Chapter 9
NINE
Riven
The light in the dream always arrived first. A clinical white. But the pressure hit before the glare—a suffocating crush that pressed against the base of my skull, dense and unforgiving. It was the feeling of being watched by something vast enough to swallow the room whole.
I was ten years old again, strapped to a table that smelled of cold iron and old blood. The faces above me were blurred behind masks, voices muffled by the whine of machinery. They didn’t speak to me; they spoke to the data.
“Subject stabilised. Prepare for extraction.”
I tried to scream, but the terror froze the sound in my throat. I could only watch as the device descended—a sleek, silver construct vibrating with a hungry, unnatural frequency. It lowered towards my chest. To the left. Directly over the heart.
The metal pierced the skin. It hooked into the core of what I was and pulled.
Then the room exploded.
A shockwave hammered the air, blowing out the masks and buckling the steel walls. The scientists screamed, scrambling over one another as thick smoke filled the space.
I was free. But the sensation didn’t leave. That tension at the base of my skull remained, observing the chaos with a detached, terrifying patience.
Before I ran, I reached for the thing buried in my chest. My fingers—small and bloodied—wrapped around the metal protruding from my skin. I yanked it loose. The sound was wet and terrible, a tearing of gristle and soul.
It came free in my hand. Heavy, dripping with liquid darkness.
Air rushed into my lungs, harsh and raw.
I hadn’t woken up like this in a decade. I was sitting up, my right hand clenched into a fist in front of my face. I was squeezing so hard my knuckles were white, anticipating the bite of the metal, the heft of the stolen device.
I opened my fingers. Nothing. My palm was empty.
I made sure of that. I stole the key. The broken piece lies buried in the one place in this city Korenth doesn’t know exists.
I dropped my hand. The metallic stench of the lab vanished, replaced by the sterile chill of my Highspire apartment.
The room was freezing. The chill bit without leaving a mark on the pristine surfaces, but the air was stifling, pressurised. This apartment was a sterile box, designed to show nothing.
But the shadows knew.
For twenty years, my control had been a fortress.
It had only cracked once before. But tonight, the darkness knew better.
Thick and viscous, it wound around the bedposts.
It pooled on the pale carpet like spilled ink, blotting out the pattern, sliding towards the door.
The wards in this building were tuned to detect this specific frequency of magic, yet here it was, bleeding out of me while I slept.
If it touched the threshold, the alarms would trigger.
I shut my eyes. In. Hold. Compress.
I grabbed the shadows mentally, reeling them in inch by inch. I forced the darkness back under my skin. Swallowing broken glass.
My chest ached—a dull throb directly over the old wound. It had been doing this for two days.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The floorboards were freezing against my bare feet. My magic thrashed under my skin, agitated and raw. It hadn’t felt like this in years. Not since the night I escaped.
I walked to the window. Highspire sprawled below, a grid of glass and steel, oblivious to the violence simmering beneath the city’s surface.
I pressed my hand against the pane. The glass was frigid, a stark, grounding contrast to the violence that had slammed into me two days ago.
The surge from the Old Quarter. The shockwave in the Lows hours later. Those were no accidents. They were detonations.
The force of them had hit me like a physical blow, snapping something deep inside me that I thought was dead. It woke something up. And that heavy, watching presence from the dream loomed closer than ever.
And now, I had to walk into that office and pretend I was still asleep.
The walk to Korenth’s tower was a gauntlet.
Highspire didn’t need an army. Its true defence was the suffocating arcane density.
The wards woven into the pavement and the glass facades were set to a frequency that scraped against the teeth of anyone with magic.
For the registered, the sanctioned, it was a gentle buzz.
For me, carrying a storm of unauthorised power beneath my skin was like walking through a field of razor wire.
Every step sent a spike of static up my legs.
My magic bristled, wanting to lash out and shatter the wards.
I forced it down, shoving my hands deep into my coat pockets to mask the tremors. Sweat trickled down my spine.
I had spent years calibrating my output for these sensors—projecting just enough to be useful, never enough to be a threat. But today, the suppression was physical agony. If my control slipped for even a second, Korenth would see exactly how strong I really was.
I reached the private lift. The biometric scanner read my palm. It took a fraction of a second too long, the red light searching deep, before flashing green.
The ascent was smooth, but my ears popped. The sensation from my dream returned—that absolute weight pressing against the base of my skull. The compression increased the higher I went, closer to the source of the district’s power. Closer to him.
The doors opened onto the penthouse level. I stepped into the office.
Korenth Vhail stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, a tall, lean silhouette of old-world strength and unsettling symmetry. His dark hair caught the light with an unnatural sheen. Up close, his angular face was striking in a way that offered no comfort, only the stark reminder of his authority.
The room was vacuum-sealed, air inside suffocating. That familiar, watching presence I felt in the lab was concentrated here, magnified until gravity doubled.
“You’re late,” Korenth said. He didn’t turn.
“Traffic,” I lied. My voice was steady, but my chest burned. The scar over my heart was reacting to the ambient magic in the room, beating in time with the wards. He was doing it on purpose—filling the room with his gravity to remind me of my place.
Korenth turned. His violet eyes locked onto me—analytical, searching for a hairline fracture in my story. Deep in his irises, thin silver swirls were already spinning—a sign he was drawing on the shadows to weigh my soul.
“The city was loud two days ago,” he said softly. “A surge in the Lows. Did you feel it?”
My magic spiked—a defensive lunge inside my ribcage. I clamped down on it, hard. The effort blurred my vision for a millisecond.
“I felt a fluctuation,” I said, keeping my face bored. “Old pipes bursting. A mana line backfiring. The Lows are always leaking.”
“It was a detonation,” Korenth contradicted. He moved closer, and the gravity in the room ratcheted up. “It tripped sensors I haven’t seen active in years.”
He moved towards me, studying my pupils, tracking my pulse. He looked at me the way a craftsman looks at a tool he repaired after a bad break—checking for cracks, ensuring the glue held.
“The asset,” Korenth muttered, his voice tight. “The Umbrakynn who stole from me. Tell me you’ve located him.”
“I haven’t,” I said, meeting his gaze with a mask of professional failure. “He’s gone to ground. If he’s still in the city, he’s staying behind my radar. But most likely, he has already fled the city.”
The lie tasted like cold ash. The Umbrakynn he’s looking for wouldn’t be talking to Korenth, or anyone else, ever again. I’d made sure of that.
“He was seen in the area right before the sensors tripped,” Korenth said, choosing his words with frustrating care. “But he is missing. My recovery teams swept the blast radius. They found nothing. No body. No residue. Just emptiness.”
He looked at me, gaze hardening. “It takes a very specific skill set to clean a scene that thoroughly, Riven.”
My hand twitched in my pocket. I knew that skill set better than anyone.
Erase the trace. Nullify the signature. It was the first dark art he had drilled into me after I resurfaced from the wreckage of the lab.
I had crawled back to him two days later, playing the part of the broken survivor with a hollowed-out core, and he had decided to make me useful in a different way.
He taught me to scrub a room of magical resonance to bury his mistakes, never realising I perfected the technique to hide the one thing he was desperate to find: the truth of my own power.
“You remember what happens when things get messy,” Korenth said, his voice dropping to a silken threat. “You remember the cost of losing control.”
The feeling at the base of my skull flared—a vivid, phantom memory of the lab, of the pain before the explosion. He thought he was reminding me of my fear. He thought my loyalty was a scar tissue formed over that trauma.
For a long time, he had been right. I had let him and Varessia blind me, content to play the broken soldier. But the surge had burned the blindfold away.
I met his gaze without blinking. “If you want me to dig deep to find him, just say a word.”
“Continue the search,” Korenth snapped, his hand cutting through the air in a tight, impatient arc. “The asset is an expensive liability, and I want him found.”
He walked past me to his desk. On the sleek black surface, a holographic display showed a live feed of the city news—police lights flashing at the edge of the Low Warrens.
“A body was found that day,” Korenth said. “A Calysteri man. The seventh victim, if we are counting the girl from earlier this week.”
“The police found him,” I noted, keeping my voice neutral.
“The MCIU found him,” Korenth corrected, his voice cooling. “Detectives. They were on site before the surge even registered on our sensors.”
He tapped the desk, killing the feed.