Kael’s first thought was that the world had turned into a mouth.

  Not the Hound’s though its teeth ringed the sky as he fell, just the earth itself, swallowing, drawing him down in long, wet gulps. Sand became a throat and then, with a sickening smoothness, glass. His shoulder hit skidded, his ribs drummed along a glazed curve; his hip bounced and sent a slick pain up his spine. He stopped hard, spun half around, and lay panting on a floor so clear he could see sand trapped inside it like flies in amber.

  The Hound slithered into view a few arm-lengths away, not climbing so much as deciding to be here, its bulk haloed by an invisible shimmer. It threw him the last meter like a child tossing a stick into a stream and then simply watched him from a polite distance. The temperature had been a furnace on the way down. Here, it was merely unbearable.

  The burrow opened around them like a cathedral carved by heat. The walls were fused sand, smooth as poured sugar, rippled where the monster’s body had pressed and melted and moved. Glass corridors the size of avenues branched off in every direction, some angling up until they climbed into white glare, others sloping farther down into a dark that looked thick enough to chew. The tunnel they were in split and split again, lanes, ramps, mezzanines, a whole city plan written by a thing that didn’t need roads but had made them anyway so it could be everywhere at once.

  Kael pressed his palm to the floor and flinched. The heat was there, pounding, but… bounded. A pressure contained by a will. He could feel the choice in it; if the beast stopped being careful, everything within fifty paces would slump and run, including him. It was managing itself the way a man manages his hands when he picks up a baby.

  He crawled to a sit, propped on one elbow. The air had weight. His lungs worked like bellows full of mud.

  The Hound didn’t come closer. It tilted its head. He saw the neat slit behind the jaw hinge where shade had bitten it, the raw seam glistening. Two fingers were missing from the near foreclaw—Nhilly’s work—stumps glossy and already sheathing, new growth puckering like a mouth learning how to spit. The creature studied its injuries with what could only be called curiosity, turning the paw in the heat-haze, flexing phantom joints, testing. Its chest rose and fell in colossal patience. Somewhere deep inside it, the heartbeat went on, a muffled drum through glass and hot sand.

  Thoom.

  …thm.

  Kael swallowed and tasted metal. He rolled to his knees. Celeste’s barrier wasn’t on him, he felt naked to the world in the honest, painful way you feel naked when the person who kept you alive has to choose someone else. He reached for shade the way a drowning man reaches for a rope.

  Shadow answered. It came up out of the right-hand corridor like water from a crack, eager and thin. He slid into it and out again, testing how it flowed against these glass surfaces too bright, too slick. The edges of things made small knife-wounds of reflection; there were places where shadow stood, but there were more where it only pretended. He felt the lie under his fingers and made a map out of it.

  The Hound blinked if that’s what the slow, rippling shutter of heat over its eye meant and did not move closer.

  “Uninterested. Good,” Kael muttered, and grinned at his own voice for being steady. “Let’s make you interested in the wrong things.”

  The plan did not change underground. It was still buying seconds with blood and math. Above them, twelve thousand souls needed distance. Down here, his body was a wedge he could jam into the monster’s timing. A bad door can be held with a shoulder if the hinge complains in the right place.

  He slid. In. Out. Angle. Cut.

  Shade made a blade in his hand that the glass did not love. He went for the vents where heat hissed, the soft welds where massive plates met. The Hound took his attentions like a man letting rain hit his sleeve while he reads, only occasionally flicking the page to shake it dry. When it did move, it was minimal and exact turn, tilt, paw-lift the kind of motion that has thought in it and no hurry.

  Kael tasted every breath. He took two small mouthfuls of air, put a cut on a seam. Another two, slid into a crease of heat that did not like him and came out the other side with the edge of his coat sparking. He worked until his teeth ached with cold from inside his hot mouth.

  Then the Hound flicked him.

  He hit a column of half-melted glass at shoulder height and bounced through it, shards tinkling like rain. He tumbled, found a strip of shade, dove and came out too early, momentum unkind. He rolled to stop and drove the point of his blade under his own palm to make the body obey.

  “Buy time,” he told his bones. “Not victory. Time.”

  The next pass he was faster. Habit makes courage look like skill. He skimmed a foreleg, took a neat swipe at the frayed tendon behind the claw he’d worried above. Heat blasted his ears; his hair sizzled and curled. He tucked, slid, let a laugh out because the world was ridiculous and he was still alive in it.

  The Hound tolerated him the way a mountain tolerates a goat. It didn’t even growl; it breathed and the tunnel sang. Its paw came low and flat and sent him skidding like a cobble down one of the angled ramps. He pinwheeled, palms screaming, boots finding no purchase on the smooth glass. The ramp ended in a tooth.

  He had dodged that exact tooth a breath earlier. Now he didn’t.

  The spear of bone punched through meat below his knee and pinned him to the floor. There was no noise at first, just a bright subtraction in the world where his leg used to belong to him. Then sound came back and he realized the screaming was his. He tried to pull free and everything went white.

  He breathed. One. Two. Three. Four.

  He looked at it. His leg stuck on a tooth like a fish on a spit. Blood puddled and skittered in the heat, already turning the colour glass wants it to be. He laughed once, high and shocked. Then he went to work. Shade wouldn’t cut the tooth, but bone has other edges; he levered, twisted, made a bad choice, made a worse one, made the right one at last and rolled off himself with a wet sound that would visit him in dreams if he were permitted them.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He lay on his back, panting, heat stroking his face with damp hands. Shadow pooled at his left; if he crawled, he could get to it. He didn’t move yet.

  His head filled with Cairo.

  Not because he wanted it—because pain knocks at every door and memory opens the ones that don’t lock. White roofs and laundry lines. Spices and bus fumes. The sound of an old elevator cage that stuck on the lobby floor and needed a kick to make up its mind. The woman at the corner stand who called him “handsome” and refused his coins half the time. Boys on a rooftop doing handstands because that is what being alive looks like when you think it will last. Heat there too, but kinder.

  Then the new friends: Eli with soot on his nose and apology in his smile; Celeste with her hands raw and righteous, telling him to drink water and shut up between sips; Nhilly, a man who had split his face into two masks and worn both so long he believed neither. How Nhilly would lift a hand and an army would move, then sit alone on a wagon edge afterward and look at a knot in the wood like it might tell him how much more pretending it would take to keep everybody from dying. How Kael had joked about poems and maps and in the quiet parts had wanted to take the mask off for him and say, you do not have to be beautiful to be good.

  He laughed again, choking on it. “Should’ve asked,” he whispered. “Should’ve said—stop saving us like that. Save yourself a little. Let us act badly for once.”

  Seris arrived like a wind through a door left open. Yarion first—mud on the hem of a borrowed dress, hair flung back with a quick hand, the way she stood too square to the world like a soldier pretending to be nobody. Then the click—another room, another light. Earth. Lily.

  He could smell the sea from that memory, Piraeus dock slop and oil, no, wrong coast, other day: a narrow street outside a cafe in Zamalek where the coffee was too strong and the chairs were all the wrong height. She had been laughing then, head down, palms out as if surrendering to his argument before she won it anyway. Lily. Not Seris yet. Disappeared three years before he did; he’d marked it in his head as a number because numbers behave, and then she’d been there again in Yarion as if numbers were jokes gods told each other.

  He saw her on the day the Scenario recruiters came, holding his sleeve with a grip that didn’t allow for dignity.

  “Don’t,” she’d said, fierce, scared, not for herself. “This one is bad. They’ve edited it to be bad. If I’m wrong, you’ll have me to mock. If I’m right, I’ll — I’ll come back for you.”

  She’d arranged a dozen toughs with soft eyes to block the hall, their hands gentle as they kept him from making the worst decision of his life through a door painted with charming lies. He had shouted, of course he had; pride is a drug we give ourselves when we can’t afford the others. She had kissed his forehead like a rude sister and gone, and then scenarios and gods and laughter in palaces that weren’t.

  He cried. Not pretty. The heat took the tears as they left him and made them into shine on the glass under his head. He laughed once at that—at the recycling of sorrow.

  Hot wind roared across his face. He came back into the now with a start that hurt his neck. The Hound had leaned close, breath pouring out of it like the inside of a kiln. He could see down its throat farther than a man should see into a living thing. The new teeth budded and clicked. Heat laid its palm on his cheek and did not press. It could have cooked him in a word. It was… waiting.

  Kael looked at it and discovered a fresh, ugly truth he had never had to say aloud.

  “On the threshold,” he whispered, and the words arranged themselves because thinking has habits, “men are rarely brave. They are true. And the truth is a crooked, shameful thing we spend our lives disguising with better stories.”

  He did not want to die.

  He did not want the good death. He wanted a stupid, selfish one someday at an ordinary age over an ordinary thing with someone he loved nearby to call him an idiot for leaving. He wanted to stand up again and be petty and wrong and loved. The desire hit him with the force of a thrown plate.

  He rolled to an elbow, shaking, and called for his sword. Shadow came to his hand like a loyal dog and made a shape that looked like it could make a difference. He raised it. The blade trembled. His arm did too.

  The Hound lifted one vast paw and set it down on his forearm with exquisite control. There was a soft, decisive series of pops as small bones decided they had done enough for one life. The sword fell out of his hand and skittered across glass in a sound that would have been funny if it belonged to cutlery at lunch.

  A breathy sound left him. Part sob, part laugh. He tried to roll, to get the arm free. The paw pressed until the world narrowed to a single lit door and everything outside it went silent.

  Heat increased. Not a lot. Just enough to teach.

  The floor under his bare back began to soften. It went from slick to tacky to the feeling of hot wax poured over shoulder blades. Skin stuck. Then scorched. He bucked and made a noise he had never made in front of anyone and had promised himself he would not make even alone. The smell came next, a chemical sweetness that undid him.

  “Please,” he said. He had never put that word in that shape before. He stuttered it now like a child banging on a door. “Please, I’m begging—have mercy. Please. Please stop. Don’t—don’t come near me. I don’t want—” He gulped air like a fish in a dry bowl. “I don’t want to die. I want to live. I’m—” He sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The Hound’s face did a thing he had not seen it do. The non-lips drew back. The jaw unscrolled. The teeth—old and new and in-between—presented themselves in a terrible bouquet.

  It smiled.

  Then, as if the idea of delight needed demonstration, it collapsed sideways with theatrically careful grace, the way a huge animal satisfies itself with its own weight. A sound came out of its chest that might have been a laugh if a canyon could laugh when a river tickled it. The temperature rose with its amusement. The glass all around them softened one long degree.

  Kael screamed until his throat bled and the noise turned into a scrape.

  The floor sagged under his spine. He stuck harder. The skin gave way in layers, each with its own insistence and smell. He arched, then couldn’t. The paw on his arm kept beauty out of it. The heat licked his sides, took hair, took the silk from under his skin and made it soup.

  He begged, and then the begging went past words into a sound like breathing if breathing had a word for “don’t.”

  The Hound laughed again, delighted by the way the room shone.

  When the glass finally agreed to be liquid, it was quick because decisions, once made, are efficient. It took him the way the Wastes had taken men earlier—simply, with gravity and purpose. His ruined arm slid free in a wet shrug and floated for a second like a thought someone had changed their mind about keeping. The rest of him went down with bubbles that burst and made small, cheerful noises.

  Heat smoothed the surface. The floor became a mirror again, with something the colour of old honey folded inside it.

  There was no heroism in it. There was no banner anywhere. He had bought time, ugly, crying, honest time, and the hour did not say thank you because hours never do.

  The Hound stood, the last of its laugh steaming out of the slit, and shook itself, a dog at a shoreline. The tunnels hummed with the movement. Far, far above, the heartbeat of the valley kept on, patient as ever.

  Thoom.

  Thoom.

  It turned without hurry and moved down a different branch of glass, where the road sloped up toward a seam that would open the ground with polite malice. The wound where two fingers were missing pulled; new buds swelled; the creature flexed and admired the way its body learned.

  Behind it, trapped in the immaculate floor, a blur watched a last heat ripple travel the ceiling and thought nothing at all.