Rain hammered the tin awnings of Lower Kaze, drumming a rhythm that matched the pulse in Kira Ashford's throat. She stood beneath a torn canvas sheet, its edges dripping brown water onto the cobblestones, and watched a man bleed out on the steps of a condemned tannery.
Ward Boss Tessen sat propped against the doorframe, his massive frame somehow diminished by the spreading darkness on his chest. Three of his enforcers knelt around him, hands pressed to wounds that would not close. The rain made rivers of the blood, carrying it down toward the gutters where it disappeared into the city's rotting veins.
"Boss, stay with us," one enforcer whispered, his voice cracking.
Tessen's eyes found Kira through the downpour. Recognition flickered there, along with something she had never seen on his weathered face before. Fear.
"Ashford," he rasped. "Knew you'd come. Heard you were back in the district."
Kira moved forward, her boots splashing through ankle-deep water. She crouched beside him, ignoring the warmth that seeped through her trousers. Up close, she could smell the copper of his blood mixed with the wet rot of the alley, the chemical bite of alchemist's fire that still hung in the air.
"Who did this?"
"Doesn't matter who." Tessen's hand closed around her wrist with surprising strength. "What matters is what's coming. For me. For the Ward. For every soul sleeping in these hovels tonight."
His grip tightened, and Kira felt something pressed into her palm. A small object, wrapped in oilcloth.
"There's a relic," Tessen said, his words coming faster now, slurring at their edges. "Stolen three nights ago from the Shrine of Silent Echoes. Touched my hands once, when I was young and stupid enough to believe in sacred things. It's not just an artifact, Ashford. It's a key. And someone is using it to unlock something that should stay buried."
"What kind of key?"
Tessen's laugh became a cough, wet and terrible. The rain pounded harder, almost obscuring the sound. "The kind that opens doors between worlds. The kind my grandmother told me about when she wanted to scare me into behaving. I didn't believe her then."
His eyes lost focus, then found her again with effort that cost him. The fear in them was worse than the blood.
"Find it. Before the bleeding spreads beyond my chest. Before whatever they're summoning finishes waking up." He tried to push the wrapped object more firmly into her grip. "Ten thousand gold marks. Everything the Ward has saved. It's yours if you bring it back. Or destroy it. Destroying might be better."
"Tessen." Kira's voice came out harder than she intended. "I need more than folklore and dying man's riddles."
"Soren Crane." The name came out in a wheeze. "Cartographer. Works out of a shop on Tinkerer's Row. He knows the old paths, the ones that don't show on any map. Tell him Tessen sent you. Tell him... tell him the turtle remembers."
His hand went slack. The rain kept falling.
One of the enforcers, a woman with close-cropped hair and a face scarred by years of street fighting, looked up at Kira. Her eyes were red, but her jaw was set.
"Boss died owing debts all over the district," she said. "But he never welched. Not once in twenty years. Whatever he paid you to do, you do it. The people of Lower Kaze are counting on it."
Kira rose to her feet. The oilcloth bundle sat heavy in her palm, lighter than it should have felt given the weight of what it represented. She unwrapped a corner, just enough to glimpse what lay inside.
A scale. Dragon-scale, if the old stories held any truth. It was the size of a coin, black as a starless sky, and it drank in the lantern light rather than reflecting it. Even wrapped, she could feel a coldness radiating from it, the kind that had nothing to do with the rain or the season.
"This thing is dangerous," she said, more to herself than to the enforcers.
"Everything dangerous can kill you," the scarred woman replied. "That's what dangerous means."
Kira rewrapped the scale and tucked it into the inner pocket of her coat, against her ribs. She could feel its chill even through layers of leather and wool. She thought of her squad, the ones she had lost on a mission in the northern territories when a map lied and a door opened onto the wrong side of the world. She thought of the silence that had filled her comms when the screaming stopped.
She had spent three years trying to outrun that silence. Hunting relics in the margins of civilization, taking contracts that no sane operative would touch. Building a reputation for closing cases that should have stayed open, for venturing into places where the maps ended and the monsters began.
This felt like one of those cases. Worse, maybe. Because this time, the monster was not waiting at the end of the trail. The monster was waking up while she stood in the rain.
"Where is the Shrine of Silent Echoes?" she asked.
The enforcer pointed up toward the cliffs that rose behind the Lower Ward, where the oldest part of the city clung to the rock like a stubborn barnacle. "Above the Merchant's Stairs. Abandoned since the plague of '94. Nobody goes up there anymore. They say the shrine keeps itself, no priests left to tend it."
"Nobody?"
"The relic keepers, maybe. The ones who don't believe in dying." The woman spat into the rain. "Or the ones who've already done it and don't know how to stop."
Kira turned to leave, then stopped. "Did Tessen have family?"
"A daughter. Lives upriver, married to a fisherman. He sent her away six months ago, told her it was for business. I think he knew something was coming." The enforcer's voice cracked again, just for a moment. "He was a hard man, Ashford. But he was fair. That's more than most."
Kira nodded once and walked into the rain.
The alley opened onto a wider street, and she moved through it with the practiced ease of someone who had learned to make herself small in hostile territory. Her hand rested on the hilt of the short blade she carried in her coat, though the threat here was not the kind steel could answer.
The relic burned cold against her ribs. She could feel it pulsing faintly, like a second heartbeat that did not belong to her.
She had taken the contract. Now she had to see it through.
The stairs to the upper city began at the end of the street, carved into the living rock and worn smooth by centuries of feet. At their base, a small fire burned beneath an awning, tended by a figure wrapped in layers of stained cloth. The figure raised its head as Kira approached, and she saw a face that had been badly burned long ago, the features melted into something between a man and a landscape.
"Going up?" the figure asked. The voice was surprisingly clear.
"Looking for someone who knows these paths," Kira said. "A cartographer. Soren Crane. Tinkerer's Row."
The burned face considered her. Rain dripped from the edges of the cloth wrapping.
"Crane keeps strange hours. Stranger company." A pause. "He lost his sight three winters back. Claims he sees better than he did before. Might be true. Might be the rot talking."
"I need to find him before dawn."
"His shop sits above the chandler's, third floor. Knock twice, then once, then twice again. He'll know you're not one of the usual pests." The figure gestured up the stairs. "The shrine is beyond the old aqueduct. Don't drink the water up there. Don't look at your reflection if you pass the Mirror Pools. And if you hear singing, walk the other way."
"Singing?"
"The shrine remembers its priests. Some of them still answer, even dead." The burned face turned back to the fire. "Tessen was a good boss. Tessen paid his debts. Now it's your turn."
Kira started up the stairs.
The rain followed her, relentless, washing the blood of Lower Kaze down toward the harbor while she climbed toward whatever waited in the silence above.
The shrine was smaller than the stories suggested. Stone and old wood, its roof half-collapsed where the aqueduct had once channeled water that no longer flowed. Kira ducked through the entrance, her boots finding dry ground where the overhead structure still held against the rain. The air inside tasted of dust and something herbal, the ghost of incense that had burned here decades before the gods fell silent.
Soren Crane sat in the center of the floor, surrounded by unrolled maps and scattered instruments whose purposes she could not name. He was younger than she had expected, perhaps forty, with dark hair cropped close to a skull that bore the prominent ridges of someone who had once been handsome. His eyes were pale and opaque, filmed over in a way that confirmed the burned figure's words. He turned toward the sound of her entrance, though how he tracked her so precisely remained unclear.
"You're not one of mine," he said. His voice was even, thoughtful, with the cadence of someone accustomed to working in silence. "You smell of ozone and old fear. Military, or close to it."
"Ex-military." Kira crouched across from him, keeping her hands visible. Crane might have been a courier, but couriers survived in Lower Kaze by being difficult to kill. "I'm looking for a fighting pit. The kind that takes exotic fighters and pays well for their losses."
"Everyone in the Ashfall Slums is looking for a fighting pit. It's the only honest entertainment left." Crane's head tilted, listening. "But you don't want to gamble. You want to find someone. Someone specific."
"Someone I've been sent to retrieve."
"By whom?"
Kira considered the question. Vex had given her the name, but Vex gave names like coins, always watching to see which pockets they disappeared into. "An employer. The details aren't important. What matters is the fighter's name and where the pit operates."
Crane was quiet for a moment, his fingers moving across the map nearest his knee. The gesture seemed reflexive, a cartographer's habit even without sight. "There are three fighting pits in the Sprawl that deal in the kind of merchandise you describe. Two of them are beyond your reach. Ward Boss Tessen runs the third from a basement off Sable Alley, and even Tessen's reach has limits."
"Tessen's the one I need. I heard he sources from the Eastern Provinces."
"He sources from everywhere there's desperation." Crane's mouth twisted. "You want the pit. I can give you directions. But I need to know what you're planning to do once you find this fighter. The pits don't release their property willingly, and the fighters inside them are often not in a state to be reasoned with."
"I don't plan to reason with anyone." Kira kept her voice flat. "I plan to walk in, find the person I'm looking for, and walk out. How difficult that becomes depends on how cooperative the staff feels like being."
"You're either very confident or very stupid."
"I've been told it's a fine line."
Crane made a sound that might have been a laugh, though it carried no warmth. He turned and called out toward a curtained doorway behind him. "Yua. Come here."
Movement behind the curtain. A woman emerged, perhaps sixty, her hair bound in a simple knot, her face lined but her eyes sharp. She wore the gray robes of the Shrine's caretaker, though Kira suspected the shrine had no real caretakers left to dress.
"This is Yua," Crane said. "She tends the shrine. She also tends the less savory side of my work. She'll get you into Tessen's pit without being gutted on the threshold."
Yua looked Kira over with the practiced eye of someone who had been assessing threats since before Kira was born. "Tessen's place. Which fighter?"
"Amber eyes. Half-dragon. Exile from the Northern Reaches."
Yua's eyebrows rose. "Volkov. You're looking for Volkov." She said the name with something that was not quite recognition, something closer to professional interest. "He's been causing problems. Doesn't kill, which is more dangerous than killing because the dead can't learn and the living come back meaner. Tessen's been bleeding money trying to break him."
"Can you get me in?"
"I can get you to the door. What happens after that is your concern." Yua glanced at Crane, who gave a slight nod. "We have an arrangement with Tessen. I provide certain services. He'll see my mark on you and grant you entry. Once you're inside, you're on your own."
Kira rose. "How much?"
"The usual fee. Two silvers for passage. And when you find your half-dragon, tell him Crane sent you. Tell him the map he asked for is ready."
Kira paused. "He asked you for a map?"
"Three weeks ago. Before they put him in the pit." Crane's expression remained neutral, but his fingers had stopped their restless movement. "He wanted to know where the seal was buried. I told him the maps that matter aren't the ones you can unroll."
Yua produced a small token from her sleeve, a disc of dark wood carved with a spiral pattern. "Wear this where Tessen can see it. Don't lose it, and don't try to sell it. Tessen has a long memory and short patience."
Kira took the token, feeling its weight. Two silvers changed hands. The exchange felt more like a toll than a transaction, the price of passage into something that could not be taken back.
"Go through the Sable market, past the fish-stalls and the bone-carvers. Take the alley behind the Drowned Rat. There's a door with no handle. Knock three times, slow." Yua spoke quickly, her tone indicating this information had been given before and would be given again. "Tessen will let you in or he won't. The rest is between you and whatever gods still listen in the Sprawl."
Kira memorized the directions as she moved toward the door. The rain had not let up, if anything it had grown heavier, the drops now fat and cold where before they had been merely persistent. She pulled her collar higher and stepped back into the narrow streets, the token pressed against her chest beneath her coat.
The Sable market was louder than the shrine had suggested, even in the downpour. Vendors hunched beneath awnings, their wares displayed on tarps that puddled with each gust. Kira moved through the crowds with the particular invisibility of someone who did not want to be remembered. She bought nothing, spoke to no one, kept her eyes on the gutters where the truly dangerous things liked to travel.
The Drowned Rat was easy to find, its sign swinging despite the weather, a painted rat with its mouth open and bubbles rising from its throat. The alley behind it was narrow enough that Kira had to turn sideways to pass, her shoulders scraping against walls that wept with moisture. She counted her steps. Thirty-seven. Forty. The door was where Yua had said it would be, wood darkened with age, no handle, no marking.
She knocked three times, slow. The sound disappeared into the rain.
Nothing happened.
Kira waited. The alley filled with the smell of the market's overflow, fish guts and cheap incense and the particular sourness of bodies that had been working too long in the wet. She was beginning to think the door was a relic of some forgotten business when it opened inward, just a crack, just enough to reveal a single eye and the gleam of a blade.
"Token," said a voice from behind the door.
Kira drew the wooden disc from beneath her coat and held it up. The eye studied it for a long moment, then the door swung wider, and a hand reached out to pull her inside.
The passage beyond was lit by a single lantern, its flame guttering in a draft that came from below. The man who had let her in was broad and silent, his face a landscape of scars that suggested he had spent more time on the losing end of violence than the winning. He pointed downward, toward a staircase that descended into a ruddy glow, then stepped back into the shadows and was gone.
Kira descended.
The sounds reached her before the sights did. A roar of voices, the meat-thud of impact, the higher keen of someone in pain. Then the space opened up around her, a basement that had once been a warehouse and was now a colosseum in miniature. Tessen had carved a pit from the floor, circular, perhaps twenty feet across, surrounded on all sides by tiered seating that climbed toward a ceiling lost in smoke. The air was thick with body heat and the copper-tang of blood, and beneath it all the sweeter smell of alcohol being consumed in quantities that would leave half the spectators dead before morning.
She found Tessen without difficulty. He sat in a high-backed chair at the pit's edge, a man built like a barrel with hands that could have crushed stone and eyes that missed nothing. His face was weathered into a permanent expression of calculation, and when he saw Kira's token, something shifted in his gaze. Not warmth. Recognition of commerce.
"Yua's mark," he said. His voice was rough, gravel dragged over gravel. "What brings you to my establishment?"
"I'm looking at your fighters," Kira said. "Specifically the half-dragon. The one who doesn't kill."
Tessen's expression didn't change, but the men flanking him tensed slightly, hands moving toward weapons they hadn't quite drawn. "Volkov. You've heard of him."
"I've heard he's expensive. And that he causes problems."
"Both true." Tessen leaned back, studying her with the patient interest of a predator deciding whether something was worth the effort of pursuit. "You a buyer? A relative? A fool with a death wish?"
"I'm a person with an offer."
"I don't take offers from people who walk into my pit wearing borrowed marks." Tessen's voice hardened. "Yua vouches for passage, not for business. If you want to talk business, you talk to me, and you do it straight."
Kira held his gaze. "I'm here to negotiate the release of your half-dragon fighter. I have resources. I have motivation. And I have a very specific interest in making sure this transaction concludes without anyone losing more than they can afford."
Tessen stared at her for a long moment, then barked a laugh that drew glances from the surrounding seats. "You think you can buy Volkov? Lady, he isn't merchandise. He's a punishment. He kills men, I lose fighters and pay the families. He refuses to kill, my clients lose interest and stop paying. Either way, I bleed."
"Then let me take the bleeding off your hands."
"Three men tonight." Tessen held up fingers thick as sausages. "Three trained men, and he broke every one without once drawing his blade. Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. The kind of terrifying that empties seats and empties pockets." He leaned forward, voice dropping. "So here's what I want to know. Why should I let some stranger with a borrowed token walk out of here with my most expensive headache?"
The crowd noise swelled around them. In the pit below, two figures circled each other, but Kira's attention was on Tessen, on the calculation behind his questions, on the specific shape of his greed.
"Because whatever debt the half-dragon owes you," she said, "I can settle it. And I can settle it in a way that doesn't require you to explain to your clients why their entertainment walked out the door."
Tessen considered this. Around them, the pit fight ended with a wet crack that drew a cheer from the lower tiers. The victor raised a fist. The loser did not rise.
"Twenty thousand," Tessen said. "And that's just to start talking."
"Ten."
"Eighteen."
"Twelve, and I never come back."
"Fifteen, and you tell me who's paying you to want this man."
Kira hesitated. Vex's name was not something she traded lightly, but Vex had sent her here knowing she might have to use it. "An interested party. Someone who believes Volkov is worth more free than caged."
"That's not a name."
"It's more than you're getting from anyone else."
Tessen's eyes narrowed. He looked at her the way he had probably looked at a hundred negotiation opponents, weighing what he could take against what it would cost him to take it. Then he gestured to one of his flanking men, a gesture that was almost lazy.
"Bring Volkov out," he said. "Let's see how much our guest is willing to bleed for her investment."
Kira counted her breaths as the enforcers moved through the crowd. One, two, three. Each step they took toward the holding cells below the arena was another breath she would not get back. Four, five. The crowd's roar dimmed to a dull wash of sound, the fight below reduced to a distant concern of lesser men.
Tessen watched her with the patience of a man who had already won something and was merely waiting for her to realize it.
"Volkov hasn't fought in the pit for three days," he said, his gravel voice cutting through the noise. "Too valuable to damage. But he eats, drinks, and waits. A man like that, with nothing to do but think, gets ideas. Gets stubborn." He tapped a thick finger against his knee. "You've got a way to make him cooperate, or I've got fifteen thousand reasons to find out if he bleeds interesting colors."
"Sixteen," Kira said. "Your opening was fifteen."
Tessen's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Sixteen it is."
The enforcers returned, parting the crowd with their shoulders. Between them walked Ryu Volkov, and Kira felt something shift in her chest that she had not expected to feel. Not relief, exactly. Recognition.
He was taller than his file had suggested, broad through the shoulders in a way that spoke of old training rather than recent labor. His hair was dark and pulled back from a face that might have been carved from the same stone as the temples he had once served. His eyes were the pale gray of winter dawn, and they found Kira immediately, cataloging her the way a soldier catalogs a threat. They did not soften.
A manacles circled his wrists, the metal etched with symbols that Kira did not recognize but that seemed to drink the lantern light. His clothing was torn at one shoulder, the fabric dark with old sweat, and there was a bruise yellowing along his jaw that someone had given him recently and probably regretted.
"Volkov," Tessen said, gesturing with the casual authority of a man pointing out livestock. "Your ride is here."
Ryu said nothing. He stopped three paces from Kira, and the distance felt deliberate, measured, the gap between strangers who have not yet decided if they will become something else.
"You're not syndicate," he said. His voice was low, smooth, with the faintest trace of an accent that Kira could not place. Eastern European, maybe, worn smooth by years of travel. "Your hands are wrong."
"My hands," Kira repeated.
"Sword calluses, but not on the right fingers. And you hold your shoulders like someone who was taught to shoot before she was taught to step." His gaze dropped to her hip, where her coat hung loose over the pistol she had not bothered to hide. "Former military. Intelligence branch, if the stance carries. You're not here to collect a bounty."
"No," Kira said. "I'm here to warn you."
"Warn me." For the first time, something moved behind those winter eyes. Not warmth, but attention. The sharpening of a man who had spent years listening for the sound of the world ending. "About what."
Kira glanced at Tessen. Tessen crossed his arms and leaned back against his booth, making it clear he intended to hear every word. The crowd had thinned slightly, the pit fighters being cleared away for the next bout, and the lantern smoke was thicker in the gaps.
"About the people who bought your contract," Kira said. "And what they intend to do with the thing you were sent to deliver."
Ryu's expression did not change, but something in him went very still. The kind of stillness that Kira recognized from her years in the field, the moment before a man decided whether to run or to fight.
"You know what I'm carrying," he said. Not a question.
"I know what you're supposed to be carrying. I need to know if it's true."
"It's true." The words came out of him like a confession pulled from deep water. "The heart is sealed. It has been sealed for three hundred years in a casket of jade and bone, bound by the last true oath of my order. If it is opened, if the seal is broken, what sleeps beneath the Eastern Gate will wake."
"Will wake and do what."
Ryu looked at her then with the full weight of his winter gaze, and Kira understood why the syndicate had wanted him alive and why Tessen had been so eager to keep him contained. Ryu Volkov was not a desperate man running from a debt. He was a man who had been carrying the weight of an apocalypse in his coat pocket and had not slept properly in years.
"The Wyrm Tide," he said. "The sea of dragons that the old gods drowned beneath the mountains when they sealed the mortal realm from their hunger. The Gate holds them. The heart is part of the Gate. When the seal breaks, the mountains will bleed, and what comes through will not be dragons of flesh and scale. It will be the memory of dragons. The hunger of dragons. Every death they ever caused, every fire they ever breathed, gathered into a single tide that will pour through the wound and swallow everything east of the spine."
The lantern smoke curled between them. Somewhere below, a new pair of fighters had entered the pit, and the crowd's roar rose again like surf against a shore. Kira was aware of none of it. She was aware of the shape of the danger, of how neatly it fit into the pattern Vex had given her, of how completely unprepared she had been for the scale of it.
"The syndicate," she said. "The Ashford Compact. They're buying your debt to get to you."
"Not me." Ryu's voice was steady, but his hands, still circled by the etched manacles, had curled into fists at his sides. "The heart. They want the heart. A man is just a key to a lock."
"They want to shatter the Eastern Gate," Kira said, and heard her own voice as if from a distance. "To loose the Wyrm Tide. Why?"
Ryu was quiet for a moment. The crowd cheered. The lanterns swung. The world continued, indifferent.
"Because some of them believe they can ride it," he said. "That the hungry dead will recognize their masters and spare them while the rest of us burn. Because some of them simply want to watch the world end and call themselves gods of the ashes. And because some of them are owed debts by powers that have waited three hundred years to collect."
Kira thought of the voice in the smoke at the market, the thing that had spoken to Vex through the torn page. She thought of the way the world had felt lately, thin at the edges, like paper held too close to a flame.
"Tessen," she said, without turning. "How much did the Ashford Compact pay for Volkov's contract."
Tessen did not pretend to consider. "Enough that I stopped asking questions."
"Enough to buy your silence when the mountains start bleeding?"
Tessen's silence was answer enough.
Kira reached into her coat. Tessen tensed, his enforcers stepping forward, but Kira only drew out a small leather purse and set it on the rail of the booth between them. The coins inside clinked with the heavy sound of silver.
"Sixteen thousand," she said. "As agreed. Plus five more, if you let us walk out of here without your men following."
Tessen looked at the purse. Then at Kira. Then at Ryu, who had not moved, who was watching Kira with an expression she could not read and did not try to.
"You're asking me to spit in the eye of people who don't get spat in," Tessen said. "People who remember."
"I'm asking you to live," Kira said. "Because if Volkov is right, and the Gate falls, there won't be a Slums left to rule. There won't be a Compact to collect. There'll just be hunger, and the memory of fire, and nothing else."
Tessen's jaw worked. He was a man who had clawed his way up from nothing, who had built a small kingdom in the gutters and would die before he let anyone take it from him. But he was also a man who understood, in the way that survivors always understood, that some threats did not negotiate.
"Twenty-five," he said. "And you take the eastern passage, through the old canal. My men don't patrol there after dark. You won't be my problem anymore."
"Done."
She added the coins. Tessen took the purse, counted it with a quick practiced motion, and nodded to his enforcers. The manacles around Ryu's wrists clicked open. The etched metal fell away, and Kira saw the raw skin beneath, the old scars where the symbols had bitten into his flesh.
"Volkov," Tessen said, as Ryu rubbed his wrists and did not look at him. "You were bad business. I hope your new owner knows what she's buying."
Ryu said nothing. He fell into step beside Kira as she turned toward the eastern exit, and she was aware of him the way she had once been aware of squadmates in hostile territory, by the rhythm of his breath and the placement of his feet.
They did not speak until they had left the noise of the arena behind and entered the corridor that led to the old canal. The air changed. Cooler. Damp. The lantern light gave way to a faint phosphorescence that clung to the tunnel walls like lichen, the last residue of some long-forgotten water magic.
"The heart," Kira said. "Where is it."
"Safe."
"Safe isn't a place."
"It's a person." Ryu walked beside her, his stride unhurried despite everything. "An oath-bound keeper. The last of my order who did not flee when the temple fell. I cannot tell you who. Not until I know what you intend to do with what you've learned."
"I intend to stop the Compact from breaking the Gate."
"With what army?"
"With whatever I can find between now and the end of the world."
Ryu was quiet for a few steps. The tunnel curved. The phosphorescence brightened, then dimmed.
"You believed me," he said. "About the Tide. Most wouldn't."
"Most haven't seen what I've seen."
"And what have you seen."
Kira thought of the smoke in the market. Of Vex's face in the lamplight, aged a decade in a year. Of the thin places in the world where the rules bent and the hungry things pressed close.
"Enough," she said. "To know that some doors, once opened, don't close again."
They walked on. Above them, the Slums groaned with the weight of the city and the bargains of its people. Below them, the old canal waited, dark and patient, leading toward the only part of the story that mattered now.
Ryu glanced at her sideways. "Kira Ashford," he said, as if tasting the name. "The relic hunter who used to chase shadows for the Crown."
"Formerly."
"You still chase shadows."
"Yes. But now I get to choose which ones."
Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile, but the place where a smile might live someday, if the world held together long enough to permit such things.
"Then we should move," he said. "The Compact won't wait. They never do."
They moved.