Bite to the Top

The world runs on a plain rule for Tyler Hayes: blood makes him bigger. He wakes up as a flea, small enough to be flicked away and angry about all of it, and works out early that feeding does more than keep him alive. Each drink strengthens him, quickens him, and etches new markings across his shell, and the markings are the road toward a pair of wings and open sky. So he bites. He is cunning, he holds nothing sacred, and he has an unusual talent for producing a trick at the moment he should be dead. Bite by bite he moves up the chain of things that eat other things. At Xuantian Academy there is a girl named Nina Mercer, cold in manner, careful in thought, and slow to forget an injury. She is the only person who registers what the flea actually is. She has not decided whether to crush him underfoot or put her own strength behind him, and her choice keeps turning out to matter more to his fate than anything he does himself.