Groans sounded off all around me as the blackness receded from my vision and gave way to
blooms of red. I lay on my back, pinned beneath a warm weight that began to slowly roll
away. I tore open my lids, and a faint light stabbed my eyes.
"Torrin," came Seth's croaking voice. "Torrin, are you alright?"
"Ermph," was all I could muster as I rolled onto my stomach and got two hands braced on
either side of me, forehead on the cool soil. I ran my tongue over a puffed lip and tasted
blood.
Vague voices and heavy footfalls brushed at my eardrums. Closer by, a low pop came in
tandem with a grunt from Seth.
I pushed onto hands and knees too suddenly, and a drilling pain bored through my skull.
Everything went fuzzy at the edges, and my stomach heaved up breakfast. Gasping, I sat
up, knees bent beneath me, and spit until my mouth felt clear.
"Better?" Seth asked.
"Peachy." I looked to find him gingerly rolling the shoulder he must've just popped back into
its socket. "Thanks."
His uninjured arm reached out and grabbed my shoulder in a quick squeeze. The movement
drew a pained grunt from Seth, and both our gazes dropped to a sharp piece of earthen
armor plate embedded in the muscle of his side. His leathers were shredded. Shallow cuts
surrounded the deeper wound, but the bleeding had already been stanched by the raden
faintly glowing beneath his skin.
Seth gripped the armor plate and tugged it free with a sickening squelch. He looked pale,
jaw clenched tight, chest rising and falling quickly.
I knew any voiced concerns or inquiries about his pain level would go unanswered, so I just
dug in my pack for a clean polishing rag and handed it to him. He nodded his gratitude and
pressed it to the wound. Bruises faded on his jaw as his raden went to work, and a blistering
burn on his neck from the raden steam looked less angry by the second.
"What happened?" I asked, careful not to turn my head too fast as I searched for the dragon.
"Did it explode?"
Even though I asked, I knew it couldn't be true. The corpse was still intact. But all the armor
was gone, blasted outward, embedded in trees and several unmoving ardents who lay
broken in puddles of blood. The golden threads of raden that had run through the dragon's
skin had gone black. "Must've been a last-ditch defense mechanism," I muttered to myself.
Seth's hand appeared in my eyeline, and I took it. I wobbled a little and reached up to feel a
lump on the back of my head. Didn't feel any blood, though. So that was something.
"You guys good?" Jace called out as he looped another ardent's arm around his shoulders
and helped the man limp toward the medic station.
"Yeah," I called back as Seth gingerly raised a hand.
A form crouched next to the dragon corpse straightened, and I recognized the runesmith. He
carried a knife and a jar filled with blood, his raden-glowing hands providing the proper
temperature regulation to keep it in liquid form. Despite the hammering in my aching head, I
couldn't take my eyes off his work, captivated by the rune being siphoned right in front of me.
This dragon definitely seemed like a candidate for a powerful rune aspect.
A cluster of surviving boneforgers watched the runesmith from afar, hesitant to approach the
corpse. When he stepped away safely, they began to trickle forward, moving to carve up
pieces of the unprecedented specimen's unique vents and adaptable skin before it stiffened
too much to be fully usable.
I knew I should join them, see what knowledge I could glean from the beast's parts, but I still
felt woozy.
Lots of people were following the runesmith's tracks, and curiosity swiveled my gaze after
them. I took two steps in that direction and paused, glancing back. That dragon was a new
discovery. Probably a drake type of some sort. I should really help out…
"We can… take a minute," said Seth, resting his hand on my shoulder, turning me back
toward the runesmith. "Catch our breaths."
My gaze returned to the tattooed smith. He had settled at the workstation he'd set in the no
man's land between the dragon and the warped remnants of the forger tables. Seth and I
approached the loose ring of onlookers, but halfway there, he staggered, hip knocking
against me. Instinctively, I caught him around my shoulders as he went down, his sudden
weight dropping me to one knee. He let out a garbled groan, eyes fluttering, and I saw blood
dripping over his lip onto his chin.
"Oh God," I murmured, then called out, "Medic!"
There was a lot of commotion all around, but my cry and waving arm caught a free medic's
attention. When she reached us, she took one look at Seth and her hands set to work
searching for injury, flipping his bedraggled cloak aside and giving me my first good look at
his back. Blood seeped from dozens of wounds clogged with blue-black flecks of the
dragon's armor. His raden must've broken down the larger projectiles, but hadn't totally been
able to shield his body from them. The medic ushered Seth away to a makeshift station
formed of salvageable pieces from the old one, shooing me when I tried to follow.
Gavin was over there getting a nasty map of bruising across his left ribs tended, but Fintan
wasn't hovering at his shoulder like I would've expected. I looked around and found him
hanging back with the boneforgers acting as supplementary carvers. He bent with his nose
practically inside one of its wounds, a finger prodding, coming away black with blood. Hewiped it on his armor and started scribbling away on a notepad. He wasn't exactly playing
with dead things, but it was still kind of unsettling.
I hobbled back to the runesmith. He adjusted his safety goggles, scanned the faces around
him, and puffed up as if gorging on the anticipation in the air. He set the jar of blood on a
thermal plate and pulled a small nugget of raden resin out of a little pouch at his hip. Next,
he took out small chisels, drill bits, and grinding burrs, lining them up beside a small canister
of compressed air. At last, he unscrewed the jar and poured the blood onto the sterile work
surface beside the resin piece and cupped his hands on either side of both. His raden
pooled around his hands, growing between them and then billowing out in a bubble that
started to spin at speeds high enough to create a vacuum. Finally, he pushed the nozzle on
the air canister, introducing Earth's atmosphere to the low-pressure bubble.
Here was the moment of truth.
I held my breath, swaying forward. Colter took it a step further, moving to stand opposite the
runesmith, his hands braced on the table, gaze transfixed. I couldn't quite look at him after
seeing how Braden and Nina had died. It didn't sit right. I kept seeing Colter's hand reach
out, seeing Braden stumble.
It looked so… I winced at another spike of pain through my temples. I rubbed it, shaking
away the end of the thought. It couldn't have been deliberate.
"Back, please," the runesmith snipped as the blood started to bubble.
Colter dropped his hands from the table but stayed where he was, the raden vacuum
spinning in his pupils.
The blood came together, as if its surface tension had tripled, gliding on the slick table like a
little snake. It began to twist and turn, making a new shape—proof that the dragon had a
high enough raden output to allow the crystallization of its blood within our atmosphere. The
smith was on the clock now, and my pulse quickened, mirroring the urgency in the hard set
of his mouth as he concentrated a light aura of raden around his fingers and the instruments
he selected. He had to carve a matching shape inside the resin nugget. It sounded difficult
in books, but seeing the swift, decisive cuts he needed to make in split seconds put it into a
whole new light. If he went too fast, tried to predict the shape prematurely, he'd never get the
bloodrune to mesh with the resin container. If he went too slow, the blood would lose all
malleability, and the bloodrune would break before he could get it inside the container.
A stark light in my peripheral irritated my left eye, and I squinted toward the bright red edge
of the inner rift. The lowest point of the giant, otherworldly rip hovered some thirty feet off the
ground and cut through one of the golden trees. Just like the cut platform in the original rift,
the tree looked like its upper branches had been lopped off. A fist-sized flying insect, with a
jade beetle-like carapace and two blinking antennae, buzzed out of the leaves, taking off
straight for the rift. As it crossed the boundary, the red rim flashed, and the beetle poofed out
of existence in what looked like a little burst of wings and legs.
I rubbed my stinging eyes and returned my gaze to the table at a soft, wordless exclamation
from the runesmith. He was drawing a second piece of resin out of his pouch.
"What's that for?" Colter asked. "Did you screw up the first one?"
The runesmith didn't even spare him a glance. He had his nose practically pressed to the
raden vacuum, his drills whirring over both resin chunks.
The sound made my head start throbbing again. A little dizzy, I took a step back and averted
my eyes from the spinning drills, but that didn't help much, as the jagged seams of the rift
tear had taken on a wavering, mirage-like quality that only worsened the sensation. It was
playing tricks on my vision. I could have sworn the tree trunk jumped one foot to the left,
moving so fast the leaves seemed to lag behind. Bald branches reached toward the rift, and
then the whole thing snapped back into place, the foliage fresh and golden.
I held my head, seriously worried I had a concussion.
"Amazing," murmured the runesmith, wiping at the sweat pouring down his face.
The two resin containers were now interlocked by holes the smith had drilled in their
middles, arranged so the engravings meant to hold the bloodrunes could interlock, becoming
a larger shape.
Curiosity pulled the air taut. No one dared utter more than soft, inquisitive sounds as the
runesmith picked up the linked containers and flipped them over the similarly intertwined
bloodrunes that had formed on the table. He aligned the engravings with surgeon-steady
hands, and when they were almost touching the table, the bloodrunes curled like cats
arching their backs and sank into the grooves. Only then did the runesmith withdraw his
raden.
He lifted the pieces up to a little penlight he clicked on over his ear. "Extraordinary," he said,
breathless. "I've heard of this but never seen it."
"What is it, Mark?" Colter's hands latched back to the table, his whole upper body leaning
toward the runes, and I saw the wolf in his eyes again, hungry and searching. A prickle ran
down my spine.
"A parasite," said the smith, laying the pieces in his palm and bringing the light closer to the
etched markings.
Colter reeled back, nose wrinkled. "Parasite?" In a breath, he brushed back his hair and
gathered himself. "Just one of them, right? The other is the drake creature's?"
"Exactly," said the runesmith, entirely fixated on the pieces, never noting Colter's invasive
proximity. He pointed to the bottom rune. "I'd guess this one is the parasite. It's the weaker
construction of the two. Still decent, though; I'd estimate class four."
"And the other one's class?
Judging by the raden output it required to form…" He gave his head a small, disbelieving
shake. "It's at least a class seven."
My own awed murmur mixed with a few in the crowd. Seven?
"Maybe eight, but never having seen one, I can't be sure," the runesmith continued.
Colter seemed to vibrate, his body and voice suddenly frenetic. "But this one is at least a
class seven? You're sure?"
Colter reached out and tapped the rune that bore a triangle etching, and the runesmith finally
looked up. The smith inched back, fingers closing over the runes as he pulled them toward
his chest.
"Yes, as sure as I can be without further study. Once the more senior runesmiths at Hogun
and Krutz confirm my assessment of its class, it'll be sent to the Global Defense Council for
observation. But I'll get you a list of its postulated abilities in case you want to apply for it."
Colter's fingernails scraped the table, arms going rigid, but when he straightened, he struck
a casual pose, hand raking his shaggy hair again as he let out a soft chuckle. "The
Conglomerate runesmiths are perfectly capable of confirming its class. We won't need any
third-party contractors."
The runesmith's brows jumped. "Look, Colter, I came here as a favor to you, but the law is
the law. As the forging runesmith, I'm required to make sure any class five or above that I
craft gets sent to the government for strategic placement."
"Mark…" Colter leveled him with a knowing, amiable look. "The Valera Conglomerate will use
every resource to accommodate this slight breach in the due process."
The runesmith countered Colter's easy grin with a thin-lipped frown. "There's a six-month
turnaround period where you can apply as a potential candidate to receive the rune. Just
send in a resume like everyone else, and—"
"You're mistaken," said Colter, a knife's edge in the new slant of his smile, though he kept his
tone good-natured. "That's Conglomerate property." His head cocked slightly, and unease
pooled in my gut. "Valera property."
The runesmith rose to his full height and raised his chin so he could attempt to look down his
long nose at Colter, tucking the runes protectively in his crossed arms. "Name-dropping's not
going to fly with me, Valera."
"No, but you're a smart guy. So I'm confused why you have that stick so far up your ass."
Gavin chuckled deep in his chest as he came to flank Colter, flashing those white veneers.
Fintan materialized behind them both, blue eyes hard. Beside Colter, Rhea, bounced her hazel eyes between them all with a deepening frown. I could practically hear her soldier
brain whizzing through possible outcomes and what I hoped were deterrent strategies.
"Come on, Mark," said Colter, opening a palm and beckoning with his fingers, "just admit you
don't know what class it is and hand it over."
Growing dread tightened my chest, trapping my next inhale. A few hours ago, I would have
chalked this up as a meaningless dick measuring contest that a little paperwork could solve.
But I'd seen what Colter did to Braden. I was more certain he'd pushed him with each
passing second.
Leon shoved through the hushed crowd next, arms crossed to flaunt his biceps.
Mark stood his ground, though I watched his Adam's apple bob. "You're not going to push
me around," he sniffed. "You have a problem, you take it up with your legal department."
Colter's fist slammed the workstation, leaving a dent in the metal surface, and I jumped a
foot. A few others around me started to back away, some awkwardly clearing their throats as
they coaxed friends toward the medic and forger stations, not wanting any part of the
escalating argument.
"Our contract says that for today, you work for me," said Colter, breathing heavily, though he
kept the stretched smile plastered on his face as he uncurled his fist. "That rune belongs to
me." He jabbed a finger into his own breastbone. "I'm in charge of this mission. I killed that
parabeast. I saved everyone's asses, including yours. Anything that comes from the beast is
rightfully mine."
Mine. Not the Conglomerate's. He'd claimed it, and his voice had dropped an octave,
approaching a snarl.
It had always been a little odd to me that the heir to the company didn't have a rune when
less accomplished ardents did. Now it seemed like maybe he'd been holding out on purpose,
and he'd at last found what he wanted.
Mark's nostrils flared, but he held his tongue. He picked up a small metal case, pushed in a
three-digit code on the lock that flipped up the latches, and opened it to reveal a padded
inner lining where he nestled the conjoined runes. Before he could shut the lid and lock them
away, Colter's hand shot out and grabbed the upper handle. The runesmith tugged on the
lower one, both flaring raden down their arms that made the metal handles whine and warp.
They stared each other down with silent snarls, and Colter started stalking around the corner
of the table. Mark backed along that side, keeping the tension in the case. Just when
Colter's handle looked ready to snap off, he let out a growling sound of fury, golden raden
flaring, and lashed out with the back of his hand.
Mark's skull caved, his eye socket sinking in as his forehead jutted out unnaturally. He
dropped in a heap.