The battlefield on the massive screen was a portal type I’d never seen before. It probably didn’t even exist below A-Rank. But for the two most powerful delvers in the tournament, an Ambrosial world had made its appearance.

  Gold and marble walkways stretched past ponds whose water glowed a slightly purple tone. Perfectly-shaped trees and bushes grew from planters evenly spaced at the right-angled intersections between the paths. I couldn’t smell the trimmed grass and blooming flowers, but I could imagine it.

  On the left side of the screen, Deborah Callahan stood, her bulky armor filling up more space than it should have. Her shield and sword shimmered with red-and-blue energy, just like in the 50% match I’d watched when I was E-Rank. She wore a helmet this time—a full-faced one that provided absolutely no hints at what she was looking at—and her head pivoted from left to right as she shifted and stretched out.

  To the right, a man with a Coyote armband and shining white armor leaned against the room’s stone wall. He palmed a spellbook in one hand, his thin dagger in the other, and stared at Deborah with slightly narrowed eyes. He’d already cast several Scripts and Bindings as he walked down the tunnel to the room itself, but hadn’t summoned a single minion yet. That would change soon.

  The most hyped fight of the second round was about to start.

  Ellen, Jeff, and I stood near the back of a shade shelter. The afternoon sun beat down on the tent overhead, and the people all around us were covered with a thin layer of sweat. We could have watched from home, but I’d insisted we come here. I wanted to feel the energy of their fight as closely as I could—and Ellen needed to catch every detail. Whoever won would be her third-round opponent.

  Harold moved first. A page flipped through the air, then shredded into a dozen pieces. They rained down on the battlefield, landing in the water and next to the trimmed trees, and everywhere they landed, a single skeleton in tarnished silver armor rose up. Every single one of them carried a spear with a banner hanging from its cross-braces—and every single banner showed the Coyote Guild’s symbol. They didn’t move. Instead, they merely displayed their banners toward Harold.

  His dagger glowed, and he dashed, faster than the E-Rank dungeon should have let him move.

  Deborah hardly moved by comparison. Her red-and-blue-glowing shield lashed out and slammed into the dagger as it ripped toward the soft spot in her armor’s armpit, knocking it aside. I watched her carefully; she’d almost certainly capitalize on her opponent’s overextension.

  No.

  Instead, she rushed the nearest skeleton, sword flashing. The banner-spear fell to the ground, cut in two, and the skeletal minion followed a moment later. She ripped through two more in the moment it took for Harold to recover from her parry. I watched her rush across the room, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.

  I watched—and I winced. I couldn’t help it; Harold’s minions were all but worthless. He wasn’t a traditional summoner. Every one of his skeletal summons increased his own strength, in a strange inversion of the standard summoner set-up.

  “He’s going to win,” I muttered.

  Ellen nodded happily. “Yep. Deborah’s battle plan is wrong for the fight. She’s not an area-effect mage. There’s no way she can minimize his summons, so her best bet is to go after Harold himself.”

  Harold didn’t chase after Deborah; he didn’t need to. Instead, he drew another tome from his belt and flipped it open, then dropped three papers to the ground. This time, only three monsters appeared—but all three were golden beams with only the barest hint of a body under them. All three vomited golden light across the pathway around Harold, and he stood in the intersection of the light. His dagger grew longer and more whiplike, and his aura glowed brightly enough to be visible on the screen.

  And Deborah smashed another skeleton.

  “What is she doing?” Jeff asked.

  I shrugged. Deborah wasn’t this stupid. What was going on?

  Harold’s whip lashed out. Deborah took it with her armor, and it left a singed, half-melted line across her shoulder and breastplate. Another skeleton exploded into dust, then vanished.

  And I started to accept the reality that the most anticipated fight in Round Two was going to be a one-sided massacre as a titanic obsidian pillar erupted from another of Harold’s book pages. The numbers were just too much for Deborah to handle. Not that I wanted her to win—but I did want her to extend the—

  “Match,” Sarah Cullman said.

  I blinked. Harold was still standing there, but now Deborah was on the wrong side of the battlefield. Every single skeleton was dead. Two of the three pillars of light were gone, and the obsidian one was cracked and shattered. Then the handful of surviving summons blinked out and disappeared, and Harold crumpled like a crushed soda can. He collapsed onto the marble pathway, and Sarah leaped down and started pumping healing magic into his unconscious, bleeding body.

  Deborah didn’t say anything. She just walked away, through the door Harold had come in, and headed for the portal’s exit.

  “What happened?” Jeff asked. “Did you see it?”

  “No.” Tanks didn’t hit that hard. They couldn’t. I stared at the screen as Sarah Cullman worked on the fallen summoner. And in the moment before it cut away, I caught something strange.

  Every single pond was empty. Completely empty. But the water was nowhere to be seen.

  Ellen was panicking.

  She didn’t mean to panic. But she couldn’t help herself. The reality of what had happened was slowly settling on her, and she didn’t like it. Harold the Herald should have won the sparring match she’d just watched. She was confident she had at least an even chance of beating him. And she’d been confident that she could give Deborah Callahan a run for her money, too.

  She’d been confident in that. Not anymore. Whatever the A-Rank tank had done, it had been so fast and so aggressive that she hadn’t been able to follow it—and it had happened in an environment that was supposed to be E-Rank-limited. The knot in her throat was so big she felt like she could barely swallow around it.

  Kade didn’t seem to be worried, though. He seemed almost contemplative as the three of them climbed into Deimos and the car took off, heading not for the Desert Wind Guild’s headquarters, but for a place to get something to eat. “I think I know part of what happened,” he said slowly once the car was moving, “but I don’t understand it all.”

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  “What did she do?” Ellen asked.

  Her boyfriend was quiet for a few moments. She thought about saying something else, but before she could, he nodded. “Okay. I think Deborah’s gotten control over water somehow. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but…the ponds were full, right? The last thing I saw before the feed cut to commentary were empty ponds everywhere. I don’t know what she did, but she weaponized the entire arena against Harold. That doesn’t fit in with what we know about her skills—or with anything we saw with the convoy, though. I don’t understand how she did it, only what she did.”

  Ellen stayed quiet. The lump in her throat didn’t get any smaller.

  Jeff didn’t stay quiet, though. “We can pull up her first round fight and see if there are any hints of what she’s doing in that one. Between the two, we should be able to get a baseline for what Deborah’s capable of. Once we have that, we can start prepping you for your fight with her.”

  Kade nodded. “You’re worrying. That’s okay. But we’ve got you, Ellen. We’ll get you ready for this fight, and you’ll have at least even odds of winning by the time we’re done with you.”

  As the car pulled into a parking lot next to the greasiest, fattiest burger joint Ellen could imagine, she nodded once. Curtly. But the juicy, ketchup-covered sandwich she ordered didn’t look appetizing at all, and she just stared at it until Jeff started stealing fries from her basket. Then she shoved the whole thing at him and stared out of the glass window at the 303 Wall outside.

  Whatever Deborah was doing, it was a wrinkle in any plan she could come up with, and she had no idea how to beat it. Maybe Kade did.

  I had no idea how Ellen was going to beat Deborah Callahan, and both my next fight and Jeff’s were still up in the air, so I focused on the things I could control—namely, the dripping cheeseburger in front of me and how Ellen was feeling.

  The sandwich was easy to deal with. It was gone in about three minutes, along with my fries. Ellen was a tougher puzzle to figure out, though.

  She’d been excited for her match-up with Harold the Herald, and I couldn’t blame her. Of all the people in the tournament, she was the most likely to be able to counter his minions. Between Shadow Shapes, Shadow Box, and the myriad area denial spells she could pack, he’d be locked into E-Rank strength and speed, and she’d be able to wear him down quickly. It had been a foolproof battle plan even before the tournament started.

  I put an arm around her and pulled her in for a side-hug. She leaned into it, but didn’t offer one in return, and her tension didn’t fade. She didn’t say anything, either—not the whole time we sat and ate.

  Ellen didn’t talk on the way back to the Desert Wind Guild’s building, either. The trip home was awkward and silent, even without the pulsing drum and bass I was used to hearing in Deimos, and Ellen disappeared into the guild’s library the moment we got back.

  I didn’t.

  “Kade, I have an important question for you,” Jessie said the moment I walked through the door.

  “No, you can’t skip school tomorrow,” I joked.

  “But Kade, you don’t even know why I want to ditch!”

  I blinked. My sister grinned from her seat, then burst out laughing. “Got you. No, it’s not about missing a day. You were right, school’s important, blah blah blah. Besides, school is where my friends are—“

  “Stephen?”

  “…Shut up.” Jessie’s eyes narrowed. “No, I’ve got other concerns. I’ve got a meeting scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. It’s super important, so I made sure it didn’t clash with school or therapy, but I, um…”

  “What?”

  “I need Yasmin for it.” Jessie stared at me. “It’s with the portal people, and they might trust her marginally more than they trust me, since she was one of the first people from Earth that she saw. I’ll only get one shot at this, and I have to make it count.”

  “Count for what?” I asked.

  “No idea. I just know that they’re important to the translation work I’ve been doing. They’ve got the answer to the puzzle, and I need this conversation to go as perfectly as it can.”

  “And you need my permission to take Yasmin why, exactly? You’re the guild leader, remember? This is between her and you.”

  Jessie froze for a moment. Then she stood up and walked to the elevator. “Your room. Now.”

  I followed her. The moment the elevator door opened and we stepped into my suite, she relaxed a tiny bit. Not much, but enough. “Okay. I know something they’re not saying on the news. The tournament’s a side-show—and it’s about to get postponed. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, Phoenix is going to be under attack. Real attack, not the little fight you guys had in the green triangle. The guild’s going to be busy, and I’m trying to take away your support during this fight. That’s why I’m asking for permission.”

  “Am I supposed to know this?” I asked, sitting on the floor.

  Jessie sat across from me, folding into a lotus position. I mimicked her. She didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did I.

  There was just too much piling up. The Carlsbad portal. The tournament. Whatever Andrew had been up to—and what had made Sarah Cullman so mad at the end of our fight. Deborah’s sudden display of…water magic? And now Jessie’s translation was getting close to being finished. I couldn’t keep up with it all.

  I pushed the heel of my palm into my eyes, rubbing them. Then I sighed. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s bad enough that the GC asked Angelo for six days, and he’s only going to pull two and a half at best. Past that, I don’t know.” Jessie sighed and closed her eyes. “It’s too bad the Traynor Corporation’s deal with those guys from San Diego didn’t work out a month or two earlier. If it had, we’d have some different options for handling the Carlsbad portal’s monsters. But yeah, it’s not going to be good.”

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Force myself to relax through sheer strength of will. “Tell me everything you think you know about your translation.”

  “Right. Okay. Three things, then.” Jessie took a deep breath of her own. “First, the thing you took from that portal is a lexicon and a ledger, and that ledger documents transactions between at least seven separate worlds to get those tanks you saw from their world to the Arboreal one. Second, this trade is common enough that there’s a, uh…Lingua Franca is the phrase, but a common language all the different worlds rely on, and it’s what’s in that book. And third, that language doesn’t belong to any of the portal worlds. It belongs to a person, and that person’s title is Crone or Old Woman or something like that.”

  I nodded. Then I took a deep breath. “Okay. If Yasmin’s willing to help you out tomorrow, we’ll do whatever we need to do without her. That ‘Crone’ person sounds like a Paragon, or maybe a monster as powerful as the God of Thunder, though, so be careful. Anything weird happens, you tell me, and I’ll tell Eugene. Deal?”

  Jessie nodded seriously. “Deal. Now, focus on your breathing, Kade. You need to relax.”

  “Seriously, Jessie?” I hated meditation so much, even if it was useful sometimes, and my little sister knew it.

  “Seriously. Chill out.”

  It was beyond unusual for Eugene to focus on a world.

  The reality of a monster like him, at SS-Plus rank and a proper Paragon of his own Path, was that individual worlds were rarely worth his time—especially worlds that lacked the conditions to produce Rank-SS powers. Earth was one of those worlds, and since Kade Noelstra’s appearance on his radar, he’d ignored the world in favor of the uniqueness of the kid. The rest of the world wasn’t that interesting. Sure, the nuclear mage was powerful for his rank, but the world’s conditions meant he’d progress along tiers—parallel to the true path to power, but diverging from it nonetheless.

  He’d laid a claim on the world as a matter of principle, but Earth just wasn’t that important to the God of Thunder, and it would have remained that way if not for the oddity he’d felt yesterday.

  Someone on Earth had made contact with a Paragon.

  That wasn’t abnormal. The Archqueen of Madness made contact with, on average, three to five people a month. They never survived, and Eugene all but tuned out those frequent meetings. Lesser Paragons met delvers on at least a weekly basis, but they were always inside their own portal worlds, not on Earth. More importantly, a monster below SS-Rank had little to offer beyond their core—and that transaction was both permanent and final.

  But this contact had been with a Paragon powerful enough to survive whatever transaction had happened, subtle enough to hide the details from Eugene’s senses, and wise enough to keep the contacting human alive. Any one of those three would have been noise to Eugene, and he’d have ignored it. But all three together? That wasn’t a coincidence. And it sparked his curiosity.

  But even with all his power, the God of Thunder hadn’t found a single shred of information on which Paragon was taking such an interest in someone on Earth. That bothered him. It was annoying. His claim to Kade was inviolable, and as far as he could tell, the rest of the world wasn’t worth his time beyond planting his flag and leaving.

  So, the God of Thunder studied Earth, trying to find the person who’d contacted a Paragon, and to understand what deal that person had made. But more importantly, Eugene’s attention was locked onto one question—one all-important question.

  What had he missed?

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