The rain in the Roots of Orynth didn't wash away the filth; it only made it run, turning the alleyways into streams of black sludge and broken promises.

  Nasir watched a single gray droplet trace a twisted path down the broken window of the room. The glass had been cracked for three months, ever since the upstairs neighbor, a drunken blacksmith, dropped his anvil during a fight with his wife. They had glued the pieces together with pine resin, but the howling wind, funneled by the oppressive architecture of the bridge above them, always found a gap to enter.

  The ten-year-old boy adjusted the thin blanket over his shoulders and turned his attention back to the treasure in his lap.

  It wasn't gold, nor food. It was a book. Or rather, the corpse of one. The cover was missing, the first twenty pages were soaked in lamp oil, and someone had used the final margins to wipe a blade dirty with blood. But the core... the core was legible.

  "Theory of Athereal Resonance: Volume 3 - Divergent Flows"

  Nasir stroked the rough paper with reverence. Malik had found it in the dumpster behind the Alchemists' Tower. To most, it was trash, the discard of some frustrated apprentice. To Nasir, it was the only window into a world that his body, with its atrophied meridians fragile as glass, denied him.

  "The flow isn't a river..." he whispered to himself, eyes tracing complex diagrams of Aether circulation. "It's a breath. Expansion and contraction. If you force entry during contraction, the core cracks. They teach it wrong at the Academy. They force the opening, when they should wait for the pulse..."

  He coughed, the damp, moldy air of the room irritating his lungs. He didn't have a strong core. The guild doctor, a charlatan reeking of cheap gin and hopelessness, had said Nasir's meridians were "like dry twigs in winter." If he tried to channel Aether, they would snap, and the magic would consume him from the inside out.

  But the book said something different on page 42, in a footnote scribbled by hand by some forgotten scholar: "Where the flow is blocked, perception sharpens. The blind man hears better. The stagnant feels the current."

  The room's door creaked. The sound was quiet, but to Nasir, it sounded like thunder.

  He instinctively closed the book and hid it under the straw mattress. Malik hated when he stayed up late reading "complicated things," straining his eyes in the gloom instead of resting. Malik said rest cured everything. Nasir knew it was a lie, but pretended to believe it.

  The figure that entered didn't have the heavy, confident stride Malik usually displayed on the street. It was light, dragging, leaning on the doorframe.

  The door closed with a soft click. Malik leaned his back against it and slid down to the floor, letting out a sigh that seemed to tear at his throat, a sound of absolute exhaustion he would never allow anyone outside those four walls to hear.

  "Brother?" Nasir called, his voice small, trembling.

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  Malik jerked up, the mask of "Strong Older Brother" falling back into place instantly. "I'm here, Nas. I'm here." His voice failed on the first syllable, hoarse.

  The weak light of the defective "moonstone" hanging from the ceiling, flickering between pale blue and darkness, illuminated Malik's face. He was only fifteen, but his eyes carried the weight of a thirty-year-old veteran. There was a fresh cut on his cheek, a thin red line that still seeped living blood. His clothes—patchwork second-hand leather armor, too big in the shoulders—smelled of sewage, burnt ozone, and something metallic... copper. Blood.

  "You got hurt," Nasir didn't ask. He stated, getting out of the covers, his bare feet touching the cold floor.

  "It was just a scratch. A rusty nail on a loose pipe," Malik lied. He always lied about pain. He smiled, a tired but genuine smile that didn't reach his eyes. He pulled something from inside his coat, protecting it as if it were a royal jewel. "But it was worth it. Look."

  He threw a cloth bag on the floor. The metallic sound was the most beautiful music Nasir had heard in days. Clink. Heavy. Coins. And, along with them, a package wrapped in greasy paper. The smell of roast meat, animal fat, and fresh bread invaded the tiny room, fighting bravely against the scent of mold and dampness.

  "Did you get the contract?" Nasir asked, grabbing the basin of water and a clean cloth to wipe his brother's face. His small hands trembled slightly.

  "Better." Malik let Nasir clean the cut, hissing slightly through his teeth when the cheap alcohol touched raw flesh. "Pest cleaning in the sewers of the Silk District. Payment up front. And the cook at 'The One-Eyed Boar' tavern owed me a favor. Real meat today, Nas."

  Nasir stopped. His eyes drifted down to Malik's right hand. The knuckles were skinned, the skin torn, and there were circular burn marks on the shirt cuff, singed black and green. Volatile acid marks. Marks of Aether Rats. Unstable pests that exploded in corrosive acid when they died.

  "Aether Rats don't live in the Silk District, Malik," Nasir said softly, without looking up from the wound. "They live in the Disposal Zones. Where the toxic waste from the alchemy labs is dumped. The toxins there... the air there burns your throat."

  Malik's smile faltered for a thousandth of a second. His fingers curled into a fist, hiding the burns. "You read too much, Nas. They were just big rats. Common sewer rats that ate magical trash."

  He grabbed the bread, tore off a generous piece—the biggest part, containing almost all the meat and sauce—and extended it to Nasir. "Eat. Tomorrow I'm buying that syrup for your cough. And who knows... maybe there'll be enough left for a new book. A whole one this time. Without blood on the edges."

  Nasir took the bread but didn't eat immediately. He looked at Malik. Malik, who was fifteen but had the hands of a manual laborer. Malik, who smelled of death and acid so Nasir could smell bread.

  Malik bit into his own piece of dry bread, looking at the cracked window with a fierce, almost frightening determination. "We're getting out of here, Nas. I promise. The Imperial Enlistment opens in two years. If I hit Iron Rank by then... if I can catch the eye of a Minor House..."

  "No," Nasir said, mouth full, almost choking. "Not the army. It's too dangerous. They use Iron ranks as cannon fodder on the Northern Borders. I read it in the discarded reports. The survival rate is 20%."

  "The world is dangerous, brother." Malik stood up and ruffled Nasir's hair, slightly staining the black strands with the soot from his gloves. His voice hardened, losing the brotherly sweetness and gaining the steel of a guardian. "But we are more stubborn than it is. I won't die in an Orynth gutter. And you won't die coughing in this moldy room. I'm going to carve a path for us, even if it's at the point of a sword."

  Nasir ate in silence. He knew Malik was hiding how much he was shaking, probably a side effect of the residual poison from the rats. He knew the mission in the Disposal Zones had been hell, that Malik had probably almost died three times that night. But he also knew that, in that moment, the bread tasted like hope.

  And hope, in the Roots of Orynth, was the most expensive, addictive, and dangerous substance of all.