They turned the corner into Scrap Market. It was early—too early for the Market to close—but already people were in a rush to pack up their stalls. Levi and Jac ran against the crowd, knocking vendors and customers out of their way. Down the street, the bottom floor of an old tenement—the Scarhands’ residence for the day—was engulfed in flames. Smoke streamed out of the cracks in its shutters, and the closer they got, the more the air reeked of it.
They shoved their way to the front of the spectators watching the fire. A man stormed out the front door, clutching a girl over his shoulder. She kicked and pounded at his back with hands covered in scars. The Scarhands outside watched the burning building in horror. Although several had guns raised, no shots were fired. Most people seemed confused about what was happening.
A Scarhand beside Levi pointed at the balcony on the second floor, where Jonas Maccabees was fighting three men at once. Blood ran down Jonas’s split lip and nose. He dodged a swing toward his stomach and collided with the balcony railing.
“What’s going on?” Levi yelled to the Scarhand beside him, but he couldn’t hear his response over the noise of the crowd.
Someone screamed from inside the building. A moment later, the flames exploded through the third story. The building would fall within a few minutes, and whoever had screamed was still in there. But no one dared approach. Not the Scarhands. Not the whiteboots. Not Sedric’s men.
“Hold my hat,” Levi told Jac, who took it before realizing what Levi intended to do.
Levi lurched forward. Within three steps, a man grabbed his shoulder. He was more than a head taller than Levi. “You can’t go near there!” he hollered.
“Someone’s still inside!” Levi ripped out of his grasp and sprinted to the entrance. The man tried to follow, but Levi slammed the door closed behind him and locked it.
“Who’s in here?” he yelled. Fire reached for him from the walls, but it couldn’t hurt an orb-maker. The collapsing building, however, could. He didn’t have much time.
The man pounded on the door. Levi ignored him and ran upstairs, where there were two closed doors. He tried the first one and, finding it locked, he pulled out his pistol, shot at the hinges and kicked it open. The apartment was filled with smoke, but empty of occupants. On the balcony outside, Jonas and the men were gone—climbed down, or perhaps fallen.
Someone shouted for help from the other apartment. It sounded like Reymond.
“Reymond!” Levi screamed. He coughed from the smoke, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. He charged back into the hallway, toward the other door. “Reymond!”
There was no second yell. Levi’s heart raced.No no no. This wasn’t how Reymond Kitamura was supposed to die.
Levi aimed his gun. “If you’re in there, get away from the door,” he called. Still, no one answered. His stomach lurched. He had to save his friend.
Three shots. His ears rang.
“I’m coming!” He kicked open the door. “Reymond?”
But before Levi could step over the threshold, strong arms grabbed him from behind. It was the man from outside. He pressed something against Levi’s hand, and his vision blackened. He glimpsed a flash of silver and struggled to hold on to consciousness.
It slipped away, and he fell into darkness.
* * *
He woke in the hallway with black and white doors.
Levi got to his feet. His clothes smelled of smoke, for some reason, and dirt was caked into the skin between his fingers. He wiped them on his pants and peered down the hallway. It stretched on endlessly in both directions. Everything was quiet.
Remembering that the black doors were locked, he opened the first white one he came to.
Suddenly, Levi was eleven years old again, and he stood by his mother’s bedside, rubbing her hand to generate the warmth she was quickly losing. The covers no longer moved as she breathed. She was cold. But he was still holding her hand, still rubbing, still hoping.
This was his fault, the vision told him. All his fault.
He ran downstairs to his father, who was bent over his oven, twisting a rod into the fire. The glass orb on the end sparked white with volts, and, dimly, Levi heard screaming from inside the forming sphere, heard the auras of those who had made the volts and the anguish of their murders. It made Levi’s skin crawl, made him want to throw up.
His father was muttering something about “his king,” the Mizer he’d mourned all these years. It was very like him. Some days, it seemed as if he couldn’t remember what had happened, where his family lived now, and he obsessed over the past like it was a lock whose combination he’d forgotten. Levi had learned by now not to ask about it.
Noticing Levi behind him, his father handed him the rod. “You do it.”
“No.” This was their eternal argument. Levi had tried to explain to his father before that his blood and split talents simply didn’t mix, that he’d gladly accept his family’s disappointment over enduring the screams he heard when sealing volts within glass.
His father growled and shoved the rod toward his son. Levi ran through the door that led to their backyard, led to his escape, but when he crossed the threshold, he was in the hallway again, panting from the aftereffects of the memory.
Voices shouted from the black door in front of him. He pressed his ear against the wood.
