While her brother, Ellen, and Jeff spent time studying their first-round opponents’ fighting styles, skills, and tendencies—not to mention sparring in the Desert Wind Guild’s training room—Jessie had other things on her mind. School, for one.

  Her recent brush with Phoenix’s civilian government had given her a new appreciation for her Civics class. She still didn’t believe that the mayor or City Council had any actual power. The GC’s to-secret archives were crammed full of evidence to disprove that. But not having power over portals, portal-related activity, and the city’s delvers wasn’t the same as not having any power at all.

  The civilian government—and its legal system—were valuable tools and weapons, and in order to understand how to use them, Jessie had decided that she had to understand how most people thought they worked. The average person in Phoenix believed that the Governing Council and City Council shared power equally, with separate domains. Just because reality didn’t line up with that didn’t mean Jessie could get away with not understanding the perception. She had to dig into the illusion of reality.

  So, as the bell rang to dismiss Civics and free her for the rest of her day, her teacher cleared her throat. “Jessica Gerald, stay behind for a minute, please.”

  Jessie already had her lie ready. It was even kind of the truth. When the teacher asked, she pretended to think about it, then nodded. “Yeah. I started thinking more about the politics in Phoenix, and I realized there was a lot I didn’t know. Someday, I want to get into local, neighborhood-level governance, and I…I guess I haven’t been the best student so far.”

  “Well, I’ve noticed your work ethic has been changing over the last few days. If you keep it up, a low B isn’t out of your reach.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. M.” Jessie excused herself and let the crowd part for her chair. It took a while; the minutes after the dismissal bell were the worst. Everyone was so busy, and Stephen’s class was across the building, so she couldn’t lean on him for help. Metaphorically, of course. She didn’t need help. Not really.

  Plus, she was sitting down.

  Then, when the hall finally cleared enough, she wheeled herself to the pick-up area, where a shiny silver sports car waited. Stephen caught up with her there, and they loaded the chair into Deimos’s back hatch, then took off. Ten minutes later, Stephen was at his house, and Jessie got herself changed behind tinted windows.

  By the time they pulled up outside of the GC’s headquarters, Jessica Gerald looked the part of a guild leader—but one twenty years younger than anyone else in attendance.

  The Outer Council didn’t meet in a conference room.

  Thirty factions—most capping out at Type Three guilds specializing in C-Rank portal clears, but the Big Five were here, and so were another half-dozen guilds with a team that could clear A-Rank portals—were simply too many people. A lot of the guilds had a representative and an assistant.

  By contrast, the Governing Council seemed underrepresented. Only one man—a big, gray-haired man whose eyes cut like knives at whoever he looked at—plus a single assistant. But Jessie knew exactly who he was. Councilman Nathan Anders.

  The room was a tiered-seating lecture hall. And it felt empty, even with over fifty people.

  “Right. Calling this to order. The main issues on the agenda all revolve around the alleged aliens from another world. We have updates on our attempts to translate their language into something we can understand and use ourselves. But before that, as is tradition, I open the floor for any and all complaints, criticisms, or concerns,” Anders said.

  One of the B-Rankers cleared his throat as he stood up. “The Bladestorm Guild wishes to lodge a formal complaint against all five of Phoenix’s major guilds. Their efforts to stack the Fallen Delvers Tournament in their favor go against the spirit of the game. We demand that their A-Rankers withdraw from the tournament and—“

  Deborah Callahan snorted. “Not happening. Tournament’s fair. Deal with it.”

  Anders narrowed his eyes at Deborah. “Everyone gets a chance to speak here. Anything else from the Bladestorms?”

  Silence. Jessie thought about saying something. It was suspicious how the five biggest delver guilds represented so much of the tournament. Add in the Traynors and the Desert Wind, and they made up over half of the thirty-six entrants—closer to three-quarters, in fact. But Deborah was right. The tournament was designed to be fair. And more than that, it had a larger purpose.

  And even more than that, Jessie had come into this meeting with a plan: observe, take notes, and learn, but don’t draw attention to herself.

  The offended guild leader stood for a few more seconds, then shook his head.

  “Noted,” Anders said. “The tournament isn’t about the prize inside the Fallen Delvers Memorial Portal. It’s about the incoming monster tide. We’ve made contact with the Monster Eaters, and they’ve agreed to move into the desert west of Phoenix until the threat has passed. Our scouts report that the bulk of the break’s force is approaching. They’ve been fighting front-runners for days now—ever since the Light of Dawn and his team retreated across the desert.

  “So, if the Bladestorms, or any other guild that’s not represented in the tournament wants to be where they matter, make arrangements to defend the 303 Wall in your district, or to help cover someone else’s. It’s going to be ugly. Next?”

  “What about the wall’s in-built defenses?” someone asked. Jessie perked up. She’d heard about them, but this was a chance to learn how they worked.

  Anders nodded. “The Governing Council has been stockpiling cores, and all Script and Bindings are fresh and ready to trigger. The 303 Wall is ready, but it won’t hold off the monster tide alone. We’ll need active defenders, too. Next?”

  “The Renegades have been cutting corners in their clears. We’re petitioning for access to their territory.”

  “Like hell you are!”

  It went on for almost half an hour. The whole time, Jessie wrote until her wrist ached. Then she wrote some more. Everything had to be documented. Everything had to be remembered. This was a crash course in the real politics between Phoenix’s guilds, and she couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

  And gradually, a pattern emerged.

  The Iron Falcons didn’t have any allies. They stood alone on every issue except for the Carlsbad Portal Break. The Coyotes only worked with the Iron Falcons when that was the topic of discussion. Otherwise, they preferred a small collection of a half-dozen minor guilds that neighbored them. The Roadrunners and Portal Tyrants were close allies, but when they disagreed, they became bitter enemies. And every one of the four Phoenix guilds—the Roadrunners, Guardians, Portal Tyrants, and Coyotes—had at least four or five smaller guilds whose interests aligned with theirs.

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  There weren’t thirty factions in the room. There were five.

  Six, counting Anders.

  Seven, counting the Desert Wind Guild—but Jessie didn’t count her guild. Not until she knew where the wind was blowing.

  That held all through the open floor session, until Anders, looking bored, held up a hand. Over the next five seconds, silence descended on the room. When it was quiet, Anders said, “Now, the main topic of the night. Doctor Fred Teller is here to bring everyone up to speed on translation efforts for our guests’ language.”

  Dr. Teller was a thin man. White goatee, white eyebrows, absolutely no hair. Cardigan, brown pants, wrinkles on his clothes and face. Jessie was honestly surprised she couldn’t find a pipe anywhere on him.

  “Now, as you know, language is a strange thing—especially with regards to our guests. I’ve translated multiple dead languages from first principles, and nothing has ever stumped me this badly,” Dr. Teller said. “It doesn’t follow any terrestrial rules.

  “Typically, if you have a native speaker and a written source, translation is easy. But in this case, it hasn’t been. There’s been something missing. A complete block in communication. They won’t talk to us, so we’re left with only the text we have. We’ve been studying it for the last three weeks, trying to narrow it down, and I believe we’ve hit on the key.”

  He pulled up a page of words on a screen in front of the room. Jessie tried not to yawn; she’d been in school all day, and the last thing she needed was another lecture, even if the subject matter was this important.

  “We’d been approaching the written language like either English, Arabic, or Chinese—that is, either left to right, right to left, or up to down. Nearly every written language in Earth’s history follows one of those three formations. That gives us a common point to begin comparison. From there, we look for alphabetical or ideogrammatic lettering and start solving from there, using the rules we take for granted to speed up the process. Our verbal language decoding follows similar principles. That is, when we speak, our sentences are constructed in similar, rules-based patterns, and we can take advantage of that in translation.”

  Dr. Teller pushed a button, and sections of the text on the screen highlighted, while others faded into the background. “The Hyperboreans—we needed a name, and we pulled from Greek—have rules as well, but their language is based on emphasis, not direction.”

  Jessie stared at the screen. She’d seen patterns like this before. She’d solved patterns like this before—hundreds of them, in hospital beds all through her childhood. Word searches. The Hyperboreans’ language was word searches.

  It explained everything. Everything. Why her translation programs, friends, and hours of work hadn’t produced results. Dr. Teller was right. Their language didn’t follow Earth’s rules at all. Why would it?

  “How could that possibly work?” someone asked.

  “Emphasis.” Dr. Teller clicked the button again, and the screen changed to highlight one phrase. He pointed. “We found this symbol all over everything taken from a recent delve into an Arboreal portal world. We believe it marks the start of a sentence and the direction to read it in. We also think direction dictates tone of voice, but we’re not sure.”

  “And what does it say?” someone else asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  Councilman Anders lifted his head. “Dr. Teller and his team are working on building trust with the Hyperboreans. However, until they’re willing to work on a lexicon together, there is no way to translate the symbols properly. Correct, Doctor?”

  “Correct. This is a major breakthrough, not a solved lexicon. If that happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Jessie suppressed the urge to either roll her eyes, say something, or both. This was a major breakthrough, but Dr. Teller was missing at least half of the puzzle pieces. Jessie had something he didn’t: the notebook Kade and Ellen had pulled from the Arboreal portal world. Now that she had the emphasis trick and the word search theory, she could figure this out.

  Every scrap of evidence Jessie had pointed toward it being a ledger. It had come from a warehouse, and it was formatted like a list of names and numbers—right down to the spreadsheet-style rows and columns. But what if it wasn’t? What if…

  It had to be. Jessie listened as Dr. Teller finished, Councilman Anders took over, and the discussion spiraled into a repetition of questions and non-answers. She vaguely noticed that none of the Big Five guilds had any questions at all. They had to know all of this already. And of course they would; the Inner Council probably decided what the Outer Council heard and saw. This discussion meant nothing. But what did matter was this:

  Kade’s description of the portal world they’d gotten the notebook from mentioned a marketplace and warehouses. They’d been full of things that didn’t match an Arboreal portal world. In fact, Kade had recognized items from at least three different worlds—and that was just what he recognized.

  To communicate across language barriers, the elves, biosculptors, and orcs would need a lexicon—or a common language. And Jessie was almost certain that was what Kade had given her. She just hadn’t known how to read it until now.

  Deborah Callahan’s knuckles bled. Another training dummy lay tangled and twisted in front of her; even the specially-built training room she did her workouts in wasn’t enough anymore. She was on the edge of S-Rank. She could feel it in every motion, like pent-up energy screaming for release, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t get there.

  “Fuck,” she gasped as she stared at the smoking pile of metal, chest pumping like a bellows. She blinked sweat out of her eyes and shook her head, then opened the door and stepped out. No one was waiting for her. She hadn’t had a gaggle of low-rankers following her around since Angelo got back—earlier than expected, and in worse shape than she’d hoped.

  Everything was going off the rails.

  The Inner Council was keeping the details to themselves, but she and the other A-Rankers that the Big Five guilds had entered into the Fallen Delvers Tournament were all they could spare. If they’d had their way, they would have entered everyone. But war was coming, and the GC needed soldiers.

  Right now, there was fighting in Globe, by the Grand Canyon, and far to the south of Tucson. And every high-ranker who wasn’t in the tournament was helping out. Angelo was somewhere to the east, no doubt glassing even more sand. The Portal Tyrant and most of his guild’s team had reinforced the Iron Falcons, and they were holding for now. But that wouldn’t last. Eventually, even the Phoenix Reborn would have to be called out of retirement to help fight his city’s battles, and anyone who wasn’t still in the tournament would be on the walls. What Angelo had reported from the depths of Carlsbad Caverns was bad. Very bad.

  But not bad enough for Deborah to forget everything else. Not to make her forget about her quest to contact a higher power—only to delay it for a few days, until she was truly ready. She didn’t want to compromise her shot at winning the tournament. No, she needed to get to the end—and not for the prize. For something else.

  She’d found something interesting in the tournament’s bracket—two things, in fact.

  First, an archer. Deborah knew her people’s skill builds by heart. She’d studied them, helped them optimize, and made them who they were. It could have been a coincidence that five of this archer’s seven skills matched ones she’d given Carter Richards, but she doubted it—especially when his Unique skill was a merge. That archer was almost certainly Carter, which meant he was alive. And that he was hiding from her.

  That pissed her off, but she couldn’t do much about it. The tournament’s rules had been very clear—no tampering with other delvers. She’d just have to hope they ran into each other in…the semifinals? That was the earliest they could possibly fight. She couldn’t kill him in the sparring room right under the Spark of Life’s eyes. But she could make him suffer.

  And she could hurt Kade Noelstra long before that. Not directly, no. They didn’t share a bracket. But his girl toy? The shadow mage? Her, Deborah could get to. And she’d make it hurt.

  That’d be fun.

  And then there was Kade Noelstra’s sister. She was, inexplicably, part of the Outer Council now. It was one thing to bring in children to act as GC reps. But to sit on the council made a mockery of the whole GC. It was outrageous. Deborah had been watching her the entire time, and she’d seen a moment of recognition on the girl’s face the moment Dr. Teller revealed his breakthrough.

  What did Jessica Gerald know, and how could Deborah use it once she found a higher power to contact?

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