Through Another's

William was supposed to go down in the second round.

The deal was simple, and the boss had repeated it twice: first round, fight normally; second round, eat a combination, hit the floor, and stay there until the count was over. No heroics. No accidents. The money was already down.

William was twenty-seven. Tall, broad-shouldered, built heavy like a fighter, with a face that had taken its share of punishment. His nose had been broken once, an old scar sat above one eyebrow, and short stubble covered his chin. His dark hair was cropped short and always a mess. He dressed simply: T-shirt, black hoodie, sweatpants, sneakers.

Once, he had stepped into the cage for sport and honestly believed he could make a legal living from fighting. Then the tournaments dried up, so did the money, and people from the neighborhood were quick to explain that sports promotions weren’t the only ones willing to pay for a good fight. For the last few years, he’d been earning his living in underground bouts and running with a gang that controlled part of the neighborhood.

Music hammered beyond the locker-room door. The cramped space smelled of cheap antiseptic, stale sweat, and warm glove leather. The underground gym occupied an old warehouse; all that remained of its former purpose were concrete pillars and loading-bay doors covered with black plastic. Plastic chairs lined the walls, bookmakers taking cash from their seats, while people were already crowding around the cage. They hadn’t come for technique. They wanted a result.

William sat on a bench, wrapping his hands. His phone lay beside him, screen up.

Three missed calls from his mother.

One message from Maya: “Come by after the fight. Your mom’s pretending everything’s fine again.”

He read it and turned off the screen.

His mother worked as a cashier in a small grocery store and always pretended everything was fine. Even when she was short before the end of the month. Even when his younger sister, Jenny, brought home college bills and said she could pick up another shift. They both knew how William made his money, but preferred not to ask for details. He, in turn, preferred to pretend the money appeared simply because he knew how to fight.

Maya was the only person who refused to live by that arrangement.

They had grown up in neighboring buildings, spent several years together, and for a while had seriously talked about renting a place and living on their own, somewhere away from the neighborhood. Then there was too much Sugar in William’s life, too many late-night calls, too much money whose origin couldn’t be explained. Maya hadn’t left after a fight or an affair. One day she’d simply said, “I don’t want to sit around waiting for somebody to call and tell me you’re gone.”

After that, they hardly saw each other.

But Maya still visited his mother.

Sugar wasn’t some simple villain in William’s life, either, someone it was convenient to hate. When William ran out of money after a bad season, Sugar was the one who gave him work. When his mother broke her leg and couldn’t work for two months, Sugar covered the rent without asking questions. Then came the errands. Then being part of the gang became so normal that William stopped noticing the point where help had turned into debt.

Today he was supposed to repay part of that debt with one fall in the second round.

He didn’t think it was honest.

But honesty didn’t pay his mother’s rent or cover living expenses and his sister’s college.

So William was going to take the fall.

Not because he was afraid.

Because sometimes the choice between right and wrong existed only for people who had enough money not to choose between two bad options.

Sometimes William won. Sometimes he lost. Sometimes the result was known before the cage door even shut.

Tonight, he was supposed to lose.

He worked the first round clean. Didn’t push forward, let his opponent land a few times, and even heard an approving shout from the boss’s men by the cage.

In the second, everything went wrong.

His opponent started pressing. William backed up. According to plan, this was where he was supposed to let himself get pinned, take the shots, and go down.

He was about to do exactly that when the other man suddenly dropped his level and shot for his legs.

William’s body reacted before his mind did.

Old reflex.

William snapped a short kick into his head. The impact sent a dull vibration through his shin, and his opponent dropped to the mat like a felled tree.

William stepped back.

The referee crouched beside the man. The crowd was already roaring.

“Get up, for fuck’s sake!” voices shouted.

His opponent rolled onto his side and tried to stand, but he swayed like grass in the wind. The count ended. The referee waved it off. The room exploded.

William had won.

For several seconds he just stared at the man on the floor. Then he looked up.

The boss stood at the far end of the room.

Even from here, William could see his face.

He understood without a word.

He never made it back to the locker room.

One of the fighters he knew caught him in the hallway.

“Run.”

“What?”

“Do you have any idea how much he put down?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“He already said to take you out.”

William stopped smiling.

“For what?”

“Run, Will.”

He ran.

He met the first two men at the service exit. They knew him, which got in the way more than it helped.

The first still tried to say,

“Don’t make this harder.”

William hit him. His knuckles burned; the man folded. The second pulled a baton, metal cutting briefly through the air. William jumped, took him off his feet, and drove him to the floor. His heart hammered fast but steady, while a strange cold clarity filled his head, as though all of this were happening to somebody else.

Open the door.

Three silhouettes appeared at the far end of the corridor.

William burst outside and rolled across the hood of a parked car. Someone grabbed the back of his jacket. William turned. Elbow. Knee. Yank free.

He almost made it.

Then a knife flashed.

William managed to twist. The blade didn’t go deep, but it opened his left side. Heat and wetness spread under his clothes at once.

Pain came as a hot stripe.

He punched the attacker in the jaw and kept running.

People shouted behind him. An engine started.

Now he understood: this was serious. They wanted him dead. Not scared. Not beaten. The boss had lost too much money on a fixed fight, and William had gone from fighter to problem.

He couldn’t go home. Couldn’t go to anyone he knew, either. He threw away his phone in the first alley.

A few blocks later he cut toward an old industrial district. The pursuit fell behind. Or maybe they’d simply lost him.

His side was bleeding worse. He needed to wash the wound and hole up somewhere until the neighborhood cooled down.

He reached the river.

Here, New York seemed to end. Cars, lights, and people stayed behind him. Ahead were water, concrete, and an overgrown bank.

William crouched by the water and pulled up his shirt. Damp cold rolled off the river; the wet wind crawled unpleasantly across his overheated skin.

“Shit.”

But survivable.

He washed his hands, then the wound. The cold water burned worse than the knife, and a metallic taste filled his mouth. That was when a red glint flashed between the stones.

A dark lump of rock jutted from the mud almost at the water’s edge. About the size of a fist. Thin red veins ran through its black surface. They weren’t reflecting light. They were glowing on their own.

William picked it up.

The stone was warm—almost alive against his chilled fingers.

“Great. Hallucinations too.”

The red line inside it twitched.

Thump.

Then again.

Thump.

He tried to drop the stone.

Too late.

His fingers clenched on their own, and a colorless voice sounded directly in his mind.

You are undergoing the Trial of the Chosen. Duration: seven days. Prove the choice was not made in vain. First stage: find the place of trial.

“What?”

The world vanished.

* * *

At that same moment on Silan, Vianel was returning from evening training.

The next day he was due to face what he had spent several years working toward: initiation from apprentice of the Temple of Blood’s combat division to journeyman.

For Vianel, the transition meant three fights to the death.

Three opponents. Three victories. The loser could die. The winner earned the right to rise to the next rank.

Vianel was eighteen. The initiation had been set for the day he came of age. He was lean and flexible, with the body of a fighter used to relying on speed. His long black hair was tied high at the back of his head, several strands falling along his face. Dark green clothes with gold embroidery, leather wraps around his forearms, and a curved knife at his belt made it clear that the young man standing before the Temple was no priest, but a warrior.

He was good with a knife, could fight barehanded, and already possessed something the Temple had never taught him—the Shadow Step.

The gift had awakened several years earlier. The world would turn gray, other people’s movements would slow, and Vianel could cross ground where an ordinary person wouldn’t manage half a step.

His mentor, Rekhta, forbade him from using the Shadow without need.

If the victory belongs to the gift, you’ll never know whether it belonged to you, he liked to say.

The lower city was visible through the narrow windows of the combat wing.

By evening, red glass lanterns were lit there. Market awnings stretched between pale stone houses, water murmured through gutters, merchants shut their stalls, and children still raced across the squares until their mothers started calling them home. Bakeries breathed out the smell of hot flatbread and spiced root. Small plaques bearing the names of ancestors hung beside house doors—ordinary people remembered the Debt outside Temple ceremonies too.

Vianel had not grown up in the Temple.

Until the age of twelve, his home had stood down there, in the lower city, on a narrow street behind the dye shops. His mother still lived there. With Nira, his younger sister, who announced every time they met that next time he absolutely had to bring her something better than a sweet Temple flatbread.

Their father had died when Vianel was a child. Afterward, Rekhta helped the family arrange the Temple payment and offered the boy a place in the combat division. At first Vianel hated him for it. It seemed to him that the mentor had simply taken him away from home at the exact moment his mother needed him most.

Years later, he understood something else.

An apprentice received rations. A journeyman received wages as well.

If he passed all three fights tomorrow, his mother could work less, and Nira wouldn’t have to go straight into a dye shop after finishing basic schooling.

For Rekhta, the initiation was proof of maturity.

For the Temple, tradition.

For Vianel, it was also money that would go to living people in a house with a cracked step by the door.

He didn’t think fights to the death were madness. He had grown up in a world where a person entered the Arena of Debt willingly and knew the price. It had been that way long before he was born. You could refuse, remain an apprentice, choose a trade, leave the Temple.

Vianel didn’t want to.

He liked fighting. Liked the moment a difficult movement finally became simple. Liked the thought that one day his mother would look at him not as the boy who had been taken away to train, but as a man capable of supporting his own household.

Before evening training, Nira had sent him a small wooden bird through a Temple messenger. Crooked, with one wing longer than the other.

Scratched into the base were the words: Don’t die.

Vianel had laughed and set the bird beside his bed.

Tomorrow, after the initiation, he planned to go down to the lower city and personally explain to his sister that wishes could be worded more politely.

There was less than a day until tomorrow.

On the evening before his initiation, Vianel wanted only to reach his cell and sleep.

He was walking through an old corridor of the combat wing. The wall to his right was built of nearly black stone. Vianel had known it since childhood, which was why he noticed the piece jutting from the masonry too late.

His shoulder brushed something hard.

He stopped.

A small black stone with a thin red vein protruded from the wall.

It hadn’t been there before.

Or maybe Vianel had simply never noticed it.

He ran his fingers over the red line.

The stone turned warm.

Vianel jerked his hand back.

Too late.

The same colorless voice sounded in his mind.

You are undergoing the Trial of the Chosen. Duration: seven days. Prove the choice was not made in vain. First stage: find the place of trial.

“What kind of—”

Red light flooded the corridor. It didn’t strike his eyes—it seemed to pass through skin and bone, washing every other color from the world for a single instant.

* * *

William stopped feeling his body.

He wasn’t dead.

This was worse.

For one impossible instant, there simply was no body.

Red light passed through his consciousness. Foreign images came with it.

A training yard.

A knife.

Red clothes.

A man with a broken nose whom, for some reason, he wanted to call Rekhta.

Three stone doors.

Initiation.

Eighteen years old.

The Shadow.

The world turns gray.

William saw all of it like his own memory and knew at the same time that it wasn’t his.

Somewhere very far away, another mind screamed,

Who are you?!

William managed to think back,

Was about to ask you the same thing.

Then darkness.

He inhaled.

Stone floor filled his vision.

Not the riverbank.

Not New York.

William surged upright and nearly fell. The floor lurched under his feet: the familiar movement had been made for a completely different body.

This body was lighter than his own, narrower through the shoulders, with a different center of gravity.

He looked at his hands.

Grayish skin. Unfamiliar scars.

“No.”

The voice was foreign too.

Young.

William got up more slowly.

A cell. Stone bed. Table. Red training clothes. A sheath on the wall.

He saw it and automatically knew what kind of knife was supposed to be inside.

He didn’t guess.

He remembered.

“This isn’t mine.”

Agreed.

He froze.

A stranger’s voice sounded inside him.

“Who’s there?”

Vianel.

The name triggered a flash of memory.

Rekhta. The Temple of Blood. Combat division. Initiation. Three fights. Eighteen.

William pressed a hand to his forehead.

“Stop.”

It’s not me.

“What’s not you?”

I have your memories too.

William stopped moving.

“Which ones?”

A pause.

The cage. The fight. You were supposed to lose. Then a man got angry. They chased you.

Cold ran down his back. Not from the room—from the feeling that some stranger had just walked, uninvited, through the most private pieces of his life.

“How do you know that?”

I don’t know.

William could see Vianel’s life.

Vianel could see William’s.

Before either of them could say another word, the System spoke into both their minds at once.

Transfer completed irregularly. Cross-memory overlay recorded. Rules remain unbroken. The Trial continues.

Silence.

William said slowly,

“Transfer.”

I heard it too.

“Where are you?”

By the water.