Chapter 33 · A Name in the Storm

The storm wasn't outside anymore. It was in my skull, and it had teeth.

I could feel every grain of sand in the city. Every grain that had ever moved. Every grain that had blown through the collapse ten years ago, and it all had my name scratched into it, over and over, like someone had spent a decade carving the same word into a mountain. Kai. Kai. Kai.

And underneath that, something else. Something older.

"Get out of there," Ashmark's voice came through like he was shouting from the bottom of a well. "Kid, you can't—"

I couldn't answer. My mouth was full of sand that wasn't there. My lungs were choking on wind that didn't exist. The storm core sat in front of me, half-buried in the compound floor, pulsing like a heart made of glass and lightning. Steelhook stood twenty feet away, one hand raised, sand spiraling around his arm. He was grinning.

"You're in too deep now," he said. His voice was steady. Calm. Like he'd been waiting for this. "You feel it, don't you? The weight of it. Every storm that's ever hit this city, it all flows back to that core.