I'd said Carter Richards was poison. That he'd rot Deborah Callahan from the inside.

But I'd been wrong. He was poison. A mess of a person. Dangerous to everyone he touched because of his ambition and his self-importance. I read through his letter for the seventh time as I rode the bus out to the Portal Tyrants' main guild hall. But he'd figured out a way to redirect his poison away from Deborah and back toward me.

The letter was very clear about what he'd done. It laid out everything Caleb Richter had done in excruciating detail. His faked death, his new persona, the two-skill merge he'd done to modify his Unique and hide himself from the Roadrunners. The potential he'd thrown away—and more importantly, the friends and allies he'd felt like he was protecting when he'd done it.

But it also laid out everything he'd done to maneuver himself into a position where he could deliver the letter to my sister and make Jessie promise to give it to me. Everything. Not just the things Jessie had told me about, but all the things she hadn't seen.

I couldn't trust him. I couldn't trust my gut reaction—that he thought it was all Deborah's fault. And even if I could, I couldn't do anything about it right now. I was still C-Rank, and she was at the cusp of A-Rank.

Besides, I had a job to do.

The bus stopped outside of the Portal Tyrants' building. It wasn't a tower so much as a castle that loomed over the 303 Wall, facing north. The district around it had been leveled out to a quarter mile and replaced with fields; this close to the Wickenberg Portal Break, every bit of unused land was fair game for food.

Its walls were concrete masses, squared off and hideous. But its gate was open, so I exited the bus and headed inside. A pair of E-Rankers met me at the door. One hung back, while the other approached, clearing his throat. "Name, rank, and guild affiliation, sir?"

I blinked. Sir? Then I settled myself. "Kade Noelstra. C-Rank. No guild affiliation, but I'm hoping to talk to the Portal Tyrant about that. Do you have a line of communication to him?"

The second E-Ranker fiddled with a phone, then pocketed it. She pointed at a line of chairs against the wall. "Please wait. The Portal Tyrant is currently occupied with—"

"The Carlsbad Break, right? I was part of that team for a while," I said. "Let me know when I can talk to him."

"Of course. It could be several—" The phone beeped, and the E-Ranker stared at it. Her eyes widened. Then she pulled herself together. "Right now. The projection room. Follow Ian."

Ian nodded slowly and started walking through the halls. "As a guest in Tyrant Keep, you must follow me to our destination with no deviations. Please hurry. We just restored connection to Carlsbad Fortress, but the projection room costs a C-Rank core to operate for an hour. The expense is something the Portal Tyrant only extends to honored guests and important conversations."

The concrete hallway stretched around the entire castle's perimeter, the floor gradually sloping downward and the temperature getting colder until, by the time Ian opened a door and gestured me inside, I was all but shivering. "I'll wait here for you to finish your conversation," he said.

Then the door closed, and the Portal Tyrant appeared on one wall. Or at least, a projection of him did. As I shifted my head, though, I realized it wasn't just a projection. It was three-dimensional—or at least two-and-a-half dimensional, like a sculpture carved into Queen Mother Yalerox's door. Then he moved, and his aura slammed against me for a moment before settling. So, that was interesting. The projection room projected auras, too.

"Kade Noelstra. I wasn't expecting you to call," Terrel Young said. "We're taking a ten-minute break before we go back to fighting. What's going on?"

I took a deep breath. "I appreciate everything you've done to try to help my sister—"

"Cut it. We don't have time. You're going to back out of our deal, correct?"

"Yes. There's an opportunity I have to take. It'll be the best thing for her and for us. I'm telling you because we have this deal, and it feels like the right thing to do."

"What's the opportunity?" Terrel's eyes narrowed slightly.

I hesitated. Then I decided to go for it. "There's a guild building for sale in Surprise. Twenty million, fully equipped and ready for a small guild to occupy it. If we can get the money together, we're going independent."

Terrel stared at me. Then he laughed. "You're an audacious little shit, aren't you? You're breaking our arrangement to buy our building and make your own guild on the edge of our territory? Ridiculous. And next, you're going to ask for me to keep working on Jessica Gerald's condition, right?"

"I wasn't, but if that's on the table, then absolutely."

One blink. A second. Then Terrel's eyes narrowed. "I need something from you. Nadiri said you introduced yourself as C-Rank. Not core-broken, but C-Rank. How?"

"I can't tell you that," I said. "All I can tell you is that it happened."

"Bullshit. You can tell me whatever you want to," the Portal Tyrant half-shouted. He spent a few seconds calming himself down. "Here's my offer: you tell me everything you can about how you fixed your core, and in return, I'll keep Miss Gerald's current medical staff working with her, won't go after your upstart guild, and I'll even forgive you for breaking our arrangement."

I paused. The Portal Tyrant was willing to give all of that—and forgive me for backing out on him—just for whatever I felt like telling him? That seemed outrageous. How could he trust me to tell him the truth?

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Maybe it didn't matter. If I gave him anything, he could probably find a way to put the pieces together. But if I gave him enough, in the right way, I could point him away from my relationship with the God of Thunder. "When will you be back in Phoenix?" I asked.

"We're probably here for a month more," Terrell said quickly.

"I'll tell you when you come back, then. It's too…there's too much at stake to risk someone I don't trust overhearing."

"That works for me," Terrell said. "Now, if there's nothing else, I have a fight to get back to."

"Actually, there is one more thing," I said.

Twenty minutes later, I sat at the bus stop, waiting for my ride back to Peoria.

It pulled up, engine roaring, and I opened Deimos's door and climbed in. Ellen sat in the driver's seat, dressed in the same sweats she'd been wearing that morning. I blinked.

"What? I'm going to the GC center after this. It's workout time—and you're joining me," she said.

"How's that going to work? You're B-Rank, and I'm C-Rank. We can't be in the gym at the same time."

"Sure, we can. I figured out how by watching Angelo Lawrence fight. He's constantly moderating his own power. If he went all-in like he did outside of Carlsbad, he'd destroy the…well, everything. But he doesn't when he's in Phoenix."

"So you're going to do the same thing?" I asked.

"Yep. Or at least I'm going to try." Ellen smiled sheepishly. "It's something I've been working on for a while. I was hoping you'd recover, and I'd be able to help after. Now that you have, we need to get you caught up—and I know what it takes to hit B-Rank. How did your meeting go?"

"It went okay. Terrell Young isn't willing to compromise on the building's cost, but he was willing to put a hold on the sale until we have the money, or for a month. That gives us some time."

"Not enough," Ellen said quietly. "Thirteen million's a lot of money. We can't possibly clear enough portals to make that in thirty days, even if we target B-Rank ones, and that pushes the team's limits. How do guilds make so much from portals?"

I stared at her for a second. Then I answered. "They mine them. We can't do that with one team and no support staff."

"Damn. That'd be perfect. Do we have any other options?"

"Not really. This is the best I could do, and I had to trade away a lot to get it," I said.

"I know."

"You do?"

Ellen smiled at me. "You know, you're not as clever as you think you are, Kade. Jessie noticed that all her doctors changed about a month ago. She saw the Tyrant symbols hanging out by her hospital. And she's a computer whiz. You should have expected her to suspect you had something to do with it."

"What?"

"She told me about it last week. Apparently, she had a friend phish up a password to get access to the hospital's database, then rampaged through it just before you came home. She figured out the connection between the Portal Tyrants and her new doctors, confirmed it, and asked me what I knew."

Right. Jessie was a sophomore, and sometimes, it was easy to forget that she was also a genius.

"I didn't tell you because she asked me not to, and because she couldn't find anything in the Portal Tyrants' systems about it except for confirmation that they'd sent several doctors and therapists to the hospital. They didn't have a single mention of your name anywhere in their system, according to Jessie. I mean, she might've missed something, but don't you think that's suspicious? She sure did."

"Yeah, that's super suspicious. I've had a few run-ins with Portal Tyrants. Nothing like our Roadrunner conflicts, but…" I hesitated. "Remember Zeke? His real name is Ezekiel Elwood. He's a recruiter with the Portal Tyrants. B-Rank. He can also modulate his power, but unlike Angelo—"

"Wait, you're going too fast," Ellen said. "Zeke's a Tyrant?"

"Yes. He's got a unique set of skills that lets him flex his apparent rank, and that lets him find the best recruits for the guild or something. I don't know the details. But the point is that he's definitely brought me up to the Portal Tyrants. So if my name isn't in their records…why not?"

Ellen laughed. "Easy. You're a black project. Off the books. Way too important to risk some other guild—or a random teenage girl—stealing everything they've learned. They definitely have a paper record of everything you've done, but probably only one."

"Stop messing with me," I said.

"I'm not. I'm one hundred percent serious. This is Corporate Counterespionage 101. You never put anything where people can find it unless one of three things is true: you can afford to lose it, you want your rivals to see it, or you have to have it easily available to your company. That's why Bob keeps the good stuff in a vault at home, not on the Traynor Corporation's databases." Ellen paused. "By the way, how did your meeting go, really?"

I took a deep breath. "I traded a promise to share what I could about core break repairs with Terrell Young—and only Terrell Young, no other Tyrants—in exchange for me backing out of our arrangement, him continuing to help Jessie, and him giving us some time to come up with the money. That was the best I could do, and—"

"Your priority is your sister, Kade." Ellen stared at me as Deimos turned into a parking lot. "I understand. Family's important to you. But if you couldn't talk the Portal Tyrant down—which I didn't think you'd be able to, but I was hoping—then we need to come up with twelve million dollars in a month, and there's only one place we can go for that."

"Where?"

"My father. Let's get some exercise in, and I'll think about how to make it happen."

"Okay." I let the subject change as we stepped out of Deimos and headed for the GC building. "I'm thinking I want to test my body and really see what it can do, so a full workout, then sparring. Sound good to you?"

Ellen grinned. "A chance to beat you up? I'll take it."

"Great. I'm looking forward to it. And then after…I'm ready to advance Stormbreak."

Jeff and Yasmin had fought.

Now he was sulking on Kade's couch. He was furious. And he was convinced he was right—and also that she was right, too.

He had won. But he'd also failed. He'd failed to build for his future, and he'd failed to find Lamar or save Nevaeh. Those failures were problems, and Jeff had no idea how to solve them. He had no idea how to move forward with his life, either. Carlsbad wasn't an option; they'd evacuated everyone he cared about. And he couldn't keep crashing on Kade's couch forever.

Jessie wouldn't put up with it for much longer. She was already starting to shoot nasty looks his way when she knew he was looking.

And Yasmin was done putting up with it now. She wanted changes. And she deserved them.

But Jeff wasn't ready. Changing his entire life—continuing on after he'd done the one thing he'd committed everything to—was hard. He needed someone to help him focus. Yasmin couldn't be that person for him. Neither could Kade.

So, after some hesitation, he pulled out his phone and slowly scrolled through the numbers in it. He stopped at one he hadn't called in far too long. Then he breathed deep, let the air out slowly, and pressed 'call.'

It rang twice.

Then it connected.

"Hello, Jeffery," his dad's voice came through a little scratchy, just like it always had. He refused to upgrade his phone; instead, he'd started doing his own repairs whenever it went belly-up, and staticky was the best-case scenario.

"Hi, Dad." Jeff took a deep breath. "I won."

"I know. I saw it on the news," his dad said.

The silence stretched. It got awkward, then blew past that into uncomfortable.

Then Jeff gathered himself. "I don't know what to do next, Dad. Can you help me?"

"I've been waiting for years for you to ask, Jeffery."

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