The city erupted.
Min-jae had seen battles.
He had stood in the burning city and the gray plain and the square at the heart of a dying world, and he had learned, the way a man learns the weather, to read the shape of a fight before it happened.
But he had never seen anything like this.
The whole city came apart at once, in a hundred places, in a thousand ways.
The sky went the color of old bruises and the streets ran with fire and the enemy was everywhere, the Monarchs’ soldiers and the broken-gate monsters together, pouring out of rents in the air and up from the rubble, and the black tide met them everywhere, and the battle for the city became the city.
The gray world dissolved into a single, endless kill.
Min-jae moved through it the way he had moved through the square, the way he had moved through every battle since the first, but it was different now, and he felt the difference in his bones.
He was a Knight.
The power that had broken its banks on the plain had never gone back to sleep, and it filled him now, sharper and heavier than it had been, and the compulsion rode him like a rider rides a horse, and he was good at this, terrifyingly good, the way he had never been good at anything in his life.
The monsters died.
The enemy’s front bent where he stood.
His claws took them apart, and his voice was in him, a rasp of shadow that he had not used since the avenue, and he wanted to use it, wanted to scream a name into the gray roar of the city, but he held it, because screaming it would not bring her closer, and it would only tell the god who was watching that the sword had a heart.
The weight was still on him.
He felt it with every step, the thread of attention laid across the back of his neck, the memory of being seen.
The god had looked at him in the square, had seen the name he carried, and Min-jae did not know what the looking meant, did not know if it was curiosity or judgment or the beginning of his unmaking.
All he knew was that it had not lifted, and that he was fighting now in the light of that gaze, and that the light made everything colder and sharper and more terrible.
But it did not stop him from wanting.
The wanting was the only thing the god had not been able to touch.
The compulsion pressed him forward, toward the center of the city, toward the heart of the battle, toward wherever the black tide needed a sword, and Min-jae went, and killed, and moved, and all the while the wanting pulled him the other way, the way a thread pulls a needle, toward the avenue, toward the rally point, toward the last place he had seen her.
He knew where she was.
He had not seen her since the avenue, since the hero and the smoke and the will that had wrenched him away.
But he knew the shape of the city, knew it the way he had known it his whole life, and he knew that the evacuation was funneling toward the rally point, and he knew that the enemy was moving to cut it off.
He could feel it, the way he could feel the shape of a battle.
The rally point was on the far side of the district, where the wide streets met, and the enemy was closing on it from three sides, and the black tide was holding the center, and no one was moving to hold the rally point, because the command did not care about the rally point, because the command only cared about the front.
Min-jae cared.
He had spent his whole life caring about the things the command did not care about.
The door behind him.
The kid behind him.
The line, and the people behind the line.
It had killed him, that caring.
It had planted him in a tunnel with a barrier in his hands and a dead gate at his back, and it had been the one thing about him that had refused to die, and it was the only thing about him that was still his.
He pushed against the compulsion.
Not the way he had pushed in the square, a hair’s breadth, a held step.
The leash bent.
He could feel it bend, feel the cold hand on the back of his neck loosen by a finger’s width, and he took a step toward the rally point, and the compulsion did not snap him back.
He took another.
The gray city streamed past him.
He was moving against the tide now, cutting across the current of the battle, toward the far side of the district, and the shadows around him did not notice, and the enemy died where he passed, and the weight on his neck followed him, patient and terrible, and he did not think about it, because thinking about it would have stopped him.
Once, a shadow soldier fell beside him, cut down by a horned charge, and Min-jae stepped over it without slowing, because that was what the tide did.
Then he stopped.
He turned, and he dragged the hollow thing out of the path of the charge the way he had dragged one on the plain, and the empty soldier rose and went back to killing without ever knowing it had been saved.
Min-jae did not know why he had done it.
He did not have time to wonder.
But he had done it, and it had been his, and he carried that small warmth with him into the smoke like a lit match in a storm.
He passed the hospital.
He knew it before he saw it whole, the way he had known it in the morning, the wide low building with the emergency entrance and the awning, and he did not mean to look, and he looked anyway, because he had never been able to stop himself from looking.
The wall was gone.
Not collapsed, gone, a whole corner of the building open to the gray sky, and the rooms behind it hung in the air like a doll’s house with the front taken off.
He could see the floors and the beds and the curtains moving in a wind that did not exist.
He could see the room with the white walls and the window that looked out on a parking lot, the room where his mother had slept for two years, and he could not see his mother, and he understood, with a cold that had nothing to do with the battle, that he would not see her.
They were carrying people out.
Rescuers and shadows together, lifting stretchers over the rubble, and Min-jae’s feet slowed, and his head turned, and he counted them the way a man counts the dead, and he could not tell, he could not tell, he could not tell, and then he saw the one stretcher that did not move like the others.
The shape on it was still.
It was covered, head and all, and the people carrying it moved differently, slower, careful, the way people move when they are carrying something that no longer needs to be carried fast.
Min-jae felt the world stop.
A feeling.
Not a memory.
He had no memory left that could tell him what this was.
Her face was gone from him, her name had never been his, and he could not have said, if the god had asked him, what his mother looked like, or what she sounded like, or what she had called him when he was small.
But he felt it, the way a man feels the change in the air before a storm, the way a body knows a loss before the mind can name it.
The stretcher passed.
The compulsion carried him on, past the hospital, past the rubble, past the still shape under the sheet, and the feeling stayed with him, cold and certain, and he told himself it meant nothing, told himself it was the war, told himself the city was full of still shapes, and he did not believe any of it.
He kept moving.
He saw it the way he saw everything now, through the gray, and the gray was full of motion and panic and the terrible geometry of a rout.
The evacuation had been funneling through the wide streets, thousands of people, and the enemy had closed on them from the east, and the line that was supposed to hold them had broken, and the monsters were in among the crowd.
And there, at the edge of it, in the middle of the gray and the screaming, he saw her.
Ji-woo.
She was alive.
She was still alive, still standing, still whole, and she was not running.
She was pulling a woman up off the ground, an old woman, and the monsters were coming, and she was looking for a way out, and there was no way out, and Min-jae saw it all in the space of a heartbeat, the way he had seen the doorway in the burning city, the way he had seen the gap in the square.
He was too far.
The distance between them was not great.
It was a street, a barricade, a knot of rubble and fighting.
But it might as well have been the width of the world.
The compulsion held him at the edge of the rally point, pulling him back toward the center, toward the front, toward the battle it needed him for, and the enemy was breaking through toward her group, and the monsters were surging, and she was going to die, and he was too far to reach her in time.
Unless.
The word came to him out of the dark of his own mind, quiet and terrible, and he understood what it meant before he finished thinking it.
The compulsion never asked him to spend himself.
It asked him to advance, to kill, to hold, to march, and it gave him power for those things, power that was not his, power that he had never earned.
But it had never once asked him to choose.
It had never once asked him to burn.
He could burn.
He had felt it, under everything, the fuel, the memory-stuff, the bright warm things that were all that was left of the man he had been.
He had felt it go when the name was torn out of him, and he had understood, in the dark, that it could be spent.
That it could be spent to buy something, the way a man spends coin, the way a man spends himself.
He looked at his sister.
She was still pulling the old woman, still looking for the way out, still alive, and the monsters were almost on her, and Min-jae was too far, and the compulsion was pulling him away, and there was only one thing left in the whole gray world that he could offer her.
He stopped resisting.
He felt the leash go taut as he stopped, felt the cold hand close on his neck, felt the command gather itself to drag him back, and he did not fight it, did not push, did not even want.
He simply stopped, in the middle of the gray and the fire, and he looked at the distance between himself and his sister, and he measured it, the way he had measured a hundred lines in a hundred dungeons.
Too far.
Unless he spent what the command had never asked for.
The monsters broke through toward her group.
Min-jae turned, and the whole weight of the god’s attention was on him, cold and terrible and watching, and he did not care, and he began to move, not the way the compulsion moved him, but the way he had moved when he was alive, toward the line, toward the breach, toward the doorway, toward his sister.
And the price, he knew, was going to be terrible.
He was going to pay it anyway.