Chapter One:

Content warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, implied/referenced child abuse, non-consensual body modification, language, use if in-universe slurs, some blood and gore

The boy’s begging for mercy draws nothing but apathy from the gathered crowd and their raised phones, recording every second of his public disfigurement. 

Isabella watches, something like panic settling and squeezing in fettered bursts inside her stomach. The urge to run consumes her, but she stays where she is, feet planted, refusing to meet Sawyer’s eyes when he tries to catch hers. The guilt is like hot coals pressed into her mouth, burning through her tongue and leaving her dizzy and mute. 

He’s only up there, held in place by unforgiving human hands, back pressed against one of the rows of tables, because of her. 

They’d come to the donation center together. She only agreed to sneak him out at all because she and her guardian could hear his aunt screaming at him through the walls last night. He was being beaten again, savagely. She’d thought she was helping, getting him away from the apartment, and it’s blown up in her face. 

She’s chewed her lip to blood, but sinks her teeth into it away as the scaetel dagger is withdrawn. The begging turns to tears, then bubbling desperation, “I’m not magi, I’m not magi!” but no one moves to interfere, not even her. When the anti-magi set their eyes on someone, the kindest thing to do is nothing. 

Isabella wants to. Dios, how she wants to, but all she’ll accomplish is getting his throat slit. Sawyer knows that, he’s seen the same news stories she has, he watched their classmate get dragged out of class just like she did. When their teacher had tried to stop the anti-magi, they’d left the girl’s corpse in the gymnasium instead of just branding her. 

Selfishly, horribly, she wishes that Sawyer Walker would remember that, instead of begging. 

The long scaetel dagger is gleaming, the dragon scales gray, inter-spaced with strips of blue. A weapon like that has been contraband since the Freeman’s Genocide thirty years ago. Now it gets smuggled between hands like ghost guns; it's illegal for anyone but the government to own. The dragons were hunted to extinction for this metal, because their scales won’t cut through human skin, but slice through magi’s like thin strips of paper. Magi can’t use enhanced healing on the wounds either, which makes it that much more appealing. 

Inhumane, public protest said, pointing to the shivs built by the slaves during the genocide.

The anti-magi don’t give a shit. Their purpose is to break laws, to make points. Layer this mutilation in symbolism, another message to the Dread Daughter about how her year-long eternal winter, the Freeze, isn’t fixing anything. Her unspoken manifesto for equal rights failed. Game over. Try again. 

They drag Sawyer’s shirt sleeve to his elbow. He turns his head away as the metal is pressed into his pale white skin, eating into it greedily. His fingers twitch as it slices from one end of his forearm to the other, blood oozing out in cheerful, bubbling rivulets. 

“You want to know something, Xeno?” The man holding the dagger spits in Sawyer’s face. He’s been smoking, Isabella can hear the rasp of it in his voice. “Humans never beg.” 

Sawyer’s dark gray eyes avoid Isabella, but she shrinks back anyway, privately begging everyone not to remember her. Her neighbor is breathing too heavily to respond. The anti-magi grabs a fistful of Sawyer’s dark brown hair, yanking his head back, pressing the tip of the dagger to his throat. “It’d be like taking out the trash.” 

“Please,” Sawyer whispers. 

Isabella has to bite back a shout of protest. Don’t interfere, don’t interfere. She’s starting to shake from the building panic attack, squeezes her hands into tight fists, wishes that she could look away. Every second drags, eternities passing between them.

Inhale. Exhale. Any sort of breath, actually, would be ideal. 

The man leans in, “Do you see this, Xeno? Not a single person gives a shit what happens to you. So go ahead and scream nice and pretty for the Dread Daughter. Where are your Elementals now?” 

Sawyer swallows, thick. Isabella mentally pleads with him to remain silent. He’s like she is, he’s always been quiet in their classes, an unremarkable student, no one to think twice about, let alone even once. The only reason that she talks to him at all outside of school is because her guardian has taken it upon himself to religiously stalk the boy’s aunt. 

Don’t let him develop a spine right now, Isabella prays to a god that has long-since abandoned them. 

The anti-magi makes a thin sound of disgust, raises the dagger from Sawyer’s throat to his face instead. He shifts position, blocking Sawyer’s head from her sight with his big palm. Isabella doesn’t see what they do, just watches the arm movement—a sharp drag downward—and Sawyer releases a bubbling, choked scream. There’s another one of those swipes, then Sawyer, sobbing, is released from the hold of the others.

His hair isn’t. The leader drags him forward by his scalp and throws him at the feet of the crowd, where he crumples, landing roughly on his stomach, and curls in on himself like a dying spider. Isabella can already see the smear of blood forming in a dizzying pool underneath his face. 

She’s going to be sick. She can’t inhale right. She can smell smoke and taste ash on her teeth. No. No. She can’t freak out right now, she can’t fall apart. Her magic is pressing close to the surface, and a fresh wave of terror crashes through her at it. She can’t control it, if she sets this donation center on fire, there’s no telling where it will stop. 

“Now then,” the head of this impromptu group squats down next to Sawyer, brushes his hair back. Isabella bites harder down on her lip. Dios, aren’t they done yet? What else can they do if they’re not going to kill him? Are they going to kill him? “You gonna to try and steal our food again, Xeno, or am I going to have to make this lesson more clear to you, master?” 

The last part is spat in mockery. It has been for the last thirty years, ever since non-users assassinated Emperor Ludwig Todenhöfer and started dismantling his empire thirty years ago. 

At sixteen, Isabella isn’t old enough to remember it, but she’s heard stories, she's seen pictures of Emperor Todenhöfer’s corpse, videos of the riots, read about the massacres. 

Slavery has been banned for decades, but it doesn’t matter. The Dread Daughter has ensured no one will forget. It's another domination by another Elemental, another one that got away without consequences. The desecration that the four most powerful magic-users in the world—the almost gods of their element—caused by fighting the Lendarian War before then vanishing went unanswered. 

The Dread Daughter may not have enslaved millions, but her winter has ruined just as many lives over the last fourteen months. Ended more. 

“What was that?” the man sneers. Isabella didn’t even hear Sawyer try to speak, just the ragged, wet sounds of his breathing. “Come on, Xeno, nothing to say? What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” 

Oh god. What did they do to him? 

Hatred pools in the man's eyes at Sawyer’s lack of response. He wants it, Isabella realizes, this man wants something to make him angrier. He’s not done hurting people. His grip on the dagger shifts. He raises his arm up for another swing, and Isabella does cry out before she can stop herself, making an aborted movement forward.

A hand catches the dagger before it can make contact, and the entire crowd stiffens. Dread rapidly pools through the atmosphere. They know just as well as Isabella does what’s going to happen now.

Isabella recognizes the savior even before his head shifts slightly in her direction, finding Isabella easily in the crowd. Her guardian’s dark bangs are a mess across his face, the rest of his shoulder-length curly hair pulled back tightly. It makes his jawline stand out. To the little knowledge she has about her biological family, they’re not related, but they look similar enough that they could almost be siblings, if not for his darker skin, thicker lips, tighter curls, and the fifteen years between them. 

Aza’s cold blue eyes are devoid of concern when they meet hers. He’s pissed. 

Mierda. 

She takes a half step back, wishing that the crowd would swallow her whole, but there might as well be a glowing beacon hovering over her now. 

Aza shoves the anti-magi back on his ass roughly. The man makes a sharp noise, the rest of the group stepping forward, hissing angry words, but Aza plants his boot into the man’s stomach and smashes his wrist into the floor. The scaetel dagger clatters across the rough carpet of the church. 

“Hey! You can’t—” one of the other men starts. 

Aza grabs the leader by the lapels of his shirt and hauls him up, slamming him against the nearest wall with ease. His strength serves well as a threat, even if it's clear to Isabella that Aza would rather be wrapping his long fingers around the man’s throat. Aza’s voice is faintly accented, the words dark and low, “The child is bleeding and traumatized, you feel better now?” 

The anti-magi bristles. “We’re not doing this out of enjoyment. The Dread Daughter made her statement, we’re making ours.” 

The phrase has been spouted all over the internet. An excuse for the violence, for the public outings, the humiliation, the deaths. Just making a statement right back. 

Isabella hates it. 

“I hope your cult brings you comfort in these trying times,” Aza says dryly. He pulls the leader back, only to slam him against the wall with such force his head cracks on the plaster. Someone makes a muffled noise of panic. Aza lets him drop boneless to the floor, then turns to the other anti-magi, withdrawing his pistol from his belt. He levels it at them, pointedly thumbs the safety off. There’s four total, including the leader, enough to prove a point, not enough to be a mob. 

When they don’t start scrambling off, Aza fires a bullet in one of their knee caps, then the next man’s shoulder. Isabella is biting so hard at the skin on the base of her thumb that she can taste her teeth on the skin. There's muffled panic rolling through her, like cold fingers stroking inside her chest. 

The gunshots feel like explosions in the confined space. 

The last anti-magi, a woman in her fifties, raises her hands in surrender immediately, looking furious, but unwilling to get shot. Injured and bleeding on the floor, the group is down enough that Aza starts moving toward Sawyer. They’re lucky none of them had guns, lucky this didn’t turn into a bloodbath, lucky this wasn’t like her school. Just so freaking lucky. 

Aza shoves the gun back onto its holster as he squats down next to their neighbor. It seems to be cue for everyone to move. Slowly, achingly, they start shifting. Young children are herded out first by scrambling keepers, but others stay to watch. 

Isabella sucks in ragged, uneven breaths. She’s not going to fall apart, she’s not going to have a panic attack right now. She’s not.

Isabella moves to Aza’s side. He’s murmuring to Sawyer softly, and she doesn’t hear the words until she’s practically on top of them, “...alright, you’re alright, let me see it, chico.” 

His hands are gentle on Sawyer’s spine, cupping the back of his skull. A wave of rancid jealousy washes through her at the sight of it. She can’t remember the last time that her guardian was this affectionate with her, the last time he touched her, even in passing. He won’t even let them brush shoulders in the hall, like she’s infected with something egregious he needs to keep away from. It makes her feel like she isn't real.

Painfully, hyperventilating, Sawyer tilts his face up to put the damage on display. Isabella sucks in a sharp breath. Tears spring to the forefront of her vision, and she pulls her shaking hands away from her mouth to say, “Ay, Dios. I’m so sorry, Sawyer, I—” 

“Cállate,” Aza snaps sharply, and Isabella quiets at the rebuke immediately. 

Her eyes find Sawyer’s face. The anti-magi always brand the ones they leave alive with an “X” for Xeno, but it’s up to the discretion of the person holding the blade to decide where. Sympathizers are given the same treatment, outcast and shunned. No one wants to be seen with a child of the Dread Daughter. 

There are two deep cuts making an uneven line across his mouth. The edge of his cheek to his chin. They’re leaking blood, oozing like he’s been drinking it, smeared across his face with his tears. His lips are already starting to swell. 

Aza’s jaw works unhappily for a second before he grabs Sawyer’s arm. That cut is more concerning. Dangerous. It’s deep enough that it’s going to need stitches, close enough to the ulnar artery that it’s trying to spurt. 

“Find me something to staunch the bleeding. Now.” Aza orders her in their native tongue, and Isabella nods, turning helplessly. She had a bag a few minutes ago, she doesn’t know what happened to it. There were paper towels. 

The Hill donation centers don’t skimp on anything. Jacob Hill—the multi-billionaire tech genius whose inventions slathered him on the front page of every newspaper—has been providing most of the United States with free rations since the Freeze started, just one thing on top of an endless font of them that the nation owes him for now. His donation centers are always stocked with necessities, and enough for wants, just like Jacob said they should be when he promised provisions. 

Wants like the stupid paper towels that felt so important twenty minutes ago. 

The church’s pews have been removed in favor of temporary shelving, tables set up next to the doors to feed the homeless in the mornings. She can’t even remember what aisle the paper towels were on. Bandages. There should be bandages somewhere, right? But medical-grade? 

The crowd is still between her and the shelves, and behind her, the anti-magi are still bleeding sluggishly in front of the doors as they try to get up. Someone is calling the policía. 

She can’t move. It’s like every part of her has been replaced with spun glass, and if she takes a step forward, she’s going to shatter. An ache has started to build in her chest, just below her sternum, like her entire rib cage has discovered the concept of pain receptors and is abusing it vigorously. 

At Aza’s sharp look, Isabella takes an aborted movement forward. He’s grabbed the scaetel dagger off the floor, but he’s looking at the anti-magi with increasing anxiety. They need to get out of here. Now. Before the policía arrive. 

Isabella grabs the zipper to her jacket and starts to yank down and use that, but stops when a roll of thick, white bandages is shoved into her face. She jerks, nearly tumbling backward. Her teeth return to her bloody lip. 

She follows the hand back to the face. A black girl in her late teens stares back at her, eyes hard. Her long box braids are hanging across her face, braided up in cornrows on one side so they only fall over a single shoulder onto her long white coat. Her freckles are dark against her warm brown skin. 

Isabella knows this girl.

She’s—

When their eyes meet, the painful weight in Isabella’s chest makes a weird twisting-pull sensation, like something is trying to physically crawl out of her rib cage. The girl’s breath faintly hitches. A name pushes to the forefront of Isabella’s tongue, and saying it isn’t instinct so much as a pulsing, insatiable need.

“Hazel.”

“Isabella.” The girl, Hazel, looks disoriented for a moment, before the dazed look in her eyes clears, and the bandage nearly clatters from her fingers. Isabella doesn’t know how they know each other, because despite how familiar Hazel is, she’s drawing a complete blank. Classmate? Neighbor? Maybe they’ve met at the donation center before.

Isabella couldn’t care less right now if she tried. 

She plucks the bandages from Hazel’s fingers with a faint, “thank you,” then turns and offers them to Aza. In less than thirty seconds, Sawyer’s arm is wrapped, Aza has hauled him up to his feet, and they’re moving out of the donation center without another word.

Isabella doesn’t see Hazel in the crowd when she remembers to look back for her. For the best, probably. Being within Isabella’s orbit is poison. Sawyer can attest to that, and he’s barely there at all.

Aza manages to restrain himself from shouting at her until Sawyer has been settled into the backseat of her guardian's run-down Toyota. The boy’s tears have dried, his gaze far away. The bruise around his eye looks worse in the pale gray daylight, stark and vivid. 

Isabella hasn’t eaten in two days. Sawyer was desperate to escape the apartment. It had felt like a fair trade at the time. A good idea, for all that it was going to get them into trouble with their respective guardians. Hunger isn’t an unfamiliar feeling to her, especially since the Freeze started, but she’d been getting desperate. 

Sawyer had offered to pawn the keys to his aunt’s ugly Honda Odyssey, but she’d refused. They’d taken LACMTA to get here, and Isabella stares at Aza’s sedan with growing trepidation. 

Panic is swelling in her gut like an inflating balloon. 

She’s avoided getting in cars ever since the accident that severed her spinal cord. She spends enough time in them in her dreams, reliving the moment of impact over and over and over. The blinding headlights in her face before the explosion of sound, the metal crumpling, glass shattering around her, glittering like falling, blood-soaked stars, time of death 9:03 p.m.—

She remembers waking up in the morgue, alone and terrified. She doesn’t remember being dead, but every time she looks at a car now, the cold of that table beneath her bare back is all she can think about. People don’t do that. They don’t die and then crawl off the morgue table twelve hours later, alive. 

“What the hell were you thinking?” Aza snarls, all but slamming the door on Sawyer’s fingers. Isabella finds, with her mouth going dry like someone is vacuuming it of the burden of any liquid, she has absolutely no words to explain or defend herself. 

“I don’t know,” Isabella whispers.

“Dios, Isabella. ¿Por qué me molesto?” He scrubs his hands over his face. Isabella’s stomach lurches to her throat at his words. You bother with me because you care. You care. You have to care. If you don’t, no one does. 

Her parents abandoned her when she was born. She has a warrant for her arrest in Mexico. She barely knows anyone in the United States. She and Sawyer are barely friends. School is proof complete solidarity exists even surrounded by people, Aza is the only person she has that sees her. That knows her and still wants to keep her despite all that’s broken. But that wanting is conditional. 

“What happened?” Aza demands, giving her a rough shove toward the passenger seat. She nearly jumps out of her skin at the contact, muted as it was beneath her clothing. Normally, whenever he needs to direct her somewhere, he just grabs a fistful of her hair and yanks. “I came home and you were gone, I tracked your phone here and saw them assault the boy.” 

Isabella climbs into the passenger seat, refuses to let herself upend her stomach into her lap. She has to try twice to grab the door handle and her fingers actually curl around it. It’s fine. It’s fine. This isn’t ten months ago, her arm’s not bleeding from a stab wound and she’s not desperate to flee the State if it meant getting away from her guardian. 

Aza starts the car before she manages to speak. “We were just picking stuff,” Isabella says, refusing to dwell on the memory. Get it out, factual and emotionless. “I was hungry,” I almost blacked out, she doesn’t say, because she refuses to prove Aza’s point for him about her weaknesses, “so he opened a package for me with Mer Growth so I could…we didn’t think anyone would…” 

They couldn’t get it with their nails. Sawyer’s were chipped and bloodied, Isabella’s chewed hers down nearly to bone. He’d said, winking, that no one would see it. But the glyph had glowed in his palms, and people did see it, and the anti-magi had spawned out of nowhere like they were in some sort of video game and the boss fight just started. 

This is why they can’t do magic in public anymore. It’s not safe. It’s not normal. Relations between magi and humans haven’t been great since the Freeman’s Genocide, but they were trying for peace, if a xenophobic one. Open hostility and murder didn’t start until after the Freeze did. 

Aza sets his hands on the steering wheel, visibly trying to stop himself putting them on her instead. She studies his scars to avoid looking at his face. They look a little bit like henna, there's an art form to it. The scars are dark and old, scratched out in patterns down the back of his hand to his fingertips, a half-moon on the front. There are more scars that go up his arms and his stomach, she doesn't know what all of those were from. Some look like stabs, like a belt, like a knife. And there are the cigarette burns. On the inside of his left forearm, from wrist to elbow. 

Aza has never volunteered where any of the scars came from, but he smokes—often—and she wonders sometimes if he does it to himself. Or did, at some point. The cigarette scars are so old they’ve gone white, and she’s never seen any fresh ones. 

Her guardian closes his eyes. “I am trying to imagine,” he starts, vicious, “the amount of stupidity that exists in your brain to have thought this was a good idea. How many times do I have to grill it into your ugly, mishappen skull that magic isn’t safe? Do I have to steal ULTIM to prove a point, Isabella?” 

She flinches, shaking her head, then ducks it to cover her face with her long brown hair. She wishes that his comments on her appearance would sting less, but it’s like she’s incapable of getting numb to them. She knows she’s hideous. She’s short and thin, with the complexion of a plague patient, big hazel eyes that look grotesque and huge in her face.

She’s not pretty, but she’s not supposed to be. She’s supposed to be rotting. She’s supposed to be dead for ten months and counting.  

“No,” she whispers.

“If you wanted food you should have just told me,” Aza snaps, “you never let me help you with anything. Not your nightmares, not your school, nothing. Why do you never let me help?” 

Because he never offers? Isabella releases a shuddering breath. She doesn’t say anything to that. She can’t. She just needs to sit here, let him yell at her until he’s worn himself out, and try not to be angry that this is her fault that he refused to find food. He wouldn’t, because her grade in English dropped again, leaving her GPA at a steady 2.4. She hasn’t been a model student since she died. The only thing that’s kept her sane is drawing, but even that has been falling apart in her hands, sketches turning to scribbles and torn pages. 

She fails to hold her temper in check, like a dumb, dumb bunny rabbit. “Because the last time you helped me you killed someone?” 

Aza tenses, eyes snapping up to her face. Mierda. Bad idea. Disengage. She draws back, but it’s too late. Her guardian’s voice is dark, “If you had been in my position, where death was the only way to protect someone, you would have shot him, too.” 

“No,” Isabella says with conviction, thinking of the blood she cleaned off her face that night, the shower that she stood under until she was shivering with cold. It’s been months, but no matter what she does, that sensation never seems to go away. The blood stained her. “I wouldn’t.” 

Aza snorts, and the laughter in his eyes is mocking. “Yes. You hold your moral high ground, mija, and you watch as it gets you nowhere in this world. You have more bodies on your hands than I do.”

She shrinks into the chair. The Mexico City fire was an accident. Aza murdered the doctor. There doesn’t seem to be a distinction for him, but there is for her. 

Aza’s teeth set at the look on her face. He's unhappy. “Check on Sawyer,” he says, and the conversation drops. Isabella climbs into the back to do so, pressing tentative fingers against Sawyer’s neck. His pulse is rapid. He’s not unconscious exactly, but he’s not here either, in some sort of awkward in-between. Isabella wipes some of the blood off his neck and dabs at his chin. The cut on his arm has stopped spurting, but the bandage is soaked through. 

Shame has taken permanent residence in her chest, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. “Lo siento,” she whispers, and she wishes he was awake enough to hear the sincerity in the apology. The guilt. They shouldn’t have been out there today. Aza was right, it was stupid, it was reckless. She doesn’t get to help people like that. Not with what she is. 

She tips her head forward, resting it against Sawyer’s shoulder. 

When they get to the apartment complex—rows and rows of two-story buildings built sixty years ago that used to get shot up every other week before the Freeze and recently graduated to only hosting drug deals on the corner next to the vending machine—Aza parks the car in front of their door. There are people loitering outside, enough that there's probably deal going down soon. Great. Isabella helps Aza ease Sawyer up, then out. Her guardian is nothing but gentle with him, she can see remorse in his expression.

The boy stirs some as he’s pushed to being on his feet, enough that he can produce a key in unsteady fingers. “She’s not home,” he whispers, the words split and croaked. He cowers at Aza’s reprimanding stare. Hannah is at work. The relief that washes through Isabella at the realization his aunt won’t be there to hit him for this is overwhelming. 

“Who will take care of you then?” Her guardian asks, “This needs stitches, it will get infected.” 

“I’ll manage,” Sawyer’s eyes shudder, hand coming up like he wants to cup his entire mouth, but doesn’t know where it wouldn't hurt. 

Aza sighs. “Go inside. Let me get my first-aid kit, I’ll help you.” 

Sawyer nods. He moves like he’s on a boat, swaying faintly, but manages to make it to the door without falling over. Isabella and Aza both watch him enter, then close it firmly behind himself. The look her guardian levels at her is dark. Your fault, is unspoken, but heard perfectly. 

Isabella drops her eyes again, and follows him toward their own apartment. He jams the key into the lock and twists it, shoving the door open. Isabella flips on a light switch as he starts to rant again in Spanish, “I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to—” 

He stops, going rigid so suddenly it seems to rattle through him like a shiver. His hand goes to his pistol, and he’s withdrawing it before she even manages to spot what it is he’s looking at. 

A tall figure has gone equally still, holding Isabella’s notebook turned sketchbook in one hand. The girl from the donation center. The one that handed her the bandages. Hazel, her mind offers readily, as if it’s as easy as her own name. 

“You…” Aza breathes, in recognition. Her guardian grabs a fistful of Isabella’s hair and yanks her backward. Hard. By the time she can think past the pain, she’s half a step behind Aza where he shoved her, trying to regain her balance. Aza lifts up his pistol and points it at Hazel’s chest. 

Oh god, no. Not again. Not someone else. Isabella lurches to grab him. “Aza!” 

He doesn’t get the chance to shoot the other girl. No. Instead, Hazel drops the notebook and withdraws a gun from her own coat, handling it like it’s the most familiar thing in the world. She can’t be older than eighteen, if that, and—

Why does she have a gun? Things are bad with the Freeze, but is it really enough to warrant kids running around with loaded weapons, handling them like they’ve been in the military since they were two? Aza snarls, but the sound is more stressed than threatening.

Hazel takes several steps closer, her pistol remaining trained on Aza. Her voice is authoritative. Flat. “Mr. Alvarez, put down the gun. I’m here on behalf of NAMCU to talk with Isabella.” 

Mierda.

And then, just as Isabella is positive this couldn't get worse, Aza shoves Isabella away with enough force that she goes tumbling toward the ground, points his gun at Hazel’s head, and squeezes the trigger.

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