Chapter 1: Porter

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Porter

Elias Pierce started every morning the same way: two buses, one elevator that smelled like bleach, and a plastic chair beside bed fourteen on the fourth floor of Merridan General.

The chair had a crack down the middle of the seat. He’d learned to sit on the left side of it.

Mira was already awake, propped against two flat pillows with a tablet balanced on her knees and the drip line from her mana stabilizer taped to the back of her hand. Morning light through the blinds caught the faint blue lines on her forearms, thin and branching, like frost creeping up a window. Gate sickness scars. They’d climbed another centimeter since last week.

He noticed. He always noticed.

He opened his mouth to ask how she’d slept.

"Did you cut your own hair again?" Mira said.

He closed his mouth.

"You did." She set the tablet down to look at him properly, which was worse. "Eli. It’s lopsided. The left side is living a completely different life from the right side."

"It’s a style."

"It’s a cry for help." She squinted. "Did you use the kitchen scissors?"

"They’re good scissors."

"They’re for chicken."

He dropped into the chair, left side, and handed her the paper bag he’d been guarding since the bus. Two custard buns from Halden’s on Fifth, still warm. Her whole face changed. She was sixteen and sharp-edged and trying very hard not to look like a kid who’d been waiting for this, and failing completely.

"So," he said, while she was busy chewing. "How’d you sleep?"

"Fine."

"Mira."

"Fine-ish." She shrugged one shoulder. "The stabilizer beeped at three. Nurse Ruiz fixed it. I dreamed about the ocean." Her eyes flicked over him. "You look tired."

"I’m always tired. It’s my brand."

"Your brand is bad haircuts." But her gaze had landed on his jacket, the worn one with reinforced shoulders, the one he only wore to gates. Her voice dropped. "You’re working today."

"Just a raid."

"What rank?"

He considered lying. Mira read him better than any Appraiser skill ever could. "C."

"You’re E."

"Porters stay at the back. I carry bags and count loot. The hunters do the stabbing." He spread his hands. "Very glamorous."

She didn’t smile. Ten years ago, the Crimson Break had torn open over their neighborhood and taken their parents in a single afternoon. Mira had been six. She’d lain under a collapsed ceiling for four hours, breathing raw mana, and it had been poisoning her slowly ever since. She didn’t remember much of that day, but she remembered enough to hate gates.

"Come back with all your fingers," she said finally.

"That’s the plan."

"And get a real haircut. With the money."

"That is not the plan."

She threw a napkin at him. He caught it without looking, she rolled her eyes, and for one moment everything felt almost normal.

On his way out, the billing officer at the front desk, a tired man named Mr. Halloran who always looked sorry, slid a folded envelope across the counter without meeting his eyes. Elias didn’t need to open it. Pink paper meant overdue, and this was the third pink envelope this month.

He tucked it into his jacket next to the other two and walked out into the cold.

The only job on the Merridan hunter board that paid enough to dent a pink envelope was a C-rank raid with the Ironfang Guild.

Elias had read the posting three times on the bus. Porter wanted. C-rank gate, rail yard district. Standard share plus hazard bonus. Ironfang wasn’t a good guild. Their porters didn’t last, and nobody talked about why. But it paid on time, and on time was what he could afford.

The rail yard sat on the eastern edge of the city, where the old freight lines ran out into weeds. The gate hung above the tracks between two rusted boxcars: a vertical tear in the air, three meters tall, rippling like oil on water. Association tape circled it in a wide yellow ring, and past the tape, Ironfang’s hunters were suiting up beside a line of black SUVs, loud and careless.

Dex was waiting at the tape with two coffees.

Dexter "Dex" Moreau was lanky, perpetually late, and constitutionally incapable of taking anything seriously before nine a.m. He held out a cup. "Black, no sugar. Like your soul."

"That’s not even a joke."

"It’s a warm-up joke. I’m stretching." Dex bumped his shoulder. "Okay, real one. What do you call a porter who survives a C-rank raid?"

"What."

"Overqualified."

Elias took the coffee. "That’s worse."

"It’s honest." Dex sipped his own and winced. "Ironfang, man. You sure about this?"

"You’re here."

"I’m here because my landlord has started saying my name in a very specific tone." Dex nodded toward the SUVs, where a broad man with a shaved head was barking orders. Garrick Holt, Ironfang’s guild master. Even from here, Elias could see a faint grey sheen on his knuckles, Stoneform half-active the way other men cracked their knuckles. "Stay behind me. If anything gets weird, I’m running, and you’re running faster."

"Deal."

Then Elias did what he always did before a gate. He watched.

Six hunters. Two tanks, one with a new shield still stiff at the strap. A healer checking her phone. An archer, Vance, Garrick’s second, restringing his bow with hands too steady for someone who cared how this went. Nobody had walked the gate’s edge to check for fraying. Nobody had asked the porters what they were carrying.

He filed it all away. Noticing things was free, and it was the only skill he had that the Association had never bothered to measure.

"Do the thing," he said.

Dex sighed, handed Elias his coffee to hold, and lifted one hand toward the gate. His Appraiser skill was F-grade on a good day. It read names, ranks, and sometimes prices, and it gave him headaches if he pushed it. A faint lens of light flickered in front of his eyes.

"Gate designation..." He squinted. "The Drowned Cathedral. C-rank. Water-type, undead-aligned. Boss grade: C." He blinked, and the lens faded. "Stable. Boring. Textbook."

Elias studied the tear in the air. The surface rippled slow and even. For a second, he thought he heard a bell somewhere deep inside it, faint and far away, like it was ringing underwater.

"Nothing weird?"

"Nothing weird." Dex took his coffee back. "Relax. It’s a church. What’s the worst that can happen in a church?"

"Pierce! Moreau!" Garrick’s voice cracked across the rail yard. "Packs on. We go in five."

Elias shouldered the porter’s pack, forty kilos of empty loot bags and spare potions, and followed the hunters to the edge of the gate. The air there was cold and wet, and it smelled like old stone.

Nothing about it looked wrong.

Not yet.