CHAPTER ONE

  Dead, Then Dying

  The boy ran like he knew what was behind him.

  He did. Ian had been running from it in one form or another for three years, ever since the hunters had come to his family’s cottage on a morning that smelled like rain and cut grass and taken him away from everything he knew. Three years of rules and restrictions and the particular exhaustion of being watched. Three years of keeping his magic small and quiet and contained in the ways they had taught him, in the ways that kept him from drawing attention, in the ways that were slowly making him something less than what he had been.

  He was done being less.

  The ruins rose around him as he ran — old stone worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain, walls that had belonged to someone else’s civilization, archways reaching for a sky that was going purple at the edges with the coming dark. He didn’t know whose ruins they were. Nobody did, really. Old, the elders said when he was small. Old enough that the knowing of them had been lost. He’d taken comfort in that once, the idea of things that predated memory. Tonight he just needed them to be between him and the hunters long enough to matter.

  His breath came ragged. The wound in his side — a hunter’s blade, not deep enough to kill immediately but deep enough to make everything harder — pulled with every stride. He’d bandaged it with torn cloth and stubborn optimism but the cloth was wet now and the optimism was running out.

  Arcanis. He turned the word over in his mind the way he’d been turning it for six months, ever since Petra had whispered it to him in the corridor of the holding house with her eyes going everywhere at once and her voice barely above breathing. A kingdom, she’d said. Far east, past the mountains. Mages live there free. Nobody hunts them. Nobody takes them.

  He hadn’t asked how she knew. You didn’t ask how people knew things in a Covenant holding house. You just held the knowing close and let it keep you warm.

  The sound of boots on stone behind him. Two sets, maybe three. The hunters moved with the particular confidence of people who had done this before and expected to do it again. He’d heard that confidence his whole life. It made him run faster even when faster felt impossible.

  He turned a corner into a wider section of the ruins, something that might have been a courtyard once, and his foot caught on broken stone and he went down hard on hands and knees, tearing skin, and the world tilted and kept tilting and he understood with sudden terrible clarity that he was not getting up from this one. The wound in his side had decided it was done being patient.

  He rolled onto his back and looked up at the darkening sky and thought about his father’s hands. The way they looked after a day in the fields, calloused and capable, the kind of hands that knew how to fix things. He thought about the sound those hands had made hitting the ground when the hunter knocked him down, the wet solid sound of it, and how Ian had not been able to look away.

  He thought about Lena’s face, too small to understand, and Pip’s face, just old enough to start understanding, and Calla’s face, which understood everything and couldn’t do anything, which was somehow the worst of all of them.

  He thought about Maren. His mother’s voice. He thought he could still hear it sometimes if he was very quiet.

  "I’m sorry," he said to nobody. To all of them. "I almost made it."

  The hunters came around the corner at a walk. No need to run anymore.

  Ian closed his eyes.

  And then something happened that had never happened to anyone in a very long time.

  ? ? ?

  The first thing Marcus Chen registered was pain.

  Not the abstract awareness of pain, the kind you catalogue from a professional distance as a data point requiring attention. Actual pain. The specific, insistent, deeply personal variety that announces itself in the nerve endings with complete disregard for whatever else you might have been planning to think about.

  His side. Something wrong with his side.

  He opened his eyes and the sky above him was the wrong color. Not the flat institutional white of a hospital ceiling, which had been the last thing he’d seen on Earth — or the last thing he remembered seeing, anyway, before the pressure in his chest became absolute and everything became very quiet and then became nothing at all. This sky was purple and orange at the edges, a sunset happening without his permission, and the stone under his back was cold and uneven and definitely not a hospital floor.

  Right, he thought, with the particular clarity that sometimes comes in moments of extreme crisis. I died.

  He sat with that for approximately one second before his analyst brain noted several additional data points that required immediate processing. The pain in his side was not the pain of a heart attack. The stone under his back was actual stone. The sky above him was actually a sky. There were voices nearby, getting closer, and they sounded purposeful and not particularly concerned.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He was, it appeared, alive.

  He was also, it appeared, about to not be.

  The arithmetic of this situation resolved itself in his mind with uncomfortable speed. He was lying on his back in what appeared to be ancient ruins at dusk. He had a significant wound in his side that was actively bleeding through inadequate bandaging. He could hear at least two people approaching who sounded like they had found what they were looking for. His hands when he looked at them were the wrong hands — younger, calloused differently, belonging to someone else’s body in a way that he could feel the moment he tried to flex them, a slight lag between intention and response like running software on hardware it wasn’t designed for.

  Conclusion: he had died and woken up in someone else’s dying body.

  He gave himself exactly three seconds to process the existential implications of this and then set them aside entirely because they were not the most pressing problem.

  The most pressing problem was the blood.

  He pressed his hands against his side — wrong hands, his mind noted again, filing it — and tried to remember everything he knew about field medicine, which was not very much. Think tank analysts did not typically require field medicine. He was reviewing the deficiency in his skill set when a voice spoke directly into the center of his skull.

  "Interesting," said the voice. "The first compatible soul in several thousand years, and it arrives already half dead. I want you to know that this is not what I designed the compatibility criteria to select for."

  Marcus went very still.

  The voice was female. Dry in the way that expensive wine is dry — a quality that suggested depth rather than simply absence. It had the particular cadence of someone who was accustomed to being the most informed person in any given room and had long since stopped finding this interesting.

  "Who," Marcus said carefully, "are you."

  "The more immediately relevant question is what you are doing dying in the ruins where I have been waiting for several millennia. I would appreciate it if you didn’t. I have not waited this long to bond with a compatible soul only to watch it expire in the first ten minutes."

  The hunters’ boots on stone. Closer.

  "I don’t," Marcus said, "know how to not be dying. This body came pre-wounded."

  "I’m aware. Ian’s injury is survivable if addressed within the next three to four minutes. After that the blood loss becomes a more serious consideration. I am attempting to minimize it through the bond but I require your cooperation."

  "You require my—" He stopped. The voices outside the courtyard had stopped moving. That was worse than them moving. "There are hunters outside."

  "Yes. Two of them. They believe they have found what they were looking for. They are currently debating whether to confirm the kill or simply report it and return to their station. They are leaning toward the latter, which works in your favor, as you are currently in no condition to survive a direct encounter."

  "How do you know what they’re debating?"

  "I have been dormant in these ruins for a very long time. I have become familiar with the acoustics."

  The boots moved again. Away this time.

  Marcus let out a breath that cost him significantly in terms of the wound situation. He lay still and listened to the footsteps recede and thought about the voice in his head, which was apparently real and apparently attached to something that had been waiting in these ruins for several thousand years and apparently knew things about hunter patrol logic and acoustic properties and blood loss timelines.

  "Are you," he said, "a hallucination caused by blood loss."

  "I’m going to need you to have a higher opinion of your own mental state than that. No. I am not a hallucination. I am the intelligence of the Magistrate’s Sphere, which has bonded with you through a process that I will explain once you are in less immediate danger of dying. For now I need you to do something very specific and I need you to do it without arguing."

  "I’m not going to argue."

  "You seem like someone who argues."

  "I’m bleeding."

  "Yes. That’s rather my point. Listen carefully."

  Her instructions were precise. Breathe in a specific pattern. Relax the muscles around the wound rather than tensing against the pain, which is counterintuitive but correct. She talked him through it with the patience of someone who had no patience whatsoever but had decided to set that aside temporarily for practical reasons. He followed the instructions because he was bleeding and she seemed to know things and arguing was, in fact, not the priority.

  The bleeding slowed. Not stopped — but slowed.

  "What," Marcus said, when he trusted himself to speak without the words coming out sideways, "is a Magistrate’s Sphere."

  "An artifact of considerable age and more considerable significance. It has merged with your body — not something you can reverse or transfer, before you ask. You are bonded to me and I to you, and neither of us had a vote in the matter because the sphere itself made the decision based on compatibility criteria that I established a very long time ago."

  A pause. Then, with an edge to it that suggested this was not a comfortable thing to say:

  "I want to be clear that I find the absence of consent on my end as frustrating as you presumably find it on yours. The sphere’s judgment supersedes both our preferences. We are, as a result, stuck with each other."

  Marcus lay on cold stone in the fading light of a world he did not recognize, in a body that did not belong to him, bonded to a voice that had been waiting thousands of years and was apparently annoyed about the specific terms of what it had been waiting for, and thought: this is a lot of information to process when you have recently died.

  "Okay," he said.

  "That’s it? Okay?"

  "I died about fifteen minutes ago. I’m rationing my existential crises. What do I need to do to not die again in the next hour."

  Another pause. Shorter this time.

  "\...You need to get out of these ruins before the hunters reconsider their decision to leave. And you need to find shelter before the temperature drops, because blood loss and cold make poor companions. And you need water."

  "Right." He started the careful process of getting to his feet, which involved several moments of serious reconsideration. "And you’re going to help with this."

  "I am going to provide information and instruction. You are going to do the physical work, as I don’t have a body. Which I find I would like to register as an additional complaint about the present arrangement."

  "Registered," Marcus said. He made it to his feet. The world tilted and settled. "Tell me which direction."

  "East. There is a stream approximately four hundred meters out, which will solve the immediate water problem and give us time to discuss the rest."

  "The rest."

  "The rather significant amount of rest, yes. We have a great deal to cover and you are currently occupying the body of a fifteen-year-old fugitive mage in a world that would very much like him to be dead."

  Marcus looked up at the sky, which was properly dark now, stars beginning to show through the purple, and thought about how twelve hours ago he had been writing a policy brief on agricultural subsidy distributions in three developing nations and worrying about a deadline.

  "East," he said, and started walking.