Eventually, though, we found our rhythm. I slowly began to find my way and get more comfortable with the process. My higher Body Stat was probably doing a lot of the heavy-lifting when it came to coordinating my various parts. I even started having fun, as I grew less worried about my feet and more focused on how good it felt to have her in my arms.

  Then, like a damned magician, Samila was suddenly gone, and I bumped into another blue woman, this one in a gray dress.

  Sissa jumped as if something had just pinched her, and she put up her hands to politely pull away … until she recognized me.

  Her eyes widened and her mouth opened to … protest? Say hello? I didn’t know. Nothing came out. She didn’t punch me in the face, however, so our post-evacuation interactions were trending better, I guessed.

  “Uh—Hi.” I said.

  “Hi,” Sissa said back. She smoothed the front of her dress and seemed to fidget like someone caught in the act of doing something wrong. Unlike my clothes, Sissa’s dress seemed to be made for her—a gray, flowing thing that hugged her all in the right places before flowing out like a waterfall of mist to pool on the floor.

  I looked around one last time for Samila. “I’m just guessing here,” I ventured, “but I think we’re supposed to dance.”

  “Is that why you grabbed my—Ah, dammit, Samila!” Sissa fumed, looking around the crowd much like I’d done, a look of embarrassed disapproval on her face. “She takes her role as Second too far.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “Second?”

  “Second in our clutch. The youngest.” Sissa stood up on her tiptoes. Unfortunately she was shorter than most of the tall folks here, and even if she were as tall as I, she wouldn’t have been able to spot her sister. She’d vanished in a proverbial cloud of smoke.

  “Do you want to dance?” I asked awkwardly. The question seemed to surprise her. She turned back around so quickly, her hand swept across my face, and I had to duck to avoid getting another Sissa-specialty black eye.

  Her mouth opened again, her cheeks flushing a dark navy that seemed to change the shape of her face, accenting her cheekbones.

  She nodded. “I guess I wouldn’t mind a dance. Seems like it’s what we’re meant to do.”

  With a self-effacing smile, I put my hands in the right places and brought my body into line with hers. She was so small—tiny, even—willow-thin and soft. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a wrong move on my part might hurt her, but I knew better. She was strong. Stronger than me, probably.

  It took a full verse of the song before I got up the courage to speak. “I don’t get you and your sister,” I said.

  “No?” she asked, stumbling slightly before resetting her feet.

  Wow. She was just as good a dancer as I was.

  “No, I really don’t,” I insisted. “I’m pretty sure your sister is—uh—interested in me.”

  “No kidding? What gave you that impression?” Sissa asked a bit too sarcastically. “Was it the long, mournful stares? The intense interest in your backside?”

  It was my turn to trip. She caught me before I could fall all the way to the floor, though. I swallowed, suddenly feeling a bit more self-conscious. “Uh, yeah … The clues were there, I guess.”

  “Okay, so you get that. What don’t you get about us, then?”

  “If she—uh—Constance, I feel like I’m in middle school … If she likes me, why did she set us up like this?”

  Sissa’s gaze slid down, and she seemed to gain a new appreciation for the floor as we went through the motions of dancing. When she spoke again, her voice had a sad note to it—regret, maybe. “She’s second-born in our clutch. Dragonkin are invariably born in pairs. It has something to do with how the divine power of the dragon cannot be contained in a single mortal vessel, but I don’t know exactly how it works.”

  She took a deep breath as if preparing herself to explain something she didn’t really enjoy talking about. “The eldest is meant to be first in everything. From how tall we are to who gets the first roll at dinner. We’re meant to be the picture of excellence, as a representative of our sire. The second is meant to help the first accomplish that. It’s a dragon rule, a sort of natural law, one that we follow instinctually.”

  My stomach soured after hearing that. Samila was born to play second fiddle to Sissa? That sounded like something archaic. Out of myth and legend. Who would do that to one of their own children? Why condemn a child to second place from birth? It went against everything I was ever taught. We were all created equal, and no one deserved deference based on the circumstances of their birth. You were not made to kneel to anyone.

  “I see you aren’t pleased,” Sissa observed.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, I just can’t wrap my head around it. You have free will, don’t you? How can firsts and seconds even exist?”

  It was Sissa’s turn to frown. “Well, I’m not exactly a big proponent of the concept, either, Ryan. I have tried to fight against it—even gone so far as to try and make her stop treating me as her better, but whenever I try, it just comes across as another order I’m giving her. I hate how she’s been forced into the background, but, at the same time, she considers it a privilege. We naturally slip into these roles. So naturally, you might even think we were made this way on purpose. I am the leader. I make the decisions for the both of us, and she’s always there to back me up.”

  Her eyes hardened as she stared at something in the middle distance, lost in some distant memory.

  “No matter how much we want to run from it, that’s how it always shakes out. Do you have any idea how infuriating it is to not know if your personality is truly yours or if it is simply a manifestation of natural law?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course, I had the System slowly pushing me toward becoming a monster, and I couldn’t trust if my thoughts were my own anymore, either. This conversation wasn’t about me, though.

  I looked around once more to try to find Samila somewhere out there. Nothing. The song was starting to wrap up, too.

  “This is her asking for your permission, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Sissa nodded, not meeting my eyes. “Not just mine, either.”

  Oh, so it was that kind of moment, then.

  “So, what’s your answer?” I asked, fighting to keep my tone neutral.

  The dragonkin shuddered slightly, then raised her gaze in line with mine. I could tell she was fighting to not look away, but she got herself under control and gave me the same stare she did every other challenge she met.

  “For her, I’d give up everything,” Sissa declared, her determination slightly belied by how she had to wipe a tear from her cheek. The wetness traced a dark line down her scales like an unhealed scar.

  She sniffed and let out a little, bitter laugh. “I think you and I are too much alike to work, anyway.”

  Muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching chose that moment to relax. Was I feeling … relieved? No, that wasn’t quite it. It was a type of relief, though, I was sure.

  “Too alike, huh? Samila said something like that, too. So, what does punching me in the face earlier this week say about your sense of self-worth?” I teased.

  “Too much.” Sissa laughed nervously, again reaching up to swipe at a tear before it could get anywhere. “In some ways, you’re who I want to be, actually. Taking the hard road. Sacrificing for others even if it means denying yourself. To be so empty of want is something I consider noble.”

  Empty of want? What the hell did that mean? I wanted things. There were things I had to—

  I stood there in contemplative silence as I took mental inventory. What did I want? I was an Exotic now. My life had changed. I wasn’t the outcast clan mechanic anymore. But now that I wasn’t my past self, what did I want in the future? It couldn’t all be running for my life and trying to get home. I wanted people to be safe. To not have to pay for consequences I’d caused. I wanted to see them all happy and alive, and—

  “See? Empty,” Sissa said as the music finished. “Maybe in another life, I’d have claimed you, but not this one.” Everyone around us clapped as the band took a bow.

  That interrupted my little crisis. I felt my eyebrows climb far up my forehead. “You’d have claimed me?”

  “I’m a dragon, Ryan,” Sissa replied with a knowing smile. “I’d have claimed you.”

  We parted without another word, awkwardly. She muttered something about getting a drink, and I just stood there like an idiot. I didn’t follow her.

  It wasn’t more than a couple of breaths before a familiar voice spoke from behind me.

  “I told you. Shame.”

  And Samila was back. Funny how that worked. I gave her my best angry scowl and tilted my head to ask for an explanation. She didn’t provide one, though, unmoved by my silent tantrum.

  “Come on.” She sighed with exasperation. “There’s a lot of people that want to shake your hand.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “Well, if you’re not going to do the smart thing, you can at least do the gracious thing. People want to thank you for what you did.”

  “Oh,” I said, already wishing for the comfort of whirring machinery and volatile chemicals already. “Oh, no.”

  “Nope. No getting away now. You’re committed. I told them the Rising Sun of Eclipse would sign their naughty bits.”

  “No way. You better be—”

  “Of course I’m kidding. I have an alternative plan, if you want to hear it,” she purred, grabbing my collar and pulling herself up on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear.

  My breath caught in my throat, but I had the wherewithal to keep talking. “Uh, what plan?”

  “How about we get out of here and do something … spontaneous?”

  “Uh—” That was it. My brain collapsed like a dying star. No more thoughts. Sound was muffled, and the entire world narrowed down to a singular point of blue and gold.

  “You spook like a deer, I swear.” She giggled up at me. “Seriously, though, I’m barely holding back your admirers. I had to growl at them to keep them away for so long. If we stay any longer, the party might become more about you than the newlyweds.”

  We stay too long. We can’t stay too long. We’ve—

  With a rushing sound, my world came back into focus, so hard it was like a physical blow. I blinked.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  She frowned up at me, tilting her head slightly. “What? I said let’s get out of here. Sex is still on the table, but if you make me repeat my lines, things might change.”

  “No. No,” I insisted, breaking away a little less gently than I wanted to. My mind was racing, whirling around a central point, a nexus that I couldn’t see. “The thing about staying … Say that again.”

  Samila’s frown deepened into a confused scowl, but she did as I asked. “Hmm. If we stay too long, the party might become more about you than—”

  “That’s it!” I shouted.

  “What is?”

  “Samila, it’s the tutorial. I—The other guy … he’s stayed too long. There’s—Oh, Constance. The insertion point! They stay active. His insertion point has been active for over a thousand years, and now there’s—Oh, shit!”

  “Slow down, Ryan,” Samila pleaded. “What do you mean?”

  It all fit. Everything from the moment I was chosen up until now, the goblins, the tutorial, the stories, the city, the Dark Lord, the Spire, the Undead, the other Animator. It all fit perfectly. I’d found the failure point.

  I clenched my metal fist as the heat of conviction washed over me, and a thousand connections sparked to life in my brain. “I know how to stop this.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Put It Together

  Achill wind whipped at my face as I leaned against the railing of the Spire’s open-air observatory, while the dead city of Eclipse sprawled in gray patchwork down below.

  I was at an altitude that seemed to turn all but the largest of the manmade structures into a flat sort of abstract shape, more discernible as a group than as individuals, and it was easy to tell how well different parts of the city fared before and after the Scourge. The decaying grays and creaking, moldy skeletal structures of Riverside and Bogtown, funnily enough, seemed to have fared the best through the apocalypse. Hardly any of them were smoking ruins, maybe because of their proximity to the water. Maybe because I hadn’t gone to that part of the city yet.

  Meanwhile the well-to-do browns and greens of the richer parts of the city still smoldered in places. I hadn’t started those, or at least I didn’t think I did. The fire I had started at the south gate was mostly out after the wind changed directions, but that part of the city was still partially obscured behind a hazy cloud of smoke.

  Through that haze, I could just make out the dark greens of the glade, the crooked border to the swampland beyond and, above that, the mountains, where I’d first arrived in Ralqir.

  Below, the faint popcorn sound of automatic turret fire came in little spurts of violence, though from this height, I couldn’t pick out which tiny black dot the guns were trained upon. My log told me it was mostly the small stuff, Undead and goblins with a few mystery beasts. The Experience notifications were trickling in steadily, but I wasn’t getting much base XP from any of them. The bonuses weren’t great, either, not with the crowd as thin as it was now. The targets were too sparse to keep the chain bonus going, and the System was counting them as small groups as opposed to a horde. The Scourge-Touched were in roam-and-scavenge mode now, so big pileups of bodies were rare.

  I wasn’t out for Experience tonight, though. Tonight was about preparation. Not mine. My modest little factory was handling that for now. No, tonight, I needed to prepare everyone else for what I was about to do.

  Finally, someone cleared their throat from somewhere near the stairwell. I turned, finding most of the people I’d invited to join me up here tonight: Samila, Sissa, Geddon, Trix, Tiba, and her guards, along with Jassin and Garret bringing up the rear. The Church guards were all armed and armored again, Geddon’s and Samila’s kit still stained with black blood all the way up the sword arms. Either they hadn’t had a chance to clean them yet, or they’d been called to put down a breach somewhere.

  Tiba carried her spear, and Trix wore his carbine across his back. Garret only had a sword and some kind of loose, padded underclothes but somehow managed to look more ready for a fight than anyone else. Jassin simply looked as he always did, his gaunt face pinched in a mask of calculated neutrality as he took in everything.

  I leaned over slightly to see if anyone else was behind them but saw no one. I shot Samila a questioning look, but she only gave a tiny shrug in response.

  Well, this was as good as I was going to get, then.

  They all filed in and found a place to sit or stand. There wasn’t a whole lot of room other than along the scaffold-type railings where I’d been looking out over the city, since the middle of the observatory was taken up by a giant overdesigned telescope.

  I say “overdesigned,” because it certainly didn’t look like a telescope in the way I understood them. The main housing was a cylinder, as I would have expected, ten feet across, pointed straight up at the moon. The material was tarnished gold in color with violet streaks folded into the alloy, and no part of it was visible under any sort of Detect Ability I tried. Where it got weird, however, were the rings that rotated in inconsistent, uneven orbits around the whole thing, wobbling up and down slowly, eerily silent, while some kind of shimmering, translucent liquid stretched in sheets between them. I would have felt better if the thing squeaked or creaked, but the only sound was from the displaced air the rings caused when they wobbled on their different tracks.

  Once everyone was in place and as comfortable as they were going to get—Garret clearly the most comfortable, lying down on a bench with his hands behind his head (the man could be at ease anywhere)—I began.

  “Well, I guess that’s everyone.” I sighed. “Thank you all for coming.”

  Jassin was the first to speak, as I knew he would be. “Your message said it was urgent, so we came right away. It did take some time to give my practitioners the night off, however. I am sure they’re not complaining, but I, for one, am quite curious as to why I was asked to do so.”

  It took a level of trust to do something like that, I knew. Jassin had this place running on a set schedule so that people didn’t work too long and burn themselves out, while no one ate too much or slept too much or spent too much time alone. I’d probably thrown that careful schedule off by just plopping my turrets down at the gates and handing the guards spare magazines, but it needed to be done this way.

  “I appreciate what this means, Lord Jassin. I just need a few minutes of everyone’s time, and then what happens after will be up to all of us,” I replied.

  Then, the distinct bap! bap! of wood on stone echoed up from the stairwell, and my gut clenched slightly. I’d invited our final guest, of course. He needed to be here. I couldn’t leave him out, given how much pull he had, but I wasn’t fully comfortable with him being here, either. Attempted murder, understandably, did that to a guy.

  Slowly, Bishop Kolash dragged himself up the stairs and into the room, leaning heavily on his staff. He paused at the very top of the stairs, winded and sweaty, but his eyes bore fierce determination as he surveyed the room, noting every face with his wide-set eyes. I noticed his broken hand was bandaged but not healed. He had to have had the chance to heal it by now with his magic. Why leave it?

  Everyone went still.

  “Bishop Kolash,” I announced, gesturing to a seat that was in our general area. “Please, sit. Thanks for coming.”

  “Your message mentioned cleansing our world of the foul presence of the enemy. I would be neglecting my duties were I to not attend such a meeting.”

  The fact that he considered me one of “the enemy” was not lost upon me. I wasn’t going to let him rattle me, though. I gave him a nod and a smile. “That’s the gist of it. Please, come sit,” I offered.

  There was a long pause where he seemed to consider, his eyes not leaving mine while he lingered there, but, eventually, he stepped further into the room, choosing a seat to my right and a bit further distant than the one I offered him.

 

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