The city of Junkholm had three rules, and everyone who lived there knew them by the time they were old enough to walk the Slab.
Rule one: Never touch glass you didn't break yourself.
Rule two: If the sky turns green, you run before you look.
Rule three: Kael Duskrow was not to be trusted with anything you actually needed to keep.
That last one was less of a rule and more of a neighborhood consensus, but it had the same weight. Kael was aware of it. He had, in fact, contributed to it — accidentally, mostly, though once on purpose during the winter of his sixteenth year when Priest Vorlan's supply cache had somehow ended up redistributed across the twelve poorest families on the lower Slab, and Priest Vorlan had looked directly at Kael for the entire duration of the community hearing and Kael had looked directly back with an expression of absolute innocence that convinced no one.
He was nineteen now, and his reputation had not improved.
"Left," said Nara from somewhere above him. She was perched on a rusted beam three stories up, scanning the collapsed sector ahead with the cracked telescope she'd salvaged from the pre-Break ruins two seasons ago. "There's a gap in the rebar. You can get through without cutting."
"How big?"
"Big enough for you. Maybe not for the cart."
Kael looked at the cart. It was loaded with today's find: fourteen intact glass panels from a collapsed tower in Sector 9, a coil of copper wiring still wrapped in its original pre-Break sheathing, and what appeared to be a partially functional water purifier that he was going to take apart tonight and understand if it killed him. The cart weighed, conservatively, as much as a very large and unhappy person.
"I'm not leaving the cart."
"Then we go around."
"Around adds forty minutes and takes us past the Crow Brothers' territory."
There was a pause from above. Then: "I hate the Crow Brothers."
"Everyone hates the Crow Brothers. That's irrelevant. Can we cut the rebar?"
"With what? Your feelings?"
Kael crouched beside the cart and thought. This was the part of scavenging that the stories never captured — not the dangerous parts, which were real but intermittent, but the extended stretches of logistical problem-solving in uncomfortable positions. Three years on the Slab had taught him that most of survival was not fighting monsters or outrunning rivals but rather figuring out how to move fourteen glass panels through a gap that was eight inches too narrow.
The Fractured Sprawl had once been a city. Several cities, maybe — the old maps were unreliable, contradicted each other, and had been reproduced so many times through so many imperfect hands that they were more mythology than cartography. What was certain: three centuries ago, something happened that people called the Break. The sky had done something terrible. The ground had done something worse. And the world that came out the other side was this one — layered, ruined, radiating, beautiful in the way that bones were beautiful when you learned to see structure instead of death.
Kael had grown up thinking it was the only world there was.
He was starting to suspect that was wrong.
It had started six weeks ago, when he'd found the device.
He hadn't known it was a device at first. It looked like a tile — ceramic, pre-Break, etched with symbols he didn't recognize. He'd nearly sold it to the collectors' runner who came through Junkholm every fortnight, but something had stopped him. He'd kept it under his sleeping mat instead, and on the third night, it had lit up.
Not dangerously. Not with the sick green-gold of radiation bleed or the harsh white of an active power cell. It had lit up softly, blue-white, the color of the sky at the precise moment before dawn, and it had shown him things.
Images, mostly. Places. A city of spires where light moved through the air in visible threads. A station hanging in black space, its lights warm and deliberate against the void. A mountain so tall its peak disappeared into cloud, with figures moving up its face like slow-climbing fire. A desk, an office, a man staring out a window at traffic, looking deeply, profoundly tired.
And then, last week, words.
YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR THE CROSS-WORLD SURVEY. REPORT TO MARKER SEVEN AT DUSK. BRING NOTHING YOU CANNOT CARRY.
Kael had stared at those words for a long time.
He was, genuinely and without irony, not a person who trusted messages from glowing tiles. He'd grown up in the Sprawl. He knew what bait looked like. He knew that good things did not arrive unbidden for people like him, that the universe was generally indifferent to his existence, and that any invitation that did not specify who was doing the inviting should be declined with extreme prejudice.
He was also nineteen years old and had spent his entire life moving through rubble.
He wanted, with a ferocity that surprised him, to see what was on the other side of that door.
"Found it," said Nara, sliding down from her beam with the easy grace of someone who had been climbing since childhood. She landed beside him and held up a length of rebar the width of her thumb. "There's a hacksaw in the cart. If we cut this piece here" — she pointed — "the whole section pivots. Thirty seconds."
Kael looked at where she was pointing. She was right. Of course she was right. Nara was almost always right about structural things, which was why he kept her around despite her devastating honesty about his reputation.
"You're very smart," he said.
"I know." She held out her hand for the hacksaw.
He gave it to her. Thirty seconds later, the rebar section pivoted, and they moved the cart through the gap with four inches to spare on each side.
Above them, the sky was its usual color: gray-yellow, threaded with high cloud, the sun a smear of pale light that warmed nothing but illuminated everything with a flat, democratic impartiality. The Slab stretched in every direction — fractured concrete, creative salvage, three hundred years of human persistence laid out in the most unlovely and earnest architecture imaginable.
Tonight, Kael thought, pushing the cart toward home. Tonight, marker seven.
He did not tell Nara.
He would not tell anyone.