Riley glared at the woman. His face hurt, and she wasn’t even bothering to notice how angry he was and how intense his glare was. Drawing her attention was made difficult by the bindings on his wrists, and the knot of some rubbery thing in his mouth preventing him from talking. At best, he could manage a ‘mmmph’, which the woman was ignoring.

She seemed to be in charge of this team of… whatever they were. Soldiers, police, ninjas, he had no idea. They didn’t have guns. They had short spears, with blades long enough that they almost looked like swords. Which was already deeply weird. That they were, every one of them, women — well, that wasn’t as weird as the spears thing, but together they painted a singular sort of picture.

He had been kidnapped by a gang of lesbian ninjas.

It was at least as plausible as everything else that had happened for the last few hours.

He could hear them talking, barely, their voices carrying down the hallway they crouched in, peering at the top page of an unrolled sheaf of papers. They’d carried the whole roll of paper as a bundle, inside what looked like a leather wrap tied with a cord, with a shoulder strap to sling it across the back. Maps, he supposed. He could, at this distance, only see that it was a drawing of some kind, but the tenor of the conversation seemed to be a discussion or a planning session.

Periodically, one of them would look over at him, as though considering how he fit into their map-related situation. Given that he was bound and his limp had gone from mild to severe from the exertions of the chase, he supposed he was part of the problem. If they were lesbian ninjas, they probably leaped from one building to another as though they were anime characters, and that wasn’t something Riley was capable of.

Or even things substantially less athletic, honestly. Even before the accident, he didn’t have a lot of definition or strength, and after the accident, he withered. Slender became thin, his wrists knobs of bones at the end of tapered sticks for arms. Walks in the park were meant to counter his flaccidity, but he also wasn’t eating regularly.

Athleticism was not going to suddenly arrive for him in a moment of crisis, with the lesbian ninjas. He wasn’t going to win any races or escape in a daring chase. The actual attempt at a daring chase made that, at least, extremely clear.

Frustratingly, the leader of the group wasn’t one of the people who turned to look at him when he was clearly being evaluated for fitness. He kept his glare sharpened just in case.

After an interminable time sitting against the wall, his ass growing first numb and then throbbing with the bone-ache of his previously broken hip, he finally couldn’t tolerate the pain any longer, and intentionally tipped over onto his side, groaning around the gag.

That, at last, brought their leader’s attention to him. She rolled her eyes, and walked down the ten feet of hall to where they’d left him. It was a strange hallway; he thought it was probably a pedestrian bridge between two buildings, because it had windows on both sides, and both sides were illuminated by the same orange glow.

She crouched down next to him. “I’m going to take the gag out of your mouth, but I need you to not call any more Sigils, okay? You’ve already fucked us over with your bullshit, and we’re having to replan our entire route.”

None of that made any sense to him, but he really wanted the gag out of his mouth, so he just nodded.

“None of that makes any sense to me,” he said, after spitting the foul rubber taste out of his mouth and taking a deep and satisfying breath. “Also, I can’t sit for this long. My hip is fucked up and it’s really painful.”

Her eyes flicked down to his butt, and back up to his face, and she extended a hand to help him to his feet. “Sorry. Didn’t know. You’re not exactly a prisoner right now, but… we’re still trying to be careful, since you probably have no idea what’s happening.”

He barked a humorless laugh. “You think?”

“And your ignorance makes you dangerous.” She sighed. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.” She turned her head to call over her right shoulder: “Take another five, and then we move. Find a trunk route, because we’re not climbing anything.” Then she looked back to him. “This is going to be the quick version, because you need to know so we can be safe, but the full intake is the headmistress’s job, and I’m not qualified to do it.”

He shook his head and blinked very deliberately, to convey that she was speaking gibberish.

“My name is Ianthe Martin. I’m the Captain of the Tower Watch. You’ve already seen the Tower, I think? Giant fucking building in the middle of the City?” Riley nodded. “Okay, that’s where we’re going. Normally the way this works is, we find you in the Primary — uh, that’s basically Earth, though that’s not entirely accurate, but whatever. And we– what?”

He was shaking his head, a disbelieving grin on his face. “Basically Earth. Okay. Is this some kind of, I don’t know, a LARP or an escape room or a virtual reality game or– is this The Matrix?” He suddenly had a nasty idea. “You know what The Matrix is, right?”

Ianthe looked incredulously at him. “What?” As he took a breath to start explaining, she cut him off with a hand gesture, sharp, precise. “I know what the fucking Matrix is, yes. We live in the Tower but this isn’t some kind of fantasy world or whatever you’re thinking. I’m from Toronto.”

He absorbed this, and she continued. “As I was saying, normally we meet you in the Primary, we explain the whole situation, and we bring you directly to the Tower for a meeting with the Headmistress and a couple of the department heads, and you decide if you want to stay. Obviously that’s not how things went down this time.”

“What was all that orange fire stuff? And the lightning tree, and–”

She cut him off. “I can’t explain all that to you. Even if I understood the theory, like I said, I’m not qualified. So here’s the simple version: The Tower is a school for magic. You can do magic. It’s dangerous, so we bring you here to either learn how to do it, or have the ability blocked and your memory edited. Your call which.”

“A school for magic. You mean like Hogw–”

“Yeah we don’t really like to bring that shit up, okay? Both because it’s kind of demeaning, and because the author is a piece of shit. But that’s the basic idea, I suppose. Only you don’t go home for summers.”

His face was a study in incomprehension, so she pressed onwards. “You did something, we call it a Working, where you basically used a bunch of magical power and you opened a, I guess a doorway, between the Primary and the City. And according to the diviner on your case, it’s not the first time you’ve done it.”

This stabbed him with a realization. The accident. Memory of a sketch in fire, and memory of lying on asphalt in the dark, rain lashing him in the cold. And then he pushed the thought down, because he didn’t like how that thought implied he was accepting this total bullshit as anything like reality.

Hard to explain this City though, unless you do accept it, his mind nagged at him.

She saw the look on his face. “So you know about the previous time, too. Okay, good, that will probably make this all a little easier for you to deal with, because we’ve got to get moving now.”

She looked him over. “I’m going to remove your bindings. Please don’t do anything stupid or run off or whatever other heroics you might be imagining. We will catch you again, and if we don’t, it will be because you’ve caused yourself some pretty fatal harm. This place is dangerous, and that’s not even counting the things that live here.”

He held his hands out. “I’m not going to run. I’m not even sure I can run anymore. My hip is–”

She nodded. “I should have noticed the limp earlier. Sorry.” She quickly turned some kind of release at his wrist, and the bindings fell away. It was just a length of rope? He couldn’t parse how that had all fit together, a knot that could just release itself instantly like that, and his restless mind started working on the topology in the background while he listened.

“Anyway, when you made your Portal and showed up in The City, your diviner spotted it, and gave us your location. Which is way the fuck off in South District, by the way; thanks for making us walk this far.” He shrugged, his expression saying are you seriously trying to blame me for this, but he stayed quiet, and she kept talking. “I brought a team out to pull you in before you fell off something or something ate you. And now we’re trying to get back, but–”

They had gotten moving at this point, and she motioned for him to keep up as they walked down the pedestrian bridge. He thought they might be five or six floors up from the base of the buildings around, but he wasn’t going to go peer over the side; he didn’t need to give Ianthe, Captain Ianthe, some reason to think he was running for it, and put the impossible cuffs back on him. He’d tried to make sense of the way they’d been tied, the way they’d fallen off, and ultimately the topology didn’t work, and there was no way for what she’d done to have a reasonable knot-design explanation.

“That stunt you pulled when you fell, you Worked a local gravity reversal. You basically changed what down meant for a few seconds, and that’s why the fall didn’t kill you or break you.” She looked down at his leg. “Break you more, anyway.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Like, I fell and blacked out. All that other stuff, you’re bullshitting me, right?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m guessing you blocked the memory because it fucked with your brain when you did it. I don’t know the details. You’ll have to talk to Theory, or Archives.” He could hear the capital letters when she said these, like they were department names.

She continued. “The upshot is, you fucked with a fundamental force of reality, you did it in a really sloppy way, you fumbled through a bunch of seriously advanced magic like it was playtime at the kindergarten and the blocks are all made of blown glass.”

She caught his eye. “The Tower really, really doesn’t like when people fuck with reality at that scale, or on that fundamental a level. We use Charms to do slow-fall parachutes, which are like, um.” She cast around for a good analogy, but ended up defaulting to the likely familiar terminology for a nerd. He telegraphed nerd, and he knew this, and she was right; this was familiar ground. “Magic items. They’re Worked items that have– actually, never mind. You can get these details from your classes.”

She paused a beat, but didn’t look over at him. “If you decide to stay.”

He laughed, this time a real laugh, though dripping with bitterness. “Go back to all my exciting adventures in normal reality, or commit to the bit here and live in a bullshit fantasy-land.”

She shook her head. “Basically, yeah. But… listen, you’ll need to go through intake with the Headmistress. There are, uh, extenuating circumstances in your case.” She shook her head, short and sharp. “Anyway. My point is, we tend not to do extreme things like ‘shut off gravity to slow fall’. We use Worked objects.”

They were climbing down a stairwell, and one of the women opened what seemed like an arbitrarily chosen door into a hallway. He was already completely lost, had been since well before they’d unbound his hands, and he really hoped those maps were accurate. Or comprehensible. Or sane.

“When the Tower gets upset about reality fuckery, there can be consequences. Fatal ones.”

“Uh. Fatal?”

“It has erased people from reality before. I’ve been there when it happened, once. It was like watching a movie and suddenly it switches to a different movie entirely, seamlessly, changes just appearing with no warning. The Adept…” She paused, in reverie. “She didn’t even scream or — anything, I guess. She didn’t anything. She was there, and then she wasn’t.” Ianthe looked over at him. “That was for a lot less than fucking with the literal fundamental forces of physics. So you got lucky.”

They’d stopped at a window which looked out onto a small rooftop courtyard with a dead shrub and a leafless brown tree. The women at the front of the group were attaching some kind of mountain climbing gear that Riley had seen before in movies but didn’t know the name of.

“We, unfortunately, didn’t get lucky. This is part of it.” She gestured at the ropes that were being run through the pulley contraptions. “The City changes sometimes, usually when the Tower gets pissy or when a celestial storm blows through. Which are often the same thing. Anyway, our entire route home was scrambled, so we’re looking for a way through the new layout, updating our maps, and trying to find a trunk.” She looked at him to see if he was following. “Trunk. Make sense?”

“I can guess. Like a freeway.”

“Got it in one. We need to move fast, but we can’t do acrobatics with you along, or ziplines, or anything really exciting. So we need the City equivalent of a freeway. Luckily, they’re really visible to Pathfinders, and Finley there–” she pointed to a woman with dark hair and skin, whose eyes were closed and who held a hand up to her face curled into a tube like a kid making a pretend telescope — “is one of the better Pathfinders.”

“The best,” she said, and Riley heard Pakistan by way of Boston in her voice. “And we’re about half a mile from a really big trunk, and once we hit it, it’s a straight shot back to the Tower.”

“Good.” Ianthe hooked Riley up to the climbing gear, strapping some kind of safety harness around him. “We’re moving fast because in addition to the Tower, you probably woke up a half dozen Banes. We don’t want to encounter any of them.”

“That sounds like some kind of monster.”

She indicated he should climb out the window, and after a few minutes of exciting aerial adventures, they were both on the ground in the courtyard, and Finley was in the window, unhooking the gear. The women who had preceded them into the courtyard were already spread out, checking perimeters and sightlines.

“Yep. Except it’s not like a monster in a game, where we all hit it with our swords and get gold and experience.” The rope fell, and she caught it and started winding it around her forearm. Finley descended with whatever slow-falling gadget they’d used before. “Banes will fuck you up. Just seeing one can fuck you up, in some cases. We can probably take one of them, if we have to. Two, and we’re going to be looking at fatalities.” She looked him full in the face with a serious-business expression. “Your stunt could have us being tracked by five or six of them. It was loud.”

Her voice was flat and deadly serious. Riley stammered his way to an apology. “I– I’m sorry, I didn’t– I wasn’t even awake–”

Ianthe waved a hand dismissively.

Finley, pushing past them, said “Don’t worry about it. We know you didn’t do it on purpose. For one thing, if you had?” She grinned, her smile bright and genuine. “We wouldn’t be trying to rescue your stupid ass.”

“Eyes on the path, Finley.”

“Yes ma’am.” Finley caught his eye again, and while she didn’t wink — who ever really winked, like in real life? — she did quirk up one corner of her smile as she turned away.

“We move fast, we avoid Banes, we hide if we have to, and we get you home. Well, our home.” She looked at him and he had a sense of something wrong, but didn’t know what it was he was picking up on. “You, well. Remains to be seen.”

“What do you mean?”

Ianthe sized him up. “Most people don’t decide to stay. I haven’t decided which way I think you’ll jump, when you get the chance.” She made a flip-flop gesture with her hand. “But if you decide not to stay, we send you home. Simple.”

“Just like that? Without more hiking through this weird-ass city? How?”

“With an actual Adept opening the Portal in the tower, under controlled circumstances, and putting you somewhere specific. Instead of what you did, which is more like… pointing your finger at a map and picking a destination at random.” She gave him a half-smile. “It’s one of the things we’re good at around here. You know. Magic.”

“Right. Of course.” He sighed, looked up into the gloomy orange sky. “Magic.”

# # #

Therese woke to the muted sounds of conversation from the other half of the room. Key was sitting at her desk, her journal open in front of her, but she’d turned her chair to talk to someone. Therese blinked, bleary-eyed and with the remnants of the headache still lingering in the back of her skull, and saw that it was Alexis. Allie was in Academics, and it made sense that she’d have dropped by to talk about the recruitment thing that was happening. It would end up being her problem, if the recruit — if he — decided to stay.

Also, Allie and Key were dating, or at least were close in the ‘with-benefits’ sense of the word. So she was bound to show up at some point. She’d pulled up another chair and was leaned in, talking to Key, close, heads near to each other, trying to keep from waking her up.

Rubbing her eyes, Therese sat up. Allie saw the movement through the opening in the curtains and said, softly, “We didn’t wake you up, did we?”

Therese waved one dismissive hand. “No, I was– I’m awake. I was waking up anyway. I have to get up, check on the thing. The recruit.”

Key said, “Still nothing. The Captain’s still out. It’s only been a couple of hours, though.”

Depending on how weird the detours they ended up making were, it could be twice that long before they got back. Travel in the City was unpredictable, and based on the Working that Riley had managed, there were probably Banes involved now. The thought of Banes sent a crawling spider of ice up her spine, and she shook herself. It wasn’t as though the Captain was in any real danger; the only danger was to Riley, really. The Ranger team was smart and competent and any of them could escape a Bane and make it back to the Tower solo.

But she was still worried. Worried for this boy she’d never actually met, who she’d only seen in a strange divinatory vision, months ago. Riley.

How the hell was this going to work? Not my department, not my problem she repeated to herself like a mantra.

“I better go check in. Someone’s probably looking for me.” She gave Allie a little wave as she stepped past the curtain and looked around for her shoes. Allie was tall where Key was short, pale where Key was dark, and had long loose hair to Key’s careful braids. She had her hand resting on Key’s knee, unselfconsciously; relationships in the Tower weren’t unusual, and even encouraged for graduates. Everyone knew about Key and Allie.

Key nudged Therese’s shoes out from where they’d been hiding under the drape of the curtain, and Therese smiled gratefully as she slipped them on. “I’ll let you know if they tell me anything,” she said to Key, and waved to both of them as she left the room.

The next stop was probably the Ranger offices, because they’d know the status of the retrieval, but more likely she’d just get underfoot if she went there now. They didn’t need a rookie Diviner loitering and asking annoying questions. So instead she went to the common area closest to their offices, and collapsed into an overstuffed sofa.

Tower common areas were open to the main Tower shaft, with a few more private spaces behind doors or screens. Spoke-passages led out from the common areas, away from the main shaft, and branched off into improbably large wings of rooms for whatever purpose. Residences, offices, classrooms, whatever; where their access corridors led back to the main Tower shaft, there was usually a common area.

Couches and chairs and sitting cushions and in one area near the Archives, hammocks, formed little clusters around low tables or in niches along walls. Anywhere you sat, there were always a few additional seats so that others could join you, and typically people would unless you were clearly in the middle of something important.

So when she arrived in the common area that served as the foyer of the Ranger offices, the Armory, and the Surveyors, she spotted a pair of people already in conversation. She started to head towards them, but she recognized Brynn, a Ranger, and saw that she had a bunch of papers spread out before her. Maps, probably. So she was probably helping with the route planning, and had come out to the common room to clear her head, or get a new perspective, or something. Not a good idea to drop in on her conversation right now.

Instead, the overstuffed sofa. She let out a long sighing breath. Overhead, she could see dancing motes of light drifting through the upper Tower shaft, the same deep orange as the sunlight that came through the impossibly high skylight ceiling above.

Riley. A boy.

They didn’t really have anything sex-segregated in the Tower, because they didn’t have anyone living there except women, so why would they need to? Some of the associated trade guilds that clustered in the City around the base of the Tower had men living and working there, generally specialist crafters, but the Tower itself had no need for a “men’s wing”.

New novices lived together in dorm-like accommodations, four to a room. This wasn’t because the Tower lacked space for more people; it was quite the opposite. Endless dusty wings of rooms stretched out on every level of the Tower, with more than enough space to fit ten times as many people as actually lived there. The dorms were pedagogical. It was an article of faith that celestial magic was best learned in small, mutually-supportive groups. Cadres. Four girls, who would bond with each other and create a kind of team unity between them.

Ultimately, magic was dangerous, and it was important that nobody ever go off on her own to practice or experiment. Ensuring that everyone was always working with a handful of peers, friends, allies, sisters: this kept inexperienced novices from screwing up so badly that the Tower itself intervened, or something even worse happened.

There were six current novice cadres in the Tower, two in the third-year cohort and three in the second-year cohort, with a single cadre in the first-year cohort. And she knew that there was a new cadre that had just finished orientation, and was just about to enter the first-year cohort for the year. They had three girls already; normally a cadre had to have at least three members, but could go as high as five if that’s just how the numbers worked out. Generally the intake rate was just enough to keep the numbers consistent, somewhere around ten to twelve new recruits arriving every year. Cadres could be held back until they had at least three, for as long as six months if necessary, but that was rare.

It was, however, the case with the current novice cadre waiting to start. They’d been waiting for their third for a month, and so they were already behind the rest of their cohort. Their third, a quiet and terrified girl named Eve, had only arrived a few days ago, and Therese hadn’t been sure she’d make it through orientation at all. But she had talent, and after a lot of nervous dithering she’d finally agreed to stay at the Tower, at least through the first year.

But Riley. Riley was a boy. How was he going to join a cadre and bond with the others? How could his fundamental difference ever be overcome enough to make the easy sisterhood that cadres were meant to gel into? What if one of his teammates didn’t want to room with a boy? Would they have to create some kind of special solo cadre for him?

She shook her head. Not my problem, she reminded herself again. This was for Allie and her department to manage. They did the training, managed the cadre and cohort structure, planned the curriculum to each cadre’s needs, and took care of the day-to-day stuff. Therese couldn’t imagine wanting to deal with that; it would be like never graduating, a thought that made her shudder. She’d loved her sisters in her cadre ; Key had been one of them, and their bond had carried on into the year that followed graduation. But after her three years were complete, Therese was done with classes. She wanted to figure things out, learn new concepts, do actual research, become a real Adept. She wanted magic, not more school. Not teaching.

It’s a good thing there were people like Allie around, people for whom the whole process was their passion, for whom the regularity and structure and coherence of daily Tower school life was an envelope of care and security and warmth they wanted to grow and nurture themselves.

Nurture. That’s what she didn’t have. Therese lacked all nurture. She was happiest in the middle of a Divining chamber, alone, casting her mind out into the cold darkness of the Celestial realm, exploring its frontiers with only her spotter to keep her tethered to her reality and her identity. She never missed the embrace of the Tower community during those times. She could feel the faint brush of profoundly alien intelligences much larger than anything a human could even imagine, and she exulted in it. The cosmos was so much, and she would never tire of it. Next to that, human contact seemed pallid and empty.

Thinking of the lure of the celestial, Therese was considering heading up to her own department to get some scrying time in before Riley arrived and she had to give briefings to people. But then there was a change in the tenor of the conversation happening on the other side of the common area. A third person had joined Brynn and the junior whose name Therese didn’t know. The newcomer was also a Ranger, not someone Therese had met, and she’d brought some kind of concerning news, because Brynn started gathering up the paperwork.

Therese got to her feet and moved deliberately towards them, making it clear she wanted to know the details; Brynn saw her approach and waved her over.

“This one is yours, right? Riley?”

Therese nodded. “What’s up?”

Brynn shook her head, gestured to the newcomer. Katya. Right. Kat.

Kat said, “They’ve been pinned down by a pack of lesser Banes. Probably opportunists that saw easy meat when they smell ed the newbie’s Working.” She gave Therese a sudden, intense look. “Is it true that the new girl isn’t a girl?”

Therese shrugged. “That’s what my divination said, and what my telltale said. Riley. Boy, who can call Sigils. No clue how.”

Kat shook her head in disbelief. “Something for Theory to tell us in ten years when they’ve all written a bunch of research papers on it, probably.” The general attitude towards Theory in the Tower was that they were cool and scary and exciting but also not exactly part of the day-to-day. If there was a crisis, you could count on Theory to explain it… years later, in dense mathematical notation, impenetrable to the rest of the Tower.

“Just minor Banes though, right?” Therese was still worried. For this random boy she’d never met.

“Yeah, goblins basically. Or something that size. I bet it’s scaring the piss out of the newbie, though.” Kat grinned, and Brynn poked her with one finger, frowning slightly.

“What do we say about Banes, Kat?”

Kat rolled her eyes, recited in a singsong voice: “If I am complacent around Banes, I will get my sisters killed.”

Brynn nodded, but she spotted the look of concern on Therese’s face and shook her head. “No, don’t worry. She’s basically right. Your recruit will probably need a change of underwear but sh — he’s in no real danger. The Captain could handle this group solo, probably.”

Therese still worried, though. But Riley was a boy, and boys loved this kind of action fighting nonsense, she imagined. He’s probably fine.

# # #

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck–”

Riley was crouched behind a low wall at the edge of a courtyard, and every so often the cacophony from the courtyard would die down and he’d hear himself babbling, swearing, almost crying. Then another shriek of inhuman rage or the crack of some terrifying burst of what he supposed was magical energy would sound, and the roar of battle would resume.

He risked a peek up over the edge. One of the things, half again the height of a person and which looked like a nightmare fusion of something decidedly insectile with an anachronistic variety of pistons, pneumatics, cables, pulleys, and gear shafts, was rearing up to claw at the ranger named Finley. She had a fixed grin on her face, and she was crouching low in front of the monstrosity, legs spread, ready to dive in either direction depending on how it attacked. Behind it, two of her teammates were circling with their spears out.

It looks like a cyborg crustacean, Riley thought, though he could tell this was his mind trying to apply some kind of reasonable label to the incomprehensible thing he was looking at. It was venting gases from valves, leaking fluids from around gaskets, and pulsing organic veins were tangled with actual wires and pistons along the length of its torso and limbs. When it moved, it looked like an animated knife drawer.

Beyond this immediate melee, Ianthe and another of the rangers were closing in on a second, wounded creature, having severed one of its chitinous armored appendages. The severed limb was still thrashing back and forth, heaving itself up off the dark fluid-soaked concrete. As he watched it, hypnotically fascinated by the unnatural movements, additional appendages started to burst from the broken, cracked carapace, little thrashing metallic bits of wire and metal and flesh that stiffened into insect-like legs, trying to drag the oozing, leaking thing off to the side and, perhaps, escape. Ianthe led with a long-bladed sword, and the sword’s blade was a blur hovering in the air ahead of her, and Riley had no idea what the hell that meant.

The Rangers had dispatched two of the nightmares already. Of the remaining Rangers on the team, one was injured, and the other two were protecting her and doing what was probably first aid. Not that Riley could make out details from here.

The monster closest to him, the one looming over Finley, lunged with one of its appendages, the carapace-enclosed claw folding out of the limb through a film of clinging, wet viscera, the mechanism of its extension lubricated by the glistening slime. It unfolded like the ribs of an umbrella, each hinge swinging out to another length of blade, doubling the length of the weapon-arm. Faster than Riley could follow with his eye, the creature lashed out with the appendage, sweeping it towards the Ranger, glittering with all its newborn reach and length. Riley caught a scream in his throat, expecting to see Finley gutted or shredded or impaled or whatever the thing was trying to do to her.

Instead Finley moved in a flickering blur, like she’d briefly glitched her position in a video game. She was there, and then only an afterimage remained, and she was five feet away, moving in a smear of blurred speed, now suddenly flanking the creature, under and away from the scything arc of its blade-limb.

I can’t tell if that was magic or if she just moved really fucking fast, he thought, and for a moment he wondered how close reality could come to movie special effects.

Finley, from her new advantageous position, lashed out with something in her hand. The ‘something’ was apparently a giant fuckoff whip made of fire, so that was something for Riley to consider later when he was able to change his pants. The coils of fire spun out from her hand, writhing towards the now exposed side of the creature.

The monster’s attention turned, the half-dozen beady stalked lobster-like eyes swiveling to take in this new, incandescent burning threat. At the same moment, Finley’s two companions, still circling it, darted inwards, stabbing and slashing, their spear-blades burning with some kind of white-hot fire that left streaks of afterimages in Riley’s eyes. Then, having struck, they leaped back, tumbling as they went to try to avoid the flailing of the damaged creature’s other appendages.

One of the two didn’t pull back fast enough after her attack, and the creature lashed out with a blade-like leg driven by churning pistons in pale flesh. It caught her almost idly, flicking out as though by reflex rather than intention. The strike toppled her onto her side and the force of it sent her skidding a few meters back across the broken paving stones. Riley saw her head hit the ground, hard, when she bounced to a stop.

In the other melee, Riley saw Ianthe extend one hand, covered in some kind of silver-filigree gauntlet. She clenched her fist, and a portion of the wireframe glove began to glow dull orange. The monster she was fighting began a high pitched shrill whine, and Riley’s mind, still trapped in the thought of the creature as a crustacean, thought she’s boiling it, that’s the sound of a lobster in boiling water.

Then bits of its carapace began crumpling into themselves. Viscous fluids, opaque yellow-green and thick like custard, burst in spatters out from the creature’s armored body and across the courtyard. Some substantial part of it, largely an endoskeleton of dark and corroded metal coiled about with wires, ripped itself loose from the dying carcass. Two of the creature’s tangled wire-and-pulley limbs went along with it, forming a kind of wet industrial tripod trailing a mixture of organic and technological viscera behind it.

Finley had continued her flickering assault with the animate rope of fire, darting in and away, hooking insectile appendages and thrashing rubbery body parts. The fire-whip seemed almost alive, defying physics as though it were self-directed and endowed with its own independent locomotion. Finley gestured, and it coiled and uncoiled itself in unexpected directions and at unpredictable speeds, leaving burning tracks across its target as it flexed implausibly around in the air.

The Ranger who’d been toppled over by the creature’s leg strike had managed to get to her feet, but she was clearly no longer able to fight, with one arm limp at her side and the other clutched to a bloody scalp injury. The third member of their trio stood between her and the monster, her spear held out to keep it at bay while her companion retreated. She had done something to her spear that made its handle telescope out to two and a half meters, and she was waving the burning blade at its tip back and forth in what looked like more show than genuine threat.

The bizarre tripod facing Ianthe wasn’t able to tear itself into a new stable configuration in time to prevent the Captain from kicking it over, pinning it to the ground with one boot, and using her blur-bladed sword to hack its would-be legs off right at their bases. She severed metal joints and cartilage from the remaining body of the thing, and the flow of liquids and crackling energy pulses that were leaking off its carcass subsided. What remained of the squalling mass continued to heave mindlessly, but Ianthe clearly believed the fight was over, and moved to join Finley’s battle.

Which wasn’t necessary, because Finley’s lash had coiled around the thing’s midsection and held it still while her partner leaped forward to strike at the now-immobile torso. As the carapace cracked with a sound like a gunshot, Finley’s whip tightened abruptly, pulling the monster’s top half off its bottom half. Inside lay exposed an ichor-slick grinding flywheel with thrashing wire teeth gnawing through the creature’s abruptly-exposed and traumatized flesh. One strike from the other Ranger’s white-hot spear blade right into the middle of the whirling mechanism was enough to shatter this flywheel and cause the metallic and chitinous fragments of it to tear off in different directions, like a tire shredding at highway speeds.

The relative silence was horrid. It was filled with soft wet sounds, scraping sounds of inhuman appendages clawing at the concrete trying to find purchase, oozing sounds of fluids pumping for the last time through organic valves and inorganic tubes.

After what felt like an eternity of just listening, Captain Ianthe called out, “Report!” Riley saw that where her blur-sword had been, there was now just an ordinary giant fucking single-edged blade.

Finley’s combat partner had gone to their injured third, and she called back, “Sanvi’s arm is fucked but she can walk.” From the other side of Ianthe a woman’s voice shouted, “Hyun-ji maybe has a concussion, also still mobile but dizzy.”

“Okay, let’s triage and get moving, folks. We’re close. Let’s not fuck this up now.” She looked around, spotted Riley’s head peeking up from over the wall, and motioned for him to come out and join her. He hesitated, and then did so, stepping over puddles of gore and still-shivering bits of alien flesh.

“What the fuck were… were those machines or creatures or — ”

Riley could hear the rising panic in his voice, and apparently Ianthe could as well, because she reached out to grip his shoulder. “That’s a really good question, and you’ll have to ask the people who study them. I think the jury’s still out. You going to be okay?”

The concern in her voice was controlled and professional, offering support without assuming any weakness. He felt like he was being manipulated by someone who was very, very good at leadership in the field, and was more than willing to accept her reassuring tone of command.

His eyes flicked to the silver-wire gauntlet around her sword hand, dormant but suggestive of incomprehensible violence. He found his voice. “Those– were those Banes?”

Ianthe grinned. “Technically, yes. Little ones. Still a pain in the ass to deal with, but we plan for a fight about that rough once per expedition. Mostly we’re able to avoid them, but it’s best to be prepared for the times we can’t.”

Minor. Jesus. “You couldn’t avoid them. Because of me.”

“Well, yes.” She frowned. “But you’re the mission. You’re the objective. Otherwise we’d just be out on a fun parkour adventure, right?”

“Yeah, but… why? I’m just some fucking guy. You’ve got this whole team of bad-asses–” At that, Finley’s face broke into a smug grin. “Why not just let me die? Why go to all this trouble? There’s no way I’m worth all this.”

Ianthe gave him a look that seemed caught somewhere between ‘baffled’ and ‘irritated’. “We could just leave you to get eaten by Banes, I guess. You want to die?”

Riley’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. Almost. He saw Ianthe’s gaze sharpen, probing. “No. No, I guess I just… want to know what’s going on. I mean, more than just ‘we’re bringing you in’ or whatever.”

“I don’t know why you’re being brought in except the usual reasons. ‘You can do magic’ and ‘you’ll die otherwise’. Things like that.” She looked away, down the alley that led out of the courtyard. “You’re also interesting for uh, other reasons.” She briskly moved on past that cryptic comment. “I don’t know what the people at the top are thinking. I don’t know why they particularly care about you. Maybe they don’t, and it’s just routine. I can tell you that we do one of these recoveries, from some prodigy wandering into the City from the Primary, maybe once every five years. So it’s not like it’s unprecedented.” She shrugged. “It’s the mission. We save g– candidates.”

Riley heard the stumble, but he could have imagined it. What was she going to say?

“Anyway, don’t beat yourself up. Minor injuries and scrapes and bruises, and Finley got to try out her new toy.” Ianthe gestured towards Finley.

“Firesnake. I still have no idea what I’m doing with it, but it’s cool looking, right?”

Riley nodded, still dazed by the violence of the past few minutes, all of it apparently orbiting around him.

“Let’s get underway, though. I don’t want to meet any more of those.”

Riley remembered something he’d wanted to ask. “How– how big are uh, real Banes?”

Ianthe gave him a broad, feral grin. “They’d fit into this courtyard.” She looked around her, as if surveying the space in an exaggerated show of thinking it over. “Maybe. Some of them.”

“Do these things have a name other than ‘small Banes’? And, I don’t know, what are they even made of?”

The ranger named Sanvi had a sling on her right arm, and several of the women had what looked like organic fibers tied around various places on their bodies, some slowly staining with absorbed blood.

Ianthe finished checking over Sanvi’s sling, and continued talking. “We’d call something that size a bugbear. Smaller than that and it’s a goblin, bigger and it’s an ogre. Full-grown Banes don’t really get a cute fantasy name. They’re just Banes.” She caught the eye of the woman named Hyun-ji with a questioning look; Hyun-ji gave her a thumbs up despite the obvious spasms of pain visible on her face. “What they’re made of? No idea. City-stuff. Animals and machines. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of these kinds of things, cyborg crabs.” She pointed at a piece of Bane-wreckage. “But that’s not constant. Some of them are more like bugs, or fish, or squid, or apes. Some are more like machines with a brain somewhere inside them. Most of them are a combination of things. They change over the fight, too. Adapting.”

The woman who’d had the glowing light-sword spoke up. “There’s some people in Theory working on an idea that they’re what’s left of the City-Builders.”

Finley snorted, and Sanvi added, “Which don’t exist.”

“Right, which don’t exist, but still. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

Ianthe cut in. “Theory hasn’t spent enough time in the field to draw conclusions about them. They ought to come out here and see how much building these fuckers are capable of.” The sneer in her voice was just barely audible. She didn’t think much of Theory, Riley thought, with the disdain of a jock for an egghead.

“Let’s get back to travel discipline, everyone. We don’t want to draw another group onto us.” And with that, the team moved on in near-silence, speaking only in low mutters to call out obstacles and features of the path they were on.

# # #

“So how the hell did you end up recruiting a boy, anyway?” Brynn was slouched lazily in her chair; Katya and the junior Ranger had the situation in hand, and had taken their pile of maps and City cross-sections back to the Ranger briefing rooms to discuss further.

Brynn’s entire demeanor was a kind of ready tension, like a coiled spring. Therese assumed she relaxed sometimes, but on reflection had never seen her actually completely at rest. Even now, she could see the muscles in her legs slowly flex and release, as though she were preparing for a sprint, or a fight. Rangers were weird.

Therese said, “I was just doing an open-ended divination. Exploring the celestial space, basically. Poking around for anything interesting — prophetic dreams, weird Sigil behavior, whatever. It’s what we do in Divination when we don’t have anything specific we’re researching.”

“And you what, found a boy Working?”

“Sort of.” She thought back to the events of six months ago. “I was mapping out the area of the celestial realm we call the Sisters. Associated with the Pleiades. It’s kind of become a focus of my research. There’s a lot of interesting Sigils there, and they interact in interesting ways.”

Brynn slow-blinked, shaking her head. “I’ll take your word for it. I passed the Divination class, but only just. Most of that stuff has never made sense to me.”

They’d been in different cadres, but had graduated the same year, and were roughly the same seniority: first term Adepts, far enough out from their classes to be considered mature and responsible. Their paths hadn’t really crossed, though, and just like with everyone else from her year, Therese had drifted away from Brynn.

“Well, that’s where I was, and abruptly there was a pretty intense Sigil-calling happening right in front of me. Like, something reaching out of the dark to grab a giant fistful of the nearby celestial field. Really clumsy stuff, clearly not a trained Adept. So I dove into the prophetic vortex to see what was going on.”

“And it was a recruit.”

“It was a car accident. It was dark and wet and I guess whoever was driving just didn’t make the turn. Anyway, there’s also this kid lying on the ground nearby, and that’s where all the celestial power is lingering, like some kind of serious Working just happened.”

“He saved himself with magic, maybe?”

Therese nodded. “That’s what I figured. I threw together a quick Working so I could go poke at the bits of leftover power. I wanted to see if I could piece together what he’d done.”

“And that’s when you figured out it was a boy.”

“Yes, but that was kind of secondary, honestly. Because that’s when he used whatever celestial power he had left and he reached out and grabbed me, like my Working was a lifeline, and he caught the end of it, and just kind of took control. And he could see me, just like I could see him.”

“Jesus. Is that even possible?”

“Nora says no, and if anyone would know, it would be her.” Therese raised her hands in a shrug of defeat. “But it happened, so I don’t know.”

“You don’t think you made a mistake?”

Therese laughed. “Gaveny asked me the same thing. ‘Is it possible you are mistaken about the events of that evening?’” Her imitation of Gaveny’s polite clipped tones was passable, and Brynn laughed.

“I mean, it’s possible, but I really don’t think so. I’m pretty good at what I do.” She frowned, biting her lip. Gaveny’s implication had been that it was more likely Therese was mistaken than a boy had used magic, which, fair enough, but she’d thought she’d established herself as a reliable and level-headed Diviner by now.

“And I saw the Sigil he used. I could pick its signature up from the bits of Working still lingering around.”

Brynn waited expectantly, making a ‘go ahead’ gesture.

“Torn Asunder by Taloned Wings. One of the Pleiades Sigils. Flight, movement, being in two places at once, breaking things in half, binary divisions. I’m pretty sure he used it to escape the car crash, and that’s why he was so far from it. Like ripping open a local Portal and jumping through it before it collapses.”

Brynn whistled softly. “That’s… not something I’d like to try doing, even with time to prepare.”

“Portals from one place on the Primary to another are supposed to be nearly impossible. So, like, I don’t know what to make of it, but that’s what I saw.” She shook her head. “I only ended up being able to put together about half the Working, but it was complicated and had a bunch of math concepts in it I’ve never seen before in a real-world application.”

Brynn rubbed at her temples as though she had a headache coming on. “This is why I joined the Rangers, you know. Math makes my head hurt.”

Therese laughed. “Well, we can’t all be Nora. But anyway, I left my divination telltale on him because I figured, if he could do that, and he did it a second time, I’d be prepared to let someone know and get an actual recruitment team out.” She made a sour face. “I was pretty sure Gaveny wasn’t going to do a recruitment pickup of a boy on nothing but my say-so from a bizarre prophetic dream.”

Gaveny’s exact words had been something like “I suspect it will amount to nothing” when she’d made her initial report. But the Headmistress, with her usual understated ironic self-awareness, had also said “If something happens, I will permit you to be smug at me.”

Brynn gestured around them as if to indicate the planning session that had been happening until just recently. “Here we are, though; you were right.”

Therese shrugged. “I hope so. I don’t know what he represents, but if it’s a boy who can do magic, that seems like a pretty big deal.”

“Did you say ‘I told you so’ to Gaveny yet?” Brynn grinned.

“Ha! No, but I think she knew I was thinking it, you know?” Therese laughed. “I think she was too worried about how she was going to explain it all to the Magisters.”

“Well, here’s hoping she comes up with something that sounds good for them, and soon, because I think they’re bringing him in now.”

# # #

The Tower didn’t have a broad promenade leading up to it, or a main gate, or an imposing archway, or even an ominous message marking its entrance. The City that enveloped the Tower just grew up into it, organically, like the Tower was just one among many such structures all clustered together. Where does the foothill end and the mountain begin? Where does the tree-root end and the trunk begin?

So there wasn’t any great fanfare or welcoming committee or the grinding of a vast portcullis to announce to Riley that he’d entered the Tower. The first sign of a transition from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’ was simply a new face: someone who waved to Captain Ianthe from a doorway in the brownstone they were passing. They had a frame backpack propped up outside the doorway, and a litter of objects on the ground around it.

“Anything good?”

Hyun-ji called to the person in the doorway, who shrugged and called back, “Just the usual junk. We found some interesting clockwork, though.”

Finley said, pitched for Riley’s ears, “Hyun-ji loves scavenger junk. I think she joined Rangers just to get a chance to poke around in the City’s trash heaps.”

“What’s scavenger junk?” Riley had a notion, but wanted to hear the answer.

Finley gestured towards the buildings around them. “City’s full of weird things, broken machines, bits of glassware. We don’t know where any of it comes from. And it seems to come back over time, like the City is growing it. Like a mechanical fungus.”

Hyun-ji, overhearing, said “Half of what we use in our daily lives in the Tower is scavenged. It’s where our artisans get their raw materials, and how we’re able to get working technology. It’s important work.”

“Hey, I never said it wasn’t.” Finley grinned. “But most of us don’t have a shelf of scav toys.”

Hyun-ji blushed. “It’s just music boxes. I like them.”

Riley spotted four more scavenger teams, and they paused at each for Hyun-ji to confer with them. The second team handed over a small device, and as they continued walking, the tough, scary, lean athlete was transformed into a beaming, enthusiastic child, as she worked the mechanism of the device, trying to work out the interlocking gears and rods. Riley could see a faint light emanating from the device when Hyun-ji turned the crank on its side, but he had no idea what it might be for.

The buildings that flanked the roadway were crowding closer now, and occasional pedestrian bridges cut across the sky overhead, many floors up, with tangles of cable following them in parallel, thick and thin black silhouettes. And then a bridge crossed at a single story above them, and the road turned into an underpass. The buildings to either side loomed together until at last they met overhead, and the road became an enclosed tunnel, pockmarked with metal doorways marked with signs in a pictographic language Riley didn’t recognize.

One of the rangers released a floating sphere with a flame trapped inside, somehow; the same devices, Charms, he’d seen when they were chasing him, he realized. The sphere bobbed along above the middle of the group, lighting their way in the gloom of the tunnel.

Then, the sound of life, of muffled conversations and footfalls and occasional laughter. Smells of food and industry, the clang of metal on stone, the rumble of a distant engine, the creak of cart-wheels under a heavy load. Something like civilization, in other words. Riley craned his neck around, looking for people.

The street along which they walked was shadowed by criss-crossing pedestrian bridges, pipes, bundles of cable, and projecting bits of decorative masonry overhead, turning the thin blade of sky visible above into a jagged yellow-white comb. There was a scent of smoke in the air, and occasionally wisps of it would drift across the sky, escaping from some fireplace or stove. Washing was hung from lines tied between buildings, and windows on the street level were thrown open to reveal domestic scenes of housework, crafting, and industry.

The Captain had fallen back from the point position to walk alongside Riley. “This is the Peripheral Tower. Kind of an outskirts. Tradespeople and crafters live and work here, handle the scavenged stuff, make simple machinery and other stuff we need inside.”

“Why not just bring stuff over from Earth?”

“From the Primary? It won’t work.” She shook her head. “I mean literally, stuff from there isn’t reliable here. The more complicated it is, the less reliably it works. There’s no cutoff point, because something might work one day and fail the next. But if it was invented much later than the start of the 20th century, it’s probably going to break.”

Hyun-ji added, “Materials from the Primary fall apart too, if they’re complicated. We end up making our own clothes because synthetic fabrics eventually turn into dust, and even organic fabrics from the Primary will wear faster than cloth we make here from imported fiber.”

“Something about this place,” Ianthe continued, “is entropic. Things fall apart here. The City keeps renewing itself, but everything’s in a state of disrepair, all the time. There are a lot of theories why.”

Riley had gotten the decaying vibe from the place, the feeling like this was a place at the end of its life, sinking into ruin. An abandoned place, a lost place. Why did these people live here? He wanted to ask, but he was pretty sure, based on the other questions he’d asked and failed to get answers to, that he’d just be told to ‘wait for the Headmistress’ or ‘wait for orientation’, so he just filed the thought away for later.

At some point, without Riley having noticed it, the road down which they were walking had acquired a close-fit paving stone surface, which then itself gave way to a mosaic surface of gray and amber stones, laid in geometric patterns. The narrow strip of daylight became completely obscured by overhanging buildings, which became a kind of tunnel, which became a kind of ceiling.

After a half an hour of walking in the gloom of this enclosed space, they were indoors, and emerging into a vast open chamber.

Riley looked up, blinking against the yellow-orange light from above. Far, far above. He was looking up an absurd vertical distance, a shaft that ended an impossible distance overhead in what looked like a glass dome. Openings along the interior spiraled up its length, windows or doorways or some other apertures. Occasional platforms the size of large rooms jutted out from the walls into the central shaft, supported from below by elaborate stonework buttresses mounted into the interior walls. Voices echoed up and down the interior, muffled by distance and the vastness of the space, blurred into an incomprehensible murmuration.

“Welcome to the Tower, Riley.” Ianthe put her hand on his shoulder, and he slowly pulled away from her, turning, trying to process what he was seeing, his mind incapable of handling the appalling scale of the place.

# # #

Your first sight of what, exactly, this place is all about was almost enough to break you. It’s a good thing you never saw the shattered little bits of reality that burst upon you every time you had one of your little mystical episodes, because compared to those, the minor inhabitants of the nightmare that is the Final City would have seemed positively adorable.

They’re like an irritant in your mind, the Banes — a bit of sand caught in the sclera of your mind’s eye. You can’t stop your thoughts from drifting back to them, the way they moved, the way they exploded with a sickly vigor. They’re a symptom of a deeper infection that bulges like an infected boil and reaches a head at the Tower itself, atop the cresting mount of the City. You imagine the tower as a thorn that’s driven into flesh, and the flesh is suppurating and oozing and swelling, and the Banes are parasites crawling on the rotting flesh.

This is not a nice place, you decide.

But that was obvious when you arrived, and the Banes have done nothing except clarify the way the whole place seems dead and decaying, drying and withering.

And yet, there’s something here, isn’t there? You can feel it. You felt it the moment you stepped through into the great central vault of the Tower. There’s a throb underfoot, something alive and vital and coursing with energy. Not something you can feel with your feet, but something you can feel in your gut, in your sense of self. Nameless emotion, untethered to joy or passion or hate or anger, just insensate feeling.

You’re wanted here.

You’re desired here.

Whatever Anchor has secured this place out of an endless fractal of possibility, you and it, you’re on the same page in some way that’s profoundly alien to you. And this, of course, is because it is the feeling of home, and you have no idea what that feels like.

You’ve locked every part of you that might be able to feel something like ‘home’ away in a fortress inside you, and you’ve imagined walls that can’t be broken, and you’ve created defenses to ensure that nobody can ever touch you, not the real you. The real you is so very small and scared and fragile. You can no longer confront it even in the imagined safety of your own mind, and the wall is to stop you from thinking about her just as much as it’s to stop anyone else from seeing her. The wall is built out of bricks of artificial identity, mortared with lies you’ve told for so long that you believe them yourself.

You’re here, inside your own mind, thinking about this, and even here you’re an unreliable narrator.

You can’t even trust the things you’re telling yourself right now.

But you know what’s about to happen, don’t you? You’re going to meet her. The girl with the grey eyes and the brown hair. The one who saw you. The one who saw you. She’s here, you can feel her above you somewhere, you’re aware of her in a way you can’t describe.

She’s going to step through your careful walls of identity like they’re made of childrens’ wooden blocks. And you’re terrified, of course, but you’re not only terrified, are you?

You’re trembling with anticipation.

It’s just you and I here. You may as well admit it.