"Alright. Good news, or bad news."
Emil sat across from Rafael with his ale untouched and his arms still crossed.
"Bad news?"
"We don't have good news."
Emil let out a long slow breath through his nose.
"Haha."
"Wait. We do have one."
"What."
"Military Police recruitment is at its highest since the founding of the RMO."
Emil kept his deadpan in place.
"Come on. That's something."
"Why."
Rafael snapped his fingers and pointed at him across the counter.
"Because for the past two decades, *you know* the MP and the Army have never leave bottom three segments by recruitment numbers, right? Everyone's been racing to join the RMO. Or the Palace Affairs office for the ones with old money. Nobody wanted the MP. Nobody wanted Army."
"Ehh why? is it crucial to know or some."
"Kind of — well."
---
Far below them, beneath the eastern district MP building, the deepest holding cell sat at the end of a stone corridor that smelled like old water and lamp oil. The lamps along the corridor had been turned to half-flame to save oil. Shadows moved against the walls when nobody was moving.
Marcus Hale was sitting on a wooden chair just outside the bars.
The chair was the only piece of furniture in the corridor.
He had his elbows on his knees, his hands folded loosely in front of him, his coat draped over the back of the chair. He had been sitting like that for nearly an hour.
The man on the other side of the bars was named Mikhail. He had been a colleague of Marcus's for thirty years and a personal friend for slightly longer. He was, by current job title, the commander of the southern division of the Standing Army.
He had not spoken in the last twenty minutes.
"Mikhail," Marcus said again. His voice was calm. It had stayed calm for the entire hour. "We grew up together. Same district. Same school. Your sister was at my mother's funeral. You don't need to keep doing this."
Mikhail did not look at him.
"I am not asking who you reported to. I am not asking who paid. I am asking what you know about the new city. What the Standing Army was told. Anything." A pause. "Help me help you."
Silence.
Marcus inhaled.
"You — at the moment this country is in its worst position in this whole century — you betray it and you have the *gall* to stay silent?"
Mikhail moved.
He was at the bars in two steps. He grabbed them with both hands and shook them once, hard. The iron rang.
"*The country?*" His voice came out rough. He had not spoken in long enough that the first word cracked. "Marcus. Marcus, do you remember what the Standing Army was twenty-five years ago? Do you remember? Before the RMO existed?"
"Mikhail—"
"We were the institution. The one every cadet wanted to join. Old families sent their sons to us. The Palace council sat us at the front of the room. My father carried his Standing Army sash to his own wedding because that was the most prestigious thing he owned in his life." His hands gripped the bars. "And then they founded the RMO. One year. *One year* after the RMO opened its first recruitment, we were already the joke. The bottom of the list. The institution you joined if you couldn't pass the catalyst and law exam."
"Mikhail."
"And it wasn't the RMO's fault. Not really. It was *us.* It was our own people. Do you know how many Standing Army commanders sold internal records to the RMO recruiters in those first three years just to secure transfer slots for their sons? Do you know how many of *our* officers turned in *our* people for the chance at a Greycoat uniform?" He let out a sound that was almost a laugh. "We rotted ourselves. By the time the corruption scandal broke and the Palace had to publicly execute the three senior commanders, there was nothing left to save. We never recovered. We were never *meant* to recover."
He let go of the bars and took half a step back.
"When the Standing Army does anything now — anything at all — we get a *letter.* A letter, Marcus. Not a Vanguard runner. Not a Palace courier. A *letter,* signed by some clerk who has never met any of us. When the council meets, we are not in the room. When the RMO requests our manpower, we provide it without question, and we are not invited to the briefings afterward to learn what we provided it for. We are the largest body of armed men in this country and we are treated like postal staff."
He paused. His breath came out as a slow controlled exhale.
"And that fruad," he said. The honorific came out with the specific flat sarcasm of a man who had once used the word with reverence and had long since stopped. "That fraud Flaure. Do you remember how it was when she first ascended? She was going to sweep the Cogwork heretics from the eastern districts. Eradicate them. Public statements every week. Tribunals lined up. Half the academy was terrified to even own a Cogwork pamphlet."
A pause.
"And now?"
He looked at Marcus directly.
"Now she is quietly negotiating with them. Sending Palace Affairs envoys to their senior chapters. Offering them legitimacy in exchange for political support against the new city. The same heretics she swore to wipe out — she is courting them. Because they are convenient. Because she needs leverage." His mouth twitched. "Do you know how that lands in the Standing Army officers' mess, Marcus? Do you know what it does to morale when the men who buried their friends fighting Cogwork extremists in the eastern movement ten years ago? that they have movement about idea against The Church of herself? and she sweeped them one by one? hear that the Palace is now treating those same people as allies?"
He shook his head.
"She bends. She bends with whichever wind blows. There is no spine left in that throne. There hasn't been for years."
He turned half away.
"At least the god in the south is something. At least he is consistent."
Marcus said nothing. He had stopped trying to interrupt.
"I am not betraying the country," Mikhail said. "I am leaving a country that left me first. I am chasing a dream. The same dream the thousands of people were illegally walking south to chase. There is a city out there built on the old Thalassian harbor. The best natural port on the continent. Before the Omens that whole region was the richest stretch of coastline in the known world — the canals went through the narrow part of the southern landmass, ships paid tolls just to cross. It was *paradise* before paradise was outlawed."
"We have been there too, remember? when we were ten — we were mesmerized by it, don't you remember!?"
He paused, breathing.
"And they're rebuilding it. And rumor is — there is a god there. An old god. The kind that built the world before this human-turn god fraud bullshit and come and slain all newer generation."
Marcus, who had been waiting through all of this without moving, finally moved.
"Wait." His voice changed slightly. "An old god?! You mean—!"
---
"And that's how it went," Rafael said.
Emil had been staring at his ale glass during the entire account. He looked up.
"An old god? *Old?*"
"Mm. Yeah."
Rafael stretched, twisting one shoulder until it cracked.
"I don't actually know much about that part either. The whole reason I was going to take you to the information market today was to find out more. But." He gestured vaguely at the bar around them. "The market is gone. So we're stuck."
"...how was the infiltration, by the way."
Emil looked down at his hands.
"I — well — I almost didn't make it out, senior."
His voice did not project. It almost never did when he was being honest about something.
"There was a moment during the ritual when the priest was about to read my mind. I was — there is no other word for it — I was about to be caught. Then the white-haired one — Const — he said something earlier about thinking unfocused thoughts. About scattering attention. I remembered it just in time." He exhaled. "It worked. Barely. I scattered my thoughts. The priest read everything useless."
---
a day before that.
Const had stopped Emil in the corridor outside the investigation room. He had said, quietly:
*"If you're going to follow the others into the church, tellfind a way to scatter your thoughts when the priest tries to read you. Tell them those and don't let any image sit still in your mind. Anything will work. Don't tell them I said this."*
Then he had walked off.
Emil had blinked at the empty corridor and filed the warning under *very strange thing that may or may not matter.*
It had mattered.
---
"...and I remembered something you said when you were drunk one time. About how you can get through almost anything if you have alcohol in you."
Rafael laughed once.
"I said that?"
"Yes, sir."
"That sounds like me."
"I bought a small flask on the way to the church. Just in case. I didn't end up needing it."
"Why not?"
"Aim figured something out. Cracked some part of the system before I had to use it. And Const — Const looked like he was *expecting* Aim to figure it out. Like he'd been waiting to see if Aim would."
Rafael sat with that for a moment.
"You think he was watching Aim specifically?"
"I think Const watches manys. But yes. Aim especially."
Rafael folded his arms. He let his head tilt back until it rested against the wall behind the counter.
"Uhmm.. ehehe" Emil added, "we came up empty, senior. We learned a lot. We didn't get *anything*."
"Well." Rafael lifted his glass. "Empty-handed but not empty-headed. Could be worse."
They both laughed it off quietly.
---
Far to the southeast, at the mouth of the old Thalassian harbor, the wind off the sea was strong and warm. The great canal — silted shut for thirty years, abandoned to sand and dead fish — had begun to fill with water again over the past two months. Nobody had given an order to clear it. Nobody had brought equipment. The water had simply returned. The promised land.
In a high stone room overlooking the rebuilt port, the Prophet sat on a chair that was not yet a throne but was being treated as one. His eyes were half-lidded in the manner that had become his trademark. His hands rested folded in his lap. He had not moved in some time.
His apostles waited around him in the careful silence of people who had learned that interrupting him was unproductive.
When he finally spoke, his voice was even. Quieter than the room expected, but not weaker.
"I cannot see."
The closest apostle — middle-aged, devout, the kind of man who had given up a comfortable career in academic theology to follow him south — leaned slightly forward.
"My Seer?"
"I said I cannot see."
A small breath ran through the room. One of the younger apostles took half a step back without realizing he had done it.
"My Seer — you possess the Eye Beyond Time. How can—"
"It has been this way since Terminus began to move."
A thin line of red traced its way down from the corner of the Seer's left eye. Not a tear. Blood, slow and dark, marking brown skin in a single deliberate line.
He did not wipe it away.
He did not appear to notice it.
The apostles went very still. Nobody spoke. The kind of silence in the room had changed.
"My Seer," the closest apostle said carefully, "should we—"
The Prophet raised one hand. Barely. The room understood and went silent again.
His half-lidded gaze stayed fixed on something that was not in the room with them.
"Terminus," he said, almost to himself. The name came out flat — not angry, not afraid. aware.
---
In a small abandoned shelter along the abandoned road of north deadland, four travelers had stopped for the night.
Thanks to Vine's artifact—they managed to cross whole nation without going on good path in less than a day.
Vine had taken the corner nearest the fire with the easy possession of someone who had never been told no by a room. Const sat opposite her, his coat folded on his lap. Aim and Isolde were against the far wall, eating dried meat from a single shared cloth.
Aim leaned slightly toward Isolde.
"Sol."
"Mm."
"I've been noticing something. For a while now."
"...?"
"It's about Const."
Isolde went very still. She did not look across the fire. She kept chewing.
Aim kept his voice low.
"The bar that first night. When he said something about us—he covered up too quickly. The night the Vanguard assassins came — he arrived *exactly* on time. The folder that appeared on your dining table through a locked window. The way he knew the Eastern District market route the day we first followed him."
"I noticed."
"What does he actually want us for?"
"I have been asking myself that for two months."
A long pause.
Across the fire, Const's eyes flicked over to them. Just once. He smiled the small polite smile of a man who had absolutely not been able to hear them from where he was sitting.
A thin blood-like-liquid ran from his left eye.
Aim's chewing stopped.
Isolde's hand, halfway to picking up another piece of dried meat, froze in midair.
Vine, on the other side of the fire, had also turned to look. Her purple eyes settled on Const's face. Her expression did not change.
The liquid that ran from Const's eye was not red like blood.
It was deep, slow, dark blue.
Const reached up with one casual finger and wiped it away.
He looked at his fingertip.
He smiled.
"Something the matter?" he asked.