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Kato smacked into the wall of his brother’s back. “What the—” He glared at the kid. “You could at least warn a guy before stopping like that.”

“We’re here,” Skye said without looking back.

Just ahead, the forest fell away to reveal a graveyard of giants. What remained of the buildings jutted upward, skeletal and immense, their sheer scale still enough to dwarf the trees that now fought for space among the ruins. Massive slabs of stone lay scattered, some buried so deep in the earth that only their edges showed, while others tilted like forgotten gravestones marking the city’s slow decay.

The map made it look straightforward—just a marker. But the city wasn’t that simple. It had been built in layers, with buildings rising high into the sky and digging deep into the earth.

“Where do we go from here?” Kato asked, eyeing the tilted skeleton of a skyscraper swaying faintly in the wind. The riftway could be anywhere, up or down, in any of these old buildings.

“We need to go down,” Skye said, kicking at the dirt, looking for something. “Taly scried for the location. She said she saw the riftway in a room with windows looking out onto a cavern with a stone ceiling.”

“That’s useful. Must be nice just being able to peek at the solution.”

“If by ‘peek’ you mean lose sleep, swear at it, throw something, hit something else, and then swear some more until she finally pieced together that little bit, then… sure.”

Skye produced a second map, this one pulled from the Ryme city archives. It showed the old airtram tunnel network—now the only way to access the underground city. While his brother busied himself with shoving aside bits of rubble and muttering about a “hatch here somewhere…”, Kato made himself useful by supervising from a distance.

There were no shades on the north side. They always attacked from the south. Still, being outside the walls set Kato’s teeth on edge. The ruins stretched around them like the skeleton of a beast too massive to understand, broken and scattered but still somehow oppressive. Then again, that was Tempris in a nutshell—strange, broken, and full of secrets waiting to pounce.

“Hey, can you hurry up?”

“You could help,” Skye muttered, kneeling and skimming his hands across the ground.

“Leadership is all about delegation,” Kato said, leaning against a chunk of rubble.

“Delegation,” Skye repeated flatly from where he crouched. His fingers scraped through the dirt like they were along the edge of something. “There. I think I found it.”

Roots and clumps of dirt gave way, snapping and crumbling as he pried the hatch open with a grunt.

Kato peered down into the dark. “That doesn’t look safe.”

Skye didn’t say a word, just raised a brow in silent challenge before stepping into the pitch-black opening.

“Damn it,” Kato muttered.

He didnotsign up for this shit today. But orders were orders, and right now his were to follow that little punk…

Joining the Gate Watchers was officially theworstdecision of his life.

It wasn’t as far down as he’d been expecting. His boots hit solid ground.

The smell hit like a sledgehammer—damp rot, sour and clinging, the kind of stink that seeped into your clothes. Kato gagged.“What died down here?”He waved a hand in front of his face, but the air barely moved.

Skye didn’t respond, his focus on the narrow path ahead. The light from his lantern flickered against the walls, casting jagged shadows over the cracked stone and the tangle of roots that had worked their way through over time.

They moved cautiously, their footsteps echoing in the confined space. The floor was a treacherous mix of uneven stone and slick patches of dampness. Long, rusted rails vanished into the gloom. Here and there, a shattered tile bore a flash of color—part of a larger mural eroded by time.

Kato slowed, his gaze darting to a patch of the wall where a faint streak of greenish slime caught the light. He made a face, pulling his coat tighter around himself. “What are we looking for exactly?”

“A service entrance,” Skye said, shining his light into the tunnel ahead. “With a little luck, there should be an airlift shaft that will take us down. At least, according to the map.”

The deeper they went, the more pungent the smell of earth became, heavy and damp, mingling with the acrid scent of something that might have once been oil. Water dripped somewhere in the distance.

Skye paused, angling his light against the crumbling wall. There was a faint outline—a seam in the stone that didn’t match the rest. “There. That’s the entrance.”

“You’re sure?” Kato asked, arching a brow.

“Not really,” Skye admitted. “But Taly said to follow the sound of water dripping, and…” He cocked his head as if to say,listen.