Realms
The portal looked less like a doorway than a wound.
It hung in the old subway tunnel below Queen Street, twenty feet tall, rimmed in white light and black rain. No one knew where the rain came from. It fell upward half the time. It soaked the concrete ceiling and left the floor bone dry.
Someone had spray-painted above it:
RUNNERS GO IN DEBTS COME OUT
Under that, in smaller letters, someone else had added:
sometimes
I stood at the yellow line with a borrowed pack on my back and my sister’s hospital bill folded in my sock. Sweat crawled down my ribs. The tunnel smelled like rust, hot dust, and old urine. All the holy places probably smelled better. This one had vending machines.
“Name?” said the registrar.
She was behind a plastic folding table with a thermos, a cracked tablet, and a pistol lying in plain sight beside her pen. Her hair was shaved close to the skull. A silver tag at her throat read M. Voss, Licensed Exit Witness.
“Cal Mercer,” I said.
“First run?”
I thought about lying. Everybody lied the first time. They put on the face, the slouch, the tired eyes. Pretended they’d seen sky-whales and glass orchards and teeth in the moon.
Voss didn’t look up from the tablet.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Amateur license?”
I handed it over. Laminated paper. Cheap stamp. My photo looked like a man who had already regretted several decisions and was shopping for more.
Voss scanned it, snorted, and slid it back.
“Twenty-six minutes.”
“What?”
“That’s the average survival time for first-timers who go in alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
Behind me, Tuck raised two fingers.
Tuck was six foot four, missing most of his left ear, and wearing a coat made of some animal that had probably objected. He’d been a Runner for nine years, which meant he was either lucky, careful, or very good at taking things from dead people before they cooled.
He had agreed to guide me because I’d paid him half up front.
With money I didn’t have.
Voss looked at him, then at me. “You paid Tuck?”
“Yeah.”
“With what?”
“Cash.”
She finally smiled. It was not a kind smile. “Then you’re alone.”
Tuck laughed. “Come on, Voss. That hurts.”
“You sold out three crews in the Bone Orchard.”
“Two. Third was a misunderstanding.”
Voss made a note on the tablet. “Cal Mercer. Entry: 18:09. Sponsor: none. Recovery claim?”
I blinked.
“For your body,” she said. “Assuming anything brings it back with pockets.”
“My sister,” I said.
“Name?”
“Lena Mercer.”
“Contact?”
I gave it. My voice cracked on the last digit.
Voss heard it. She didn’t say anything. That was decent of her.
Then she pushed a little metal charm across the table. A dull disk with a hole through the middle, stamped with a number.
“Exit token. Keep it on your skin. Don’t put it in a pack. Don’t trade it. Don’t swallow it unless you’re sure the thing chasing you won’t cut you open to get it.”
I tied it around my wrist with black cord.
“What happens if I lose it?”
“You become local.”
Tuck put a hand on my shoulder. “She means you don’t come back.”
“I know what she means.”
I didn’t, really. Not yet.
Voss leaned back in her chair. “You’re going to Deepmarket?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Tuck says a lot.”
“I need a heartseed.”
At that, two men by the vending machines turned to look at me. One of them had a bandage over his eyes. The other had no mouth. Just smooth skin from nose to chin.
Voss tapped her pen once against the table.
“Heartseed’s not beginner cargo.”
“My sister needs one.”
“She needs a transplant.”
“She needs a miracle.”
“Miracles cost more than amateur licenses.”
I hated her then. For being right. For looking tired instead of cruel. For making me say it in front of strangers.
Lena was twelve. Her heart had come apart in slow, mean ways, like a machine stripping its own screws. The doctors had used soft voices. They’d shown diagrams. They’d said waitlist, donor match, deterioration, comfort. Each word had been placed carefully, like flowers on a grave.
Then I heard about heartseeds.
Realms goods were illegal unless licensed. Dangerous unless cured. Expensive unless stolen.
So here I was.
Tuck clapped his hands. “Beautiful talk, everybody. Really warm. We going?”
Voss looked at me one last time.
“The portal doesn’t care why you enter,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
Then the black rain shifted sideways and Tuck stepped through.
He vanished with a wet pop.
I followed before my legs could vote against it.
The first thing the Realms took from me was sound.
The subway tunnel disappeared. No pop. No roar. No choir of the damned. Just a pressure in my ears and then silence so complete I could hear my own eyes move.
I landed knee-deep in red grass.
Above me, the sky was full of doors.
Thousands of them. Maybe millions. They drifted at different heights, turning slowly in blue air. Wooden doors. Steel doors. Screen doors. A bank vault door the size of a school bus. A little yellow door with a cat flap. Some opened onto fire. Some opened onto ocean. Some opened onto rooms where people sat at tables and stared back.
Tuck was already walking.
“Don’t look up too long,” he said.
His voice arrived late, like it had taken a wrong turn.
I swallowed. “Why?”
“You’ll pick one.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Everybody sees one they want.”
I looked down.
The red grass bent away from my boots without touching them. Far ahead, a road made of white stones cut through the field toward a city built on the back of something sleeping.
The thing was the size of Toronto Island. Bigger, maybe. Its shell rose in black plates under towers of copper and bone. Every few minutes, it breathed, and the whole city lifted.
Deepmarket.
I’d seen smuggled photos. Bad ones. Blurry shots taken through charm-glass by Runners who charged twenty bucks a look. The real thing made the photos seem insulting.
Tuck kept moving. “Rules.”
“I read them.”
“No, you read Runner forums written by cowards and dead men. Listen. Don’t eat anything that offers itself first. Don’t give your full name. Don’t ask prices twice. Don’t thank a merchant with blue hands. Don’t touch children unless they cast shadows.”
I glanced around. “What?”
“And if you hear your mother calling, that’s not your mother.”
“My mother’s alive.”
“Then she’ll be surprised.”
We walked.
After ten minutes, I started to hear the city.
Deepmarket sounded like knives in a drawer. Bells, wheels, shouting, animals coughing, music played on strings that disliked being touched. The road grew crowded. Runners mostly, though you could tell the fresh ones by how clean their boots were and how often they touched their weapons.
Tuck had told me not to bring a gun.
“Guns work fine,” he’d said. “The problem is they make you think you’re safe.”
So I had a knife, a water bottle, three protein bars, two flares, a roll of copper wire, salt packets stolen from a diner, and a photograph of Lena in the inside pocket of my jacket.
At the city gate, a woman made of smoke charged us one memory each.
Tuck gave her the smell of his father’s truck.
I gave her my first kiss, by accident. I hadn’t meant to choose that one. It just slipped loose when she touched my forehead with her long, cool finger.
There was a girl named Priya. Ninth grade. She tasted like cherry gum and panic.
Then she was gone.
Not dead. Worse, maybe. I knew the shape where the memory had been. I knew I had once cared about it. But the thing itself had been scooped out.
I staggered.
Tuck grabbed my collar. “Keep walking.”
“I gave too much.”
“You gave what you could afford.”
“I didn’t choose.”
“You never do, the first time.”
Inside Deepmarket, everything was for sale.
Real teeth that could chew through lies. Bottles of bottled thunder. Maps that screamed when folded wrong. Three-headed hens laying brass eggs. Saints’ knuckles. Fake saints’ knuckles. A booth selling apologies in seven languages. Another selling baby names guaranteed not to attract wolves.
The people were worse.
Some were human. Some wore human like a coat. One merchant had mirrors for eyes and kept turning his head toward me too quickly, catching bits of my face. Another stood in a tub of milk, selling dreams from a ladle.
Tuck led me down a narrow street slick with green wax.
“Heartseed dealer’s this way.”
“How much?”
“For you? Everything.”
“Tuck.”
He stopped so suddenly I almost walked into him.
“You don’t buy a heartseed with money,” he said. “You buy it with years, blood, names, grief, firstborns, last breaths. Stuff that sticks. Stuff that hurts coming loose.”
“I have money.”
He stared at me.
I took the folded bills from my jacket. Seven hundred Canadian dollars. Damp with sweat.
Tuck laughed until a passing dog with human hands barked at him.
“You said half up front,” I said.
“I said half my fee up front. I didn’t say it bought the seed.”
“You knew.”
“Yeah.”
My knife was in my hand before I decided to pull it.
Tuck didn’t flinch. That annoyed me more than fear would have.
“You lying piece of—”
He hit me in the stomach.
It wasn’t dramatic. He just drove two knuckles under my ribs and folded me over like laundry. My knife clattered into the wax.
“Lesson,” he said above me. “Never show anger in a market. Somebody will bottle it.”
A thin man with antlers paused nearby, disappointed, then moved on.
Tuck crouched.
“You want your sister alive? Good. That kind of want has weight here. But wanting doesn’t make you special. Every fool through that portal wants something. Riches. Youth. Revenge. A cure. A dead wife back. A new face. A god in a jar. The Realms run on want. They smell it from the dirt.”
I wheezed. “Then why bring me?”
“Because you paid.”
He picked up my knife and handed it back handle-first.
“And because I know a dealer who likes tragic boys.”
The dealer lived in a shop with no door.
You entered by standing before a blank wall and admitting something shameful.
Tuck went first.
“I once left a friend behind because his boots fit me better.”
The wall opened.
He looked back at me. “Your turn.”
I wanted to say something small. A school lie. A stolen chocolate bar. But the wall was listening. I could feel it listening the way you feel someone standing behind you.
“I was relieved,” I said.
Tuck tilted his head.
“When the doctors said Lena might die. For one second. Maybe less. I was relieved it could be over.”
The wall split.
Inside, the shop was warm and dark. Roots hung from the ceiling. Glass jars lined the shelves, each holding a pulsing lump of light about the size of a plum.
Heartseeds.
My throat closed.
Behind the counter sat a child in a gray suit. He had white hair, wrinkled hands, and eyes too old to belong in any face.
“No,” Tuck said immediately.
The child smiled. “Hello, Tuck.”
“No children.”
“I cast a shadow.”
“Barely.”
The child turned to me. “Cal Mercer. Amateur Runner. Brother. Debtor. Coward for one second. Brave for many after.”
I hated him more than Voss.
“How much?” I asked.
Every jar on the shelves pulsed once.
The child steepled his fingers. His hands made dry paper sounds.
“For a heartseed strong enough to root in a dying human girl? Twenty years.”
“Take them.”
Tuck swore. “Kid.”
“Take them from me,” I said.
The dealer’s smile widened. “You haven’t asked which twenty.”
I stopped.
There it was. The hook under the bait.
“Which twenty?”
“The best ones, naturally.”
“I decide what that means.”
“No. You’re twelve minutes into your first run. You decide nothing.”
Tuck stepped closer. “We’re leaving.”
I didn’t move.
The dealer slid one jar forward. The light inside it beat gently against the glass.
“Your sister will live. She’ll run. She’ll hate carrots. She’ll fall in love badly at seventeen. She’ll learn to drive and hit a mailbox. She’ll outlive your mother. She’ll name a child after you, if she remembers why.”
“If?”
“Payment must come from somewhere.”
My mouth went dry.
“What do you want?”
“Your place in her life.”
Tuck said my name.
The dealer kept his eyes on me. “She keeps the years. You lose the brotherhood. Photos blur. Records change. Your room becomes storage. Your mother remembers a miscarriage before Lena. Your sister wakes with a new heart and no idea you ever existed.”
I stared at the jar.
A minute earlier, I would’ve said yes.
That’s the awful part. In the tunnel, on the road, even at the market gate with Priya’s kiss gone from my head, I would’ve paid anything. That was the heroic version of me. Clean. Simple. Brother trades himself for sister. People cry. Maybe there’s music.
But standing there, looking at the price, I saw my room. My cracked phone charger. Lena asleep on the couch with one sock off. The stupid song she played when she brushed her teeth. Her calling me Cal-Cal when she wanted something.
Gone.
Not dead. Scrubbed.
A person can be selfish even at their most loving. Maybe especially then.
“No,” I said.
The dealer blinked.
Tuck exhaled.
“No?” the child said.
“I said no.”
The jars stopped pulsing.
The dealer leaned forward. The old eyes sharpened. “Then why are you here?”
I took Lena’s hospital bill from my sock and unfolded it. The paper had gone soft. Numbers, codes, polite threats.
“I thought I was here to buy something,” I said.
“And now?”
“Now I think I’m here to steal it.”
Tuck started laughing.
Then the shop tried to kill us.
The roots dropped first. Thick as wrists, wet and blind, snapping around Tuck’s arms and throat. The shelves folded inward. Jars rattled. The child dealer opened his mouth too wide, jaw peeling down to his tie, and something inside him shrieked with the voice of a train braking in ice.
I threw salt in his mouth.
I don’t know why. Forums, maybe. Some half-remembered post from a Runner named GutSaint72 who wrote in all caps and died in 2021, according to replies.
The dealer screamed harder.
So salt worked.
Good to know.
Tuck tore one arm free and smashed a jar against the counter. Light spilled out, fluttering like a trapped bird. The roots recoiled from it.
“Wrong jar!” I shouted.
“You said steal!”
“The right one!”
“You want to read labels while we’re being strangled?”
A root wrapped my ankle and yanked. My chin hit the floor. Stars burst white behind my eyes. I rolled as another root stabbed down where my chest had been.
The jars had labels.
Not words. Pictures.
A deer heart. A furnace. A blue infant. A hand with six fingers. A girl with black hair sitting under a kitchen table.
Lena.
The jar was on the highest shelf behind the dealer.
Of course it was.
I crawled under the whipping roots. Something tore my cheek. Warm blood filled the corner of my mouth. The dealer’s shriek became words.
THIEF THIEF THIEF THIEF THIEF
“Amateur!” Tuck yelled.
I looked back.
He tossed me my knife.
Bad throw. Too high.
I lunged anyway.
The root around my ankle snapped tight, swinging me sideways. My fingers brushed the knife handle, missed, caught the blade.
Pain flashed up my arm.
I held on.
Then I cut the root.
It bled milk.
I hit the counter shoulder-first, climbed, slipped, climbed again. The dealer lunged over me, mouth full of salt foam and needle teeth. I grabbed one of his lapels and pulled myself higher.
His breath smelled like coins and spoiled apples.
“You can’t take what you won’t pay for,” he hissed.
I headbutted him.
This was a terrible idea. His skull felt like a brick in a child mask. My vision went soft at the edges. But he rocked back, and that gave me enough time to grab Lena’s jar.
The moment my hand closed around it, the shop disappeared.
I was falling through doors.
Not one door. Hundreds.
I fell through a kitchen where a woman screamed and dropped a plate. Through a desert under three red suns. Through a room full of sleeping versions of myself. Through six inches of ocean, then empty night, then a wedding where everyone turned to look at me as I crashed through the cake.
I clutched the jar to my chest.
A door opened below me onto the subway tunnel.
I saw Voss’s folding table. The vending machines. The spray paint.
I also saw Tuck falling ten feet away, wrapped in roots, laughing like he’d finally found religion.
The portal spat us out.
I hit concrete.
The jar shattered.
For one dead second, I thought I’d failed.
Then the light crawled into my cut hand.
It hurt worse than anything. Worse than the root, worse than the dealer’s shop, worse than seeing Lena in that hospital bed with wires blooming out of her gown.
The light moved under my skin, up my arm, across my chest.
Voss was suddenly above me with her pistol drawn.
“Where is it?” she snapped.
I couldn’t answer.
Tuck rolled onto his back beside me, coughing milk and blood. “He stole it.”
“Where’s the seed?”
I looked down.
My chest glowed.
Voss went very still.
Tuck stopped laughing.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s bad.”
The heartseed had rooted in me.
Not in Lena.
Me.
I woke up in a clinic that smelled like bleach and burned toast.
My left wrist was cuffed to the bed. My right hand was bandaged. Something inside my chest beat twice for every heartbeat. A second rhythm tucked under the first.
Voss sat in the corner, reading a paperback.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“Lena.”
“Alive.”
I pulled against the cuff. “Did she get it?”
“No.”
The room tilted.
Voss put the book down. “Listen before you rip your wrist open. She’s alive because whatever rooted in you is pouring off enough spare life to keep a ward of cancer patients tap-dancing. Your sister got the first transfusion two hours ago. Her numbers are better.”
I shut my eyes.
Better.
Not cured. Not saved forever. Better.
That word was cruel and beautiful.
“How long?” I asked.
“For her? Don’t know. For you?” Voss glanced at my chest. “Also don’t know.”
Tuck’s voice came from the other side of the room. “She means before the dealer comes looking.”
I turned my head.
He was in the next bed, face bruised purple, left arm in a sling. Roots had left pale rings around his throat.
Voss said, “The dealer can’t cross without an exit token.”
Tuck looked at my wrist.
The cord was gone.
So was the metal disk.
I remembered the dealer’s mouth. The salt. The roots. Falling.
My skin went cold.
Tuck gave a small, sorry shrug. “Told you not to lose it.”
Outside the clinic door, someone knocked.
Three soft taps.
A child’s voice said, “Cal Mercer.”
Voss raised the pistol.
Tuck reached for the knife under his pillow.
My new heart beat again.
Hard.
Hungry.
And from somewhere behind the door, far away and impossibly close, my sister laughed in her sleep.