Bizarre sensations flooded my body the moment I made the selection. Muscles I hadn’t known I’d possessed stirred into wakefulness, except they weren’t in my body so much as outside of it somehow, and under my control. The sensations stopped about an arm’s width away from my skin. I latched onto Ipoh’s arm, pulled until he stumbled within the radius, and set my new ability on full blast to ‘repel’.

This was a mistake. A cube under my toes collapsed into the ground as I put my full weight on it, and this time I did fall. Balance only protected me so far. I slammed face first into the ground, feeling skin tear as my palms and cheek were shredded on rubble against stone. But only stone. By rights, I should have speared myself in half a dozen place on sharp metal corners. Instead, as if in slow motion, I watched the metal disintegrate into small particles, spiral into the air like flies – insects – and swarm into the air in a silent cloud.

The Servant struggled under me, twisting my arm to pull me up and onward. I fought back, too weary to string coherent sentences together. He reacted in kind, but had apparently used up more of his energy than he’d let on. I dug the bone of my arm into his chest and worked with gravity to keep it there, while his eyes looked over my shoulder and widened in fear. The fight drained out of him.

I twisted to follow it.

The stavist was almost on top of us, discharging more of the bright flashes in rapid succession. Though not at us. They shot from the length of her staff; twin bolts of glowing, incandescent energy aimed at the back of the passage. Each missile released force rocking her back, but she stood strong with one boot planted in front of the other, firing as fast as the device seemed able.

A roiling cloud roared towards us from the end of the tunnel, silver and glinting with furious energy. It sparkled like glitter in the light of the bolts. Ahead of it, slow trails of smaller swarms spiralled up to join it, gentle and lazy at first, only to accelerate the longer they lasted.

All around me, similar trails were rising into the air and seeping away, pushed aside by the magnetic field. They converged on the hunter from behind. They didn’t resemble cubes at all anymore, nothing rectangular about them. Only coarse grey dots the size of salt crystals, barely larger than dust. They descended on the stavist, tearing into her skin and clothes and leaving behind only blood.

She shook them off with her fingers, but they didn’t behave like ordinary insects, undeterred. The movement only brought more into proximity with her fingers, and she switched to trying to brush them off. That didn’t work, either.

The hunter roared. With one arm protecting her face, she flung the staff with the other into the centre of the approaching swarm. Half the insects peeled away to follow it, leaving the remainder behind to press on with the attack.

Insects whirled away in a spiralling cloud, hovering just beyond the edge of the field. The warrior stopped batting at her fingers – or what was left of them – and moved in towards me, into the magnetic field. Insects swarmed off her as she approached.

Anticipating my reaction, Ipoh pinned down my arms before I could push her away. “Truce!” he snapped. “She comes with us.” He barked out a few harsh words to the hunter, who looked angry but didn’t attack. She pressed in threateningly close, keeping an eye on me while angling for a view of her weapon, which crawled with insects. Piece by frightening piece, the staff disappeared under the swarm, eaten away by the cloud.

The hunter, now weaponless, grit her teeth as we pressed together. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She cradled her hand. It was in a sorry state; the fingers half-eaten away through muscle and bone. The wounds were clean, with very little blood, though it was beginning to well up from elsewhere. With slow, careful movements, limbs pressed close to his sides, Ipoh unwound the makeshift bandage from his arm and fed it onto the hunter’s.

The thick of the cloud hit, swallowing Ipoh’s lights so that only a dim glow reached through. Two came hurrying back to the inner field and as many stayed outside, apparently immune. The swarm couldn’t eat magic.

It did want to eat us. Hundreds, thousands of tiny masses battered at the edge of the field, only to be flung away. The field wasn’t especially powerful, but it didn’t seem to care about the number of attackers so much as their size. Individually, the bugs were weak, and the field held them at bay. The cloud swirled around us, searching for a way in and finding none.

An unpleasant stench of sweat reached my nose. I was pressed against the hunter’s shoulder, with Ipoh on the other side, all of us drenched in the exertion of running for our lives. The taller woman was badly cut and scraped into the bargain. Most of her face and neck had come out intact; less so the hands she’d raised to protect them. Her tough armour had been shredded from top to bottom, barely intact; a moment later and it would have been broken through. The swarm appeared to ignore the type of material entirely, devouring everything in its path with equal ease and attention. The pile on the staff was already dispersing, and although the roil made it hard to see, I made out only stone left behind.

The larger mass wasn’t going anywhere soon, however. Whatever substitute passed for its brain was telling it we were there. Or at least something edible. It bashed at the field, bouncing off and trying again, coming at us from all directions. The others pressed in, poking me with elbows, armour straps and stink, only outweighed by the knowledge that giving in to comfort might as well be accepting death.

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We stood there like that, huddled and waiting, for what must have been hours. But at long last the swarm thinned, subsiding. Cubes formed around us in the passage, solidifying into inert metal clumps.

Only when the air was truly still did the three of us unwind and stretch out our pained muscles, tiptoeing around the cubes for further hours until there were no more to be seen.

The stavist – now staffless – peeled off and sat against the nearest wall. Ipoh followed her, and the pair spoke in low voices.

I scowled when he returned, reluctant to afford my would-be abductor any leeway. “We could have just let her die,” I said, the question in my tone implicit. “Now we have another problem to worry about. One who’ll stab us in the back the moment she gets a chance.” I hadn’t asked for this. I hadn’t planned on being anyone’s fetch toy. But now that I had, I didn’t have to be happy about it.

Ipoh made a small, dissatisfied noise in the back of his throat. “I offered a truce. She accepted. There are situations in which a compromise isn’t worth it. And there are situations where it is. Most situations are worth a compromise.”

The hunter sat some distance away. Her head was down, staring at the ground beneath her knees, but she was clearly listening. Without knowing the language, it wouldn’t do her a whole lot of good. Not that I was in much of a different boat.

Finding something in common with this woman somehow made the betrayal chafe more. “She was going to deliver us back to Blue,” I protested in a low voice. “Who was going to kill you.”

In an abrupt motion, the Servant stood and paced over to me, raising his voice a fraction. I tensed, in case it resummoned the razorlings. From the expression on his face, I had a feeling that was almost what he had in mind. “Do you remember what I told you back in the jail cell, back when you wanted to know what it was like to be an Ancient?” He gestured at me now. “Look at yourself. You’re already in danger of becoming one.”

“I am –"

“I don’t mean the rebirth, the promises, the powers, the colours; none of that. I’m talking about the callous dismissal of a human life. This soldier was sent on a mission to capture us, yes. And the moment you stop thinking of her as a person, you truly do become one of them.”

Odd. I’d expected people to speak of the Ancients in varying tones of awe and wonder. People beyond human, or perhaps, I mused, never truly human to begin with.

When I listened to Ipoh’s tone now, I only heard pity. It burrowed into a deep spot in my stomach and stayed there. I didn’t like the way it way me feel.

My response came out somewhat defensively. “I think of her as a person,” I protested. “A person who would have turned us in. I bet she’s still waiting for her chance.” The hunter hadn’t moved her head, but one eye had swivelled to watch us more openly. “I bet she’s waiting right now.”

“Undoubtedly.” The hardness in the Servant’s voice didn’t let up. “She might even win. One does not say ‘no’ to an Ancient. Especially not one like Blue. I have been studying her and her impact from a distance for close to a decade. Blue is all honey all the outside, but crossing her is a mistake few live to regret. Most who do come to wish they did not. When you want to blame someone for injustice in the world, look towards the mind giving the orders to the hand. This hand stays with us for the time being. You saved her life, after all. That has to count for something. Dare I say we might even find her useful.”

The scolding hit like a slap in the face, and it took me aback. He was right. Somewhere along the line, with all this ‘Ancient this’ and ‘Ancient that’, the submission, the reverence, I’d unthinkingly assumed it would rub off on me. I had been letting it get to my head, even though it wasn’t directed at me.

Shame rolled over me in an internal wave. It was the first time I’d experienced the emotion, but I recognised it instantly. “You’re also speaking about her as if she’s a tool,” I pointed out sullenly.

“That’s because I’m also a hand,” Ipoh returned. “And because failing to acknowledge a practical benefit when it stabs you in the boot means you’re an idiot. You, if you survive, are going to become a brain.”

I couldn’t help but notice the ‘if’ in the sentence.

“You may also turn out to be an idiot,” the Servant continued, which didn’t make me feel any better. I supposed I deserved it. “Time will tell. For now, I’m holding out hope.”

I had a feeling he wasn’t talking about idiocy.

The hunter raised her head as Ipoh crossed the passage to crouch beside her and unwind the bandage now thoroughly soaked in crimson blood. They spoke in low voices together. I caught a glimpse of half-eaten exposed bone and turned my head away from the scene. My cheeks felt warm with humiliation, even though I knew the other woman hadn’t understood a word of our conversation. The body language would have been enough. I’d been chided like a child in front of an audience, and worse, it had worked.

I distracted myself from that and the rumbling of my stomach by experimenting with my new magnetic fields. The ability was limited; I had no control over where it appeared, only that it did. I could turn it on or off, and reverse the polarity from ‘push’ to ‘pull’. It didn’t seem to take anything out of me to leave it on when not thinking about it, other than an odd awareness in my senses that it was very much on, and decided to keep it up by default. At least until we were very far away. Beyond that, it was out of my hands. Nor did the field feel particularly strong; it was just that the razorlings had been very small.

Magnetism was the first upgrade I’d received from the Guide that didn’t trundle along doing its thing in the background. It was something I could activate and use at will, and that made it all the more strange and fascinating. I wondered how else I could use it; if I could stop metal weapons in their tracks, or at least turn them aside. But for now I had nothing to test with it, and its full mysteries would remain a secret a while longer.

Ipoh took his time with the hunter. By the time the Guide broke in with an update about banking a new upgrade – next one in seven hours – they were still going, shooting only occasional glances my way. I was beginning to feel like an extraneous addition to the group, and it had barely existed in its current formation. I had a bad feeling I’d ruined the beginning of my relationship with Ipoh, and wasn’t sure how to fix it. I wasn’t sure about a lot of things. That was the problem with amnesia.

If it even was amnesia. All this talk of being reborn, but what about the previous Black had made them me, other than name? Was my personality the same, at least? Orange had hinted at there being differences from cycle to cycle. How much, or if it was true at all, I had no way of knowing.