Chief Hothman had been a city official for nineteen years. He had attended classified briefings, stood in the aftermath of aberrant attacks, and shaken hands with men whose names did not appear in any public record. He was not, by any reasonable measure, someone who frightened easily.

  And yet he had been standing outside this tent for almost a full minute without going in.

  It was a plain black structure, nothing that would draw attention — no insignia, no markings, no indication of what it contained. Two officers in white uniforms flanked the entrance and had not moved since he arrived. Not adjusted their footing. Not blinked, as far as he could tell. The evacuation zone around it was functioning normally: civilians in lines, medics triaging, soldiers coordinating traffic. The world continued as though the tent were simply not there.

  That was the part that unsettled him most. Not the tent. The way everything around it behaved as though it wasn't worth noticing.

  He adjusted his coat, tightened his grip on the metal briefcase, and stepped inside.

  * * *

  Five masked figures sat around a plain table at the center of the tent. The filtered morning light fell evenly across them, reflecting off white masks, each marked differently, and not one of them looked up when he entered. They carried themselves with the particular stillness of people for whom waiting is not an inconvenience but a default state — the kind of stillness that suggested the destruction outside had cost them nothing.

  Hothman recognized none of them. He had not expected to.

  He took the empty seat beside Wyman and set the briefcase on the table.

  Before he could reach for the clasps, it moved.

  Not violently — it simply slid across the table toward the man seated opposite, drawn by something Hothman couldn't see and couldn't explain. The man's mask bore a bold, oversized cross carved through its center, its intersecting bars cutting sharply across the white surface. He hadn't touched the briefcase. His hands had barely moved.

  "So rude, Guntman," Wyman said, pointing with visible irritation. "This is exactly why the Lilies hate working with you."

  "Shut up, Wyman," the cross-masked man replied without looking at him. "I just wanted the Lieutenant to see it first."

  He slid it toward the masked man with the two-eyed black dots.

  "Forgive him, Chief Hothman." The Lieutenant's voice was unhurried, the tone of someone who managed disruption the way others managed weather — as an expected condition rather than a problem. "You didn't try scanning it with your sixth sense, did you?"

  "No, sir," the chief answered. "I haven't developed one yet."

  He became aware of the others at the table as he said it. Two of them had not moved since he entered, their hands locked into deliberate seals that implied sustained concentration — something held, something maintained. A woman with three vertical lines carved into her mask kept both hands tightly clasped. She had not spoken and did not look at him. Beside her, a masked figure whose faceplate bore the design of a broken wing pinned to a descending spear maintained a twin-finger seal, his gaze fixed on the briefcase with an attention that felt less like interest and more like vigilance.

  Hothman had the sudden, unpleasant sense that whatever had kept him from noticing this tent from the outside was currently keeping everyone outside from noticing what was happening inside it.

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  The Lieutenant opened the briefcase.

  Inside were two items: fragments of a shattered black blade, and a pen coated in dried dark residue that caught the light faintly, almost iridescent at certain angles. The Lieutenant lifted the pen first. He turned it once, slowly, and something in the quality of his stillness changed — not visibly, nothing a casual observer would catch, but Hothman had spent nineteen years reading rooms and he caught it. A brief, private recognition. The kind a person suppresses before it reaches their face.

  Guntman leaned in and said something too low for the chief to hear. The Lieutenant gave a single small nod and closed the case.

  Whatever the pen meant, it would not be explained here.

  Hothman's gaze moved without meaning to.

  Against the far wall of the tent, a woman in a black mask and trench coat was kneeling beside a body bag. She worked with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this before — not callous, but practiced. The zipper reached the top with a sound that was very small in the quiet of the tent. She rested one hand briefly on the sealed bag before standing.

  Hothman looked away.

  He did not ask. In his experience, the questions that presented themselves most clearly in rooms like this were precisely the ones you did not ask. A person. Someone they wanted removed. That was all he needed to know, and considerably more than he wanted.

  "Chief Hothman."

  He straightened.

  "How many civilian casualties at ground zero?"

  The question was routine in tone and devastating in implication. He answered carefully.

  "Two hundred seventy-nine confirmed so far." He paused. "Actually — two hundred eighty, including the last civilian before you neutralized the aberrant."

  A brief silence passed through the room like a current.

  "Make it two hundred seventy-nine," the Lieutenant said. "The last one won't exist on paper."

  No elaboration. No justification. The chief nodded, because there was nothing to say and because men in his position learned early that acceptance was faster than understanding.

  He stood and turned toward the exit.

  His hand pressed against something solid where nothing was visible.

  "Sherlyn. Drop it. We're done."

  The woman with the three-lined mask unclenched her hands, and the resistance vanished.

  "Can we go home now?" she muttered as she rose, rolling her neck. "I've been here since the first call came in. I want a hot bath." She nudged the figure beside her, who was still holding his seal with the fixed concentration of someone who had forgotten an easier setting existed.

  "Head out," the Lieutenant said to the room. "I'll report to the Empire with the Captain. Wyman — make sure Sander snaps out of it before he starts reading beyond the perimeter once the barrier drops."

  He left through the rear. The black-masked woman followed, her steps unhurried, and Guntman lifted the body bag over his shoulder with careful hands — deliberately, as though the weight inside still warranted that — and walked out behind her without a word.

  Wyman was the last. He paused beside the chief and tapped him once on the shoulder, not unkindly.

  "We're done here. You can head out the front."

  * * *

  Chief Hothman stepped outside.

  The tent was gone.

  The guards were gone. The evacuation zone, the medics, the orderly lines of civilians — gone. In their place was the wide, rusted expanse of Bahaks' largest abandoned dump yard, chain-link fencing on all sides, the distant hum of the city audible but far away. The morning sun sat at the same angle it had when he entered. No time had passed, or none that he could account for.

  He stood very still for a moment.

  A police officer came running toward him from the far end of the yard, breathless and pale.

  "Chief! Where have you been? We lost your tracker signal — only came back a few minutes ago. We sent men looking for you."

  Hothman looked at the empty ground where the tent had been. No marks. No impressions in the dirt. Nothing to suggest anything had been there at all.

  He let out a slow breath.

  "The Empire would appreciate it," he said quietly, "if we agreed on a story about where I went."

  The officer grimaced. "It's them again, right?"

  Hothman shook his head — a small, careful motion that was not quite denial and not quite confirmation, the kind of answer that said: do not pursue this.

  "Good thing I got to you before the others did," the officer muttered.

  They walked toward the yard's exit together. In the distance, several helicopters climbed above the city's edge and disappeared into the pale sky, carrying whatever they carried to wherever it was supposed to go.

  Hothman watched them until they were gone.

  Two hundred seventy-nine, he told himself. That was the number. That was the only number that had ever existed.

  He had the quiet, settling certainty of a man who has just agreed to something he will spend a long time not thinking about.