I stood in the doorway for two full seconds.

  "Daniel," the hare said from behind me. His voice had that specific tone of someone who already knows exactly what disaster they're looking at and is really, really hoping they're wrong.

  "Is he—"

  "He is."

  A pause.

  "OH MY GOD! HE IS DEAD! DANIEL HE IS FUCKING DEAD!" the hare said, calmly.

  He was right. The doctor was dead. Someone had cut his throat while we sat just ten feet away in the waiting room. I hadn't heard a thing. That meant whoever did it was either very good at being quiet or the waiting room had really effective soundproofing. Either way, they were probably still in the building, which was bad news for everyone with a throat.

  I started backing up.

  I quietly closed the supply room door behind me, using the universal technique of "closing a door very slowly so it doesn't make that clicking sound but then it makes the clicking sound anyway."

  "We're leaving," I said quietly to the examination room.

  The hare was already moving, which showed good survival instincts.

  I crossed the examination room in four steps, opened the door to the waiting room, and walked through, trying very hard to look like someone who hadn't just discovered a murder.

  The waiting room had three chairs, two medical posters about washing your hands, and one very alert Kitten Cowboy. He stood in the middle with his paw on his gun and his ears flat, facing the front door like he'd already figured out something was wrong.

  Mira sat on the arm of the nearest chair with her wings half-open in that way birds do when they're about to either fly or fight.

  She looked at my face.

  "What happened," she said. It wasn't a question.

  "The doctor is dead," I said. "We're leaving. Now."

  Kitten Cowboy was already at the front door, because apparently everyone in this group had better survival instincts than me.

  Mira made a sound and flew to my shoulder. The hare followed at my heels. We moved.

  We stepped outside into the street.

  I kept walking.

  "Don't run," I said quietly. "Just walk fast."

  "Why not run?" the hare said.

  "Because running makes you look suspicious," I said. "If someone's watching, running tells them they picked the right target."

  I walked as fast as I could while still technically walking. It was the kind of speed that said "I have somewhere to be" rather than "I am fleeing from a murderer."

  Mira said nothing. She was watching everything. I could feel it from how her weight shifted on my shoulder and the small movements of her head, like a security camera that could also stab you.

  I turned a corner. Then another. We moved away from the narrow building with PELLUCID MEDICAL on the sign, which I was now pretty sure had a zero-star rating.

  After the third turn onto a wider, louder street full of the normal chaos of the market district, I let out a breath.

  "Okay," I said.

  "OKAY?" the hare said, in the voice of someone who very much did not think things were okay.

  Mira's talons tightened on my shoulder. "Daniel," she said carefully, "is there something you want to tell me?"

  I walked for a moment, considering my options. I could lie. I could deflect. I could—

  "Mira," I said, "I have a parasite."

  A longer pause.

  "You opened the chest, didn't you?" she asked, in the tone of someone who already knows the answer but is giving you one last chance to surprise them.

  "Yes," I said. "And something jumped into me."

  The cat tilted its head slightly backward—behind us.

  I turned my head slowly, keeping my body facing forward in what I hoped was a casual "just looking around" kind of way.

  The market district was busy. Dozens of people moved in different directions, carrying things, talking, doing the normal work of being in a city. Stalls had items hanging from them. A cart was pulled by something that might have been a horse if you squinted and didn't ask too many questions.

  About thirty feet back in the crowd stood a figure in a dark coat with the hood up.

  Not moving.

  Everyone else was moving. The crowd shifted and moved around this person like water flowing around a rock, or like when someone stands in the middle of a busy sidewalk looking at their phone and everyone just... accepts it.

  Hood up. Hands in pockets.

  A long, thick tail curved out from under the coat. It was ringed and pale, curling slightly at the tip in a way that would have been cute if it wasn't attached to someone who was clearly following us.

  "Is it him?" Mira whispered so quietly I almost didn't hear.

  The figure hadn't moved.

  "He's just... standing there," the hare said.

  "Menacingly," I added, because sometimes you have to appreciate the classics.

  We moved through two more streets—wider, louder, more crowded. I picked directions randomly, turning left, then continuing, then turning left again. We were probably walking in a big circle, which wasn't great, but I didn't have a destination in mind beyond "anywhere that isn't here."

  The feeling didn't go away.

  "Is he still there?" the hare asked.

  I turned right onto a street that was slightly narrower but still felt safe—open on both ends, still connected to the main district. A vendor sold something in paper bags. A couple of people argued outside a door. Normal city stuff.

  Twenty feet ahead. Not in the crowd. Right there, as if he had teleported from thirty feet behind us to directly in our path, which was either very impressive or very concerning.

  He was looking at me.

  I almost stopped walking but managed to get within four feet of him, because at this point what was I going to do, run?

  Then I stopped.

  We looked at each other.

  "Hello," I said, because saying hello was accurate and filled the silence and maybe if I was polite he wouldn't kill me.

  The snow leopard said nothing for a moment.

  Then he moved. His hand came out of his pocket and grabbed my arm in a grip that was very firm. He stepped sideways into a gap between two buildings that I was almost sure hadn't been that wide a second ago. I went with him because the alternative was losing my arm, which I was still using.

  The hare screamed as loud as possible, which was fair.

  The alley swallowed us.

  It was dark and narrow and smelled like old water and stone and regret. The light from the street was a bright rectangle behind us, getting smaller as the snow leopard moved deeper with a grip on my arm that was very calm and very certain and absolutely not open to negotiation.

  The snow leopard stopped.

  We were at the far end of the alley where it opened into a small, dead, forgotten square. Just old stone floor, three walls, a drain that hadn't worked since probably the last century, and a patch of grey sky above. No doors. No windows. Nothing interesting except us and the growing likelihood of my death.

  He let go of my arm and turned to face me.

  The snow leopard crossed his arms and looked at me. His expression was complicated. Not exactly angry. Or not just angry. It was the expression of someone who came home to find their house on fire and could already hear someone inside saying I can explain.

  He breathed out through his nose in a very controlled way.

  He said: "Do you know what I told them?"

  I said nothing. This seemed like the right choice.

  "I told them," the snow leopard said, "that you were not going to open the chest."

  He paused, letting that sink in.

  "I told them this with confidence. I was certain. I told them—" He stopped. Looked at the ceiling like he was asking it for strength. Looked back at me. "I told them I knew this because I had met you, and I had talked with you, and I had figured you out. And while you were clearly an idiot—" He gestured at me, taking in everything from my ruined boots to my name tag to whatever was now living inside me. "—you were not the specific kind of idiot who would hear 'do not open this chest' and immediately open the chest."

  The hare made a small, strangled sound from somewhere behind me.

  The snow leopard continued.

  "I didn't tell them this because I trusted you," he said. "I want to be very clear about that. I didn't look into your eyes and see an honest soul. I didn't believe in you as a person. I trusted you because I thought—I genuinely thought—that no one could possibly be that stupid." He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "I have worked in this city for sixty years. I've dealt with thieves, murderers, cult leaders, and a man who was actually three smaller men in a coat pretending to be one tall man. I have never once met someone who actually does the thing everyone tells them not to do the moment they're left alone with it."

  He lowered his hand.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "And yet... And yet," he said very quietly.

  We stood there for a moment in the dead square with the grey sky above us and my life choices hanging in the air between us.

  The snow leopard made a sound that wasn't quite a word. He turned away from me, and for a second I thought he was just going to walk away and leave us in the alley, which would have been reasonable and also meant I got to keep living.

  Then he turned back.

  His eyes had gone very still in a way that suggested walking away was not the plan.

  He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  It was a short whistle. Two notes, low then high. The kind of signal that meant something specific to someone who knew what to listen for, like a secret code.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the wall opened, because apparently today was just full of surprises.

  A section of the building's stone wall, three feet wide and six feet tall, swung inward on invisible hinges, showing darkness on the other side like the world's least welcoming doorway.

  The snow leopard's hand closed around my throat.

  He moved fast. The distance between us vanished. His hand closed around my throat and he was already moving forward. I went with him—not by choice, but because his grip gave me approximately zero other options.

  His claws were out.

  I know this because I could feel them pressing against my neck, which was a very effective motivation technique.

  He didn't say anything. He just jumped through the hole in the wall.

  We fell.

  Not straight down. At an angle. Fast. Very fast.

  There was a smooth, steep surface under us and we were sliding down it at a speed that suggested someone had built a slide but forgotten to include the "fun" part. It was totally dark for about a second, then there were lights—small, warm lights mounted on the walls, passing in blurs as we went down like the world's worst theme park ride.

  The slide curved.

  We curved with it, because that's how slides work.

  Behind me, from above, through the hole we'd come through, I heard the hare say "OH NO" in the voice of someone who's already committed to jumping before thinking it through, which honestly was becoming a pattern for all of us.

  Then a cat sound.

  Then a wing sound, which suggested Mira was handling this better than the rest of us.

  We hit the bottom.

  Not hard—there was something at the end that absorbed the impact and slowed us down, like a cushion but more mysterious—but we hit it, and I went from moving to not-moving very suddenly in a way that made my organs rethink their positions. The snow leopard kept his grip on my throat through the whole thing, which told me something about his reflexes and also his commitment to the bit.

  I lay on my back.

  My throat was still in his hand.

  I looked up.

  The ceiling was far above us. Very far. The slide we'd come down curved up the far wall like a scar on the stone, ending at a hole where a door was slowly swinging shut.

  Before the door finished closing, three shapes came through.

  The hare came first, screaming something I couldn't understand from this distance but could definitely understand the general emotion of.

  Kitten Cowboy came second, managing to look dignified even while sliding.

  Mira came third, and she just flew, which was probably smart and also showed she'd been thinking ahead.

  The door closed with a sound that seemed very final.

  I looked around.

  We were—

  I took a moment to process this.

  We were in a very large room. No, not a room. A space. The ceiling was held up by columns that looked like they'd been added later, like someone had found a cave and thought "this needs more architecture." The floor was old stone but had been partially covered with wood and rugs and things that showed people actually lived here, which raised questions. There were tables. Chairs. Shelves along one wall with things on them. Lamps that worked well. Tunnels leading off in at least four directions, some lit and some dark, all of them looking like they led to more questions.

  There was also a group of people near the far wall who were now looking at us.

  They weren't alarmed. This was notable. A man had just fallen through a hole in the ceiling with another man held by the throat, followed by a screaming hare, a tiny cowboy cat, and an imp, and none of the people near the far wall had reached for anything or changed position in a threatening way or even looked particularly surprised.

  They were just watching.

  One of them was smiling.

  Most of them were smiling, actually, like this was entertainment.

  They had the look of people who had seen this happen before and had opinions about it, possibly including ratings.

  A few of them had the same careful quality the snow leopard had—the kind of relaxed stance that wasn't actually relaxed, the kind of stillness that was always ready to move. Guild members, I thought. Or something like it. People who knew how to kill you efficiently.

  The snow leopard, who still hadn't released my throat, looked down at me.

  "Do you know," he said, "how hard it is to keep a reputation?"

  I considered saying something.

  "Don't," he said.

  I didn't.

  "Sixty years." He wasn't talking loudly, which was somehow worse. The quiet version was clearly the one he used when he was actually angry, not just frustrated. "I have never had a situation get out of control. I have never—" He paused, probably thinking of all the situations that had stayed in control.

  The hare, from somewhere behind me, made a small noise that suggested he was still processing the slide.

  His claws pressed in slightly, which was a gentle reminder that I was still very much at his mercy.

  "I had a reputation," he said. "Specifically, I had a reputation for not being connected to disasters. That is the reputation. That is the only reputation that matters in this city. Do you know how long it takes to build that reputation? Sixty years. Do you know how long it takes to lose it? One idiot."

  The people near the far wall kept watching. One leaned over to say something quiet to another. Both looked at me. One of them definitely laughed.

  I gave a small wave, because maybe someone would feel a little sympathy for the man with a hand around his throat.

  The snow leopard made a sound through his teeth that suggested sympathy was not forthcoming.

  I reached up and found my pink sash. Held it up like a flag of surrender. "Please don't kill me."

  With his free hand, he pulled out a blade from somewhere I hadn't seen—probably a pocket dimension at this point—and held it to my neck.

  The blade moved slightly, and I had the distinct impression he was deciding something.

  "Stop."

  A voice. From across the room. From one of the tunnels.

  A calm voice. A woman's voice. The kind of voice that made people listen.

  The snow leopard froze like someone had hit pause.

  I turned my head carefully, because there was still a blade at my throat and I wanted to keep my throat attached to the rest of me.

  She was coming down the stairs.

  The stairs were wide and curved, carved into the far wall of the room like something from a fantasy novel. At the top was a woman.

  Black. Everything was black—her coat, the hood pulled back from her face, the cape-like thing that moved around her as she walked in a way that showed it wasn't just for decoration. The fabric was expensive. The kind of expensive you couldn't tell was expensive unless you already knew what expensive looked like, and then you'd look again and think "oh, that probably costs more than my life."

  She was tall. She was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that caught you off guard and made you suddenly very interested in looking at literally anything else.

  I made eye contact with the drain in the floor for a moment, which seemed safe.

  The woman walked down the stairs.

  She walked slowly and calmly, taking her time. She moved like someone who always showed up at exactly the right time and knew it, like someone who had never been early or late in her entire life.

  The people near the far wall had shifted slightly. Their posture had changed. It was subtle, but it was there—the kind of shift that meant someone important had entered the room.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs.

  She looked at me from across the room, and I had the feeling of being assessed very quickly and very thoroughly.

  Then she looked at the snow leopard.

  She didn't say anything. She just looked at him.

  The snow leopard let go of my throat and stepped back like he'd been given an order, even though she hadn't said a word.

  The woman walked toward us and stopped about ten feet away, which felt like a reasonable distance for someone deciding whether or not to let me keep living.

  "Well?" she said.

  "The seal went into him," the snow leopard said, gesturing at me like I was evidence.

  The woman looked back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read.

  "He opened the chest. The seal was in the chest. It entered him through—"

  "I know where the seal should be and how seals work," she said, cutting him off in a way that suggested she didn't need the explanation.

  The snow leopard pressed his lips together, possibly rethinking his choice to explain.

  She looked at me. At my face first, then down, scanning.

  "I thought," the snow leopard said, "that if we cut it out—"

  "If the seal has attached itself properly," the woman said, looking at my arm, "then we're too late for everything."

  I looked at my arm, because that seemed like the kind of statement that deserved investigation.

  There, on the inner part of my forearm, was a mark.

  I had looked at a lot of strange things recently. I wasn't easily surprised by weird things anymore.

  This was still something.

  A ring. Dark. The lines weren't clean. They were cracked and rough, with the texture of burnt stone rather than ink, like someone had carved it with a very angry chisel.

  The ring wasn't complete. On the side facing my palm, there was a break—a gap, sharp and rough, like something had been torn apart there. The edges were jagged, ending in rough points that bent slightly toward each other, like they wanted to close but couldn't quite manage it.

  From the outer edge of the ring, lines stuck out. They were short and uneven, some straight and some slightly bent, like rays from a sun drawn by someone who had never seen a sun and was working from a very bad description. Some were short. Some came to points. The whole thing looked like it had burst out rather than grown slowly, like it had been in a hurry.

  The gap faced my palm. When I opened my hand, the whole mark pointed toward my fingers like an arrow. When I made a fist, the gap's edges pressed slightly inward, and the skin around them did something that wasn't quite shaking, not quite a heartbeat, but definitely not nothing either. A pressure. The kind that feels like a doorway about to open.

  "He is the key now." she said, looking at the mark like it confirmed something she'd suspected.

  The snow leopard turned his head very slowly toward her, in the manner of someone who has just realized things are even worse than they thought.

  "Welcome to our little group," she said. "It's good to see another human. It's been a while." She turned and moved back where she came from.

  I looked around the room. Most of the people who'd been watching from the far wall had drifted back to their business, losing interest. A few still watched. One gave me a small, encouraging nod.

  I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

  The hare sat on the floor with its knees drawn up, staring at a fixed point in the middle distance with the expression of an animal that had processed too much in one day. Kitten Cowboy stood beside it, one tiny hand on the hare's back in what was clearly meant as a comforting gesture—which was working about as well as it sounds. Mira had landed on a nearby chair and was looking around with the focused attention she gave things she was trying to rapidly understand.

  I turned to the snow leopard to ask what happens next and what exactly a key is and whether being a key could be undone, or at least if I could trade it for something with less responsibility.

  The snow leopard was already walking away.

  "Wait—" I started.

  He didn't stop.

  "What—"

  "Shut the fuck up." he said. Not loudly. Not even over his shoulder. Just as a general emission into the air around him, like a field.

  I closed my mouth.

  He continued walking.

  He kept walking until he had crossed the entire room, passed through a tunnel entrance on the far wall, and disappeared into whatever was on the other side of it. He did not look back once.

  I turned back to my group.

  "Okay," I said, walking over and lowering myself to sit on the floor next to the hare. It was a sit-on-the-floor situation. I had opinions about that, but I kept them to myself.

  Kitten Cowboy relocated to my knee without being asked.

  Mira drifted from the chair and settled on my shoulder.

  The hare looked at me with both eyes.

  "We okay?" I asked.

  "NO," the hare said, in what was, for the hare, a completely moderate volume. "THERE IS SOMETHING IN YOU. YOU ARE THE KEY TO SOMETHING. DENIEL THATS NOT FINE!”

  "I didn't say it was fine."

  The hare stared at me for a moment. Then it turned back to the fixed point in the middle distance, apparently deciding that was more comforting.

  Mira's talons shifted slightly on my shoulder. "What do you want to do?" she asked.

  I looked around the room.

  The guild was still operating around us. Quiet sounds. Movement. The ordinary texture of a place that functioned every day.

  I looked at Mira.

  "We should talk to them," I said.

  "The people?"

  "Yeah." I looked around the room more carefully. Near one of the lit tunnels, someone sat alone at a table. They had pointed ears, a long snout, and a tail wrapped around the chair leg. A fox, or close enough. At another table, two people talked quietly—one tall with curved horns like a ram's, the other small with bug-like eyes that reflected the lamplight. Near the shelves on the wall, someone with pink gills on their neck organized things with the careful focus of someone who organizes to calm themselves down.

  Different. All of them different.

  "Okay," I said.

  I pushed myself to my feet. Brushed off my destroyed boots out of habit. Checked that my name tag was still attached, which it was, because of course it was.

  I looked at the room.

  "We start with the fox," I said.

  I walked across the room toward the person at the table. I passed under the lights, past people who looked up briefly—probably wondering if I was about to be another problem—then went back to what they were doing. This place had clearly been here a long time, which made me feel both better and worse about my situation.

  I pulled out the chair across from the fox and sat down with all the confidence of someone who had no idea what they were doing but was committed to doing it anyway.

  The fox looked up.

  Their eyes were amber and clear. The kind of clear that comes from either handling life well, or still working through it. Either way, they seemed calm, which was more than I could say for myself.

  "Hi," I said.

  The fox looked at me for a moment. At my name tag.

  "Daniel." they said. Not like an insult. Just stating a fact, like mentioning the weather or that the sky was blue.

  "Thats me." I said.

  They looked at Mira. At the hare. At Kitten Cowboy, who had climbed onto the table edge with one small hand near its holster like it was ready to defend my honor at a moment's notice.

  "Interesting group," the fox said.

  "We're having a rough day," I said, which felt like the understatement of the century.

  The fox thought about this. Then they put down what they'd been holding—a small object I couldn't identify—and gave me their full attention.

  "What do you want?" they asked.

  It was a fair question. Fairer than most questions I'd gotten lately.

  "I want to understand where I am," I said. "What this place is. What this means." I put my arm on the table with the mark facing up. "And if anyone here knows what a key is supposed to open."

  The fox looked at the mark on my arm.

  Their face didn't change much. But something in their eyes did—a flicker of recognition, or maybe concern, or possibly both.

  They looked back at me and sighed.

  "Get something to drink first," they said. "This is a long story."