1
The Event

Morning light ignites floating embers of dust and cuts across Zami’s face while she sleeps. She’s beautiful in a way I’ll never be, but I don’t resent her for it. If anything, her beauty has mostly brought her grief. She keeps her hair short in part to keep men from noticing her as much. And because it’s practical for her particular occupation. She’s good with second-story work, climbing railings, shimmying up pipes or picking locked windows. She knows the rooftops of the Second and Fourth Wards as well as she knows the streets below. Most of her burglary is done in broad daylight when her mark is at work, and she knows a house is empty. It’s simpler that way, and she’s good enough that she can operate from roofs and catwalks without ever being noticed. I know she’s planning to hit a house in the Second this afternoon. Some low-level aristocrat with Senate ties and no family. I’ve never heard of him, but Zami seems like she’s done her homework. We’ve been best friends long enough that I trust her implicitly. Unlike me, she doesn’t take unnecessary risks.

I yawn as I stare past her shoulder to the haggard wooden slat roofs, leaning walls, and mud brick facades of the Fourth Ward beyond our window. Last night’s near-death experience still has my nerves on edge. I roll away from the sunlight drifting through our frayed curtains. I have no plan for today, and another few minutes of sleep won’t hurt.

I’ve almost dozed off when it happens.

It starts as a deep, penetrating vibration in my chest. I sit up and hear dishes rattling in the tavern below. When a frame falls off the wall, Zami wakes with a flinch.

“The hells?” she mumbles, wiping her eyes. She looks out the window. “Earthquake?”

I honestly have no idea. The Endless City is built on a geothermal system, but the last legitimate earthquake in Razgov was before I was born. Another heavy vibration, and suddenly the window in the room shatters. Zami scrambles back with a shriek, and there’s an urgent knock on our door. She picks a piece of broken glass from her hair.

“Sha, let me in!” It’s Tolly.

I jump up, pull on my still-damp pants from the night before, and unlock the door.

“You alright?” he asks, his eyes on the shattered window by Zami’s bed. Tolly is apt to check on others before he takes care of himself, which explains why he’s at our door and not already downstairs.

Before either of us can answer, the entire building shakes. My knees go weak for an instant, and Tolly holds onto the door to keep from falling. Dust drifts down from the ceiling onto his natural black twists.

“So this is what a quake feels like?” His dark skin is nearly the same shade as mine. He still manages to smile in spite of whatever is going on around us.

Another tremor, and I hear something break downstairs. Then Chark’s booming voice carries up to us. “Sha! Zami! Get down here. Now!”

Zami tugs on her clothes, and I grab my leather pack and sling it over my shoulder. Everything I own is either in this room or in my pack, which I try to never let out of my sight. Tolly is already out the door. Zami careens into me as the building shakes again, and we teeter into the hallway and down the stairs into the Head and the Heart tavern, or the Double H to us.

Chark and Rylan are trying to move all the glassware to the floor before it falls off the shelves. Light pours in through what was the large bay window at the front of the building. It’s a sharp, jagged hole now, the shifting tension of the frame proving too much for the solid pane. Just as I’m about to ask what we should do, there’s a sound I’ve definitely never heard before. Almost like rolling thunder but sharper and rougher and–

All at once, we hear screaming. And it’s not one person. It’s a lot. Something outside cracks, and then we see people running past the front of the tavern. From somewhere down the street, there’s a loud boom.

“What in the–” says Tolly, trailing off.

Chark and Rylan have stopped moving glasses and are staring outside just like the rest of us. The street is quickly turning into a madhouse. Through the remnants of our window, people are running in a full sprint. A woman stumbles and falls and is pulled to her feet by a short man pulling a young girl along with him. Another man rushes by followed by a barking dog. Body after body pour past, and then the street begins to fill with a thick cloud of dust. The moving figures are obscured as the building shakes again, and the big mirror behind the bar dislodges and starts to topple. Chark moves fast and just manages to grab it before it shatters. I’m frozen in place as more screams come from outside. The dust is so thick now we can barely see a thing beyond our front door.

And then something roars.

It’s the loudest, deepest sound I’ve ever heard. And I have no earthly idea what could possibly produce it.

Everyone lets various curses fly at once. I meet Rylan’s narrowed eyes.

“We’re leaving,” he states as fact. “Right now.”

No one argues with Rylan. As usual. Instead, we jog together into the grit cloud of the street. People continue to run past. I spot a neighbor who works in a dress shop two blocks south. A dark trail of blood cuts down the side of her face. She’s got a boy in her arms who can’t be more than two, and he isn’t crying. He’s just staring down the street with wet, terrified eyes. I follow his gaze, and the dust cloud shifts just enough to let morning light streak through.

And then I see something my mind can’t quite comprehend.

It has to be at least fifty bodies tall. It’s moving on two feet and has some sort of armored bone plate on the ridge of its head. And spikes on its shoulders and tail. And scales–an endless mass of dark scales. Something from a nightmare or a story meant to frighten children. We’re all staring down the throughway now with our jaws hanging open. And then it roars again, and our collective senses snap back into place all at once. It’s less than forty strides away. I’m having trouble getting a breath.

“A ramakis?” Tolly gasps, his dark skin already shining with sweat. “It–it can’t be.”

“Looks pretty goddamned real to me,” Chark growls.

“Run!” Rylan orders.

Just as I’m about to sprint like my life literally depends on it, the massive creature swings its tail. Screams come from all directions, and I watch the fish market I’ve visited my whole life wiped away in a single stroke. We turn wordlessly and begin to move.

The ramakis–if that’s what we’re actually seeing–is on us instantly, its strides so long that it covers the gap in two steps. Its leg, thicker than the largest tree on the island, crashes into a building on my left–The Warm Night–a local inn. I watch the second story of the place slide off its axis and come down like a landslide, rubble pouring into the road. Suddenly, a massive hand with claws longer than my leg swoops down like a giant bird of prey and snatches a pack mule from the street as if it’s a house cat. I gasp as the animal is thrown twenty strides through the air, braying hysterically before slamming into the side of a workshop with a sagging roof. I lose sight of the mule as we swerve down a side street and sprint through undulating shadows. I look over my shoulder just enough to catch a glimpse of the monster as it barrels into the water tower behind us, the wood crushing in on itself and a huge plume bursting free, the sunlight illuminating the spray in a prism of color. The monstrosity roars again, the horrid sound so loud I grimace and cover my ears as my legs keep moving. We’re following Rylan, who knows every alley in the Fourth Ward by memory. I smell smoke.

We run and run and run. The cacophony of chaos and ruin behind us begins to fade as we put distance between ourselves and the creature. My lungs are burning and there’s a stitch forming in my side. Mercifully, Rylan finally eases to a halt. I look around and realize we’re nearly at the edge of the Fourth, the massive gate to the Third Ward looming down the street several blocks on. Two bearded men with hard, tanned faces stand just across the road. They stare past us, their mouths hanging agape. I put my hands on my knees and try to breathe.

“What the holy fuck?” Chark pants beside me, swooping his long auburn hair from his eyes.

“It destroyed everything,” Tolly mumbles, his gaze glassy and unfocused. “The whole neighborhood. All those–all those people.”

I turn and look back at the billows of smoke and tops of buildings with cracked beams sticking out like bones. The colossal monster is a silhouette against the hazy yellow sun. As we watch, something new begins to appear. The air seems to move and waver like a heat mirage, and then everything changes, and the creature is backlit now not by sunlight but by a dark, starless hole in the world. The monster leans its head back and roars at the sky, and even half a mile away, I grit my teeth. We all look on dumbfounded as it moves inside the massive hole of dark indigo light. My eyes must be playing tricks, because it almost looks like streams of fire crisscross for a moment behind the ramakis’ body.

And then the giant dark hole closes, and the creature is gone.

An eerie hush falls across the Endless City as smoke drifts into the sky. I feel lightheaded and grip Zami’s shoulder for stability. She turns and throws her arms around me, burying her face in the crook of my neck.

“Sha,” she mumbles, but nothing follows my name.

I feel warm tears soaking into my shirt as her shoulders start to shake, and we stand in the middle of the street together as she cries silently against me.

That evening when the fires have been managed and the scene fully investigated by the Watch to the Triumvirate’s satisfaction, we’re allowed back in to find what’s left of our home. The air still smells of woodsmoke and burning oil. Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust or ash. Many of the tan, mud-brick buildings around me are charred, leaning, or downright demolished. It’s not hard to tell which ones were trampled by the ramakis. They look like large bombs were detonated on their front doors. There’s nothing left but rubble. Somehow, other buildings were spared completely. We pass bodies wrapped in dirty cloth in the street. Enough that I know I don’t want to keep count. I see a young boy squatting by the road with tear streaks cutting tracks down his dirt-covered cheeks. He’s staring vacantly at one of the shrouded corpses, and my heart feels like a hand is slowly crushing it. The Fourth was already the poorest Ward. Coming back from this much death and destruction will take years, if we can ever come back at all. These people–these families–many were already balanced on a knife’s edge with no safety net. As I look around at the wasteland that was their home, I wonder how the Fourth will ever recover.

I see the shape of The Head and the Heart before I can make out the details. By the time we reach the site, I have tears in my eyes. Chark’s face is tight, his gaze hardened as he surveys the ruin and picks up the hanging sign with the overlapping golden H’s from the street. Strands of his long hair blow across his defeated face. He and Rylan have run the place for years now, ever since the old owner died without children and left it to Chark, his most dedicated employee. The Double H barely scrapes by, even with occasional injections of cash from our less legal activities. But seeing it destroyed means we’ve lost our meeting place, our business, and our home all at the same time.

Zami puts her arm around me. None of us say a word at first. The second floor has effectively collapsed into the tavern itself. I see my bed hanging haphazardly above the bar. Even if we had disposable income–which we don’t–it would take a lot to reconstruct the place. Finally, it’s Rylan who speaks. His eyes are dry, but I know him well enough to see that he’s grieving just like the rest of us, even if he’s better at hiding it.

“Find what you can. We won’t be coming back here. I’ll start working on a new spot for tonight.”

My heart shrivels and swells in equal measure. The loss of a place we all love and that holds so many memories for us hurts. Rylan’s steady pragmatism and the knowledge that he’ll somehow find a way to take care of us helps lessen the blow. We still have each other. We all made it out alive. How many families won’t be able to say the same? How many will be mourning and wondering just how the hell they lost their loved ones to something that’s not even supposed to exist? The ramakis–yes, I think that’s what it was–is as much a legend as the Halo’s angels or the Rodalon Cult’s bloody savior or the god Calan himself. But here we stand in the wake of that myth made real, and the endless sea of questions that I know are on the tips of our tongues even if we haven’t found the time or inclination to voice them yet.

How could such a monstrosity have suddenly appeared in the Fourth Ward? If it had come from the sea, the Watch would have sounded the bells long before it ever reached us. So how in Calan’s name did it disappear into some sort of portal as quickly as it had come? And perhaps the single most important question of all: why? Was it some sort of freak occurrence? The kind of once-in-a-millennium event that will be passed down in histories until most scarcely believe it ever actually happened at all? Or worse, was it planned? A purposeful attack? And if so, who could possibly want to bring such devastation and death?

My head is thick with too many questions as I stand with my friends–my found family–and stare into the mess that was the center of our lives. Finally, we all begin to move. We don’t talk to each other now. What is there to say? We just go about digging through the wreckage for whatever might be left. I follow Rylan to the back room first. He makes a beeline for the overturned floor lamp and the hidden compartment beneath. Maybe there’s a scrap of luck left in the world, as he pulls the rough but intact sack of stolen goods from within. And then he opens a lower cabinet and retrieves his quiver of arrows–all of which he personally crafted. It’s a skill his brother taught him–something they used to do together, I think. I see his sharpness soften for a moment.

I find Zami upstairs. She’s singing something softly to herself and stops when she realizes I’m behind her. She has only two possessions that really matter to her, and one of them is in her hands. A music box made by her father before he died in the short-lived Burbastian Revolution when she was eleven. Thank the gods it’s in one piece. She’s wearing the other thing I know she came to find–a broach brought over on a boat by her grandmother when her family immigrated to Razgov. It could have bought her a week’s worth of meals at any time over the past several years, but I know she’d never sell it.

My pack is still hanging from my shoulder. Unlike her, I have no family heirlooms or any interest whatsoever in whatever they might have given me.

Zami and I have been out on our own together for nearly ten years now. When we were twelve, she was abused by a creep in Halo leadership, and there was a coverup. My great shame is that her abuser was my dad. He’d made his way up the church’s hierarchy and must have at some point along the way decided he could cause as much pain, anguish, and humiliation as he wanted without consequence. When I’d learned the identity of the man who had done those things to her, I’d immediately assumed our friendship to be over. I thought she would hate me, but she’s a better person than I will ever be. She had seen my father for the evil pervert that he was but had not transferred those properties to me. My mother was drunk most of the time back then and apathetic about basically everything in life. She wasn’t about to admit my father’s crimes, which I’m almost certain she was aware of, as it was easier for her to go on living in blissed-out denial. Zami’s dead dad and banished mother had given my father opportunity, and when I’d found out from Zami that it had been him all along, I announced my permanent separation from our family in a hot blaze of curses and violence, leaving him bleeding from a stab wound and out of my life immediately and forever. And leaving my father meant leaving the Halo as well. Zami agreed to go with me to try to start a better life on our own.

We wandered the streets at first, begging for scraps behind taverns, digging through trash in the darkness, and taking on random odd jobs to survive. Because the Halo had taught us well, we already had basic thief skills that helped keep us from starving, at least for a while, but we were young and rudderless and had no real clue how to actually take care of ourselves. It was a few weeks after I’d run away from home when Rylan found me unconscious. I’ll never be able to repay him for agreeing to take Zami and I under his wing. It would have been just as easy to look the other way. To listen to my father’s threats and deliver me back to him. To not believe Zami. But instead, Rylan became the protective older brother neither of us had ever had.