I slid my fingers slowly along the indent of the blade’s fuller, testing the balance. As a ray of golden light fell on the weapon, my eyes narrowed. The blade's ivory hue told me it was made with compressed parabeast bone, and its hefty weight indicated that the forger had used a steel base. The brittle bone was unmarred by combat, not from disuse but because its wielder had reinforced it with their raden.

I tilted the hybrid sword and, adjusting the magnification on my goggle lenses, searched for any lingering imperfections. Sure enough, a cluster of black blood had fused to its underside.

“Damn it,” I muttered, pulling the goggles down around my neck.

I set the weapon on the flat boulder I’d chosen for my makeshift workstation in this damp, forsaken cave and reached for my kit. Nerves firing, I cast a sidelong glance at my crossbow, nestled against the condensation-slick wall where it had been the last five times I looked. A small pile of bolts lay arranged around it.

Good.

Dozens of tempered glass jars clinked together as I rifled through my pack. I found the mixture I needed and unscrewed the lid, ignoring the pungent stench spilling out. I held the ivory sword at an angle and poured the jar’s mucus-like contents over the splotch of blood. A plume of yellow-green smoke spiraled up on contact, and I rummaged through my bag for one of the abrasive sponges I always kept on hand.

When bubbles fizzled inside the stain, I got to work.

With the end of the blade held firmly under my tattered sneakers, I scrubbed the weapon as hard as I could. My personal solvent recipe broke down the hardened parabeast blood enough so I was able to scrub it off without weakening the integrity of the bonesword underneath.

“Come on,” I muttered through clenched teeth, arms burning from the effort. “Come off, you stupid—”

Finally, the last dried flakes peeled off. I ran my arm across my sweaty brow and allowed myself a satisfied grin.

While I polished the blade with a soft cloth and some oil, I let my gaze wander the cavern.

The rough, gray-green walls crawled with golden moss, highlighting the many ruts and outcroppings that pressed in all around me. The occasional flickering of our spotlights made unnerving shadows dart around in my peripheral vision.

The presence of the ardents in the cave should have put me at ease, but, if anything, it did the opposite.

Two men, their bodies outlined by a thin, hazy golden glow that hummed with life, stalked toward a pile of monster corpses stretched out nearby. Each man held three reptilian parabeasts piled in their arms, yet they chatted in casual tones as if they weren’t both carrying over six hundred pounds.

Broad-shouldered. Thick-muscled. Unfazed by the gore in the rifts. They looked like living statues of Greek gods, only these gods had menial chores to complete before they could go home.

I didn’t have to look further than their scowls to know exactly how much they enjoyed their task.

My gaze fell back to the stained cloth in my hand, and I suddenly felt like a fool. I’d actually been proud of my little chemistry solution—even though the bigwigs in Lightbridge Towers had already refused to put it into production. After all, anyone else would just reinforce themselves and the weapon with their golden raden and scrape the blood off using brute strength.

I clicked my tongue against the back of my teeth, trying to ignore the tightening in my chest by losing myself in the long, deliberate motions of the polishing rag and the gloss it left behind. I tuned out the gentle hum of the raden-powered spotlight illuminating my makeshift workstation. I ignored the rumble of voices and the clatter of boneswords as ardents from the last raid tossed their busted weapons into the growing pile behind me. And I ignored the question that burned in my head every damn moment of my life.

Why?

Almost two decades ago, when jagged fissures tore across the sky and bathed the entire globe in radiation, why hadn’t I gained the ability to harness that energy like just about everyone else?

Why, while the rest of humanity grew stronger and healthier—better—had I been left behind, unaffected by the radiation?

Squeezing my eyes shut, I forced a deep breath through my grinding teeth, and then another.

I was grateful to be a boneforger, but every day was a reminder of what I wanted but would never attain. Even the damned moss could glow with raden, but not me. I was twenty years old, but without raden reinforcing my body, even children and their sweater-vest-wearing grandparents were stronger and in better shape than me.

The dull ache in my shoulders dragged me out of my stupid self-pity. Wiping my stained hands on my jeans, I stood up and stretched my back as I made my way to the pile of carbon fiber scabbards lying nearby. I sheathed the freshly polished hybrid sword and scanned the growing pile of busted or bloody boneswords. It was going to be a long day.

The sharp snap of a breaking bone drew my attention to the two grumbling ardents now crouched over a row of veilgator corpses. Brows furrowed, they ripped broken spears out of the reptilian monsters’ scaled hides. Specks of black blood flew with each yank, though most of the serrated spearheads snapped off in the parabeasts’ bodies.

Damn it.

With the growing workload, more and more ardents were being assigned to prepare the corpses for dissection after each raid, and they all hated the chore. So, of course, they cut corners and left a mess for us forgers and carvers, every time without fail.

I wanted to ignore them like I usually did. The hours of extra work their ineptitude caused wasn’t any worse than actually trying to talk to the ardents.

But I also couldn’t just let them damage the veilgator corpses. The desiccated muscle fibers I could harvest from them were essential in crafting the ardents’ protective undershirts—the best we’d formulated since the rifts first opened. There wasn’t enough to go around as it was, even without a couple of meatheads ruining half the corpses.

“Hey, guys.” I scrubbed my scowl into a polite smile—or at least a sham of one—and approached the ardents. “I know it’s a pain, but if you don’t use the textbook extraction method, it damages the pectorals and any muscle sinew needed for—”

The ardents’ golden auras flickered with annoyance, but neither bothered to even look up. Instead, Matthew, the bigger of the two, made it a point to purposely snap the shaft of a spear.

He spared an irritated glance over his shoulder. “Sorry, did you say something, Red?”

My mouth twitched, my fake smile faltering, but I didn’t let the jab get to me.

Red. The socially accepted and just borderline HR-appropriate term—unlike ‘defect’—for Radiation Energy Deficient. That was the official term coined for us fortunate few who survived without raden. Most people had either succumbed or adapted once the rift radiation spread across the globe. Oddities like me had done neither, living with bodies unchanged as the world went mad.

I kept my shoulders straight. “I said, if those spears aren’t taken out properly, the forgers won’t have enough materials to make more fiber shirts.”

“Got it.” Eyes drilling into mine, Matthew slowly snapped off another shaft.

The smart choice would’ve been to relent and let the two fighters, who were quite capable of ripping me in half, heed their primal urges. Unfortunately, my pride won out.

“Wow, so strong.” I rolled my eyes and ignored the fact that my heart was attempting to punch its way out of my chest. “Maybe you should do the next raid naked instead of decking yourselves out in armor that us forgers make to protect your ungrateful asses.”

“That’s funny.” Matthew kicked away the veilgator corpse he was manhandling and cocked his head. “I didn’t think I got any dirt in my ear”—he wiggled a finger in the canal for show—“but I must’ve heard you wrong. We lost an ardent today saving one of you useless forgers, and you’re saying you protect us?”

The ardent strode toward me with malice in his eyes. “You’re all weak, but you…” His finger jabbed my chest, staggering me. “You’re the worst of them. A pathetic Red who can’t even protect himself. So don’t think for a goddamned second that you somehow protect us just because you scrub our swords.”

“My lack of raden doesn't change the fact that meat-fingering the corpses will worsen the fiber vest shortage.” Even as my common sense screamed at me to shut the hell up, I scoffed. “Is that clear enough for you, or do you want me to draw it out in crayon?”

Matthew’s fist blurred in a haze of gold, but before I could even flinch away from the debilitating blow, his buddy, Arnold caught him at the elbow. “Just leave it, man. It ain’t worth it,” he grunted as Matthew tried to wrench his arm free. “Unless you want to explain to Seth why his kid brother’s brains are all over the wall.”

And that’s what it always boiled down to.

Fear of Seth. It was never, “Hey, don’t be an asshole, Torrin’s one of us.” Because nothing I could do made up for my lack of raden. Not working on the aftermath of dozens of raids. Not the books I’d filled with notes on extraction, forging, and cleaning methods. To people like these two, I would only ever be a burden.

I rubbed my temple, careful not to touch my eye in case I had any solvent on my fingers. “Look, just—leave the veilgators. I can finish the cleanup myself.”

Matthew finally pulled free of Arnold’s meaty arms. “Yeah, you do that.”

I figured they’d leave now that they’d come out on top, but Matthew and Arnold hovered as I went to work. Biting back a frustrated sigh, I twisted the spear with careful pressure. A muscle in the beast’s left arm spasmed, and its clawed fingers curled. I flinched back, and the two ardents chuckled.

Neck burning, I tilted the spearhead forty-five degrees, wiggling it slightly before giving it a sharp tug.

It didn’t come out.

“See?” Arnold nudged Matthew, his tone placating. “Big mouth, little arms.”

I frowned, ignoring them. When veilgators died, their scales hardened in place while their outer muscle layers relaxed, which made them the easiest parabeasts for carvers to dissect.

It should’ve worked. Then again, I had been distracted.

I frowned and braced my palm on the dead creature’s chest to pull harder.

The scaly torso expanded beneath my hand, taking a shaky breath.

Oh, shit.