Chapter 1: What I Am Now
The world in 2400 runs on blood and hierarchy and the specific terror of people who have decided that the old rules no longer apply to them. I have spent 1 chapters deciding the same thing. The blood in my veins is not what it was. Some nights that terrifies me. Most nights I am grateful for the terrifying thing. Tonight Kael was somewhere to my left, moving with the silence of fourteen centuries, and Zara was somewhere to my right, her fire banked low against her wrists, and we were about to do something that the surviving Dominions would call reckless and I would call the only available option.
The encounter with a Collector husk — a Dusk-born drained of power and free will, following orders with dead eyes began the way all the worst ones did: without warning, from the direction I was not watching. I moved — the hybrid speed engaging before the thought did, my body making the decision while my mind was still cataloguing options. The creature was between me and the exit and it was old enough to be fast. Not fast enough. I had been in more than enough of these since my blood changed. I knew how to read the angle of an attack before it landed. I knew how to use memory extraction — Dorian’s fingers at my temple and the past rearranging itself like pages turning as both weapon and shield. I hit back with everything I had, which was more than it had accounted for, and that was the deciding factor.
Warren 3 outside the battle zone was doing what Warrens did: surviving. the Collector patrols — pairs of enforcers in Dominion insignia moving through Warren Nine with ledgers. I had grown up in one of these places before I understood what the registration tattoo meant — that someone owned the right to my blood and my body was collateral in a world I had not voted for. Zara had grown up in Warren Nine with the specific advantage of blood immunity and the specific disadvantage of everything else. We had both learned early that survival in the Dusk-born world was a negotiation, and the terms were always skewed against the humans at the table. We were renegotiating the terms. Chapter by chapter.
the way he said my name — Riven — like it cost him something. Like he had been holding it for centuries and was only now allowed to spend it I let myself feel that for exactly four seconds — because four seconds is all I can afford in the middle of everything — and then I put it somewhere for later and went back to the work. The work was ongoing. It would continue to be ongoing. This is something nobody tells you about fighting for a better world: there is no moment when you are done and can simply be in love without qualification. The love happens inside the fight. That is where we live. That is where it has always happened for us.
She set the Collector’s enforcer on fire so casually it took him three seconds to notice. Then she looked at her hands the way you look at something you knew was coming but are still surprised to see. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s new.’ She was the thing I would not trade — not for safety, not for power, not for any version of this story where I survived but she did not. She had told me the same thing, early on, in the specific blunt language she used when she was being most serious: “I am not a side character in your life, Riv. I am the co-author.” She was right. She has always been right about the important things.
I thought about the arc of this book — Book 1 of however many it takes — and about what we were building versus what we were dismantling, and about the specific cost of dismantling something that had been standing for two hundred years. The blood in my veins is not what it was. Some nights that terrifies me. Most nights I am grateful for the terrifying thing. The Collector was still out there. The surviving Dominions were still negotiating. The Warrens were still running on blood tithe and registered terror. But something was different. Something had been different since I stopped being entirely human. Something had been shifting since Zara’s fire came in. We were building something. I could feel its shape even when I could not see its edges.
Kael looked at me across the aftermath and I looked back and something passed between us that I did not name because naming it would make it fragile and I was not going to let it be fragile. Not here. Not in Book 1 where we had survived everything the chapter had thrown at us. I nodded. He nodded. We moved. The story continued because we continued. That was always the arrangement.
