I slept on a cot in the back room and didn't dream.
Or maybe I did dream and the city took those too.
When I woke, grey light was pressing through a small window near the ceiling. For one half-second I thought I was home. Then the smell hit me — smoke and iron and that sweet rot underneath everything — and I remembered exactly where I was.
I sat up.
Riven was already awake, sitting at a small table near the door, sharpening a knife with slow, careful strokes. He didn't look up.
"You slept four hours," he said. "That's more than most people get their first night here."
"Is that good?"
"It means the city hasn't decided to break you yet." He tested the blade against his thumb. "Eat something."
There was bread and something dark in a bowl on the table beside my cot. I didn't ask what the dark thing was. I ate it.
"The assessment point," Riven said as I ate. "It's in the Wrath District. A building called the Iron Mark. Every unranked person who enters the city has seventy-two hours to get assessed before the gangs are legally allowed to do whatever they want with them."
I stopped chewing. "Legally."
"The Lords established rules for a reason. Order is profitable." He stood and sheathed the knife. "You've been in the city roughly eight hours. You have sixty-four hours left. We go this morning."
"What happens at the assessment?"
"They measure your sin energy. Rank you. Brand you."
"Brand."
"Small mark on the wrist." He pulled back his sleeve briefly. On the inside of his left wrist was a mark — like a small stylized flame, dark against his skin. "Shows your rank to anyone who knows how to read it. Changes as you advance." He covered it again. "It also connects you to the sin network. Makes you official."
I thought about what he'd said last night. The network that ran under the city, connecting everyone with sin energy. The small silence where the Void had spread.
"Will they be able to feel the Void energy during the assessment?"
Riven looked at me for the first time that morning.
"Yes," he said. "Which is why we need to discuss something before we go."
He sat down across from me.
"The assessors work for the Lords. Not directly — they maintain a fiction of independence — but their reports go up the chain. When they assess you, they'll record your sin type." He paused. "I need you to understand what it means when they write down Void."
"You said it was rare."
"I said I'd never seen it. That's different from rare." He laced his fingers together on the table. "There are records. Old ones, in the Black Archive. They mention Void energy twice in the last three hundred years. Both times—" He stopped.
"Both times what?"
"Both times the person carrying it died within a month of being identified."
The bread sat heavy in my stomach.
"Who killed them?"
"The records don't say. Just that they died." He met my eyes. "I'm not telling you this to frighten you. I'm telling you so you understand why, when the assessor asks you to demonstrate your ability, you show them something small. Controlled. Nothing that looks like what you did in the street yesterday."
"I don't know how to control it."
"I know. So we practice before we go."
He stood and moved to the center of the room, pushing a table aside with his foot to clear space.
"Hold out your hand," he said.
I did.
"Close your eyes."
I did.
"Think about yesterday. The moment before it happened. What did you feel?"
I went back to it. The boot on my back. The hand reaching for my bag. The helplessness. And underneath the helplessness—
"Fear," I said. "And something else. Something colder."
"The cold is the Void. Fear triggered it, but the cold is the actual power." His voice was steady, instructional. "I want you to find the cold without the fear. Just the cold."
I tried.
It was like trying to find a specific thread in a dark room by touch alone. I knew it was there — I could feel the memory of it. But reaching for it deliberately felt like trying to catch water in cupped hands.
"I can't—"
"You can. Stop trying to grab it. Just notice it."
I stopped trying to grab it.
And there it was.
Not a door swinging open this time. Just a presence. Quiet and still, the way deep water is still — not because nothing is there, but because what's there is so large that the surface doesn't show it.
"I feel it," I said.
"Good. Now just let it exist. Don't push it anywhere. Don't pull anything."
I held it there. Just the cold presence, sitting in my chest like a stone.
"Open your eyes."
I opened them.
Riven was staring at my hand. Specifically at the shadow beneath it, which had deepened unnaturally, as if the light in the room was slightly avoiding the space around my palm.
"That," he said quietly, "is what you show the assessor. A minor effect. Unexplained shadow distortion." He looked up. "Not what you showed that gang yesterday."
I let the cold settle back. The shadow normalized.
"How do you know so much about Void if you've never seen it?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because I've spent nine years in this city trying to understand everything I could about the sin system." He picked up his jacket from a hook by the door. "And because six months ago, someone started asking very careful questions about Void energy in the Black Archive."
"Who?"
He pulled his jacket on. "The name they used in the archive request was false. But the handwriting on the request—" He stopped. Seemed to decide something. "Matched the handwriting on a trade contract I once saw signed by a man named Kael."
The room felt suddenly smaller.
"My brother was researching Void energy."
"Six months ago. Yes."
"Why?"
"That," Riven said, opening the door, "is what I'd very much like to know."
The Iron Mark was a squat, heavy building near the center of the Wrath District, set back from the main street behind a short wall. Two guards stood at the entrance, wearing no gang colors — neutral marks on their shoulders, the kind that said we work for the system, not for a side.
A small queue of people waited outside. Maybe twelve. They ranged from a boy who looked barely fifteen — thin, nervous, eyes jumping to every sound — to a large woman with the kind of stillness that suggested she'd been in fights before and had stopped finding them interesting.
We joined the back of the queue.
Riven said nothing. I said nothing. After a few minutes the queue moved and we filed inside.
The interior was a single large room. High ceiling, bare stone walls, torches in iron brackets providing orange light that made everyone look slightly feverish. At the far end were three desks behind a low railing, each staffed by a person in grey robes. Assessors.
The queue moved steadily. People went to the desks, held out their hands, went through a process I couldn't fully see from where I stood, and then were directed to one of three doors on the far wall. Left door, middle door, right door. I watched the pattern.
Left door for the lower ranks. Most people went left.
Middle for the middle ranks. A few went middle.
Right door — nobody went right while I was watching.
"What's through the right door?" I murmured to Riven.
"Sin Champions and above," he said quietly. "Rarely used."
"Has anyone ever gone through who shouldn't have?"
He glanced at me. "Not in my experience."
The queue moved. The boy who looked fifteen went to the desk. I watched his face while the assessor worked — he winced once, then looked surprised, then was directed to the left door. He went through looking slightly relieved.
The large woman went next. Something happened at her assessment that made the assessor sit up straighter. She was directed to the middle door. She went through without expression.
Then it was my turn.
I walked to the desk.
The assessor was a middle-aged woman with close-cropped grey hair and the kind of eyes that had processed too many people for any individual person to be very interesting. She had a small device in her hand — a short rod of black metal with a faintly glowing tip.
"Hand," she said.
I held out my right hand, palm up.
She touched the rod to the center of my palm.
It was cold. Much colder than I expected. For a moment nothing happened, and then—
She went very still.
The rod in her hand had stopped glowing. Not dimmed — stopped. Gone completely dark.
Around us, the low-level hum of other assessments continued. But at this desk, the woman in grey robes was staring at my palm with an expression I couldn't read.
"Hold still," she said. Her voice was carefully flat.
She tapped the rod twice, like someone trying to restart a device that had stopped working. Nothing. She set it down and picked up a different instrument — a small glass disc — and held it over my palm.
The disc frosted over immediately.
"Name," she said.
"Aren."
"Origin?"
"Outside the city."
"Sin type."
I thought of Riven's coaching. Minor effect. Controlled. Nothing alarming.
"I'm not sure," I said. "I don't have much experience with—"
"Sin type," she repeated.
"Shadow distortion," I said. "Minor. Inconsistent."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she wrote something on the paper in front of her. I couldn't see what.
She pressed a stamp to my left wrist. It burned cold — not hot, cold — for about three seconds. When she lifted the stamp, there was a mark on my wrist. I looked at it.
It was not the simple shape Riven had shown me.
It was a small mark like a circle with something missing from the center. As if someone had tried to draw something and the ink had refused to fill the middle.
"Rank: Ember," the woman said, in the same flat voice. "Report to the integration office through the left door within forty-eight hours."
She gestured to the left door.
I walked toward it.
Just before I pushed through, I glanced back.
The assessor was not writing. She was not moving to the next person in line. She was sitting very still, looking at the dark rod in her hand.
And then she reached under her desk and pressed something I couldn't see.
A signal.
I pushed through the door.
Riven was waiting on the other side. He took one look at my face and then at the mark on my wrist and went very still himself.
"That's not a standard Ember mark," he said.
"No."
"She pressed something under the desk."
"Yes."
He looked at the mark for one more second. Then he took my arm and started walking.
"We need to move," he said quietly. "Now."
"Where?"
"Somewhere that isn't here. In about ten minutes, someone is going to come through that building looking for whoever just broke three assessment instruments." He pulled me around a corner into a narrower street. "And we need to be very far away when they arrive."
Behind us, through the walls of the Iron Mark, I heard a door open.
And footsteps. Fast ones.
We ran.