It felt like a lightning bolt struck me the moment I looked down at Kedrick Kane’s massive palm and saw the familiar storage ring resting across the deep lines of his hand, and his words didn’t initially register. The nine-foot golian repeated himself, not a hint of annoyance or any emotion in his voice. We had to go. He stopped me when I tried to push past him, and in my panic, I almost fought him there in the hallway.

  Those five seconds of panic took a year off my life, but I got a hold of myself. As the man recommended, I went back inside and changed into something that could be called professional, as he recommended. All I had were dresses. My real professional equipment was stowed away in my hidden armory, and it would do more for me there than being out in the open. I chose something sleek and subdued to wear, no pomp or frill to it. It wasn’t until Kedrick was leading me back to the stairwell, where two men armed with those enchanted weapons I had seen the authority carry around, the kind that could fire powerful beams of destructive kinetic force, that I realized I had chosen a black dress to wear out.

  It still seems like a bad omen. Sitting in the plush interior of a flying transport, the huge golian on the sofa across from me and the other two in their purple dress-shirts and black slacks, I feel like I am in a funeral procession. We sail over the streets of Faeth in what can only be described as a black box. Glass reflecting pinpricks of light and distorted scenes from the nightlife a hundred feet below flies past the window I recline against as we navigate through the grid of towers, but I don’t have eyes for any of it. My gaze keeps falling down to my hand. Dovik’s storage ring rests in my palm, empty, promising dark news.

  Kedrick wouldn’t elaborate on why he had the ring after handing it over to me. He just said that he would bring me to where Dovik was, that my friend was alive, but he was injured.

  The trip through the city flew past as I contemplated dark fantasies of impossible events and tragedies that could come out of nowhere. Those grooves in my mind, the dark and unexpected twists and turns that the world could take, were deep and well-worn from spending nearly a month in isolation. Pain and fear had cut deep into my soul, and I don’t think they are ever going away.

  The ship sets down on the single brightest street I have seen since coming to this city. A strange ringing, like celebratory chimes coming from a thousand different sources tucked away inside the oddly shaped buildings lining the street, floods into the interior of the ship as a teenager in a bright blue uniform opens the ship’s door from the outside. The two armed men Kedrick brought with him hurry out ahead of me, the latter leaning back and offering me a hand to help me outside. The buildings running down the street break from the architecture of the rest of Faeth. Each is built in strange shapes–one rises like a dome while another looks like a giant twisted a stone cube and sat it off the side of the road. They compete to break the uniformity of the city, and are all bathed in bright yellow lights. Down the sides, people dressed in sequins and suits skirt around bums and drunks sitting tucked into the barely clinging shadows of alleyways. Those close to us stand still, looking back at the flying carriage that landed just in front of one of the bright buildings shaped like a dragon’s head, or, rather, they are looking at me.

  “This is our way, Ms. Devardem,” Kedrick says as he ducks out of the ship. The vehicle rocks as he steps out onto the road despite the powerful enchantments that should keep it hovering motionless above the ground.

  “Ms. Devardem,” I say, as the man takes a moment to smooth out his clothes. I want to comment on the formality, but hold myself back. The few times I have run into this man in the Adventurer's Hall, he always called me by my new, terrible nickname, but what do I really know about him? Almost nothing. His presence now still helps a bit, helps me stop the terrible fantasies from spinning out of control in my head, helps me not imagine wrecking everything in my path until I reach some vague place where someone will tell me words I want to hear. The towering man in front of me is in the third rank, and sometimes having someone else above me around helps me check myself.

  Instead of leading me into the building we have stopped in front of, Kendrick heads around the side of the building with me in tow. There is another armed man waiting in front of a nondescript cement box standing in the alley off the side of the building. With a nod, the man opens a red, metal door for Kedrick, and we descend a staircase into a dark tunnel illuminated by hanging lights spaced too far apart. The two armed men following us stay outside, striking up a conversation with the third as the door we entered closes with a locking bang.

  In silence, the two of us walk for more than five minutes, passing through the total darkness spaced between dim magical lights. The giant in front of me never stops, never looks back to make sure that I am keeping up.

  The tunnel ends in another set of stairs that lead up to a silver door. Without needing to knock, the door opens for Kedrick, and together we walk into what might be mistaken for the first-floor lobby of one of the Faethian towers if it weren't for the twenty armed men standing at the edges of the room and the fact that the walls are made of steel. Where a receptionist’s desk might sit in front of a set of stairs leading up, a column of steel rises toward the high ceiling and disappears into it. As we approach, a rectangle of light opens from the steel column to reveal an elevator compartment where a familiar man stands, Treston Mox.

  “Good. You have arrived,” Mr. Mox says, snapping closed a pocketwatch and tucking it away.

  Kedrick steps into the elevator compartment and moves to stand behind Mr. Mox. I stop on the threshold. “If this is some sick ploy to make me reconsider, then you are about to regret today,” I say, holding up Dovik’s empty storage ring.

  “No ploy, and I am already regretting today, thank you very much. Come now, Ms. Devardem. Let us take you to your friend,” Mr. Mox says.

  My reluctance to join the two men in the rather large confines of the elevator lasts for only a moment before I step inside. Neither gives any visible sign, but the door closes all the same, and the lurching of our steel box moving follows close behind. We ascend for quite a while before the door opens again. Two armed men snap out of their conversation as the door opens and stand at attention when they see who exactly it is has arrived on their floor. Treston Mox hurries ahead, snapping open his pocketwatch once more and checking the time as he walks down the hall.

  We stop at a window, peering in on a room guarded once more by two armed men. The bareness of a holding cell clashes with the rushed addition of a surgery suite. The room itself is a featureless box of steel, the only splash of color being a single bed set hastily inside. On it, Dovik lies, his clothes thrown in a bloody bundle on the floor near him. His chest is a mess of crisscrossing white bandages stained with still-wet blood. A nasty gash on his forearm dribbles a line of blood and is barely held closed by stitches. Yet, to look at his face, I might imagine that he is having a pleasant dream.

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  “Control yourself, Ms. Devardem,” Kedrick says behind me.

  The noise makes me look up. One of the armed men who had been standing ramrod straight in the hall is on a knee, gasping as he tries to suck in air, his weapon lying on the floor in front of him. His neighbor stands with his weapon drawn and pointed at me. The man has to bend to aim around the huge bulk of Kedrick that stands nonchalantly in the center of the hall, but he does make the effort. It is the whine of a side table collapsing near me that makes me come back to myself.

  “Who says I am not?” I ask, lightening the pressure of my soul presence enough to let the weaker man at least be able to breathe. The narrow tunnel of focus begins to clear as well. The information fed to me by my soul presence feeds me the dimensions of the floor we stand on, and makes me aware of the man in the room with Dovik, pointing a weapon at my unconscious friend. Seeing that is what makes me pull my power back into myself. The man kneeling on the floor falls forward, collapsing into unconsciousness.

  “What happened?” I ask, turning to look at Treston Mox. There is a lingering aura of magic around the man, something given off by an enchanted item hiding within the folds of his loose robes. Still, sweat speckles his brow.

  “He failed,” Treston Mox sneers. “Failed at the same task I asked you to carry out.”

  “So, when I turned you down, you decided to go to my friend.”

  “Not initially,” Mr. Mox says. “It just worked out that way. Come. We can discuss the details in my office.” Without waiting for a reply, the man turns and begins to walk back toward the elevator.

  I linger a moment longer, thinking of how exactly I might rip this building apart and get my friend out while the huge golian stares down at me. It isn’t the magician in front of me that stops my rash action, but the fact that the man in the room with Dovik continues to hold his weapon pointed at him. My presence let me know that there is another one in there with him, concealed somehow, also armed.

  Treston Mox’s office is almost precisely how I would have imagined it. The fact that we are in a high tower grows apparent as the entire top floor of the building opens up into a single expansive room. Lush carpets from distant lands cover the black stone of the floor where three couches sit haphazardly around the vague center of the circular room. Here, the walls are made of a single pane of glass that runs the entire circumference of the chamber. Treston Mox sits at a desk of black stone, watching as I quickly scan the room. Rather than take any of his offered chairs, I pull one from my vault and sit in front of him.

  It doesn’t take the man long to explain what happened to Dovik. He tells me about coming across my friend after he cheated in one of his casinos, how it was just a happy coincidence that he found someone he might persuade to take on the job I turned down just a short while ago. He details the job; he wanted Dovik to beat and humiliate a man in the fighting pit in front of a thousand people who would never forget it. When he is done, I believe very little of what he tells me.

  “Who is this Mallis person?” I ask.

  “The second strongest fighter of the Pit. He shouldn’t have been an obstacle, but he decided to take his turn fighting before he was supposed to.”

  “Why?”

  Mr. Mox shakes his head. “He made that very clear. For some reason, he believes that Dovik Willian killed his brother. His youngest brother died tragically a few weeks ago. A building fell on him.”

  The man’s words make my blood run cold. I try to hide my shock, but I don’t know how successful I am. “You should keep a tighter leash on your fighters.”

  “Believe me, Ms. Devardem, I plan to clean house. Before that, however, I still require this job to be completed.”

  I scoff. “If you want a man that you yourself employ to be beaten, why don’t you get someone from your stable of fighters to do it instead of putting on this farce?”

  “Because it has to be public,” Mr. Mox says. The man’s jaw clenches as he says the words, and he barely manages not to growl.

  “Why?”

  “Because I say it does!” The man slams his fists on the stone top of his desk. Magic flares from one of the bangles he wears on his wrist, and a crack cuts through the stone beneath his hand. The mask of calm slowly falls back over the man’s features, but it lasts for only two seconds before Treston Mox explodes from his chair, knocking it to the floor. “It has to be a nobody! It has to be public! It has to be impossible to recover from!”

  The man hammers the desk again and hisses as he injures his hand. He glares at me like all of his problems in the world are my fault. “How hard is it to beat a bunch of stage fighters? Huh? You and your buddy are supposed to be some kind of prodigies. The League has you listed as killing multiple monsters above your rank, and yet the man can barely handle Raez and Hart. He lost to Mallis fucking Sanderval. How can he be so useless?”

  Before I can even think about voicing the venomous words that come to me, a presence flows over me from behind. Kedrick stands just behind me, his emerald-colored soul presence wrapping around me like a constricting fist ready to tighten at any second and crush me to paste.

  Treston Mox turns, pointing at me, entirely unaware that his giant is keeping me still. “You will fix this,” the man sneers. “You will fix my problem. There will be no negotiation, no back talk, and no bargaining. Tomorrow night, you will enter the pit and take on the run. You will beat Senya into the dirt and humiliate him in front of everyone in the stadium, and if you don’t, your friend won’t survive his injuries. Do you understand me?”

  It takes me a moment to tuck away all the dangerous promises and threats that immediately come to me. I take all of them and string them into a tight ball that is tucked away at the back of my mind. “I understand perfectly,” I say, forcing my voice to remain steady.

  “Good,” Mr. Mox nods to Kedrick. “Now get her out of here. The fights begin tomorrow at ten in the evening. Do not think that you can give a pitiful performance like your friend and expect that I will forgive it. I am not a forgiving man.”

  “I’m not so big on forgiveness myself,” I answer.

  “Get out!”

  It only takes half an hour before I am stumbling through the door of the penthouse once again. The past few hours feel like a dream, like a nightmare. Anger wars with a bottomless fear in my chest. For a while, I just stand there in the middle of the penthouse, one hand clasped over my mouth as I try to breathe the echoing terror out between my fingers. Another one of my friends is hurt. Again, it is all my fault.

  Before the thoughts can start running away from me, Galea appears at my side. The well of sympathy I see in the spirit’s eyes makes me feel so small.

  “Mistress,” she says, turning and pointing out toward the balcony. “What is that?”

  There, sitting on the railing of my balcony, is a bird made of silvery metal. Held in its claws is a note written in a familiar hand. Lady Talagast wants to speak to me in the morning. She wants me to make sure that Mox’s men don’t follow me to meet her. It’s not difficult to guess what it is she wants to speak about. The letter burns to ashes in my hand as I look out over the dark city.

  “I need to do something,” I tell Galea. The wind tugs at my hair, making dark crimson currents that float in the air like blood in water.

  “Do what, Mistress?”

  “Something drastic,” I say. “Something terrible.”

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