The morning air tasted of rain and metal. London had the clean, sharp tang of a city that had been scrubbed raw by fear and then made to look whole again. Marc walked the perimeter of the rubble in a pressed suit and sensible shoes, the analyst's face pinned to him like another layer of skin. Howard moved beside him, hands shoved into his coat, eyes flicking like a hawk's over every camera drone and reporter's microphone.
They approached the scene as if they had stumbled upon it by pure, professional happenstance—two civil servants summoned to catalogue damage, to put words around a spectacle the rest of the city still couldn't name. A half-collapsed façade smoked in the pale light and police tape fluttered like a flag around the wreckage. Firemen toed briquettes of shrapnel into evidence bags. A news drone circled, broadcasting the image of a crouched figure—Moonveil—caught mid-heroism on yesterday's feeds.
Inside the cordon, uniforms filed through with the practiced solemnity of men who had seen the impossible and decided there was better profit in paperwork than panic.
"You two with the Ministry?" an inspector asked when Marc and Howard presented badges. He was a man whose face had been shaped by too many night shifts and too little sleep, the kind of face that could not be shocked by anything the world could invent.
"Yes," Marc said, voice steady. "Weapons analysis. We need to log the debris—any technology that could explain the structural collapse."
They walked the wreck as analysts, measuring, recording, speaking the bureaucratic language that flattened wonder into numbers. Marc's gaze went past the glass and beams and soot to the smaller things: a scorched flap of fabric, a charred shard of some alloy that still hummed faintly when he thought of it. The limiter slid like a band around his chest—Tecciztecatl's soft, unyielding hand reminding him who he was allowed to be. It burned with the ridiculous intimacy of restraint.
"Interesting fracture patterns," Howard murmured into his recorder. "Kinetic dispersion inconsistent with conventional munitions. Localized energy signatures—Aetheric residue in microscopic amounts."
The inspector's brow rose. "Aetheric?"
"You heard of Enttle," Howard said. "Worth analyzing. Might be historical remnants, but we'll need to run it through the lab."
Later, in the conference room, men in suits and dull ties debated the proper noun for their new geography. "Superhuman zones," one bureaucrat offered. "Nodes of deviation," a defense attaché countered. A grizzled detective from the Metropolitan leaned forward and fixed Marc with an unblinking stare.
"Whatever you call them," he said, "they mean London is not just a city. It's a theater for forces beyond our statutes. Sovereignty doesn't mean much when a man in a cloak can pry a building apart with his hands."
Somewhere in the room, someone laughed too loudly. The sound died quickly under the weight of what was being admitted: the old definitions were gone. Long before, London had been a stage in a nation called England; now, because of the phenomena that gathered nightly under its skies, it behaved like its own sovereign entity—de facto, if not de jure. Banks negotiated shadow clauses. The Ministry of Defense ran interim protocols in tandem with the City. Roads and bridges had become contested infrastructures. When the meeting devolved into geopolitics, a colonel lit a cigarette in the trash bin light and said, bluntly, "Ireland controls Scotland. France fractured in twenty-twenty-nine. The Russo-Ukraine conflict was ruled a stalemate on February Nineteen, 2026. Borders are politics now, not geography."
It was imperial arithmetic: carved pieces and absentee crowns, a map rearranged by the forces that few public servants could define and even fewer wanted to confront.
Marc and Howard entered the discussion like actors joining late in a play. They reported, measured, offered plausible hypotheses—Aetherian artefacts, rogue nanotech, criminal orchestration. They lied with the practiced politeness of people who understood the necessity of omission.
"We found traces of something," Marc said, keeping his voice clinical. "Uncatalogued alloy. We'll send samples to the lab. At first blush, it appears non-terrestrial, but it could be a civilian derivative that mimics Aether signatures."
The detective, who'd seen enough to be skeptical of anything reducing his world to sentences, nodded slowly. "You do your tests. If this is the vigilante's doing, we'll want to know how and why."
Camera drones kept their distance. The Ministry's PR office already had a statement drafted: "No causal link to official technology deployments has been established. Citizens are urged to maintain calm." The words looked limp in print, as if they had been scrubbed of their meaning to make them safe for broadcast.
Across town, in the darker rooms of Ynkeos Tower, a different kind of council convened. Juarez stood before William, not as a man of swagger but as a slow-breathing thing caged in an elegant suit that did not belong to the same world. The light in their private chamber cast the CEO's carved face into a dozen sharp shadows.
"You failed," William said simply. No cinema, no showmanship—merely cold arithmetic.
Juarez's mouth worked. The soul inside him, only a partial guest at this point, still wanted to say what used to be said by men with names and sins. "He's stronger than we thought," Juarez confessed. The admission tasted like iron. "He used a relic. He moved like something older than the god we feed."
William stepped closer. The voice of the dark lord hummed in the air like a tuning fork, a presence more felt than heard. "We had a favor," William said. "The stars bent." He smiled, the expression of a man for whom contracts and coordinates were spiritual. "But the favor is not endless."
Juarez shifted, the motion mechanical. His fingers clenched. "I will finish it. Next time—"
"Next time," William repeated, the threat implicit and soft as a guillotine's whisper, "or you will not be allowed the honor of failing again. Kneel."
Juarez dropped to his knees as if an old muscle remembered the bow. The motion shocked even the hardened men in the room—part ceremonial, part confession. In that instant, the creature Juarez had become and the man Juarez had been collided. A choked sound—a prayer, perhaps, or a last human plea—escaped him.
William's hand rested lightly on the bowed head, not gentleness but possession. "Go," he said. "Return to the streets. Gather the others. Prepare the sites. When the stars move, we will make sure he does not stand at all."
Juarez rose, a puppet remade. He left with the smoothness of someone who had been ordered into war and came back as a soldier without memory.
Back at the Ministry, where domestic affairs tried to masquerade as normality, Marc and Howard walked out into rain that glimmered like spilled oil. The city throbbed with whispered plans and half-laid traps. On a screen in the square above them, William smiled like a man who owned everyone's future.
Marc's hands found the edge of a railing, fingers tight enough to blanch. The limiter at his throat hummed dull and certain. Tecciztecatl's presence felt small beside the problems they now catalogued—geographic fractures, political rearrangements, and a CEO who had purchased an altar and called it a lab.
"Eighteen days," Howard said, as if naming it might make the number less lethal.
Marc didn't answer. He stared at the city's skyline and felt, with a clarity that had nothing to do with policy or biology, that the coming days would not merely test them. They would remap the world.