Forward, but Never Forget (XOXO)

by Lullabyes

Zaun is free—and must grow into its unfamiliar new dimensions. So must Silco and Jinx. A what-if that diverges midway through the events of episode 8. Found family and fluff, politics and power, smut and slice-of-life, villainy and vengeance.

20. Pentimento

We've hit the proper 'plot' arc yaaay :D Finally getting into the magic systems, politics and character entanglements that are the heart of the fic, and will only grow more convoluted as this monster grows teeth hehe.

A fair bit of smut in this installment, so heads up!

cw: for rough sex, angst and grief.

---

tw: for PTSD related symptoms during sexual intimacy, poverty-related trauma, and dysfunctional relationship dynamics

With wax wings on your back
I'll seek that height
If you wanna stop me, try again
Try cutting my head off

~"Zitti e Buoni" – Maneskin (Translation)

---

Esteemed First Chancellor,

I pen this missive quite lightheaded with Zaun's devilfruit wine. It is a delightful gift, and I thank you on behalf of the Council. Better still if we were to make such exchanges a regularity. My appetite would grow quite accustomed to your generosity. You, in turn, would have no difficulty in selling these fruits to greater Runeterra. The buyers of Demacia and Shurima are not so easily pleased as hardy Fissurefolk. But they can be won over with patience.

On the subject—you've proven most patient in combing through our Treaty of Mutual Cooperation, Trade and Security. I applaud your stamina for the rigors of fine print. It far outclasses most seasoned Councilors. Would that they had half of your sense of devoir, and but a fraction of your devilry. Piltover would ascend from a beacon to a bonfire.

As for Zaun—well, I can scarce imagine what devilry one would find within its walls. Unless, of course, I am invited by some enterprising soul…

But my apologies. There need be no further mention of our cities in future official correspondence, unless it falls under the purview of trade relations. Vis-à-vis our private correspondence, however, feel free to wax poetic about how much more pleasant Zaunite life is since that fateful October of independence.

I, in turn, will sing praises of Piltover's wonders, and the mutual bounty that comes from our alliance.

If the gods are kind, it will last the distance.

I have attached the fair copy of the Treaty for your perusal. The original will go before both Piltover's Council and Zaun's Cabinet for ratification. I trust you anticipate no difficulties. On my part, I foresee nothing less than a bright future ahead.

I also offer you a sweet trifle: Piltover's traditional Blushing Maid. A treat more suited to a wedding than a peace agreement. But your potent wine has brought a blush to many a Councilor's cheek.

I look forward to greeting you at the riverside Peace Ceremony aboard the SS Niobe. And to laying eyes upon your daughter, Jinx. With such extraordinary feats under her belt, she is surely worthy of attendance. Her invitation is included herewith. I understand a formal ceremony may not be her speed; at her age, it certainly wasn't mine. Hopefully, it should prove instructive. Inspiring, even.

May our nations prosper together, and share our prosperity with others along the way.

Cordially yours,

Mel Medarda

---

Councilor Medarda,

Thank you for your letter. May I say that devilfruit wine gives your handwriting quite the flourish. Would that I could match your eloquence even halfway sober. But if the wine is to your tastes, then by all means. Partake whenever you please. We have plenty. In fact, we're planning on expanding production.

May its devilry ferment through Piltover and beyond.

Re: the Treaty—the document is entirely satisfactory. Our Cabinet has approved it unanimously, and I expect no future objections. Your quickness of work and wit have proven invaluable. Lesser leaders confuse showy performance with progress. It takes an attitude such as yours to make clear the gulf between them.

The Peace Ceremony will take place as planned. Naturally Jinx will attend. She'll want to see the city that so strongly shaped her character. And stop by a few patisseries. She has an explosive sweet-tooth.

Speaking of—the Blushing Maid was first-rate. I regret only that I could not sample another. Perhaps Zaun will try its own spin—and solicit your opinion as our valued guest. We'd ensure your stay is full of sweetness and spirits, lacking only the charm that sunlight might provide, were Zaun not so well-suited to darkness…

I greatly anticipate our meeting for the Peace Ceremony. And the gala Zaun will hold afterward in the Council's honor, where we can embrace our friendship with all due enthusiasm.

Meantime, the day is almost gone, and I must rise early for next week's preparations. A sorry farewell, but a promise for warmer salutations when we next meet.

Sincerely,

—S

---

FLASH MESSAGE

SUBJECT: NOT FUCKING OFF

Alive and in public.

New Undercity. New you.

END OF MESSAGE.

FLASH MESSAGE

RE: SUBJECT: NOT FUCKING OFF

Same old, same stupid.

Like I said: fuck off.

END OF MESSAGE

FLASH MESSAGE

SUBJECT: …

Need to talk.

END OF MESSAGE.

FLASH MESSAGE

RE: SUBJECT: …

No talking.

Not right now.

END OF MESSAGE

(Correspondence recovered from Entresol Zone C)

---

A Muzak version of an old doo-wop ballad—I Only Have Eyes for You—filters through recessed speakers.

The convolvulus overhead lamp casts a coppery glow over the Vyx's opulent dressing room: all cedarwood paneling with curlicued etchings. Inside a large wooden edifice, suits hang impeccably cut. The gilt trifold mirrors reflect with luminous clarity a meandering pile of dishabille: a snowy cravat, a twill waistcoat, a strip of underwear.

"Fuck." The baritone scrapes over the rhythm of hitching breaths and hollow thuds. "Fuck."

Past the silk folding screen—into which someone has embedded a knife—sits a chaise lounge with devious ergonomics. Silco is toppled backwards—his body a lean sprawl of outstretched arms and legs, head tipped back to bare the pale curve of Adam's apple.

His teeth likewise bare themselves, biting down harsh sounds as Sevika bears down harder. Knees hooked over the chaise arms, her own arms balanced on his shoulders, she grinds without mercy in his lap. Her dress-uniform falls in swathes of black serge around his thighs. The fabric and his trouserfont are already soaked.

On a clenching downstroke, Sevika gasps, "Is that a noun—or a verb?"

"You can't tell the difference?"

"A reminder—never hurts."

"If it's instruction you're after—" Silco's grin is a sharp-edged slash. "—I'll oblige."

His hand insinuates between their bodies, a slick flickering of fingertips across her clit. Sevika's breath spasms in her chest. "Oh shit that's—that's fucking good."

"Adjective."

"Fuck me—like that—"

"Verb."

"Don't stop—there, yeah—fuck!"

"Interjection."

Sevika's sounds turn guttural; she needs more.

She pushes herself up, her powerful muscles flexing as she finds the right angle, and there it is, the slick friction folding into a spark inside, her eyes glazing over and the lids fluttering shut. Her aggression slides away in one long tremor of nakedness as she goes from barely seeming to breathe to sucking in air as if trapped in a steam-bath. Her whole body seizes his—thighs, arms, cunt—a hot substantial grip of muscle that is dizzying.

Silco gasps. It hurts, it hurts fucking good, a brutality synonymous with sweetness. Snarling, he hitches himself in deeper. Sevika isn't a shrieker, but the sound she makes is a damn near thing, scraping savagely up her throat. Her whole body locks him in place, anchoring him, hips a frantic bludgeoning against his own. He will be bruised where bone meets bone.

The delicious abuse provokes his own torment. His spindly hands seize her thighs, fingers digging sharp as spurs. His teeth sink in, too. Not into her neck because they never leave marks in plain sight, but into the flesh near her left breast, right where meat melts into machinery. Sevika cries out. Her features are a pained twist in anticipation of pleasure, and everything that follows, a plunge into waters so black that there is nothing left at all.

Death feels like that.

Or maybe it is life at its most extreme ambit. The space where the definitions of vertigo blur into solidity.

Tether.

Growling, Silco rides into her in deep goading stabs. The chaise's headrest strikes the wall—bang bang bang—the soundtrack synchronizing itself with the wet slap of skin on skin and sawing breaths, his and Sevika's, before Sevika's become a hoarse rhythmic chant as he pounds into her, fucks her with no mercy—don't stop—don't fucking stop—I'm not done—right there—right there ffffuck—and then his squeezing hands move from her hips to her breasts to her throat, cutting off her words, his own teeth-clenched sibilations devolving over the span of a dozen trip-hammering thrusts into a strangled snarl as he impales himself seemingly in the pit of her stomach.

The throb of his climax is like a gut-wound. Sevika's spasms overlap his own, the pulse of violence and the beat of blood.

Monstrosity gripping them in its heated claws.

And yet, afterward—they are human. With every ragged breath, they become more human.

Boneless, Sevika stays straddling him, his cock softening inside her. He feels her heartbeat slowing. He smells her sweat. His sturdiest soldier, his grunt of machine and muscle. A cogwheel, like the rest. Yet in this moment she is obscenely splendid.

His fingertips caress up her spine.

Sevika makes a slurred sound. They regard each other. Her dark fingers are curved around Silco's jaw, his pale ones on the nape of her neck. Satisfaction leaves Silco's expression sloe-eyed. Sevika's own flickers into an uncharacteristic uncertainty. She dips her head. He feels brightleaf-scented breath on his face.

She kisses him.

Silco's good eye snaps open. They don't kiss. Haven't in years. Not since his left eye warped into a lidless portal, the flesh ravaged into sharkskin. Since then, under her regard, his face may as well be a poisoned salt lick. She might kiss around it, but the deformity itself is kept at arm's length, an aberration beyond endurance.

Sevika sighs against his mouth.

Her tongue slides in, teeth catching his lower-lip, letting go, before she crowds in again. Kisses chased like memories, deepening even as their bodies cool down. Each touch makes Silco feel like a stranger in his skin. A displacement of past and present, the sum of his old hopes and the cruelty of his current condition.

He'd enjoyed kissing, once. Or Sil had. He remembers kissing Sevika, before. A playful tussle of lips and teeth, in alleys and bar corners. They'd usually be drunk when they kissed. They'd be more than drunk after. He remembers kissing Nandi, before that. No tussling but a smooth slide of tongues and the heady music of sighs. So much music, even when she never spoke a word. Her silences a rapture.

And he remembers kissing Vander. He'd been a slow kisser—silent, too. Theirs had been a language of tangled arms, the press of fists on shoulders, the scrape of bristle on skin. Silence, to Silco and Vander, meant you were making good even if you were up to no good.

And kissing meant, simply, this:

Coming home when home was nowhere to be found.

At least, that's how it had felt to Silco on that night. The night. The night he'd returned to the Lanes after three years in Stillwater, to find no sense anywhere. No solidity, no solace. Just Vander, and the promise of a second-chance that would never come.

Their last kiss, before Vander called him to the Pilt…

And drowned him.

Silco snaps back into focus.

"Kill it."

The safe word: sparingly used but non-negotiable.

Sevika's melty fugue hardens into blunt sobriety. She climbs off him. Silco sits up, his right knee twinging. For a moment, memory lingers like a sticky film on the skin. Ten fingerprints circle his throat. Silco inhales and shakes himself loose.

Sevika sets her fingertips on Silco's wrist. "You okay?"

"Hm."

"You were spacing."

He levels her with a look. Back off.

Sevika lifts her hands in surrender. Just checking.

Their bodies disentangle completely. The sheath is still caught on Silco's waning erection. Sevika tugs it off, knots the end with capable fingers, and tosses it in the trashcan. Then she reaches toward the washbasin and wets a cloth. Matter-of-factly, she sets to work cleaning him off while he reclines, sated, on the chaise. The dressing-room's superb acoustics turn her slow refrain of Devil's Got the Blues into a ballad-for one. The touch of her rough knuckles is almost grounding.

Silco breathes and reinhabits his scarred skin.

After she's done, Sevika dabs herself clean with the same cloth. Then she tosses it into the chute for soiled linens—all pretty stained glass, like the rest of the posh little boutique.

That's the Vyx for you. Its establishments always combine decadence with function.

What began as a small strip of glassed-in hovels at Bridgewaltz where seamstresses would rush a cheap suit in twenty-four hours has evolved into a sumptuous sprawl of premium boutiques and bespoke tailor-shops. Quality fabrics and sky's-the-limit standards have made it the go-to mecca for not just Zaunite elite, but a number of well-heeled Piltovans with a taste for the avant garde. Its reputation for being strategically shoulder-to-shoulder with the Vyx's high-end brothels only adds to its dissolute allure.

Nowadays, Silco seldom condescends to visit in person. He would no more pass through the doors of the emporiums than through the eye of a needle. Like his whores, his suits are delivered to his doorstep. But for special occasions, Margot's staff whisk him up to the private boutique. They cater to his requests with unobtrusive severity, then disappear at his command.

Sevika seldom accompanies him. She has no patience for clothing that isn't strictly utilitarian. A fitting room is nothing to fear, Silco sometimes remarks, to her stubborn, I already know what fits.

Today is different.

In a week, Zaun and Piltover will sign the Peace Treaty. There will be galas and press conferences. Flashbulbs and cameras. All the pomp and circumstance that neither he nor Sevika have the patience for—but which is an inevitability of their new positions.

For once, Silco expects Sevika and the crew to look the part.

Sevika pats her uniform for a post-fuck cheroot. Silco stops her with a reproving finger. Grumbling, she stashes it away.

He's recently signed a decree prohibiting indoor smoking except in private homes, hotel lobbies and open-air restaurants. It's a precursor to an Emissions Control Program that will debut next year.

That isn't the only change.

Zaun has undergone an overhaul: in the spotlight and on the sly. With the launch of the nautical corridor, trade and logistics have taken center stage in the open market. The city's renegade chemtech, independent customs regime and open-access harbor are proving an attractive alternative to Piltover's stifling bureaucracy and increasingly insular, walled-off ports. Merchants all the way from top-notch Noxian traders to third-rate Buhru chandlers have begun flocking to the Fissures—their goods in tow.

Along the nautical corridor itself, Zaun has begun fostering a network of docks, all the way from Ionia's Cape of the Cauldron to Bilgewater's Leywood Port. Along the sea lines, the maritime chokepoints have been re-charted by Zaun's Exploration & Survey Corps. When Piltover and its allies come to re-evaluate the route next year, they'll find that path heavily patrolled and fiercely defended.

Closer to home, the mining projects are burgeoning. The average miner's workday remains just as hellishly long. But the labor is better regulated than it was under Topside oversight. No longer will a child of six be dropped down pitch-black shafts to break ore-crock for ten bells straight. Safety equipment is provided to all. Shift schedules are staggered to avoid exhaustion. Working conditions are regulated, with no more than three miners per crew. The air filters and light crystals in their masks have been upgraded. So have the sluice boxes and flumes.

The changes will take time to cement. But as the mining settlements become well-oiled systems, the mortality rate will stabilize. Already, the yields have spiked. The chem-seams are disgorging rich deposits of raw metals, ores, minerals and gemstones at a rate far exceeding past yields. It's a market ripe for foreign investment.

Without Piltover robbing the Fissures blind, they can finally tap the depths and scale their rates accordingly.

Meanwhile, the citywide school reform initiative has begun. Buildings of varying size and uniform design have begun cropping up throughout Zaun. Though attendance is compulsory for children under fifteen, it has not been mandated. Instead, the curriculum is being developed to incentivize children with skill-sets useful in both trade and industry, thus keeping them out of gangs. Teachers will be paid a wage commensurate with their qualifications. Four main keystones will be stressed: literacy, numeracy, vocational education and civic awareness.

Zaun has a long way to go. But the program will serve as a template for similar efforts across the city. In time, the educational system will slough off its exploitative Topside roots. Funding will be granted based on academic achievement, not privilege. In the Sumps, the Cabinet has also authorized the construction of dormitories—at no cost to guardians, so long as the children are present for at least five bells a day.

It's not a hostage situation so much as a strategic lure. It will entice would-be parents to treat their children as potential investments rather than live-in labor, in exchange for a warm living space and a hot meal.

Speaking of meals…

Singed's F12 Shimmer-crops have yielded fruit. Literally. The seeds are responding favorably to the formula's modification. In the cultivars' hot-houses, consistent yields are coming in: juicy, thick-skinned cherries, lush clutches of grapes, fragrant garlands of rosemary, mint and lemon balm. Indeed, the F12 crop is proving more versatile than even Singed could have predicted. Hybridized strains are being cultivated to create crossbreeds and even brand-new varietals. Last month, Silco's lunch included everything from fantastically tart bloodlimes to candy-sweet kiwis.

Some will be mass-produced for foreign export. Others will become a staple of Zaunite diets.

Not that Zaun will morph into the Oshra Va'Zaun gardens anytime soon. But there is talk of chem-farms along patches of the Deadlands. Zones to produce bio-engineered crops in the vein of hydroponics: their fruits nourished by chem-treated soil. In time, the strategy could even be implemented at a larger scale, to raise livestock and enrich the local diet.

Singed's methods are close to the bone: he keeps the formula under lock and key. Silco has already given him carte blanche to expand F12's research into medical applications. His laboratory has been upgraded accordingly. In the vivarium, he has even begun unorthodox forays into Shimmer-splicing. His aim is to develop an enhanced vaccine that could potentially eradicate everything from respiratory contagions like the black flu to fatalities like Gray Lung.

To test the strain, Singed has drafted a number from Silco's blackguards. They are quarantined in a barge at the edges of the harbor: a lozenge-shaped vessel of reinforced steel with an independent ventilation system. The unit is stocked with basic amenities, and overseen by six dozen chem-trained doctors. By this time next year, Singed predicts that the vaccine will be ready for mass-production. It could hit the clinics as soon as the winter.

There's a certain irony to it.

Shimmer, the stuff of Piltover's nightmares, may prove Zaun's salvation.

Salvation comes at a price, though. To keep pace with the rigors of progress, Zaun must have a profit-generating industry at the ready. Street sales of Shimmer are slowly being siphoned off. Now the revenue must be substituted elsewhere. Silco has set his sights on steroid-synthesizing. His goal is to produce a performance-enhancing compound that can treat anything ranging from physical ailments to psychosomatic fatigue.

The side-effects—an enhanced musculature, speeded metabolism and increased bone density—will be a temporary fix.

But the addictive properties will make it a lucrative long-term investment in foreign markets.

It's a delicate balance: the needs of a city that always needs more. Zaun is blossoming by inches and by miles. But it is not the world that Silco needs to lead it into. Not yet.

A time will come when Zaun's glacial crawl out of the shadows is inevitable. But first, there will be schools, highways, hospitals. A medical system that cures ills instead of perpetuating them. A bureaucracy that doesn't strip children of their rights and drop them into labyrinths. And a place where the Fissurefolk can thrive instead of scraping by.

The path is a winding one, and Silco's compass is crooked.

But he won't deviate.

One foot in the dark, and one in the light.

Sevika offers Silco a folded hand-towel. He dabs himself dry before buttoning up. His trousers and shirtfront are drenched with her spendings.

Silco crooks a brow. "Should this go on your tab or mine?"

Sevika's eyes flick down and back up. Her lip curls sideways. "Your word buys everyone's silence, sir."

"Including yours?"

"For the right price."

"That sounds like extortion."

"Your cock's the real criminal."

Her words are casual. Yet they cover for a mute discomfort. She'd overstepped earlier with the kiss. The pact between them doesn't bleed into softer intimacies. Now the humor is all surface. Worse, Silco's smooth expression conceals beneath it a bite of speculation.

"Back on the hashish, are you?"

Sevika shakes her head. After a beat, she mutters, "Guess it's not your thing anymore."

"Hash?"

"Kissing."

"You're the one afraid of rot."

Sevika turns her head away, but not before Silco sees a secret smile. "It's growing on me."

Interest flickers in Silco's eyes. Bad moves and breadcrumbs—curiouser and curiouser. The question is whether she has anything to lose from the line crossed. Or if he has anything to gain from the bluff called.

Cost; reward.

The variables change but the equation stays constant.

The chaise creaks as Sevika finds her balance. The rich material of her uniform slides down her damp flesh. Rising, she goes to the mirror. At the brass rod, gowns hang on display. The Vyx's top-notch designs in every imaginable style of deep green: Zaun's national color.

Critically, Sevika eyes the display. "Nobody told me getting gussied up was part of moving up."

"Never underestimate the importance of spectacle. Hard power through austerity is well-suited to war. In times of peace, soft influence is the ace up the sleeve. Visuals are the most compelling of all. They tell a story. They confer a mood."

"Clothes make the nation, huh?"

"And dictate the new status quo."

Sevika draws out a dress from the neat row. Deep-cadmium and double-breasted, cut with the somber impregnability of a military uniform. The shoulder pads flare like epaulets. The ideal silhouette for a person of substance. She holds it in front of her torso, prompting a verdict.

Silco nods. "Acceptable."

For whatever that's worth as a compliment.

Sevika hangs the dress from an ornate hook. "So long as I don't look like a damn Uppsider."

Contempt reshapes Silco's lip. "Be the opposite."

"Opposite?"

"Someone honest about what's beneath the skin."

Sevika scoffs with that half-disgusted, half-marveling glance that is reserved for him.

It's the same look she'd worn when he returned over three months ago in the blackguards' motorcar—with Jinx nestled under his arm.

He'd expected Zaun to dissolve into chaos as soon as he'd vanished. Instead, he'd found it in a fierce tug-of-war. A pair of chem-barons had already attempted a coup. Their private guards had seized territory in the Sumps, stoking tempers that were already simmering among the common folk. Sevika, the blackguards at her back, was staving them off, even as a tide of unrest was swelling in the Cabinet, a molten wave of opportunists measuring Silco's loss against the bottom line of their balance sheets.

Another day, and they'd have descended into disorder.

Until Silco waltzed into the war-room—Jinx in tow. Silence fell like a guillotine. The chem-barons stopped dead in their tracks. News of Jinx's disappearance had been kept on lockdown. Silco's own had spread in a panicked wildfire. Nobody knew where he'd gone, or what had happened. They didn't know what a catastrophically close shave it was.

Nobody except Sevika.

By daybreak, Silco had chivvied Jinx upstairs to the suite. The corpses were gone. The walls and carpet were spotless. Jinx had extracted Silco's solemn vow that there'd be no more surveillance. In turn, he made her pinkie-promise that she wouldn't disappear again. Afterward, he'd let her climb into his bed. She was so exhausted, so steeped in conflicting emotions, that she'd drifted off in seconds.

His hand stayed clasped in hers. Every time Silco attempted to withdraw, her fingers twitched as if subconsciously begging to hang on.

It was tempting to stay. Not doze off—he'd wanted to stay awake. He was overflowing with a heartsick gratitude that was the flipside of hardheaded avarice. She was his purest treasure, narrowly saved, and he wanted to be near her. Do things with her and for her, or just do nothing but breathe where she was breathing.

Except duty called.

Zaun never slept. And the Eye couldn't afford to blink.

He'd spent the remainder of the morning knee-deep in paperwork. The crew were dispatched to do damage control. Lock was entrusted with quelling the furor among the rank and file. Ran was put to work soothing the chem-barons now suffering from buyer's remorse after hastily throwing in their lot with Silco's opposition. Dustin and his pack of runners hit the streets to protect Silco's territories. Sevika took up her position at the war-room and began coordinating with the blackguard officers to quash the brewing crisis.

While she worked, Silco wrote. He drafted a dozen letters to Piltover's Council to proceed with the Peace Treaty. He composed a set of statements to his own Cabinet to go on record in firm support of the deal. He worded a letter of near surgical-precision to his contacts in the press to keep his disappearance quiet. He crafted an official statement to the chem-barons, affirming his intention to hold them blameless if they fell back in line.

There was more to do—always.

The sky outside began to darken. His bad eye throbbed. His bones ached. But Silco didn't stop. The future depended on him not stopping. He'd just finished drafting a communiqué to the Bilgewater envoy, when Sevika appeared in his office, flanked by blackguards.

Silco's hands were stained with ink. Sevika's own were smeared with blood. The blackguards had two gunny sacks dangling from either fist. The fabric was wet with gore.

Silco didn't ask what was inside the sacks. He knew.

"It's done," Sevika said.

The turncoats were dead. The turmoil in the ranks was subdued. Zaun had nearly toppled in its first steps—and survived.

"Should I get rid of 'em?" Sevika asked.

"No," Silco said, and let that blackwater chill rise up behind his unbroken stare. "Schedule an assembly in the war-room. Put the heads on display at the table. We'll send the message that Zaun's future has no room for disloyalty."

Sevika nodded, once.

She'd not spoken again for the remainder of the evening. Silco had likewise not overindulged his own love of words. They'd spent the bells in a grim cooperation, side-by-side, tying up loose ends, only occasionally meeting each other's eyes. The space between them felt deep and cold as a grave.

By nightfall, Sevika said, "Better get some rest, sir."

Her words sounded like the offer of a consoling shoulder. Except her body language didn't invite him to lean on her. She stood on-guard, a stern sentry, cued to his next command.

Or his next disappearing act.

Silco replied, "Meet me in the Laguna Lounge."

It was a summons. A reminder that she didn't run the Fissures. He did. And he'd give her whatever she wanted—having failed to be there when he was needed.

Their eyes met. It was the longest exchange they'd shared so far.

Nodding, Sevika exited his office.

In the Chancellor's suite, Jinx hadn't stirred once. It was a testament to the depths of her exhaustion. In sleep, she looked like an ordinary child worn out after a tiring day. Her lips were softly parted, her hair a mangled nest of blue. Her brow held the barest furrow, a phantom distress longing to be kissed away.

Silco did—with infinite care. The skin-to-skin touch felt electrifyingly sweet. Here was his little girl and his new beginning. A fairytale fey with a miraculous gift.

Only this time, he'd keep her safe.

In the Laguna Lounge, Sevika was waiting. Perfectly still by grim force of self-command. But her dark eyes signaled a temper climbing into red. Silco hadn't made excuses. She knew why he'd disappeared. He knew what she'd dealt with in his absence. His parting shots lingered, a blow as bitter as his departure.

Yet she'd stayed, and fought off the scavengers. Stayed and kept watch over his turf. Stayed, and stayed loyal.

To Zaun.

To him.

Now came, not rapprochement, but reckoning.

Without speaking, Silco heeled off his shoes, unbuttoned his vest and shucked his shirt. Making a fist, he'd slugged his thigh, once. Sevika didn't need words to recognize the shorthand. He'd made it a few times before. Once, after Vander's death. The next time, after a blast by the Slickjaws wiped out his entire squad. The last, after Jinx was salvaged from the rubble and resurrected on Singed's table.

Each time meant a different kind of rage. Each one demanded the same thing. Not comfort, not intimacy. Not even sex. Just contact that would leave him bruised. Shut off his mind and quiet the monster through sheer physical demand. Transform him into a twist of livewire loathing whose only purpose was to bite and claw and feel.

The gesture ordered: Wreck me.

Sevika met his gaze without hesitation, though her jaw tightened. Then, as if to prove herself worthy of his apology, she followed his lead.

The Morning After was a bitch on multitude of fronts.

He'd planned a debrief that would last a bell. It ended up taking the entire night, during which he got very little sleep. But in those hours, biting down a wad of bloodied sheet between his teeth while Sevika's strap-on sawed like an enormous file inside of him, her hot muscled weight draped across his bruised body and her angry grunts rasping against his ear, he'd made an executive decision.

He couldn't risk a repetition of last night. The power vacuum may have lured out the traitors. But the debacle had also proven something. In his absence, someone had to defend Zaun's interest without their own eclipsing it. Someone who could keep governance stable, not just during emergencies, but for the day-to-day crises that were increasingly beyond Silco's schedule to accommodate.

That person couldn't be Jinx—for a thousand reasons.

But it could be Sevika.

The green glow of dawn wept from behind the blinds. Silco and Sevika sprawled face-to-face, wrists and ankles nearly touching. Two fighters who'd fallen into truce after an exceptionally taxing bout more than two reconciled lovers soaking in the afterglow.

They weren't lovers. The dynamic between them was a dance, not a duet. But it was high time their steps aligned.

When he said as much, Sevika let off a slurred scoff. "Did you practice this little speech?"

"I'll spare you the re-workings. The short of it: yes."

"Then you've got an angle."

Idly, Silco lifted a hand—it felt heavy as a slab of ore—and traced Sevika's hipbone. The skin was hot under his cool fingertips. His thumb smoothed over the red calligraphy the strap-on had printed into the flesh.

"Two angles."

Sevika shivered, the aftermath of adrenaline. "I'll take the good one first."

"One: I need someone to oversee the city's trajectory. Not the games and grudges. The day-to-day navigation on the streets."

"The war-room wasn't enough?"

Silco shook his head. "Zaun's future isn't in the war room. It's out there. That's where you need to be. You'll lead your own division. An underboss for each zone. Ordinary folk, who don't shy from hard work or hard truths. Ones who make things happen."

Sevika's eyes narrowed. "Underbosses?"

"They will report directly to you. They will keep your ear on the ground. You'll rely on their loyalty. As I rely on yours. You'll lead their operations, as I'll lead the city. That way, Zaun's voice will be heard from each pocket. With several voices, we can counterbalance any that speak against us. If there is a coup, we will kill it in its sleep."

Sevika digested this. Her silence shifted from cautious to considering. "What's the second angle?"

"That one is subordinate. Not just to the city's trajectory, but to mine." Half sitting up, Silco reached for the silver case on the endtable. Tapping out a cigarette, he sparked up. His bad eye, freshly dosed with Shimmer, wept a blood-red glow. "I need a contingency."

"Thought you had a dozen."

"Try three dozen."

"Then you can afford to be less cryptic."

Behind a plume of smoke, Silco's notched lip curled. "I need you to be the contingency. Not Zaun's. Mine. A time will come when I'm gone, and not by choice. If it happens, you'll be there. You'll hold the line."

She eyed him with a bluntness that only Sevika could get away with. "You got a death-wish, sir?"

"Far from it."

"Zaun needs you more than a damn contingency."

"It needs both. The contingency isn't just a means of insurance. It is insurance. The promise of my legacy. A promise I must uphold by making you uphold yours."

"So I'd be—what? Guard dog?"

"Gatekeeper."

"Still dancing to your tune, huh?"

"You'd dance to your own." Silco flicked the cigarette's ash into a tray. "You're longer my XO."

Sevika's eyes glassed darkly; her mouth dropped open. She crammed a fist into it, the way Nandi used to do whenever he'd drop a bombshell. Unlike Nandi, who'd been a ferocious scowler, Sevika looked ready to roar. "That's a fuck-you if I ever heard one."

Silco breathed smoke in. He breathed smoke out. "I won't lie. We've had our differences. You and I—and the city."

"And Zaun's still reeling from last night—"

"I'd like to make amends."

"By firing me?!"

"By promoting you." Silco's smile was a beguiling twist. "To Deputy Chancellor."

He expected Sevika to relax. She didn't.

Dragging a handful of the disordered sheets to her lap, she began to wipe herself clean. The heavy waft of their fucking saturated the air. There was scarcely an inch of them that wasn't slicked with spendings or claimed by teeth: hers, his.

They weren't lovers. This wasn't pillowtalk. Every syllable held the hard cadence of transaction. The silent cipher: cost; reward.

Yet within that familiarity was a wholly alien frisson.

Trust.

She said, "Why now?"

"Because of your loyalty. Because of your competence. And because—" Silco tipped his chin, his bad eye glowing out of black infinity to settle on her "—you're all that's left."

"Left?"

"Of the old dream. The old life."

Silence descended, but for their slow breaths and the rising hum of the city beyond the suite. Smoke from Silco's cigarette drifted in hazy curlicues between them. The bedroom's shadows were thick as grave dirt.

And, permeating those shadows, the tiniest specks of sunlight.

Sevika whispered, "That night, when you disappeared—"

"I had to."

"Bullshit!" she snarled, and he heard the whiplash of past hurts:

You left me weak.

Like my father left me weak.

Like Vander left us all weak.

"You put Jinx before Zaun," Sevika said, quieter, but no less forceful. "Before our cause. Our city. Our lives."

"Without Jinx, we have none of that."

"Without Jinx, Zaun has you!"

It was the closest she'd ever come to saying: Without Jinx, I have you.

She didn't say it. Dusty sunbeams slipped over her silhouette. Her body was a temple of scars. None of them by accident, to be blamed on anyone but himself. There was a comfort in that. In owning the hard-won history that had forged their freedom.

Silco said, "Zaun will always have me. But Jinx will have me more than Zaun. That is fact."

Sevika's jaw flexed. She said nothing.

Silco went on, "I need you to be the counterbalance. In times where I step back, you must step forward. Keep the city moving. Keep it steady."

"Keep it yours."

"Yes and no." Silco took a final burning drag of the cigarette. The whispery crackle of ember echoed as he stubbed the cigarette out. "You'll have leeway to act on your own, with assets at your disposal. You will be accountable to me, but the city's interests will come first." Softer, "And one day, if you choose to step back, there will be a seat for you at the table. Even if it's not the Chancellor's chair."

"You're talking—what? A pension?"

"Something like that."

Sevika's face took on a shrewd cast. "I'm guessing there's a catch."

"One. A small concession on your part."

"Namely?"

"Let go of your bitterness over Jinx."

Sevika's eyes shifted from flint to spark. "My bitterness?"

"That's right."

Sevika shook her head: "That little bitch has done more damage than any coup. On Bloody Sunday, she could've killed us all—"

"—But she didn't."

"Until the next time she finishes the job!"

"It is finished. The past is done. The future is a choice." Silco's tone held the dead flatness of imperative. His eyes, tangling with Sevika's, were the same. "Your choice, Sevika. Keep beating your head against the walls, or move on. Pick one: Jinx or the bitterness. I'll wait."

Sevika's jaw gritted. She didn't say a word.

Silco kept his own silence. This wasn't a matter that could be coaxed or coerced. Jinx and Sevika's antagonism ran deep as roots. It was tangled up with their histories, their natures, their better selves. Their broken selves, too, and Silco's own choice to prolong the fractured state.

Zaun could no longer afford internal discord. The scars might never fade. But the wounds needed to be cauterized.

"I get it," Sevika said at last.

"Get what?"

The spark in Sevika's eyes dimmed. "I get why you're asking."

"Oh?"

"If something happens to you—" She ran her tongue over her teeth, "—you want me to look out for her."

"Yes."

"Until then, I keep the leash short."

"Yes."

"And keep forgiving her? For every crazy thing she does?"

"As Nandi forgave you."

The knot of silence pulled tight as the line of Sevika's spine. Reaching out, Silco clasped her shoulder. The smooth skin was hot with exertion. Her pulse thudded like a war-drum.

"You've forgiven me worse," he said. "What's one unruly child compared to a man who would abandon his city?"

"I'm not my sister, Silco. I can't—"

"I don't need you to be Nandi." He squeezed. "I need you to be who you are. Make the right choice when it comes to Jinx, no matter what that choice might be. She is Zaun's future. I need you to understand that, even if I'm not there to make it clear."

Sevika's jaw worked. Her eyes were hidden under dipped lashes. "You know what you're setting up, right? A trust fall with no net."

"That's the business of revolution." Silco loosened his grip. "Faith in fair trade."

"Nandi's favorite saying."

"Mine, actually. She just liked it enough to coopt it."

Sevika's scoff was a low, rueful thing. "Somewhere up there, she's probably cussing us both out right now."

"Or cracking a good laugh."

"Yeah?"

"Why not?" His smile burned bright, then vanished, a will'o-the-wisp in a dead night. "We've given her plenty of material the last six years."

Sevika scoffed again. But the tension ebbed from her body like a pinhole leak. Without meeting his stare, she nodded. There was a beauty to her in that fractaling green sunlight, a glow that even fucking never lent her.

The glow of a duty taken on.

He was asking for a great deal. But it was necessary to achieve the impossible. For all the challenges that lay ahead. For all the battles to be won. One step after another. One game after the next.

One foot in the dark, and one in the light.

This morning, Silco had ironed out the final details, then finalized the decree in the Cabinet. The Deputy Chancellor would be answerable to him—and him alone. Sevika's duties would extend beyond the city's security, to its civic development. As Zaun's second-in-command, she'd spearhead reform programs for the streets, broker accords and mediate disputes. She'd oversee the war-room, and shadow the chem-barons' assemblies. But her hands would now be free to act in any capacity she saw fit.

And—where necessary—to strike.

The chem-barons had taken the news poorly. Sevika's promotion foreboded a sea-change in the city's power balance. It presaged the consolidation of Silco's authority. Underbosses meant another layer of accountability at the cost of their own leeway.

Their protests meant little. Zaun was poised for a brand-new era. Soon, the Peace Treaty would be ratified. With it would come a slew of foreign investors. The chem-barons would have to fall in line, or miss out on the plunder. In time, they'd have to resign themselves to playing nice.

Soon, they'd have no choice.

The promotion ceremony was somber, as was the reception—until the bottle of gin Dustin had put in the punch took hold. Afterward, Sevika cornered Silco in the dressing room, and demonstrated her appreciation with a gusto that Silco doubts Babette's finest could match.

A good businessman recognizes an investment well made.

Now, in the subdued lamplight, Sevika removes her soiled uniform. He watches her shape bare itself: first the sturdy columns of legs, then the taut buttocks, then the smooth curvature of spine that flares into the winglike sweep of shoulderblades. Muscles throb everywhere. Her scarred skin holds the reflective sheen of hammered copper.

A dragon in all but fact.

The display deserves a frame. Silco merely crooks a brow. "Your ensemble for the Peace Treaty?"

Sevika chuckles. "Should have 'em standing to attention."

"In more ways than one."

That, for the record, is a compliment.

Sevika doesn't bat an eyelash. Like Nandi, she takes flattery in stride. "What about Jinx?"

"Her dress leaves more to the imagination."

"She's already picked?"

"I sent her three gowns. One for the ceremony, one for the gala, one for the dinner. She'll choose what suits."

Sevika waves that aside. "She'd get away with murder in a sackcloth. That's not what I meant." Turning, she scoops up her underwear and stockings. They are in shreds; gin goes straight to Silco's knife rather than his head. Tossing them aside, she reaches for a burgundy jumpsuit hanging from a clothes tree. "You really expecting her to attend?"

"Jinx freed Zaun. She deserves to be present."

"It's a dangerous proposition, sir."

"Peace always is."

"I'm talking about—"

Silco's tone chills. "We've been over this."

He gestures with a soundless snap of fingers. Sevika passes him the black suit hanging from the hook: sleek and pressed. They dress side-by-side: Sevika enrobing herself in the jumpsuit like armor, while Silco slithers into his fresh garments like a snake inhabiting a different skin.

In the mirror, their eyes meet. Silco's expression is mild, a warning in its way.

"I'll allow the next five minutes for your concerns," he says. "Afterward, the subject is closed."

Sevika's jaw grits.

Silco waits. Silence works well with her.

After a moment, she says, "Look, I'm not denying she's made strides the past months—"

"She has."

"—but the fact that you're making her the public face of the Peace Treaty says you've got an angle. It can't be because Zaun needs a spunky underdog. You'd have your pick of poster kids from the sumps for that. Why choose Jinx?"

"Because she is Jinx." Silco's fingers card through his hair—mussed from their exertions. "Her reputation is known across Runeterra. So is her prowess with gadgetry and magic. With the right moves, we can harness that mystique into a political brand."

"You're serious?"

Silco's reply is the shadow of a smile. "Think of all the investors at the event. Press. Diplomats. Dignitaries. We show up as we are—just myself, or you, or the chem-barons—we will look like a nation of thugs. A girl with sorcery and science at her fingertips? That's different. She represents hope. Empowerment. She will leave an impact."

"Or blow everything up."

"Impact is impact."

Sevika's expression flickers into stubbornness. "There'll be Enforcers at the Peace Ceremony. Every-fucking-where."

"And?"

"If they set Jinx off—"

Silco runs a finger round his immaculate collar. The message is plain: Enough.

Paranoia tastes like blood. And blood is the flavor of Sevika's words.

Ordinarily, she never accommodates Jinx's triggers. But in recent weeks, she's kept her word to Silco. Her dislike has been warring with grudging attempts at accommodation. Since Jinx's return, she's not made a peep about the girl's lamentable lack of ballast, treating her day-to-day antics with the settled conviction of an orderly in a nuthouse.

On her part, Jinx—with a bit of guidance—has reciprocated the forbearance. The hostility between them hasn't ebbed. Sevika doesn't give her an inch; Jinx never bothers to go the extra mile. Instead, they maintain a wary detente. Its sincerity is dubious. But it serves, for the moment.

Jinx may be Sevika's antithesis: the explosive pebble in her shoe. Yet their lifelong mission is now a reality. Jinx played her part.

Now she's part of Zaun's milieu, and Sevika has to deal with it.

Same way Jinx is dealing with it.

"You could be yourself in Zaun."

Silco gave her is word. He is determined to keep it. Support Jinx until she finds her footing. But just as Zaun never sleeps, and the Eye cannot blink, so too is fatherhood a war that never ends. He's nearly lost her twice. Now he struggles with the instinct to hoard her like a precious resource.

Since returning, she was no longer staying sequestered in the suite. A good sign, and Silco took it as such. Like in the early days, he'd carved out a small refuge for her in his office. Back then, she'd sit on the rafters, futzing with her tools and paints, before climbing down into his lap as if for a top-up of stability.

Now, at seventeen, Jinx fancied herself too old for a playpen, as she put it. Instead, when Silco worked, she'd sit crosslegged on his desk, addressing envelopes, proofreading fair copies, sometimes looking up facts in books as he directed her. It wasn't as tedious as Jinx had dismissed—sometimes she'd end up so engrossed in an article or a trade edict that Silco had to gently remind her of other tasks left undone.

During the first week, he'd not cared if her schedule got too nocturnal, or if she'd stayed too tied to his side.

At least she was close.

But administrivia wasn't for Jinx. She was too lively to waste the daylight poring over pages to a mindless tip-tap of typewriters, while pneumatic tubes clattered endlessly across Silco's desk and voices of politicians rose and fell in steady duets on the telephone.

By the second week, she'd already organized anarchy: a cage of parakeets unleashed in the war-room (droppings included), confetti bombs strewn across the carpeting (with a few real ones), chairs glued to the ceiling (clerks in tow), and a dozen sensory assaults from strobe lights in the somber corridors—to say nothing of the neon-sprayed obscenities on the walls (where in Kindred's name had she learnt those words?).

Just a fortnight ago, she'd walked next to Silco like the hollow-eyed survivor of Helia. Now she was Jinx—times ten. Yet behind her fierce exuberance, Silco saw the uncertainty. She was still unsettled in her skin. Still making it up.

Playacting.

In front of the keen-eyed spectators, Silco kept stoic. Nothing was more important than bolstering Jinx. Her inner-struggles were nobody's business.

Privately, it was a different story.

Her moods stayed erratic. When she smiled, it had a taste of sugar-stickiness; too fake. When sad, her face resembled a harlequin mask, full of twitchy-dark melancholy. Sometimes she'd shudder mid-conversation, and Silco could almost sense the ghosts brushing the back of her neck. Without a word, she'd slip into the bathroom and stay there for nearly a bell. Silco would hear soft sobs lapping from behind the door. More than once he'd threatened to pick the lock if she didn't come out.

Except his threats with Jinx always ran empty.

In the end, he'd sit outside the door, and pass his handkerchief through the gap beneath. She'd press it back, tearstained, with notes scribbled inside it. Angry, forlorn, lost. He'd reply with his own, more patient.

'I hope someday the sharp bits stop rattling in the dark. Eventually. Meanwhile, you are my light. XOXO'

Jinx had light. Plenty of it. Too much to play a hidden cog in Zaun's machinery of progress. Her mixture of roles made it impossible. She was his daughter, an intimacy that none of the crew could claim. She was the nation's champion, the girl who'd saved them from Piltover's stranglehold. She was Silco's confidant, a role that was essential, but also dispiritingly passive. It was easy for her to feel like a hanger-on.

If not for Jinx's marvelous mind.

Her hideout was ashes. But with a little persuasion, Silco got her to choose a new workshop. There was an entire turret above the Chancellor's suite that nobody used. The Aerie—it was called. Typically, it served as a watch-tower for blackguards. Honeycombed with hidden chambers and full of winding staircases, high ceilings, plenty of space, and an unmatched view encompassing Zaun's glittering cityscape.

It suited Jinx from the get-go.

Freed from the decadent minimalism of Silco's office, she quickly transformed the Aerie into her playground. A surreal maze of shelves crowded with tools, dangling tinsel lights and tinkling chimes. The walls were splattered with graffiti—sharks, ravens, bats. To go with the menagerie was a real one—well, a stuffed one. They had different names from the friends collected in Jinx's girlhood: Teditha the Tigress, Sylvia Le Swan, Minxy Mongoose.

To Silco, they sounded like working-girls from Babette's. He kept that detail to himself.

The menagerie wasn't the only change. Bit by bit, Silco began transitioning Jinx into the public eye. His primary motivation was practical. The Peace Treaty was set for three months hence. He needed Jinx to be comfortable with the mass exposure. Her posture, her bearing, her attire—everything would soon be scrutinized. Zaun's future—its very soul—would rest on her small shoulders.

His secondary motivation was less straightforward. Jinx needed to learn that glamor wasn't just a disguise. It was a state of mind. If she could make the transformation, it would go a long way to vanquishing that specter of self-doubt. Her new life didn't have to be a mask. She could step into the second skin and feel right at home. Treat it as an evolution, rather than an erasure.

No longer Powder; no longer Jinx. Someone stronger.

Something more.

It was a work in progress. Jinx's confidence was shaky at best. So was her mastery of social graces. The streets had their own rules; an elaborate protocol of life or death. Whereas in Piltover, silvery language was the currency of status. Jinx would meet people from backgrounds vastly different from hers. People who couldn't be terrorized or threatened. People whose desires could sway entire cities—or send them crashing down.

If Jinx was to change minds and steal hearts, she'd need a winning hand.

Silco spent the shank of each evening tutoring Jinx on how to bluff her way through social gatherings. He taught her the most useful tricks in his repertoire. Dead blinds and deuces; business and banter. He made her spin the roulette wheel in her mind's eye, betting on every scenario from a stranger's verbal tics to a passing glance to a tense exchange.

People, he explained to Jinx, wanted much, much more than they'd been given. There were ways to show them glimpses of what they desired, without truly surrendering it. He taught her how to dissect motives from all angles; diplomats intent on bedding her for leverage, dowagers who'd see her as an upstart to be snubbed, dilettantes who'd size her up as stepladder to be used. He showed her how to pierce the real emotion behind the veneer—lust, loneliness, longing—and twist it to her advantage. By the third week, he was feeding Jinx strategies for exit and entry: when to seize eye-contact; how to drop a topic; how to stir up a crowd.

Jinx had the makings of a consummate player. She could smell the game in advance, and see the bottom line in the dregs. She was also a natural beauty—a gift Silco had never possessed, but one that could be leveraged to great effect.

A bombshell in a silk pocket.

Jinx's wardrobe was her first exercise of that potential. An impoverished child from the Sumps, she'd worn castoffs as a little girl. Under Silco's aegis, she'd outfitted herself in secondhand chic. As Silco's fortunes rose, she'd begun indulging her love for whimsy. None of it was sophisticated, but it was bold. It made a statement. A child's way of announcing I'm still here! to a world that had stolen her voice.

Now, in the public eye, Jinx felt compelled to switch up her appearance. Her tastes grew wilder, a glamor-scape of sequins and satins and studs. With each outfit came a new persona. Sometimes she'd blossom into the most girlish thing alive; a pink powder-puff in bouffant sleeves and frothy skirts. Other times, she morphed into a gothic vampirella in constructions of rich velvet and dripping lace. Once, she'd accompanied Silco to a meeting in a smartly-tailored three-piece suit identical to his own, complete with a worsted waistcoat and silk cravat, her hair slicked close to her scalp. Another time, dressed in short-shorts and fishnet stockings, her face smeared in red and white greasepaint like a clown, she'd terrorized the staff in the halls, laughing maniacally and spraying confetti in her wake.

Lacking the psychickers' terminology like "major stress events," "reconstruction of the self," and "reassertion of control," she had to make do with crude equivalents to demonstrate the damage done to her displaced mind and body.

In her own words: "If they're gonna gawk, might as well give 'em somethin' to gawk at!"

Silco was supportive. Privately he got a kick out of watching mountain-dwelling dignitaries from Targon and subdued wraiths from the Shadow Isles stare at his little punk-blackened princess doing the rounds at official engagements. Her brazen incongruity, contrasting against his own austere elegance, made Zaun seem what it was: a cosmos of cultural dissemination.

And in that cosmos, Jinx was fast becoming a star attraction.

She was seventeen years old. A minor by Zaun's standards. The press were kept at an arm's length. But on the rare occasions that Jinx faced the shutterbugs, she glowed with a zippy charisma. It didn't happen overnight. The first few times, she'd jitter into paralysis, as if facing down a firing squad.

But a celebrity spotlight isn't so different from a career criminal's searchlight. Soon, her uncertainty caramelized into bravado.

The cameras courted her. She winked back.

The press were not the only ones paying court. So too were nations angling for Zaun's favor. They came from every corner of Runeterra. From the frozen glitter of the Freljords to the sun-baked deserts of Shurima. Each delegation bore gifts: artworks, artifacts, jewelry. Each one desired something different: from trade deals to political alliances.

All in exchange for Jinx's talents with the arcane.

Publicly, Silco accepted the tributes with grace. Privately, he committed to nothing. The blackguards were under strict orders to waylay anyone daring to be alone with Jinx. Fraternization was tolerated. Flirtation was forbidden.

His child was Zaun's crown jewel; not a prize for conquest.

On her part, Jinx didn't bat an eyelid at the extravagances. For every gift horse, she'd say Thanks a bunch! and ride away beaming.

But in her heart, she was lonely.

Silco couldn't always be there. He had deadlines by the dozens. Nor could the public engagements be relied on. Politics was a hornet's nest. Nobody could be befriended. Only beguiled, bullied, bribed. The Fissurefolk adored Jinx, but a pedestal of adulation only deepened the void; one misstep, and what is a pedestal, if not a precipice?

In her insecurity, Jinx needed solid footing. A handfasted love.

Mostly, she poured herself into her work. Schematics were spiraling from her hand again. The Aerie's table was littered with designs for new inventions. There was a ferocity to them—the lines jagged and the angles sharp, so the results resembled a predator's daydreams. Yet they held a strange fragility too. Like they'd struggled to the surface for a glimpse of sunlight that might at any moment be snatched away.

Like sunlight, Jinx's creative upswings weren't constant. Most rarely lasted beyond three days. But with each one, she built momentum, and sustained Silco's hopes that she'd settle into herself.

Into Zaun.

They were developing a routine—the disordered kind of two intractable monsters finding their balance, but with fingers tenderly twined. In the morning, Jinx resumed dosing Silco with Shimmer: a careful one-two-three and a cauldron of boiling pain poured into his eyeball. By lunchtime, he'd return to the suite, and they'd sit together at the table, amid a comfortable disorder of eel pie and cupcakes, sharing conversation about trade, turbines, rezoning, rebuilding. By evening, Jinx went walkabout across the cityscape—Puff-Puff at her belt and a notebook under her arm. Later, Silco would find messages in Jinx's looping handwriting on his desk: requests for tools, raw materials, books. By night, between flying sparks and blatting music, she'd perch at her work-table and design prototypes of vastly different stripes: drum-mounted turret lasers, turbines, infrared sensors.

Each project an electrified skein tied to a luminous center.

The Hex-gem.

She and Silco had had heated discussions on its potential. Jinx's verdict on the infrastructural projects was damning. The engineers were making do with primitive and piss-weak versions of everything: raw materials, power sources, labor. For the sake of internal politics, the projects were largely overseen by chem-barons, who—Jinx complained—were either incompetent, or double-dealing, or both.

Jinx wanted to get in there and make real change. And she knew exactly how.

"A Hex-Code."

"What?"

It was late-evening. Beyond the balcony, the neon skyline scaled towards the smoky dome of the emerald sky. Jinx and Silco were sprawled side-by-side on the poolside chaises. The underwater lights dappled their bodies. Sometimes, surfeited after a long day's work, they'd sit here and share a quiet drink together.

Jinx, who used to make the most hilarious faces when sneaking sips from his flask, was maturing into a girl who liked a good cocktail. Sharp, fruity, fizzy—everything was her favorite fare.

In public, Silco eyed her intake closely. In private, he gave her a crash-course on everything from tonics to aphrodisiacs. He educated her on how intoxicants could manipulate the mind and body: addiction; persuasion; coercion. He also warned her that the smallest mistake, the tiniest taste of weakness, could tip a life off its axis.

Jinx soaked up the lessons the way she did everything else: exuberantly.

Tonight, she'd whipped up her own concoction—an opulent pink sherry with a spiral of lime. The formula was designed to dull migraines and fire synapses. Silco's own bedtime brandy sat in a cut-crystal glass on the table.

He'd spent the entire day haggling with a Targonian nobleman over the rights to a copper mine. Like wrestling a minotaur at close-quarters: gritting, sweaty, exhilarating. Lately, the southside quadrant had been beset with wheelers and dealers, each one angling for a cut of the pie. Small wonder, given the Firelights had withdrawn from the scene.

They'd been lying low since taking blame for the explosion in Oshra Va' Zaun. Thanks to the media's careful disinformation campaign, they had begun falling out of favor among the masses. Sevika's strategies in the war-room had enabled the shadowrunners to retake the southside and hold the line against their saboteurs tactics.

Now the group had gone dark. Not disbanded; simply biding their time.

Silco didn't mind. He could play the game with infinitely greater patience. With Piltover and Zaun soon in each other's pockets, the Firelights would find themselves in an untenable position. Their influence would fade; their rations will dwindle. In time, there would be discord and deserters. They would have to alter their strategy—or die out.

Either way, Silco would be waiting.

Now, Silco sipped the brandy. The burn—like the Targonian's signature on the dotted line—tasted of victory.

"A Hex-Code," Jinx repeated. "Like a polyphase system of magic."

"A poly-what?"

Jinx sighed. But the exasperation was in good spirits. She was perched on the chaise with her knees drawn-up, one arm dangling, fingertips stirring through the water. Silco lay stretched beside her, elbow crooked over his face like a sun-bather.

Moon-bather.

Jinx's eyes radiated the same lunar hypnosis. Silco kept a mental tally of each phase. Tonight, the glow waxed bright. His darling was beaming.

"The old techies used the term 'power grid,'" she said. "Well, think of Zaun as a bunch of grids. The Promenade grid. The Entresol grid. The Sump grid. Each one is from a different era. They're either crazy underutilized or on their last legs—and they aaaaalll need rebooting." She held up the Hex-gem in her palm with a dramatic flourish, droplets skittering off her fingers. "Gemmie could solve that. With hexes to tie the grids together."

"A magic power-source."

"Yep."

Silco's forearm slid off his brow. "You are joking."

"Nope." She rolled over to regard him, elbows in the cushions, chin propped in her palms. "Remember when we were in the Deadlands? How the explosion was right behind us one second? Next we were miles off?"

Silco regarded her sidelong. "I remember."

In truth, he'd nearly blocked it since. The blast, the obelisk, the flash. A vortex of power that resonated to the marrow, all pulses and ebbs. It was not gone, exactly. Just muted. He was aware of it still tugging at the strings of his viscera. Plucking away, a relentless pull like destiny.

Silco had no gods to pray to. But the recollections of that night held a primordial thrall. A force greater than faith.

And Jinx was the tuning fork, vibrating to its frequency.

"I've got a theory!" she said. "Remember how you told me the Deadlands were where the old sorcerers of Oshra Va'Zaun lived? How they used to practice magic for everythin' from cultivating gardens to making potions?"

"I do."

"Well, what if the obelisks were the key?" Her face was rapt. "Like a big ol' switchboard? The runes could be a sort of control panel. Special symbols tied to the arcane. That night, for whatever reason, they set Gemmie off. They must have activated a hidden hex-code. A sequence of energy that catapulted us across miles! Like the magical equivalent of a quantum leap!"

Silco considered this warily. "You're serious?"

"Well, yeah!" Jinx crooked a finger. "After your history lesson, I got to thinkin.' What is it that makes Zaun's topography so unique?"

"You mean why it's a hodgepodge of gaudy and grotesque?"

"Exactly! And then it hit me. It's not simple aesthetic. It's like layers of a painting! And these layers all sit on top of each other in a time-lapse! All the Jugendstil antiquities in the Sumps are from the mercantile era, when Topside was booming into a bigass metropolis. The utilitarian cages of steel and glass in Entresol are from the Void Wars, when refugees were packed together like sardines in a tin. And the latest super-stilty stuff on the Promenade, that looks like it's made outta papier-mâché—that's from our heyday, when raw materials got so depleted, we had to use foreign scraps in construction."

Silco nods. "Go on."

"When I thought about it, a word popped into my head: pentimento. I read about it some old art history book. It's a Shuriman word for underpainting. When an artist layers over their first attempt. The best way to with colors and shapes that are similar. Except the layers become a chronology. Each one is connected to the next by a timeline. New on top of old on top oldest. That's us!"

"Us?"

"Zaun!" She snaps her fingers. "We're a city of salvaged scraps. But our base is the ancient architecture of Oshra Va'Zaun. It's never gone away. We've built on it, covered it, but never erased it. All the layers are there! A whole network of runes hidden from sight. We just need to find them!"

"What's this have to do with powering up our infrastructure?"

Jinx spread her hands, exasperated. "Don't you get it? That means Zaun's already a grid! A whole a repository of runes! I've read that the ancient ones kept 'em as a system of ley lines. They used 'em like power cables to create conduits for magic. Raising storms. Vaporizing rocks. Waking Eldritch Horrors from slumber..."

Slowly, Silco sat up. "You believe the Hex-gem is our way to tap those old ley-lines?"

"Yep! We just need to find 'em all."

"How? A citywide excavation?"

Jinx nixes this with a headshake. "Too messy. And it won't do jack-all. Zaun's too big. You'd have to dig deep, and we've already been digging for centuries. The old runes are buried under miles of junk. But—" Her eyes twinkle. "—with Gemmie, we could map 'em out in double-time."

"How?"

"With magic, Silly." She uses the same patient tone as a schoolmarm with a dim pupil. "Gemmie is sensitive to runes. If I construct a magnifying glass to amplify her energy, and focus it on the cityscape's ley-lines, the whole thing'll act like an X-Ray! We'll learn their patterns, and be able to plot the network! Easy-peasy-pie-and-cheesy."

"So you say."

"We-ell..." She relents, sawing a hand under her nose. "I'll need a scattershot map of basic runes first. Otherwise, I won't know which ley-lines I'm missing. Then I'll need to calibrate Gemmie to narrow out the rest. And then there's the matter of the magnifier. It's gotta be reeeeeeally strong. Otherwise the signals will get lost in the background radiation. I'm thinkin' I could design it like a gigantic telescope. Except at its base, instead of lenses, it'd have a focusing array of crystals. Like a Geiger Counter, only instead of measuring ionized radiation, it'll measure frequencies of magic."

"And one you've mapped the network of runes, how will you harness them?" Silco rejoins. "By the sounds of it, that level of power is enough to vaporize a city."

"Simple! By turning the runes into a trapped-key interlock!"

"A what?"

"It's a safety mechanism. Say you have a river running downhill. You want to make sure it doesn't flood. So you build a dam with a bunch of gates. One gate gives way to another. They're all interconnected. That way, when one gate opens, the others stay shut. The whole thing works as a big dam. The same goes for the magic. Gemmie would be the power-source. Like a flow valve or a circuit breaker. The ley lines would be the flow-paths. The runes themselves would be the sequence. Different runes activating different levels of mana. And the Hex-Codes would function as a time-delay switch. They'd stop the power from overloading."

"And what, precisely, is the Hex-code?"

"It'd be a miniature sequence of runes. I'd inscribe 'em into a matrix, then encrypt 'em. Like a password. Gemmie would sit in the center. With each rune paired or sequenced, she'd recognize the pattern, and kick out appropriate levels of mana. Then once everything's in order—"

"Unlimited energy."

"Bingo!" Jinx snapped her fingers. "Every zone would have a power grid. Real power. Fully connected and fully charged. Imagine everything we could do! Terraform the Sumps. Start new housing projects. Filter the air. We wouldn't just be the chem-tech city. We'd be the—uh—the—" Her endorphin-pumped tirade stuttered. "What d'you call it again?"

"A megalopolis."

Jinx raised her arms high like a boxing champion. "Ding, ding, ding!"

Silco stared. He tried to conjure a vision that ran parallel to Jinx's words. A Zaun full of pristine neon spires and shellacked glass facets. He imagined the economy transformed: an influx of foreign capital pouring in, with trade agreements galore. He saw a new generation of citizens, their city no longer a cesspit of pipes and pistons. He imagined all eyes turned to Jinx—for once, seeing the genius who'd pulled all of Zaun's disparate parts into a spectacular whole.

He saw progress: a many-splendored monster with golden wings.

And he saw the cost.

"Jinx, that sounds—"

"Amazing!"

"Dangerous."

He'd hit the wrong note. Crestfallen, Jinx slumped. "Huh? Why? I thought you'd be all—" She pantomimed a mastermind's chin-stroking moue, "—'A capital idea, child. We'll make history with this. And bloody Topside's nose in the bargain.'"

"It is a capital idea."

"But?"

"A capital idea with deadly consequences."

Jinx's eyes picked up a gleam of hurt. "D'you think I can't handle it?"

"No, that's not—"

Silco started, then stopped. Already he regretted the kneejerk rebuke. Yet he was pressured by the certainty that this gamble could come at too high a price. Magic wasn't like money. It wasn't quantifiable. For all Jinx's cleverness, there was a limit to what could be codified by the rational sciences.

His eyes went to Jinx. The water's glow limned on her skin, sleek as wet cobalt. Her swimsuit—a two-piece black and white print—was demure by Zaun's standards, and yet did little to conceal the shape of girl maturing into womanhood. In that moment, the beauty of her was a blade to his dead heart. He saw all of her—the spirit, the fire, the fragility.

The will to change a world. And the innocence stolen in the bargain.

Stolen once by Topside. Stolen twice by Silco's ruthlessness.

(I need you. Now build me a weapon.)

"Jinx." Silco chose his words with care. "You've made leaps with the Hex-gem. You won the war. The city owes you everything. But this is different. The magic involved is older than Zaun. Old as the Fissures themselves. There is too much we don't know."

"Oops, there's a giant hole in Zaun! I'll just wave my magic wand and fix it." Jinx's cackle burst like black confetti. "Um—newsflash, Silly? We've never known. Not when I was futzin' with Gemmie in my cave. Not when the Golden Duo in Topside—Talis and Whatsisnose—were tinkerin' with the Hex-Gates. They could've kickstarted a wormhole, and poof! We'd be living in another galaxy by now!"

A blade of déjà vu cut down Silco's spine. His expression reabsorbed itself.

"What?" Jinx asked.

"When have you ever seen a wormhole?"

"Well—never, I guess. Unless Dustin's stomach counts."

Silco's scrutiny didn't abate. "You're sure?"

She nodded. He'd trained her well. No room for doubt in the eyes. Except she'd not yet mastered her hands. They held a quiver: skittish, then still.

"That night," Silco said. "During the blast in the Deadlands, something... shifted. I felt it. Some kind of rift in the space. There—then gone."

Jinx was quiet.

"You felt it too."

She nodded, once.

"You know what it was?"

He watched Jinx's face change: that flicker of muscle that redefined her features from a subdued little girl to a half-lidded enigma. "I don't know. Not for sure. But I think—" She glanced past him, to the rippling lights in the pool. "It wasn't a rift. More like a gate."

"Like the Hex-Gates?"

"Kind of. Except the Hex-Gates are linear. That night... the gate was—" She struggled to find the right words. "Twisty. Like veins. Each one flowing someplace different. Pulsing with power. A whole lotta power." Her features held a dizzied trace of wonderment. "I think that's how it works. Every Hex-gem is a key to open the gateway. The runes are combination codes. They get you in. But each combination takes you someplace different. Kinda like a maze."

"What would happen if someone used multiple gems simultaneously?"

"Dunno." Her stare was prismatic in the dusk. "Trigger an actual wormhole? Take you to the end of the word? Or..."

"What?"

"Maybe it'll bring a new world to us. Change us like the sands change with the tide."

"Or like the Cataclysm drowned us alive."

He expected Jinx to flinch. She didn't. Reaching out, she stroked his scarred cheek with the tips of her fingers. The city-lights filled her eyes. Their refraction turned them into a shifting galaxy.

"The Cataclysm was an accident," she said. "Greedy men with empty dreams. This is something different. Older. Something that's always been there." Her voice held a soft conviction verging on a prophecy. "I told you… that Gemmie talks to me. I wasn't lying. She does. Off and on. But that night... it's like she wanted me to talk back. To reach out to me. Open wide, she kept saying. I'll fill you up. All I had to do was let her in. Let her flow, and I'd flow too. With ideas and music and dreams and—"

Jinx stopped. A shadow fell over her eyes.

"All of me," she finished.

"All of you?"

"All the broken pieces. All the holes. Everything stitched back together." Her voice was fragile. "Perfect."

Silco stared at her. He wanted to cut in; it was his first reflex. Her tale was far-fetched as a fairytale. Yet Jinx's words were painfully intimate. A confession he couldn't disparage. Truth told, he barely remembered the phantasmagoria from the blast. A taboo sworn for sanity's sake, because the memories that weren't hazy were horrible.

Except they were real. Real as Jinx's palm cupping his face.

He said: "You believe the Hex-gem is our key to salvation?"

"I do."

"But?"

"No buts. We're sitting on the craziest resource alive. And it is alive. Like a current. We just need to decode the runes. Once we do, there's no stopping us." Her fingers stirred along his jaw. "I think... that's what magic really is. Just another way to connect with something bigger."

"Jinx—"

She transitioned from trancelike to tart. "This is all too woo for you, huh?"

He didn't relent. "I'm a realist, Jinx."

"That's your problem. You can't make everything real with facts and figures. Zaun's not a balance sheet."

"And yet, our stakes are highest."

Sighing, Jinx dropped her hand. "That's why we need to do this. That's why I need to. You don't have to be all in. I mean, it'd be nice, but... I just want you to let me work this out. To believe in me."

"I do."

"Then let me use the Hex-gem." Her eyes sought his. "I know you think we shouldn't be messing with old magic. But I think magic is our best shot." She gazed out beyond the balcony rail, at the smear of neon across the cityscape. "Y'know... when I was a little girl, Vi and me used to sit on the Drop's roof. We'd watch the stars peek from behind the smog. We'd hear the patrons down below. Someone pitching a fit. Someone puking in the ginnel. Vi... she told me not to see all that. Just the stars. She told me I was a star too. Someday, I'd shine real bright. And I'd make Topside see Zaun for what it was. For who we all were, under the grime."

She rested her cheek on her drawn-up knee. Her silence lapped at Silco like the susurrus of the pool.

"Vi used to believe in me, once," she whispered. "She said I was her little star. This city was our safe spot." Her laugh grated in her throat. "Miss Vi's got no room in her life for stars anymore. She's out in the sun. But we're still down in the dark."

Silco heard the desolation in her voice. A little girl's dreams gone down the drain. That's what she became, whenever she spoke of Vi.

A lost little girl.

By his side, she'd never found her true place. Only chased it, harder and harder, the more elusive it proved. He'd given her a new name. Revived her with a newfound persona. She'd embraced it with a zealot's mania. She'd proven herself—in her eyes and his—by laying waste to Piltover.

But her old hurts were always there. A throb in her heart; a fire in her eyes.

A wound that never healed.

"The dark," Silco said softly, "is where all the stars shine."

"So let me!" Jinx focused on him, her face twitching as if a live current was racing through it. "Let me shine, Silco. I'll make Zaun the city we always dreamed of. If I can do that, I can fix what was broken." Her voice trembled. "Fix everything."

Silco's gaze held an ineffable gentleness. "You can't undo death, child."

"I'm not trying to." Tears slid hot-pink from the corners of her eyes "I'm just trying to make sure they didn't die for nothing. Mylo, Claggor, Vander. Maybe if I do that—they'll go quiet. I'll unjinx them. I'll unjinx myself."

Reflexively, Silco rose of the chair. He took Jinx's head in both hands, a cradle to cover for the strangling ache in his chest. Jinx roused as if from a spell. Their eyes met. Her lashes were spidery wet with tears. His thumbs smoothed them away.

"You have nothing to unjinx," he said. "Nothing. What happened at the cannery was an accident. What happened in the war was inevitable. Everything after? All the progress you've made? That is a miracle. So are you, Jinx. Do you understand?"

Jinx's mouth quivered. She said nothing.

"Do you?"

She nodded.

"You're already a star." He smoothed her hair, the shorn strands crackling against his palms. "The brightest we have. But most importantly, you're my daughter. Mine." He leaned in, their foreheads together. "I won't lose you again."

Jinx's smile held a tiny tremor.

"You won't lose me," she said. "There's nothin' to lose."

"How can you know that?"

"I just do." Her breath was warm: salt and sherry. "This isn't a bomb I'm building. It's bigger. A brand-new boom. And I want to dive down and say hello. I think—if I do, I'll finally understand it. How to fix Zaun. How to fix myself. Gemmie is part of it. I need to know what she means."

"And if you don't come back?"

Jinx's eyes were full of neon constellations. "I will."

He searched her face. She was earnest, brave. A comet unfurling before his eyes. Out of childhood and into—what? Not a downspiral but a leap of faith.

A place that he couldn't follow—not fully. But he could devise a trapped-key interlock.

"Knowledge of runes," Silco said, "takes years to perfect. It's a lifelong pursuit."

"You promised to give me time."

"I will. But I need a promise from you, too." He took her chin, tipped her face up. "Whatever happens, you won't return to the Deadlands. Not with the Hex-gem. Not alone. Understood?"

Jinx's lips parted to protest.

He stopped her. "Understood?"

The protest died. She looked sullen.

"I will not apologize for setting a limit, Jinx. Not if your life's at stake. If we're going to understand the runes, we need to know their history. Their hazards and limitations. The more we know, the better decisions we can make." Gentling: "Whatever you need, I'll make it happen. You'll have all the resources at your disposal. But you'll be smart. You won't act without consulting me."

"Silco—"

"That is non-negotiable. Do you promise?"

He seized her stare. Held it for a long, long time.

"Yes," Jinx whispered.

"Swear."

Jinx offered her pinkie. A solemn vow between two people who stole lives and twisted truths as easy as breathing.

Their fingers curled in a knot.

Silco felt calmer now. More in control. The promise wasn't the point. It was in taking the measure of Jinx's trust. If she'd refused, he would have reeled her back. A regrettable move—but necessary. Jinx wasn't dice to roll or chips to stack. She was his daughter. His to safeguard.

His to love—in the tenderest and the most killingly sharp ways.

Jinx said, "So when do I start?"

"Tomorrow. I'll stop by the Aerie to see."

Jinx pounced gleefully into his arms. Her hug held all of the effervescence of the old days. His armful of freckled future: a blue head of sparks, a steel spine, a perfect silhouette. She fit into the crook of his arm, into the shape of his chest, the niche of his neck, as if she'd always belonged there.

"You won't regret this," she said.

"I never have, Jinx." Silco nestled the crown of her skull under his jowl. "Not with you."

"That's good." Jinx grinned against his chest. "Because I've got a bucketload of bad ideas."

A bucketload, indeed.

Since Silco has greenlit the endeavor, Jinx has been spinning like a top. Her mind is in a constant creative loop, ideas birthing ideas. With every one, her excitement grows, as if she is one step closer to unlocking a door she'd long been too scared to open.

Not a door. A gate. One that can take you anywhere.

Or nowhere.

Silco doesn't trust magic. But he trusts Jinx. The only time she seems herself—her most dazzling self—is when she's knuckling down to understand the Hex-gem. In communion with its energies, her mind and body work together in a synchronicity Silco hasn't even seen her exhibit with bombs.

Magic gave Zaun the edge over Piltover. Magic saved their lives. Restored their hope.

Jinx did.

Now, she seems determined to infuse those same energies into Zaun—from its streets to its very soul. To lift the Undercity to a newfound brightness.

Or maybe it's her own glow the city is borrowing?

Clothes tidied and hair combed, Silco steps away from the mirror. Sevika stares after him. Her gaze is guarded. "I received reports today that Bandle City's faerie charms are missing from the vault."

"Not missing. Elsewhere."

"In Jinx's Aerie."

"If you know, why ask?"

She scrutinizes his reflection in the mirror. "Those charms are priceless antiquities."

"No different from our chem-tech." Silco shrugs into the coat draped neatly over the back of a chair. It holds the rich rustle of serge and silk: his old one, far from virgin, has been retired. The somber colors—slate, charcoal and pewter with carmine embroidery—mock the imported pretentions of the chem-barons. Every stich local to Zaun: spun and dyed with the blood of her people. "The charms are worth more on Jinx's table than ogled at by Topside tourists."

"Is that why you've put aside crazy sums to acquire a tome on archaic runes from the Shadow Isles?"

"Questioning my judgment?"

"I'm questioning what could possess you to spend so much coin on something with no strategic value. Unless you have intel that the rest of us don't."

Silco adjusts the lapels and flicks a wrinkle off his cuff. "No strategy. I am in pursuit of my child's happiness."

"With your private coffers."

"Jinx has won the city's freedom. She's never demanded a thing in return. This is the least I can do."

Sevika shakes her head. Her silhouette hums: a territorial forcefield. "I'd buy that if you and Jinx hadn't disappeared for two days in the Deadlands. If our shadowrunners hadn't reported high traces of magic in the caverns."

"I told you. There was an accident."

"With a shitload of TNT, right?" Sevika's scorn is withering. "Question is, why'd she need TNT? What was she doing out there?"

"Family matter." He slides into his suede gloves, smoothing the seams with the tips of his fingers. They fit flawlessly—like everything else in Zaun lately: by clever design and painstaking calculation. "Now if you're done doling out the third-degree..."

Sevika's hand clamps on his wrist. "I'm keeping an eye on fires, sir. Tired of getting burned."

Her grip is unyielding. But the glint in her eyes betrays wariness.

Silco holds her stare until she drops both.

Released, he regards her implacably. His and Sevika's rapport on the day-to-day is always matter-of-fact. Ditto for the fucking. But Sevika's true infallibility rests in her talent as a walking lie detector. After six years by his side, she can pick out the barest nuance in his voice—truth, evasion, prevarication. As an emotional firewoman, she is pure instinct.

But emotion is also her Achilles Heel.

Passion puts her off-balance. It clouds a world she prefers to see through a naked eye. She's learnt to strongarm her own scorching blasts of emotion into work. Or if work fails, brawls. Silco's passions are different. They stay locked inside, scaly and seething. Sevika can glimpse them only at the corner of her eye, like something below the surface of water. It's hard to guess what state he's in—right until it erupts in catastrophe.

Or Jinx does.

Sevika is wondering whether magic forebodes a brand-new breed of catastrophe.

Bluntly, she says, "You're hiding something."

"I've given you the particulars."

"You've given me bare bones. What happened in the Deadlands? Since you've returned, you've been like a tidal wave. Plots upon plots. A back-up plan for a back-up plan. Now magic? You've got something up the sleeve."

"You're running too hot."

"I'm concerned. I can't have your back if you knock me out and disappear. I can't be locked and loaded if I don't know who the enemy is. You've got me keeping an eye on the Noxian warmason and his cadre, a viper's nest of chem-barons, a backdoor deal with Medarda, your Four Horsemen of a financial Apocalypse, on top of all that shit with Vi—and I'm still in the dark about your real agenda. I'm not like you, Silco. The dark is not my element." Her glower intensifies. "Tell me what's going on so I can do my damn job."

"In time."

"In time?"

"In time," Silco repeats, "I'll debrief you. Until then, stand sentry. Let me make the necessary decisions."

"Silco—"

"Last time, Sevika."

She stares at him. With effort, Silco regains a grip on his tone.

He's rebuked her for running hot. In truth, so is he. Dangerous, given what's at stake. The next few days depend wholly on his stamina for politics and his appetite for the long game. Nearly losing Jinx hasn't cheated him out of either. But not for the first time, he acknowledges that his senses are easiest to knock out of joint where it concerns her well-being.

Fatherhood is re-introducing him to something he'd long forgotten.

Fear.

He never lets Jinx see it. If fear is the cost of keeping her, he'll pay it in full. He'll move heaven and earth—or burn both to hell.

Sevika expression darkens. "So damn typical."

"What?"

"If you're not playing me close, you're dogging me out."

"Sevika—"

"Six years of this shit and you still won't see sense—"

For a moment, Sevika's expression is see-through. For a moment, he's seeing a different version. Not the tough-as-nails veteran with whom he trades snark and sex, but someone younger. The girl at the Nymph who'd crunched lime wedges between her sharp white teeth. The girl who'd sat elbow-to-elbow with him at Jericho's and shared a pitcher of cheap gin. The girl who, in another man's life, had been as good as his second shot at life.

She'd taken up Nandi's torch after Bloody Sunday, and never once faltered. Taken the remnants of Sil's heart, and kept them beating, when nothing else could.

One tough nut, one shrewd fixer. And yet, despite the odds, they'd fit.

They'd come out on the other side.

"Six years of this shit," Silco says with quiet ferocity, "and we've survived regardless."

"Oh, it's we now?"

"Of course it's we." His good eye, coldly opaque, narrows into bare fury. "It's the cause. It's Zaun. It's Jinx. It's Vander and Nandi and Lika and Benzo. It's all of us."

Sevika's mouth tightens. She doesn't speak.

"Six years," he repeats. "And I've forgotten none of it. Not your losses or mine. But think of what in six years we've accomplished. And understand that in half that time, Piltover will know to respect us. Respect—hell. If they've any sense of proportion, they'll fuckin' genuflect." He realizes he is speaking with the coarse consonants of the Lanes, something that never happens nowadays. He reverts to the usual. "Until then, do your duty. I know mine. Jinx knows hers. For better or worse."

Sevika exhales. "For better or worse."

"Worse now. Better to come."

Retrieving his cravat, Silco holds it out, a gesture both peremptory and expectant. Sevika relents. Her hands know their work, moving with the same briskness as when loading a gun or jacking his cock. She drapes the cravat under his collar, and twists it into the trademark efficient knot.

It's an easy exchange of closeness, superficially flattering. In truth, the proximity of her hands at Silco's throat is a mark of trust on both their parts. The only time he lets her so close; the only time her motives are so transparent. An opportune moment for murder—though it is presently in neither of their best interests.

Maybe that's the thrill?

A secret shared; a threat turned inward.

"I think—" Sevika's fingers still in the middle of tying the knot. "You ought to tell me one thing."

"One thing?"

"Just one."

She's close enough for him to smell the sex on her skin. The mélange of oils from her prosthetic arm. And beneath it all, the pheromones signature of sandalwood and brightleaf that holds the olfactory richness of a memory bank. His nostrils flare as if for the scent of prey, but the visceral pull is something else. Not a phantom pulse, but proof of the present.

He's still here. And Zaun is as real as the woman before him.

"Go on," he says. "Ask."

"The night after we took Vander to the Cannery. After I lost my—" Her hand slips. The knot sags, unraveling. She tries again, fingers dogged. "You said something to me. Before I was put under for the surgery. 'Shimmer isn't like magic. There's no cure-all.' I thought nothing of it. Same way I thought nothing of how you'd taken on a little girl with killer crystals. But now—"

Her fingers go still on the knot.

"Magic," she says. "I remember you mentioning magic."

Implacable, Silco holds her stare.

"If you're implying," he says, "that I'd planned something all along..."

"Did you?"

He shakes his head.

"Why the interest, then? The tomes? The Deadlands? Jinx?"

Silco says nothing. He can't afford to mistime his steps, and yet, the moment feels like a Sumpside Waltz. Measuring how much proximity is permissible—and what should stay hidden. When to keep Sevika abreast of the truth, and when to send her spinning away.

At least for now.

In time, he'll tell Sevika. He'll tell the Council. He'll tell the world. But not yet. Not before the risk is fully measured. Not before Jinx's safety is guaranteed.

"It's not a plan," he says finally. "Not the way you're thinking. It's more—a pentimento."

"What's that?"

"Old artwork. Artists used to paint on top of their first attempts, to create a new image. A better one. We've been doing that for years. Every deal struck. Every turn of the screw. We've built on the foundation left by our dead. This is no different. I'm simply repainting our future." He stops, then amends, "And if that painting has a thumbprint of magic? All the better."

Sevika studies him. Not as if she is accepting a decision, but making one.

"That's it?" she says. "All you're gonna say?"

"For now."

"And if I want more?" She's staring, a rawness hidden deep in her eyes. "If I need you to give me something?"

"More than this?"

His mismatched eyes drop to her hands. Her fingers, deft and sure, hold the knot fast. All his vulnerable arteries and nerve endings within reach. His own hands, unencumbered, inches from her body. If she wanted, she could crush him. If he wanted, he could gut her. That is the nature of their pact. Mutually assured destruction.

And six years of the liminal space in-between.

Sevika breathes: "Is there?"

"Is there what?"

"Something more." She holds his stare, the way she does whenever her pride is at stake. "More than this."

He is silent. For a moment, truth teeters at the tip of his tongue. A truth he'd deny, if the actuality did not keep creeping up on him. In the months since he's returned from the Deadlands, something has shifted between them. Not a rift, but a rearrangement. The kiss earlier isn't the proof; it is the symptom.

He nearly wants to admit this out loud. To force Sevika to agree.

Except truth would be the beginning or the end. Or the middle, a fork in the road. The last thing Zaun needs right now are forked roads. Silco has a goal to meet. Jinx needs him whole and sharp. Zaun needs the same. His agenda flows in one direction: toward the promised land.

And Silco?

He needs—

At the wrought-iron table, a trill.

Silco and Sevika disconnect. As one, their eyes fall to the culprit. The ornate gilt contraption—its rotary dial stamped in gold—judders to life. Recently, new conduits for pneumatic tubes have been laid throughout the city, extending the system beyond the limits of its Piltovan predecessor. Silco has also sanctioned the communications firm from Demacia to begin developing a citywide speaking telegraph network.

Telephones, they're called.

So far, their use is confined to intercity affairs. But their potential for both encryption and wiretapping makes them a boon for both classified conversations and keeping a finger on circulating public sentiments. Already, Silco's network has developed a coded switchboard: trusted operators who keep the lines connected and monitor the flow of traffic. It is their responsibility to decrypt and prioritize all the messages intercepted, then to deliver the relevant ones to Silco.

It keeps Silco apprised of developments across Zaun in three shakes of a rat's tail.

Convenient. But he keeps their use sparing in his private life. A layered defense is as effective as a switchblade. But if you don't know how to wield it, you may as well lose your hand.

Or your ears.

The telephone rings again—shrill as a buzzsaw.

Reaching out, Silco lifts the cradle. "Yes."

"Bossman." It's Ran. "We're on."

"One-oh-six?"

"Seven."

"On my way."

He replaces the receiver. It's his habit when on the line with his crew to keep the conversation coded when mentioning dates, times, and names. Jinx teases him mercilessly, but his paranoia is rooted in experience. The more secure their system, the more effective their dealings.

Especially for the work that lays ahead.

"Trouble?" Sevika asks.

Silco shakes his head. "Business."

"Who with?"

"Need-to-know." Silco shrugs on the coat draped neatly over the back of a chair, then pulls his folding knife from the torn screen. "I'll be making a detour along the way."

Sevika's features show little emotion. If his evasion irks her, she's had years to grow accustomed. "The Aerie, I take it?"

"Hm. Jinx has a few schematics to share. New filtration systems in the Sumps. If it goes according to plan, the drinking water should be safe enough for human consumption by the year's end."

"Jinx the Water Fairy." Sevika gives a headshake. "Who'd have guessed."

"You'll bless her with every sip."

Her jawline sets. "Every coin in the vault, you mean."

"If we're to change this city, everyone must play their part." He starts past her, then stops. After a beat, his hand settles, with the same proprietary ease he'd once used to touch Nandi or Vander, on her shoulder. "You asked me for more. I'm asking you for something else. Loyalty. As Deputy Chancellor, Zaun needs those from you, no matter what comes." Softer, "And I need it too, Sevika. Understood?"

Sevika's breath stirs. Her shoulder is hard as stone under his palm. A long, long moment passes. Then her features shift: not quite a softening, but near enough. A sign that, at the very least, she's listening.

"Yes, sir." Her mouth tightens, as if she means to add more. Instead: "I need a smoke."

"Light up in the limo."

"Where am I headed after dropping you?"

Silco tips Sevika's chin. Brings her in, until the warmth of her breath is nearly his, and the shape of her mouth is nearly his.

There is no kiss. Only an order lingering in the gap.

"Topside," he says, "to pay Vi a visit."

Sevika's lashes dip, then rise. "You've got her first job lined up."

"On the day the Peace Treaty is signed. Jinx will be in attendance. An entire evening of politicking for the cameras. I want Vi nowhere near the vicinity."

Sevika nods.

"Further instructions will be on your desk. Familiarize yourself with the schedule on that day. The signing ceremony will be spent on the yacht. Dinner in Zaun for the gala—where the real business is conducted. By which time I expect you to get Vi started with hers."

Sevika nods again.

"Watch yourself," he says. "Watch Vi too. Make sure there are no fuck-ups."

Sevika smiles. It isn't her nice smile. "Count on it."

Unexpectedly, Silco yanks her in. Their mouths collide into a teeth-edged kiss.

Sevika's cry catches in her throat. A moment later, it blurs into a snarling greed. She grapples him close. Draws his tongue into her mouth as if her intention is to consume it. She tastes of bitter brightleaf and an exotic wetness. But the real intoxication is the desperation in every inch of her body.

A thrill-seeker trapped in a torture-chamber.

Silco breaks off. Sevika's breath comes raggedly. She undoes her slitted eyes to stare at him. Her lips move, but Silco is uninterested in what they have to say. It's action that proves its use. The kiss is simply a forewarning in the guise of pleasure; he'd rather not ruin the useful things he owns.

"Remember," he says softly. "No fuck-ups."

---

The radio is tuned to a Fissure station; a lilt of doo-wop floats through the air. I Only Have Eyes for You

Sunlight fills Vi's bedroom.

She keeps the curtains pulled back in most rooms. After a subterranean lifetime, the honey-colored rays are worth bars of gold. In Stillwater, she barely got any sunshine except during the one-hour yard romp. In the Undercity, it was worse. As if the architecture—iron and rust and glass—leeched the warmth as surely as the Grey.

In Piltover, Vi soaks up the sunlight. Drinks it in like a flower.

She loves the way it petals Caitlyn's skin.

They wake as they usually do on Sunday morning—trading sweet, sleep-sticky kisses. Kissing like Vi hasn't done since she was a teenager, just their intertwined bodies and the silky connection of lips and tongues. She'd almost call it innocent—except it definitely isn't. Caitlyn's whole body keeps burrowing closer, and instinctively Vi weaves a leg between hers, thigh pressing her hips. She can hear their uneven breathing, taste the salt on Caitlyn's upper lip, feel her toes curling across the disordered sheets. She can feel her own wakening body's response.

"Mornin,' Cupcake," she mumbles.

"Mrrrrr."

Poor Caitlyn. Not much of a conversationalist at 6. A.M.

After nearly ten months, Vi is used to this. Cait's mind is uncharacteristically logy in the mornings. In the early days, it used to piss Vi off. She'd build a head of steam prodding Caitlyn out of bed, into the shower, into a coffee mug. Turns out rich Pilties—especially only children—don't have chores to do or siblings to look after. Unless they have a busy social calendar like Councilor Kiramman, they can laze in bed until noon.

Fortunately, Caitlyn devised a scheme to keep Vi in bed—and keep her mouth occupied.

Caitlyn is wearing one of her lilac nightdresses, bare legs coming out of the lacy hem. Her calves, beneath Vi's coasting palm, are like buttermilk, and dusted with hairs too fine to be visible, velvety to the touch. When Vi sloughs the nightdress off, the rest of her is the same. Buttermilk skin and twilit eyes and a cascade of blue-black hair perfumed with jasmine.

Vi seldom wears nightclothes. It's either an oversized T-shirt or nothing at all.

Today, it's the latter. The air is shimmery with humidity. The ceiling fan stirs through it like a ladle through soup. In the Fissures, it is probably ten times worse.

(Is Powder okay—?)

Vi's throat aches. Then Caitlyn's arms encircle her and the pain—doesn't disappear. Diffuses.

For now, it's good enough.

Caitlyn's skin is soft, so soft on Vi's. Fragile, almost. In bed, Vi had expected her to be the same: a shrinking violet. She'd been pleasantly mistaken. Like with everything else, Caitlyn was refreshingly direct. She'd had a few girlfriends before Vi; none had crossed to the bedroom stage. Yet her inexperience only emboldened her. She wanted to try everything.

Sex wasn't a game to her; it was serious business, like marksmanship. She approached it in the same passionate focus. A few times she'd catch herself and blush, wondering if she'd done something too crazy, or gotten too carried away. Then she'd see how much Vi was loving it, and plunge in head-on.

Literally.

Now, her warm hands touch Vi everywhere, palms traveling longingly along the contours of her breasts, the curve of her biceps, the ripple of her abdomen. Vi shudders on a rasping noise when Caitlyn's palm curls around her bare sex. She parts her legs further; Caitlyn's fingertips dabble in growing wetness before sliding inside. Vi's breath catches in her chest. She feels caught the same way, in a boneless paralysis, where time stops its natural flow.

There is only Caitlyn, and the caress of her fingers, and their ragged breathing undercut by the sunrays.

Caitlyn whispers, "Is this all right?"

"It's—more than all right."

Caitlyn's lips lift delicately at the corners. It reminds Vi of a secret escaping on hidden wings.

The pleasure builds slowly, the way it always does. A languorous rise-and-fall that must take its own time. There's a stereotype—a dangerous one—that Fissurefolk fuck hard and fast, because it's all they've got. Undercity girls are never simply girls. They are a hot number, a firecracker, a spicy piece. And the guys? They're all animal instinct. They'll take what's theirs and take it without asking.

For Pilties, the Fissurefolk are a fantasy of their own creation. Half-harlots, half-hooligans. It's the kind of lie most believe, because believing is easier. The lie protects them from a truth they refuse to see: a city of broken souls, who will do anything to survive. The brothels belowground only feed the cliché, even as they're crammed with girls and boys who'd rather be anywhere else. Their bodies are not theirs; they belong to a different world.

The city of the dead.

Vi can't remember a time when she'd owned her own body outside of a fight.

With Caitlyn, it's different. With her, Vi is anything but a stereotype. She wants the real thing; not a performance or a quick fuck or a rough thrill. She doesn't ask Vi to be a badass, or a fighter, or a brute. She only wants Vi to be present, to let her feel what's real. She knows pleasure is no easy thing for her. Too many memories; too much loss. The first time they'd made love, Vi was constantly on edge, a livewire of anxiety and arousal. Caitlyn had sensed her unease. She didn't force anything. Just let the heat build slowly, until the tension snapped, and joy spilled through the cracks like tears.

That's how it is, every time. With Caitlyn, Vi can go slow. Let the heat build. Savor the sensations. And Cait is a quick study; effortlessly patient. She's learnt that the best way to get Vi off is to alternate between soft then hard, both extremes of the pleasure spectrum.

Now, her fingers continue their good work—a fullness Vi salutes with a squeeze. Her other hand pets and soothes, with a little tickle at the bunny birthmark on Vi's right knee. Vi lets off a cackle, an involuntary clench that Caitlyn feels in curious places.

It's a totally different context, and yet it reminds her of the way Powder used to tickle her when they'd play-fight as kids. Whenever she was cornered, her sister always scored a cheap shot by attacking Vi there, with the sadistic relish of a prison torturer. It always ended with them rolling around on the floor, shrieking and laughing.

The old gorge of grief swells. Caitlyn leans in and kisses her—so gently, knowing nothing and yet wanting to give Vi's everything. Vi's sadness drains into the moment. Into Caitlyn.

Into this.

When her climax comes, it throbs in slow-motion, twisting from her heels to her heart. Vi's thighs squeeze tight together, trapping Caitlyn's wonderful fingers deep inside her, a delicious scrape of bones, a shuddering sob of bliss. Caitlyn dots Vi's face with kisses before zoning back on her mouth, tongue wet, sweet, the kiss like water in a racing current.

Vi's own hand goes adventuring at the same time, and finds its cozy place between Caitlyn's thighs. Heat, liquid, filming her palm.

Caitlyn breaks the kiss on a whine. "Mmmm—oh."

Vi smile is lopsided. "Somebody's gonna leak through the mattress."

"Shut up and make it worse," Caitlyn says fondly.

It is only natural for Vi to kiss her again. Only natural to taste the shape of her mouth, and then the rest of her body.

The sunlight melts the condensation against the windows, droplets sluicing across the glass. They leave a mosaic of moving shadows on the whiteness of Caitlyn's skin. Barely a mark on her. It's fucking unreal. Nothing like the Undercity; ruined bodies and ruined prospects at every turn.

Vi chases the shadows on Caitlyn's body with her fingertips, and her tongue, and the edges of her teeth. And everywhere she touches, it is as if Caitlyn's skin burns. Her breaths come in jitters. Pinpricks of sweat bloom, making her gleam like satin.

And when Vi ducks her mouth to the tender place between her legs, she arches all over, her eyes dropping shut and her mouth dropping open, silent in totality, a beautiful latent scream.

Vi's own thoughts are high-pitched with heat. Against her mouth is a small haven of rosy flesh and downy blue-black fleece. And Gods, she is so wet. Vi uses her fingers to separate Caitlyn and laps her tongue from the soft pink conch of inner-lips up to the peak of clit. She tastes of sea-salt and sweetness. A ripe delicacy.

Caitlyn's hands fly down to clutch Vi's hair. Her fingers are shaking. Her whole body is shaking.

"V-Vi—!"

"Sssh. Is that okay?"

"It's—it's good."

"Like that? Slower?"

Caitlyn doesn't answer. She digs her heels into the mattress, rolling her hips to meet Vi. Wetness smears Vi's chin, and her mouth is suddenly, deliciously full of Caitlyn and all the countless other things she can't say, except like this.

For now, it's good enough.

Caitlyn sighs, her body stirring the coverlet as Vi explores her with delving sweeps of tongue. Caitlyn is the sharpshooter, but Vi is the one with the marksman's repertoire at this game. She'd learnt it early in the Lanes, with Nao, with different girls. In Stillwater, chances for a legover were few and far in between, but she'd had a few inmates on her string.

Point is—she knows her way around. Tricks up the sleeve, twists of the tongue.

Except with Caitlyn, she can never think of twists or tricks. With her, everything is spelt out in a new language. Vi's senses are suffused with her, the scent and taste, and the way she urges Vi on with her hips and her thighs and her hands, scrubbing them through Vi's hair, stroking them across Vi's head and shoulders, trying to touch all of her. Vi keeps on teasing her, working her fingers inside by stages. One, then two. Cait is always a little too tight, but not resistingly so. Her whole body holds a lassitude that is kissing-kin to total relaxation.

Absolute trust.

And Vi knows Caitlyn trusts this, she trusts Vi, because her breaths are no longer caught in her lungs but soaring in her throat, a silvery helpless hymn that vibrates through the air like the piano notes on the radio. And then it isn't notes at all, it is a full-blown singing, a slick-hot clenching broken by the shocks of her muscles, a helpless rhythmic ah—ah—ah filling the air, her fingers twisting and untwisting in Vi's hair, her whole body surging as her pitch rises higher, higher, higher… and then softens beneath a sheen of sweat.

"Vi…"

Vi lifts her head. Her mind feels ransacked; her heart safecracked.

Caitlyn's entire face is broken open, a complexity of lines that weaves her expression out of its usual clever-eyed calm and into a soft stupefaction. Her hands are no longer gripping Vi's hair. They are tugging, a plaintive fistful on each side.

Obliging, Vi drags her mouth and fingers away—Caitlyn shudders—and climbs across her. Her body feels like a power-plant, kicking off heat and sparks. Yet her kisses hold a total lack of urgency: slow, sloppy, savoring. She can't see Caitlyn's smile, but she feels it, a curl of lips that comes and goes with the passing sweetness of her mouth on Vi's.

There's a saying in the Undercity: Spit in the wind before you kiss a Piltie.

Vi doesn't think much about kissing Pilties. But Caitlyn? She could kiss her all day.

Then her lips brush Vi's ear, words blurring against its shell. "I love you."

Vi exhales raggedly, and kisses her again.

For now, it's good enough.

Afterward, Caitlyn drowses in a pretty heap. Vi pats the heap; it mumbles but doesn't move. She considers carrying Caitlyn to the shower to blast her awake—but that would be mean. Instead, Vi pads alone to the bathroom. Six minutes are spent under hot sluicing water. She re-emerges in a tank-top and sweatpants.

The kitchen is a modest sunlit geometry. Vi gets started on breakfast. Typically, Caitlyn handles the tea-brewing and the clean-up. After moving in together, they've developed a system. Vi has taught Caitlyn how to hang her towels, do the dishes, fold the laundry. Caitlyn has taught Vi how to pick wines, deposit a check and write 'Thank-You' cards. The slow ramp-up of domesticity is sweetened by a shared sense of novelty.

It's a freedom neither of them has enjoyed before.

Cracking two eggs one-handed against the bowl, Vi begins whisking. Into the silky saffron froth, she sprinkles a pinch of sea salt and a dash of cayenne. Poverty and pickles go hand-in-hand—that's the saying belowground. Yet Piltover is the real loser when it comes to zesty cuisine. All the premium produce in the world doesn't compensate for their lack of spice.

Since moving in together, Vi has shown Caitlyn a dozen ways eggs can be served. There is no wrong way to cook one, so long as it's flavorful. Ditto for stews, soups, sandwiches. Her sump-vole fritters—a barbarism to most Topsiders—have won the highest praise. Since then, Caitlyn has sampled all the dishes in Vi's repertoire: a charcuterie board of pickles, rice and onion pilaf, crawfish stuffed with cheap macaroni.

Last week, she'd even invited her parents on a tentative dinner. Their first together in a month.

Councilor Kiramman had stared at her plate with polite revulsion. But as the wine flowed and Mister Kiramman proffered genial compliments on every dish, the matriarch began to thaw. Midway, she'd tasted a forkful of Vi's sump-vole fritter. A startled smile had softened her severe face. In that moment, the resemblance to Caitlyn was uncanny.

"Where did you learn this dish, child?"

"Down-low, Councilor," Vi replied, smiling.

"Is it always so spicy?"

Vi cocked her head. "There's a fine line between good flavor and a hole in your gut. You gotta walk it."

Caitlyn had stifled a snort. Mister Kiramman hid a smile behind his handkerchief. The Councilor was less amused. But the food had woven its magic, and by the time dessert was served—a tart berry crumble, the only dish Vi knew how to make without setting off smoke detectors—she'd unbent so far as to ask Vi directly for the recipe, instead of addressing her obliquely through her husband.

Vi had given her the recipe, a personal gift.

Afterward, Caitlyn grinned with unabashed pride, Vi's hands clasped in hers. "I think she's warming to you."

"Like mother, like daughter, huh?"

Caitlyn's kiss was all the answer Vi needed.

Now, Vi pours the omelet mixture into the frying pan, smoke spiraling. With a spatula, she coaxes the eggs into fluffiness. Once they are done, she will garnish them with a generous fistful of parsley and mushrooms, a melty twist of cheese, and a drizzle of salt-brined cream. The finishing touch: chili flakes sprinkled like red confetti.

It's all healthy, hot, filling. Guaranteed to stretch the waistband out.

Reflexively, Vi touches her belly. The skin feels both drumlike and soft. Harder to stay toned in Topside unless your daily commute is a roof-run. Enforcers' duties are surprisingly sedentary. When not patrolling, they're confined to deskwork.

In the early months, Vi had bloated up. For a while she'd been obliged to leave her pants unbuttoned and her shirts tucked out. Caitlyn had teased her about the joys of three square meals. Vi took the ribbing with grudging grace. Privately, she'd felt embarrassed.

That wasn't the only change. Her monthly bleeds were like Mom's: irregular and hellishly painful. The doctor at Stillwater had labeled it endometriosis. A medical byword for Chainsaw to the cooch. In Piltover, though her cycle remains agonizing, it has regularized like clockwork.

At this point, Vi is pretty sure hers and Cait's cycles are damn near synced.

It should've been a relief. Instead, Vi felt uneasy. Like she didn't deserve to feel better in Piltover, when the Undercity—her home—stayed a cesspit.

Like her body had turned traitor.

Nowadays, Vi adheres to a strict workout. Five minutes with the skipping rope, five minutes of running in place in a series of double passes and crossovers, five more for performing sit-ups before flipping over to do knuckle pushups. Finally, she slips on the sixteen-ounce gloves Caitlyn bought her as a just-because present, and uncorks right-and-left hooks on the heavybag for thirty minutes straight.

It's where she is most centered: pushing her body to its limit, finding with quiet satisfaction that it is durable no matter the terrain.

The terrain Topside is undeniably softer.

Vi tips the sizzling eggs into a pair of plates. The smell wakes a gloomy appetite in her gut. Spicy omelet in the Undercity was a once-a-month treat. Access to good nutrition was limited. The standard fare consisted of bolted wheat, red herrings, sump-vole, beer, and cheap tea.

Here, Vi's neighborhood is a stone's throw from a marketplace. In the Lanes, the closest grocer was a bell away at the Promenade. It was the only place it could operate safely—grocers being a target for break-ins. At the Drop, they'd sometimes swapped stories and sang songs of the brutal robbery committed by The Wharfside Devil, a spoor of blood and corpses left in his wake.

Apparently, the man had wanted booze and bread.

The limited menu caused friction at the Drop daily. Four bottomless pits, Vander would mutter. Still, he'd made sure none of them starved. There was usually stewed squid on Sundays, which Vi doled out, sparingly, for lunch and supper. The rest of the week they ate stirabout or sump-vole chitterlings with cavernfruit chutney; fried riverbird doused in chili sauce; whole roasted fish dripping with oil; smoked eel, glistening with soy. Sometimes there were potatoes. Other times, pickled mangoes. Vander drank gin; the kids liked watered beer. It was safer than the tapwater. Occasionally, if they could splurge, there were cherries.

Powder loved cherries.

Vi's eyes burn.

Over three months, and there's been no word. Not from the Council about her re-entry into Zaun. Not from Silco about their shitty deal. Not from anyone above or below about the dead blackguard. Talis had conducted an officially-sanctioned inquest into the man's death. It ended up trapped in administrative limbo. So far there seemed no evidence of dirty pool—or of homicide.

Vi was reinstated as Peacekeeper. By next week, she'd resume her duties.

A relief?

Yes and no. She can't endure the death on her conscience. Her reinstation isn't exoneration; Vi has no way of confirming what truly went down that night. Worse, she and Powder still may as well be on different planets. She'd kept on tenterhooks, with half an eye on the news, or for any sign of Silco's goons. Nothing so far.

Then came the blast in the Fissures. The reverberation was so powerful, it had rattled the chandeliers all the way to Mainspring Crescent. Newsfeeds went dark, then flooded the radio-waves with static. The official statement was that the blast was an internal Zaunite skirmish.

Set off by the Firelights.

Vi didn't buy it for one red second. But at the mention of a Firelights, a frisson—half-horror, half-hope—shot through her. If the news was remotely true, could Ekko be alive? There were no survivors recovered from the Bridge. Nor had she seen his corpse among the wasteland of blood and viscera in Jinx's wake.

Could Little Man still be kicking?

Vi can't begin to guess. She'd gotten the sense during her time in the Firelight's hideout that Ekko wasn't just a hothead with an agenda. He genuinely cared about his crew, and they about him. For all the daredevil risks they took, they stuck together. In a world where trust is hard-won, the Firelights were a family.

She hopes they still are.

The floorboards creak. A savoring sigh: "Oh Gods, that smells so good."

Vi turns.

Caitlyn peers out around the bedroom door, her face bright in a dark tangle of hair. Vi's heart hiccups, an involuntary spike of heat. It's the little things that keep her going: Caitlyn's drowsy morning voice. Her soft skin, dusted with the prettiest of gold flakes. The sweet taste of her still lingering on Vi's tongue.

For now, it's good enough.

"I'm almost done," Vi says. "Go ahead and shower."

"In a minute."

Caitlyn pads over and kisses her, lingering. Her palm comes to rest over Vi's heart. She does that sometimes, even when they're not in bed. A physical grounding; a softening. As if, with each touch, the hard, hidden shell in Vi's heart will crack open.

It does, just a little. But the rest of Vi remains steadfastly rooted belowground.

One foot in the dark, one in the light.

"Mmm. Eggy, you," Caitlyn teases.

Vi manages a grin. "I'll whip up rashers too."

"You're always like this in the mornings."

"Like what?"

"Quiet." Her smile is wistful. "Subdued."

Vi hides a flinch. "Makes for a nice change of pace, huh?"

"Vi..."

Caitlyn hesitates, her hand on Vi's breastbone. Vi has a terrible suspicion that she can read her mind. Vi can handle almost anything, but not that. Then Caitlyn kisses her again. Not her mouth, but the notch of Vi's collarbone. Her hair tickles Vi's shoulder. The silkiness stirs her nerves into a tizzy.

Vi shudders. "Cait..."

"I love the way you taste," Caitlyn jut. Her hand finds its way to the waistband of Vi's sweats. Her thumb circles the jut of Vi's hipbone. Her other hand skates across Vi's spine, tracing the indentations of muscle with a doting slowness. "I love you."

Vi swallows.

She has never been loved this much. By anyone.

"I-I know." Her arms encompass Caitlyn. "Cupcake, I know."

"So why..."

"Nothing. It's nothing."

"Liar." Caitlyn nuzzles her cheek. "You know what you're like?"

"What?"

Caitlyn kisses her jawline, a line of feathery pecks, then a full-on suckle. Tease.

"You're like a painting," she says. "A pentimento."

"A what, now?"

"It's an old technique. When an artist paints over something, it doesn't really go away. It's like a shadow, a memory beneath the paint. And when you look closely, it's right there. Phantom shapes hidden in the brushstrokes. Sometimes the original subject is clearer than the new one." A sad smile. "Sometimes, they're all the eye can see."

Vi swallows. She's seen a few paintings in the Kiramman mansion. Some are in the style Caitlyn's describing. A cityscape of deep-green, with a girl's somber face superimposed in the curve of the night sky. A field filled with static sunlight and sprigs of sunflowers, the trees a blur of silhouettes. A bird's wingspan, etched like an afterimage into a countess' sumptuous blue gown.

Each artwork holds an uncanny sense of duality. Past and present, occupying the same space.

Like memories. Like ghosts.

(Like Powder.)

"You're the same way," Caitlyn says quietly. "No matter what we do, there's always something below the surface. I can't touch you, no matter how many times we—"

"Hey. That's not true."

Vi takes her by the shoulders, squeezing gently. Their eyes lock, and Vi is there with her, one hundred percent. The same girl who'd crossed the red line in Stillwater, and talked to Vi through the striped bars of black and white. The girl who'd gone all-in on her gut, and risked it all on an ex-con she didn't even know. The girl who'd given Vi hope, and a home, and a second shot at happiness.

She'd asked for nothing in return, except for Vi to let her in. To see all of her, light and shadow, and accept her as is, without condition.

One clever misfit, one reckless bruiser. And yet, despite the odds, , they'd fit.

They'd come out on the other side.

"I'm not going anywhere," Vi says. "I promise. Just..."

"Just?"

Vi nuzzles close. Her eyes burn, but there are no tears.

"I don't know. I don't know why I get so quiet." She strokes Caitlyn's hair. "I feel... I don't know. Content, I guess. Relaxed. A weight off my shoulders. That's never happened before. So I'm never sure how to feel."

"You're safe," Caitlyn breathes. "You're free. You've got me."

"Yeah." Vi swallows. "Yeah."

"For now, it's good enough, right?"

Vi kisses her in answer.

Afterward, Caitlyn goes to take her shower. Vi returns to the stove, skin buzzing and eyes hot. The bacon crackles as she turns the rashers over. In the plates, Vi finds herself arranging them into patterns: XOXO. For a moment, she's back in Silco's tent. Staring at the rainbow cross-stitch across his handkerchief. Love threaded into the black cambric, over and over.

Vi's gut clenches.

There's no reason why she can't do this. Why she can't do love.

(Except there is.)

She doesn't deserve love. Doesn't deserve Caitlyn. How can she, when she'd failed her own family?

Failed Powder.

The clench in Vi's gut becomes a claw. Three months, and every morning she has been tempted to sneak into the Undercity—danger be damned. She knows where Silco is keeping Powder. She knows the layout of his headquarters. Maybe this time she can reach her sister. She can—

But no.

Silco's headquarters are too big. There are too many checkpoints. Too many guards. As time melts away and the mundanity of Vi's life goes by without word on Powder—or word from Silco—she's begun to wonder if he'd been lying.

There were no jobs; he had no use for Vi. He only wanted to scare her off.

Vi isn't scared off that easy.

The week before she'd been officially placed on administrative suspension, Vi had gone through the Peacekeeper's channels to access inmate files from Stillwater. She'd wanted to run a background check on Silco. Conformation about certain things he'd told her. Things Vi didn't want to believe.

Later that same week, she'd rolled up her sleeves with Caitlyn, and they'd dug into the open-source archives of Piltover's civic records. Cupcake was a natural sleuth. She always told Vi that the right explanation in a crime was often the simplest one. And simple explanations weren't nestled behind folio-colored folders stamped Top Secret. They were always sitting in plain sight.

So was Silco.

His earliest photograph was a mugshot. A boy, barely seventeen. Same age as Vi when she'd been sent to Stillwater. He'd peered out of an angular gloomy-eyed face streaked with black. Dried blood, Vi realized. He was charged with stabbing a Patrolman to death. There were additional accusations of smuggling, but those were dropped owing to a dead paper-trail. By the time the file reached the Wardens, it was downgraded to involuntary manslaughter. No prison sentence, but Silco served for three years as a convict in Hölle Juvenile Correctional Facility.

By the looks of it, he'd been up to no good since then.

In Piltover's Academy, he'd been accepted as a student on a Fissures scholarship. A lucky break: the Warden himself wrote Silco a letter of recommendation. He'd seemed to have the aptitude. His grades were top-notch. By the time he'd graduated, however, he'd found a different calling.

Political subversive.

Since before Vi's birth, she saw articles referring to the young firebrand, S, linked to sit-ins and strikes. He'd written a pamphlet, Pay the Lessons Forward, in which he encouraged the Fissurefolk to resort to violence if peaceful protest was ignored: "If the masters will not hear reason, let them feel the bite of steel." Multiple times, he was charged with seditious libel. The following year, he was accused of inciting the famous miners' strike that won the Fissurefolk union rights. After that came a string of other charges including rioting and assault of an officer.

With his partner-in-crime.

Vander.

Vi remembers being confronted with the grainy photograph from the old documents. Vander, a big glowering man with sledgehammers for fists, his chin tipped defiantly at an Enforcer. And at his side, a workman's suit enfolding his whippish frame, Silco. His hair was wavy and long and fell in his face, not quite concealing a bloodsplattered nose and a black eye. His finger was crooked as if in challenge.

The byline read: THE TONGUE AND THE FIST. And below that: All that is recalcitrant, obstinate, unruly, these two embody as a Janus-faced duo of the Undercity's rising tide of rebellion.

It was dated roughly six months before Vi's birth.

What followed were a collection of badly-framed surveillance snaps. There were even a few group photos. A sepia background Vi recognized as the interior of the Last Drop, an unbroken circle of comrades gathered together. Vander and Silco again. But also Vi's mom, and Benzo, and Sevika, and a woman who strongly resembled Sevika, but with a narrower frame and paler skin.

There was a slightly blurry snap of this woman with Silco. A headline from a local Fissure paper: Dance Hop Winners! The woman was sitting in Silco's lap, on the stool of an unknown dance-hall. Her half-lidded eyes were serene. Silco, looking pleased with her, and himself, had an arm slung around her waist. The other hand hefted a small sackful of coins. His hair was a black riot of waves over his unscarred face. The angular features weren't handsome, exactly, but the wry smile gave him the appealing look of a gamester on a winning streak.

He couldn't have been more than twenty-six. He also seemed familiar in a way Vi dared not place.

In a third snap, he leaned an elbow against a bar, again the Drop, talking one-on-one to Vander, now with a scruffy beard and a barkeep's perpetual stoop. There was a strange look on both men's faces. Not smiles, exactly, and not happiness either, but something more complex. Like a secret shared between two halves of one body. Something intimate like blood.

The surveillance time-stamp dated the photo as four years after Vi's birth.

The last photo was Silco on his own. A mugshot. Sentenced in Stillwater, for the murder of thirteen plainclothes Enforcers, followed by armed revolt, insurrection, smuggled weaponry, and inciting a mob to violence. The charges were all related to the Day of Ash, though what kind of evidence they had to link him directly was unclear. Even the charge of smuggled weaponry was vague.

Where had Fissurefolk found weapons?

There was a transcript of an interrogation between Silco and the Warden on the day of his arrest. It was marked: Classified: Unredacted. Vi had lingered over the intake information. It was the first time she'd ever seen his full name: E_ Silco. His mother was Shira, a common Ionian name. His father was Olivier, a native Trencher, and a Riverman by trade. True to Vi's suspicions, Silco was born in a settlement by the Bonscutt Pump Station.

Same as Vander.

In the transcript, Silco was described as "clever," "vicious," and "possibly criminally insane." He'd spat scornful laughter when the interrogators accused him of conspiracy to overthrow the Council. The transcript quoted him saying: "When you take from us, we will take from you. That's the game of equity. And it's a rule the Council will remember—one way or another."

Vi could picture Silco's voice saying those words. That insouciant drawl. The way he'd lean forward in the chair, one leg crossed over the other. His hands, always moving, always gesturing. Languid with an edge of menace.

He'd meant every word.

What Vi had believed was their birthright had been his lifelong quest.

His risk assessment report was marked with red lines in every paragraph. His ambition and skill-set were unquestionable. But his potential for violence was at the forefront of every concern. "This individual is highly dangerous. His charisma makes him extremely manipulative. He has a way with words and the ability to spin a story that would turn any rational mind into an accomplice. His history of sedition marks him as an anarchist, though it is unclear to which extent he believes in his ideology, and which he has adopted simply because of his hatred of the higher orders."

At the bottom of the transcript, the Warden had scrawled: "He must NOT be allowed back into the Fissures."

In Stillwater, Silco was sentenced to ten years. He served only three. The reasons were never made public. The official statement was that Stillwater had a dearth of cell space. He was assigned a parole officer, Margot Baffier. The parole officer's report was glowing. "I could never find anything to criticize. Mr. Silco was a model of impeccable behavior. In the time he was assigned to me, he showed no hint of radical leanings—or even signs of violence. He did his time quietly, and in due course was reintegrated into his community. I believe he is an example of how the Fissure-born can redeem themselves with our guidance."

She'd been dead wrong.

After his release, Silco returned to the Lanes. Vi expected more of the same news. Within six months, he'd start another riot. Wage another revolution, back-to-back with Vander. Except that wasn't possible. Because the Day of Ash was the night Vi and Powder lost their family.

The night Vander took them in as his own daughters—and hung up his gauntlets for good.

So where had Silco vanished? Was this the period when Vander attacked him, drove him off? Maybe Silco planned something so ugly Vander had no choice but to stop him? Maybe Vander didn't mean to hurt him, but Silco left him no choice? That might explain the secrecy. Six years Vi stayed at the Drop—and not once did the name Silco pass Vander's lips.

Or anyone else's for that matter.

Silco himself didn't start appearing in the news until later. After Vander's death. Mostly fifth-page articles here and there, before he graduated to society magazines and business journals. The loathsome man Vi knew, in double-breasted gabardine suits, the creases sharp as blades, his features edged with cruelty and crosshatched with scars.

One eye the color of bad blood.

This was the public image he cultivated. The Industrialist. A scrapper who'd pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made his own way. Meanwhile, the real Silco was someone completely different. A kingpin who ruled over his city in the shadows. A schemer. A killer.

Now the father of a nation.

Vi had stared at the collection of documents, questions eating at the lining of her brain. She felt no closer to understanding Silco as a man than to understanding Vander as a murderer.

All she knew was that she despised him—and everything he'd done.

To Vander. To the Lanes. To Powder.

Water pipes clatter behind the wall. Vi hears off-key humming. Caitlyn is still in the shower—she takes forever in there. Vi hears her trying out the tune for The Wave-Soaked Maiden, a song Vi likes to sing from time to time. Her improv is not going well.

Vi manages a small smile. Caitlyn isn't wrong. Mornings are never easy. Sometimes she wakes still disoriented from nightmares about Stillwater. Other times, in the middle of something, she spaces out into blankness with reminders of the dead blackguard. But having Caitlyn nearby keeps her centered.

Nourishes her like sunlight.

At the kitchen window: a tap-tap.

Vi jumps. The blinds are drawn; there is no shadow behind them. But a pinworm of adrenaline snakes through her body. Spreading two fingers into a gap, Vi peers out. On the street: a couple of motorcars. A few pedestrians. A child playing with a dog.

A relaxed vibe. Sunday morning.

Sevika stands in the shadow of the fire-escape.

What the fuck—?

Her appearance, slouched against the railing, upends Vi's brain.

Her fists instinctively curl. Wrenching the window open, she vaults out. Wind whistles through her ears. Her swinging blow connects with nothing. Sevika evades in a flash, spilling over the fire-escape and to the pavement. Vi nearly loses her balance, catching herself against the railing. The cold granules of sunlight hit her face.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

Now Sevika is leaning against the lamppost.

"Running errands. Thought I'd drop in." She gives Vi a provoking once-over. "You've packed on a few pounds. Stopped training?"

Rage thunderspouts through Vi. She leaps off the fire-escape. Her bare feet hit the cold pavement. They square off in the sunlit street. Sevika's black hair is longer, and severely bound back. Otherwise much the same. She wears a maroon jumpsuit, dark red lipstick, and high-top boots. A mix of Zaunite grunge and cosmopolitan flair.

An eyesore in Vi's haven.

"You got some nerve posting up here," she snarls.

Sevika crooks a brow. "Not gonna invite me up?"

"You're lucky I haven't cracked your jaw."

"Damn. Thought Fissurefolk were family."

"We're not family."

Sevika tips a shoulder. "Straight business it is." Her eyes narrow. "Silco's got your first job ready."

"I'm not in the mood for Silco's nonsense."

"No?"

"Or for yours." Vi's voice goes deathly soft. "You're about ten seconds away from getting your ass kicked."

Sevika sticks her chin out and glares with dark disdain. "Try it. Just one finger. I'll co-sign your obit so fast these Uppsiders will think you were a ghost. Although—" A flicker of lashes. "This isn't exactly the place. Not with the Peace Treaty in the works."

"Peace Treaty?"

A glint of malice lights Sevika's eyes. She's always enjoyed dangling juicy tidbits of info—then snatching them out of reach. "Guess you wouldn't have heard. The papers won't mention it until the weekend before the formal ceremony. But I'm sure there's been plenty of circle jerking in the press."

What are you talking about? Vi starts to say—then stops.

Sevika is right.

Lately, Topside papers have been publishing puff pieces extolling how reconciliation between Zaun and Piltover will lead to greater prosperity across not just the sister cities—but Valoran itself. In the elite Piltover quarters, a craze for Zaunite aesthetics has gripped the fashionistas. Dark lipstick, black eyeliner and jewelry like spiderwebs are all the rage. Freckles, a beauty-mark belowground, have become a hot-ticket. Even tattoos—a look Uppside has no patience for—are suddenly admired. More than once, strolling hand-in-hand with Caitlyn down the streets, Vi has gotten compliments on her ink.

She'd thought nothing of it. Pilties are forever fetishizing Fissurefolk. People are easy to control when they're boxed in. Just ask Stillwater's inmates.

Except fashion isn't the only change. Lately, there has been an uptick in Undercity teas and spirits. Devilfruit wine has begun popping up in curiosity shops, parlors and cafes. Rhubarb tea, a common remedy in the Lanes for everything from curing headaches to inducing miscarriages, is being touted as a miracle cure.

It's hard to imagine anything more absurd than Pilties lining up to try the bitter sap of vegetable that grows in pitch-darkness. Than again, it's a step up from Piltover's piss-weak coffee.

Most notable these few months is the popularity in Fissureside music and dance styles. Vi's favorite radio station plays constant tunes from the Undercity, with a heavy emphasis on drums, guitar riffs and saxophones. In the saloons, Piltie bards sing of poverty and backbreak—struggles as removed from their daily milieu as a fantasy epic. In the dance-halls, the latest fad is the Trencher-Two-Step, which involves hopping around in circles while holding hands with fellow dancers.

Some call it a metaphor for unity. Vi knows it is purely physical—a way Trenchers keep warm during the winter chill.

Now her disoriented mind takes these details and connects them to a more shadowy system at play. A campaign behind the scenes to soften up the Pilties. To normalize relations with Zaun, and make reconciliation seem like it was inevitable. Like everyone was already on board.

By the time the Treaty passes, most will be singing its praises.

Sevika watches the comprehension creep across Vi's face. Her tone holds a sly relish. "Yeah, they've been working overtime to make this happen."

"They, who?"

"Silco. Medarda."

Birds of a feather, Vi thinks.

Naturally the Council would find it more profitable to do business with Silco than to take him to task for his crimes. They're no better than he is. And Medarda—the woman rumored to have the Council in her pocket and Talis wrapped around her little finger—is just as devious. If she had her way, Vi suspects she'd wipe the slate clean and let Silco run roughshod over the Undercity for as long as he chooses.

All in exchange for a cut of the Fissures' profits.

The rage boils up again. Vi's jaw hardens.

"What. Do you. Want?"

"Told you. It's time to earn your keep."

Sevika rummages through her pocket. A folded-up paper and a handkerchief bounce off Vi's chest; she snatches them out of the air. The paper is just a piece of junk mail. A brochure advertising a fleshpit in Rotten Row.

Rumbler's Den.

Vi's heard of the place: a smoky salon hidden in a slushy dark avenue near the wharves of Rotten Row. Overdressed chem-punks and rough laborers alike slum it up there with a glass of gin and cheap company. Once, three Piltie youths were caught jumping a local chanteuse in the alleyside. There were accusations of rape. But the attackers were let off with no charges.

Vi's brow scrunches. Why is Sevika giving her a brochure to this dive? Then her eyes fall on the handkerchief. She recognizes the embroidered pattern—a cross-stitch of xoxo's. Her fingers tremble; she grips the handkerchief in a damp fist.

Powder made this.

Sevika's voice cuts in and out of her ears, like static on the radio. "Since you liked the Boss's hankie… can use it to mop that sorry-ass look off your face… sitting around Jinx's workshop collecting dust anyway…."

Jinx.

Carnival-horror laughter floats through Vi's skull. Her skin rebels in gooseflesh; she shudders.

"What," she snaps "does the brochure have to do with the job?"

"You've never been to Rumbler's Den?"

"Why would I?"

Sevika smiles. Her teeth are a white arc. Predatory.

"Because that's where the real fighting happens. I don't mean bare-handed brawls. You can watch those at any corner of Zaun. I'm talking balls-to-the-wall. Anything goes. Some fighters wrap their knuckles in concertina wire. Others splash their fists with methamphetamine. If you get too close to the crowd, they're worse. Might take a finger—or the whole hand."

Vi's stomach is a sickened twist. She's heard of places like those. Cage-matches. Vander's own father had been crippled in one. Vander used to call them dog-pits. Only difference is that the dogs don't know any better.

"What's Silco want me to do there?"

"Fight."

"What?"

"You heard me."

Vi's face wavers into a disgusted grimace. "I don't think so."

Sevika's smile fades and something sinister flashes in her eyes. "This ain't Queen Catherine's invite. Either you agree to the job, or we drag you there. The Boss will pay for your funeral afterward."

"He can't get you to fight for him?"

"Not for this kind of fight. I'm too high up for Silco to spare anymore. The rest of the crew aren't skilled enough. You're different. A natural in the ring. You'd get the warmason's attention in thirty minutes."

"Warmason?"

"There's a Noxian terrorist cell that's infiltrated Zaun. One of their captains is prowling the fighting-pits for recruits."

"Recruits? For what?"

"A coup," Sevika says. "In Piltover."

Vi's heart trip-hammers. Disbelief creeping into dismay.

"Why—why would they do that?"

"Why do you think? As an excuse to frame Zaun for a terror attack—and suspend the Peace Treaty. Keep the two cities at odds, so they can make a play for the Hex-tech."

"Does the Council know?"

Sevika's expression folds into contempt. "Sure they know."

"So why's Silco helping 'em? He hates the Council."

"You hate Silco. You're still working for him, aren't you?"

Vi grits her teeth. "I wouldn't work for him—or with him."

She expects Sevika to taunt, Then why are you still listening? She doesn't. Vi realizes she doesn't need to. She's already asking herself the same question. And none of her answers are convincing enough.

Sevika says, "You don't care if Zaun gets thrown under the bus?"

Vi glowers. "Zaun is Silco's business. It's got nothing to do with me."

"Nothing? The Lanes aren't your home?"

"They were yours too!" Vi shoots back. "That didn't stop you from stringing everyone out on Shimmer."

"I mean your loyalty."

"My loyalty's to my sister. I don't give a rat's ass about the rest of you."

"You ought to." Sevika's careless smile doesn't quite fit. "If you don't finish this job, in a few months you'll tune into the radio and hear of the ugliest carnage since the independence conflict. Mass casualties on both Zaun's side—and Piltover's. All courtesy of these warmasons and what they're planning. You'll see dead bodies piling up, and you'll know it happened because your dislike for Silco mattered more than your good sense."

Bile spews up Vi's gut. Sevika has some nerve. As if Vi is being petty and not squarely in the right. As if Silco never despoiled the Lanes. Never killed Vander or corrupted her sister.

Her hand seizes a fistful of Sevika's shirtfront. She yanks her in until their noses touch. The other woman holds the sharp twilit scent of the Fissures: diesel fumes, brightleaf tobacco, lye soap—and the salty musk of sex. She'd gotten laid before dropping by.

Repulsed, Vi nearly shoves her away. She doesn't want a piece of it, not even by proxy.

But she wants Powder.

For her sister, she'll do whatever's necessary.

"There's no difference between Silco and the Council," Vi seethes. "No fucking difference."

"You'd be wrong there."

"Yeah?"

Sevika's tone is infuriatingly certain. "The ends, Vi. It's all about the ends."

"If that's what you believe."

"I do." Her face twists into mockery. "Wise up, and you will too."

The rage drains out of Vi. She pushes away from Sevika in a manner that suggests she's lost all interest.

"Leave," she says. "Now."

Casually, Sevika straightens her jumpsuit. The posture of a winner.

"You've got a week," she says. "Be ready."

"I said: leave."

Sevika's eyes pass from Vi to the fire-escape. Her expression shades into a restrained amusement. She nods, greeting and goodbye rolled into one.

Then she melts into the early-morning streets.

Vi glances up. Caitlyn is on the fire-escape, fully-dressed and in a sharpshooter's pose: balanced on one knee, elbow propped on the other, sighting along her rifle. Vi has no idea how long she's been there. But it's evident she's had Sevika in her crosshairs the whole time. Her wrists and shoulders are rigid as steel. Her eyes are slitted in the sunlight.

But she never blinks. The barrel never wavers.

Nor does Vi's determination. Her knuckles whiten around her sister's handkerchief.

(I won't let you down again, Powder.)

And this time: no fuck-ups.