The arena vendor was named Seko, which sounded like Sico, which is how people in the sump referred to silver coins. So a fitting name for a man who had decided the best way to survive a plague was to monetize it.

  I had been watching him for forty minutes from the mouth of a service passage beneath the east stand. Down in the pit, the crowd was roaring for Vorrik. The three-year champion was dismantling a challenger with a heavy axe. I watched his footwork for a few seconds. Sloppy on the left side, overcompensating for an old knee joint injury. Three seconds to kill him if I dropped from the rafters.

  “I felt something strange just now.”

  “What is it.”

  “You are being nostalgic about being booed in the arena? Interesting.”

  “It was the opposite of all the problems I have currently. The Boos were loud but easy to ignore.”

  “Easy to bask in them as well. A spectacle always creates noise, and every noise can be a melody in disguise..”

  “I had bruises from flasks and stones thrown at me.”

  “The crowd always reacted to you. You had a stage name at 8 years old. Veterans in the business call that “ungrateful talent”

  “shut up.”

  “Jump on that stage, come on!”

  “Shut up.”

  I wasn't here for Vorrik anyways.

  Seko finished his circuit through the crowd and moved toward the service gate that led into the arena's underbelly. I followed.

  The passages beneath were a maze of fighter quarters and storage rooms that smelled of fresh violence and old money. I stayed thirty back, letting the Shinobi variant do its work, the shadow absorbing the torchlight, my footsteps producing nothing.

  He led me to a loading area near the arena's rear. Three other vendors were already there, unloading brass merchandise from a wooden cart. The figurines were plague brass. The texture was wrong for cast metal…too organic. Someone had taken transformed material from the Sump victims and turned it into souvenirs.

  The operation was organized. I noticed the registration marks on the cart. The vendors' faces. The guard who was very carefully not watching them.

  And I noticed the crates. Stamped into the pale wood, half-hidden by a canvas tarp, were sharp, dense geometric lines. The exact same impossible script I had seen folded in Damian's pocket.

  Everything that followed was instinctual.

  I took Seko by the collar and put him against the stone wall. He made a sound. The other vendors scattered. The guard who was not watching continued to not watch.

  "The supply origin," I said. "Where does the material come from."

  Seko ran several calculations. The one about whether I was imperial enforcement. Maybe also considering the implications of the shadows swirling around me.

  "Warehouse district," he choked out. "Carden Street. There's a factor there who buys the material from collectors."

  "The stamp on the crates." I pressed my forearm into his throat. "Whose is it."

  "I don't know! It's just a brand the Carden factor uses! I don't ask, I just sell what I'm given!"

  He knew what the brass was, but I’d rather have him alive.

  "Carden Street. Hett," I said, reading the logistics manager's name off the cart's manifest. "If either stops being accurate, I'll find you."

  I let him go and stepped back into the shadows. Carden Street was three blocks from the densest plague concentration in the Sump. And the crates were marked with the geometry scribbles that I saw in Damian’s chamber. Someone had been building this infrastructure before the plague became visible.

  I filed that and moved toward the market district exit. The afternoon crowd was thick and loud.

  “I felt something.. for real this time..”

  That was when the presence arrived behind me.

  Just suddenly there was someone, and they must have been ready to suddenly be there for a while now..The Shinobi variant hissed under my skin, retreating.

  "Oh." A woman's voice, warm and genuinely delighted. "You're him."

  I turned slowly. Kept my hands visible.

  The woman behind me was beautiful. And obviously dangerous. Dark hair that caught the light at wrong angles. Eyes like obsidian. She was examining a vendor's fruit with the easy expertise of someone who had been shopping in human markets for centuries.

  "Malgrin," I projected inward.

  His response was immediate, and the panic in it was not performed.

  "This is Khamsa. Class 5 fire demon. Do not provoke her. Do not do anything that could be read as a challenge."

  My heart rate spiked. The corruption pulsed in my shoulders.

  "Relax." Khamsa smiled. It was a genuine smile. "I'm not here to fight. I just wanted to see the boy I feel I know so well already."

  "Then you know I am not interesting."

  "You are, though." She tossed a coin to the vendor and bit into a red apple. "You survived the Portal. And you're tracking the Carden Street supply chain." Her eyes flicked playfully toward the arena behind me.

  "Good eye on the crates, by the way. I hear those who work with brass absolutely swear by that brand."

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  She knew about.. everything, probably.. And she was mocking it.

  "What do you want."

  "To look at you." She tilted her head, analyzing me like a museum exhibit. "The broadcast doesn't quite capture it. The way you move. The way you calculate the math of surviving me instead of just freezing."

  "What broadcast."

  Khamsa laughed. A bright, uncomplicated sound.

  "Did you think your little struggle was private? Every demon in the Abyss has been watching you since you made your pact. The betting pools have made fortunes."

  I thought about Malgrin's constant references to an audience. I had assumed it was his theatrics coming out.

  "They're watching us right now," Khamsa said softly. She took a step closer. The air between us grew hot. Literally. The temperature of a furnace door opening.

  "4 Million of them. That’s more than half of our entire population. Wondering if the humanity you're clinging to is strong enough to survive what's yet to come, cursed boy."

  She reached out. Fast enough that I couldn't stop it, slow enough to demonstrate she wasn't trying to kill me. She pressed one finger against my chest, just over my heart.

  The contact burned through my clothes.. Sizzling hot, insisting on being felt.

  "Every day is a choice, Yozi," she whispered, her voice dropping its playful lilt, revealing the ancient, patient hunger beneath. "Power or principle. Demon or human. Smile for the audience. I can't wait to see what you choose when you're finally desperate enough."

  She stepped back. The burning faded slowly.

  "We'll talk again," she said.

  Then Khamsa turned and vanished into the market crowd, blending into humanity with terrifying ease.

  I walked back to the new safe house alone.

  Four million demons watching me constantly in real time. My corruption, my choices, the kiss? All of it was entertainment by things that were older than the empire.

  "I mentioned it pretty often.”

  “I am not saying anything.”

  Good! Also, she's playing a long game," Malgrin said quietly in my head. "Building familiarity. And when you're at your absolute lowest, she'll have a deal ready.. I don't want you to take that deal, Yozi.I want you to survive this as yourself."

  He was being sincere. And I knew Malgrin well by now. He is the closest thing to a friend I will ever have.

  "She's assuming desperation produces surrender," I said to him, staring at the cobblestones. "She hasn't accounted for what desperation produces in people who've lost the appetite for comfortable choices.”

  When I pushed open the door to the safe house, the smell of roasted chicory and burnt ash hit me first.

  Lillian was standing at our small table, unpacking wrapped bundles of Sump-bread and a jar of preserves. It was a new tradition she had forced upon us over the last few days. Setting up a space for us, stopping by in between evacuation shifts to drop off terrible coffee and edible food, making sure the people trying to save her city remembered how to sit at a table.

  Nyssara sat across from her, looking exhausted, holding a warm mug.

  "You look like you fought a wall and the wall won," Lillian said to me, wiping her hands on her practical merchant's apron. She nudged a bundle of bread toward my side of the table. "Eat. You're no good to the Sump if you collapse."

  "Thank you, Lillian." I sat down.

  "Don't thank me, just eat it." She smiled, patted Nyssara's shoulder, and moved toward the door. "Keep him in line, Commander."

  "Always," Nyssara said softly.

  Nyssara set her mug down. She had been in the archives for many hours almost daily now. I I won’t ask her about something that she didn’t willingly shared by now. But I think there is something..

  I told her about the geometric brand on the arena crates. Then I told her about Khamsa. The broadcast, the millions watching, the burning touch.

  Nyssara didn't interrupt. "What did you think, when she told you it was likely you'd break?"

  "That I intend to defy, and that I am sure of that." I said. "That's what I have instead of hope right now."

  Something in her expression shifted.

  "The archives," she said, pulling a stack of notes from her coat. "The script you saw on Damian and in the crates. I found references to it. A pre-dynastic binding language. Used in a specific category of demonic possession that operates through administrative consent rather than direct force."

  "The possessed person agrees to it."

  "They agree, and then the binding makes them forget they agreed. The demon doesn't fight the host's will. It absorbs it." She tapped the paper. "But the relevant sections on how to break it were removed. Someone who knew we'd eventually look cleaned the record first."

  She paused.

  "Tally helped me find the references. She was thorough. She knew exactly which subsections to cross-reference."

  I looked at her. "Who is Tally?."

  "I don't know yet."

  She met my eyes. "I've been trying to find the angle and I can't. She's been really kind."

  "Be more than careful. Please."

  "I will." She reached out and touched my arm.

  "Promise me something. If you get desperate enough that demon looks like the only option. Tell me first. I'd rather fail trying to help you than succeed at doing nothing."

  "I promise."

  We sat in the safe house as the last light left the sky, eating Lillian's bread. Carden Street was a thread for tomorrow. The archives were a thread for Nyssara. And somewhere in the Abyss, millions of demons were watching us sit in a room, making promises, deciding whether we'd keep them.

  Private Sub-Channel: HOTTIES FROM HELL Members: KHAMSA, TALATA, TAMANYA

  KHAMSA: touched him today. Corruption went up. He's SO fun. Give him three days and he'll have rationalized the whole encounter into a tactical variable. ??

  TAMANYA: Focus, Khamsa. The Boss wants an update. Is the anchor ready to be pulled?

  KHAMSA: ugh, you're so strictly business. yes, malgrin is practically begging for a violation. he's getting so attached to the boy it's pathetic.

  TAMANYA: Good. The writ of summons is drafted. I’m filing it with the Court of Performance Records tomorrow morning. "Conduct unbecoming a neutral observer." He stopped being a narrator and started being a participant.

  TALATA: wait, you're actually getting him recalled to the Abyss? ??

  TAMANYA: The evidence is solid. Half the audience thinks his editorializing is charming, but I've been cultivating the other half. The court will have no choice but to summon him for judgment.

  KHAMSA: timeline?

  TAMANYA: The summons hits him within the week. He'll be ripped back to the Abyss right as the plague response hits its crisis point.

  KHAMSA: oh that is gorgeous. the boy loses his only friend right when the stage catches fire. without malgrin, he has no one to translate what he's becoming. which is when he breaks right in front of me...

  TAMANYA: Exactly. Talata, what's the status on the Inquisitor?

  TALATA: she calls me 'Tally' now. we are basically besties ??