The Beast Tamers Hidden System

The crystal was colder than Adrian had expected, and it was taking too long.

He kept his palm flat against it and watched his own breath fog the surface. Four hundred students sat behind him on the stone benches, and above them the guild recruiters leaned on the balcony rails in their good coats. Every one of them had just watched the pillar blaze amber for Marcus Thorne. Rank C, Fang Command. The cheering was still ringing off the ceiling.

For Adrian, the pillar did nothing at all for a count of five. Then it gave a weak gray shimmer, like a dirty window.

“Faint Bond,” Examiner Pryce read from his slate, and he winced slightly as he said it, which was somehow the worst part. “Rank F. Capacity, one beast. Rank E or lower.”

Someone laughed. Then lots of people did.

Adrian took his hand off the crystal and walked down the steps at the same speed he’d walked up them. He had decided on that years ago, watching other people get humiliated. The only thing you could still control afterward was how fast you moved.

The guild booths lined the east corridor, and he made himself visit every one. Silverwood wished him well and meant nothing by it. Ironvale’s man never looked up from his papers. At the last table, under the black-and-crimson fangs of the Crown, a recruiter with a scarred chin looked Adrian over and said the training halls were hiring cleaners.

“Honest work,” the man added.

“Thank you for your time,” said Adrian, and he was proud of how level it came out.

He got as far as the back courtyard before his hands began to shake.

It was a bare square of flagstones that backed onto an iron fence, and past the fence lay the Old Gate District. Nobody went in there. The city had walled it off forty years ago, after the first breach, and the sign wired to the bars had faded to a pale suggestion: RESTRICTED. LETHAL BEASTS REPORTED. He pressed his forehead against a bar and thought about Mina, ten years old, counting her breaths on the good days so she’d know when to rest. The clinic wanted eight hundred marks a month now. Old Harlan paid him one-sixty for the night shifts.

“Cross! You dropped something.”

He didn’t need to turn around. Marcus came across the flagstones with three friends fanned out behind him, and in his fist was the pale stone every Awakened student was issued that morning, the one with ADRIAN CROSS scratched into the base. It was the only thing the Academy had given him.

“Give it back.”

“Sure. Go on, fetch.”

The stone went up and over the fence in a high lazy arc. Adrian heard it clack once on something hard, a long way in, and then nothing.

“No Bond Stone, no registration,” Marcus said pleasantly. “No registration, no seat at Halcyon. A replacement’s eight hundred. Funny number, isn’t it?”

Adrian thought about hitting him. He thought about it properly, the way he did everything, and saw it end with him on the ground and the stone still lost.

“You’ll want to remember today,” he said.

“Oh, I will.” Marcus patted his shoulder as he went past. “Every year.”

The rust had eaten through two bars near the base of the fence. A thin boy could get through, if he didn’t care about his coat.

He didn’t.

The district had no sound in it. That was the first thing, and it bothered him more than the ruins did. Even dead places had pigeons or rats or a loose shutter. Here the ash lay in gray drifts along the walls, and his shoes barely made noise in it, and the buildings leaned over the street like they were holding still on purpose.

He picked a length of pipe out of a gutter and used it to tap the ground ahead of him. Slow. His father used to say a Gate Warden’s whole job was knowing what you didn’t know yet.

No animal tracks. He noted it and kept walking.

But boot prints. Deep ones, evenly spaced, wandering in from the east wall. Somebody heavy had come through not long ago and had not been in a hurry.

Forty paces on, the pipe rang hollow against the ground. Adrian stopped. He knelt and brushed the ash back with his sleeve and found a pressure plate, and beside it a wire as thin as a hair, strung at ankle height across the alley. He stepped over it with his heart going hard and told himself it was probably old.

It was not old. The wire was bright.

The stone sat against the foot of a fallen archway, pale and unharmed. He almost laughed. He closed his fist around it, got halfway to his feet, and heard something breathing.

It was a small, wet, hitching sound, and it came from behind the arch.

He had a stone in his pocket and a gap in a fence forty yards behind him. He stood there for a count of ten, and the whole time he knew how it would go. Then he stepped around the arch anyway.

At first he took it for a spill of shadow. It was lying in a nest of broken brick, a black fox-shaped thing no bigger than a house cat, with fur that looked soft and slightly wrong, as if it hadn’t made up its mind about being solid. The tip of its tail frayed into smoke. A coil of silver wire bit into its back leg, and from each cut a thread of dark mist leaked upward and thinned away to nothing.

The eyes opened. They were violet, and deep, like coals that hadn’t gone out.

It hissed. It was a thin, furious sound, and the leg didn’t move.

“Okay,” Adrian said. His own voice surprised him, calm and low. “I’m not with them.”

Them. He hadn’t known he was thinking it. He looked at the boot prints trailing off the edge of the alley and at the bright wire and then at the silver, wound neat and professional, and he understood that someone had done this on purpose and meant to come back.

The creature watched him. It was afraid, and it was also doing something harder than being afraid. It was refusing to ask for anything.

Don’t be stupid. A cornered beast takes your hand off.

He got out his pocketknife anyway. “I’m going to cut it. It’s going to hurt. Try not to bite me, all right?”

The silver was tougher than he’d expected. He worked the blade under a loop and sawed, and the creature shuddered and its teeth clicked shut an inch from his wrist, and then the wire parted with a bright little ping. The knife skidded and opened the heel of his hand.

He swore. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped off, and a few drops landed on black fur.

The creature went absolutely still.

The mist stopped leaking. It curled back toward the cuts as if someone had called it, and where Adrian’s blood had touched, the fur began to glow a deep, steady violet. Something low and enormous passed through the ground, too deep to be called a sound, and his teeth hurt, and the whole world went white at the edges.

When he could see again there was writing in the air.

[ DING! ]

Compatible companion detected.

Bond catalyst accepted.

Hidden talent identified: INFINITE EVOLUTION.

Initializing Beast Taming System…

Adrian didn’t breathe. The pane of pale blue light hung there in the ash-gray air, perfectly clear, and it was reading him back to himself.

TAMER: Adrian Cross

Talent (displayed): Faint Bond. Rank F

Talent (true): Infinite Evolution. Rank: ???

System Level: 1

Bond Slots: 1/1

Companion: [UNKNOWN BEAST]

Species: [ACCESS DENIED]

Rank: [ACCESS DENIED]

Condition: Critical. Essence 4%.

And under it, one line, patient and bright:

Form a Bond? [ YES ] / [ NO ]

His hand was shaking, so he held it with the other. He thought of the Pillar, the gray shimmer, the pity in Pryce’s face. He thought of the eight hundred marks and of Mina counting her breaths. And then, strangely, he thought about how still the creature had been while he cut the wire. It had trusted him that far. It hadn’t wanted to, but it had.

“This is going to cost me something,” he said quietly. He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to the System, the creature, or himself. “Isn’t it?”

Nothing answered. The words just waited.

He pressed YES.

The bond hit him like cold water going the wrong way. It wasn’t words. It was a stream of impressions, none of them his: hunger, a deep ache of loneliness older than he could comprehend, and the wary, grudging beginning of something that wasn’t trust yet but could someday be. Behind all of it, one image rose and held. A gate of black stone, impossibly tall, standing open on nothing. A man’s hand resting against the lintel. On one finger, a plain iron ring, notched on the inside, with a Warden’s mark stamped into the band.

Adrian knew that ring. He had spent five years looking at the faded outline of it in a photograph on Mina’s bedside table.

His father’s ring.

The image broke apart. Violet eyes watched him from the ground, steady and exhausted and unreadable, and somewhere beyond the broken walls, unhurried and getting closer, boots crunched through the ash.