The Climb

Eleanor stood at the edge of the world, and she was smiling. The sight of her—spine straight, wine glass catching the violet glare of the apocalypse—was a jagged blade to my sternum. She had played the invalid for twenty years, a spider weaving a web of pity while her legs were as strong as her malice.

The fire from the tank’s blast licked at the plaza's marble pillars, but I didn't look back for Dante. I couldn't. His life had been the currency for my entrance, and I had to make the exchange count.

I threw my weight against the maintenance door, the Obsidian Blade pulsing a warning in my hand. Inside, the lobby was a cathedral of glass and Syndicate steel.

"Intruder!" a voice barked from the mezzanine.

Three soldiers descended, their armor clattering in the echoing space. I didn't reach for a gun. I felt the Blade’s hunger—a cold, parasitic drain on my marrow—and swung.

The obsidian edge didn't just cut; it erased. It sliced through the first man’s tactical shield like it was made of smoke, the violet energy cauterizing the air in its wake.

I moved with a fluid, terrifying speed I didn't recognize as my own. Every parry was a vibration in my teeth, every strike a withdrawal from my life’s savings of strength. I hacked through a knee joint, spun, and drove the jagged glass through a breastplate.

They were the elite, Lucius’s best, but I was the weapon the Founders had intended. I was a heart-beat away from collapse, my vision fringing with black, yet I was unstoppable.

I reached the elevator bank, blood slicking my grip on the hilt. I punched the call button with a shaking finger.

The display didn't light up. Instead, a screech of grinding metal echoed from the shaft—the sound of cables being severed. Lucius was cutting the paths behind him.

"You’ll have to climb, Aria," a voice whispered in my mind—not Lucius, but the Blade itself.

I tore open the emergency hatch to the service shaft. The darkness stretched up forever, a vertical tomb of grease and cold air.

I began to climb.

Ten floors. My fingers were raw, the jagged obsidian hilt biting into my palm until I felt my own blood mingle with the Viscosity of the hilt.

Twenty floors. The frequency was louder here, a physical weight pressing against my eardrums. My lungs burned with the thin, ozone-heavy air.

Thirty floors. I looked down, and the lobby was a distant, fiery eye. One slip and I was dust.

Forty floors. My muscles seized, the Blade’s drain becoming a frantic, starving pull. I was hollowed out, a ghost in a tactical vest.

I reached the maintenance platform for the fiftieth floor. My hands were shredded, the black veins of the corruption beginning to lace up my wrists. Above me, the sky through the ventilation grate wasn't black or blue. It was a bruised, pulsating purple.

I hauled myself onto the roof, the wind screaming through the transmitter’s struts. The locket in my pocket felt heavy, a reminder of a mother who might still be breathing in the wreckage of this family.

I looked toward the primary relay. Lucius was there, standing before the crystal core, but Eleanor was the one holding the synchronization key. She looked at me, her silver hair whipping in the gale, and her expression wasn't one of fear. It was recognition.

"You look just like her when you're angry, Aria," Eleanor shouted over the roar of the signal. "But Vivian never had the stomach to finish the job."

She raised the synchronization key, a twin to the Blade in my hand, and pressed it into the core’s housing.

The frequency spiked into a physical scream. I lunged, my boots skidding on the glass, but the air turned to liquid lead. A pulse of violet light exploded from the transmitter, throwing me flat against the roof.

I looked up, my vision swimming, as the dome of light finally touched the city streets.

And then I saw it. On the monitor built into the relay’s base, the timestamp for the global broadcast flickered.

It wasn't a countdown to a signal. It was a live feed of Richard, and he was standing in the twins’ bedroom, holding a needle over Sam’s sleeping heart.