The harsh wind felt good against Nico’s face. His nerves cooled down and he no longer wanted to choke his sister. So much for being even headed. She was the worst one of them all. Are we trapped in a corner? Are we outnumbered and outmatched? Oh yeah easy solution for that— just kill all your enemies! What a genius.

He quickly climbed up the ladder, though it was hardly his choice. It was like running down a hill. Every time he threw his arm up for the next step he felt himself lean back. By the time he got to the fifth floor the drop would have knocked him out for a while.

Their immortality was slow but powerful. Torn skin stitches itself together in minutes and their broken bones reformed in hours. The thing that took the most time was thermal damage or losing chunks of flesh. The only thing it couldn’t do was growing new bone or surviving brain damage.

Nico stepped onto the roof. It was lit in pale white by the night stars. Uhan was sitting over the edge, bawling his eye out. He looked at Nico as the tears streaked by. He didn’t bother wiping them off.

What do I say? The only thing that Nico knew about Uhan was that he was a fan of Jarl. So what would Jarl say?

Nico gave Uhan the widest smile he could pull.

“Ew,” Uhan said, coughing on his sobs. “Please stop.”

“I tried,” Nico said, throwing his arm up in the air. He dropped near him. “It’s too cold to stay alone.”

Uhan nodded once, sniffing. They sat in the dark feeling the cold pass between them. The walls surrounding the City was just a few dozen Blocks away. They rose as high as Nico’s eyes can reach, further than the moon was. Some said the city’s walls rose to outer space itself. It was so tall most of the Third District stayed in its shadow.

Nico leaned back. He let his head roll on his shoulders to look at the open sky directly above. It was filled with hundreds if not thousands of stars, each one glimmering like a gem with a different color. Pretty, but what’s the point? He wasn’t gaining anything. He wasn’t learning anything. There was no progress or change besides a little momentarily pleasure. Come tomorrow and he’ll forget it.

“Do…do you think we’ll make it? All of us?” Uhan asked, but Nico heard something different: do you have a magical way out of this?

Something witty. Humorous too, with bravado and a hint of bravery. “At the rate we’re going, probably not.”

“Yeah,” Uhan said. “That’s why you’re lame.”

“I said probably.” Yeah, just like that. False or not, everyone needed one type of hope or the other to keep trying again. Jarl had his lottery and Nico his probabilities, though he didn’t know what Yen had. He supposed she believed in Nico, but look where that got her. “The chances of me making it were low. The chances of you making it is low. But it’s not just us. It was dad. It was mom. Jarl. Yen. Maybe Dan if we get past this. Then Lilla. Or whoever joins the fam. We do that enough, and eventually one of us will make it. Admitting our chances are bad isn’t the same thing as giving up.”

“So your saying that because it’s not impossible, we should do it regardless of how low the chances are?”

“Yup.”

“…you do realize you can apply that to everything, right? Since most things aren’t impossible?”

“Yup,” Nico said, smiling wide. “Which is why I’ve never lost an argument before—are you learning son?”

Uhan’s laughter was dry, but with each meek chuckle he grew louder and more animated. He finished with a sigh that seemed to lax all his muscles. He sat back, letting his arms drop and his legs to stretch in front of him. “Why does god hate us?” he said.

Oh no. That was a long conversation Nico didn’t have the time or patience to go through. “Which one?”

“Deema,” he said, slightly annoyed. “You knew that. Yen told you and now you think I’m an idiot.”

Deema was the thing that the Suns called the sun. Their whole deal was that the Deep is divine punishment for gaining immortality, and that the walls surrounding the cities were raised for god’s chosen few. Their sole evidence for this theory is that the Immortality Elixir, the Walls, and the Deep appeared at the same time.

There was of course a more reasonable explanation. With the creation of the Immortality Elixir, the kings and queens of the old world lost their power over their people. People no longer needed to live within expensive temperature-controlled shelter, nor did they need to buy food or overpriced health services.

So in response, walls were built and the Deep was unleashed. Anyone who did not pay to get inside died.

But acknowledging that theory meant that the Houses, which are still mostly ancestors of the ‘noble houses’ who ruled the cities back then, started a genocide that killed millions of people just to stay in power.

Last time Nico checked, half of the 3rd city or so were Suns. The other half was split between non-believers, and an even more insane cult called Children Of The Deep, who spread from the 4th City before its fall.

You would think that having the very thing that you worshipped destroy you would make you rethink your beliefs, but the opposite happened with the Children. They just spread even more and declared the person that caused the 4th Fall their prophet who would bring salvation and cleanse the world of its sin.

In all, not much different than the rest of the other cults running around. Most of them boiled down to a simple concept—endless happiness for good people, and endless suffering for bad. You were good if you were a believer, bad if you were not.

“Well that’s a given, you are my brother,” Nico said. “Being idiots is our thing, but here I think you’re just scared.”

“I’m not scared of dying,” Uhan said.

“Say that again, but wipe the snot first,” Nico said.

Uhan wiped his face. “I’m not scared of them.”

“Then I guess everyone is a pussy, and you’re the only real man in the family,” Nico said, stifling a groan. It felt like he was talking to a child, which to Nico’s displeasure he remembered he was. It put his mother’s training into a perspective he didn’t like.

Stop acting like a child, even though you are. It wasn’t fair, and here he was, repeating the pattern. “Being afraid is natural, Uhan. If we weren’t, then we wouldn’t work so hard to avoid our fears—but Deema is not the way to handle it—I have a question for you. Why do you think the Syndicate endorses the Suns? My guess is that because their policies—”

“It’s called scripture.”

“So their scripture is very convenient for Rankers—obey authority, hunt monsters, fight for the glory of the sun, and you’ll get into Paradise. Everyone who has ever hurt you will suffer in flames for all eternity—but only once they die, and only god or its—”

“Her.”

Nico stopped. “Her?”

“Yeah? It’s the sun bro.”

…right, because it makes so much sense for a God to have a gender. How else would it have intercourse and make baby gods that create their own universes? But that was hardly the largest qualm he had with the cults, so he just let it go. “Right. Her. So don’t bother doing anything against authority and just wait for the prophet, savior, or whoever will eventually arrive and make everything good. Knowing what you know about the Syndicate, don’t you find some of that a bit suspicious?”

“I get it,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You don’t believe, but I do. I won’t let it interfere with…with whatever I’m supposed to do around here.”

Fucked. From every direction. “That’s not the point,” Nico said, giving up on the matter. The lesson here was obvious—roleplaying is dangerous. Uhan was living in a world of their own making.

“It’s written on your face.”

“Every hook and knack of my face is filled with unblistered positivity.”

“Positively sure we’re going to die.”

Not die, just fail. Become something hideous. It started with abandoning Jarl. Each subsequent problem that will inevitably arise will push them closer to the reality Dan had described. Uhan didn’t seem to grasp that hopelessness and fear were the Ranker’s whip and Paradise the carrot, but Nico didn’t have the time to teach him this.

Now the idiot thinks there was something divine about having his brother feel his flesh melt, and not even being able to afford to numb the pain he was feeling right now.

And what if Uhan does grow up to endorse the very people taking advantage of him? Whose fault would that be but theirs for allowing it to happen? “Cheeky bastard,” Nico said in the end. It was that, or he really was going to beat Uhan to a pulp every night and call it divine punishment. Or blame it all on the devil, because apparently that was popular too.

“I learned it from you!”

“And I learned it from Jarl, so who is really at fault here?” Nico said, bumping his shoulder. Really, who is? “Come on now, before I lose my toes too.” He placed his hand over his, squeezing lightly. Warm enough. Sometimes people didn’t notice how cold their hands were and fell as they were climbing. “Go take care of Jarl. He needs you more than ever. Ay?”

“…Ay,” he said, with a lot less enthusiasm.

Nico stared at Uhan’s face. It didn’t feel good leaving him at that note. “You know when we spar sometimes—”

“That was four years ago,” Uhan said.

“I would ask you what mode would you like to fight on—easy or hard.”

“I was a kid,” he said. “Winning wasn’t the point.”

“Good thing you’re still a kid, because you always picked hard mode. And that’s what life for us is, Uhan. It’s hard mode. So…just don’t be hard on yourself, okay?”

“Are you saying that to me, or yourself?”

Nico smiled. He gave Uhan a tight hug and held him there until Uhan wrapped his hands around Nico and squeezed back. “You’ll do just fine. Take care of Jarl. Just chat with him if you have the time, it’ll help more than you realize.”

“Yeah,” Uhan said quietly voice. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll figure something out,” Nico said, walking away. He waved his hand. “Be a better older brother to Dan than I was to you, huh?”

“Already done!” Uhan yelled as he climbed down.

True. If Uhan didn’t have talent for fighting, then Nico didn’t have a talent for being a brother. Both could have been substituted with time neither of them had.