Page 7 of The First Scar
We didn't need to speak. We moved. Fast, ducking back through the carts and tethered horses the way we'd come. Serenya caught my sleeve, pulling me past a knot of onlookers too stunned to move.
"Did you hear them?" she hissed as we cleared the last wagon. "They'll call it corruption before they dare blame the Veil's fracture."
I ground my teeth and gripped the handle of one of my daggers. They always did. Blame whatever suited their agenda. Cowards dress fear as doctrine.
I glanced back—just once—toward the horizon.
The temperature plummeted and the wind snapped my hair back.
And I saw it.
The Nullatheon. A wall of mist, towering, pale, and alive. It didn't drift like weather. It pulsed—folding in and out, like lungs woven from fog. And for one suspended second, I couldn't tell if I was breathing it in—or if it was breathing me in. Beautiful. The worst things always were.
My Mark bloomed in answer. Aware. Straining, it recognized what was out there and wanted to answer.
I tore my gaze away. Not now. A boy's life was hanging on how fast I could run.
But the feeling didn't fade. And somewhere beneath the panic and the mission and the pounding of my boots on stone—I knew.
The Veil wasn't just watching. It was waiting.
And it already knew my name.
Chapter 3
AMARIA
We were two alleys away when the voice split the air—amplified and final.
"By decree of the Crown, the Sorting now commences in the Square of Names."
Serenya's head snapped toward me. "Go! The square—I'll check their shelter!"
We knew what that meant. If the boy was already at the Square of Names—before we masked the mark—he was as goodas claimed. I pushed past crates, carts, and the stunned faces of people turning toward the voice. Smoke from the evening cook-fires hung low and thick: charred fat and temple sage and the sour bite of open drains. My heart surged ahead of my steps. Please, please not yet.
The square opened like a wound in the city's chest. People packed the perimeter. Mothers gripping children by the wrists, merchants abandoning their stalls mid-transaction, priests in white filing toward the dais like it was holy ground and not a butcher's block. The air stank of myrrh with an edge underneath. Fear. The kind that makes a crowd go still and obedient. Banners hung limp from the temple columns—Crown-blue and gold-threaded. Above them, terraces ringed the square like theater boxes for an audience that never had to bleed for the show. A show where children were displayed like cuts of meat waiting to be graded. And at the center of it all, raised three steps above the square on polished marble veined with gold and shadow, the Sorting platform waited. Two Enforcers flanked it, spears upright, faces blank as gravestones.
I pushed through the crowd, surveying faces, movement, anything that might be him. Please, let Serenya find him hidden and safe. I found the dais looming ahead, a raised platform just visible through the press of bodies, where the children would be waiting. A shoulder slammed mine—solid and unforgiving. I staggered a step. Caught myself. Snarled. Let them bruise. I had worse to outrun.
Sixteen children stood bare-chested on the platform. Torchlight licked across their shoulders, their collarbones, the soulmarks already surfacing on skin too young to hold them. Some had their arms crossed over their chests. Others stood with fists at their sides, chins up, feet bare on marble that had to be cold by now. Brave little fools. I'd been one of those once.
I scanned the crowd looking for him, then a sound broke through the throng—a child's cry—and everything in me locked.
"One of them—there!"
The shout snapped like a whip—and I saw her.
A girl, no older than seven, dirt-smudged and wide-eyed.
She trembled near the foot of a temple stair, tunic hem snagged on broken tile, eyes darting like a trapped animal.
She stumbled as the enforcers closed in, their movements slow, deliberate. Predators pretending to keep the peace.
"She's hiding a shadowmark," one of them sneered, smirking and confident.
A lie. And my Mark felt it before I did.
My Luminar mark—the Unravel—detected and untangled falsehood.
