At seventeen, Rem Avern knew three things about dungeons: they paid late, smelled like wet metal, and never opened where it was convenient.
He rolled his shoulder until it popped and cinched the leather strap across his chest. The pack on his back wasn't glamorous. It never was. Spare blades, coiled rope, chalk, flares, two canteens, three tourniquets, a folded stretcher. He had carried the same weight into a dozen rifts and out of almost as many. The guild called him a porter. Hunters called him "kid." The broken called him when they needed to see daylight again.
The morning crowd surged around the guildhouse like a tide that knew where to go. Brass bells clanged, runners barked times and tiers, and the big board at the entrance clattered through postings: F-rank clean-up on South Wharf. E-to-D escalation near the canal. C-rank Rift scheduled for the Royal District next week, "audience welcome," bold as theatre.
Rem's badge hung low on his neck. F was stamped into the tin as if the letter could bruise. "Barely a spark," the intake assessor had said when they'd tested him. "Plenty of muscle, no current." The man had smiled like he was doing Rem a favor.
"Back in one piece, wolf," called Old Brann from his post by the doors. Brann had both legs but only one eye, and he counted everything with that eye like it owed him money.
"I'm not a wolf," Rem said. He adjusted the strap again. "Wolves hunt in packs."
"You will too, if you ever stop scowling." Brann jabbed his cane toward the board. "South Wharf job. F-to-E creep. You're on Team Beacon as a pack mule."
"Porter," Rem corrected. It was a useless correction. He went anyway.
South Wharf was the city's wet lung: tar, fish, iron, voices layered in salt. The rift there had opened in a storage yard between stacks of oiled crates, a vertical seam in air that glimmered like heat over stone. Around it the guild had hammered stakes for the anchor lines and chalked rings on the cobbles. A small crowd had already gathered at the rope barriers, some curious, some praying, some just bored. There was always a crowd.
Rem joined Team Beacon at the edge of the chalk. Three hunters, all E-rank. They had the easy confidence of people who knew their own reach.
"You're new," said the leader, a woman with braided hair and a breastplate polished past reason. "Name's Laska."
"Rem," he said.
She eyed his shoulders, the way the pack sat like it belonged there. "Good. You keep the lines clean, you feed us gear before we ask, and if something with too many teeth looks at you, you step behind me. Your job is to be there when we come back out."
Rem nodded. He'd done this speech before in other mouths.
A priest in white and gold swung a censer at the rope line, smoke curling in sweet loops. His voice drifted above the crowd. "Order is a blessing. Praise the Star who set the heavens, praise the ones who bring us back safe."
Rem didn't look at him. He'd grown up on stories in the doctor's little house near the river, stories that didn't end with a bow. Altair, the Void, had wanted people to choose for themselves. Solaris, the Star, had wanted them to choose correctly. Somewhere between light and silence, the sky had broken and dungeons started to fall like missing pieces of a puzzle too big to see. That was the doctor's version, told between stitches and bitter tea.
"On my mark," Laska said. She checked the anchor, then her team, then Rem. "Mark."
They went in quick, the way you step into cold water before your mind can talk you out of it. The world shuddered once around Rem as he crossed, like someone had plucked a string through him. Darkness swallowed color and then gave it back slowly in steel and mineral blue. The rift's interior was a corridor of black glass ribs, each arching to meet the next in a cage of lightless bone.
Rem set down the pack beside the anchor spike and fed out line as Laska's team moved forward in wedges. Glints moved in the dark like eyes that didn't blink. Rem's hands were steady. He counted breaths. He listened for how a fight sounded when it was fine and how it sounded when it wasn't.
It wasn't fine about four minutes in.
The first two creatures were easy, slick-bodied things that slithered low and died fast under Laska's blade and the crack of her partner's runestaff. The third came from the ceiling on silent hooks. Laska shouted, spun, missed the catch by half a heartbeat. Rem didn't think, because thinking came after. He drove forward, grabbed her by the collar, and yanked. The thing's hooks scraped air where her throat had been. Laska's elbow caught Rem in the cheek hard enough to ring, then she recovered and split the creature open with a clean upward cut.
"Move," she snapped.
"I am," Rem said. His cheek sang. He tasted iron and smiled without meaning to. Some things felt honest.
They reached the core room ten minutes later: a cavity where the floor fell away into a shaft of black. The core hung over the drop, a knot of glass and light. Cracks spidered its surface. The team formed a triangle around it, blades up, staff humming, Laska's stance long and low. "Pack," she said.
Rem had already set the tripod and ratchet from his pack. He clipped the harness, fed the line, and braced with his heel against the anchor as Laska leaned out over the drop to fix the clamp to the core. The shaft breathed up cold. Something below clicked like teeth counting.
"Almost," Laska said.
The thing from the shaft leapt.
Rem didn't see it so much as feel the air change. Laska couldn't pivot without losing the clamp. The runestaff flared and died as the other hunter's spell misfired. Rem stepped into the space between problem and consequence because there was no one else to do it, because that was the job people paid him not enough to do.
He caught the thing by two of its limbs and planted it. His boots scraped. His shoulders screamed. He didn't have a spark to burn and didn't miss it. He had bone and leverage and the kind of strength that makes adults frown and say you should be careful with that. He turned, heaved, and threw.
The creature pinwheeled, hit the glass ribs, and shattered like rotten ice. Pieces rained down the shaft and were gone.
"Clamp," Laska said, breathless, as if nothing had happened. The ratchet clicked. The core came free. The room brightened like a held breath finally exhaled.
They walked out to bells and cheers. The priest's voice rose and folded itself into the noise. "Praise the Star, who orders all things. Praise the brave who bring the glow back to our streets."
The guild runner who met them at the rope counted scratches and faces and gear like a tax man. "E-to-D confirmed and closed," he said. His eyes slid past Rem as if past furniture. "Laska, report filed. There's pastry in the hall."
"Get your cheek looked at," Laska told Rem, which was generosity in her language. "You held."
"I held," he said.
He went home by the river, pack lighter, steps slow because the adrenaline was gone. The doctor's house looked like a book had learned how to be a building and refused to stop. Shelves everywhere, notes pinned to notes, a kettle that sighed as if tired of boiling water for people who bled on the furniture.
"You're back late," the doctor said without looking up from the mortar he was grinding. He was not old and not young, his eyes cut with the sort of patience that made Rem want to be quiet.
"Wharf," Rem said. He tilted his head to show the bruise. "It looks worse than it is."
"It is," the doctor said, and set the mortar down to check the cheek with cool fingers. "Hold still."
Rem did. He'd held still for stitches and splints here since he was ten and came in snarling with both knees skinned and a story about a market guard who didn't like orphans talking back.
"Did you listen to the priest?" the doctor asked.
"I heard him," Rem said.
"That's the same thing."
"He wasn't talking to me."
"He was," the doctor said. He set gauze against Rem's cheek and taped it down gentle. "He's always talking to the ones who don't care to listen."
Rem let that sit. Outside, the river shouldered itself along with the patience of stone. A ferry bell chimed. Somewhere in the city, other bells answered in patterns people pretended meant order.
On the kitchen table, among the tea cups and the anatomical sketches, sat a folded flyer printed in deep indigo. Rem picked it up with his thumb and forefinger like it might bite.
"Royal District Announcement," he read. "'Demonstration Raid' at the Grand Arcade, three days hence. Attendance encouraged. Blessings to be given. Performers to include Royal Academy candidates."
"Mm," the doctor said. He poured hot water over leaves and let the steam fog his lenses. "Blessings. That word is doing heavy lifting."
Rem set the flyer down. "You don't like crowds."
"No," the doctor said. "Crowds don't like to think, and thinking is where your choices live. But you should go."
Rem looked up. "Why?"
"Because you're seventeen and you can carry a team out of a rift with your bare hands," the doctor said, which was not a compliment and not not a compliment. "Because the guild will push you there anyway, and it's better to go where you mean to. Because the Royal Academy will parade their best, and it is useful to know the faces of people whose names the city will chant."
"Like the duke's daughter," Rem said, mostly to see if the room would react.
It did, faintly. The doctor's mouth tucked at one corner. "The Duke's daughter, Rank B already. The Academy writes songs about her and then pretends they don't. She will be at the front of that parade."
Rem folded the gauze's edge under with a thumb. "Good for her."
"Good for no one if the wrong people notice," the doctor said. He slid a cup to Rem and took one for himself. "Drink. Then sleep. Then go where you said you would."
Rem drank. The tea tasted like rain had learned bitterness from smoke. He didn't sleep much, but he lay on his back and watched the ceiling and listened to the river and thought about the way Laska's weight had come into his hands when he hauled her from the hook's path. He thought about the priest's voice thinning the air above the rope line. He thought about indigo ink and crowds that cheered on cue.
The city woke itself early three days later for the promised show. Banners striped the Grand Arcade, a broad stone spine with glass ribs arcing high overhead. Vendors wheeled carts to the edges. Guild officers chalked lines and set anchors and smiled with too many teeth. The rope barriers went up and with them the first rows of spectators, wide-eyed and tidy. The air tasted like bronze and sugar.
Rem reported to the supply tent because his badge said F and F belonged behind the ones with letters that mattered. The quartermaster checked his name off a board and pointed with a clipboard. "Porter Three, you're with the Academy team. Keep clear, keep quiet, do what you're told."
He did the first two.
The Academy candidates lined up under the shadow of the Arcade's glass. They were crisp as coins, uniforms pressed, sigils stitched, nerves held in with posture. Rem recognized faces from guild bulletins and street posters. He recognized one from everywhere. She stood a little ahead of the line without looking like she meant to, dark hair braided back, eyes like someone had sharpened the color for use. She wore rank like other people wore weather.
"Evelyn Verran," someone whispered near Rem's shoulder. "B-rank at seventeen. The duke's girl."
Rem didn't say anything. He adjusted the strap across his chest and checked the flares one more time because flares didn't care about names.
The archmage officiant lifted both hands. "For your safety," he said, smile bright as polished glass, "please remain behind the line. Today, the Royal Academy will show you what discipline and devotion can do."
The first bell chimed. A second answered. Light collected midair above the Arcade's stones, a point bright enough to etch the back of Rem's eyes, and then the air tore with a neat seam like a ribbon cut at a ceremony.
The crowd sighed as one. Some prayed. Some cheered. The seam widened. Cold slid out. Rem felt the weight of it like a hand on the back of his neck.
His pack was already in his hands when the seam twitched wrong.
He saw it the way people see a step they thought was there. The rift flinched, then yawned in a way that was not part of the show, a blackness with teeth. The officiant's spell faltered. The chalk lines at the stone's edge bled like someone had dragged a sleeve through them.
The nearest Academy candidate looked at his instructor. The instructor looked at the officiant. The officiant looked at the crowd.
Rem didn't look at any of them. He looked at the gap and at the girl in front of it, the one people would write songs about later no matter how this went. She lifted her hand and the air around her tightened like it had agreed to obey.
"Porter Three," the quartermaster barked from behind Rem. "Hold for orders."
Rem stepped forward.
The crowd hadn't realized anything was wrong yet. It would. And when it did, it would turn and run and crush itself and blame the wrong names in the morning. Rem had no sigil and no spell and not a lot of patience for permission.
He reached the line and set his pack down and thought, not for the first time, that moving first was sometimes the only magic he needed.
The rift opened its mouth.
Rem moved.