The wind found him before Mary did.
It came up over the edge of the roof carrying the smell of smoke and cold metal and something underneath both — that faint ozone taste the shield left in the air whenever it pulsed. Glen stood at the railing with his hands in his pockets and let it push against him. Below, Johannesburg breathed. Not the way it used to breathe, full of traffic noise and street vendors and the particular chaos of a city that never quite decided if it was asleep. This was a wounded kind of breathing. Generators. The distant clang of a repair crew on the third ring. Someone, somewhere, hammering sheet metal back into something that might pass for a wall.
The shield hung above all of it like a second sky. Deep indigo. It pulsed once while he watched, a slow wave rolling out from the center toward the edges, and the System threw a notification into the corner of his vision that he’d already learned to ignore.
[ Shield Integrity: 97% | Classification: UNDETERMINED ]
Yeah. He knew.
"You’re going to wear a groove in that railing."
Glen didn’t turn. "That the technical term for it?"
Mary crossed the roof behind him, her steps quiet enough that he wouldn’t have heard them if the wind hadn’t carried the faint click of her cane. She’d started using one three days ago. Not because her legs were failing — Glen had checked, twice, with senses he didn’t fully understand yet — but because she said it made people expect less of her. A woman with a cane was a woman with a story people didn’t ask about. Mary had always played the world like that. Eighteen years of hiding had made her very, very good at the small deceptions.
She stopped beside him. The wind caught the grey streak in her hair and pulled it across her face. She didn’t bother fixing it.
"Look at it," she said.
Glen looked. The city spread below them in a ragged half-circle, the parts that had survived the First Wave pressed close together like animals sharing warmth. Beyond the shield’s edge, the wild had already started creeping in. He could see it from here — the wrong color of the grass, the way the trees on the northern ridge bent at angles that didn’t match the wind. The System hadn’t just broken the world. It was rewriting it, one meter at a time, and the shield was the only reason it hadn’t finished the job here.
"I built that," Glen said. Quiet. Not bragging. Still not quite believing it.
"You built that." Mary’s voice had no surprise in it. "And now something worse than a General is coming, and you’re standing on a roof pretending you don’t know what I’m about to tell you."
He let out a breath. "You always do this."
"Do what?"
"Skip to the end. Most people build up to bad news. You just hand it over like it’s groceries."
Mary smiled. It was the kind of smile that lived mostly in her eyes — tired, warm, and carrying about thirty tons of weight underneath. "I’ve had eighteen years of practice at not wasting time. Sit down."
He sat. She settled onto the low bench beside him, the cane across her knees, and for a moment neither of them said anything. The shield pulsed again. The city kept breathing.
"There’s a place," Mary said. "Three days north, through the wild. Past the ridge, past the dead forest, past the line where the System’s corruption gets thick enough to choke on. A tower."
Glen turned his head. "A tower."
"The Black Tower." She said it the way you’d say the name of someone who’d died. Carefully. With the shape of the word already familiar in her mouth. "It’s old, Glen. Older than the System. Older than the Hunters. The people who built it — they were like us. Before. They could touch the raw stuff of the world. Mana, we call it now. They called it something else. And they built the Tower to prove themselves. To test what they were."
"And then?"
"And then the System came. And the ones who built it became the Lost."
That landed. Glen felt it settle into his chest like a stone dropping into water. The Lost. The original inhabitants, the ones the System had broken and reforged and twisted into something that wanted to erase every Hunter who’d ever drawn breath. The thing he’d fought in the First Wave. The thing whose General he’d devoured.
"The same people," he said.
"The same blood, if blood is the right word. The Tower survived. The System couldn’t classify it either, as I understand it. Too old. Too strange. It just... sat there. And the wild grew around it like it was part of the landscape."
Glen leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The black ring on his finger was warm — it had been warm since the First Wave, a low steady heat like a coal that never quite went out. Mary had made it. He’d known that. He’d never known why.
"Tell me about the floors," he said.
Mary was quiet for a long time. Long enough that he almost thought she wouldn’t. Then she set the cane aside and held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread, like she was reading something written on the air.
"Five floors. Each one tests something different. The Tower doesn’t care how strong you are. It cares what you are." She curled her fingers in, one at a time. "The first floor is combat. Simple in concept. Brutal in practice. Constructs — things the Tower makes from its own material, stone and shadow and old will — come at you in waves. They don’t tire. They don’t feel pain. They learn. Every time you beat one, the next one is faster, or heavier, or it has a trick the last one didn’t. You keep going until the Tower decides you’ve proven you can fight."
"How does it decide?"
"It stops. The floor goes quiet. The door opens. And you feel it — this... recognition. Like something very old has looked at you and found you adequate." She said it dryly. "It’s not a compliment. It’s a minimum."
Glen almost laughed. "A minimum. Great. What’s the second floor?"
"Willpower." Her hands closed fully. "There’s nothing to fight on the second floor. You walk a corridor. The corridor gets inside your head. It finds the thing you’re most afraid of and makes you live in it. Not a vision. Not a memory. A simulation so complete you can’t tell it isn’t real. You stay in it until you choose to walk through it. Some people never walk through it. They just... stay. The Tower lets them. It doesn’t judge. It waits."
The wind picked up. Glen felt the hair on his arms rise, and it wasn’t from the cold.
"What did you see?" he asked.
Mary’s expression didn’t change. But something behind it did — a flicker, fast and buried, like a light going out behind a curtain. "That’s not a question I’ll answer, Glen. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. The second floor is private. Whatever you face there stays there. The Tower keeps it. That’s the mercy of it."
He wanted to push. He didn’t. The set of her jaw told him everything about what that floor had cost her.
"Third floor," he said instead.
"Mana control. The Tower gives you raw energy — more than you can safely hold — and makes you shape it. The constructs on this floor don’t attack. They watch. And they break apart if your control slips even slightly. You have to hold a shape for as long as the Tower decides. Could be minutes. Could be hours." She looked at him sidelong. "For you, this one will be strange. Your mana isn’t normal. The void in you — the thing that merged with you — it doesn’t follow the usual channels. The Tower may not know what to do with you."
"Good," Glen said. "I like confusing ancient structures."
Mary didn’t smile. "The fourth floor is mental fortitude. Think of it as the second floor’s crueler sibling. The second floor shows you what you fear. The fourth floor shows you what you want. Everything you’ve ever wanted, laid out in front of you, real enough to touch. Comfort. Power. People you’ve lost. A life without the System. The Tower offers it to you, and you have to refuse it. Not once. Again and again. It doesn’t stop offering. You have to keep saying no until it believes you mean it."
"That sounds awful."
"It is awful. It’s also the floor that breaks the most people. Fear you can push through. Desire you have to starve. Most people can’t starve it. They sit down in the dream and the Tower closes over them and they’re never seen again."
Glen stared at the shield above them. The indigo light pulsed slow and steady, a heartbeat that wasn’t his.
"And the fifth floor," he said.
Mary was quiet for so long this time that he did turn to look at her. She was staring at her hands.
"The fifth floor tests identity," she said. "It asks you one question. Who are you? Not your name. Not your rank. Not your skills. It strips everything away — every class, every ability, every system notification, every piece of power you’ve ever earned — and it asks you what’s left. If you can answer, truly answer, from the thing underneath all of it, the Tower recognizes you. If you can’t..." She trailed off. "If you can’t, you don’t leave. You become part of it. Another construct. Another stone shape waiting on the first floor for the next person to come through."
Glen’s mouth was dry. "What happened to you on the fifth floor, Mom?"
She looked at him then. Full on, no deflection, no tired smile. Her eyes were dark and deep and very old. "I answered. The Tower gave me what I asked for. I asked for the strength to hide. To suppress my core so far down that no System, no Hunter, no court, nothing could find me. To become invisible. To keep you safe."
"And it took something."
"It always takes something. The Tower gives and the Tower takes. That’s the deal. The same blood that built it built the rules." She picked up the cane again, turned it in her hands. "It took my ability to fight. Not my strength — I’m still strong. But the will to raise my hand against another living thing. The part of me that was Morrigan. The Shadow Weaver. The Tower reached in and cut it out, clean as a surgeon. I can defend. I can shield. I can’t strike. I haven’t been able to strike in eighteen years, Glen. Not once."
Eighteen years. The number sat between them. Eighteen years of F-Rank. Eighteen years of the world thinking Mary was a tired woman with a cane and a dead husband and a son the System couldn’t classify. Eighteen years of a lie so complete it had become her life.
"Could you get it back?" Glen asked.
"I don’t know. I’ve never tried. The Tower doesn’t give refunds." She paused. "And I’m not sure I want it back. The Shadow Weaver was... not a kind woman, Glen. Your father loved her anyway. But she frightened people. Including me."
Glen thought about that. He thought about the mother he knew — patient, careful, the woman who’d taught him to read the System notifications like they were street signs, who’d explained mana flow with diagrams scratched into kitchen tile. And he thought about Morrigan, the Shadow Weaver, a name that sounded like a door slamming shut.
"You’re sending me into this," he said. Not an accusation. Just holding the fact up to the light.
"I’m telling you it exists. The decision is yours." She reached over and took his hand — the one with the ring — and turned it so the black band caught the shield’s light. "This is the key. I made it from material I brought out of the Tower. Pre-System. The constructs inside respond to it. Without the ring, the Tower treats you as an intruder and the first floor kills you. With the ring, it treats you as a candidate. It’s not a free pass. The tests are the tests. But you’ll be allowed to take them."
Glen looked at the ring. It had been warm against his skin for weeks. Now he understood why. It knew where it came from.
"How do you know it’ll still work? You walked the Tower eighteen years ago."
"The Tower doesn’t change. That’s the point. The world ends and reforms and the System rewrites everything, and the Tower sits in the wild and waits. It’ll be exactly as I left it. The constructs will be different — they cycle, they’re not the same every time — but the structure, the floors, the rules. Those are stone. Those don’t move."
He slipped his hand free. Stood up. Walked to the railing again. The city below was starting to light up as the evening crept in — not electric lights, not everywhere, but the warm orange of campfires and the cold blue of mana lamps and, here and there, the green flicker of a Hunter’s passive skill left on by accident. People living. People who didn’t know that the thing protecting them was held together by a man the System couldn’t rank and a shield it couldn’t classify.
Three days north. Through the wild. Past the corruption line. Into a tower built by the people who became the monsters he’d been killing.
"When?" he asked.
"Tomorrow," Mary said. "The court won’t wait. Whatever they’re sending — it’s moving already. I can feel it. The shield can hold it, but not if it’s another General, and not if it’s worse. You need to be stronger before it arrives. The Tower is the fastest way I know."
"You sound sure."
"I am sure. I’m also terrified." She said it plain, no drama, the way she said everything. "I’m sending my son into a place that ate people stronger than him and I’m telling him to climb it. I know what that makes me."
Glen turned back to her. "It makes you the kind of mother who gives her kid a fighting chance instead of a comfortable death. I’ve seen the other kind. I’d rather have you."
Mary’s composure held, but barely. She looked away, out at the shield, and her hand tightened on the cane until her knuckles went pale.
"Bring the ring," she said. "Don’t take it off for any reason. Not in the Tower, not on the road, not in the wild. The wild responds to it too — the corruption will part around you if you carry it. It recognizes old authority. The System is new. The ring is not."
"The ring is older than the System."
"The ring is older than the System."
Glen filed that away in the growing list of things about his mother that didn’t fit the woman he thought he’d known. He added it to the top.
"What about the shield? If I leave —"
"It’ll hold. You built it to hold. It runs on you, but it doesn’t need you standing next to it. The integrity will drop slowly — maybe a percent a day, maybe less. You have time. Three days there, time inside the Tower, three days back. If you’re fast. If the Tower doesn’t decide to keep you."
"Cheery."
"I’m not a cheerful woman, Glen. You’ve met me."
He almost smiled. It didn’t quite reach his mouth, but it was there somewhere, and Mary saw it and her expression softened just enough to notice.
"Tell Caleb," she said. "He’ll want to plan. He’ll want spreadsheets. Let him. It’ll make him feel useful, and he is useful, and he needs something to do with his hands while you’re gone or he’ll wear a hole in his tablet."
"He’s already worn a hole in his tablet."
"Then he’ll wear a hole in the next one. Tell Vera. Don’t tell Seraphina — she’ll find out on her own, she always does, and she’ll respect you more for not pretending you could hide it from her." Mary stood, steadier than she’d been a moment ago, the cane finding its place. "And Isla."
Glen waited.
"Tell Isla whatever you think she needs to hear. She’s not like the others. She won’t ask you to come back. She’ll just expect it. And if you don’t, she’ll never say a word about it, and that will be worse."
Glen didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer that. Isla was a locked room he kept walking past, and he wasn’t sure he wanted the key, and he wasn’t sure he didn’t.
Mary reached up — she had to reach up now, he was taller than her, when had that happened — and put her hand on his cheek. Her palm was calloused in the specific pattern of someone who’d held weapons for decades before she’d stopped.
"Come back," she said.
"You just told me the Tower eats people."
"I know. Come back anyway. You’re the only one who can hold that shield, and you’re the only one I have left, and I am asking you as your mother, not as Morrigan, not as a Hunter, as your mother — come back."
Glen put his hand over hers. The ring was warm between their skin.
"Tomorrow," he said. "I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll pack light. I’ll move fast. I’ll take the ring, I’ll take the Tower, and I’ll come back with enough strength to hold this city when the court sends whatever it’s sending."
Mary nodded once. She dropped her hand. She turned and walked back across the roof, the cane tapping a slow rhythm on the concrete, and she didn’t look back, and Glen knew that was because if she looked back she wouldn’t let him go.
He stayed at the railing. The shield pulsed. The city breathed. The wild waited to the north, dark and wrong-colored and patient.
Tomorrow.
He touched the ring with his thumb. It pulsed once under his finger, warm and old and sure, like a heartbeat that had been counting since before the System learned to count.
He had three days to walk and a tower to climb and a question at the top of it that he didn’t know the answer to yet.
Who are you?
Glen stared north and didn’t answer. Not yet. The Tower would ask. And then he’d find out.
The wind found him before Mary did.
It came up over the edge of the roof carrying the smell of smoke and cold metal and something underneath both — that faint ozone taste the shield left in the air whenever it pulsed. Glen stood at the railing with his hands in his pockets and let it push against him. Below, Johannesburg breathed. Not the way it used to breathe, full of traffic noise and street vendors and the particular chaos of a city that never quite decided if it was asleep. This was a wounded kind of breathing. Generators. The distant clang of a repair crew on the third ring. Someone, somewhere, hammering sheet metal back into something that might pass for a wall.
The shield hung above all of it like a second sky. Deep indigo. It pulsed once while he watched, a slow wave rolling out from the center toward the edges, and the System threw a notification into the corner of his vision that he’d already learned to ignore.
[ Shield Integrity: 97% | Classification: UNDETERMINED ]
Yeah. He knew.
"You’re going to wear a groove in that railing."
Glen didn’t turn. "That the technical term for it?"
Mary crossed the roof behind him, her steps quiet enough that he wouldn’t have heard them if the wind hadn’t carried the faint click of her cane. She’d started using one three days ago. Not because her legs were failing — Glen had checked, twice, with senses he didn’t fully understand yet — but because she said it made people expect less of her. A woman with a cane was a woman with a story people didn’t ask about. Mary had always played the world like that. Eighteen years of hiding had made her very, very good at the small deceptions.
She stopped beside him. The wind caught the grey streak in her hair and pulled it across her face. She didn’t bother fixing it.
"Look at it," she said.
Glen looked. The city spread below them in a ragged half-circle, the parts that had survived the First Wave pressed close together like animals sharing warmth. Beyond the shield’s edge, the wild had already started creeping in. He could see it from here — the wrong color of the grass, the way the trees on the northern ridge bent at angles that didn’t match the wind. The System hadn’t just broken the world. It was rewriting it, one meter at a time, and the shield was the only reason it hadn’t finished the job here.
"I built that," Glen said. Quiet. Not bragging. Still not quite believing it.
"You built that." Mary’s voice had no surprise in it. "And now something worse than a General is coming, and you’re standing on a roof pretending you don’t know what I’m about to tell you."
He let out a breath. "You always do this."
"Do what?"
"Skip to the end. Most people build up to bad news. You just hand it over like it’s groceries."
Mary smiled. It was the kind of smile that lived mostly in her eyes — tired, warm, and carrying about thirty tons of weight underneath. "I’ve had eighteen years of practice at not wasting time. Sit down."
He sat. She settled onto the low bench beside him, the cane across her knees, and for a moment neither of them said anything. The shield pulsed again. The city kept breathing.
"There’s a place," Mary said. "Three days north, through the wild. Past the ridge, past the dead forest, past the line where the System’s corruption gets thick enough to choke on. A tower."
Glen turned his head. "A tower."
"The Black Tower." She said it the way you’d say the name of someone who’d died. Carefully. With the shape of the word already familiar in her mouth. "It’s old, Glen. Older than the System. Older than the Hunters. The people who built it — they were like us. Before. They could touch the raw stuff of the world. Mana, we call it now. They called it something else. And they built the Tower to prove themselves. To test what they were."
"And then?"
"And then the System came. And the ones who built it became the Lost."
That landed. Glen felt it settle into his chest like a stone dropping into water. The Lost. The original inhabitants, the ones the System had broken and reforged and twisted into something that wanted to erase every Hunter who’d ever drawn breath. The thing he’d fought in the First Wave. The thing whose General he’d devoured.
"The same people," he said.
"The same blood, if blood is the right word. The Tower survived. The System couldn’t classify it either, as I understand it. Too old. Too strange. It just... sat there. And the wild grew around it like it was part of the landscape."
Glen leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The black ring on his finger was warm — it had been warm since the First Wave, a low steady heat like a coal that never quite went out. Mary had made it. He’d known that. He’d never known why.
"Tell me about the floors," he said.
Mary was quiet for a long time. Long enough that he almost thought she wouldn’t. Then she set the cane aside and held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread, like she was reading something written on the air.
"Five floors. Each one tests something different. The Tower doesn’t care how strong you are. It cares what you are." She curled her fingers in, one at a time. "The first floor is combat. Simple in concept. Brutal in practice. Constructs — things the Tower makes from its own material, stone and shadow and old will — come at you in waves. They don’t tire. They don’t feel pain. They learn. Every time you beat one, the next one is faster, or heavier, or it has a trick the last one didn’t. You keep going until the Tower decides you’ve proven you can fight."
"How does it decide?"
"It stops. The floor goes quiet. The door opens. And you feel it — this... recognition. Like something very old has looked at you and found you adequate." She said it dryly. "It’s not a compliment. It’s a minimum."
Glen almost laughed. "A minimum. Great. What’s the second floor?"
"Willpower." Her hands closed fully. "There’s nothing to fight on the second floor. You walk a corridor. The corridor gets inside your head. It finds the thing you’re most afraid of and makes you live in it. Not a vision. Not a memory. A simulation so complete you can’t tell it isn’t real. You stay in it until you choose to walk through it. Some people never walk through it. They just... stay. The Tower lets them. It doesn’t judge. It waits."
The wind picked up. Glen felt the hair on his arms rise, and it wasn’t from the cold.
"What did you see?" he asked.
Mary’s expression didn’t change. But something behind it did — a flicker, fast and buried, like a light going out behind a curtain. "That’s not a question I’ll answer, Glen. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. The second floor is private. Whatever you face there stays there. The Tower keeps it. That’s the mercy of it."
He wanted to push. He didn’t. The set of her jaw told him everything about what that floor had cost her.
"Third floor," he said instead.
"Mana control. The Tower gives you raw energy — more than you can safely hold — and makes you shape it. The constructs on this floor don’t attack. They watch. And they break apart if your control slips even slightly. You have to hold a shape for as long as the Tower decides. Could be minutes. Could be hours." She looked at him sidelong. "For you, this one will be strange. Your mana isn’t normal. The void in you — the thing that merged with you — it doesn’t follow the usual channels. The Tower may not know what to do with you."
"Good," Glen said. "I like confusing ancient structures."
Mary didn’t smile. "The fourth floor is mental fortitude. Think of it as the second floor’s crueler sibling. The second floor shows you what you fear. The fourth floor shows you what you want. Everything you’ve ever wanted, laid out in front of you, real enough to touch. Comfort. Power. People you’ve lost. A life without the System. The Tower offers it to you, and you have to refuse it. Not once. Again and again. It doesn’t stop offering. You have to keep saying no until it believes you mean it."
"That sounds awful."
"It is awful. It’s also the floor that breaks the most people. Fear you can push through. Desire you have to starve. Most people can’t starve it. They sit down in the dream and the Tower closes over them and they’re never seen again."
Glen stared at the shield above them. The indigo light pulsed slow and steady, a heartbeat that wasn’t his.
"And the fifth floor," he said.
Mary was quiet for so long this time that he did turn to look at her. She was staring at her hands.
"The fifth floor tests identity," she said. "It asks you one question. Who are you? Not your name. Not your rank. Not your skills. It strips everything away — every class, every ability, every system notification, every piece of power you’ve ever earned — and it asks you what’s left. If you can answer, truly answer, from the thing underneath all of it, the Tower recognizes you. If you can’t..." She trailed off. "If you can’t, you don’t leave. You become part of it. Another construct. Another stone shape waiting on the first floor for the next person to come through."
Glen’s mouth was dry. "What happened to you on the fifth floor, Mom?"
She looked at him then. Full on, no deflection, no tired smile. Her eyes were dark and deep and very old. "I answered. The Tower gave me what I asked for. I asked for the strength to hide. To suppress my core so far down that no System, no Hunter, no court, nothing could find me. To become invisible. To keep you safe."
"And it took something."
"It always takes something. The Tower gives and the Tower takes. That’s the deal. The same blood that built it built the rules." She picked up the cane again, turned it in her hands. "It took my ability to fight. Not my strength — I’m still strong. But the will to raise my hand against another living thing. The part of me that was Morrigan. The Shadow Weaver. The Tower reached in and cut it out, clean as a surgeon. I can defend. I can shield. I can’t strike. I haven’t been able to strike in eighteen years, Glen. Not once."
Eighteen years. The number sat between them. Eighteen years of F-Rank. Eighteen years of the world thinking Mary was a tired woman with a cane and a dead husband and a son the System couldn’t classify. Eighteen years of a lie so complete it had become her life.
"Could you get it back?" Glen asked.
"I don’t know. I’ve never tried. The Tower doesn’t give refunds." She paused. "And I’m not sure I want it back. The Shadow Weaver was... not a kind woman, Glen. Your father loved her anyway. But she frightened people. Including me."
Glen thought about that. He thought about the mother he knew — patient, careful, the woman who’d taught him to read the System notifications like they were street signs, who’d explained mana flow with diagrams scratched into kitchen tile. And he thought about Morrigan, the Shadow Weaver, a name that sounded like a door slamming shut.
"You’re sending me into this," he said. Not an accusation. Just holding the fact up to the light.
"I’m telling you it exists. The decision is yours." She reached over and took his hand — the one with the ring — and turned it so the black band caught the shield’s light. "This is the key. I made it from material I brought out of the Tower. Pre-System. The constructs inside respond to it. Without the ring, the Tower treats you as an intruder and the first floor kills you. With the ring, it treats you as a candidate. It’s not a free pass. The tests are the tests. But you’ll be allowed to take them."
Glen looked at the ring. It had been warm against his skin for weeks. Now he understood why. It knew where it came from.
"How do you know it’ll still work? You walked the Tower eighteen years ago."
"The Tower doesn’t change. That’s the point. The world ends and reforms and the System rewrites everything, and the Tower sits in the wild and waits. It’ll be exactly as I left it. The constructs will be different — they cycle, they’re not the same every time — but the structure, the floors, the rules. Those are stone. Those don’t move."
He slipped his hand free. Stood up. Walked to the railing again. The city below was starting to light up as the evening crept in — not electric lights, not everywhere, but the warm orange of campfires and the cold blue of mana lamps and, here and there, the green flicker of a Hunter’s passive skill left on by accident. People living. People who didn’t know that the thing protecting them was held together by a man the System couldn’t rank and a shield it couldn’t classify.
Three days north. Through the wild. Past the corruption line. Into a tower built by the people who became the monsters he’d been killing.
"When?" he asked.
"Tomorrow," Mary said. "The court won’t wait. Whatever they’re sending — it’s moving already. I can feel it. The shield can hold it, but not if it’s another General, and not if it’s worse. You need to be stronger before it arrives. The Tower is the fastest way I know."
"You sound sure."
"I am sure. I’m also terrified." She said it plain, no drama, the way she said everything. "I’m sending my son into a place that ate people stronger than him and I’m telling him to climb it. I know what that makes me."
Glen turned back to her. "It makes you the kind of mother who gives her kid a fighting chance instead of a comfortable death. I’ve seen the other kind. I’d rather have you."
Mary’s composure held, but barely. She looked away, out at the shield, and her hand tightened on the cane until her knuckles went pale.
"Bring the ring," she said. "Don’t take it off for any reason. Not in the Tower, not on the road, not in the wild. The wild responds to it too — the corruption will part around you if you carry it. It recognizes old authority. The System is new. The ring is not."
"The ring is older than the System."
"The ring is older than the System."
Glen filed that away in the growing list of things about his mother that didn’t fit the woman he thought he’d known. He added it to the top.
"What about the shield? If I leave —"
"It’ll hold. You built it to hold. It runs on you, but it doesn’t need you standing next to it. The integrity will drop slowly — maybe a percent a day, maybe less. You have time. Three days there, time inside the Tower, three days back. If you’re fast. If the Tower doesn’t decide to keep you."
"Cheery."
"I’m not a cheerful woman, Glen. You’ve met me."
He almost smiled. It didn’t quite reach his mouth, but it was there somewhere, and Mary saw it and her expression softened just enough to notice.
"Tell Caleb," she said. "He’ll want to plan. He’ll want spreadsheets. Let him. It’ll make him feel useful, and he is useful, and he needs something to do with his hands while you’re gone or he’ll wear a hole in his tablet."
"He’s already worn a hole in his tablet."
"Then he’ll wear a hole in the next one. Tell Vera. Don’t tell Seraphina — she’ll find out on her own, she always does, and she’ll respect you more for not pretending you could hide it from her." Mary stood, steadier than she’d been a moment ago, the cane finding its place. "And Isla."
Glen waited.
"Tell Isla whatever you think she needs to hear. She’s not like the others. She won’t ask you to come back. She’ll just expect it. And if you don’t, she’ll never say a word about it, and that will be worse."
Glen didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer that. Isla was a locked room he kept walking past, and he wasn’t sure he wanted the key, and he wasn’t sure he didn’t.
Mary reached up — she had to reach up now, he was taller than her, when had that happened — and put her hand on his cheek. Her palm was calloused in the specific pattern of someone who’d held weapons for decades before she’d stopped.
"Come back," she said.
"You just told me the Tower eats people."
"I know. Come back anyway. You’re the only one who can hold that shield, and you’re the only one I have left, and I am asking you as your mother, not as Morrigan, not as a Hunter, as your mother — come back."
Glen put his hand over hers. The ring was warm between their skin.
"Tomorrow," he said. "I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll pack light. I’ll move fast. I’ll take the ring, I’ll take the Tower, and I’ll come back with enough strength to hold this city when the court sends whatever it’s sending."
Mary nodded once. She dropped her hand. She turned and walked back across the roof, the cane tapping a slow rhythm on the concrete, and she didn’t look back, and Glen knew that was because if she looked back she wouldn’t let him go.
He stayed at the railing. The shield pulsed. The city breathed. The wild waited to the north, dark and wrong-colored and patient.
Tomorrow.
He touched the ring with his thumb. It pulsed once under his finger, warm and old and sure, like a heartbeat that had been counting since before the System learned to count.
He had three days to walk and a tower to climb and a question at the top of it that he didn’t know the answer to yet.
Who are you?
Glen stared north and didn’t answer. Not yet. The Tower would ask. And then he’d find out.