Chapter 1. The Anchor Awakens (1)

The night the sky tore open over San Francisco, Lynn Moore was standing outside the Powell Street station doing the math on her psychology midterm.Eleven thirty-seven. If she skipped the reading, if she bullshitted the essay question hard enough, a B minus was survivable. She had a cold latte in one hand and her student-council lanyard in the other, and the wind off the Bay was trying to scalp her with her own hoodie strings. The fog was rolling in from the water, the way it always did, turning the streetlights into soft white bruises.Then someone screamed.Not a normal scream. Lynn had worked the night shift at the student center long enough to know the difference between "someone stepped on my foot" and "something is wrong with the universe." This was the second kind. It went on too long, and it was coming from the sky.She looked up.The sky had a wound in it.A tear maybe seven feet long, hanging over the station entrance, its edges bleeding a sick purple light like a cut that had gone bad. And then something climbed out of it.It had no shape Lynn could hold on to. Black mist, mostly, coiling into a dozen thin shadow-tentacles that dragged across the streetlights as they came, and everywhere they touched, things started to die. The ad board sizzled. The handrail corroded. The concrete beneath one tentacle crumbled like stale cake. It moved with a wet, chewing sound, like the city itself was being eaten from the outside in.The station plaza detonated into chaos. People screamed and shoved and lost their shoes. A woman in heels went down hard and nobody stopped to pick her up. Somebody's stroller clipped a curb and tipped, and Lynn heard a baby start to cry, small and furious, as if the universe had personally offended it. A guy in a Warriors jersey ran straight into a parking meter and kept running.And the businessman in the suit was already gone. A tentacle had him by the ankle, dragging him backward toward the tear, and he was shouting "help —" in the particular way of a man who had never once needed to shout it. His briefcase bounced down the steps and burst open, and papers went everywhere, and nobody picked those up either.Lynn's brain, in that moment, did something very undecided about an ordinary college student.She dropped her latte and ran at the monster.She couldn't have told you why. Her body moved before her brain filed the paperwork. Something in her chest cracked open like a bank vault, and gold light poured out of her fingers — actual light, hot and bright, and it startled her so badly she almost tripped over her own feet.The light answered her anyway. It snapped up between her and the stroller like a shield, and the tentacle that had been reaching for the baby hit it and recoiled with a sound like water hitting a hot pan.

The black mist hissed and peeled back, inch by inch, and the baby stopped crying. A pair of round eyes stared at her through the chaos."Wow," the kid said. "You're glowing.""It's not a glow stick," Lynn said, and laughed once, badly, and was immediately terrified of herself.Not of the monster. She'd been raised on worse stories than monsters.She was terrified that she could glow.Ordinary people did not glow. She'd spent eighteen years at St. Agnes's Home, raised by the Sisters of the Covenant, and the Sisters taught her to pray, to keep the ledgers, to never, ever be emotional. They never taught her what to do when a person's hands started leaking light in the middle of a monster attack. She knew what lived under the world — the moldy books on the Covenant's forbidden shelf were full of anchors and dark domains and vampires and martyrs. The Anchor Code. Rule One: a guardian does not love. Rule Two: a guardian does not want. Rule Three: a guardian does not run. She knew every guardian in the last three centuries had died before twenty-two, martyred for the world, sealed in the ledgers, replaced. She had just never believed, not once, that the math applied to her. The math was for other girls. Other girls got awakened; other girls got martyred; Lynn Moore was going to get a degree and a job with health insurance and a tiny apartment with a plant that survived.The gold light crackled around her fingers and disagreed."Run!" someone screamed at her. "RUN!"Lynn didn't run. Her legs were shaking so hard she could feel it in her teeth, but she didn't run, because the businessman was still dangling from the tear, and a tentacle was working its way into his chest like it was looking for something in his pockets. His face had gone gray. His mouth was moving but no sound was coming out.She gritted her teeth and yanked. The gold light bent to her will for the first time, rope instead of shield, and it caught him around the waist and hauled. She felt the weight of him, the drag of the tentacle, the whole stupid physics of it, and she planted her feet on the wet concrete and pulled like she was trying to win a tug-of-war against a freight train.The price came due instantly. Her knees buckled. Something hot and wrong climbed her throat — the taste of iron — and every nerve in her body lit up like she was being pulled out of her own skin. The backlash. The Covenant's books called it the Recoil. The books were very calm about it. The books had never had their bones pulled from the inside.The rope held. The businessman came free, tumbling onto the steps, gasping, alive. The tentacle that had been holding him screamed — actually screamed, a sound like a kettle full of knives — and swung at her.Lynn raised both hands. Gold flared.