Dawn in Orynth was rarely beautiful. The sun squeezed through the thick layer of industrial smog from the Smelting District, bathing Beggar's Street in a dirty orange light, the color of old rust.

  Malik and Nasir were already awake long before that light touched the sidewalk.

  The walk to the Eastern Ruins took two hours. To Malik's surprise—who had been ready to carry his brother on his back—Nasir insisted on walking the entire way. His small feet sank into the dockyard sludge, his bones jutted through his oversized clothes, and Malik's coat would have made him look like a sad scarecrow to any observer. But the cough didn't come; the liquid wheeze was gone. In its place was only the steady sound of air flowing in and out of lungs that, for the first time in the child's miserable life, weren't fighting their own blood.

  "The Moon-Thistle is just relief. It doesn't fix the broken glass of my meridians," Nasir had said right before they left the rotting little room. "But now that the glass doesn't inflame the wall of my chest every time I breathe... I can take it."

  When the boys reached the rusted ancient gates of the eastern courtyard, Miren and Brog were already leaning beneath a stone archway that had belonged to a grand wall a century ago.

  Brog, now sporting full chainmail beneath his rigid iron breastplate, merely spat on the ground upon seeing them approach. Miren dragged on a cigarette emotionlessly. If the healer cared to see the boy walking without his own lungs collapsing, her cold eyes told no one.

  "Eight on the dot. You aren't total dead weight, after all," the woman assessed, putting out the cigarette on the sole of her boot and tossing the dark butt into an overturned metal trash barrel.

  She raised her gloved hand toward the crater ahead of them. The 'Ruins' were, in fact, the rotting foundations of an Alchemists' Association factory that had partially sunk into a geological fault twenty years ago, exposing native rock and forming an improvised underground catacomb, isolated from the light, packed with unstable chemicals.

  "The Association lost three idiot researchers down there last week," Brog scratched his heavy throat. He pulled his monumental warhammer from his back. "They want the whole bodies back for a knowledge sweep at the Academy or whatever crap that is. And we were ordered to kill the colony of Powder-Ants that nested inside."

  Nasir furrowed his pale brow from the top of the stairs.

  "Powder-ants? Is the Alchemists' Association certain of that?"

  Miren opened a small pocketknife, scraping sludge from beneath her hardened leather nails, uninterested.

  "That's what the survivors described to me. Serrated mandibles digging through drawn steel, shiny silvery shells that detonate sulfurous spores if cut in half in the open air. It's a powder-beetle until I see something worse."

  "Don't hit the back sac on their bodies. Crush their heads and their jaws lock up, a natural short-circuit," Nasir murmured, not to the adults, but to his own chain of thought. The boy walked to the rotting threshold of the dark hole and inhaled the moldy air.

  Miren gestured with an unlit cigarette between her gloved fingers.

  "Go ahead, boy. Start your talking map."

  They descended through the shadows at a disciplined pace. Malik took the vanguard, just below Brog's massive protective shadow. Nasir walked in the center, flanked from behind by Miren.

  The damp air had a bitter tang of chemicals that instantly made the mouth tingle.

  Visibility in the catacomb dropped drastically with every bypassed duct. Brog twisted a tiny valve, igniting an alchemical lantern hanging from his breastplate, emitting a narrow beam of pale yellow light.

  They stopped suddenly before a main junction of cracked tunnels. Brog raised a rigid hand as wide as a loaf of wheat bread. Silence.

  Ten paces ahead, beneath a fallen gigantic metal gutter... Three mastiff-sized insects were strolling. Translucent shells beneath the dim light brushed against each other, generating a sharp hissing that gave a toothache. They were scouts. Pulsating slits at the animals' rears expelled tiny spores like ash when they sniffed the wall.

  "I'll draw the attention of the three on the left, Malik run from the other side," Brog hissed in a growl, without moving his neck tight within the chainmail. "Crush their side joint. I want a clean kill, kid."

  Brog stepped off the edge and charged. Like a castle wall gaining legs, he sank his eighty-kilo dwarven frame into a devastating shield rush. He collided against the alpha beast's jaw, smashing the frontal bone with a dry, brutal sound.

  The warhammer came down in a perfect arc, crushing the second creature's neck.

  It had been surgically immaculate. Malik stepped out with his rusty knife, drawing the third, startled beast. He pulled it away from Brog's back. With the path clear, the dwarf's heavy iron boot came down on the creature's neck in a simple, deadly stomp.

  However, further back, Nasir's cold hand rose, grabbing the buckle on Miren's belt.

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  She turned in silence.

  Nasir wasn't looking at the beetles or the flawless, bloody spectacle the dwarf had just enacted. The child's brown eyes trembled, wide, fixed on the hollow ceiling of the industrial structure above them, an impenetrable darkness that the dwarf's lantern couldn't reach.

  Nasir inhaled slowly through his half-open mouth, like someone chewing the air to taste its harsh flavor. His fragile airways felt it. The magical energy of the place was not inert. It flowed. It was like thousands of sour wires of static electricity running across the ceiling in a foul cluster in the stagnant room directly above them.

  "...They're reacting, Miren," Nasir whispered. The boy's voice was deadly cold, completely ignoring Malik stomping in the puddles on the frontline.

  Miren looked at him with disdain, not even reaching for her dagger.

  "Reacting? Child... there's literally a dead carcass under the dwarf's boot. Reacting is what beasts do."

  Nasir didn't flinch his brown eyes from the impatient tutor's lethal gaze.

  "The ambient Aether changed, Miren," he said in a harsh, cutting whisper. "The flow of toxins in the walls isn't coming from down here. The vibration in the ducts is descending past our necks. It's not those three scouts they just killed."

  The healer froze. The presumption vanishing from her gray eyes as she listened to the absurdly certain timbre of the kid.

  "They feed off the nest of leaked crude acid in the upper pipes," Nasir spoke faster, logical panic seizing control as he stared at the ventilation grates suspended thirty feet above Brog's head. "And they just pulsed in sync. We chewed the bait the colony threw into the lower hall. And the noise Brog just made was a death knell for the entire floor above us."

  The last word was still drawing vapor in the cold air when the steel above them groaned.

  A filthy iron plate sparked rust, giving way under a weight the worn structure couldn't hold. The ceiling collapsed with a dull roar, and the shattered concrete rained down.

  Along with it, a living, shimmering tide plunged from the darkness.

  Miren didn't even think. With the brutal fluidity of years of slaughter, she grabbed Nasir by the scruff of his oversized coat and threw herself backward, rolling in the alchemical dirt and kicking away debris while dragging the thin boy with her under the primary arch of the stone doorway.

  "HARD-SHELLS ABOVE!" she roared, her lethargic voice instantly replaced by a tactical combat command.

  Brog didn't look back. In the instant the debris began to fall, hiding dozens of crazed powder-ants in freefall, the iron wall acted. He didn't retreat toward the escape stairs. Instead, he took a wide step to his left, covering Malik.

  He drove his colossal shield into the cement floor and pulled the boy by his belt. Brog threw him roughly behind the tempered steel, with a brute force that nearly dislocated Malik's thin shoulder.

  The impact of the horde upon the shield sounded like a dozen rabid dogs slamming against a heavy vault door. Serrated claws scraped against the iron. Sparks rained down. The sound of clacking mandibles filled the dark catacomb. Brog's lantern cracked from a blow, leaving the group bathed only in a weak, precarious orange glow. The dying fire illuminated the horror of a living mass trying to devour them.

  Brog roared. With every lunge, his boot planted a military step. His warhammer ground the front legs of the abominations that dared to pass the edge of the shield.

  Malik was huddled right behind, his heart hammering against his ribs. His instinct screamed to run into the darkness, but the sharp blades of the underworld had taught him something clear: in chaotic fury, whoever steps away from the shield dies cut apart. Malik didn't pull his useless knife, but rather a thick, rusted iron stabilizing rod he had grabbed from the loose tracks on the floor.

  A powder-ant flanked the shield from the right, squeezing itself against the wall. Its serrated jaws lunged at the weak point in Brog's armor, aiming for the exposed nape of his neck.

  Malik's action wasn't coordinated, but purely reflexive. He bellowed, raising the iron rod and thrusting it in a brutal lateral stab. The blow caught the giant insect squarely in the side of the eye.

  The serrated jaw snapped with a wet thud and veered away from the dwarf's jugular. Brog didn't miss the chance. He reversed the head of the hammer and brought it down on the open shell, sinking below the neck and ending the monster that had nearly ripped his throat open.

  "Get behind the iron, idiot bait!" the veteran's enraged growl echoed over the din of battle.

  But a harsh spark of astonishment had formed in the hidden eyes of the assassin dwarf. The damn kid hadn't fled and hadn't left him exposed to die.

  At the base of the entrance, forty feet from the clash, Nasir was on his knees. The dust made it impossible to see Malik through the shadows of the confusion, but Nasir's chest pumped air without failing. Terror chilled his back.

  Miren was standing beside him, the room's shadows swallowing her face. In her drawn left hand, her veins glowed a lethal purple hue that cracked at her fingertips.

  Miren raised her hand.

  Four threads of purple energy hissed through the air. Invisible beneath the dust, they crossed silently over Malik and Brog's heads, tearing through the ants' exoskeletons as if they were made of wet paper.

  Deep cuts spewed a sticky yellow blood, killing seven beasts at once. When the recoil of the magic struck Miren's channels, her legs gave out from the exhausting pain of casting pure, refined mana.

  Nasir supported the mage with his skinny little arms before she hit the ground alone. Miren bumped her heavy hip between the protective stones, taking deep breaths between her pale, thin lips.

  An exhausted, heavy silence fell over the catacomb, bathing shattered bodies.

  Brog tossed his loose, hot breastplate aside, panting heavily in the darkness. Malik let out his breath with a bitter laugh, dropping the soaked iron rod. The boy dragged his tired body along the sides, running exhausted to the destroyed stairs, crouching down elated to see his younger brother in perfect condition beside the fallen tutor.

  Brog spat on the cavern floor, wiping the thick sweat and bone splinters embedded from the battle from his battered face. He walked through the deadly, crushed corridor without uttering a single insult.

  Brog extended his thick hand, still dirty with alchemical blood, toward Malik. The boy was crouched in the darkness, helping Miren with her bandages on the ground. The dwarf pulled him up without a word. There were no jokes. The small gaze that had always measured the two boys had changed. There was respect there, atop that rotting swamp.

  "You're good, long-ears, damn it..." Brog pulled Malik by the forearm so the brother could stand up from the dirt, smiling tiredly, and rubbed Malik's soot-tangled hair before giving his shoulder a heavy but comradely slap. "Morning coffee is on me with the coin from the carcasses, kid. And for the static little runt there, too."

  The Pack hunted their first carcass of the day.

  They were home.