Chapter 19

T he clothing consisted of a pale shirt, black skirt, and gray jacket—suitable to blend with all the other Exchange workers she had met at Sandy's. Ripping up the lace dress, Vala wrapped the material tightly around her shoulders and back, providing a homemade bandage. Fortunately, the cold air had largely started the clotting process and the wound barely seeped blood through the lace as she carefully eased on the shirt and jacket. The guards had impassively watched her dress, not that she cared. She was beyond the point of wondering who saw her naked, shivering body.

They placed shackles on her hands and guided her from the dungeon.

The long, slow ascent caused her pain but she felt the air brighten as they climbed the many stairs and the feeling quickened her heartbeat. Standing in the doorway of the dungeon, she gazed upon the palace courtyard. Snow fell lightly upon the huge, drifting billows, remnants from last night's fury. In the gloom, the gold and marble palace rose, a shadow laced with darkness.

A black car waited for her, guards within its depths. She sat with them and noticed they were armed as if headed on a particularly dangerous patrol. Pistols, cudgels, knives…she gulped and clenched her fists, angry at the overprotection. They guarded against a rescue from the Masked Man. The emperor wanted no interference.

Even if the assassin did care for her, why would he want to rescue her now? He would probably say she deserved it. That he was tired of saving her. Maybe he was right. But nothing mattered save for the revenge she plotted against Luiximor.

The revenge for Janie and Corina. And her stolen future.

The courtyard gates swung open, heavily, scraping great drifts of snow aside. The car rolled forth under the black arch and upon the slick streets, leaving the palace behind. She grimaced in pain as the car lurched over a speed bump and approached the gates of the Upper Level. Revenge would be hers. The desire was like sour wine on her tongue. The emperor had to die for her soul to find peace, even as her body could never forget all the inflicted miseries he had caused. She only hoped that Corina would have enough time to run far away before they found out the truth and killed her too.

The car rushed through the dark city streets. Black glass skyscrapers loomed over her like a pack of watchful crows and the wind howled and beat upon the car in mournful lament. Dawn seeped thin, gray light through cracks in the buildings. The day of the Noventury had begun.

As the buildings rushed past, a stab of pain curled within her furious heart. She badly wanted to see the Masked Man one more time, if only to feel the pretense of a caring hand. Their fight had been so pointless in hindsight. Ridiculous now that nothing mattered. At least their parting could have been a happy one. Something to smile upon when things turned from bad to deadly in several more hours. But he had left her and she was left to fight this last battle herself.

The car merged onto a wide avenue and their destination came into view. Before her rose one of the great wonders of the world; the Imperial Exchange. She had seen it once before, a year ago. Curious to glance upon the place where her trades were entered, she had walked over and stood for a long time, staring at the building, wondering how her life could have gone differently. Finally, a guard had mistaken her for a vagrant and told her to go away.

The Imperial Exchange was enormous, rising fifty stories high and covering four city blocks. The walls were of brick, punctuated by huge columns thickly carved with protection runes. There were no windows. Only a set of small, glass doors punctured the entrance, hidden deep under colonnaded, stone brows. Dozens of guards were stationed about the street and police vans flashed warning lights upon the dark exterior.

"Come on, don't drag your feet." The guard pulled her sharply.

She staggered forward, following her captors through the entrance. The doors held checkpoints filled with more guards who waved them past. The grand hall they walked into was mostly empty. Great iron doors, guarded by multiple sentries, lay shut against dim noises within. Exchange workers stood around, chatting in tight groups or walking swiftly to unknown parts of the building. Many looked her way, concern or cool interest on their faces. She wondered if they thought she was a rogue trader being removed from the trading stations. Or perhaps they recognized her as the dragon girl, brought to the Exchange for some unknown purpose.

She heard a heavy, low thrum. It lay about her, above and below, and felt as if to reshape the beating of her heart. The place literally shook with rune trades , she thought, amazement seeping through her terror. The building felt like a dangerous, powerful machine built into the mountainside while simultaneously racing upon electrical connections that shot around the planet, connecting to the Exchanges of other countries.

A place that was nowhere and yet everywhere at once.

Like the world of the Dynn.

Several corridors later and a stair climb that took the breath from her lungs, she stumbled into a small room. But not just any room , she thought, as they fastened her shackled hands to a desk that rose in the center. Before her, a thick black curtain obscured the wall and the other walls were covered in panels of electric lights and glowing buttons. A table stretched behind the desk and multiple chairs were stationed around.

She sat, wincing at the cold, metal seat upon her bare hands. A dim murmur rose from beyond the curtain—loud voices and the heavy thrum of machines. The guards stood on either side of her desk as people filed into the room. She eyed the entering Exchange workers; suits, glasses perched on elegant noses, trader badges gleaming. Some of them wore a black pin indicating they were managers of portfolios of runes and had teams of traders working for them. She knew only one of them. An older man with a portly stride and a designer suit, his eyes quiet and unblinking in that grizzled face. Joe. Her heart leapt but he avoided eye contact and she heard a chair scraping on the floor behind her as he sat.

Heep slinked into the room, vapid eyes lingering upon her with distaste before flickering away to the others gathered. She was not at all pleased to see him. Of all the people there, Heep stood to be the person who knew enough about her runes to interfere with her plan.

The guard closed the door and someone else pulled upon a hidden cord. The curtain opened, exposing a large glass window. For a moment, she forgot all about Luiximor, the eclipse, and her upcoming death for below her spread the Floor, the beating heart of the Imperial Exchange. She had never seen anything more beautiful and terrifying in her entire life.

A huge, circular hall spread out before her eyes, some two stories below the elevated room. Pillars rose from marbled floors to the vaulted glass ceilings above, their sides covered in large, electric panels upon which runes flashed and winked in stunning, ever-changing arrays. Yet, blue light from the rising sun slanted through the massive skylights across the space, already tarnishing the luminance of the electrical lights. She knew the amount of daylight within the Floor was highly purposed. If a day was stormy or sunny, the influence upon trading would be important to know first-hand.

Traders thronged the Floor, their eager gaze studying the myriad of flickering lights. Some clutched phones to their ears, electronic wires dangling from the wall, and shouted above the babble of voices. Others gesticulated over sheets of paper—she could just make out the shapes of equations scrawled upon them. The walls were lined with what appeared to be huge boxes of metal, twisted in wiring, tendrils of steam seeping from hidden vents within their depths. The computing machines.

She eyed the metal contraptions with some awe and even competition. It was due to their failure that she sat here today to do what they could not. Traders clustered around the machines, pressing buttons, waiting for outputs to print on paper cards. Above—a chandelier of iron armed with a heavily ticking purpose—hung a massive clock. The time showed eight fifty in the morning. Her stomach tightened with adrenaline. In ten minutes, the markets opened and rune trading would begin around the world's Exchanges.

Joe spoke then, surprising her. "Flowers, do you know why you are here today?"

She leaned back and winced as the chair pressed into her wounded back. "Please, enlighten me."

The Joe she knew from Sandy's would have been amused at her directness but Joe, Head of the Exchange, remained impassive. "The switches and buttons in these walls," he indicated around the room in a neutral voice, "Command the center board that runs the Exchange Floor. We are tasked with monitoring the emperor's rune holdings. Those columns on the Floor connect into the Dynn, feeding information from the runes that grow in that world. We follow the electrical action upon those pillars and trade as the imperial rune's futures correspondingly shift in the Dynn. Are there any questions?"

Yes, several, and all of them important enough to warrant her death. Joe had been her friend. Her supporter. How many hours had they shared over rune equations and drinks for those two years in Sandy's? He pretended she was a stranger. She had grown used to rejection but this one hurt. Then she thought of something else. Perhaps it had all been a game. Had their meeting been so accidental or did he sense that she had been restless in Sandy's and eager to please in return for praise and money. Had he simply occupied her time with tasks that had never improved her future? Perhaps she would have done something else with her time had that outlet not been offered to her. Something better. Something uncontrollable .

"So, what happens now?" She liked that her voice sounded so calm, given the rage in her heart.

Joe glanced at the shackles on her wrists and perhaps a spasm of compassion flickered on his face. "As the eclipse unfolds, the markets will begin to crash, starting with the emperor's rune holdings. Our job is to unload worthless holdings and purchase new runes to preserve the imperial future and lead the rune trajectory upwards from the crash. I've been informed that you are aware of the part your runes play in all this?"

"Yeah, I'm the emperor's great short." Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

He nodded but surprise flashed through his eyes, quick enough for her to notice. "When his runes wither under the eclipse, yours will grow fast and strong. We will trade upon your rune growth, swapping your runes for his and giving his name to your future, until no more of your runes are left and the eclipse is over. But you are here not for that reason alone."

She grimaced. When the last of her runes were bought by Luiximor, she would die. But not if she got her way first. "I know that my runes have been acting strange, growing where they were pruned. They've hurt today's trade plans and you need help calculating new trades in rapid time to fix your trade strategy."

He affirmed this with another nod but she caught a glimmer of acknowledgment in his face. Well, he had seen nothing yet.

"The emperor reached out to us this morning. He told us to let you come here and help us fix the deviations in the short. I agreed you were fast…and I told him that you were entirely uncleared and never mind unsuitable for such a position. His words were less than kind. This is why you're here today and not stuck in some dungeon or neutralized on a sunship over the ocean—" Joe sounded sarcastic as he twirled a pen, in, out, around his fingers. Again and again.

She bit away a smile. The emperor had listened to her . She had scared him enough to send her into the Exchange. If only he knew she was like a ticking bomb entering a shelter. She wondered if Joe knew she came today with treasonous intentions.

Heep demurely coughed and stepped forward, interrupting. "Joe, I'll take over now. You may be Head of the Exchange but I am her court-appointed supervisor."

Joe graciously inclined his head to Heep and stepped aside. She got the impression the two men did not like each other. But a guard was fastening something to her shackles. A long cord that clipped upon the metal bands and drifted behind her?—

Heep's fingers shriveled into an emphatic handclasp. "My dear girl. I have trained you for years to meet a moment such as this. Do your best…no, do better than your best. Should you perform well, we will inform the emperor of your work and you will be honored. If you attempt to mislead or in any way, damage the trades, your shackles are linked to an electric shocking device." He smiled. "Of course, we will use this punishment only as needed."

Her stomach seized painfully. The cord snaking beside her brimmed with untapped currents of pain. Heep would certainly do it too.

Heep's face twisted into what he probably imagined was a smile. "Now, on behalf of the empire and my colleagues gathered here, we wish to thank you for your service to the empire."

She heard a smattering of claps ring out behind her. She snarled inwardly. If only they knew what she truly planned. Only Joe did not clap. He stood working at a switchboard; his fingers quick upon the glowing buttons. Trading had begun.