The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard

Ava Cide shoveled some more ore into the sifting pan and rocked it gently back and forth in the stream of the sluice. As the water flowed over the stepped riffles, the varicolored mixture gradually separated by weight into categories: heavy metal objects—rusted nails, fragments of tools and machine components—at the top; thinner and lighter goods—crushed cans, glass shards, broken ceramic and porcelain—in the middle; and the lightest objects of all—various bits of colorful plastic, some with electronic components embedded in them like glittering jewels—on the bottom.

Ava shook her head in wonder. Though she had been a midden miner since she could first walk, the opulence in which the ancients lived never ceased to amaze Ava.

“Ava, we’re thinking of calling it a day.” The speaker was Shaw, Ava’s little brother. Still showing a bit of baby fat in his cheeks, the young man tried to furrow his brows to show his seriousness. Behind him, his friends were already packing up their tools and finding-buckets.

At twenty-five, Ava was older than most of the other miners. And as the only one who had traveled outside of Dripe Prefecture, she was treated as their leader—a big sister to all of them, not just Shaw.

Ava glanced up at the sun, still several arm’s-lengths high in the western sky. “So early? There’s still plenty of mining left.”

Shaw scratched his head hesitantly. “We were thinking of… going to see Fey Swell.”

Ava’s face darkened. “What do you want to do with that reckless woman? Mark my words, she’s bound to bring trouble to those who follow her—”

“Fey is offering to buy everyone weapons on credit, so there’s no need for any money from us. I’m good with a bow and fought off two jackals with a staff last year—she saw me—”

“So you still want to volunteer for the militia. I’m not going to debate with you again. This isn’t about money, and the answer is no.”

Turning away, Ava heaved the pan out of the water with a grunt. Softening her tone, she added, “Help me.”

Shaw looked helplessly at his friends, whose resentful looks Ava ignored. With a sigh, he squatted down next to the pan with Ava and began to sort through the deposits.

They worked quickly but carefully. The midden mines were replete with broken glass, rusty blades, and sharp needles carrying curses from the ancients. More than a few miners had lost their lives from mysterious diseases acquired through a pricked finger or sliced palm. For protection, they both wore gloves Ava had made specifically for this purpose.

The mines were full of thin sheets and bags of plastic, often covered in colorful logos and meaningless words. Most miners had discarded them as slag. But Ava found a way to cut the plastic into thin strips, which she then twisted into yarn and wove into a tough cloth. Gloves made from the cloth were supple, functional, and very beautifully designed. By now, practically every midden miner had been gifted a pair of such gloves by Ava.

Four hands danced through the debris, draped in pretty mosaics that Ava had cobbled together from the detritus of a bygone age: a soaring phoenix, a falling maple leaf, a blooming rose, a rabbit with drooping ears…

Silently, the two siblings sorted the contents of the pan into finding-buckets. The metals were good for a few centicredits by the kilo, but the real finds were the electronic components in the plastic boards. Once the solder had been melted away, any components found to be still working could fetch a few credits apiece. Every miner knew a story of some friend of a friend who once found a rare chip that fetched a hundred credits in Wooster or Roanflare.

Shaw took a deep breath. “They say that if you manage to break into a rotten nest, everyone can get enough to buy three years’ worth of rations—”

“We’ve got plenty to eat,” Ava shot back. “Do you really think fighting the rotten is as easy as hunting squirrels? What if you encounter one of the Revealed rats? Leave the fighting to the army.”

“We don’t have to use the money to buy rations. We could save up and buy gifts for the recommendation committee—”

“The recommendation committee? So that’s what this is really about.” Ava’s voice hardened again. “Have you forgotten what Mother said before she died?”

“No,” said Shaw, sullen. “But I don’t want to spend my life digging in a trash heap.”

It was some time before Ava spoke again. She struggled to keep her voice gentle. “You’ve only been to Dripe Town on market days, but you’ve never lived there, or heard what the townsfolk say about us when we’re not around. And the residents of Roanflare are even more arrogant. To them, people like you and me are like weeds, disposable trash. You won’t find happiness—”

“Things are changing,” said Shaw, growing more impassioned. “All the governors and generals are recruiting! There are opportunities—”

“You will never be Revealed,” declared Ava, fairly shouting. “That is final!”

“Just because you failed, it doesn’t mean that I will too! Maybe when my nature is Revealed, I will be someone who matters!”

Ava stilled as though she had been slapped. At length, she struggled to speak past the lump in her throat. “You don’t understand—”

But Shaw had ripped off his gloves and tossed them down on the ground. “Don’t bother with dinner for me tonight. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t believe in me.”

As his stunned friends watched, he ran away from the midden mines.

Ava stared at his receding figure, frozen in place. Then, she glanced at the sun, sighed, and returned to sorting through the deposits in the pan.

Absentmindedly, Ava caressed the photograph in the middle of the table, the only portrait her family had ever taken. It had cost her parents all the savings from mining for a year, and they had sat still in the only studio in Dripe Town, willing themselves to not blink, as the light-painter slowly worked his magic to freeze their image on silver-plated copper.

In the photograph, her mother and father stood on either side of eighteen-year-old Ava, dressed in the formal gown issued by the governor to the bright young people chosen to be Revealed. Her parents had tried to heed the light-painter’s instruction to keep their features relaxed rather than smile—it was impossible to hold such an expression long enough for the imaging process to capture it without blur—but she could see pride curling up the corners of their mouths, her mother’s arm wrapped protectively around Ava’s own waist. Shaw, only a boy of eleven back then, stood in front and a bit to the side of Ava, his face a smear because he couldn’t help gazing up at his big sister with admiration.

How much hope there had been back then, dreams of transformed lives, of opportunities in Roanflare, of the elevation of a family from the midden mines to wealth and privilege.

Then it had all gone to hell.

“Just because you failed…”

The image of her mother, shriveled, illness-ridden, dying on the moldy mattress in the back of their ill-lit hut, surfaced in her mind’s eye.

“Protect your brother. Keep him at home,” she wheezed. “His heart is restless. But a turkey isn’t meant to soar like an eagle, and we are not meant to be that which we’re not.”

She took a bite of the tasteless ration pack, supplemented by a cup of tea made from boiled aruk root. The aruk, a hardy weed, was practically the only thing that thrived in Dripe Prefecture, where the soil had been so poisoned by the midden mines that no crops would survive after the Plague. The aruk tea was bitter, and Shaw always compared it to drinking mud—dining alone for the first time in years, Ava found herself missing her little brother’s incessant complaints.

It was so late in the evening that only the wood-burning stove, with the soldering iron warming over it, illuminated the room. She got up, thinking she should go look for Shaw. After all, she was the big sister; it was her duty not to respond in kind to his words uttered in anger.

As she reached the threshold of the door, she paused.

He’s safe. The family of one of his friends will feed him tonight.

Shaw is no longer a boy, and maybe time and space away from me is exactly what he needs to understand.

She washed the plate and cup, put them away, and sat down next to the stove, wielding the soldering iron to gently remove the electronic components embedded in the day’s haul of plastic boards. As she worked, she heard the distant hooting of an owl or two, intent on the hunt for small rodents in the fields of aruk outside. The window shutters rattled in the gusting wind, and her heart calmed as she lost herself in the repetitive motions of work. Thoughts of marauding bandit packs, of lives of luxury in the distant capital, of ambition and warfare, faded.

“Things are changing.”

Could Shaw be right? Have I become blind to change? Am I too timid, too traumatized by the path I walked, too attached to this life of toiling in obscurity, of familiar peace?

She stopped and looked down at the rectangular piece of plastic in her hand. The row of LEDs embedded at the top showed that it had perhaps once been an illuminated sign. The words on the sign, printed in an ancient script, were barely legible. With some difficulty, she puzzled out the words: GREATER ROANFLARE ECOPOLIS METROPOLITAN REGION.

A hard name to parse, a meaningless abstraction. Almost like an incantation, a phrase to summon.

Abruptly, her mind was transported to that day seven years ago.

Though she had imagined the moment of arrival in Roanflare a thousand thousand times, Ava was not prepared for the reality.

A rumbling bashe, a massive vehicle shaped like a moving house and festooned in flowers and fruits from every corner of Grema—most of which she could not name—carried her and the other Revelation candidates down Commonwealth Avenue. The central artery of Roanflare was wide enough for a hundred people to walk abreast, and columns of smaller motor vehicles preceded as well as followed the bashe, making a mechanical din that overwhelmed Ava’s senses. The pungent fumes emitted by the engine told Ava that the bashe was powered by biodiesel, an almost unimaginable luxury. She had only smelled the scent once before in her life, when Governor Kide had paraded through Dripe on a Longleg.

She bit into the apple she had been given: the real thing, not a synthesized imitation, twice as big as her balled fist. The sweetness was unbelievable. She looked up at the banner flapping at the front of the bashe, a stylized outline of Grema, with its long coastline bisected by the Arlos River. Cursive script around the map spelled out the motto of Grema, a phrase found on so many artifacts from before the Plague that suggested deep mysteries few understood: Greater Roanflare Ecopolis Metropolitan Region.

The recording that she had played over and over the night before, intended to indoctrinate her in the basics of the Revelation, echoed through her mind.

…The name of Grema dates from before the Plague, connecting us to the mystical past.

Once, the magnificent coastal metropolis of Roanflare was the sun of a proud commonwealth, in which the smaller towns, villages, and islands in Massenwhal Bay were the planets, each in its assigned place like glittering jewels carefully inlaid in a mosaic of fields, woodlands, and sea. Tens of millions of people lived there, dreamers in a fantastical world built of steel and electricity, wherein even the weather was subject to their whims, and the secret of eternal life was within their grasp….

Residents of Roanflare, dressed in shimmering garb, lined both sides of the road to observe the spectacle, many with bored expressions. Garlands of fresh flowers wound through their hair, and vendors in stalls behind the crowd hawked foods that Ava had only heard of in the tales of wandering storytellers—raw tuna, roasted lamb skewers, steamed lobsters that must have been acquired miles off the coast in the eastern mist. Strange service machines, perhaps powered by electricity, buzzed in the air and thrummed on the sidewalks, their movements impossibly precise and fluid. Far in the distance, beyond the crowds and vendors, she could see the wrecks of the ruined skyscrapers, mountains of bent steel and shattered glass, draped in thick vines and home to thousands of birds.

The bashe slowed down. Imitating the other candidates, Ava leaned out of the window by her seat. Ahead was Flare Hill, and on top sat the magnificent golden-domed Commonwealth Palace. She squinted, hoping to be the first to catch a glimpse of a legate or two, or perhaps even the silver parasol that announced the presence of the Seventh Archon herself.

The Plague, seemingly overnight, wiped away the froth of that indolent and sinful civilization we read about in the surviving works of ancient sages—miniature electronics that put brains in grains of rice, continent-spanning networks that fulfilled every desire, virtual gold summoned out of thin air… The laws of nature our ancestors thought they understood no longer applied, and monsters sprang forth in sea and on land, punishing them for their hubris. Millions died, and survivors faced a transformed world, in which Life itself seemed to have become vengeful and fantastical.

It was only with a superhuman effort that the First Archon, aided by his faithful Revealed companions, brought peace and order back to the chaotic aftermath of the Plague.

Each of the thirty-six prefectures of Grema has its own climate and produce, as well as its own unique scar from the Plague: one prefecture has rich orchards that yield sweet fruit, but the fruits bear no seeds; another has soil and water so poisoned that nothing grows, and the inhabitants must mine the ruins to eke out a living; still another contains lakes and rivers filled with delicious fish, though many have two heads or three tails….

Past the borders of this new Grema, beyond the influence of revived Roanflare, heavy fog makes navigation impossible, and monsters await the reckless who venture there….

The peace in Grema was not easy to achieve and is even harder to sustain. The Revelation is the key.

Instead of legates or the Archon, however, she was greeted by a sight even more wondrous.

The Lords of Grema, men and women who had once perhaps been as wide-eyed and awestruck as Ava herself, stood upon the steps of the Commonwealth Palace, ready to welcome the new candidates.

They were not dressed in finery; they were not surrounded by electric machines; they did not ride on mechanical monsters guzzling diesel. The Lords of Grema simply stood naked in their Revealed, magnificent nature—

The burnt odor of overheated solder and melted plastic shook her from her reverie. Cursing silently, she pulled the iron away before it could do more damage.

No, she resolutely told herself. Nothing could be regained by recalling her shame, by dwelling upon the past. She had to focus on the here and now, on the work at hand. The midden mines might never bring her and Shaw great wealth, but it was an honest and safe living, and there was pride in that, too.

Deprived of Shaw’s help, it was past midnight before she was finished with de-soldering and testing the extracted components. The day’s haul was average, with a few large capacitors that would probably fetch a good price the next market day. She was satisfied.

The next day, Ava awoke and found herself still alone in the hut. She made breakfast and waited until the sun was too high to be ignored. Reluctantly, she headed for the mines.

By noon, she was uneasy. None of the other miners knew where Shaw was. A growing dread seized her heart, and she left the mines and returned to the village. Door by door, she inquired after her brother. Neighbors and friends shook their heads, unable to help her.

Frantic and fearing the worst, she went to find Fey Swell.

Though Fey Swell was a midden miner by trade, like much of the population of Dripe Prefecture, Ava couldn’t recall the last time she had seen the woman at a pan or sluice. In reality, Fey made her living as a poacher, stealing from the flocks and herds of wealthier neighboring prefectures. Occasionally, Fey even ventured into the mists beyond the border of Grema, hunting for the exotic meat of monsters that fetched a good return on the black market, destined for the tables of thrill-seeking residents of Dripe Town or Wooster.

Ignoring the cold looks of the two muscular young men who flanked Fey—the hunter had a gang of such youths who followed her wherever she went—Ava shuffled up to the woman and politely inquired whether she had seen her brother.

At six foot four and at least a hundred kilos, Fey was an intimidating presence. A long hunting knife was strapped to her thigh, sheathless so that sunlight glinted from the cold blade, spotted with a few stains that could be either rust or blood. She locked eyes with Ava, saying nothing. Her face, as black in hue as her short-cropped hair, betrayed no emotion.

Ava’s heart pounded. Fey had a reputation for being quick to anger. She prayed fervently that Shaw had not somehow insulted this woman. She forced herself to hold Fey’s gaze, neither obsequious nor defiant.

At length, Fey shook her head. “Your brother did come to see me yesterday afternoon,” she said, her voice a deep, guttural rumble. “But he didn’t want to join my militia.”

Ava sighed with relief. “Good.”

Fey narrowed her eyes. “Good? The rotten have gathered a large force only a few days’ journey from here. Everyone should be volunteering for the militia.”

“Fighting bandits is the army’s job. The Archon has her generals.”

“Spoken like a coward,” said Fey, a look of utter contempt on her face. “What age do you think we live in? The Archon is in charge in name only, and the generals and governors answer her pleas only when they please. They’re more concerned with fighting one another than the bandits at the moment. The brave should step forward to defend what is theirs and make a fortune and name for themself.”

“Not everyone is meant to live by the tip of a blade,” said Ava. “Toiling in the mines may not be very glamorous or lead to riches, but it is far safer than following you. I’m glad to know Shaw has a good head on his shoulders.”

Fey stared at Ava, her eyes widening as though she had trouble parsing Ava’s words. At length she began to laugh, a deep, belly-shaking guffaw that crinkled her features.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Ava, dread growing in her stomach.

“ ‘A good head on his shoulders,’” mocked Fey, struggling to stifle her mirth. “You and your brother are both fools, just in different ways.”

“What exactly did you discuss with him?”

“He asked me whether there was any truth to the rumor that the rotten have found their own supply of Revelation wine.”

Blood drained from Ava’s face. “Wh-what?”

“I told him that I didn’t know, but given what I know of the world, it is possible.”

“How could you say such a thing?” cried Ava. “The Orange Brothers are inveterate liars, and their cult is only for the gullible—”

“You don’t know what I know,” said Fey, a hint of menace in her voice. She paused, calmed herself, and added, “Then he asked me for my best guess as to the site of the rotten encampment. I told him to head due west, past the broken highway. He thanked me and left.”

Ava was horrified. She had not understood the depth of Shaw’s obsession with the Revelation. Rumors of the terrors practiced by the Orange Brothers and the rotten filled her mind.

“He’s going to try to steal from the bandits. We have to find him before it’s too late. Come with me! Bring all your followers.”

Fey stared at her. “You really are as mad as your brother. An assault on a rotten base with a small band of militia would be suicide! He’s your brother, not mine.”

“Spoken like a coward,” spat Ava.

Blood rushed into Fey’s face. “What do you know of—”

But Ava was already gone.

The red sun hung in the west like a ripe peach suspended in cloud-trees.

Ava pushed her way through the shoulder-high aruk, careless of the thorns pulling, scratching, tearing. Her clothes were in tatters, and streaks of blood covered her face and arms.

She had been stumbling through the pathless wilderness beyond the broken highway for hours, always heading west. There had been no sign of Shaw, but she sensed, without being able to explain why, that she had to press on.

The marauding rotten, bandits who had fallen under the sway of the cult of the Orange Brothers, vowed to “slaughter the rich and feast on their fat.” But in practice, they preyed upon the poor in remote, mostly rural prefectures like Dripe. The truly rich could hide behind city walls, secure that their houses and credit chits would be untouched. Meanwhile, the peasants, herders, fisherfolk, and miners were left to the mercy of the bandits.

The field of aruk stretched before her like an endless sea, the wind driving waves through the swaying stalks. A mist was gathering over the field with the chill of the evening, veiling the landscape around her in a blood-tinged haze. From time to time, a red-winged blackbird or two erupted from the vegetal sea, streaking through the fog like flying fish skimming above the waves, trilling and screeching, a sound that resembled the clang of metallic scales.

Ava stopped, panting. She was tired, and the light was failing. It was dangerous to spend the night out in the wild, especially in this unfathomable sea of grass. She stared at the ground, at the openings between the thorn-encrusted stalks. Would she—could she—should she—

No, she rejected the thought, her heart throbbing with fear and doubt. Ever since her return from Roanflare, she had kept her secret to herself, unwilling to revisit the truth that had shattered her family, that had left her parents disappointed, that had buried her in shame—

Again, the trilling, like metal plates grinding against one another, sending a shiver down her spine.

With a start, she realized that the sound wasn’t the cry of a blackbird. It was louder, harder, more relentless. And along with the metallic trilling, she could hear another noise like her own panting breath, but more desperate and wilder.

Ducking down among the aruk stalks, she peered into the thickening mist and willed her thumping heart to still so that she could listen.

A disturbance roiled the sea of grass in the distance, as though a ship were parting the waves, accompanied by heaving snorts and a long whinny that shattered the fog like a lightning bolt. Beyond the disturbance, still concealed by the mist, she could detect other presences, monstrous beings that marched with mechanical precision: chug-clank-chug, chug-clank-chug.

A gust of wind ripped away the mist.

The biggest horse she had ever seen in her life was crashing through the aruk, leaving a wake of broken stalks. The mare, standing full three meters tall, was the hue of a burning bonfire. The long mane billowed like a crimson banner, while luxuriant fiery-red hair—feathers—covered the pedaling hooves. Ava had never seen any creature so splendid. She was pure power, strength, speed incarnate.

How did a Revealed come to be here?

Behind the mare, in hard pursuit, were two hulking Longlegs. Constructed from black steel, the all-terrain military vehicles resembled giant mechanical spiders, with eight segmented, piston-driven legs topped by a squat cockpit with a revolving turret. Piloted by a crew of three, these machines were the pride of the Archon’s army, the deadliest killing machines to stride across Grema.

The mare was slowing, the distance between her and her pursuers shrinking.

Thunk. Thunk.

Massive bolts, propelled by the force of electricity and magnetism, shot from the spinning turrets and slammed into the ground around the fleeing mare, one of them grazing her side.

The mare reared up, screaming. Foam spilled from her mouth as she turned to gaze defiantly back, baring her teeth and flaring her nostrils. Red droplets, perhaps sweat, perhaps blood, cascaded from her back in rivulets, staining the broken stalks around her.

Pity and rage filled Ava.

Thunk!

Another bolt headed straight for the mare’s head. Moving with impossible grace for such a large animal, the horse leaned to the side as she kicked, the graceful leap covering at least twenty meters.

But the crews of the two Longlegs had been working in tandem. A second shot from the other Longleg had anticipated where she was going to land. The bolt struck her right hind leg, and the mare collapsed to the ground with an agonized cry.

As the lamed mare floundered on the ground, the Longlegs clanged closer, their spinning saw-toothed steel mandibles aloft, ready to shred the defeated mare to pieces. As the dying rays of the sun caught the mare’s eyes, Ava saw in them no despair, only the will to fight, to resist, to bite into the steel legs with her bare teeth in a last expression of her indomitable spirit.

Blood boiled inside Ava. To see something so splendid, so glorious and alive, brought down by a few cowards hiding safe inside a mechanical monstrosity was intolerable.

Abruptly, she stood up, showing her face above the sea of swaying aruk stalks. With a low growl, she focused her attention inward, in the manner she had been taught seven years ago—

The burn of the Revelation wine coursed through her veins, the bitter taste of a thousand spices still on her tongue. Her mind was storm tossed, and it was all she could do to keep herself from stumbling as she shuffled forward.

Together with the other candidates, she was led into the Hall of Reflection, in the dark warren of secret tunnels under the palace. One by one, they were guided into the Chamber of Mirrors, where they would finally be shown their true form.

All the years of pious prayers at the shrines of the gods, of reading and memorizing the words of the sages, of her parents scrimping and saving for the chance to buy a recommendation letter, had been leading up to this moment.

From beyond the closed door, she heard a cry of ecstasy, followed by a roar of admiration from the crowd of observers. What new self had been revealed to that boy? The fate of the boy as well as his family would be transformed forever. He would be set on the path to become one of them, one of the Lords of Grema, who had stood on the steps of the palace to welcome the new candidates parading down Commonwealth Avenue:

A bull buffalo, his curved horns raised high like a pair of moon blades, pawed the ground. A tiger, her shoulders as tall as the bronze palace gates, yawned lazily. An eagle, her outstretched wings at least eight meters across, screeched. A bear, almost as massive as Governor Kide’s Longleg, reared up on his hind legs…

The noise beyond the locked doors quieted. The transformed boy would be led through another set of doors on the other side of the chamber and ascend into the palace, where the Archon and the legates would greet him, securing his place among the ranks of the nobility—the lowest rank, to be sure, for much politics and strife would still be required to climb up the ladder.

Almost delirious with anxiety, Ava realized that she would be the next candidate entering the Chamber of Mirrors.

“Mother, Father, Shaw,” she whispered to herself. “All our sacrifices have been worth it.”

While wealthy urban residents had many avenues to be noticed by the prefecture’s recommendation committee, responsible for picking candidates for Revelation, midden miners had few opportunities. It took years of volunteer corvée by the family before the governor felt obligated to recommend her, the lone rural nominee among dozens of children of privilege. The family had then put all their savings into bribes for the few members who had let it be known that they were open to such persuasion. Even then, her place wasn’t secured until her committee interview: the garrison commander had been impressed by her athleticism, and the scholars had commented favorably on her knowledge of the ancient texts. Behind those accomplishments were countless hours of study and practice, without the aid of tutors or trainers.

The Revelation wine was one of the first secrets of this altered world to be discovered after the Plague. A concoction that awakened some hidden mechanism inside the body, the wine allowed its drinkers to reshape their body into a second form, a form that displayed their latent talents and hidden abilities. With its aid, the First Archon, an unremarkable petty gangster during the dark days immediately after the Plague, had Revealed himself to be a drake, a magnificent beast of charisma and fortitude. With a legion of other Revealed companions, he had then driven monsters from the land and defeated his rivals, founding the Commonwealth of Grema.

The heavy doors before her swung open. The glare from the mirrored walls was so bright that she lifted her arms to shield her eyes.

“Ava Cide,” intoned the attendant who had opened the door, “you may enter.”

Stumbling, almost falling, holding on to the wall with trembling hands, she felt her way into the room, brightness-blind. Her mind was a blur, the pounding of her heart a roar in her ears.

Was she destined to be a hardy ox, a minister who would serve the Archon faithfully in administration until she might be elevated among the august ranks of the Synedrion? Or was she meant to be a wise monkey, a scholar tasked with recovering the knowledge of the ancient sages lost in the corrupted data banks of the Roanflare Archives, striving to usher Grema into a new golden age? Or perhaps she was intended by the gods to be a wolf or a lobster, a warrior to defend Grema, this one oasis of civilization, against the monsters of the Plague-ridden wilderness and the domestic threats of ambitious rebellion?

She struggled to put the attendants’ whispered instructions, which she only half-understood, into practice. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, envisioning the air inside her lungs as two balls of energy, one blue, one red. Slowly, she imagined herself pushing the balls of energy into her belly, where they merged into one white-hot sphere. Stoking it, feeding it, fanning it aflame, she willed it to grow, to suffuse her chest cavity and limbs, to fill her body with a holy flame. She imagined the energy burning away her old self, awakening each cell, routing new vessels through marrow and muscle, reconstructing her body into a new form, her new self—

—crying out in ecstasy and terror, she felt it. She felt the Revelation wine come to life inside her, rebuilding her like the flooding Arlos River reshaping its banks every spring. The wine was discovering her true nature, bringing it to the surface much like the captured image gradually emerged on the light-painter’s copper plate in the mercury fumes. She felt her bones crack and fuse, her muscles reattaching to the new skeleton, her organs rearranging themselves to suit the new space…. The physical sensation was neither pleasure nor pain, but something akin to and beyond both. She lost herself to it, completely absorbed by the intensity of the transformation.

At length, consciousness returned. Once again, she could command her limbs, and instantly she felt the difference. It was like putting on thick furs and boots for the first time in winter, when everything felt awkward and unwieldy. She would have to get used to her new body before she could move with grace and control, before she could shift back and forth between her human and Revealed forms with ease.

Not yet daring to move, she waited, expecting exclamations of admiration at her new shape.

Deafening silence.

Gingerly, she opened her eyes.

She couldn’t comprehend how she had been transported to this unrecognizable landscape. Gigantic statues loomed around her like the towering columns of the Temple of Wisdom, colossal human figures with expressions of shock suspended far above her. They were so big that they reminded her of the ancient ruins of skyscrapers in Roanflare, mute witnesses of a bygone age.

“Where am I?” she wondered, dazed.

Then, the massive statues began to move, their voices thunderous in her ears. She winced, shocked by how sensitive her ears had suddenly become. The words were hard to parse, impossible to make sense of. Gazing helplessly above, she suddenly recognized the face of the attendant who had opened the door for her—

“A useless Revelation!” the attendant roared, his gargantuan face twisted into a look of disgust. “A waste of time!”

“This is what happens when you dig through trash and pick among weeds.” Another voice. A clap of thunder.

“Standards! Don’t they care about standards in the prefectures?”

Instinctively, she bolted forward just as a massive foot, attached to a leg as thick as the trunk of a hundred-year-old tree, slammed down into the space she had occupied but a moment earlier.

She found herself in front of a bright wall, and a fur-clad face stared back at her with terrified eyes and a twitching nose. She crouched down and saw the figure in the wall crouch down likewise on furry paws.

Realization dawned.

She felt and saw her long, floppy ears rest against her shoulders in disappointment. A high-pitched whimper emerged from her throat, and she licked the split upper lip with her tongue as she watched the creature in the mirror, no more than a foot in length and clad in ash-grey fur, repeat the motion.

Horror and shame overwhelmed her—

—the stalks of aruk shot up and thickened around her as she once again experienced that mix of pain and pleasure, of terror and ecstasy.

A thousand sharp odors, unnoticed in her human form, assaulted her nose—fresh droppings from voles and deer, the rotting vegetation of late fall, the intoxicating fragrance of a clump of mushrooms. Her ears, fine like nets dragged through the Arlos River by fisherfolk on smooth sculls, caught every noise and vibration in the dusk air. Her eyes, now located on the sides of her head, provided her with a nearly omnidirectional view of her surroundings, sharp and distinct in the half-light that she preferred.

More clangs of metal grinding against metal. Another defiant scream from the crimson mare.

Ava-Rabbit hopped forward, luxuriating in the sense of freedom provided by her strong hind legs. Now that she had shrunk, the field of dense aruk was no longer a pathless, resistant medium that had to be force through, but a forest of swaying trees with wide-open paths everywhere she looked.

On, on, she ran, growing more used to her other body with each hop. As she immersed herself in this new mode of existence, the shame of having been Revealed to be prey rather than predator, of being an ordinary, unremarkable rabbit instead of a supersize ox, tiger, wolf, or drake, sloughed away, much like her discarded human clothing.

Upon returning from Roanflare, disgraced, she had kept what she had seen in the Chamber of Mirrors from her disappointed family, telling them only that she had failed to be Revealed. But time and again, when alone, she had delighted in taking on her rabbit form under the glow of the moon, hopping, exploring, sniffing the night air for unfamiliar scents. It was another way to be, to experience a reality that belonged only to her.

She was conflicted. She didn’t know how to reconcile her human nature with her rabbit nature.

But such anxieties had no place here and now. For the first time, she needed to accomplish a specific task in this form; she needed to do rather than wallow.

She skidded to a stop as the aruk stalks parted, and she came face-to-face with the gigantic mare.

As Ava gazed sympathetically upon the crippled horse, the glow in the equine eyes dimmed. The mare snorted in resignation—what was the use of compassion from a rabbit, dwarfed by even one of the horse’s dinner-plate-size hooves? Impatiently, the mare shook her head, telling Ava to get away before the mechanical predators descended upon them both.

“Hold still,” she whispered to the mare. Satisfaction warmed her heart as she saw the surprise in the mare’s eyes. “Lie down and stop kicking. It will be hard for them to see you in this red light.”

As the mare gaped in astonishment, Ava bounded away into the thick aruk, heading straight for the Longlegs.

There! A metal leg pistoned into sight, crushing the aruk like a meteor slamming into a copse. A second one followed. The metal columns shone with the dull solidity of unshakable strength, forces of corrupted nature.

What could she do? Ava pondered the sight, full of doubt.

She was a runner, not a fighter. She lacked the size, weight, and strength to stop or even slow the steel spiders; she had no dagger-like teeth or steel-rending claws to menace the crew. What good was a ball of fur against the mightiest war machine of the Archon?

The earth quaked as more metal legs slammed into the ground and then held still. The spinning saw-toothed mandibles seemed to hesitate. The crimson mare had followed Ava’s advice, and the spiders’ crews had lost—at least for the moment—their prey.

Hope rekindled in Ava’s heart. She gritted her teeth and bounded toward the towering legs. Landing next to two of the thick columns so that she was in the blind spot of the crew in the cockpit—though she doubted they would have considered her a threat even if they had seen her—she bit into the aruk stalks around the pistoned legs.

She worked quickly. The stalks tasted bitter, much like the tea made from the weed’s roots. Wielding her incisors like chisels, she hacked away at the grass-trees with abandon.

One stalk fell; another; a third. She was a miniature lumberjack, racing against time to cut down the tough, fibrous trunks.

The metal spider legs remained still. The turrets whirred and spun above her as the crew searched for the bloodred equine form that had somehow faded into the dense aruk, dyed crimson by the setting sun like a field of embers. Tentatively, the spiders shot a few bolts randomly into the thicket, hoping to rouse their injured prey.

Ava knew that she didn’t have a lot of time. Without breaking to rest her sore jaws, she began to hop back and forth, dancing among the felled stalks of aruk like a frenzied beaver.

One over, two across; one over, two across… Tirelessly Ava leaped and hopped, keeping her ears slicked back, clutching her front paws tightly around the fibrous strands. It was the same pattern that she used to weave her gloves out of strips of mined plastic, the motion so familiar that she fell into a trance.

Her ears twitched at a sudden rustling. The mare, perhaps unable to stand the pain from her injured leg, had twitched in her hiding spot. The turret of the spider above Ava spun to lock on the sudden movement in the grass. There was a nigh-imperceptible shift in the whine of the diesel engine. Ava hopped away. She prayed to the Jade Rabbit in the moon that she had done enough.

The whine of the engine grew higher pitched. Pistons began to contract, joints began to flex, the legs would lift up and step forward in a coordinated dance—

Two of the legs, bound together by a woven web of aruk stalks, pulled against one another clumsily, and the spider stumbled. The pilot inside the spider, confused, nudged the control stick back and forth in an effort to disentangle the legs. But the grass strands, twisted and braided by Ava for strength, held.

The pilot, annoyed, grabbed the control stick and shoved it back and forth, increasing the power to the pistons as she did so. Suddenly, the woven strands tying the legs together snapped, and the straining spindly appendages, abruptly freed from the resistance, kicked out wildly, out of control.

The vehicle teetered, on the verge of losing its balance. Panicked, the pilot wrestled with the control stick and shoved it hard the other way. The pistons groaned as the spindly legs struggled futilely to right the body, but it was too late. The spider stumbled like a newborn foal that had lost its footing before falling to the ground with a mighty crash. The whirring metal saw blades bit into the earth, throwing up a blinding explosion of rocks and clods that fell back down like hailstones. The turret groaned as it came to a stop; smoke billowed from the seams. A moment later, three soldiers, hacking and choking, threw open the door at the top and climbed out.

The crew of the other spider, unable to see what had brought their comrades down, reacted by panicking in their turn. Thinking that they were under attack, the crew aimed their gun at the area immediately around the disabled spider and set their gun on rapid fire. Bolts thunked into the ground, adding to the confusion. As the crew of the fallen war machine scrambled behind their vehicle for shelter and screamed for the other crew to stop firing, Ava bolted out of harm’s way.

Finally, the crew of the still-functioning Longleg noticed the rabbit fleeing from the wrecked spider. The turret spun to track her, and a stream of bolts slammed into the ground, missing her by mere inches.

Left, right, zig, zag. By shifting her direction every second, Ava hung on to life by the thinnest of threads. She could feel herself slowing, her breath growing labored. Though she was fast, she was built for quick dashes, not sustained exertion. It was only a matter of time before the gunner caught up to her.

“They can’t see you if you stop moving!” Her ears caught the hoarse whisper on the wind.

Ava brought down the nictitating membranes over her eyes and dug her paws into the earth. She curled up to make herself as small as possible, forcing herself to disregard the instinct to bolt as one more bullet slammed into the ground next to her, covering her with thrown-up soil and broken stalks.

The relentless ack-ack-ack stopped. The voice had been right. Panic had caused her to forget her own advice. She was too small, and the twilight too dim. Without swaying stalks disturbed by her passage to give her position away, she was practically invisible.

The turret continued to revolve and clang as the gunner searched for his target. A cacophony of human voices filled the air, oblivious of her presence.

“What was that?”

“A vole, maybe?”

“Could be something worse. Could be one of the rotten!”

“No rotten would be that small. It was just some dumb animal. You were shooting at us! You could have—”

“You must be the clumsiest pilot in history! I’ve never even heard of anyone crashing a Longleg because of a vole. The captain is going to—”

“Forget about the vole. Where’s the fugitive?”

“She couldn’t have gotten far. Climb up here and we’ll go after her.”

Curses, laughter, the swish of a rope ladder being tossed down. The functioning Longleg was retrieving the stranded crew of its wrecked twin.

“Can you move?” Ava squeaked into the distance, knowing that the mare would hear her high-pitched squeals while the human crew couldn’t.

“No,” came the reply on the wind.

Ava pondered their situation. As soon as the crew united inside the spider, they’d return to the hunt. It was only a matter of time before the mare would be found.

Ava’s heart thudded painfully; she was terrified beyond measure. But she forced herself to creep slowly through the aruk in the direction of the spider, skirting past the stalks to leave them undisturbed. She had to try something, anything.

The massive killing machine loomed into view. Three human figures were climbing up a rope ladder dangling from the side cockpit. The spider was listing from their weight.

Tensing her long hind legs, she leaped, tracing a brief arc above the grass. As she landed, she raced straight ahead, aiming for the opening between the long, spindly legs.

“There! There!”

The gunner, who had been nervously scanning the gently swaying grass sea the whole time, squeezed the trigger without thinking. A stream of bullets spat out of the gun as he spun and tilted the turret, trying to keep the grey streak in sight.

“Stop shooting! You fool—”

But it was too late. The combination of the momentum of the spinning turret, the recoil, and the weight of the climbing figures was pushing the spider off its center of gravity.

Barked orders, curses, screams. The second spider teetered and toppled over, crashing to the ground with a bone-shattering din.

Ava raced through the thick aruk and returned to where she had left the injured mare.

Instead of the horse, she found a tall, slender woman with a thick mane of red curls lying on the ground. Her face, not unhandsome, was crisscrossed by streaks of red, perhaps scratches left by the thorns of the aruk, or perhaps spider veins resulting from overindulgence in alcohol. One of her legs was twisted in an unnatural manner.

Ava crouched down, exhausted. The woman held out a hand and laid it gently on Ava’s back. Ava’s rabbit body trembled, but she allowed the contact, locking eyes with the woman.

“Thank you,” the woman whispered. It was the same hoarse voice she had heard earlier. “I never thought I would be saved by someone… like you.”

“The gratitude might be a bit premature,” panted Ava. “I’ve only delayed the inevitable. Once they’ve recovered from their confusion, even without the Longlegs, six trained soldiers on foot will still make short work of you and me.”

The woman shifted her position and winced. “If it weren’t for this leg, they’d never catch us.” Then she threw a contemptuous look in the direction of the wrecks. “Six soldiers is nothing. In a fair fight, Crimson Mare would hold up just fine even if there were ten thousand of them.”

Recalling the awe-inducing splendor of the woman’s Revealed form, Ava knew that this was no mere idle boast.

“I’m not much good in a fight,” lamented Ava, “either in this form or as a human.”

The woman looked at her. “There’s no one I’d rather have by my side in a fight than you, Grey Rabbit.”

The words warmed Ava’s heart as the hand warmed Ava’s body. Ava turned her face away to keep the woman from seeing the tears welling in her eyes.

The crew from the two toppled spiders had finished bandaging one another and were now discussing how to hunt for the fugitive.

“Go, and save yourself,” said the woman. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay back my debt to you in this life.”

Ava shook her head. “I won’t abandon you.”

The woman smiled and stroked Ava’s long ears. Ava felt no condescension in the gesture, only admiration. “Show me what you look like. If we’re going to die together, I want to see your face first.”

“Why?”

“So I can find you in the Hall of Heroes in the beyond and invite you to come back and haunt our killers together.”

Ava laughed. Even knowing that she wouldn’t live much longer, a sensation long absent from her shame-filled life made her shiver with pleasure. It was the feeling of pride.

She transformed back into her human form, lying next to the woman. “My name is Ava Cide—though Grey Rabbit has a nice ring to it.”

“I’m Pinion Gates, of Rivereast Prefecture. It’s an honor to know you.”

They clasped hands, sat up, and turned together in the direction of the soldiers, ready to face their fate.

A gruff voice broke in. “When the two of you are done with this meeting of the mutual-admiration society, maybe we can discuss how to get out of here.”

With her dull human senses, Ava had not noticed the strong feline odor that suddenly permeated the air. As she watched in shock, a sleek and powerful leopard, fully ten feet in length, with a coat as black as coal, parted the thick stalks of aruk and padded toward them.

“Fey Swell!” exclaimed Ava. “What are you doing here? And when… where… how did you become Revealed?”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” said Fey arrogantly. “You called me a coward! If word got around that you went after the rotten to save your brother all by yourself while I cowered at home, how would I ever be able to hold up my head in front of my minions?”

Without giving the other two a chance to argue, she turned around and crouched down, offering her back. “Hop on!”

As Fey carried the two women on her back and loped through the aruk under the stars, the trio shared their life stories.

Pinion had once been a trawler on the shores of the Arlos River. One day, she caught a rare three-headed humpback pike. When she gutted it, she found a small glass vial inside, filled with a green spirit redolent of spices and herbs. As Pinion could never resist a good drink, she drained it in one gulp—and thereby became Revealed.

“Why didn’t you go to Roanflare to seek your fortune?” asked Ava. “Thousands would give up a limb or two to have your luck.”

Pinion laughed coldly. “The wandering storytellers tell us that the Commonwealth Palace is muddier and more turbulent than the Arlos River during the spring flood. Why would I want to give up my life of carefree drinking and courting to try to ride the currents of politics? No, I just wanted to be left alone.”

So she had disguised her talent and carried on. But one day, after an afternoon of beers and games, she saw an official trying to extort the life savings of another fishing family by imprisoning their son with made-up charges. Falling into an alcohol-fueled rage, she tied the official to a tree and whipped him until he howled to be spared. Extracting from him a promise to leave the family he was trying to extort alone, she let the man go.

But the humiliated official sought his vengeance. He hired desperadoes to murder the fishing family, then accused Pinion of being the murderer. Without any kind of investigation or trial, the governor of Rivereast arrested Pinion and declared that she would be executed in the morning. That night, Pinion transformed into Crimson Mare, kicked down the doors of her cell, maimed the guards, and escaped. Galloping through the streets of Rivereast, she found the murderous official and flattened him under her hooves. Since then, she had lived as a fugitive, always on the run.

“How could officials of the Archon act in such a lawless manner? And to think that the governor, a Revealed Lord, would be so foolish and callous!” exclaimed Ava, as she gently bounced up and down on Fey’s back. Fey Swell, in her form as Coal Leopard, seemed to see as well by starlight as by sunlight, and she moved with the natural grace of a hunter.

“The Archon is a feckless young woman with little interest in governing,” said Fey, her breathing slow and even, though she was carrying two grown women on her back. “She has surrounded herself not with counselors of wisdom and virtue, but with childhood playmates who fill her ears with flattery and their own coffers with treasure stolen from the commonwealth. Greed and ambition are the rule at court, and the only goal of every governor, general, official, and legate, Revealed or not, is selfish gain, not the good of the people.”

Ava was silent. What Fey was saying was well-known to all, but Ava had always tried to deny it—to accept that the Revealed Lords were not as perfect in virtue as they were glorious in their form was, to her, also to accept the death of an ideal. Because she could not be ranked among the Revealed, that very unattainability had made her romanticize them even more.

“So what about you?” Ava asked Fey. “How did you come to be Revealed?”

Fey had always liked to explore into the mists beyond the borders of Grema, for there was where the most interesting monsters would be found, and whose furs, antlers, horns, or scales would fetch the most on the black market. One time, while trading in Dripe Town, she was introduced to a woman in the employ of a legate of the Synedrion. The woman offered Fey a flask of Revelation wine in exchange for rare pangolin scales—which the legate believed could be used to brew a potion for virility and long-lasting youth.

“She just offered you some Revelation wine?” asked Ava in disbelief. “But… that is a crime!”

“To the powerful and ranked lords, the laws of the land are mere marks on sheets of toilet paper,” said Fey. “Like Pinion told you, there’s nothing the officials, Revealed or not, wouldn’t do if there’s personal gain. I figured that it was useless to count on the army to protect us from the bandits, and so I took the Revelation wine in order to be strong enough to protect myself.”

Ava was once again silent. She had been taught that to be recommended to be Revealed was the only path to discover the truth of one’s nature and to join the ranks of the nobility, but the reality was far different.

Things are changing indeed.

Ava, Fey, and Pinion, now back in their human forms, cautiously peeked out at the encampment in the mist-shrouded valley. They were now miles beyond the borders of Grema—even Fey had not hunted this far.

The place had apparently been the site of a town in the days before the Plague. A grid of streets could still be discerned among the vine-clad ruins of houses and buildings. Many of the ruins had been taken over by the rotten as living quarters or storage space for their loot, as evidenced by wisps of cooking smoke and figures milling about the ruins, carrying heavy chests or pushing laden carts. The overall effect was of looking down at a large warren, teeming with creatures driven solely by greed.

“How many do you think are down there?” asked Ava, awed by the sight.

“I’d say about eight hundred fighters at least,” said Fey. “And who knows how many of them are Revealed rats?”

Both Pinion and Fey had pledged to help Ava recover her little brother. Pinion’s leg was now mostly recovered. After several days’ journey, the sensitive nose of Fey had finally tracked Shaw here. It was obvious that Shaw couldn’t have made it so far on his own—most likely he had been taken captive by the rotten.

“I’m now thinking Ava was right,” muttered Fey. “Maybe we ought to try harder to convince the army to come.”

At Ava’s insistence, once they had found the rotten base, Pinion had raced back to Dripe Town to leave a message for the governor with the location—the speedy mare had made the round trip in a single day. Neither Pinion nor Fey thought there was even the smallest chance that Governor Kide would bother doing anything with the information.

Pinion chuckled. “Scared?” She glanced at Fey, a challenging smile on her spider-veined face. “I don’t have your teeth or claws, but I wouldn’t shrink from a fight.”

“Even the most powerful cat is no match if outnumbered twenty to one by rats,” retorted Fey, a shade of deep red coming into her dark cheeks. “Besides, if a fight does turn bad, I imagine some of us will be running away faster than others.”

“Who are you suggesting would be running away?” said Pinion in mock anger.

The two fighters had taken an instant liking to each other. They enjoyed sparring—both verbally and physically—whenever they got the chance.

“We’re not just going to just run in there and start fighting any rotten we encounter,” said Ava. “I don’t care how confident you are in your prowess—there’s no point in being reckless.”

The Orange Brothers, three young men from one of the islands in Massenwhal Bay, had been recommended for the Revelation in Roanflare a few years ago. But the wine had revealed them as man-size rats, a form usually associated with rebels or criminals. The Archon had imprisoned them, but they had bribed their way out and, it was said, stolen a supply of Revelation wine from the Archon’s store before they left.

For a while, they were content to lead small bands of bandits to prey on merchant caravans between the towns of Grema. But in the last year, their ranks had swelled to thousands, largely due to the drought in prefectures to the north. Rumor had it that they had acquired some kind of magic that made their fighters fearless and fight with the strength of ten each—a state they described as “rotten.” They raided villages and even small towns, and after they passed through, it was as though a plague of locusts had struck, leaving nothing but death and devastation.

“What do you have in mind then?” asked Pinion and Fey together.

Ava pondered the rotten base, her eyes roaming around. Eventually, they settled on a drainage ditch just outside the ruined town.

“This may be one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had,” grumbled Fey. “The stench is unbearable.”

“Just be glad that I didn’t ask you to come in your Revealed forms,” said Ava, her voice muffled through the cloth she wore over her nose and mouth. “With that sensitive nose, you may actually faint.”

“Try not to talk so much,” said Pinion. “The more you talk, the more air you have to breathe in.” She pulled her foot out of the slime with a loud squish. “And don’t think too hard about the nature of what we’re walking through,” she added in a mutter.

The thought of the waste-disposal needs of the hundreds of rotten living above her almost made Fey gag. At least that stopped her grumbling.

The three picked their way through the ankle-deep sewage in complete darkness, one hand each on the equally slimy wall.

“I cannot believe you went through here as Grey Rabbit earlier,” said Fey. “How did you not drown?”

“Rabbits are good with tunnels,” said Ava, and suppressed an involuntary shudder as memories of her earlier exploration of the sewers returned. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

Ava knew that every town was built atop an underground warren of sewers, through which the daring could get to any part of the town undetected. While Fey and Pinion had rested in the afternoon, she had hopped through the tunnel maze and explored every branch and fork until she had found the building where Shaw and other captives were kept.

“Here we are,” she said, coming to a stop. Above them, faint starlight spilled through the grille.

The three held still and listened. In the hours before dawn, there was no sound save the gentle whistle of a night breeze. This far from the cities of Grema, the rotten were not concerned with assaults from the army or militias.

One by one, the three climbed out of the sewer opening onto the side of a deserted road. Next to them was an imposing stone building two stories tall, and a pair of guards were napping on the ground next to the gate.

The trio circled to the back of the building, where it took Fey no time at all to bend the bars over a large window to create an opening for them to climb through. The large hall on the first floor was covered by sleeping mats and slumbering figures. Tiptoeing between the snoring bandits, Ava led the way to the stairs. The smaller rooms on the second floor were where the rotten kept the captives who were deemed useful enough to be recruited rather than slaughtered.

The second floor was lit by a night-glowing orb, no doubt taken from some wealthy estate raided by the rotten. Ava looked at the closed doors, trying to decide which one to investigate first. A metallic clang—almost immediately muffled—came from behind her.

She whipped around. By the cold light of the orb, she saw Fey right behind her, a guilty look on her face. She was holding a long steel spear and trying not to drag it on the ground.

“Sorry.”

“Where did you get that?” whispered Ava.

“I came after you in such a hurry that I forgot to bring my knife,” said Fey. “I need a weapon if we have to fight. I took this from one of the sleeping bandit captains as we passed by—it was calling out to me.”

“We’re not here to fight,” Ava said. “Just to get in, save Shaw, and get out.”

“I’m just following her example,” pleaded Fey. She leaned to the side to reveal Pinion, who was holding a long, crescent-shaped pole-sword.

“You are always telling us to take precautions,” said Pinion. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with stealing from bandits, is there?”

Ava shook her head and sighed. She turned back and led the way down the hall. Hopefully, all the prisoners would also be asleep, and they’d be able to find Shaw without waking anyone.

Very slowly and quietly, Ava pushed opened the first door.

Immediately the three fell to the floor and rolled away from the opening. Both Fey and Pinion took up defensive crouches, their weapons at the ready. Ava hid behind Fey, barely stifling a frightened yelp.

The room had been full of bandits standing at attention, their eyes wide-open.

Seconds passed in absolute silence save for the waves of snores coming from the floor below.

At length, Ava screwed up enough courage to steal a look into the room. “They’re not moving,” she whispered.

Three heads peeked around the doorjambs. The bandits, about thirty in number, stood in neat rows, their eyes open and staring forward, as still as statues.

“They’re definitely not wax figures,” said Fey, who extended a finger and poked at the foot of the nearest one. “See, the skin sinks in.” She strode in and waved her hand in front of the woman and, eliciting no response, made a face at her.

“This is too strange,” said Ava, the hairs on the back of her neck standing straight up.

“I don’t like this either,” said Pinion. “But there’s no time to solve the mystery. Do you see your brother in here?”

Ava and Fey shook their heads. Pulling the door shut, they went on to the next room.

The same eerie sight of bandits who seemed awake but didn’t respond greeted them in several rooms, while others were filled with foodstuffs, weapons, and machine parts. The whole place had the look of a storehouse, and even the standing bandits resembled objects more than human beings.

At last, they arrived at the last room at the end of the hall. Ava pushed open the door. Inside, the room had been partitioned into multiple holding cells with barred doors, with eight to ten bunks in each. In contrast to the other rooms, the people on the bunks really did seem to be asleep.

“Ava? Is that you?” a whisper came from the corner.

Ava was there in a few long strides. “Shaw! Are you all right?”

“You came after me,” muttered the young man, sounding incredulous. “Thank the gods you are here! I’m so sorry—”

“There’s no time for that,” said Ava gruffly, but tears of relief threatened to spill from her eyes. “Are you hurt? We’re going to get you out of here now.”

“It’s horrible, Ava. They don’t have the Revelation wine at all! They caught me just past the highway and brought me here. They make the captives drink a poison that robs them of their will, so they’re walking corpses, fearless and obedient.”

“That explains those statue-like bandits we saw,” said Fey.

“They try to recruit you first with promises of treasure and power,” said Shaw, sobbing, “because they say it’s better to have a willing fighter than a mere drudge. But knowing what they did to the villages they raided, I refused. They were going to force me to drink the poison in the morning if I kept on saying no.”

“We’ll talk more later,” said Ava. “Fey, come on.”

Fey strode up to the bars of the gate and tried to bend them. But the bars were too thick even for her powerful arms.

A cry from downstairs. “Hey, what happened to my spear?” Soon, angry and barely coherent voices, aroused from sleep, answered in denial. The owner of the missing weapon had apparently decided to make a fuss to discover the thief.

Fey cursed. “Just my luck to pick the one with a full bladder.”

“There’s no time for subtleties anymore,” said Pinion. Standing still, she closed her eyes. Ava and Fey scooted back to give her room. In a minute Pinion had transformed into Crimson Mare, almost too big for the small dimensions of the room. She turned around and kicked out hard with her powerful hind legs, and the gate of Shaw’s holding cell crashed down with a deafening clang, torn from the walls.

Shaw gazed upon the Revealed beast with terror and awe.

Loud peals from a brass bell reverberated through the building. Shouted orders. Thundering footsteps. General alarm had been raised. Other prisoners, now awakened by the noise, banged on the bars to their cells, begging to be released.

“We’ve got to go!” shouted Fey.

“We can’t just leave these people here,” said Ava, hesitating. “My brother was fortunate to have the three of us to save him, but who will save them?”

The door to the room banged open. Several of the rotten, deprived of their will by the poison, marched through with wooden spears.

“I’ll hold them off while you free the rest,” shouted Fey. She dashed to the door, the long steel spear leading the way. With a single lunge she threw four attackers out of the room.

Meanwhile, Crimson Mare made her way around the room, kicking down the bars of the holding cells. Ava and Shaw comforted the frightened captives, trying to keep them from panicking and adding to the confusion.

Fey stood in the doorway like a dam against an oncoming flood. Two, four, eight, sixteen—no matter how many rotten bandits came at her, they could not force her back even one step. Holding tightly to the pole, she used the tip of her spear to describe tight circles in the air, a spinning steel flower, the flickering tongue of a serpent, a barrier of will and strength beyond which none shall pass.

More shouting. Cries of alarm. The peals of the bell were being taken up by other bells around the town.

“These rotten drudges are unbelievable,” said Fey, her voice strained. “I’ve never seen anyone fight like this.”

The mindless drones, compelled by orders from a bandit commander crouched behind them, filled the narrow hall and pressed forward like a wall of flesh and blood. Heedless of the injuries from Fey’s spear, they fought without regard for loss of limb or life. As Fey, forced to draw blood, buried her spear in the chest of one of the drones, the man howled with pain and spurted blood from his mouth, but didn’t even take half a step back. His unblinking eyes showed neither terror nor understanding. As the other drones behind him pushed forward, they forced the spear point deeper into him, thrusting out his back only to plunge into the chest of the drone after him.

Fey’s face was a frozen rictus of disgust and fear. “This is an abomination!”

“What pitiable creatures,” said Ava. “They are also someone’s sister, brother, son, daughter. They fight not because they want to, but because their minds have already died. Even if the Orange Brothers were to die a thousand times, it wouldn’t be enough to bring justice.”

“I can’t hold them back much longer,” cried Fey. Her feet slid back on the floor, slick with the blood of the drones.

“We’ve freed all the captives,” shouted Ava. “Pinion, let’s go!”

Crimson Mare whinnied in response. In a single bound, she was next to the wall at the back of the room. She kicked out with her hind legs, the hooves raised like two massive jackhammers. Once, twice, thrice. The stones collapsed. Where the wall had been, there was a giant gaping hole whistling with the night breeze.

Crimson Mare cried triumphantly and leaped out. Ava, Fey, and the others followed.

The predawn fight was intense and bloody.

The bandits, driving wave after wave of mindless drones, tried to surround the escaping captives and cut off their escape.

In her Revealed form, Ava sniffed the air and listened for ambushes, trying to direct the frightened captives down roads that would lead them out of the bandit-infested town. Fey, Shaw, and she could have gotten out of the town easily on Pinion’s back—there was no way any of the bandits could have caught up to the fleet-footed mare. But Ava insisted that they not leave the rescued captives behind.

And so Fey and Pinion, as Crimson Mare and Coal Leopard, growled and whinnied, fighting back the pursuing bandits. Hoofs thundered through the air; claws and teeth flashed in the starlight. Bandit blood slicked the dirty streets, and howls of pain echoed from the stone ruins. The more numerous the bandits, the stouter the hearts of the warriors.

Ava, exhausted, bounded down another alley, the group of captives bunched closely behind her. But ahead, instead of freedom, she saw more bandits brandishing swords, spears, and even shock prods powered by electric batteries. A few of the bandit captains, giant Revealed rats, led the charge, their claws and teeth glinting even colder than the blue sparks from the shock prods.

Fey leaped over the captives like a black rainbow and landed in front of Ava. She crouched down and roared at the approaching bandits. The stunned bandits halted and stumbled back, overcome with terror.

Behind the captives, facing down the pursuing bandits at the other end of the alley, Pinion let out a loud scream of defiance, her hooves drumming against the ground, each a mini-earthquake.

The bandits began to press forward again, at first hesitantly, then with more confidence. The drones were compelled to do so, while bandits still with wills of their own were encouraged by their numbers. No matter how fierce and powerful Crimson Mare and Coal Leopard were, they were so vastly outnumbered that they had no hope to prevail.

In despair, Ava crouched down, knowing that their run was at an end.

Shaw crouched down next to her.

“I’m sorry, little brother,” said Ava. “I couldn’t save you, or Pinion, or Fey, or any of the others. Your sister is… a failure.”

“No.” Shaw extended a hand and touched the side of Ava’s trembling, tearstained face. “You are the best of sisters.”

Ava laughed bitterly. “I’m only a rabbit, good for nothing. Look at me. I tremble from exhaustion even after running less than half a mile. I cannot defeat even a child in a fight.”

“Yet Fey and Pinion follow you, and so would all of us,” said Shaw. “You may be small in stature and strength, but you have courage, wisdom, and compassion. You listen and amplify the voices in other hearts.”

“I wasn’t so good at listening to you. I didn’t understand what you really wanted,” said Ava.

Shaw shook his head. “Listen to me now, and believe. Your spirit soars like the flight of a drake. I thought I could try to redeem the family, but I didn’t understand that my family has already been blessed with the grandest of Revealed Lords.”

Ava looked up at her brother, and she realized that the way he looked at her was the same way he had looked at her seven years ago, when they had taken their sole family portrait.

“Thank you, little brother,” said Ava, her heart at peace. “Let’s make these bandits pay a dear price before we go. We’ll die like drakes, not rabbits—”

Even as she spoke these words, a long, loud trumpeting pierced the air like the rising sun that had just leaped above the horizon. All the combatants stopped and glanced up.

There, in the east, emerging through the dissipating mist, was a great flying beast snow white in color: two oversize wings, sharp eagle-like claws, a long serpentine neck ending in an arrow-shaped head. Streaks of mottled blue ran down the sides of the beast like an ancient military uniform.

“I’ll be damned,” said Fey Swell, her voice full of wonder. “The White Drake.”

Ava’s ears, ever so sensitive, swung to the east. She could hear a faint rumbling, the steps of a thousand soldiers and the grinding of a thousand thousand gears.

“The Archon’s army is here!” she shouted. “The Archon’s army is here!”

The great drake winged his way closer and dived toward the town. Panicked shouts from the bandits warred with joyous cries from the freed captives. And then, the rotten bandits scattered, like a castle of sand crumbling before an irresistible tide.

Ava, Pinion, and Fey stood in a clump. Ava swallowed nervously.

Before them, sitting on a chair elevated on four other chairs, was General Don Excel, also known as the White Drake, Governor of Wooster, the most powerful warlord in the land. Already a physically imposing man, his power and height were only enhanced by the temporary throne. His sharp eyes, merciless, calculating, the orbs of an apex predator, gazed down upon the three women patiently.

“It was nothing, Your Excellency,” said Ava. “We only did our duties as citizens of Grema, loyal subjects of the Archon.”

The governor had thanked them for bringing him intelligence of the bandit nest. As it turned out, Governor Kide was one of Governor Excel’s supporters. Knowing that his patron had been seeking a military victory to enhance his standing among the Lords of Grema and to add to his political capital, Kide had passed on the location of the rotten nest to Excel, who had decided to launch an all-out assault on the bandits.

The fight—or more accurately, the massacre—had been swift. As the bandits scattered across the ruined town, pursued by the fiery breath of the White Drake, they found their escape routes sealed off by striding Longlegs raining steel bolts. Overhead, crews in Dragonflies, death-dealing machines with two whirring rotors, picked the survivors off with well-oiled crossbows. Finally, foot soldiers in plastic armor strode through the ruined town, killing any surviving bandits with electric shockers. Revealed, human, or mindless, none of the rotten escaped, even if they had fallen to their knees and begged to be allowed to surrender.

A pile of human heads, along with coiled tails from the Revealed rats, sat next to the general like some gruesome trophy. Ava’s stomach turned at the sight.

The general said nothing, still waiting patiently.

“We’re most honored by your praise and the opportunity you offer, Lord Excel.” Ava swallowed, forced herself to meet that predatory gaze, and continued her speech. “But my sisters and I are simple folk, unused to the demands of serving a grand lord.”

She had chosen to introduce Pinion and Fey as her sisters in order to conceal the fact that Pinion was a fugitive. Given the merciless way in which the rotten had been massacred, she didn’t want to expose Pinion to any danger. Shifting her gaze between the pile of bloody body parts and the general perched atop the throne, she wasn’t sure which frightened her more.

“You are a clever girl, Ava Cide, and you’ve demonstrated considerable potential in securing me this victory.” Lord Excel’s voice was a deep rumble, seductive and slow. “Do not boast through false modesty. Do you consider the titles I’ve offered you too low? Consider them only an opening bid. I could offer you more, much more if you serve me loyally.”

“You misunderstand us, Your Excellency,” said Ava. “We are not bargaining. We fought not for ambition, but to save our loved ones. We crave no glory, only the chance to live in peace.”

“Peace?” The general laughed, but there was no mirth, only calculation, in the noise. “The aruk in the fields may wish to stand still, but the wind will not leave them so. When Grema is besieged by monsters from without and Roanflare is filled with the ambitious from within, how can anyone live in peace unless they shelter with and serve a powerful lord? A sharp sword requires a skilled wielder, and a talented horse would die in obscurity without a noble rider.”

“Feral horses are only fit for the wilderness, not the gridlocked streets of Roanflare,” said Pinion Gates.

“Rusty blades are only fit to hack at weeds and firewood, not dangling from the jade belt of a great lord,” said Fey Swell.

Tension thickened the air, and General Excel narrowed his eyes.

“What my sisters mean is that we wish to live beholden only to our own dreams,” said Ava, her voice gentler than Pinion’s or Fey’s, but no less determined. “If you would force us to work for you against our will, then you would be no different from the rotten, who use poison to enslave those they cannot convince.”

For a brief moment, General Excel’s frosty look seemed to chill the air, and the three women tensed. But then his face broke into a warm smile. “Well said, Ava Cide. Well said. Instead of pressing more where I’m not welcome, I wish you three a pleasant journey.”

Ava sighed with relief. The three bowed deeply to General Excel and turned to leave. Ava beckoned at Shaw, standing among the captives huddled to the side.

“We’re going home,” said Ava, smiling.

“Send them on their way,” intoned the general from behind. “All of them.”

In one swift motion, soldiers standing next to the captives unsheathed their swords and plunged them into the captives. Most didn’t even have a chance to cry out before they gurgled their last breath.

Ava was too shocked to even move.

Shaw collapsed to the ground. As though awakening from a dream, Ava rushed to him and fell to her knees. Cradling the dying boy in her arms, she frantically pressed her hands against the wound in his chest, struggling to stanch the blood.

“Oh gods! Please, please!”

Shaw looked up at her, struggling to smile. “It’s all right, big sister. I should have listened to you and stayed in the midden mines.” His voice was so faint that Ava had to lean her ear against his trembling lips. “You were right. We’re like weeds to these people.”

At length, Ava gently lay the unmoving body of her brother on the ground. She turned to the general. “Why?”

“A feral horse that cannot be ridden by me should be ridden by no one,” said the general, his tone as placid as the blood pooling at Ava’s feet. “And a rusty blade that refuses to obey my hand must not be taken up by another. Besides, we still lack a few heads to make an even thousand enemies slain for my triumphal report to the Archon. To make up the number, I have to borrow the heads from the captives, and… the heads of you and your sisters.”

“How can you do this?” Ava screamed at him. “You are a servant of the Archon, of the people of Grema!”

“The Archon trembles in my presence these days and dares not command me,” said the general. “Indeed, upon returning to Roanflare, I think I will ask for an even better title from her. Lord Protector of Grema has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Perhaps the other governors and generals will finally understand the new reality.”

The soldiers pressed forward, their swords raised. Ava, her eyes locked with the general’s, ran at him, her hands raised like claws—

A powerful pair of arms grabbed her and lifted her off the ground. Then she felt herself settling down upon the back of a powerful red-maned back, rocking up and down as the general receded in her view. She was riding Crimson Mare, held in place by Fey Swell, running out of the reach of the general’s servants.

Fey’s deep, pained voice sounded in her ears. “Not now! The rabbit always waits for her chance!”

In the shoulder-high aruk, three women covered in blood knelt to face the east, the direction of the rising sun and of Roanflare.

“Though we weren’t born on the same day of the same month of the same year,” they spoke as one, “though we weren’t born to the same parents under the same roof with the same names, we’ve found one another. United by grief, linked by the desire for justice, we call one another sister. As the heavens and the earth are our witnesses, we didn’t want to start this fight, but we’ll be sure to end it. We’ll never stop until we’ve brought peace back to Grema or die together on the same day of the same month of the same year.”

The aruk stalks swayed in the wind. The three sisters dried their tears.

Through the sea of grass, the crimson-red mare galloped alongside the prowling coal-black leopard. But in front of both, leaping like a flying fish skimming over the waves, was a grey rabbit. She would listen, she would hide, she would scheme, she would even fight—but she would never turn away from the essence of compassion.

“Lords of Grema,” whispered Ava to herself, “there’s a new member in your ranks.”