August 25th, 4:40 PM.
Fourth Prince Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou stepped off an airship at Shengdeli's international airport and walked toward a waiting luxury car with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life been told to hurry up. The press corps, who had been stationed at every conceivable exit for the past twenty-four hours subsisting on vending machine sandwiches, erupted. Cameras swiveled, reporters jogged in heels, drivers punched accelerators. Within seconds, a full convoy of news vehicles was tailing the prince's motorcade through Shengdeli's evening traffic.
Ten minutes later, a second Tserriednich walked out of the same airship.
The private soldiers of the Second Prince, stationed at sniper points across the airport's perimeter, pressed their earpieces and said nothing. Through their specially modified eyepiece optics, they watched the prince exit the aircraft, board the luxury car, and depart, making exactly the same movements, the same half-turn at the car door, the same angle of the chin, at exactly the same speed the first one had. The vehicle traveled the same route at the same pace and disappeared the same way.
"Mirror image confirmed," someone murmured into a headset. "Hold positions. Report any deviation. Wait for orders."
The second prince's voice came back, flat and clipped: "Keep watching."
The tactical net spread wide. The A-family had people on rooftops with binoculars three blocks from the palace gates. The Zhou-family's operatives worked the street level, plainclothes, hands in pockets. The She-family had eyes at the major intersections. Overlaid on top of all of that was the king's own army, professional and unhurried, moving through the city's arteries in ways that looked like routine patrol and were not.
Every single one of them was watching the same motorcade.
In the street-level team, a young woman named Melina kept pace with the vehicle on foot with practiced ease. Beside her, a heavyset man with a shaved head, Wo Kenyi, tilted his head toward a cluster of private soldiers three intersections back.
"Those eyepieces the Second Prince's people are wearing. They don't look standard."
Melina didn't glance over. "New procurement. The king's forces don't have them yet, apparently."
"The king's forces don't have good equipment?"
"Of course we do," said their team leader's voice through the comms. "Don't embarrass me, Henrich."
A different voice broke in, quiet and dry. "The First Prince is dead. Whether or not the Fourth Prince had anything to do with it is almost beside the point now. The king will be seen to act."
"Seemed like a lot of theatre for dealing with it quietly."
"It's a lot of theatre because the whole world is watching. Now stop chatting and keep your eyes on the car."
Thousands of pairs of eyes, networked across three criminal organizations, the Second Prince's private army, and the apparatus of the royal household, all converged on a single motorcade moving through evening traffic toward the palace. The Fourth Prince, trailed by cameras and killers alike, rode through it without visible concern.
Some distance away on the opposite end of the city, approximately sixty-six kilometers from the palace in a purchased single-family house with private soldiers at every entry point, Camilla sat on the floor with her legs crossed and a battered scripture open across her knees. Across from her, inhabiting the body of Ellie Abby, the Liam-shaped thing that had been managing the Kakin operation for the better part of a month peeled a banana.
"I'd have thought you'd be reading fashion magazines," it said.
"If you're bored, turn on the television," Camilla said without looking up.
"I'm not bored. I'm chatting with you."
Camilla raised her eyes from the scripture, assessed the banana situation with mild distaste, and said: "Anything Camilla wears gets analyzed in twenty-four hours by at least three major fashion publications. Fabric provenance, silhouette philosophy, accessory synergy. Within seventy-two, the high street has caught up. Camilla's aesthetic influence is structural at this point."
"Our Shizuka wears the same outfit seven days running. Strong woman. Impervious to weather and public opinion both."
"The blessing of not being watched."
A pause. The banana was finished.
"Isn't it a little impolite," said the thing wearing Ellie's face, "for the Second Prince not to be at the palace to greet her dear brother?"
Camilla closed the scripture with one finger marking her page. "Tserriednich's Nen ability reverses entropy within a fixed radius. Everyone inside the reversal loses ten minutes of consciousness along with ten minutes of their life. Camilla will not accept that." She reopened the scripture. "Additionally, there is the small matter of Camilla not wanting to be within ten kilometers of a man who is both smarter than average and deeply irritated about being summoned home under fabricated treason charges."
"Nothing is absolute," said Liam's voice from Ellie's mouth. "I've demonstrated that much, at least. He can't reverse what he can't perceive."
"Then let's confirm that today." Camilla turned a page. "The version of you here will try to stay synchronized with the version of you in my father's body. If the ability triggers, we'll know immediately whether your consciousness survives the window."
The eyes of Ellie's borrowed face went slowly, deliberately blank.
Liam's attention was elsewhere.
Sixty-six kilometers away, in a hall that smelled of preserved flowers and cold stone, the First Prince Benjamin lay in an ice coffin under the light of a single overhead fixture. The room was otherwise empty except for the man standing in front of the coffin, one broad hand resting on its surface. King Nasubi Hui Guo Rou, monarch of Kakin, large and composed, had been waiting here for most of the afternoon.
He heard footsteps at the door.
Against the sunset burning through the hall's narrow western windows, a figure stepped over the threshold.
"My eldest brother is dead," said Tserriednich. His voice was measured, as it always was. He looked around the empty room and then at his father. "Where are the others?"
The king's body turned, and the thing behind the king's eyes observed the Fourth Prince with considerable interest. The double chin had a remarkable texture. The detail was genuinely distracting.
"How many days has it been," said the king's voice, "and you think I've been waiting for anyone else?"
Tserriednich took a step into the room.
The king's hand drifted to his waist, to a small ornamental gourd hanging there on a silk cord. His fingers touched it lightly.
"For many generations," the king said, his voice taking on the measured weight of ceremony, "our ancestors passed down a vessel for choosing among the princes. A test. A selection. Benjamin did not live to reach that day." He tilted his head. "Tserriednich."
The name landed with the specific weight of a verdict.
The Fourth Prince's eyes moved to the gourd, recognition crossing his face a half-second before everything else happened, and that half-second was too long. The air around him collapsed inward. His body became a column of pressurized aura that unraveled at the edges, spiraled, and vanished into the gourd's mouth in a single smooth motion, like smoke drawn through a keyhole.
The king stood alone in the hall with Benjamin's ice coffin and a small gourd that now contained a Tserriednich.
Liam turned the gourd over in the king's broad palm, feeling the resistance inside it. The contents pushed back with focused, agitated aura. Specialization type, and a strong one. The Ginseng Fruit Gourd had refined Beyond's clone over months and still found it demanding work. This would take longer than the Second Prince had required, but not dramatically so.
He considered his options.
The original plan had been to plant Star Marks ahead of the Fourth Prince's route and allow one to make quiet contact as Tserriednich passed. Simple, low-visibility, the kind of thing that left no evidence. The problem was the reversal ability. If Tserriednich triggered his entropy window at the moment of contact, a spent Star Mark talisman would not regenerate. He'd confirmed that much through painful experience. The construct would be gone, the contact would be gone, and Tserriednich would simply walk out of the ten-minute hole in the universe knowing something had tried to touch him.
Specialist types didn't play by comforting rules. There was too much room for the ability to interact with a Star Mark in ways that produced unpleasant surprises. The gourd approach was not elegant, but it was thorough. While Tserriednich was inside, his aura would be ground down methodically until there was nothing left to power an entropy reversal. After that, a man without aura was simply a man.
The king calculated the time. It should be enough by now.
He shook the gourd once, gently.
A Tserriednich came out.
He landed on the stone floor with the specific bonelessness of someone whose aura reserves had been reduced to zero, and lay still for a moment in the dust. The king looked down at him with appropriate paternal gravity.
Then the body on the floor began to blur at the edges, as though viewed through water.
It was a subtle thing at first, the kind of thing that might be dismissed as a trick of the light in a hall lit mainly by a cooling evening sun. But it wasn't a trick of the light. The shape of the Fourth Prince on the floor softened, detail dissolving like a sketch erased lightly, and then there was nothing there at all.
No body. No mark on the floor. No residual aura signature.
Just dust and evening light and Benjamin's ice coffin.
The king heard footsteps behind him.
"Father," said Tserriednich's voice, entirely composed, from the direction of the door. "You mentioned a pot?"