Sixty-six kilometers from the palace, in a room with blackout curtains and three tactical monitors, Ellie's eyes opened.
"It's started," said the voice coming from Ellie's mouth, which was Liam's. "He activated the reversal."
Camilla was already moving. The scripture hit the floor and her hand found the headset in one motion. "All units, prepare to fire."
In the palace, time ran backward.
It began at a point somewhere near the funeral hall and spread outward at the speed of certainty, a radius of reversed entropy unrolling across the grounds. King Nasubi, possessed, standing in the hall holding the ornamental gourd, turned around. Not deliberately. His body simply reversed. He watched his own arms move in directions he had not chosen, the king's broad hands retreating through motions they had already completed.
Across the palace, everyone else did the same.
The First queen sat haggard in her chambers. She had just taken her evening medicine and it had tasted bitter all the way down. The reversal put the bitterness back in her mouth and deposited the medicine in the bowl.
The Second queen had been crying. Whatever had moved her to it was private. The reversal collected the tears from her cheeks and returned them to her eyes.
The Seventh Prince had been in the middle of his third smoke of the afternoon. The smoke obligingly reversed course, traveling back down the cigarette and into his lungs, and then back into his lungs further, because the reversal did not make exceptions for personal dignity.
The Tenth and Eleventh Princes, the twins, were crawling in a small courtyard garden where someone had installed miniature rides at some point in the palace's history. They crawled backward, laughing, which under normal circumstances would have seemed sinister but in reverse simply looked very efficient.
Palace maids retreated through corridors. Birds flew in reverse, wings beating against their own forward momentum. A clock on a wall ran counterclockwise, its second hand sweeping backward with the specific unhurried authority of mechanism obeying physics.
For everyone within the radius, the reversal was not experienced as reversal. The neural current itself ran backward. They were not aware of unremembering. They simply, second by second, were.
Outside the radius, Camilla's tactical teams held their positions and watched.
Through the modified eyepieces, they had been tracking the Fourth Prince's car as it entered the palace grounds, constructing an AR overlay of his position at every second. The moment the reversal phenomenon visibly began in the palace interior, several of them understood simultaneously what they were seeing, and also understood, in the same instant, exactly why the Second Prince had positioned them here and not twenty meters further in.
She had known the ability's radius.
She had kept them outside it deliberately.
The reversal carried Tserriednich's real body backward along its own arrival path, step by step, second by second, retreating through the palace corridor, through the gates, down the entry stairs, back toward the waiting car. At a certain point, moving backward in real space, his real body position aligned precisely with the AR ghost image of him stepping out of that car ten minutes ago.
The captain of the tactical team had been watching for this moment without blinking.
He pulled the trigger.
The bullet crossed the distance before the sound did, as bullets generally prefer to, and met the Fourth Prince at the point of overlap between his real body and his past position. It punched through his forehead with the mechanical efficiency of a well-maintained sniper rifle and converted the contents of his skull into a spray of red, white, and yellow that crossed the car door and distributed itself across the roof with more coverage than anyone present had been prepared for.
The tactical team breathed.
Tserriednich's body stood, briefly, the way bodies sometimes do when the brain has stopped receiving input but the rest of the structure has not processed the memo. Then it stopped standing.
In the car, the personal guard captain moved.
Theta had been with the Fourth Prince for long enough to have opinions about most things that had happened during that time. She had taught him Nen. That was the fact she returned to most often, in the private accounting she did when she couldn't sleep, which had been happening more frequently. She had assessed his readiness, judged his capability, and made a professional decision to transmit the techniques. She had been thorough. She had been correct about his talent. And then she had watched what the techniques did when poured into the specific container of Tserriednich's existing personality.
The chimera ants had settled it for her. She had seen what he ordered with them. She had stood in rooms where those decisions were made and kept her expression at professional and her thoughts at private and wondered, in the accounting hours, whether she had released something that was already there or whether she had created something that had not existed before the Nen.
The answer was probably the first one. She chose to believe the first one. The evidence for the first one was substantial.
Now the Fourth Prince was dead, on the ground, with his head in several places, and she was helping the body into the car because that was the procedurally correct response to a prince assassination on palace grounds, and because she needed something concrete to do with her hands.
The relief was quiet and thorough and she did not examine it closely.
"Poor Theta," said the Fourth Prince. "Are you sad for me?"
She dropped the body.
The body she had dropped was gone. No body. No blood. Not on the ground, not on her hands, not on the car door. She looked at the back seat where the voice had come from. Tserriednich sat there with both hands folded in his lap and his head entirely intact and not a single bloodstain on his jacket.
He raised one finger to his lips. "You performed well. Keep going. Look appropriately distraught. Get everyone moving."
Theta's mouth was dry. Her hands were shaking, which was new.
She said "yes" in a voice that came out smaller than she intended, got into the driver's seat on automatic, and relayed through the headset that the prince's convoy was departing the palace immediately for security reasons. She made her voice sound like grief. This was not difficult. The grief was genuine. It was simply aimed at something different from what her voice was implying.
The car rolled out through the palace gates under the tactical team's scopes.
In the safe house, Camilla's second headset crackled.
Kurapika's voice came through, quiet and exact. "He's alive."
Camilla had not been waiting for that confirmation to make her decision. She had already made it. But having it was useful for everyone's peace of mind.
"Plan B," she said.
The rocket hit the car while it was still in range.
The explosion was not a modest one. It was the kind that makes people on nearby streets step outside to see what the noise was, and then step back inside to call someone, and then decide not to go out to dinner after all. The car lifted. It inverted at an angle not designed for cars. Fragments traveled at distances that suggested the original car had contained considerably more volume than it appeared to.
Inside what had been the car, Tserriednich pressed his teeth together.
He thought "now," and the grinding sound rose in his skull like a record running backward at half speed, and the world accommodated him.
The car began to roll back. Upright again. Undamaged. The blast retreated, the flame inhaled itself, the pressure wave reversed course. In the driver's seat, Theta's right arm, which had ceased to be attached to Theta approximately two seconds into the explosion, reversed its separation and reattached.