I never found out what the rats in that chamber were worth. The one-eyed brute hissed a second time, quills rattling, and then all five of them broke at once and poured into the outflow pipes in a scrabble of claws and clattering spines, gone before I'd taken a second step. I stood there with the knife raised and nothing to use it on. I had no idea why they'd run, and I wasn't about to crawl into a sewer pipe after them to ask. Zero points. I kept walking.
Drainage Trench 7 let me out at the foot of the perimeter wall a little after four-thirty, and for a moment all I could do was tilt my head back and look up.
The wall of District 9 was a slab of dark, salt-stained concrete, sixty feet high and four feet thick, built to keep the outer rift beasts out of the residential zones. I'd lived in its shadow for fifteen years and never once been on the other side.
At Checkpoint 9-B, the heavy iron gates were shut tight, locked down under the protocols that always followed the awakening ceremony. I crouched behind a stack of rusted drums in an abandoned spirit-coal yard fifty yards back, the cold of the steel seeping through my jacket where my shoulder pressed against it, and watched.
Two arc lights cut through the yellow fog above the gate and threw harsh white beams over the muddy approach road. Two municipal guards in grey alloy armor leaned against the lower barricade. One held a short-barreled spirit-carbine. The other cradled a steaming tin cup of spirit-chicory, his breath puffing white in the cold.
I knew the one with the carbine.
Sergeant Vane. Grey beard, bad knee, a voice like gravel in a bucket. I'd tried to talk my way through 9-B twice last year. The first time, the guards had laughed me all the way back to the shelter. The second time, Vane had been on duty, and he hadn't laughed. He'd taken me by the back of my jacket, turned me around like a lost parcel, and said, "Rifts eat kids, son. They don't care how stubborn you are." Then he'd pushed half a ration cracker into my hand and told me to go home.
I'd carried that cracker in my pocket for a week before I ate it. I still wasn't sure why.
My plan for tonight had been to lie my way past them: Chen had sent me out on an early supply run. It was a terrible lie, and I hated that it used Chen's name. Then something strange started happening behind my eyes, and the lie went clean out of my head.
It had begun in the tunnel as a faint prickle I'd written off as tiredness. Now it was opening up, as if a door I hadn't known was in my head had swung wide.
Until tonight, "energy" had been a word. Something I'd read in library manuals, or heard proctors say while I stood at a slate and failed. It was a thing other people felt, a tingle in the veins, a green glow on a dial.
Now I didn't just see the two guards. I sensed them.
In the belly of the one with the cup, a man I'd heard Vane call Pell, a thin, sluggish thread of pale yellow light flickered like a lantern in a draft. My mind read it before I could ask the question: Spirit Cultivation, Realm 1, Level 2.
My attention slid to the carbine. Slotted into its brass receiver sat a tiny spirit stone, cracked straight across. I could feel the heat inside it, jagged and mechanical, and I could trace the exact path it would take if Vane squeezed the trigger. If he ever fired at me, I'd see it flare a heartbeat before his finger moved.
They'd issued the guards cracked stones. Of course they had. Whole stones cost money, and nobody spent money on District 9.
I looked at my hands. My forearms were bare in the freezing air, the skin still raw and pink, but I wasn't cold. My pulse sat slow and deep, forty-five beats a minute. My muscles felt like wire wound tight and ready. When I shifted my weight on the gravel, not one pebble made a sound.
This is what a body feels like when it isn't fighting itself, I thought.
I hadn't swallowed a single pill or sat under a single waterfall. The Celestial System had opened the seal, and the Creation and Destruction locked up in my blood were finally tuning my nerves to the world. I didn't need to lie to anyone. I didn't need anybody's permission.
That should have felt better than it did.
I stepped out from behind the drums and moved toward the base of the wall without a sound.
Vane stopped mid-sentence. His head turned toward the dark between the drums, and his eyes narrowed as he swung the arc light around. "Who's there? State your business or step into the light!"
I didn't answer. I dropped into a crouch and slid behind an iron drainage pipe bolted to the wall, twenty feet to his left. The metal was slick with condensation under my palm.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Vane took three steps toward the drums with his weapon raised, the cracked stone flaring orange. His light swept over the empty mud where I'd been standing a second earlier. Behind him, Pell grunted into his cup. "Stray cat. Relax, Vane. Who's sneaking around at four in the morning? Everyone's waiting on the draft lists."
"I heard something." Vane scanned the drums for three more seconds, then spat in the mud. "Place gives me the creeps."
Sorry, Sergeant, I thought. You were right to worry. You just weren't right about me.
While he was still looking at the drums, I was already fifteen feet up the wall.
I hooked my fingers into a three-millimeter gap between the concrete and the pipe and pulled. My body felt almost weightless. No strain in my arms, no burn in my thighs. I climbed the whole sixty-foot slab in under five seconds and slipped beneath the motion sensors at the top, picking out the thin, invisible threads of infrared crossing the parapet as easily as if they'd been painted on. Then I squeezed through a section of wire mesh where winter frost had cracked the concrete, the cut ends snagging at my jacket.
I stood on the outer lip and looked back.
District 9 spread out below me, a cluttered maze of rusty roofs and yellow streetlamps and chimneys breathing smoke into the dark. Thousands of people were sleeping down there, waiting for tomorrow's shift. Somewhere in that tangle, Lin was curled up behind a door with her mother's boots outside it. Somewhere, Chen was asleep in the alcove behind a cold iron vat, with two coppers hidden on his counter. And in a room on the sixth floor of a leaning tenement, a broken wooden box lay in pieces on the floor.
It was the only place I'd ever lived. I hated it, and I knew every crack in it. It was home the way a bad tooth is part of your mouth.
For about three seconds, I thought about going back.
Then I turned around.
On the outside lay the Outer Garbage Rifts. Mountains of crushed industrial scrap. Hills of black spirit-coal slag. Rusted machinery and abandoned pipes strewn over scorched earth, stretching for miles into the grey. The air tasted of copper. Far off, high above the scrap horizon, the sky was torn open in three places, three bruised-purple wounds bleeding faint threads of light into the gloom.
Sixty feet below me, a soft pile of coal dust waited at the base of the wall. A drop from this height would shatter the legs of any ordinary person and leave them lying in the mud for the rift beasts.
I took a breath and stepped off.
The wind roared in my ears for a split second, and the ground rushed up.
THUD.
I landed flat on my feet in the slag. My knees bent, my hips sank, and my Primordial Physique swallowed the entire shock, spreading it through my muscles and into the loose coal. No broken bones. No sprains. No pain. Just a puff of black dust rising around my shins.
I stood and brushed it off my knees.
"Not bad," I muttered. A small smile pulled at my mouth, and for once there was nothing sharp or crooked about it. "Not bad at all."
I unclipped my iron hunting knife and walked into the scrap fields.
For twenty minutes I wound through towering heaps of metal and crushed spirit-coal sacks, back low, placing my feet where the slag was packed hard enough not to shift. The deeper I went, the stronger the copper taste in the air, but it didn't sicken me. My lungs took in the Void miasma like cold water and turned it into warm Primordial Essence that settled in my core. Free fuel, as long as I kept breathing.
I kept my new sense open and let it stretch across the mist. It was like having a second pair of eyes that didn't need light. Within a hundred yards I could feel every ripple in the air, and under the scrap piles, small twitchy pulses of Void energy darting through the rusted pipes. Void Rats, dozens of them, each carrying a tiny, erratic spark.
Then I passed a collapsed three-story incinerator of cracked red brick and iron girders, and my sense snagged on something else.
It wasn't a twitchy pulse. It was big and dense and hot, a dark, muddy blend of unrefined Fire Qi and wild vitality, sitting in the heart of the ruins like a heavy stone in the fog.
[TARGET DETECTED: GOBLIN-CLASS QI BEAST (F-RANK HIGH-GRADE)]
[DESCRIPTION: Feral humanoid rift creature born from low-level spatial instability. Possesses leathery hide, compressed bone structure, and crude predatory instincts. Equivalent to a Realm 1 Level 5 human cultivator in physical strength.]
I stopped behind the rusted corner of an old steam boiler, fingers tightening on the knife until the wood creaked.
A Realm 1 Level 5 beast.
On Azure Star, it took three or four armed guards with spirit-rifles, or a squad of apprentice mercenaries from the upper sectors, to clear a creature like that safely. If an unawakened orphan ran into a rift goblin in an alley, nobody would find enough of him to bury. Pell was Level 2. This thing was more than twice that, and it hadn't needed a carbine to get there.
I leaned around the corner and looked.
It was sitting on a heap of charred spirit-coal, gnawing the leg bone of an iron-hide goat. Four feet tall, bow-legged, wrapped in warty, scarred leather. Bald, oversized head. Long pointed ears, a flat nose, a wide mouth packed with jagged yellow teeth. Beside it on the coal lay a club made from a rusted steel axle-rod wound with wire.
Four Void Rats sat at the foot of the heap, waiting for scraps the way the street-strays waited outside Chen's stall.
The goblin grunted, snapped the bone in half with its jaws, and sucked out the marrow with a wet, slurping noise that carried across the ruins.
I stood in the shadows while my heart pounded, hard and fast and entirely ordinary. It didn't matter what my body could do. My nerves hadn't gotten the message yet.
I could just go around, said the small, sensible voice in my head. Hunt rats for a few days. Work up to it.
Then I thought of Dugan's pen scratching out another zero. Chen's boots, waiting in a back room for a kid who'd never need them. Fifteen years of being the thing everyone stepped over.
I looked at my knife. Chipped, rusty at the guard, worth four copper credits. Then at my hand. Calloused, crossed with thin white scars, and humming underneath like an engine waiting to turn over.
"Realm 1, Level 5," I whispered, my eyes on the goblin's thick neck. "Let's see what a Missing Prince can do."
It sounded ridiculous out loud. I stepped out from behind the boiler anyway and walked into the incinerator ruins.