Prologue
Kira
Three Years Ago
The Capital
Kallum, Ciondo
830 P.C. [Post-Collapse]
Kira first met him in the before-times. Before she went from a fruit vendor at a cheap market to the centerpiece of the emperor's plot to annihilate the rebels. Before she lost everything and everyone she'd ever known. Before she proved to the most powerful people in the world that even though they'd broken her, she'd never surrender a single innocent life to them.
She met him in the time before she knew his face, voice, or name. Or all the maddening and wonderful and conflicting facets of the most tortured man she'd ever met.
That night, he'd been a stranger to her, with all that made him human hidden beneath a mask and uniform as dark and cold as the night. They'd sat on dormant winter grass together on a hill outside the manufacturing district, watching the dawnbreak over distant mountains. Quiet and waiting to see if her riskiest gambit yet had worked.
For years, Kira newspapered alleyways with forbidden truths, but that night, she did something every person in the capital of Ciondo would see. And in the process, she'd gotten herself trapped in restricted offices late at night, ones crawling with ruthless soldiers ready to imprison her and everyone she loved. That was until this masked soldier ripped open the door of her hiding place and helped her escape without explaining himself.
How did he know to look for her when she had no connections with the military?
The chillingly familiar special-ops uniform rendered the emperor's soldiers faceless, with the slim helmet and goggles masking their humanity. The dark shadows of these lethal operatives haunted her worst memories, their presence a promise of death. And yet one of these men betrayed their emperor—the Phaedra—to help her. Kira, who kept her head down, stayed quiet during the day, and snuck out at night to make trouble for the regime. A nobody by all accounts.
This stranger risked so much to help her, and she didn't know why.
They'd spent hours climbing roofs to escape the offices, too exhausted to speak. At that time, nothing mattered except for staying silent, staying agile, staying alive. She hadn't cared that he'd hardly spoken a word to her, or that he spent half the night holding her close to keep her from falling. Not even that when he'd pressed her back against a window, carefully balancing on the ledge with her, she knew nothing about him except the feel of his hard chest. That the draw to him ripped at her with the same force that was fighting to suck her fifty feet to the ground.
But those details mattered now that they were safe. It mattered that his warmth and closeness radiated against her, his pull tugging in her gut, desperate to unravel her. She dared a glance at where his black sleeves hugged his shoulders just enough to make out the definition beneath, and then at the goggles she needed to peer beyond.
“We'll never see each other again, will we?” she asked.
He didn't look at her. The voice changer in his mask deepened his to the low hum she'd spent her life fearing. “No.”
“I can't know anything about you, so give me this. Make whatever you say the truth. The real truth.”
A pause. “Fine.”
Kira smiled and turned her eyes back to the skyline of the capital. To the rise and fall of apartments and businesses hugged by a sleepy sky and mountains outlined in the pink of dawn. The tall black steel of the Phaedra's tower rose far higher than any other structure, piercing the backdrop of the mountains in a pointed tip as a reminder of the emperor's power.
Red lights streaked its angular edges in a hazy crimson cloud by night, in honor of all those killed in war. By day, the emperor's tower gleamed with the sun’s light, casting its golden beams upon the city below. The transition of daybreak gradually shifted the deep red into gold. Soldiers called the mixing of the colors ‘the bloody glory’.
And today, for fleeting hours, something else shone from the navy sky over the emperor's tower. Something no one in the empire except for Kira ever managed to do. For hundreds of years, the world believed the power left behind by the Old Ones belonged to the Phaedras alone, but Kira used it today to write rebellion into the sky.
Her hazy red letters burned like fire over that grand tower.
HE LIES
SEIZE YOUR LIFE
Her masked stranger scarcely tore his stare from the words. As the city awoke, every single person would lift their eyes to the message, far more than the scattered few who found her newspaper in the alley. They'd not simply see the writing, but proof the Phaedra didn't possess any special powers. Kira stole his myth of divinity and blew it up for all to see.
Long ago, when the Old World collapsed, little remained for the survivors. The legends said the Old Ones escaped from the dying world and left them a mystical gift to safeguard them from certain doom. Of course, the emperors claimed they alone controlled it. The elusive power rarely showed itself, but when it did, it danced through the air in swirls of blood-red haze—destroying pollution, rendering nuclear weapons inert, protecting them from the worst of humanity's weapons. Slowing and eventually reversing the damage to the Earth that caused oceans to swell over the land, reshaping continents.
Everyone called it Pixi Dust, like the magic in fairytales. It fascinated Kira so much as a child that she learned to manipulate the forbidden power despite the threat of death.
Now Kira's Pixi Dust burned against the darkness of the capital.
And she was not dead.
