Within the scattered streets of Gutworth in a tiny one-room apartment laid a woman. She was enduring the screams of propaganda and trying to get her shit together to leave bed for a job she hated.

  "The Grand Council gave us Remarks to express ourselves in ways our tongues cannot!” So said the teeth pierced speakers, strung up on wires strangled to organ draped poles.

  “To dance with Death is to live. Our Remarks kill those who don’t know the steps, darlings,” the posh voice said, echoing off the dusty streets and sealed windows. Clay houses awkwardly shoved next to half sunken concrete buildings were equal in their inability to insulate. A motley crowd seeped out from every opening, uniformly miserable and all cupping their ears.

  “A strong person has a strong Remark. So of course Morgan Lemure is the strongest of us all.”

  Repeated for years, the morning chant was only useful as an alarm clock.

  Getting up with practiced sluggishness, the woman took in her form from the mirrored walls (which was an architectural choice most apartments shared, only a few newer buildings did without it, nothing in her price range). She didn’t like to be reminded of her body. To wit, her limbs felt undersized and scrawny, as if she deserved something far more substantial. She had eyes too big for her face, and a mouth that was slightly crooked, favoring her left side. She rubbed a hand through her hair. Strangely itchy. Her head was topped off by messy black hair outside of two purple strands that hung down beside each ear, contouring her face; one of the only habits she maintained was keeping it trim. She had let her hair grow out in her previous body. But in her current one, long hair just didn't feel right. Her name was Devon Near. She would eventually destroy existence, but at the moment she was checking her hair for lice.

  (Short hair also made it easier to confirm, no lice or bugs of any sort!)

  Her skin was brown, the color of the polished wood on her father's boat. She had to sell that boat when her father was killed by a lackey of the man who now ruled.

  "Morgan Lemure." She said his name. Most were afraid to say it. Nine years ago they had thrown away their autonomy in favor of a despot. She was only ten then but understood how much had been lost.

  "Morgan-"

  There was a rough knock on the right wall. She was being too loud. Or perhaps merely stating the name of their dictator had been made illegal. With a sigh, she got around to getting up, her mind racing with thoughts of murder she had no hope in carrying out.

  Quickly she opened her small drawer and pulled out a bag of muddy clay. She half bounced the bag on the palm of her hand. It was a good heft. They wouldn’t laugh in her face this time. She had actually succeeded in harvesting a quality batch of dream dust.

  ”There will be tryouts today to join Lemure’s Legacy,” the voice of Gutworth’s mayor proudly proclaimed, but there were always tryouts. Backstabbing was encouraged, and people were desperate to rise through the ranks. The “legacy”, or Numbers as they were called, were cruel townies on a never ending power trip. His numbers wore armor based on his own, with gaudy capes and dozens of badges. They were all stupid, worthless, meanspirited assholes who loved to push their weight around.

  And today she would be passing off drugs to two of the cruelest.

  “Morgan Lemure reminds you all that dueling is egalitarian. If you believe yourself to be the true ruler of Gutworth, he will be happy to duel you and put that to the test.”

  Perhaps today, Morgan Lemure would visit the terrible diner where she worked. Stranger things had happened; his elite guard, the Constants, had eaten there more than once. Perhaps, if she were asked to grill him some food she'd put some poison in it. The kind that worked slow. That was what he deserved, she thought—an awful death for an awful man.

  The thought of killing him was her only real motivation. She put on one of the seven pairs of blue and yellow track jackets and jeans she had, not letting her pathetic image in the mirror deter her. Closing the door and locking it behind her, she ignored the loud buzzing of insects four doors down and the muffled sounds of an argument above as she trudged to work.

  The streets of Gutworth were not streets so much as they were dunes that buildings had happened to sink into. All of them were packed tightly together like coffins. In some of the lanes closest to the port the hot red sand had been smoothed down, easy enough to walk on. Not so in the outskirts, where height could differ by as much as fifty feet. Devon had to deal with the worst of it on her commute. Her shoes sunk into the sand, again and again. The constant smell of burnt rubber lingered in the air. Through the smell had no source, it was always present.

  The suggestion of a sky peeked in through the mountains that fought for space high above her. Closer but still miles away was the giant wall that circled all she’d ever known. A reflective blue tinged surface, heavily sketched with scratches. Though Devon couldn’t know if others thought the same, it felt as if they were in the middle of a massive hollow drum. Like a crate, or a barrel, but built on the scale of an ocean. She had never been outside it.

  “Devon!”

  Her neck hairs bristled as footsteps approached. Suddenly paranoid, she patted the bag of dream dust in her pocket as someone came closer.

  ”Where have you been? We barely see you anymore,” she didn’t recognize the voice. Someone else behind her chuckled. She kept walking forward, hoping they’d assume she was deaf.

  ”Are you sure that's him? I’m pretty sure that's a chick.” She stopped and gripped her thigh, suddenly very scared. It was a nervous tic carried over from her first body.

  “Nah it’s him, even if it doesn’t look it. Idiot tried to off himself in the Shifting Waters. He just got boobs instead.”

  Not bad boobs, she thought to herself, allowing a smile. What they said was worded crudely, but not wrong. She had jumped into the Shifting Waters assuming it would kill her, as it often did. But instead she emerged in flesh that suited her, that made life slightly more tolerable.

  If she could do it over she never would have given her name. Who would have known, right? And yet when the fishermen had asked, obviously a little wary, if she was that poor little orphan boy who had gone missing. She, like a dope, had said yes.

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  “Grand, I heard about that,” said the second voice, a bit slow on the uptake. She had narrowed the first voice down to a neighborhood kid that hadn’t been killed or left town yet, someone who remembered her far better than she did him. Maybe the kid who had left her death threats. She had gotten them for a good month before they stopped as suddenly as they had began.

  Letting go of her leg she turned to face them. She arched her left foot and kept it firm, creating a trail in the sand as she pivoted with the other. This, hopefully, came off as badass and intimidating.

  There were three of them, their leader a guy with a prominent cowlick. He wore a trendy magenta to yellow gradient covered in symbols from the Great Deluge. “And there he is. Whose body you got there, Devon? Who’s the corpse you’re prancing around in?”

  She didn’t know. More than that she didn’t want to believe that this body had belonged to someone else. The Shifting Waters was not an exact science, its process was as mysterious as it was unpredictable. Everyone knew it sometimes changed those who fell in, but other times it simply didn’t. For her the Shifting Waters had been kind, Grand knew why. And yet… every night she went to bed, she knew something was still missing, but she always fell asleep before she could pinpoint what.

  ”Looks like she- I mean, he doesn’t want to answer,” said one to the left of Cowlick, looking stricken over almost gendering her correctly. She was mean mugging the three and trying to look as dangerous as her toothpick arms allowed. Suddenly, she remembered who Cowlick was. What luck, he was one of the few people she had leverage over.

  “Hey, you’re Norman.” she said. “I kicked your ass, didn’t I?”

  It was years ago, when her father’s death was still recent. Cowlick, real name Norman Certain, mocked her. He said his daddy told him that her daddy deserved it. He said people like her daddy deserved to die, because if they didn’t they’d never have been weak enough to die in the first place. She kicked him, punched him, bit him, made him cry, all without summoning her Remark.

  The idea of Devon kicking ass was ridiculous enough to be a joke in itself, but she really did fuck him up. They were both kids, and when you’re a kid your power is directly proportional to how angry you currently are. And kid Devon was fucking livid.

  “I’m pretty sure you still have a scar from that.” She pointed at his nose, where there was a faint divot. “Yeah… that part never fully healed. Shame the rest did.”

  ”Piece of shit!” Norman ran at her and Devon took off laughing.

  She didn’t get far. Something snagged her ankle and she hit the dirt hard. With a confused groan she turned over to see a coiled rope with eyes tied around her leg.

  Her scream cued laughter. Norman and his lamentable goons slouched forward with glee. Holding the other end, the man to Norman’s left looked down at the rope and it suddenly vanished. So that was his Remark.

  ”Devon Near, I challenge you to a duel to defend my honor. I have two seconds here that won’t hesitate to kill you if you try to run again.” They both nodded in unison, treasuring being second fiddle. “This will be non lethal, so don’t throw your life away when you can leave with only a few bruises.”

  She spat on the ground and got to her feet. All five foot four of her stared up at his snot nosed face. She was pissed. At this rate, she was gonna miss her shift and her drug deal.

  “I’ll take your silence as acceptance,” he said.

  “You can take it however you want.” Among the morning commuters and street vendors, attention was being thrown their way. Duels were always interesting, even if the competitors were absolute nobodies.

  He summoned his Remark. Even after seeing the process hundreds of times, it still made Devon’s blood go cold to see it happen. It always felt impossible, the way the weapon would appear from nothing, full formed, and readily leap into its owners waiting grasp.

  Norman’s was a mostly flat bludgeon with a hole in the shape of a skull at the larger end. It looked more suited to playing ball games than dueling, but most Remarks were strange. They always fit the person, and the jokey sort of ego this one suggested fit him.

  “Alright Devon, lets see yours.”

  Devon did nothing.

  “Well Devon, I know you have a Remark. I’ve seen it before. Yours is like… its a dead fish isn’t it?”

  One of Norman’s goons laughed. He tried to steady himself with a hand on Norman, who swatted him away with his Remark.

  ”That wasn’t a joke, her Remark is a dead fucking fish.” He turned away from her to the crowd now, most watching in earnest. “She’s unsightly and disgusting, so is her Remark.” Devon wanted to give him props for gendering her correctly, but was more concerned with bumrushing him when his back was turned. The crowd let out a collective gasp when she collided.

  She wasn’t able to get him to the ground, but she did headbut him in the torso. Kneeled over in pain, she grabbed a metal bucket filled with crawlcow feed from a passing farmer and hit him upside the head with it. She would have continued but the weight was more than she expected, and she fell with the bucket, having to catch her breath. Norman was on the ground in no condition to keep fighting, his Remark unsummoned. He stared profoundly at Devon, seeming unable to comprehend that his record against her was now 0-2.

  The crowd applauded politely, appreciating the novelty of her forgoing her Remark. Even if she knew from experience that most were disappointed she hadn’t used it.

  Her heart felt like it was gonna burst. Physical exercise, the exertion of it, she felt it too rarely. The exhaustion though, that was familiar. She took a second to sit, let her body relax, and closed her eyes, as if waiting for something.

  “Make way, get inside! No one is safe!”

  She opened her eyes to see a platoon of Lemure’s Legacy members marching towards her. They all wore masks of the fabled Deluge Wyrm as a cowl around their head, their faces covered by black cloth that represented the creature’s cavernous mouth. The one at the front pointed a gloved finger at her. “I’d suggest locking your doors tonight ma’am.” The soldier said.

  ”W-why? Has there been an attack?” Norman asked behind her, his hatred towards her forgotten.

  “An attack? An attack?” The Legacy Member cackled. “It was no attack, it was a slaughter. A stranger by the name of Adam killed four of our numbers. I saw it myself. I’ve never seen such ferocity, such cruelty, and with a Remark that didn’t look fit to cut cheese! We’re spreading the word, take it to heart.” Devon couldn’t help but notice the strange glee the member had as she recounted it. It seemed unfitting.

  Devon got to her feet and scooted past, feeling surprisingly light, considering the circumstances. Sure there was a killer out there, but anyone who killed legacy members couldn’t be all bad. Plus, she had just avoided losing a duel. As rarely as she was challenged to a duel, even rarer had she won. She deserved to be, if not happy, at least not miserable.

  The restaurant she worked at was at the edge of town, in the direction the killer was supposedly coming from. She weighed the risk of dying, and decided with a shrug to keep walking to work. Whatever or whoever was coming, it would certainly be interesting. Interesting was worth dying for.