LoL Universe Indexing and Search

The plump belly of the Rising Howl looms before me, churning with its endless gears and elaborate ironwork. Some say the Howl is named for the wrought iron wolf that cries atop the apex of the hexdraulic descender; others swear the ghost of a black-veiled gentle-servant haunts the cabin, and when the Howl lifts him away from his lost love in Zaun, the sounds of his moans reverberate and shake its metal core. Many Piltovans, convinced as they are in their own sound judgment, are sure the name refers to nothing more than the cold wind whistling between the crevasses below their city.

But to me the Howl is not a single lone cry. It is an orchestra of noise, a melodic blend of a thousand unique sounds. It is why I am drawn to the machine.

The multi-tiered elevator, supported by three vertical structural beams which span the height of the city, descends to the Promenade level and slows to a lurching halt.

“Disembark for the Promenade!” the conductor announces, her voice magnified by a bell-shaped sonophone. She adjusts her thick goggles as she speaks. “Boundary Markets, College of Techmaturgy, Horticultural Center.”

Passengers pour from the descender. Dozens of others board and spread throughout its floors: merchants traveling to Zaun to trade in the night bazaars, workers returning home to sleep, wealthy Zaunites visiting night blooms in glass-domed cultivairs. Then there are the unseen riders who have made the Howl their home. I spy them scurrying in the shadows: plague rats, shadowhares, and viridian beetles.

Sometimes I climb down the crevasses to descend to the Sump, but tonight I long for the harmony of noise I know the descender will create.

Instead of entering through the doorway, I swing around the outside and lock my grip on the bottommost bar where ridged steel brackets frame the glass windows. My metal plates clank as I clamber onto the Howl, drawing stares from the passengers and what looks like a grimace from the conductor. My knowledge of facial expressions grows each day.
Most passengers ride within the compartment, away from the cold and soot, but outside, in the open air, I can hear the satisfying click-clack of mechanical parts snapping into place and the soft hiss of steam releasing as we sink into Zaun. And besides, I don’t easily fit through most doors.

A small boy clings to his sump-scrapper father’s hand and gapes at me through the window. I wink at him and his mouth opens in what I estimate is surprise. He ducks behind his father.

“Going down!” says the conductor. She rings a large bell and adjusts the dials on a bright red box. I can almost feel the commands buzz as they surge through wires into the descender’s engine.

Below us, the iron pinnacles of Zaun’s towers and green glass cultivairs glitter like candles in the dimming light. The Howl whirs and creaks as its cranks spiral down against the three towering beams, weighted down with iron, steel, and glass. A blast of steam whistles from the topmost pipe.

Inside the cabin, the sump-scrapper and his child look on as a musician tunes his four-stringed chittarone and begins a sonorous melody. His tune synchronizes with the clacking gears and whirring machinery of the Howl. The father taps his foot to the rhythm. A beetle snaps her pincers as she scrambles away from the man’s heavy boot. A gang of chem-punks lean against the wall in soft repose, a pause so unlike their usual frenzied jaunts through the city.

The Howl whirs in its perfect fusion of sounds during our descent. I marvel at the symphony around me and find myself humming along to the deep buzzing tones. The rhythm thrums through me and I wonder if those around me feel it.

“Entresol!” the conductor calls out as the descender slows. A pair of couriers carrying parcels wrapped in twine disembark, along with a crew of chemtech researchers and a crowd of chem-merchants. A merry crowd of Zaunites from the theater district steps aboard.

“Down we go!” she says, ringing her bell, and the Howl responds with a whir. The descender sinks and the windows mist as vapor pours from pipes above. Beads of water spread across my metallic chest as the harmony of clanking machinery and whooshing steam begins anew.

A discordant murmur interrupts the pattern of sounds. The vibration is subtle, but I can tell something is off. The descender continues as if all was normal, until a jarring clunk breaks its perfect rhythm.

Though I have never dreamed, I know a break in the pattern this abrupt is a machine’s most frightening nightmare.

The spiralling gearway is jammed, and the cabin’s iron brackets grate against it with a horrible screech. Many lives are at stake and I feel the machine’s pain as it braces desperately against the support beams. The entire weight of the Howl heaves against its bending columns and the cabin tilts at a lurching angle. Rivets burst from their seams as metal is pulled away from itself.

We wobble for a moment, then drop.

Inside the cabin, passengers scream and grasp at the nearest railing as they plunge. This is a different kind of howl.

I tighten my hold on the cabin’s bottommost platform. I extend my other arm, launching it toward one of the three vertical structural beams. The iron column is slippery in the mist and my grip misses it by inches. I retract my arm and steam blasts from my back as I try again, whizzing it toward a second beam. Another miss.

Time slows. Inside the cabin, the chem-punks cling to a ledge while the viridian beetle flies out an open window. The sump-scrapper and his child brace themselves against the glass, which fractures under their weight. The boy tumbles out, scrabbling at the frame with his fingers before he slips and falls.

I reach up and catch the boy in mid-flight, then retract my arm.

“Hold on,” I say.

The child clings to the plates on my back.

I fire my arm up toward the support beam once more, and this time my hand meets solid metal with a resounding clang as I secure my hold. My other arm is forced to extend as it’s wrenched down by the plunging cabin, so much that I feel my joints might fracture. Suspended in midair, I try to steady my grip.

With a great jolt, my arm jerks as the descender halts its freefall. It shakes from the sudden stop, now supported only by my arm. The boy shudders as he tightens his grip on my back.

The Howl is still fifty feet above the ground, hovering over the Sump-level buildings. My overlapping metal plates groan as they strain against the weight and I concentrate all my efforts on holding myself together. If I fall, the Howl falls with me, along with all its passengers.

While locking my arm onto the support beam, I slide my arm down the pillar. We drop ten feet and the cabin sways precariously before stabilizing again.

“Sorry about that!” I shout. Statements of empathy can be reassuring to humans in moments of crisis.

I must try again. I must be strong.

I release my grip on the support column ever so slightly, and with a piercing screech we gently slide down the remaining forty feet to the ground. My valves sigh as they contract.

Passengers echo my sighs as they stumble through the doors and broken windows into the Sump level, leaning on each other for support.

The boy on my back breathes rapidly as he holds my neck. My arms whir as I retract them and lower myself to the floor, crouching down so the child can touch the ground. He scrambles back to his father, who embraces him.

The conductor emerges from the descender and looks at me.

“You saved us. All of us,” she says, her voice shaking from what I think is shock. “Thank you.”

“I am simply fulfilling my purpose,” I say. “I am glad you are not hurt. Have a good day.”

She smiles, then turns to direct the crowd of Zaunites who have gathered to offer their assistance to the passengers and begin repairs. One of the chem-punk girls carries the musician’s chittarone for him as he crawls from the descender. Several of the theater-folk comfort an elderly man.

Two Hex-mechanics stumble toward me and I direct them to a medical officer who is setting up a tented repair station. The murmurs of the passengers and the hissing groans of the wounded descender blend with the whirrs and churning of the Sump. The steam-engine within my chest murmurs along, and I am moved to whistle a tune.

The boy turns and waves shyly at me.

I wave back.

He runs to catch up with his father, his heavy boots tapping a rhythm on the cobblestones. Shifting wheels sing and gears click-clack within the belly of the Rising Howl. The viridian beetle snaps her pincers in time with the beat as she zooms away into the Sump.

Jinx hated petticoats.

Corsets too, but she grinned at how she’d put the space under and within the stolen dress to good use. Her long blue braids were concealed beneath a ridiculous feathered bonnet that was the latest fashion in Piltover. Jinx sashayed between the wedding guests, keeping her smile fixed and trying not to scream at the dead-eyed people surrounding her. It took an effort of will not to grab each one by the shoulder and try to shake them awake.

Jinx had come here to get all explodey on the observatory atop Count Sandvik’s mansion, but when she’d seen there was a wedding underway... well, that was too good an opportunity for mayhem to pass it up. The count had spared no expense in making his daughter’s party a grand spectacle. The cream of Piltover society was here; the heads of the major clans, lauded hextech artificers, and even fat Nicodemus had managed to finagle an invite. The Warden-Prefect looked like an overstuffed poro in his dress uniform, chest puffed out and beady eyes ogling the sprawling buffet table. Music from a small orchestra drifted over the wedding guests, so slow and ponderous it made Jinx want to yawn. She’d take the foot-stomping, spin-around-till-it-made-you-sick music of Zaun any day.

Hexlumens fitted with rotating zoetropes and oddly-angled lenses projected spectral dancers onto the floor that pirouetted and spun to the delight of laughing children who’d never known a moment of hunger, pain, or loss. Mimes and sleight of hand artistes moved through the crowd, delighting the guests with the fingerwork of their card tricks. Jinx had seen better. The sump-snipes of the Boundary Markets would quite literally give any of these performers a run for their money.

Pictures of Piltover’s bigwigs hung on walls paneled with oak and inlaid with geometric copper fretwork. The men and women in the portraits looked down on the people below with haughty disdain. Jinx stuck her tongue out at each and every one of them as she passed, grinning as they tutted and turned away. Windows paned with colored glass patterned the mosaic floor with rainbows and Jinx skipped merrily over every bright square as she made her way to a table heaped with enough food to feed a hundred families in Zaun for a month.

A liveried waiter passed her, bearing a silver tray of fluted glasses filled with something golden and fizzy. She took one in each hand, spinning away with a grin. Flying foam stained the backs of dresses and frock coats of nearby guests and Jinx sniggered.

“Drink up,” she said and knocked back what was left in the glasses.

She bent awkwardly and set the glasses on the mosaic floor, right in the path of oncoming dancers, and burped the opening bars of Vi is a Stupid Fathead, a tune she’d only just made up. Cliques of society ladies turned to sneer at her coarseness, and Jinx covered her mouth in mock, wide-eyed embarrassment. “Sorry, I accidentally did that on purpose.”

She skipped on and helped herself to some weird looking fish-things from another waiter’s platter. She tossed them into the air and managed to catch at least one in her mouth. A few fell into her enhanced cleavage and she plucked them out with the glee of a sump-scrapper who’d found something shiny in the ooze.

“You thought you could get away from me, fishy-fishes!” she said, wagging a finger at each morsel. “Well, you were wrong.”

Jinx stuffed the food into her mouth and readjusted her dress. She wasn’t used to this much up top, and stifled a giggle at what she had stuffed down there. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled, and she looked up to see a man staring at her from the edge of the chamber. He was good-looking in a stiff sort of way and wore nice, formal clothes, but was so obviously a warden that he might as well have had a sign around his neck. She turned and pushed deeper into the throng of guests filling the chamber.

She reached the buffet table and sucked in an impressed breath as she saw the towering wedding cake; a frosted masterwork of pink fondant, whipped cream and lacework caramel. A replica of the Tower of Techmaturgy in sponge, jam, and sweet pastry. Jinx reached out, lifted a ladle from the punch bowl, and scooped out a cave in the sponge. She tipped it out onto the floor, licked the ladle clean and tossed it back onto the table. She saw a number of the guests looking at her funny and bared her teeth in her best, manic grin. Maybe they thought she was mad. Maybe they were right.

Jinx shrugged. Whatever.

She reached down into her décolletage and pulled out four chompers. She stuffed three deep into the hole she’d scooped in the cake and dropped the other in the punch bowl.

Jinx strolled along the length of the table, pulling out another two chompers and depositing them in various dishes. One went in a copper soup tureen, the other replaced the apple in the mouth of a suckling pig. Her dress was a lot looser without the additional baggage upstairs, and as she pulled down the side zipper, Jinx spotted the good-looking man she’d earlier pegged as a warden making a beeline for her through the guests.

“About time,” she said, spotting another four, gussied-up wardens, three women and a man, converging on her. “Oooh, and you brought friends too!”

Jinx reached around to the small of her back and pulled the knot securing the petticoats around her narrow waist. The bottom half of her dress sank to the floor as her corset fell away to surprised gasps of the men and women around her.

Revealed in her pink leggings, ammo-belted shorts and vest top, Jinx ripped off the bonnet and shook her hair loose. She reached down and swung Fishbones up from where it had been concealed beneath her dress, and hoisted the weapon up to her shoulder.

“Hey folks!” she yelled, leaping onto the buffet table and drawing Zapper from her thigh-holster. “Hope you’re all hungry...”

Jinx spun on her heel and fired a crackling bolt of energy down the table to the chomper in the pig’s mouth.

“‘Cause this buffet is to die for!”

The chomper exploded, draping the nearest guests in ribbons of scorched meat and fat. A chain reaction of detonations followed. The tureen blasted into the air to drench scores of guests in hot beef soup. The punch bowl blew up next, and then the climax of the detonations; the wedding cake.

The three chompers inside detonated simultaneously and the towering confection launched into the air like a rocket. It almost reached the stained glass ceiling before it arced over and nosedived back to the floor. Guests scattered as the giant cake exploded on impact, and fondant fragments flew in all directions. Screaming guests ran from the blasts, slipping and tumbling in patches of gooey cream and sizzling punch.

“Seriously folks,” said Jinx, blowing a loose strand of blue hair out of her face. “Screaming helps, not at all.”

She skipped down the ruined buffet table and fired a rocket from Fishbones that blew out the nearest window. Iron bolts from hand crossbows flashed past her to embed in the walls, but Jinx laughed as she leapt through the shattered window frame to land in the garden beyond. She rolled back to her feet and pulled up short. She’d had an escape route sort of planned out, but looking toward the Sandvik Mansion’s entrance, she saw a tall, gleaming ring-rider that looked like it’d be a ton of fun to steal.

“Now, that I gotta try...”

She slung Fishbones over her shoulder and elbowed a host of gawping Sandvik footmen out the way, settling into the disc-runner’s hand-tooled leather saddle.

“So how do you start this thing?” she said, staring at the bewildering array of ivory knobs, brass-rimmed dials and gem-like buttons on the control panel in front of her.

“Time for a little trial and error!”

Jinx hauled back on the nearest lever and hit the biggest, reddest button she could see. The machine throbbed beneath her, spooling up with a rising whine and hum of building power. Blue light spun around the outer edges of the wide disc as the main doors to the mansion slammed open. Stern voices yelled at her to stop. Like that was going to happen! The stabilizer struts retracted into the gleaming frame and Jinx whooped with manic glee as the disc-runner shot away from the mansion like a super mega death rocket.

“See ya!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Awesome party!”

Urgot always believed he was worthy.

As a headsman, an executioner of the weak, he was a living embodiment of the Noxian ideal that strength should rule, making it a reality with every swing of his axe. His pride swelled as the bodies piled ever higher behind him, and his intimidating presence kept countless warbands in line.

Even so, a single word was all it took to seal his fate. Sent to distant Zaun to eliminate a supposed conspiracy against the ruler of Noxus, Urgot realized too late the mission was a setup, removing him from the capital even as the usurper Swain seized control of it. Surrounded by agents of the chem-barons, and enraged that everything he believed was a lie, Urgot was dragged down into the chemtech mines beneath Zaun. He was defeated. He was enslaved. He was not worthy after all. He endured the mine’s hellish conditions in grim silence, waiting for death.

In the Dredge, death came in many forms…

The mine’s warden, Baron Voss, would sometimes offer freedom in return for a prisoner’s tortured confession—granting it with the edge of her blade. From the screams that echoed through the tunnels, Urgot learned about the wonders of Zaun. There was something special about the city, something marvelous and evident even in the secrets that spilled from slit throats. Urgot didn’t know what it was until he was finally brought before Voss, fearing that she would break him.

But as the baron’s blade cut into his flesh, Urgot realized that his body was already wracked with agony, far beyond anything Voss could inflict. The Dredge had made him stronger than he’d ever been as a headsman.

Pain was Zaun’s secret. His laughter drove Voss back to the surface, and a reign of anarchy began in the depths.

Seizing control of the prison, Urgot reveled in new trials of survival. He found the parts of his body that were weakest, and replaced them with scavenged machinery, technology created by those who would die without it—necessity being the mother of pain.

The guards could no longer enter the areas Urgot had carved out of Voss’ grasp. The prisoners themselves were more afraid of their new master than they were of her. Many even grew to hold a fanatical respect for Urgot, as they were forced to hear his feverish sermons on the nature of power, his grip tightening around the necks of those who would not listen.

Only when a Noxian agent arrived in the Dredge was Urgot finally forced to confront his own past. Though the spy recognized him and sought his aid in escaping, Urgot beat him mercilessly, and hurled his broken body into the darkness.

It was not strength that ruled Noxus, Urgot now realized, but men… and men were weak. There should be no rulers, no lies, nothing to interfere with the pure chaos of survival. Starting a riot that ignited a chemtech vein within the mine, Urgot shook the city above, and cracked the prison open in an explosion that rivaled the birth of Zaun itself. Many prisoners died, with thousands fleeing into the Sump—but the worthy, as ever, survived.

From that day, Urgot’s reign of terror only grew. A hideous fusion of industrial machinery and Noxian brutality, he slaughtered chem-barons and their lackeys one by one, gathering a following among Zaun’s downtrodden masses. He was said to be a new savior, one who would lift the boot of the oppressor from the neck of every common Zaunite.

However, his actions did not make such distinctions, as Urgot tested the worthiness of the meek and the powerful alike. To any who found themselves spared in his deadly trials, his message was clear: he was not there to lead, but to survive. If others were worthy, they would survive, too.

When Urgot finally struck at representatives of the Piltovan merchant clans, the Wardens were forced to intervene, hauling him in chains to a fortified prison cell—though this merely seemed to confirm “the Dreadnought” as a legend among the gangers, the sump-snipes, and the forgotten.

For Piltover is not the first to shackle Urgot, and one must wonder if any cage can ever hope to hold him for long…

Even three bells after the Sun Gate had closed, Piltover was still full of life - life that was currently getting in her way. Caitlyn sprinted down Mainspring Crescent, weaving a path between midnight revelers strolling down the fashionable promenade of cafes and bistros. The supper clubs were emptying, as were the nearby theaters inside the Drawsmith Arcade, so this street was going to get a whole lot busier. If they didn’t catch up to Devaki soon, they were going to lose him.

“Do you see him?” shouted Mohan from behind.

“If I could see him, I’d already be drawing a bead on him!”

The hextech rifle slung over Caitlyn’s shoulder was loaded and ready to shoot, but she needed a target, and Devaki was more nimble than a spooked doe. He’d robbed three clan workshops (that they knew of) in the last five weeks, and Caitlyn had him pegged for two others. Working a hunch that something big was in the works, she and Mohan had been keeping watch on one of House Morichi’s workshops, and sure enough, Devaki had shown. Though they hadn’t known it until the city lighters had worked their way down the street to ignite the glow-lamps and Caitlyn caught his reflection in the glass of the cafe across the street. Devaki had seen her in the same instant, and took to his heels like a startled wharf-rat.

Caitlyn skidded to a halt at the next junction. The caged flames atop the fluted lampposts bathed the dozens of surprised people staring at her with a warm, amber light. Her pale blue eyes darted from person to person, seeking Devaki’s distinctive silhouette.

A young man crossed the street toward her, his cheeks ruddy with a night’s enjoyment. He waved at her.

“You looking for a man on the run?” he asked. “Fella with a big hat?”

“Yes,” said Caitlyn. “You saw him? Where did he go?”

The young man pointed left and said, “Down that way at a good clip.”

She followed his gaze and saw cheering theater-goers spilling from the Drawsmith Arcade, a vaulted structure of colored glass and ironwork columns. They mingled with stall-holders selling refreshments and promenade-girls looking for a wealthy mark. Mohan finally caught up to her, sweating and breathing hard. He bent at the waist and propped himself up with his palms on his knees. His blue uniform coat was askew and his hat tipped back over his head.

“Figures he’d try to lose himself in the crowd,” he said between gulps of air.

Caitlyn took a moment to study their public-spirited helper. His clothes were finely-tailored and must once have cost him a pretty penny, but the cuffs were frayed and the elbows worn. Her eyes narrowed as she took in last season’s colors and a collar that hadn’t been in style for a year.

Wealthy, but down on his luck.

Mohan turned toward the busy street and said, “Come on, Caitlyn! Let’s go or we’ll lose him.”

Caitlyn dropped to one knee to look at the street from a different perspective. The cobbles were slick from the evening rain and were well trodden. From this angle, she saw the scuffs of heel marks on stone that only a running man would leave. But they weren’t heading left, they were heading right.

“How much did Devaki give you to tell us that?” said Caitlyn to the unfashionably dressed young man. “If it was less than a gold hex, you were swindled.”

The young man put his hands up and said, “It was five, actually,” before turning tail and running toward the crowds with a laugh.

“What the...?” said Mohan, as Caitlyn sprinted in the opposite direction. She’d lost valuable seconds, but knew exactly where Devaki was going now. She soon left Mohan behind, her sometime partner a little too fond of the sugared pastries the District-Inspector’s wife made for her husband’s officers.

Caitlyn ran a winding path through the city, along seldom-traveled alleyways and crooked paths between the gables of tall, brick-fronted warehouses. She cut across busy streets, drawing cries of annoyance from those she barged out of her way. The closer she came to the great canyon bisecting Piltover, the narrower the streets became, but she was betting she knew the shortcuts of Piltover better than Devaki. After a dozen twists and turns, she emerged onto a crooked street of undulating cobbles that followed the jagged line of the cliff. Known locally as Drop Street thanks to the wheezing hexdraulic conveyer at the end that ran late into the night, it was deep in shadow.

The iron-framed cabin hadn’t yet opened, the lozenge-patterned grille still in the closed position. A group of fifteen Zaunites, a great many of whom were intoxicated, gathered around the ticket booth. None of them were the man Caitlyn was looking for. She turned and dropped to a crouch, resting the barrel of her rifle on a packing crate bearing the brand of Clan Medarda. Stolen property, no doubt, but she didn’t have time to check it.

Caitlyn thumbed the rifle’s primer switch to the upright position. A gentle hum built within the breech as she worked the action to ready a shot. She pulled the butt of the rifle hard against her shoulder and slowed her breathing. Her cheek pressed into the walnut stock and she closed one eye as she took aim through the crystalline lenses.

She didn’t have long to wait.

Devaki swung around the corner, his long coat billowing out behind him and his hat a tall silhouette. He appeared to be in no hurry, but then, he believed he had shed his pursuers. He held a heavy brass-cornered case in his metal-clawed hand; a crude thing Vi said he’d had done in one of Zaun’s ask-no-questions augmentation parlors when he was a foolish youth.

Caitlyn focused her aim on the pneumatic monstrosity and squeezed the trigger. A searing flash of orange-red exploded from the weapon’s muzzle and Devaki’s hand vanished in a pinpoint blast. He cried out and fell back, his hat toppling from his head as the case fell to the ground. Devaki looked up, his eyes widening in pain and surprise as he saw Caitlyn. He turned to run, but Caitlyn had been waiting for that. She toggled a thumb-switch on the breech and pulled the trigger again.

This time the beam struck Devaki in the back and exploded in a web of crackling energy. Devaki’s back arched and he fell, twitching, to the ground. Caitlyn powered down her rifle and slung it over her shoulder as she walked toward the fallen Devaki. The effects of the electro-net were dimming, but he wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon. Caitlyn bent to retrieve the case he’d dropped and shook her head with a tut-tut sound.

“H-h-h...how?” said Devaki, through the spasms wracking his body.

“How did I know where you were headed?” asked Caitlyn.

Devaki nodded, the movement jerky and forced.

“Your previous thefts were meaningless in themselves, but when I looked at them as part of a larger scheme, it seemed like you were gathering components to build a version of Vishlaa’s Hexylene Caliver,” said Caitlyn.

She knelt beside Devaki to place a hand on his rigid body.

“And as we all know, that weapon was outlawed as being too dangerous, wasn’t it? No one in Piltover would dare touch that kind of banned hex, but someone, maybe in Noxus? They’d pay handsomely for that, I imagine. But the only place you could get something like that out of the city is through one of Zaun’s less reputable smugglers. This is the only quick route down into Zaun that’s still running at this time of night. Once I saw you weren’t going to try and hide out in Piltover, all I had to do was get to the conveyor before you and wait. So you and I are going to have a long talk, and you’re going to tell me who you’re working for.”

Devaki didn’t answer, and Caitlyn grinned as she reached over his prone body.

“Nice hat,” she said.

“Hurry up, Wyn!” shouted Janke. “The Rising Howl’s on its way!”

“I know!” he shouted back. “You don’t need to tell me!”

Wyn could hear the squeal of greased iron and the taste of metal tingling on his teeth. The interior of the vent pipe he was climbing vibrated with the hexdraulic elevator’s approach.

He pushed his back against the beveled ironwork, keeping his cramping legs braced on the opposite side. Looking up, the square of light that was the way out of the pipe seemed impossibly distant. A head appeared above him; his older brother, Nico.

“Almost there, little man,” said Nico, reaching back to offer his hand to Wyn. “You need me to come down?”

Wyn shook his head and dug deep, pushing with his spine straight as the muscles in his legs burned. Step by step, he inched upward until he was close enough to reach for his brother’s hand.

Nico grabbed his wrist and hauled, pulling him from the pipework. Wyn landed badly and stumbled, falling flat on his face in the cliff-side alcove known to every kid in Zaun. The space was barely wide and tall enough for them to stand next to each other with a sheer drop at the edge. Maybe ten yards beyond the edge were the elevator’s three support columns, each two yards wide and wrought from heavy ironwork.

Feen stood at the farthest part of the ledge, looking down with a manic grin. The wind billowed around him, his patchwork clothes flapping and his hair wild. Kez stood next to Nico, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Janke beat a nervous tattoo on his thigh with the palm of his hand, glowering at Wyn.

“You almost made us miss it.”

“Howl ain’t here yet,” snapped Wyn. “We ain’t missed nothing.”

Janke glared at Wyn, but with Nico here, he didn’t dare say or do anything. Back at Hope House for Foundling Children, Janke was a bully, but a bully it was sometimes handy to have around when low-rent Chem-Baron thugs fancied kicking downward.

Kez reached to help Wyn up. He smiled and took her hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure,” she said, leaning in to be heard over the noise.

Wyn smelled the caustic soap she’d washed with that morning - like chemical lemon juice. Given the nature of this excursion, she’d made an effort with her clothes too, digging out an old dress from the boxes of clothes discarded by kids who’d outgrown them, or who’d left the foundling home when they got too old. Wyn had beaten the worst of the dust and grime from his own threads, but he suddenly felt acutely scruffy next to Kez.

“I’ve never ridden the Howl,” she said, still holding tight to his hand. “Have you?”

The screeching roar was getting louder. The clattering rattle of the elevator’s mechanisms echoed deafeningly from the dripping, algal-green walls of the alcove. Feen was looking back at him and Janke had an ugly grin plastered over his face. Fear of looking like a dumb kid made the lie easier to tell.

“Me? Yeah, loads!” he said, knowing instantly it was a mistake. Wyn glanced over his shoulder. The others were gathered at the edge; legs braced, leaning into the wind.

Wyn leaned close to Kez’s ear.

“Sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” he said. “I ain’t done this before. Not never once. Don’t tell the others, but I’m crapping it.”

She let out a relieved breath.

“Good. I didn’t want to be the only one.”

Riding the Rising Howl was one of many rites of passage for the kids of Zaun. Like reaching the top of Old Hungry with all your limbs intact, cutpursing a baron’s man or playing knock-and-run with a stilt-walking sump-scrapper. Zaun had a seemingly endless procession of insanely dangerous tests you had to pass to truly count yourself a hard-bitten street kid.

But gathering his courage to leap from the rocky ledge, this test seemed to Wyn to be the craziest. The scream of the approaching elevator was getting louder, filling the alcove with the shriek of metal on metal and the boom of ratcheting gears.

Nico stood, leaned out and stared down, turning back with a crooked grin and a thumbs up. He bent his knees and threw himself out from the cliff. Arms and legs flailing, he vanished from sight. Not wanting to be shown up, Janke went next, hurling himself from the ledge with a wild whooping yell. Feen followed his friend, laughing like a maniac.

“Ready?” yelled Wyn, his words drowned out by the Rising Howl.

Kez nodded. No way she could hear him, but she got the message. She still hadn’t let go of his hand. He grinned, and they ran toward the cliff edge. Wyn’s heart was in his mouth, beating like a pneuma-hammer against his ribs. His step faltered, but it was too late to stop now. He reached the edge of the cliff and leapt into the wind, yelling a defiant roar of fear and bravado.

The ground vanished beneath him. Only empty air between him and the lower levels of Zaun, hundreds of yards below. Sheer, undiluted terror seized Wyn. It clamped him in a smith’s vice and squeezed the air from his lungs. Wyn saw himself tumbling to the ground, windmilling his arms as if he might suddenly learn to fly like the cliff-shrikes. He looked down. The ovoid, glass and iron shape of the Rising Howl was below him, coming up fast.

Nico, Janke, and Feen were already on it, clinging to its baroque latticework frames or braced against its structure. Wyn slammed into the thick glass and rolled. He flailed for a handhold, sliding down the curve of the outer windows. His sweaty palms slipped. His feet scrabbled for purchase. Anything to slow his descent.

Nothing.

“No, no, no...” he gasped, sliding over the curved topside toward the edge. “Janna’s mercy!”

An updraught of wind flipped him over onto his front and he saw a bronze hook standing proud on the giant elevator’s side. He threw himself at it, and it seemed the wind at his back gave him just enough of a push to reach it. His fingers closed on the metal and his sliding descent to oblivion halted.

With the threat of a long fall, followed by a hard stop, averted, Wyn was able to get his feet under him and looked around for Kez. He saw her higher up, laughing hysterically at having survived. Wyn felt the urge to laugh, and couldn’t stop grinning like a lunatic as he clambered up to where the upper surfaces of the Rising Howl were less angled.

Nico gave a whoop when he saw him and punched Janke in the arm.

“See? Told you he’d make it!”

Wyn clambered to his brother, his legs rubbery as a shimmerfiend’s after an all-night bender. He sucked in a great draught of clean air. Down in the Sump, the air had texture, but getting higher, it had a sharp clarity that made him pleasantly light-headed.

“Not bad, little man, not bad,” said Nico, giving him a slap on the back. His older brother coughed and spat a wad of gray phlegm onto the glass. Nico wiped his lips with his palm and Wyn couldn’t help but notice the brackish residue left on his hand.

“Yeah, no bother,” said Wyn.

Nico laughed at his bravado. “Worth it though, eh?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Kez.

Wyn had to agree. Far below, this part of Zaun spread over the rocky floor of the canyon in a glittering, bottle-green swathe of light and color. Vapor rainbows arced over the Factorywood and spiraling plumes of shimmering smoke danced over the chem-forges. From up here, sump pools wavered like emerald mirages and the winking hearth-lights in the darkness were like the stars he rarely saw from Hope House.

Tears pricked Wyn’s eyes, and he told himself it was the keenness of the wind. High above, Piltover shone in towers of ivory and bronze, copper and gold. Beautiful also, but Zaun’s beauty was lived in. Its streets were filled with life and vitality, every one bearing a heaving, bustling mass of humanity. Wyn loved Zaun. For all its faults, and there were many, its sheer unpredictability and exuberance gave it a pulse you didn’t often find up in Piltover.

Wyn looked down through the glass beneath his feet to see scores of people staring up at him. The passengers of the Rising Howl were used to folk hitching a lift upward, but that didn’t mean they liked it. A few were Zaunites, but most of them were well-heeled Pilties, returning after an evening spent in the gaslit commercia arcades, glass-ceilinged food parlors, or pounding music halls of Zaun.

“Bloody Pilties,” said Janke. “Coming down to slum it in Zaun. Think they’re living dangerously, but at the end of the night they run back up to Piltover.”

“Be a lot less coin flowing down in Zaun if they didn’t,” pointed out Kez. “Pilties do well outta Zaun, and we do well outta them. And how many grand days out we had up in Piltover? Remember the fireworks over the Sun Gates last Progress Day? Remember that Piltie girl you were sweet on? You talk big, Janke, but you’re the one always wants us to head up top.”

They laughed as Janke went red.

“I’ll give ‘em something to look at!” said Feen with a grin. The scrawny lad shucked the braces from his shoulders, dropped his trousers, and planted his ass on the glass ceiling. “Hey, Pilties, there’s a new moon out tonight!”

And like a dog dragging its backside along the ground, Feen let himself slide down the glass with his ass-cheeks splayed for the viewing pleasure of the people below.

They laughed uproariously at the horrified expressions of the elevator’s passengers - men covering the eyes of children and shaking their fists at the filthy Zaunites.

“We’re not going right up top,” said Nico, getting his breath back and wiping tears from his eyes. “Babette’s is on the Entresol level.”

“We ain’t even sure Mama Elodie’s gonna be there,” said Janke.

“She’ll be there,” said Wyn. “I saw the playbill on her desk. Painted picture of her singing on stage, sure as Gray follows Day. But we gotta hurry, she goes on at eight bells and it’s already gone six!”

Mama Elodie was the mistress of Hope House, a foundling home dedicated to the welfare of the many orphans created in the wake of the disaster that tore Zaun apart. Initially funded by the families who would go on to become Piltover’s clans, more than two hundred orphans had been cared for within its walls. But in the century or so since its opening, the institution’s fortunes had waned as the money from the newborn city on high stopped flowing. The wealthy upsider families eventually decided they’d assuaged their guilt with enough gold, and that was that.

Mama Elodie was the only member of staff to stay on when the funds dried up, a dark-skinned woman who said she was an Ionian princess. Wyn suspected that might just be a story to charm donations out of the Chem-Barons, but he liked it when she told how she’d chosen to see the world instead of living a boring life in a palace. Wyn couldn’t imagine turning your back on wealth like that, but he’d never met anyone else from Ionia - even when he’d run errands for seafarers down at the docks.

Every waif and stray in Hope House had heard Mama Elodie singing as she cooked and cleaned. Her voice was extraordinary, and Wyn had fallen asleep to her lullabies more than once as a babe in arms. Wyn had been delivering a cup of herbal tisane to Mama Elodie when he’d seen the folded playbill for Babette’s Theatrical Emporium tucked under a sheaf of dog-eared letters. He’d only had time for a quick look, but swore on a chest of golden gears that it was Mama Elodie, dolled up in her best finery and singing on a footlit stage. She’d seen his look and sent him on his way with a cuff round the ear and a sharp rebuke for being nosy.

He told the others what he’d seen, and within the hour they’d formed a plan to sneak out and see her sing.

“Look!” yelled Wyn, nudging Nico in the ribs.

Nico looked down and nodded, seeing the uniformed conductor shouting into a flexible speaking tube.

“He’s warning the staff above to watch out for freeloading Zaunites,” said Nico. “But it don’t matter. Remember, we ain’t riding it all the way to the platform.”

“So where we getting off then?” asked Feen, clambering to his feet and, mercifully, hauling up his trousers.

“There’s an old winch mechanism just below the embarkation platform,” said Nico, pointing upward. “The cowl’s nice and flat and wide, and next to it, there’s a vent pipe that’s lost its cover.”

“We’re going to have to jump again?” asked Wyn.

Nico grinned and winked.

“Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem for a seasoned pro like you, eh?”

Wyn let out a shuddering breath, his palms bloody where they’d grabbed the rusted cowl of the winch. His second jump into thin air had been just as gut-wrenchingly terrifying, but at least this time he’d known he could do it. The Rising Howl continued upward on its way, and Wyn was glad to see it go.

At least heading back down to Zaun would be easier. They’d take the steps cut into the sheer rock or slide down the dizzying screw-stairs plunging through the overhanging structures cantilevered from the side of the cliffs.

The winch cowl was right next to an open vent, just as Nico had said it would be. The inside reeked of toxic runoff, but at least it was mostly dry. Thankfully, it was large enough to stand upright, which meant it had likely carried a whole lot of gunk and deposited it down into Zaun.

“Where does this end up?” asked Kez, careful to avoid the greenish slime that pooled in depressions in the iron.

“Comes out just behind the Bonscutt Pump Station, I think,” said Nico.

“Don’t you know?” said Janke. “I thought you’d done this before?”

“I have, but it was about a year ago and I ain’t too sure the layout’s gonna be the same as it was.”

They followed the pipe as it rose and twisted through the rock. The metal groaned and creaked with the movement of the cliffs.

“The cliffs are muttering again,” said Kez.

“What are they saying?” asked Wyn.

“Nobody knows,” she answered. “Mama Elodie once told me the rock was still sad about what happened when they split the land to make the canal. She said that every now and then, when the rock’s sorrow gets too much, it sobs, and that’s what shakes the earth.”

“So for all you know, this might end in a wall of rock or a barrier of twisted metal?” said Janke.

“Could be,” said Nico. “But I doubt it. Look.”

Nico pointed to thin spars of light up ahead. Swirling motes of dust hung in the air, and Wyn saw a rusted ladder rising into a square-cut channel in the pipe.

“Looks like we got ourselves a way out,” said Nico.

Wyn had only traveled to Zaun’s Entresol level a couple of times in his life, and on each occasion it had left a singularly vivid impression on him. Situated just below the notional border between Piltover and Zaun - a fluid and ever-changing line at best - the Entresol was a flourishing hub of cosmopolitan commercia arcades, supper-clubs, recital halls and joy houses, making it one of the most populated districts of the cities. It was also widely regarded by the people that lived and toiled there as the place where the real work of Zaun got done.

Emerging from the pipework, they’d quickly got their bearings and navigated toward one of the main thoroughfares. Wyn and Kez were the only ones who could read well enough to decipher the cursive street signs, and Kez led them to a wide boulevard thronged with the most amazing people Wyn had ever seen.

Men and women from Piltover and Zaun happily mingled on the cobbled street, dressed in colorful finery and plumed hats. The women wore pleated dresses with scoop-lined necks and brightly colored sashes. The men looked dashing in their long frock coats and polished boots that wouldn’t last a day in the muck below.

“Everyone is smiling,” he said, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch upward in imitation. “And laughing.”

“You’d laugh too if you weren’t struggling every day to feed yourself,” said Janke.

Wyn started to reply, but Nico shook his head. Janke had come to Hope House older than most foundlings, and was on the verge of having to leave and find his way in the world. Small wonder he was bitter.

Wyn understood that bitterness. After all, who didn’t want more than they had? Who didn’t want to live somewhere nicer if they could? The harsh reality of the world was that folk lived as high as they could afford. Most folks were content with their place in the grand scheme of things, but Wyn yearned for a life spent in a place where he could walk hand in hand with a beautiful girl, take in a show, and eat a meal under the moonlight whenever he wanted.

On impulse he took Kez’s hand, and when she didn’t pull away, his heart beat harder than it had when he made his first jump. With Nico in the lead, they strolled down the center of the street like they had every right to be there. Which, of course, they did, but the stares their grimy attire attracted made it clear that, while no one was going to kick them back down, they weren’t exactly a welcome sight.

For a moment, Wyn fantasized that they could stay here forever, walking along a street of glowing chem-lumens, surrounded by people who could direct them to the best delicatessens with the creamiest crag-duck confit, or advise which plays they simply had to see. He pictured himself dressed like a dandy, greeting his fellow citizens and doffing his hat to visiting clan representatives.

“Is that a cultivair?” said Wyn, pointing to a latticework dome of smoky glass leaning out from the edge of the cliff.

“I think so,” said Kez. “I’ve only ever seen them from below.”

An iron bridge and taut cables tethered the glass dome to the rock, and they paused to take in the beauty of what it contained. Behind the glass, a small forest of tall trees with broad leafy canopies were tended by a robed gardener with a tattooed and shaven head. A riot of flowers, with petals of red, gold, and blue stood out in contrast to the greenery within. Wyn had never seen anything quite so beautiful in all his life. He waved to the gardener, wishing he could walk with Kez through the forest, smelling the perfumed blooms and feeling the soft grass between his toes.

The gardener smiled and waved before returning to his duties.

A series of bells rang out. Wyn counted seven in total.

“Come on,” he said urgently. “The show’ll be starting soon.”

Janke turned to Nico. “You sure you know where this place is?”

“Babette’s? Yeah, I know it,” said Nico, covering his mouth as he coughed again. “I took Aleeza there once, when I had a few coin to my name after I beat that merchant from Bel’Zhun in a drinking contest.”

Wyn remembered that night well, watching in disbelief as his brother threw back shot after shot of kouaxi, a potent spirit the Shuriman had said was made from fermented goat’s milk. They reached twenty shots before the merchant finally keeled over. Nico was hungover for a week before he could spend his winnings.

“It’s just up here,” said Nico, as they entered a cavernous plaza hollowed out from the cliffs.

People thronged the wide open space, talking, negotiating and haggling over who knew what. A few people with metallic augments strolled through the plaza, each bearing the sigil of one of the Chem-Barons, but they were few in number and attracted more than their fair share of wary glances.

At the far end of the plaza stood a grand structure of vivid color and noise. Barkers shouted inducements to enter and handed out playbills. Fluted columns of black marble veined with gold formed the building’s giant portico, over which was a series of statues of wild animals, dragons, and armored warriors. Greenish chem-lights illuminated them, and the wavering flames made it look like they were alive.

“I give you Babette’s Theatrical Emporium,” said Nico, taking a deep bow and pointing to the brightly-lit structure.

“What do you mean we can’t come in?” said Nico.

The two doormen were well-dressed, but no amount of finery could conceal their experience in hurting people. Snaking tattooes covered their necks and wrists, and one of them had a mechanized arm that buzzed with something energized. A shok-club maybe? Or something even more deadly? Or perhaps it just wasn’t working very well.

“We can pay,” said Kez.

“It ain’t the money, girly,” said the first doorman, a man Wyn mentally christened Chem-Breath.

“Then what is it?” she demanded.

“You ain’t dressed right.”

“Indeed,” chimed in the second doorman, the one with the buzzing, mechanical arm. “Mistress Babette expects a certain level of... hygiene in her guests’ sartorial selections. Your attire falls somewhat below the expected standard, I fear.”

“Yeah, so go and crawl back to where you came from,” said the first.

“Where we came from?” said Kez, incredulous. “This is Zaun ain’t it? This is where we come from, you stupid sump-sucker!”

“Get lost, ya snipes,” said Chem-Breath. “This part of Zaun ain’t your Zaun.”

“Fine,” said Nico, turning and walking away. “Let’s go.”

“Wait, what?” said Wyn, as he and the others followed Nico. “We’re just going home?”

His brother waited until they were out of earshot before responding, making sure the crowds at the entrance obscured them from the two doormen.

“‘Course not,” said Nico. “Stupid of me. Forgot the first rule of the Sump: Only marks go in through the front door.”

They traversed the length and breadth of the plaza for ten minutes before finding what they sought. Wyn kept one eye on the theater doors. People were still going in, so the show probably hadn’t started.

“There,” said Feen, pointing to a sudden plume of emerald smoke gusting from a nearby roofline. Feen worked for Gray-Scrape Malkev, a ductwork maintenancer who threw a couple of cogs the scrawny lad’s way to worm through the narrow ducts and clean off the scum when the breather pipes got too clogged.

The source of the smoke was an eatery that looked as if it served a fusion of Zaun street food and upscale Piltovan cuisine. The diners were languid, artist types, and the food looked almost too beautiful to eat.

“That’s a shared pipe if ever I sniffed one,” said Feen. “See, you can smell the food from the kitchens and the burn-off from the crystal burners up at Babette’s.”

“I knew there was a reason we brung you along, Feen,” said Nico, leading them down the alley cut through the rock between the eatery and the theater. Heavy crates hauled up from the docks were stacked against the wall, and hissing, groaning pipes sagged overhead. Burly men hauled crates inside, grunting with the effort. None of them paid the kids so much as a second glance.

Feen traced the routes of the ducts with his fingers, counting and listening as they gurgled and rattled. He sniffed the air and grinned.

“That’s the fella,” he said, pointing to a narrow vent that passed into the rock-face.

“You sure?” asked Janke. “I don’t wanna find you picked it wrong and we get flushed out over Zaun.”

“I ain’t wrong, sump-raker,” said Feen. “You crawl through enough soot and slime like I have, you get a nose for what leads where.”

They waited until the men working for the eatery took a break before using the crates to climb up onto the roof. Feen quickly found them a crawl-hatch on the side of the pipe and prized it open. Wyn blanched at the fumes leaking from the hatch.

“Is that safe?” he asked.

“Safe enough for a sump-snipe,” said Feen. “Trust me, you’ll get more grit on your lungs walking the Black Lanes than you will from the fumes in there.”

Wyn wasn’t so sure about that, but Feen crawled inside, swiftly followed by Kez. Janke went next, and Nico gestured to the pipe.

“Your turn, little man,” said Nico.

Wyn nodded and climbed inside, following the sounds of scraping knees, cursing and coughing. Feen was right about one thing; the air in here was pretty rank, but nothing like when the Gray closed in and made every breath a battle. Nico climbed in behind him and he settled into a rhythm of shuffling forward on his elbows and knees. Light filtered in through cracks in the metal where it had split, but that ended the minute the pipe plunged into the cliffs.

“How much farther?” called Nico from behind him, the sound resonating weirdly in the pipes. He received no answer, only echoes. Wyn tried not to think of all the reasons why there was only silence. Had the pipe emptied them out over the cliffs as Janke had feared? Had the others hit a pocket of gas that had knocked them out or suffocated them? Or maybe the rock hereabouts was sad too, and had chosen to crush the tiny figures crawling through it.

Just before the thought of being crushed to death by melancholy cliffs paralyzed Wyn with fear, a hand reached down from above and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

“Got ya!” hissed a voice as he was hauled up through a hatch that had been invisible in the darkness. He cried out in alarm and struggled before he realized it was Janke pulling him up. He was deposited on a wooden floor in a lightless room. No, not lightless, a thin bar of light shone from beneath a nearby doorway. As Wyn’s eyes adjusted, he saw the myriad paraphernalia of the performer’s art stacked haphazardly around the room; shelves upon shelves of masks, garish costumes, theatrical backdrops and fake props.

Feen was laughing as he pranced around the room with the top half of a horse costume on his head. Kez wore a golden crown with paste-gems studded around its edges and a bright red stone at its center. Janke swung a wooden sword, its blade painted to look like gleaming silver.

Wyn grinned as Nico climbed from the pipe behind him. He felt light-headed, but couldn’t tell if it was from the fumes or the elation of getting inside.

“Nice work, Feen,” said Nico, dusting himself off and coughing out a wad of gray phlegm.

Feen threw off the horse costume and beamed at this unaccustomed praise. He started to speak, but then they heard the beat of drums and the skirl of pipes.

“It’s starting,” said Kez.

The interior of Babette’s was no less impressive than its exterior. The main hall was adorned in colorful fabrics, gilded balconies, and a vaulted ceiling decorated with stunning vistas of sweeping forests, soaring mountains, and achingly blue lakes. An enormous chandelier of sparkling crystals hung from the center of the ceiling, wheeling constellations that sent beams of splintered light through the chamber.

Hundreds of people filled the space, revelers in fashionable attire and dancers who had shed their coats and inhibitions both. A raised stage at one end was home to musicians who played from the heart, a pounding, driving beat that shivered the blood and got your feet tapping. The music was infectious and Wyn laughed as Kez dragged him onto the dance floor. The sight of five sump-snipes anywhere else might have provoked a reaction, but here, amid the spinning dancers and singers, it barely raised an eyebrow.

They moved with the ease of those who knew how to slip out of a Piltover warden’s grip in a heartbeat. Feen stomped and threw his arms around like a madman, all elbows and knees. Janke shuffled and bobbed his head, lost in his own private world of music. Nico danced in a weaving pattern, smooth as you like, pausing every now and then to flirt with a pretty girl. Wyn waved as he and Kez twisted across the dancefloor, spinning each other around with euphoric abandon.

The music was so loud they couldn’t speak.

He didn’t care.

Chemlights threw a rainbow at the chandelier and it exploded in a dazzling borealis of colors in splitting lozenge patterns. Wyn lifted his hands, as if trying to catch the light. Kez threw her arms around his neck and reached for the lights as well. He smelled her soap and sweat, the perfume of her hair and the heat of her body. He never wanted this moment to end.

But it did.

A meaty hand came down on Wyn’s shoulder and he felt the crushing disappointment of a moment that might never come again being snatched away from him. He cursed at the interruption, but the swears he was about to unleash died when he saw Chem-Breath the doorman looking down at him.

“Didn’t I tell you to go back to the Sump?”

He glanced over at Kez and saw her chest heaving with excitement. She nodded, and the answer to his unasked question was in her outstretched hand.

Wyn laced his fingers in hers and yelled, “Run!”

He squirmed from Chem-Breath’s grip and they bolted toward the heart of the dancefloor. Kez gave a wild yell and they wove through the dancers as if they were playing hook-dodge in the Sump. They ran hand in hand, Chem-Breath right on their heels. He barged through the dancers, but Kez and Wyn had run the streets of Zaun since they’d learned how to use their legs. They’d given the slip to wardens, chem-thugs, and vigilnauts alike.

A fat doorman was no challenge at all.

They heard Chem-Breath’s enraged shouts even over the music, as if he were singing along to it. They led him on a merry chase, ducking between the gyrating dancers and singers. Kez held tight to his hand. Wyn couldn’t help but laugh even as they let Chem-Breath get close. Then, just as the man’s hand reached for his shoulder, Chem-Breath fell to the dancefloor, smashed in the face by Feen’s flailing elbow.

They left him rolling on the ground. Wyn couldn’t remember a feeling this intoxicating. His every dancing, running step was in time with the beat of the music. Each soaring chorus felt like it had been written especially for this moment. They laughed like lunatics through the light and sound, united in a way they’d never known before.

Then the music stopped. The lights were extinguished and a single chem-burner focused its illumination upon the stage. The suddenly stilled dancers gave a collective sigh as a woman rose from the center of the stage. Magic or stagecraft, Wyn didn’t know or care, it was a magnificent entrance.

“Mama Elodie,” said Kez.

Wyn knew it was her, but still couldn’t match the stern, matronly mistress of Hope House with this goddess before him. She wore her long hair tied up in an elaborate series of braids threaded with beads of mother-of-pearl and jade that glittered like newborn stars. She wore a radiant green gown that hung in sweeping folds and which shimmered like silken spider-skin.

She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Mama Elodie raised her head, and the music built from a slow, glacial pace to a rising heartbeat. Her head lifted in time with the music and her dark skin shimmered with diamond dust. Her eyes swept the crowd, seeming to fix everyone in Babette’s with her soulful gaze. She smiled, as if surprised to see so many people, and the warmth of her almond eyes reached everyone who saw her. Wyn felt her goodness enfold him, feeling as if burdens he didn’t know he carried were being peeled away, layer by layer.

And then she began to sing.

The words were unknown to him, but they flowed like honey, half spoken, half sung. Every note drifted like leaves on a warm, summer night, flowing in spirals around the room. Her voice rose in pitch and volume, and Wyn felt his skin tingle with its touch. He let Mama Elodie’s song wash over and through him. Wyn felt a swelling feeling of connectedness between him and Kez. Her eyes met his and he knew she felt the same.

But it was more than that.

Wyn felt a connection between him and everyone in the audience, a sense of oneness and harmony he’d never known or dreamed was possible. Mama Elodie’s hands sculpted the air as her powerful voice filled the chamber with harmonies that penetrated skin and bone and made every edge within them smooth. Sweat sheened her skin, and veins stood out on her neck.

However she was making this music, it was clearly taking a toll.

The light filling the chamber dimmed as her voice grew softer and softer. The notes melted like snow in spring, sunset over a winter ocean. Tears flowed down Wyn’s face, and he knew he wasn’t the only one crying. Dozens of men and women wept, reaching toward Mama Elodie and imploring her to continue. She swayed on the stage, the song nearing completion.

Slowly, so very slowly, she descended through a trapdoor into the stage until she was gone. Mama Elodie’s voice grew softer and softer, until it was little more than a whisper.

Soon, even that was gone.

The chamber was entirely dark now. Wyn let out a shuddering breath as the house lights gradually came up. He blinked as his eyes adjusted, seeing how low the chemlights had burned. How long had Mama Elodie’s song lasted? Hours? Minutes? He had no way of knowing for sure. Wyn felt exhausted, but renewed at the same time. His thoughts were lighter, his lungs feeling clearer than than they had in months. He turned to Kez, and saw she too felt the same sense of rejuvenation. The audience members were smiling; friends and strangers alike embracing in the shared magic of what they had just experienced.

Nico, Feen, and Janke came over, and every one of them had experienced some profound revelation. What that was, Wyn couldn’t know, but that every one of them felt changed was clear.

“Did you...?” said Wyn.

“Yeah,” said Nico.

They hugged, five orphans from Zaun, sharing a brief moment of belonging they would never know again. By the time they broke apart, it was to see the two doormen, Chem-Breath and Buzz-Arm, standing with their hands balled into fists. Chem-Breath’s nose was askew on his face. An improvement, thought Wyn.

“I believe we told you to go home,” said Buzz-Arm.

“Bloody sump-rats,” snapped Chem-Breath, still nursing a bleeding nose. “Think they can give us the runaround.”

He thumped one meaty fist into his palm for extra emphasis.

“It’s time for you to leave, and I can’t promise it won’t be painful,” said Buzz-Arm, sounding almost apologetic.

“There’s no need for that,” said a melodious voice behind them.

Wyn let out a relieved breath as Mama Elodie put a hand on the back of his neck. Her fingers were warm and he felt a calming sensation flow through him at her touch.

“They with you?” asked Chem-Breath.

“They are indeed,” replied Mama Elodie.

The two doormen looked as though they wanted to take this further, but came to the conclusion that arguing with the headline act in front of her bewitched audience probably wasn’t a good idea. The doormen backed away, making eye contact with each of the kids to let them know that they may have escaped a beating this time, but coming to Babette’s again would be a really bad idea.

Wyn turned to face Mama Elodie, but whatever magic she had woven on stage was now entirely absent. The Ionian princess was gone and the Zaunite housemistress was back. She glared at them with hard, flinty eyes.

“I should have let them give you a good beating to teach you all a lesson,” she said, ushering them toward the front door of the theater. The others nodded in mute acceptance of her anger, but only Wyn caught the glint of amusement in her eye. Even so, Wyn could see a great deal of menial labor in all their futures.

“You were amazing,” said Kez as Mama Elodie marched them from the theater and turned toward Drop Street. The late-running descender to Zaun had a station there, so at least they’d be spared more jumping onto elevators or a lot of stairs. Nico, Feen, and Janke waved and ran off, old enough to head home on their own without needing to ask permission. Wyn didn’t mind; he was with Kez and Mama Elodie, so he’d enjoy this moonlit descent to Hope House.

“Where did you learn to sing like that?” asked Kez.

“My mother taught me when I was a girl,” said Mama Elodie. “She was of... an old Ionian line, though her voice was far superior to mine.”

“It was a beautiful song,” said Wyn.

“All the vastaya songs are beautiful,” said Mama Elodie. “But they are also sad.”

“Why are they sad?” asked Wyn.

“True beauty is only beautiful because it is finite,” said Mama Elodie. “That is why some of their songs are too sad to sing now.”

Wyn didn’t really understand. How could a song be too sad to sing? He wanted to ask more, but the farther they walked from Babette’s, the less important it seemed.

He looked up. Chemlights and reflected stars shimmered on the city of iron and glass as they navigated the cliffside streets toward home. Wyn saw a sliver of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds, and took a deep breath of clean air, knowing it might be his last for a while.

“You know you’re all scrubbing floors and pots for the rest of the week, yes?” said Mama Elodie.

Wyn nodded, but didn’t mind. He was still holding Kez’s hand. A week of scrubbing seemed like a small price to pay.

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”

It has been while, Mundo thought, stroking the massive purple tongue that hung from his mouth like an executed criminal swinging from gallows, since Mundo made a housecall.

He rolled out of his bed (a large wooden box filled with sharpened knives and rusty nails), brushed his teeth (with a nail file), and ate breakfast (a cat). Mundo felt exuberant. He felt alive.

Today was a fine day for practicing medicine.

He spotted his first patient hawking shimmerdrops just outside Ranker’s Limb Maintenance. The man limped around in a circle, shouting at everyone within arm’s length about how shimmerdrops would make their eyes roll into the backs of their heads and how if they didn’t buy some right now, right this second, then they were damn idiots and did you just give him a condescending look? Because he’ll kill you and your family and your family’s family.

Mundo took out his notepad, a tool he often used to mark down observations about his patients, both past and present. The notepad was large, yellow, and imaginary.

Patient exhibits signs of mania, Mundo would have written if he hadn’t been tracing random squiggles in the air with a meaty finger. Possible infection of nervous system via cranial virus, he might have inscribed if he were capable of such multisyllabic thought.

“MUNDO CURE HEAD AND FACE AREA GOOD,” he said to himself.

Rank was just about to pack up his shimmerdrops and head home for the night. He needed to get new shoes. These ones rubbed his feet raw when he walked, and at the end of a long day’s work, hadn’t he earned the soft leather of grayeels?

As Rank was thinking this, a huge purple monster jumped out of the shadows and yelled, “MUNDO HAS RESULTS OF YOUR BLOOD WORK.”

Mundo left his first patient more or less as he found him (save for a few limbs) and took to the Commercia Fantastica, a market specializing primarily in gearwork toys. Though most of the shops were closed, Mundo spied a lone Zaunite teetering to and fro as he stumbled down the path. The Zaunite sang a song of a Piltovan beauty and the shy boy from the undercity who loved her, except he seemed to have forgotten most of the words apart from “big ol’ eyes” and “gave it to her.” An empty bottle dangled from his hand, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in months.

Was this man afflicted by the same disease that had ravaged the shimmerdrop dealer? Was this a virus? An epidemic in the making? Mundo had to act fast.

This was clearly a man in need of medical attention.

“TAKE TWO OF THESE AND TALK TO MUNDO IN MORNING,” the purple monstrosity said as he tossed a bonesaw into the drunk’s back.

Mundo descended into Zaun’s Sump level. If there was a virus going around, chances were it originated here. There must be a patient zero somewhere. If he could just cure the first sufferer of this mystery disease, Mundo knew he could cure the rest of Zaun.

But how was Mundo to find one specific patient in the sprawl of the Sump level? What steps would he take to isolate, quarantine, and fix this most suffering of Zaunites? How would he–-

Mundo heard something. Footsteps, and a rhythmic clang of metal against metal.

He followed the noise as carefully and quietly as he could –- wouldn’t want to spook the patient into running away and infecting even more people –- and found exactly what he was looking for.

A young boy. No older than fifteen, probably, with a shock of white hair and a large metal sword-looking-thing in his hand. He had some sort of hourglass tattooed onto his face. Maybe a warning? A symbol that he was not to be approached under any circumstances?

Mundo knew he’d found him. Patient zero.

It would be a complex operation, requiring skill, planning, a careful eye and–-

“YOU MIGHT FEEL A LITTLE STING,” the creature said, leaping out. His enormous purple form hurtling through the air, massive bonesaw in hand, tongue flapping in the wind.

The boy was surprised, but not unprepared. Anybody hanging out in the Sump knew to be ready for trouble at a moment’s notice, and the kid had plenty of time to prepare.

Nothing but time, in fact.

No two ways about it: this was a troublesome patient.

He refused to answer Mundo’s questions about his medical history, and continued to evade Mundo’s attempts to make him take his medicine. He repeated himself over and over again (perhaps suffering from a case of physical amnesia?) and had no respect for Dr. Mundo’s authority.

The two scuffled over the child’s sickness for what felt like hours. Mundo made what he thought were very salient points about the merits of treatment, but the child constantly evaded Mundo’s attempts to help him.

Mundo grew tired of arguing with the boy. He mustered up one final attempt at treatment, wielding his precision scalpel with the artistry of a Demacian duelist. The words of his medical vows -– “MUNDO FIX ALL THINGS, MUNDO DO MEDICINE VERY HARD” –- ran through his head again and again. His desire to cure this child filled him with purpose and determination.

He swung with all his might.

The treatment was a success.

But then –- somehow –- the treatment reversed itself. Whatever good Mundo had accomplished in his last attempt at a cure was suddenly undone. To Mundo’s utter confusion, the child scurried away, utterly uncured.

Mundo screamed in irritation.

“WHY CAN’T MUNDO SAVE THEM ALL?” he screamed to the sky.

Not every operation was a success. Mundo would be the first to admit that. Still, Mundo tried to focus on the positive: Apart from this most recent patient, Mundo had helped an awful lot of people. He’d done a full day’s work, and now it was time to rest.

As the sun came up, Mundo retired home and tucked himself into bed. Who knew what tomorrow might bring? Another patient to help. Another epidemic to stop.

A doctor’s work was never done.

I told Zalie to charge it all to my uncle. He’s good for it.

Now I’m ready to explore!

Oh yeah, I probably should write down what I’m exploring. For posterity.

My uncle theorizes that Zaun was once a Shuriman port city called “Oshra Va’Zaun”, and that over the centuries the name got shortened. He doesn’t have much proof and no one believes him. So, I’ll be a good nephew, find proof, and then take all the credit.

My sources say industrial excavations opened up a crack somewhere deep in the Sump.

The plan is simple:
Tomorrow I will locate, and descend into, the crack.
Find proof (see above). Preferably an accursed urn or lost grimoire. Something earth-shatteringly cool.
Spelunk my way back to the surface.
Gloat to my uncle over dinner.
Profit?

I’m keeping this journal to document the process. The record of these events will probably end up in a museum, next to a marble statue of me.

(Note to self: get sculptor recommendations)

Hmm. This is one massive crack. I forgot to bring a lantern, so it’s a good thing my gauntlet glows pretty bright. When I peered down into the crack, I almost literally gasped. There’s a whole maze of dusty staircases and old passageways down there. It’s a veritable labyrinth. Going to descend. Will update from the other side.

Uncle Lymere’s probably going to be really jealous.

I’m only about a quarter of the way down, and I’ve run out of rope. This narrow ledge provides me a chance to rest, and reflect upon this most dire situation. I must decide: face starvation and continue downward, or abandon the whole thing and return empty-handed.

Excellent news! I found something!

A few ledges down from where I was resting was a door. Old, sandstone, very dusty. I brushed away centuries of grime to reveal some glyphs. Owls and stuff.

I deciphered what I could, but my ancient Shuriman is a little rusty. Best guess, it was something about a curse. A really bad curse that multiplies? Maybe a thousand curses? This is fantastic! Like I always say: if it’s not cursed, it’s not worth it.

Since I couldn’t locate any kind of ancient door knob, I resorted to the ultimate lockpick—my gauntlet. Sorry about your door, history, but what lies on the other side intrigues me more than a bunch of old glyphs.

This new antechamber is really intriguing. It’s impeccably clean, for starters and—

Sorry, I thought I heard something. Cracks? Footsteps?

With the benefit of hindsight, my gauntlet blast may have been too much for the support columns. Gotta go. No one remembers explorers who get smooshed.

Well, that was fun. I thought the tomb was going to collapse, because tombs always collapse, especially when I’m inside. But, what really happened? Well, the door didn’t lie, the antechamber was cursed.

Turns out, Oshra Va’Zaun housed the renowned Vault of Resplendent Holies. One of those “holies” is a relic that once belonged to the emperor’s personal spirit-banisher, Carikkan. Looks like he used to bind troublesome entities into inanimate objects, and use them for his own dark purposes. And he died right here, where Zaun now rests!

He also had one of those slow, dimwitteda whole army of fiery stone-warriors, who don’t like people touching old Carikkan’s stuff.

Don’t worry, I blasted them all to smoldering smithereens!

I was able to grab this wonderfully preserved golden stele, though. It’s inscribed with the legend of the “Day of Fire”, and Carikkan’s oath to protect the city of Oshra Va’Zaun. It’s like a whole secret history that I can fit right in my satchel! This is going to change the world!

(Hopefully not just the academic world. Nobody cares about the academic world.)

Ancient Shuriman curses really don’t mess around. Not only was there that one army of fiery stone-warriors (Oh wait, were they golems?) but all of a sudden water began rushing in through the cracks in the floor. I must be somewhere under the River Pilt.

Swam through so many tunnels. Lots of locked doors. Had to resist the urge to explore them all.

Think I’m close to the surface, which is good, because I saw some nasty-looking murk-eels a few tunnels back. Disgusting creatures.

Might be a while before I can check in again, but as long as I keep this stele wrapped up in cloth and protected, this whole trip will be completely worth all the life-threatening shenanigans and tragically soaked socks.

On a sadder note, I’ve used up the last of my Dapper Explorer Pomade.

Sitting in Zalie’s. It really is one of the best outfitters in Piltover—in fact, I’m here to take advantage of their excellent return policy. My jacket is torn to shreds. The boots weren’t waterproof at all. I could say it’s all defective… but Zalie has already graciously offered to tailor me some replacements.

The Explorers Guild is never going to take me seriously if I present this journal, and the stele, dressed like I’ve just lost a game of Krakenhand to a bunch of Mudtown buck-ringers! I have to look good. New jacket. Pants. Boots. Socks. Pomade.

Feels good to look this good. Trust me on that.

Let this official record show that I had NOTHING to do with the swarm of fiery critters that plagued the mercantile district of Piltover. I am blameless!

So, I hear you ask, who is to blame? The clerk at Zalie’s.

Never let the bumbling clerk at Zalie’s handle a potentially enchanted golden stele you laboriously retrieved from a lost vault in the depths of Zaun. Why? Because he will undoubtedly unwrap it, and set it on a windowsill in direct sunlight… which, of course, will conjure disembodied voices chanting in a hitherto unknown, arcane language. Then, your precious stele will begin to glow, before exploding into living shards of searing heat.

Yes. Turns out, when placed in the sunlight of an equinox, the stele unleashes old Carikkan’s infernus gremlins.

Okay, so I didn’t know today was the equinox. That’s on me. I should invest in an almanac.

(Note to self: invest in almanac. Not from Zalie’s.)

The earth is shaking. I probably should stop writing right now, because more of these little horrors are pouring out of the sewer grates. I shot a few of them with my gauntlet. They didn’t like that one bit, and winked out of existence pretty quickly. Result!

So, yeah. All the proof I have of the entire caper is this journal, and my own good word.

The preliminary hearing is set for next week.

Need to read up on Piltover’s libel and slander laws. I’ll be representing myself, obviously.

What’s the difference between law and order?

Can you have one without the other? And what does either have to do with justice? Maybe it depends on who you ask. If you asked me, well, the young me, justice comes by cracking skulls.

Guess I’m feeling young today.

It’s still dark when I finally reach the Hall of Law. As is often the case, though not usually so early in the morning, I’m bringing guests with me. A pair of them, two from the seven I had caught vandalizing a row of shops and cafes down on Horologica Avenue. One is snoring from the light tap I gave him, but the other is wide awake, and quite the fan of colorful language.

“Pipe down—you’re disturbing my peace.” I tighten my metal fingers around his collar and nod to his accomplice, slung over my shoulder. “If I were you, I’d take a hint from your friend here.”

“This is brutality,” he hisses. “Where are we? In Noxus?”

“Noxus?” I have to stop myself from laughing. “I wish. If we were in Noxus, I’d be taking you to the Reckoning pits, not a shaming cell.”

The imagery gives him a jolt, and I get a few moments’ quiet before he’s back at it.

“You think you can silence us, but you can’t. We are going to expose your system of oppression and tear it down.”

“And breaking all the windows in a tea room accomplishes this, how? You’re just another bored, spoiled brat, looking for a reason to smash things. You aren’t helping anybody.”

“We’re speaking up for those without a voice!” he snaps. “For the poor and the downtrodden.”

I look at his clothes. New, clean. There hasn’t been a day he’s wanted for anything. “Well, I am one of those poor, downtrodden Zaunites, and my voice works just fine.”

“And now you’re part of the system.” He spits pink onto the street. “Put a few cogs in your pocket and you turn on anything. How do you sleep at night?”

There’s an itch I get, wearing these gauntlets. The urge to feel a ribcage wrap around my knuckles that on some days is damn near overpowering. Try as I might, his words have my blood getting hotter, and my hextech fists begin purring in response, ready for a scrap that’s usually sure to come. But I tamp it down.

“When I’m not rounding up idiots for smashing up tea rooms? I sleep like a baby.”

Mercifully we reach the doors.

“Here, help a poor Zaunite in need.” I use the talker’s head to knock. I confess letting a touch of my frustration slip into the last rap—it’s loud enough to get someone to work the lock from the other side.

“Warden Kepple.” I grin at the blinking face behind the slowly opening door.

“Getting an awful early start, eh, Vi?” he grumbles, pawing sleep from his eyes.

“Injustice never rests, my friend.” I drag my arrests through the door, giving Kepple the quick version of the morning’s events.

“I’ve apprehended two of them,” I finish. “Both suspects are…” I look at each of them, now both snoring in tandem. “Subdued.”

Kepple raises an eyebrow. “Sure seems like it. Sheriff Caitlyn’s already looking for ya, upstairs.”

“I trust you can handle the processing for this pair of recreational revolutionaries, then?”

“I’ll get it logged,” Kepple grunts as I dump one of the punks in his arms, and the mouthy one at his feet.

I flash a smile as I pass him. “You’re an asset to the force.”

Caitlyn’s office is a mess. The creaking wooden desk is smothered, hidden beneath a forest of brass pneuma-tube capsules and the endless forms, messages, and edicts that they contain. The sheriff is lost somewhere in that forest, rummaging through warrants and mandates and the demands of her bosses and the merchant clans. It doesn’t look like she’s left the room in days, leaving me to guess at how short her temper might be as I close the door behind me.

“Sit down,” she says without looking up, still digging around for something.

Straight to it, then.

“What, this about those punks?” I clear off a chair and sit, flexing the mechanical fingers of my right hand and propping my boots up on the corner of her desk. “They’ll be walking around again in a few days. If you ask me, I went easy on them.”

“This isn’t about that,” she answers, each word somehow more tired than the last. “There is something that has been brought to our attention, developments that are… complicated, that we need to look into. It’s about Zaun.”

I see then that it’s not all lack of sleep weighing Cait down. Something’s got her guard up, an apprehension that’s rare in a woman who can put a bullet through a silver cog from three streets away.

“Is it her?” I ask. Can’t keep the acid from my voice.

Cait finally stops hunting around her desk. Those sapphire eyes flick up to me. “No. This is something different. Something new.”

“New,” I repeat, though no more sense comes out of it.

Cait takes a slow breath. “Something is happening in the Sump.”

I cock my head. “That’s pretty damn far from our jurisdiction.”

“Ever since the split,” says Cait, “our cities have existed in symbiosis. Despite appearances, one can’t survive without the other, so a balance must be maintained.”

Split, they call it. Usually a split is clean and even. In this case, some rich merchants got excited about digging a canal, too excited to make sure the land was stable. They put half of Zaun under water. Drowning people in service of commerce, and the way that commerce has been divvied since, is pretty far from clean or even.

“A real easy way to break that balance would be to reach down into lower Zaun and start shaking things,” I point out. “But we aren’t talking about the Promenade here—there’s no overlap in the Sump where we can massage events after the fact and make matters slide.”

Cait sighs. “These are all topics that have been discussed and considered.”

“By who?” I ask. “Care to clue me in?”

“I am able to tell you as much as you need to know, and right now you don’t need to know that.”

“So what does this have to do with us?” I ask, fiddling with an empty pneuma-tube capsule. “What the undercity does is its own business.”

“Not this time.” Cait plucks the capsule from my hand, setting it down as she sits back against the desk. I frown. She isn’t normally this tight-lipped.

“What’s changed, then?”

“We don’t know,” Cait answers. “To find out, we need eyes down there, someone who knows Zaun. That’s where you come in.”

“This is all pretty vague, sheriff.” I shake my head. “What about the barons? You think they’re just gonna sit back and let Piltover send wardens down to their turf and start flipping tables?”

Cait gives me a tired grin. “Is that the big, bad Vi I hear, scared of a few little chem-barons?”

I cross my arms over my chest. “I just like to know who’s going to be looking for my scalp, is all.”

“The barons won’t be an issue.”

“Oh, really?” I raise an eyebrow. “And why is that?”

“Because they’re the ones asking for help.”

I sit up straighter at that.

“You’re right. This is new.” I shake my head. Something is very off with this, and I’m not getting anywhere close to the full picture. “Still a lot of bad blood between the barons and the Wardens. There’s a dozen ways this can go wrong.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much on that account,” she says, “because you won’t be going as a warden. Those kids you tuned up happened to have spawned from Clan Medarda, and their parents want your head.”

She holds up a sheaf of vellum missives. I can make out the calligraphy through the light coming in from the window. From that same window I hear the beginnings of a crowd gathering—an angry one.

“Lucky for you,” Cait says with a smile, “I talked them down. You can keep your head, so long as you’re out of the Wardens. You’re leaving town, going home to reflect and reconnect with your roots.”

“Cute story.” The word home sticks out, whether she meant it to or not. All these years here, guess I’m still a visitor—one who’s getting the boot for doing her job, because someone has enough cogs to think they’re above the law. “Convenient, too.”

“This means you’ll be on your own down there.” The levity drops from her voice. “No backup. And appearances must be kept up. I’ll need your badge, and your hands.”

“Go down to Zaun…” I work the clasps on my gauntlets and take them off. “Don’t know what I’m looking for, only that it’s bad enough that the chem-barons can’t handle it.” I drop the bulky hextech fists on Cait’s desk with a thunk that crushes capsules and scatters papers onto the floor. “And I can’t even bring my hands. This is getting better by the minute.”

“There’s no one else I could trust to do this,” Cait says.

“So you’re really not gonna tell me who’s pulling the strings on this one?” I ask, biting back on my temper. “Not every day I’m asked to provoke an international incident.”

“I’ve told you all I can, Vi. Believe me.”

“You could always come with me,” I say with a grin. “Take a little working vacation to Valoran’s most scenic tourist destination.”

Cait doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. I know she can’t go, but it’s always fun to tease. And it keeps me from punching a hole in the wall.

Dawn settles into morning by the time I reach the Rising Howl. The crowds outside the Hall of Law gave me jeers and a few tossed stones as I left, but they knew better than to get too close. They clung to the Hall where they could stay seen, and keep their teeth in their heads.

It feels strange to walk the city without my gauntlets, my hands still wrapped up from the day before. I left anything that could tie me to the Wardens back at the Hall, anything to tie me to Piltover, really. I’ll need to lay low—I’m far from forgotten in Zaun, and there are plenty of folks whose memories I’d rather not refresh. I’ll go down, see what’s got the barons so spooked, and be back in a few days, tops.

The conveyor fills near to bursting as the conductor whistles herself hoarse and the doors finally lock. Hexdraulic winches loosen their grip on the great chains holding us, and the descent begins. I find a seat on the bottom level of the pod, staring out through the bottle-green window panels as we sink.

The morning light has spilled across all of Piltover, glittering off towers of iron and glass, but only teases the lips of the chasms. The light will reach the Promenade—Zaun’s highest level—but won’t be much more than a glimmer any lower than that.

I shift my boot, seeing a symbol scratched crudely into the floor. Some kind of spider.

The air already starts to slicken as the conveyor slides through the Promenade, and I taste chem fumes and feel a low sting in my nostrils. The new spire comes into view, a giant tower of pale stone and shimmering glass starting all the way down at the Entresol. Mechanicians, laborers, and menials toil in its base levels, synthesizing and refining their hex-crystals before shipping them up to the city above. Of the process, all that remains in Zaun is the concentrated runoff, more dangerous than the Gray by tenfold, at least by the smell of it.

I’m not sure who owns this spire—Ferros isn’t the only player in the synthetic hex-crystal game anymore, though they still make the strongest, purest kind. Word is even chem-barons, like the Poingdestres, are trying to make their own brands of cheap knock-offs, without the merchant clans. But most likely, this spire is yet another joint venture between the barons and the clans.

As we descend to the Entresol, something catches my eye through the window. The conveyor shafts are no stranger to graffiti, but one mark stands out bright and new against the faded tags it’s covering.

A spider.

I look down at the floor. The mark is the same. My eyes go back to the window and I find it again, and again.

I stand up, pressing my back to the wall as the Howl shudders to a stop at the Entresol. The conveyor empties, and more than one pair of eyes look at me with alarm when I don’t exit.

A bell chimes, a signal the Rising Howl is due to depart. The conductor descends the stairs, peering this way and that before spotting me.

“Lift’s going down soon,” she says, the unease clear in her voice. “You’re heading Sumpward, then?”

I take a look around, seeing an empty platform beyond the doors. “Looks like I’m the only one.”

“May not pay to be unique in this regard, dear.” She takes a step closer, pushing her goggles up to her brow. I can see the fear in her eyes. “Sump’s not right these days. Best to stay further up.”

“You know anything about it?” I ask.

The conductor looks down, fidgeting with her sonophone. “Enough not to trifle with it.”

I consider her for a moment. “I think I’ll take my chances.”

She lingers, hoping I’ll have a change of heart, before giving a slow nod and clambering back up the stairs. Soon the Howl begins its slow rumble downward, down to the Sump, where I will see what everyone is so afraid of.

The light gets poorer once you clear the Entresol. Chem-lamps appear fewer and fewer, like fireflies rising up the farther down we go. The light from the Howl itself is enough to see the immediate surroundings of the conveyor, though the worth of that might be dubious.

The Sump has never been pretty. Maybe a long way back, before the Flood turned half of it into a graveyard and the other half became a landfill, it might have been different. But that’s long gone, and from what I see, even compared to what I remember, it’s only getting worse.

Make the wrong enemies, break one too many promises, back a loser with your last cog, you’ll end up down here. Desperate people scratching out a living, safe from those above who won’t stoop to look for them. That makes it almost a haven for them, if not from each other.

The lights flicker out. I stand, walk over to the window, and lean against the railing to glimpse through the green glass. After a few moments, the lights return, bathing the conveyor shaft in enough illumination to show me what’s covering every inch of it.

Spiders. Nothing but spiders.

That same crude mark as before, but where above it was rare, here it has been etched, carved, or sprayed over everything. An unending swarm, as though marching and climbing up from the dark they had already claimed as theirs.

I feel something cold in my stomach, a tiny flare of adrenaline. Whatever it is that Cait sent me down here to find, it has to be connected to this.

“This is as far as I’ll go,” I hear the conductor’s voice scratch from the sonophone as the Rising Howl comes to a halt in a groan of protesting iron. The doors unlock and I peer out at an abandoned platform, the only light a single chem-lamp pulsing faintly at the far end. I step onto the platform and the doors lock fast behind me, the conveyor already rising as I look back at it over my shoulder. Soon it’s just one more firefly, rising from the chasm.

There’s no such thing as silence in Zaun, even down in the Sump. I hear steam coughing out of corroded pipework, factories and scrapyards growling in the distance… and a trio of voices muttering in the dark.

The spider symbol crawling all over the conveyor shaft is on the gangers, too, splashed on threadbare clothes, still raw and red on their faces and necks from new tattoos. They’re armed, and making no effort to hide it. One has a chain, another a length of pipe. I see the dull sheen of a tarnished blade in the hand of the last.

They’re young, young enough not to recognize me. Whatever gang this is, these are new pups, the most likely to do something stupid in order to prove themselves.

“You lost?” one of them says, the one holding the knife.

“Can’t say that I am,” I answer, playing off a bored calm as I take in every detail. Posture, health, temperament. I know in a few seconds which of them take the orders and which one gives them. Which are most likely to run, and who is willing to spill blood.

I make to pass them. The blade flicks out ahead of me, catching the yellowed light from the chem-lamp.

“I think you are.” He looks me over. “Tell me, sister, have you come to hear the Voice?”

I take a slow quarter step to keep all three of them in view. “Whose voice might that be?”

Knife wrinkles his nose. “Believers and pilgrims would know, and that’s all who’s welcome here.”

“Time to turn around and go back home, sun-stained filth.” Another of them spits. He gets a hissing chorus of agreement from his mates.

I could probably get more out of them. The name of their gang, who this Voice belongs to, how exactly they have the whole of the Sump running scared. But the urge to lay hands on them wins out.

“Boys, boys.” I shake my head, smiling. I make a fist, and my knuckles crack loud enough for them to hear. “I am home.”

A quick side glance to each other and they rush me. My eyes go to weapons, flicking from blade to chain to pipe to see who I need to drop first. The air tastes like ammonia and grease as the tension cracks open.

Adding a splash of blood won’t hurt.

I throw the first punch, forgetting I had left my hands behind. Wear them long enough, and you get used to the power a pair of hextech Atlas fists can give you. When my knuckles find the side of Knife’s skull, I feel something flex sideways, between my fingers. The pain is sharp and immediate, making me hesitate enough for the pipe to swing in low and take me in the ribs.

The third circles, chain lashing my legs, but my focus is on the blade. My punch had sent him to all fours. A knee to the jaw and he sprawls.

I snatch hold of the chain, wrenching the ganger holding it into a headbutt. His nose mashes flat against my forehead. He topples, clutching at his face. The whistle of the pipe makes me duck, throwing its owner off balance, and I add to his momentum to send him crashing into a wall.

Pipe springs up to his feet, and freezes. His eyes dart from me to Knife, back to me, then to Chain. The pipe pings as it hits the ground, almost drowning out the pounding of his boots as he runs for it. I lunge after him, but I’m stopped cold by a spike of pain in my ribs squeezing my lungs shut. I let him go.

Knife and Chain aren’t worth the trouble. I snap the blade beneath my boot and fling the weapons off the platform, ignoring my ribs as I start making my way deeper into the Sump.

They say that when something’s hurt and on the run, it heads back to what’s familiar. A nest or warren, some kind of sanctuary where you know you’ll have some walls to put around you.

Precious few sanctuaries in the Sump, for me at least. There might have been a handful of places I could go, but now everywhere I look there’s that mark, the spider that’s swallowed everything. I need somewhere to catch my breath, and down here there’s only one place I can think of.

I’m hazy on when and how I first ended up at Hope House for Foundling Children. I haven’t thought about the orphanage in awhile, but I still know the way by heart. You always remember how to get home, even if you ran away from it.

I stay out of the open, keeping to shadows and side streets to avoid any more encounters. I watch clots of gangers moving around, every one of them armed, but no chaos. They aren’t breaking or wrecking a thing down here.

Why smash up what you already own?

My hand is getting distracting, joining my ribs with a sharp poke each time my heart beats. I can feel it swelling up under the wraps, not broken but damn near close. I just pull them tighter.

Round a corner and there it is, Hope House, in all its dull, crumbling glory. It was far from in good shape when I left it, and the years since haven’t been any kinder. I’m amazed it’s still standing. For a second I’m a kid again, coming home banged up from a scrap or a heist. I can’t keep the smile off my face seeing it.

Kids chase each other around the front of the building, the faster, healthier children outpacing those with a missing limb or wheezing through third-rate esophilters. They see me coming and scatter. Trust is a hard thing to come by this far down, one of the first lessons the abandoned are forced to learn.

One of them makes for the front door. He hurries up the worn steps leading to the entrance, nearly stumbling face first before reaching it. His fist pounds on the door until it opens, and a young woman looks down, too young to be his mother, but old enough to be responsible for him.

“Now what did I tell you about playing on those stairs?” she scolds, thumbing away a smudge of grime from the boy’s cheek. “I’ve told you they’re tricky, and if you’re not careful, one of these days—”

“One of these days,” I say, stopping at the foot of the steps, “you’ll collect a crack in your skull.”

Her eyes go wide. I knew her voice the second I heard it, and it’s enough to sting my own eyes a touch. My mind fights to reconcile the young woman standing there with the shy little girl I once knew.

“I used to have to warn a little girl here about that all the time.” I smile. “She was trying her hand as a tumbler, when her head wasn’t buried in a book.”

“Gave up on the tumbling,” she replies, gently guiding the boy through the door before stepping outside and closing it behind her. “But I still like to read, when I can find the time.”

“Roe?” The first stair creaks under my weight as I place a foot on it. “Is that you? Can’t be.”

“It’s me.”

I climb another stair. “You can’t be Roe. Roe’s just a kid, barely reaches my hip. Look at how you sprouted.”

“Nobody stays a kid down here for long,” she says. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Another stair. “It’s good to see you. Been a long time.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks down. “I’m not the one who went anywhere.”

I stop my climb, and take a step back. The hurt is clear in her voice. When I left, she was just a kid, one I had looked after from the day she first showed up at Hope House. I had never let her run with me, kept her clear of the scraps and the stealing and the gangs. I protected her.

And then I left.

“Heard you’re with the law now,” Roe says, leaning back against the door.

“You see a badge anywhere?” I spread my arms out wide. “I was a warden for a little while, yeah, but we’ve gone our separate ways of late.”

“Seems to happen a lot.”

I dip my head. “Hey, if you wanna brawl, we can brawl. You’re old enough now.”

Despite herself, a thin smile slips through.

“Maybe. Can it wait until I get back?” Roe asks. “I’m gonna go in just a moment.”

“Go where?”

Roe looks back toward the door, then to me. She is silent for a moment, considering me. I glance at her and notice a pin on her collar, little more than an etching on a chip of scrap metal. It’s of a spider.

“Have you ever heard the Voice?”

I leave with Roe, walking through the crumbling neighborhoods toward the gathering. I listen to her talk about her life, learning about this new person she’s blossomed into. The shyness is still there, and she’s still smart from all those nights I saw her with her head hidden in books, but there’s more to her now. There’s conviction in her, an intensity that shines in her eyes.

I stick to asking questions, skirting around mentioning what I’m doing down here. All the talking starts a coughing fit that nearly doubles me over.

“What?” Roe laughs. “Spent too long up out of the Gray, huh?”

“I took a pipe to the ribs.” I wince, pressing a hand to my side. “A message of welcome from your friends when I stepped off the Howl.”

Her smile dulls. “We all want the same thing. An end to the oppression. Liberation from the barons and the clans. Clean air. Just not everybody agrees on how we should get there. Most are coming from life in the gangs, so they’re on edge. There’s great people here, kind people who just want a better future for us.”

I’d spent years in Piltover, walking among those who saw Zaun as nothing but a prison, a wasteland, an underworld. Piltover looked down and saw Zaun’s eyes looking back at them, and they either pitied them or hated them—or tried to speak for them, like that punk I arrested.

“They certainly seem preferable to the lot I’ve met already,” I say.

Roe nods. “I’ll show you.”

The closer we get, the more people we see. There are all kinds, young and old, members of rival gangs who were out to slit each other’s throats only weeks ago, all walking together. Every one of them has the spider on them, on a patch or tattoo or on a pin like Roe’s. They’re filing into an old factory with only three walls upright, and no ceiling, waiting in patient lines to gain entry.

We reach the door, barred by a pair of brutes. They are armed, one augmented with a claw of burnished iron, but they know each person by name, greeting them warmly as they come in.

“Roe, my sister, you are welcome,” one of them says, his voice low and soft despite his aggressive bulk. He then looks to me. “But this one, no.”

“Let her in,” Roe tells them. “She’s with me.”

“She is sun-stained,” says the other, lifting his chin with a sneer. “Not to be trusted.”

They want to turn me away for the joke of a tan I’ve gotten upstairs in Piltover, not because I joined the Wardens. These guys must be new.

“She has come to hear the Voice. I vouch for her, Togg.” Roe stares the guard in the eye, not backing down. “Get out of the way.”

The pair convene, muttering, before turning back to us. “The Voice is for all to hear, so you are welcome, too. But we will be watching.”

I feel their eyes on me as we step inside, and the static’s enough to have me taking in the room for ways out if this goes wrong. The place is a wreck, full of holes and collapsed masonry. If things turn red, I can get out. The only question is whether Roe will run with me, or after me.

There’s no pomp or ceremony. No music or votive candles, no dish passed hand to hand for contributions to the cause. There’s just a mass of people, surrounding a mound of rubble in the center where a man sits, calmly waiting.

“Is that him?” I whisper to Roe. “The Voice?”

She nods. I look over at him, this man who conquered the Sump, and I don’t understand.

He’s young, barely older than Roe, little more than a kid himself. Scrawny and gaunt, he has the look of a ganger in his eyes, eyes that have seen his share of horror. But there’s a strange warmth there, too, like he has a secret to tell, just to you. The last of the assembly enters, and the Voice begins to speak.

“I see many new faces.” His voice is gentle, almost quiet, though it carries to every ear. “You are all welcome here. Each one of us found our own way to this place, countless paths leading to where they become one. Know now that you are no longer alone.”

I scan the crowd. All are hanging on his every word. I wonder how many have never had those words spoken to them before. The rejected and abused, the forgotten, seen as people for the first time.

“We all bear scars,” the Voice continues. “The marks of the lives we’ve had to live, our trials and our suffering. The world has done all it can to beat us down, to convince us to stay there and be grateful for what little we have. That has been the reality here for far too long, and it is time that changed.”

Murmurs of affirmation wash over the gathering. You don’t need to have worked as a warden to feel the tension ratcheting up. The Voice is dredging up wounds, making them raw again. He isn’t lying—these people have borne more than their share of hurt, but I can see the game he’s playing, hidden beneath that truth.

“How long have their boots been on our throats?” His voice begins to rise, its edge sharpening. “The chem-barons. They use our home to build their wealth, and what do we get from it? We get poison in the air we breathe, in the water we drink. Sickness, pain, death—is this what we deserve?”

“No!” The crowd is angry now, playing right into his hands. I glance at Roe beside me, and see the same rage on her and every other face. Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but I feel like they should have found a theater to hold this performance.

“I say, no more,” growls the Voice. “No more will we weep for brothers and sisters too weak to stand, or watch our children’s lives waste away. The barons will pay for what they’ve done, but more than that, we will bring justice to those they truly serve.”

Here it comes.

The Voice stabs an accusing finger skyward. “The corrupt merchants in that city towering over us. A city where the sun shines so bright it blinds them to the crimes they have committed here. The pain they have caused you, and the ones you love. They hide in that blindness, because they think it will protect them. But it will not, not after he arrives.”

Awed whispers fill the room, like he has just spoken of a god. Roe brushes a tear from her eye. They’re all drawn in, but nothing about this feels right, and I’ve yet to trust a word that’s come from this Voice.

“Who is he talking about?” I ask, but Roe nods back to him as he continues.

“I am his Voice, and we are all of us his sons. I have seen his face. I have heard his words and survived his test. He laid his hands upon me as his chosen, to seek out his flock and make ready for his return. That day is soon to dawn, my brothers and sisters. Not one of retribution, but of justice.”

“And who will pay the blood price for that?”

Silence descends. All eyes turn to me as I find myself standing.

“What are you doing?” Roe hisses, tugging at my hand.

Damn my temper. Vi, you’re a terrible spy. Well, no going back now.

“I’ve heard this kind of talk before,” I say, both to the Voice and the crowd. “Glib talkers who prey on the pain of the wronged and the dispossessed. They rile them up in the name of justice, when all they want is to see their puppets dance, because they want to be a god.”

The Voice listens, without any change to his patient facade. “I have not seen you here before, sister. You are new to our ways—none can fault you for not seeing them clearly.”

“I see clearly.” I glare at him. “I see a cult getting whipped up to spill blood. I see a liar promising freedom and prosperity, but putting armed thugs at every entrance to his territory.”

“They are what will win our freedom,” he answers plainly. He looks me over. “If our brothers attacked you, then I am sorry. You must understand that a dog can only be kicked so many times before he bites back. We’ve waited and we’ve waited, but now there is another way.”

He walks down from his mound of rubble, slowly approaching with his arms spread wide.

“I see much pain in you, a hurt you keep hidden behind your eyes. I see a child of Zaun who has strayed from her rightful home. Piltover has its corruptive mark all over you. You think strength lies in helping our oppressors to change, but they won’t ever change. You have strength, strength that could be used to help liberate these people.”

He certainly has a way with words. I realize I’ve made fists, and exhale to slowly release them. As much fun as making a crater out of his head would be, I wouldn’t last five seconds after.

“Whatever pain I have is mine.” I thump a fist against my chest. “I carry the weight of the choices I made. I don’t push them onto others. I don’t make scapegoats, and I don’t believe the wrongs done to me justify my inflicting them on someone else.”

The Voice looks down, chuckles softly before meeting my gaze again. “He would like you. But, if this is not your path, then leave now, and no harm will come to you. Return, though, and I can make no promises.”

I glance down at Roe, at every face staring at me. “I’ll go, and so should all of you. There is no one coming, no great being to deliver you. All I see is a man, looking for lost people to do his bidding.”

Again that soft smile, almost sad and without a hint of malice. “No, my child. He is very real. And soon enough, you won’t have to rely on my words to know that.”

True to his claim, no one touches me when I leave. Not even a threat. I don’t hear a harsh word until I am clear of the place, and Roe catches up to me.

She cuts me off. “Who do you think you are?”

“I—”

“You left,” Roe snaps. “Years pass, and all of a sudden you just walk back in and think you know what’s best for me?”

“I heard enough. You can’t tell me you actually believe all of this.”

“What’s so hard to believe? That there’s someone out there who gives a damn about what happens to the Sump?”

I take a deep breath. “I know a demagogue when I hear one, Roe. They talk, and they say anything to spin folks up, but in the end it’s never their hands that get bloody. He’s manipulating all of you.”

“He’s trying to help us.” She shakes her head bitterly. “Do you even remember what it’s like down here? You got out, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. We stay separate and alone, and nothing will ever change. He’s going to set us free!”

“How?” I try like hell not to sound like a warden just now. “And how many are going to be left alive when it’s done? Do you know what he plans to do? If you know something, Roe, please, it is very important that you tell me.”

Something changes in her eyes. “Why? Who are you going to tell it to? Why are you even here?”

“I want to understand what has happened.” I raise my hands, trying to walk back the suspicion curdling our talk. “What is happening now, so that I can keep two cities from falling apart.”

Roe laughs, but it comes out as half a sob. “You’ve been in the sun too long. You’ve lived up there for all these years, you say you care, but what the hell have you done for us?”

“Roe.”

“Just name something,” she presses. “One single thing you’ve done to help these people, to help me, instead of keeping us all locked where we are.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

It’s a simple question, but it hits me like a knife in the gut. A child might ask it, trying to figure out why the world doesn’t make sense.

“Forget it. Go back up. You don’t belong here. He’s coming, Vi, and then you’ll see. All of you up there will see.”

“Who?” I grip her shoulder. “Roe, who is he?”

Her expression goes cold. “Everyone knows who the Voice is talking about. Everyone but you. It’s the Dreadnought.”

“Dreadnought?”

It’s night up in the Promenade. Cait’s left behind anything that might make her stand out, to be recognized as a sheriff of Piltover in the bustle of where the two cities touch.

“Mean anything to you?” I ask.

Cait shakes her head once. “I’ll do some digging, see what I can turn up. What else can you tell me?”

I explain all that I had seen. The marks on every wall. The complete control over the Sump. The Voice’s words when they gathered.

“They are organized,” I tell her, “and they are angry. It’s not a matter of if this boils over, but when.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath, processing. “And when it boils over, do we know where, or how?”

“I don’t know.”

Cait’s voice changes with the next question. It’s lower, quieter. “Have you heard any of them mention hextech?”

“Hextech?” I frown. “What does that have to do with—”

“Hextech,” she repeats, locking my gaze to hers. “You hear anyone start talking about gems, crystals, magic, that is news I need to know immediately.”

A question surfaces in my head, one I don’t want to ask, but will stay lodged there until I do. “Do you already know what you’re looking for, Cait?”

She looks at me. “We’re on the same side here, Vi.”

“And what side is that?” The fact she has to say such a thing puts me even further on edge. “It isn’t just the barons involved with this, is it? We’ve watched them feud with the gangs for years, and never lifted a finger. Suddenly there’s a new player on the scene that the barons can’t keep on a leash, and now you’re talking about hextech. The clans get spooked about their margins, so they need us to go down and keep Zaun in line?”

Cait doesn’t answer. My blood’s up, and I push out a slow breath. “Guess I’ll have to find out myself.”

“I told you what I could, what you needed to know.” She looks me over, her eyes falling on my hand. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll manage.” I stand, and start walking.

Dawn’s light doesn’t reach this far down. The flickering chem-lamps make a poor substitute as I climb the steps to the front door of Hope House, where that little boy sits, alone.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Remember me? I’m Roe’s friend. My name’s Vi. What’s yours?”

Both of us are careful as I close the gap. He’s pouting, cheeks flushed and arms crossed over his chest. “Yulie.”

“Yulie,” I say, stopping a few stairs shy of him. “Do you know where Roe is, Yulie?”

He nods his head. “She’s gone.”

Something goes cold in my stomach. “Gone where, Yulie?”

The boy looks at me, the hurt making his eyes shiny in a grimy face. “She came home mad. Then she left with some of her friends.”

“Now, Yulie, this is very important.” I reach out, very slowly, and place a hand on the stair he’s sitting on. He watches me, but doesn’t flinch away. “Do you know where they went?”

“She said they were done waiting.” Yulie sniffles. “I wanted to go, but she said I had to stay here.”

“Where did they go?” I try to keep my voice soft so as not to spook him, but I’m getting impatient.

“The new tower.” Yulie nods up toward the Entresol. “She told me they make the magic rocks there. I asked if she would bring me one, and she promised that, when she got back, she’d have enough for everyone.”

I’m already running.

It takes time to make it up to the Entresol, but once I’m there, I know where to go.

The spire. A symbolic and literal image of the common Zaunite’s oppressors. It spans both cities, but while all the sweat and blood are shed in Zaun, most of the money is spent in Piltover. At the very tip of the spire is a dome, where the merchant clan’s representatives lord over the workers below.

What a sight will greet them today, if they bother to look down. To see the base of their tower turned red with blood.

The ground is already thick with dead when I arrive. Piltover may be the destination for the hex-crystals, but the chem-barons get their cut for having the spire on their turf, and they make sure they have enough brutes on hand to keep the factory secure.

The cult must have run at the gates, dragging down the guards like a tide. I see corpses from both sides littering the way. The security force had chemtech weapons, training, and experience, but they couldn’t stop a wall of fanatics, armed with little more than blunt objects and the chance to get a little payback.

The gates have been thrown open, and I see men and women that I recognize from the gathering, hauling crates and inspecting racks of round metal canisters. I keep my distance, blending into the crowds. I find my way to where most of them are massing, around a pile of crates seized from the spire. I can’t see Roe anywhere.

Standing atop the crates is the Voice. His face is bloodied and bruised, his clothing torn. He looks like he had been in the thick of the fighting. Using a pry bar, he levers open the nearest crate, revealing racks of small, gleaming blue stones.

Synthetic hextech crystals.

“This is a momentous day!” The Voice holds up one of the crystals in triumph. “Behold, the instrument of our freedom. For so long we have given everything, and received nothing in return. Today, with these, we will balance those scales, and take what is rightfully ours!”

His celebration is interrupted by the terrible screech of metal against stone.

All eyes turn upward to the walls of the spire, where a dark shape can be seen descending in a great shower of dirty sparks. Even from a distance it is enormous, an entire arm replaced by a massive cannon, the body perched upon a multitude of splayed mechanical legs, segmented and ending in sharpened claws gouging deep wounds into the spire. As it gets closer, I can see that the top portion is vaguely human, pallid flesh fused to metal and lambent green medical tubing, but the legs belong to a monster.

Or a spider.

Dreadnought. I hear the name flicker through the crowd, whispered like a prayer.

I had believed that the Voice was deluded, or a charlatan. That the creature was something he had conjured up to rally an army for himself. But he is real. Things have suddenly become far more dangerous.

The Dreadnought crashes down to the ground, making impact in a cloud of dust and rock splinters. The people fall to awed silence, parting before him as his clicking spider legs bring him to loom over his prophet.

“You’re here,” the Voice says, an ecstatic whisper. “You’re finally here.”

“Indeed, my witness.” His true voice is thunder, rendered through furnace iron. “I am here.”

I push into where the onlookers are thickest, my eyes darting, going from searching for Roe to watching what is unfolding. The Voice leaps down from the crates, his hands full of hex-crystals.

“Mighty Dreadnought,” the Voice says, beaming, “I offer these, hard won with the blood of your children. The key to our liberation.”

The Voice pours the crystals into his master’s flesh hand, stepping back in preparation for praise.

“Why do you bring these before me?” The Dreadnought tilts his hand, and the crystals spill to the ground.

Silence. Then: “I don’t understand,” the Voice stammers, watching the priceless gems scatter into the dust.

“That is clear.”

“We’ve won you a fortune. With these we can buy weapons, armies.”

“You think as they do.” The Dreadnought says it like an accusation. He looks out to the crowd. “Hate Piltover for what they have become, but revere their forebears. Industrious, committed, those people possessed the strength to harness the magic within our world, and bend it to their will. Truly they were mighty.”

I can feel the crowd’s confusion, because I share it. Of all the things they expected their savior to say, I can’t imagine it was this.

“Yet over time, the tool they had forged bore more weight. It became a crutch, and then it became their master. They have made themselves into slaves. They awoke so shackled to these gems that in their absence, the civilization they had inherited would end.”

He turns to the Voice. “Wealth is a vice—it is not strength. The boy I found that day appeared worthy. Was I mistaken?”

Unease sweeps over the crowd. We all become very aware that nearly every facet of the Dreadnought is lethal, bladed, and weaponized as his hand cups the Voice’s jaw.

“I was chosen,” the Voice pleads. “That day. You spared me.”

“Indeed.” The monster nods slowly. “Though I am not infallible. I can only seek out my failures, and correct them.”

The Voice screams, a sharp, short sound. A yelp of agony and it’s over. The Dreadnought discards the body, immediately forgotten.

“I am Urgot,” the creature says, turning to address the crowd. “And I have heard you, Zaun. The whispers of your hearts, the things you have hoped and dreamt for me to be. The names, the titles. A liberator. A god. I speak before you now to say that I am none of these things. I am greater. I am an idea.”

Every person there flocks to him, ringing his monstrous form like a congregation. He reaches for one of the metal canisters, and I notice dozens more of them within the gates. “I am a reflection of this world, an echo of the great contest between strength and weakness waged in each of our souls, with every breath we draw. I cannot be a god to you—that offering is not within my power. What I can offer you is a test to learn if you bear the strength needed to be your own god.”

A sick feeling creeps up my spine. Urgot gestures to the medical tubing linking his mechanical body to the mask covering his mouth and nose, and holds up the canister. It’s covered with warning sigils: toxic, poison.

“What lies within this metal shell is the very air I have come to breathe. I took it in, and conquered it, for true liberation comes from within. That is the message we will take to our enemies, our would-be oppressors.”

Urgot scans the crowd. “Who among you has the strength to follow me? To take this misery within yourself, and endure?”

Every one of them sinks to their knees, yearning to be baptized.

“Urgot!” they roar. “Urgot! Urgot!”

“Very well.” Urgot closes his hand over the canister’s safety valve, pale fingers forming a claw. “Let us see.”

The gas bursts out from between Urgot’s fingers as he crushes the valve. He tears a rent in the canister, and a green cloud rushes out to envelop his followers. I’m near the back, away from the greatest concentration of it, but almost immediately people begin to die.

“Roe,” I whisper, pushing through the crowd as panic begins to set in. Men and women collapse, pinkish froth boiling from lips and noses. I find a breather mask discarded by the wreck of an equipment shed, and pull it on as I feel the air begin to claw at my throat.

Visibility devolves into a putrid greenish haze. I see silhouettes all around me, shivering and thrashing and toppling over. I have to find Roe. I have to get her out. I have to find her.

And I do.

She is kneeling with a group of others, tendrils of mist rolling up their chests as it finally reaches them.

“Roe!”

She looks up, seeing me. The shy little girl I used to know. Roe stares me in the eye, vision clear with absolute belief, and breathes in.

“No!” I skid to her side. Her skin begins to blacken, dark webs of corrupted veins filling with poison. She gags. Bloody foam rings her lips. I tear the breather mask from my face, trying to press it to hers. Roe spends the last of her strength fighting me, even as she sags to the ground. Her conviction, that ironclad belief, never leaves her eyes until the life does.

Less than half of them are still alive when the cloud finally dissipates. Many of the survivors are those who are half augmented, their jaws bracketed in clunky brass esophilters and prosthetic windpipes. My mouth tastes like blood and burnt sugar. Tears cut through the grime on my face.

“Arise.” Urgot lifts a hand, and his army clambers to their feet. “Those who have passed the test bear the right, and the duty, to grant that trial to the world.”

He turns his eyes to the peak of the spire. “For too long have they been separated from the full fruits of their labor. It is time we return it to them.”

Urgot had sealed the spire, his followers opening every canister inside the air-filtration system. The toxic mist is coiling up the tower like a sickly green snake to fill floor after floor with choking, paralyzing death.

I had managed to sneak in before they locked the gates. My heart pounds as I climb the stairs toward the top, clutching the breather mask to my face. I don’t know how many dead I pass on the way, but a feeling settles in my gut that I may join them before this day is done.

If that’s the cost of a reckoning, then I’ll pay it.

It’s a race now. The cult and their monstrous leader are swarming up to reach the dome. The men and women at the peak are clan folk, and if they die, so will many more from both cities. The symbiosis, that fragile peace, will end, and those waiting for an excuse to use violence will finally have one. That’s not a fight Zaun ever wins.

I’m ready to give my life to see that prevented, to protect these people so that the true innocents might be spared. But when I throw open the doors to the clan’s sanctum, all I see makes me want to hate them.

The peak of the tower is a shimmering glass dome, painted in painstaking detail to resemble a clear, clean sky. Opulence is heaped upon opulence, from the richly appointed furnishings to silver trays of sugared fruit. The clan representatives here do not reside in a laboratory or workspace—they are in a palace.

I hurry toward the knot of frightened Piltovans, trying to suppress my anger, when a familiar face steps forward from their midst.

“Cait?”

The sheriff tips her cap. “Up here in the Promenade, it can get murky where Zaun ends and Piltover begins. Sometimes you just aren’t sure where your jurisdiction is.”

I tell her of what has happened, of what is coming.

“Well, then.” She produces a bulky case and hands it to me. “You’re going to be needing these.”

The gauntlets purr as they come to life. I make a fist, my aching bones a memory as I wait for the scrap that’s coming. Toxic mist tumbles in, immediately stinging the eyes and biting the lungs. Several of the clan folk begin to vomit.

Cait’s face goes stony and her rifle snaps up high, faster than I can track. I hear the shot and the ring it leaves in my ears. I feel the air tear as the bullet strikes the reinforced glass of the dome.

Cracks radiate out from the hole left by the bullet, rushing across the surface like lightning. The dome shatters. Colored glass rains around us, spinning and slicing. The pressure change lashes at the gas, whipping it out of the tower.

It buys us a second to breathe, but no longer. The mist fills the entrance, darkening as cultists skulk through. They pace and rattle their weapons, but hold back, waiting.

The doorway darkens again, this time entirely. It solidifies into Urgot’s titanic silhouette as he arrives, stooping to enter the dome’s bucolic splendor, his followers parting before him.

Urgot watches the gas dissipate and chuckles, a sound like gravel and slipping gears. “You think you have denied these people their test? That you have denied yourselves? No. I shall deliver it to you, and after you are destroyed, I shall deliver it to them.”

Cait grips her rifle, the hextech crystal in its chamber pulsing with rose-tinted light. She looks over her shoulder at the Piltovans behind her. “Get clear, now. Take the bridge to the Promenade. We’ll handle this.”

Energy dances across my gauntlets as I crash them together. “Behold!” Urgot cries, gazing at me. “Such precious weapons. Your masters give you strength, but underneath you are broken. Weak.”

“I don’t need these to be strong.” I laugh, bitter and quick. “I won’t need them to break you. They’ll just make it more fun.”

“I saw you with the girl.” Urgot gives a slow nod. “You cling to two worlds, child of Zaun. The day will come when you will have to choose.”

“I’m tired of listening to you talk.” My rage finally slips. “I’m tired of doing anything other than beating you to death for what you did.”

I can’t tell if the fight lasts seconds or hours. I only remember it in flashes. Crushing metal. Ribcages wrapping around my knuckles. Thunder from Urgot’s cannon-arm, stitching explosions. The sound of blood, fizzing and popping as it cooks on my gauntlets.

Between Cait and me, we whittle down Urgot’s followers, until it’s only him left standing, a metal monster of fire and bullets and slashing chains. It’s unclear who will leave the broken dome alive, until Cait sees an opening with her bola net.

Urgot roars as it envelops him, pinning his arms to his sides and distracting him just long enough for my charge. I put everything into the blow, sending him teetering off the edge of the dome. But I won’t let him fall, not yet.

I gather up the end of the net, straining against his appalling weight as my boots slip and skid to the edge. I want to look him in the eye once more, before I drop him.

“Let’s see how fast a spider flies.”

“Wait!” I hear Cait shout behind me.

“This ends here, Cait,” I hiss.

Cait stops beside me, a metal spar in her hands. “True strength is being able to choose whether you use it. You let him die now, you make us no different than he is.”

She threads the spar through the net to pin Urgot to the tower. I don’t want to listen to her. I want justice. But I know it won’t replace what he has taken.

I spit, and hammer the spar into the ground.

It would take a very generous perspective to call the stacks of wind-blown rock just off the isthmus islands. Barren and lashed by salt-spray, they’re far from any place someone would want to make their home. Seems a few generations back, someone in a position of authority in Piltover agreed, and built a prison there.

After my reinstatement into the Wardens, I told Cait that I trusted her to see that Urgot would be transported and interred to the letter. I was headed for the Sump, to visit Hope House and use these heavy hands to build instead of break. But I think she saw what it meant to me, and she wanted me here to see with my own eyes that he would face justice.

“I know this was difficult for you,” Cait says. “But I wanted you to see the end result of all that you did. So you know that you made a difference.”

Difference. The word catches in my throat, and my head fills with the image of all those people, suffocating on the poison left in the wake of progress.

“Putting him away, we saved both Piltover and Zaun a lot of chaos.”

“Do you ever think that something better might come out of that chaos?”

She looks at me, sighing softly. “Maybe, or maybe something even worse. A lot of people would have to die for anyone to find out, and I can’t let that happen. So we fight, and we do what we have to, to keep things together. That’s what the law does, what we do. We preserve order.”

Law. Order. Can you have one without the other? And what does either of them have to do with justice? If you had asked the younger me, she might have had an answer. Ask me now, and I’m not so sure anymore.

“Urgot’s following will wither,” Cait says. “Ambitious folks will fracture it, looking for power. They’ll be too busy fighting each other to give us any trouble.”

“You weren’t there, Cait.” I shake my head. “Not like I was. You didn’t see the numbers, the commitment. We aren’t finished with them, not by a long shot.”

We’re standing on a gantry overlooking the cell block. Cells flank us on either side, the cages cleared as wardens and prison guards bring Urgot down a central passage to his new home, an immense tube of reinforced iron running from floor to ceiling like some gigantic piston.

Urgot is in chains. He makes no move to resist as the procession reaches his cell.

“How much of him can we remove before he dies?” Cait asks me, loud enough for the Dreadnought to hear. “I bet most of him.”

“Step forth and test your theory, then.” Urgot’s eyes glimmer. “Unless all you have brought with you are idle threats.”

“Let’s speak plainly.” Cait slings her rifle. “You exist here on our sufferance alone. You will eat when we tell you, sleep when we tell you, breathe when we tell you. Nothing more, nothing less. Deviate from this in any way, and I will have you destroyed. Is that clear?”

Urgot laughs. “You believe you have the power to destroy me? You don’t. You never did. That is a door that will never be open to you.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to settle for closing this one.” Cait nods to a technician. He throws a switch and the tube descends over Urgot, clanging to the floor and locking fast.

I can still hear him laughing through the iron as we walk away. I pause at the door to the cell block, looking back over my shoulder, a dread I can’t shake sneaking up my spine.

Urgot didn’t look like a prisoner to me.

He looked like a spider, waiting patiently in his web.

We were running through the streets of Zaun. The pipes and stained glass were blurred, smeared colors against the Gray, and the fog that hung in every chem-soaked alley. Zori was to my left, all matted hair and rusty knives—her smile was the only sign that she was beautiful beneath the grime. Blenk was behind her, with a spray-philter full of glowing paint and a head dripping with ideas. Scuzz brought up the rear, every bit the kind of lug you’d expect to be called Scuzz. But he was our Scuzz, every scuzzy bit of him.

He yelled our gang’s name into the billowing smoke, marking the night as ours.

“Sump Riders!”

We laughed, and yelled it too. We were young, we were alive. Nothing could stop us. It would have to catch us first, and we were still running.

The city itself seemed to carry us forward as we slid down into its depths, farther and farther from the sump-scrapper we’d just robbed and left bleeding in the gutter. His cogs still jangled in our pockets. More than enough for a bit of fun. We were on our way to the Black Lanes, the market at the heart of Zaun.

“Think they’ll sell us any shimmerwine?” Zori asked. “Bleedin’ that sumper made me a mite parched.”

Blenk scoffed. “They’d sell shimmer to a child in the Lanes. And then they’d sell the child.”

“Gob it, both of you,” Scuzz growled, catching up. His face showed a kind of concern that I’d never seen before, a frown slowly forming. “Can’t you hear that?”

I squinted my eyes and peered into the night—since you can’t squint with ears, you ken? Not without a few augments. “I can’t hear nothin’,” I said with a shrug. “Not even a plague rat’s brown cough.”

“That’s what I mean,” Scuzz muttered.

And the silence after… It weighed heavier even than Piltover, glittering above us.

Pushing slowly into the market through the fog, we found dram-carts overturned, their wheels spinning lazily. Stalls abandoned, still full of exotic wares. There was a stench in the air that reminded me of the sump-scrapper—a stench strong enough to make my eyes water, when even seeing him bleed had not.

And there were bodies here, too. Many of them were wearing a chem-baron’s emblem. They’d been torn to pieces, the cobbles red beneath them.

It was a massacre.

“Nasty bit of work, eh?” Blenk grinned, rooting through one of the dead men’s pockets, carefully picking away giblets of flesh. “Guess that means we’re gettin’ a discount.”

Zori only shuddered. “There’s someone… in there,” she whispered, pointing into a cloud of raw chemtech that was spewing from a pipe in the clearing beyond. It was the source of the stench that was only growing stronger, crushing my senses, somehow making my ears hum. “It’s… It’s a man.”

“That’s not a man,” I murmured, following her gaze into the growing green veil. “Not anymore…”

It was a hulking shape, with mechanical legs and many guns, fused savagely to its flesh the way a mechanician would fuse two pipes. Burning and searing. Just looking at it made me wince. In one hand, it held a much smaller figure aloft. A man, choking in the chemtech cloud. As he writhed, the monster taunted him, its voice a mechanical buzz vibrating deep in my gut, threatening to loose the bowels within.

“This is what you want,” it almost cooed, cruelly forcing the man’s face into a rent in the pipe, the chemtech gas gushing out around them. “Breathe it. Make it yours.”

But the man only writhed, kicking uselessly, growing weaker and weaker—until finally, only his augmented arm still jittered, echoing his last, desperate thoughts. Even after they ceased.

And with that flash of brass, it hit me. The dangling corpse, he was a chem-baron, the only kind of person who could afford newfangled kit. Baron Crimson, or somesuch. These were his men, scattered around us.

Were his men. And now…

“We have to get out of here,” I gasped, turning from the carnage to my friends behind me. But I couldn’t see them. The gas from the pipe, it was spreading, a toxic green cloud making it harder to breathe… Harder to… to…

Run. We had to run.

I could hear Zori, Blenk and Scuzz panicking and coughing somewhere nearby. I reached out into the swirl for anyone, anything, to pull along with me as I made my escape. But there was only the sound of a body slumping softly to the ground, a spray-philter rattling across the cobbles.

Blenk. I stumbled as the truth hit me. He was gone.

And the worst was still to come.

The monster pushed itself through the cloud, a massive, armored leg slamming down beside me, and then another, and another—all revealed chemtech-filled tubing, and protruding gun muzzles that smoked with the very same heat still smoldering in the bodies around us.

I could taste it at the back of my throat, a truth as bitter as the acrid air. I was going to die here.

The monster grabbed me by my ragged scruff, lifting me close enough to see its face. It was a visage of terror, all the more horrifying because it was human. More human than the rest of him, at least. His tox-mask glowed as it vented pure alchemy, but his eyes were somehow even brighter. Intelligent. Almost seeming to smile as they took my fear in.

“A son of Zaun. What is your name?” he growled as he brought me closer. His accent was sharp, but I couldn’t place it. His words battered my resolve, each one hitting with the force of his hate.

I couldn’t even stammer an answer.

He laughed. “The baron, you recognize him? Like many, he tried to rule this city, casting countless people into the depths, to mine this…” He breathed in deeply as the gases swirled. “…this misery. Now he is no more, killed by that which gave him power over others. It is you, the gutter rat, at home in the squalor, who survives. So, tell me, which of you is stronger? Which of you deserves to live?”

Suddenly, I was falling back to the ground, landing on top of my friends. They were shuddering, choking as the chem-baron had. Scuzz, his mouth was foaming. And Zori… I closed my eyes against the tears before I could see what had happened to her.

“Run,” the monster said. “Tell the city how you survived and a baron did not. You will be my witness. The first of many.”

I hesitated.

“Run!” he bellowed. I saw Zori then, sobbing, reaching out for help with the last of her strength. I didn’t want this to be the way I would remember her. I wanted to remember her smile. I still do.

But I was running again, through the streets of Zaun.

And can you imagine how it felt to realize, with burning lungs and heaving breaths, that my screams were the message I was to bear?

I was alive. My friends were not.

I was worthy.

PopRox: Hello to our international audience! Today we have very special guests for you. I’m here with the four members of K/DA. If you haven’t heard of them, and how have you not heard of them, are you living under a rock?! Go to YouTube right now and search for their hit song “POP/STARS”.

We are so excited to have you today, K/DA.

K/DA: Hi everyone! My name is Kai’Sa and you’re listening to PopRox! The rest of K/DA and I are excited to hang out!

PopRox: I got to say, Kai’Sa, it’s so lovely to hear your accent. Tell us more about your upbringing.

Kai’Sa: Thank you. Well, I grew up all over actually; my parents traveled quite a bit. My accent is pretty international.

PopRox: Any favorite cities?

Kai’Sa: <LAUGHS> Of course! My favorite cities are Cape Town, Seoul, New York, and Hong Kong, where I spent most of my time before K/DA.

Ahri: 그래서 저희 안무에 이국적인 느낌이 있어요. 카이사랑 안무 연습을 하면 연습 같지 않고 너무 즐겁죠.
(She brings international style to our choreography too! It's never a boring dance practice with Kai'Sa.)

PopRox: That’s incredible! And thank you, Eve for translating. How long does it take for you to get ready for a performance?

Ahri: A lot of time! 상상도 못 할 정도로 오래 걸려요. 다들 최선을 다하거든요. 투어 중에는 빨리 일어나서 의상 챙기고 메이크업 받고 준비를 하죠. 투어 중이 아닐 땐 스튜디오에 일찍부터 가 있고요.
(Everyone in the house works so hard. We get up early to get dressed and prepare for a day during tours. If we're not touring, we'll be at the studio early.)

PopRox: Alright, let’s talk about you Ahri. How does it feel to be back in the limelight and with such a hit single?

Evelynn to Ahri: 자꾸 왜 이런 걸 물어볼까? 난 이 질문 별로야.
(I don’t think it’s a great question. They always ask.)

Ahri: 너무 그러지 마, 이블린. 저는… 일단 음악에 집중했어요. 팬분들께서 좋아하고 자랑스러워하실 만한 노래, 대담하고 아름다운 노래를 만들고 싶었거든요. 언제나 다양한 문화에 열린 마음으로 저희를 응원해 주시는 팬 여러분께 감사하다는 말씀 드리고 싶네요. 정말 감사합니다! 꿈이 현실이 된 것 같아요.
(It’s ok, Eve. I focused on my music. I wanted to make bold and beautiful songs that people love and have confidence in. Thank you to our fans around the world for the continued support and acceptance of our cross-cultural artists. Thank you for all your love. Our vision came together.)

Eve: This is important. Ahri did not disappear. She saw real issues with the restrictions of creativity from music labels and found a way to unleash a powerful album with a fearless team.

PopRox: That’s a great point, Evelynn. You have a reputation in the music industry as a difficult artist to work with. Do you feel you’ve found a perfect position on K/DA?

Eve: Oh, I’m familiar with the “bad girl” or “diva” labels. I have nothing but good things to say about previous bands I’ve worked with. We simply had creative differences. Everything we do in K/DA is collaborative. Ahri’s leadership enables each of us to express our talents equally. Yes, this is a perfect fit for me.

PopRox: Can you tell us more about your album, K/DA?

Ahri: 카이사, 네가 대답할래?
(Kai’Sa, can you answer?)

Kai’Sa: There is a place between fantasy and reality where anything can happen. You have the power to be anyone, and do anything. It is your dream. In our in-between world, K/DA feels confident and strong. We can do anything, and so can you.

Akali: So can you!

Ahri: <LAUGHS>

PopRox: Why do you think the song “POP/STARS” is such a hit?

Ahri: 아칼리 덕분이죠. 저희의 비밀 병기라고나 할까요? 목소리가 독보적이잖아요.
(Akali. She's our secret weapon. No one sounds like her.)

Akali: No! No it’s not me I promise. I am trying to break tradition, but it’s easier with K/DA doing it together. It’s all of us. Eve and Ahri work so hard to encourage each of us to unleash our minds. For example, I wrote the rap for “POP/STARS” so many times, and each time Ahri encouraged me to go further. Eve… well Eve is more direct.

Eve: I told her to stop trying to be the most creative rap artist in Asia, and to just be it.

Kai’Sa: I feel like Akali brings this truly unique vibe. We each have our own style and with Ahri’s direction we make music completely different than current pop songs. And our fans love it!

PopRox: Akali, you perform on the street, right?

Eve: You can’t stop her.

Akali: Ha. Yes. Sometimes. I don’t want to be successful because people know who I am. I want them to like my lyrics because they’re good.

Eve: They’re good.

PopRox: That’s pretty rare for a pop star, and we really appreciate it. You’ve been spotted in Hong Kong and Tokyo as well, wherever you girls tour. There’s a viral video of you in Seoul rapping and doing a few flips.

Akali: Ha. Yeah. Just a few flips.

PopRox: What was each of your favorite parts in “POP/STARS?”

Kai’Sa: Oh I adore Akali’s rap. The black light scenes showing how there’s so much more than what meets the eye, that’s the kind of art I like making.

Akali: Kai’Sa spray painted the art herself! She made my mask. My favorite part is Ahri’s elegance. Her parts in “POP/STARS” give us a strong foundation to set up this magical world.

PopRox: You two have so many talents! What about you, Eve?

Eve: Driving down the tunnel at Kai’Sa was a thrill. The thing is we filmed that scene only seven times. I wish I had more time with that sports car. We did put Kai’Sa in front of the speeding car once, but they told us not to do it again. Seeing the final version of it was fabulous.

Kai’Sa: You know I would’ve gotten away in time.

Eve: But the stunt coordinator might not.

PopRox: Ahri?

Ahri: POP/STARS에서 제가 제일 좋아하는 부분은… 마지막 장면에서 같이 안무하는 거요. 촬영 중일 땐 따로 있는 경우가 많다 보니까 함께인 순간이 좀 특별하게 느껴져요. 넷이 같이 춤을 출 때 저희가 제일 빛나는 것 같아요.
(Dancing together in the last scene is my favorite part of “POP/STARS”. We’re not always together when we film. When we are, it’s very special to me. When the four of us dance together, K/DA shines.)

PopRox: So what’s next for K/DA?

Ahri: 팬분들을 위해서 투어도 계속하고 음악도 만들어야죠. 저희 음악의 가치는 자기표현이나 사랑, 아름다움, 우정, 자신감 같은 데 있는 것 같아요. 더 많은 분들께 그런 가치를 전해드리고 싶어요.
(We’ll continue to travel and create music for our fans. I believe our music celebrates self expression, love, beauty, friendship, and confidence. We will take that all over the world.)

Eve: Basically, we’re just getting started.

PopRox: Thank you so much for spending time with us K/DA. Wishing you the best of luck at the League of Legends Worlds Championship performance. And thank you to our listeners from around the world. This is PopRox signing off.