Cameron

"Go with him."

The order felt like Mackaroy had stuck a hot knife in Cameron's guts, and the old shadow was busy twisting it to make the wound deeper. Cameron wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve, to hide the sudden flash-sweat.

"Why?" Cameron managed to ask, in an angry rasp.

Mackaroy spun around in place and glared at him. Meeting his gaze felt like being dunked in a bucket of ice water, or standing on the tracks in the face of an oncoming train. The scarred shadow's right hand was raised, his fingers twitching as if he wasn't sure what he was about to do. "Because I burning told you to. Because the whole ash-stained reason you and I are out here is to make sure he isn't going to become another Saval."

There was no arguing that point. The coldstone knife at his belt — like a bag of ice resting beneath the heavy army coat — was impossible to forget. And much like what had happened on the wall just hours ago, with Crafter Saval turning on her shadow and then everyone around her, it felt like an open wound.

"Why can't you do it, boss?" Cameron asked.

"Thought I'd save you from having to fight the Gloamtaken," Mackaroy said, with a shrug. Strangely, the old shadow broke eye contact first.

"I've never heard a more obvious lie, Mack." Cameron could see Mackaroy shrink back, fold in on himself as if he were wilting away on the spot. "What's the real reason?"

But when Mackaroy responded, his voice had all the gentleness of stone. "I want you to see a Crafter at work."

"I'd have to go back to the City for that," Cameron said.

"Don't be daft. Vincent Hearthsward is a tailor away from being a fully-fledged Crafter. He's in the same league as his master, and the others you saw on the wall. You've spent your time in Oversight dealing with rejects, which is both extremely good training, and completely useless," Mackaroy explained, his gaze unfocused, as if he were staring at memories. "Rejects give you a good idea of when a Crafter could become dangerous, and a very bad idea of what could happen when they lose themselves. Even the weakest reject is dangerous, sure, but comparing one of them to Vincent is like pretending a candle is as hot as a smelting furnace."

Cameron's own thoughts were pulled back to the recent hours. Vincent's little bird, a creation of fire so lifelike it even blinked and fluttered like the creature it mimicked. The smell of ink and wet gravel when they sheltered beneath his heat haze. And the strangely muted way they watched the explosions that fell on the Golem like rain, like watching a blast furnace through thick glass.

"I know he's powerful, Mack," Cameron agreed.

"But you don't know when you're in danger around him." Mackaroy's voice was still quiet, like he was having this conversation with someone else and Cameron was eavesdropping. "He went with a demolitions sergeant to the wall. So go with him, and pay attention. Learn something."

Cameron cursed, but complied. He pushed himself into a jog, eerily similar to the quick march the Rangers seemed to view as their normal moving speed, and made for the wall. He went over the back end of the train platform and climbed up the grain silo ladder to see.

It took just a moment to spy Vincent's now familiar head of shoulder-length hair. It was distinctly out-of-place with an army coat, and combined with the small emblem of a flame stitched to his right sleeve, made the apprentice almost as easy to spot as if he had the red coat. Cameron slid down the ladder, and cut across the other side of the warehouse until he was in their path.

Cameron's hand twitched, and slowly reached into his coat, as soon as he spied Vincent. He had to grit his teeth to hold his hand there, and wait as the others approached.

The sergeant with Vincent was frowning, with his bushy eyebrows furrowed. He stepped forward, and slowed to a lazy walk as he approached Cameron. "You lost, soldier?" the sergeant asked.

"I'll be accompanying you," Cameron replied, and he slid his other hand up his sleeve. He sighed, and smiled as his fingertips found his throwing knife.

"I think you've forgotten how rank works, kid," the sergeant replied. He looked calm, with a small smile and his right thumb hooked into his pocket. But his left hand gripped the top of his sword's scabbard.

"It isn't an issue of rank, sir," Vincent said. "Mister Aster is an evaluator, from the Bureau of Oversight. Since I'm not a graduated Crafter, and I'm working at a battle front, it isn't unreasonable to have someone from the Bureau nearby."

Cameron blinked, and hours of tension melted from his body. His hands fell to his sides, and a sigh passed his lips unbidden. "That's exactly it. Apologies, sergeant. I should have lead with that."

Something changed in the sergeant's posture. It was hard to pin down, the man was surprisingly similar to Mackaroy in how he seemed very familiar with being in danger. But the telltale sign, the left hand holding the sword scabbard, pulled away and reached into a small pouch on his belt. "Don't know much about how Oversight works, but I'll take your word for it. There's room on the maintenance lift for three people."

The sergeant walked past Cameron. Vincent, however, fell into step beside him, with a furrowed brow and wide eyes. "Cameron, are you okay?"

It stung, hearing compassion from the apprentice. Like someone trying to stop the bleeding after they stuck a knife in your chest. "I'm fine, boy. Don't assume otherwise."

Vincent marched faster, to Cameron's relief. Until he turned around and put himself in the way. "Did you know any of them?" Vincent asked.

Cameron shook his head. "Know any of whom?"

"The other shadows. Sorry, the evaluators from Oversight. The ones on the wall with us," Vincent said. "I know I'm not the only person who's lost friends tonight."

Vincent's compassion was an unwelcome shock to Cameron's mental state. He paused, gaze falling to the dirt and his hands going limp. He hadn't known any of the shadows on the wall, asides from Mackaroy. And seeing them vanish in fire, or die to a salamander shot's worth of fire that a red coat tossed as casually as a crumpled piece of paper, it didn't leave him grieving so much as relieved that someone else was there to die.

Anger followed the shock. An unfamiliar anger, one he wasn't used to feeling. But it came welling up as he realized this Crafter's apprentice was looking at am who might have to kill him, and was worried about him. Worse still, this boy — whose power would consume his humanity — cared more for Cameron's dead compatriots than he did.

It wasn't anger, not really. It was shame.

"Stuff your sympathy, and get back to your task," Cameron said. He couldn't meet Vincent's eyes, and turned away. "Let's not grieve for any more people."

"Right," Vincent nodded, and turned to follow after the sergeant. Cameron opened his mouth to say something more, but the City didn't have the time it would take to work up enough courage to apologize.

By the time Cameron started his quick march again, the sergeant was already waiting by the maintenance elevator, and Vincent was already stepping aboard. The sergeant had his hand on the controls, tapping the lever with his fingers. Cameron stepped on, closed the gate, and leaned against the far rail.

"So, whatever we need to do, any concussive force is going to damage the wall," the sergeant said as he pulled the lever. The elevator started to rise slowly; Cameron could have walked up a flight of stairs faster. "So we need to do it in as few actions as possible, to preserve the wall's integrity."

"It won't topple easily. They built these walls well," Vincent reflected, pointing towards the battlements at the top.

"It's not falling over that I'm worried about. But if we shake too much of it loose when we start blasting, anything we do could keep dropping more of the wall down into the hole we make," the sergeant explained. "The engineers designed the walls with compression force in mind. They don't bend well."

"I noticed," Cameron said.

The sergeant raised his eyebrow and scolded. "Explain that, soldier."

"The walls crumbled when the Golem struck," Cameron said, and a wash of cold fear went through him as he thought back to it. But it was an honest fear, something that had nothing to do with the Craft. "The stone shattered and crumpled apart. Not like the towers in High Central during that earthquake five years ago. I remember watching those towers wobble, but none of them fell."

"You can stay," the sergeant said, and Cameron could hear a change in the sergeant's tone. "And the shadow-soldier is right. The walls don't handle being shaken about well. And we're not getting though the sixty-foot base without doing a lot of shaking."

"Not necessarily, Sergeant Lorec," Vincent said. "Would you stop the elevator for a moment?"

The sergeant pulled the switch. Once the swaying stopped, Vincent reached over to the wall, and held out his hand. Cameron couldn't see any fire, or any dramatic shift in the light. No warped air or sudden gust of heat. The only thing that seemed, at all, out of the ordinary, was a slightly acidic smell. Eerily similar to the smell that came from spent Salamander shot.

Then Cameron saw Vincent's hand disappear into the wall, sinking into the stone like he had pushed his fingers into a party cake. He sunk his hand in up to his knuckles, pulled his sleeve back with his other hand, and then pushed in further until he reached his wrist.

Cameron gasped, and his hand was back inside his coat, reaching for his knife. For the coldstone one. "Stone is tricky, because at the point of contact its melting point can vary inch by inch," Vincent mused, as he twisted his hand around, and scooped out a piece of the wall. Scooped out, with little more effort than a soup ladle in a stew.

The hand on Cameron's knife was shaking, and his thoughts were far away. Flashes of orange from the Craft that buffeted the Golem, the cacophony of explosions that could have brought down even the towers of High Central, and the scalding winds as hot as the open door of a blast furnace.

And the sight of Cassiopeia Saval, pointing her finger at her shadow, and in a heartbeat, turning a man into smoke.

Cameron forced himself to let go of the knife as Vincent turned around, holding a fist-sized ball of stone in his hand, that he offered to the sergeant. "So it takes longer, but I can apply heat gradually. You can see how much structural damage I leave behind in the wall."

The sergeant's reaction to Vincent's casual display of power was very, very different from Cameron's. He turned the piece of stone over in his hand, wide eyed, and inspected the melted edges. "That is extraordinary. It looks like a piece of gelatinous grease, separated with a hot knife. Can every Crafter do this?"

"Honestly, we're not supposed to do that without extra training," Vincent admitted, and the revelation immediately had Cameron's hands clenched into fists. "If we forget to let the bits of molten rock cool before we stop crafting, we can burn a hole through our own hands."

"Long as you're only risking yourself by overstepping that rule, I'm all right with it," the sergeant said.

"That's all it is. Playing with molten metal is one of the most common ways apprentices get themselves injured," Vincent admitted with a small laugh. "First year, usually. Someone thinks they're cleverer than their instructor, tries it out on a doorway, and gets distracted while they're holding a ball of iron that's glowing like a lantern."

The story had Cameron's stomach churning, and found it strange to see the sergeant laughing as if it were the funniest story he had ever heard. "You can honestly get distracted, with a glowing cannonball in your hand?"

"Our apprenticeships can be surreal," Vincent admitted, smiling wistfully. "One of our first lessons was boxing while making a candle-sized flame."

"Odd lesson," the sergeant mused.

But Cameron knew. It was the only lesson many failed apprentices had been given in the Craft, before they had failed out. The lesson was meant to teach an apprentice that wielding the flame made it a part of the wielder. They learned by taking blows without feeling pain, to write and make puzzles while blindfolded, to listen to conversations in other rooms through their power. Not being able to learn those lessons meant an apprentice couldn't use their power without losing themselves, and were the first ones rejected.

And the ones Cameron most often had to kill.

"So if you could carve out a piece of it, could you then break it apart without damaging something around it?" The sergeant asked, excited. The question pulled Cameron out of his dark musings, and back into the moment.

"I, that should be too much of a stretch," Vincent said, and he held out his hand. The sergeant handed Vincent the chunk of wall, and Vincent looked it over. "So, small explosions. Pick an element, and sublimate it. If there's an air gap, most of the force should dissipate without doing too much damage to the rock around it."

Vincent put the rock back against the wall, and used his finger to spread the chunk out, like it was putty. He then took off his coat, and pressed it against the wall in front of him. He turned around, and gave Cameron a goofy grin. "Best to turn away for a second, just in case."

Vincent wasn't looking at his coat when the wall started exploding behind it. A dozen quick blasts, so fast they might have been notes in the same verse, cracked the air and buffeted Vincent's army coat. Gravel, pulverized stone so fine it might as well be sand, poured down from the hem and fell to the ground below.

Cameron flinched and stepped away, until his back hit the elevator rails, as Vincent flicked his coat and put it back on. His thoughts were a whirling mess of anger and fear that burned in his stomach like boiling water. He could barely hear Vincent as the apprentice spoke to the sergeant. "Sorry about the noise, but I think I managed to do that without doing much to the surrounding wall. As long as there's open air, the sympathetic vibrations won't-"

Vincent's speech was cut off mid-sentence but a quiet hiss, as the sergeant's sword flashed in the air and pointed at Cameron's chest. Cameron blinked in surprise, and frowned as he stared at the tip of the sword. "What the burning hell?" he asked.

"That's my line," the sergeant said. "Vincent, take that elevator back down. The shadow is getting off."

Cameron raised his hands to protest, and only then realized that there were knives in both. His coldstone knife, the gleaming blade from Crafter Saval's personal chest, bit at his fingers and drank the heat all the way up his arm. And in his left, one of his throwing knives, held so that it was ready to be thrown with just a flick of the wrist.

"Burn me," Cameron muttered to himself, looking at the weapons in his hands.

"I don't know what you've seen, kid," the sergeant said, as the elevator shuddered and began to descend. "But you aren't staying."

Cameron couldn't bring himself to disagree.