"Et tu, Brute?" — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Morning arrived in Caelmont with bells.
The shrine bells rang from every district at dawn, and their sound rolled across the rust-colored rooftops while the whole city dressed itself in festival colors for the most important day of the year.
Joel stood at the window of his bedroom and watched workers raise banners along the main avenue, and beyond the rooftops he could already see crowds flowing toward the Central Plaza like water finding a drain.
He had slept better than any poisoned man had a right to. His fingertips were still numb when he flexed them against the glass, and the metallic taste still clung to the back of his tongue like a coin stuck there, but his head was clear and his heart was steady.
The tonic bottle sat on the nightstand where Chloe had left it the night before. Joel carried it into the bathroom, turned the shower on to cover the sound, and poured every drop of the murky green liquid down the drain.
He watched it swirl away between his numb fingers, and then he crushed the wax seal flat with his thumb out of pure spite.
’One dose at a time,’ he thought calmly. ’You almost had me.’
He could not purge weeks of heavy metal out of a body overnight, and he knew that better than anyone, because he was probably the only pharmacist in two worlds standing in that particular bathroom.
What he could do was stop the intake completely, eat a real breakfast, and flush his system with as much water as his stomach would hold, so he did all three things methodically while the household bustled around downstairs.
Chloe looked like the ceremony had been invented specifically for her benefit. She wore the Bellamy colors in teal and cream, with her hair braided into a crown and a silver pin shaped like a snowflake holding it in place.
"Ready, S-rank?" she asked brightly.
"We’ll know soon enough," Joel answered, and he smiled the way the city expected him to.
The Central Plaza sat directly before the gates of the Zenith Spire, and it had been built to hold the entire population of Caelmont at once.
By the time Joel and Chloe arrived, tens of thousands of people had already packed the square, and vendors moved through the crush selling grilled skewers, candied nuts, and cheap pins stamped with the faces of famous heroes.
A giant bookmaker had set up his board beside the fountain, and he was screaming odds through a brass megaphone while a small crowd of gamblers waved credit chits at him.
"Five to one on S-rank for the Carrow boy! Five to one! Last chance before the doors, you cowards!"
An old woman beside the board cackled through her remaining teeth. "The golden boy is waking up grey, mark my words. I’ve seen that sickly color on him for weeks. Twenty credits on F-rank, and I’ll dance on the fountain when I win."
The bookmaker laughed at her, but he took her bet, and Joel noted with distant amusement that the odds against him were shorter than the odds for him.
The crowd was not betting on what he was, because none of them knew what he was. They were betting on the story they had been sold.
Overhead, the Spire consumed a third of the sky. Its base was wrapped in a permanent ring of storm cloud that turned slowly like a wheel, and the plaza’s floating lanterns had to burn at full brightness even in the morning to fight the shadow it cast.
At ten o’clock, horns sounded from the vault road, and the crowd’s roar changed pitch entirely.
The Genesis Tear was coming out.
An honor guard of twenty garrison soldiers escorted a reinforced wagon drawn by four armored oxen, and chained in the wagon’s cradle lay a crystal the size of a carriage.
Even from across the plaza, Joel could feel it in his teeth, because the crystal emitted a deep harmonic hum that made the air vibrate like a struck tuning fork.
Veins of light ran through its milky depths in slow pulses, and every pulse made the lanterns overhead flicker in sympathy.
A hundred years ago, the First Ascendants had carved that crystal out of the Spire’s own cast-off shards so that their children would not have to gamble their lives in the tower just to learn what they were.
Every walled city on the continent kept one, and every one of them hummed the same low note, like bells from the same broken bell.
"Vance shouted, Over here, we saved you spots!"
Joel turned toward the shout, and his new best friend came pushing through the crowd with his arms spread wide.
Vance was seventeen like the rest of them, and he was built the way the recruiting posters wanted boys to be built, with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and a clean jawline that the girls at the academy had voted "most trustworthy" two years running.
He kept his chestnut hair swept back from his forehead, and he had warm blue eyes that crinkled at the corners whenever he grinned, which was constantly.
Vance family had money without quite having name, since his father ran the city’s procurement office, and Vance wore his tailored academy uniform with the studied casualness of a boy who wanted everyone to know the tailoring was expensive but not to say so.
He reached out and clapped Joel on the shoulder, directly on the numb arm, and his eyes stayed on Joel’s face for a fraction of a second.
"There he is," Vance said warmly. "The man of the hour. Try not to make the rest of us look like livestock when the Tear lights up, golden boy."
"No promises," Joel said, and both of his friends laughed, and he laughed with them, because that was the mask the old Joel had worn every day of his life, and today of all days it needed to fit perfectly.
On the marble VIP balcony above the plaza, the city’s power had gathered around two men in particular.
Mayor Sterling occupied the center of the balcony like furniture that had grown there. He was somewhere in his fifties, broad and softening, with silver hair combed back in careful waves and a white ceremonial coat straining across his stomach.
The gold chain of office sat on his chest and four jeweled rings glittered on his fingers, one for each term he had won.
The Mayor’s smile was wide, warm, and constant, and it had never once, in any photograph or speech, reached his eyes.
Beside him stood the reason half the plaza had dressed this nicely. Proctor Harrison had come down from the inner Spire-Cities to watch Caelmont’s ceremony.
Proctor Harrison was tall and angular, wearing the black and silver uniform of the Zenith Vanguard Academy with a half-cloak pinned at one shoulder, and a pale scar cut through his left eyebrow like a correction mark.
His hands were clasped behind his back, and he observed the crowd with the flat patience of an accountant auditing a warehouse, occasionally tapping a rune-slate that recorded candidate projections in glowing script.
Sterling’s voice boomed across the plaza through a mana-amplified horn, warm as grease in a hot pan.
"Citizens of Caelmont, one hundred years ago our ancestors knelt in the ash of the old world, and today their grandchildren touch the light of the new one!
Today our sons and daughters stand before the Genesis Tear and receive what fate has owed them since birth!"
The crowd cheered on cue, and Sterling let it build before he played his card.
"And this year, fate owes us a debt of honor, because this year, the son of Marcus and Elena Carrow steps forward.
Two heroes gave their lives on our walls, and their blood stands in that square today. Caelmont’s golden boy! S-rank walks among us again, and I will stake every year of my service on it!"
The plaza detonated. The roar came off the stone in a wave, and the bookmaker’s board lit up as the odds on Joel collapsed to nothing, and somewhere the old woman screamed that the whole city had lost its mind.
Harrison tilted his head slightly toward the Mayor without taking his eyes off the candidates. "Your career is now a betting slip," he said quietly. "I hope the boy cashes it."
Joel let the roar wash over him, and he turned to share the moment with the two people standing at his shoulders, because that was what the golden boy would do.
That was when he saw it.
Vance and Chloe were not looking at him, and they were not looking at the balcony either. They were looking at each other.
Then the roar reached its peak, Chloe’s radiant smile reassembled itself, and Vance threw his head back and whooped like a proud friend.
Joel applauded along with the rest of the plaza, and behind his smiling face the last piece of the puzzle slid into place.
He walked the list slowly and coldly. The tonic arrived weekly from Doctor Fenwick’s clinic with the wax seals intact, which the old Joel’s memories confirmed, and that meant the tampering happened after delivery, inside the Carrow house.
The staff had served the family for a decade and had nothing to gain from a fallen orphan, and the security wards logged every outsider at the gate.
Only two people moved through that house freely enough to reach a nightstand. One of them slept in his bed, and the other one had been clapping his numb shoulder all morning like a quality inspector.
’There you are,’ Joel thought, almost fondly. ’Both of you, right where the math put you.’
He felt no heat and no urge to scream, which surprised the old Earth version of him a little.
Mostly he felt the same quiet clarity he used to get on night shifts right before a complicated order came in, because rage was a luxury and information was currency, and he had just been paid in full.
Below the balcony, the horns sounded again, and the herald’s amplified voice rolled over the crowd.
"Candidates of the seventeenth year, proceed to the Spire gates! The Antechamber awaits! The Tear will accept you in registration order!"
The colossal gates of the Zenith Spire began to grind open, spilling out a breath of cold air that smelled of stone, and the great crystal on its wagon rolled forward into the gloom with its harmonic hum rising steadily.
The candidates streamed after it in a river of nervous seventeen-year-olds, and Joel walked among them with a beautiful girl on one arm and his best friend joking on the other side.
He kept smiling all the way to the threshold, because a masked man reveals nothing the night before the heist, and somewhere in the darkness ahead the Tear was already humming as though it were counting something that only it could see.