The Black Canal

Kellum grabbed my collar with one hand and Brynn's arm with the other, hauling us beneath the remaining three-foot gap of the portcullis and out onto the muddy drainage embankment.

We hit the muck just as the iron gate slammed home with absolute finality.

A second later, the explosion detonated behind the iron door.

The shockwave tore through the drainage pipe, blasting outward in a wave of heat, pulverized masonry, and black smoke. The stone archway caved in, burying the portcullis beneath tons of collapsed river-stone and severing the pursuit completely.

I lay in the freezing mud of the drainage embankment, the breath knocked entirely from my lungs. The scream in my throat was choked with dust and sulfur. Foster was gone. The man who had taken my retainer in a dirty fighting pit had just bought our lives with his own ribs.

"Up, Tierney," Kellum's voice cut through the ringing in my ears. He was hauling the padded mirror harness onto the wooden drag-skiff hidden in the reeds. "We are not clear of the perimeter."

I forced my boots to find purchase in the freezing mud. Brynn was sobbing silently, wiping soot from her nose with the back of her sleeve, but her hands were already working the skiff's towlines. We were professionals. In the Ditch, you buried your grief after you survived the night.

We pushed the skiff out into the black waters of the South Basin canal.

The rain was coming down in freezing sheets now, churning the canal into frothing black grease. Above the high stone walls of the Guild compound, searchlights were sweeping the riverbanks, their glaring white beams cutting through the downpour like search-knives.

"Two hundred yards to the North Basin cut," I breathed, digging a muffled oar into the murky water. "If we reach the drydock before dawn—"

A crack like a whip snapped across the water.

From the high masonry catwalk of the South Foundry, a solitary Guild marksman had sighted through the rain.

Crack.

A heavy lead-and-silver slug ripped through the darkness.

I didn't even hear the shot. I only saw the muzzle flash bloom against the foundry roof.

Before I could flinch, a black shadow eclipsed my vision.

Kellum threw his entire body across the skiff, slamming me flat against the floorboards beneath his chest.

The impact was sickening.

A wet, heavy thud tore into his left flank, followed immediately by the sharp hiss of burning flesh.

Kellum gasped—a ragged, choked sound that vibrated through my entire skeleton.

Through the crescent scar on my wrist, a wave of blinding, white-hot agony tore into my bloodstream. It felt as if someone had poured molten lead straight into my heart. My vision blurred into jagged static. I couldn't breathe. The pain wasn't mine, but the bond forced every ounce of his suffering into my nerve endings.

"Kellum!" I cried out, struggling beneath his weight as the skiff rocked violently.

The marksman on the catwalk didn't get a second shot. Brynn, with a feral shriek of rage, seized Foster's dropped winch crossbow from the floorboards, hoisted it to her shoulder, and fired blindly into the rain. The steel bolt took the marksman through the shoulder, sending him tumbling fifty feet down into the churning foundry flume.

Silence fell over the canal, broken only by the roar of the downpour and the ragged, rattling gasps tearing from Kellum's throat.

"Kellum, look at me," I pleaded, shoving his heavy shoulders up.

His head fell back against the wooden gunwale. His face was deathly pale, his dark eyes clouded with gray static. Where the bullet had entered his ribs beneath the armpit, the surrounding skin was blackening at terrifying speed, bubbling with foul, silver-tinted vapor.

Silver. Pure, weaponized Guild silver.

To a human, it was a bullet. To a Noctis, it was an invasive cancer that burned through supernatural flesh like boiling grease.

"Get... the oars..." Kellum rasped, his clawed fingers digging into the cedar floorboards until the wood splintered. "Dawn... in forty minutes. If the sun touches me... with silver in my blood... there will be nothing left to bury."

"Brynn, pull!" I screamed, grabbing the second oar and throwing my entire weight against the current.

We rowed through the black canals like condemned souls racing the devil.

Every stroke sent a jolt of fire through my wrist, echoing the catastrophic necrosis spreading through Kellum's torso. By the time the rotting timber walls of the North Basin drydock rose from the mist, my arms were numb and my palms were bleeding.

We dragged the skiff up the grease-slicked slipway and hauled the heavy canvas doors shut behind us.

The abandoned drydock safehouse was pitch-black, smelling of old motor oil, sulfur, and stagnant river water. Rain hammered against the corrugated zinc roof above like a firing squad.

"Help me get him onto the workbench," I ordered, my voice shaking.

Brynn and I hooked our arms under Kellum's shoulders, hauling his dead weight across the concrete floor. He was burning up. The unnatural cold that usually radiated from his skin had been replaced by a raging, unnatural fever. His fangs were bared, his lips stained with black, oxidized blood.

We dropped him onto the heavy oak workbench beneath the hanging gas lantern.

Brynn collapsed against the tool chest, her hands trembling so hard she dropped her wrench. "Is he going to die, Tierney? God, Foster is dead, and now Kellum—"

"He isn't dying in my shop," I said, tearing open his soaked shirt with a pair of shears.

The wound was catastrophic.

The silver bullet had shattered a rib and lodged deep within the muscle sheath near his spine. Black, web-like veins of necrotic poison were spidering outward across his chest, creeping toward his throat. The smell was suffocating—burnt ozone, rotten meat, and hot metal.

"Light the gas ring," I told Brynn, yanking my jeweler's loupe over my eye. "Boil the surgical forceps. Bring me the bottle of antimony solvent from my leather satchel."

"Antimony? Tierney, that's industrial etching acid—"

"Antimony binds to silver and draws out the oxidation," I snapped, clamping the brass loupe into place. "If I don't neutralize the silver dust inside the wound track before I pull the slug, his regenerative healing will close over the poison and rot his heart from the inside."

I grabbed the curved steel forceps from the tool rack. My hands were slick with cold sweat, my vision swimming with exhaustion. But as I leaned over him, Kellum's left hand shot out.

His fingers locked around my wrist—right over the glowing crescent mark.

The shock of contact hit me like an electric current. Through the bond, his consciousness crashed into mine. I felt the endless, predatory depths of his Noctis mind, battered by waves of delirious agony, fighting desperately against the creeping dark.

Tierney.

The voice wasn't spoken. It echoed inside my skull, rough and desperate.

"Hold still, you idiot," I muttered out loud, blinking back the burning in my eyes. "This is going to hurt worse than the bullet."

"Do it," he breathed against the wood, his eyes snapping open, blazing with fierce, feverish gold.

I dipped the forceps into the antimony wash and drove the steel prongs directly into the blackened entry wound.

Kellum's entire body arched off the table. A choked roar tore from his throat, shaking the rafters of the drydock. The air sizzled with caustic smoke as the antimony met the silver-coated lead. Black bile and boiling blood gushed from the wound, spattering my forearms.

My own chest burned as if a hot iron were pressed against my ribs, the bond forcing me to share the agony. But I didn't pull back. I gripped the forceps with both hands, probed through the ruined muscle, and felt the hard, jagged resistance of metal against bone.

Clamp.

I twisted the forceps ninety degrees to free the barbed edges of the slug, set my heels against the floor, and pulled.

With a wet, tearing crunch, the silver slug came free.

I dropped the smoking, blackened lump of lead into a brass bowl on the bench. It sizzled against the metal, dissolving the patina into green foam.

Kellum collapsed back onto the oak planks, his chest heaving in shallow, ragged gasps. The black veins radiating from the wound began to pale, shifting from necrotic charcoal back to a dull, bruised purple as his supernatural metabolism finally kicked in to close the torn vessels.

I slumped against the edge of the workbench, my hands shaking violently as I peeled off my ruined leather apron. My work shirt was soaked in sweat, river mud, and black Noctis blood.

Across the room, Brynn had sunk to the floor beside the padded cradle of the First Mirror, her head buried in her knees, exhausted and trembling.

The safehouse fell into a heavy, suffocating quiet, broken only by the rhythmic hammering of rain against the zinc roof.

Kellum turned his head slowly toward me. The golden fire in his eyes had dimmed to deep, exhausted amber, but his gaze was sharp as a straight razor.

"You pulled it," he murmured, his voice dry as cracked slate.

"You took a bullet meant for my chest," I said, wiping a smear of grease from my cheek. "Consider our account balanced."

"Nothing between us will ever be balanced, mirror-wright," he whispered.

He pushed himself up onto one elbow, ignoring the fresh blood seeping through the crude bandage I had strapped across his ribs. His dark eyes shifted toward the center of the room, where the eight-foot First Mirror sat beneath the canvas shroud.

"You need to know the truth," Kellum said.

I frowned, stepping closer to the bench. "The truth about what? Your syndicate tipping off my father? We already know they sold us out."

"They didn't sell us out to kill me, Tierney," Kellum said, his voice dropping into a grim, hollow register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "They made a pact with Grandmaster Arthur three months ago. The High Syndicate never wanted the First Mirror to break into the human quarter."

I stared at him, the chill of the damp safehouse sinking deep into my bones. "What are you talking about? The First Mirror is the master ward. It's the primary anchor that keeps the Noctis out of Lowell."

"It's not an anchor," Kellum said, his fingers curling into the oak bench until the wood creaked. "It's an amplifier. Arthur didn't forge it to protect the city. He and the High Syndicate engineered it to reverse the harmonic polarity of every ward in the northern provinces. When the solstice comes, the syndicate won't breach the walls. The mirror will shatter the silver-lining in every home simultaneously, turning three hundred thousand humans into an open feeding ground—while Arthur and his inner circle escape south with the monopoly on the only surviving protective glass."

The words hung in the cold air of the workshop like a death sentence.

I looked from Kellum's bruised, bleeding face to the massive, canvas-draped slab resting between us.

The heist wasn't an escape from my father's shadow. It wasn't a ticket out of the Ditch.

We had just stolen the detonator to the entire city.

Outside, beyond the cracked windows of the drydock, the first pale, gray light of dawn began to bleed across the northern horizon.