Saturday morning dawned grey and drizzly—perfect weather for staying indoors, according to Mrs. Evans. "A perfect day for movies and hot chocolate!" she announced, already pulling blankets from the linen closet.
Astraea sat at the small kitchen table, pushing cereal around her bowl. The milk tasted like dust, the cereal like cardboard. Her dragon senses, heightened by starvation, rebelled against the human food. It was empty calories. Noise without nutrition.
"Not hungry, sweetie?" Mrs. Evans asked, noticing her untouched breakfast.
"I ate earlier," Astraea lied smoothly. "I was up before dawn. Couldn't sleep."
This was true, in a way. The hunger pains had kept her awake, a deep gnawing in her core that human food couldn't touch.
Mrs. Evans smiled, misunderstanding. "Growing pains! I remember when my nephew hit his growth spurt—up at all hours, eating everything in sight!" She paused. "Though you're not eating much…"
"I'll have extra hot chocolate," Astraea promised, offering her best child-smile.
The plan formed as Mrs. Evans settled into her Saturday routine: laundry, then her weekly video call with her sister in another state. The call always lasted at least an hour. That was her window.
It was a small gate, one of dozens that dotted the city's infrastructure. Not a glorious tear in reality like Alpha-7, but a practical, engineered thing—a mana tap into the deeper flows, regulated and controlled. Boring. Unimportant.
Perfect.
At 10:17 AM, Mrs. Evans started her call. Astraea heard the familiar greeting through the bedroom door: "Hi, Sarah! Yes, the weather here is dreadful…"
She moved quickly. A hooded jacket over her clothes. Sneakers. She left a note on her bed in careful, childlike handwriting: Gone to library. Back soon. -Raea
The library was three blocks away, in the opposite direction from Gate Theta-9. A plausible destination. A safe alibi.
The drizzle had become proper rain by the time she slipped out the apartment's back door, down the fire escape. Her small form moved through alleyways and side streets, avoiding main roads where someone might recognize Mrs. Evans' foster child out alone.
The hunger guided her. It was a compass in her chest, pointing toward mana. Her dragon senses, usually carefully muted, opened like flowers to the rain. She could feel the city's mana flows—thin streams of energy running along ley lines, tapped and channeled by human engineering. Most of it tasted stale, processed, like filtered water compared to the spring-fresh flow from Alpha-7.
But Theta-9… as she drew closer, she felt it. A steady pulse of raw mana, barely processed. It called to her core like water in a desert.
The gate facility was underwhelming: a fenced compound about the size of a tennis court, containing a single concrete building and a small, shimmering circle of stabilized energy about two meters across. A bored-looking security guard sat in a booth near the gate, reading something on his phone. Rain pattered against the chain-link fence.
Astraea watched from behind a dumpster across the street. Her dragon sight analyzed the scene: no magical wards, no surveillance beyond the standard cameras. The guard was human, non-Awakened. The fence was standard issue.
But between her and the gate: twenty meters of open pavement, visible from the guard booth.
She needed distraction. Or invisibility.
Her glamour could bend light, but not perfectly. Not for twenty meters in daylight with rain revealing distortions. She needed the guard's attention elsewhere.
A memory surfaced—an old trick from a century when she'd needed to sneak past castle guards. Not magic. Psychology.
She focused on a puddle near the guard booth, gathering a tiny fraction of her remaining mana. Not for a spell. For a suggestion. A manipulation of moisture and light.
The puddle shimmered. Ripples spread from its center, though no rain fell into it. A shape seemed to move beneath the water's surface—something small, animal-like.
The guard glanced up from his phone, frowning at the puddle. He stood, peering out his booth window.
Now.
Astraea moved, a small grey blur in the rain. She reached the fence, her fingers finding holds in the chain-link that shouldn't have been there for a child. She was over in three seconds, dropping silently to the wet asphalt on the other side.
The gate pulsed ahead of her, a circle of shimmering silver energy contained within a ring of copper and crystal. It was beautiful in its utility, like a well-made tool. The mana flowing from it smelled of ozone and deep earth.
She didn't have time for reverence. She reached the gate's containment ring and placed her hands against it.
And fed.
It wasn't the delicate sipping of her CYAP visits. This was drinking. Gulping. Her core opened like a parched mouth, and mana flooded in. The gate's output, steady at 3.7 units per hour, suddenly spiked as she drew from its reservoir, from the deeper flows it tapped.
The numbers scrolled, a glorious counterpoint to the feeling of fullness spreading through her limbs. The cold hollow in her chest warmed. The trembling in her hands stilled. Her wing buds hummed back to life, a contented purr of resumed growth.
She lost track of time. There was only the flow, the healing, the rightness of proper nourishment after days of starvation.
"Hey! Kid!"
The shout shattered her focus. The guard was out of his booth, coming toward her at a jog. He'd finished investigating the puddle.
Astraea yanked her hands back, breaking the connection. Her core, now at 47%, protested the sudden cessation. She turned, already crafting her story: lost child, curious about the pretty lights…
But the guard's expression wasn't angry. It was alarmed. He was looking past her, at the gate.
She followed his gaze.
The gate, which had been a stable silver circle, was flickering. Colors danced across its surface—not the usual shimmer, but frantic, unstable flashes. A low hum had become a whine.
Two to three minutes was longer than she had.
"What did you do?" the guard demanded, reaching for his radio. "This is a restricted area! You—"
Astraea didn't wait for the rest. She ran, not toward the fence, but toward the back of the compound where she'd spotted a delivery gate. It was locked, but the lock was simple. A touch of focused mana—a spark not of silver but of void-cold negation—and it clicked open.
She slipped through just as the guard's radio crackled to life. "Theta-9 reporting minor gate fluctuation. Possibly weather-related. Investigating."
The rain swallowed her, and she ran, her newly replenished core fueling legs that could have outrun any human child. But she made herself slow to a jog, then a walk. Just a kid caught in the rain. Nothing to see.
Back in her room an hour later, dripping wet but buzzing with mana, she checked her status.
She'd done it. She'd fed. But as she toweled her hair dry, listening to Mrs. Evans still chatting with her sister, the reality settled in.
She'd left evidence. A destabilized gate. A guard who'd seen her.
And worse: the hunger, now temporarily sated, would return. Stronger. Sooner.
The gate excursions couldn't be a one-time solution. They'd have to become routine.
And every time she fed, she risked exposure.
[System notification!]
[Quest complete: 'Weekend adventure!']
[Objective: Explore your neighborhood! (You certainly did!)]
[Reward: 'Explorer' Title, +5 to Adventure stat]
[Note: Going on adventures helps us learn about the world! Just be safe!]
Astraea looked at the cheerful notification, then out her window toward where Theta-9 still hummed in the rain.
Safe. The word felt very, very far away.
Tonight: warmth and fullness. Tomorrow: planning the next hunt. The hunger had been fed, but the need had become a cycle.