She pushed herself up against a wall, back to the brick, and walked step by step in the pieces of the path that the moonlight didn’t quite touch.

Up ahead, there was music coming from the amity precinct.

A group of seven guards sat outside on old wooden chairs, clapping and laughing in low, cold tones. They had a music box on the ground by their feet, enchanted to play the kind of beat Saxony had only ever heard at the Crook when the drinks started to dry up and the sun was readying to rise.

“Look at him move,” one of the amityguards said. “We’ve got ourselves quite a show, haven’t we, lads?”

It was only then that Saxony noticed one of the seven guards was not a guard at all, but a man. A civilian. Dressed in what looked like nightwear, with long brown hair down to his shoulders and bruises swatched everywhere across his milky skin.

He was dancing madly, erratically. In a way that could only be charmed.

The guards clapped and cheered him on and the man, who sobbed and winced while he moved in beat with the music, kept going.

Saxony looked to his feet. Bare and bleeding.

She flinched and it was almost as though that action jolted the spell because the man suddenly collapsed onto the street.

Beside Saxony, Wesley let out a breath.

Straightened his cuff links.

Relaxed his tightened jaw.

He had broken the magic somehow. Cast a spell in the time it took for Saxony to blink and assess the situation. She hadn’t even heard him utter the words or felt his power travel through the air.

Wesley’s magic was like a ghost, roaming through the world undetected, seen only when it wanted to be. After so long lost, it had gotten quite good at hiding.

One of the guards jumped to his feet, knocking over the chair he had been lounging on so that it clattered to the ground. The noise would have once vanished in the musicality of Creije, but with the eerie silence that now blanketed the streets, it seemed as loud as a gunshot.

“Who said you could stop?” the guard spat.

The dancing man looked up at him from the ground, lips trembling. They were torturing him, in the middle of the night and the middle of the street. In full view of anyone who dared to look.

“What in the fire-gates do they think they’re doing?” Saxony whispered.

“Having the time of their lives, apparently,” Wesley said.

He studied the amityguards with a blank expression, no mirror of the outrage Saxony felt and no sign of pride at having saved the man. But Saxony could see his eyes narrow as he took in the scene, evaluating every moment and weighing up what he should do next.

“We have to stop them,” Saxony said, making the choice for him. “Those guards are damn rieshles!”