I spent almost ten seconds staring at Jessie over my cereal.

  Then Ellen, Jeff, Yasmin, and I spent seven minutes trying—and probably failing—to convince Jessie that she had no business contacting a Paragon, no matter what she thought the Hyperborean language cards she’d made said. It was dangerous. Reckless. The city was literally under siege by an S-Rank portal break’s monster wave. If something went wrong, there’d be no one coming to save her.

  “Oh, that’s fine, Kade. I’ll have you,” my little sister said smugly when I told her that. “Besides, I’m not quite ready to reach out to a Paragon. I need a few more things first.”

  In the end, though, we got her to agree to a few terms.

  First, she wouldn’t make contact unless the whole team was at the Desert Wind building and all six of us were ready to go. Second, she wouldn’t agree to anything the Paragon demanded of her. And third, we’d have a contingency in place in the form of a speed dial to the GC, just in case things went wrong.

  It wasn’t as good as convincing Jessie to abandon her attempt to talk to a Paragon, but I couldn’t exactly say ‘No’ when I was chatting with Eugene every couple of days. Granted, I had a pretty good idea of his capabilities, and while he was strong, he wasn’t a direct threat to all of humanity. He couldn’t leave his portal world, after all.

  “Don’t you have something else you need to do?” Jessie asked as the conversation entered its ninth minute. She looked irritated, frustrated, and every shade of annoyed in between; her eyes were stuck between a pout and a glare, and I could feel the heat coming off of her.

  Ellen opened her mouth to continue, but I just nodded. “You’re right, Jessie. We have a job to do, Ellen. Let’s get to work on it.” Then I stood up and retreated to the elevator, Ellen following along as I pulled her by her hand.

  By the time I pushed the button for the top floor, she was glaring at me, too. I sighed. It just wasn’t my morning.

  “What the hell, Kade?” she hissed. “She’s not going to listen to your terms. The second she gets the chance, she’ll—“

  “I know, Ellen.” I sighed again. “I definitely know exactly how my sister is. Can you trust that I’m working on it, and that she’s not going to do anything stupid today?”

  She stared at the metal walls, then nodded slowly. “Sure. Tomorrow? Maybe. But I don’t think she’ll try it today.”

  “Then I’ll solve the problem tonight, I promise.”

  The door opened, and we sat back to back on my suite’s floor, synchronizing our breathing until it matched perfectly. The process took longer than usual. Both of us were worked up from the revelation that my sister was on the verge of contacting an entity that could be anywhere from the Paragons we’d hunted at D-Rank all the way to the God of Thunder himself in power. I hadn’t had any problems with making her the administrative head of the Desert Wind Guild, but…

  But I’d thought we’d stay a small guild, little more than a team, with the benefits that being in a guild would give us. Now, between Jeff, Sophia, and Jessie, that small guild was about to expand in numbers and importance, and I’d put my kid sister in charge of it.

  It was stupid. That decision had been wildly irresponsible, and, after a minute, I decided that if I had to do it over again, I’d probably end up making the same one. Jessie was good at administrative stuff. She might’ve been only sixteen, but she understood how to work past the red tape.

  “I just need to get her to focus on what’s important,” I muttered.

  “Kade, shut up and focus on what’s important yourself,” Ellen whispered.

  I winced, then nodded. “Sorry. Focusing.”

  We weren’t in my mental space.

  And Ellen’s had shifted dramatically since the last time I’d visited it, just before my core broke in an attempt to push her to B-Rank. Before, it had been her walled garden at the Traynor estate, with pools, ponds, and pathways that weaved in between each other and around the Palo Verde trees and saguaros. It had been lit by a spotlight, and she’d learned and consolidated her Laws in the form of informational signs.

  The garden remained.

  But the walls were gone, and the spotlights were all turned off. Only a handful of tiny garden lights held back the darkness around us as seemingly the entire desert pushed in at the garden. It felt like an overwhelming amount of pressure bearing down on us. Ellen stiffened. Her breath caught in her lungs. Fear washed across me.

  “Focus,” I said.

  I didn’t see her look, but I felt the narrowed eyes. Felt her aura shake as she tried to restrain it. Then she nodded, and her breathing started up again.

  Deep breaths. Matching breaths. As I focused on my breathing and Ellen slowly got back to mirroring it, the sky began to fill with clouds. Angry clouds. They blotted out the moonless, star-filled sky. It was shockingly dark even before they rolled it, but as they swirled above us, the sheer blackness of the night pushed at us like it had an aura of its own.

  It weighed on me, the darkness. And worse, the black clouds overhead, while angry, offered nothing I was familiar with. No lightning and thunder. No wind and rain. The storm existed up there, but I couldn’t make contact with it, couldn’t channel my understanding of it into my understanding of this. I was on my own, with no support from the Stormsteel Path or Eugene. All I had was Ellen.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Was Ellen all I needed, though? I believed so. I leaned into her, feeling her back rise and fall slightly with each breath. The last time we’d advanced Shadowstorm Battery, there had been hunger. Hunger so all-consuming that we’d both felt it in waves, and that our Mana had drained instantly to it. But this time…this time, the feeling of nothing was there, but not in the form of hunger.

  She felt it, too. Her breathing accelerated, and her head flicked back and forth to take in the garden lights around us. I did the same thing. Were they…

  They were. Even as I watched, a pair winked out. The darkness pressed in around them, covering the plants they’d cast their faint lights on with shadow.

  The void wasn’t hungry, though. Or rather, as I focused in, the hunger was present, but not immediate. That wasn’t the lesson we were supposed to be learning. The void wasn’t consuming Ellen’s mental space. It was…

  What was it doing?

  Another set of lights flickered out, and Ellen reached back to touch my hand. I let her pull it off my knee and rest hers on top of it, the path below it grazing my knuckles slightly with each breath. I expected her to be more high-strung, but to my surprise, her grip was steady and her hand didn’t shake at all.

  She knew. She understood. Somehow, she’d figured out the Law. I just had to allow that understanding to reach me somehow.

  Dual Skill Advancement. Our connection. It allowed us to share a mental space, but I needed more than that. I needed to borrow her understanding of—

  It hit me like a lightning bolt. One moment, I didn’t understand at all. The next, it was like my mind had opened up. The void wasn’t consuming. It was concealing and negating.

  Law Learned: Second Law of the Hungering Abyss

  Shadowstorm Battery: Rank D to C

  The void blankets. Covers. Concealing, comforting, its pervasiveness doesn’t seek to destroy, but to remove. Where destruction is angry and violent, the void cares only about sating its hunger and negating all it touches. The shadow will cover. The void will feast. The darkness will remove. In welcoming the negation of the void, you have taken a step down the deviant Stormsteel Path: The void removes.

  It was so simple. Ellen had been doing it since E-Rank. Shadow Box. Darkness. Shadow Shapes. Her toolbox wasn’t built to destroy. It was built to remove and conceal and slowly make an enemy go away. She could accomplish more than that, of course; Shadow Shapes did a lot of damage in a wide area, and it did it quickly. But being a shadow mage meant, in essence, using her Mana to remove.

  And it made so much sense. Ellen’s relationship with Bob had never been one of fury or anger, as much as those emotions flashed in on occasion. It had been one of fear, disgust, plotting, and conspiring. Conspiring to remove. Where I’d solved my problems with fights on the playground, she’d worked on hers by hiding her plans, trying to remove herself from her situation, and slowly maneuvering until she could break free. Her magic reflected that strategy. Her aura reflected that approach.

  And now, some of her magic was mine.

  I opened my eyes. The room was empty except for Ellen. She leaned against my back, breathing hard and not saying anything. We sat that way for a while, just taking in the rank-up and the Law, and each other’s presences.

  But, eventually, the elevator door opened, and Jessie, of all people, poked her head through. “Hey, Jeff says you’ve got an eight o’clock with the Governing Council. He says he’s given you more than enough time to, and I quote, ‘bask in each other’s glow,’ and that it’s time to get to work.” She looked a little grossed out as she said it, and I stood up quickly, with Ellen only half a beat behind.

  “Right. Right,” Ellen said. “Yeah, we’ll be down in three. Thanks for the reminder.”

  Jessie nodded seriously. Then she winked at Ellen, and I rolled my eyes.

  Ten minutes later, Deimos rocketed toward the GC’s meet-up point.

  We’d somehow managed to stuff Jeff, Ellen, Raul, Yasmin, and me into the sports car. The girls sat on either side of me, with Jeff and Raul up front; their bulky armor just wouldn’t fit in the back seat, and the trunk could only take so much. Ellen looked a little annoyed to not be ‘driving’ her own car, but she’d seen the reality of the situation. It was the only way to get five people inside.

  The sky was gray. It was almost 7:30 in the morning, and the sky felt like it was still six o’clock. The steam dome hadn’t moved, and it hadn’t grown thicker. The rain also hadn’t stopped, and Deimos sent up waves of water as we headed into downtown.

  Then a text message rolled in.

  Councilwoman Myers: Desert Wind Team, new instructions. Deploy to the old botanical gardens. B-Rank portal. Your team is closest and was assigned to reserve duty today. Clear, report when cleared, stand by. Understood?

  Kade: Understood.

  That was the whole conversation, but it did tell me a lot more than the single message.

  The garden was far to the east side of Phoenix, well inside the Coyotes’ territory. The Desert Wind Guild had no business being the closest team to a portal there, which meant that the entire Coyote guild was already occupied—and so were most of the Portal Tyrants’ teams.

  And second, if Councilwoman Myers—the second-in-command of the Governing Council—was texting deployments, then the Council was overcommitted as well. That didn’t make any sense, though. There hadn’t been an emergency alert since the siege started, and the GC had never been hesitant to communicate when there was a crisis. The GC shouldn’t be overcommitted after just one day of fighting.

  “Was there a portal surge we didn’t know about?” Yasmin asked. She leaned against the window, staring out at the mist far overhead and the rain splattering against the glass.

  “I don’t think so,” Jeff said from the passenger’s seat up front. He pulled out his phone, flipping through it for a minute. I did the same. Then he shook his head. “Nope. No uptick in the number of portals. Something else is going on. Any guesses?”

  The car went quiet. Then speculation started flying as we closed in on the old botanical gardens. But by the time we’d gotten there, we didn’t have a single answer.

  Sophia was waiting for us, along with her handler. Dr. Baker nodded as we struggled to untangle ourselves from Ellen’s too-small car and the others assembled their gear. “Hello. Delver Walker has been cleared for a single B-Rank portal, with psychiatric evaluation afterward.”

  Sophia smiled, but her eyes screamed nervousness, and she kept looking at the ground. Yasmin pushed me out of the way and gave the healer a massive hug. “Good to have you back with us. This should go pretty quickly. In and out, easy job.”

  The healer nodded. Then she leaned in close and started whispering. “I’m surprised we got sent here. The rest of…well, everyone…is setting up further to the east. The GC’s planning something. I’m glad we’re just delving into a nice B-Rank portal, though. Much better than the S-Rank monsters out there.” She shivered, and Yasmin squeezed even tighter.

  The GC rep at the portal tipped his head as we walked up. “Desert Wind, right? Portal’s a standard B-Rank. We have a backup team en route, but they’re at least an hour or two out, so it’s all you. Before you go in, one thing. The GC needs this portal knocked out. It cannot break. All delver teams that can respond to it are tied up right now with the Light of Dawn’s operation. That backup team isn’t here to clear the portal by itself. It’s full of C-Ranks, with no hard carry delvers like you guys. If you need their help, stay alive and link up with them. Otherwise, get the job done.”

  I stretched out my back, then summoned the Stormsteel armor, cloak, and Stormsong. “Got it. We’ll take care of this. See you in a few hours.”

  Then we stepped into the blood-red portal.

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