No one seems to be following me. That doesn’t reassure me about the guard on the roof, but I have quick reflexes.

The alley twists away from the street and ends abruptly at the edge of an expanse of waist-high yellow grass about fifty yards wide. Beyond the field of grass, the Wall looms. Immense steel ribs joined by tons of concrete as thick as twelve men standing shoulder to shoulder wrap around the city, holding the Wasteland at bay and the citizens beneath the Commander’s thumb. Every one hundred twenty yards, a turret rises. Guards assigned to the Wall spend most of their shift in their assigned turrets. But three times a day—at dawn, at noon, and at sunset—they turn off the motion detectors and leave their turret to do a detailed sweep of their section of the Wall.

I reach the edge of the field just as the first drops of rain slam into the ground, the sun sinks below the Wall, and the low hum of the motion detector stutters into silence. The guards in the turret closest to me step into the steady downpour, swords in hand, NightSeer masks in place, and walk north with measured precision.

Rachel rises from the center of the field. The panic I’ve kept at bay flares to life as she stays low to the ground and races across the field in spurts—sprint, drop, roll into a crouch, and repeat. Beneath the curtain of rain, aided by the swiftly falling darkness, she’s nothing but a shadow.

If I can see her, so can the guard above me. In seconds, I hear the soft whoosh of a body plummeting to the ground and brace myself. He lands slightly to the right of me, all of his attention on Rachel. I leap forward, slam my fist into the side of his head, and drag his unconscious body back under the lip of the roof. A quick scan of the area confirms that no other guards are pursuing Rachel. If I can get to Rachel before she’s seen by the turret guards, maybe I can avert disaster completely. I take off after her at a dead run.

She reaches the Wall before the faint glow of the guards’ NightSeer masks has completely disappeared in the distance. I estimate just under ten minutes before the guards return. Just under ten minutes to capture her, subdue her inevitable argument, and get her back into the relative safety of the city before she puts both of us on the Commander’s execution list.

The driving sheets of rain make it hard to be certain, but I’m pretty sure she just dropped her skirt to the ground and started up the ladder in a pair of skintight pants. Fury overtakes my panic and fuels me. If a guard sees her dressed like that, he won’t hesitate to take what he thinks she’s freely offering, and then I’ll have to kill him.

She makes it to the top before I reach the base. The rain pounds into me, but I barely feel it. The rungs are slippery, so I wrap my hands in my leather cloak, grasp the metal, and climb as quickly as I can.

Best Case Scenario: She’s foolishly setting herself up for a covert trip down the side of the Wall and into the Wasteland, and I get the unenviable task of standing in her way, but she hasn’t been noticed by any guards.

Worst Case Scenario 1: The turret guards return early, and I talk our way out of it.

Worst Case Scenario 2: The Brute Squad finds her, and we fight our way out.

Worst Case Scenario 3: Commander Chase discovers her act of treason, tries to punish her for it, and I draw my weapon against the man who rules all of Baalboden with an iron fist of terror.

I climb swiftly and pray I’m not too late.

CHAPTER NINE

RACHEL

I scramble over the lip of the Wall and race into the rounded stone turret a few yards to my left. Rain pounds the walkway as I grab the magnetic handgrips I’d snatched from Logan’s supply of inventions before leaving with him for Sylph’s house. The metal circles feel cold against my skin, and I hurriedly strap them onto my palms. I don’t have long before the guards return.

I wave my hand cautiously in front of the iron torch bracket beside the doorway, and the handgrip slams my arm to the bracket. It takes most of my strength to yank myself free. These will easily adhere to the steel ribbing on the outside of the Wall and hold my weight as I descend. It pains me to admit it, but Logan is a genius.

Not that I’d ever tell him that.

I drag my cloak closer to my body. The rain is falling in opaque sheets. I’ll be lucky if I can see two yards in front of me. Which means the guards won’t be able to see me either.

But it also means I can’t see what waits for me in the Wasteland. I’m not too worried about highwaymen or wild animals. What I can’t kill, I can elude. Dad trained me well. Facing the Cursed One, however, is another matter.

We don’t know how long the beast lurked in its lair beneath the surface, but we know what set it loose. A rich businessman searching for a new source of renewable fuel bought up land all over the globe, hired crews, and on one fateful day, had every crew drill down through a layer of metamorphic rock deep beneath the earth’s crust. Instead of finding a new source of fuel, the crews woke immense, fire-breathing beasts who tracked their prey by sound. Driven wild by the noise of the civilizations living above them, or perhaps driven by nothing more than a feral instinct to destroy anything that might be able to destroy them, the beasts surfaced and laid waste to miles of densely populated areas each time they broke through the ground.

In the ensuing chaos, every military branch positioned their most experienced squadrons in densely populated areas with the plan to set traps for the beasts. It was a suicide mission. No one could predict when or where the creatures would surface, and any troops not perfectly in position were immediately destroyed. Several squadrons got lucky and blew a beast or two apart before they themselves were killed, but the military was shattered before they could kill them all.