Jace cleared his throat. “Hey, I’m out of the loop here. Someone want to fill me in?”

“Apparently, even though Seth knows damned well that I work, train, and study twice as hard as anyone, he doesn’t think I deserve the promotion President Valera offered me today—doesn’t think I can handle an active rift,” I said, the words all coming out on a single angry breath. “Isn’t that right, big brother?”

“Whoa, the head honcho promoted you himself?” Jace asked, a little too chipper as he nudged my shoulder. “Impressive.”

“Valera knows nothing about your… circumstances,” Seth cut in. “He didn’t even know your name. He won’t remember anything about that so-called promotion, or you, tomorrow.”

I jabbed a finger down on the center console. “I’m not blind to the fact that this promotion is bullshit, but it’s still a chance. Being a boneforger is what I want. Stop trying to force your low expectations on me.”

Seth swallowed, hands fidgeting at the wheel, and I thought I spied the tiniest tinge of remorse in his narrowed eyes.

Jace’s face hovered between us for a moment, mouth twisted in a pensive look. In the end, he said nothing, just gave our seats a few commiserating slaps and settled into the back. He was used to our arguments, and he only ever stepped in to act as mediator—or maybe referee.

I stared outside as the suburban ruins ended and civilization began. The bumpy asphalt eased into smooth, well-maintained roads, and a row of tidy townhouses lined the street. Ahead of us, the skyline was an uneven ridge of high-rises flanked by twin mountain ranges, Ojai City spilling out to fill the basin between them. In the fading day, lights began to blink to life all over the valley.

The jeep turned left, away from downtown and toward the ardent district closer to the eastern mountains.

Seth let out a sharp, impatient snort and slammed the brakes. My body shot forward, seatbelt biting my shoulder. I winced and looked up to see a field of red brake lights. Dozens of people marched through the streets waving picket signs, obstructing traffic.

“Damn it,” I groaned. “Again?”

“Nutjobs,” Jace grumbled, lounging like he might return to his nap.

Seth grabbed the gearshift and looked over his shoulder, but his frown deepened at the cars already queueing behind us.

We were stuck until the protest ended or was broken up.

A blonde woman dressed in black yoga pants and a bright pink jacket walked the dotted lines between the now-parked cars as more people filtered through the standstill traffic after her. She held a bullhorn to her mouth and thrust her other fist high above her head. The muffled chanting of the growing throng seeped through the jeep’s windows.

“Keep the rifts open!” Her amplified voice cut through the city noise.

“Open rifts, free raden!” her fellow protestors chanted back, growing louder as they came closer.

“She wouldn’t say that if she’d ever been inside one,” I muttered.

Seth shifted the car into park. “So you can see her recklessness but not your own?”

“You know, I think I’ll walk home,” I said, mimicking my brother’s flat tones.

I opened the car door and winced as the muffled shouts became a thunderous roar. I waded into the crowd, going against the flow of foot traffic.

“Open rifts, free raden!”

I bent my head and focused on my feet as I wove through the protestors, their chants blending, snippets leaping out at me.

“…cancer rates are down seventy percent…”

“…but our government hoards power, just like the others…”

“The raden makes us stronger!” a protester shouted as he bumped into me. Turning, he pressed a paper against my chest, his wide eyes meeting mine with a pleading intensity. “We’re healthier for it, and it’s our right to access as much of it as we can!”

“Then get lost in there!” I tossed away the crumpled flier. “Though we both know you’re not about to do that.”

The protester flushed, lips working like a fish. He had no real rebuttal.

The governments of the world couldn’t yet predict the long-term ramifications of prolonged exposure to the rifts’ radiation. A lot of that research had been classified above my clearance, but from what I saw at the rifts, it was pretty clear they were working around the clock to prevent a worst-case scenario.

There was a reason every major city had prioritized building nuclear bunkers, even if none of them wanted to admit it to the public, but nuance or risk didn’t matter to these protesters. They saw what they wanted to see, just like everyone else.

“Hey, Torrin, wait up,” Jace’s voice called. I turned to see him easily cut through the crowd, reforming the flow of traffic like a dam.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, the denim now stiff with dried parabeast blood, and walked on, but of course he caught up with me.

“Seth send you to babysit me?”

“No.”

“Just thought you’d stretch your legs after a full workday on your feet?”

Rather than volley a joke, he caught my elbow and fixed me with a brotherly smile. “You really think Seth sees you as a helpless kid, huh?”

I scoffed. “Of course, he does.”

“He doesn’t. I’m serious.”

“So am I.” I slipped out of his casual grip. “He doesn’t think I can do anything. He phrases it like he’s protecting me, and sure, that’s genuinely how he views it, but he’s not that much different from anyone else who calls me a Red. Not really.”

“You’re wrong,” said Jace, so low I almost didn’t catch it over the nonsense chanting.

I sighed, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. Mediator or not, when it came down to it, Jace was almost always on Seth’s side. I did not want to have this conversation, so I sped up, hoping that with all the noise and the jostling of the crowd, he’d give up trying to talk to me.

In the distance, rising above even the tallest of the surrounding skyscrapers, the Lightbridge Towers glowed with the last burnt orange light of the setting sun. The rift hovering between the two roofs wavered like a mirage, the constant spinning of its unique containment ring just a blur from this distance. I stared up at the majestic buildings where I’d learned to boneforge.

My first contribution there had been discovering the processing method for the muscle sinew now used as under armor. I hadn’t even cared that I wasn’t given credit. The excitement in the ardents’ faces as the prototype withstood a blow from a reinforced sword had solidified my dream career path.

Bubbling frustration made me snap at Jace. “If I’m wrong about Seth, then why won’t he just let me take this promotion in peace? He knows what I want to do with my life. I’ve told him I need first-hand experience, to learn what you guys need in the heat of battle.”

To succeed without raden, I needed to know what ardents had access to in there, how fast different parabeast corpses decayed, and the most ideal point for harvesting. Cleaning up after the raids had been my foot in the door. Now, after applying for months, I would have the opportunity to experience the raids as they happened.

Jace was quiet as we waited for the light to turn at the last crosswalk before we entered the ardent district. The cars had started moving again, the protestors scattering with the dying daylight. Once on familiar streets, my feet moved on autopilot. The steady buzz of conversation blended with the occasional chime and ding of the dozens of stalls in the sector’s night market, but I barely looked up. Just like the rest of Ojai, the night market never changed.

“Do you remember when you’d try and hide on lake days?” Jace asked suddenly, over the sizzling of frying food.

I hunched my shoulders. “Yeah. So? I was like seven.”

We’d been at the orphanage for a few years then. Long enough for the world to find a new rhythm after the chaos of the first rift appearances. The people who ran the place had decided to cart us to a nearby lake every Saturday in the summers and let us run wild. I usually sat on the bus or in the field far from the bank. To me, the water was a dark hole. I didn’t like dark places, didn’t like not being able to see what might be lurking under there. It had been almost four years since our parents died, but I’d still conjured fanged mouths and yellow eyes in every shadowy recess.

“Remember what got you over it?” The upward slant of Jace’s crooked grin said he knew I did.

“Fishing.”

Actually, it was more about making better and better poles, then making elaborate, life-like lures. To test out my creations, I had to start getting in the rowboat, and then eventually, when I’d caught enough perfectly normal fish in the lake, I’d decided going for a swim might not be so bad.

“And who got you into fishing?” coaxed Jace, making an exasperated “spit it out” gesture with his hand.

“Seth,” I admitted. “What’s your point?”

Jace’s grin turned sly. “How’d he get you into fishing?”

I stretched my mind back to that sweltering bus seat, picking at a loose thread on my already threadbare swim trunks. Seth had marched inside with two poles. Bet you can’t catch a fish.

“He told me I couldn’t do it,” I said around a smirk.

“Exactly.”

I narrowed my eyes at Jace, his point clicking into place. “That’s not what he’s doing now. He’s not challenging me; he really doesn’t want me in the rifts. At all. He wants me to take a desk job.”

“True. Going into live rifts is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a lake. He’s worried. But my point is that he’s never coddled you. You’re convinced he thinks you’re incompetent or something, but that’s not true.”

I huffed, trying to loosen the knot in my chest. “So, great, he doesn’t think I’m a bungling idiot, but ever since we started working for the Conglomerate, he’s been hung up on my limitations, and he never acknowledges my strengths.”

“He’s always known you’re capable. That’s why he pushes.”

I bit the inside of my lip, wanting to believe it. But the Seth who’d challenged me into the lake hadn’t been hung up on my lack of raden. That Seth had actually smiled every now and then, praised me every once in a while. “Maybe he used to,” I said, avoiding Jace’s eye. “But, that was the old Seth. He hasn’t been that guy in years.”

Jace sighed. “Seth is who the world made him become. But he’s still Seth.”

I barely contained an eye roll. “Jesus, maybe you should have made your move and married Seth before Hanna came along.”

Laughter echoed from a pub to our left, drowning Jace’s snort. Through the open door, I could just see the burly men drinking at the bar, their joyful outburst crinkling their eyes. Even outside the ardent sector, I’d have known their occupations by the enormous muscles straining against their shirts, still stained with dried blood.

The pub’s mounted TVs showed various reporters all standing in front of roughly the same shimmering, silvery skyline I’d seen broadcast countless times over the past few months. The UN’s new flying city was finally taking off.

I stopped in my tracks, making Jace look around, and watched. The city, which would house the headquarters of the UN's new branch, the Global Defense Division, expanded beyond the edges of the screen even though it lay miles behind the line of reporter vans. With every passing second, more of its soaring skyscrapers disappeared as the city began to rise. Raden crackled like streaks of lightning around its perimeter as the resin that powered it fed off each other and the raden thrumming through the atmosphere. Beneath the untouched streets and the massive foundation, a maze of silver piping fueled the maiden flight, golden raden humming through them. If all went to plan, the city would never touch down again.

“Holy shit, they really pulled it off,” I said, but Jace wasn’t looking at me. He was holding up a hand to one of the ardents who’d swiveled around on her stool and was eyeing him while toying with the cocktail straw in her mouth.

I watched Jace slowly remember I was with him. He looked at me over his shoulder. “Hey—”

“Go ahead. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure? It’s still a long walk from here.”

Tell me about it. It was at least an hour. But I had wanted to be alone. “Yeah. I’ll take the train the rest of the way.”

I wouldn’t, though. I didn’t want to get home just yet.

With a final goodbye, I trudged onward.