The Salem Gate

He's seventeen, sitting in a principal's office in Albuquerque, when the warmth in his chest finally gets a name: a bloodline, a three-hundred-year-old covenant, and a stone gate under a chapel in Salem, Massachusetts, that has been waiting for him specifically.

At Harker Academy, the Society's best combat trainer is nineteen, sharp, and careful. She has a fourteen-month-old daughter named Lily, and walls she built because the year she's had required them.

She is not broken by it. She's never broken by anything.

This game's test is the heaviest yet: can you love someone who comes with weight you didn't sign up for? Can you choose not just the person, but everything they carry -- the grief, the child, the history, the walls?

Some doors should stay shut. He's going to open this one anyway.

Book Five of Across Infinities: The Twelve Games.