The car door opened.
Spinici Seller was kneeling on the pavement outside it. He had been doing this for long enough that his knees had stopped sending useful information and had switched to a general policy of complaint.
Camilla did not look at him from the back seat. She looked at the middle distance with the expression she used for announcements rather than conversations.
"Effective immediately, Kurapika leads the A-family. All decisions go through him. All matters. Camilla will not say this a third time." She paused, in the specific way of someone leaving space for comprehension rather than response. "Do you understand?"
"Of course," Spinici said. "But the new leader has asked about the orphan sacrifice custom, and whether—"
Camilla looked at him.
His voice stopped. There was a specific quality to being looked at by Camilla that had nothing to do with the angle or the distance, and Spinici had been in the family long enough to know exactly when to stop talking. The sensation of his life being a very small and temporary thing had arrived without warning, as it usually did.
The door closed. The limousine pulled away smoothly and quietly.
Behind it, Spinici Seller, former head of the A-family, blood relation to the former king of Kakin through a lineage that had never been publicly acknowledged and had not protected him from anything, pressed his forehead to the ground and stayed there until the car was out of sight.
Beside him, Melina, the A-family's young head, stood with her eyes lowered. The country under Camilla's rule had been producing signs of genuine structural change since the coronation. Whether that change was Camilla's actual intention or a calculated performance for the first months of her reign was a question Melina filed alongside the others she was keeping for later.
In the back seat of the limousine, Aoi looked up from where she had been sitting quietly.
"What is the orphan sacrifice?"
"You don't need to know," Camilla said. "It won't exist anymore."
Aoi accepted this with the equanimity of someone who has learned that certain doors open only in one direction and at specific times. She went back to watching the road.
Liam had left Akane and Aoi in the capital while he and Shizuku stayed at Misu Mountain. Camilla had arranged their care without being asked, which was either generous or practical or both, depending on how well you knew her. When she came to the mountain villa, the students came with her. Whether the master had come out of seclusion was, apparently, the question of the day.
Camilla watched the road and thought.
The natural system, applied with enough understanding, could simulate most Nen techniques. The exception was Specialization. Specialization abilities operated on internal logic that even their users often could not fully articulate, and simulating the unexplainable was a different problem from simulating the merely complex.
Akane's Butterfly was an example of the unexplainable. The ability to step from one world into another, carrying passengers, returning changed. Simulating even the crossing itself, if it could be done through natural energy, would open an entirely different kind of reach. Compared to the space of everything that had ever existed or might exist, Kakin was a genuinely small concern.
Camilla allowed herself the small private smile that she reserved for thoughts too significant to share with anyone in the car.
The natural system. Liam had taught it to her. The decision to keep him in her orbit had been correct at every step since she made it.
The limousine turned onto the mountain road.
The memory arrived with the quality that childhood memories have: the particular vividness of things that were formed before the part of the brain that filters for relevance had fully developed.
A teenage Tserriednich, sitting on a bench at the Misu Mountain resort with the newest handheld game console, not looking up.
"Hal, why do you always trail after Benjamin? You look like you've been dragged through a field. Is that what princes look like now?"
A teenage Halkenburg, catching up to the first prince on the path, pausing to offer a vague apologetic expression in Tserriednich's direction without breaking stride.
A teenage Benjamin, who had the relaxed expression of someone who had never found it necessary to care what anyone else was doing, leading Halkenburg through the mountain resort at a pace that suggested a specific agenda. The agenda, it turned out, was comprehensive terrain knowledge.
"A soldier understands the ground he stands on," Benjamin had said, in the tone of someone delivering military instruction to an audience of one. "All of it. Including the parts nobody told him about."
They had found the secret passages that afternoon. Every property of the Hui Guo Rou family had them. The king's policy toward his children had always been a benign indifference, the kind that permitted exploration without encouragement, and when he found out what they had discovered, he had simply laughed.
The hook-nosed private soldier crouched at the concealed exit of a passage in the villa's eastern wall and waited.
He had been in this body long enough to have stopped noticing the mismatch between his internal sense of his face and what the mirrors showed him. The body was functional, which was the primary requirement. The passage was exactly where Benjamin had shown him twenty years ago, which was the secondary requirement.
His ability had come to him after he understood what had happened to his country. He had hired a professional Hunter to learn the mechanics of operating it safely. The Hunter had given it a name: Red Lotus, after the specific quality of resolve that powered it, the kind that had already accepted all costs before the decision was made.
The mechanics were clean, if severe.
He could form his soul into an arrow and fire it at a target. On impact, his soul entered the target's body and forced an exchange: his soul occupied their body, their soul occupied his. His soul could not reverse this process. If he died in the new body, he died permanently. If the target died in his original body, their soul returned and the two shared the original body on a rotating basis, one sleeping while the other woke.
There was no version of this ability that was comfortable to think about for long.
The black limousine came through the villa gates.
Camilla stepped out of the car.
Halkenburg extended his arm, shaped the aura into the bow he had been practicing since the day he understood what he was willing to spend, aimed at the woman who had, according to every conclusion he had been able to draw, taken his brothers from the world, and released.
The soul arrow flew true.
It hit Camilla.
His consciousness rode the arrow inward, drilling through the surface of her mind with the determined force of something that had already considered the cost and committed to it. He pushed deeper, pressing into the space that should have been open, looking for the root where the soul attached.
He found something else.
At the deepest reachable point of Camilla's consciousness, barely visible at first and then unmistakably present: a rose-gold pentagram. Small, precise, settled. The specific shape of something that had been placed there deliberately by someone who knew what they were doing.
The pentagram shifted.
The shape behind it resolved into the back of a person with dark hair, who turned his head and looked at Halkenburg with the expression of someone who has just noticed an intruder trying a door that is, and has always been, locked from his side.
The soul arrow came apart.
Halkenburg's consciousness was ejected from Camilla's body with the specific thoroughness of someone being removed from a room by the most efficient available means. He came back to himself in the private soldier's body, on the ground at the passage exit, drooling, his vision refusing to resolve into anything coherent.
Camilla had stopped walking. She looked to the side with the interested neutrality of someone noting an unusual event.
The king's soldiers extracted Halkenburg from the passage with the professional ease of people trained for exactly this kind of work.
The wind came first, as it usually did, moving through the trees in a way that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. Then Liam and Shizuku landed on the path, the golden cloud dissipating as their feet found the ground.
Akane and Aoi looked up from where they had been watching the soldiers and said, simultaneously, "Master."
Liam looked at the private soldier being held at the passage exit, then at Camilla, then at the soldier again.
"Manipulation-type attempt," he said. "Failed. Looks like a soul-transfer ability of some kind." He thought about it for a moment. "He hit the Star Mark at the bottom of your consciousness and it threw him out."
"Camilla is also a Manipulator," Camilla said, with the composure of someone who finds the implication that she required protection mildly offensive. "When exactly did you develop the impression that Camilla needs a guard dog at the bottom of her mind?"
"Yours doesn't compare to mine."
"What a rude thing to say."
The private soldier on the ground raised his head. His focus was poor, his expression the specific one of someone whose soul had just taken a significant impact and was still reconstructing the world from available pieces. He looked at Camilla, then at Liam, and something assembled itself behind his eyes.
"You," he said. "You're the one who helped her take this country."
He laughed. It had the hollow quality of laughter that has stopped being about anything funny. "So that's it. That's all it was." His voice shifted. "Do you know what Kakin is? Do you know what this royal family has actually been doing? Have you heard of the Carnival? The banquet?" He laughed again, and it went somewhere worse. "This country should end. It should have been changed. I should have been the one to change it..."
He was crying by the time the laughing stopped. He did not seem to be aware of the transition.
Then he rolled his eyes and went still.
Shizuku crouched beside him and pressed two fingers to his neck. She looked at her watch and waited a few seconds.
"Alive," she said. "But it's unusual. Like something is missing and something isn't."
Camilla looked at the soldier's face with the focused assessment of someone running a specific check.
"That is Halkenburg," she said. "This is his actual consciousness. He transferred himself into this body and then tried to transfer into mine."
Liam looked at the unconscious soldier. "What a mess," he said, with the tone of someone who finds a situation genuinely baffling as a life choice. "What exactly was the plan here."
His pocket vibrated.
He pulled out the phone, read the screen, and had approximately half a second before the call connected.
"YOU LITTLE—" Bisky's voice arrived at a volume that was, by any objective standard, not suited to a phone call. He held the receiver away from his ear. "How long exactly were you planning to make me wait? I have been sitting in this city for two weeks like some kind of extremely beautiful and patient wallflower, which I am NOT!"
"Two weeks," Liam said. "That's dedication."
"Don't FLATTER me, it doesn't work when I'm THIS—"
He held the phone further away and looked at Shizuku, who had stood back up and was watching him with the expression she wore when something was going about as expected.
The yelling continued.