“Team eight, there’s a portal opening on your right flank.”

  Evalyn’s thumbs hesitated on the locks; a reflex she looked like she regretted immediately. Their briefing beforehand had laid out protocol, prohibiting any contact with outside forces in the Queen’s realm—this creed was to be prioritised over everything else, examining evidence included.

  “Hurry,” their over-watch reiterated. Evalyn was still hesitating, thumbs still wavering on the buckles, but she ultimately moved first.

  “Let’s go,” she muttered, grabbing the briefcase by its handle and Iris by her wrist. Running away was something they rarely did in full armour. They were relinquishing ground again, tiptoeing around the truth, still following rules.

  If reality was barely holding together, what was the point of following those anymore?

  Evalyn and Iris unlaced their armour—beacons of colour they were, but their Aether signature was leagues brighter. Their surroundings were dead, but not entirely barren, and they found refuge in a shallow ditch bordered by a smattering of skeletal hedges that worked well enough as a one-way peephole. Evalyn unslung her rifle and shouldered it, steadying her aim against the ground. Iris drew her handgun and cocked the hammer back, keeping it close to her body and her body close to the ground.

  Stillness. The very beat of their hearts threatened to rouse a rustle out of the dry forest floor below them.

  The fissure in space widened to its full form—a blue ring, no different from the one through which they had entered. The world on the other side was indistinct and hard to pin down, a trait shared by those who soon came barging through. Black winter coats, ski masks, cargo pants, and gloves. All armed with automatic weapons, small with high fire rates. They would have looked like a well-armed troupe of burglars if it weren’t for the way they moved.

  In tight formation, they filed through one by one, fanning out into a tight circle around the portal, scanning their surroundings. Evalyn’s breaths were shallow, the pad of her fingertip light on the trigger.

  The group totalled ten, all in similar garb. Nothing about their uniforms discerned an allegiance, and their weapons might as well have been scavenged army surplus. They were trained; that was all that Iris could tell off the top of her head.

  Once satisfied with their surroundings, one operative raised a signal above their head. The last member of the cadre stepped through. A beak.

  Smartly dressed, like a man from the last generation.

  Iris’s breath caught in her throat, and it took all the willpower she could muster to keep her muscles still bar her heart. Evalyn noticed the catch in Iris’s breath.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “That’s him,” Iris said, barely a stutter in her diaphragm. “In the catacombs.”

  Evalyn’s grip around her rifle tightened, and her aim changed ever-so-slightly, fixed onto a new head.

  The Beak had no need to project their voice. With a nod of their head, the group fanned out in a search pattern, scanning the forest floor. It wasn’t long before they stumbled across what they were looking for: Rayak’s body. Three others gathered around the fourth who’d come across the carcass in the foliage, and together, they lifted it off the ground.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Don’t,” Evalyn hissed, as though moving now and catching them at the height of their guilt wouldn’t put an end to everything. Iris could feel her muscles inciting a rebellion, headed by a small, insurrectionist notion in her brain. Like a tumour, it grew by the millisecond, pulsating with every step the masked men and women took, dragging their evidence away.

  Unimpeded. Unpunished.

  Who would believe you?

  Nobody. Nobody would besides them, lying helplessly in a ditch as they watched the adversary pull away from them once again.

  You don’t even exist.

  Not in a way that mattered. Not in a way that was acceptable. Not in a way that even her closest friends and family could admit to.

  You have all the power in the world, and yet…

  Rules. Handshakes. Agreements ratified in court, in history, in shady back alleys and private meeting rooms. Reality really was a woven fabric, sewn with agreements into wool and pulled over the eyes of collective millions.

  But to tear a hole in it. Two could play at that game.

  “Iris?”

  Years ago, she might’ve thought her visions were taunting her. Giving physicality to apparitions of her own mind, fleeting thoughts and nightmares dredged from her past. Warnings, threats, assaults.

  There was a small child among the enemy—silver hair, tattered robes. Born from misfortune, in what was supposed to be a clean break from an endless cycle of betrayal.

  As ever, there was nothing in her eyes. Fear, determination, anxiety, pride—all absent. A blank canvas, waiting for Iris to paint on it. Do with it what she would.

  “Iris! Stop!”

  “Team eight! Stand down!”

  It had once been the entire world at her fingertips, and now she was but a fraction. Powerless, tossed around by a violent storm of different headwinds, kicking up waves of injustice from gusts of greed.

  If the world wasn’t fair, what was the point of playing by its rules?

  She was already looking through her armour by the time she came to. Their terrified faces hid behind their masks; what little remained filtered through a screen of purple. It meant little to her now, the looks of those who took away her friend, her library, her safety, her home.

  Her home. Her city. The one place that felt safe.

  Iris’s beast lunged for the four dragging the corpse towards the portal. Black silhouettes disappeared into nothing between its jaws. Iris followed it, climbing the bank of the ditch and taking the brunt of a torrent of automatic gunfire. She could deal with them faster than her beast could travel.

  She flicked her wrist, and from it flew wads of viscous purple. Each globule found its target—mouths, nostrils, ears. She clenched her fist, and it all hardened.

  Quiet. The leaves below the dead settled.

  The silver-haired girl was still watching her, standing before the Beak.

  You can’t change a thing.

  “What are you?”

  Her beast wrapped itself around her body, scales clicking like popping joints and breaking bones, maw opening unnaturally wide, birthing a spark of brilliant, deathly life.

  “Destruction.”

  Reclamation of a long-dead identity with one. Single. Word.

  The beam of light burnt away the blue rift and continued deep into the forest. Wood, bark, leaves, and the countless worlds beyond melted all the same at its mere graze. Heat overwhelming, sound obliterating. The blast tore the very air around it apart; a scream of rage her lungs could never hope to match. And yet, as it died as quickly as it came to life, Iris sensed a horrible feeling that, in the end, it had all come to nothing.

  Black smoke. Roaring fire. What remained standing was a hollow climax. The Beak had gotten away, and the silver-haired girl had disappeared along with him.

  The world wasn’t fair. Heavy-handed attempts to tip the scales were nothing more than heavy-handed. Rage, however righteous, was a fickle servant.

  “Iris…”

  Evalyn’s rifle hung from shaking fingers. She stumbled forward, one small, failing step at a time. The look on her face burnt itself into Iris’s psyche in an instant. A face she never thought a mother could direct at her own child.

  She thought that perhaps in that moment, Evalyn, for the first time, looked at what she’d raised as something other than her daughter.