Chapter 62: Loyalty Test
The gate cracked open with a sound like a knuckle popping, violet spilled out across the concrete, and a man I'd known for six hours handed me a gun that didn't work.
That's a loyalty test, at this level. Nobody sits you down. Nobody shakes your hand or gives you a password. They walk you to the edge of a black-money gate, press gear into your hands that's one notch short of adequate, and stand back to see whether you die usefully or live suspiciously.
Either answer tells them something. I intended to give them the boring one.
"You porter," said the handler. His name was Vasco, and he had the exact personality of a parking meter. "You carry. You don't fight unless something's already chewing on you. When the squad clears, you haul the stones out. You come back with the bag, you're crew."
He shrugged, like the next part cost him nothing.
"You come back without it, you don't come back."
"Got it," I said, in Taylor's small grateful voice, and I stepped through the swirl before I could give myself time to think, because thinking was not going to help.
The gate took me like they all do. Cold pressure, skin shoved back against bone. It spat me out into a cavern that stank of ammonia and rot.
And then my tattoos woke up.
Which had never happened. They're faint white lines down my arms and my spine, the ones my mother called a family thing and then never once explained, and I'd long since stopped seeing them at all, because an old scar just quietly becomes skin.
They itched.
Deeper than itched. They hummed, a low buzz under the skin, like a struck tuning fork held against the bone, and the buzz got stronger the deeper I turned toward the dark of the cavern. Toward the part where the mana ran thick.
I stood very still and told the buzz to knock it off.
It didn't stop, exactly. It settled, like a dog that's decided the thing at the door isn't worth barking at yet but is absolutely keeping one eye on it.
Not now, I told it. We're working.
And I filed the whole business in the overflowing folder in my head labeled things about myself I will panic about later, and I got to work.
The gate was rated low.
The gate was not low. I knew inside thirty seconds, the way you know a step is missing before your foot finds the gap. The monsters were wrong. Too many, too evolved, a nest that had climbed a full tier past its own paperwork while nobody bothered to look.
A mutating gate. Of course it was.
I'd stood in one exactly like it the day I nearly died renewing my license, and my body remembered that day a lot better than my mind did, because my ribs started aching out of pure old sympathy.
And here was the trap, and it was a beautiful one. I almost admired whoever set it.
If I fought like a real desperate D-rank porter, I might actually die in here. If I fought like me, like a woman carrying borrowed ice and stolen edges and an S-rank's worth of dirty tricks, I'd live easy, and every man on this squad would go home and report that the new girl was worth a much closer look.
Vasco wasn't testing my loyalty at all. He was testing my ceiling. Desperate nobodies don't survive over their heads, and the ones who do are exactly the ones you start worrying about.
So I survived to my paperwork. And not one inch past it.
I used the smoke bomb from my boot. A real one, cheap, F-rank kit, the sort of thing a scrappy broke porter would absolutely own. I used the terrain. I let a scrawny handler named Deel do the actual killing while I made myself useful the small way. The porter way.
I spotted the drop before he stepped in it.
I jammed a bone-crawler's mandible with a pried-up rock, one half-second before it took his leg off. CRUNCH. He didn't even see me do it.
Useful. Boring. Alive. A girl who's handy in a pinch and nothing you'd ever lose sleep over.
And the whole time, the ice stayed lidded in my chest, cold and coiled and begging to be let out. Keeping that lid on was the hardest fight in the room. It wasn't close.
We came out with the bag.
I came out with the bag, actually. Hauled the last stretch of it myself when Deel's arm finally quit. The look Vasco gave me was the look you'd give a mule that turns out to also be quiet and punctual.
Approval, minus respect.
Which was precisely what I'd come to buy.
Then Deel went down hard on the concrete, right past the gate's edge, and one of the other porters swore, and somebody hollered for the medic like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Down here, it was.
Maybe it happened every week. A squad limps out, somebody's arm has stopped working like an arm should, and the machine already has a little station set up for exactly that, tucked in the lee of a shipping container. An assembly line for the wreckage. Efficient. Unbothered.
I filed that too. Nobody panicking, nobody improvising. That's how you learn the real age of an operation. Not the size of it.
The boredom of it.
I peeled myself off the concrete, my side screaming where something with too many legs had clipped me, and I limped toward the container, because a smart porter gets herself looked at before Vasco decides she's malingering.
And that's when I met the medic.