BATTLE CARDS

The coin was warm in Ren's hand. He'd been holding it too long, pressing it between his thumb and forefinger until the metal absorbed his body heat. It was the last of his money — not the last coin he owned, but the last one he could spend without admitting he had nothing left. A copper piece, worn smooth, worth a bowl of thin soup and maybe a heel of bread if the vendor was feeling generous. Toma would need both. Ren stood at the edge of the market square, watching the old beggar settle into his usual spot against the fountain wall. Toma moved slowly now — slower than last year, slower than last month. His left leg had been broken badly when Ren was a boy, healed crooked, and the years had turned that crookedness into a permanent, grinding pain. He walked with a stick. He sat with his back against stone and his good leg stretched out and his bad leg folded under him, and he smiled at everyone who passed. Nobody smiled back. The market was thinning. Late afternoon light slanted through the canvas awnings, turning the dust in the air to gold. Vendors were packing up their stalls — folding cloth, stacking crates, counting the day's take with the weary efficiency of people who had counted it before and would count it again tomorrow. A woman was arguing with a fishmonger about the price of something that had clearly been dead too long. Two children chased each other between the legs of a cart horse, shrieking with the particular joy of children who didn't yet know they were poor. Ren knew. He crossed the square, dodging a handcart piled with turnips, and crouched beside Toma. The old man's eyes were closed. His breathing was shallow, but steady. "Toma." The eyes opened. They were clouded with age, but they crinkled at the corners when he saw who it was. "Boy." Toma's voice was a rasp, worn thin by years of asking for things and being refused. "You're late." "I'm not late. You're early." "I'm always early. It's the only advantage I have left." Toma shifted, grimacing as his bad leg protested. "What do you have for me?" Ren pressed the coin into his hand. Toma looked at it, then at Ren, and something passed between them — not gratitude, exactly. Something older and more complicated. Toma had known Ren's father. He'd known Ren when Ren was a child, when the slums were just a place Ren lived rather than a place Ren belonged. He'd watched Ren grow up hungry and kind, which was a combination the poor quarter didn't usually produce. "You should keep this," Toma said. "You should eat." "I ate yesterday." "You ate half a potato yesterday. I watched you." Toma laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough turned into something wet and painful that Ren pretended not to hear. When it was over, Toma wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "You're a stubborn little bastard, you know that?" "I learned from you." "No. You learned from your father. He was the stubborn one. I was just too old to argue." Toma pocketed the coin. "Alden would have been proud of you. You know that?" Ren didn't answer. He never knew what to say when Toma mentioned his father. Alden had been dead for four years — a quiet death, an ordinary death, a man who had once been someone and had chosen to become no one. Ren remembered him as a shadow in a small room, a man who mended things and read books and never talked about the card he kept in a locked drawer. Ren had that card now. He carried it in his pocket, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. He touched it sometimes without thinking — the way other people touched a necklace or a scar. He didn't know why. It was just a habit. Just a thing his father had done. "You should go," Toma said. "Before the vendors pack up. Marta might give you the bread she won't sell tomorrow." "She won't." "She might. She likes you." "She likes my father." "Same thing." Toma waved him away. "Go. I'll be here." Ren stood. He looked down at Toma — the crooked leg, the worn coat, the smile that never reached his eyes — and felt the familiar knot in his chest. The knot that said you should do more, you should be more, you should find a way to fix this. The knot that had been there since he was old enough to understand that the world was not fair and that he was not important enough to change it. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said. "I know you will." Ren turned and walked away. He was ten steps from the fountain when the sky opened. There was no sound at first. That was the thing that made it terrible — the silence. The birds stopped. The children stopped. The woman arguing with the fishmonger stopped, her mouth still open around the word she'd been about to say. The whole market square went still, as if the world had been holding its breath and had forgotten how to let it go. Then the sky screamed. It was a tear — a wound — a line of white-hot nothing that split the air above the square like a knife through wet cloth. The light was wrong. It was too bright, too pure, too foreign. It hurt to look at. It hurt to look away from. Ren stood frozen, the cloth-wrapped card suddenly burning against his leg. The Rift opened wider. And something came through. It fell — that was the only word for it. It fell from the Rift like a stone dropped into water, a dark shape against the white light, tumbling end over end with a bonelessness that was somehow worse than any deliberate movement. It hit the ground in the center of the square with a sound like a wet sack being dropped from a height. The silence broke. People screamed. They ran — into each other, into the stalls, into the streets that led away from the square. A cart overturned. Turnips scattered across the cobblestones. The children were crying, and their mother was dragging them, and the fishmonger was shouting something that might have been a prayer or might have been a curse. Ren didn't move. He was looking at the thing on the ground. It was standing now. It had gotten up — unfolded — risen to its full height, which was taller than any man Ren had ever seen. It was thin, and it was wrong, and it was looking at the running people with eyes that held no recognition and no mercy and no anything at all. It moved. The woman who had been arguing about fish was the first to die. The demon crossed the square in three strides — too fast, impossibly fast — and its hand closed around her throat, and there was a sound that Ren would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life, and then she was on the ground and the demon was moving on. The square was a slaughterhouse. Ren should have run. Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to run. But his feet were rooted to the cobblestones, and the card in his pocket was burning, and his eyes were fixed on something else entirely. Toma. The old beggar was still sitting against the fountain wall. He hadn't moved. He couldn't move — not fast enough, not with that leg. He was watching the demon approach with the calm of a man who had been waiting for death for a very long time and had finally seen it coming. Ren moved. He didn't think. He didn't decide. His body just went — across the square, dodging the fleeing crowd, his lungs burning, his heart pounding, his hand reaching out to grab Toma's arm and pull. "Up! Get up!" Toma came up. He staggered, nearly fell, caught himself on Ren's shoulder. Together they ran — or something like running — a desperate, stumbling, half-carrying flight toward the alley on the north side of the square. Behind them, the demon killed again. The alley was narrow and dark and smelled of rot. Ren dragged Toma into it, both of them gasping, both of them shaking. The sounds from the square were worse now — screams, crashes, the wet impact of bodies hitting stone. "How many?" Toma's voice was a wheeze. "How many of them?" "I don't know. One. Maybe more." Ren pressed himself against the wall, peering back the way they'd come. "We need to get to the north gate. If we can get to the gate—" "The gate will be blocked. It always is. When the demons come, the soldiers seal the gates and leave us out here to die." Toma slid down the wall, his bad leg folding under him. "You go, boy. You're young. You're fast. You can make it." "I'm not leaving you." "You are." "I'm not." Toma looked up at him. The old man's face was gray with pain and fear, but there was something else in his eyes too — something that looked almost like peace. "You're a good boy," he said. "Your father was a good man. He would have been proud of you." "Stop talking like that." "I'm not going to make it to the gate. You know that. I know that." Toma reached up and gripped Ren's wrist. His hand was thin and cold and strong. "The card. Your father's card. You still have it?" Ren's free hand went to his pocket automatically. "Yes." "Good. Keep it hidden. Keep it safe. It's worth more than—" He broke off, coughing. When he spoke again, his voice was weaker. "It's worth more than you know." "Toma—" "Go." The demon appeared at the mouth of the alley. It was different from the one in the square — smaller, maybe, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. It moved with a fluidity that was almost hypnotic, its head turning side to side as if it were scenting the air. Its eyes were the color of old blood. It saw them. Ren didn't think. He grabbed Toma's arm and pulled — dragged him deeper into the alley, away from the demon, toward a door he remembered from childhood. The door was old and rotten and it led to a cellar that led to a tunnel that led— The demon caught them. Not Toma. Ren. It grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him backward, and he hit the ground hard, and for a moment the world was nothing but stars and pain. When his vision cleared, the demon was standing over him. Toma was on the ground a few feet away, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, trying to crawl toward him. "Run," Toma said. "Run, boy." The demon bent down. Ren's hand closed around the cloth-wrapped card in his pocket. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know why. He just pulled it out — the old, worthless, useless card that the Order had filed away as trash — and held it up like a shield. The card ignited. Light exploded from it — white and gold and warm, so warm, warmer than anything Ren had felt in his entire cold, hungry, miserable life. The light shaped itself into a figure. A woman. Tall and composed and unmistakably royal, her face sad and kind and ancient and young all at once. She looked at Ren. She held out her hand. "Grasp the power with your heart," she said, "and use it to fight for the people and for justice." Ren didn't know what that meant. He didn't know who she was or why she was there or what the light was doing. But Toma was dying behind him, and the demon was reaching for him, and the only thing in his hand was a card that the whole world had told him was worthless. He grabbed the woman's hand. Power flooded through him. It was like being struck by lightning and drowning and being born all at once. It was too much — it was far too much — his body screamed in protest, his vision went white, his ears filled with a sound like the ocean. But underneath the pain there was something else. Something steady. Something there. The demon's power. He could feel it. It was a dark, cold thing, coiled in the demon's chest like a snake. It was strength and speed and hunger, and it was right there, close enough to touch. Ren touched it. He didn't touch the demon — he touched its power, reached out with something that wasn't his hand and grabbed hold of the strength that was keeping the creature alive. It was like grabbing a live wire. It was like grabbing the sun. It was agony. But he held on. For ten seconds, he held on. The demon froze. Its eyes widened — not with fear, exactly, but with something like confusion. It didn't understand what was happening. It had never felt this before. It had never been held. Ren used its own strength to drive his fist into its chest. The demon shattered. Not died. Shattered — its body breaking apart like a dropped glass, pieces of it flying in all directions, its power dissipating into the air like smoke. Ren collapsed. His nose was bleeding. His ears were bleeding. His eyes were bleeding. The card in his hand was dark and cold and quiet. Toma was staring at him. "Boy," he whispered. "What did you—" And then the high-tier demon came. It came through the wall. Not around. Not over. Through. The stone exploded inward, and something emerged from the dust and the rubble that was larger than the thing Ren had just killed, and wronger, and infinitely more terrible. It was tall and thin and its skin was the color of ash, and when it looked at Ren, he felt his soul try to leave his body. This was not a low-tier demon. This was something else. Something older. Something that had been killing humans for a very long time and had gotten very good at it. The demon looked at the card in Ren's hand. And it smiled.