Morning in Redhaven began with a sound like a tired machine coughing itself awake.Generators throbbed in their cages. Metal shutters rattled open. Smoke drifted low and gray above the salvaged rooftops, curling around towers of welded scrap. The base stretched like a scar across the bones of the old world—market lanes made from cut-up shipping containers, barracks stitched from garage doors and billboard frames, towers capped with salvaged satellite dishes that no longer spoke to anything.
Oz woke before the first whistle. He didn't need it anymore. Since the awakening, his body ran on a steadier engine; he slept shorter, deeper, and rose clear-headed. He lay on his cot and listened to the base breathe, counting the beats of the generator. He found he could match the rhythm with his pulse. It calmed him. It also reminded him he wasn't the same boy he had been a week ago.
He slid out of bed and padded barefoot to the washbasin. Cold water bit his skin awake.Mara stirred, then propped herself on an elbow. Her voice was rough with sleep. "What time is it?"
"Still dark," Oz said, drying his face with a rag. "I'm going to stretch."
"You're going to train," she corrected without opening her eyes. "Thirty minutes. Then we eat. Then inventory."
He smiled. "Yes, ma'am."
He crossed the narrow room to where a length of steel conduit lay on the floor. He'd cut it to the height of his collarbone. Heavy enough to feel dangerous, not so heavy he'd break his wrists. He held it as if it were a staff, mirrored a stance he'd seen in another world, and breathed once to set his balance.
Then he looked.
The world blurred at the edge of sight. His breath went thin and cold. The room remained—the stains on the concrete, the burned kettle, the ragged blanket—but behind it something else unfolded, like a second film projected over the first.
Dimensional Peek.
At first, it had been a flash, a dizzying shock of impossible colors and shapes that left him retching. Now, with practice, it came like the gentlest turn of a lock. He didn't force it. He let it open.
A courtyard appeared—stone-paved, dusted with white sand. Lanterns swayed from wooden eaves; mountain air moved like a hand over water. A man stood under a cedar, bare feet in the sand, spinning a wooden staff with lazy precision. The man's hair was shot with gray; his shoulders were rope-hard, his eyes half-closed in something like prayer.
Oz counted silently. One minute. He had learned the hard way to respect his limits.
He watched the man's hands. The staff flowed, not struck. The wrists worked like hinges floating in oil. The stance stayed soft at the knees, the spine tall but not rigid. The man slid forward without lifting his feet, as if the earth itself was carrying him.
Oz matched the angle of the elbows. Changed his grip by a finger's width. Breathed in through his nose and out through his teeth. The conduit hummed faintly as his arms learned the circle. He wasn't mimicking; he was studying.
The lanterns in that other courtyard flickered as if obeying a wind he couldn't feel. The man shifted, reversed the spin, sank lower. Oz copied, and his thighs burned.
A pinprick pressure tightened behind Oz's eyes. His breath shortened. The courtyard shivered, wavered—and vanished.
He blinked, suddenly aware of the cold, of the sweat on his arms, of the cheap conduit buzzing in his hands.
Fifty-nine seconds.
Mara had rolled over and was watching him now, face resting on her forearm. "How long?"
"Not even a minute today," he admitted. "I pushed last night. I guess I'm still paying."
"Good." She yawned. "Pay early and small; it'll keep you from a bill you can't afford."
He leaned the conduit against the wall, shook the ache from his wrists. "I saw the courtyard again. The staff master."
Mara's mouth tugged upward. "Master now, is he?"
"He moves like water," Oz said simply. "I thought it was his arms. It's not. It's his spine and the way he lets the ground carry him."
She sat up. "You can watch him, you can copy him. But you're not there. If something goes wrong—if you drain yourself—you're here with me and no air in your lungs. So keep the timer in your head."
"I do." He tapped his temple. "Like we practiced."
Mara stood, tied her hair, and stretched until her back popped. The flame tattoo along her wrist flickered once, a dull ember greeting the morning. "Eat," she ordered. "Then we file our scrap receipt with Market Control, then we talk crystals."
Oz's chest tightened—and not with fear.
Crystals meant possibility.Crystals meant more time inside the Peek before it kicked him out.Crystals meant power he needed to survive the world outside their thin walls.
He swallowed his excitement. "Crystal budget is tight, isn't it?"
Mara made a face. "The word you want is miserable."
They ate ration porridge and split a strip of dried meat. Oz didn't complain. He'd grown up on food that tasted like endurance. He cleaned the bowl, wiped the spoon, slid both into his Dimensional Space without thinking. The inner room inside him—vast, cold, obedient—accepted the items with a flutter like a second heartbeat. He still felt a ripple of wonder every time. Somewhere, in a place that didn't take up space in this room, a pile of practical magic grew: bowls, tools, coils of wire, a dented pistol, three spare magazines, rags, adhesive, a pencil stub, two notebooks, a socket wrench set, and the treasure of yesterday—a bag of bolts someone would trade dearly for.
Outside, Redhaven opened like a cautious eye. The market lanes filled with barter. A woman hawked boots laced with copper wire. A boy stacked spent casings by caliber inside a tray made from a car's floor panel. A pair of awakeners argued about a broken pump; their voices were polite, their hands trembling from hunger.
On a high platform, Market Control posted the day's exchange rates with chalk and a steady hand:
L1 Crystal → 2 Days Food / 20 rounds 9mm / 1 Antibiotic (generic)L2 Crystal → 1 Salvage Permit (Zone West) / 1 medpack / 60 rounds 9mmL3 Crystal → 1 Generator Belt / 1 reinforced vest (used) / 4 medpacksMetal Scrap (per 10 kg) → 1 can mixed beans / 5 roundsCopper (per 1 kg) → 1 can meat / 10 rounds
Numbers shifted daily. The generator belts had doubled since last week. Electricity was a luxury that ate money faster than fire ate wood.
Mara filed the receipt for yesterday's steel haul. Tomas signed. Linnea haggled with a trader over a battered drill press. Derek flirted with a baker in the way he thought was charming and which everyone else agreed was insufferable, but he left with two extra slices of stale bread, so perhaps charm was not the point.
Oz stood back and watched everything, committing the map of trade to memory. In this world, knowledge was insurance. If you didn't know what a kilogram of copper fetched on a wet day, you could be cheated into hunger. If you didn't notice the way Market Control's chalk paused over crystal rates, you couldn't predict whether the base planned a push or a retreat.
Mara finished with the clerk and crooked a finger at Oz. "Walk with me."
They went past the line of water drums and the field of half-dead cabbages, out to the perimeter where the rusted wall met a scaffold like a broken rib cage. Two sentries nodded at Mara and looked through Oz as if he were air. He didn't mind. Being invisible kept you alive longer than being special.
Mara rested her elbows on the railing and watched the wastes breathe under a pale morning sun. "I'm going to say it plain," she said. "You need to move from Level 1 to Level 2."
Oz didn't look at her. "I know."
"You're stronger than before, but not strong enough. Not for what's out there. We keep you in support because it's safer—and because you're the reason we can bring home enough to eat—but that won't protect you if things turn bad unexpectedly. Which they will." She paused. "And the Peek will strain you more as you stretch it. I can see it in your face after you train."
He nodded. He felt it. The Peek wasn't a window; it was a lens. The longer he held it open, the more it drank from him.
"I've been timing it," he said. "First days, I could manage thirty to sixty seconds. Yesterday I hit eight minutes once. Most of the time, I can reach six without shaking. If I try for ten, I black out—just for a second, but I wake up feeling like my bones are hollow. The cooldown varies. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes the rest of the day."
Mara's jaw tightened. "And jump?"
"I'm not using Dimensional Jump," he answered immediately. "Two reasons. I can't protect myself if I land somewhere hostile. And the energy cost—" He searched for words. "It feels like a fall that doesn't stop. I don't know how long I'd be empty afterward."
Mara exhaled. "Good. We keep that one in its scabbard until you're ready to cut."
"Peek and Space only," he said. "I promise."
She gave him a sideways look. "You keep your promises better than most men I've known."
He didn't know what to say to that. He watched the wind push a line of ash along a collapsed overpass. "Crystals," he said. "How do we afford Level 2?"
Her mouth tilted. "We don't. Not honestly, anyway." She tapped the railing. "But we plan. We target. We take a contract the other teams think is a waste of time and make it pay."
"What contract?"
"Western Industrial Zone," she said. "Not the easy yards. Deeper. There's a rail depot with a crane assembly. The steel cabling fetches copper-rate if you strip it right, and the pulleys are worth more than Market Control listed last week. Everyone avoids it. It's a maze, it echoes like a drum, and it's got a resident pack that nests in the freight cars. They say there's a Level 3 carrier."
"A carrier?"
"Evolved," she said quietly. "It doesn't just hunt. It gathers. Brings smaller ones back to feed its brood. We've seen what they do at a distance. Not up close."
He pictured a train yard full of open mouths. The steel conduit at his side suddenly looked like a joke. "We shouldn't—"
"We will," Mara said. "Because we can load half the depot into your Space if the path is clear, and because the Level 3 crystal in that carrier will push you to Level 2. And because if we don't take it, someone sloppy will. The pack will follow them home."
He swallowed. "What's the preparation?"
"Two days training. One day scoping. We move on dawn of the fourth, quick and quiet. Your job: learn to see what we can't. And keep your Space open for whatever Linnea points to."
He nodded. "I'll be ready."
"Good. Eat more. You look like a nail. If I hammer you, you'll bend."
He laughed and almost sounded like a child.
Training became a ritual carved into the day.
At sunrise, Peek for time-on-target: Oz set an internal metronome and opened his second sight. He visited the courtyard first, because the staff man's movements taught him patience. He learned to read weight transfer by how the man's toes whitened in the sand, to time exhalations with the staff's hidden circles. He adjusted his own conduit a fraction at a time: an inch shorter for leverage, a strip of canvas at the midpoint for grip, a wrap of wire below the right hand so his fingers always returned to the same place.
At midmorning, Space practice: he cataloged and recalled at speed. Bandage roll, wrench, three screws—stow. Retrieve in reverse order without looking. Close eyes. Five screws—no, six, he corrected, remembering the slightly different weight and the faintly oily smell of the sixth he'd picked from the garage floor. He set tasks for himself. Left hand only. Eyes closed. Count ten objects stowed by touch and recall them in prime-number order. The Space obeyed flawlessly if his mind did.
Afternoons, Peek again—but not for the courtyard. He roamed.
He limited himself to ten minutes total across all peeks. It kept him honest. It also meant he had to choose: cultivation mountains or towered cities of magic; a modern world that wasn't broken or a brutal training hall where men shouted until their throats bled. Each glimpse brought knowledge and a kind of hunger. He watched warriors whose fists cracked stone, then watched the master who stepped aside so gently that the strike fell into a pool without a ripple. He watched mages trace runes in air—some logic he couldn't parse in stillness—and he watched a surgeon in a bright, clean room stitch a wound with speed and mercy that felt like its own magic.
He kept a notebook—two, actually. One for drawings, one for words. He sketched the courtyard from memory: lantern angles, the cedar's roots, the line of the mountains. He wrote: Staff—circle from shoulder, hinge elbow, weight in foot not knee. Breathe at pivot. He wrote: Peek cost: minute one = mild pressure behind eyes; minute three = breath short; minute five = slight hand tremor; minute eight = scalp cold; minute nine = black flicker; minute ten = danger. He drew a simple bar each day marking how far he'd gotten before discomfort forced him out.
At evening, he practiced the staff outside, behind the machine shed, where the ground was crushed brick and weeds. Tomas smoked and watched him with a half-smile. Derek tried to copy once and whacked his own shin so hard he cursed in a language that probably never existed. Linnea adjusted the conduit's balance by adding a thin sleeve of scrap at one end and declared the boy "not hopeless."
Mara supervised without hovering. She didn't correct the staff work because she didn't know it, but she corrected the stance. "Your feet are lying," she'd say. "They say you're ready to run. Put your weight down. Commit."
He did. The staff grew less like a stick and more like an extension of the thought behind his ribs. When he moved it right, it was quiet. When he moved it poorly, it sang a wrong note, a whining metal that made his molars ache.
Nights, he set the Peek aside. He'd learned that peeking with a full day of sweat behind him was like leaning out over a cliff after running stairs; the world tilted. He slept hard and short and woke to the generator's cough without resentment.
Two days of this and he reached nine minutes without the black flicker. He didn't push for ten. He closed the door with a kind of reverence, sat on the floor, and let his breath quiet.
Mara came back from watch and found him there. "How far?"
"Nine. No crash."
"Good." She nudged his shoulder with her knee. "You look less like a nail today. More like a thin screw."
He made a face. "Progress."
She ruffled his hair. "Progress."
The third day was for scouting.
They took a light truck with the plates painted dull to kill the shine. Tomas drove because he listened to the road like it was a suspicious neighbor. Linnea sat beside him with a coil of cable and a magnet, ready to clear traps. Mara rode in back with Derek, both geared but quiet. Oz sat where he could see over the cab.
Redhaven shrank behind them. The western skyline rose: skeletal factories, silos split like rotten teeth, conveyor belts frozen mid-scream. When the wind changed, it sounded like moaning, but Oz knew that was just air in the broken ribs of industry. He also knew actual moaning lived here too.
They parked a kilometer short and went in on foot. Oz kept his staff strapped along his pack, a thing he had not yet earned the right to swing in a fight, but he carried it because it reminded his hands to be ready.
"Eyes up," Mara whispered. "Listen in layers."
Oz listened. First layer: their feet, the click of gravel against boot soles. Second: wind. Third: something irregular, a scrape like a bottle rolling and catching, rolling and catching. Not wind. A slow shape. Fourth: silence too complete around the mouth of a warehouse that should have been full of pigeons years ago. He pointed. Mara nodded and altered their arc by ten degrees, giving that mouth a wide berth.
They reached the edge of the rail depot and crouched behind a carton crusher the size of a shed. The depot spread like a chess board—parallel tracks, rows of freight cars rusted to a darker red, loading cranes that leaned in prayer. The air smelled of old oil and cold meat.
Mara touched Oz's sleeve. "Two minutes."
He nodded. They had a rule: in the field, the Peek was rationed like water. He slid into it carefully.
The overlay arrived: a faint charge in his skull, then the world off to the side, a different depot. He didn't want that one. He wanted this one—but more. The Peek wasn't a telescope; it was a way of stepping around what the eye missed. He learned he could use it to read patterns in this world by briefly brushing an adjacent one. Angles clarified. Shadows behaved. The broken windows shivered in a wind that didn't exist here and, in doing so, revealed where air actually moved.
He traced the currents. Saw where dust wasn't. Saw a line of prints—bare, small, the size of a child's—cross under a car and then scatter into handprints. Not a child. Scavengers didn't crawl by their fingertips.
He followed a thin drift of ash that had settled strangely, as if breathed out of a vent and not shaken by wind. He peered along the rail line until a freighter with a split-top hatch flashed wrong, like a smile. He felt the tug behind his eyes and let the door close at one minute forty-three seconds.
"Talk to me," Mara murmured.
"Under the third car from the crane," Oz said, pointing. "Empty dust where there should be more. Handprints. Something comes and goes there. The open-top car near the switch—inside is darker than it should be. I think it's been packed with nests. The far warehouse—north wall—is quiet. Too quiet. I don't hear birds."
"Good," she said softly. "We start with the cable spools behind the crane. Derek and I clear. Linnea strips. Tomas hauls. You float. If we stir the nest, we drop everything and move east to the fuel bank. Fastest lanes are here and here." She traced lines with a gloved finger in the dust. "If we get separated—"
"Sound off every fifteen seconds until regroup," Oz recited. "If someone is silent, we don't go back unless Mara says so."
Derek grimaced. "I hate that rule."
"I hate funerals more," Mara said.
They moved. Each step was the kind you'd take on a sleeping dog's floorboards. Oz kept his Space open and drew breath through his nose. He helped Linnea lift a spool the size of a man—only he didn't lift, he touched and pulled it into the cold room inside him where weight didn't mean anything and edges didn't scrape skin. They moved down the line: pulleys, brackets, crates of bolts that would trade like coins. Oz kept count. Seventeen items so far. He didn't like to rely on Space's perfect memory; he forced his brain to match it.
At the sixth spool, the air changed. Oz felt it first because the Peek left a thin film in him that made sneaking winds into drumbeats. Mara tensed a hair before he did, which told him she didn't need magic to read the same book.
A sound rolled from the open-top freighter. Not a growl. A gathering. A wet rearrangement. Derek lifted his rifle; Mara's hand on his barrel put it back down without a word. Gunshots turned quiet problems into loud problems.
"Oz," Linnea whispered, "spool."
He touched and folded. Number eighteen. He took the cracked pulley that matched it. Nineteen. The sound in the freighter clung. He felt the pressure behind his eyes—the urge to Peek and know. He pushed it down. Discipline wasn't glamorous, but it kept you walking.
They reached the final spool. Tomas signaled with two fingers angled down: low shape, left. Oz tracked the angle. A shadow like a broken dog moved under the trains. Thin. Testing. If it was a scout, others were belly-crawling out of sight. If it was a lure, the nest was about to pour.
Mara counted with her free hand. Three. Two. One.
They didn't run. They withdrew. There was a difference, learned through the ugly school of not becoming bait. They slid along the rail line, used the dead angles of the cars, and reached the depot edge with the discipline of people who'd learned which movements woke gods and which movements let gods sleep.
Only when the wind changed and brought with it a smell like old soup turned to bone did Mara nod, once, sharp. Run.
They did.
Back at the truck, Tomas didn't start the engine for another thirty seconds. Listening. Ears and steering wheel in the same hand. Then he turned the key and they were moving, tires respectful of the gravel.
Only when Redhaven's towers were closer than the gray behind did anyone exhale fully.
In the yard, Derek spat and grinned the grin of men who confuse not-dying with winning. "That's a good haul, boss."
Mara nodded. "Good, not great. But clean. We come back at dawn tomorrow. Different lane, same rules."
She looked at Oz. "How do you feel?"
He took stock honestly. "Space load is half spent. Peek is fresh because I didn't use it. Legs good. Hands fine."
She gave him a small nod that warmed him more than bread.
That night, Oz wrote in his notebook until the words made a low hum in his skull.
Dimensional Peek training: staff form—weight from ground, wrists passive, circle lives in back, not hands. Timer: 9:00 safe, 9:30 edge, 10:00 dangerous. Use in field only for pattern reading, not curiosity. Curiosity is a tax you pay to death.
He drew the freight cars and shaded the one that felt wrong. He sketched a symbol he'd glimpsed in a tower-world—a zigzag through a circle—and wrote unknown, underlined twice.
He considered Dimensional Jump and shut the thought away, like you close a locker that smells like ocean and lightning and drowning. Not yet. He would not cut a gate he couldn't close.
He turned to a fresh page and wrote: Crystals: path to Level 2.
Under it, he listed prices and the haul they'd need. He did the math and felt the pinch in his chest that wasn't fear but hunger sharpened into something like ambition.
Tomorrow they'd go back. And the day after, if they lived. And if they did that three times, they might have enough to trade for a Level 2 crystal—unless they took the carrier's crystal instead. He didn't relish killing anything, even the dead, but he didn't mistake what world he lived in. It had rules, and one of them said: Eat or be eaten, learn or be lost.
He closed the notebook. The oil lamp threw a trembling circle of light. Mara slept with one hand on the knife under her pillow. Outside, generators coughed. A storm smelled like it might be coming.
He dreamed in faint colors—the courtyard, the cedar, lanterns, breath. The staff master looked at him across worlds and, for the first time, nodded as if he had noticed the boy in the shadow all along.
Dawn made everything new and everything the same. They returned to the depot an hour earlier, moving along a different line. Oz peered but didn't Peek until Mara tapped twice on his elbow.
"Sixty seconds," she said. "Only. Tell me what the world hides."
He opened.
This time, the overlay brought not an adjacent depot but a mountain pass, icy wind scouring stone. The wrong world, but the right lesson: snow had a way of laying out what moved. He blinked and let the logic carry back here. He scanned for the equivalent of tracks: a shimmer of dust in a narrow strip where something passed often. He found it—a path between two storage crates leading to the cab of a crane. He tasted metal in his mouth; not a symbol, a memory. The crane had power once, and something remembered that warmth and slept there.
He shut the door at fifty-four seconds. "Crane cab," he said. "There's a trail. Whatever's here uses it as shelter. We avoid."
"Marked," Mara said. They painted a tiny dot of grease on a rail where only they would look.
The second haul was heavier. Oz folded twenty-three items into Space, then three more after that he hadn't intended to—because as they moved, the nest woke. Not in a rush. In a roll, like a bed of snakes deciding to become a river. He felt the headache start too early—Now?—and wanted badly to Peek to track the flood. Discipline held. They followed their marked lanes, used cover, denied the depot's echo. A single low call followed them and then died away, as if their choice not to engage had left the nest unsure.
On the return, they passed a team on the way out. Six men, two women. Bravado carried in their boots. One wore a necklace of spent brass and smiled like teeth had never mattered.
"Morning, Giggs," he said. "How's the scrap fairy?"
Mara's smile was polite and empty. "Light on her feet."
The man's gaze slid to Oz. "And that's your purse, huh?" He thumped the side of the truck. "You got weight in there, kid? Or is it all tricks?"
Oz kept his eyes on the horizon. He had learned—with Mara's hand lightly on his wrist—when to be smaller than he was.
They passed without trouble. The man's laugh followed, but laughs break into pieces when the wind has opinions, and the wind out here did.
Back inside the base, Market Control tried to shave ten percent off the copper rate. Linnea argued with the precise fury of someone who measures twice and cuts once. Tomas told a joke that sounded like gravel laughing. Derek found a way to acquire two onions that might have actually been bulbs of another plant, but boiled, they promised to taste like victory. Mara paid an old woman to sharpen Oz's conduit. The old woman didn't ask why a boy needed a staff. She had been a girl once.
That night, Oz hit ten minutes. Not in the field. Not flashy. He chose the courtyard, watched the master draw a circle that wasn't a circle but a spiral, and let the minute hand in his head roll past eight, nine, ten. The pressure behind his eyes built into a clean pain. He took it like you take weight under a bar: not with pride, with attention.
When he closed the Peek, he didn't black out. He swooned, sat down hard, and laughed because he was still breathing.
Mara, sitting cross-legged across the room, didn't ask the number. He told her anyway. "Ten."
She didn't say good or careful or finally. She just slid half her ration bread across the floor. He knew what that meant. Strength feeds strength.
He slept and did not dream.
On the fourth morning, they went to the depot with a plan to steal from a god.
It had rained in the night. Water blurred tracks. Wind tore old notices from chain link and sent them flapping like surrender flags. They cut across last time's path and angled toward the far end, where a line of tank cars squatted under a rotten awning.
The air had that soup-bone smell again. Mara's voice was barely the ghost of a whisper. "Stay tight."
Oz held the staff in his left hand, Space open in his right mind, Peek closed for now. He did not want to know everything. He wanted to know enough.
They reached the pulleys and stripped them. He packed two lengths of chain—numbers twenty-four and twenty-five—then a gearbox that made Space tremble as it crossed the threshold. He almost smiled; even his pocket universe respected heavy things.
Derek paused, head cocked. Tomas froze mid-breath. Linnea's hand touched the crane's cold frame. Mara's knife lifted, point down, the way she held it when she was tired of lying to the air.
The carrier arrived on all fours.
It moved like a memory of a panther someone had described to another person who had described it to a blind god. Long, low, braided with tendon. Its head still had the architecture of a human face, but not the priorities. Eyes a pale, patient blue. When it opened its mouth, it did not roar. It tasted the world with a sound, and the sound bent back.
Oz felt the Peek reach for him in reflex, the way your hand reaches for a rail when the stair shifts. He denied it. Not yet. He watched the carrier the hard way.
It studied them as if choosing which problem to solve first. Mara solved the choice by throwing a bolt into the shadows to their left. The carrier's head snapped. Sound poured. From under two cars, five thin shapes slid. The pack. The carrier had what the base whispers said: a brood smell. They followed it like iron follows a magnet.
"East," Mara breathed.
They moved. Not fast. Right. Derek took the right flank, Tomas the left, Linnea in the center, Oz three steps behind Mara where the space bent with her pace. The pack circled. The carrier padded parabolic arcs, setting a net. Oz felt his heart beat in the place where Space lived and wanted, badly, to open the Peek and map the angles.
At the second switch, Mara took them over the track bed—gravel sliding, the soft noise of betrayal. The pack surged. Derek lifted his rifle, face a book called Fine, Then. Mara's hand pushed it down again, so hard his elbow would welt later.
"Quiet," she hissed. "We will lose a gunfight with an echo."
Oz counted steps. They were three turns from their exit, two turns from the wrong lane. He saw the wrong lane—dark, pure, inviting—and put his body on the correct one by trusting the map they had drawn in dust days ago. The carrier flowed to cut them, then paused, scenting the air. Something in their line offended it: discipline has a smell predators don't like.
"Right," Mara said, the word a hair on breath.
They went right. The shadow to the left dragged a fraction too late. A packling lunged and scraped Tomas's boot soul to heel; Linnea's hand brushed and it fell silent, its skull opening like a cut fruit that didn't bleed properly. Linnea had a way with metal and bones were sometimes honest about being metal. They made the fence break at the corner. The carrier came then—not leaping, not foolish—closing the distance with unargumentative inevitability.
Oz felt the door in his chest shake. He could Jump. He could pull Mara with him. He could escape the problem and land them somewhere else and survive by abandoning the rest of the math. He didn't. He would not. This world had taught him a rule and he would not betray it: Do not survive alone on purpose.
Instead, he chose the smallest risk. He Peeked for three seconds. No more.
The world gave him a gift: a glint where a drain cut the concrete, a slick that would turn paws to slide. He shut the door, pointed. Mara nodded. They shifted a step left. When the carrier lunged, its front right foot hit the slick. Its weight went wrong. It corrected perfectly—too perfectly, the way a dancer trained on stages slides on gravel. A fraction of overcorrection opened a gap; they filled it with their bodies passing. They didn't hit. They weren't there when it bit.
Then they were under the chain-link breach, then in the weeds, then moving without choosing. The carrier followed hard until the edge of its map—territory matters to predators more than hunger when hunger can return tomorrow. It stopped, loomed, breathed a sound that marked them, and retreated as if pulled by a thread back to the brood.
They didn't slow for a full kilometer.When they did, all five laughed, the raw laughter of nerves burning off poison.
Back inside Redhaven, Market Control tried to pay the old copper rate for the chain. Linnea put the gearbox on the scale and the scale complained. Prices rose by the time it finished groaning. Tomas acquired something that might really be an onion this time. Derek found the same baker and left with bread again and perhaps something like a promise. Mara bought nothing for herself. She turned her script into a single small vial—a stimulant for emergencies—and a Level 1 crystal to start their climb.
She pressed the crystal into Oz's palm in their quiet room. "Not yet," she said. "After stew. And after sleep. And after you show me tomorrow that you can do ten minutes without looking proud about it."
He closed his fingers around the crystal and felt the whispering thrum in its heart answer the thrum inside him. "I'll earn it," he said.
"You already did," she replied. "This is just interest."
He didn't sleep right away. He stood in the dim and held his staff and practiced the soft circle until the conduit stopped singing wrong. He imagined the courtyard, but he didn't Peek. He had learned the virtue of absence. When he finally lay down, the generator's cough felt like a big animal's purr. He thought of the carrier's eyes and didn't shake. He thought of the crane cab and realized he had not been afraid while they were there, only awake.
He slept and woke before the whistle again. He ate. He trained. He watched the staff master in the courtyard and reached ten minutes without the pain turning jagged. He closed the door gently and went to Mara and said nothing and she understood everything because that is what siblings learn to do when the world stops asking permission to break them.
At midmorning, they went to the market and traded the chain for two more medpacks and a promise of a fair rate tomorrow. At noon, Oz timed his Peek at six minutes and then stopped even though he wanted to keep tasting the other world's air. At afternoon, he practiced Space retrieval blindfolded while Derek tried to distract him by telling a story about a woman and a saw blade that made no sense and less morality. At evening, they ate onion stew and it was actually onion and he almost cried at the sweetness.
Later, Mara set the Level 1 crystal on the table between them and said, "Tomorrow, we go back for the carrier. Not to chase it. To catch it chasing us." She looked at him. "We will need you to see the lines and not draw any."
He nodded. He would not Jump. He would not be the knife you swing when you can still walk away uncut. He would be the eye. He would be the pocket that let them carry home the future. He would be the student who learned from a man beneath a cedar in a world that might never know his name. He would be the boy who planned, because planning was the only way he'd live long enough to become anything else.
He held the crystal up. Its light was a small, stubborn thing. It felt familiar.
He thought of levels and ranks and all the foolish ways people speak about power like it's a staircase you climb with your teeth. He thought of breath, and ground, and letting the earth carry you. He thought of Mara's hand stopping Derek's gun and changing death into time.
"Level 2," he said quietly, testing the shape of the words. Not now. Not yet. Soon.
He put the crystal away—Space rippled and calmed—and blew out the lamp. In the dark, he practiced a quiet thing more dangerous than any blade: he counted his minutes and did not lie to himself about what they cost.