“What in Gul!” Ortho screamed.

“New party member!” someone screamed back.

“Let me out!”

Ortho was panicking. Tight walls. Darkness. Something trying to kill him, or that’s how it seemed. He needed to get out, but he was taught that, to escape, he had to kill. Monsters never gave up once they had your enma signature.

He put everything he had into the wadi on his wrist and slugged whatever had shouted back at him. His fist connected with something. It flew into the wall of the dumpster, knocking the whole thing back.

He scrambled up for the exit. Light peaked in through the crack. Clean air filled his lungs, relief flooding through him. But as soon as Ortho tried to climb out, hands wrapped around his face and dragged him back in.

Ortho gagged as a horrible scent overwhelmed him, like burnt ozone and rot mingled together. “You stink worse than the dumpster.”

Heart racing, blind from both the darkness and the hands covering his eyes, Ortho twisted and threw a kick at where he thought his attacker was. It connected, but something felt off. He’d flowed his enma into the wadi on his ankle, but when he’d connected, he’d felt a strange tingle. His enemy’s body didn’t seem to take the full force, like Ortho had landed a normal, unenhanced kick.

Red sparks engulfed his vision. His whole body went numb, then Ortho slumped into a pile of garbage bags. Oh, he could smell their contents, alright! But his body was too numb to even gag.

Ortho felt himself getting lifted into a seated position. “Upsy-daisy!” his enemy yelled.

Ortho’s mind was racing, but his heart and body weren’t responding like they should. He wanted to move. He wanted to scream, to fight. But no matter how much he struggled, he couldn’t do anything. If he could have vomited from fear, he would have.

The top of the dumpster cracked open and both light and fresh air rolled in. Ortho’s internal panic settled a little. He heard Luci’s voice above him.

“Mr. Wip, is everything—oh, no. It’s not. It’s definitely not okay.” Ortho groaned as something like the butt of a pole poked his cheek. “Um, I think you should do that healing thing.”

“But I only knocked him out,” Wip cried. Ortho heard a sparking sound, accompanied by that overwhelming scent of burnt ozone that all but drowned out the rubbish. “But I had to use a bit more than usual because he’s pretty tough. He should wake up in an hour.”

“Beat him again, Wip!” Stella yelled from a distance.

Wip scratched his collar. “Hang on, let me try this.”

Unknown to the both of them, Ortho had been using a technique that had been passed down in the Nubah Kilebhi tribe for generations. He drew unformed enma from his soul then fed it back in, recycling it in a loop. The feedback loop was a sort of trick: it allowed his soul to be larger, deeper, without actually changing it, like taking a strip of paper, twisting it by half, and then connecting its ends to create an infinite loop. And by making the soul larger, the impact of curses or any effects caused by enma were significantly reduced.

His eyes snapped open. He saw Wip’s hand coming towards him and dodged to the side. He leapt up and wrapped his legs around Wip’s shoulder and chest then dropped into an armlock. Wip tried to muscle out of it. That wasn’t going to happen with Ortho’s strength enhanced by his bangles.

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“How do you like that? Huh?” Ortho growled.

“But it hasn’t even been a minute!” Luci cried.

Ortho ratcheted the armbar tighter. “I’ll take my sweet time getting you back for this!”

“Oh, I know this one,” Wip said calmly.

Wip wiggled the fingers on his trapped hand and red sparks jumped between them. Ortho looked at his hand, looked at the dumpster he was in, then leapt to his feet.

“What in Gul are you doing?” he screamed. A scrap of wet cardboard fell off his head.

Wip hopped up and reached for him with a sparking finger.

Ortho scrambled back into the wall of the dumpster. “You’re insane!” he shouted.

“Suck it,” Stella shouted from the corner of the alley.

Ortho thrust a finger at her. “You’re worse.”

Wip’s sparking fingers wiggled in front of Ortho’s face. “I’m healing,” he said.

Ortho got his first good look at the man, and he had to be the worst case of child abuse Ortho had ever met. Broken or missing teeth, burns on both sides of his head, and scars criss-crossing his entire body. A collar was fastened tight around his neck, lined with red studs that gave off faint light. The only hair he had was a tuft of it atop of his head. He had good muscle, though, so that and his weird skills meant he wasn’t a pushover. Ortho would have respected that, if Wip hadn’t dragged him into this grupp pen.

Ortho held his hands up in a staying gesture. “We are in a metal coffin filled with,” he sniffed, “warped aftos! By Enmaneth’s spear, why would you use enma? Or create electricity?”

Wip pinched his half-missing brows. “Nah, it’s fine.”

Before Ortho had time to react, he stabbed his finger to the side of the dumpster. The whole thing began to rattle violently.

Cursing, Ortho tried to leap out of the dumpster, but silvery threads wrapped around his torso and tossed him back in.

“Sorry, but Ms. Stella says you have to help Mr. Wip, so you need to stay in the coffin,” Luci said. Then her cheeks went red and she put a hand to her mouth. “I meant the dumpster. Oh, goodness, I did not mean to imply that we’re trying to kill you, Mr. Ortho.”

“Kill him, you toothless idiot!” Stella shouted.

Wip flashed his half-missing teeth and raised a sparking finger.

“You’re going to kill us both, you lunatic!” Ortho shouted at him.

“Okay, okay,” Luci sighed. She waved one end of her long bag between the two of them. “Can we calm this situation down a little. If what Ms. Stella said about the Cartel is true, then we should be working together to help pay off the debt. The last thing we need is another situation like what happened last week.”

Last week. Cartel. Toothless idiot. That was what Morder had called Stella’s… client…

“Ah, it—it’s you!” he said, thrusting a finger at Wip. He edged back and bumped against the side of the dumpster. “You’re the toothless idiot that Morder is after. You—you caused the crater in the Shanties! This isn’t even my problem. I shouldn’t be here, see?”

He tried to climb out again but Luci wrapped him in threads again. Struggling against her was pointless. He was lifted up bodily and plonked into the middle of the dumpster. He felt something wet under him backside. Smelled it, too. He screamed louder to block it out of mind.

“When I get my shield back, you’re all getting blasted into a nuedul’s pit!”

He turned to Wip and prepared a kick. His hands were bound but his feet were free, so that had to be his method of escape. However, Wip wasn’t trying to fight anymore. He pointed out of the dumpster.

“Nah, the crater wasn’t me,” he said.

Ortho traced his finger. From the corner of his eye, he saw Luci’s rabbit ears bouncing over the dumpster wall. He got to his knees and saw her biting her nails.

“Wait. You caused the crater in the—”

“It was an accident!” Luci wailed. “Everything happened so fast and before I knew it I…” In her panic, she released her threads. Ortho took a deep breath as his arms were freed and the feeling of entrapment passed.

Stella stomped over and hissed, “All of you, shut up. This is the last thing we should all be talking about in the middle of a busy street. Look.”

She poked a thumb over her shoulder at the street. A crowd was gathering at the edge of the alley to watch them, and it was slowly getting bigger.

Luci pranced on the balls of her feet. “They’re watching us. They’re going to find out. They’re going—”

“Get in,” Stella said, pointing at the dumpster.

The last thing Ortho expected to see today was a teenage girl in a clean white dress leap into a dumpster without the slightest hesitation. That was exactly what he saw, and he didn’t know what to make of the situation. Stella followed afterwards.

Panicking, Ortho tried to scramble out of the dumpster, but Wip pressed a hand to his head and his legs turned to gelatine. He collapsed to the dumpster floor with a whimper before Stella closed the lid on top of them, engulfing them in semi-darkness, offset only slightly by Wip’s collar. It didn’t emit enough light to see by.