"I don't need your sheet, I need my milk powder." He stepped closer, close enough that Bara had to fight the urge to step back, because stepping back always got read as guilt. "You know how much that costs me?" "I didn't take it." His voice was doing the flat thing again, and he hated it, because flat sounded like lying to people who didn't know him, and flat was the only way his voice knew how to hold something this frightening. Reza appeared in the doorway at exactly the right moment, wearing an expression of manufactured concern that made Bara's stomach drop before he'd even said a word. "Pak, I didn't want to say anything," Reza said, soft, reluctant, a performance so smooth it made Bara feel sick. "But I saw Bara near the storeroom late last night, after closing. I figured he was just finishing up, but ...." "I was locking the back gate," Bara said. "That's my job. You know that's my job." "I'm just telling Sir Hendra what I saw." Reza's eyes flicked to him, and and for

"Sure, buddy." The first man laughed, not unkindly, but not kindly either — the laugh of someone entertained rather than convinced. "Guess the curse finally turned into something useful, huh?" Titan, still resting against Bara's collarbone where it had landed after the sting, buzzed once, low and warning, and the man actually flinched back a step. The paramedic reached them and started checking the woman's pulse, asking her questions in a calm, practiced voice, and for a moment nobody was looking at Bara at all, and in that gap he felt something he hadn't expected to feel, not relief, not pride. Just tired. Bone-tired, the kind that comes from being seen and still not believed in the same breath. "Hey." A hand touched his shoulder — Sari, somehow already here, out of breath like she'd run the whole way from the store. "Bara, are you okay? I saw people running this way and then someone said—" She stopped, taking in the wet clothes, the bee glinting gold against his collar, the wom

The whole building shook. Not from Bara. From something else — something enormous, wingbeats like thunderclaps, descending toward the apartment block from the black sky outside, and through the shattered window Bara caught one impossible glimpse of gold scales the size of dinner plates before every alarm in the building started screaming at once. "That's a Guardian. It's come for the bottle, not for you — but it will take you both if it has to." The old woman's voice cut through the chaos from the ruined doorway, and for the second time in three days she appeared exactly when Bara had no idea how to survive the next sixty seconds. She stepped over broken plywood like it was nothing, robe snapping in wind that had no business existing indoors, and threw something small and bright into the air between them and the window. It unfolded into a shimmering wall, translucent gold, just as the enormous shape outside slammed against the building's exterior and the whole wall Bara's back wa

"The boy in the file panics," it continued, and the words seemed to arrive inside Bara's skull as much as his ears. "Stammers. Flinches. Cannot hold a straight sentence under pressure. That boy was chosen for how easily he could be managed once the Key found him. You are something else." "I'm the same person," Bara said, and it came out steadier than he expected, steadier than he'd ever managed to sound in front of Pak Hendra or Reza or anyone, because for once the only thing in the room that mattered wasn't whether he could arrange his voice into something acceptable — it was whether he could protect what was behind him. "You just never bothered looking at him properly." The swarm-shape tilted, an approximation of curiosity. "The Key was sent into exile to escape a bearer who could not be trusted with what he carried. You have held him three days and already broken two of my Guardians and turned one of my informants. That is not the profile of an easily managed vessel." "Good,"

"Then here's a suggestion," Bara said, and he was surprised by how steady his own voice sounded, surprised by the fact that his hands, for the first time he could remember in a room full of people watching him, weren't shaking at all. "Leave my family alone. Leave the people I care about alone. If you want to talk about the gate, about the Key, about whatever debt you think is owed — you talk to me. Not to my mother. Not to my father. Not to anyone you can hurt to get to me faster." The alley held its breath. "That is not how the Hive negotiates," the Sovereign said slowly. "Then I guess," Bara said, closing his glowing fist, Titan's wings flaring bright against his wrist in silent agreement, "we're about to find out what happens when it has to learn something new." The Sovereign's light convulsed, gathering violently upward, and above the alley the torn seam in the sky — which had been slowly closing since the confrontation began — suddenly tore wide open again, wider than bef