Grayhaven’s interrogation rooms were nicer than Ethan’s old apartment.
That bothered him more than it should have.
The chair was padded.
The table had rounded corners.
The lights were warm instead of fluorescent.
Someone had even given him tea in a real ceramic cup rather than one of those paper things designed to collapse the second your dignity did.
If he hadn’t been wearing silver restraints on his wrists and ankles, he could almost have believed he was waiting for a recruiter.
Across from him sat a tired man with a recorder.
“Name?”
“Ethan Hayes.”
“Age?”
Ethan hesitated.
He had looked twenty-five in the mirror they passed on the way in.
The face had been his.
Mostly.
Same dark hair.
Same jaw.
Same faint line between the eyebrows from spending too many years staring at bad dashboards.
But not exactly.
This version of him looked stronger.
Cleaner.
More dangerous.
“No idea,” Ethan said.
The interviewer looked up.
“Your age.”
“I heard the question.
I don’t know.”
“Date of birth?”
“No idea.”
“Place of birth?”
“Also no idea.”
The man stared.
Ethan lifted his cuffed hands.
“I can keep giving you creative variations, but the content won’t improve.”
Behind the observation glass, Amy wanted to break something.
“He’s mocking us.”
Nathan Bennett stood with his arms folded, watching Ethan through the one-way panel.
Amy paced behind him, gray tail lashing beneath her coat.
“He says he doesn’t know his age.
He says he doesn’t know his childhood.
He says he doesn’t know what species he is.”
Nathan did not look away from the glass.
“Record the answers as given.
Do not improve them into a theory.”
“He checked before answering sex.”
“I saw.”
“That doesn’t strike you as absurd?”
“It strikes me as behavior.
We can decide what it means after we have more than one room’s worth of evidence.”
Amy stopped pacing.
“Let me question him.”
“No.”
“I have certification.”
“You have a Level One Interrogation Arts credential issued under a standard that was abolished twelve years ago.”
“It was a mistake to abolish it.”
“That opinion has no bearing on this interview.”
Amy’s ears shifted with irritation, but she stopped arguing.
Nathan kept watching Ethan.
The suspect didn’t look like a cult leader.
That meant very little.
Some of the worst men Nathan had arrested looked like accountants.
One murderer had cried because Nathan accidentally stepped on his flower bed.
Still.
Ethan’s reactions were wrong.
Not deceptive.
Wrong.
He had been startled by common civic technology.
He had stared at the observation mirror as if he had never seen one.
He asked what year it was and then laughed for nearly a minute when told.
Nathan had watched liars for more than a century.
This did not feel like lying.
Amy saw his expression.
“No.”
Nathan glanced at her.
“Don’t you dare tell me you believe him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You made the face.”
“What face?”
“The face you make when evidence becomes inconvenient.”
Nathan turned back to the glass.
Inside, Ethan was being asked about the Four Pillars.
He leaned forward.
“Let me be completely clear,” Ethan said.
“I do not know what they are.”
The interviewer slid four photographs across the table.
Ethan looked.
His face changed.
Nathan noticed.
The photographs showed crime scenes.
Bodies.
Symbols drawn in blood.
A row of abducted citizens found in a basement beneath a theater.
And in the corner of the last image, Ethan Hayes.
Not someone similar.
Ethan Hayes.
Same face.
Same body.
Different eyes.
Nathan saw the moment the suspect understood.
Ethan’s lips parted.
“Oh,” he said quietly.
The sarcasm vanished.
He looked at the pictures again.
“That’s me.”
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t do this.”
“You are visible in the evidence.”
“Then someone wearing my face did.”
The interviewer frowned.
Ethan pressed both hands against his temples.
“I know how this sounds.”
“Do you?”
“It sounds insane.”
“Great.
Progress.”
Nathan tapped the glass with one finger.
Amy sighed.
“Memory extraction.”
“No.”
“He’s either telling the truth or he’s not.
Get a memory specialist.”
“No specialist will touch him.”
Amy’s ears—mostly human, except when irritated—shifted.
“Why?”
Nathan looked at her.
“He saw the Pillars directly.”
Understanding hit.
Amy stopped moving.
Memory was admissible evidence in Grayhaven because it could be extracted, authenticated, and replayed.
But the Four Pillars had made memory itself dangerous.
“One hundred thirty-four years ago,” Nathan said, “I worked a case in East Grayhaven.
A licensed extractor reviewed the memories of a cult courier.
She became a believer before realizing it.
So did the second extractor.
Then the supervisor who examined their contamination report.”
Amy’s tail lowered.
“How many?”
“Forty-seven deaths.
One district burned.”
She swallowed.
“So we can’t verify him.”
“No.”
“And we can’t torture him.”
“And if he really has total memory loss…”
Nathan finished the thought.
“Then under the Human Capacity Act, he may no longer be legally equivalent to the person who committed the crimes.”
Amy stared.
“He could walk?”
“In theory.”
Her fangs showed.
Nathan kept his voice flat.
“In theory.”
Nathan spent the next hour in Records.
Amy followed because she had questions and because refusing her access would only make her ask them louder.
Ethan Hayes’s file occupied three secured partitions.
The first contained public crimes.
The second contained classified incidents.
The third required Nathan’s senior hunter seal and a blood-authenticated signature.
Amy whistled when the final section opened.
“He’s been busy.”
Nathan scrolled.
Four Pillars contacts.
Suspected recruitment nodes.
Missing persons.
Financial transfers.
Seventeen names marked deceased.
Nine unresolved.
Amy’s ears flattened.
“You still think he’s confused?”
“I think his behavior is inconsistent with the file.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.”
Nathan opened the earliest image.
Ethan Hayes at a lecture hall.
Two years ago.
Calm.
Smiling.
Elegant black coat.
The man in the footage knew exactly where every camera was.
He never looked directly at one.
The Ethan downstairs had stared into a wall sensor for thirty seconds before asking whether it was “a magical smoke detector.” Nathan moved to medical.
No trauma indicating recent identity damage.
No soul fracture detectable through standard scanning.
No possession markers.
No obvious glamour.
“Could the Pillars have wiped him?” Amy asked.
“Anything involving them is possible.”
“Then why?”
Nathan leaned back.
That was the right question.
If the Four Pillars had altered their own cult leader, they had done so immediately before a raid.
Self-sabotage.
Unless the wipe served another purpose.
Unless the man downstairs was a decoy.
Unless— Nathan stopped.
Amy saw his face.
“What?”
“Nothing yet.”
“You hate when people say that to you.”
She leaned against the desk.
“What happens if he’s legally a different person?”
Nathan opened the Blood Moon statute.
“Public Judgment predates the modern memory code.”
“So?”
“So it does not require continuity of identity.”
Amy’s expression changed.
“It judges the civic image.”
“Exactly.”
“If Grayhaven believes Ethan Hayes deserves death, it doesn’t matter whether Ethan Hayes remembers being Ethan Hayes.”
“Correct.”
“That lets public anger outrun the identity law.”
“Yes.”
Amy’s jaw tightened.
“Then the statute should have been amended when the memory code changed.”
“It was reviewed.”
“And left in place.”
Nathan finally looked at her.
“Correct.” Blood Moon Judgment was popular.
That did not make it coherent, and it did not make it just.
It had survived because voters preferred punishment they could watch and because institutions were skilled at describing participation as legitimacy.
Grayhaven called it civic transparency.
The statute called it collective resolution.
Nathan had worked enough Judgments to know what it became once the cameras came on.
“Will he know?” Amy asked.
“Soon.”
“Should we tell him ourselves?”
“He will receive statutory notice.”
“The automated notice.”
“Yes.”
Amy looked through the glass at Ethan.
“Then he’ll learn that the city may erase his soul from a form.” Nathan’s expression did not change.
“That is the procedure.” Neither of them spoke after that.
Downstairs, Ethan was about to discover how Grayhaven handled people it feared.
The detention guide contained a section titled YOUR RIGHTS DURING CIVIC JUDGMENT.
Ethan opened it with the kind of optimism usually associated with clicking “Terms and Conditions” and expecting good news.
The first paragraph informed him that he had the right to clean clothing.
The second guaranteed reasonable grooming supplies.
The third assured him that no sponsor could place commercial branding on his body without written consent.
He stopped.
“Sponsor?”
A footnote explained that older Blood Moon broadcasts had permitted advertisements during sentencing.
That practice had been restricted after something called the Harrowgate Razor Scandal.
Ethan closed the footnote.
“Nope.
Don’t need that history.”
He searched for counsel.
PRISONERS MAY CONSULT A CIVIC ADVOCATE BEFORE BROADCAST.
He selected REQUEST ADVOCATE.
FUNCTION UNAVAILABLE UNTIL CASE ASSIGNMENT.
“When is case assignment?”
The system produced a date.
The sixteenth.
Ethan stared.
His judgment was the fifteenth.
He checked twice.
Same answer.
“That feels intentional.”
He created a note.
THINGS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD:
1.
Three moons.
2.
Government vampires.
3.
Public execution television.
4.
Customer support worse than mobile games.
He added a fifth.
5.
I may have been a serial-killing cult leader.
That one killed the joke.
He sat quietly for a while.
Outside the cell, footsteps passed.
Ethan wondered whether Nathan believed him.
More importantly, Ethan wondered whether he believed himself.
Memory loss was convenient.
Too convenient.
What if he had done everything and some part of him had simply broken?
What if “Ethan from another world” was a story his brain invented to avoid responsibility?
He remembered his office.
The broken coffee machine.
A coworker named Kevin asleep under a desk.
The launch meeting where six adults argued for forty minutes over the color of a purchase button.
The memories felt real.
But so did the body he occupied.
Ethan pressed his palms to his eyes.
“One apocalypse at a time,” he whispered.
The interview ended twenty minutes later.
Ethan was escorted to a detention suite.
Suite was not an exaggeration.
He had a bed.
A desk.
A private bathroom.
A screen embedded in the wall.
The food had been better than anything served in his office cafeteria.
Apparently Grayhaven believed in prisoner dignity.
Ethan would have appreciated that more if every document in the room didn’t suggest he had been an apocalyptic cult leader.
He spent hours reading.
Four Pillars.
Four names.
Four manifestations.
War.
Manipulation.
Disease.
Desire.
The smiling “angels” he had welcomed were parasites wearing ideas like perfume.
He found a photograph of himself standing over a bound man.
Another beside a ritual circle.
Another entering a building later found filled with bodies.
Ethan stopped reading.
He went to the bathroom and vomited.
Afterward he sat on the floor.
His hands shook.
He told himself it wasn’t him.
Which was true.
Probably.
But the face was his.
The body was his.
The hands in those pictures were the hands in his lap.
His stomach twisted again.
A soft chime sounded inside his skull.
Ethan froze.
A translucent panel unfolded in the air.
He stared.
No projector.
No wall display.
The interface floated directly in his vision.
MESSAGE RECEIVED.
“Okay,” he whispered.
“That’s new.”
He focused on it.
The panel expanded.
DEAR MR.
ETHAN HAYES,
PRISONER ID: 4001623
GRAYHAVEN CITY HALL FORMALLY INVITES YOU TO APPEAR AS A FEATURED PARTICIPANT IN THIS MONTH’S BLOOD MOON JUDGMENT, BROADCAST LIVE ON GRAYHAVEN CHANNEL ONE AT 8:00 PM ON THE 15TH.
PLEASE MAINTAIN APPROPRIATE PRESENTATION STANDARDS.
OFFICIAL TRANSPORT WILL BE PROVIDED.
TO DECLINE PARTICIPATION, REPLY “TC.”
Ethan read it twice.
Then a third time.
“Featured participant.”
Nothing good had ever happened after that phrase.
He focused on the words BLOOD MOON JUDGMENT.
A public information tag expanded.
Civic punishment program.
Audience participation enabled.
Conviction resolution through mass judgment.
Ethan leaned back slowly.
“Nope.”
He selected the reply box.
Typed with thought.
TC.
SEND.
A new notification appeared.
MESSAGING FUNCTION DISABLED DURING ACTIVE DETENTION.
Ethan stared at it.
Then at the original message.
Then back.
“You absolute sons of—”
He stopped.
There was no one to hear him.
That somehow made the insult feel wasted.
He tried again.
TC.
FUNCTION DISABLED.
He tried opening network access.
DISABLED.
External channels.
DISABLED.
Camera.
DISABLED.
Virtual realm access.
DISABLED.
Arcane output.
DISABLED.
He clicked through the system information.
Consciousness Interface 14.4.1.
Miracle Series 13 implant.
Carrier: Grayhaven SpiritNet.
Account owner: Hayes.
Ethan touched the back of his neck.
Nothing.
He couldn’t feel hardware.
Yet the interface responded instantly to thought.
This world had magic, vampires, memory law, and implanted augmented reality.
And apparently televised executions.
“Great,” Ethan said.
“Cyberpunk wizard prison.”
He opened the calendar.
The fifteenth was four days away.
Four.
His heartbeat accelerated.
The interface blurred slightly.
He forced himself to breathe.
There had to be some legal process.
An appeal.
A hearing.
Something.
He opened the detention guide.
His eyes moved faster as he read.
Blood Moon Judgment was not technically classified as an execution.
Of course it wasn’t.
It was a “collective civic resolution.” Prisoners whose crimes generated broad public outrage could be placed before a citywide audience.
Citizens voted.
The sentence could range from exile to soul termination.
Soul.
Termination.
Ethan shut the document.
Four days.
He needed information.
A lawyer.
A loophole.
A miracle.
The final word stuck.
Miracle.
He looked at the floating interface again.
Most functions were disabled.
Calendar.
Notes.
Calculator.
Local files.
He opened the app list.
Only a handful of icons remained.
One of them made him stop.
It had a dark cover.
Silver letters.
A title he recognized.
Not from this world.
From his old one.
A game that should not exist here.
A game he had downloaded the night he died.
AURORA’S ARCANIST HANDBOOK.
Ethan’s skin prickled.
He clicked it.
The screen went black.
A line of text appeared.
CHECKING LOCAL RESOURCES…
NETWORK UNAVAILABLE.
SWITCHING TO OFFLINE MODE.
Ethan sat up.
Another line.
WELCOME BACK.
For the first time since Nathan Bennett put him in cuffs, Ethan smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile.
It was the smile of a drowning man who had just found something floating.
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Let’s see what followed me here.”