It looked like a standard Phoenix dust storm at first, a wall of dirt and air so tall it dwarfed Angelo Lawrence’s nuclear blasts. Then, as it rushed closer, I realized what it was.

  Standard Phoenix dust storms came from the southwest, not the east.

  It was a dust storm, yes—but only the first wave. After that…it rippled and wavered like a mirage on a desert road. And that meant heat. Phoenix was already hot, but what was coming was superheated to the point where the entire thing shimmered as it ripped across the desert.

  Then a trio of massive, full-powered explosions lit up the day as Angelo dropped all pretense of holding back and opened up on the onrushing wave.

  It broke, splitting in two and shaking under his assault. But it didn’t disappear, and the two split waves of steam slammed into the 303 Wall.

  The 303 Wall was, on its surface, a mess of rusted rebar, concrete, and portal metal. It looked like a simple, passive defense. But Phoenix hadn’t survived twenty years of portal surges, breaks belching monsters into the wilderness, and more by being passive. The Wall was a work in progress, constantly being repaired, upgraded, and strengthened with the best technologies and strongest Scripts the GC could find. It was a constant reminder that Phoenix was a safe place in a wasteland. I’d grown up with the knowledge that it was immovable; a portal could break inside of it, but we were protected from that by delvers like Dad.

  The Wall would keep us safe from anything. It was unbreakable.

  Against that, the wave of steam felt like an unstoppable force. It dwarfed the city, making its vast sprawl and towering buildings look like a child’s model. Only Angelo Lawrence’s phenomenal power had made any impact on it, and even that had only reshaped and redirected it slightly.

  The impact was awe-inspiring.

  The wave shook the wall. Portal metal and steel heated up until they were all but red-hot. Then they started to cool as the Wall fought back. I winced; the sheer power the Wall was using had to be worth dozens of A-Rank cores. But as the steam wave overtopped the wall, it cooled and collapsed as if by magic. Intellectually, I knew what I was seeing. Thousands of Scripts and Bindings, all tied together, and all drawing Mana from the cores the GC had been buying up for close to two decades.

  A torrent of water fell on Phoenix’s eastern districts in seconds; even from here, the sudden chill in the air was palpable as it evaporated on the hot streets below, condensed, and rained a second time. The steam wall cascaded over the city, then stopped a few thousand feet up, unable to keep pushing. Instead, it spread high overhead, a massive snow globe of gray that blocked out the sun completely.

  Ellen and I didn’t move. We just watched. The power behind that had been every bit as strong as Yalerox—or stronger—and the Wall had stopped it dead.

  Then my phone buzzed on the bed. I turned and reached for it.

  Governing Council Message:

  Status: Extreme Emergency

  This is a conscription message from the Governing Council. Response is considered mandatory for all delvers of B-Rank or higher, as well as sixty-seven percent of each guild or team’s lower-ranked delvers. Failure to respond will result in imprisonment.

  Well, that was new. I kept reading.

  The S-Rank Carlsbad Portal Break has entered a period of extreme activity and has begun a full-scale surge in monsters, aimed directly at Phoenix.

  All civilians in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, all non-awakened Governing Council and government security forces, and all visiting non-awakened travelers, merchants, and dignitaries are required to shelter in place immediately. Avoid open streets, rooms with east-facing windows, and confined underground spaces such as basements until the situation stabilizes.

  All conscripted delvers in Phoenix and Tucson must report in person to the nearest Governing Council center for deployment orders.

  All non-conscripted delvers should be on alert for E to A-Ranked monsters and bosses, as well as to assist with unclaimed portals within guild territories, until further notice.

  There was nothing about contributions, bounties, or rewards. Nothing about our interest. The stark nature of the message contrasted with the more detail-oriented ones the GC usually sent out, and I took a moment to look over my shoulder at the steam cloud as it smothered the city three thousand feet below it. The Wall’s magic held it high above, but the rainfall pouring down from it was creeping toward Surprise.

  There was one more line. I read it, then nodded.

  The third round of the Fallen Delvers Tournament is postponed until the immediate crisis is passed.

  It was go-time.

  They assigned us to the east wall. It was Ellen, Raul, Jeff, and me—plus a full team of C-Rank delvers who’d showed up together and who seemed skeptical of the four of us. I didn’t blame them; they might’ve been C-Rankers, but their team felt well-suited to the job of defending the Wall, with not one but two archers, a mage, a healer, support, and two tanks.

  I could practically feel Jeff’s envy; they were close to his ideal team composition.

  The steam wall whipped at my hair as it rushed upward along the wall’s outside surface. I squinted into the maelstrom, trying to see something, or to understand the storm that was breaking itself against Phoenix’s walls, but it wasn’t a hurricane or thunderhead. This was artificial. It had been created—and not by a spell like Queen Mother Yalerox’s Eye of the Storm. No, this was different. It wasn’t driven by fury or rage, but by malice.

  Then the first wave of monsters hit.

  Scaling Construct: A-Rank

  Just like the group we’d fought by the Guardians’ fields, they were brass monstrosities. These, though, latched onto the base of the wall and began ripping into it with giant gears, each with a gripping claw on the end. The massive cogs tore at the wall, gouging gashes in the portal metal and concrete.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Get ready,” someone said.

  Then the machine-monsters started to pull themselves upward. They climbed the wall quickly, leaving behind ladders of brass chains and silk. In seconds, the first one reached the top.

  “Now!” the same voice yelled over the roaring, crunching sound of the Scaling Construct’s gears. A dozen monsters rushed off of it, silk and brass surging toward us.

  I didn’t care about any of that. We’d had time to talk to the C-Rank team, and our battle plan was simple. With three tanks, we had a ridiculously strong front line. The healer and Raul could support that, but the majority of the fight was on the mages—and on me.

  Fireballs surged over the tank’s heads, whipped into a firestorm by the wind mage’s efforts. The archer didn’t try to kill anything herself; instead, she seemed to mark targets, and the mages followed her lead. Between their synergy spells and the archer’s target-finding, they were forces of destruction, carving a path through the monsters that was almost as impressive as the one Ellen made with Shadow Shapes and Shadow Box.

  Almost.

  I didn’t care about any of that, either. Instead, I rushed the closest monster and quickly attacked it two times, generating Lightning Charges. Then I backed off just as quickly; a second later, a massive firestorm engulfed the B-Rank monster, and it died.

  Feet planted. Sword in one hand, the other hand free. Cyclone Forms. Polarity Shift. Lightning Strikes Twice. Repeat. Touch of Shadow. Thunder Crash. Six lightning bolts, green-black and sinister-looking, slammed into the Scaling Construct. Each was the width of the thing’s gears. They hung in the air for a full second, burning bright afterimages into my eyes and reaching up to punch through the steam cloud overhead.

  The thunder hit a moment later, knocking delvers and monsters alike back a few steps. I smiled. Then I waited. One second. Two.

  The massive climbing cogs disengaged from the wall before the count of three, and the Scaling Construct fell to the ground below. “Nice job, Kade,” Ellen said.

  I shot her a grin that was probably more feral and bloodthirsty than it should have been, then let the battle trance take over. There were more high-rank targets to hunt, and as long as I had Mana to spare, I’d keep hunting them. And I had a lot of Mana to spare.

  Shadowstorm Battery activated, and Mana poured in from Cheddar, who’d found shelter in an abandoned building like I’d asked him to. And I went back to the fight.

  I’d had Mana to spare.

  But for the last three waves, I’d been leeching off of Ellen, and even with her, Pepperoni, and Cheddar all pumping Mana into my spellcasting, we were both running on fumes.

  So was the healer, and both the wind and fire mage. They’d changed strategies; instead of fighting the monsters on the wall, they’d decided to leave them to Ellen. Instead, they’d started an inferno down below and were focusing on maintaining and feeding it. It was more efficient to kill the enemy down below than it was to wait for them to reach the wall.

  More efficient, but less effective at stopping them.

  The rain poured down onto Phoenix. In the few moments I had to look behind us, the amount of water in the streets was shocking. The entire city seemed to be covered in steamy fog behind us, and the massive wave of steam outside had filled the sky, throwing the world into a gray, flat light.

  “Kade, can you do anything with that?” Ellen asked, gasping for air to my left.

  I turned. A B-Rank monster. Brass armor and weapons in place of arms. Negative Space aura. Rain-Slicked Blade. Lunge. Puncture, shock, withdraw. It wasn’t pretty. It was almost like answering a teacher’s question about multiplication tables or something. We’d been doing this for two hours, and the only thing that had changed was the number of monsters on the wall. There were more now—a lot more.

  As much as I didn’t want to admit it, we were losing. If it kept up, we’d lose the 303 Wall—and if that happened, we’d lose Phoenix.

  Worse, the rest of the wall around us looked as bad or worse. The strategy we’d worked out with the C-Rank team was working. It just wasn’t working well enough.

  My tongue tingled. I stared out at the Sonoran Desert for a moment. Then I remembered where I’d felt that. “Everyone, down!” I yelled and threw myself against the concrete and exposed, jagged rebar. The metal ripped at my arms, but I did my best to ignore the pain. It was better than facing Angelo’s power unprotected.

  A massive white flash rippled across the battlefield. The conflagration below had been casting weird, underlit shadows up into the mist above, but the shockwave and wind that ripped out from the flash’s source put the blaze out instantly. My skin tingled as much as my tongue had been, crawling under my armor and clothes. As the heat built up around us, I rolled over to the C-rank team’s healer. “Do what you can. That’s the Light of Dawn’s fallout hitting us.”

  He went pale. Then he nodded. “Understood.”

  When the city went on lockdown, Jessie didn’t panic. Yasmin did, a little, but she was lucky, even if she didn’t realize it. She was with Jessie, acting as an assistant to an unawakened guild leader, and she was safe from getting conscripted. And even better, she was stuck in the GC headquarters building, on the thirtieth floor of the tower, far from the wall.

  Jessie was worried about Kade and Ellen, of course, but she also knew they’d be fine. Kade was Kade, after all. If anyone could drag themselves through what was happening outside, it was her stupid maniac of a brother.

  She tore herself from the window as a sliding door behind her opened. The rain outside was entrancing and apocalyptic to her; she’d never seen anything like the downpour or the mist forming as the water instantly evaporated and rose into the air. A few storms had gotten close, but even then, they were thunderstorms or haboobs—walls of dust that ripped across the desert. But as fascinating as that was, the people that a GC rep had just brought into the room were even more interesting.

  Kade hadn’t done a good job of describing them.

  They were tall. Even the women were almost a foot taller than the man in the suit who sat in the corner and fiddled with his GC rep tablet, and the men were even taller than that. And they were skinny. Yasmin probably outweighed half of them. But even so, they were undeniably human. Jessie knew what a monster looked like, and they weren’t monsters.

  Some of them were dressed in homespun cotton-esque clothing, while others wore modern street clothes. And all of them stared at her with wide but untrusting eyes.

  Yasmin shrugged. “Yeah, they were like that when we found ‘em, too. I think they thought we were monsters.”

  Jessie snorted.

  “Yeah, I know. Them thinking I was a monster? Hard to believe.”

  “I was thinking about Kade,” Jessie said.

  “Oh, right. I could believe that. He’s pretty scary. Mostly in a hard-to-categorize, maniac way,” Yasmin said. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to communicate,” Jessie said. She reached into her wheelchair’s bag and pulled out a pile of papers she’d cut into small rectangles. On each rectangle, she’d drawn one of the main symbols the Lingua Franca she’d been trying to decipher used. Then she fished out a handful of smaller papers with the angled directional pointer drawn on them. She spread them out on the coffee table in front of her, then started slowly piecing together a sentence she’d practiced a dozen times.

  Hello Understand Me

  That was what she hoped it said, at least. But as the rain fell outside and the battle raged beyond Jessie’s sight, not one of the people from another world responded. They all stared blankly.

  I Friend

  Nothing. Jessie picked up the papers, then reshuffled them and found another combination. Then another. After the sixth one, she started to get frustrated, and by the eighth, she was out of ideas. She’d been convinced that she was on the right track. If she wasn’t, then her entire work figuring out Kade’s stolen ledger was wrong.

  Jessie sat back in her chair and looked toward the ceiling.

  Yasmin put a hand on her shoulder. “See now, that’s what I figured. I don’t think it’s your fault. Like I told you on the way up, they don’t want to talk to us. They think we’re monsters, and not the friendly, trash-can-and-cookies kind.”

  It was pointless. The whole trip was pointless. Jessie wheeled herself back to the window and watched the rain come down.

  Then she stopped and returned to the table. The cards she’d made flew every which way as she rearranged them, then added a starting mark. Then she pointed at the new phrase she’d made.

  “I have one more thing to try.”

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