Chapter Text
The room was too quiet for a morning class.
Conversations that should’ve overlapped hung at odd, careful volumes. The kind of hush that settled when everyone realized something wasn’t quite right, but nobody wanted to be the one to name it.
Phainon made a point of being the loudest thing in the room.
“—and if anyone tries to tell me The Parallax Directive wasn’t just state-sponsored fear-mongering with a glossy filter, you can get out now. Save yourself the embarrassment.”
A couple of his students cracked smiles. A few glanced sidelong at each other, uncertain whether it was safe to laugh. One girl at the back pretended to check her notes, though there was nothing open in front of her.
Phainon grinned wider. Bright, easy. Friendly. The beloved madman professor with a caffeine problem and zero regard for authority, just how they liked him.
He perched one hip against his desk and spun the notes in his hand like it was a coin.
“You know what? Screw the syllabus. Today’s special. Since the Council’s been so gracious lately about policing what you can and can’t say—” He gestured broadly to the wall where a campus code of conduct poster hung askew, “—I figured we’d ride that wave and have ourselves a good old-fashioned debate. Topic is: The Ethics of Authoritarian Surveillance in Times of Civil Unrest.”
He said it lightly, as though it wasn’t the most suicidal classroom discussion anyone had hosted in the past week.
A few heads lifted. One or two faces stiffened. A nervous shifting of shoulders. Phainon clocked them all.
There was Dymas—usually smug, currently staring a little too hard at his desk. Ione and Theros, who always sat together, now two seats apart. Three new faces near the front. Only one had officially enrolled last week.
He didn’t react.
He could feel the hum before he heard it: a thin, mechanical buzz overhead, quiet as static. The VIB drone hovered past the window in a slow, deliberate arc.
Fourth one today.
Phainon’s smile didn’t falter.
“And yes, yes, before any of you nervous nellies get your paperwork in a twist— it’s still technically legal to talk about hypotheticals,” he drawled, waving a hand. “For now. So I want gut reactions. No citations, no historical sourcing yet, no long-winded uncle-at-a-family-dinner monologues. I want to know where your instincts land. Who’s in favor, who’s against, and who’s about to pull a neutrality cop-out and say it’s complicated.”
A beat of uneasy chuckles. A cough.
Good. Keep them slightly off balance. Relaxed, but not complacent.
He tapped his notes against the desk edge and was about to split them when a hand went up.
Phainon’s gaze flicked to the student.
Tall. Clean-cut. Soft gray jacket. Neatly pressed collar. No scuff marks on his boots—new issue, regulation standard. The kind of face you forgot immediately after seeing it, which meant it was designed that way.
Not one of his.
The young man’s expression was open, a little curious. “Professor, would the scope of ‘authoritarian’ in this context also include civil surveillance established under declared states of emergency, or just regimes that never rescind control?”
Normal question.
Phainon’s smile sharpened by half a millimeter. Easy, bright. He chuckled like a man who definitely hadn’t just marked this kid as an operative the second he walked in.
“Ah, excellent clarification,” he said, voice smooth, hand gesturing animatedly. “We’ll call it… broad-spectrum authoritarian. Anything where the average citizen no longer has full consent in how they’re being watched. Emergencies, permanent states, whatever keeps you up at night.”
He met the kid’s gaze for just a heartbeat longer than necessary. Polite. Open. Completely harmless.
Agent. Definitely.
Phainon clapped his hands together.
“Alright, enough foreplay. Pros on the left, cons on the right, fence-sitters in the back. No hiding, no changing sides halfway through just because someone makes you feel bad about your morals. Move.”
The room stirred. Chairs scraped. Some lingered half a second too long before standing, waiting to see who went where.
Phainon watched them all. Cataloged the nervous glances, the ones who moved too quickly, and the ones who hesitated just long enough to be worth remembering.
He didn’t stop smiling.
Not for a second.
But when their backs were turned—chairs scraping, voices rising in half-hearted debate—his expression softened, the grin thinning at the corners. He leaned back against the desk, the heel of one hand pressing against the wood, a casual rhythm tapped out with his fingers.
Truth was, he didn’t feel much like smiling today.
Not with everything happening outside these walls.
In less than a week, the entire northern corridor of the district had fallen under what the Council labeled a civic preservation protocol. In official terms, it wasn’t a lockdown. No broadcasted emergency. No martial law order blinking across feeds. Civilians still moved freely, shops stayed open, lectures went on as scheduled. On the surface, it all looked unnervingly normal.
But the air told a different story.
Surveillance frequencies had surged in the last seventy-two hours.
Checkpoints appeared overnight in sectors with no logistical justification.
Drones blanketed the skies in layered patrol grids, monitoring not just government buildings or transit hubs—but schools, clinics, and even cafés. There was no pattern, no rationale.
Phainon had seen it before, of course. Power moves disguised as public safety. The Chrysos Heirs made their entrance first, slipping into the sector with the kind of subtlety they were known for. Operatives seeded into civil branches. Quiet scans. Minimal interference. Their net tightened slowly. Three days ago, no one so much as flinched when it started.
But then the Council moved in.
And this time, they didn’t bother with subtlety.
That wasn’t surprising in itself—the Council and the Heirs barely tolerated each other as it was. Their relationship was a balancing act held together by public opinion and the constant threat of mutual ruin. They each knew where the line was, and while tension ran high, neither side crossed it without cause.
This, however, wasn’t edging the line.
This was obliterating it.
VIB forces stormed the sector like they owned it, deploying checkpoints without jurisdiction, seizing control of patrol routes meant to be under joint command. Heavy surveillance grids. Double-layer biometric scans, no civilian consent required. Drones under full override authority—something that hadn’t been greenlit outside Black Tide containment zones in years.
It made no strategic sense.
The Chrysos Heirs already had operatives in place. They hadn’t requested Council backup. No known incidents had triggered escalation. And yet, the Council descended like a hammer, their forces overlapping Heir patrol routes, undermining their protocols.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Goldweaver herself entered the field.
Two days ago, her threads began to manifest—some visible, glinting lines of gold strung between NetGrid nodes and public comm-towers, most unseen, laced through the atmosphere, woven into pulse lines and infrastructure relays. Phainon didn’t have to see them to know they were there.
He could feel them. Even now.
Golden threads threaded through every conversation, every transmission, every shift of thought if you let your focus slip long enough. There was no such thing as a private word anymore, not with her watching. Thought-mapping resonance traps buried in the city’s pulse, waiting to catch any stray idea that drifted too far from the sanctioned narrative.
The worst part wasn’t that it was happening.
It was that no one seemed to care.
People barely blinked when the Heirs arrived. A few protests. Some grumbling. Nothing sustained. Then the Council brought their heavy hand down, and still—no headlines, no outcry. The NetGrid ran silent. Just the usual news cycle, polished and indifferent.
It felt… quiet.
Too quiet.
And Phainon knew better than to trust quiet.
Nothing stayed this still before unless someone intended it that way. And whoever was pulling the strings this time wasn’t following protocol, wasn’t sticking to old grudges and power plays.
This was something else.
Phainon’s gaze tracked a drone as it passed overhead—a soft, electric whine undercutting the hum of conversation.
Fifth one in the last hour.
Whatever this was, it was getting worse.
And he hated being the last to know.
His gaze flicked toward the drone again, then down—thumb swiping his screen awake.
No new messages.
The last text from Mydei was still stamped Read 3 days ago.
He hadn’t seen him since.
Phainon tapped the screen, half on instinct. Scrolled past his own messages, sent in uneven intervals. A few every few hours, sometimes a full day apart. He wasn’t keeping track. Not really.
Yesterday | 00:42
u better be alive bc if not I’m stealing your stupid jacket collection.
Day before | 18:19
some kid in class asked if NetGrid used thought-echo tracking so I told them no but like. lies huh.
Yesterday | 03:00
thinking about you idiot. but not in a gross way don’t get excited
And then, nothing.
No read receipts. No reply.
He told himself it was fine. Mydei went off-grid sometimes. Got tangled in whatever business he had. It wasn’t unusual.
Except it was.
Not for three days. Not without a word.
Phainon scrolled further up, just far enough for the page to fill with the same one-sided messages, casual and teasing, sometimes affectionate in the way someone might toss a paper airplane into a storm. He let his thumb hover over the newest text bubble.
[Type message…]
His fingers moved before he could stop them.
I miss you.
He stared at it for a moment longer than he meant to.
Then deleted it.
Didn’t even leave it in drafts.
His thumb lingered against the glass, like the heat of his skin could summon a response by sheer force of will.
It didn’t.
It never did.
A sharp yell cut through the low hum of the room.
“Death to the standardized testing overlords!”
Phainon blinked up in time to catch Caelus standing on a chair, one arm raised like he was leading a rebellion, Stelle dramatically faking a swoon behind him, half-sprawled across a desk. A few students gave token groans, others snorted into their sleeves. One girl near the window murmured please get down before the drone notices, which only made Caelus louder.
“Death to mandatory citation quotas!”
“And death to curriculum-approved historical interpretations!” Stelle called, back arched over the desk like she was perishing from academic oppression.
Phainon huffed.
Didn’t laugh. Didn’t cheer.
But let the edge of his fake grin tug a little closer to something genuine.
Because if he thought about the other thing too long—the unreturned messages, the absence of warmth where it used to live—he wasn’t sure what would be left to hold together.
So he let them be loud.
Let them fill the room with something stupid and reckless and alive.
And kept himself upright.
For now.
The last debate points had barely cooled in the air before students began packing up, the scrape of chairs and shuffle of bags breaking the classroom’s artificial calm. Conversations started with the kind of cautiousness people had when they weren’t sure who was listening.
“—saw ‘em changing the keycard panels on the east wing.”
“No one got a memo. Not even the staff.”
“Whole perimeter checkpoint doubled. Said it was a ‘precaution.’”
A pair of students lingered near the door, voices hushed.
“New cameras in the stairwells. Same model they use outside the halls.”
Phainon didn’t look at them. Kept his posture loose as he thumbed through a stack of debate notes left behind, scanning a page without reading a word. Every clipped sentence found him anyway.
Patrols outside.
ID verifications on floors that never needed them.
A sweep team no one had authorized.
He inhaled—slow, through his teeth—and let the papers settle into a pile.
One by one, they left.
The twins gone.
The agent-in-student-skin giving him a parting nod, which he returned with the exact degree of forced, easy charm required.
The room emptied. The hum of the overhead lights pressed in.
Phainon grabbed his coat, shrugged it on, and stepped out into the corridor.
The hallway stretched long, reinforced glass along one side offering a view of the courtyard below. A pair of VIB operatives moved past at a measured pace, helmets catching the pale overheads.
And then, from his left—
“Phainon.”
He turned at the voice, already feeling the sigh in his throat.
There, leaning against the wall like the day hadn’t gone sideways, was Anaxa.
Hair loose, expression sharp and unimpressed. The exact same unreadable face he’d had since they were sixteen, but worst.
“Anaxa—”
“—goras,” Anaxa cut in, tone flat.
A single glance passed between them. That was enough.
They fell into step without speaking.
Footsteps in sync, pace casual.
Phainon’s grin made a brief, tired appearance. “So,” he drawled low. “How’s your afternoon shaping up?”
Anaxa gave a humorless huff. “About as well as yours, apparently.”
Neither of them asked why the other was here.
Neither of them needed to.
They kept walking.
The staff lounge was three turns down and a floor up, past two new camera mounts and a door scanner that hadn’t existed last week. Phainon kept his stride easy, Anaxa at his side, neither of them acknowledging the way the halls felt a little too empty.
“I caught a lag in the sync modules by East Admin,” Anaxa started, as if continuing a conversation they’d been having since breakfast. “Nothing flagged it, but the spikes didn’t line up with operational hours.”
Phainon hummed like that was mildly interesting. “Could be a firmware drift.”
“Could be.” Anaxa’s voice stayed calm. “Problem is, it happened again thirty minutes ago. Same routing pattern.”
And there it was. Goldweaver’s threads pushing into places she hadn’t touched before. Administrative East wasn’t high-priority enough to merit her attention—unless someone was about to get boxed in.
Phainon flicked his eyes to a wall console they passed.
“You thinking proximity cascade?” he asked.
“If it is, it wasn’t us.” Anaxa’s lips twitched. Not quite a frown, but close. “And there’s packet noise I can’t source. Picked up a ghost log on the uplinks this morning. Pathing wasn’t local.”
A third party. Inside the net.
Not regular Chrysos or Council units.
Phainon didn’t react beyond a soft click of his tongue. “Anyone patch the breach on the northeast sector?”
“Nothing official,” Anaxa muttered. “Unit routing’s inconsistent. Feels like someone’s running custom configs off-books.”
The subtext wasn’t hard to follow. The VIB patrols were ignoring central command protocols. Meaning either rogue elements, or someone higher than the city post had their hands on the playbook.
Anaxa kept going. “Firewall drift’s pulled east. Left a gap. Two sectors wide. No one’s patched it.”
A blind spot. Undertaker’s doing, probably. A reallocation of her forces leaving a clean corridor between Chrysos and Council patrol routes. Could be dangerous. Could be perfect.
Phainon gave a soft, sardonic laugh under his breath. “You always bring me good news.”
Anaxa snorted, half a smirk breaking through for a second. “Server’s been behaving like it’s preparing a soft wipe, too. Nothing confirmed, but it’s too washed.”
Phainon’s stomach gave a quiet twist.
Silent lockdown.
He scrolled through the new pieces in his head—Goldweaver escalating, Council getting reckless, an unknown operator slipping between their teeth, and a city gearing up for something without saying it out loud.
Anaxa gave him a sidelong look. “You still smiling, or did that glitch?”
Phainon smirked faintly. “Oh, I’m in the best mood. Love it when things get messy.”
The lounge came into view ahead—mostly empty save for a tech staffer and a coffee machine cycling through its cleaning program.
Phainon opened the door with a press of his ID, and the officer silently trailing them peeled off.
“You in or out on this one?” Anaxa asked, deliberate.
Phainon didn’t answer right away. He let the question hang there.
Then: “I’m in.”
Anaxa nodded once, and that was enough.
Phainon let the door shut behind them, rolling his shoulders as he worked a stiffness from his neck. A vertebra cracked with a sharp, satisfying pop.
“Better?” Anaxa asked, already darting toward the coffee unit.
“Closer to death every day,” Phainon grinned, leaning back against the counter.
Anaxa snorted, grabbing one of the cups and stabbing at the machine’s menu with the kind of focused irritation of someone who hated every option it offered. He didn’t bother asking if Phainon wanted one.
“You sleeping?” Anaxa asked without looking up.
Phainon smirked. “You’re hilarious.”
“Didn’t ask if you were laughing.”
“Didn’t ask if you cared.”
That earned a scoff from Anaxa as the machine finally churned out something approximating coffee. He took the cup, sipped, grimaced.
“Still garbage,” he muttered.
Phainon tapped his knuckles lightly against the counter. “You should’ve calibrated it. At this point half your job title is fixing stupid things.”
Anaxa ignored him, instead grabbing a newspaper left on the corner of the table—one of the few relics still circulating around campus because some old professor refused to stop getting the print edition. He slid a plain disposable phone beneath it in one practiced movement.
Phainon’s eyes barely flicked to it before settling back on Anaxa’s face.
“You done playing hero today?” Phainon asked, casual.
“Depends on who’s watching,” Anaxa shrugged, heading for the door.
He paused, hand on the frame. “Swing by after you’re done babysitting.”
The words were easy, offhand, but Phainon caught the edge of it.
Phainon gave a lazy salute. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Anaxa left without another word. The door hissed shut.
Phainon waited a breath. Then another. His gaze slid to the wall by the far corner—a small, nearly invisible Heir sigil etched behind one of the ceiling tiles, visible only when the angle of the light caught it.
Message received.
The threads were here too.
His expression didn’t shift. A lazy, absent flick of his fingers beneath the table, like brushing dust from his palm—but in its wake, the surveillance weave faltered. A temporary dead zone stitched into the ambient field, frayed wires of reality coaxed just wide enough for the next thirty seconds to belong to him alone.
Then, as if nothing happened, he set the paper down on the table and palmed the disposable phone. Standard cheap model. No encryption, no log history, no trace.
He powered it on.
One message.
[CIU went public. They’re ‘Cleaners’ now.]
Attached was a brief internal memo—grainy, scanned from a Council operations feed, judging by the formatting. The new designation:
Containment Integrity Services Division (CISD)
Operational Moniker: CLEANERS
Mandate: Specialized emergency protocol team responsible for the neutralization and removal of high-risk operatives, anomalous materials, and compromised facilities as part of classified counter-threat operations.
He read it twice.
And then a third time.
Phainon clicked his tongue, leaning back against the counter. His thumb flicked the edge of the phone absently, his mind already unpacking what Anaxa hadn’t put in writing.
So that’s why he didn’t say it aloud.
The Cleaners.
They’d buried the CIU’s old designation like it was bad history—the same CIU they’d tracked months back in the records, the ones responsible for the Node extractions attempt to replace Heir figures with mimic constructs. And now, with no Nodes left, rather than dissolve the unit, the Council repackaged them.
New name. New badge. Same monster.
The wording was deliberate.
‘Counter-threat operations.’
Which meant whatever the Council decided a threat was. Rebels. Heirs. Their own people. Hell, a static anomaly in the wrong sector would qualify if it was politically inconvenient.
And no one would question it.
Phainon exhaled through his nose, the ghost of a humorless smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Typical.
But what unsettled him wasn’t the rebrand—it was the timing.
Why now?
Why escalate a cold war into a public operation?
What was the Council afraid of that warranted pulling their old ghost squad out of storage and giving them open jurisdiction?
Phainon didn’t have the answer yet. But he knew the kinds of things that made people like this nervous.
And it wasn’t good.
He powered down the phone, snapped it in half, and tossed the pieces into the trash beneath a pile of half-eaten snacks and old disposable cups.
He’d think about the motive later.
For now, there were classes to teach—and a meeting to attend later.
Phainon pushed the lounge door open, already back on his face as he headed down the hall.
Showtime.
The sun had vanished hours ago by the time Phainon slipped out of the university’s north wing, bag slung over one shoulder, fingers working at the knot of tension between his shoulder blades.
“Who designs chairs like that?” he muttered under his breath, wincing as a joint cracked. “Sadists.”
He hadn’t planned to stay that long. The idea was to leave with the last of his students—a clean exit, simple. But between actual coursework, department bureaucracy, and discreetly tracking the shifting security net threading itself around campus, the day had devoured itself.
And outside, the streets had changed.
Patrol formations were tighter than they’d been at midday. Routes tweaked by just enough to tell him someone new was managing the perimeter. Cameras—fresh installations, industrial grade—glinted from corners they hadn’t occupied yesterday, lenses panning slow arcs across alleys and thoroughfares.
Phainon clocked it all without slowing.
His phone stayed in his pocket.
The first tail was easy to shake. The checkpoint guard near the southeast barrier lingered a beat too long on his tablet—eyes flicking the roster once, twice, too many. Amateur. Phainon slowed, stretched, pretended to check a nonexistent notification, and slipped through a propped maintenance door left ajar from the afternoon’s HVAC inspection.
The shortcut was narrow, lined with old piping and the low hum of utility drones. It reeked of stale air and machine oil.
He never took the same route twice.
If he’d noticed the Council shifting patrol routes, then Anaxa had already mirrored the whole sector’s logs six ways from yesterday. Which meant sticking to static blind spots—the ones no one wanted to fix because the paperwork was a nightmare.
Some inefficiencies, it seemed, were still reliable.
He cut down a side alley where two buildings pressed close enough to leave a clean slice of dead zone between their cameras. The trick was timing—wait for the sweep, then move. He counted.
Three. Two. One.
Step through.
Further ahead, an old pedestrian underpass sagged beneath a main road checkpoint. The Council’s drones refused to fly low there—the overhead power lines scrambled their nav systems. He’d tested it last week, watching from a rooftop as three units glitched and spun in place before control pulled them back.
Still held.
He allowed himself a small smile and ducked beneath the archway.
“Alright,” he exhaled, rubbing his face. “Almost there.”
One last detour: a disused service hatch linking to the crawlspace under the old residential block. Off-limits, technically, but the access panel had never been rekeyed after restructuring five years back.
Phainon popped it open with a flathead coin, slipped inside, and let the hatch click shut behind him.
It was cramped. Damp. But quiet.
He leaned against the wall for a moment, eyes half-lidded, listening to the city hum overhead—a thousand frequencies, threads of information and silent orders moving through the bones of the district.
Another hour survived.
He pushed off the wall, breath steadying.
Time to see Anaxa.
The place didn’t look like much at first.
A cramped storage room tucked behind what had once been a machine shop—bare walls, a single flickering overhead strip, and shelves lined with rusted tools. Phainon stepped inside, the door hissing shut behind him with a hollow click.
Then the wall at his back slid into place with a final snap.
The overhead light dimmed, replaced by a subtle ambient glow as the illusion peeled back. Floors smoothed, walls retracted, and concealed panels unfolded, revealing matte surfaces and buried tech humming just below audible. A climate-controlled pulse washed over the space. The transition was seamless—one second derelict, the next the kind of precision-grade infrastructure only someone like Anaxa could rig this smoothly, under this much scrutiny.
Phainon gave a low whistle, slinging his bag onto a nearby counter as he moved further in.
“Gods,” he muttered, hands in his pockets. “Goldweaver could sew herself into the floorboards and she still wouldn’t find this.”
He wandered past the main console, where a holomap flickered above a circular display table—a living, shifting schematic of the district’s aetheric grid, rendered in fine pulses of blue and gold. Power resonance mapping. Subtle aetheric seismic readings. Chrysos deployment threads tracked like faint, glimmering spiderwebs, tracing the ghost of Goldweaver’s influence through the city.
“Impressive,” Phainon mused, leaning down to study a sector junction. “You get bored or something?”
“Didn’t build it for aesthetics.”
Anaxa’s voice came from behind him, tired.
Phainon glanced back to see the shorter man approaching, sleeves rolled up, a fresh cup of something dark in hand. The Heir’s expression was as cold as ever, though there was the faintest amusement as well. Phainon grinned.
“No, no—really. I’m starting to feel underdressed.”
“Good,” Anaxa said. “You should.”
The holomap shifted mid-sentence.
A sector of the grid in the eastern quarter flashed. The fine Chrysos threads frayed, pulling back as a dull red ring bloomed outward on the map’s surface—an expanding radius marked with clinical precision.
Undertaker’s kill field.
It shouldn’t have been moving. There hadn’t been an official shift. No perimeter change logs or updated warnings.
And yet there it was. Spreading.
The room fell quiet.
Phainon’s smile faded, eyes fixed on the ripple as it ate through the map’s edge.
Anaxa set his cup down with a careful tap. Neither of them spoke.
A long moment stretched.
Phainon cleared his throat, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off the weight. “Anyway,” he muttered, straightening. “Business before recreational existential dread.”
Anaxa huffed something like a humorless laugh, brushing his palm over the map’s surface. The projection stabilized, shrinking the radius. For now.
“Yeah,” Anaxa said. “Let’s get to it.”
The map blurred again, shifting from aetheric readings to clean satellite overlays and CCTV network logs. Rows of data crawled down one side of the display—Cleaners movement patterns, cross-referenced against traffic reports and archived patrol routes.
Phainon leaned forward, one brow raised. “They’re active,” he muttered. “That’s… not a sweep. That’s a hunt.”
Anaxa didn’t answer, too focused on flicking through logs, pulling in campus checkpoints, public camera captures, even merchant route manifests.
Phainon scanned the map, brow furrowed as he spoke. “Alright. Possible motives: One—they found technology we didn’t know about. Two—someone defected. Three—they’re prepping a lockdown for another culling, though they usually announce those through backchannels first. Or four—”
Anaxa sighed, sharp and tired, cutting him off. “Stop.”
The word hung in the space between them.
Phainon’s mouth closed around the rest of his theory.
Anaxa straightened, dragging a hand down his face before turning his head toward him. “We both know that’s not what this is.”
The room went still for a long, weighted moment.
Phainon exhaled, jaw tightening. “…They got a lead.”
Anaxa nodded once. “Yeah.”
“That’s impossible. We didn’t leave anything behind.” It sounded weak even to him.
“Phainon.” His name, sharp and final.
Phainon groaned, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Fine.”
Anaxa’s features softened for a fraction of a second—exhaustion in his posture more than his expression—then he leaned back, pulling up another set of files. “We’ll figure out how later. For now…”
He tapped the side display, pulling up a branching set of profiles, data sheets, and site maps. Anaxa’s notes scrawled in sharp, meticulous shorthand: Chrysos deployment patterns, Cleaners movement, and Heir registry intel pulls.
“Looks like they’re not just after you,” Anaxa said. “They’re doing recon on all the Heirs. Which means, whether you like it or not, your safety plan’s a priority tonight.”
Phainon rolled his sleeves up, flexing his fingers as he stepped closer to the display. “Alright. Let’s dance.”
Anaxa smirked faintly, pushing a fresh cup of black coffee his way. “Buckle up, buttercup. It’s gonna be a long night.”
Phainon grabbed the cup, raising it like a toast. “Wouldn’t be the first.”
The map’s glow painted their faces as the district’s cold, restless pulse stretched on.
The holoscreens flickered, cycling through the last of the compiled data streams. City grid overlays, operative manifests, resonance field fluctuations. The room’s ambient hum had settled into the kind of oppressive quiet that made even the air feel heavy.
Phainon groaned and dropped his head onto the edge of the desk with a dull thunk.
Anaxa didn’t even look up from his terminal. “Whiny.”
Phainon lifted one hand, middle finger lazily extended, cheek still pressed to the cold metal. “If my brain liquefies, I’m haunting you.”
“You’d have to die first,” Anaxa shot back.
Phainon sighed, sitting up and scrubbing his face with both hands. “Alright, let’s make some calls. Threat assessment. First pass.”
He pulled up the local operatives roster, flicking through the flagged Heirs and external agents.
“Kitty Phantom Thief?” he suggested halfheartedly.
Anaxa snorted. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because one—she hasn’t set foot in this district since the Node Incident. Two—she only intervenes if there’s a direct Chrysos acquisition in play. And three…” Anaxa tapped a line of data highlighting her last three known activity clusters. “She sticks to the outer sectors. Statistically, odds of her interfering are under four percent.”
Phainon whistled. “That’s a hard no, then.”
“Glad you’re catching up.”
They both turned their attention to the next set of names.
“The Tribios,” Phainon muttered, leaning back. “Annoying, but minor.”
Anaxa shrugged. “Agreed—though minor doesn’t mean harmless.”
Phainon sighed. “Problem is I’m weak to kids.”
“Yeah, you’ve got that whole tragic martyr instinct thing. It’s gross.”
Phainon grinned. “You love it.”
“Not the point. Let’s break them down.”
He tapped the display, bringing up the profiles.
Trianne—Century Gate: spatial manipulation, teleportation, dimensional folds.
Trinnon—Purge: resonance cleansing, anomaly neutralization.
Tribbie—Enhancer: proximity-based ability amplification for her siblings.
Phainon stared at the display a moment. “They’re problematic together.”
Anaxa nodded. “Their strength is proximity. Tribbie enhances them both—split the trio and their effectiveness drops dramatically.”
“Alright. Step One: Isolate.”
“Agreed.”
Anaxa narrowed his eyes. “Trianne’s the linchpin. With Century Gate, she can reposition them on a whim. Control the field.”
“So we neutralize her movement. How?”
Phainon considered it. “We limit spatial anchors.”
Anaxa perked up. “Good. She needs fixed resonance points to bend. Disrupt those, her jump range drops. Set traps in high-drift zones, somewhere with unstable aetheric saturation. Her gates will misfire.”
“Like the old Underworks district.”
“Exactly.”
They both marked it on the map.
“Then there’s their morality,” Phainon added, expression cooling. “They hesitate when civilians are in danger.”
“Soft spots,” Anaxa agreed. “Could use it.”
“Not saying hostages—but if we draw them into a sector with protected assets, high collateral risk… odds are they’ll back off or split to protect the civvies.”
Anaxa gave a faint approving nod. “Calculated risk. I like it.”
They both watched the map for a moment in quiet, the steady pulse of city grids cycling through projected overlays.
Phainon rubbed the back of his neck. “Any other cards on the table?”
Anaxa glanced sidelong. “Nothing worth burning yet. Cleaners are still the biggest problem. We deal with the kids if we have to—but priority is staying off CIU’s grid.”
Phainon let out a breath and leaned back in his chair. “Hyacine?”
Anaxa gave a small, dismissive shrug. “She’s not in this.”
“Right,” Phainon agreed. “I figured.”
On the holomap, her signature marker pulsed softly near the quarantine zone perimeter. Not in conflict. Never in conflict.
“Even being Chrysos-affiliated, she’s neutral ground,” Anaxa continued. “No one’s stupid enough to cross that line.”
Phainon smirked faintly. “Not if they want the sectors to stay standing after a breach. Half this district would’ve sunk into the Tide months ago without her stabilizing the drift.”
“Exactly. She doesn’t fight or scheme. She patches everyone up and keeps territories from falling in on themselves. Council, Chrysos, the strays—hell, even the Cleaners would leave her alone.”
“Because even if you win a fight without her,” Phainon muttered, “you’re standing on a dead city after.”
They shared a look, both knowing the unspoken reality: Hyacine’s neutrality wasn’t a courtesy. It was survival. You didn’t shoot the person keeping the ceiling from caving in.
“And frankly,” Phainon added with a tired smile, “she’s a sweetheart. Glad we don’t have to deal with that.”
Anaxa rolled his eyes. “Soft.”
“Says you.”
“Don’t start.”
Anaxa straightened, eyes narrowing at the map again. “That leaves three main contestants.”
“Yeah,” Phainon murmured, already dreading the next names about to come up.
Anaxa tapped a sequence on the control panel, and Goldweaver’s dossier flickered up on the holomap, her signature warping the map like a taut golden net stretched across half the district.
“Next nightmare,” Anaxa muttered.
Phainon grimaced. “Of course.”
“Luckily,” Anaxa continued, voice dry, “I’ve got a temporary workaround.”
Phainon laughed, leaning his elbow against the edge of the console. “Naturally you do. Damn, professor, you think about her so much it’s bordering on obsession. Did she murder your whole bloodline or what?”
Anaxa shot him a look sharp enough to cut glass. “Moving on.”
“She locks down the weave,” He explained, gesturing to the simulation. “No seams, no fractures. Which means no easy exits for your little tricks.”
“Yeah, trying to thread through that’s like sewing steel.”
“Exactly why I built this.” Anaxa swiped a small device schematic onto the display—a crude, flickering model labeled Fray Pulse. “Localized aether disruptor. Shakes the weave loose for about a second. You won’t get a clean construct, but you’ll get a tear wide enough to slip through.”
Phainon eyed it skeptically. “And the catch?”
Anaxa shrugged. “Volatile as hell. Might fry everything in a ten-block radius. Might make a gap. Might implode. Depends how lucky you’re feeling.”
“So a desperate GTFO card, not a weapon.”
“Only if there’s no other option. Avoidance first. I’ve mapped unstable seams her grid missed—use those to move. Drones will keep tracking live updates.”
Phainon gave a mock bow. “Yes sir, Sensei.”
Anaxa ignored him, switching to another screen. “Also—you’ve been stabilizing better lately. Since we started regulating your focal points.”
Phainon glanced up at that, quiet.
“You notice,” Anaxa went on, “your constructs hold longer when you don’t overthink the logistics. Instinct, then shape. Not the other way around.”
“I know,” Phainon said, rubbing his wrist absently. “It’s easier when I’m pissed.”
“That’s not a healthy strategy.”
“Never claimed it was.”
A moment of silence stretched between themm.
Then Anaxa cleared his throat. “Alright. Next pain in my ass.”
The holomap shifted again—Undertaker’s sigil expanding like a dead zone across the city’s southern districts.
The icon beside it showed an all-too-familiar shape coiled around her: Pollux.
Phainon made a face. “Gods, why does she even need the dragon? Isn’t the whole ‘kill-on-touch’ bit already overkill?”
“She’s an overachiever,” Anaxa said flatly.
Phainon folded his arms, watching the data stream. “Her ability’s too swift. One touch, she decides if it ends you or not—it’s not even metaphoric.” He sighed. “And then there’s her oversized lizard. Pollux eats the threads I work. Devours the energy I shape before it stabilizes.”
Anaxa glanced at him. “Energy can’t be destroyed, but death alters resonance states. Pollux doesn’t erase your constructs—it converts them. Shifts them into inert decay states you can’t re-thread. That’s why you can’t grab a seam near her.”
Phainon rubbed his temple. “Wonderful. So how the hell do we work around that?”
Anaxa leaned back, tapping his stylus against his chin. “Temporal Echoes.”
Phainon blinked. “Explain.”
Anaxa expanded a cluster of diagrams on the holoscreen—rippling outlines of Phainon’s typical constructs, then dimmer, semi-transparent variants. “Your power’s strongest when it’s rooted in belief. But the echoes you make without anchoring them to reality—they’re essentially dream-logic phantoms. Meaning no living thread.”
Phainon’s brow furrowed, catching on. “And Undertaker’s ability only works on living threads.”
“Exactly. The echoes will crumble if she touches them, but they won’t trigger her kill-state. It’s bait.”
Phainon beamed, sharp and vicious. “You’re a bastard.”
“I know.”
Anaxa’s gaze flicked to the dragon’s sigil on the map. “Pollux, though… that’s trickier. It rides death sonority. Devours anything with an active life-thread.”
“So unless I want to get my head turned into an ornamental paperweight, we need to jam its frequency.”
“I’m working on it.”
Anaxa pulled a schematic from a side console, starting to sketch an unstable-looking field generator as he spoke. “Pulse Cage. Temporary containment field. Disrupts death-energy harmonics in a localized area. Won’t stop Pollux outright, but should scramble its lock for thirty seconds.”
Phainon whistled. “Thirty whole seconds. You’re spoiling me.”
“Better than zero.”
He scribbled a few adjustments mid-conversation. “Also—there’s a lag before she summons it. Minor, but it exists. Chrysos binding protocol dictates post-summon sync calibration. Dead zone for about eight seconds before the link finalizes.”
Phainon straightened. “Meaning if we hit that window and haul ass before she resets the board…”
“We’re clear.”
Anaxa flicked his wrist, and the prototype Pulse Cage diagram rotated in midair. “But—and this is important—only engage her in a pre-staged zone. Pulse Cage has to be active. No improvising.”
“No improvising,” Phainon repeated.
“I mean it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Stage the trap, bait the queen, slam the door shut.”
Anaxa gave him a look. “You make it sound like chess. It’s not. It’s survival.”
Phainon rolled his shoulders. “A survival I’m currently winning, thank you.”
“For now,” Anaxa muttered, adding another line to the diagram. “Alright. That leaves one more problem.”
The map zoomed out, leaving the last contested district blinking cold and blue.
Godslayer.
Phainon groaned outright, head thunking back against the wall again. “We can’t even do anything to him without dying.”
“Technically,” Anaxa muttered, “we could try.”
Phainon shot him a look.
Anaxa held up a hand. “I said technically.”
Another long, miserable silence stretched between them. Neither moved for a good ten seconds.
Then, reluctantly, Anaxa grunted and swiped through another series of feeds. “Alright, fine. I’ll pull up previous interview logs, surveillance threads… Chrysos public records, the good stuff.”
Phainon visibly winced. “You mean the censored, edited-to-hell garbage where everything mildly useful gets blurred out or cut.”
“Yup.”
He groaned again, dragging both hands down his face. “Gods, kill me now.”
Anaxa breathed out. “Sorry, that’s Undertaker’s job.”
They both chuckled, weak and bitter.
Anaxa exhaled through his nose, watching lines of code flicker across the display. “Y’know,” he started, tone casual, like they weren’t ankle-deep in paranoia, “for a bunch of Council grunts with baseline trackers, this sweep’s been uncharacteristically focused.”
Phainon didn’t look up. He was half-sprawled across the desk, scrolling aimlessly through a hollowed-out surveillance grid wishing for death. “They’ve had good days before. Even a stopped clock’s right twice.”
“Mm.” Anaxa’s gaze flicked to a second monitor. “Except this isn’t a random strike of luck. Pincers in the east quadrant, suppression fields along tertiary alleys, no redundancy in the wrong sectors. This grid’s been narrowed.”
Phainon grunted. “So someone got clever.”
Anaxa shrugged, tapping through another sequence. “Problem is, that kind of precision doesn’t happen without a prompt. Nothing’s pulling those routes on its own. Either someone high up flagged a location… or someone fed them something.”
That earned a flicker from Phainon—not a reaction so much as a twitch behind his eyes. He scoffed lightly, brushing a hand through his hair. “Yeah, sure. Because we’ve been so chatty lately.”
“Never said it was you.” Anaxa didn’t glance over. “But narrowing a manhunt like this, without a recorded trace? Someone either saw something, or someone whispered it. Maybe not a name. Just a zone, a direction. Happens.”
Phainon gave Anaxa a humorless smile. “Who’d be stupid enough?”
Anaxa was already moving on, pulling up a fresh stack of public logs. “That’s the part bothering me. Nobody should even know ‘Flame Reaver’.”
For a moment, Phainon didn’t care. Or rather—he told himself he didn’t. It was late, his head was pounding, and this whole damn night felt like one long, dragging crawl through half-finished panic attacks. He let Anaxa’s words hang, unimportant.
But then—the logic of it.
No one should know.
He stared at the edge of his monitor, his reflection faint in the glass.
Anaxa kept talking, more to himself than anyone. “Unless someone’s been watching patterns more than we have. Not hard if they had the right incentive. Or the right proximity.”
Phainon blinked.
Proximity.
And for the first time, the thought brushed him—not fully formed. Just the concept of it. Someone near him. Someone who shouldn’t be able to, who didn’t have a reason to, but somehow…
No.
It was absurd. It was impossible. There wasn’t anyone. Except—
The cold rolled in. Not sharp—not even fast. Just a slow, heavy drop in his chest like something settling inside him. A breath caught and refused to leave.
He tried to shake it. Told himself it wasn’t what he thought.
But his brain was already flipping through faces. Familiar ones. People who couldn’t. People who wouldn’t. And one face lingered just a second too long.
A dull, awful tightness behind his ribs.
No. No, it wasn’t—
“Shit,” Phainon muttered under his breath, louder than he meant to.
Anaxa glanced sidelong, caught the look on his face. “What?”
Phainon dragged a hand down his face. “Nothing. Just… I think I know how. Or might. Later.”
Anaxa studied him for a moment, expression unreadable. “You good?”
“Fine.” Lie. “We’ll talk after this.”
“Alright,” Anaxa said after a pause, and turned back to the screens.
But something in the room had changed.
Phainon kept his head down, kept his breathing steady.
He told himself it was nothing.
But the cold didn’t leave.
The room had gone too quiet.
The projection feeds kept shifting—old broadcasts, civilian-captured scraps, Chrysos-vetted “safety campaigns” with their sanitized vigilante footage. All of them featuring one thing neither of them wanted to look at anymore:
Godslayer.
“This is a waste of time,” Phainon muttered. His voice came out hoarse, somewhere between exhaustion and resignation.
“Patterns leave residue,” Anaxa replied, not looking up, scanning half a dozen overlapping data windows. His tone was maddeningly patient. “Even curated footage. No one’s perfect every frame.”
Phainon scowled, but stayed put.
They kept going. Clip after clip. Godslayer decimating Black Tide aberrants. Leveling rogue sectors. Every shot perfectly staged. Every move engineered for dominance.
Then—one of the more recent feeds, timestamped just under three months ago. A skirmish at the edge of Zone K7. Minor incident really.
Anaxa slowed it to quarter-speed on instinct.
Godslayer landed a heavy finishing strike against an anomaly spawn—textbook form. Clothes snapping, Guantlets carving a clean arc.
But Anaxa’s brow furrowed.
He scrubbed back. Again. Slower this time.
Right after the strike—a half-beat lag, barely perceptible. A micro-shift in torso alignment. Left shoulder tightening, mid-spine pulling slightly inward.
Anaxa’s head tilted, just a degree.
“…Huh.”
“What?” Phainon asked, not bothering to mask the tedium in his voice.
Anaxa rewound. Highlighted the alignment shift. “Doesn’t finish the torso rotation.”
“So?”
Anaxa pulled up another clip. Different day. Different fight. Same maneuver.
Same hitch.
Now Phainon leaned in, interest reluctantly sparking. “…Wait.”
“I thought it was a recoil reflex,” Anaxa muttered. “But no. It’s always left side, guarding something.”
He started cross-referencing. Layering multiple high-speed captures, phasing them together like ghost images. Every fight-ending strike had the same compensation. A minuscule body load. A protective tension in the same spot.
“Compensated vector load,” Anaxa whispered.
“A what now?”
“It’s when someone instinctively shields a structural vulnerability—think old injury or nerve cluster. You adjust without thinking.”
Phainon’s pulse skipped. “Wait, pull older footage.”
Anaxa didn’t argue. He called up a Council promo reel from three years back. Different setting, same godawful slogans. Slowed the playback.
And there it was. Mid-spine. Same pivot.
“Motherfucker,” Phainon whispered, a grin creeping in.
But then his brain clicked another gear.
“Wait—” He snapped his fingers, eyes narrowing. “Do we have any footage of him with Undertaker and Pollux?”
Anaxa raised a brow, intrigued. “Why?”
“Because if that’s what I think it is, and if Pollux is bound to death resonance—” Phainon was already leaning closer. “—then if something’s off, that dragon’s gonna react.”
Anaxa quickly pulled up a joint-op recording—both Godslayer and Undertaker on-site during the K-Field incident. Two Heir powerhouses in a closed kill zone.
They scrubbed through it. Godslayer moving like a storm, Undertaker trailing death, Pollux a massive, suffocating presence in the sky.
And then it happened.
An aberrant got a lucky shot—a spike catching Godslayer dead center in the upper back.
It barely staggered him. But Pollux, normally detached and deathly still, twitched. A flicker of tension in her coils, head snapping toward him, a snarl curling from her throat.
Phainon’s heart dropped to his stomach.
“Wait—there.” He jabbed a finger at the dragon’s reaction. “Look at her! She felt it.”
Anaxa froze the frame, zoomed in. Pollux’s gaze locked, pupils a needlepoint slit.
Both of them went silent.
For a moment, neither spoke. Then Anaxa’s lips split into a grin, sharp and feral.
“Well,” he murmured, “guess we’ve got a damn lead.”
Phainon huffed a disbelieving laugh, half exhilaration, half horror. “High five or breakdown first?”
“I vote both.”
Anaxa opened a fresh overlay—a neutral anatomy grid, extrapolating from the angles they’d recorded. “We’re not pinpointing it yet, but it’s thoracic. Upper mid-spine, somewhere between T7 and T11.”
Phainon ran a hand through his hair, still staring at the frozen image of Pollux’s reaction.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
A vulnerability. A real one.
And for the first time all night—it wasn’t guesswork.
Anaxa started sketching out spatial vectors and potential approach angles, marking critical zones around the upper thoracic region with digital indicators. The room’s light dimmed further as tactical blueprints bled into the screen.
Phainon watched him work, a small crooked grin forming. “Alright, professor. What’s the play?”
Anaxa didn’t look up. “We don’t use it.”
Phainon blinked. “The hell do you mean, we don’t—?”
Anaxa raised a hand to cut him off, voice sharp and final. “Unless we absolutely have to. This isn’t for sport, Phainon. Or revenge. Or whatever spiraling breakdown fantasy you’ve got loaded in your head. This is a failsafe. A last-resort option if we’re pinned, dying, and out of time.”
The grin slipped from Phainon’s face. His chest tightened—not out of offense, but because he knew Anaxa was right.
“…Yeah,” he muttered. “I wasn’t planning to get creative with it.”
Anaxa finally glanced up, eyes sharp. “Good. Because whether you admit it or not, you’re not built for that kind of kill. And I’m not here to watch you collapse.”
A moment passed.
Then Anaxa leaned back, sighing. “Alright. Now that that’s settled—” he dismissed the screen with a flick of his wrist, the projections flickering out of existence. “Let’s circle back to your theory.”
Phainon’s brow creased. “What theory?”
Anaxa’s gaze pinned him. “The one where you said you’ve got an idea how the Council and Heirs started closing in on you.”
Silence. Immediate. The shift in the air was so sharp it felt like the room lost a degree of warmth.
Phainon’s stomach lurched, his earlier adrenaline curdling into something sour.
“Right,” he said, voice tight.
His fingers drummed once against the edge of the table—and stilled.
The moment lingered but Anaxa didn’t press. He just waited.
And somewhere deep behind Phainon’s eyes, that gnawing suspicion he’d buried days ago—maybe longer—started clawing its way up again.
He swallowed hard.
“Let’s…table the killing-Godslayer part for now,” he muttered, staring at nothing. “And…yeah. Let’s talk about that.”
The room stayed cold.
Anaxa only nodded.
“Alright.”
Phainon braced both hands against the table’s edge, the pulse in his wrist ticking like a war drum.
“I think it’s Mydei.”
He didn’t look up when he said it. Just stared at the scarred surface of the terminal, the words landing in the space between them like a dropped weapon.
Anaxa’s brow twitched. “What about him?”
Phainon’s jaw clenched, a pulse of pain behind his temple as he forced it out. “I think he’s working with the Chrysos Heirs.”
The room seemed to constrict. Even the hum of the monitors felt distant.
Anaxa didn’t move. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful, almost cautious. “As an Heir?”
Phainon’s head snapped up, eyes like cold glass.
“No.” The word cut the air clean. Final. “Lower than that. But high enough.”
Silence pooled between them.
“I haven’t seen him in days,” Phainon went on, voice tighter now. “Which isn’t unusual on its own—we both vanish sometimes. But the timing, Anaxa. The CIU grid closes in. The Council tightens their leash. And the only person close enough to even have a chance of connecting me to Flame Reaver is him.”
He took a breath, rough and uneven.
“But if they really knew? If they were sure? They’d come straight for me. They wouldn’t waste time fencing off this district, sweeping channels. They’d come for me.” His hand lifted, fingers flexing once, twice, before dropping to the table again.
He tried to laugh, and it sounded wrong.
“Maybe he doesn’t know, then, right? ‘Cause if he did, I’d be pinned to a Chrysos slab by now. Or dust. Or worse.”
His mouth kept moving. The words like teeth clicking together.
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where there’s just—” he gestured vaguely at the room, at nothing “—the usual rot.”
Another laugh, sharper, hollow.
“Or maybe… maybe he knows and he’s waiting. Drawing it out. And it’s a sick joke, right? Flame Reaver blindsided by his own—” he swallowed hard “—his own… person.”
“Phainon.”
“Maybe I should ask him, you know? Just show up, like ‘Hey buddy, happen to be stabbing me in the back? ‘Cause I’d love to pencil that in between my existential crisis and your fucking sweet smile.”
Anaxa’s voice cut in firm.
“Phainon.”
He didn’t stop. Didn’t even hear it.
“Maybe none of it matters, you know? ‘Cause if it’s him, I’m already screwed. And if it’s not, well—hell, maybe I’ll owe him an apology for suspecting him between getting executed and processed.”
“Phainon.”
“Or maybe it’s all some Chrysos test, huh? See how fast the Flame Reaver can break down. Ten creds they say I crack in under a week—”
The slap cracked through the room like a gunshot.
Phainon staggered back a half step, blinking, one hand lifting to his cheek where the heat bloomed sharp.
Anaxa’s hand fell to his side, face hard, gaze unflinching.
“Stop.”
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Phainon’s chest rose and fell, eyes unfocused, the weight in his chest anchoring him to the floor.
Then, quietly, like glass cracking, he muttered, “Yeah.”
Anaxa let out a breath through his nose, but there was no relief in it.
“I’m coming back later. Sit with it. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Phainon didn’t answer.
Anaxa left.
He sat alone.
The hum of Anaxa’s gear filled the room, a steady, mechanical whine. It should’ve been background noise. Lately, it wasn’t.
Just tired.
You’re just tired.
He told himself that, though it didn’t sound like his voice.
The phone was still on the table. He stared at it for a while before picking it up, thumb hovering over the screen longer than necessary.
The thread with Mydei was pinned to the top.
The last message sat there, unopened.
Phainon☀️:
Hey. Didn’t see you today. Hope you’re eating.
Nothing.
He sent another.
Phainon☀️:
You alive?
The little status bar stayed empty. No read receipt. Just the nothingness stretching wider than it had any right to.
He set the phone down.
The room didn’t feel right. He couldn’t tell what it was—the angle of the shadows, the way the datapad on the shelf seemed too far to the left, like it had shifted a fraction while his back was turned.
Or maybe it was the air.
It felt like being watched.
Not by a person.
By the room itself.
A voice surfaced, not real but real enough.
You should’ve known better.
He flinched. Nothing there. Of course.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. Tried to shake it loose. His stomach felt tight, hollow. It wasn’t even the idea. It wasn’t that.
It was the waiting. The not-knowing. The ache of a half-dead hope.
Backstabber.
The word rippled through his head again.
But when he tried to pin it on Mydei, it slipped.
Landed squarely on his own chest.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking slightly. He clenched them tight until his nails bit into his palms, a faint flicker of heat flashing to life in one, dying a second later.
He told himself it was fine. That it didn’t mean anything. People got busy. Signals dropped.
But then another flicker of memory.
Blood on his hands.
A voice, somewhere behind him, calling his name, hoarse and breaking.
A ruined horizon.
You knew better than this.
The breath left him sharp and uneven.
“It’s not him,” he said out loud, just to hear it. “He… he wouldn’t.”
And something, not a voice but a shape in the bones of his thoughts, pressed back.
Wouldn’t he?
His throat closed. The world tilted, the edges of things bending—only in the corners of his vision, only when he wasn’t looking straight at them.
The phone screen stayed blank.
And the thing that cracked him, the thing that slid under his skin like a blade, wasn’t the possibility that Mydei had done it.
It was knowing—knowing with a hollow, gut-deep certainty—that if he had…
Phainon would forgive him.
Would make excuses.
Would crawl through glass to find a reason it wasn’t his fault.
And that was worse than betrayal.
He swallowed hard, the lump in his throat dry and sharp.
His voice came out thin, almost a whisper.
“If it’s him… it’s fine.”
He waited for it to sound like a lie.
It didn’t.
He meant it.
He truly meant it.
Somewhere deep beneath Council jurisdiction, far from the choking city lights and Chrysos territory, a woman stood alone before a wall of aging monitors.
The light from the screens carved sharp hollows into her face, all angles and cold intent. Data flickered. Surveillance feeds. Corrupted files attempting to rebuild themselves in fits and fragments.
An operative lingered nearby, his posture stiff beneath the weight of silence.
“Chrysos presence spiked in Quadrants Six through Nine,” he reported, voice thin. “Confirmed Heir deployment. Cleaners sweeping the southern sectors. Should we pull CIU teams back? Or wait for the Heirs to finish it?”
The woman’s mouth curled. Not quite a smile—something crueler.
“And leave our orchard to scavengers?” she murmured. “No. Let them flush out the rot… but the harvest is ours.”
The operative hesitated. “Respectfully, ma’am… their activity patterns suggest they’ve narrowed in on something. A location. Possibly the Flame Reaver’s sector. Should we—”
“You misunderstand,” she said softly, the tone of someone correcting a child. “A wildfire doesn’t care which spark set the earth alight. It consumes what’s left behind.”
She stepped forward, tapping a distorted monitor. A fragmentary file staggered to life—scorched data bleeding into static. Most of it unreadable. All but one thing in the top corner, still clinging like a burn scar:
NeiKos496.
The woman’s expression barely shifted. A sliver of satisfaction. A predator scenting blood in the water.
“A single blighted tree spoils the grove,” she whispered. “Fortunate for us… seems the Heirs already marked the one to cull.”
The operative said nothing.
The woman’s gaze lingered on the burned data a moment longer, before turning away into the dark.
Caenis smiled.