The click of the iron lock was the loudest sound Leximus had ever heard. It sealed away the transcript, the truth, the names of his dead, and in that final, metallic snap, it sealed something inside him too. The hollow quiet was gone. In its place was a low, constant pressure, like deep water held back by a dam of sheer, disbelieving will.
Lady Sarah of House Karmis. A Duke's granddaughter. A burner from the Ember Imperium. A treaty violation. A covered-up train to the capital.
The facts arranged themselves in his mind with a cold, surgical clarity. They did not fit. They were jagged pieces of a world that should not exist, forced into the shape of his life. He felt his identity—the orphan of the Warrens, the unwritten boy—being slowly crushed between them.
Sirius's voice cut through the silence, sharp and administrative. "Calvin, the boy's physiological readouts during the engagement. Did Kael's Logical Field trigger a stabilization or a destabilization?"
The question was so cold, so utterly divorced from the apocalyptic truth they had just uncovered, that Leximus felt a surreal disconnect. They were discussing him like a faulty apparatus.
Calvin, still holding the empty transcript tube, blinked as if waking from a nightmare. "A… a destabilization, initially. His core resonance spiked in rejection. But following the foreign pressure, it plateaued at a new, lower frequency. It's not stable. It's… dormant. Suppressed."
"Interesting," Sirius murmured, turning his analytical gaze to Leximus. "The anomaly rejects definition by becoming less of itself. A strategic retreat at a metaphysical level. Noted."
Strategic retreat. The words were a spark in the dry tinder of Leximus's mind. "My sister," he said, his voice a stranger's—flat, stripped of all affect. "She's a political asset. A noble's heir. That's why they took her alive. That's why they burned the rest."
"Correct," Sirius said, as if congratulating a student on a simple deduction.
"And me?" Leximus looked up, meeting the older man's dark, impenetrable eyes. "Why am I still alive? I'm not a noble's heir. I'm the discrepancy."
For the first time, something flickered in Sirius's expression. Not pity. Calculation. "You are the witness the story cannot account for. In their narrative, the Cross family is dead or trafficked. You are a statistical impossibility. Valerius hunts logical flaws. You, Leximus, are a living one. Your survival is, in itself, a form of heresy against their ordered reality."
The dam inside Leximus cracked. The deep water of his rage began to seep through, cold and silent. "So my parents died for a church that forgot them. My new parents died for a Duke who erased them. My sister was stolen for a bloodline. And I… I am to be deleted for tidiness." He stood up. The motion was fluid, unnervingly calm. "What is the operational objective?"
Samantha, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed, raised an eyebrow. Calvin looked pained.
Sirius, however, gave a thin, approving smile. "The objective is triage. Kael has his data point. He will not wait. He will petition the capital for a Cleaner—a specialist in the excision of conceptual anomalies—but the bureaucracy will take a minimum of twelve hours. His immediate move will be to return to the ward with full authority and dismantle it, seeking the source of the anomaly and any corroborating evidence. He will arrest me. He will seize the archives. He will tear the place apart until he finds a shadow that doesn't belong."
"And our response?" Leximus asked.
"We divide. The majority of our combat-capable assets, including Samantha's tactical team, will evacuate with me. We will become a moving target, drawing Kael's primary focus. A skeleton crew will remain at the ward."
"A distraction," Calvin said, the weight of the plan settling on his shoulders. "A sacrificial play."
"A necessity," Sirius corrected. "The ward's primary lattice, its core archives, cannot be moved. If Kael secures them, he doesn't need to find Leximus; he can reconstruct him, predict him, and have a Cleaner waiting at every possible exit from the city. The remaining team has one job: buy time. Not to defeat Kael, but to force him to expend time, energy, and legal capital in a protracted, messy seizure. To make the audit so chaotic that any 'anomaly' he claims to have found looks like a product of the chaos itself."
"Who stays?" The question hung in the lamplit air.
Sirius didn't hesitate. "Larry. His Stoneblood Bulwark capabilities are optimal for fortification and delaying action. Esther. Her Stormmind acuity will be needed to counter Kael's own logical assaults and manage communications. Rylan."
Calvin stiffened. "Sirius. He's barely conscious. His soul is…"
"Scarred. I know," Sirius interrupted, his voice devoid of mercy. "The Dissolution Event left a phantom. That phantom is attuned to the deep flows, to hidden things. If Kael tries to hide a sanction or plant evidence within the local Etheric current, Rylan's… condition may sense it. He is a liability and an asset. Here, his liability can be contained, and his asset utilized."
"And me?" Leximus asked, already knowing the answer.
"You are the anomaly. You evacuate with the primary group. Your presence with us is what makes us the primary target."
Leximus looked around the room—at Calvin's weary concern, Samantha's hardened readiness, Sirius's glacial strategy. He thought of Larry's blunt strength, Esther's sharp wit, Rylan drowning in a quiet room upstairs. They were all pieces on Sirius's board, being moved into the path of a storm to protect the king.
The unwritten variable.
"No," Leximus said.
The silence this time was different. It was startled.
"I am the discrepancy," he continued, the pressure in his chest finding its shape in words. "If I flee with you, Kael's focus splits. He hunts you, and he tears the ward apart for clues. If I stay… I am the clue. The primary anomaly will be right there, in the one place he is legally empowered to search. It will draw his entire focus, his entire fury. It will hold him in place. It will give the evacuation a clean window."
"It's suicide," Calvin breathed.
"It's a logical deduction," Leximus said, echoing Sirius's own cold tone. "You said it yourself. My survival is a heresy. So let me be the heresy he finds. Let him waste his hours trying to define me, to cage me, while the rest of you disappear. I am the distraction. It is the most efficient use of the resource."
Sirius studied him for a long, silent moment. The approval in his eyes was now tinged with something else—a recognition of a weapon that had just aimed itself. "You would be captured. Possibly executed on the spot as an unstable aberrant."
"You told me Valerius is the one who needs me deleted for tidiness," Leximus countered. "Kael is a Savant. An analyst. His report said 'fascinating.' He will want to study the contradiction. To understand it before he destroys it. That will take time. That is the time you need."
The calculus was perfect, and they all knew it. It was the move of someone with nothing left to lose but a purpose not yet fulfilled.
Sirius gave a single, slow nod. "Then the skeleton crew is reinforced. You, Larry, Esther, Rylan. You will be the stone in Kael's shoe. Your objective is not victory. It is delay. Inflict bureaucratic friction. Force him to follow every protocol. When the time is right, you will disengage and exfiltrate via the submerged conduit we used for the Hightower extraction. Is that understood?"
"Understood," Leximus said.
Calvin looked as if he wanted to argue, to protest, but the strategic truth of it had settled over the room. There was no better play.
"Move out," Sirius commanded, his voice returning to its normal, commanding timbre. "Samantha, muster your team. We leave in twenty minutes. Calvin, prep the mobile lattice cores. Leximus—go to the infirmary. Brief Rylan. And see if the water left him with anything resembling a spine."
Leximus turned and left the study without another word. The hollow pressure was gone, replaced by a clear, cold emptiness. A purpose. He was no longer running from the truth. He was walking directly into the jaws of its consequence.
In the dim hallway, he paused. From a room nearby, he heard the low, pained murmur of Rylan's voice, talking to no one, answered by a silence that seemed to whisper back.
The unwritten variable, Leximus thought, walking toward the sound. The living heresy.
He would give Kael a heresy to remember