Ryan was lost. The section of city he’d strolled into had quickly turned into a labyrinth, every street and building looking identical. He only realized how lost he was because he’d walked passed the same vagabond leaning on his personal pile of garbage. Soon after, his efforts to find his way out had only made it worse.

He wasn’t afraid to ask for directions either. The directions he’d been given were just that unhelpful. Everyone seemed to get around by using mystical landmarks that only the grittiest of labyrinth dwellers could find.

Ryan had been moping around in a small market square thinking about a search strategy to locate Mags when he overheard some nearby shoppers gossiping about a group of farmers camped out by the west wall. Thinking it was the perfect place to start his search, he’d confidently headed toward the west wall and the docks. He had lived for years in a big city back home; how hard could it be to get around in Darna?

As it turned out, they built everything crammed together and upward, all the two and three-story buildings looming over dirty alleyways masquerading as cramped streets turning the place into an actual maze.

He finally broke down and came up with a new tactic. Ryan walked up to the nearest person on the street, a well-muscled middle-aged woman lugging grain sacks, and caught her attention.

“Which direction to the docks?” he asked, trying to suppress his irritation.

The woman jerked her thumb down the street in the same way he’d been walking with a confused look. She caught sight of his Guild emblem and her expression grew even more confused. She hastily stepped out of his way as he gave a quick nod of thanks continued down the street. He came to an intersection and repeated the process with a brand new person.

Ryan finally felt like he made some progress. The buildings were shabbier and the streets dirtier and more cramped, a good sign that he was walking in the right direction. A group of kids trailed him through the streets and not in a fun way, but more like a group of sharks looking for an easy meal. They must have marked him as an easy pick-pocketing target since he had ‘lost tourist’ written all over him. Just in case, he dialed up [Spatial Cognition] and adjusted it to weed out everything that wasn’t person-sized and larger, and continued on his way.

At some point, without him realizing it, the top of the wall popped into view and he stopped hassling the locals for directions and used it as a landmark. Eventually, the little street urchins made a move on him. In [Spatial Cognition] they stood out like beacons of condensed physical intent, packets of information detailing their size, direction, and speed. There was a name for that in physics, but he’d never had an aptitude for that stuff and couldn’t remember.

He spotted one dirty street kid approaching from the front on his right-hand side, and the other from behind on the opposite side. [Spatial Cognition] trivialized figuring out when they would intersect with him. He waited for the moment they would make their move, but instead of confronting them or running, he simply pivoted mid-step to the side around another traveler in the street and completely avoided the bump and grab that was obviously their plan. Jokes on them though, he didn’t have a wallet or coins on him.

They dropped out of his range as he continued through the filthy streets. He wrinkled his nose. It was smellier in this part of the city. There had always been a smell, but it was much more potent in this section. Everywhere he looked he saw rotting remains of unidentified organic substances, piles of sludgy water, and trash. He kicked some loose garbage out of his way as he walked, jumping as it stuck to his boot, and shook his foot around until it peeled off. Garbage and grime everywhere.

A few streets later the pickpockets went for the same move again, but this time the kid in front looked up before he got too close and his eyes flew wide and locked onto cloak clasp with the Hallow Song emblem on it. Without missing a beat he peeled off and ducked out of sight behind some passerby. Following him with [Spatial Cognition], Ryan saw the kid duck into a tiny alleyway. He glanced back at the remaining kid staring after him, his face scrunched up, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Ryan smiled to himself, unreasonably smug with his accomplishment the first time they had tried, and satisfied with the fringe benefits of his affiliation being on display.

Now that he understood what to look for in his ability, it was almost natural to use, certainly far easier than just the day before. If only he’d had the same trick available to him when he visited Rome after high school, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache and money. The urchins disappeared from his senses, having determined that the risk was too high.

If the increased foot traffic was any indication, he was close to the same gate through which he had come into the city. Sure enough, two corners later and the main avenue came into view. He strolled toward the gate, unsure in which direction the farmers camped. He tried to remember what the gossipers had said, and it sounded like they were close by, so he chose the left side, which was on the same side of the main avenue as the market had been.

The space between the city buildings and the wall was wider than the narrow streets of the district he lost himself in, but not by much. Traffic was almost nonexistent; the only people around seemed to be those that made the nearby buildings home.

He saw some movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see a huge bird land on the roof of a nearby building. It was some kind of bird of prey, resembling a large hawk or a small eagle. Its plumage was deep brown, which bloomed into a bright gold around its head and eyes, shining like spun metal in the afternoon sun. Its claws were long, curved, wicked things that gouged out splinters from the rooftop edge. It was watching him, its head and eyes following him as he followed the wall. Creepy. Ryan picked up the pace and almost walk-jogged around the curve of the wall, trying to get out of sight of the creepy bird.

It wasn’t long before he spotted the farmers. They were a ragged bunch, just like the ones he’d seen coming into the city. Their belongings were piled up around them in organized stacks and they looked like they were getting ready to move. He approached, looking for any familiar faces, but didn’t immediately recognize anybody.

“Ryan! Is that you? What are you doing here in Darna?” a childish voice called out.

Ryan turned, looking for the source of the person calling his name, and spotted a teenage girl striding toward him from the middle of the crowd. He stopped and waited for her, unwilling to interrupt everyone’s preparations. There wasn’t anything familiar about her, she wasn’t someone he remembered speaking to in the village. She was unfamiliar until he spotted the weapons strapped to the belt at her waist.

She carried two brutal daggers made for puncturing and ripping. A memory clicked. This was the teenage girl from the night that the village head Jensum had corralled the meth badgers and let the kids have a couple of chances at getting Keys. She had very long braided jet black hair, a wiry muscled frame, and strode with purpose. Her name was lost somewhere in the back of his memory, or maybe he’d never known it. She was the one who had danced her way onto the corpses of her two Onslaught Badger opponents.

“Hey, I remember you. I don’t think we’ve ever met, though. What’s your name?” Ryan asked.

“It’s Casey. Yeah, I wasn’t around the village much. My parents kept me busy.”

“I didn’t think many of the villagers knew me by name. I didn’t show up often.”

“Oh, everybody knows your name. Everyone was always gossiping about the weirdo hermit that Mags had taken in,” said Casey with a straight face.

Ryan hesitated, unsure if she was serious or not, but couldn’t contain a soft snort of laughter.

“Fair enough, I guess,” Ryan said. The brief splash of humor fell away. “I’m here looking for Mags. Is she here with you?”

“What are you talking about? She said she told you to go to Rild? That’s where she is.”

“She’s alive! Shit, give me a second,” Ryan said, as he walked off a few steps to take some deep breaths. The weight that had been crushing him the last two days lifted. He clenched his teeth and forced down the tears that tried to push their way out. He could let them out later; now wasn’t the time. He turned back to Casey, confused.

“She said she told me to go to Rild? We never spoke, not for most of the day, and definitely not during or after the attack. When did you speak to her? Wait, before that, what even happened? I snuck into the village and saw some stuff go down, but some of those freaky wolves chased me out.”

“I wasn’t there, I only saw her on the road before we split up. She said that those shadow guys killed Jensum and when they went to finish the rest of them off, some crazy strong guy showed up out of nowhere and minced them up. They tried to kill him with a shadow storm, but they couldn’t hit him. He just ghosted it and sliced them into cube steak, then disappeared. Afterward, everyone from the village made for Rild, since it’s closer. I’m only here because my parents have relatives here to shack up with.”

The description Casey gave pointed to Flicker. It had to be. It sounded like him. Damn, the guy was prolific in chaos, if nothing else. Ryan wondered how the rest of the villagers had finished the shadow wolves, but Mags hadn’t seemed panicked or anything during the fight, just busy. Ryan stopped on that thought, another memory clicking into place. Mags yelled something at him during the attack when she spotted him. At the time he couldn’t make it out, even though she repeated it a few times. That was when she must have been yelling at him to get to Rild.

He cursed softly. So much would have turned out differently had he heard Mags. It was hard to feel regret. He doubted Flicker would have taken him to Rild instead of Darna, which was the linchpin in everything that had happened after and also a potential source of loads of trouble. With perfect hindsight, he could only shake his head and determine that what happened was probably the best outcome, the alternative for him would have been death by shadow wolf. At least Mags was alive and well.

Ryan caught sight of Casey staring at something. She locked her eyes onto the emblem holding his cloak together. He self-consciously fiddled with the emblem with the tips of his fingers, unsure of what to say, wanting to brag a bit, but the look on her face killed that idea.

“You shouldn’t be wearing that. I’m not sure where you got that, but if the Guild sees you wearing it, they’re going to give you a beat down you’ll never forget. Best get rid of it, like now. We’re in their damn city, by the lost gods,” Casey said, her gaze intense and a little apprehensive. She glanced around, as if making sure there were no Guild members ready to pounce.

“I’m… sort of in Hallow Song now. They invited me to join today.”

Casey’s head snapped back and her eyes lasered in on him. “What?” she said, the word exploding out of her mouth. “Are you being serious? How the hell did that happen. You don’t even have any Keys. You better not be joking, it’s not funny. You have to take those guys seriously.”

“I found a Key the other day, out on the farm. That’s why Mags was out running around. She was trying to figure out where the weird corpse that produced it came from. It turns out, it was a dead shadow wolf.” Ryan said, the connection between the corpse and the attack forming in his head. He hesitated, he didn’t want to further link himself to Flicker, so he didn’t say anything about him, but said instead, “I also had a bit of a fortuitous encounter with someone that helped me kill some of those shadow wolves and I got a second key.”

To demonstrate, Ryan turned around and took a step, activating [Warp Step]. His perception of the street compressed and his sense of time stretched. His foot landed, and he walked out of his warp tunnel five meters away and turned back to look at Casey. The warp had been easy; no nausea or anything. His practice had paid off.

Her eyes were wide. She stood unmoving, processing what she’d just seen. Behind her, a few of the farmers yelped in surprise as they saw him warp down the street. Ryan and Casey both ignored them as she rushed up to him and grabbed his arm.

“You have to help me. Holy shit, you’re in a Guild. You have to help. I was here trying to get these cowards to help, but they won’t. They’re headed to Rild. My parents need help,” Casey said.

“I don’t have any money Casey, I’m broke,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing I can do to help anyone right now. Besides, I need to go Rild too to meet up with Mags, since the Guild has given me some time to do as I want.”

“No no no. You don’t understand,” Casey said, a hint of panic creeping into her voice. “People from the entire region to the north have been trickling in the last couple of days, not just from our village. Those shadow people are destroying everything. But that’s not what I’m trying to say. There is a gang here, Ryan. They’re snatching people off the streets. They have taken a whole bunch of people. They took my parents last night, right after we got to the city. They tried to get me too, but I was too fast for them.”

That got Ryan’s attention. He had assumed it was something mundane, but he should have known better by the way Casey came at him. “You’re sure? Never mind, of course you’re sure. What is it you think I can do? I’m brand new to the Guild, only a few hours in. They’re not going to care about what I have to say,” Ryan said.

“It’s the Guild’s job to handle this stuff. This is one of the things they’re required to do, handle gangs and stuff that the city guards can’t handle. Usually, you have to take this stuff to the city administrators and they create jobs or get the guards involved, but you can take it straight to the Guild.”

Ryan wasn’t so sure. What she said sounded good, but what would they think if he showed up empty-handed with no information other than ‘there are kidnappers out there’? If he was going to help, and he wasn’t sure that he would or could, they needed to gather some information first. Carefully. He wasn’t about to fight a gang by himself.

“Do you know where they are? I can’t show up at the Guild empty-handed, whether they’re supposed to be doing this or not.”

“I don’t know for sure, but the few people around here I’ve gotten to talk about it have kind of pointed to the north section of the docks out by the river,” Casey said.

Casey fidgeted as Ryan hesitated once more. Did he really want to throw himself into more trouble just after having escaped a whole heap of trouble over the last couple of days? He looked at Casey and he could see the worry in her eyes. He thought back to her fight with the badgers. She was a competent fighter, certainly more capable than he was, even if she was only a teenager. And she had a Key. She needed his help. He sighed, feeling a new weight on his shoulders to replace the one he had just gotten rid of.

“Ok, let’s do it. We need to figure out where they’re taking people, or at the very least where they hang out. But that’s as involved as I’m going to get. We’ll take that to Hallow Song and let someone more qualified handle it,” Ryan said.

“That’s more than enough,” Casey said. She grimaced, her face determined, but her eyes showing relief. “Ok let’s go. We at least have a starting point.” She walked back over to where the farmers still milled about and grabbed her gear. She cast disdainful looks at everyone around her and shouldered her way toward Ryan.

“Let’s get out of here before their cowardice rubs off on me,” Casey said.

He couldn’t shake the unease that welled up within him. It felt like he was doing the right thing, but who was he to run around an unfamiliar city saving people from gangs of kidnappers? He’d been in the city for less than a day. Had his Keys somehow cursed him to live an interesting life, as the Chinese proverb went?

Casey started walking back toward the west gate, and Ryan followed behind her. He gave the farmers a last look. Some of them looked back, regret or fear etched into their features. Casey might blame them for not jumping to help her fight city thugs, but he could relate. Their unwillingness to get themselves and their families caught up in another mess was understandable.

He looked up at the sound of wingbeats flapping away, but didn’t see anything. Turning back to the street, he followed Casey out through the gate.

Time to find some gangsters.