The hunger didn't feel like an empty stomach. It felt like a hollowed-out tooth, a sharp, singing void in the center of Kaelen's skull that demanded to be filled with something other than air.
She crouched in the shadow of a dripping steam-pipe, her boots slick with the oily runoff of the Tanyard District. Above her, the Obolus sky was a bruised purple, choked by the Arcane Dreg—the shimmering, toxic smog that bled from the Guild factories. It tasted of copper and ozone. It tasted like headache.
Just a nibble, Kae. Just a sip, whispered the Echo of the Banker.
Shut up, Kae thought, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes.
He was afraid when he died. I like the fear. Let's find fear, the Echo of the Whore giggled from the back of her cerebellum.
Kae ignored them both. They were just leftovers—psychic residue from the last two minds she'd sunk. They were fading ghosts in the library of her head, growing quieter as her hunger grew louder. She needed a fresh memory. A fresh life to dissolve into her own, just for an hour, just to stop the shaking in her hands.
She watched the alley entrance. A man stumbled out of the Grey Lark Tavern, swaying. He wasn't a Guild-master or a priest; just a dockworker with knuckles scarred from brawling and a soul heavy with cheap gin. Perfect. He wouldn't be missed for an hour.
Kae stood up. Her movement was liquid, practiced. She adjusted the high collar of her leather coat to hide the brands on her neck—the scars that marked her as a Mindsink, a unregistered psychic parasite.
She stepped into the amber pool of light cast by a flickering gas lamp. "Lost?" she asked. Her voice was raspy, unused for days.
The man blinked, his eyes unfocused. "Eh? Who're you?"
"Someone who can make you forget the cold," Kae said. It wasn't a lie. It was the truest thing she could offer.
He grinned, a wet, lopsided expression. He reached for her, clumsy fingers grasping at her arm. "Right. Come here then, love."
He touched her. That was the mistake.
Skin to skin.
Kae didn't pull away. She stepped in. She let her barriers drop, the mental walls of her fortress crumbling with a sigh of relief. She latched onto his psyche like a drowning woman grabbing a rope.
The world dissolved.
She was no longer in the alley. She was on the docks, the smell of salt and rotting fish overwhelming. She was angry. She was hitting someone—a rival foreman—feeling the satisfying crunch of cartilage under her fist. The rush of adrenaline. The pride. The guilt hidden beneath the pride.
Kae drank it all. She sucked the memory of the fight out of him, draining the emotion, the sensation, the context. She swallowed the adrenaline like fine wine.
In the alley, the man gasped, his knees buckling. His eyes rolled back, the light draining from them as he slumped against the brick wall. He wouldn't remember the fight on the docks anymore. He wouldn't remember the pride or the guilt. He would wake up with a headache and a hole in his past where that hour used to be.
Kae released him, staggering back. The hunger in her skull quieted, replaced by the warm, buzzing intoxication of someone else's life.
Violent, the Banker whispered in her head. Uncouth.
Alive, Kae countered. He feels alive.
She leaned against the damp wall, closing her eyes to savor the stolen adrenaline. For a moment, she wasn't Kaelen the starving Mindsink. She was a strong man who had won a fight. She felt powerful.
Then came the click of a cane on cobblestones.
Kae's eyes snapped open. The high lasted only seconds before reality crashed back in. At the mouth of the alley, silhouetted against the churning Dreg-fog, stood three figures. They wore long coats of waxed black leather and silver masks that covered the lower half of their faces.
Luminaries. The Church's hounds.
The central figure stepped forward. He didn't wear a mask, revealing a face made of sharp angles and pale scars. Inquisitor Valerius. Kae knew him by reputation—every "rat" in the city did. He didn't arrest unregistered mages; he incinerated them.
"Kaelen Vance," Valerius said. His voice was calm, terrifyingly polite. "You are a difficult woman to track."
Kae looked for an exit. The alley was a dead end. The unconscious dockworker groaned at her feet.
"I didn't kill him," Kae said, her voice tight. "He's just sleeping. He'll wake up. He won't even know what he lost."
"I'm not here for your petty thefts of the soul," Valerius said, stepping over a puddle of iridescent sludge. "I have a job. And unfortunately, it requires a scavenger."
Kae let out a sharp, incredulous laugh. "The Luminaries don't hire Mindsinks. You burn us."
"Tonight is an exception," Valerius said. He gestured to the two masked guards behind him. They lowered their hands, which had been hovering near the flintlock pistols at their belts. "A murder has occurred. A… complicated one."
"I'm not a bloodhound," Kae spat. "Find a Necromancer."
"The victim isn't talking to Necromancers," Valerius said. He stopped two feet from her. Up close, she could smell him—soap, antiseptic, and cold iron. "The victim is Guild-Master Thorn. And his head is still full of secrets. We need you to retrieve the last one."
Kae froze. Thorn was one of the Architects of the city. To touch his mind, even dead, was treason. It was suicide.
"If I refuse?"
"Then I light a match," Valerius said softly, "and we purify this alley right now."
The carriage ride was silent, tense as a drawn bowstring. They ascended from the Tanyard slums into the Gilded Ring, where the gaslights burned clean white and the buildings were polished obsidian and brass.
They stopped outside Thorn's manor. The gates were open, guarded by nervous-looking police.
Valerius led her inside. The air in the foyer was thick with the scent of lavender and… something underneath. Something metallic and rotten.
"Don't touch anything," Valerius commanded.
They entered the study.
Kae had seen death before. She lived in the gutters of Obolus; death was a neighbor. But she had never seen this.
Guild-Master Thorn was suspended from the ceiling. Chains, seemingly generated from the Dreg itself, held him in a posture of grotesque exaltation—arms wide, head thrown back. His chest had been opened, the ribs cracked outward like wings.
But there was no blood on the floor.
The blood had been collected, every drop, and used to paint a single, spiraling symbol on the far wall. It looked like a labyrinth that had no center. Just looking at it made Kae's freshly fed mind ache.
"The Laughing God," the Whore whispered inside Kae's head, sounding terrified. Don't look, girl. Don't look.
"He has been dead for two hours," Valerius said, his clinical tone at odds with the horror in front of them. "The brain is cooling. The memories are degrading into static. If you are going to dive, you dive now."
Kae stepped forward, her boots crunching on expensive glass shards. She looked at Thorn's face. His eyes were wide open, frozen in an expression that wasn't fear.
It was ecstasy.
"This… this isn't a normal kill," Kae murmured. "Whoever did this… they enjoyed it. They took their time."
"The memory, Vance," Valerius snapped. "Who did it?"
Kae approached the hanging corpse. Her hands were trembling, and not from hunger this time. To sink the dead was dangerous. The dead didn't give up memories willingly; they dragged you down with them into the dark.
She reached up and placed her palms on Thorn's cold, waxy temples.
"Pull me out if I start to scream," she told Valerius.
"If you scream," Valerius replied, "I'll shoot you."
"Comforting."
Kae closed her eyes. She pushed past her own fear, past the whispers of the Banker and the Whore, and opened the door to the dead man's mind.
Cold. It was so cold.
Static hissed around her, a blizzard of white noise. The memory was decaying. She waded through the fog, looking for the moment of death. Usually, it was a bright, burning star of trauma.
She found it.
She was suddenly sitting in the chair. She was Thorn. She felt the pain—sharp, blinding agony as the ribs were cracked. But underneath the pain, there was a drug. A paralytic. She couldn't move. She could only watch.
A figure stood before her. They were blurred, indistinct, wearing a mask made of shattered mirrors. The figure held a scalpel in one hand and a conductor's baton in the other.
Kae tried to look at the figure's face. She pushed the memory, trying to sharpen the focus. "Who are you?" she threw the thought at the memory-ghost.
Usually, memories were recordings. Passive. Unchanging.
But the figure in the mirror mask stopped moving. It turned its head. It looked directly at the camera of the memory. It looked directly at Kae.
It saw her.
Kae's heart hammered against her ribs. This was impossible. You couldn't interact with a memory.
"Hello, little thief," the figure said. The voice didn't sound like it was coming from the memory. It sounded like it was coming from inside her own ear.
Kae tried to pull back, to sever the connection. She couldn't. Her mental hands were glued to the corpse.
"You're hungry, aren't you?" the figure asked, stepping closer. The mirror mask reflected nothing but the swirling Dreg. "You eat the past because you're afraid of the future. Let me give you a gift. A little appetizer."
The figure raised a gloved hand and pressed a thumb against Thorn's forehead—against Kae's forehead.
A surge of black, oily energy rushed through the connection. It wasn't a memory. It was a sentient, living thought. A complex cipher of madness and geometry.
"Room for one more?" the figure laughed. It was a wet, gurgling sound.
Kae screamed.
She was ripped backward.
She hit the floor of the study hard, breath exploding from her lungs. She scrambled away from the hanging corpse, scrabbling backward on her hands and heels until her back hit the leg of a desk. She heaved, vomiting bile onto the expensive rug.
"Vance!" Valerius was over her in an instant, gripping her shoulder. "What did you see? Did you see a face?"
Kae gasped, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The room was spinning. The symbol on the wall seemed to be pulsing.
She clutched her head. It felt crowded. The Banker was silent. The Whore was silent. They were cowering in the dark corners of her mind.
Because something else was standing in the center of the room inside her skull.
"Vance!" Valerius shook her. "The killer. Who was it?"
Kae looked up at the Inquisitor. Her vision blurred. She tried to speak, to tell him about the mirror mask, about the trap.
But when she opened her mouth, it wasn't her voice that spoke.
"The performance," a silky, amused voice whispered from the back of her mind, echoing through her own thoughts, "has only just begun."
Kae stared at Valerius, her eyes wide with a terror deeper than death.
"He's not gone," she whispered, clutching her chest.
Valerius frowned. "Who?"
"The killer," Kae choked out. She tapped her own temple, her fingers digging into her skin until it bled. "He's not in the wind, Inquisitor. He's in here."
And deep in the grey matter of her mind, the new voice began to laugh.