“Does it matter?”
“It matters if you’re doing something dangerous to get it. Your mom needs you alive, not just rich.”
“I’m being careful.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she moved to the shelves and began pulling down bottles of amber liquid. “This should last her six weeks if she takes it twice daily. More if she rations it.”
I paid her and tucked the bottles carefully into my satchel, padding them with cloth so they wouldn’t clink together.
When I got home, my mom was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that she hadn’t touched. “Where did you go?” she asked.
“Got your medicine.” I set the bottles on the table. “Six weeks’ worth.”
She stared at them, then at me. “How? We don’t have money for??—“
“I found work. Good work. It pays well.”
“Juno.” Her voice held a warning. “What kind of work?”
I couldn’t lie to her. My mom had always been able to see through me. “The kind that might help Father. The kind that will keep you breathing.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Not at the cost of losing you too.”
I knelt beside her chair, taking her hands. They felt fragile, the bones too prominent beneath papery skin. When had she gotten so thin?
“You’re not losing me. I’m careful. I’ve been running the Gallery for years.”
“This is different. I can see it in your face. This is bigger than your usual salvage runs.”
“It’s one job, mom. One run. And when it’s done, we’ll have enough money to hire a lawyer for Father and keep you in medicine for a year. Maybe more.”
She pulled her hands free and cupped my face. “You’re so much like him. It terrifies me.”
“I’ll come back. I promise.”
It was a promise I had no business making. But I made it anyway, because she needed to hear it and I needed to believe it.
That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Click curled against my side, his brass tail occasionally twitching in whatever dreams tiny creatures had. Through the thin wall, I could hear my mom’s labored breathing, broken up by the occasional wet cough.
In a few days, I’d meet Cypher. And then we’d leave for Nytheris, a realm so dangerous that even the most hardened scavengers refused to go there. I should have been terrified. Instead, I felt a strange anticipation, like standing on the edge of a precipice and knowing that the only way forward was to jump.
The Gallery had called me since I fell into it three years ago. Ever since something in that darkness had reached out to me, had whispered my name in a voice that wasn’t quite a voice. I’d spent years trying to forget, trying to pretend that those three days had been nothing more than survival and luck.
But deep down, I’d always known the truth. The void had touched me. Changed me somehow. And now I was going back into it, deeper than I’d ever gone before. Whatever waited for me in Nytheris, I’d face it. For my father. For my mom.
For the part of me that had never stopped hearing those whispers in the dark.
The messagefrom Gideon came three days later, delivered by the same terra elemental woman who’d answered his door. She handed me a sealed envelope and left without a word.
Inside was a single line in Gideon’s cramped handwriting:The Bone & Barrel. Tonight at sunset. Come alone.
“Absolutely not,” Kora said when I showed her. “You’re not meeting him alone. What if it’s a trap?”
“Why would Gideon trap us? He needs us for the job.”
“Maybe Cypher doesn’t want partners. Maybe he plans to take the job and cut us out entirely.”
I tucked the note into my pocket. “Then I need to convince him otherwise.”
