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"You're bleeding on my floor."
I looked up. The woman in the doorway had a scalpel in one hand and a field kit slung over her shoulder. Her scrubs were spattered with something dark that wasn't hers.
"Wrong address," I said.
She stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind her. "You came here on purpose. Now sit down before you pass out and I have to drag you."
I didn't sit. My ribs were screaming and my left arm hung useless, but I stayed on my feet. The alley outside had been full of Gideon Ro's men, and this apartment was the only door that opened when I kicked it.
"I don't know you," I said.
"Mina Wen." She dropped the kit on the table and pointed the scalpel at the chair. "Sit."
"I'll be gone in five minutes."
"You'll be dead in three if that shoulder doesn't get stitched." She moved closer, and I saw her eyes for the first time. Sharp. Tired. The kind of tired that meant she'd seen worse than me tonight. "What did you do to piss off the Ro family?"
"Broke into the wrong vault."
"Steal anything good?"
I pulled the cracked glass sphere out of my pocket and held it up. It was the size of a plum, filled with some kind of amber liquid that swirled on its own. Gideon had kept it locked in a case with six different wards, which meant it was either priceless or catastrophically illegal.
Mina's face went pale.
"Put that down," she said.
"It's just—"
"Put it down now."
I set it on the table. She stared at it like it might explode.
"Where did you get that?"
"Gideon Ro's private collection. He had it in the back vault under the old distillery."
"You broke into the Coppervault."
"Didn't have a choice. I owed him money. He said the debt was clear if I brought him something from the east docks. Turned out he lied."
Mina picked up the sphere with two fingers, holding it away from her body like it was venomous. "This is a resonance core. Pre-collapse. If it's still intact, it's worth more than this entire block."
"Great. I'll sell it and pay off the rest of my debts."
"You can't sell it. No one in Copperfall will touch it. The second you try, every ward family in the city will hunt you down."
I wiped the blood off my mouth. "Then what do I do with it?"
She turned the sphere in her hand, and the liquid inside began to glow. Faint at first, then brighter, until the amber light spilled across the table and lit up the walls.
"Mina?"
She wasn't looking at the sphere anymore. She was looking at me.
"You can see them," she said.
"See what?"
"The lines."
I followed her gaze. At first I thought it was the light from the core, but then I realized it was coming from behind the walls. Thin threads of copper fire, running through the ceiling and floor like veins in a body. They pulsed in rhythm with something I couldn't hear, and the longer I stared, the more I could see. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A web that stretched through the whole building and beyond, disappearing into the city.
"What the hell is that?"
Mina set the core down and stepped closer to me. Her hand went to my wrist, and I felt her fingers press against my pulse.
"How long have you been seeing them?"
"I don't—"
"How long?"
"Since I touched the core. Maybe ten minutes."
She let go of my wrist and stepped back. Her face was unreadable now, the kind of locked-down expression that meant she was doing math in her head and didn't like the answer.
"You're not a ward mage," she said.
"No."
"You're not a breaker."
"I'm a fixer. I open locks and find things people don't want found. That's it."
"Then you shouldn't be able to see the meridian lines. No one can see them except—" She stopped herself.
"Except who?"
She didn't answer. Instead, she picked up the core again and held it out toward me. The copper threads in the walls flared brighter, and I felt something pull in my chest. It was like a hook behind my ribs, dragging me forward.
"Don't touch it," Mina said.
I wasn't planning to. But the lines were moving now, shifting and twisting, and one of them snaked out from the wall and wrapped itself around Mina's arm.
She gasped and dropped the core. It hit the floor and cracked, and the amber liquid inside spilled out in a thin stream.
The line around her arm tightened.
"Mina—"
She fell to her knees, clutching her arm. Her face twisted in pain, and I saw the skin where the line touched her start to blacken.
"Get it off," she said through her teeth.
I grabbed her arm, but my hands passed right through the copper thread. It wasn't solid. It wasn't even real, not in the way the table or the floor was real. But it was killing her.
"I can't—"
"Cut it."
"With what?"
"Your hand. Just do it."
I didn't understand, but I didn't have time to argue. I reached out and grabbed the line with my bare hand, and this time I felt it. It was hot, hotter than metal left in the sun, and it burned when I closed my fingers around it.
I pulled.
The line snapped.
Mina screamed, and the sound of it filled the room like breaking glass. The copper threads in the walls went dark all at once, and the air went cold. I stumbled back, my hand still burning, and watched as the severed line dissolved into smoke.
Mina was on the floor, gasping for breath. Her arm was a mess of blistered skin and char marks, but she was alive.
"What the hell was that?" I said.
She didn't answer right away. She just lay there, staring at the ceiling, her chest heaving.
Finally, she sat up.
"You just cut a meridian line," she said. Her voice was rough, like she'd been screaming for hours. "No one's done that in a hundred years."
"I don't even know what that means."
"It means you're not a fixer. You're a line breaker." She got to her feet, unsteady but standing. "And it means you're coming with me."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Yes, you are. Because Gideon Ro isn't the only one looking for you now. The second you touched that core, every ward family in Copperfall felt it. They know something changed. And when they find out it was you, they'll tear this city apart to get you."
I looked down at my hand. The skin was red and raw, but it wasn't burned the way it should have been. Instead, there were faint lines traced across my palm, copper-bright and glowing.
"What do they want with me?"
Mina bent down and picked up the broken core. The liquid inside had stopped glowing, but there was still a faint pulse coming from the glass.
"There's a tower in the center of Copperfall," she said. "It's been sealed for a hundred years. No one's been able to open it. Every ward family has tried. Every breaker, every mage, every lock smith in the city. Nothing works."
She held up the core.
"This was a key. A piece of one, anyway. And you just activated it."
I stared at her. "I didn't activate anything. I just touched it."
"That's the problem." She shoved the core into her kit and slung it back over her shoulder. "The tower only responds to someone with meridian sight. Someone who can see the lines and cut them. Someone like you."
"So what? Let them have the tower. I don't care."
"You will when they start hunting you. Gideon Ro won't stop until he has you in a cage. And the other families? They'll kill you just to keep him from using you first."
She moved toward the door, then stopped and looked back.
"You want to survive the next twenty-four hours? You come with me. I know how to keep you off their radar long enough to figure out what you are and how to fix it."
"And if I don't?"
She opened the door. Outside, I could hear footsteps. Heavy boots on metal stairs. A lot of them.
"Then you die here," she said. "Your choice."
I looked down at my hand again. The copper lines were still glowing, brighter now, and I could feel them pulling at something deep inside my chest.
The footsteps were getting closer.
I grabbed my jacket and followed her out the door.
We made it three blocks before the first shot rang out. Mina shoved me into an alley, and we ran. The streets of Copperfall were a maze at night, all narrow lanes and rusted fire escapes, and she moved through them like she'd memorized every turn.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"Somewhere they won't follow."
"Where's that?"
She didn't answer. We turned a corner, then another, and suddenly we were standing in front of a chain-link fence. Beyond it, rising out of the industrial sprawl like a monument to something dead, was the tower.
It was taller than I remembered. Black stone, no windows except for a single ring of glass near the top. The whole structure hummed with a low, subsonic vibration that I felt in my teeth.
Mina pulled a pair of bolt cutters out of her kit and snapped the lock on the fence.
"You're insane," I said.
"Probably."
We slipped through the fence and crossed the empty lot. Up close, the tower was even worse. The stone was covered in old wards, burnt-out glyphs that had been carved by hands long dead. I could feel the weight of it pressing down on me, like the air itself was thicker here.
Mina stopped at the base of the tower and pulled out the broken core.
"Hold this," she said.
I took it. The second my fingers touched the glass, the copper lines inside me flared to life. I could see them now, running through the tower like cracks in ice. They spiraled up the walls and disappeared into the top, where the single ring of windows sat dark and empty.
"What now?" I said.
Mina stepped back.
"Now we see if you're the key," she said.
The core began to glow. The amber liquid inside swirled faster, and I felt the pull again, that hook behind my ribs dragging me forward. The lines in the tower lit up, one by one, and the air filled with the smell of burnt copper.
Then the core cracked.
Not just a fracture this time. It split clean in half, and the liquid inside evaporated in a burst of light and heat. I dropped the pieces, and they hit the ground and shattered into dust.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, high above us, one of the tower windows lit up.
Mina's face went white.
"No," she said. "No, that's not—"
The hum from the tower grew louder. The ground beneath our feet began to vibrate, and I heard something inside the stone shift. A grinding sound, like gears that hadn't moved in a century.
Mina grabbed my arm.
"Run," she said.
But before I could move, the air around us exploded with light. Copper threads burst out of the ground, wrapping around my legs, my arms, my chest. I tried to pull free, but they held me in place.
Mina was shouting something, but I couldn't hear her over the sound of the tower waking up.
The last thing I saw before the light swallowed everything was the window at the top of the tower. It was glowing now, bright as a star, and inside it I could see a shape. Human, maybe. Or something that used to be.
It was looking down at me.
And it knew my name.