At seventeen, Rem Avern knew three things about dungeons: they paid late, smelled like wet metal, and never opened where it was convenient.
He rolled his right shoulder until it popped and cinched the leather strap across his chest. The pack on his back was not glamorous. It never was. Spare blades wrapped in oilcloth. Coiled rope. Chalk. Flares. Two canteens. Three tourniquets. A folded stretcher with a hinge that bit skin if you forgot where it pinched. He had carried the same weight into a dozen rifts and out of almost as many. The guild called him a porter. Hunters called him kid. The broken called him when they needed to see daylight again. At night he slept above Dr. Livesey's shop by the river, learned to hold still while stitches set, and learned that questions matter more than prayers.
The morning crowd moved around the guildhouse like a tide that knew the rocks by name. Brass bells clanged. Runners barked times and tiers. The big board at the entrance clattered through postings: F-rank clean-up on South Wharf. E-to-D escalation near the canal. C-rank demonstration raid scheduled for the Royal District, audience welcome, printed bold as theater.
Rem's badge hung low on his collar. F was stamped into the tin as if the letter could bruise. Barely a spark, the intake assessor had said when they tested him. Plenty of muscle, no current. The man had smiled like he was doing Rem a favor.
"Back in one piece, wolf," called Old Brann from his post by the doors. Brann had both legs, one eye, and the habit of counting everything with that eye like it owed him rent.
"I am not a wolf," Rem said. He adjusted the strap again. "Wolves hunt in packs."
"You will too, if you stop scowling." Brann jabbed his cane toward the board. "South Wharf, F-to-E creep. You're on Team Beacon. Pack mule."
"Porter," Rem said. It was a correction that never stuck. He went anyway.
South Wharf was the city's wet lung: tar, fish, iron, salt voices. The rift there had opened in a storage yard between stacks of oiled crates, a vertical seam in the air that shimmered like summer heat over stone. The guild had hammered anchor stakes and chalked rings on the cobbles. A rope barrier held a small crowd at a polite distance: some curious, some praying, some bored. There was always a crowd.
Team Beacon stood at the chalk edge: three hunters, all E-rank, easy in their gear the way hands are easy with familiar tools. The leader, a woman with braided hair and a breastplate polished past reason, flicked a look at him.
"You're new," she said. "Laska."
"Rem."
Her gaze weighed his shoulders, the way the pack sat like it belonged there. "You keep the lines clean, you feed us gear before we ask, and if something with too many teeth looks at you, step behind me. Your job is to be there when we come back out."
He nodded. He had done this speech before in other mouths.
A priest in white and gold swung a censer along the rope line, smoke curling in sweet loops. His voice drifted above the noise. "Order is a blessing. Praise the Star who set the heavens. Praise the brave who bring the glow back to our streets."
Rem did not look at him. He had grown up on stories in Dr. Livesey's house near the river, stories that did not end with a bow. Altair, the Void, wanted people to choose for themselves. Solaris, the Star, wanted them to choose correctly. Somewhere between light and silence, the sky had cracked and dungeons began to fall like missing pieces from a puzzle too big to see. That was Livesey's version, told between stitches and bitter tea.
"On my mark," Laska said. She checked the anchor, then her team, then Rem. "Mark."
They went in quick, the way you step into cold water before your mind can change its mind. The world shuddered once around Rem as he crossed, like a plucked string ran through him. Darkness swallowed color and then handed it back in steel and mineral blue. The interior was a corridor of black glass ribs, each arching to meet the next in a cage of lightless bone.
Rem set the pack beside the anchor spike and fed out line as Laska's wedge moved forward. Glints shifted in the dark like eyes that did not blink. Rem's hands were steady. He counted breaths. He listened for the sound a fight makes when it is fine and the different sound it makes when it is not.
It stopped being fine about four minutes in.
The first two creatures were easy, slick-bodied things that slithered low and died fast under Laska's blade and the crack of her partner's runestaff. The third came from the ceiling on silent hooks. Laska spun and missed the catch by half a heartbeat. Rem moved before thought could get in the way. He grabbed her by the collar and yanked. Hooks scraped air where her throat had been. Her elbow smacked his cheek hard enough to ring, then she recovered and split the creature open on an upward cut that ended the argument.
"Move," she said.
"I am," he said. His cheek sang. He tasted iron and smiled without meaning to. Some things felt honest.
They reached the core chamber ten minutes later: a cavity where the floor fell away into a shaft of black. The core hung over the drop, a knot of cold light. Cracks spidered its surface. The team formed a triangle: blades up, staff humming, Laska long and low on stance.
"Pack," she said.
Rem had the tripod and ratchet out before the word finished. He clipped the harness, fed the line, and braced a heel against the anchor as Laska leaned out to fix the clamp. The shaft breathed up cold. Something below clicked like teeth counting.
"Almost," Laska said.
The thing from the shaft leapt.
Rem did not see it so much as feel the air change. Laska could not pivot without losing the clamp. The runestaff flared and died as the other hunter's spell misfired. Rem stepped into the space between problem and consequence because that was the job people paid him not enough to do.
He caught the thing by two limbs and planted it. Boots scraped. Shoulders screamed. He had no spark to burn and did not miss it. He had bone and leverage and the kind of strength that makes adults frown and say be careful with that. He turned, heaved, and threw.
The creature pinwheeled, hit a glass rib, and shattered like rotten ice. Pieces rained down the shaft and kept falling.
"Clamp," Laska said, breathless, as if nothing unusual had occurred. The ratchet clicked. The core came free. The room brightened like a held breath finally exhaled.
They walked out to bells and cheers. The priest's voice rose to meet them. "Praise the Star, who orders all things. Praise the brave who bring the glow back to our streets."
A guild runner met them at the rope, counting scratches and faces and gear like a tax man. "E-to-D confirmed and closed," he said. His eyes slid past Rem as if past furniture. "Laska, report in the hall. Pastries by the blue counter."
"Get your cheek looked at," Laska told Rem, which in her language was generosity. "You held."
"I held," he said.
He went home by the river, pack lighter, steps slower now that the adrenaline had spent itself. Dr. Livesey's house looked like a book had learned to be a building and refused to stop. Shelves everywhere. Notes pinned to notes. A kettle that sighed as if tired of boiling water for people who bled on the furniture.
"You're late," Livesey said without looking up from his mortar. He was not old and not young, his eyes cut with the kind of patience that made Rem want to be quiet.
"Wharf," Rem said. He tilted his head to show the bruise. "It looks worse than it is."
"It is," Livesey said, and checked the cheek with cool fingers. "Hold still."
Rem did. He had held still for stitches and splints here since he was ten and came in snarling with both knees skinned and a story about a market guard who did not like orphans talking back.
"Did you listen to the priest," Livesey asked.
"I heard him," Rem said.
"That is the same thing."
"He was not talking to me."
"He was," Livesey said. He set gauze and taped it down gentle. "He is always talking to the ones who do not care to listen."
Rem let that sit. Outside, the river shouldered itself along with the patience of stone. A ferry bell chimed. Somewhere in the city, other bells answered in patterns people pretended meant order.
On the table, among teacups and anatomical sketches, lay a folded flyer printed in deep indigo. Rem picked it up with two fingers like it might bite.
"Grand Arcade Announcement," he read. "'Demonstration Raid' tomorrow. Attendance encouraged. Blessings to be given. Performers to include Royal Academy candidates."
"Mm," Livesey said. He poured hot water over leaves and let the steam fog his lenses. "Blessings. That word is doing heavy lifting."
"You do not like crowds."
"No," Livesey said. "Crowds do not like to think, and thinking is where your choices live. But you should go."
"Why."
"Because you are seventeen and can carry a team out of a rift with your bare hands," Livesey said, which was not a compliment and not not a compliment. "Because the guild will push you there anyway. Because the Academy will parade their best, and it is useful to know the faces the city will chant."
"Like the duke's daughter," Rem said, mostly to see if the room would react.
It did, faintly. Livesey's mouth tucked at one corner. "The duke's daughter. Rank B already. The Academy writes songs about her and pretends they do not. She will be at the front."
"Good for her," Rem said.
"Good for no one if the wrong people notice," Livesey said. He slid a cup toward Rem. "Drink. Then sleep. Then go where you said."
Rem drank. The tea tasted like rain that had learned bitterness from smoke. He did not sleep much, but he lay on his back, watched the ceiling, listened to the river, and thought about the way Laska's weight had come into his hands when he pulled her off a bad line. He thought about the priest's voice thinning the air over the rope line. He thought about indigo ink and crowds that cheered on cue.
The city woke itself early for the promised show. The Grand Arcade ran like a spine of stone, glass ribs arcing high overhead. Banners hung in the blue like decisions that had not been made yet. Vendors wheeled carts to the edge. Guild officers chalked lines and set anchors and smiled with too many teeth. Rope barriers went up and with them the first rows of spectators, wide-eyed and tidy. The air tasted like bronze and sugar.
Rem reported to the supply tent because his badge said F and F belonged behind letters that mattered. The quartermaster checked his name off a board and pointed with a clipboard. "Porter Three, you're with the Academy team. Keep clear, keep quiet, do what you're told."
He did the first two.
The Academy candidates lined up under the shadow of glass. They were crisp as coins, uniforms pressed, sigils stitched, nerves buckled down under posture. Rem recognized faces from guild bulletins and street posters. He recognized one from everywhere. She stood a little ahead without looking like she meant to, dark hair braided back, eyes like someone had sharpened that color for use. Rank sat on her like weather. She did not look at the crowd. She looked at the work.
"Evelyn Verran," someone whispered near Rem's shoulder. "B-rank at seventeen. The duke's girl."
Rem did not say anything. He adjusted the strap and counted the flares one more time because flares did not care about names.
An officiant in formal robes lifted both hands. "For your safety," he said, smile bright as polished glass, "remain behind the line. Today the Royal Academy will show you what discipline and devotion can do."
A bell chimed. A second answered. Light collected midair above the Arcade's stones, bright enough to etch the back of Rem's eyes, and the air tore along a neat seam like a ribbon cut at a ceremony.
The crowd sighed as one. Some prayed. Some cheered. The seam widened. Cold slid out. Rem felt the weight of it like a hand flattening the back of his neck.
His pack was in his hands when the seam twitched wrong.
He saw it the way you see a step you thought was there. The rift flinched, then opened in a way not on the program, a blackness with teeth. The officiant's spell stuttered. Chalk lines at the stone's edge smudged like a sleeve had dragged through them.
The nearest Academy candidate looked at an instructor. The instructor looked at the officiant. The officiant looked at the crowd.
Rem did not look at any of them. He looked at the gap and at the girl standing in front of it, the one people would write songs about later no matter how this went. She lifted her hand and the air around her tightened like it had agreed to obey.
"Porter Three," barked the quartermaster behind him. "Hold for orders."
Rem stepped forward.
The crowd had not realized anything was wrong yet. It would. And when it did, it would turn and run and crush itself and blame the wrong names tomorrow. Rem had no sigil and no spell and very little patience for permission.
He reached the line and set his pack down. Moving first was sometimes the only magic he needed.
The rift opened its mouth.
Rem moved.