Fate's Edge

that?”
    George looked back and held his gaze. “Declan’s uncle tried to enroll me into Selena University. It’s the best school in Adrianglia. I scored in the top one percent of nine hundred applicants. I was denied admission. They know that Declan can pay for my school. They just don’t want the likes of me on their admission scrolls.”
    Welcome to the real world, kid. The Weird ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. For all of their reforms and talk of equality, pedigree still mattered in the Weird.
    “Jack can at least do the military, but he has to get his temper under control. I can’t,” George said. “I’m fast and strong, and I can fight well; but I don’t have the endurance. I’ve worked on it for two years, and a ten-mile run leaves me nearly dead. I can’t put on a fifty-pound backpack and march thirty miles in one day. I will never be good at it. But I could be good at this.”
    “The Mirror doesn’t care if we’re Edge Trash,” Jack said. “It doesn’t care that I’m a changeling, either.”
    This was ridiculous. These two kids thought they were good enough to go up against ruthless killers, augmented with magic and trained to murder. Two fools, full of innocent arrogance. Was he ever that young? No. No, he wasn’t.
    “This isn’t an exercise or a drill. Nobody will blow the whistle and make the other side stop shooting while we huddle up and review what we did wrong. This is the real shit. People I go up against kill children. They won’t hesitate. They will slit your throats and never think about it again. Your lives mean less to them than the life of a mosquito.”
    “We’re not children,” George said. “You killed your first man when you were fourteen.”
    He would have to wire Gaston’s mouth shut.
    “I was fighting in a family feud. It was about pride and hate and survival. And I had my family around me. It’s different when you’re in a group. Crowd mentality kicks in.”
    Kaldar made a right turn and slowed. The boundary bit down on them with its blunt teeth. The kids gasped. The car kept rolling, the pressure grinding him, compressing his bones, then, suddenly, they were through. George coughed.
    “We’re a crowd,” Jack said.
    Kaldar sighed. “More like a gang of idiots, and I am the biggest moron in it.”
    George coughed carefully. “Would that make you the Chief Moron then?”
    Kaldar parked the car under a tree and rapped his knuckles against George’s head. The boy grimaced.
    “Gaston does that, too,” Jack reflected.
    “Family punishment.” Kaldar got out of the car. “You will come with me to Washington. I need to find a woman there. You will not get in my way. No more unsupervised outings, no more field trips, and no more fights. You do as you are told, when you are told, or I will hog-tie you, load your scrawny behinds onto that wyvern, and have Gaston hand-deliver you home to your sister with a pretty little ribbon tied over your mouths. Understood?”
    “Understood,” the two voices chorused.
    As they headed up the path, he checked the gray shape in Jack’s arms. “How’s the cat?”
    “He’ll be okay,” Jack said. “He just needs someone to take care of him for a while.”
    Don’t we all, Kaldar reflected. Don’t we all .

FOUR
    HELENA d’Amry inhaled the evening air. It smelled of the woods and dampness. She leaned against a large cypress, her cloak mimicking the color of the cypress bark so precisely she was practically invisible. In front of her, the road stretched into the distance, sectioned off by a weak shimmer. The boundary.
    Helena closed her eyes and felt the reassuring current of magic. It was weak here, in the Edge, much weaker than in the Dukedom of Louisiana, but beyond the boundary, it didn’t exist at all. Beyond the boundary, she would be dead. She could see the different dimension, but she could never enter it. The Edge was her limit. Very few of the Hand’s agents could cross into the Broken. The Hounds were differently augmented, and yet barely a third of her crew had been able to cross the boundary.
    This place, it was too damp, too rainy, too . . . verdant. Her Louisiana estate was verdant as well, but there the nature served her will, shaped by the tools of her gardener. Here it ran wild, like a bull out of control.
    Still, it was good to be back. She had grown up in the Dukedom of Louisiana, on the family estate, and although her duty took her from the colony all the way to the capital of the Empire