Rulven peeled the officer’s coat off his shoulders as if it had grown teeth.
He held it out at arm’s length, the way you’d hold a fish you weren’t sure had stopped flopping.
“Take it back,” he said.
“I’ve been wearing a target this whole time and nobody thought to mention it.”
“Nobody knew,” I said, which was true, and also not much comfort to a man who’d spent the last hour infiltrating a royal district dressed as bait.
I took the coat from him anyway.
It was heavier than I remembered, or maybe I was just tired enough that everything felt heavier.
My shoulder had been complaining since the alley, a dull, grinding ache that flared every time I raised my arm past waist height.
I folded the coat over it instead of putting it on, which solved nothing but felt like a decision.
Mavra was crouched by the cellar door at the end of the alley, knocking on it with two knuckles in a pattern that was clearly meant to sound friendly and clearly wasn’t landing that way.
From inside, someone had wedged furniture against the frame hard enough that the wood groaned every time she touched it.
“They’re not opening,” she said, not turning around.
“I don’t blame them. Last thing they saw out here was a man in that coat dragging someone by the collar.”
“That was Rulven’s contribution to the local economy of fear,” I said.
“I was undercover,” Rulven said, with the wounded dignity of a man who knew it hadn’t worked.
I crouched next to Mavra and knocked twice, lower on the frame, near where I guessed a person on the other side would actually be standing if they were listening with an ear instead of a nose pressed to the crack.
“We’re not palace,” I said, keeping my voice level and unhurried.
“We’re the ones who’ve been burning their relays. Two down already, citywide, you can ask anyone who’s been near the river district or the tanning quarter. We’re not here to drag anyone out. We need somewhere to sit for ten minutes and we’ll be gone.”
Nothing.
Then a scrape, then a voice, muffled and suspicious.
“Prove it.”
I glanced at Mavra.
She was already digging into the satchel we’d been carrying, pulling out the folded sheets we’d started keeping after the first relay went up in cinders, the ones with times and locations and a running tally of which sectors had gone dark on the palace’s spell network.
It wasn’t much.
A few names crossed out, a rough sketch of the eastern relay tower with an X through it, a note in Zekh’s handwriting from another life about a flooded stairwell that had nothing to do with any of this and had ended up in the packet anyway because nobody had bothered to separate the pages.
I slid two of the sheets under the door.
The silence that followed lasted long enough that I started composing a backup plan in my head, something involving the next alley over and a lot of walking.
Then the furniture scraped again, this time in the other direction, and the door opened just wide enough for a face to check us over before swinging the rest of the way.
The cellar smelled like root vegetables, candle wax, and too many people breathing the same air for too many hours.
There were maybe a dozen residents packed into a room built for half that, sitting on crates and rolled blankets, watching us come down the stairs with the particular flat stare of people who have run out of surprise.
“Ten minutes,” said the woman who’d let us in.
She had a kitchen knife in her hand, held low and unconvincingly, like she’d picked it up because it was there rather than because she believed it would do anything against three armed strangers.
“Then you’re back out that door.”
“Fair,” I said, and meant it.
Mavra had already found a corner and dropped her pack, and by the time I turned around she was holding something I hadn’t seen before, a small metal cylinder about the length of a finger, capped on both ends, with a thin band of glass running around its middle that glowed faint blue.
“When did you get that?” I asked.
“While you were gone.” She turned it over in her hand, studying it like it might explain itself if she looked hard enough.
“It’s a property container. You feed it a physical trait off an object, it holds the trait for ten seconds, then it dumps whatever’s inside back out on its own, no input needed. I haven’t tried it on anything that matters yet.”
“Try it now,” Rulven said, dropping onto a crate with the enthusiasm of a man who’d decided the next few minutes belonged to somebody else’s problems. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“I want to see something interesting before we get thrown back out into the street.”
Mavra scanned the room and settled on a spoon sitting in a bowl of something that had gone cold an hour ago.
She picked it up, pressed the cylinder against the handle, and the glass band brightened for a second before dimming back down.
“Rigidity,” she said.
“It’s holding the spoon’s stiffness. Ten seconds starting now.”
She set the cylinder on the crate between us and we all watched it like it was going to do a trick, which, in a sense, it did.
At the count of ten, the glass flared bright and the cylinder gave a soft click, and that was it.
Nothing dramatic.
No smoke, no flash.
“So what would happen if you’d been holding it against something soft when it discharged?” I asked.
“Then whatever I’m holding gets a spoon’s worth of rigidity dumped into it for however long the discharge lasts,” Mavra said.
“Which is not very long, and not very controllable, which is the part I don’t love. But if I can time it right, I can stiffen something that’s supposed to bend, or I can hold on to a property I’ve absorbed from somewhere dangerous without cooking myself the way the gate did.” She flexed her fingers once, an old habit from the fever that had come with melting through iron.
“It’s not perfect. But it’s something.”
She pulled a scrap of chalk from her pocket and crouched by the dirt floor, sketching out two rough circles connected by a line, then a third circle off to the side, unconnected, question marks scratched around it.
“Two relays down,” she said, tapping the first two circles.
“East tower, and the one under the tannery that took the gate crew half a day to even find. Both confirmed dead by teams that aren’t us. That leaves a third somewhere we haven’t pinned down, and until it goes with the other two, Orsane keeps his neck reattaching every time someone tries to solve this problem the honest way.”
“And you know where the third one is?” I asked.
“No. Nobody does. That’s the whole reason the central archive matters. Every relay gets logged somewhere when it’s built—has to—or the crown loses track of its own network. If there’s a registry anywhere in this city, it’s in the archive, and if we get our hands on it, we stop guessing.”
I looked at the third circle on the dirt floor, unconnected, waiting to be named, and felt the particular kind of tired that comes from realizing the actual job hasn’t even started yet.
That was when the bracelet on my wrist gave a short, polite chime, the kind that always sounded far too cheerful for whatever it was about to tell me.
SYSTEM NOTICE: A bounty has been posted by the Crown of Vhaldrèche.
The garment currently in your possession, designated “Royal Enforcement Coat, Grade II,” has been reported stolen from a wanted officer.
Reward for delivery of the wearer, alive, to any royal guard checkpoint: 400 credits.
Reward for return of the coat alone: 150 credits.
I read it twice, mostly to make sure I hadn’t misread the number, then held the bracelet up so Rulven could see it.
He laughed first, a real laugh, loud enough that a couple of the residents flinched.
“Four hundred credits for me,” he said, wiping his eyes.
“I’ve never been worth that much in my entire life. Not even close.”
“You’re worth it dead or alive?” I asked.
“Alive, apparently. There’s a premium on breathing.” He shook his head, still grinning.
“Somewhere out there, a very angry officer is missing his coat, and the crown thinks I’m worth more than most of the buildings on this street.”
A couple of the residents laughed along with him, that nervous kind of laugh people do when they’re not sure if something is actually funny or if they just need the release.
One woman near the back didn’t laugh at all.
She was older, thin in a way that had nothing to do with fashion, and she was looking at the coat draped over my arm with an expression I recognized because I’d worn something close to it myself, back before any of this, back when four hundred credits would have been six months of rent, and I’d have thought hard about a lot of things I wasn’t proud of considering.
“That’s real money,” she said quietly, mostly to herself.
“That’s real money for turning in a coat.”
Nobody answered her right away.
The room went a little colder without anyone doing anything to make it colder.
“It’s real money for turning in a person,” I said, keeping my voice even, “who’s been fighting to burn the same relays that keep your neighbors bound to a king who reattaches his own head on camera. You want to weigh that against four hundred credits, I understand it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. But you should know exactly what you’d be selling before you decide it’s worth the price.”
She didn’t answer, and I didn’t push it further, because pushing it further wasn’t going to make her poorer or richer and it definitely wasn’t going to make her trust us more.
I just made sure I remembered her face, and made sure Mavra had seen it too, and left it at that. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“We need the archive registry,” Mavra said, steering us back before the silence could curdle into something worse.
“It’ll have every relay logged since the network was built. If the third one’s anywhere on paper, it’s there.”
“How do we get in without getting cut into pieces by the same guards who just sealed the palace gates on us?” Rulven asked.
I didn’t have an answer for that from where I was standing.
But I had a different kind of answer, the kind that didn’t require me to be the one standing there.
I spent the next few minutes doing the thing I always did before triggering Programming, which was mapping every inch of the route I could see or remember, because whoever took over my body wasn’t going to have the benefit of me narrating along the way.
I walked the alley outside in my head, the door we’d come through, the side passage Mavra had scouted before we ducked in here, the general direction of the archive district based on the palace’s silhouette against the smoke haze.
I fixed it all as clearly as I could, the way you’d memorize a route you were about to hand to someone else to drive.
“Twenty seconds,” I told Mavra.
“If the exit’s cut off when it’s time to come back, priority is getting me conscious immediately, not finishing the grab. I’d rather come back empty-handed than come back through a wall.”
“Understood,” she said, and moved to where she could watch the stairs.
I sat down against the crate, closed my eyes, and let the trigger go.
There was the usual nothing, the gap where I wasn’t the one steering, and then I was back, blinking up at the cellar ceiling with a heavy leather-bound volume in my lap and a small brass token on a frayed ribbon tangled around two of my fingers.
My arms ached like I’d been hauling crates for an hour, which, as far as my muscles were concerned, I probably had been.
“You’re back,” Mavra said, already crouching beside me.
“Twenty seconds on the mark. What did you get?”
I lifted the volume enough to read the spine.
Archive Register, Central Registry, Vhaldrèche.
Underneath it, on the cover, someone had stamped a smaller mark I didn’t recognize at first, a maintenance seal of some kind, the ribbon threaded through a small hole punched near the binding.
I held the token up to what light there was.
It wasn’t crown insignia.
It was smaller, cleaner, stamped in a font that had nothing to do with palace heraldry, a logo I’d seen exactly once before, stitched small on the collar tag of a piece of gear I’d been issued back at intake, before any of this had a name.
Arena technical production.
Property of.
I sat with that for a second longer than I should have, the kind of second where your whole understanding of a room quietly rearranges itself.
This wasn’t a royal maintenance duct.
It was theirs.
The production’s.
I pocketed it anyway, same as any other piece of transportable gear, and turned my attention to the ledger, because whatever the token meant, it wasn’t going to matter if the third relay burned before I figured it out.
“Three sub-archives,” I read off the first page my thumb landed on, the ink cramped and old but legible enough.
“All linked to the central relay network. All three have to go up at once, or the crown routes the load through whichever one’s still standing and nothing we’ve done so far means anything.”
Mavra leaned over my shoulder to read the rest, and that was when the bracelet chimed again, this time with no bounty attached, no cheerful little number waiting to insult anyone.
SYSTEM NOTICE: Location swap initiated.
Veyr—Vhaldrèche, will exchange with Veska—Odrance, in 5 seconds.
I looked up at Mavra, at the ledger still open between us, at the third relay’s location sitting somewhere in these pages that I hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Read it out loud,” I said.
“As fast as you can.”