“Alright! Let’s try that again.” Jack and Zeke look down at Corva through a hole in the floor.

Fidgeting, Corva sits on the stone floor of her “training room”—more like a pit, or a dungeon. Jack said the room is called a “keefa” or “cave-a” or something. Whatever it’s called, it’s dark and suffocatingly thick-aired. About the only thing it’s got going for it is that its location is even more remote than Bule.

It’s part of a canyonside cluster of ancient stone buildings that Jack calls Cliff City. It’s not that far from Bule, not much more than a klick farther along the canyon. Maybe it’s a few hundred meters deeper below the lip. But that’s the straight shot to get there. Without being able to fly, straight shots to this place don’t seem to exist.

They’ve been coming here every night since the raid and Jack has yet to take her on a path that isn’t packed with switchbacks, blind turns, and ledges barely wider than a grown man’s foot. It’s actually pretty remarkable how well he knows these cliffs. Even in the dark, he’s a sure-footed guide. More than once, he prevented her from taking a step that would cause her to plummet to the bottom of the canyon.

Still, it’s a hassle. And all for this dark, musty hole in the ground. It’s not like she’s used to an easy lifestyle of class and luxury. She’s been on the road long enough to consider running water a top-tier feature. And decent lighting. The only light source they’ve got here is the illumination cord from Jack’s room under the bar. Only once have they ever made a fire, and that was the first night. They’d forgotten to bring any source of light at all that night. It took them forever to find enough burnable material for a fire. They were only able to train for about half an hour that time. Since then, they’ve been better prepared, and able to go for much longer.

On the nights that they train through to dawn—like this one—the cool light of the cord is touched by accents of orange when the early morning sun rays stumble their way through the tunnels and corridors of Cliff City. However, there’s never enough time to take full advantage of the daylight. They have to rest up and prep the bar for the next evening’s pack of drunken merc jerks.

Frustration brimming, Corva sits on the stone floor and taps her metal forearm bracers with a finger-length carpenter’s nail. She purposefully avoids looking up at Jack and Zeke through the hole in the ceiling a few meters up. “I still don’t see why we have to do it this way. Why couldn’t we do this back at the bar? There’s plenty of space in the basement if we move around some of those boxes.”

Jack sighs, exasperated. “I told you, Harris is watching the bar like a damn hawk. We still got another two weeks left in his stupid one-month ‘probation period.’ Ain’t gonna risk losing the place on account of you goin’ all DestructaBilly in one of these little training sessions. Least down here it don’t matter so much if you can’t control your fits.”

Fits. That’s what Jack has taken to calling her “fighting mode.” The kid sure likes to put names on things.

She tilts her head up so she can see Jack and Zeke. “But it takes so long to get here. We lose so much time just in transit.”

“Look, you’re still trying to lie low. Ain’t no one come lookin’ for you. And since Harris took credit for killin’ those grunts during the raid, no one else in town knows about the fits. Or the bounty on your head. How long do you think that’s gonna last if you start going an’ wrecking the place on the regular?”

“Oh, come on. I’m not that destructive.”

“Really? I thought you said you can remember what goes on durin’ a fit now.”

“It’s more complicated than that.” What he said is true, though. When it’s happening, she’s fully aware of what her body is doing. Memories after are a bit patchy, a bit dreamlike—especially considering the kinds of dreams she’s been having recently. But it’s easy enough to piece together what she’s done. The problem is that she’s a passenger. No control.

“Everything’s always complicated with you. Like your bounty. You’re the only person I ever met who don’t know who’s after ’em, or why. I still think you’re feedin’ me bullshit on that.”

She looks back down to the ground. “Little bit of both, actually.”

“What’s that?” Jack’s voice cracks. Corva can’t tell if it’s a mixture of excitement and incredulity, like he can’t believe he guessed something right, or just his voice cracking.

“I don’t exactly know who set the bounty. But I’ve got a pretty good idea why someone would.” She lowers her voice to just over a whisper. “Fareburne.” Some leftover Shadowfold mage could be trying to tie up loose ends. Of course, all of the soulmancers from the Shadowfold were supposed to have been taken out, but that hasn’t stopped Corva from living a life of looking over her shoulder. She escaped Fareburne. Who’s to say someone didn’t escape when the Shadowfold was attacked?

“Look, if you’re just going to sit down there and mumble to yourself, let’s just get back to training. The sun’ll be up soon.”

So it really was just his voice cracking.

Corva shakes her mind free of the past and focuses back on training. “Yeah. Training. What’s next?”

“Well, take a good look at the wall in front of you. Remember that?”

Corva raises her head and scans across the wall. “The shiny bit right there?”

“Look closer.”

Jack points to a small cluster of circles glimmering in the light of the illumination cord. They look like coins glued to the wall.

She squints. “Those circle things?”

“It’s not just shiny. An’ those little circles? They’re nail heads for the exact kinda nail you got in your hand. Notice how they’re drilled all the way in the rock. They got that way because you threw them. You’re gettin’ stronger.”

Her eyes widen. She does remember. Images flash in her mind. She sees her hand grabbing nails one at a time and flinging them at the wall. Still, it’s all in a patchy fog. It doesn’t feel like those are her memories.

“Oh, and this is my favorite part.” Jack leans into the hole. Almost his entire upper body hangs upside down. He points a couple paces to the right of the shining cluster of burrowed nails.

“Have a look at this little crater in the wall. See the indentation at the center? That’s from your friggin’ fist!” Jack continues to hang upside down while wildly gesticulating with each word. He looks a bit like a wet shirt on a clothesline, flapping in the wind. “You did all that shit. And no sign of damage to your hands.”

Corva looks away from the wall, inspecting her hands, alternately opening and closing them. If she punched that wall, her punching hand should be swollen to the size of her head. The bones within, a shattered mess. But both of her hands look just fine. Barely a scratch. Not even so much as a bruise.

Jack continues his diatribe, still hanging the upper half of his body into the room. “We’ve been over all this before. You gotta lie low. That means you train outside of Bule. We figured out how to trigger your fits pretty easy. Get Zeke close enough to you and, boom, you’re set off. But you got shit control and you tend to pass out after. Good news is that you’ve been wakin’ up faster afterward. If we can get you to have a fit when I ain’t afraid of being killed—”

“Anyone ever tell you that you talk too much?”

“No one that matters.”

“Asshole. Fine. Let’s just do this thing, then.” She stands, slapping the dust off her pants. Asshole? She’s not a huge fan of the fact that she’s starting to pick up some of his ways of speaking. Clearing the thought from her mind, she looks up to Jack and Zeke. “How far did we get last time?”

Jack wriggles his way back up so he’s no longer half hanging into the room. He points down the length of rope hanging into Corva’s training room. “We had Zeke down to the fourth mark. That’s obviously too close. And the third mark wasn’t close enough. I figure Zeke needs to climb down to the third mark. Then he can creep forward a bit at a time.”

“Didn’t we try that already? I don’t think it’s the way to go. These … episodes—”

“Fits.”

“Yeah. Anyhow, they feel pretty all-or-nothing. I don’t think there’s a sweet spot that Zeke has to be from me where I’ll suddenly have more control. Besides, there’s only like a single hand-length between the marks on that rope of yours. If distance were the key, Zeke would have to maintain that distance the whole time I’m triggered. That doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that’s quite how it works.”

“Yeah, yeah. And the rope sways when Zeke is on it, too. It ain’t exactly a perfect way to go about it. You gotta better idea, girlie?”

Silence. She doesn’t have a better idea yet. But there’s something else. Disrespect. “I told you not to call me that, Jack. I have a name.”

“Yeah, maybe you do. But it’s a shit name. What the hell kinda name is ‘Corva,’ anyway? Sounds like half a cough.”

Avó’s face flashes in Corva’s mind. She clinches her fist around the nail in her hand. Tight. She can feel her fingertips digging into her palm. “It was a gift. A personal one. That’s the last time you disparage it, child. I don’t make fun of your stupid streak of dyed hair. The least you could do is respect my name.”

Jack reflexively runs his fingers through the curly mop on his head, right through the white streak that starts over his right eye. “Bitch, you don’t know me. Don’t know anything about me. This ain’t dye.”

“Oh yeah? Then what is it? Some kind of birth defect?”

“It’s what happens when Death misses his mark.”

“Death?”

Corva feels her eyes widen. It’s like she’s lost her breath for a moment. Death? The last of the Four?

She turns her head away from Jack and stares at the metal bracers on her forearms. “Death doesn’t miss.”

“Yeah, well, there was a lotta killing going on that day. S’pose it’s easy to get sloppy and lose track. Only two of us got out.”

Her full attention spins back up to Jack. The story was familiar. “You survived one of the Shadowfold massacres?”

Jack’s head tilts the same way he always does before saying something smug or sarcastic. “Yeah. Something like that.” He stares at her for a second before turning his gaze away and shrugging. “We all gotta be survivors from somewhere, don’t we?”

Corva’s mind flashes back to her last moments with Avó. “Yeah. I suppose we do.”

There’s a bit of silence after that. Jack must notice the awkwardness in the pause because he starts filling that void with words. The kid isn’t the smoothest of talkers, but what he lacks in finesse, he makes up for in volume. As he talks, his tone changes and he gets a strange look in his eyes, a weird combination of wistfulness and something else, perhaps nostalgia.

“My memory of the thing is pretty spotty. I was only five years old then. The first wave was like a normal raid, just larger in scale. We holed up an’ hid ourselves in as dark a spot as possible. Away from any vid or drones or …” He stops himself from finishing, caught in his memories. He shakes his head before continuing, “Hell, I think we even avoided all other people, just in case.”

“We? There were other survivors?” What she wouldn’t give to have even just one other person from Fareburne with her.

Jack doesn’t seem to notice her change in expression. He continues right along, “Yeah. We. Weren’t you listening? I said two of us got out. Lyia an’ me. Pretty sure we were the only two, though. Lyia’s the one who helped you recover after the bar fight. Brought the meds and gear.”

“That wasn’t you?”

“Some of it was. But—” His face twists into a disgusted look. “She also helped clean you up when you pissed yourself—you were unconscious for three days. You were pretty out of it, though, so you might not remember her.”

He smiles and his eyes seem to lose focus. “But if you were awake, you’d remember. She’s pretty hard to forget. ‘Course, she’s only been by the bar once or twice since then. Ol’ Maddy Shard has had her pretty busy the last month or so.”

“Maddy Shard?” Corva knows that name. Jack’s mentioned that name before. Not fondly, though. Which shop does—

Suddenly, Corva knows exactly the business that Maddy Shard runs. “Lyia works at the brothel?”

Jack gives Corva a look like she’s suddenly sprouted a second head. “The Red Light. And yeah, she works there. After the—” He pauses, like he’s searching for a word. “Well, after the thing, we got picked up and carted off to an exchange. Maddy Shard got Lyia an’ me in a bundle auction. Soon as we got to Bule, the dirty skank traded me off to Old Man V.”

His smile returns at this. “Maddy couldn’t get rid of me fast enough, apparently. Seems I was more than she could handle.” He shrugs and turns his head to look at Zeke. “I been at the bar ever since.”

“Having a weepy five-year-old stomping around the halls and crying all the time probably isn’t great for her kind of business, either.” Corva can’t help but smile a bit at the thought of Jack interrupting the—ahem—business that happens at a place like that.

Jack’s smile, however, completely disappears. It’s replaced with a hard stare in her direction. Uncharacteristically serious. “What do you mean, ‘weepy’? Why would I be crying?”

Something about what she said really got to the kid. She tries to smooth things over. “Oh, nothing. Just you said you were five and you just lost everyone you knew. I assumed that you’d be upset.”

He turns his face away from both her and Zeke, back in the general direction of Bule. “I didn’t lose everyone.”

His voice is quiet and his sentences are short. Very un-Jack. It takes Corva a few seconds to realize that he’s talking about the fact that Lyia survived, too. In any case, the attempt at smoothing doesn’t appear to have taken hold. Maybe explaining herself a bit more will help.

“Hey, I’m sure that Lyia is great. But she’s not family, right? Didn’t you have a mother and father in your town? Siblings, maybe? Losing any one of those would make anyone sad. You lost them all and you were still a young child. I was eight when the Shadowfold took Fareburne. It makes sense that—”

“Fareburne? You’re from Fareburne?” Jack’s eyes widen, but it’s difficult to tell what emotion is causing that.

“Yeah. Fareburne was my town. Like you said, we’re all survivors. It actually feels really good to talk about this with someone who can relate. Weird that you said Death was part of what happened to your town. I don’t remember hearing about him being part of—”

“You need to stop.”

Corva feels herself blink in surprise. “What? I was just saying that a little trauma would make sense for a situation like that. I get it. Even though Lyia survived, too, I can’t imagine it’d be enough to make up the difference.”

“I said you need to stop. You’re talkin’ about stuff you don’t know nothing about, girlie.”

Alright, now he’s being a jerk on purpose. “It’s Corva, Jack, get it right. I’m just trying to have a conversation with you. For someone who thinks he’s so mature, you sure are acting like a child.”

“Child? Child? Fuck you, Corva. You ain’t that much older than me. You don’t get to call me that. In fact—”

He raises his eyebrows and springs to his feet. The idea pushing up his brows seems to have continued pushing until he’s standing with the rope in his hand. “You know what? I think it’s time for a break. A little time for reflectin’. Zeke an’ me will just go. We’ll get some rest and get started for the day. Let you think things over a spell, and then you can find your own damn way out.”

With that, Jack yanks at the rope and brings it all the way up out of the hole he was looking through.

“Wait. You’re taking the rope, too?”

“Yeah. It’s my rope. See how you like things without my help.”

Corva grits her teeth. He really is going to leave her. “You go ahead and do that. When I get out, I’ll be sure to wake you up before I start beating on you.”

“Whatever. Zeke, let’s go.”