I hated it.
So far, I’d had to correct three E-Rank delvers from Jeff’s low-rank team when they’d called me the Unbroken Storm. They kept looking at me—everyone except for the core team did—and it was a little uncomfortable. It was also a part of the job, according to both Ellen and, to my immense frustration, Jessie. She’d cornered me a half hour before things got started. “Kade, you’re my brother, and I love you…”
“But?” I’d asked.
“But you get irritated easily, and if we’re having a party, there are going to be some irritating guests. Try to tough it out, okay? For the guild, and for me?”
I’d agreed, and I regretted it.
Jeff and Sophia were both busy wrangling low-rankers. So was Sophia’s therapist/handler. Yasmin, meanwhile, was three beers in, sitting on a couch in the atrium and telling a couple of other guests her favorite Jeff story, about the giant turtle boss we’d fought during the most recent portal surge. Music blared from the building’s speakers; for tonight only, we were prepared to deal with breaking the energy rationing thing—and we had the money and cores to pay the fine. And that, for a handful of minutes, left me mostly alone.
Mostly, because there were a couple of surprise guests, and both of them were more interested in the fight itself than in celebrating it.
“I told you she was a striker mage hybrid,” Ophelia St. Vrain said over her completely untouched glass of…something bubbly. “I’m glad you listened to me in the end.”
She didn’t look glad. Ophelia’s face had hardly changed since she got here; she gave the impression that all of this was just a job, not fun at all for her. I nodded. “Yeah. Once I started looking at her fights less from a tank’s perspective, it made more sense. She wasn’t an impossible problem anymore, just one more issue to solve. Her build isn’t really that good—all she’s got is tank stuff plus one unpredictable, hard-hitting strike.”
“Correct.”
The silence hung, and pulsing bass filled it as the other guest stared at me, glaring over his drink. Unlike Ophelia, he’d been working on it. Carter Richards—still in his Caleb persona—watched me like a hawk.
I’d hoped for Rob, but he hadn’t shown. Carter had. He hadn’t said anything yet, but he didn’t have to for me to know who’d invited him. Jessie. What was she thinking? He’d broken into our apartment—I didn’t want anything to do with him.
After far too long, Jeff broke free from the gaggle of low-rankers swarming him. He separated, got on top of a coffee table on the far side of the guild hall’s atrium, and raised a glass in the air. “Hello, everyone! We are gathered here today to celebrate—“
“Not this again,” I interrupted.
Or tried to. Jeff plowed onward, not even glancing at me. “—our friend, Kade Allan Noelstra’s victory in the Fallen Delver’s Tournament. With it, he’s really stepped up in the world and put our little guild on the map. More than that, he’s a gracious, humble winner—aren’t you, Kade?”
I glared back at him.
“So, Kade, what do you think is in that portal?” Jeff asked.
I shrugged. Truthfully, I had no idea. “All I know is that it changes based on the delvers inside of it, and that there’s a point called the Vision Gate. Past that, I know as much as any of you.”
“Guess!” someone yelled.
There were too many people here. I missed the little party we’d had, just the five of us—Jeff, Ellen, Jessie, Stephen, and me—back when I’d finally made enough money to rent an apartment with two bedrooms. Now, there were at least four dozen people—over half of them delvers I didn’t know—in the room with me. I shrugged. “I really don’t. Sorry.”
“Alright. Fine,” Jeff said. He stepped down off the coffee table—which groaned as his weight left it—and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. Then he dragged me into the crowd. “Time to meet the team.”
So, for the next twenty minutes, as music echoed off the guild hall’s walls and rain ran down its windows, I talked to the eight low-ranking delvers.
Jeff had split them into two teams.
Cristine, Wally, Leo, and Vic were the first: a striker, mage, healer, and archer, respectively. They had portal duty tomorrow, and unlike Jeff, they were taking it easy on the alcohol. Three of them seemed to know each other, while Vic—a thin kid who couldn’t have been much older than Jessie—was an independent delver with only a single delve under their belt. The idea behind the team was for Yasmin to go with them sometimes so they weren’t doubled up on healers, and so they didn’t over-tax Sophia.
The second team was much different. Not one, not two, but three archers, plus a support. I rolled my eyes. “Let me guess. Jeff hand-picked this one?”
“Yep,” one of the archers said. She had dark eyes and cornrows. “Billy. This is Tamara, Kyle, and Shane.”
It was, in many ways, Jeff’s ideal portal-clearing team. One tank up front, a support and healer to keep things running smoothly, and a bunch of archers to do damage without taking it. I rolled my eyes. “Hope both teams do well. It’d be good to start building up a little. My sister has big…”
I trailed off. Where was my sister, anyway? This was her party.
“Your sister’s the guild leader, right?” Billy asked.
“Yeah, and I have no idea where she is.” I offered a hand, and Billy shook it. “Sorry, but I’ve got to go. Any time Jessie’s conspiring, it’s a problem.”
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Billy nodded. “I’ve got a little brother. I get it.”
As I worked my way slowly through the crowd—there were a lot of people here I didn’t recognize at all—I kept my eyes peeled for Jessie. But it wasn’t just her. Now that I thought about it, the party had been going for a solid half-hour, and I hadn’t seen Ellen, either. That was weird. Ellen was a social creature, by training if not by nature.
I stepped into the elevator, pressed the fifth floor button, and let the sound of drum and bass music fade as it carried me to the guild leader’s suite.
And there they were.
It had hit Ellen about ten minutes before the party got going.
She was happy for Kade. Obviously.
But up until the moment Deborah’s sword nearly cut her head off her shoulders, a small part of Ellen had truly believed she’d be the one on the podium today, accepting the trophy and portal key from Nathan Anders. She’d put in just as much work as Kade. She’d done everything in her power to stay on pace with him—and to maintain her lead when he broke his core. She’d bled, sweated, and cried plenty. And it hadn’t been enough.
It should have been enough. But it wasn’t.
So, as the second party she’d wanted to attend in the last five years—the first being in Kade’s honor, too, but a lot less high-energy— got going, she was still sitting on Kade’s bed, in an aquamarine silk dress that hung just right, ruining her make-up. That’s when Jessie found her, of course.
“Tough draw, huh, Ellen?” she asked.
Ellen took one look at Kade’s little sister—her big eyes, her wheelchair, and the dress they’d gone shopping for together—and burst out laughing. It wasn’t the funny kind of laughter. “It’s so pathetic, huh?”
“Nah. Try growing up with him,” Jessie said.
Ellen only laughed harder, tears running down her cheeks.
“I’m serious.” Jessie wheeled herself over and put a hand on Ellen’s knee. “Dad loved me a lot. He taught me everything he could about delving, and later, about taking the best care of myself I could. Meditation, mantras, all that stuff. But I never got the chance to spar with him. That was always Kade. He always seemed better than me growing up, and it was frustrating. I’d pour myself into meditation just to make it through a half-day at school, and then he’d come home early, covered in bruises and nursing a bloody nose like it wasn’t a big deal.”
Ellen nodded. She’d never really heard this side of Jessie before, and she stayed quiet as the other girl kept talking. “It was so frustrating. Kade was the special one. I felt like the spare. The extra, like something was wrong with me. And Kade didn’t help, either. He hated meditation, and he wasn’t into computers or the internet. All he wanted to do was fight, and I couldn’t do that.”
“What changed? You two seem close now,” Ellen asked.
“Dad died.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Jessie let the silence hang for a couple of seconds. “He’s an idiot. Kade, I mean. But it took Mom bailing on us and Dad…going away…before I realized he didn’t think I was worthless. He never even stopped to consider that I wasn’t special, or anything like that. Instead, he poured himself into delving. Sure, part of it was that he likes to fight. Maybe even most of it. But it was also a way to keep his promise to dad, and take care of me.”
The silence stretched on, quiet enough that Ellen could just make out the one hundred twenty beats per minute pulse of drum-and-bass from downstairs. She shivered. “Kade promised me something, too, but I don’t know how he can keep it.”
“He’ll keep it,” Jessie said. Then she cleared her throat. “I was going to save this for later, but I’ve been thinking about the Crone’s world. Want to hear it?”
“Sure,” Ellen said. She didn’t care that much, but it was something to focus on.
They were still talking when Kade came up the elevator forty minutes or so later.
Ellen had been crying.
I made a note of that, then elected to ignore it. “You two have been hiding up here, and you didn’t even invite me?”
“Sorry, Kade,” Jessie said quickly. “Girl time. See yourself out.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll let Ophelia know. She’ll be up in a minute.”
“Absolutely not.” Ellen crossed her arms over her chest. “I’ll be functional in a minute or two. Jessie, can you help me out a little?”
“Sure.” Jessie wheeled her chair around, and she and Ellen retreated to the bathroom, leaving me blinking, confused, and alone. What was going on here?
“Hey, uh, Stephen’s down there, too,” I called at the closed bathroom door.
“Great! I need to talk to both of them. Ophelia, first, though. Business, then pleasure,” Jessie yelled back.
It took about five minutes before Ellen appeared, presentable and tearless. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.
“Kade, Ellen is frustrated,” Jessie said as she wheeled herself over to the elevator. “Talk to her, figure it out, and do better.”
“What?”
The elevator closed as Jessie winked at me, and I rolled my eyes, then focused on Ellen.
“It’s nothing—just stupid stuff. I keep thinking about what you promised me. That you were with me for the long haul. How are you going to do that when you keep surpassing me, no matter how hard I work?” Ellen asked.
“Oh.” I took a moment to think about it, then started trying to talk.
But Ellen reached out and put a finger on my lips. “I had a good talk with Jessie. She felt the same way.”
“When?”
“You’re so stupid sometimes, Kade. When you two were kids, not now. We talked about it for a while, and she told me what I needed to hear, so you don’t have to. Let’s talk about something else. Anything.”
I stared at Ellen as her eyes flicked across my face. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. You’re going to keep your promise to me. It’s what you do, and I know it. I just…Look, I wanted to win just as much as you did. Maybe more. I wanted to show my…Bob…how strong I could be by myself, just like you wanted to win to make your dad proud. We’re no different, really. But I am happy you won. Let’s go downstairs, and I’ll tell you a secret on the way down.”
“What is it?” I asked as I took her arm in mine. I’d been practicing, and she only had to adjust it a little bit before it looked more or less correct.
“I’m ready to hit A-Rank,” Ellen said as all the lights went out and the Desert Wind Guild building shook.
The message came in on my phone less than thirty seconds later.
Governing Council Message:
Status: Extreme Emergency
All delvers in Phoenix must respond immediately to a major assault on the 303 Wall. The main angles of attack are as follows:
- The I-17 corridor north of Phoenix
- The Mesa gate area, all along the old 202 loop.
- The I-10 corridor south of Phoenix, heading toward Tucson.
Additional information, including deployment locations, to follow.
Ellen read over my shoulder, then fumbled around for her own phone. It took another minute for her own message to come in, though. “I’m heading to Mesa. I think we all are—the message was addressed to the entire guild. E and D-Rankers, too. This is going to be bad.”
I nodded. My own message hadn’t come in yet, but I’d be with them. “They need everyone? The low-rankers, too?”
“Yes.”
“Great. We’ll have to—“
My phone buzzed, and I glanced at my message. Then I looked a second time. Then a third.
“What?” Ellen asked.
Instead of answering, I held up the device.
Governing Council Message:
Status: Deployment Location: Kade Noelstra
A-Rank delver Kade Noelstra, report to the Fallen Delvers Memorial. Once there, group with the GC team in the courtyard, and clear the Fallen Delvers portal as quickly as possible. When the portal is cleared, regroup with the remainder of your guild in Mesa.
I let Ellen reread it, then pocketed it and started changing into clothes that were a little more suited for delving. Halfway through, I had to unzip Ellen’s dress as she did the same thing, but slower and in more shock. The moment we were changed, we headed for the stairs, and halfway down, I grabbed her hand. “I will catch up to you. Keep yourself and the others alive, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. I promise.”
“I believe you. Take Deimos. I’ll catch a ride with Yasmin or someone,” Ellen said. She kissed me, a quick peck, and we headed out to battle.
The Siege of Phoenix was over. The battle for the city had just started in earnest.
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