The smog clung to memories like a jealous lover. Claire often wondered if the Monarch's factories pumped the stuff straight into her nightmares. Her earliest memory wasn't of her mother's face, but of the stench—burnt coal, rusted iron, and the tang of blood from the butcher shop below their apartment. The Voss family lived in Unit 307 of the Larkspur District, a crumbling honeycomb of loyalists and liars. Her mother's fern, a defiant splash of green in the gray, was the only thing the ISB didn't incinerate when they came. They just shattered its pot. Priorities, Claire thought bitterly. Even monsters appreciate good foliage.
Her parents hadn't been rebels. Not the dramatic, manifesto-scrawling kind. Arlen Voss was a middling ISB analyst with a talent for spreadsheets and a face as memorable as a paperclip. Lira tracked black-market purifiers, her reports as dry as the rations they allocated. They were cogs—good cogs—until the Monarch's Census Edict deemed them "genetically suboptimal." Translation: No baby for you.
But Claire had a habit of existing anyway.
Lira's ankle was a masterclass in bureaucratic loopholes. Arlen had practiced the "accident" for weeks, swinging a chisel at pig ankles in their bathtub. "Think of it as tax evasion," he'd joked, pale as milk. The punchline? Lira's scream, muffled by a leather belt, as he shattered her bone. The ISB bought it. Mostly.
For six months, Claire lived in a ventilation shaft, her cradle a hollowed-out oven panel. Her lullabies were the static hum of ISB radios downstairs. They named her Claire—after the fern, though she suspected it was really for the clairety of their desperation.
---
The purge came on a Tuesday.
Claire remembered the boots. Always the boots. ISB agents wore polished black ones that squeaked like rats being stepped on. Arlen stuffed her into a laundry chute, his wedding ring snagging her blanket. "Don't look." She looked.
Her mother fought like a feral cat, clawing at the agent's eyes as he dragged her by her hair. Arlen swung a fire poker—thwonk—and for a glorious second, Claire thought they'd win. Then the gunshot. A single pop, like a cork. Her father folded sideways, his head hitting the fern's soil. Fertilizer, Claire thought hysterically. He'd hate that. The smell of gunpowder clung to her for years. Not the acrid stink of the factories, but something sweeter, metallic—a scent that curled in her sinuses like a promise. Later, she'd flinch at the pop of a grease fire in the diner, her fingers spasming around a spatula. Priorities, she'd mock herself, scraping charred eggs onto a plate. Survival was a series of small betrayals: forgetting the pitch of her mother's laugh, the way her father hummed off-key while scrubbing blood from his cuffs. But the smell? The smell stayed.
The Resistance found her three days later, half-feral under a dumpster, gnawing on a rat carcass. "You're a lucky little ghost," rasped the scavenger woman who dug her out. "Most kids taste worse."
They named her Kestrel. Not out of poetry—because she stole a man's lunch and he called her a "goddamn scavenger bird."
---
The Junkyard Quarter wasn't a home. It was an open wound, its shanties oozing rust that crusted under fingernails and stained knees scabbed from crawling through debris. Children played knucklebones with syringe needles, their laughter sharp as shattered glass. At night, the wind moaned through corroded pipes, a dirge for the damned. The Resistance shuffled Claire between bolt-holes: a coffin-sized crawl space beneath a brothel, a sewage pipe that flooded when it rained, once the hollowed-out carcass of a dead crane. She learned to read by firelight, squinting at waterlogged propaganda pamphlets. Literacy: A Citizen's Duty! (The Resistance had scribbled over it: Literacy: A Great Way to Learn the ISB Lies!)
Elias found her when she was nine, after she'd melted a patrol drone with stolen turpentine. He was a Red Scholar, though he looked more like a deranged librarian—tweed coat patched with electrical tape, hair a bird's nest of gray. "Fire's flashy," he said, toeing the drone's smoldering corpse. "But subtlety keeps you alive. Here." He tossed her a screwdriver. "Next time, jam this in its charging port. It'll fry its circuits and give it existential dread." Elias' screwdriver was ice-cold, its handle notched with decades of grudges. When Claire jammed it into the drone's charging port, the machine shrieked—a sound like nails dragged across slate—before its circuits spat sparks that stung her palms like wasp bites. He didn't smile. His eyes, though—a muddy brown that sharpened to flint when he talked sabotage—glinted with something like pride. Or maybe it was just the reflection of the drone's dying lights.
He didn't teach her. He haunted her. His lessons were riddles wrapped in shrapnel. Once, he'd let her starve for three days, then tossed her a locked briefcase. "Dinner's inside." She'd picked the lock with a hairpin, only to find a single protein bar and a note: Hunger sharpens the mind. Regret dulls it. She'd hated him then—not for the hunger, but for the way he'd smirked when she found the second lock, hidden beneath the lining. Always a second lock, he'd say. Especially when you think you've won. Left schematics in her hideouts: How to Disable a Camera with Chewing Gum. 101 Uses for Rat Bones. Once, a doodle of the Monarch with donkey ears. Claire kept that one.
---
By twelve, she could pick a lock, forge ration stamps, and recite the ISB loyalty oath backward.
"Why?" she'd asked Elias after he'd made her dismantle a live grenade. ("Call it hands-on history.")
He'd shrugged. "The system's a cockroach. You don't kill it with grand gestures. You outlive it. Out-piss it."
The lessons were merciless. She once spent a week trapped in a mock ISB interrogation, Elias playing the agent. "You're terrible at this," she'd spat after he'd "waterboarded" her with cold tea. "I've had worse baths."
"Exactly," he'd said. "Now you'll know the real thing's overrated."
The dumps taught her the rest. Like the day she tried to save a soot-faced urchin from a purge squad. The boy's name was Pip. Or maybe Pick. She'd shoved him behind a trash heap, hissed stay, but the ISB hound smelled fear like perfume. Claire watched, frozen, as it dragged him screaming under a van.
Elias found her puking afterward. "Sentiment's a luxury," he said, tossing her a rag. "The system taxes luxuries."
"Go f—"
"Ah, ah!" He wagged a finger. "Save the creativity for your enemies."
Her first spell? An accident.
The veil left a residue—a film on her tongue like licking a battery. Elias called it "the toll," but never explained who collected it. Her dreams frayed afterward: shadowy figures murmuring in static, a pressure behind her eyes like thumbs pressing into wet clay. She'd wake clutching the soup-can fern, its leaves quivering as if in a breeze. There were no breezes in the Quarter. Just the stale breath of the damned.
Claire's mind went blank, then burned—a white-hot wire searing through her skull. Shadows slithered up the walls like liquid pitch, their edges fraying into smoke that stank of charred hair. The toddler's cries vanished, swallowed by a silence so thick it pressed against her eardrums. When the agents kicked in the door, they found empty hooks and silence.
"Tier 2 veil. Unconscious," Elias muttered afterward. "Showoff."
"You're just jealous."
"Damn right. Took me years to pull that off."
---
Now, at twenty-three, Claire ran a diner, a revolution, and a perpetual headache.
The Resistance was less a movement and more a support group for the terminally stubborn. They jury-rigged explosives from toasters, passed intel in lamb chop orders, and once derailed a purge by bribing a Seraphim's chauffeur with caramelized onions.They were a mosaic of misfits held together by spite and duct tape. Roza, the ex-ISB sniper, taught kids to count with bullet casings. Jax, who'd lost his voice to interrogation serums, communicated in a flurry of knife-taps against pipes—three taps for danger, two for all-clear, one for I miss the sky. They traded rations for rusted screws, bartered intel in limericks, and once, memorized an entire patrol schedule by tattooing it on a stray dog. The ISB shot the dog. They got another. ("Turns out holy warriors have a sweet tooth," Roza had crowed.)
Leadership was a slow bleed. She memorized allergies (Roza: shellfish, pollen, authority), mediated fights over ration splits, and lied to wide-eyed recruits—"No, the ISB doesn't have dragon-mechs. Yet." The diner's grill hissed louder than any assassin, its grease fires a distraction from the real work: stitching wounds with piano wire, smuggling codes in gravy stains. Sometimes, she envied the fern. Roots didn't ache. Roots didn't dream.
But the system? The system was a hydra. Cut off a head, two grew back, plus a memo about productivity quotas.
Claire traced the fern-shaped scar on her palm, its ridges raised like braille. The shard had bitten deep that day, her mother's blood mingling with the terracotta dust—a final, furious act of defiance. Now, the scar throbbed in the damp cold, a phantom ache that whispered, "Eyes forward.". she thought, watching the diner's neon sign flicker.
The ISB took her parents. The dumps took her childhood. The system took her patience.
But they'd never take her spite.
And spite, Claire had learned, made excellent syrup for poison.