They ordered Japanese food and ate it on Levi's bed while the city went dark outside.
The ambassador's condition came first. "They're torturing him," Levi said, between bites of tonkatsu. "He's conscious but barely. We need him out tonight."
"Midnight," Sylvia said.
"We need Zarraz before midnight. Where is he?"
Nobody knew. He'd been gone since they arrived back at the hotel, and the gap between "probably taking a walk" and "it's been four hours" had shifted into something that warranted a phone call.
They called Melissa.
She called back ten minutes later with news that managed to be both reassuring and inconvenient: Zarraz was in a Levatian hospital with a broken arm, fractured ribs, and a concussion. Car accident. He'd be there overnight.
The three of them sat with this for a moment.
"His task happens after we rescue the ambassador," Levi said. "If he can't move, his task doesn't happen. And if his task doesn't happen—" He stopped. "The execution is tomorrow morning. Whatever we do, it has to happen before that."
"Then we go to him," Priscilla said.
The hospital was twenty minutes away. Zarraz was in a room on the second floor, propped up in a hospital bed with his arm in a temporary cast and the expression of someone who had factored in the possibility of complications and was already working through them.
"The timing is the problem," Levi said, pulling his chair close. "If you can't move until tomorrow, your task and our extraction can't happen simultaneously. And simultaneously was the plan."
"So we change the plan," Zarraz said.
"The execution is at eleven tomorrow morning. Live broadcast, public venue, royal guards." Levi looked at him. "What do you actually need to complete your task?"
"Line of sight," Zarraz said. "Distance. One clear second."
"You can do it injured?"
A pause. "The arm is the non-dominant one."
Levi thought for a moment. Then he looked at Sylvia and Priscilla. "I have a plan."
✦ ✦ ✦
He laid it out carefully, working through the sequence.
"The execution is at the Levatian Embassy — public venue, broadcast setup, the Emperor appears in person to give the order. That's the key detail: he'll be there, visible, in front of cameras." Levi looked at Zarraz. "I can place a marker at the venue tonight, during setup when security is lighter. Tomorrow, I teleport us all to the marker — you, me, Sylvia, Priscilla — in the moment before the execution happens."
"That puts four of us on a live broadcast," Sylvia said.
"For about ten seconds. Long enough for Zarraz to complete his task, for Priscilla to immobilise the executioner and break the ambassador's chains, for me to get everyone out." He paused. "The chaos of the moment is the cover. Nobody will be expecting it. The guards will take a second to process what they're seeing before they move, and we'll be gone before they do."
"And the escape after?" Priscilla asked.
"Zarraz drives. I've already given him Jamal's coordinates. If the city goes into lockdown — which it will — we go to Jamal."
Zarraz was quiet for a moment. He looked at his cast. Then at Levi.
"The marker," he said. "Tonight. Can you place it without being detected?"
"I'll be in and out in under three seconds," said Levi.
Zarraz nodded once. "Then we do it."
They went back to the hotel. Levi set his alarm for two in the morning, slept for four hours, and placed the marker.
Nobody detected him.
✦ ✦ ✦
The morning of the execution, they were ready an hour before the broadcast.
Not ready in the sense of comfortable — ready in the sense of having done what could be done and now waiting for the moment. The hotel room had the particular quality of a space before something irreversible, the air slightly different from the air of ordinary mornings.
Sylvia had a sheet of paper from Zarraz — something he'd prepared, she didn't know exactly what, until she infused her magic energy into it and a magic circle bloomed from the surface. Through it, somewhere across the city, she could feel Zarraz synchronised on the other end.
"He's connected," she said.
"Good." Levi had the marker in his mind — a precise location at the venue's north edge, behind the broadcast setup, close enough to the platform that three seconds of movement would cover the distance. He held the connection, steady.
Priscilla was watching the broadcast feed on her device. "They're setting up. Emperor's motorcade just arrived."
"Tell me when the ambassador is on the platform," Levi said.
They watched.
The Levatian Embassy had been set up for a public address — a wide platform, cameras on three sides, a crowd kept at distance by a rope line and royal guards. The Emperor appeared at eleven o'clock exactly, his wife beside him, flanked by soldiers in dress uniform. He was composed and well-dressed and looked exactly like someone who believed he was in complete control of the situation.
Which he was, until he wasn't.
Levi watched the feed on Priscilla's device and catalogued everything — the platform layout, the guard positions, the sight lines, the distance from his marker to the ambassador.
The Emperor began speaking. Something about sovereignty, about Olympia's disrespect, about making examples. His voice had the measured confidence of someone who had rehearsed this and found it satisfying to deliver.
"Bring out the executioner," he said.
A large man walked onto the platform. Behind him, the ambassador — in chains, unsteady on his feet, but moving under his own power. He looked worse than he had in the dungeon. Whatever the Empress's methods were, she hadn't stopped using them.
"Now," said Priscilla.
Levi connected to the marker.
"Hold on to me," he said.
They did.
He teleported.
—
The venue arrived around them.
Levi had timed the teleportation for the gap between the executioner raising his weapon and the Emperor giving the signal — a window of perhaps three seconds in which all attention was on the platform. They appeared at the north edge of the broadcast setup, behind the camera rigs, and he was moving before the world had fully resolved.
The Emperor felt the shock on his right hand — Levi's marker, pressed there last night in a passing moment — and turned.
The trio were in front of him.
For a fraction of a second, the live feed showed three teenagers materialising from nowhere on the broadcast of an imperial execution, and nobody — not the guards, not the Emperor, not the crowd, not the cameras — was processing it fast enough to act.
That fraction of a second was all Zarraz needed.
From his position outside the venue — a rooftop three hundred metres out, a free-floating magic circle in the air before him, his good hand steady despite everything — he fired once.
The shot was precise.
Emperor Lyon was dead before he fell.
The venue erupted.
—
Priscilla was already moving. She extended her awareness to the executioner — felt his weight, his stance, the force required — and drove a telekinetic impulse into his centre of mass that sent him off the platform in a single controlled shove. He landed hard on the ground below and stayed there.
The chains on the ambassador's wrists: iron, old, the locks standard. She found the stress points and applied force. The chains broke.
She levitated him to where Levi was standing.
The guards reached them in the same moment — six, eight, more coming from the rope line, weapons drawn. Sylvia put herself between them and Levi, fire sword infused, and held the line for the four seconds it took Priscilla to complete the extraction.
"Force field," Levi said.
Priscilla raised it — a bubble around all four of them, the ambassador included. Sylvia layered her fire over the top, the two abilities working together the way Aivlys had shown her, heat and force as one expression rather than two. The guards hit it and found it solid.
"Everyone on me," Levi said. "Now."
They put their hands on him. He found Zarraz's marker — three hundred metres away, rooftop, northwest — and pulled.
The venue disappeared.
✦ ✦ ✦
They came out on a rooftop.
Zarraz was already packing the magic circle away, moving with the careful efficiency of someone working around a broken arm. He looked at the ambassador. Then at the trio.
"Car's in the alley below," he said. "We have about four minutes before they lock down the city."
"Then we move," Levi said.
They moved.
The car was where Zarraz said it would be — a nondescript sedan, keys in, engine cold. He got into the driver's seat without discussion because Levi didn't have a licence and Sylvia's expression when he'd suggested she drive earlier that morning had been unambiguous.
They were two blocks away when the emergency broadcast interrupted every screen in the capital.
"Immediate lockdown. All borders closed. Fugitives wanted in connection with the assassination of Emperor Lyon—"
Their faces appeared on the billboard screen above the intersection.
Levi, Sylvia, and Priscilla.
"Five million each," Priscilla read. "That's—"
"A lot," said Sylvia.
"Wait," said Levi. He looked at the screen. At all four faces listed. At the bounties. "Zarraz doesn't have a bounty."
Everyone looked at Zarraz.
Zarraz drove.
"Zarraz," said Sylvia.
"Driving," said Zarraz.
"How do you not have a bounty?"
"I wasn't on camera."
"You were on a rooftop three hundred metres away," said Levi. "How is that—" He stopped. He thought about Zarraz's ability. The free-floating magic circle, the weapon conjured from it, three hundred metres of distance, one shot. Nobody had seen him. Nobody had identified him. Nobody had even known where to look.
"Seventeen," Levi said quietly.
"Eighteen," said Zarraz.
He drove.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the back seat, Sylvia checked the ambassador.
He was conscious but deteriorating — whatever the Empress had done over three days had accumulated into something that needed a hospital, not a car seat. He was breathing steadily but his colour was wrong and he was tracking poorly.
"He needs medication," Sylvia said.
"We need to get out of the city first," said Zarraz.
"Both," said Levi. He looked at the coordinates on his device. "Jamal's club. They might have something."
"The escape route is there too," said Priscilla.
"Then that's where we go." Levi looked at the city going past the windows — the grid streets, the uniform buildings, the screens carrying the lockdown announcement on a loop. Three million in bounties between them and a wounded ambassador and one exit route through a club they'd visited twice.
He thought: this is the part Melissa said the mission was for. Not the plan, not the intel, not the clean execution. This part — the part where everything is still moving and you have to keep moving with it.
"Zarraz," he said. "You know where you're going?"
"I have the coordinates," Zarraz said.
"Good." Levi looked at the road ahead. "Then let's go."