Day 2 — 10:47 PM, 4th District, Halcyon Aerostatics Works
⠀
The fourth floor of Halcyon Aerostatics went up like a struck match, except it wasn't fire. It was color.
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A wall of reinforced glass that had, thirty seconds earlier, been protecting several million Nanum worth of proprietary inflation gel blew outward in a hail of glittering shrapnel, and out of the hole it left came a car.
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Not just any car. A long, low, chrome-toothed monster of a thing, painted the exact shade of a Ring sunset caught mid-collapse, its exhaust already coughing up thick, candy-colored plumes that curled skyward instead of dissipating. The tires hit the loading dock outside and screamed against the concrete, fishtailing hard enough to peel rubber into two long black commas before the driver wrestled it straight and gunned it toward the perimeter fence like the fence had personally insulted him.
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"CLOUD NINE, BABY!" King "Smoke Shot" McGee bellowed over the engine, one hand on the wheel, the other slung out the window, flipping off the entire burning factory behind them with real, sincere enthusiasm. "You seein' this, Guy?! Tell me you're seein' this!"
⠀
In the passenger seat, Guy Bertillon was, in fact, seeing this, mostly because he had no other choice, given that his seatbelt had been designed by whoever built this car for a much smaller and considerably calmer man than himself.
⠀
"I'm seeing a burglary alarm I distinctly remember you promising wouldn't go off," Guy said, bracing one hand against the dashboard as Cloud Nine cleared the fence in a leap that had no business being physically possible for a vehicle with four wheels and a driver laughing the entire way through it. "And I'm seeing several dozen very large men on the roof of that building who look extremely unhappy about it."
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"Details!" King crowed. "We got the bag, didn't we?"
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In the back seat, wedged between two duffel bags and a spare tire, sat the bag in question: a massive, canvas-wrapped shape roughly the size of a small elephant, cinched tight with industrial rope, radio-silent and heavier than either of them had expected when they'd hauled it out of Halcyon's fourth-floor vault.
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"We got the bag," Guy confirmed, twisting around to eye it warily, "and I still don't know what's in it, and you still won't tell me, and at this point I'm choosing to interpret that as a bad sign."
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"It's a surprise!" King said, grinning wide enough to show off a gold tooth that caught the streetlight every time they passed one. "Best kinda surprise there is! The kind you didn't even know you needed till it's already happenin' to 'ya!"
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Behind them, the factory's rooftop alarms had stopped being merely loud and started being specific, a rhythmic klaxon pattern that Guy, who'd spent more of his professional life around Post sirens than he cared to admit, recognized immediately.
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"That's a District response signal," he said, sitting up straighter. "That means Post, Smoke."
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"Yeah?" King didn't look concerned. As far as Guy had ever been able to tell, King was constitutionally incapable of looking concerned about anything that hadn't already personally set him on fire. "Which one?"
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The answer came before Guy could hazard a guess, in the form of a bright, crackling arc of blue-white light that streaked down from the rooftop of a nearby high-rise, hooked itself into the girder of a half-finished skybridge two blocks ahead, and deposited, with an almost balletic precision, a woman in a matte black jumpsuit directly into their flight path, standing perfectly upright on a taut, glowing line of pure electricity as though it were solid ground.
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"Ampere," Guy said, flatly. "Wonderful."
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"AMPERE POST, HOLD FOR INSPECTION!" the woman shouted down at them, her voice amplified by something built into her collar, crackling at the edges with the same current running along her line. Behind her, three more shapes launched off adjacent rooftops in quick succession, grapple-hooks trailing arcs of white lightning as they caught power lines, transformer housings, anything conductive within reach, swinging themselves across the District's skyline in great, snapping loops like spiders stringing a web made of electricity instead of silk.
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"Huh," King said, genuinely delighted. "Never actually seen 'em work before. Thought it was just a rumor! Haha!"
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"King."
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"Yeah?"
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"Drive faster."
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"Now that," King said, stomping the pedal flat to the floor, "I can do!"
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Cloud Nine surged forward with a scream of overtaxed engine that Guy felt more than heard, the sunset-orange paint job blurring into a smear of color as the car rocketed beneath the skybridge, close enough that the Ampere Fixer standing on her line of lightning had to leap clear or lose her footing entirely, twisting midair to land in a crouch on the bridge's railing, already reeling her line back in for a second attempt.
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"They're gaining," Guy said, watching the side mirror fill up with pursuing shapes swinging from rooftop to rooftop, closing the gap in great, effortless arcs. "How exactly does one out-drive something that doesn't need roads?"
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"You don't out-drive it," King said. "You out-enjoy it."
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"That's not a strategy!"
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"Sure it is. Watch."
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King cranked the wheel hard, sending Cloud Nine screeching through a ninety-degree turn down a narrower avenue lined with shuttered shopfronts, and reached back with one hand, fumbling blind at the ropes cinching the enormous canvas bag in the back seat.
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"What are you doing?!"
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"Buyin' us a little goodwill!" King said, finally working a knot loose with his teeth still bared in a grin. "C'mon, help me get this open, would ya? Can't drive and unwrap a present at the same time! That'd just be rude to the present!"
⠀
Guy, against every professional instinct he possessed, twisted around and yanked at the remaining ropes, and the moment the last one gave way, the canvas peeled back all on its own, propelled from the inside by several thousand cubic feet of compressed, self-inflating latex that had been waiting, with admirable patience, for exactly this moment.
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The balloons came out like a held breath finally released, a boiling, rising flood of color, reds and golds and impossible, shimmering iridescents, each one snapping fully inflated the instant it hit open air thanks to whatever proprietary Halcyon gas mixture Guy still didn't fully understand and hadn't asked about, streaming up out of the open-top car in a column that widened with every passing second, catching in the wind, spilling out over the rooftops of the 4th District like the sky itself had sprung a leak made of joy.
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"Balloons," Guy said, staring up through the sunroof at the widening rainbow flood pouring out behind them. "You robbed a factory. For balloons."
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"A hundred thousand of 'em, give or take!" King said, entirely too pleased with himself. "Instant-inflate, self-sealing, guaranteed not to pop for at least six months! You know how much a District like this one loves a good spectacle, Guy? Look down there!"
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Guy looked. On the sidewalks below, in the windows of high-rise apartments, on the rooftop patios of restaurants that had been serving dinner ten minutes earlier under the assumption that nothing more interesting than traffic would happen tonight, citizens of the 4th District were pouring out into the open air, faces turned up, mouths open in delighted, disbelieving laughter as the balloons kept coming, thousands upon thousands of them, an entire skyline suddenly, inexplicably, wonderfully full.
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A child on a balcony three stories up was shrieking with pure, uncomplicated joy, both arms thrown up toward the passing flood as if she could pull the whole rainbow down to her by will alone. An elderly man on a corner, cane forgotten at his side, had simply stopped walking entirely, standing stock-still in the middle of the street with his hand pressed flat over his heart, watching.
⠀
King's left palm, resting loosely on the wheel, had begun to glow.
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"There it is," he said, quiet with satisfaction, glancing down at the number climbing steadily across his skin, digit after digit ticking upward faster than either of them could properly track. "That's the good stuff."
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"You're gaining points," Guy said, something in his voice caught between disbelief and, despite himself, a flicker of real, grudging admiration. "From a robbery?"
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"From joy, Guy. The robbery's just how I got the joy where it needed to go." King glanced over at him, grin softening at the edges into something almost sincere. "That's the part nobody in that stinkin' sewer room seemed to wanna understand. Don't matter how you get there. Matters what you leave behind you when you do."
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Guy didn't have an answer for that. He turned back to the mirror instead, in time to see the first Ampere Fixer land, hard and precise, directly on Cloud Nine's roof.
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"KING."
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"I see her!"
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The Fixer who'd landed above them dropped into a crouch, a long, sparking shock rod already extending from a collapsed baton at her belt, crackling with the same current that had run along her zipline a moment before. Two more shapes swung in behind her, boots skidding against the trunk as they found their footing on a car doing considerably more than the posted speed limit.
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"Cease vehicle operation and surrender the stolen cargo!" the lead Fixer shouted down through the open sunroof, shock rod angled at King's head with the crisp, procedural confidence of someone who had clearly done this exact maneuver successfully many times before.
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King looked up at her, at the rod, at the balloons still pouring out behind them in a wake of pure delight, and beamed.
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"Guy. Take the wheel."
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"I don't have a license!"
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"Neither do I! Never stopped me!"
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Before Guy could formulate a proper objection, King had already released the wheel entirely, planted both hands on the doorframe, and hauled himself up and out through the open window in one smooth, powerful motion, boots finding purchase on top of a car still doing sixty through a narrow 4th District avenue.
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"ALRIGHT!" King roared, cracking his knuckles as the wind tore at his coat. "Who wants to dance first?!"
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The lead Fixer didn't waste time on words. She lunged, shock rod sweeping in a tight arc meant to catch him across the ribs, and King, rather than dodging, simply reached out and grabbed the rod with his bare hand.
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The current hit him full force, a blue-white flare of electricity crawling up his arm, and for one horrible second Guy, glancing back through the sunroof, was certain he was about to watch a man die on the roof of his own getaway car.
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Then King started laughing.
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Real laughter, delighted and full-throated, his whole body shaking with it as the current arced across his skin in bright, crackling branches and found, apparently, absolutely nothing in him willing to be hurt by it.
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"That tickles!" King wrenched the rod clean out of the startled Fixer's grip and tossed it off the side of the car in one motion, spinning to catch a second attacker's baton strike on his open palm, close enough that the shock jumped straight into his chest and lit him up like a struck match, and he only laughed harder. "C'mon, is that all you got?! I've had worse mornings just wakin' up hungover!"
⠀
"His resonance is spiking!" one of the Ampere Fixers shouted to the others, genuine alarm cracking through her professional composure as she caught sight of King's left palm through the chaos, its glow now bright enough to throw shadows across his own knuckles. "He's not just tanking the current, he's feeding on it!"
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"Feedin' might be a strong word!" King said, catching a third rod between both palms and simply holding it there, current pouring into him in a steady stream while he grinned at its owner from a distance of about six inches. "Call it more of a... appetizer."
⠀
He let go of the rod, spun on his heel, and drove a fist into the Fixer's shoulder with enough force to send her tumbling off the trunk entirely, a controlled fall that she absorbed with a practiced roll across the pavement below, already scrambling back upright, already reeling in a fresh line to launch herself back into the fight.
⠀
"They're persistent," Guy called up through the sunroof, wrestling the wheel through a hard left as a delivery truck loomed up ahead entirely too fast for comfort. "King, we've got a truck!"
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"Then don't hit it!"
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"That was the plan, thank you!"
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The two remaining Fixers on the roof pressed their advantage while King's attention split, one lunging low for his legs while the other came high with both rods crackling, a coordinated pincer that would have ended the fight cleanly against almost anyone else standing on a moving car with no handholds and a truck bearing down from the front.
⠀
King planted one boot hard against the roof, dropped his weight low enough to let the high strike sail over his head close enough to singe his hair, and drove his free hand down into the low attacker's collarbone with a sound like a gavel striking hardwood. The Fixer folded, current from her own weapon arcing wild and useless into the open air as she lost her grip on it entirely, and King caught the falling rod out of pure reflex, twirling it once between his fingers like a baton before tossing it, with what Guy could only describe as showmanship, directly back at its owner.
⠀
"Y'know," King said, conversationally, catching the third Fixer's strike on his forearm and shrugging off the resulting shower of sparks like rain, "I really do appreciate the enthusiasm. Ampere's always had good form, better'n half the Posts I've tangled with. But you're gonna wanna check with your Captain on somethin', next chance you get."
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"And what's that supposed to mean?" the Fixer snarled, resetting her stance.
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"Ask her what she felt, growin' up in the 4th, on the one night a year the Coalition used to do the lantern drop over the harbor." King's grin didn't waver, but something in his voice, for just a moment, went quiet and almost gentle underneath the noise of the fight. "Ask her if she remembers what that felt like. Then ask yourself if you really wanna be the one who stops that feelin' from happenin' again tonight, just 'cause it happened to come outta the back of a stolen truck instead of a permit form. Her name's Clara, right?"
⠀
The Fixer hesitated, just long enough, just a fraction of a second, and King used it, closing the distance and wrapping both arms around her in something that was technically a grapple and looked, from any distance, remarkably like a hug, current and all, before setting her down gently on the trunk rather than throwing her clear.
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"Go on," he said. "Look up. Just for a second. I promise the car'll still be gettin' away when you're done."
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She looked up. Above them, and behind them, and spreading out in every direction across the 4th District's glittering skyline, the balloons had kept climbing, an entire quarter of the sky gone gold, green, blue, red and impossible, glowing iridescent in the light of every window and streetlamp beneath it, and on every rooftop, every balcony, every fire escape and sidewalk cafe along Cloud Nine's entire flight path, people had stopped whatever they were doing to watch it happen.
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The Fixer didn't say anything. She didn't have to. King saw it land on her face anyway, the same soft, helpless wonder he'd seen on the little girl three stories up, the same stillness he'd seen in the old man with his hand pressed to his chest, and he nodded, satisfied, and let her go.
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"Ampere Actual, this is Team Three," she said into her collar mic, voice considerably less steady than it had been ninety seconds earlier. "...Requesting we stand down pursuit. Reason: unclear at this time."
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King laughed, delighted, and dropped back down through the sunroof into the passenger seat, dripping sparks and grinning ear to ear, leaving the last remaining Fixer alone on the roof with no partner left to coordinate a pincer against and, evidently, no further appetite for trying.
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"Alright, Guy! Get us outta here, nice and slow now, no need to rush a good exit!"
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Guy eased off the gas, watching in the rearview mirror as the Ampere Fixers, one by one, reeled in their lines and simply... stopped, standing on rooftops and skybridges across the District, faces turned up the same as everyone else's, watching balloons instead of chasing a car that had, by any reasonable measure, gotten away clean.
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"You're insane," Guy said, finally, once his own hands had stopped shaking enough to trust his voice.
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"Probably," King agreed, cheerfully, holding his glowing palm up to admire the number now sitting there, considerably higher than the three it had shown a night earlier. "But hey. Worked, didn't it?"
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Guy looked down at his own palm, at the number sitting there, unchanged, still a flat, cold zero against his skin despite everything he'd just watched, everything he'd just helped make happen, and found himself, against every instinct he'd walked into that sewer room with, wishing, quietly, that it hadn't stayed that way.
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FLAVOR OF EUPHORIA — RESONANCE UPDATE Day 2, 11:59 PM
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King "Smoke Shot" McGee — 41 Points
Guy Bertillon — 0 Points
Henrique D'Souza — 0 Points
Bethuel Mac Findlaech — 0 Points
Gieffrin Melisanbeque — 0 Points
Aristio Newbeck — 0 Points
Yisheng Wu — 0 Points
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Rotary Eleven Epicenter, Viscera Department, King "Smoke Shot" McGee's Office — 1:12 AM
⠀
Cloud Nine sat cooling in a private garage three floors below, its paint job scorched in a few places, its exhaust still occasionally coughing up a stray puff of pink smoke like it wasn't finished being excited about the day. Upstairs, King had one boot propped up on his desk and a large cigar hanging from his jaw, watching Guy pace back and forth across the office rug with the restless, coiled energy of a man who badly wanted to be doing something other than thinking.
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"You're gonna wear a groove into that carpet," King said. "It's a nice carpet. Bashnya silk, actually, took me three separate favors to get my hands on it."
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"Forty-one points," Guy said, not stopping. "For balloons."
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"For joy," King corrected, not unkindly. "The balloons were just the delivery method."
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"You could have died up there. Twice, by my count." Guy finally stopped pacing, turning to face him directly. "You grabbed a live shock rod with your bare hand and laughed about it."
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"Didn't hurt."
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"It should have hurt."
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"Yeah, well." King exhaled a puff of smoke, considering the question with more weight than his tone let on. "That's kinda the whole trick of it, ain't it? Same current that'd drop most fellas to their knees screamin', and all it did to me was tickle. You wanna know why?"
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Guy didn't answer, but he didn't leave either, which King seemed to take as answer enough.
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"'Cause I wasn't scared of it," King said. "Not for one second, the whole fight. And fear's most of what makes pain actually hurt, if you sit with it long enough to think about it. Strip the fear out, and what's left is just... sensation. Somethin' happenin' to you, instead of somethin' bein' done to you." He shrugged, setting the bottle down. "I figured that out a long time ago, back before any of this Overseer nonsense. Figured if I could feel good about gettin' hurt, wasn't much left in the world that could actually touch me."
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"That's not a superpower," Guy said quietly. "That's a coping mechanism with some damn good marketing."
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King barked out a laugh at that, sharp and genuine. "Hah! Yeah, alright, fair. Maybe it started out that way. Don't much matter what it started as, though, does it? Matters what it does for me now. And what it does for me now is make my palm light up like a Coalition parade every time I get to watch somebody's face do what that Ampere gal's face did tonight." He looked over at Guy, something more serious creeping into his expression despite the loose, easy set of his shoulders. "You gonna tell me what's eatin' you, or am I gonna have to guess?"
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Guy was quiet for a long moment, arms crossed, staring at a point somewhere past King's shoulder.
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"My palm didn't move," he said, finally. "All day. Not once."
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"Yeah, I noticed."
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"You helped set that whole thing up. I drove the car straight into a burning building's loading dock. I fought off three Ampere Fixers alongside you, or close enough to it. And at the end of it, I've still got a flat zero on my hand, same as I did in that sewer." Guy's jaw tightened. "I don't understand the metric. Truly. I don't."
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"That's 'cause you weren't doin' it for the joy, Guy," King said it plainly, without judgment, the way a man points out a fact of weather. "You were doin' it for me. Which, hey, I appreciate the hell outta that, don't get me wrong. But the letter's real specific about what it's countin'. Emotional intensity, number of people affected, longevity of the thing you made happen." He tapped his own chest. "That's gotta come from somewhere real in you, or the numbers just don't stick. Can't fake your way into Euphoria. Believe me, I've tried faking plenty of other things in my life, and it never once worked out."
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"And what would you suggest I do about that? Given my particular tastes don't exactly line up with releasing balloons over a District skyline."
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Something in Guy's voice had gone quieter, harder-edged, and King caught it immediately, setting the cigar down entirely now, giving him his full attention.
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"I've heard what people say about the Heart Valves," King said, carefully. "About what earns a fella that title, inside the Viscera. Watchin' things fall apart. Watchin' people break, real slow, and gettin' somethin' outta the watchin'. That true?"
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Guy didn't answer right away.
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"It's true," he said, eventually, flat and unashamed of it in a way that made King's easy grin fade, just slightly. "I don't enjoy your kind of joy, King. I've tried tonight, standing next to you, watching those people. I felt something, watching them. I did. But it wasn't the same thing you felt. It never has been, not once in my life, and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago."
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"So what're you gonna do," King asked, quiet now, "when the letter wants you to make somethin' real?"
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Guy's mouth curved, slow and humorless. "I suppose I'm going to have to find out exactly how honest that Overseer meant to be when he wrote that this wasn't a competition of cruelty." He turned toward the door. "Because my honest answer to what makes me happiest in this world isn't a balloon, King. It never has been. And I'd rather test that particular rule sooner than later, before I've wasted a month of this game pretending I'm made of something I'm not."
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He left without waiting for a response, the office door clicking shut behind him with a finality that made King's earlier grin feel, for the first time all night, a good deal further away than it had a minute ago.
⠀
King sat alone with his cigar for a long while after that, staring at the door, at the cooling city outside his window still faintly lit gold and red from ten thousand balloons that hadn't come down yet, and didn't touch the cigar again.
⠀
"Damn," he said, finally, to no one at all.
⠀
9th District, Wharfside Collections Warehouse — Day 3, 4:50 AM
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The 9th District's collections warehouse sat at the end of a long, unlit pier, close enough to the water that the whole building smelled permanently of rust and low tide, and Guy Bertillon had chosen it specifically because he'd known, walking in, exactly what he'd find inside.
⠀
He'd heard the name Doruk Aslanov whispered in a few separate 9th District taverns over the past two years, always in the same low, careful tone people used for things they were afraid might overhear its own name being spoken. A collections enforcer, technically employed by a shell contractor two steps removed from Vitalität's official books, technically not a Fixer, technically not answerable to any Post in the Ring for what he did to the households that fell behind on debts the Coalition's own policies had guaranteed they'd never climb back out of. Guy had looked into him properly for the first time only that night, after leaving King's office, after finally admitting to himself exactly what kind of task he needed to set for himself if he wanted his own palm to mean anything at all.
⠀
Three fingers, permanently missing, from a woman two blocks from the warehouse who was four days late on a payment plan she'd never agreed to and couldn't remember signing.
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A twelve-year-old boy with a fractured jaw, for the crime of answering his mother's door when she hadn't been home to answer it herself.
⠀
An entire family, gone in the space of one night, from a tenement that had, according to the fire report nobody in Vitalität had ever properly followed up on, simply "failed to maintain adequate wiring."
⠀
Guy stood at the edge of the warehouse floor now, in the dark, watching Doruk Aslanov count a stack of Nanum by lantern light at a table near the back, entirely alone, entirely unaware that anyone was watching him at all.
⠀
"You're a hard man to get an appointment with," Guy said, stepping out of the shadows.
⠀
Doruk's hand went for the length of chain looped at his belt before his eyes had even fully adjusted to the newcomer's face, a reflex built over however many years of exactly this kind of unpleasant, unannounced visit. "Whoever sent you, tell 'em I already settled with the—"
⠀
"Nobody sent me." Guy's voice stayed even, almost pleasant, which seemed to unsettle the man more than a shout would have. "I'm here entirely on my own initiative, Mr. Aslanov. I wanted to meet you. I've heard a great deal about your work."
⠀
"My work," Doruk repeated, slow, wary, still gripping the chain. "You a Coalition auditor? 'Cause I got paperwork for every single collection I've ever—"
⠀
"I'm not an auditor." Guy took another step closer, unhurried, hands visible and empty at his sides. "I'm someone who's been trying, for a very long time, to understand a particular feeling. I think you might be able to help me understand it a bit better tonight, whether you mean to or not."
⠀
Doruk's eyes narrowed, some old, animal instinct finally catching up to the wrongness of the situation. "You threatenin' me?"
⠀
"I'm offering you a duel," Guy said. "A fair one, by my own standards, which I'll grant are considerably more generous than yours ever were to that woman on Lantern Row, or that boy with the broken jaw, or the family in the tenement that supposedly just had bad wiring." He let the words land, watching them land, watching the color drain slowly out of Doruk's face as he realized exactly how much Guy already knew. "You may run. You may fight. You may call for whoever you've got on retainer to back you up. I only ask that you decide quickly, because I find I have very little patience left for men like you tonight."
⠀
Doruk didn't run. Guy hadn't expected him to, not really; men who built entire careers out of other people's fear rarely knew what to do with fear of their own, once it finally arrived at their own door. He came in swinging the chain instead, wide and desperate, and Guy let the first strike catch him across the shoulder without so much as flinching, more interested, in that moment, in watching the man's face than in avoiding the blow.
⠀
The fight, such as it was, didn't last long. Guy wasn't a Fixer, or any of the flashier names circulating through the Ring's various Posts; his talents ran quieter, colder, built around patience and precision rather than raw power, and against a man whose entire skill set had been built on the assumption that his victims would never fight back, patience and precision were more than enough.
⠀
He didn't kill Doruk quickly. He wanted, he realized, to watch the man's bravado curdle slowly into the same desperate, cornered terror he'd inflicted on dozens of families across the 9th District, to give him time to properly understand what was happening to him, the same courtesy Doruk had never once extended to anyone he'd broken.
⠀
It was ugly. Guy didn't pretend, even to himself, that it wasn't ugly. But somewhere in the last few minutes of it, watching the fear on Doruk's face curdle further, into something that looked, unmistakably, like relief the moment the pain finally promised to end, Guy felt his own palm begin to warm, a slow, steady climb entirely unlike the flat, dead zero it had shown all through King's balloons and King's joy and King's easy, generous laughter.
⠀
He stood alone afterward in the empty warehouse, breathing hard, staring down at the glowing number on his palm with an expression that wasn't quite triumph and wasn't quite anything else he had a ready name for either.
⠀
Nineteen, he thought. Nineteen, for a man nobody in this District will miss, and nobody in Vitalität will ever properly investigate.
⠀
He thought of the woman missing three fingers, and the boy with the broken jaw, and wondered, distantly, whether either of them would ever learn what had happened to the man responsible, or whether it would simply fade into the same unremarked, unrecorded silence that had swallowed every single one of Doruk's own victims.
⠀
He hoped, quietly, walking back out into the gray predawn light along the pier, that someone would tell them. He didn't examine too closely why that particular hope mattered to him, given everything else he'd just done, or what it might mean that some small, stubborn part of him still wanted his own dark, ugly flavor of Euphoria to land somewhere close enough to justice that he could still look at it, afterward, without entirely looking away.
⠀
His palm, still glowing faintly in the dark, didn't offer him any answers on that particular question. It never would, not once, for the rest of the month the letter had given him to find one on his own.
⠀
3rd District, Vitalität Coalition Central Bank — Day 3, 9:14 AM
⠀
The Vitalität Coalition's central branch occupied eleven floors of white marble and gold filigree in the heart of the 3rd District, a building designed, quite deliberately, to make every citizen who walked through its doors feel simultaneously welcomed and profoundly small. Henrique D'Souza had worked in that building for six years before the letter arrived in the sewer, had climbed exactly as far as a Fixer with a 3rd Division rank and impeccable manners could climb inside a Coalition that preferred its violence tucked politely behind a teller's smile, and had, in all that time, never once found a task that made his own palm so much as flicker.
⠀
Today, he thought, might finally change that.
⠀
"Mister D'Souza, sir." A junior teller, barely into her twenties, hovered at the edge of his office with the particular nervous energy of someone who suspected they were about to be asked to do something they'd regret. "The, uh... The 9th District accounts. You wanted them flagged for review this morning?"
⠀
"I did." Henrique didn't look up from the ledger in front of him, his handwriting neat and unhurried as he initialed page after page. "All of them, Ms. Okoro. Every account originating from a 9th District branch, regardless of balance, flagged for immediate compliance audit, effective this morning."
⠀
"Sir, that's... that's nearly forty thousand accounts. Most of those people don't have the paperwork to survive a formal audit. Half of them can't read the forms we'd be sending."
⠀
"I'm aware."
⠀
"They'll default. All at once. The moment we freeze withdrawal access pending review, they won't be able to buy food, they won't be able to pay for—"
⠀
"I'm aware of that as well, Ms. Okoro." Henrique finally looked up, and whatever the teller saw in his expression was enough to still her mid-sentence. "The compliance audit isn't the point. The compliance audit is simply the mechanism. What happens in the 9th District over the following seventy-two hours, once forty thousand households realize simultaneously that the money they believed themselves to have no longer exists in any form they can access, that is the point."
⠀
"...Sir, I don't understand."
⠀
"You don't need to." Henrique returned to his ledger, initialing another page with the same unhurried care as before. "Send the notices. All of them, today.
⠀
...And Ms. Okoro?"
⠀
"...Yes, sir?"
⠀
"Have someone stationed with a camera at the 9th District branch by tomorrow morning. I'd like a recording of the response."
⠀
The teller left without another word, and Henrique allowed himself, for the first time that morning, a small, private smile.
⠀
He'd spent six years inside Vitalität learning exactly how the machinery of a Coalition bank could be turned, quietly and entirely within the letter of every regulation ever written, into an instrument capable of producing suffering at a scale no ordinary Fixer's contract could ever hope to match. He had never, until three days ago in a dark sewer room, had a reason to test the upper limit of what that suffering was worth.
⠀
By midday, the first reports began filtering back from the 9th, relayed through a junior compliance officer too frightened to editorialize on what he was reading aloud.
⠀
"...Reports of a small riot outside the 9th District branch, sir, nothing the local Post couldn't contain. Several account holders attempted to force entry into the branch itself. Two arrests. One elderly woman, um... she suffered what witnesses are calling a breakdown on the front steps, sir, she just... sat down, and wouldn't get up, and wouldn't stop..."
⠀
"Continue," Henrique said, not looking up.
⠀
"...crying, sir. For nearly forty minutes, before her family managed to get her home."
⠀
Henrique's left palm had begun, very faintly, to glow.
⠀
He examined it with the same detached, professional curiosity he brought to a difficult ledger entry, watching the number tick upward, slow and steady, nothing like the explosive climb King's palm had shown the night before, but climbing all the same, and undeniably, unmistakably real.
⠀
Emotional intensity. Number of people affected. Longevity of the happiness created, he thought, turning the letter's phrasing over in his mind with the particular satisfaction of a man discovering a loophole in a contract he'd assumed was airtight. The letter never once specified whose happiness.
⠀
By the time evening reports arrived, the number sitting on his palm had climbed to nine, small compared to King's forty-one, but Henrique found he wasn't in any particular hurry. A month was a long game, and he had, by his own estimation, only just begun to understand its rules.
⠀
"Sir." The compliance officer again, paler now than he'd been that morning. "There's... um... There's a second matter I should bring to your attention. One of the flagged account holders. A young man, twenty-six years old, 9th District resident, he was found this afternoon—"
⠀
"I don't need the details," Henrique said, quiet and even. "Only the outcome."
⠀
"...He didn't survive the night, sir."
⠀
Henrique's pen didn't stop moving across the ledger in front of him, though his palm, for just a moment, flared bright enough to cast a faint shadow across the page.
⠀
"Noted," he said. "File it under the compliance audit's administrative outcomes. Nothing further needs to be done."
⠀
The compliance officer left in a hurry that Henrique chose not to comment on, and he sat alone in his office for a long while afterward, watching the number on his palm settle, studying it the way he might study a particularly elegant financial instrument, one that had finally, after six patient years, begun to pay real, tangible dividends.
⠀
He did not feel guilty. He noted, with the same clinical interest he brought to everything else, that he did not feel guilty, and found that observation, more than the number on his palm, to be the single most useful piece of information the day had given him.
⠀
3rd District, Cobbleworth Row — Day 3, 4:40 PM
⠀
Three blocks from the gleaming marble of Vitalität's central branch, in a cramped, sun-faded stretch of shopfronts and narrow apartments known to locals as Cobbleworth Row, Bethuel Mac Findlaech was, at that very moment, attempting to juggle four loaves of bread while reciting what he insisted was an original sonnet, to the considerable delight and mild concern of the small crowd that had gathered around him.
⠀
"Lo! Behold this humble loaf, tossed high upon the breeze," he declaimed, catching two loaves in one hand and nearly dropping a third, "a gift most freely given, that all who pass might seize! For what is bread, but sunlight baked and given wondrous form, a small, warm miracle to weather any storm!"
⠀
A child in the front of the small crowd laughed so hard she had to sit down on the curb, and an elderly baker's wife, watching from her shop's doorway with flour still dusting her forearms, wiped genuine tears of laughter from her eyes.
⠀
"Bethuel, you absolute fool," she called out, "you're going to drop every last one of those, and then what will you do for your sonnet?"
⠀
"Then, madam, I shall simply write a tragedy instead!" Bethuel called back, and promptly did drop one, catching it against his own chest with an exaggerated grunt of pain that sent the gathered crowd into fresh peals of laughter. "Alas! Alas! Poor loaf, I knew thee well!"
⠀
He wasn't a Fixer. He'd said as much, plainly, to the six terrifying strangers gathered around that sewer table three nights ago, and not one of them had seemed to know quite what to do with the information, which had suited Bethuel fine, since he barely knew what to do with it himself. He was simply a citizen of the 3rd District, a man who'd spent most of his twenty-eight years working odd jobs at the edges of Cobbleworth Row's little economy, delivering bread for the baker, reading contracts aloud for the illiterate, performing increasingly elaborate and increasingly terrible poetry for anyone willing to stand still long enough to listen.
⠀
He had absolutely no idea why the Overseer of Euphoria had chosen him, out of everyone in the entire Ring, to sit at that table alongside Fixers and Viscera members and whatever unsettling thing lived behind Gieffrin's calm, watchful eyes. He'd decided, somewhere around the second glass of celebratory wine the baker's wife had pressed on him after his very first task letter arrived, that he wasn't going to spend the next month worrying about the why of it.
⠀
"One loaf remains!" he announced grandly, holding the last one aloft. "To whom shall this final, noble crust be gifted?"
⠀
"Give it to old Henrik," the baker's wife suggested. "He hasn't had a fresh loaf all week, not since his hip's gone bad and he can't make the walk down here anymore."
⠀
Bethuel's grin widened. "Then to Henrik it shall go! Come, good people, let us make a procession of it! What is a gift, if not made grander by an audience to carry it there?"
⠀
The small crowd, laughing, delighted, entirely charmed by the sheer, guileless earnestness of the whole display, fell in behind him as he set off down Cobbleworth Row, loaf held aloft like a torch, reciting increasingly ridiculous verses about the noble journey of bread the entire way.
⠀
By the time they reached Henrik's narrow apartment above the cobbler's shop, the procession had grown to nearly thirty people, drawn by curiosity and the simple, infectious pull of watching something joyful happen in a District that didn't get much of that particular currency freely. Henrik himself, ancient and startled, opened his door to find an entire crowd assembled on his doorstep, Bethuel at the front of it, bowing low with the loaf extended in both hands like an offering to visiting royalty.
⠀
"Good sir Henrik! Word has reached us of your plight, and we, your neighbors, could not in good conscience allow so noble a man to go without his bread!"
⠀
Henrik, who had lived in the same building for forty-one years and had never once, in all that time, seen more than three of his neighbors gathered in one place at once, took the loaf with hands that shook, and looked out at the assembled crowd, and did not, for several long seconds, say anything at all.
⠀
"...Thank you," he finally managed, voice thick. "I don't- ...I haven't had this many people in my doorway since my wife's funeral. It's a bit much, all at once."
⠀
"Then let it be a bit much in the good direction, for once," Bethuel said, gently, all the theatrical flourish dropping out of his voice for just a moment, replaced by something simpler and considerably more sincere. "The world gives us enough reasons to gather for grief, Sir Henrik. Seemed high time somebody gave you a reason to gather for something else."
⠀
The old man laughed, gleeful and surprised, and the crowd laughed with him, and somewhere in the middle of that laughter, Bethuel felt the familiar, warm tingle spread across his left palm.
⠀
He glanced down at it later, once the crowd had dispersed and he was walking home alone in the fading evening light, and found the number sitting there considerably higher than he'd expected for something so small, so ordinary, so entirely unremarkable by the standards of a game built for Fixers and monsters.
⠀
"Sixty-two," he murmured to himself, turning his palm over to catch the last of the sunset. "Well. Fancy that."
⠀
He didn't know, walking home that evening, that a very different sort of number had climbed on a very different palm three blocks away that same afternoon, born out of an entirely different kind of gathering. He wouldn't learn of Henrique's compliance audit, or the elderly woman weeping on the bank steps, or the young man who hadn't survived the night, for several more days yet.
⠀
When he did learn of it, considerably later in the month than either of them would have liked, it would matter to him a great deal more than either of them could have guessed sitting in that sewer room, three strangers among seven, none of them yet understanding what the others meant when they said the word Euphoria out loud.
⠀
4th District, Null Post Field Office — Day 3, Late Evening
⠀
Gieffrin Melisanbeque kept his office the way he kept everything else in his life: precise, uncluttered, and arranged entirely around the assumption that he might need to leave it permanently within the next thirty seconds. A single desk. A single chair. A katana mounted on the wall behind him in a plain wooden rack, its faint, ARCH-born glow dimmed to a low, watchful pulse in the evening dark.
⠀
Spread across the desk in front of him were seven sheets of paper, each one labeled with a name.
⠀
King "Smoke Shot" McGee. Guy Bertillon. Henrique D'Souza. Bethuel Mac Findlaech. Aristio Newbeck. Yisheng Wu.
⠀
He'd left his own name off the arrangement, on principle. A man couldn't properly study a system from inside it, not without accounting for his own presence skewing the results, and Gieffrin had built his entire career as a Null Post Fixer around the discipline of studying systems from just outside their edges, close enough to touch, far enough to remain unaffected.
⠀
"Sixty-two points from bread," he said, quietly, to the empty room, tapping Bethuel's sheet with one finger. "Forty-one from balloons. Nine from an entire District's financial collapse." He sat back in his chair, considering the numbers with the flat, unhurried patience of a man assembling a puzzle whose picture he already half-suspected. "Interesting. The letter said number of people affected. It didn't say anything about the intensity mattering more than the sincerity behind it."
⠀
A knock at the door interrupted him before he could finish the thought. He didn't look up.
⠀
"It's open."
⠀
The door creaked inward, and a young courier, barely more than a boy, stepped inside, clutching a Null Post dispatch satchel to his chest like it might try to escape. "Sir. Message came in through the usual channel. Said it was for you specifically, sir, not the Post."
⠀
Gieffrin held out one hand without looking up from his papers, and the courier deposited a small, sealed envelope into it, maroon parchment, a comedy mask insignia pressed into the wax.
⠀
"That'll be all," Gieffrin said, and the courier fled the room with considerably more speed than he'd entered it.
⠀
Gieffrin turned the envelope over once in his hands before opening it, unhurried, and read the single line printed inside with no more visible reaction than he'd shown examining his colleagues' point totals a moment earlier.
⠀
First Task: Find something in this Ring that a stranger would call worthless, and make someone love it. You have three days.
⠀
He set the letter down on the desk beside the others, and, for a long moment, simply sat with it, turning the phrase over in his mind the same careful way he'd turned over the numbers.
⠀
Worthless, he thought. That's an interesting word choice, for someone claiming not to lie.
⠀
He thought, briefly and without any particular warmth, of a district he hadn't set foot in for the better part of a decade, and a man he'd once called something close to a mentor, before that mentor had made the mistake of trying to see past the calm, unbothered surface Gieffrin presented to the entire world and found, underneath it, something he hadn't much cared for. Gieffrin had left that district, and that mentor, and never looked back, and had built, in the years since, a reputation as a Fixer capable of solving nearly any assignment handed to him with the same cold, surgical efficiency, regardless of what the assignment actually required of the people caught up in it.
⠀
He wondered, not for the first time since that sewer room, what exactly the Overseer thought he saw in him. Talent for Euphoria, the letter had claimed. Gieffrin, if pressed, would have struggled to name a single moment in the last ten years where he'd felt anything close to the word.
⠀
He picked up his pen, and beside his own blank sheet of paper, the one he'd left off his earlier arrangement entirely, he wrote a single word.
⠀
Task.
⠀
Then, beneath it, in smaller, more deliberate handwriting: Something worthless. Someone to love it.
⠀
He didn't yet know what that would look like, three days from now. He suspected, with the same cold clarity he brought to everything else, that when he found the answer, it would tell him a great deal more about himself than it told him about anyone else playing this particular game, and he found, turning that thought over one more time before finally rising to bank the room's single lamp for the night, that the prospect unsettled him more than he was willing, even alone in an empty office, to fully admit.
⠀
5th District, The Ashwell Underpass — Day 4, 2:00 AM
⠀
Aristio Newbeck had chosen the Ashwell Underpass for the same reason he chose most things: it was cheap, it was quiet, and nobody who mattered would think to look for him there.
⠀
He sat on an overturned crate at the mouth of the tunnel, cigarette burning low between two fingers, watching a small crowd of 5th District regulars gather around a chalk circle scratched into the concrete, the same circle he'd been drawing and redrawing for six years, long before any letter or any Overseer had given his particular hobby a name that fit inside a rulebook.
⠀
"Alright, alright, settle down," he called out, unhurried, to the assembled crowd. "Same rules as always. Two in the circle. Whoever's still standin' when the other one quits wins the pot. Anybody dies, that's on them, not me, and I keep their entry fee out of respect for the effort."
⠀
A ripple of laughter went through the crowd, dark and familiar, the kind of laughter that only worked on people who'd already made their peace with exactly how ugly the world around them had gotten.
⠀
Aristio didn't run these fights for money, not really, though the money helped keep the lights on in whatever hole he was currently calling home. He ran them because he'd learned a long time ago, the hard way, that there was a particular kind of joy that only showed up on the other side of real, immediate danger, a joy that couldn't be faked or bought or delivered gently, the kind of joy that lived in the exact, narrow space between I might not survive this and I did.
⠀
He watched the two fighters circle each other in the chalk ring, watched the crowd lean in, breath held, and felt, distantly, the familiar warmth spread across his own palm as the fight found its rhythm.
⠀
Number of people affected, he thought, tapping ash off his cigarette. Longevity of the happiness created. He didn't know if a crowd's shared, screaming relief when a fight ended without a death counted as happiness by whatever standard the Overseer was using to grade this thing, but his palm had been climbing steadily for two nights running, and Aristio had never once in his life questioned a method that was visibly, measurably working.
⠀
The fight ended the way most of them did, one man dropping to a knee, hand raised in surrender, the crowd erupting into a raw, ragged cheer of relief that had absolutely nothing polite or pretty about it and everything real. Aristio watched both fighters get helped up, watched the winner get clapped on the back by a dozen hands at once, watched the loser get handed a bottle by the same crowd that had just been screaming for him to fall, and allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
⠀
This is what people don't get about Euphoria, he thought, lighting a second cigarette off the first. It ain't always pretty. Sometimes it's just relief wearin' a joy costume, and relief's gotta come from somewhere first. You gotta scare people a little, before you can let 'em feel good about not bein' scared no more.
⠀
He'd have said as much, if Yisheng had been there to hear it, or Gieffrin, or any of the others who seemed determined to overthink a concept that had never struck Aristio as particularly complicated. He'd been chasing this exact feeling his whole adult life, long before he'd ever heard the word Euphoria attached to a game with rules and points and a mysterious letter-writer hiding somewhere behind it all. The letter had simply given his existing appetite a scoreboard.
⠀
It was somewhere around his third cigarette of the night, watching the next pair of fighters step into the chalk circle, that Aristio noticed something was wrong.
⠀
It wasn't much. A faint, unfamiliar heaviness settling into his chest; it didn't come from smoke or exhaustion or the cold night air blowing through the underpass. He set the cigarette down, unfinished, and flexed his left hand, watching the glowing number there flicker, just slightly, dimmer than it had been a moment before, before settling back to normal.
⠀
Huh, he thought, frowning down at his own palm. That's new.
⠀
He didn't mention it to anyone. There wasn't anyone around worth mentioning it to, not at two in the morning in the underpass, and Aristio had long ago developed the habit of keeping his own small, private worries exactly that: small, and private, and easily drowned out by the next lit cigarette. He told himself it was nothing. Exhaustion, probably. A month was a long game, and he'd barely slept since the letter arrived.
⠀
He didn't yet know the name for what he'd just felt, that brief, cold flicker beneath his ribs. Nobody playing this particular game knew that name yet, not even the one among them who'd eventually give voice to it. But somewhere in the back of Aristio's mind, in a place he wasn't in the habit of examining too closely, a small, unfamiliar doubt had lodged itself, quiet and patient, waiting for its moment to grow.
⠀
He lit a fourth cigarette instead of thinking about it further, and turned his attention back to the fight.
⠀
1st District, Stellaire — Yisheng Wu's Private Dining Room — Day 4, 8:00 PM
⠀
Reservations at Stellaire ran, on a good week, upward of thirty million Nanum for a party of four, a number that had never once, in the restaurant's eleven-year history, deterred a single member of the Ring's upper crust from securing a table. Tonight, the entire dining room had been cleared for a single, private party of six, and not one of the six guests currently seated at Yisheng Wu's table had paid anything at all to be there.
⠀
They hadn't chosen to be there, strictly speaking, either. Yisheng found that detail, when he considered it, rather beside the point.
⠀
"Course the first," he announced, gliding out from the kitchen with a lacquered tray balanced on one upturned palm, his chef's whites immaculate, his dark eyes catching the low, warm candlelight in a way that made more than one of his six guests shift uncomfortably in their seats. "A small study in contrasts, if you'll permit the indulgence."
⠀
He set six plates down in front of six very wealthy, very frightened members of the Vitalität Coalition's board of directors, each plate holding a single, perfect, glistening morsel arranged atop a bed of foraged greens and a delicate reduction the color of old wine.
⠀
"I don't— " the eldest of the six, a heavyset man with a signet ring on every finger, stared down at his plate with the particular horror of a man who suspected, quite correctly, that he did not want to know what he was looking at. "What is this?"
⠀
"A question best left unasked, and best answered, regardless, once you've tasted it," Yisheng said, smiling with a warmth that did nothing at all to make the smile less unsettling. "I find that the mind resists what the tongue has already decided to love. Please. Indulge me."
⠀
Nobody at the table moved to pick up a fork.
⠀
"You will eat," Yisheng said, and something in his voice, quiet and pleasant as it remained, made all six of them reach for their utensils at once, hands shaking, expressions caught somewhere between revulsion and a compulsion none of them seemed able to name or resist.
⠀
The eldest board member took the first bite, and Yisheng watched, delighted, as his face went through an entire, silent symphony of emotion: horror, then confusion, then, unmistakably, a slow, dawning, helpless pleasure that seemed to disgust him even as it visibly overtook him.
⠀
"That's..." the man said, voice unsteady, staring down at the empty plate in front of him like it had betrayed him personally. "That's the single finest thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. What did you—"
⠀
"Ah, ah." Yisheng raised one finger, still smiling. "A magician never explains the trick, and a chef never explains the dish. Only the experience matters." He looked around at the rest of the table, at five more forks slowly, helplessly rising to meet five more plates. "Isn't that, in the end, the truest flavor of Euphoria there is? The moment joy arrives before you've had the chance to decide whether you're allowed to feel it?"
⠀
He didn't tell them where he'd sourced the evening's ingredients, or why he'd specifically requested this particular six names for this particular dinner, six men whose bank had, by complete coincidence, Yisheng found entirely delicious in its own right, spent the last several days at the center of a certain compliance audit's fallout three floors below their own boardroom. He didn't tell them, either, that his own left palm had begun to glow, bright and steady, the moment the first bite crossed the eldest man's lips, climbing steadily higher with every fresh wave of confused, helpless pleasure that crossed each subsequent face at the table.
⠀
He simply watched, delighted, as six of the most powerful men in the 3rd District finished plate after plate of a meal none of them would ever be able to fully explain to themselves afterward, laughing softly to himself between courses, carving the evening's final garnish, a single apple, into the shape of a perfect, blooming rose, without once looking down at his own hands to guide the blade.
⠀
Watching people break, real slow, Guy had called it, back in that sewer room, in a tone that suggested he expected it to be an insult. Yisheng had found the description, at the time, rather flattering. He found it more flattering still now, watching the color drain from the eldest board member's face as the true weight of what he'd just eaten, and enjoyed, and asked for seconds of, finally began to settle in behind his eyes.
⠀
"You'll want to leave quietly, once you're finished," Yisheng said, gently, gathering the last of the plates himself rather than summoning a server. "I find confessions taste considerably worse on an empty stomach, and considerably better once the meal that inspired them has had time to properly settle."
⠀
He hummed softly to himself as he carried the plates back toward the kitchen, the number on his palm settling into a steady, satisfied glow behind him, and did not once look back at the table he'd left in ruins.
⠀
? ? ?— Within "Sevenfold Burden" Barony — Day 5, Dawn
⠀
There was no name attached to the vantage point from which the numbers were being watched, no fixed District, no Coalition banner, nothing at all that would have let any of the seven players currently scattered across the Ring identify the room, if it could even be called a room, from which their palms were being read.
⠀
There was only a table, and on the table, seven small, glowing lights, each one a different color, each one flickering upward and downward in slow, uneven rhythms as its corresponding player, miles and Districts away, made their small and large choices about what, exactly, they believed Euphoria to mean.
⠀
A hand, pale and unhurried, moved across the table, adjusting the lights with the same idle patience of a gardener checking on seedlings that had only just begun to show real growth.
⠀
"Seven candidates," a voice said, quiet, amused, entirely alone in whatever space it occupied. "Seven very different definitions of the same word. How wonderfully, predictably human of all of you."
⠀
The hand paused over the flickering violet light that represented Aristio Newbeck, noting, with something that might have been curiosity, the faint, momentary dimming that had occurred at two in the morning in the Ashwell Underpass, a dimming none of the other six lights had yet shown.
⠀
"There it is," the voice murmured. "Right on schedule. I did wonder which of you would feel it first."
⠀
The hand withdrew, folding itself out of view, and the table's seven lights continued their slow, uneven flicker, unwatched now, at least for the moment, though not entirely unmonitored, as somewhere far below, in a modest, sun-faded manor in the 3rd District, an entirely new letter began, slowly and silently, to take shape on Bethuel Mac Findlaech's bed, its maroon parchment catching the first gray light of a new day.
⠀
He would find it there in a few hours, when he woke, and would read, with rather more confusion than anyone else opening a letter that morning, a single instruction that made no sense to a man who'd never once, in his entire ordinary life, held anything resembling a weapon.
⠀
Second Task: Take something from someone who does not want to give it, and give them something better in return. You have five days.
⠀
He would sit with that letter for a long while, turning it over in his hands, and would not, for several hours yet, understand that five Districts away, in a bank office still smelling faintly of ink and unspent guilt, Henrique D'Souza was reading the exact same words, and smiling, for entirely different reasons, at exactly the kind of task he'd been waiting his whole adult life for someone to finally hand him permission to complete.
⠀
6th District, Scrapline Depot — Day 6, Dusk
⠀
Gieffrin had spent three days doing something he generally tried to avoid: asking questions he didn't already know the answer to.
⠀
It had taken him most of the first day just to settle on a definition of the word worthless that didn't feel like cheating. Money was worthless to plenty of people who had too much of it, which felt like an easy, hollow answer unworthy of the effort. A weapon was worthless to someone who'd never need to use it, which felt closer to honest but still too abstract to build a task around. He'd walked the better part of the Ring's outer Districts over those three days with that single word turning over and over in his mind, watching, listening, cataloguing, the same cold, patient discipline he brought to every Null Post assignment he'd ever been handed, until he found himself, on the evening of the second day, standing in the middle of the Scrapline Depot, staring down at a small, broken shape half-buried in a bin of condemned Post equipment awaiting the melt.
⠀
It was a relay drone. A small, birdlike thing, barely larger than his own two fists cupped together, its once-bright copper plating gone dull and pitted, one wing bent at an angle no amount of careful hammering would ever fully straighten again. A model retired from active service a decade earlier, back when Posts still ran physical message relays between Districts too far apart for a Sub-Train line to reach efficiently, long since replaced by faster, cleaner systems that didn't require winding a spring or replacing a cracked lens every few months.
⠀
"That one's scrap," the depot worker told him, not unkindly, when Gieffrin lifted it carefully out of the bin. "Been sittin' in that bin two years now. Nobody's got parts for those old birds anymore, and nobody's got the patience to fix one even if they did."
⠀
"I'll take it anyway," Gieffrin said, and paid the man three times what the depot worker asked for, mostly because the man looked too startled by the offer to think to raise the price himself.
⠀
He spent the better part of that night in his own office repairing it, an exercise in patience that had almost nothing to do with mechanical aptitude and almost everything to do with a stubborn, quiet refusal to admit defeat on a task he'd assigned, in some sense, to himself as much as to the Overseer's letter. By the time dawn broke on the third day, the little drone's wing sat straight again, its lens replaced with one scavenged from an entirely different piece of obsolete equipment, its small clockwork heart ticking over, slow and steady, for the first time in over two years.
⠀
The harder question, the one that had actually taken him three full days to answer, was who.
⠀
He found the answer, in the end, at a modest row house on the edge of the 6th District, home to a retired Null Post relay handler named Otsdal, seventy-one years old, who had spent forty years of his working life training exactly the kind of drone now sitting, repaired, in the inside pocket of Gieffrin's coat.
⠀
"Mr. Otsdal." Gieffrin had never been especially good at social calls, and the stiffness in his own voice made that plain the moment the old man opened his door. "You don't know me. I trained under a handler who trained under you, a long time before either of us met. I understand you retired without ever getting a proper send-off from the Post."
⠀
Otsdal squinted at him, wary in the particular way old men got wary of unannounced visitors who claimed a connection they couldn't immediately verify. "That's true enough. Post doesn't much bother with send-offs for handlers, not once your birds get replaced by somethin' faster." A pause, his eyes dropping, almost against his will, to the shape of Gieffrin's coat pocket. "...That a bird you're carryin'?"
⠀
Gieffrin drew the little relay drone out and held it up, and watched, with the same careful, analytical attention he brought to everything else, as Otsdal's entire face changed.
⠀
"That's a Type-Nine," the old man breathed, reaching out with hands that had gone suddenly, visibly unsteady. "I haven't seen a working Type-Nine in... Lord, must be fifteen years now. Where in the Ring did you find one still in service?"
⠀
"It wasn't in service," Gieffrin said. "It was two days from the melt."
⠀
Otsdal took the drone with a reverence that made Gieffrin, standing there in the doorway, feel something he wasn't in the habit of examining too closely, a small, uncomfortable warmth somewhere beneath his own carefully maintained calm.
⠀
"You fixed her yourself?"
⠀
"I did."
⠀
"The wing's crooked."
⠀
"Less crooked than it was."
⠀
Otsdal laughed, cradling the little drone against his chest like something considerably more alive than a decade-old piece of obsolete machinery had any right to feel. "You know, son, I used to tell my handlers, every single one of 'em, that a bird like this one was worth more than any fifty of the fast, shiny replacements the Post kept tryin' to push on us. Nobody ever believed me. Everybody just wanted the fast thing. The efficient thing." He looked up at Gieffrin, eyes wet now in a way the old man didn't seem inclined to hide. "Nobody in forty years ever brought one back to me like this. Not once."
⠀
Gieffrin's left palm, resting loosely at his side, had begun to glow, climbing slow and steady in a way that felt, to his own considerable surprise, entirely unlike the cold, clinical satisfaction he'd expected to feel completing an assignment.
⠀
"I'll leave you to it, then," he said, turning to go, uncomfortable, for reasons he couldn't immediately name, with staying to watch any longer.
⠀
"Wait." Otsdal's voice stopped him at the edge of the step. "What's your name, son? I'd like to know who to thank, next time I've got somebody worth tellin' this story to."
⠀
Gieffrin hesitated, longer than the question strictly warranted.
⠀
"Gieffrin," he said, finally. "Gieffrin Melisanbeque."
⠀
"Melisanbeque." Otsdal turned the name over slowly, frowning slightly, as though searching for something in it he couldn't quite place. "...You know, that's a funny thing. I trained a boy once, years and years back, who worked under a swordsman with a name close enough to that, I always used to wonder if they were kin. Never did find out. He didn't stick around long enough for me to ask him properly."
⠀
"A common enough name, I'm sure," Gieffrin said, and left before the old man could press the point any further, walking back down the row house's narrow steps with his palm still glowing, warmer than he'd expected, and a small, unfamiliar knot sitting somewhere behind his ribs that had nothing at all to do with the number climbing across his skin.
⠀
He didn't look back at the house. He told himself, all the way back to the Null Post field office, that the old man's half-remembered story meant nothing at all, was simply the kind of coincidence that surfaced in any city old enough to have this many names circulating through it more than once.
⠀
He almost believed it, by the time he reached his own front door.
⠀
5th District, The Ashwell Underpass — Day 6, Night
⠀
Aristio had upped the stakes twice since the first night King's balloons had lit up the sky, and both times, he'd told himself it was purely in the interest of research.
⠀
Tonight's chalk circle was bigger, and the crowd around it considerably larger, drawn in by three nights of steadily building word-of-mouth about the fights happening under the Ashwell overpass, and the two men currently circling each other inside it were carrying real blades instead of bare fists, a step up Aristio hadn't sanctioned lightly, and had only agreed to once both fighters swore, in front of the whole assembled crowd, that they understood exactly what they were volunteering for.
⠀
He watched the fight with his usual half-lidded, unhurried attention, cigarette burning low, one eye on the fighters and one eye, more discreetly, on his own left palm.
⠀
The dimming had come back twice more since that first night, each time a little sharper, a little more noticeable, a cold, hollow flicker running through his chest like a held breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He'd started keeping track, quietly, in a small notebook he didn't show to anyone: how long since his last fight, how high the last fight's payout had climbed, how long the glow held steady afterward before the dimming crept back in.
⠀
Doesn't hold as long as it used to, he'd written, two nights back, in handwriting considerably less steady than his usual careless scrawl. Bigger fights buy more time between dips. Smaller ones barely buy anything at all anymore.
⠀
"You keep starin' at your own hand like it owes you money," a voice said from just behind his shoulder, smooth and amused, "you're gonna miss the actual fight."
⠀
Aristio didn't need to turn around to know who it was. He'd caught the smell of expensive cooking oil and something faintly, unsettlingly sweet drifting through the underpass a full minute before Yisheng Wu settled onto the crate beside him, immaculate chef's whites looking entirely, deliberately out of place against the Ashwell's rust and concrete.
⠀
"Didn't figure you for the type to slum it down here, Wu."
⠀
"I go where the appetite takes me." Yisheng's dark eyes tracked the fight with real, undisguised interest, watching the crowd's reaction more closely than the blades themselves. "I find crowds like this one fascinating. All that fear, all that hope, all wound up together so tightly nobody down here could tell you where one ends and the other begins, if you asked them plainly. It's rather like cooking with two ingredients that shouldn't work together, and somehow do." He glanced sideways at Aristio, something knowing in his expression. "You've noticed it too, haven't you? The dimming."
⠀
Aristio's cigarette paused halfway to his lips. "How the hell would you know about that?"
⠀
"Because it's happened to me as well," Yisheng said, mild and unbothered, as if discussing nothing more consequential than a recipe that hadn't quite come together. "Three nights ago. A small, cold flicker, right in the middle of what I promise you was an extraordinarily successful evening. I'd assumed, at first, it was simple exhaustion. I've since revised that assumption."
⠀
"Revised it to what?"
⠀
"I don't know yet." Yisheng's smile didn't waver, but something behind his eyes went, for just a moment, genuinely thoughtful rather than performatively pleasant. "But I've begun to suspect our generous, anonymous host left rather more out of that letter than he put into it. 'Don't slack off,' he wrote, if I recall correctly. I wonder now if that was less an encouragement, and rather more of a warning."
⠀
Aristio was quiet for a long moment, watching the fight below reach its close, one fighter dropping his blade, the crowd's fear cresting and breaking into the same raw, ragged relief he'd been chasing for years now, entirely on his own, long before any letter had shown up to put a price on it.
⠀
"You scared?" he asked, finally, not quite looking at Yisheng when he said it.
⠀
"Scared isn't quite the word I'd choose." Yisheng rose from the crate, brushing an invisible speck of dust from his immaculate sleeve, already turning to leave the way he'd come. "Curious, perhaps. I find I rather enjoy discovering the true shape of a thing I've already decided to love, however uncomfortable that discovery turns out to be along the way." He paused, glancing back over his shoulder, the low firelight from a nearby oil drum catching the edge of his smile. "You might consider doing the same, Mr. Newbeck, before it decides to introduce itself to you on its own terms instead of yours."
⠀
He was gone into the dark before Aristio could think of anything worth saying back, leaving him alone with his cigarette, his notebook, and a small, cold knot behind his ribs that no amount of chalk circles or borrowed blades had quite managed to burn all the way out.
⠀
3rd District, Cobbleworth Row — Day 8, Evening
⠀
Bethuel had spent five days trying to figure out how, exactly, an ordinary man with no combat training and no ARCH contract was supposed to complete a task that read, on its face, like an instruction manual for theft.
⠀
Take something from someone who does not want to give it, and give them something better in return.
⠀
He'd turned the phrase over a hundred different ways since the letter first appeared on his bed, trying, failing, and trying again, to find some gentle, bloodless interpretation of it that didn't require him to become, even briefly, the kind of man who took things from people against their will. He'd finally settled, on the morning of the fifth day, on an answer that felt, if not entirely comfortable, at least honest to who he actually was: he would take grief from someone unwilling to set it down, and give them, in exchange, a reason to laugh instead.
⠀
He hadn't expected, walking toward Old Henrik's building with that plan half-formed in his mind, to find Henrique D'Souza already standing on the sidewalk outside it, flanked by two junior Vitalität enforcers, a folder of paperwork tucked under one arm.
⠀
"Ah," Bethuel said, stopping short. "You're not, perchance, also engaged in the Overseer's second little errand, are you, good sir?"
⠀
Henrique regarded him with the flat, assessing look of a man recalculating an equation he'd assumed was already solved. "Mac Findlaech. I wondered when our paths might cross. Yes, as it happens. This building's residents are three months behind on a debt-consolidation fee levied by the Vitalität, a fee I intend to collect from Mr. Henrik personally, this evening, regardless of his willingness to pay it." A thin, humorless smile. "Taking something from someone who doesn't wish to give it. I imagine the Overseer would find the letter of his own task rather thoroughly satisfied."
⠀
"And the something better you intend to give him in return?" Bethuel asked, already knowing, with a sick, sinking certainty, exactly what the answer would be.
⠀
"The relief of a settled account," Henrique said, without a flicker of shame. "Debt is its own kind of grief, Mr. Findlaech. I intend to remove it. Whether Mr. Henrik enjoys the process by which I do so is, regrettably, beside the point."
⠀
"That is not relief," Bethuel said, and found, to his own considerable surprise, that all the flowery, theatrical language he usually wrapped around himself like a favorite coat had entirely dropped away, leaving something plainer and considerably angrier underneath it. "That is cruelty wearing a ledger's clothing, sir, and you know it full well!"
⠀
"I know a great many things," Henrique said, unbothered. "I know, for instance, that your own point total currently outpaces mine by a considerable margin, despite my having spent six years perfecting an instrument you only discovered three days ago by handing out bread. I find that discrepancy rather instructive. It suggests our anonymous Overseer values sincerity over scale, which is a foolish metric to build an entire game around, but not one I intend to argue with while it still happens to favor whichever of us can generate the loudest, purest version of it." He gestured toward the door. "Step aside, or don't. Either way, I have an account to settle."
⠀
Bethuel did not step aside.
⠀
"Then I suppose," he said, drawing himself up to his full, unimpressive height, "we shall simply have to see whose version of Euphoria this particular doorway prefers."
⠀
He had no blade. He had no ARCH contract, no Fixer's training, nothing at all to offer against two armed enforcers and a man whose entire career had been built on making other people's suffering into an efficient, well-documented line item. What he had, instead, was a small crowd of Cobbleworth Row neighbors who'd noticed the commotion and begun to gather at a wary distance, and Old Henrik himself, appearing in his own doorway at the sound of raised voices, leaning heavily on a cane he hadn't needed indoors a moment earlier.
⠀
"What's all this, then?" Henrik asked, squinting between the two of them.
⠀
"Nothing that need concern you tonight, Mr. Henrik," Henrique said smoothly, stepping forward with his folder already open. "Simply a matter of an overdue account, which I'm here to resolve."
⠀
"He means to take your home, good Henrik, and call the taking a kindness!" Bethuel called out, loud enough for the gathering crowd to hear clearly. "I say we give him a different sort of kindness in return! A gift he cannot so easily balance against his ledgers!"
⠀
He didn't entirely know, saying it, what that gift was supposed to look like. But the crowd behind him, thirty strong now and growing, people who'd walked with him days earlier to deliver a single loaf of bread, who remembered exactly what that afternoon had felt like against the backdrop of everything the 3rd District usually offered them, began, slowly, to close ranks around Henrik's doorway, not with weapons, not with violence, simply with numbers, and with the particular, immovable stubbornness of people who had decided, all at once, that tonight was not going to end the way Henrique had planned for it to.
⠀
Henrique looked out at the gathered crowd, at thirty faces that had, days earlier, laughed at a fool juggling bread and reciting terrible poetry, and found, for the first time since the letter had arrived in that sewer room, an equation in front of him that his usual instruments weren't built to solve.
⠀
"This won't stop the debt from existing," he said, quiet, controlled, though something in his voice had gone considerably tighter than it had been a moment earlier. "You're simply delaying an outcome that's already been decided."
⠀
"Perhaps," Bethuel said. "Or perhaps, good sir, you are about to discover that some ledgers simply refuse to balance the way you expect them to, once enough people decide, together, that they'd rather not let them."
⠀
Neither man moved. The crowd held its ground, and Henrique, after a long, silent moment spent weighing an outcome his ledgers had never once accounted for, folded his papers closed, turned on his heel without another word, and walked back the way he'd come, his two enforcers trailing uncertainly behind him.
⠀
The crowd's cheer, when it came, was loud enough to rattle the windows of every shopfront on Cobbleworth Row.
⠀
Bethuel's palm, held aloft in the middle of it all, lit up brighter than it ever had before, the number climbing so fast he barely had time to watch it happen. Three streets away, in a bank office gone very quiet and very still, Henrique D'Souza stared down at his own palm, and watched, with cold, clinical fury, as the number there did not move at all.
⠀
"Interesting," he said, to the empty room, in a voice gone considerably flatter than usual. "It would appear cruelty has its own diminishing returns, once enough witnesses decide to make the outcome inconvenient." He set the folder down on his desk, very deliberately, and did not, for a long while afterward, pick it back up. "I'll simply have to find a debtor with rather fewer neighbors, next time."
⠀
FLAVOR OF EUPHORIA — RESONANCE UPDATE Day 8, Midnight
⠀
King "Smoke Shot" McGee — 58 Points
Guy Bertillon — 19 Points
Henrique D'Souza — 12 Points
Bethuel Mac Findlaech — 141 Points
Gieffrin Melisanbeque — 37 Points
Aristio Newbeck — 44 Points
Yisheng Wu — 61 Points
⠀
Eight days gone, twenty-two left on the letter's clock, and seven very different people had already begun to learn seven very different lessons about the word Euphoria, none of which matched the tidy little definition any of them had walked into that sewer room believing in. Somewhere beneath all seven of their glowing palms, patient and unhurried, something colder than any of them had yet given a name to had already begun, quietly, to keep score of its own.
⠀
END OF PART ONE