Chapter 0 — When the Curtain Cracked
I know how to bend metal with a fingernail. They taught me that as soon as I could hold a file: a precise gesture, a sharp snap, a piece that gives way. Here, in the lodge, they taught me the small skills that make things forget they've been broken. They called my work "relic maintenance." I called it scraping the memory of the dead.
My life fit into a schedule: up at dawn to empty the lab ashtrays; afternoons cleaning the armored glass of the display cases; evenings hauling heavy crates once security started dozing. They'd given me a name and a number on a nailed plaque, and sometimes they granted the favor of stale bread. The other slaves—"Little Fiber," "Scar," "The Handle"—knew the same tune: servitude, pain, anonymity. We weren't up for discussion; we were useful.
The relic room was a functional sanctuary. Armored cases, neat labels, sensors buzzing like a swarm. The objects kept there were anything but ordinary; they followed rules that the bourgeois tongue calls "dangerous" and the underworld tongue calls "beautiful." They rarely let me near, but when they did, it was to sweep dust between protocols, wipe condensation from the boxes, reposition a seal that had shifted.
The morning of the attack, I was scraping old rust off a frame when the sirens started. It wasn't a polished sound—it was panic in code. Researchers scrambled, high-pitched voices shouting procedures. Someone yelled: "Intrusion! Relics!"—and that means you don't just close a door, it means someone's coming for what they guard.
They herded us into a containment room: windows covered, automatic locks. I figured it was routine, just another alarm. Then the door exploded inward. The figures that entered didn't move like thieves: they were artists who knew how to kill without noise. Red coats, masks, precise gestures—they formed an assault choreography. Someone uttered a name I'd heard in whispers: Red Circus. Legends in red and black, but that morning it was concrete, and fear had a face.
The troupe didn't waste effort on everything; they hit the points that mattered. Screens went dark at their whim, vaults opened, and one of the Directors—a tall silhouette, white mask with sharp brows—gave an order that sounded like a line from a play. The scientists protested, then were silenced by gestures. Everything was impeccable: no needless crashes, no blood yet—only the efficiency of a staged performance.
They'd sent me to scrape broken glass from a case after a gunshot took out a sensor. I had the blade and the rag, head down. I didn't hear the card fall; I felt it. The world narrowed around a small black rectangle that had slid under a clearer shard. I picked it up without thinking—reflex of a kid finding a coin in the street. The design on the face was stupidly simple: a smile, without a mouth, etched like a scar. It was cold, as if it had never known warmth.
The curtain cracked.
I didn't see the transition. One moment I was scraping the case, the next the floor had become a stage; the air, velvet; the room, a theater full of invisible seats. The sounds of fighting were light-years away. On the stage, a figure stood straight. The smiling mask was perfect, not because it was crafted, but because the idea of the smile existed with an authority I'd never felt. Its voice came straight into my head before I heard anything else.
— Who are you, kid who touches things that shouldn't be touched? said the voice. Do you know how to play, or do you only know how to learn?
I had no learned rhetoric to answer an entity. It wasn't human, yet every word sounded like an instruction. I straightened, the card in my palm like a talisman.
— I'm only good at picking up, I replied. I know how to spot a crack.
It laughed—a sound that wasn't laughter but logic folding in on itself. The room before me hollowed into red curtains; shadows of seats flickered. I was in a theater that existed between the world's heartbeats.
— Three tests, it said. Three answers you'll hold even when everything tries to contradict you. You win, you receive. You lose, you're nothing but dust.
The first question came not as words but as an image: a hand pulling away, an empty table. I understood it was asking why I still clung to life.
— Why do you breathe? the voice asked.
I surprised myself with a smile I didn't recognize.
— Because I'm afraid of being forgotten, I said. If I go, I want to leave something that snaps, even tiny. A name, a gesture. Someone has to know I existed.
The jester tilted its head, like a scholar noting an interesting datum. Its response was a murmur that vibrated in my chest.
— Shameful ambition. Acceptable.
The second trial was more intimate, like being handed my own mirror.
— What do you truly want to possess? it asked.
I saw images—shoes that wouldn't fade, a bed without drafts, laughter that wasn't opportunistic. But I knew the price of things. I answered differently:
— The right to choose my shame. To turn my chains into a decision.
Silence. Then the voice, slower.
— You want authority over your own lack. That's bold.
The third question was offered like a blade I had to throw. It asked: "Tell me a truth I don't know." There was the test: to touch a weakness in the very definition of a creature that shouldn't be able to doubt.
I searched for something I'd stolen in the nights—a word, an image, the little unsaid that a sensor can't catch. And finally I spoke.
— You exist because you're named, I said. If I stop naming you, you lose the voice that holds you.
Time contracted. I'd said something simple, but its reach was like a stone thrown into the water of an unknown lake. The mask twitched—not flesh, but meaning. The entity in my head seemed to search for its own certainty.
— Well-formulated paradox, it murmured. Few humans know the value of silence. You've planted an error in my discourse. Do you want to play?
The card split, a line of bluish light running across its surface. In my palm, the skin began to heat; a fine burn took the shape of a small etched smile. The moment the mark set, the theater dissolved like a sky folding in on itself.
Around me, the facility was in ruins: panting scientists, adrenaline sludge, a man sprawled with laughter frozen in spasm. Blood, glass, footprints. And the red masks of the Red Circus—their coats, the gleam on their weapons—were already fading, vanishing into the real world. One of them, taller, turned his head toward me. His mask had no smile; it had a sheet of paper pinned to it: a business symbol. And his voice, deep and strangely warm, slid through the air.
— The boy who touches the card, he said. He has something that doesn't belong to your institute. Let's take him.
Another Actor, leaner, tilted his head; it was like weighing my value as one weighs a feather in the wind.
— He bleeds the mark, he said. He can be useful.
Assistants lunged to protect me; orders were shouted. The scientists, furious, were utterly unprepared for the troupe's audacity. The Directors stepped forward and with a precise gesture sent silence over the interveners. A cloth wrapped around my neck—not a cruel tie, but a strange garrote that pinched without drawing blood. They took me, quickly, without ceremony: a slim arm lifted me like a fragile object, another draped a reddish cape over my shoulders, and I was carried beyond the shore of panicked men.
In my head, a voice I'd never heard… yet somehow intimate with new familiarity, brushed my thoughts.
— I am Zarkhael, it said. We're going to learn to bend logic. But remember: every truth you impose takes a debt. Do you accept?
I didn't know if it was a demon's speech or the reason of a mechanical argument. All I knew was that the burn in my palm told me I was no longer exactly the same.
— I accept, I said. Even if I don't yet understand how you pay.
The laugh, finally—not the superficial rumor of masks, but a laugh that seeped under my ribs—rose like a taut string. The red coats dragged me out of the lab, out of the pallid lights, and into the night. The Tent awaited, they said. The Red Circus had claimed its new performer.
I followed, body still trembling, the card gone but the mark firmly rooted. In my head, as the rooftops receded, Zarkhael's voice whispered with curiosity and promise.
— Learn to make causality waver, kid. And the whole stage will answer us. —