Chapter 2
KAGE
They tell you the city screams, but they never say what the scream tastes like.
Lurax spits at me—ashes in my mouth, the metallic tang of burning wiring, the hollow whine of a hundred damaged servos.
The skyline is a serrated toothline of broken glass and twisted pylons.
Every step is a negotiation with rubble; my boots find voids that weren't there the breath before and my knees learn to catch me without complaint.
I move like a shadow that remembers how to be dangerous, the kind of quiet that predators keep so prey don't hear their hearts ticking.
I'm not looking for survivors. I am looking for Jamie.
Her scent pulls me like a tide: cardamom and dark roasted pepper, jasmine and the old laundry soap she used when she claimed the deli needed "a woman's touch," all of it threaded through with fear and the coppery high of fresh blood.
It's a raw, human thing in a sea of smoke and industrial rot, and it lands in my chest like someone punched me right between the ribs.
I follow it down the alley where the market used to be—stalls splintered like broken teeth, banners flapping ragged in the wind.
The place where her spice jars used to sit is a smear of color in the dust, red-orange turmeric bright against the gray.
The smell is closer now, the panic in it acute, and then I see her.
She's not behind a stall or clinging to a beam.
No. She's splayed against the brick of a half-collapsed wall, her hands bare and smeared in someone else's blood.
Her face looks thirty years older than it should.
Her mouth is an uneven line. The Alliance boys have her pinned like a prize, the kind of grin on their faces that tastes like rot.
One of them is lifting his helmeted head and looking up at the sky the way men do when they expect fireworks.
The other is laughing, stupid and bright-eyed from something sharp in his veins.
"Jamie," I say, and my voice is a thing that hasn't been used in years. It is not a soft sound.
They don't look at me until they should. Then they hear something like a low bell beginning to toll—my rumble. The nearest one turns and laughs again, because he thinks he has time to mock whomever has decided to interrupt his sport. "What's this, a Grolgath?" he sneers. "You gonna dance for—"
His head leaves his shoulders before the words finish.
The first cut is clean and terrible, a rip that isn't human and wasn't meant to be carefully measured by swords or lasers.
My claws don't care about treaties; they care about pain, and they deliver.
The second man fires a reflex shot. It slams into my shoulder armor with a sound like distant thunder.
I taste iron in my throat at the noise. I don't stop—I cannot stop.
It's a god's thing, the ripping; years of fury and hunger for justice accumulated like sediment, and now it flakes away in one violent motion.
Armor buckles and ceramic plates do their best, but I am a machine of living muscle wrapped in scales and grief.
They tear, and they tear, and there is a shower of sparks and the sick twang of fiber struts snapped like the spine of a book.
The smaller man goes down with his mouth open as if he's surprised at the way the world ends.
The last one tries to crawl backward and his hand scrabbles in the dirt for purchase.
I pin him with a clawed boot and he looks up, the light in his eyes flaring white and then guttering.
"Who did this?" he manages, a thin noise. "We were ordered—"
"Shut up," I say. My voice is a stone. I don't let him finish being a person.
I tear with the efficient brutality of someone who has nothing left to give except what breaks.
There are sounds—wet, raw, animal. I'm not a careful man anymore.
Careful would have had mercy. Mercy left Lurax the morning the first shell hit the market.
When the noises die, the air is too clean.
My ears ring like someone struck a gong inside my skull.
Jamie is there on the ground, a smear of spice-colored dress against the cinder, breathing shallow, ragged.
She is still warm. I drop to my knees without meaning to, and my hands are all scales and remorse as I cup her face.
"Jamie," I say again. Her name tastes like salt and old laughter.
She looks up at me with eyes that are wider than pain should allow.
Her mouth works. Her voice comes out like a feather dragged over a drum.
"Kage," she whispers, and it is the small, private sound that used to sit in the quiet corners of my life.
For one instant, for one impossible moment, the war hasn't swallowed us yet.
"Tell me where they—" I start, but my hands are useless. They shake, so I clamp down on them and grumble. The world becomes a tight thing around her ribs.
She coughs, blood in the corner of her mouth, then forces out a sentence on a tide of breath that sounds like it could lace the sky.
"Your—parents," she says. The way she says it turns into prayer and it stabs me in a place that has been missing part of itself for too long. "Go. Find them. Please. Maybe—they—"
Don't make this a wish. Don't make this a promise you let go of.
I lean down and put my forehead to hers, because my hands are covered in someone else's dying and I don't want my eyes to start leaking.
I don't know how to say thank you. There's nothing to say for this small kindness.
She smiles, a little thing like a cracked bell, and then the light on her face goes out.
Her breath stutters and stops warm against my scales.
I begin to roar.
The sound that comes from my chest is not human, not tame.
It splits the sky. The empty buildings answer with a keening that bleeds back into me.
I scream for them all—my parents, my deli, every friendly face that ever gave me a loaf and two jokes across a counter.
The scream is a promise and a curse and I let it out until my throat is raw and the soles of my feet ache with the force of it.
No one answers. Lurax takes and takes.
When the echo fades, I am a thing made of broken edges.
I drag Jamie into what passes for shade and sit very still until the heat and the adrenaline bleed out of me.
When the blood stops making noise in my ears, I wash my hands at an overturned water tank and the water runs pink.
My claws have bits of cloth and bone stuck under them and for a moment I think of how Jamie used to roll her sleeves and say, "If you're going to cook for someone, you don't skimp on the spice.
" The memory is a cut that heals and keeps you whole.
I don't hear the medics until they come.
They move like hopeful goats, a cluster of uniforms and white and patchwork.
There's a woman barking orders at the top of some shallow throat; the IHC.
.. the human band—someone I know, because humans always try to be in the center of anything that might get them medals.
They're cautious as they step over the bodies.
They scan, and they radio, their voices bright like lights over a graveyard.
Anger is a slow burn now, an ember under a tongue.
It simmers, and it makes my jaw ache. They are medics—good.
They are also Alliance-bundled people, and they sniff around like they own the place.
They pick at the bodies, they poke, they measure.
One of the medics coughs and I smell caffeine on his breath.
He tastes like warm metal and too much coffee and cheap luck.
They move near the street where I sit, where Jamie lays folded like the last note of a sad song.
They bend down without asking. One of them touches her hair and says, "We lost—" and the number is flippant, like a tally on a ledger.
My hands find a weapon before the thought is even formed.
I do not want to be the connoisseur of their momentary shock.
I wait in the shadows. I let them breathe. I let their ignorance be the rope I will use to drag them into truth.
They are not careful. They never are, not when they have the illusion that a day will end with medals and a parade.
They laugh at something—too loud—then freeze because the air changes.
They should have seen it on their thermal screens: me, a black shape against the lighter dust, a ghost with too much hunger.
But the tech is no match for old skill and worse intent.
I move, and it is simple. Metal and body and instinct combine and they find themselves on the ground with blood blooming and the taste of fear in their mouths.
They try to reach for their weapons and I crush their hands and snap bones until the noise is loud enough to wake even the dead.
I am precise and I am not gentle. Violence becomes a language I have learned to speak without thinking.
When it's over, I'm standing in a small ring of ruined bodies while the medics stare at me as if they've seen the angel of their deaths.
One of them, a woman with red hair pulled tight, looks at me with all the professional command she can pull together.
"Who are you?" she demands, though I can hear the tremor. My head is a crown of static.
"Kage," I say. My name slips out like a basalt coin. The human word tastes like ash. "Grolgath."
She says more—about treaties, about reprisal, about reporting—but her voice is threadbare.
She keeps glancing at the IHC badge on the sleeve of her uniform and then back at me.
I can see a brain trying to organize a plan, but it is too small for what is happening.
She keeps her hands where he can see them. Her fingers twitch.
"She told me to find them," I say. My voice is low and it folds over the cracked street like a shadow. "My parents."