The dust of the collapsing vault hadn't even settled before Kyle slid behind a fallen basalt pillar, his wrist-deck sputtering with green emergency code.
"Okay, quick question for the group!" Kyle shouted over the deafening roar of falling granite. "Who the hell was the guy with the silver hair and the hundred-thousand-dollar coat?!"
"Lord Caelus," Echo spat, spitting a mouthful of stone dust onto the floor. She slammed another shell into her street-sweeper, her ruby eyes tracking the fading particles of his hologram. "That’s what he called himself."
"I don't care if he calls himself the King of England," Lyra growled, her ears pinned back as she ducked a falling boulder. "He just folded an entire Paris city block into a pocket dimension like it was origami!"
"He’s not Reclamation," I said, my voice dropping into the cold, analytical register of a master assassin as I held the Prime’s broadsword. "The Reclamation was just the front line. The janitors. Caelus is the architect."
Kyle’s fingers flew across his cracked screen, pulling up the fragmented data-ghosts left behind by Caelus's spatial transmission. "She's right. Caelus isn't running Site N-01—he *built* it. He’s the one who’s been tracking all seventeen iterations of us across the centuries. He’s the mind behind the reverse-engineered spatial tech. He didn't just study your powers, Tiara... he weaponized them."
"He remembers every anomaly," Echo murmured, her jaw tightening. "Every version of us that failed. Every version they killed."
"Because he wasn't trying to destroy us," I realized, the horrifying scope of his plan clicking into place. "He was waiting for the blueprint to stabilize. He used the Reclamation to weed out the weak clones, waiting for the exact moment two vessels survived—one with the spatial authority, one with the physical core—so he could siphon the First Assassin's soul-shard directly into his global network."
"And make an army of you," Kyle whispered, staring up at the shattered ceiling where Caelus's projection had floated. "An army of spatial-folding, immortal assassins under his personal control."
Echo looked at me, a dark, dangerous smile curving her lips despite the falling debris. "Well. He wanted an army of Tiaras."
I tightened my grip on the Prime's black star-metal blade, silver spatial rifts and crimson thermal energy swirling around my wrists in perfect, terrifying harmony.
"Now he's got two," I said. "And we're coming for his neck."