Chapter 4
AMARIA
I tore my gaze from the terrace. Whoever he was—whatever he was—he wasn't my problem. Not tonight. The boy was.
He wasn't on the platform. He wasn't at the shelter. Which left the kind of possibilities that made my chest seize. But the shelter might still have answers—if we got there before the Enforcers scrubbed the place down to nothing.
Serenya was already moving. I fell in beside her, and we slipped out of the square the way we'd come—through the cracks the crowd left behind.
The southern quarter shed the city's gilded mask with every turn—polished marble giving way to moss-slicked ruins, temple signs scraped away by those who'd lost faith in their protection.
The lanterns stopped halfway down the street, like even the light knew better.
Gutter water ran black between the cobblestones, and the air thickened with mildew and rot.
I strode down the streets quick enough to be shadow, slow enough to catch danger before it caught me. Three streets. Less if we cut through the tanner's yard, which smelled like death warmed over but had the advantage of no one wanting to linger there.
Fresh charcoal wards marked nearly every threshold, some complete, others smeared by hands too panicked to finish. The whole quarter reeked of people trying to protect themselves from blight they couldn't name.
Serenya slowed, her gaze snagging on the sigils scratched into the walls—each one more desperate than the last. Her Mark stirred, and her voice came out soft and certain in the way that meant she wasn't guessing.
"Mist-print on the east wall," Serenya murmured. "They're saying the Veil touched the well."
I didn't ask who "they" were. In Velmyra, dread had no source. It just moved.
We slipped down an alley barely wide enough for shoulders. The walls were slick with condensation, chilled through my sleeves where they brushed stone. Debris crunched underfoot—old plaster, or bone. Serenya stopped. So did I—our bodies had learned to speak without sound years ago.
"Step," she whispered.
I looked down. A thread thin as spider's silk stretched across the stones. It was an alarm system, meant to warn someone we were coming. Snap that line and someone deeper in the quarter would know we'd come. Smart. Paranoid. Both, probably—same thing down here.
I lifted my foot over it, and my skin prickled at the back of my neck. Two streets left.
We passed lines of laundry stretched between buildings. Past a barefoot boy with a charm made of teeth who wouldn't meet my gaze. Past three males bent over cards who fell silent the moment we appeared.
The mood had shifted in the quarter. Gazes lingered too long. Doors closed quiet but quicker. The whole street had that pre-raid tension—the kind where everyone knows but no one says.
The path split and we arrived at last. I hurried to their door and knocked on the outer brick—tap-tap, pause, tap. Rhain's code.
Then I heard children's voices, bright against the gloom. A stoop to my right, fractured and sunken, with tallow pooled in the grooves where a candle had burned down to nothing. Three girls huddled on the stoop beside it, knees dusty, bare feet tucked under them.
"Turn once for Light, turn once for Shade, Bind the thread or all shall fade..."
Two of them clapped palms in practiced rhythm. The third clutched a ragdoll with mismatched buttons.
"Touch hand to heart and heart to hand, Mend the sky, and heal the land..."
The words vibrated through me like the first note of a song I'd forgotten I knew. Power stirred within my Mark. Nestled there. Waiting.
Beside me, Serenya went rigid. Her head cocked, and her eyes narrowed with a focus that made my stomach drop. "The Mirrored Verses." Her voice dropped. "Amaria—those words are in the prophecy fragments. The ones I've been trying to piece together."
"Inside. Now," the mother bit out.
She crossed in three strides, hand closing around the eldest girl's shoulder—gentle but urgent. The grip of someone who knew what hunted when the sun retreated.
"Do not speak that rhyme," she hissed. Her eyes found me in the shadows.
For one breath, we looked at each other. Then she gathered the children and vanished inside, the door shut like a tomb.
The rhyme still hummed in my veins.
Serenya repeated the knock against the stone.
"They shouldn't know that," she said under her breath, staring at the wood grain. "That text was erased from the archives before we were born. Amaria, if they have the full verse—"
"Serenya. They’re just babes repeating a rhyme they picked up somewhere." I cut her off, my hand finding her arm. "We need to listen."
I bit back the rest. Don't let yourself want it to be true.
Serenya had been chasing that prophecy for years—piecing together erased texts, burned fragments, whispers from priestesses who still had spines.
And somewhere along the way, she'd gotten it into her head that I was connected to it. Thanks to my little problem under my amulet. I’d catch her watching me sometimes with that look like she was reading a text she hadn't finished translating.
But those rhyme fragments were the only ones she’d managed to recover, and she clung to them like scripture. I was terrified of the moment she’d finally translate the rest and realize I wasn't a savior—just a glitch.
No one answered our knock.
Serenya pinned me with a look. The scholar vanished and the survivor snapped back into place. She gripped the hilt of her blade.
"Back way," I whispered. "If they're alive, they'll have left a message."
She nodded once. We vanished into the shadows.
The back of the building was worse than the front. A narrow yard choked with broken crates and a rain barrel gone green with scum. Flies circled the drain grate. A child's sandal sat at the base of the wall, upright, like someone had set it down and meant to come back.
The back door gave under pressure, wood splitting at the seam.
We stepped inside.
The air hit me first—not stale, but hollow. Like something had come through and gutted the air on its way out.
The walls had been stripped bare, the shelves emptied. The cooking hearth cold, ash scattered in odd streaks.
No blood. No bodies.
But near the entrance—a teacup, shattered in place, edges swept outward in a starburst, dropped mid-step and mid-breath.
"Serenya," I said.
She was already kneeling by it, palm hovering above the shattered cup, breath slowed—that particular stillness she wore when she was listening to things the rest of us couldn't hear. Her Luminar Mark was Memory-Weaving. If the walls or broken cup knew anything, she'd pull it out of them.
I waited. Her brow furrowed, a twitch at her temple, and then her hand dropped flat, fingers splaying with a quick inhale.
"I can't find it."
"What do you mean?"
She didn't look up. "Someone erased it. They unraveled the memory thread by thread."
My heart slammed against my ribs. You don't erase memories on accident. You don't erase them without knowing what a Memory-Weaver is and exactly how to blind one. Whoever did this had come prepared—not for the family. For us.
"Can you follow it?"
"No trail. No residue." Her voice was defeated. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing."
I crossed to the hearth in two steps. Knelt. Ran my fingers across the soot-streaked stone until I felt it—a loose edge of brick. A scrap wedged beneath.
I pulled it free.
Pale blue cloth. The one I'd wrapped their balm in three days ago.
Torn. Bloodstained at one corner.
My throat constricted. For a moment I couldn't breathe, could only stare at that small, ruined thing and count every minute I hadn't been fast enough. Every street I should have run. Every second I'd wasted on a gods-damned cinnamon bun while a boy's life was hanging by a thread.
Serenya rose slowly, scanning the corners. "They were taken mid-motion. See the spread on that cup? There was no time to set it down. The cup was still spinning when they took them."
A sound slipped through the silence—distant and muffled, but unmistakable.
A shout.
Then another—closer.
Serenya's head snapped toward the window.
"We need to go," I said. "Now."