In hindsight, he wished he’d asked for Matthias’s number. Their conversation had spurred more questions than ever, and Yiran was even tempted to talk to Ash about it. But his half brother was hardly home these days, and Matthias had shared something in confidence that he hadn’t even told his own family.
A sliver of light down the corridor caught Yiran’s eye on his way to his bedroom. The study door was ajar. Just the barest of cracks. He’d been avoiding his grandfather as much as possible, and he didn’t know what possessed him to creep toward the door now. Hiding in the shadows, he peered in.
His grandfather was sitting in his reading chair. The light from the table lamp cast shadows across his face, deepening the lines on his forehead, revealing the gradual weakness of his jaw. Had his grandfather always looked this old and weary? Had so much of his once-raven hair turned white in the last month? There was something uncomfortably vulnerable about him. Something too mortal.
A lump grew in Yiran’s throat. He snapped around and marched to his room, refusing to acknowledge the emotion bubbling inside him. Emptying his pockets, he tossed his phone onto the bed. Hisotherphone vibrated almost immediately like an omen.
The caller ID was blocked, but he knew exactly who it was.
His old phone had gotten busted that day at Outram, and he’d asked Theo for help when he bought a new one. Theo was the kind of guy whoknewa guy. He’d set up the connection, and for a weekly fee, one of hisguyswould regularly scramble Yiran’s cell phone signal and make it untraceable. Yiran had taken it another step further when a Hybrid showed up that snowy evening at Theo’s penthouse lounge, asking the most dangerous question of all.
Do you want your magic back?
Yuki had disappeared after that brief meeting, but not before writing a phone number on the sleeve of Yiran’s T-shirt. Barely a friend and all enemy, he belonged to the group of Hybrid Revenants who wanted to take over the city, while Yiran’s family and ancestors had sworn to protect it. The only reason lines had blurred was because Yuki had offered something Yiran wanted badly.
As far as Yiran knew, no normie could practice magic, because their spirit cores were too weak to handle the turbulent flux of spiritual energy. So how didhemanage to cast magic after absorbing Rui’s? Maybe the Hybrid knew something he didn’t.
Do you want your magic back?
It was the worst kind of temptation, the meeting of fear and longing. It took two days for Yiran to succumb, and another to call Yuki with a burner phone.
He wasn’t proud of his weakness; he’d tried to rationalize it. Here was a good opportunity to arm the Guild with information about the Hybrids and their plans. Yiran was only being dutiful, he was thinking about the big picture. Maybe he could return to the fold armed with precious information for the Guild. He could play spy now, and Yuki would be dealt with later.
But in the end, Yiran never did tell anyone about their secret meetings. Telling would mean relinquishing control and putting his own goals at risk. His grandfather had made it clear that he’d rather Yiran remain a normie. Considering the extreme measures Song Wei had taken to try toelicit magic from his grandson as a child, Yiran couldn’t fathom why he’d abandoned that goal now.
Something remained missing inside Yiran. Hefeltit every living moment. He wanted to fill it with magic. If it meant he had to be selfish, so be it. Nobody else gave a damn about him anyway.
He would be a spy, loyal only to himself.
In exchange for information, Yiran had to keep Yuki company, but it slowly turned into more than he’d bargained for.
“I’m not going to spill everything right away,” Yuki had said when Yiran pressed him for answers the first time they’d met up. “You wouldn’t go to third base on a first date, would you? Work for it—hang out with me for the day, and I’ll tell you something useful.”
Naively, Yiran had agreed to the arrangement on the assumption that it would be a singular event. They’d watched an arthouse movie at the independent theater, strolled for miles down to the helix bridge by the Quay, where they soaked in the city lights while sharing a cheesy pizza. Food tasted like nothing to Yuki, but he relished every bite, as if clinging to some memory in his past before he’d transformed into the creature he was today. Was Yiran’s presence a connection to that life?
It was that look on Yuki’s face when he was eating the damned pizza that got to Yiran, and he agreed to another meeting. By their sixth outing, though, Yiran started to suspect that Yuki was only stringing him along.
Everything Yuki had chosen to share was observable or something the Exorcists could deduce for themselves. Hybrids couldn’t tolerate the sun because it drained their energy, so they were most active at night or when it was overcast. Hybrids retained their sentience and emotions, but the recently turned were less in control of their hunger and more prone to violence. Hybrids healed quickly and aged slowly, almost as if the cells in their body were stuck in a cryo or regenerative mode.
The spiritual energy in a Hybrid Revenant was messed up because the Blight disrupted the natural balance of vitalizing yangqi, replacing it with damaging yinqi and causing a qi deviation. It was a miracle forany human to survive the infection and subsequent transformation. But those who did had cracked the code—their bodies and spirit cores had found a way to evolve somehow. And they even learned to use yinqi for combat, similar to how the Exorcists cultivated and honed their yangqi to do magic. Except the Hybrids didn’t need a conduit the way Exorcists needed their blades, because yinqi manifested directly from their spines to form vicious weapons.
All this was information the Guild had to know already. Yuki was careful, never leaving any clues about where the Hybrid hideouts were, for example. He was stealthy and hard to tail; Yiran had tried. Yuki never spoke about the Hybrids’ plans either, or if they were still determined to take over the city and how they might do it. And he never revealed how a normie like Yiran could obtain magic and wield it again.
Yiran had run out of patience.
His burner phone stopped buzzing, the missed-call notification adding to a string of previous ones. He turned the phone off and stuffed it under his pillow.
The hot shower didn’t improve his terrible mood. Steam misted over the mirror, and his reflection stared back at him, distorted and uncanny.
For a second, it felt as if Liming was here with me...
But it wasn’t Liming that Yiran saw reflected in the mirror. It was Matthias.
Why had the man looked so familiar? He’d said his spirit core was different, and he implied that the Simulator program responded to that. Was that what happened to Yiran on his first day at the Academy? Was there somethingdifferentabout Yiran’s spirit core?
He uncapped the tube of toothpaste. Screw being polite. He should’ve asked more questions of Matthias while he had a chance. But Matthias wasn’t a ghost or anything; there had to be a way to find him. One of Theo’sguyscould do that with the information Yiran had. Matthias had been a Xingshan cadet, then a doctor at one of the city’s hospitals. He had a child. A daughter, to be precise. That was enough information to track—
Toothpaste squirted out of the tube and all over the sink.
