The convoy rolled through Phoenix's eastern gate, Deborah Callahan at its head. She hadn't lost a single truck—or a single delver, much to her annoyance—on the way home. In fact, the Hurricane Break had almost certainly made that trip easier by eliminating everything near Carlsbad as it besieged the fortress. She hadn't encountered the crazy Monster Eaters, either.

It had been the least eventful convoy crossing in the last four years—maybe longer. Without the White Sands Break, there was nothing that could stand up to even her diminished half of a strike team, and with the B-Rank teams backing her? It had been easy. Too easy.

But one thing bugged her about the trip. No one in the convoy had any information about the Carlsbad Portal Break. All she knew was that it had started acting up after the convoy request came in, and that all the high-rankers in Carlsbad Fortress were dealing with it—plus the Portal Tyrant, the Spark of Life, and the Light of Dawn. With their added firepower, they should be able to resolve it, so that wasn't a concern. Not really.

And there was a positive. Two of them, actually.

The first was that Angelo Lawrence wasn't coming back. The Roadrunners only had one S-Ranker, and Deborah was the closest A-Ranker to the coveted final rank. That meant she was in charge by virtue of strength and experience. It was temporary, but if she could hit S-Rank while the Light of Dawn was out, she might be able to position herself to make it a permanent arrangement.

And the second was Kade Noelstra.

Their Light of Dawn-enforced truce wasn't in effect anymore. She could kill him any time she wanted. It'd be easy.

But she'd found that she didn't want to.

It was more fun to watch him suffer. To watch him try to recover from an unrecoverable injury. His healer friend had kept him alive, and the Spark of Life had stabilized him, but neither of them could fix a broken core.

No one could.

Kade Noelstra had been a thorn in Deborah's side for a long time. He'd single-handedly ruined her off-the-books training program, obliterated the team of hand-picked delvers she'd selected to get rid of him, and worse, rejected her attempts to bring him into her fold. She'd obsessed over him. Over destroying him. It had been all-consuming; every time she'd seen him, all she could think about was breaking him.

And now it was over. She'd won.

And more importantly, he'd lost.

Our 'victory parade' into Phoenix was a subdued, quiet affair, highlighted by a light almost-rain that cooled the air and our trailer beds to something bearable. That was fine with me. I wasn't in shape for anything serious.

My arms and legs burned. My stomach muscles were on fire. I'd been working my body as hard as it could go—including running next to the convoy during the slowest parts of our trip. Sophia and the other healers kept trying to get me to stop. "You're not recovered enough for that," they said, and, "If you push yourself like you're used to, it'll cause permanent damage."

But I hadn't cared. My core was broken. I couldn't use my skills—although I could pull them up to see what they were.

User: Kade Noelstra Broken Core Stamina: 03/30 (380), Mana: 20/20 (490)

Skills: 1. Stormsteel Core (C-10, Unique, Merged, God-Touched) 2. Thunderbolt Forms (C-09, Altered, Merged) 3. Mistwalk Forms (C-09, Altered, Merged) 4. Cyclone Forms (C-08, Altered, Merged) 5. Stormlight Bond (C-07, Altered, Merged) 6. Shadowstorm Battery (E-10, Altered, Merged, Dual) 7. Stormbreak (E-10, Unique)

Path: Stormsteel Path Laws: First Law of the Stormcore, Law of the Shadowed Storm

I'd been close to B-Rank. Not close enough to push for it, but close. I'd been heading into the elite. Only twenty percent of portal delvers got past C-Rank. Maybe less. And I wasn't ready to give up on that dream yet. Not while I had a chance of making it.

Not that sacrificing my core had bought me nothing. Far from it. I'd kept my promises—all of them. And I'd saved everyone's life—including the Light of Dawn's.

The more I'd played my fight against Queen Mother Yalerox, the Paragon of Hurricanes, back in my head, the more I'd realized that she was telling the truth. I'd have given her a sixty-five percent chance of beating Angelo Lawrence, even with the strike team backing him. The Eye of the Storm was that strong, and with the time to set it up, she'd have been able to punch as hard as the S-Ranked delver. Stormbreak had been the perfect counter—that, and I'd gotten incredibly lucky.

And if the God of Thunder was right, it'd be a temporary sacrifice.

The trucks parked in the lot outside of the Governing Council's tower. Its glass-and-steel facade loomed over us, rain running down the massive windows and onto the sidewalk below. The trucks' engines turned off with a last volley of rumbles. And I let Jeff and Ellen pull me to my feet.

"You ready for this?" she asked, looking at the ragged crowd that had braved the weather to see us come back. Fewer than the four hundred who'd hidden in the Carlsbad Fortress bunker had shown up to welcome us back to Phoenix. Jessie was one of them. She was out there, somewhere, but I couldn't find her. And until I did, I was in danger—I remembered the sheer aggression she'd had after my D-Rank trap portal, when she'd punched me over and over in the hospital. She hadn't stopped for a serious case of Mana Burn, and she wouldn't stop for my broken core. Especially not if she didn't know about it.

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I nodded and gulped.

Then I hopped down, muscles aching, and hit the pavement. And Jessie hit me from behind like a missile. She wrapped me in a hug, cane thwacking against the back of my legs right where I'd been doing squats, and almost knocked me over. If Jeff's hand hadn't reached out and caught me, I'd have been on the ground.

"Kade, welcome home!" she said.

I nodded, turned myself around in her octopus-like grip, and hugged my little sister back, patting her back. "Thanks. Good day, then?"

"Of course it is. You would not believe how boring it was here without you. Tara checked in every night, but it was just a quick phone call, and other than that, I just sort of stuck to the routine. Nothing weird happened at all."

I raised an eyebrow. "Nothing? You're sure."

"Yes, I'm absolutely sure. Nothing. Weird. At. All." Jessie stared me in the eye, then winked. Then she looked around at everyone. Her message was pretty clear; she had something she wanted to say, but it'd have to wait until later. "You ready to go home?"

My head started to nod, but before I could say anything, a hand clamped down on my shoulder, and a wave of aura washed over me. Not enough to drive me to the ground, but enough to let me know exactly who it was. "No. All delvers from the mission need a round of more intense decontamination to make sure the Light of Dawn didn't cause any long-term health issues, and then they need to debrief with the Governing Council. Former Delver Noelstra will be back home later today," Deborah said.

I winced. She didn't have to be so smug about it. And then I winced again when the 'former' registered with Jessie. Her eyes narrowed—and not at Deborah Callahan. At me. Like it was my fault.

It was, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I'd been thinking about how to explain everything to Jessie for a long time, and Deborah had ruined all of that.

"I'll explain later, Jessie, but don't worry about it. I'm sure someone will find a solution eventually." I winked, then glanced around at the crowd.

It took her a second. Then she nodded. "Fine. But we're not done talking about this, Kade. Go do your stupid decontamination and debrief."

"I'll see you at home," I said. "It'll be a couple of hours."

Then I headed into the GC tower, along with the rest of the convoy team.

Decontamination was tedious, boring, and stressful.

Almost an hour in a room, with lasers washing over my skin and chemicals thick in the air, wearing a plastic hospital gown and shorts. Three to a room—Ellen and Sophia had piled in with me, while Jeff and Yasmin had managed to scare off everyone who tried to get into their room. I didn't mind; they hadn't had real alone time in over two weeks.

Ellen and I hadn't either, but I didn't mind Sophia's presence here. The hissing vents and tight-fitting goggles over our eyes to dull the laser lights weren't exactly romantic.

"So, where does this leave your guild dreams?" Sophia asked after a while.

I shrugged. "I don't think it changes much of anything, except for—" I cut myself off, swallowed, and then continued. "—except for that I'll probably be support staff for a while if we get started soon. There's got to be a solution, but I'm not sure how quickly I'll find it. In the meantime, I'm going to focus on keeping myself as strong as I can. I've got a lot of recovery to do still."

Ellen put a hand on my arm. "You do. You pushed yourself too hard, and it's only natural to take some time to put yourself back together." Then her face shifted, the seriousness melting away to an almost impish smile. "Besides, I'm sure Jessie could use a personal assistant for her work."

I shivered. "Never mind. I'm going to ask Eugene to get things figured out quickly."

Ellen and Sophia both laughed, leaning back on the hard benches. Sophia recovered first. She glanced at me, then at the floor. "But seriously, the guild?"

"I'm still making it happen," I said. "Jessie's still going to run it, and we are still going to run portals. I'm going to check in with her once we've gotten paid for the convoy and see how close we are to that GC building. This is something I've wanted for a long time. I'm not going to abandon that dream."

I didn't say that I'd abandon it in a heartbeat if the Portal Tyrants figured out a solution for Jessie. Ellen and Sophia didn't need to know that. And I wasn't sure it was true. I could only hope it was.

The silence stretched for a minute. Then for two. The vents hissed. Lasers hummed across our bodies, tickling my skin under the thin plastic clothes.

Then Ellen stared at the slits in the ceiling as they pushed acrid chemicals into the room until they misted and dewed every surface. "Not quite as good as a GC center sauna, huh?"

Sophia snorted. Then she pulled herself together. "So, B-Rank's treating you well, huh?"

"Yeah," Ellen said.

"That's it?" I asked. I hadn't been on any of the patrols on the way home; without a functioning core, I was pretty much as useless as the people we'd rescued in Roswell. So I hadn't gotten to see her in action. "Come on, spill it. What's it like?"

Ellen hesitated. Her face pinkened a little. "I mean, it's alright."

"Come on," I said.

"Okay. The power spike they tell you about? It's real. I've got an aura now. I mean, I've always had one, but B-Rank's where it gets strong enough to weaponize. Right now, it's tough to control. I'm constantly suppressing it. But one of the A-Rankers took me aside for a while on the way home, and he gave me some tips. Posture, posing, body control. He said I could tie my aura's strength to my body, and that'd make it easier to keep it under control, so I've been practicing that."

"And did you get a unique aura?" I asked.

"No."

Sophia shook her head. "That's totally untrue. Yours is unique. It's got that tint of darkness to it that makes the hairs on my neck stand up, and I can't stop shivering when you use it. It's really spooky."

Ellen shrugged. "I mean, I guess. That's not really what I'd call unique, though."

I offered a hand for a high-five that Ellen turned into a grab and a squeeze. "That's so cool! No one gets unique auras!"

The controllable, weaponizable aura delvers got at B-Rank came in one of two forms. For most, it was simply a wall of presence. The stronger the delver—and the more control they had over it—the more pressure that presence exerted. An A-Ranker like Deborah could flatten an unranked person, or even a D-Ranker, easily. An S-Ranker with superb control, such as the Light of Dawn, could suppress A-Rank monsters.

But some delvers got unique auras. The Spark of Life's was well-known. It didn't hurt anything. Instead, it offered a boost to both delvers' natural healing and monsters' Health-based recovery. She'd had to learn to suppress it perfectly at B-Rank, and then to control it with pinpoint precision, but now, it was one of her strongest tools in portals.

It sounded like Ellen's aura was well on its way to becoming something similar. An aura of fear, coupled with the suppressive weight of her presence, would be incredibly useful for her. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous," I said, putting an arm around her waist and pulling her in for a hug, which she returned. "But good job, Ellen. I'm happy for you."

"Thanks." She went quiet and sat there as chemicals poured down on us and lasers washed across our skin and through our plastic clothes.

An hour passed, and a beeping started as fresh air poured down over us. A digital voice echoed through the tiny room. "Attention, delvers: please report to the showers for rinsing. Fresh clothing will be provided to you. The Governing Council is ready to begin debriefing."

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