A few minutes in, the captain and Edmond were deep inside the mansion's lower hall.
Their boots pressed into a floor coated with soot and fragments of broken stone, the faint crackle of burning timber echoing from somewhere behind them.
The air was heavy enough to taste—smoke, old copper, and something faintly sweet rotting underneath.
They moved quickly but not carelessly, rifles up, beams cutting thin white lines across the wreckage. Bodies lay everywhere—guards, staff, droids—folded into each other like they'd been dropped from a height.
The captain didn't linger on any of them. Those clearly not Richmond were stepped over. The rest, he flipped with his rifle, checked the face, then moved on.
Edmond lagged half a stride behind, scanning the ground. He knelt beside a body that had been thrown against the wall so hard its spine looked bent the wrong way. The light from his weapon trembled faintly across it.
