Chapter 1: The Collection

My father was four hours late.

I know that doesn't sound like much. Four hours. People run late all the time. But not him. Not once in twenty years. Not even when the power grid failed and the whole outer rim went dark and the trains stopped running he still found a way to check in. Always.

Four hours meant something was wrong.

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my phone and tried to talk myself out of the feeling sitting in my chest. That heavy tight feeling. The one that started small and kept getting bigger no matter how many times I told it to stop.

He was all I had.

That was the thing. The whole thing. My mother was gone. No aunts. No cousins. No friends close enough to count. Just him and me and this small cold apartment in the outer rim of Vespera with its broken window latch and its smell of fried food coming through the walls from the place next door.

Just him.

And he was four hours late.

I called his number again.

Straight to the message. Same as the last seven times.

I put the phone down on the bed and pressed my hands flat on my knees and breathed. In and out. The way he had taught me. Slow and even. Don't let the panic win Maevia. Panic makes you stupid and stupid gets you killed.

I was trying.

I Really Was.

But my hands were shaking and I couldn't make them stop and the longer I sat there the worse it got until I couldn't sit anymore. I stood up. I walked to the window. Looked out at the yellow lights of the street below. A couple walking. A man selling something from a cart. Normal things. The kind of things that had no idea what was happening in this apartment.

I walked back to the bed.

Sat down again.

I don't know how long I did that. Walking and sitting and calling his number and getting nothing. Long enough that the food smell from next door changed... dinner becoming something later, something cold.

I picked up my knife from the bedside table and put it on my belt.

Put my boots on.

Told myself I was being stupid.

Told myself four hours was nothing. That he was fine. That I was panicking over nothing like a child and he was going to call any minute and laugh at me for worrying.

I almost believed it.

Then the deadbolt exploded.

Not snapped. Not broke. A chunk of the frame flew past my ear so fast I felt the heat of it on my skin before I heard the sound. Wood hit the floor everywhere. The door just folded inward. Gone.

My body moved before my brain did.

I was on my feet in the stance my father had drilled into me since I was nine years old. Bleeding shins on the cold garage floor. Again Maevia. Again until you don't think about it. The knife was in my hand. I don't remember pulling it. It was just there.

I looked at the doorway.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

He was the biggest person I had ever seen in my life. His shoulders filled the whole frame. The light from the hallway behind him was completely gone, just blocked out, swallowed, like he had eaten it. He smelled like engine oil and chemicals and underneath both of those he smelled like rain.

He was soaking wet.

He looked at me the way you looked at something small that was in your way.

I lunged anyway.

I went for the hollow above his collarbone the way my father had shown me a hundred times on that cold concrete floor. I put everything I had into it. Every kilo. All the fear. All the four hours of dread that had been building in my chest since the phone went to voicemail the first time.

He didn't move.

His hand came out and caught my wrist and that was it. Just caught it... like I was something slow and predictable and he had seen me coming from a long way off. The grip was unreal. Not painful at first. Just total. Like my bones had been swallowed by something mechanical.

Then the grinding started.

Inside my own arm.

The pain took a second to arrive. It gathered itself. Then hit me all at once... white and total and so overwhelming that the edges of my vision went gray and my knife just fell. I didn't drop it. It just left my hand while I was busy not being able to see properly.

He spun me around.

My face went into the wallpaper. It smelled like old grease and cigarettes and a hundred years of other people's problems soaked into the plaster.

I tasted blood.

"Where is he?" I got the words out somehow. They sounded wet and strange. "Where is my father?"

He didn't answer.

I heard him go into his pocket. Plastic. The zip-tie went on fast... plastic teeth biting straight to bone... and within seconds my hands were going numb and something warm was running down my palms.

I threw a kick back. Aimed for his knee. Hit his shin.

It was like kicking a building.

But he still went.

I twisted enough to see him look down at my foot. His eyes were flat and dull and the color of old metal. Something moved in them.

"That hip rotation," he said. His voice was so low I felt it in my chest. "The Sovereign House stopped teaching that twenty years ago."

My heart slammed so hard it hurt.

Never show them the form. My father's voice in my head right then. Patient and scared at the same time. The second they see it they know exactly what blood you carry.

"Shut up," I said.

He grabbed my collar and lifted me like I weighed nothing at all.

"Move," he said. "Or I break the other arm."

It was freezing outside. Black SUV at the curb. He threw me in the back and the door sealed and the sound of the outer rim, the food smells and the distant music and the ordinary noise of the street cut off completely. Like it had never existed.

I pulled at the tie.

The plastic just dug deeper.

The city slid past the windows and changed. Yellow lights become neon. Neon becoming glass. Glass became the towers of the Inner Ring leaning over the car like they were trying to get a look at me.

I kept pulling.

A tunnel. A red light turning green. Heavy gates opening and then closing behind us.

That was the last I saw of my city.

The hallway on the other side smelled of money and underneath the money something iron sharp that I recognized before I had finished breathing it in.

Blood.

Bass from somewhere above came up through the floor into my feet.

He threw me through a door and my knees hit black marble and I stayed there for a second on all fours just breathing. Just existing. Just trying to remember that I was still here and still whole and still breathing.

The door clicked shut.

Dark room. The whole city through floor to ceiling glass. Neon and rain and cold light.

I got up.

A shadow moved in the corner.

He came forward slowly. Dark shirt. No jacket. He moved like noise was something other people did. He stopped two feet away and he was warm, the only warm thing in the frozen room... and he smelled like bergamot and wet streets.

He didn't look at me.

He opened his hand.

Something small hit the marble. Rolled. Wobbled. Stopped an inch from my knee.

A ring. Silver. The crest worn smooth from years of a thumb running over it when its owner was thinking too hard.

I knew that ring.

It was still on a finger.

The room moved. A thin high sound started in the back of my head and I locked my jaw and breathed through my nose and held onto the one thought I had left.

If he took the finger, dad is still alive. He Has To Be Still Alive.

The man crouched in front of me. His knees popped in the quiet. He leaned in close and his breath was warm against my face and he said my name.

Just my name.

Like he had been saving it.

Maevia.