Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
My cold-stiffened bruises protest, and every step makes my face throb.
Everything I know about this place is more than three decades out of date.
Several Overseers serve the government, and I do not know which one has Mina—perhaps the man who visited the Bone District, perhaps another.
But they all used to live on the same street: mansions on ten-acre plots, each hidden behind high walls.
If I can reach it, the whistle might lead me straight to her.
First I need to get high enough to see where I am.
I skirt the margins. People avoid the edges; the less wealthy cluster here, though even the poorest Immortal is a king beside anyone in the Districts below. It is quieter and less watched, and I can move without drawing immediate notice.
Time has altered the streets, and I was never particularly observant as a child. I take several wrong turns. Frustration tightens my chest, yet I press on.
The historic observation tower is deserted at this hour. It is open to the public and, unlike anything left to its own devices in the Districts, has been maintained with the same obsessive care as the rest of the Zone. The stone and ironwork are flawless. The stairs are solid and even.
Built to last, and lasting.
I take the steps two at a time until my newly healed ribs force me to slow. After that, I climb them one by one.
At the top, the cold hits hard. Wind claws at my coat and finds every gap around the collar.
I stand in it and look out over the Zone until my eyes adjust. I locate Fountain Square first—the glitter of it visible even from up here—and use it as my anchor point. From there, I retrace my route through the streets below until the geography arranges itself properly in my mind.
Then I find it.
The road is not difficult to spot. Trees line both sides, and the plots are set so far apart that, in the Districts, the land alone would house hundreds of families. The houses are enormous, too large and too deliberate in their scale to belong to anyone but the Overseers.
I trace the route from the tower and fix the turns in sequence.
Straight ahead.
Second left.
Second right.
First left.
I run through it twice until I am certain.
I am about to descend when I glance down—
—and freeze.
What is this?
Elyrion glows beneath me, and in the crackling magic of the Zone, I see something new.
At first, I mistake it for reflected light.
Then the lines move.
Patterns are etched into the city like tattoos: thousands of ancient runes tracing roads, riverbanks and boundaries, following the course of the water. Every District bears them. Bone. Ink. Salt. Iron. All of them marked, all of them pulsing faintly in the darkness.
My breath stops.
The runes are not decoration.
They are not wards.
They are not old civic magic left to hum prettily beneath the streets.
They are working.
I sink onto the metal grating with a dull clang, one hand outstretched as though I might touch the markings from here.
The lines answer anyway. Not with words.
With pressure. Flow. Intention. Ink magic is made to understand shape and movement, and whatever remains of mine recognises this before my mind can bear it.
The runes are drawing.
Not from one place. Not from one person.
From everything.
From the streets. The soil. The houses packed too tightly together. The clinic queues. The schoolchildren in patched coats. The men warming their hands around mugs in the Bone Inn. The concrete beneath Mina’s paws. Me.
A slow, relentless haemorrhage.
My stomach turns.
Not a virus.
Not bad luck.
Not poverty doing what poverty does.
A siphon.
The streets themselves are the weapon.
They drain every wisp of magic that tries to rise below, person by person, year by year, and the city has called it illness for so long that we believed it.
No wonder none of us has any power left.
I press my forehead against my knees and stare at the grating.
Then I look again.
I cannot stop looking.
If they are taking the magic, where is it going?
Hundreds of thousands of people live down there.
Everyone I have passed each day for years.
My gaze drifts towards the Ink District. I locate my building, then follow the river inland to the official square. The cluster of signals centres on the grand civic building at its northern edge. Attached to the rear of it, tucked around the corner, is a residential block.
They gave me an apartment after the Games. Ground floor, clean enough, handed over as compensation, or as a way of keeping me where they could see me. I was seriously ill within the year and never worked out why.
I moved out and kept it as my official address.
For years, I thought the apartment made me ill because everything in the Districts makes someone ill eventually.
It is pressed directly against the strongest feeder line.
They put me there deliberately.
They knew exactly what that apartment would do.
They wanted me to die faster.
I claw my fingers through my hair.
What am I supposed to do with this? Who would listen?
I am the punchline. I have been the punchline my entire adult life.
“Don’t do an Elmo”, people say in the Districts, at the Depot, everywhere. Hunters have said it without realising I was in the room.
No one will believe me.
Perhaps no one else can even see what I see. Maybe it requires the bloodline—the residue of the Ink magic I was born with.
This is far beyond anything I can manage.
I cannot warn anyone. No one would heed me.
But I live down there.
So does Mina.
So do the children I smuggle out, the neighbours who pretend not to know my address, the pub regulars, the clerk with her red nose and petty cruelties. Collin, who thinks I am a psychopath.
I can investigate quietly and carefully. For my own sake, if that is the only motive I can bear to claim.
Not to save everyone.
Only to understand what is being done to us.
That is not noble.
It is merely selfish.
Fine.
Selfish will do.
I rub my face, and pain pulses beneath my bruised skin. The cold has seeped into my bones.
Perhaps I am wrong—though I doubt it. I feel the truth of it in my marrow. I wish I knew the ancient rune alphabet. Perhaps then I could make sense of what I am seeing.
Get Mina first, I tell myself. Then see what can be done.
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps something.
I genuinely do not know.
What a mess.
Every movement hurts, but I haul myself upright and climb down from the tower. At the bottom, I turn left, then right, and continue towards the first Overseer’s estate.
This is ridiculous.
No plan. No intelligence. Only brute persistence and the vague hope that something useful will reveal itself.
All I have is a bloody whistle.
I ought to be cleverer about this. Break into an Overseer’s office. Find a terminal. Hack the records and check which household has recently acquired a dog.
I groan.
I haven’t touched that kind of technology in years.
I make a slow, casual circuit of each grand estate—nothing to see here, merely a battered woman out for a midnight stroll. Now and then, I pause to blow the whistle and listen.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Just as I am ready to concede that the entire venture has been a catastrophic waste of time, I blow once more.
A howl answers.
Low, deep and heartbreakingly sorrowful, it echoes through the darkness.
Then comes a bark.
One I would recognise anywhere.
Mina.
I press myself into the shadow of the wall and wait for a light to come on, a door to open, anything.
Nothing does.
Either nobody heard her, or nobody in that estate cares what the dogs do at night.
I have found her.
My knees soften. Tears sting my eyes, but I blink them away.
I am a bounty hunter.
I do not cry.
I take a steady breath, square my shoulders and study the estate.
It is significantly larger than the others, ostentatious even by the standards of this street.
Of course it is.
The grandest house belongs to the Overseer who sends his people into the Districts to steal our dogs, as though we do not already have enough problems without losing the only protection many families possess.
I huff quietly and keep moving.
I turn left and double back. The houses behind the estate are smaller and packed closer together, their gardens backing directly onto its grounds.
That is my way in.
Less exposed than the front.
Far less expected.
I choose the third house in a row of three, perfectly positioned. A careful search reveals no wards.
Who in this pampered Zone would expect a burglary?
The estate relies on the Zone’s outer defences and the patrol dogs roaming its grounds.
I slip down the drive, pass the garage and enter the back garden. A tree obligingly leans over the fence. One thick branch stretches across the boundary like an invitation.
I scramble up and edge along the limb.
The branch creaks beneath me, and for the first time in years, I am grateful for my slight frame. I weigh almost nothing, less than I did at sixteen.
Occasionally, that helps.
Dangling from the branch, I drop toes first and let my legs absorb the impact. Pain shoots through my ribs as I land in a crouch, but I remain upright.
I am in.
My right forearm stings as I straighten, a thin line of heat beneath the sleeve. I put it down to the landing and do not look.
The lawn is immaculate, without a single fallen leaf. The gardener must visit daily.
I tread lightly, keeping to the open grass and avoiding the plants along the borders.
My pulse jolts.
I need to find the kennels before the dogs find me.
I keep moving, breathing evenly.
A full moon gleams overhead—bright and useless. Anyone glancing from a window will see me.
I lengthen my stride.
Then I hear it.
A nose working across the ground.
Soft paws padding towards me.
That is it.
I am finished.
I brace for teeth and noise.
Neither comes.
A dog trots from the darkness, head lowered and nose sweeping the grass. It passes within two feet of me and keeps going.
Farther ahead, it catches my scent.
Its head lifts.
Its body stiffens.
Yet it does not turn back. It does not even look towards me before melting into the shadows.
I stand motionless, my mouth open.
The burning in my right arm intensifies and spreads from my wrist to my shoulder. Cold rolls through me—not the clean bite of the night air, but something deeper that seeps from my bones.
A dull ache gathers behind my eyes, and strength drains from my limbs.
I push up my sleeve.
Faint lines I mistook for old scars darken across my forearm, turning black as fresh ink.
Memory returns with them.
Childhood lessons: hiding sigils, opening sigils, warning sigils, half a language written under the skin before anyone explained what it meant. I had forgotten how living Ink behaves on the body and what my sigils do when magic wakes. Pink and almost invisible while dormant.
Black when active.
But one sigil does not turn black.
It gleams silver.
That is new.
The dog did not overlook me.
Magic is working.
I am invisible.
Disbelief strikes first.
Then fear.
I drop my sleeve before I disturb whatever is happening and resist the urge to check my other arm. I have no time to wonder how far the sigils spread beneath my clothes.
A few hours in the Zone have rekindled what the runes bled from me for decades. The Games may have stripped away part of my magic, but not all of it.
Afterwards, the government merely sent me somewhere the streets could drain it every day and finish what the Games began.
The realisation nearly takes my legs from beneath me.
Later, I tell myself. Panic later.
I can fall apart when I am no longer standing in enemy territory.
Old training stirs—half-forgotten techniques, blurred by the passing years—but I fall back on what I can still do.
Focus on the task.
Deal with each problem as it comes.
I move.
I dare not blow the whistle again. If Mina barks, she will alert the patrol dogs, perhaps the household itself, and whatever luck I still possess will vanish.
I know she is here.
I need to find her before the magic runs out.
The kennels are easy to locate. Inside, dogs lift their heads towards the seemingly empty doorway, ears pricked.
After a moment, they settle again.
I walk the length of the runs.
No Mina.
The ache behind my eyes sharpens with every step, and the silver lines burn hotter. Whatever this magic is doing, it cannot last.
Outside, I search each outbuilding.
Nothing.
Then I notice one set apart from the others.
No cameras. A key hanging from a hook beside the door.
That is either carelessness or an invitation, and I do not let myself decide which. Not yet.
I let myself in.
Mina rises at once, a low growl rumbling through her chest, every muscle taut.
In my excitement, I must have released the invisibility, as she yelps and recoils.
Then she launches herself at me, whining, licking and pressing her entire body against mine with joyful abandon.
Disgusting.
Wonderful.
I check her quickly, running my hands over her head, neck, ribs and legs.
She is unhurt.
“It’s all right,” I whisper, burying my fingers in her fur. “I’m here. You’re safe.”
The tears come.
I let them.
No one is here to see.
We still have to escape—back across the lawn, over the wall and past the guard dogs.
I will work that out in a minute.
For now, I have found her.
That is enough.