Chapter One
The first person I tried to kill with a shadow was my sister. I had removed my only pair of stockings and left them to dry by the fire while I relieved myself. Remil had taken the socks, unraveled them into two useless piles of thread, and then laughed when she’d seen my face drop. We’d just had our first snow. Not the kind that sticks. The wet kind that melts as soon as it touches your skin and makes the air a damp blanket. I’d stood in the slush in ratty boots made from old tire strips glued together while the only family I had cackled like an angry fire. She had always been, what our mother liked to say, “rotten like the canal water. Stinking like the trash pyramids piled in the streets.”
We were under a bridge, with only the fading embers of a furtive fire projecting any amount of light. It was enough, though, to cast a shadow, and I gathered what little darkness I could and shaped it into a small shiv. I stabbed the blade into Remil’s neck, but before it could go too deep, an Enforcer shined his light on us, dissolving my creation and saving my sister’s life. She had stopped laughing.
The first person I actually killed with a shadow was the Enforcer. He had turned to ask my sister what had happened, and the light from his lamp had fallen across my body, casting a perfect shadowy reflection on the cracked cement wall. Just as the word Umbravant, a title given to those who tangle with darkness, left her lips, I reached into the shadow, removed the part that was my left arm, crafted a wicked hunting knife, and drove it into his back.
That was four years ago. I haven’t seen my sister since, but I hope she learned a lesson that night. I certainly did. Make sure you always have a reliable light source.
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“Adreaz! Miggins snaps a finger in my face and holds the lantern in front of the contraption we built from used wires, old ribbon, a broken lamp, and some chewing gum to hold an intricate key mold. The key’s shadow materializes on the brick wall behind me.
“Right. Sorry.” I peel the shadow from the wall, close my eyes, and use my fingernails to carve out the details I’ve memorized. Some objects are easy to fashion. I can use raw shadow for a club or cloak, for instance. To build a doorway or to lay a tripping wire. But to craft something like a key where every cut, bite, and ward must perfectly match the intended lock is anything but simple. When we first got the mission to break into the home of Odlo Henerick, one of the gold ring members of the Backtrix, I snuck over, cast a mold of the lock with foam Miggins nicked from a factory, and then stared at it for a week, memorizing every curve, chip, groove, and twist.
“You doing okay?” I ask Miggins. I turn away each time I have to breathe as the fog of my exhalations interferes with the shadows. Soft snow falls, but we are under a tattered canvass awning that shields a boarded-up school that used to train upper-level Backtrix children in the arts of coercion, manipulation, and fear-mongering. What they call leadership.
“Getting a bit of a cramp in my hand,” Miggins says. His deep voice is steady despite the cold and nerves. “But it’ll hold.”
I turn to breathe but don’t open my eyes. I manipulate the shadows. Miggens facilitates the deals, acquires supplies, collects payments, and, most importantly, holds the light. While it might seem difficult to sculpt a shadow into tangible perfection, it is even more challenging to hold a steady light for upwards of an hour to keep it from shifting or vanishing. One slip of the hand while I’m sculpting and all the work I’ve done on this key could disappear.
“Almost there.” I etch out the fine lines on the cut and open my eyes. A raw shadow is like a balloon filled with sand. It looks like it would be feathery, but it is dense and challenging to work with. The objects yielded by the umbrage are also heavy. Darkness is the absence of light and the accumulation of everything else. I shake my left wrist and hold the finished key with my right. “Done.”
“Has Henerick left?” Miggins stares at me through rounded glasses he built from old wine bottles, tar, and a busted telescope. His eyes are dark, contrasting the red hair he wears shaved close to his head.
I check in with the shadows by the front door. “No,” they whisper to me.
“He’s still inside,” I tell Miggins. “We have to wait.”
He grunts. I glance at his hand, just beginning to wobble with fatigue. His forearms are massive, like the arms of a bridge builder or a boar wrestler. He spends much time in the junkyards tossing pipes and tires to stay in shape. Most people think Miggins is a thug, but I know he would rather be in his sleeping bag reading comics than picking fights.
“My contact said Henerick would be gone two hours after the night bells,” he says. “We’re going on two and a half.”
“Do you think it’s a setup?” I nod to a three-legged stool propped against the other side of the alley, and we move in unison to place the key on the stool and the lantern across the way where the light can maintain a shadow.
Once I have created an object, I can sustain it without the primary light source as long as there are shadows around to pull from and as long as I have the energy to keep them intact.
Miggins shakes out his arms. I crack my knuckles, a habit my sister used to hit me upside the head for.
“I don’t feel great about this one,” he admits.
I don’t either, but I don’t say it aloud. A thick snowflake falls and then lands on his cheek. We’ve risked more for less in the past. For this job, it doesn’t matter how tightly Miggens’s stomach twists or my heart thumps. The money our contact offered would enable us to buy the building we’ve been squatting in. We’d ascend at least five classes in the Backtrix system.
He spins a metal ring around his finger and taps his toe. My mother told me nerves are contagious, carried by water droplets in the air and inhaled by anyone nearby. I hold my breath as his foggy exhalation dances toward my lips. Only one of us can afford to be afraid. Even then, it’s dangerous.
“If it is a setup,” I say, pressing down on my knee when I realize my foot is also rapping. “I’ll just portal us out. We’re good, Migz.”
A door creaks open in my mind. I hear the wood scraping, the handle turning. I hold a finger up to Miggins and glance down the alley to the street lamp casting shadows on the front door we cannot see. I move my consciousness to inhabit the shadows there, tucked into the darkness at the side of the building. I watch through smoky eyes as a man with a long red coat, a wide-brimmed hat, and a mask depicting what looks like a black leather vulture’s face steps onto the threshold. These masks are common for the top three tiers of the Backtrix to wear. They don’t want the rest of us to see them. To touch them. To spread our diseases and filth. They don’t wish to smell us. The man, who must be Odlo Henerick, turns a key like the one I just created in the lock, peers around with a carrion eater’s stare, and takes off down the street. He carries a package wrapped in newspaper under one arm. I leave the shadows and look at Miggins.
“He’s gone. But he took something with him.”
“You think it’s what we’re after?”
“It’s a package.”
“We gotta go in, Adz. No relic, no money.”
There had been no call this time, no in-person meeting. Only a card with instructions left on the dusty cement next to our sleeping bags in the abandoned building.
Retrieve relic from Odlo Henerick by the eighth day of Kestren. Relic will be hidden inside a clock the size of a dinner plate. Intel indicates it is in the study. Third floor. Do not open the clock. Payment will be ten million pfrontens. Paid when the relic is handed over. We will find you.
“This one looks like it will be alarmed,” he says.
I try not to think about it. My powers can do nothing against a security system. Certainly, Odlo Henerick will have protected his home with more than a lock, but we will have to deal with that once the door pops. Maybe we can run, grab the clock, and portal out before the Enforcers arrive.
Ten million pfrontens are enough to warrant Miggins and me buying our own masks. I think about the food we can eat once we get the money. My last meal was yesterday evening, a watery helping of day-old gull stew. I’m not even sure the meat was really gull. The thin, sharp bones led me to believe it was a mouse. Hopefully killed with a knife and not poison, and hopefully fresh.
That’s why we’re breaking into a dangerous man’s house to find a clock. For the chance to put something other than poisoned rodent into our bodies.
I smoothen out my long coat, a patchwork of various black fabrics I’ve sewn together. A bit from a torn sheet here, a strip from an old leather couch there. The satin ribbon from a robe. Pieces from the clothes of the dead I snatched before the collectors picked them up. The inside is lined with rat fur. Miggins wears a similar coat. We are like twins, birthed from unwanted refuse.
“You ready?” He rolls his shoulders and shakes his arm again. If there is no alarm, we can take a break after we enter. We won’t need the key again once we’re in. We can proceed in darkness. We just have to remain vigilant if I am required to weave shadows for a quick escape.
I nod and retrieve the key. As soon as I hold it, the connection with the undercurrents pulls me down. I fight against the tug to stay upright and to keep the magical connection in place. We must hurry, or my brain will tire, and I’ll be unable to maintain the link. Miggens picks up the lantern. Our footfalls leave prints in the thin layer of snow, but the weather callers say the storm will dump all night, covering any trace we hid in the alley or even that there was a we.
Miggens follows me to the front door. It is past the night bells. We are not supposed to be out. If someone catches us and sees what I carry in my hand, they will send us to Krow, that forsaken prison in the sea for Arcanari, those of us gifted with a connection to the undercurrents. Arcanari are considered valuable if they are under the control of the Backtrix. Otherwise, we are enemies of order. Miggens is a cogwright. The undercurrents don’t speak to him. His only crime is aligning with me and breaking into houses.
The street is empty, silent in both directions save the imperceptible sound of snow falling on snow. We creep up the stairs to the door, an old wooden thing looming ten feet high and five feet wide, carved with spirals and whirls, stars and moons. Symbols made by wierwards, Backtrix priests, to protect the home from outsiders. I suppose the symbols, or better yet, the intricate locking system of the door, work on the normal poor. They don’t work on Arcanari beggars.
Miggens’s head whips back and forth. He holds the light and keeps the watch. I wield the shadows and crack the doors.
If the man in the red coat and mask wasn’t Oldo, or if it was Odlo carrying the package we need…so many variables for this aren’t right. I stick the key into the lock and close my eyes, willing my energy to maintain its shape. Slowly, I turn it to the left. One turn. One click. In the quiet, the click sounds like a gunshot. Another rotation and the second mechanism falls out of place. The click reverberates down the street. The final rotation. The final click. I hold my breath, turn the handle, and push open the door, grateful the hinges have been oiled and maintained. It opens silently like the falling snow, like the shadows waiting for me to call upon them. No alarm sounds.
Miggens and I slink into the darkened foyer. I close the door, triple lock it, and we both bend over, taking deep breaths. I drop the key, freeing myself from the pressured bond. The key disintegrates before thumping against the floor. Another silent, falling object.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. I stand and stretch my arms, feeling light as a raven’s bone. Crafted shadows are heavy, but it is the pull from the undercurrents that really drains me. When I wield the magic, it is as if someone has attached lead pipes to my arms and legs, fingers and toes, to the tip of my nose. The magic wrenches everything to the ground, to itself. I can only withstand that kind of pressure for so long.
Miggens pats my shoulder, fastens the bulky lantern to a rope across his body, and pulls a candle from one of many pockets. We will need that lantern again if I am forced to open a portal.
A match strike hisses in the darkness, and his face becomes visible through the wavering flame. Freckles dot his nose and cheeks. We’ve been best friends and business partners for the last three years. Occasionally, our partnership includes added benefits when we’ve had too much to drink or give in to the unending loneliness of life as pariahs. It’s an odd relationship, but it’s the closest to family I’ve got. Even if Remil is still alive, she’s rusted beyond repair.
“All good,” I say, even though my blood runs slow and the brain fog hasn’t passed. “To the third floor.” I flick my gaze down the dark hallway toward a staircase at the back of the house. Neither Miggens nor I are talkers, which is good because almost all of our work requires being invisible. There are Arcanari with that power, the Invisus. The Backtrix fear them second most because they run on secrets. Secrets thrive on control. Arcanari threaten the power to maintain both.
The ones they fear most are supposedly all dead. Captured and killed off many years ago. The illusorides.
A towering ceiling held up by striped black and white columns looms above us. I peer into the alcoves on the sides of the hall, between the pillars. A rusty, contorted thing resembling a ladder stretching toward the ceiling, with flowers fashioned from wires and cogs hanging off it like ivy on a north-facing wall, emerges on one side. In another, the dark shape of a human-sized bird spreads its wings and gazes to the sky, the long, sharp beak highlighted by the streetlights from the window beyond. The bird doesn’t move, and I assume it is dead and stuffed.
We’ve broken into enough homes to understand not everyone sleeps in old sacks on concrete floors. There are those with beds that stand three feet off the ground with towering pillars draped in velvet and silk. Those who keep parrots and tigers as pets. I’ve seen fountains dyed gold and libraries with more books than I knew existed. Whatever Odlo Henerick keeps in his alcoves is just another reminder of what separates him from the rest of us.
We slink up the staircase. Still no alarm. No startled cries. The second floor is as silent as the world after the night bells. The doors here are all closed, and I don’t care what lurks behind them. I just want to get the ten million pfrontens so Miggens and I can get a place to live and not have to steal for the rest of our lives. I don’t need a tiger or a giant bird. I just want freedom and a bit of dignity.
We reach the third floor. My heart pounds, and beads of sweat form along my hairline even though the home is bitterly cold. I open the first door to my left. Miggens shines the candle, and I am guided inside by the swirling fog of my breath. Piles of discarded objects, which an untrained eye would see as trash, fill the room. Pyramids of broken pipes, rusted nails, lopsided furniture, threadbare clothing, soleless shoes, and toy trains. Upper Backtrix members gather these objects to keep them from the hands of the poor. If the collectors don’t get to them first to take them to the incinerators, the rich send servants to fetch them and toss them into store rooms.
We are all collectors in Evenzo. Even the poor. We collect rocks, leaves, tufts of animal fur. Collections we display and cherish and care for. Objects are currency here. Miggens has the femur bone of a long-extinct animal laid next to his sleep sack. It is nearly as tall as I am and a pain to haul around, but it is a great treasure, one he won in a game of Shackle that I rigged. It would be easier to let it go, but then who would we be? Who would any of us be without our possessions?
I stare longingly at a pair of boots covered in black lace and leather stars and pull the door shut. The next room is also for storage and is filled floor to ceiling with wooden crates painted red with black lettering forming one word on every box. Undercurrent.
I glance at Miggens, who shakes his head.
“No time,” he whispers.
I linger in the doorway, eyeing the nearest crate. I don’t care about pieces of art or piles of trash, okay, maybe a little, but I am intrigued to learn more about magic. What I know was crudely taught to me by my mother and then through trial and error after she was gone. How could the Backtrix keep the undercurrent in boxes? What even is the undercurrent? I feel it. I know it’s there. That is all. With a glare at the boxes, I close the door and move on.
Clicks, hisses, and ticks greet us in the next chamber, reverberating off the walls like someone threw a rubber ball into a concrete box. It sounds like the factory where my mother used to work. I leap back at the jarring noise, but Miggens pushes me forward, and I stumble into the space.
Bookshelves line one wall. A heavy wooden desk backs up to a window and a globe the size of a coach spins on a platform. Gears like carriage wheels cover the ceiling, turning in unison, clinking and ticking as the teeth move over one another. Pistons hold up the mechanism, rising and falling in each of the room’s four corners, hissing and steaming as they work. The ceiling rears and sinks like a beating heart.
I shrink back as my shoulders tighten. My fingers twitch, wanting to create a portal and get as far from this unnatural room as possible. “What kind of study is this, Migz?”
His mouth drops as he looks from one piston to the next. “More like the heart of a building. The center of a giant machine.”
“For what purpose could this possibly serve?” The small candle flame he holds emits enough light to cast a small shadow across the side of the rotating globe. The flicker and Miggens are the only things in this room that feel safe.
“Doesn’t matter.” Miggens points behind me, and I spin around. “Looks like we’ve got enough work without worrying about a rich man’s perverted office.”
My eyes widen as I take in the wall. The faces of a hundred timepieces stare at us, the second hands perfectly timed to rotate together. The wall moves like it is covered with coordinated marching ants. Beneath the hissing of pistons and turning of gears lies an incessant ticking.
The clocks are all different sizes, some the size of windows, others the size of fingernails, and some the size of dinner plates. They are all ringed in metal. Bronze, gold, silver, rusted iron. My stomach turns, and my body sways. Between the rising and falling of the ceiling and the swirling second hands on the clocks, I might be sick.
“You wanna portal out?” Miggenz touches my arm and gives me a gentle stare. “We don’t have to do this. The world is filled with people’s underbelly desires.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “We’ll always have work.”
I think of the mouse stew. Of the hole in the bottom of my sleeping bag. Of the cockroach that crawled through the hole last night and nestled in my sock. Of Miggens’s too-small boots. I see him each night, wincing as he takes them off and stretches out his toes.
“No.” I pat his hand and step away. “Come on. Let’s make this quick.”
Miggens reaches into his coat and pulls a canvas bag from a red felt pocket. He marches to the wall and tries to wrench a clock from the mount. It doesn’t budge. I join him and run my fingers along the metal, noticing everything is welded together.
He moves to a different clock and tugs at the frame, but it won’t budge. “Can you forge a saw? We don’t need anything complicated. Just something crude I can use to cut the metal.”
I glance at the door. Nothing and everything moves. Swaying unsteadily, I nod toward the lantern hanging from his body. He removes the lamp, lights the wick with the candle stump, and holds it high. The glow casts eerie shadows across the undulating room. I grab for a shadow near the fireplace and reach for the undercurrents. The pull of their power weighs heavily on my brain. A saw. Easy enough. Closing my eyes to stop the world from moving, I carve the gullets, bores, and teeth into the raw darkness. I finish, add a handle and heel, and pass the blade to Miggens. It’s ugly, but it’ll work. He sets the lantern on the ground, and I concentrate on maintaining the shadow’s shape.
I’ve counted eight clocks that match the size we need. Miggens removes the first five without issue and sticks them into the bag. The din drowns out our noise. I don’t recall hearing anything from the hallway, so this room must be soundproofed.
I don’t peer at the door for fear of losing the connection with the undercurrents, but my skin keeps prickling, and I want to uncover the source of my unease. Standing in this beating room is like standing in the belly of a metallic beast. I can’t recall if we entered voluntarily or if we were swallowed while we slept.
The sixth clock gives Miggens trouble. It is bound with an unfamiliar metal. Some strange alloy. I watch the second hand tick by as his face reddens and sweat drips onto his coat. Tick. Thump. Saw. Tick. Thump. Saw. We’re half an hour in. My eyes grow heavy. It feels as if the undercurrents will pull the flesh from my bones. They grasp at my soul, my blood, my being. The room darkens.
“I’m almost empty, Migz. You’ve got about two minutes before I drop.”
He grunts and bears down on the saw. “Can you give me three?”
I stare at him through barely open eyes, fighting with my power. Against it. “I can give you two and a bonus second.”
Something snaps behind us. I whip my head toward the door and feel the undercurrent’s grip release me. My body drops to the ground. Shit, I lost the blade. It’ll take at least an hour before I have the energy to craft a new one.
The door has been flung open, but no one is there. I stare into the dark abyss of the hallway, wishing I had the energy to send my consciousness into the shadows beyond to search for intruders.
Miggens crouches next to me. He grips the lantern handle in one hand, the bag of five clocks in the other, and watches the doorway like a rat watches a dying baby bird. If the room weren’t so loud, one could hear the pounding of our hearts.
“It’s time to go,” he whispers.
I bite my lip and shake my head. I don’t have the energy to fashion a portal. I barely have the strength to walk out of the room.
“How long do you need?”
I laugh.
“Come.” He drags me behind the large wooden desk. I peer out from one side. He guards the other. He flexes his fingers, and I know he’s preparing for a fight. Anything to give me time. I suck at the air, trying to fill myself, to recover enough to save us. A minute passes. Then another. I know because I watch the rotation of a hundred clocks. Five minutes. Still, the doorway remains empty. I start to close my eyes when a swish of red catches my eye.
The man, I believe to be Odlo Henerick, steps into the room.
Miggens looks at me with fire in his eyes that matches the lantern’s flame he lifts into the air. The desk chair casts a shadow onto the wall. I give Miggens an apologetic frown, then reach into the murk, close my eyes, and call upon the undercurrents to open a portal. They tremble weakly beneath my fingertips.
“I don’t think so,” a voice says.
I ignore it, focusing my energy on generating the egress. I have to pull on every reserve hidden in my body. I swirl my hand in the shadow, but nothing happens. Opening my eyes, I see the lantern has gone dark.
“Light it again!” I hiss.
Miggens fumbles with a match and gets the wick lit. A laugh comes from the other side of the desk. As soon as the lamp is lit, the man in the red cloak and vulture mask snaps his finger, and the flame flies from the lantern, tumbles through the air, and disappears into his leather beak. He swallows it, plunging us into darkness.
My stomach drops as if filled with lead. Odlo Henerick is Arcanari. Not only that, he is a Luxum, a light thief. The worst type of magic wielder for me to go up against.
“I hope ten million pfrontens were worth it.” He steps around the desk and towers over me. Miggens tries another match, but Odlo calls the flame and again swallows it.
Suddenly, the room is ablaze in light as Enforces pour through the doorway. Before I can blink, an Enforcer secures my hands behind my back and clamps a metal band around my forehead. My brain erupts in small, painful flashes.
“He’s a cogwright!” I shout, nodding toward Miggens, trying to ignore the stabbing sensation in my mind. “Let him go. He’s nothing to you.”
“He’s a traitor,” the man, I think is Odlo Henerick, says. “Your boyfriend will join you.”
I glance at the shadows dancing in the corners, but without my hands and with my brain scrambled by the band, I can do nothing. I remain helpless as I’m carried down the stairs, through the large door, and tossed into a coach beneath the falling snow. Four faces stare back at me. Four Arcanari with their hands also tied behind their backs and the special band around their heads. This was a setup. The Backtrix are doing a roundup, and we were too stupid to realize ten million pfrontens were too good to be true. Too stupid and too desperate.
Miggens slides onto the bench next to me. He fights pointlessly against the restraints. They’ve taped his mouth shut so he can’t shout. I flop my head against the wooden wall of the cart and try not to cry. I think of Remil. Of her face each time she tormented me. The glee. The sadistic fire. We’d once been kind to each other. Maybe not kind. But we’d once needed each other.
“Adreaz,” my mother’s last words reverberate in my mind. She’d concealed Remil and me in a decaying crate by the river, near the tire factory’s runoff. The stench of burning rubber stung my eyes. “Death is a kinder fate than captivity,” she had insisted, her voice barely audible. “If they catch you, find a way out—escape or end it.” With a swift glance over her shoulder, she’d shut the lid, leaving us engulfed in darkness.
I’d heard her scream. Heard the shouts of the men who placed her in chains, and I squeezed Remil to my side. My mother was going to Krow. We would never see her again.
Krow’s purpose is clear: to manipulate, to break, and if all else fails, to obliterate.
“Escape or end it,” she had insisted.
I watch a tear fall from the Arcanari across the way.
I can not escape. I can not end it. I don’t even have the energy to cry.
