The shriek of iron-shod boots skidding on slick cobblestones was too close. Aelin's lungs burned, each ragged gasp a betrayal in the suffocating, rain-lashed darkness of Varos. She risked a glance back, a mistake. Lightning split the sky, etching the alley in stark monochrome, and in that frozen moment, she saw him – a hulking silhouette, face obscured by a grim-eagled helm, hand outstretched, fingers like grasping claws. One of the Magistrate's elite hounds.
"She's in the Guttersnipes' Maze! Cut her off before she reaches the Sump!" The bellowed order, raw and brutal, echoed unnervingly near, followed by the wet, eager barks of something that wasn't entirely human.
Aelin hugged the whimpering bundle tighter, the child's fragile warmth a stark contrast to the icy terror constricting her own heart. Not my child. Not to them. The thought was a jagged prayer in the tempest of her fear. She plunged deeper into the warren of narrow, stinking passages, the city itself a decaying labyrinth designed to swallow the desperate. Rain, thick as blood and carrying the metallic tang of the ever-burning foundries and something older, something of slaughter, hammered down, attempting to drown her, to wash her and her precious burden into the city's choked drains.
This wasn't just a chase; it was a blood sport for these men, for the city itself. Varos didn't just break you; it savored the snap of every bone, the shredding of every hope. And the Magistrate, that bloated spider at the center of its web, wanted her alive. The word was a promise of agonies unimaginable, of slow, meticulous dismantling until every secret she guarded was torn from her soul. And the child… she couldn't let her mind linger on what they'd do to the child.
Her foot caught on a loose stone, sending a jarring shock up her leg. She stumbled, her cry swallowed by a deafening peal of thunder. The shadows cast by the flickering, unreliable gas lamps writhed and danced like the tormented souls rumored to be trapped within Varos's ancient, weeping stones. Each corner was a fresh hell, each doorway a potential dead end. She had to keep moving, had to find a way, any way, out of this tightening noose.
Her breath hitched, a raw, painful sob tearing from her throat as she regained her footing. No time for weakness. Weakness was a death warrant here. She pushed onward, the weight of the child a strange anchor, both a burden and the only reason to endure the inferno threatening to consume her. The labyrinthine alleys twisted, disorienting, each seeming to lead only to deeper despair. The reek of decay intensified, mixed with the cloying sweetness of rot and the sharp, acrid scent of chemicals from some hidden, illicit workshop.
A guttural snarl echoed from behind, closer than before. Not human. Definitely not human. The Magistrate had things in his employ that crawled from the city's deepest, most shadowed cracks – things that enjoyed the taste of fear before the flesh. Her blood ran cold. They weren't just sending men after her now.
She spotted it then – a narrow fissure between two leaning, decrepit buildings, barely wide enough for a starved dog to pass. A gamble. It could be a dead end, a trap. But the howls were drawing nearer, the heavy tread of boots joining them. There was no choice.
Aelin squeezed into the passage, rough brick scraping her cloak, her shoulder. Darkness enveloped her, absolute and suffocating, the roar of the storm momentarily muted. The air was thick, stagnant, tasting of mold and despair. She could hear her own heart, a frantic drum against the cage of her ribs. The child in her arms stirred, a tiny hand batting weakly at her chin.
"Almost, my little spark," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Almost somewhere safe… or at least, somewhere else."
Torchlight flared at the end of the passage she'd just vacated, shadows leaping. Heavy boots splashed, drawing nearer.
"Think she went down this shit-hole?" one guard grunted, his voice echoing.
"Nowhere else for the bitch to go," another snarled. "Cornered rat."
Aelin pressed herself flatter, every muscle screaming. Nononono, please, gods, no.
The torchlight grew brighter, inching into her narrow sanctuary. She could smell the guards now – their sweat, the cheap oil on their leather, the underlying stench of blood that always clung to the Magistrate's enforcers. One of them was right at the mouth of the fissure, peering in. She held her breath, sure his eyes would adjust, that her faint heat signature, the child's soft presence, would betray them.
Then, the guard at the entrance recoiled. "By the Void's black heart… what the fuck is that?" he choked out, his voice cracking from a confident bark to a reedy gasp.
Another guard, impatient, shoved past him. "What nonsense are you—" His voice died, replaced by a strangled gurgle.
A sudden, deafening roar, utterly inhuman, ripped through the alley, so powerful it seemed to shake the very stones of Varos. It was a sound of primordial rage, of a predator anointing its killing ground.
"OPEN FIRE!" someone screamed, panic lacing the command.
The distinct, sharp crack of a pulse rifle discharging – once, twice, then a frantic, uncontrolled burst – echoed, followed by a clang as the weapon was violently swatted aside. Then the screaming began. Not shouts of battle, but pure, unadulterated terror, abruptly cut short by wet, tearing sounds, the thud of heavy bodies being slammed against walls with bone-shattering force. Aelin squeezed her eyes shut, her hands flying to cover the child's ears, though it was a futile gesture against the symphony of slaughter unfolding just feet away. She could hear flesh ripping, the squelch of… she couldn't, wouldn't, put a name to it. Her stomach churned violently.
She prayed. To any god, any demon, any forgotten power that might still lurk in the city's underbelly. Please, let it not find us. Please, let it pass. Please, just let it be sated with them.
The cacophony of death seemed to last an eternity, though it could only have been seconds. Then, a final, choked cry, and a silence descended, so profound it was more terrifying than the screams. The only sounds were the relentless drumming of the rain and Aelin's own ragged, hitched breathing.
A shadow fell over the narrow opening of her hiding place. Immense. Blocking out what little ambient light there was. A stench rolled in with it – raw blood, something ancient and musky, like a charnel house mixed with a deep, dark cave. Aelin's heart seized. It knew. It knew she was there.
Slowly, a hand reached into the fissure. Not a hand, no. A massive, gnarled appendage, obsidian-dark, tipped with claws that gleamed faintly, each the length of her forearm, honed to impossible sharpness. They flexed, twitching, mere inches from her face, from the child. She could feel a cold radiating from it, a deathly chill that had nothing to do with the storm. One wrong move, one sound from the baby, and those claws would shred them both to ribbons.
Her prayer became a silent, desperate scream in her mind.
The claws hovered, questing, then, with agonizing slowness, began to retract. The monstrous shadow outside shifted. A low, guttural rumble, a sound that vibrated deep in Aelin's bones, echoed down the main alley. It wasn't a sound of discovery, but of… renewed purpose.
The presence receded. The shadow moved away from her hiding spot. She heard heavy, almost deliberate footsteps – too heavy for a man, too rhythmic for a mere beast – moving back down the main alley, away from her. It was hunting again. Hunting the other guards.
It had been inches from her, and it had left. Not because it hadn't sensed her, she felt that with chilling certainty. But because it had other prey to pursue. Its job here, with these particular hunters, was done.
Aelin remained frozen for a long moment, trembling so violently she thought her bones would break. Only when the distant sounds of renewed, albeit quickly silenced, chaos faded did she dare to breathe, a shuddering, painful gasp.
She had to move. Now. Before anything else found her, or before that… thing decided to return.
Steeling herself, every instinct screaming in protest, Aelin forced her trembling legs to obey. She pushed out of the narrow fissure, back into the relative openness of the alley. The metallic tang of blood, so thick it was almost a taste, choked her. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, on the rain-lashed opening at the far end, refusing to look at the shadowed heaps that had, minutes before, been men. Refusing to acknowledge the dark, glistening slicks that stained the cobblestones and walls. But the sounds, the memory of those sounds – tearing, crunching, gurgling – clawed at her mind. The city, it seemed, had feasted well tonight.
The storm raged on, a fitting soundtrack to Varos's unending misery. Each bolt of lightning illuminated her path in brief, horrifying flashes, revealing a cityscape of gothic decay and predatory shadows. The wider streets were no safer, merely offering different kinds of monsters. She stuck to the labyrinthine backways, her knowledge of the city's underbelly, learned through years of bitter experience, her only guide.
The bundle in her arms stirred again, a soft whimper that tore at Aelin's already shredded nerves. "Shh, shh, my flame," she murmured, her voice hoarse, pressing a kiss to the damp cloth covering the child's head. "It's not much further. I promise. A sanctuary… of a sort." Even as she said it, the word felt like ash in her mouth. Sanctuary in Varos? Such a thing was a cruel joke, a whispered lie told to the dying.
She'd heard the tales, of course, in the hushed, desperate corners of the city where the forgotten huddled for warmth and shared their meager hopes. The House of the Unwanted. A place where life was a grim lottery, but a lottery nonetheless. Better than the certainty of the Magistrate's dungeons, or the slow, grinding death in the factories, or the swift, brutal end in some gutter.
And then, looming out of the storm-driven rain like a skeletal behemoth, she saw it. A hulking, crumbling structure of blackened stone, its silhouette jagged against the bruised sky. Rusted iron gates, twisted into grotesque shapes, hung precariously from their hinges. Ivy, black and grasping, crawled up the walls like skeletal fingers. Above the massive, scarred wooden door, a plaque was just visible, its letters worn but grimly legible in a flash of lightning: "Sanctuary for the Forgotten.".
Aelin stumbled to a halt at the foot of the worn, cracked steps. Rain streamed down her face, mingling with tears she hadn't realized were falling. This was it. The end of one nightmare, the certain beginning of another. For her child, a life she would never know, a future she could only pray would be less brutal than her own past.
She carefully lowered the woven basket she'd carried strapped to her back – how had she managed to keep it through all that? – and gently placed the sleeping child inside. She'd lined it with the softest cloth she could steal, a merchant's cast-off, days ago, in a life that felt a century removed. A pathetic offering against the cold indifference of this place.
Around the baby's tiny neck, a small metal disk lay cool against its skin – a pendant, intricately engraved with a pattern that seemed to shift and writhe if you looked at it too long, a design that whispered of ancient power and forgotten lineage. Her own mother had pressed it into her hand, so many years ago, with a warning she hadn't understood until it was far too late. Aelin touched it once, her fingers brushing the cold, strangely resonant metal. A legacy of danger, perhaps. Or a key to survival. She could only hope.
With a trembling hand, numbed by cold and fear, she reached for the thick, braided iron bell rope. It was slick with rain, and when she pulled, the clang of the bell was a dull, mournful thud, swallowed almost instantly by the storm's fury.
She waited, her heart a frantic bird beating against her ribs. Every second stretched into an agonizing eternity. What if no one came? What if the place was truly abandoned, a hollow shell filled only with ghosts and rats?
Then, a faint scraping sound from within. A bolt being drawn. The massive door creaked open with a groan of tortured wood, revealing a sliver of dim, flickering light and a woman's shape silhouetted against it.
The woman was a creature carved from hardship and neglect, wrapped in a tattered shawl that did little to conceal the bony angles of her frame. Her face, illuminated by the sputtering lamp she held aloft, was a roadmap of past disappointments and future bitterness, her eyes hollow pits reflecting a soul long since scoured of warmth. They drifted downward, cold and dismissive, landing on the basket at Aelin's feet, then on the rain-soaked, desperate figure of Aelin herself.
A sneer, sharp and cruel as a shard of glass, twisted the woman's thin lips. "Gods, not another one," she rasped, her voice like stones grinding together. "Do they think we run a fucking charity for every alleycat's spawn?"
Before Aelin could utter a word, a deep, gravelly voice rumbled from the shadows within the house. "Who the bleedin' hell is leaving a brat out in this piss-storm?"
A man's bulk filled the doorway then, pushing the woman aside. He was immense, broad-shouldered and thick-handed, his face a brutalist sculpture of granite and grim survival. The stale reek of cheap, sour ale and a lifetime of bad decisions rolled off him in waves. This had to be Edward, the name whispered with a mixture of fear and grudging respect in the lower quarters. His eyes, small and hard as obsidian chips, narrowed as he took in the scene – Aelin, soaked and trembling; the basket; the unspoken plea in her terrified gaze.
He grunted, a sound devoid of any discernible emotion save perhaps a weary, ingrained irritation. "Just take it inside, Martha," he commanded, his voice flat and final. "Less chance of the Watch stumbling over it out here."
The woman, Martha, hesitated, her gaze snagging for a moment on the tiny, still form within the basket. A flicker, something almost unreadable – was it a ghost of pity? A shadow of ancient, buried pain? – crossed her features, gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by her customary mask of callous indifference. With hands calloused and rough as old leather, she reached down and took the basket.
The baby stirred, a tiny fist unfurling, fingers curling against the damp air.
Aelin's lips parted. Words welled up – a torrent of explanations, pleas for kindness, for understanding, for a promise that this small, innocent life wouldn't be utterly crushed by the gears of this monstrous city. She wanted to beg forgiveness from this child she was condemning to a life of institutional shadows. But the words caught in her throat, choked by the sheer, crushing weight of her despair, by the screams she'd heard, by the monstrous thing that still hunted the alleys. What use were words now? They were as empty and useless as her hopes.
With a strangled sob that was swallowed by the wind, she turned. And ran.
She didn't look back. Couldn't bear to. Couldn't bear to see that door close, to cement this final, soul-shattering act of abandonment. Each splash of her boots through the filthy puddles was a nail in the coffin of her motherhood. The pounding of her heart, the roar of the storm, the memory of claws and tearing flesh – it all merged into a single, deafening symphony of her failure and her grief.
She ran until her legs burned, until her vision blurred, until the city's cruel labyrinth finally, mercifully, offered her a forgotten corner in which to collapse. There, amidst the overflowing refuse and the weeping stones of Varos, Aelin finally let the darkness claim her, her body heaving with silent, wracking sobs. It was done. The child was… somewhere. Safer, perhaps, than with a hunted woman marked for death. The Magistrate wouldn't look for one more nameless orphan in the city's festering underbelly. They wouldn't see the spark of a dangerous lineage in those innocent eyes. Not yet.
As a cruel, grey dawn finally began to etch its way across the rain-slicked rooftops, painting the city in shades of ash and despair, Aelin was gone. Whether she had found the strength to flee Varos's suffocating embrace, or if some other, darker fate had claimed her in those tormented hours, none would ever know. In Varos, people vanished like smoke in the wind, their stories unfinished, their absences unmourned.
And life, such as it was, in the House of the Unwanted, prepared to receive another soul into its grim fold.
Years bled into one another within the grimy, weeping walls of the House of the Unwanted, each day a smear of grey monotony, punctuated by the hollow clang of the dinner bell or the sharper crack of a caretaker's switch. For the children interred there, hope was a foreign currency, swiftly devalued. They were the city's refuse, its forgotten footnotes, warehoused until they were old enough to be ground down by the factories or simply vanished into the city's insatiable maw.
Nimara, now a young woman teetering on the cusp of seventeen winters – though 'winter' was a generous term for Varos's perpetual season of damp chill – had learned early that survival in the House meant becoming a ghost. She moved through its crowded, echoing halls and dormitories with a quiet watchfulness, her presence as unobtrusive as a shadow. Her dark, perpetually tangled hair often fell across a face that had never known the softness of a loving touch, her sharp, intelligent eyes missing little but revealing less. Around her neck, hidden beneath the threadbare collar of her tunic, lay the cool, familiar weight of the intricately patterned metal pendant – the only link to a past she couldn't remember but felt as a constant, dull ache.
Her sanctuary was the attic, a place most other orphans avoided. It was cold, labyrinthine with discarded junk, and rumored to be haunted by the spirits of children who hadn't been resilient enough. For Nimara, it was a treasure trove and a laboratory. Here, amidst broken clockworks, rusted gears, and the skeletal remains of forgotten automatons, she had painstakingly, obsessively, given life to Beeps.
The mechanical spider, now a sophisticated piece of intricate craftsmanship far beyond what any casual observer might expect from a self-taught orphan, was her only true confidant. Its eight articulated legs, fashioned from polished steel and scavenged alloys, moved with an almost unnerving fluidity. Its optical sensors, a pair of multifaceted lenses Nimara had liberated from a discarded surveyor's tool, glowed with a soft, internal blue light, currently dimmed as it rested on her cluttered workbench.
Nimara herself was hunched over a new schematic, a sliver of charcoal clutched in her grease-stained fingers, the flickering light of a salvaged, re-wired glow-orb casting long, dancing shadows across the dusty beams above. She wasn't just tinkering anymore; she was innovating, pushing the boundaries of what she could achieve with scavenged parts and stolen moments. Beeps was proof of that. He wasn't just a toy; he was a complex system, capable of surprising autonomy, his core programming a secret language only she truly understood.
A floorboard creaked somewhere in the vast, dark space below. The usual cacophony of the House – distant shouts, the clatter of chores, the occasional muffled sob – was a constant hum, but this was closer. Nimara didn't flinch, but her focus sharpened, her senses automatically cataloging the sound. Most of the other 'Unwanteds' gave her a wide berth, a mixture of fear and grudging respect for the girl who spoke to machines and preferred the company of rust to that of flesh and blood. They called her 'Cog-witch' behind her back, or 'Scrap-ghoul.' She knew. She didn't care. Their fear was a shield.
But some were bolder, stupider, or simply more desperate to assert their meager dominance in this hierarchy of the damned.
The charcoal stick in Nimara's hand stilled its intricate dance across the stretched hide schematic. Her head remained bowed, as if still engrossed, but her ears, finely attuned to the subtle symphony of the decaying House, tracked the approaching sounds. Heavy footfalls, deliberately loud, designed to intimidate. The tell-tale jingle of scavenged metal trinkets some of the older boys wore like crude trophies. And a low, brutish chuckle that scraped against the relative quiet of her domain like a rusted blade.
It wasn't the usual scuttling of younger orphans daring each other to approach the 'Cog-witch's' lair, only to flee at the first imagined creak. This was purposeful. This was trouble.
Beeps, perched silently on the workbench, shifted. His multifaceted optical sensors, which had been dimmed to a soft azure, now pulsed with a more alert, intense blue. A tiny, almost inaudible whirring emanated from his core as his internal mechanisms cycled to a higher state of readiness. Nimara had programmed him with layers of defensive protocols, subtle and overt. He was more than a companion; he was her early warning system, her guardian.
"Well, well, look what the rats dragged out of the boiler room," a voice sneered from the attic's shadowed entrance. The voice was thick, broken by a premature adolescence fueled by cheap stims pilfered from the kitchens and a constant, simmering rage.
Nimara slowly raised her head, her expression carefully neutral, though a flicker of cold annoyance tightened her jaw. Three figures stood silhouetted against the grime-streaked light filtering from the stairwell. The one who had spoken, Ryke, was in the lead. Years had passed since he was merely a petty bully snatching toys. Now, at perhaps nineteen, he was a slab of muscle and malice, his face a roadmap of minor brawls and simmering resentment. He'd grown into the kind of brute the Magistrate's enforcers sometimes recruited for tasks requiring more brawn than brain. He still hadn't managed to escape the House, a fact that likely curdled his already sour disposition daily. Behind him, two other older orphans, his usual leering sycophants, lurked like ill-fed wolves.
"Still playing with your clockwork crap, Scrap-ghoul?" Ryke taunted, taking a swaggering step into the attic. His eyes, dull and predatory, flickered around Nimara's meticulously organized chaos – shelves of sorted components, tools laid out with precision, schematics pinned to the walls. His gaze lingered on the complex, half-assembled chassis of a new automaton leg on her bench. "Heard you found some good scrap down by the incinerators yesterday. Thought you might like to share with those less… fortunate." The implication was clear: share, or it would be taken.
Nimara's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the charcoal stick. "This is my space, Ryke," she said, her voice low and even, betraying none of the tension coiling in her stomach. "And my findings. You know the rules. Caretakers don't care what happens up here unless the screams are loud enough to curdle their afternoon tea."
Ryke chuckled, a humorless sound. "Rules? Oh, I like rules. Especially when I'm the one making 'em." He took another step, his cronies fanning out slightly behind him, cutting off any easy retreat, not that Nimara had ever considered retreat within her own sanctuary. "That little spider of yours," he nodded towards Beeps, who remained perfectly still on the bench, "looks a bit more… valuable than last time I saw it. Might fetch a pretty piece from the metal-mongers down in the Sump."
Beeps' internal whirring intensified almost infinitesimally. A faint, almost subliminal shift in the electromagnetic field around him occurred, something Nimara had been experimenting with – a subtle deterrent. Most humans wouldn't consciously register it, but it often created a prickling sense of unease, a primitive urge to withdraw.
Ryke, however, seemed oblivious, or perhaps just too arrogant to care. He reached out a grimy hand towards Beeps. "Let's have a closer look—"
Before his fingers could make contact, Beeps moved. It wasn't a dramatic leap. Instead, one of his slender, needle-tipped forelegs shot out with blurring speed, not to attack, but to tap Ryke's outstretched hand with a precise, sharp impact. Simultaneously, a high-frequency burst of sound, just at the edge of human hearing but intensely uncomfortable, emanated from the automaton.
Ryke yelped, snatching his hand back as if stung. "Fucking little piece of sh—" He glared at Beeps, then at Nimara, his face flushing a dull, angry red. "You'll pay for that, witch."
"He doesn't like to be touched by unwelcome hands," Nimara stated calmly, though her heart was now hammering. This was escalating faster than usual. "And neither do I. Perhaps you should remember your manners, Ryke. Or leave."
Ryke's face, already flushed with anger, darkened to a bruised purple. He flexed the hand Beeps had tapped, a low growl rumbling in his chest. "You think that little metal tick is going to save you, Cog-witch?" he spat, his voice thick with menace. "I'll smash it into so many pieces you won't even be able to build a decent paperweight from the scraps. And then I'll deal with you."
He lunged, not with the clumsy charge of his younger self, but with a brutal, practiced speed that had caught many an unwary orphan off guard. His two cronies moved with him, a wave of ill intent designed to overwhelm.
Nimara didn't have time to think, only to react. She kicked back her stool, creating a momentary obstacle, her hand instinctively darting towards a heavy, sharpened gear she kept on the workbench for just such occasions – a crude but effective weapon. Beeps, with a series of sharp clicks, scuttled sideways, agilely evading Ryke's grasping hand, and unleashed another, more focused sonic burst, this one aimed directly at Ryke's ear.
Ryke roared in pain and fury, clapping a hand to his head, his lunge faltering for a precious second. One of his cronies, a lanky youth with shifty eyes named Silas, managed to grab the edge of Nimara's workbench, intending to flip it.
Before Silas could heave, a voice cut through the tension, cold and sharp as a winter wind. "Having trouble with the local scrap collector, Ryke? Or just feeling the need to bully someone half your size again?"
All heads snapped towards the attic entrance. Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, was Jace. Years had sculpted him from a quiet, steady boy into a lean, wiry young man. His dark eyes, still unsettlingly perceptive, held a dangerous glint. He moved with a quiet confidence that often unnerved those who relied on bluster and brute force. Though he wasn't as physically imposing as Ryke, there was a coiled intensity about him, like a drawn bowstring.
Beside him, half-hidden in the shadows but radiating an almost palpable aura of watchfulness, stood Fearyn. Time had been kind to her Elven heritage, accentuating her fine features and the almost unnatural violet of her eyes. She was taller now, slender and graceful, but the bookish quietness of her youth had matured into a profound, almost unsettling stillness. She rarely spoke in confrontations, but her mere presence often had a more disquieting effect than Jace's sharpest words. Around her fingertips, almost too faint to see in the dim light, minuscule sparks of violet energy occasionally danced and died, a secret she guarded more fiercely than any other.
Ryke straightened, his expression twisting into a sneer, though a flicker of uncertainty now touched his eyes. Jace and Fearyn, like Nimara, were generally left alone. The quiet boy with the fast hands and the strange Elven girl with the unnerving stare were an unspoken deterrent.
"This ain't your concern, Shadow-foot," Ryke growled, addressing Jace. "Me and the witch here were just having a… negotiation."
"Looked more like an eviction notice to me," Jace countered, pushing himself off the doorframe. He didn't raise his voice, didn't make any sudden moves, but the air around him seemed to tighten. "Nimara doesn't want your company, Ryke. And frankly, neither do we. So why don't you and your lapdogs go find some drains to sniff?"
Silas, emboldened by Ryke's presence, snarled, "Who are you calling a lapdog, you—"
Fearyn took a single, silent step forward, out of the deeper shadows. She didn't speak, didn't even look directly at Silas. But the tiny violet sparks around her hands brightened almost imperceptibly, and the temperature in the attic seemed to drop by several degrees. The air crackled with a tension that was more than just anger. Silas's bravado evaporated, his words dying in his throat. He took an involuntary step back, suddenly very interested in a cobweb on the far wall.
Ryke saw the shift. He saw his cronies falter. His gaze flicked between Jace's steady challenge, Fearyn's unnerving presence, and Nimara, who now stood with the heavy gear in her hand, Beeps perched on her shoulder like a metallic gargoyle, its blue optics fixed on him.
He was still bigger, still stronger than Jace by a fair margin. But three against one, with one of them being the 'Cog-witch' and another the unnervingly calm Elf… the odds weren't as favorable as he liked. He hated backing down, especially in front of his toadies. But he also hated pain, and something in Jace's eyes, and in the very air around Fearyn, promised a significant amount of it.
Ryke's jaw worked, his gaze darting between the three teenagers who stood united against him. He saw no fear in their eyes, only varying degrees of cold resolution. Jace's hand had drifted casually to his side, near where a worn leather strap hinted at something concealed beneath his patched tunic. Fearyn's unnerving stillness was somehow more menacing than any overt threat; the air around her felt brittle, charged. And Nimara, the 'Cog-witch' herself, held that heavy gear with the practiced ease of someone who knew how to use it, her mechanical spider a silent, multi-limbed guardian on her shoulder.
He took a slow, deliberate breath, the bravado deflating slightly, replaced by a more sullen, calculating look. "This ain't over, scrap-sifters," he finally spat, his voice a low growl. He pointed a thick finger at Nimara. "That little trinket of yours," he gestured towards Beeps, "and whatever else you squirrel away up here… it'll be mine eventually. One way or another."
He then shot a venomous glare at Jace and Fearyn. "And you two? Keep sticking your noses where they don't belong, and you'll find out what happens to pretty boys and half-breed freaks who forget their place."
With a final, contemptuous sneer, Ryke jerked his head at his two cronies, who looked visibly relieved to be escaping the charged atmosphere. "Let's go. This place stinks of oil and crazy anyway."
He turned and swaggered out, his departure almost as loud and deliberately offensive as his entrance. His followers scurried after him, casting nervous backward glances.
Silence descended in their wake, thick and heavy, broken only by the distant, mournful clang of the House's old heating pipes and the soft whirring from Beeps as he powered down his immediate defensive measures.
Nimara slowly lowered the gear, her shoulders slumping almost imperceptibly. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb, leaving a familiar weariness in its place. "Thanks," she muttered, not quite meeting Jace's or Fearyn's eyes. Gratitude didn't come easily to her; it felt too much like acknowledging a debt, a vulnerability.
Jace finally relaxed his stance, a wry smile touching his lips. "Anytime, Nim. Though one of these days, you're going to have to let Beeps actually take a leg off him. Might improve his charming personality."
Beeps' optical sensors flickered, almost as if in agreement.
Fearyn stepped further into the attic, the ambient temperature slowly returning to normal. Her violet eyes scanned Nimara's latest schematics with a flicker of interest. "He's getting bolder," she observed, her voice soft but carrying a note of concern. "He wouldn't have tried this a year ago, not with all three of us likely to be nearby."
Nimara nodded, running a hand through her tangled hair. "He's running out of time. He's too old for the House, and he knows it. The factories are a death sentence, and the Magistrate only picks the truly useful or the truly psychopathic for his enforcers. Ryke's just stupidly violent. He's getting desperate." She picked up the charcoal stick again, but her focus on the schematic was gone. "He'll be back. And he won't come alone next time."
"Let him try," Jace said, his voice hardening slightly. He walked over to a precarious stack of salvaged metal plates Nimara had been meaning to sort. "We've handled worse than Ryke and his knuckle-draggers."
"Have we?" Fearyn murmured, her gaze distant for a moment, as if looking at something far beyond the attic walls. "The House is one thing. What's outside… that's a different kind of monster."
A fragile quiet settled between them then, the unspoken understanding of their shared, precarious existence. They were outcasts among outcasts, a strange constellation of found family bound by secrets, necessity, and the grim reality of their world. Each had their own ghosts, their own burdens. Nimara had her machines and the mystery of her pendant; Jace, his quick hands and a past he never spoke of; Fearyn, her unsettling, growing power that both protected and terrified her.
Jace broke the silence first, pushing away from the stack of metal plates with a sigh. He ambled over to where Nimara had her new project laid out – not a weapon, but something more intricate: a sophisticated energy core, its crystalline matrix interwoven with fine silver wiring and minute, precisely etched conductive plates. "Trying to build your own miniature sun again, Nim?" he asked, a teasing warmth in his voice as he peered at the complex device.
Nimara grunted, a sound that could have meant anything, but her fingers were already moving with deft precision, adjusting a tiny focusing lens within the core's casing. "It's a stabilized resonance coil," she corrected without looking up. "If I can get the harmonic frequency right, it should provide a cleaner, more sustained power output than the standard chemical cells. Enough to run something… larger than Beeps." Her gaze flickered towards a shadowy corner of the attic where a much larger, half-assembled automaton frame lay draped in a stained canvas sheet.
Fearyn, having shed the almost palpable tension she carried during confrontations, drifted over to Nimara's main workbench. Beeps, sensing her approach, swiveled his optical sensors towards her and emitted a series of soft, inquisitive clicks and whirs – a greeting. A rare, small smile touched Fearyn's lips. She held out a slender finger, and Beeps, after a moment's hesitation, extended one of his delicate forelegs, gently tapping her fingertip. The minuscule violet sparks that often danced around Fearyn's hands seemed to dim slightly when she was near Beeps, as if the automaton's own contained energy field had a grounding effect on her.
"He likes you," Nimara observed, her voice still focused on her work. "He still tries to inject a diagnostic sub-routine into Jace whenever he gets too close to his primary systems."
"Hey! I was just curious how his motivator cuff was wired," Jace protested good-naturedly, rubbing his arm in mock injury. "Besides, your little guard dog here has a shocking sense of personal space."
Fearyn chuckled softly, a melodious sound seldom heard. She continued her silent conversation with Beeps, her fingers tracing delicate patterns in the air that the mechanical spider seemed to follow with his sensors. Sometimes, she would hum a low, almost inaudible tune, and Beeps's internal mechanisms would whir in a corresponding rhythm. It was a strange, silent communion that neither Nimara nor Jace fully understood, but they accepted it as part of the unique bond between the Elven girl and the intricate machine.
"Ryke's getting worse, though," Jace said, his tone growing more serious as he turned back to Nimara. "You saw his eyes. That wasn't just greed today. There was something… desperate in him."
"He knows his options are narrowing," Nimara agreed, carefully soldering a micro-filament. "The House will cast him out soon. No skills, no prospects. Just a temper and a sense of entitlement. Varos will chew him up and spit him out before the next festival."
"Unless he does something truly idiotic first," Fearyn added quietly, her attention still mostly on Beeps, but her words were sharp. "Like trying to sell information to the Magistrate's men about a girl who can supposedly make metal move with her mind, or another who can… well." She trailed off, a shadow passing over her features.
The unspoken reference to her own abilities hung in the air. They all knew the dangers. Witches, sorcerers, anyone with uncontrolled or unsanctioned abilities, were hunted relentlessly in Varos. Fearyn had been terrifyingly powerful, albeit briefly and without control, when she'd sent Ryke flying years ago. She'd learned to suppress it, to control the outward manifestations for the most part, but the power still simmered beneath her calm exterior, a volatile secret that bound them together in shared peril.
Nimara paused in her work, the tip of the soldering iron smoking faintly. "He wouldn't dare. He knows what happened to the last fool who tried to sell rumors about 'attic witches' to the Watch. They laughed him out of the barracks, then beat him half to death for wasting their time." She tried to sound confident, but a sliver of doubt remained. The Magistrate's interest in the 'otherly-abled' had seemed to grow in recent years.
"That was before," Jace said, leaning against a support beam, his expression thoughtful. "Before the whispers started about… changes. More patrols. More questions being asked by men in cloaks who don't look like they belong in the lower rings." He glanced at Nimara, then at the pendant she always wore. "And before people like Thorne started showing up asking about girls with unique trinkets."
The mention of Thorne, the mysterious man who had visited Nimara months ago – an event that had directly led to their current state of heightened alert and the confirmation that powerful forces were indeed interested in her – brought a fresh wave of unease into the attic. Ryke was a known danger, a festering boil within the House. But Thorne represented something far larger, far more insidious, a threat that stretched beyond the grimy walls of their miserable sanctuary.
Nimara set down her soldering iron with a decisive click, the delicate work on the resonance coil momentarily forgotten. The air in the attic, usually thick with the scent of ozone, flux, and her focused energy, now felt heavy with unspoken anxieties. "Thorne," she said, the name a flat, hard stone in the quiet. "He knew about the pendant. He said it was a key. A key to what, he didn't get to say before Beeps… reacted."
Beeps, from his perch near Fearyn, emitted a low, almost defensive pulse of his blue optics, as if sensing his actions were under scrutiny. Fearyn gently stroked one of his metallic legs. "Beeps did what he thought was necessary to protect you, Nimara," she said softly. "Whatever Thorne was, whatever he wanted, he set off every danger protocol you built into Beeps, and then some I don't think even you knew were there."
"And Jace saw the Magistrate's mark on him," Nimara acknowledged, her gaze flicking to Jace. "A snake coiled around a dagge