fingers and toes, rollin so the lanterns spin round and round, becoming glowy red circles.

Mad blue sparks flashed from Ozo’s ring as it bumped down the cobbles of the Undersprawl’s main avenue, Ozo in its center, Koshka dashing doubletime after him in her prettiest red party dress. Red lanterns cast a charming glow on the dingy neighborhood, and paper cutouts decorated the windows of even the roughest taverns. Ozo spun to a flourished stop by the minion pens at the city gate. “I win!” he cried. The minions clapped.

Koshka caught up and gave Ozo’s nose a pinch. “It isn’t impressive if you ride in the ring!”

Ozo hooted laughing, crouching among the fragrant kumquat trees that grew by the fence, his tail flicking. “Don’t be jealous that I’m faster. And can jump farther.”

“You cannot,” said Koshka as she hopped the fence to the minion pen. “No one jumps farther than me. Come now, sweeties, it’s festival time!” she crooned at the minions.

“Can too. I can jump this whole city in one leap. And I’m stronger than all these minions put together. My ring weighs more than two elly-fants. Just try.” He held his ring out over the fence.

“What’s an elly-fant?” Koshka ignored the ring; the minions grunted and shoved their noses into her palms as she handed each a red envelope. “Don’t be rude,” she ordered, bopping one greedy beast on the noggin. “Open it over there.” The beasts crowded in a corner away from her, tearing open their envelopes. Two shiny gold coins dropped out of each. The minions tried to eat them.

“I can transform into anything,” bragged Ozo. “Guess what I am!” He paced back and forth along the fence on all fours, meowing.

Koshka giggled. “That’s nothing. I can pretend to be a girl.” She stood up on her two feet and pranced around the pen, her chin jutted up, and murmured in a breathy voice, “Look at me, I’m a princess. I like peanut butter.”

“I can summon the wind!” cried Ozo, then puffed out a big breath at her.

Koshka stumbled as if blown backward. “Whoa. Just for that, I’ll summon the rain.” She stuck out her tongue and blew a big zzzzrrrrbbbt at her monkey friend.

Ozo jumped away right in time, throwing down his ring and standing in the middle. “Well I can cast a protective barrier. Nothing can get me in here!”

Koshka wiggled her bum and shot forward on all fours right at him, leaping over the ring. “I’m way too strong for your dumb barriers!”

“You’re powerful,” said Ozo, “But I bet I can fit more kumquats in my mouth than you can.”

The pair dashed for the kumquat trees and jammed the fruit into their mouths, counting until the numbers were just muffled syllables. Koshka had to concede the victory to Ozo when her lumpy cheeks filled to bursting.

“Okay, okay,” said Koshka, chewing up the last of her mouthful. “But I can do a magic thing.”

“Nuh uh. You don’t know magic.”

“I know a thing,” she said. “Watch.” She scooted up close to Ozo and looked at his face. Her fingers slipped behind one of his ears. “Look what I found!” she announced, and held up a melon candy.

“Whoa,” whispered Ozo in awe, taking the candy. “You do know magic.”

“Happy Red Lantern Festival,” she said, hugging his neck, and the two sat and ate candied fruit together, watching the lanterns glow red on the cobbles as the sun set.