A woman stepped into the room.
She wore a charcoal suit cut close and exact. Her pale hair was pulled back into a knot that didn’t have a single strand out of place. Her face held a focus so complete it read as a threat on its own.
The pressure was pouring off her. She stood in the doorway like a weight the room had to rearrange itself around.
Azazel’s instincts went off like an alarm. He read her as lethal from top to bottom, already working out the fastest way to throw my body clear of a killing blow.
She kept her eyes off Doyle and didn’t so much as glance at Nox’s stance or the light around Lisa’s hands. She looked straight at me.
The pressure held the whole room hostage.
The woman stepped further into the light. Nox shifted his weight to put himself between her and the bed. Lisa kept the pale magic burning around her fingers.
I recognized her from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place who she was.
She ignored all of them. Her eyes stayed locked on me.
“The Association’s containment sweep sent back one last image before the Chilterns turned to ash,” she said. Her voice landed like a flat hand on a table. “It caught a figure fighting the Celtic hero. The figure had a single black wing. A single black horn.”
She stopped at the foot of the bed.
“I’ve spent weeks chasing a feeling across this country,” she said, her voice dropping quieter. “Every trace goes cold before I reach it. Then a forest dies in the Chilterns, the report puts my monster at the center of it, and I walk into the one hospital room with a survivor in it.”
Her eyes didn’t move off my face.
“So I’m going to ask you once. Where is it?”
There was something underneath the question that didn’t match the rest of her. The pressure, the suit, and the precision were all built to intimidate. The thing in her voice when she asked where it was wasn’t built for anything. It was just something bare and old, leaking out through a crack in all the armor.
Azazel had gone quiet in my chest, and it wasn’t his usual bored quiet. For half a breath, something hitched in him, like a word he couldn’t find. Then it was gone, as if it had never been there.
A loud, rude human in our quiet room. Get rid of her so I can go back to sleep.
He didn’t know her. Whatever had flickered hadn’t survived long enough to become a thought.
“I saw him,” I lied.
The pressure vanished.
It went out of the room between one breath and the next, and the sudden lack of it left everyone gasping. Nox swayed forward half a step. Lisa let her magic die. Doyle dragged in a long breath through his teeth.
The woman crossed the last of the distance and stopped at the bed rail. Her pale eyes had gone wide. The desperate thing that had been leaking out was now the whole of her face.
“Where?” she whispered.
“He was fighting Cú Chulainn when we got there,” I said. “It looked like something out of hell: wings and black horns. We hid in the petrified trees and prayed that neither of them noticed us.”
I held her stare without letting anything move behind my face.
“They brought the whole forest down between them. When the smoke cleared, the winged one was gone. I walked out through the ash and didn’t look back.”
Hey. I did not look out of hell. I am a prince. Correct your statement.
I kept my eyes on the woman and my face perfectly still. I’d spent thirteen rooms learning how to keep my face still while the worst things happened in front of it. A lie was nothing next to that.
“You didn’t fight him,” she concluded.
“I’d be dead if I had,” I said, which was true enough to sound like the truth.
She searched my face for a long moment. I gave her nothing.
Slowly, the wide, desperate thing folded itself back down, and the precise, terrifying woman came back up over the top of it.
“The official report says a spatial collapse destroyed the tunnels,” she said. “The Association is burying the whole thing. Drone footage is already classified. They’ve ordered a blackout.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“They’re scared,” Doyle said, sounding exhausted. “Admitting a creature out of legend leveled a forest means admitting the defense grid is useless. They’d rather print a comfortable lie. I’ve watched them do it four times and I still sit through the briefing like it might go differently.”
The woman turned to him. “Your operative is sitting in a dead zone’s only survivor’s bed. He’s tied to the Chilterns. If the main branch works out he was there, they will arrest him for entering a restricted site and put him somewhere quiet to protect their cover story.”
She looked back at me. “I’m Gwen Sokolova. I run Zarya Guild. And I think you’re the only thread I have left.”
Doyle’s jaw tightened because she was right, and he knew it. He looked at me with an apology sitting heavy in his eyes.
“I can’t keep you under the First Division anymore,” he said quietly. “Stay on my books and internal security audits you eventually. They start asking what you were doing in the Chilterns, and I can’t answer that for you.”
“We need to hide,” Lisa said flatly.
“You need to hide in plain sight,” Gwen said. She walked to the small window and looked out at the grey London skyline, standing with a posture that didn’t allow itself to bend. “I’ve opened a British branch of Zarya. Paperwork cleared yesterday. My standing gave me full operational clearance. I need local operatives. People who keep their mouths shut. People who’ve actually seen the things the Association is busy pretending it didn’t see.”
“You want to hire us?” Nox asked, unconvinced.
“I want to sponsor you,” Gwen said. “Legal cover. A corporate wall between you and the Association’s auditors. You’d work under Zarya’s name.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“You’re my only living link to that monster,” she said, flat as ever. “The Association is erasing everything else. If they take you, my trail dies. I’m putting a shield around you so I can use you to find him.”
She didn’t soften it at all. “I’m being honest about that because I don’t have the patience to pretend otherwise.”
I am nobody’s hunting dog. The rude woman is also bossy. Let me take over. I will put her through the window and we can leave.
Calm down, I told him. She’s handing us a cover. Take it.
“We don’t even have ranks,” Lisa pointed out. “We’re nobody on paper.”
“Handled,” Doyle said. He reached into his creased jacket and dropped three small plastic cards onto the foot of the bed. Official Association licenses.
I picked up the top one. My new name, my age listed as twenty-one, a solid black D printed in the corner.
“D-rank,” Nox read over my shoulder, unimpressed.
“It’s the minimum you need to legally walk into a gate,” Doyle said. “Keeps you off the radar. Anything higher pulls eyes down from the upper divisions, and you don’t want those eyes.”
“We fought a mythological hero,” Lisa said.
“You got crushed by one,” Doyle said. “You survived, which is a different thing entirely. No coordination, no formal training. You’re feral. Zarya gives you somewhere to grow without dying. Take it.”
Gwen watched me with cold blue eyes, waiting.
Nox and Lisa saw a foreign guild master offering a sensible deal. They didn’t feel what I felt. They weren’t the ones sharing a heart with the exact thing she’d crossed a country to find.
“We accept,” I said.
Gwen gave a single sharp nod. “Good. First things first. Zarya doesn’t carry D-rank dead weight. You’ll need to reach C-rank by the end of the third month. You clear gates. You pass the promotion test. You earn the rank or you’re no use to me.”
She reached for the door, then paused with her hand on the handle.
Her eyes dropped to the floor, to a small pink rabbit sticker someone had stuck at an angle near the baseboard.
Gwen went still.
Her face changed completely. The severe focus drained out of it, and her pale neck went pink. For two full seconds, she stood there looking at a cartoon rabbit.
Nox tilted his head. I blinked.
Gwen registered that we were watching her. She snapped upright, and the blush was gone between one instant and the next. Her eyes went back to hard blue ice, the pressure spiking through the room for a fraction of a second like a slammed door.
“My office. Monday.” She pulled the door open. “Don’t be late.”
She left. It clicked shut behind her, and the room sat in silence.
“Did she just lock up over a sticker?” Lisa said quietly.
“Uh-huh,” Nox nodded.
The bossy one is mentally defective. We are employed by a defective human.
“We’re employed by a shield,” I said aloud. “She can have whatever hobbies she wants.”
Doyle finished his cold coffee and dropped the cup in the bin. He stopped at the door on his way out.
“Keep your heads down,” he said. “Aegis has already spun the Chilterns into a win. Jack’s calling it a contained catastrophe, crisis averted, and the cameras are eating it up.”
He paused with his hand on the frame.
“He’s also had the whole site fenced off and put under permanent Aegis jurisdiction. Nobody sets foot on that ground without his say-so anymore.”
He left. The name stayed behind in the air.
There was nothing in a petrified, poisoned forest for the Aegis Guild. Nothing that made sense.
The scavenger is picking over the bones of our battlefield.
He’s looking for something, I thought. Or making sure nobody else finds it first.
I looked at the flimsy plastic D-rank card in my hand. The very bottom of the ladder. A long way down from where I used to stand.
I didn’t care. It was a starting line.
The others drifted out to find food and real sleep.
The gold light moved across the floor and went orange. Then it was just me and the quiet. The slow ache of a body knitting itself back together.
I closed my eyes and reached for the Umbra pooling in my chest, felt it move slowly through my cracked ribs, and started the slow work of healing.
A panel of pale light unfolded in the corner of my eye.
[ That dead ground he keeps describing? It isn’t dead, whatever it looks like to you. ]
[ It’s the most concentrated Aether residue on this entire continent right now. Almost an entire forest of it, and somebody’s fenced it off and put their name on the deed. ]
[ When you can stand again, I want it. ]
[ Every scrap of it makes you stronger, and what makes you stronger makes me stronger too. We’re going to need all of it before this is over. Start there. Trust me. ]
The light folded shut.
I lay still in the dark and thought about a dead forest with three different people circling it.
Jack was looking for something in the ash, and the thing in my chest wanted the ground itself.
And me. I needed to go back to the exact place that had nearly killed me.
Every road out of this hospital bed seemed to run straight through it.
We had three months to reach C-rank.
The climb back had started.