CASSIA

"Stop embarrassing yourself, Cassia."

Adrian Crowe's fingers were still locked around my wrist when the banquet hall erupted in laughter. It rolled through the crystal-lit room in waves, bouncing off marble columns and gilded banners, and a hundred officers-in-training turned in their seats to watch the Academy's favorite joke perform her nightly show.

Tonight's gala was supposed to be his. The banners hanging from the ceiling said so: HONORING THE HEROES OF THE VAREN CAMPAIGN.

Adrian had come back from the frontier three days ago with a medal on his chest and an imperial commendation in his file, and the whole Academy had spent those three days telling him how far he would go.

Apparently the first place he wanted to go was away from me.

I looked down at his hand. Then up at his face.

"She followed him here too?" someone whispered, not quietly. "To his own commendation gala?"

"What else can a four-percent Guide do? The Registry chained him to her. It's not like he chose it."

Adrian released me the way a man drops something sticky, wiping his palm against his dress uniform as though my skin might tarnish the medal.

I knew that expression well — I'd found it waiting in this body's memories, years of it, layered like sediment. Disgust.

The old Cassia would have apologized by now. She would have lowered her head, swallowed the humiliation whole, and begged him — sweetly, desperately — not to be angry with her.

Unfortunately for Adrian, the woman standing in front of him had already died once.

I let my gaze drift across the glittering hall while the laughter burned itself out. Chandeliers, white tablecloths, servants gliding between tables with wine and little plates of food arranged like jewelry.

Everything looked soft and warm and painfully peaceful, and that was precisely what made my skin crawl — because the last place I remembered being was a ruined city under a black sky, listening to my own blood leave my body.

Fourteen years of surviving after my world ended. And at the end of them, I had died alone in the snow, begging no one.

Then I'd opened my eyes as Cassia Veyne, twenty-one years old, a Guide of the Empire — one of the rare women born to steady the minds of Sentinels.

And the Sentinels? They were the living weapons whose own power slowly burned them mad from the inside.

Guides didn't choose their Sentinels, and Sentinels didn't choose their Guides.

The Central Registry measured every candidate's resonance and assigned each pair by law, because a Sentinel without a matched Guide was a bomb with a lit fuse, and the Empire did not gamble with its bombs.

Cassia's resonance with Adrian Crowe had measured eleven percent. Barely legal.

Her general rating was worse — four percent, the lowest score in Academy history — which made her the punchline of the entire pairing system:

The Guide so useless that even the algorithm had seemed embarrassed to place her.

She had spent three years trying to make up the difference with devotion. I had inherited the results.

Honestly? Compared with the apocalypse, this was almost funny.

Adrian strode toward the head table where the Academy officials sat beneath the campaign banners, and the laughter died into a delicious, waiting hush.

Everyone knew what a returning hero's petition was.

Every decorated officer of the Varen Campaign had been granted one request to the Crown — land, promotion, a commission of his choosing. The hall leaned forward as one to hear what the golden boy would ask for.

I folded my arms.

"Honored administrators." Adrian's voice carried, parade-ground clean. "By the merit granted me for Varen, I formally petition the Central Registry to dissolve my bond-match with Guide Cassia Veyne."

The hall exploded. Someone actually clapped.

"Finally. He's earned it."

"His family will be so relieved."

"He deserves better."

A boy could have asked the Empire for anything — and he had spent his one request on getting rid of me, in public. He didn't even glance my way while he did it.

That hurt. Not because I loved him — but because the original Cassia's feelings were still buried somewhere under my ribs, and I could feel every remnant of them. The desperate hope. The humiliation. The years spent trying to become someone worth choosing.

Then I remembered the last person I had ever begged to save me, in my previous life, in the snow. He hadn't. He'd run, and I had survived without him for years afterward, which taught me the only lesson that ever mattered.

I looked at Adrian and felt nothing at all.

The chief administrator cleared his throat, tablet in hand. "Guide Veyne. A dissolution requires acknowledgment from both parties. Do you contest the petition?"

"No."

Adrian's head snapped toward me, brows pulling together as if I'd spoken a foreign language.

"No?"

"No." I unclasped the silver resonance band from my wrist — the one this body had polished every night for three years — and the hall went strangely quiet as I set it on the table beside me with a small, bright click.

"Do I get a settlement?"

Someone choked on their wine.

"What?" Adrian said.

"A settlement." I looked at him patiently. "The petitioning party dissolves the match. Registry law includes a severance clause for the released Guide, doesn't it?"

His face darkened. "You're worried about money?"

"I've been poor my entire life. Why would I suddenly be embarrassed about money?"

Scattered laughter broke out — different laughter this time, startled and half against its will.

Adrian's jaw tightened. "You really haven't changed."

I almost smiled, because he had no idea.

"Actually," I said, turning away, "I have."

That was when the alarms began to scream.

The sound tore through the hall, and every Sentinel in the room froze in the same instant, the way wolves freeze when they scent smoke. A glass slipped from someone's hand and shattered. Then a young officer near the entrance collapsed, his body hitting the marble with a crack that silenced the whole room, and his back arched off the floor as black smoke poured out of his mouth.

The temperature dropped. Frost feathered across the nearest windows.

"Blight!" a Guide screamed. "Blight outbreak — get back!"

Panic took the hall like a match to dry grass. Guests stampeded for the exits while instructors threw up shimmering containment barriers, and three senior Guides ran toward the fallen man, only to stagger back as the darkness crawled up over his face and his eyes flooded black.

Then he screamed.

I stopped walking, because I knew that scream. I had heard it a thousand times, in a world where we called this thing the Black Tide instead of the Blight.

Different name. Same darkness — the darkness everyone I'd ever known had feared above all else, while I carried the one secret nobody else survived long enough to learn.

It can be eaten.

The Blight rippled, changed direction, and came across the floor straight toward me — as if it had heard me thinking about it.

"Guide Veyne, move!"

I didn't. The black mist wrapped around my wrist, cold flooding up through my veins, and then came the hunger — terrible, bottomless, achingly familiar. My hand moved on its own.

I touched the darkness, and it disappeared.

Everything stopped. The Guides stared at me. The instructors stared at me. Across the room, the screaming officer went suddenly still, his black veins fading, his breathing evening out into sleep.

"What just happened?" someone whispered. "Her rating is four percent. She couldn't have purified that."

"She didn't," a woman said slowly. "I think she absorbed it."

I pulled my sleeve down over my wrist, but it was far too late, and Adrian was staring at me from across the hall with an expression I'd never seen him wear.

He wasn't the only one.

Above the head table, the great Registry screen — the one that had been displaying campaign honors all evening — flickered once, and the banners of the Varen heroes dissolved into plain white text.

RESONANCE EVENT DETECTED — GRAND HALL.

SUBJECT: GUIDE CASSIA VEYNE.

STANDING RATING: 4% — INVALIDATED.

The hall's murmur died. The administrator rose halfway out of his seat.

RECALIBRATING.

The screen held there, cursor pulsing, for three long heartbeats — and I felt something cold settle in my stomach, because in my old world, being measured had never once led anywhere good.

PROVISIONAL RECLASSIFICATION: B-RANK.

ANOMALY FLAGGED. FULL ASSESSMENT REQUIRED.

The room drew one collective breath. From four percent to B-rank was not an upgrade; it was a resurrection. Somewhere behind me a girl said, faintly, "That's impossible, the Registry doesn't make errors—"

The screen wasn't finished.

PENDING DISSOLUTION: CROWE / VEYNE — APPROVED.

MANDATORY RE-MATCH PROTOCOL INITIATED.

Adrian went very still. Whatever he had expected his petition to buy him, it clearly wasn't this.

CANDIDATE LOCATED.

RESONANCE COMPATIBILITY: 91%.

The number hung there, white and enormous, above the medal they'd pinned on him.

Eleven percent. That was what the algorithm had given Adrian Crowe. The hall did the arithmetic in perfect silence, and I watched the golden boy of the Varen Campaign turn slowly gray.

Then the last line appeared, and the whispers died before they could start.

CANDIDATE IDENTITY: SEALED.

CLEARANCE REQUIRED: IMPERIAL LEVEL.

The administrator tapped his tablet once, twice, a third time, and each time the screen returned the same answer. Imperial level. Above the Academy. Above, if I understood the Registry's hierarchy at all, everyone in this room.

Somewhere under my ribs, the darkness I had swallowed turned over lazily, like a well-fed animal settling in for the night — and for the first time since waking up in this world, I had the distinct feeling that it recognized something.

I looked up at the sealed file glowing over the ruins of Adrian's gala, and I thought, a little tiredly:

In my last life, the darkness only ever led me to monsters.

Let's see what it drags in this time.