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.

23. Sumpside Waltz (Part II)

I'm taking back
what you stole from me
brick by brick
Tearing all your walls down

~ "Coming For You" – Unsecret

---

The Undercity holds a latent heat like after an explosion.

The mood isn't jubilant so much as gut-shocked. Piltover and Zaun have signed a Peace Treaty. A staggering global spectacle, arguably the most audacious since the Siege itself, unfolding before live press coverage, with indelible images of dignitaries on yachts and five-star galas in place of the blazing buildings and bloodied bodies on both sides of the river.

The Bridge, a soot-filmed skeleton, has been replaced by two ports equidistant between the undulating blueness of the Pilt. In the summer haze, the brightly-lit streaks of ships, zeppelins and steamers carry trade and tourists back-and-forth with renewed vigor.

A few months ago, both cities were at each other's throats. Now they're sharing wares across borders without being shot on sight.

Disoriented, Vi steps off the punt boat.

The Boundary Markets are strung with fairylights. The Gray is a rolling mist of witchy green phosphorous. In the distance, music skirls. A chain of fireworks erupts, bathing the night in blue sparks. Shrieks of merriment and shouts of aggression are borne on the soot-scented air.

Zaun is fitfully alive.

The war isn't water under the bridge. In Piltover's pubs, she's heard slurred grievances. Men beating their chests over Topside's humiliation at Zaun's hands. Scathing criticism of the Council for playing ball with Trenchers who ought to be pulverized beneath Enforcer's boots. Some label the Eye of Zaun as a vampire and Talis and Medarda as snakes, ripping the city apart to satisfy their own selfish egos. Others praise the peace, but there's an edge of doubt to it. Zaun isn't known for compromising. And the Eye is no stranger to subterfuge. How can you trust a nation built on the backs of chem-tech and crime lords? A culture whose very language is rife with euphemisms for murder, extortion and sabotage?

Truth is, you can't.

The only Topsiders jubilant are those with a tangible interest in the Treaty. Tradesmen, entrepreneurs, artisans. For them, tonight is a win-win. They've had their livelihoods cut in half by the war. Now they can sell their wares to both sides of the river.

In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, there has been an efflux of Zaunite goods in Piltover's ports. Root spices from the Sumps. Aged cavernfruit sherries and tins of ground-nesting honey from the canyons of the Deadlands. Wrought-iron furniture and crystal chandeliers from the mines.

Now that the Treaty is official, business will boom.

The Undercity has already donned the duds of celebration. On her last visit, Vi remembers the scenery was still crosshatched with scars. There were gutted landmarks, their rubble still being carted away. Sidewalks in repair; buildings pitted with holes like cavities on a tooth.

All that is gone. The wreckage is superseded by relentless bustle. Hawkers tempt the crush with celebratory trifles—paper moths that flutter through the air; gearwork birds that trill the national anthem; smoke-pellets filled with colored confetti. At coffee stalls, musicians huddle under the awnings, playing catchy renditions of local songs to entice passersby. Somewhere in the din, a lone voice pierces, singing a tavern ballad about The Wharfside Devil:

On a foggy night,

In the dead of October,

The Devil took his due,

With a knife in his belt,

And a club in his hand,

He took a life, too.

Everywhere Vi turns, life is in flux. Color, scent, sound. A testament to how fast the Fissurefolk adapt.

Where the Gray sits, as the Undercity saying goes.

Vi follows the disembarking passengers. Rough-looking laborers shuffle along the docks, arms laden with sacks of Piltovan-farmed produce. Well-heeled pleasure-seekers traipse excitedly into bright-glassed saloons. Children race after each other, weaving through the crowd and squealing with laughter. Most are Pilties, in polished shoes and well-starched pinafores, parents or nursemaids dutifully holding their hands. But there are also Zaunites, in worn trousers and patched dresses. Despite the differences, their carousing is the same joyful racket.

The adults are equally exuberant. Some don cloaks and dominoes as if dressed for a masquerade. Others wear chem-masks to protect themselves from the toxic haze. Most move with the purposeful stride of a night's work ahead of them. Others, dressed to nines, congregate wherever cold drinks and hot thrills abound.

Pilties—young ones especially—make slumming into an art form. Not to save money, but because it amuses them to pass from the finest life can offer to the cheapest money can buy. They relish the contrast, because they can afford both.

Now, with Zaun's open borders, even those who've never set foot belowground are tempted by a taste.

Keeping her head down, Vi follows a pair of cloaked Piltie girls to the streetside. An omnibus slows to a stop. It is a triple-decker monster: layered as an accordion. In Vander's heyday, they were a rarity. Most were confined to tight circuits around the Promenade. The lower-zones had few paved roads, let alone sidewalks. A public transport system was unsustainable. Now there are arterial twists of motorways all the way down to the heart of the Sumps, disgorging revelers wherever they choose.

Vi takes the booth by the door. The seating is two-by-two and face-to-face. She finds herself looking straight at the Piltie girls. Under their cloaks, they are dressed at the height of Zaunite style: black-circled eyes, dark lipsticks and chalky face-power. The scent of them fills the cab with a soft aroma of lilies.

In contrast, Vi is wearing her plainest outfit—a hooded jacket, a tank-top, trousers and high-top boots. An ensemble so at odds with the latest fashion that the two girls look her over askance. Their stares hold no hostility. More a Poor You pity.

Then Vi realizes the other Trenchers in the omnibus are giving her the same wide berth as the girls.

Like she's a Piltie too.

Chagrin creeps in. Vi figured she'd blend in seamlessly. Now she realizes something that had escaped her notice last time. The locals' clothes fit differently. Most are hand-stitched; the fabrics coarser. And like the Grey itself, the colors are stained.

These aren't people who get their clothes drycleaned and returned on hangers like Caitlyn does with hers and Vi's uniforms. Most hang their washing up on lines, the way Vi used to do every Sunday with hers and Powder's laundry. Invariably, the garments dried in the laden air, stiffening and wrinkling. Vi had to iron everything before she and Powder could put them on. Other families, better off, patronized launderettes that employed steam-cleaning technology. But most didn't have the coin for such luxuries. They could barely afford to feed their children.

The conductor grunts, "Where to, ladies?"

One of the girls gives him the address of a cabaret near the Breather Station. She repeats it slowly, thrice, as if she believes Trenchers are deaf.

The conductor grunts, and takes her coins.

"No Please or Thank you," the girl huffs to her companion once the omnibus is moving. "The manners on these people."

The other girl giggles. "You'll forget their manners once we hit the delicatessens."

"I'm interested in a different cut of meat—" Vi realizes she doesn't mean veal or mutton "—than what passes for prime at my father's table."

"Not to worry. Bryce has already made reservations."

"I hope that scrumptious boy is available. Miguel, isn't he called?"

The other girl laughs. "Oh, darling. We'll make sure you see him. But you've got to try all the choice ones, while the trying's good. Now that the borders are open, everyone wants a Zaunite beau. The best will be snaffled by a Holloron or a Ferros soon. Perhaps even disappear into the bowels of the Council!"

"Speaking of which—Papa told me that he will be seeing more of the Eye of Zaun." A coy smile crosses her lips. "As shall we, at luncheons."

"Goodness! Now there's cream for your cup!"

"Ah, but I shan't be allowed alone in his company. Mamma finds him dangerous. She says he represents the wicked vices of the lowborn. But Papa thinks his business acumen is second only to his own. That eye though—" A shiver "—it spooks!"

"In a fun way?"

"Like it's seeing through you. But he has a lovely way of expressing himself. You know. That voice. So articulate for a Trencher. Not at all constrained by drawing-room convention."

"What do you mean?"

"It's hard to explain. You'd have to meet him in person. He's genteel, but... sort of crooked."

"Crooked?"

"In a terribly exciting way. Even when he talks about the markets and stocks..." Her eyes sparkle. "He makes it sound like it's all one big game! As if everyone involved is cheating, conning, carousing. Everyone except us poor fools who pay our taxes."

"Oh my!"

They laugh together.

Vi regards them from beneath a frozen veneer of distaste. She's met enough Topsiders by now to recognize the type. Rich, pampered, and bored. The kind of girls who've never wanted for anything. Who've lived their whole lives on the cusp of an endless summer. Now, with the war ended, they can indulge their curiosity the way a thrill-seeker explores the sea's depths.

Zaun is the newest thing. A novelty; a wild unknown. They're excited by their own bravery, by the chance to scandalize their families. Their lives are so overprivileged, their experiences so limited, that their only understanding of true danger comes from what they are told to fear by their newspapers and radio broadcasts.

They don't understand that the Fissures aren't for sale or at their service. They don't realize that the service they are provided is not unlike that of a conman gulling a sucker. They don't know that Silco's Zaun is no dark mirror of Piltover, but a pit that that will devour them all.

Yet these girls aren't the only ones down here.

Vi is too.

For a moment, she hears Silco's insinuating voice as if right in her ear: "You can deflect, but you can't lie. It's why you can't keep away from the Undercity."

Vi drags in a breath. The folded brochure to the Rumbler's Den burns a hole in her jacket.

So does Powder's handkerchief.

The two girls exit at the Breather Station. They clutch each other and squeal deliriously at the spread of dazzling neon. Their laughter blends with the tinny skirls of music from the cabarets. A moment later, the omnibus pulls away. For some reason, Vi feels weirdly lonely without them. Their upper-class accents, groomed into melting vowels and velvet consonants, had sounded so much like Caitlyn's.

Except Cupcake would spontaneously combust if she were caught brothel-hopping.

Vi's lips twitch.

Always, thinking of Caitlyn buoys her mood. Keeps her head in the game.

Reminds her why she's here.

The omnibus turns at the Augmentation Parlors, dropping Vi off on the sidewalk. The air is denser away from Topside. Striding along in the humid warmth with the sleeves of her jacket pushed up to the elbow, her hood bisecting half her face, Vi sets off into the bowels of Entresol. She's already memorized the address. In case it's an ambush, she runs through surveillance procedures to make sure she's not being followed.

All clear—so far.

With every step, Vi circles deeper into the warren of dingier streets hidden behind the well-lit thoroughfare. Around her are a morass of pipes and vents, their surfaces blackened with fumes. The air thickens with the familiar silvery reek of chemicals borne from the depths.

Vi's throat grows scratchy. Taking a breath, she powers on.

This air, not the freshness in Piltover, is the same she grew up on.

The same air Powder still breathes.

Vi's feet carry her towards Drop Street. Where a zone ago was a thriving merry-go-round at Bridgewaltz, now lays a post-war wasteland. A wrecking crane stands near the gutted husk of a tenement. A bulldozer and a backhoe are parked in the rubble. At the corner, a giant excavator sits idle amid the skeletal frame of a collapsed tunnel. Everywhere, clusters of orange neon signs flash warnings in a dozen different languages—Safety First!—as welding embers strobe in the shadows. A strange smell—old blood, gunsmoke, dynamite—lingers in the air.

Vi remembers hearing rumors that this side of Entresol was a platter of putrefying meat. This must be how it had looked after the Siege. Now rich businessmen from Silco's consortium seem to have bought up the neighborhood, sterilizing one block at a time, replacing the decrepit infrastructure, clearing out the squatters, then starting over fresh.

A fancy façade for a free Zaun.

Vi keeps going.

Past a stygian canal putrid with waste. Past a vending machine guttering in the shadows like a ghost. Past a half-demolished monument splattered with graffiti: WHAT GOES INTO THE WATER?—ENFORCERS GET THE BOOT—A HEART FOR AN EYE. Her legs carry her before her mind has a chance to stop her. Not the shortcut toward Rotten Row, but the long way. The route she used to take as a kid. The route that, no matter where she's gone or how far, her body remembers.

To the Last Drop.

Home.

She doesn't know what to expect. The last time, she'd been here on a mission to find Powder. Vander's old bar had become the headquarters of his greatest enemy: so saturated in alcohol and fumes that you could strike a match and it'd burn into a blitz.

Now, it's an unrecognizable sinkhole. The edges are tar-scummed; the interior is pocked with pools of sludge. The sign, with its bright letters, lays in a rusted hulk at the bottom of the crater. The building's bones jut from the slush like the ribs of a corpse.

Vi stares.

Her eyes sting. Not from the fumes. There's a tightness in her throat, an ache in her lungs. A scream barely smothered.

This is the last place she and Powder had called home. The only place they had ever felt truly safe. She can't count the nights they'd spent after closing-time, bickering together and playing gin-rummy, with Vander's laughter rumbling in the background and his huge hands tousling their hair.

The first night after the Day of Ash, Vander had taken her and Powder by the hands and led them down to the basement. It was roughly furnished: a couch, a mattress, blankets, a stock of canned goods and an old lantern that cast cozy multicolored shadows everywhere. Two little boys—whom she'd later learn were Claggor and Mylo—were already curled up on the couch, fast asleep.

The dimensions of the room, its scents and textures, had felt comfortingly familiar to Vi. Like a good dream half-forgotten.

Vander had unfurled the blankets, saying that he knew Vi was too brave to be scared of sleeping in a new place, but she wouldn't mind if he tucked her and Powder in, would she? Vi was too heartsick to argue. Powder had fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Vi lay awake. Staring up at the ceiling. Remembering Mom's face, and the smoke, the screams.

And then she was sobbing, and Vander was there, holding her, his whiskery cheek against hers. Vi clung to him fiercely. When her tears had run dry, and the shudders had passed, he'd wiped her cheeks and told her everything would be alright. They'd sat up late whispering while the other kids slept, Vi under the blanket, Vander perched at the edge of the mattress, his hand in her hair.

Tomorrow, he'd told her, things will be better. I promise.

Later, Vi had heard him pacing upstairs. His footsteps had carried the weight of his grief.

But he'd kept his promise.

He had taken her and Powder in. Fed and clothed them. Taught Vi how to throw a right-cross and how to hold her own. Taught her what it meant to take care of those around you, to have their backs, to stand up for the little guy. He'd told Powder she was clever and capable; indulged her quirks and made her laugh. He'd taken them in and given them a home.

No. Not a home.

A family.

The grief comes in a wallop. Vi doubles over. Tears flood her eyes. A sob catches behind her ribs. The loss is sudden and acute. Nearly the same as the Day of Ash, her world collapsed to embers and nowhere to run. Except this time, Vander isn't there to hold her. He's gone. And not just gone. Killed.

By the same man who stole her sister.

"You okay, luv?"

Vi spins. A girl around her own age, in a patched-up dress, edges the corner. A little girl of six or seven hangs off her arm, her old burlap backpack heavy with jangling keychains. Vi's forgotten how early Fissurefolk begin breeding. They start young and go at it like rats.

"I—I'm fine." Vi hastily swipes at her eyes. "Just ate something off."

"Got business down here?"

"Depends." Vi affects nonchalance. "What's it to you?"

"Just curious. Your sort don't come this way."

"My sort?"

"Topsiders."

"How can you tell?"

"The clothes," says the girl, with the blunt matter-of-factness of a born Trencher. She gives Vi a once-over. "All those freckles. Don't get those except on the surface."

Vi shrugs, keeping her cool. "Just off on a trip. Got back a week ago."

"Oh, so you're here to pay respects."

"Respects?"

"Yeah." The girl gestures at the Last Drop. "To those who fell here."

"Like Vander?"

"Huh? Who's Vander?"

Vi bites down a surge of anger. Easy to forget the Undercity had been a subterranean warzone for decades. So many lives lost. So many names forgotten. Vander's is one of them. To everyone here, he's just another casualty. One among thousands.

"He was the owner," Vi mutters. "Before the... before."

"Yeah?"

"Hound of the Underground. You heard of him?"

"Rings a bell." The girl frowns, scratching her cheek. The little girl clings to her leg, staring at Vi with round eyes. "Maybe he's one of the names carved on the monument."

"Monument?"

"Near Drop Street. Where Jinx's mural is."

Vi's breath catches. "Jinx's mural?"

"Yeah. The big one. It's got a memorial plaque. All the dead from before the Siege."

Vi's chest is too tight for speech. She can barely breathe. All she can do is nod.

"It's a real pretty thing," the girl adds. "All bronze and etchings. You'll see."

Vi finds her voice. "I'm sure."

"C'mon, Mina." The girl tugs her daughter's hand. To Vi: "The Eye is watching."

A shiver climbs Vi's spine. The girl says it with the reverence of a blessing. Or the casualness of a curse.

"What do you mean?" Vi asks, keeping her voice light. "The Eye?"

"You know. The Eye of Zaun." The girl winks over her shoulder. "Look out for yourself, Piltie."

They set off together, leaving Vi alone on the sidewalk. For a moment, she is rooted in place, staring at the crater, her insides raw. Then her heart rate settles. Her breathing evens out.

Her feet, again, lead her on.

Drop Street is in good repair. The cobblestones are smooth as parquetry under the radiance of streetlamps. Rehab centers dot the sidewalks. Clinics advertise the latest models of chem-augmentation: steel-boned hands, copper-cog eyes, pneumatic limbs. There are brightly-painted community centers with billboards for evening-classes in the Three R's: reading, writing and arithmetic. A sign advertises a job-finding service for the unemployed. A flyer, stuck on a lamppost, urges everyone to get the latest inoculations.

There is an energy, a sense of optimism, that permeates the air. A feeling of broken things being mended. In a way, it's almost like a return to the golden days, when Topside was an emerging jewel, and the Trenchers were its industrious heart; working side-by-side to make the city shine.

A myth as fanciful as fresh air.

At street-corners, colorful awnings and festoons of fairylights are the backdrops for pantomimes. Children hoot and point at the antics of masked players. The actors are dressed as Topsiders, in pince-nez spectacles and top-hats. Some don the costumes of Enforcers. They are pelleted with bright-red softballs, chased around the platform and finally engulfed in the maw of a massive black-finned shark-puppet. A troupe of acrobats leap overhead in graceful swoops, jeering and crowing. The scene depicts a roof-hopping escapade from the jaws of death.

A common theme in Fissure stories. As a child, Vi would've found it thrilling. Now, she sees the violence underpinning the performance. A reminder that life belowground is a fight to stay afloat. Every day is a trial; besting it is a triumph. Topside may hold their lives cheap, but Trenchers cherish every heartbeat.

And tonight, they celebrate

Beneath a colorful clutch of lanterns, a storyteller holds court to a crowd of sumpsnipes. His skin is the color of bitter brown ale; his voice is a rich golden froth. His presence holds the children rapt as he gurns aggressively, gestures extravagantly, gambols grandly. His cadences lure Vi in before she realizes it.

"—So there I was. In the middle of the Siege. My whole gang is dead. Just me and a bunch of strays. We were huddling inside a bombed-out house. It was dark and we couldn't see the Enforcers. But we could hear them. The sound of their boots going thump-thump-thump. We were waiting for 'em to kick in the door and put a bullet in our skulls. That's when I remembered: I had a flare-pistol! The one every Zaunite kept to alert the cavalry. But where were the flares? I checked my pockets, and what do you know, I'd used them up in the battle. All except one."

The children let out a collective gasp. The narrator pauses for effect.

"I didn't have much choice. So I aimed the pistol at a hole in the ceiling. Then, I fired. A bright burst of light! The Enforcers saw it. I heard their boots louder. Thump-thump-thump. And the next: BOOM! Before we knew it, the door was kicked in. But not by an Enforcer. It was a little girl. She was no older than you, children."

A chorus of excited whispers. The narrator lets the anticipation build. Vi feels a prickle of premonition.

"Now, I'll tell you," he imparts in a stage-whisper. "I thought she'd been sent to finish us off. But she was no Enforcer. She wasn't even a soldier. Just a girl, holding a rocket-launcher as tall as her. She was dressed in blood, with blue braids, and eyes bigger and brighter than anything I'd ever seen!"

The crowd goes dead silent. Vi can barely breathe.

"She took one look at my gang. Then she nodded. A big, firm up and down. Like she knew just what to do. She said, 'Cover your ears.'" He mimics the motion. "So I did. The last thing I heard was the click of her trigger and the sound of the Enforcer's boots. Thump-thump-THUMP. Then... silence. When I opened my eyes, the little girl was gone. But the Enforcers were dead. Every one of them. They were piled like firewood, their helmets blasted open, and their heads..." He spreads his fingers to mime the gore. "Poof! Gone. Just like that."

A breathless Ooooh!

"Now," the narrator says, his voice hushed. "I know what you're thinking. She must've been a ghost. Or a witch. No, children. I've never seen a witch, and I doubt any of you have, either. She was human. Flesh and blood. But the stories they tell about her? Those are true. Because after that night, I swore I'd never forget her face. Not until my dying day." He smiles. "She was the guardian angel of our city."

The children squeal and jostle each other.

"Zaun's champion!"

More squeals and shrieks. As one, they chant: "Jinx!"

"That's right!" The storyteller arms spread wide as his grin. "The legend. The myth. The blood-soaked maiden! JINX!"

The children take up the name like a battlecry. Their small fists pump in the air. Their adulation echoes like the fireworks.

"I've seen her myself," says one girl. "Down by the docks. She saved my brother from drowning. He was choking, and I couldn't swim. She dove right in, and hauled him up!"

"She was right outside my house," says another. "She was fighting an Enforcer. He had his gun drawn. Hers was quicker. She shot him between the eyes. Bang! Then she took off fast as lightning."

"My Ma says she's a goddess," a gap-toothed boy declares. "If you're good and eat your vegetables, she'll grant your every wish!"

"The hell's a vegetable?"

"It's like a weed, only you can eat it."

"Sounds poisonous."

"You can eat anything, if you pickle it enough. My grandma used to say—"

"Jinx doesn't give a toss about vegetables!" A scrawny boy elbows the gap-tooth kid in the ribs. "Bombs and bullets, that's her game! The Eye made a pact with Janna. 'Send me a warrior,' he said. 'A bringer of death!' Then, whoosh! A bolt of lightning. Out came Jinx!"

"Well, if she's a warrior, then my Poppa says she's an assassin too." This, from a girl whose cheek is pocked with old shrapnel wounds. "She had a million-Hex bounty on her head. Wanted: DEAD OR ALIVE. My Poppa saw it in a newspaper. He says the old Piltie Sheriff put it up. He was ready to arrest her." Her eyes glow in hero-worship. "That's why she blew up the Bridge."

"Right after she blew his head off!"

A round of cackling.

Vi's jaw goes so tight, she thinks her teeth will shatter. Fragments of that night—the bombs, the smoke, the screaming—bubble up in the cauldron of her burning mind. She remembers the way her vision had tunneled, the world receding to a single point of clarity:

Caitlyn.

Caitlyn in Jinx's crosshairs. And Vi, leaping. Not knowing whether the bullet would find her or not. Knowing only that she had to protect Caitlyn. To die, if she had to. But not, not, not before she'd saved Powder—

From Jinx.

Vi's hands tremble; she balls them into fists. Grief leeches the color from the night. All that remains is the red bleeding from the lanterns.

And the children's voices.

"The Sheriff deserved it," says a youth with a crooked gait and a metal leg. "He set up the barricade and bled our businesses dry. The Eye made a good bargain. One life for another." He spits on the cobblestones. "Ours for theirs."

"That's what the Eye said today," says a teenage girl, her nose streaked with soot. "In his speech before the Peace Treaty. He said that Zaun's not just a city. It's a people. If one dies, we all die. It was a warning to the Council." She raises a clenched fist. "Spit in the wind before you kiss a Piltie!"

"Spit in the wind! Spit in the wind!"

The chant goes up like a war-call. The narrator laughs. "Don't spit on your shoes. Your mothers will whup you."

"We ain't afraid!" a boy crows. "Jinx has our backs!"

The chant spreads, growing more fervent: "Jinx! Jinx! JINX!"

Vi watches from the shadows. The pulse thuds in her ears. She can't decide what's been fobbed off as fiction and what's been spun as fact. All she knows is what she saw in the Siege: a bloodbath. She and Caitlyn were caught off-guard, and barely made it out alive. They'd spent every waking hour getting survivors medical help and cordoning off the disaster zones.

There'd been no time to think of anything else. The world was at once supersaturated and a vacuum. So much disorder; so much death.

In the end, she and Caitlyn were the lucky ones. They'd outlived the destruction. Vi was spared her worst nightmare: losing her sister for good. Caitlyn's family were safely out of the line of fire. Even the Council had emerged unscathed. But Vi knew it wasn't Piltover that had paid the ultimate price.

It was her city.

Zaun.

The Siege was no siege. It was a body instinctively lashing out after decades of suffering. It was a scream torn from the depths. A catharsis, a crescendo, a carnage.

None of it without casualties.

Vi knows Zaunites had died in their thousands. Schoolteachers, miners, chem-workers, buskers, laborers. The starving, the hopeless, the forgotten. They were either tangled up in the crossfire, or forced to take up arms for Silco's cause.

Like her sister.

Six years ago, Powder was a little girl who played pranks and ran around with scrapmetal toys. Silco had turned her into a monster. Her innocence corrupted; her talents exploited. Now he's even tarnished her humanity. She is no longer a girl for Zaun. She is an icon; a symbol. The kind that can be twisted into whatever the Fissurefolk's fears require.

The kind that can be deified and demonized at whim.

The chanting escalates. The children's faces are fierce. Some pretend to fire machine-guns; others throw up gang-signs. It is a salute Vi has seen in Stillwater: the inverted E. The Eye of Zaun. The same symbol emblazoned on walls; stenciled on doors; tattooed on skins.

The same one, now, on the front page of every newspaper in both cities.

If Jinx is a goddess, then the Eye is her messiah. The mouthpiece for every dark impulse, every buried fear. It's his rumor-mill that churns these tales, turning the propaganda in his favor. The truth, like a drop of dye in a vat, is lost in the deluge. And the Fissurefolk lap it up.

If you're starved, even sacrilege tastes like salvation.

"Children, children." The narrator laughs. "Calm yourselves. Don't forget. The best way to thank Jinx is to keep her city safe. Watch out for each other. Keep your eyes sharp and your ears keen. Be a soldier in the streets. A shadow in the alleys. If you see something, say something." He taps his temple. "Remember: The Eye sees all. That's why he's Zaun's best chance." His voice drops an octave. "And Topside's worst nightmare."

Ice spikes up Vi's spine. The children's cheers swell in volume. The narrator raises his arms and bellows: "For Zaun!"

"For Zaun!"

Vi slips away, unseen. Her legs feel rubbery. She is moving on autopilot. The map unfolds in her head, leading her into the center of Drop Street.

To Jinx's mural.

The streets widen. Vi's steps slow. Ahead, a wall is bathed in a halo of lustrous lantern-orange light. A knot of Fissurefolk are gathered under its glow. Some smoke cigarettes and whisper somberly among themselves. Others kneel, their features cast in shadow. Their lips stir; their heads are bowed.

Vi realizes they are praying. To what, she can't tell. But whatever they believe in, it's not a goddess flung from the sky.

Their faith is rooted in flesh.

Her sister's flesh.

Vi stops short. Her eyes take in the mural. It covers the wall in its entirety. Gang insignias splash the charred base. Layers upon layers, an impasto chronicling the fall-and-rise of the Undercity's history. First the purple ruff of the Sledgerunners. Then the red carnation of Corina Veraza. Third, the stylized filigree of the Hush Company. Fourth, the vertical pistol of the Slickjaws.

Last is the Eye of Zaun—a typographical twist of Silco's name. A taunt in plain sight.

The mural itself is a masterclass of collaborative styles. Dozens of artists have contributed with angular scrawls of graffiti; cartoonish caricatures of folk art; cubist abstractions of bas relief. And yet the central figure is unmistakable. A girl balanced on a rocket like a surfboard. Her blue braids fly in twin comets. Her grin is both bloodthirsty and sugar-crazed.

VISIT ZAUN BEFORE ZAUN VISITS YOU.

A rallying cry for chaos.

Vi's eyes are riveted. The depiction is so vivid, so lifelike, she can't look away. Her sister in all her brazen glory. The braids; the freckles; the eyes. In the background, the Bridge is shattered. A hundred homes extinguished. And the girl, triumphant, holds the world's end between her fingertips.

Next to the mural is a plaque. Equally tall; Its surface etched with names, hundreds upon hundreds. The floor is littered with offerings: votive candles, river-rocks, ribbons, trinkets. Even a few bouquets of pallid cavern-flowers, their stalks bent, are planted in shabby pitchers.

The Fissurefolk are not a sentimental lot. But these are their martyrs.

Vi's eyes drift up and down. The names are one indistinguishable blur. She knows none of them; she knows all of them. Fellow sufferers, their lives cut short.

Then a name leaps out

Vander—Hound of the Underground.

The shock is physical. Her heart jolts; her eyes burn.

A message is etched beneath the name:

"Rest easy." –Jericho

Vi stares, unable to breathe. To the left is another:

"Gone but never forgotten." –Babette

She reads every name, their praise, their eulogies. Some, she recognizes. Others are strangers. But each, she understands, is a person touched by Vander. His legacy is not a mural. It's this. The living.

The last message is the starkest. No words. Just an insignia in official typeface.

The Eye of Zaun.

Rage scalds Vi. It is a living thing, clawing its way up, howling to be released. She wants to rip the plaque apart, tear down the mural, break the bricks beneath her boots. Retribution for everything Silco stole from her. From all of them. For how he's even laid claim to Vander's memory, like a serial killer marking his trophy.

Eyes shut, Vi counts backwards from twenty.

Then she walks away.

Her footfalls echo, a steady cadence. Her thoughts are spotty, like her brain is blinking in and out. But her heartbeat is slow as a dirge. She's crossed into a state of inward determination: all five senses honed to cold steel.

(Powder.)

(I promise I'll get you back.)

(And make Silco pay.)

It's not simply a sisterly vow to right wrongs. Fucker has it coming.

She goes south, toward the zone known as the Oldtown. It is a crazy amalgam of industrial-style tenements with terra-cotta moldings and stonework apartments, onto which are grafted minarets and spires and curlicued arches. It is roughly divided into two demographic halves.

One side is the Shuriman majority, with its domed architecture and penchant for gold paint. Its denizens hail from the four points of Shurima: Saikhal, Vekaura, Kanathet, Bel'zhun. The other side is the Ionian majority, with its white faux-marble facades and higgledy-piggledy huts on stilts. These inhabitants tend toward the islands of Navori, Zhyun, Fae'lor and other scattered archipelagos.

Both groups live cheek-by-jowl, separated less by the color of their skins than the language of their tongues. And yet they are brought together by the exotic treasure at the district's heart.

Turning a corner, Vi takes a breath.

It's the last hurdle. A gauntlet-run through time.

Equinox Bazaar.

The street stretching out between vertiginous stacks of buildings resembles a river of colorful flotsam. The air stinks of incense, sizzling fish, dust, liquor, smoke. The sidewalks are congested with stalls, a summer-long extravaganza of everything from fabrics to jewelry to pottery. Here is a gnarled old woman cooling herself with an embroidered hand-fan while dozens more dangle from her stall. There is a hawker with pyramids of chutney jars, exhorting potential buyers with a spoonful to taste. Lines laden with psychedelically dyed Shuriman garments sag overhead. Signs in different Ionian characters flicker above rusted awnings. At streetside food carts, blackened riverbirds hang from hooks and live eels twitch on skewers.

The panorama is staggering. It transports Vi right back to her childhood.

Every June, in the smoky warmth of the evening, she and Powder would accompany Vander here for the choicest of Undercity delicacies: beef.

Fresh cuts were rare in the Lanes. Riverbirds, squabs, sump-vole, and cave-boar were common fare. But cows, sheep, and goats could only be found in the green moats accessible to Piltover. Prime—the best meat—cost three Hexes per cut. Enough to feed a Sumpside family for a fortnight. The poorest quality, cag-cog, was sold for ten cogs a cut. Typically, it was meat that had been around too long, or was harvested from aged beasts.

The etymology—cag; cack—meant crap meat.

During the Equinox, the Undercity celebrated the meridian of the sun and moon. Days were brightest; nights were deepest. A dozen different holy days for a dozen different cultures converged in the span of months on the same streets, at the same hour. And where there was a congregation, there was commerce.

The city transformed into a phantasmagoric riot. Streets were festooned with lanterns; bazaars were a rainbow of neon-hued gaslight. Different communities prepared rich broths and steaming stews as tribute to their gods. The Shurimans made offerings of live goats to the Immortal Fire, stoking the flames beneath their sacred pyre and feasting on the sacrificial flesh. Ionians offered their own sacrifices to the Taker, whose power was at its zenith when nights waxed long. They would devour a portion of the flesh raw, leaving cupfuls of blood as a reminder of death's shadow over the living.

On the Equinox's eve, the market was chockful of meat. Cuts cost a tenth of the price. Steak went on sale in bulk.

The perfect time to go bargain-hunting.

Vander, half-Ionian, knew which vendors sold the tastiest cuts. Vi and Powder would tag along. For them, it wasn't about the food. It was about stepping into a realm sheened with mystery. It was about getting lost among the stalls. About playing hide-and-seek among the legs of adults and dodging the swipes of irate vendors. It was about the thrill of taking home a snack—a sweet roll, a roasted chestnut, or a stick of candied ginger—without having to steal it or scrimp for coin.

Powder loved the Equinox. Maybe because was the only time of the year when their family, a motley blend of Ionian, Shuriman and Drakkenian, felt whole. The bazaar was a place where people from all over the Undercity, all walks of life, came together to barter and buy. It was a place where she and Vi were able to glimpse a brighter world, one that was more than the Lanes and their daily grind.

Vi remembers getting ready, eagerly tugging the hood over Powder's head and cinching the drawstrings so her sister resembled a Kewpie doll. Mylo would bound in, rattling off a list of demands for Vander, who stood patiently waiting by the door. Claggor would be hauling crates filled with ice blocks down the stairs while mocking Mylo for his secret yearning to go shopping with the girls.

Vander would rumble a good-natured laugh. Handing over the keys, he'd tell the boys to man the Drop.

Then, he and the girls headed up to Entresol.

For Vi, the best part was stepping into the phantasmagoria of the market. Everywhere people thronged, her senses filled with the fragrances of perfumes and spices, the glow of neon intermittently cut off by the shadows of awnings, the eddies of voices shouting in different languages spliced with tinkling music.

Powder would clutch her hand. Vander's broad back would clear their path.

From the butcher, he'd buy pink strips of bacon like pretty ribbons, cured and smoked. Sometimes, if they could afford it, lambchops salted and herbed, or a thick wedge of steak, marbled with fat. Afterward, from stalls and barrows, Vander would get garlic, ginger and potatoes. He'd hit up old friends for the low-down on local tragedies: stores robbed by gangs, families in need, destitute children. Vi would listen in, swinging a basket that grew satisfying heavy as the bells passed, while at her side Powder jittered and squealed until Vi almost wanted to pop her one.

Crowds stirred Powder up like a can of soda. Her eyes would ping everywhere, too overwhelmed for focus.

Vi knew the feeling.

Sometimes local musicians would play at the street-corners: wild drumbeats and sweet trills of flutes. She'd watch the Ionian girls dance, all swanlike curves and swinging black hair. A burning wish would take her, to know what those beautiful strands felt like between her fingers.

Vander would offer to take a break, so Vi could go dance with the girls. Learn a thing or two, eh? he'd say with a playful wink. She'd refuse, clutching Powder's hand tight and trying to look as tall and grown-up as she could, while real grown-ups milled around her, and untouchable girls wove magic across the cobblestones.

The Sumpside Waltz, the dance was called.

Vi never learned the steps. Her best footwork came in the boxing ring.

By twilight, the braziers were lit. The Old Hungry would chime six o' clock. Vander would chivvy the girls back downside. Vi was always left foot-sore but strangely floaty from the sensory feast. Powder would skip beside her, pockets jingling with loose cogs and corkscrews. The farther they went, the more Vander would point out last-minute treats to try.

"You've never tasted this kind of sugar?" he'd ask.

"No," Vi and Powder would say, always game.

Vander would hit up the vendor, who'd readily share samples. Jaggery candy, nut brittle, pickled eggs, saffron rice cakes. Often Vi felt this was Vander's way of showing her and Powder that the Undercity wasn't all doom and gloom. Other times, she felt he was teaching them about the different corners of the city, its cultures, its people.

Afterward, Vander would buy four wheels of plain bundt cake from the open kitchens at Janna's Temples—two for Mylo and Claggor, two for Vi and Powder. They'd take them around to the crumbling mortar steps of the Asylum for the Irreparable, where they'd sit amid the garbled hoots of the inmates several stories up.

Vi couldn't help but think how sad it must feel to be locked up. Then she'd bite into a fragrant wedge of cake, Powder nestled drowsily in her lap, the basket laden with savories at her feet, and feel as happy as she knew how to be.

Sometimes, Vander would tell Vi about visiting the Equinox Bazaar as a boy: first with his mother, then with a childhood friend he'd wistfully refer to as Blut. "Little rascal, that one. So slick at thievin' that the locals called him 'Roulette.' Always got away with everything."

Other times, he'd get a fond gleam in his eye, and talk about Vi's and Powder's mother. They'd been friends before she'd married their Dad. When she'd just been twenty-two, she'd gone off to Bilgewater to find her fortune. Only to come back penniless and adrift. Vander had helped her get back on her feet. She'd even stayed at the Drop, until she and Dad found their own place.

Vander would tell Vi and Powder all about her girlhood adventures. How she'd loved to dance. How she'd collected plushies. How she could charm even a shark into a smile. Then his face would darken, and he'd go quiet. Vi knew, like her and Powder, he was thinking about her last night alive.

The Day of Ash, and the bullets that had taken her.

The reason Vi would never know the touch of Mom's hands. The reason Powder would grow up never remembering Dad's voice. The reason Vander would give up his dream of a free Undercity to become a father. He'd never said it in so many words, but Vi understood. She'd been the cause of so much sacrifice in Vander's life.

So she'd tried to make it right by taking care of Powder, looking after the Drop, being the best fighter she could be.

Those nights at the Equinox Bazaar were their little escape. Not just from the daily grind, but the past. A chance to taste good food and hear joyful sounds. To know that their lives, scarred by loss, might have been lost too, but that they weren't, not anymore.

It was their way of congratulating themselves, for the family they'd given each other.

Now, Vi moves through the bazaar. Her blurred reflection flits across the glassed shopfronts. She stares at the fancy silk scarves on the racks. The jars of fresh herbs and spices. The gleaming bottles of imported condiments. Most staggering of all is the beef. No cag-cog. Prime red T-bones hang on hooks and slabs of sirloin packages lay in ice.

A thought—disloyal—crosses her mind that there is more beef at tonight's Bazaar than she's even seen in Vander's heyday.

She shakes her head and walks on.

It's just fucking beef.

The farther Vi gets from the thoroughfare, the more the festive drama fades into an impossible daydream, punctured by claws of underlit squalor. She jukes around spots where the sidewalks buckle, past a flop-house with garbage bags over the broken windows, past an empty lot with discarded water tanks, past an all-night tavern serving ale to those too broke for anything else. A few louts jeer after her. She resists the impulse to give them the finger.

She can't afford trouble tonight.

At the appointed time, she finds her spot. It is a strip of tinsel-tacky establishments by the wharves, where the river flows down the black-shouldered cliffs fringing Factorywood.

Rotten Row.

Vi remembers Vander telling her this was the oldest commercial spot in the Undercity. The precursor to the modern nightclubs and jazz palaces at Bridgewaltz. He'd forbade Vi and her brothers from coming here. The place wasn't just a haven for high-spirited pleasure seekers. It was a nexus for mercenaries.

The damp streets gleam with clusters of neon signs. Vi's eyes skip off names dredged from childhood memory: The Nymph—an old dance hall. The Sprout—a miner's hub. The Belle—a brothel.

The Rumbler's Den.

It is a featureless brick building that resembles a warehouse. The door is gunmetal gray, rust smeared across it like faded blood. It is set into a wall scorched black by old fires. By the entrance, oil-drums with real fire are being stoked with driftwood. Trenchers trade backslaps and laughter, circulating bottles of rum round the crackling flames. In the corner, shrouded by shadow, Vi spots four figures. The closest one lights a cigarillo off the oil-drum.

The cherry glows red. A pair of dark eyes meet Vi's.

Sevika smiles

"Well, well," she says, straightening with a flourish of her cloak, "look what the cat dragged in."

Vi's face twists, anger momentarily distorting her features. A beat later, she exhales. Tonight isn't a night to start fights. At least not so soon.

"I'm only at this dive because Silco's got my sister," she snaps.

Sevika rolls her eyes. "That's what everything boils down to. Your damn sister."

"Where is she tonight? At Silco's fancy-ass gala?"

Sevika holds out a hand, index finger tick-tocking. Ah-ah.

"We're here to do business," she says. "Not chitchat."

Her companions circle closer. Vi recognizes them from the dogfight. The tattooed hulk with the dewlapped mastiff's face: Lock. The feline specimen with pallid skin and jet-black hair: Ran. The lanky twist of limbs with the hyena eyes: Dustin.

Last time, they were dressed to the nines. Now they're in the uniform of Undercity low-lives: dark colors and close-fitting garments that show off sculpted physiques and tattoos.

Every gang has a trademark style. The Sledgehammers wear ruffled collars and plumed shoulder-pads. The Slickjaws sport studded jackets and steel-tipped boots. The Dead Enders favor dandified silk suits and top hats. The styles serve as camouflage within the Undercity's runway of flash-and-trash, while also functioning as a warrior dress, carrying a particular code of honor, or lack thereof. Some gangs are known for their smarts as conmen, others for their skill as thieves. Rarer still are those who revel in their reputation as killers. Everything from tattoos in Old Shuriman script to patterns of piercings to initials embroidered into jackets are a proclamation of allegiance to a craft.

Silco's crew flaunt dark palettes and sharp lines. Their attire suggests death, with a touch of decadence—polished lace-up boots, black twists of chokers, gloomy whorls of eyeliner. The kind of look you might see in a fashion show for the apocalypse.

With Silco as the harbinger.

A knot seizes Vi's stomach. For a moment, she remembers facing these same goons at the Cannery. Vander's old gauntlets on her fists, blood speckling the air with each blow. Seventeen, and she'd taken them down one by one. Now she wonders if the line Sevika fed her, about the warmasons and the coup, was just that. A line.

Maybe they've called her here to get a second crack at her. Or maybe, like feral dogs, they'll attack in a pack.

Tipping her chin, Vi says, "Funny place to do business."

Sevika chuckles, low and throaty. "Oh, you'll learn a thing or two tonight."

Dustin dances closer, his feral eyes skimming Vi's face. The scar from Silco's butterfly knife hasn't faded from her cheekbone. He slides a finger into Vi's hair, twirling at its strands for a better look. "Or we'll teach you some old things again, eh, Blowtorch?"

Vi's expression doesn't shift. The only sign of violence is the violence itself: a swivel, before Dustin gets an elbow in his belly, and a sideswiping kick that plants him face-first in the dirt.

"Fuck!"

The rest of the crew erupt into laughter. Dustin scrambles to his feet. His clothes are streaked with what looks—but doesn't smell—like mud. His lips peel back over yellowed teeth.

"Bitch," he snarls, and charges.

With a torque of her body, Vi seizes a fistful of Dustin's collar and spins him round. With another, she slams his skull against the bricks.

"Owwwww."

Woozily, Dustin slumps to his knees.

Vi shakes her head. He's quick but all gangle. Probably couldn't throw a straight right to save his mother's life. Meaning Silco keeps him around for knifework, not muscle.

Vi would rather not be at the business-end of a blade tonight. But she wants to make it plain that she's in no mood for games. Back in Stillwater, the only way to be sure someone remembered your name was to cut them down to size. If you didn't have the guts for that, everyone knew they were In the presence of a lady, as they referred to bottom-bitches.

Vi's eyes pin Dustin. "Still want to teach me something?"

Dustin shakes his head, slow as molasses.

"Thought not."

Ran snickers and Sevika's mouth curls at the corners. Lock says grudgingly, "Missy's got bottled lightning in those fists."

Vi doesn't respond. She offers Dustin a hand. He takes it warily; Vi hauls him to his feet. His muscles twitch for a moment, tendons readying to whip out a blade. The glint in Vi's eyes makes him reconsider. Rubbing his skull, he slinks off to rejoin the others.

Lock thumps him on the shoulder. "Told ya she'd bust your balls."

Ran says, "You owe me six Hexes."

"Yeah, yeah."

Lock flips a handful of coins at Ran, who catches them smoothly out of the air.

Vi scowls. "You bet on me beating him up?"

Sevika tips a shoulder. "Why not?" Her smile darkens. "He's only the warm-up."

Vi's bones go cold.

Belatedly, she feels the stares of the other men and women hanging around the wharves. They'd watched her trounce Dustin. Now they are scoping her out. Not sexually, but like a tool that can be used to turn mysterious odds in their favor.

That chills her bones further. What sort of messed-up business is happening here?

Glowering, she turns to Sevika. "Guess you've got everyone revved up."

"That's the idea." In the gloom, a bell tolls. The Old Hungry strikes nine. A flat gleam enters Sevika's eyes. "Fight's about to start. C'mon."

Inside, it is claustrophobically dark. The prep room is a shoebox of cobwebs and wooden benches. The air hangs thick with sweat. Men and women lounge on the benches or pace restlessly with pre-fight jitters. A few limber up with torques and twists. Not an unscarred body or a full set of teeth among them. These are people who will die soon enough anyway, so why bother keeping themselves alive?

Somewhere below, Vi hears the dim rumble of a crowd jeering. A match is underway.

Lock unzips a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He sets it down on the bench. Inside, there are Q tips, petroleum jelly, a mouthguard, hand wraps, gloves, and bottles with chemicals like double-strength adrenaline chloride and ferric acid—illegal solutions used to close up even the most vicious cuts.

Vi takes one look, then glares at Sevika.

What the fuck?

Sevika isn't smiling anymore. Her features are like granite. "Don't give me that look. The punters watched you clobber Dustin. Now they're laying wagers below. You back out now, you'll take more than a few licks. And not just from the crew."

"So I'm supposed to fight for what? Money?"

"I told you. Someone's attention."

"The warmas—"

Sevika's mech-hand clamps over Vi's jaw. Her eyes are glitteringly dark. "Keep your voice down. One word that we're wise to his operation, he and his cadre will pack up and disappear."

Vi thinks of Sevika's warnings about the bloodbath in Piltover. "And that's a bad thing?"

"It's not about him. It's about getting close to the others in his network."

Vi shakes her head. "I don't get it."

Sevika jerks her chin at the rest of the crew. They nod as one, melting out of the prep room. Vi squints after them. "Where are they going?"

"Never mind them." With smooth efficiency, Sevika unrolls the wraps. "Give me your hands."

Vi hesitates. This whole business is rotten. All those nights in Stillwater, eating mile after mile of punches for dinner, yet she'd never sought out trouble this way. There were always reasons behind her rashness. Here, the reasons haven't changed, but her inner-compass feels shot to hell.

She isn't on the straight-and-narrow. She is caught in a corner, and in someone else's crosshairs.

Teeth gritted, Vi thrusts out her hands. Sevika lays them out in her lap, winding the stiff herringbone around Vi's right hand, then her left. On her wrists, thumbs and the curve of her palms, she binds adhesive gauze, keeping the carpal bones interlocked.

Gotta keep it just tight enough, Vander used to say. Else you'll shatter 'em like crockery.

"Flex your fingers," Sevika orders. Vi curls her hands into fists. "Good. Gloves on."

The gloves are ten-ouncers. Well-worn, but good quality. Vi butts her fists together, and frowns. "These fit me."

"You thought they wouldn't?" Sevika says. "I remember your size."

It's wrong to feel the sick tremor of nostalgia. But Vi does. The first time she'd sparred with Sevika was during the Equinox Bazaar, after all. She remembers because they'd gone afterwards to the market for Vekauran-style lentil stew with mango pickles.

Sevika explained that an old boyfriend from the Pump Station used to like it that way. Vi figured he must be dead, because Sevika's eyes would hold a gloss nearly like sadness whenever she mentioned him. Other times, her lip would unconsciously curl into a sexy little smile. Whoever the guy was, he'd apparently eaten pussy like a pro, given the details Sevika would drop sometimes about his technique, details Vi could barely take in over her own flushed waves of embarrassment.

Even then, she'd been a little bit jealous, a lot aroused, and a whole lot confused.

Afterward, Sevika had stripped off her heavy-duty gloves to show Vi the calluses on her hands: six Hex-sized patches so tough they put pressure on the nerves.

"Rather have real Hexes in my hands," Sevika had griped.

Sometimes, she'd give Vi tips on dirty footwork and sneak-jabs. Vi was a firecracker of raw potential, but Sevika had a decade of experience at laying the nastiest opponents flat with a well-timed blow. She'd show Vi how to deliver a sidewinder by turning her hips the barest fraction. How to move her hands and feet in unison, like a pair of dancers. How to talk trash and stay patient until it was time to go for the knockout.

"You need to get that temper under control," Sevika had warned her once, after a particularly punishing match. "It's gonna get you killed."

Vi scoffed. "Temper's my specialty."

"It'll be the end of you."

"Well, it hasn't been."

"Yet." Sevika shrugged, wiping her brow with a towel. "Then again, I'm not the one you're always trying to impress."

Vi's eyes snapped to hers. The words had a bite, but Sevika's look was knowing.

Vi dropped her gaze.

She'd never told Sevika about her need to prove herself to Vander. Prove that her parents hadn't died for nothing. Prove that she could be strong enough, brave enough, to keep the Lanes safe.

Prove that she could protect Powder.

Now, looking at the familiar glide of Sevika's fingers, her easy competence with the laces, Vi finds the same emotions bubbling up. Dread that she'd never live up to Vander's legacy. The gut-deep longing to prove her worth. Prove she was a force nobody would mess with, because that was the only way to keep everyone safe.

Sevika had that in common with Vi. They'd both lost their families. Both found meaning only in their fists.

But Sevika wanted more than strength. Her bottom line was rooted in one principle: brute will. Her gang always ran the loosest, fastest, riskiest jobs in the Lanes. They played dirty, had little qualms with cutting corners, and none with breaking necks.

Sevika was a hardheaded bitch. If the Undercity was a battlefield, she was always gunning for top-dog.

Vi remembers one night at the Drop. A fight had broken out over a poker game. The Sledgerunners had been caught cheating. The Dead Enders had taken offense. Violating the Drop's rules of neutral territory, they'd savaged each other like dogs.

By the time Vi and Sevika arrived, the Sledgerunner's leader, a beefy bastard named Chud, had pulled a blade. His victim lay on floorboards gone glittering-red with broken glass and blood. Mylo and Claggor had helped Vi make a tourniquet out of old belts while Powder ran to fetch a medick. Sevika had flattened Chud with three precise blows and held the rest of his gang at knifepoint until Vander returned.

Sevika proposed taking an ear from both the Sledgerunners and Dead Enders as compensation for the broken peace. Vi suggested letting them off with a warning. Vander had listened patiently to both. Afterward, he'd sent both the Sledgerunners and the Dead Enders back to their territories.

Then he'd taken Vi and Sevika aside and made his thoughts plain.

"We're not judges, and this isn't the gallows," he'd told them. "We're here to keep the Lanes stable. Not make a name for ourselves."

Sevika had looked pissed. "So you'll let them disrespect your turf?"

Vander's eyes had grown dark. "It's not my turf. It's everyone's. I'm here to help keep the peace, not enforce a regime."

Vi's own frustration had bubbled over. "What's the difference?"

"The difference is whether you wanna be a part of the solution. Or the problem. Because that's what it comes down to." Vander sighed. "Sevika, I'm grateful you stepped in. But the Drop's not a chopping block. You don't get to decide who leaves with what body parts."

"Unless you keep your house in order, they'll do this again," Sevika shot back. "They're already running roughshod over half of Entresol."

"I'm not startin' a gang war."

"You've got numbers. They'd be too scared to try again."

"We're not soldiers. This isn't a battleground."

"He'd say otherwise."

Vander's features went rigid. "That time's passed. For all of us."

Sevika stared at him for a long moment. Then she'd stalked out. Vi had been ready to go after her. Vander laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Let her be."

"But—"

"I'm not asking, kiddo."

Vi's belly churned: anger, confusion. She'd only been fifteen. But she'd sensed she was on the verge of forbidden territory. Things unsaid between Vander and Sevika. Memories—names—better off forgotten.

"What happened?" she asked at length. "Who's 'he'?"

"The past." Vander eyes were distant. "We all have one."

"She's not wrong, you know. We gotta keep a tighter fist on things."

"Not the way she wants to."

"But what if the gangs get stronger? What if they push into the Lanes?"

Vander looked at her with something like reproach. "That's not why we do this." He took a breath. "When the world tells you no, what do you do?"

"Say yes back. Show 'em they're wrong."

"Right. You do that by being better than them. You do it with decency. Not hate."

Vi shook her head. "What if it's not enough?"

"It's not." Vander smiled ruefully. "Which is why we gotta keep at it."

"But—"

"Vi." Gently, he gripped her chin. "The world will tell you no. Over and over. It'll try to break you. Make you hard and cruel. But the best thing you can do is find a reason to keep saying yes. Even when things look hopeless. There's more strength in that than you know."

Vi's eyes refocus.

Her gloved hands are securely fastened. The laces are wound tight. So is the grief.

She seethes, "How could you do it?"

Sevika quirks a brow.

"How could you turn on Vander? Leave the Lanes to that monster?"

Sevika's face hardens with restrained impatience. "We've been over this already. Vander betrayed the Lanes too many ways. He was weak. We were all weak under him. What use is loyalty without power?"

Vi seizes Sevika's mechanical hand. "This is power?"

Sevika jerks Vi's hand off. "This is the cost for a bigger reward. Our freedom."

"Yeah?" Vi takes in the suffocating dimensions of the prep room. "Is that why you're down here instead of at Silco's party tonight? Enjoying your freedom?"

Sevika shakes her head. "I'd take the filth down here to what's at that party any day."

"Huh?"

Sevika jerks Vi to her feet. Her manner is no-nonsense. "Get loose," she orders. "We don't have much time."

"What?" Vi mocks. "No hot water bottle?"

But she's already rolling her shoulders loose, high-stepping into a shadow-boxing stance. She feints to the left, and shoots a right cross, then pivots to fire a left hook. Blood flows; sweat simmers. Sevika watches, arms folded across her chest, her dark eyes assessing.

"Keep your stance back" she advises, "Tonight's a Sumpside Waltz."

In fighting circles, it means: Anything goes. Headbutts, elbows, kicks, eye gouges.

The nastiest of the nasty.

Then she says, "Remember. There's no rules but one. Three fights or thirty minutes. Whichever comes faster. To win, you've got to keep your opponent down—or put him down."

Vi stills. "What?"

Sevika is stone-faced. "You heard me. Down here, it isn't about swinging the biggest dick. It's about showing you're a pro. Not afraid to get bloody—or spill blood to survive."

Nausea grips Vi. She thinks of the blackguard Silco had accused her of strangling. Nights of recurring shakes that Caitlyn had to coax Vi out of with whispers and kisses. Days of wandering through her routine in a daze, wondering if she'd taken a man's life. If she'd become a killer.

Like Silco.

"No," she says. "No."

"I told you. It's too late to back down."

"You told me I'd have to fight lowlifes. Not kill them."

Vi's voice rises at the last syllables. A few heads from the other benches whip toward her. Sevika glances their way, until they decide there are less volatile disaster-zones to gawk at.

"It's the thrill of the game," Sevika says. "Otherwise nobody would put money down. Once you're in the ring, it's your best option. You'll be up against fighters with bigger muscles, better footwork, more experience. You'll have one thing, and only one thing. How far you can go."

Vi's jaw sets. "And if I refuse?"

Sevika shrugs, "We'll pay for your funeral expenses."

Vi's eyes rage at her. Sevika stares back, implacable except for the faintest upturn at the corner of her mouth.

"You should know," she says. "I've placed fifty Hexes on you."

"Getting my ass kicked?"

"Kicking ass." She shrugs. "Temper's your specialty, right?"

Vi feels like a child being mocked. Her face flames. "You've got the wrong person."

"I'm pretty sure I've got the right one." Sevika leans in. "You'll fight, if only to prove you can. Meaning you'll give him his due, too."

Vi's breath catches.

Vander.

She hasn't forgotten. Nor has Sevika.

"C'mon," Sevika says. "Time to meet the audience."

---

The arena is a tiger-cage of concertina wire.

Sawdust grits the floor, soaking up old bloodstains. A hundred-odd spectators stand or sit on steel chairs or stacked pellet sacks. They are the standard brawling crowd: bloodthirsty as ghouls, with glinting eyes and fists clutching coins. The place throbs with their curses and screams, like inside a torture-box.

Vi sputters as Sevika waters her down. She dabs petroleum jelly on her cheeks with rough swipes. "Remember," she says. "Keep your opponent at a distance. Squelch his offense."

"It's not my first fight," Vi snaps.

"Not like this." Sevika takes in the spectators' murky silhouettes. "These bastards want blood in buckets. If you won't oblige, your opponent will."

"I can handle myself."

"Don't make promises you can't keep."

Sevika fishes the mouthguard from a bucket of ice, and jams it into Vi's mouth before she can retort. Then Vi finds herself shoved past the wire gate, still feeling the imprint of the older woman's palm on her ass, where she'd emphasized the shove with an unmistakable smack. She's tempted to wheel around and slug Sevika square in the nose. But the gate has swung shut.

The buzz of the crowd swells to thunder. Blood beats against Vi's eardrums.

No takebacks now.

Sawdust grits beneath Vi's boots. Forty-watt bulbs dangle on frayed cords. The sickly umber rays fall through the concertina wire, touching the contours of her opponent's clean-shaven skull. He is a whipcord-thin man—boy, really. Doesn't seem a day over nineteen. But his eyes hold a flat, empty aspect. His gaze rakes over Vi's body like a laser-scanning rifle.

Vi checks him out the same way. It's reflex: does your opponent have a limp? That's a weak side. Wrists or knees knobbed at weird angles? Old breaks that can be broken again. The boy's got no obvious physical deformities. But the skin of his face is pinched tight across the bones. A few good hits, and Vi might be able to get him bloody. Anything other than break his neck.

The boy's sneer promises no such mercy.

They meet in the center of the arena. The crowd press closer, screaming obscenities, eyes aflame. Vi picks up one or two insults as if from a fritzing radio—Lookit the tits on that one!—Boy's built like a flagpole!—Maybe she'll take a spin on it later?

A coldwater chill of disembodiment takes her. For a second it mutates into fear—I might die. Then she snaps her neck to drain her sinuses, and all that remains is the dead calm before the fight.

A promoter with gold-capped teeth lays down the stakes: one thousand Hexes to the last fighter standing.

There is no bell. Vi's opponent takes a swing at her while the promoter is still revving up the crowd. Vi dances away, the blow shearing past her cheek, raising the fine hairs in a zip of static. Rearing back, Vi slits her eyes and brings her fists up to bear. The boy tips his chin, as if to say, Give it your best shot.

And Vi does.

Torquing her hips, she feints low and swings a roundhouse kick to the kid's skull. He ducks. She follows up with a series of jabs, snapping at him with hooks, uppercuts, and knee strikes. He weaves like an eel, avoiding each attack. Quick bastard. But he'd have to be quick to survive in these streets. His hands come up, wrapped in ragged gauze. No fighter's nutcrackers. His bones are tapered as a lockpick's tools. Same hands as Mylo.

For a moment, a sick surge of sadness takes Vi.

The kid's left shoulder drops as he swings a hard left. It collides with Vi's chin in a riot of pinwheeling stars. She staggers, stunned for a heartbeat. Then she straightens with the guttural sound of a hellcat awoken from hibernation. Sadness is subsumed by rage.

Sevika warned her not to get close—but fuck that.

The kid's fist loops toward her in a nasty right cross. Vi ducks under it and comes with a submarine shot to the kid's midsection. He grunts, his knees jellying. Then without warning he grabs Vi, pulling their bodies flush, the laces on his hands swiping across Vi's face.

There is a sizzle of pain. Skin abrades. Vi cries out in shock.

Shit—he's got sandpaper twined through the laces.

With astonishing strength, the boy hooks his hands under Vi's armpits and lifts her. For a crazy moment, Vi's world goes tilt-a-whirl, her legs kicking for balance. Blindly, she strikes out. Her fist slams off the boy's cheekbone with a hollow thud. Howling, he hurls her toward the wall of concertina wire. Upside-down, Vi spies the leering mouths and blazing eyes of the crowd. If she collides with that tangle of barbs, she'll end up plastered in blood by the fight's end.

At the last moment, she catches herself on the palms of her hands, a somersault that takes her feetfirst toward the wall. Kicking out, Vi springboards and launches herself at the boy. He bullrushes her again, but this time Vi is ready, leaping airborne and bringing down both fists in a world-eating blow on his skull.

There is a whack that resonates over the crowd's screams. The boy reels, staggering. His face is blank, the mask of blindish, blistering pain. Dizzily, he tries to swing again, but stumbles to his knees in the sawdust, collapsing on his side. His head lolls; his thighs twitch a few times. No other movement.

The blow was a certified K.O.

The crowd break into a furor. Some catcall; others cheer. A flame-heated coin flies through a gap in the concertina wire, pinging off the boy's head. He stirs but doesn't rise.

A collective chant begins: ...Five...four...three...two...

By the time the crowd hits One, the boy is still out cold. A roar surges through the air: exultation, dismay. Coins are passed from hand to hand. Heated arguments break out. To Vi, it means as little as anything else in this hell-hole. The air is shot through with the smell of fresh blood.

The kid is still breathing. She can see his chest rise and fall.

The gates to the cage swing open. Two men drag the kid away by both arms like a prisoner to the gallows. Vi retreats to her own gate, where Sevika is ready with a first-aid box. Her cheek is torn from the sandpaper swipe, right under her tattoo. Thankfully, the petroleum jelly spared her worse damage.

Sevika douses the flesh with disinfectant. It burns like getting blowtorched. Vi grimaces.

"Lucky break," Sevika says.

"He's down, isn't he?"

"One down. Thirty minutes or three fights, remember? You've still got twenty minutes to go." Sevika dabs a Q-tip with tranexamic acid—a blood coagulant—across the scrape. "Keep that mug pretty, or our guy might give you a hard pass."

Vi elbows away from the older woman. Her cheekbone smarts like crazy. But Sevika is an efficient cutman. The seeping has already slowed. She wonders how many others Sevika has patched up on short notice. Or if it wasn't others, but herself.

"Have you...?" Vi falters. "Have you fought at this dump?"

Sevika's dark eyes give nothing away. But a subtle tautness runs down her jaw. "My old man."

"Your—your father?"

"Might have heard of him." Sevika shoves Vi toward the cage. "Went by the moniker The Wharfside Devil."

The name clatters inside Vi's skull. Then it hits her. The Wharfside Devil. The one from the tavernside songs. The man locked away for murdering a half-dozen strangers for booze and bread.

An unwilling stab of curiosity takes Vi's gut. "What happened to him?"

"He's still in Stillwater."

"Huh? I never saw—"

"Administrative segregation." Sevika's mouth is an acrid twist. "He killed a few guards during a riot. Got triple his sentence. His loss, my blessing. Only thing that bastard taught me was how to squeeze out of a corner when someone bigger's boxed you in." A harder shove. "Go for the instep."

"What—?"

Vi is back in the ring, face-to-face with her second opponent. Or—face-to-midriff is a better descriptor.

The woman is full-blooded Vastayan—broad as a barge. Her proportions are uncannily Sphynx-like. A sphynx dunked in a vat of pink dye that gnawed at her fur, leaving behind a washed-pink pelt, tufted at the joints and mottled with old burns. The Vastayan's ears are large, feline, the tips raggedy from torn-off piercings. Between a scraggly mane, her eyes glint a piercing hazel. A scar crosses the bridge of her nose, and her mouth is a rictus of barbed teeth.

She looks like a cat-demon, ready to feast on Vi's entrails.

Vi gives her an appraising stare. No bad angles; no weak lines. This is a pro. Again, that coldwater chill resurfaces. A shapeless trickle of fear.

Blowing a fringe of hair off her face, Vi shoulders up to meet her opponent.

In the center of the ring, they touch gloves. The Vastayan's smile suggests this will be no different from stomping out a cockroach. Vi offers no reaction to the contrary. An overconfident opponent is easier to take down.

Again, the promoter lays down the stakes. Again, a collective roar goes through the crowd.

Vi and the Vastayan collide head-on. Her style is predictably bloodthirsty. Her fist shears through the air. Vi ducks, feeling the Vastayan's arm gust over her head in a powerful sweep, like a wrecking-ball's trajectory. If the blow connected, her skull would've been pulverized.

Swiveling on her heel, powering from her hips, Vi lets rip with her own right hook to the Vastayan's gut. Her flesh contracts in a rippling wave. She grunts, staggering before righting herself.

Vi backs away, bobbing on her tiptoes, and throws stiff jabs, elbows snapping out at the end. Typically, a pitty-patter approach isn't her style. But Vander had taught her that a smart strategy for a bigger opponent is to keep them at a distance. Always counterpunching, always flowing.

If he's got thin skin or brittle bones, he'd say, the right jab at the right spot'll knock his lights out.

The Vastayan crowds in. One of Vi's blows catches her near the orbital ridge. There is a crunch. Pink fur flies. Blood flows, trickling into her eye socket. She blinks, and a pellucid film sweeps over her eyeballs. A membrane, Vi realizes. A second lid to protect fluid from blinding her.

Fuck.

Sensing Vi's dismay, the Vastayan smiles.

Then she swings.

Vi sees the fist crashing down as if from a great height: a God-Hand of doom. She swerves, but the blow glances off her shoulder, rocking her sideways with a bone-deep judder. Pain blitzes through her arm. Teeth gritted, Vi pivots and counterpunches. Her fist collides with the same spot as before, a snapping gut-punch. The Vastayan wobbles—Oof—then bares teeth limned in gray before bullrushing Vi.

The crowd stir in a gleeful susurration as the opponents circle each other, a rough figure eight across the sawdust, the Vastayan pursuing, Vi in retreat. She knows her opponent's game. Overrun Vi through sheer size, wearing her down in a game of attrition, before closing in for the kill.

Vi needs a better strategy.

Again, Vander's words reverberate: The right jab at the right spot'll knock his lights out.

They are overlapped by Sevika's parting shot: Go for the instep.

Fuck.

The instep.

Vi's eyes flick down, then up. The Vastayan is barefoot. A pair of vein-mapped appendages, grimed in dirt and tufted with fur, but entirely unguarded.

A cigarette flies through the gap in the barbwire cage, hitting the Vastayan's furred arm with a hiss. She snarls, head whipping toward the culprit. Through the blur of bodies, Vi swears that she glimpses Ran coalescing like a phantom back into the shadows.

Then it hits her.

Now's the chance to put the brawl to bed.

The cigarette falls near Vi's feet. She stomps it out as she blitzes forward. The Vastayan notices, firing off a dynamite left to keep Vi clear. Vi weaves nimbly around the blow, adrenaline zipping in her veins, that ecstatic clarity that turns every moment into a burst of slo-mo choreography. Dancing under the Vastayan's cinch, she stomps, hard, on her instep, twisting her torso at the same moment to launch her fist square into the Vastayan's face with all the force her body can summon.

There is the clash of two hard objects coming together. The more brittle of the two gives way. The Vastayan's snout caves in with a crack of cartilage. Blood splatters. Her fists fly up to her face. The moment it happens, Vi snags her ankle and twists sideways.

Like a tree felled by lightning, the Vastayan topples. The crash reverberates all the way to the rafters of the basement.

The crowd lets off a collective whoosh of breath—Aaaaaaaaah.

The Vastayan snarls, red spittle flying from her busted nose. Vi closes in, shutting down that part of her mind that knows mercy. She deals her opponent a final shot that impacts like a tranquilizer dart to her forehead. One brutal roundhouse to make lights flash-pop behind the Vastayan's eyes before—bam—it's fucking bedtime.

The Vastayan falls slack. Her liquid gurgles fill the suddenly stagnant air. The crowd is stunned to silence.

Then the chant begins: Five…four…three...two...

The Vastayan still hasn't moved. Her eyes blink blearily. Blood bubbles from her broken nose. When the gates swing open, three of her buddies arrive to haul her upright and help her stagger away. One of them tosses their drink at Vi. A cup bounces off her bruised shoulder, iced liquor splattering the sawdust.

Vi gives them the finger.

Staggering out of her own gate, she is greeted to an icebag hitting her nape. Sweet coldness pours like a soothing balm through Vi's overheated body. She heaves in a sigh. Sevika hands her a bottle of lukewarm water. Vi takes five grateful gulps, sloshing the rest across her face. Her pulse throbs with the rhythm of the crowd's babble.

Sevika traces Vi's throbbing shoulder with her fingertips. "Is it...?"

"Busted? I don't think so." Vi shrugs, then grimaces "Just hurts like a bitch."

"Goes with the rest of you."

"Fuck off," Vi mutters, but it's half-hearted.

There's a sense of déjà vu, a fragment of memory. Something that has happened before. Something that will happen again. She remembers another time and place: sprawling in the grit as a teenager, Sevika giving her a hand to haul her to her feet, Mylo and Claggor hooting from the sidelines, Powder cheering her on with a zippy grin. Vander watching from the corner, arms folded, a proud little smile on his face.

Ghosts of a warmer time.

Bitterly, Vi repeats, "How could you do it, Sevika?"

She expects Sevika to bristle. Instead, the older woman exhales, her eyes creasing almost shut.

"If there had been a better way," she says.

"What?"

"If there had been a better way, I'd have taken it." Her eyes open, hard and vivid. "If the odds weren't already against us. If the Enforcers hadn't killed so many of us. If Vander wasn't so fucking stubborn." She shakes her head. "If he could have been bought, he'd have lived. That's the funny part. Money's clean that way. Money doesn't have agendas. But he and Silco weren't about money. Their feud went way back."

A squared circle of debts and decades, Vi thinks, recalling Silco's words during the Bilgewater dogfight.

What happened between them? Why did they turn on one another, after years of fighting side by side?

Then Sevika says, "They were like brothers."

Surprise hitches in Vi's chest. She stares at Sevika.

"I don't mean brothers like kin. I mean brothers like a blood-bargain. They grew up together. Worked in the mines together. Learned how to fight together. Helped build the Lanes into what they became. They shared everything." Their eyes meet, and a strange sensation creeps through Vi, an epiphany at the edges of her consciousness, too awful and enormous to take in yet. "Then they drifted apart. Small ways at first. Circumstances changed; they changed with them. They began moving in different directions. By the end, they had the same dream. But Silco was always the one reaching into the fire to seize it. And instead of helping him, Vander pushed him and let him burn."

Disorientation bleeds into anger. Vi sucks in a sharp breath. "Vander would never—"

"Same way you'd never have left your sister behind?" Sevika looks squarely at her, her gray eyes like gun-barrels "Nobody's a saint, Vi. Nobody's a hero. Just people doing whatever it takes to get by. Sometimes that means cutting corners where others wouldn't dare. Even when those corners cut close to home."

The pulse ricochets in Vi's ears. "There's got to be better choices than that."

"There should be." Sevika's mouth twists slyly. "That's why we're down here. Pretty choices don't happen without a whole lot of dirty work."

Vi can't think of what to say. All she feels in the pounding in her skull.

Sevika's stare disconnects. "Shit."

"What?"

"Our guy liked what he saw a little too much."

Vi swivels. Her last opponent is limbering up in the corner. A man in his late-twenties, swarthy and powerfully built. He has a square-jawed face and a mass of white hair. But his features are obscured by a golden Wolf mask, only the eyes and mouth visible. He catches Vi looking, and mimes a bow like a Tereshni toreador.

Sevika says, "That's him."

The Noxian warmason, she means.

Vi frowns. "Why's he in the ring? I thought he'd be scoping out recruits."

"Looks like he's settled on you."

The way Sevika phrases this, Vi understands it is bad news. Her mind stutters before kicking into high gear. "If he wants to recruit me, he can't kill me."

"Right." Sevika is perturbed. "But that also means he'll want to win."

As Sevika speaks, the warmason begins stalking toward the center of the arena. He moves in the languid, loose-hipped prowl of a predator. His mask flashes in the gloaming. Between the eye slits, his stare is an edgeless blue.

"Throw the match," Sevika whispers.

"What? No—"

"He won't kill you. He's already settled on having you."

Having you. That doesn't sound good, either.

"Throw the match," Sevika repeats. "He'll get his ego boost. He'll be buzzed on the fight when he approaches you. He'll make you an offer. And the crew will be waiting."

"Waiting? For what?"

"To make the grab."

Before Vi can process the information, Sevika elbows her into the ring. The gate slams shut. A thunderous applause goes through the crowd.

The warmason comes out of his corner, a casual tread. His eyes rove Vi's body, taking their time before settling on her face. His lip curls in dark anticipation. It passes quickly. A remote calm enters his stare; the aspect of a soldier, accustomed to the bloodbaths on battlefields.

It makes Vi feel exposed.

Trapped.

Before they begin, he offers Vi a handshake. From experience, Vi knows that is a warning sign. To her opponent, this isn't about money. It's not even a matter of life or death. It is simply a means to an end.

Just business.

Taking a breath, Vi reminds herself this is just business too.

Her bottom-line is Powder.

"Du bist eine hübsche Schlampe," the warmason says, in Va-Nox. "Außerdem bist du gut."

Vi grew up hearing Va-Nox at the Drop. It was Vander's go-to with Mylo and Claggor, especially when scolding them for something better left unmentioned in the girls' presence. He used it often enough that she and Powder picked it up without meaning to.

By the time Vi was seventeen, she spoke it as fluently as their Mom's native Drakkenian.

"Spar dir deinen Charme," Vi retorts. "Das ist kein Hahnenkampf, wir sind hier, um zu kämpfen."

The warmason's face hardens around his previous snide expression. Not a man who likes being mocked. Tough shit. She's not interested in a charm offensive.

Let's see what his charade is worth.

Their gloves knock together. The warmason pulls it back, then lifts his arm over his head. A cheer passes through the railbirds at his corner. A beat later, Vi does the same. A sharper cheer goes up. The punters have watched her win two straight matches without breaking a sweat.

Now they expect a real floor-show.

The warmason cracks his neck, a little smile playing on his lips. "Ich werde das genießen, Kleines."

"Nein, du wirst dir das Knie brechen." Vi gestures with her left hand. "That one."

For an eyeblink, the warmason's eyes follow Vi's gloved hand. Her right fist smashes into his chin. He staggers. She follows up with a jab to his gut. This time, he feints, stepping inside her guard with astonishing speed and striking out with a near mathematical precision: a blow to the ribs, then a kick to the thigh. The impact is like twin missiles erupting: a firestorm of sudden pain.

Vi grunts. Her legs feel jellified. She drops to one knee. In the next heartbeat, the warmason is on top. Heavy and solid, bridging her ribcage with a forearm and closing her into a cage of hot claustrophobia while he brings his fist down into Vi's face. The world explodes into a riot of red stars. The back of Vi's skull bounces off the sawdust, a shockwave from her head down to her toes. Her right eye fills with blood. The blow has gashed her temple.

Through the red film, the warmason crouches over her, grinning. "Hast du jetzt genug?"

Vi's knee slams into his crotch. There is a racking gasp from the warmason's throat. Before he can recover, Vi throws all her weight onto him, shoving her shoulder under his armpit and throwing him flat across the ring.

Blood sheets half her face. She shakes her head, droplets flying across the sawdust. Adrenaline rides up her spine as she leaps up. The warmason rises too, more slowly, half-hunched to favor his groin. Vi makes use of the off-kilter stance to hit him with a looping right-cross to the jaw.

His head snaps back. The crowd loosens a high-pitched roar. When the warmason straightens, blood trickles from his lip. His stare holds a chilling hatred.

She tips her chin at him. "Had enough?"

No honeydripping swagger this time. He rolls his neck low, chin touching his chest.

Then he lunges.

Their bodies clash in the center of the ring. Reacting with savage speed, the warmason entangles Vi's arms, pulling her up to his chest. Vi kicks out wildly, but he blocks each strike. One of his hands closes on her wrist, twisting it up and back against her shoulderblades. Pain sears through Vi's arm. With the other hand, he pummels her across the torn temple again. Blood sprays in a fine pink mist. Half-blinded, Vi cries out. Instinctively, she lashes out with an uppercut, tagging him square in the ribs. He doubles over, wheezing. Wedging her knee between their bodies, Vi throws him off.

They circle in the dim glow of the bulbs, fists up, knees spread. The frenzy of the crowd recedes to a throb. The entire cage is like a massive beating heart. In the periphery, Vi glimpses Sevika. She is watching with dark, scouring eyes, fingers hooked into the mesh.

Jerking her chin toward the warmason, she moves her fingers in a scissoring motion.

Breathing hard, Vi offers the barest nod.

Rocking back on her heels, she charges at the warmason. He throws a defensive uppercut, but it hits empty air. At the last moment, Vi throws her body sideways, catching herself on her palms and swinging her legs out like a breakdancer. The warmason finds his throat locked between her thighs.

With a twist of her hips, Vi spins and brings their bodies down.

The concussive thud cuts through the crowd's screams. Sawdust plumes everywhere. The warmason struggles like a landed fish. Vi's knee presses hard into his voicebox. He gurgles and spasms. The crowd presses around the wire, slapping at the mesh. They are at a fever-pitch now. Their voices rise and fall, a symphony of hoarse cries and ragged panting.

"Yes!"

"That's it!"

"There!"

Bile burns up Vi's throat. This isn't just a slaughterhouse. It's a peep-show theater for sickos.

The warmason makes tiny wheezing sounds. Vi isn't sure if it's curses, or cries for mercy. His legs drum across the gritty concrete. His palms scrabble at her legs, nails gouging into her thighs through the fabric of her pants. Vi stays pressed close, holding him down until she sees his face turn that telltale shade of purple.

The clamp of her thighs loosens. The warmason rolls to his side, gasping raggedly. Vi unfolds to her feet. Her opponent likewise heaves himself up—but fails. His hands go to his throat, rubbing the bruised skin. His eyes dart like a hunted animal seeking escape.

Looming over him, Vi plants her boot on his shoulder.

"Have you had enough?" she repeats.

Again, the warmason struggles to stand. Again, he fails.

Vi raises a fist at the crowd. For the final time, the chant begins: Five... four... three...

Blood drips down Vi's face. Her body, still pumping adrenaline, burns as if scalded. She doesn't care.

Better blood than an executioner's hood.

ONE.

Th aftermath is nowhere near as messy.

The moment Vi exits the ring, the punters swarm her. Hands slap Vi's shoulders. Others grab her fists to shake them. She's made them a pretty penny. Now they're wondering how else she can be put to use. It takes everything in Vi not to jostle free from the seething tide of bodies. Her muscles are shaking with lactic acid. Blood keeps pooling into her eyes so she can barely see. She needs to exit the crowd before an angry welsher gets ideas and knives her.

It happened often enough in Stillwater. She has no reason to believe The Rumbler's Den is different.

Then Sevika wedges her solid bulk into the crowd. "That's enough! Let her breathe!"

Keeping the bodies back, she chivvies Vi towards the exit. Bursting out the back-door, Vi takes deep breaths of the cool exhaust-laced air. It is only now that she realizes how choking the basement was. Even the fetid reek of the riverside smells sweet.

A towel, dripping wet, materializes before her. Shedding her gloves, Vi takes it and dabs off her face. Then she lets Sevika take her head in both hands to scrutinize the gash on her temple. Mopping away the mess, the older woman peers at the split skin, and clicks her tongue. "Deep, but not too deep."

Vi nods.

"Need coagulant?"

Another nod.

Sevika swabs the gash with rubbing alcohol, and sprays the wound. The burn ignites the pain centers across half Vi's face. She snarls against gritted teeth. Sevika is already stepping away, shouldering the cutman's duffel. Relighting her old cheroot, she expels smoke through her nose.

"That was good," she says. "You got a hard head on you."

Godsdamnit. For a moment, Vi actually feels a prickle of pride. It isn't right.

Straightening, she wipes her bloodied face with the towel, then lets it drop. The seepage on her temple has already stopped. "What now?"

"Head around the back to collect your winnings. The warmason will be waiting."

"Your guys are really gonna grab him?"

"With a little help."

"What?"

Sevika has already melted away. The scent of her cheroot lingers in the darkness.

Vi curses under her breath. This entire night has been a mind-fuck. But there is nothing for it. If she walks away now, she'll never get to her sister.

True to Sevika's word, the warmason is waiting by the back alley. Mizzle falls through the sodium glow of a streetlamp, clustering in the whitish mane of his hair. He is ringed by four rough-looking men and women: all swagger and pistols at their hips. A petite darkhaired girl, about Vi's age, hands him a bottle of beer. Her green cat-eyes seem vaguely familiar. The left is a little swollen, like someone cuffed her there. She avoids Vi's gaze, lashes lowered.

Sipping his beer, the warmason looks Vi over with cold appraisal. "Da ist sie... unsere kleine Kriegerin." Then, in Standard. "You fought well."

Matter-of-factly, Vi says, "Where's my money?"

He chuckles, shaking his head. Then he gestures to one of his men.

The goon reaches into his vest and takes out a bulging pouch. He opens it so Vi can see the gleam of Hexes inside. But he doesn't hand it over just yet.

"All yours," says the warmason. "But I hope you will join us for drinks first."

Vi shakes her head. "I want my money."

"It is late. This city is dangerous. Some of these men, they may follow you. Try to rob you."

"They can try." Vi extends her hand. "Give me the money."

The warmason cocks his head like she's a dog being inspected for fleas. Then he nods. The goon tosses the pouch toward Vi. She catches it two-handed, and rummages briefly inside. She doesn't care about the winnings, but no sumpsnipe worth their skin accepts a payment without counting it first.

Satisfied, Vi stows it away and turns to go.

"Wait," says the warmason. "I have something to ask."

Vi glances over her shoulder.

"I meant it. You fight well. If you join us, you could make ten times what's in that purse."

"Not interested."

"Perhaps once you hear more." His men begin fanning out around Vi. "Over drinks."

Vi's heartbeat pulses heavily. Bubbles of leftover adrenaline sluice through her veins. She knows where this is going. Like in Stillwater, she is being press-ganged into something it's smarter to steer clear of. She wonders why Silco is allowing this warmason to prowl freely in Zaun's territory. She wonders what Sevika meant about using the warmason to get close to others in his network.

She wonders how she can avoid whatever trap awaits her here.

The answer comes in the form of a raspy growl. Vi and the warmason's party wheel as one to see a huge blurred shape charging out of shadows.

A rottweiler.

It moves so fast its legs kick up clods of gravel across the path. In an eyeblink, it leaps at the closest two goons. In a blur of white teeth and questing jaws, it tears through their throats. Their screams are aborted gurgles. In the next blink, the rottie drops the second pair of goons closest to Vi. She watches the striated muscles in the creature's throat pulse as it gnashes apart its victims.

Like the first pair, they barely have a chance to scream.

The rottie springs off the fallen bodies. Blood drips from its muzzle. It charges past Vi, so fast the Vi loses balance and drops, black-topped gravel gritting under her palms. The rottie leaps on the warmason before he can yank out his pistol. The man's knees buckle and he goes down. The rottie's teeth sink deep into the sinews of his shoulder, wrenching him across the alleyside tarmac. The warmason's howl is abruptly stifled by the Ionian girl, who stuffs a ball of rags down his open mouth.

She speaks, but not to him or Vi. "Mach es jetzt!"

From the shadows, silhouettes converge. Lock, Ran, Dustin and Sevika. They step, slowly and deliberately, over the spasming bodies, and loom over the warmason.

"Keep him down," Sevika says, and flicks her cloak back.

Her chem-arm is different from before, Vi realizes. New exoskeleton, the shape sleeker. The Shimmer amupoules are tucked away, only a luminescent purple streak limning the machinery's contours.

As Vi watches, Ran, Dustin and Lock hold down the thrashing warmason. Sevika kneels and tugs his mask off to reveal a face that would be handsome if it weren't the color of a fish-belly. In the center of his forehead, a green bead glows eerily bright. It is fused by either magic or chemicals to his flesh. Sevika touches it lightly, and the surface dazzles with energy.

Dustin says, "Is that it?"

Sevika nods.

"Should we kill him first?" Ran asks. "He's pretty noisy."

Sevika shakes her head. "He needs to be alive for the juice to stay intact."

Lock says, "Then let's nab it and get moving."

A sinister grin spreads across Sevika's face. "Agreed."

A blade flashes out from between her copperplate knuckles. She makes a neat circle in the warmason's forehead, around the green stone. Blood wells up. The warmason's stifled shrieks are spine-crawling. He struggles and tries to spit out the rags wadded in his mouth. They crew hold him immobile.

Sevika makes a ring of her mech-fingers and drives them-straight on-into the warmason's forehead. There is a squelching crunch. The warmason jerks and spasms. Sevika yanks out the bead, viscera dripping in its wake. Blood sheets the warmason's face and pools the gravel. Before he can finish the tail-end of his scream, Sevika unsheathes her blade again.

Then stabs him in the neck.

The warmason jitters. His expression is mildly bemused. The blue eyes stare past Sevika to the smogged sky.

A lone raven circles, cawing.

Sevika wrenches the knife out. Blood spurts across the stained gravel. The warmason goes into death-throes. Within moments, he is still.

Sevika wipes off her blade. It slides with an oiled click back into her hand.

"Let's go," she says.

Ran leans over the rottie, who still has its teeth embedded in the Noxian's shoulder. She grasps the underside of its jaw, thumb and index finger stroking the seam between the palates. The beast's mouth unclamps. Ran strokes its ears as if it has performed a snazzy trick, then grasps it by the studded collar, guiding it away.

Sevika turns to the cat-eyed girl. Her face is blank as a test-pattern, watching the carnage play out. Inching closer, she kicks the warmason's thigh with her foot. He doesn't move. Her hand goes to her face, fingertips tracing the shiner on her left eye.

Then she scowls and spits on the body. "Pig."

Sevika takes her by the shoulders. "He hurt you, Maven?"

Maven's face stays impassive. But her bottom lip trembles. She nods.

Sevika rubs her shoulder briefly. "The funds are in your account. You did well tonight. I'll pass on the good word to the Boss."

Again, Maven nods.

"Get moving."

She shivers, her eyes passing briefly to Vi. Again, Vi feels a disorienting sense of familiarity.

The girl hurries away.

Vi stays where she is. Her eyes feel welded to the blood-splattered bodies. Her stomach churns.

She's grown up in the Lanes, the orphan of a war, the child of poverty, the product of endemic violence. She's seen more death and suffering than she cares to remember. In Stillwater, she saw yet more. Some, she tries not to remember. Some she cannot forget. But she's never seen something quite like this: a cold-blooded slaughter with a ringside spectator's seat.

Except she isn't a spectator. She is a fucking accessory.

An accomplice.

"Vi," Sevika calls.

She is a dark silhouette at the mouth of the alleyway.

"C'mon! Move it!"

Vi scrambles to her feet. The crew are already hoofing it out of Rotten Row. At the wharves, a pug-boat is waiting. Sevika stands at the bow, Ran dragging the rottie aboard while Dustin shucks the tie-downs and they slide off. Lock pull-starts the motor. The punt slices a rapid seam up the channel, powering towards the northside of Entresol.

Vi watches the glittering lights of the wharves recede. Soon the distant banks are no more than embers smoldering the dark.

Midway between Bridgewaltz, Lock cuts the motor. They drift in the blackest depths of the waters. To the right, pallid moonlight gleams off the crumbling mortar building along the canal. The air is laden with the reek of rotting things.

Sevika frowns. "What's wrong?"

Lock's pale eyes scan the moon-glossed shores at the quay. "Our lookout's missing."

Sevika's face stays unmoved. But her dark eyes come sharply alive. "Circle back. See if you can spot any lurkers."

They turn the punt around. As they cut a second circuit, there is a whoosh of something slicing at high-velocity through the darkness. Dustin yelps as something punches between his shoulderblades. Contorting himself, he yanks it free. The silvered shape of a tranquilizer dart sits in his palm.

"What the—" Dustin slurs.

Like a marionette cut at the strings, he slumps.

Sevika slams her fist against the side of the boat. "Lock—swerve! Now!"

There is a high-pitched roar as the engine kicks up. The punt veers violently to port. But it's too late. Three more shots strafe the darkness. One dart collides with Ran's thigh. Another hits Lock square in the neck. The third embeds itself in Sevika's arm.

Her mechanical arm.

Ripping it out, Sevika watches Lock and Ran slide in motionless heaps across the benches. Her stare burns into Vi's—then catches fire in understanding.

"You little fucking—"

Her chem-arm flashes out. The clubbing blow nearly knocks Vi overboard. Scrambling, she reels onto her ass. The rottweiler surges to attention, lip bridling in a growl. Then it lets off a muted yelp. A tranq has buried itself into its hindquarters. Whining thinly, it paws at the deck for balance, then collapses.

Sevika's fist smashes square into Vi's face. The darkness inverts briefly into daylight. The boat rocks as Vi crashes down with Sevika's weight on top of her.

"Should've known you'd pull a stunt like this this."

Her two hands clamp around Vi's throat. Vi's legs thrash. Sevika bears forward with her knees pinning Vi's arms, using all her weight to keep Vi down. Her hands circle tighter. Redness pours into Vi's vision. Visions of the dead men flash through her mind. The warmason's face twisted in pain. The green bead dripping blood in Sevika's hand.

There is another zipping shot. A tranq catches Sevika in the thigh. Her firsts tighten convulsively. Fireballs burst in Vi's eyes. Then the grip loosens. Sevika stares down at the dart sticking from her thigh in angry befuddlement, before her eyes glaze over. She tips sideways and falls into the water.

Reacting fast, Vi darts after her and grabs one of Sevika's wrists before it slithers over the edge. Grunting with effort, she hauls her up and flings her into the prow. The boat tilts. Sevika's waterlogged body sprawls across the bench.

Out cold, like the rest of her crew.

Vi cycles the motor and steers toward the quay. There, she ties the puntboat off. Four bodies and one dog breathe at her feet. The rushing chill of the stream crawls up the back of her neck. Dragging herself over the gunwales, she staggers up the sloping banks—just as Caitlyn appears from out of a divot of shadow, shouldering her rifle.

Her face is grim, but her eyes gleam. She has been stationed here since late evening. They'd coordinated Vi's route into and out of Rotten Row. The only way to make a speedy return was by the canal. Silco's network would have sentries lining the shore. They'd be on watch for anything coming in or going out.

Vi had told her to stay clear. This wasn't a job for Enforcers.

Caitlyn had retorted, "You're right. I won't be doing this as an Enforcer."

"Caitlyn—"

"The ports are open. Tourists everywhere. Zaun's blackguards are focused elsewhere. They'll never suspect that a Piltover girl operating in the shadows."

Vi had opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

Caitlyn's hand had gripped her forearm. "Do what you need to. I'll cover you."

And she has.

Their eyes meet. Caitlyn starts to smile, before her mouth shapes an O of shock.

"Vi—your face—!"

Vi touches her gashes with hands gone numb from adrenaline. "I guess it looks pretty bad."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah." A rough swallow. "Cait—we don't have much time. The gala..."

In the moonlight, Caitlyn's soft gaze fills with compassion—then glosses into steel. "I've got the layout of Jinx's hideout via the Hex-drone. Look."

She shows Vi her wrist-chrono: a three-dimensional projection of the skyscraper, lit in blue. An aerial view, taken from the drone, shows the roof as a flat plane broken up by the protrusions of skylight. At the corner, a looming structure, like an old-timey lighthouse. Its interior is a spiral stairwell, its tip a platform ringed by a safety-rail. A gigantic telescope, propped on the rail, points to the west.

"It's called the Aerie," Caitlyn says. "Jinx has turned it into her own personal labyrinth. These schematics are the old plans. The ones I managed to get my hands on from the civic records."

"You think she's staying there?"

"If she's not, the drone's picked up signs of her." Caitlyn swipes her hand across the projection, revealing a series of interlocking layers, like the petals of a flower. "It's got five floors. An old maintenance hatch here." She taps the fourth floor, where a hatch is situated. "We might be able to get in undetected."

"There'll be blackguards."

"It's a gamble. I know. But they're not likely to be guarding their usual posts." Caitlyn's face is drawn. "The gala ends by three. It's now or never."

Vi nods. "Okay. We go in. We find my sister."

Caitlyn reaches for Vi's hand. Vi clasps it tightly.

Then they're racing like a faultline toward the monolith of Silco's headquarters.

(Powder.)

(I'm on my way.)