The brain orb sat wrapped in a small square of cloth in Clyde's coat pocket, dense and warm against his hip as he walked out of the Academy gates and into the streets of Matrix.
The artificial sun above the dome was doing its best impression of late afternoon, the Luminance card's output shifting toward a warmer angle, the light coming through the dome's transparent surface at a lower pitch than it had been during orientation. The streets outside the Academy district were busy with the particular energy of a city that had arranged its schedule around manufactured light and had gotten very good at making the most of it.
He slowed his pace.
Luchian was three stalls down on the left side of the street.
He had set up with the efficiency of someone who had been watching how other vendors operated and had identified the optimal position and replicated it. A clean wooden board propped at an angle displaying the day's papers, a small sign in Luchian's careful handwriting listing the price, and a stack of newspapers arranged with the same tidiness Luchian applied to everything he did. There was a queue.
A small one, four people, but a queue.
Look at that, Clyde thought, slowing further to watch without being noticed.
Luchian was handling each transaction with the warm, professional ease that he brought to everything involving other people, the same quality he had brought to selling carrots in Cristae, that particular combination of genuine friendliness and efficient service that made people feel good about handing over their money. He was talking to the current customer about something, gesturing at the front page, and the customer was laughing before taking their paper and moving on.
The next person stepped forward.
This might genuinely be our turning point, Clyde thought. Everything is working. He is building something here. I am at a school that can actually give me the tools to matter. We are outside Cristae for the first time in our lives.
He looked up at the dome above the city, at the artificial sun warm and golden at its center, at the pillars of light coming down through the transparent surface. He could hear children running somewhere nearby, the specific noise of a school letting out a few streets over, the percussion of small feet on dressed stone and the high-frequency chaos of too many voices talking at the same time. A merchant was calling out further down the avenue, advertising something Clyde could not make out from this distance.
He turned his eyes toward the far end of the main avenue.
The clock tower was visible from here, which meant it was enormous, the kind of structure that announced itself across several city districts simultaneously. Bigger than the one in Cristae by a significant margin, its face visible at this distance in enough detail that he could read the position of the hands. The mechanism that ran it was presumably similar to Cristae's, the city's day and night cycle tied to its movement, the lanterns responding to its positions, the whole city organized around its authority.
He watched it for a moment.
Then he turned toward the boarding house.
The handle of his door was still warm from the afternoon light when he heard it from next door.
BANG.
One shot, immediately followed by two more in quick succession, BANG BANG, the sound muffled by the wall but completely unmistakable, the specific sharp concussion of a firearm discharged in an enclosed space.
Clyde's hand left the door handle.
His butterfly knife was out and his Hollow Eyes were active before he had consciously decided on either, the sequence of threat-response running faster than deliberate thought. The frequency layer of the world opened around him, the ichor signatures of the building's occupants becoming visible, and he scanned the next room.
Multiple signatures. Four adult-sized Lunar Ichor presences, the waves of each carrying the slightly elevated quality of people whose adrenaline was up. And one smaller presence, fainter, the Lunar Ichor moving with the reduced amplitude of someone whose body was under significant physical stress.
A child.
Why are they shooting?! he thought. What is happening in there?
His Hollow Eyes could read frequencies through walls, but reading the physical details of a room through solid material at his current phase was beyond his range. He could sense the people. He could sense their states. He could sense that something in that room was very wrong. He couldn't see the specifics.
He stood in the corridor and thought.
If I kick the door down I lose the element of surprise and I have four armed men. If I wait and they hear me outside they will know I am here. If I do nothing—
His eye landed on a newspaper sitting on the small table beside his door, one of Luchian's, the front page face-up, the corner of it slightly bent from being rolled for transport.
He picked it up.
Walked to the adjacent door.
Slid the newspaper under it, so about half of it was visible on the other side.
Knocked twice. Knock knock.
Then he moved back to his own doorway and positioned himself flat against the frame, Clockwork card already in his left hand, the cut on his palm from the earlier activation still fresh enough to press against the card's surface.
Hisssss.
The cogs began to spin.
He chanted in his mind.
Tempus, umbra ultimae horae, dissolve filum tuum sine fine et sine ut potestas tua antiqua hunc secundum cruentem consumat.
Ring.
He heard the door next to his open.
Click.
Tempus auge.
Yellow light flooded the corridor and the world dropped to its fraction-rate, the door swinging open in slow motion, the figure stepping out into the corridor moving with the particular sluggishness of someone who existed in normal time while Clyde did not.
He moved.
Through the open door, past the figure in the doorway, into the room.
Four men. Three of them seated, one standing near the window, all of them in the specific suspended moment of normal-time people existing in a space where Clyde was moving several times faster than they could register. Glasses on the table, the liquids inside them absolutely still. Cigarette smoke hanging in the air in frozen tendrils. A gas lamp on the far wall flickering at a rate too slow to see.
In the corner, a child. Hands tied behind their back, sitting against the wall, eyes closed, breathing the shallow rhythm of someone somewhere between unconsciousness and awareness. Small. Eight years old, maybe nine. The dehydration and hunger were visible even before the Hollow Eyes confirmed the reduced Lunar Ichor output.
Clyde assessed the four men in the time it took a normal person to blink.
He took a loose piece of stone from the floor, the kind of debris that accumulated in old buildings at the edges of skirting boards, compressed his ichor into it, and flicked it at the gas lamp.
Tink.
The glass cracked and the light flickered and then pulled back to a dim unsteady glow.
He moved through the four men with his butterfly knife held flat, striking with precision rather than force, targeting the specific anatomical points that disabled without killing, the shins and knee joints of two of them, the elbows and wrists of the other two. The sounds it produced were muffled by the time-compression but each impact landed exactly where he directed it, the resonance in the blade making each strike carry considerably more force than the motion itself contained.
He picked the child up.
Walked back out through the door.
The yellow light vanished.
Everything snapped back.
CRASH. The men fell. Clang. Clatter. Weapons hitting the floor from hands that could suddenly not close properly. Groans of pain from all four simultaneously, the sounds overlapping into a collective expression of serious and immediate injury.
The gas lamp flickered back to its proper brightness.
Clyde stood in the corridor with the child in his arms, who was beginning to stir at the edges of consciousness, the small body light and too light and smelling of several days without food or water.
One of the men appeared in the doorway, leaning heavily against the frame, his face carrying the expression of someone who had been fine three seconds ago and was now comprehensively injured and had no explanation for why.
"Who are you?!" he managed.
"Nobody," Clyde said.
He heard footsteps on the stairs.
Familiar ones.
Eira came around the landing first, moving with her characteristic economy of motion, her shadow running at its usual slightly wrong angle against the stairwell wall. Aurelian was immediately behind her, still moving with the careful quality of someone managing a cracked rib.
They both looked at Clyde. Then at the child in his arms. Then at the four disabled men visible through the open doorway.
"Were you both assigned the same commission?!" Clyde asked.
Eira nodded once.
"How did you already—" Aurelian started.
"I heard gunshots and worked it out from there," Clyde said. "They are all disabled. I didn't kill anyone."
From inside the room, the groaning was continuous and emphatic.
"Amazing," Aurelian said. "Genuinely. You need to go claim the commission reward."
"Where?!"
"The Bleeding Court," Eira said. "They issued this commission."
"What is the Bleeding Court?!"
Eira looked at him with the patience of someone explaining something that is common knowledge everywhere except to the specific person they are talking to. "They maintain the balance of power across Miton. They operate everywhere, across every major city, independent of government. When they issue a commission, the reward comes from them directly."
"How do I contact them?!"
"You don't have to," Eira said. "They will come to us."
She reached into her coat and produced a quill, a small ink pot, and a card, all of which she arranged on the corridor's side table with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. She wrote a letter in quick, precise strokes and then held the card flat in her palm and pressed her fingertip to its edge.
Drop.
Her voice was low and steady, the Latin arriving with the measured quality of someone for whom the chant was completely familiar.
"Mater Luna, per sanguinem meum te invoco, portas tuas aperi et verbum meum deferto quo destinatum est. Haec epistula ad Curiam Cruentam perferatur."
(Mother Moon, through my blood I call upon you, open your gates and carry my word to where it must go. Let this letter be delivered to the Bleeding Court.)
The card surface swirled, the edges of it curling into a vortex that pulled the letter inward, and then the vortex closed and the card was blank again.
"Now we wait," Eira said.
They carried the child inside and found a place to sit on the available furniture while Aurelian and Clyde began securing the four disabled men with whatever cord and cloth the room provided. Eira moved through the space with the systematic attention of someone conducting an analysis, opening drawers and checking surfaces and reading the room for information rather than valuables.
She stopped at the cabinet near the far wall.
Reached for a letter sitting on its surface.
CRACK.
The sound of a portal, specific and sudden, and a figure stepped through, dark uniform, the blood moon symbol on the chest rendered in careful red against black fabric, the person inside the uniform carrying themselves with the complete composure of someone for whom arriving through a portal into a crime scene was entirely routine.
The four bound men were gone.
Clyde's Hollow Eyes were active and he saw precisely nothing of how it happened, the transfer occurring at a frequency layer he could not currently access.
"Commission complete," the figure said, producing an envelope. "One hundred shillings."
Clyde took it.
The figure was already stepping back toward the portal. Something about the frequency, or the absence of frequency, made Clyde's Hollow Eyes return nothing from the direction of the Blood Court representative, a blank space in the perception layer where a living person's ichor signature should have been.
Dark aura, he thought. And no frequency at all. What is that person?
The portal closed.
Click.
Gone.
Eira had the letter from the cabinet in her hands. She opened it.
Clyde and Aurelian gathered around.
The handwriting inside was precise, the content brief, the bloody handprint at the bottom of it adding a specific quality to the words above it that the words alone would have carried differently.
I have provided the sacrifices and lab specimens. We can finally accelerate the Bleeding Moon and awaken Noxella.
Clyde read it twice.
The name landed in him the way it always landed, in the substrate rather than the ears, the frequency of it resonating in the place behind his sternum where the Hollow Star beat its layered rhythm.
"They are trying to summon Noxella?!" Aurelian said, his voice carrying something between concern and alarm.
Clyde activated his Hollow Eyes and looked at the bloody handprint at the bottom of the letter.
The blood carried a signal. Faint, specific, embedded in the biological material like a frequency record of the moment it was pressed to the page.
He read it.
The cold sweat arrived before he had consciously finished processing what the signal said, running down from his forehead in a slow, specific path, the body responding to information that the mind was still catching up to.
"Clyde?!" Aurelian said. "What do you see?!"
"Five months," Clyde said.
Silence.
"Five months until she descends," he said.
Aurelian looked at Eira. Eira looked at the letter. The room held the weight of five months and everything it implied about the current state of their preparation versus the current state of the threat.
"We tell Aldric," Aurelian said.
"Yes," Eira said. She folded the letter carefully. "I will go. You two stay and analyze what you can find here about the Thaddeus connection."
She left.
Aurelian sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall.
Clyde sat on the floor with his back against the bed frame and looked at the envelope in his hands.
"Five months," Aurelian said quietly.
"Five months," Clyde agreed.
Later, alone in his room, Clyde sat on his bed with the brain orb in his lap and the borrowed book about the ichor dimension open beside him.
Five months, he thought. My current phase can stop almost nothing that would be involved in an event of that scale. I need to develop. Fast.
He looked at the orb.
He closed his eyes, pressed two fingers to his sternum, and went inward.
The ichor dimension received him, the dark, the card, the three constellations hanging in their formation. Three stars. Three abilities. Multiple empty slots in each.
Chemical analysis, he thought. Useful in a lab. Less useful against a descending goddess.
Ichor analysis, he thought. Useful for identifying threats. More useful.
Lunar flow analysis, he thought, looking at the constellation with five empty slots. Reading how other people's Lunar Ichor is moving. Knowing where their power is strained, where it's holding, where the weak points are in real time.
That one, he decided.
He materialized the brain orb in the ichor dimension, holding it in his palm.
He pressed it against the lunar flow analysis constellation.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then the constellation rotated, one slow full turn, and one of the five empty stars ignited, burning with the cold purple of his personal frequency, steady and new.
He came back out of the ichor dimension.
He walked to the mirror.
He activated his Hollow Eyes and looked around the room, then through the wall.
The range was different. Noticeably, immediately different, the perception extending further than it had before, the Lunar Ichor signatures of people in adjacent rooms visible as warm frequency signals moving through the wall's material as though the material was a mild inconvenience rather than a barrier. He could count the number of people in the rooms around him. He could read the quality of their ichor from here, the amplitude of their waves, the rhythm of their output.
He looked down the corridor through the wall.
Four people in the next room. He could tell two of them had been recently active, their Lunar Ichor running at the elevated rate of post-exertion. One of them was sitting still with a steady, calm output. One was sleeping.
He lowered the Hollow Eyes.
One star out of five, he thought. Four more and the constellation is full.
Five months.
He looked at the remaining brain orbs wrapped in their cloth on the desk.
Better get started.