Dem ducked into a blind alley and shed his skin.
He changed clothes, fed everything else into his storage ring — the extra gear, the coin purse — then stepped back out minutes later as someone else entirely.
New posture.
New stride.
Even his eyes had changed — no longer hunting, no longer measuring shadows.
Hands in his pockets, he wandered through the merchant quarter and into what passed for uptown.
High-end shops, polished stone, and curated decadence for people with just enough money to pretend they mattered. Not nobles — merchants, thieves, and hopeful fools. A place where aristocrats might slum and con artists hunted in silk.
Dem knew it well.
Uptown was dangerous in a quiet way. Stealing here got attention — from the Guards and from syndicates that didn't tolerate competition from mud-footed street rats.
It was also where Sullivan's sat.
An open-air teahouse favored by Academy students and staff.
Dem smiled as a cluster of cloaked students drifted into view. The little capes, the berets…
Ridiculous.
As hats, they were about as useful as bathing a prize pig.
Sullivan's faced the Mage Academy directly — which made it perfect. Good tea. Loose tongues. A steady stream of information drifting across tables like steam.
Dem chose a seat near a group of students who were laughing loud and pretending the world could never hurt them.
A boy — maybe ten — appeared instantly, bowing so deeply his ears went pink.
"What can I get you, sir? We serve several kinds of tea."
"House special," Dem said easily. He had no idea what that meant, but most places would carry something like it.
The boy beamed. "Orange Silk, then. Brave choice."
Dem returned the smile and leaned back, listening.
He let the voices bleed into him — idle gossip, academic grumbling, whispered crushes, lofty ambition. All of it was valuable. Some of it would be useful.
Then a neighboring waiter passed with a wrapped order tucked under one arm.
Dem froze.
"That looks… familiar."
Using the tablecloth as cover, he retrieved a small leather-wrapped parcel from his ring.
Ciara's thank-you gift.
The boy returned with a ceramic cup, steam coiling upward in fragrant ribbons.
"Oh! You've got simmons!" the boy said happily. "I was going to recommend those. Perfect for dipping."
Dem unwrapped the parcel.
The scent of honey and spice floated upward.
Simmons, it turned out, were small, round cookies. He lifted one, inhaled, then took a careful bite.
Sweet — but layered. Different from what a street rate had ever tasted, but in a good way.
He sipped the tea and blinked in surprise.
Smooth.
Creamy.
Laden with citrus.
He dipped the cookie and tried again.
"…Damn."
Dem closed his eyes, letting warmth settle where hunger usually lived.
"I'm going to have to bring some of this back for my family."
Dem enjoyed a few more of the cookies, though it took real effort to save the rest. Thinking of Ai's stunned silence or Noko's quiet smile when they tasted one was all the discipline he needed to tuck the parcel back into his storage ring.
He went still at the sound of a familiar name, followed by the words poor girl.
Another thread surfaced — Fourth Tower.
Dem shifted his gaze toward the Academy, where spires clawed at the sky. A few tables away sat the speakers: a pair older than him, not students. Staff, perhaps. Or assistants. Close enough to hear clearly.
He rose and let confusion soften his face.
"Wow… look at all those towers," he said aloud. "Ten? Twelve, maybe?"
A red-haired girl in a beret sat at a nearby table, pushed up her spectacles with the weary superiority of someone who corrected strangers for fun. "There are seven."
"Seven?" Dem frowned theatrically and started counting. "Then the tall one must be the Gray Tower?"
She sighed gently. "No. That's the Sixth Tower."
He blinked. "Sixth Tower? How inspired. And the one left of it — Fifth Tower?"
"Yes." She removed her glasses, breathed on the lenses, and polished them with her sleeve. "Honestly, I would've done a better job naming them. That one there?" She pointed at a squat spire with a crooked roof. "I'd call that one the Tower of Pain."
Dem smiled. "Sounds terrible. They beat you in there?"
She winced. "Worse. Mathematic Rune Theory. I swear my eyes bleed after every chapter."
Dem laughed before he could stop himself. "I'm Dem."
"Belle," she said — and promptly blushed like she'd confessed something scandalous. "I… I should go."
She paid quickly and gathered her things, then paused at the edge of the boardwalk and glanced back.
"It was nice meeting you."
Dem watched Belle disappear toward the Academy's main gate.
It stood open and unguarded — but only in the way a blade might lie unused in someone's hand.
She paused, traced a symbol in the air, and stepped through an invisible barrier as if she were walking through rain. Then she hurried on toward the "Tower of Pain."
Dem didn't follow.
When he first joined Brim's crew, he'd seen another fool try his luck.
A thief, sprinting from syndicate collectors, desperate enough to believe the Academy might save him. The man hit the wards at a full run — and stuck.
His lower body froze in place.
His arms flailed uselessly, fingers clawing the air as if it might pull him through.
The syndicate boys arrived at a jog and stopped at a safe distance, not even worried.
"I think you gotta draw a symbol," one of them called helpfully.
Five seconds later, the man caught fire.
No blaze, no glow.
Just screaming — and then ash carried upward on the wind.
Even what remained of him never crossed the threshold.
Dem lingered over his tea.
He listened.
Every murmured complaint, every careless word about Fourth Tower went into memory where nothing was ever misplaced.
When he'd heard enough, he paid his bill and wandered the boardwalk like he had nowhere else to be. He lingered near the fountains, watching silk-clad pedestrians and soot-dark chimney sweeps who leapt between narrow roofs with the agility of cats. Mounted guards patrolled in lazy arcs to keep the wrong kind of poor from staining uptown.
A memory surfaced.
He'd worked as a sweep once. Three weeks. Pay had been fruit and bread.
The real purpose, though, had been casing one of the houses — rumored empty for years. When they finally slipped inside, they found nightmares wearing walls like skin.
Human hides stretched and tacked into decorations.
Severed limbs sewn onto animals.
They hadn't known.
Later, they learned even the Syndicate wouldn't touch that house.
Dem ducked into a bakery and bought a paper sack of stale crackers — the kind rich people wasted on pigeons for amusement — then sat and waited.
Fed a bird now and then.
Watched the sky go pink and then dim.
Waited through that particular moment between sunset and the street lamps flaring alive — when night had arrived but wasn't yet lit up.
Then he slipped behind a row of closed shops.
A rusted sewer grate waited where it always had.
Dem stripped, feeding every stitch of fabric and every useful thing into his storage ring.
A heartbeat later, a black rat startled across the cobbles and vanished into darkness.
The sewer felt like home.
And that didn't bother him… not even a little.
Dem understood now that he had probably lived here before memory ever formed — a feral thing, half boy and half beast. Six-month-old Devon had become a rat and fled a burning house without knowing he was doing it.
When he crawled back into skin in some nameless alley later…
Six or seven years were already gone.
Years he could not remember, except in instinct.
In threat recognition.
In senses too sharp to belong to a child.
The black rat scurried downward.
What would have sickened a human body felt, to him, like a sun-drenched walk through flowers. Warm stone. Flowing water. Living rot.
He oriented himself and moved.
Clay pipes shattered under his claws whenever his path closed in. Walls flaked. Mortar cracked like old bone beneath his strength.
His dark eyes devoured the shadows.
Where other creatures saw blackness, he saw detail. Heat and shape. Motion where nothing should be seen.
Torches might as well have burned in every tunnel.
The Street Rat had come home.
He chittered softly when he felt the Academy's wards above — magic thick as frost in the air — and passed far beneath them without slowing.
They did not see him.
They did not stop him.
He went deeper.
Below the grounds.
Below the towers.
Deep into the underbelly.
At a junction of pipes, he paused — tasting the air, the walls, the vibration beneath his paws.
Full.
Empty.
Waste.
Clean.
Human disgust had no foothold here.
The Rat King had no use for it.
With a single slash, he opened a pipe.
Clear water roared out and splashing against the ceiling, rain tearing back down onto the stone as the pressure dropped and the flow thinned.
He waited.
Watched.
Other rats stared from the dark — eyes glittering like dull gems. Curious. Uneasy. Respectful.
When the torrent finally stilled, Dem darted into the breach — half swimming, half running — twisting with the pipe as it bent and fell away beneath the city.
Minutes later, he stopped.
The stillness here was wrong.
The air reeked of unnamed horror.
He tore through the clay walls of the pipe.
Beyond it lay a chamber.
Four bricked sides.
One shaft climbing straight up the spine of stone.
And death.
So much death.
Bodies sprawled and stacked without care — the fresher ones on top, the older ones liquefying beneath.
A mass grave. Fed from above by a large chute.
Rat Dem tilted his head.
Disposal, clean and straightforward, years' worth.