I was trying to save him when he started laughing.

  Not out loud, his mouth was busy drowning on dry stone, but in that wet, broken way soldiers do when something finally lets go. The square around us stank of lime and blood and the peel of burned oranges from a market cart that had overturned and cooked itself to jam. The green light made everything look like river water, even the cracks in the flagstones. Even my hands.

  “Hold still,” I told him. “I can make this better.”

  The Gem vibrated inside my chest; it was pressure, not a voice, like a thumb pressed to my throat while counting. I didn’t know the Gem’s rules, just that the vibration sharpened whenever I meant to save. I’d already used most of my tricks. What used to be a shield was now only a push; the tether that pulled knives from hands was now just a tangled thread in my fingers. I had one thing left that felt stronger than I was.

  He had been a man before the green: dark beard, city badge on a frayed sash, the kind of shoulders you trusted near a door. Now he was a pile of uniform and heat, eyes rimmed raw from the gas the monsters used when they wanted people to run the wrong way. His breath rattled like a coin in a jar.

  “Name?” I asked because names hold better than skin.

  He blinked slowly. “Harry.”

  “Think of the thing you won’t drop even if you’re dying,” I said. “An oath. A face. A something.”

  “The Gate,” he rasped, and the word had weight; you could hang a lock on it. “We hold the Gate.”

  “Good,” I said, because it was. Anchors matter. Even I knew that. “Hold it.”

  I pressed my palm to the wound under his ribs. The Gem pushed into my hand, hungry the way cats are: ready to bite while begging. Light came from me: not bright or holy, just the color of cool steel. I kept it small, a thread, not a flood. A stitch, not the sea.

  The first touch was clean. I felt the hook of his oath catch, felt the filament tie to it. Hold the Gate. The bond hummed like a tightened bowstring. His breath steadied. The green light thinned at the edges of my sight, and for one selfish heartbeat, I believed this would be the time I fixed something without breaking anything else.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The second touch wasn’t clean.

  Then his fear returned, fast and raw. The thread touched that fear and slipped. The bond grew wider, like a crack pried open. The Gem purred. I tried to pull away, but it pushed harder, suggesting, Let me, soft and tempting as sleep.

  “Hold,” I told Harry, and the word came out wrong, deeper, heavier, Gem-thick. “Hold the Gate.”

  He shuddered. The oath wasn’t enough. Panic chewed through it. The thread skittered for purchase, hooked bone, marrow, anything. The Gem liked the hunt. I felt it smile after the fashion of things that don’t have mouths.

  “No,” I said, making the light small as a hair. But small wasn’t gentle. The light always found a shape anyway. His back arched, fingers scraping the stone. His eyes clouded and cleared over and over, as if something inside him was learning to look out.

  “Harry,” I said, but I don’t think he could hear me. I don’t think I could hear myself.

  He didn’t change all at once. It happened bit by bit. Heat slicked his skin. New scales grew, slow as calluses, as steady as scars. His eyes turned the color of wet slate. When he opened his mouth, I saw both old and new teeth. He tested them together, like a man checking a hinge.

  The laughing started then, small, private, like he’d remembered a joke he hadn’t told yet. He sat up on joints that didn’t agree with the old angles of his bones and looked at me the way starving dogs look at kitchens.

  “Back,” I said. My voice carried the Gem’s weight. “Stay.”

  He stayed. The obedience hit me like fresh air after smoke. I hadn’t meant to make a command. I had made a command.

  My knees went soft with relief and something uglier. If I could make him stay, if I could make him guard, then the square would be safer for the next hour, and the next, and—

  “Harry?” I tried again, because I still wanted the name to matter.

  He tilted his head in a way that was not human. “Gate,” he said. The word sounded right and wrong, as if he’d grabbed it at random and no longer knew its purpose.

  The Gem settled low, pleased. Pleasure felt like a nap I hadn’t earned. My eyelids fluttered. I hadn’t slept, not real sleep, since yesterday, since then the hum had moved in under my breastbone and started keeping time. Every time I tried to drift on my own, the hum got louder until I snapped awake with my heart running. But now, with Harry-Not-Harry waiting with his hands placid on his knees, the hum softened. Good girl, it sounded like. Rest.

  I forced my eyes open. Rest meant mercy now, but not for me.

  “On your feet,” I told the thing that used to be a soldier. “Guard the north arch. Let anyone through who’s running and carrying a child. Break the ones who come in armor.”

  He rose, joints moving wrong, like a warped hinge. He stood in the arch and bowed, not knowing why.

  When the first band of looters came at speed with knives out and masks up, he laughed that private laugh and moved to meet them. I didn’t watch the rest. The sound was enough. Bones make one noise when they break by accident. They make another when someone learns how.

  I wiped my hand on my coat as if light could smear. My palm smelled like cold iron.

  I told myself I had saved the square.

  The green sky did not change its mind.

  Yara—a street urchin with no power and no future—became this.

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