The meeting room had no windows.
That was intentional.
Maps covered the walls instead. Not decorative ones. Working maps, layered with moving sigils and faintly glowing lines that shifted every few seconds. Each line represented a relay route. Each flicker meant delay. Each blank space meant silence.
There were more blank spaces than yesterday.
I stood near the back, hands folded, doing what I did best. Watching. Listening. Not volunteering information unless asked. The kind of habit that never really leaves you once you learn how dangerous attention can be.
Magistrate Halvek spoke first, because of course he did.
"Relay City remains operational," he said, voice calm and precise. "But outer channels are unstable. We are receiving fragmented transmissions at best."
Someone interrupted. A woman in military blue. "That's a polite way of saying we're blind."
Halvek nodded once. "Yes."
No outrage. No shouting. Just grim acceptance.
The empire had contingencies for invasion, famine, rebellion. It did not have a clean plan for not knowing.
"That makes three border regions without confirmation," another official said. "Four if we count the northern trade corridor."
My fingers twitched.
I raised my hand.
The room stilled.
Halvek glanced at me. "Go on."
"The northern corridor shouldn't be counted yet," I said. "Their relay lag matches atmospheric interference patterns recorded during the spring storms. The silence beyond the eastern ridges doesn't."
A few heads turned. Not hostile. Curious.
"Meaning?" the woman in blue asked.
"Meaning the problem isn't spreading evenly," I replied. "It's clustering."
Virex, perched invisibly on my shoulder for everyone else's sake, murmured, "And clustering is never natural."
Halvek gestured for me to continue.
"The relay network assumes disruption behaves like weather," I said. "But this behaves like attention. Something is interfering selectively."
Silence followed.
Then someone asked the wrong question. "So where will it happen next?"
I shook my head. "That's the wrong way to look at it."
Halvek frowned. "Explain."
"It already happened," I said. "We're just waiting for confirmation."
That landed.
A low murmur rippled through the room.
Elira stood against the far wall, arms crossed. She wasn't surprised. She looked… resigned. Like she'd already crossed this conclusion hours ago and hated that I'd caught up.
"Beyond Relay City," I continued, "there are regions the empire hasn't mapped properly in decades. Not because they're dangerous. Because they're inconvenient."
A map shifted. The western expanse glowed faintly.
Forests. Ruins. Old borders that no longer meant anything.
"The farther you go from structured magic use," I said, "the less predictable interference becomes. If something wanted to avoid detection, that's where it would sit."
The woman in blue leaned forward. "You're suggesting whatever caused the calamity is beyond the relay grid."
"Yes."
"And that we can't see it."
"Yes."
Her jaw tightened. "Then what good is this city?"
Virex answered before I could stop him, his voice audible only to me. "Damage control."
Halvek exhaled slowly. "We need confirmation."
"You won't get it from the towers," I said. "Not safely."
The implication hung heavy.
After the meeting dissolved, the corridors filled with quiet urgency. Orders passed in hushed tones. Couriers moved faster. Guards doubled.
Relay City was pretending it still had control.
Elira caught up to me near the inner stairwell.
"You shouldn't have said that out loud," she said.
"I know."
"They're going to push harder now."
"I know."
She stopped walking. "Then why do it?"
I met her gaze. "Because if I don't say it, someone else will. And they won't care who gets crushed when the system snaps."
She studied me for a long moment.
"You're changing," she said.
"I'm adapting," I replied.
Virex chuckled softly. "Same thing. Different survival rate."
Later that evening, I stood on one of the lower balconies, watching the relay towers pulse weakly against the darkening sky. Beyond the city walls, the land stretched out, vast and unlit.
No signals. No reassurance.
Just distance.
"What's out there?" I asked quietly.
Virex appeared beside me, fully visible now. He sat, tail wrapped neatly around his paws.
"Old routes," he said. "Abandoned watchposts. Places the empire decided weren't worth the cost."
"And now?"
"And now," he replied, "they're realizing the cost of not looking."
I thought of the missing expeditions. Of the silence. Of the thing that had looked back.
Relay City was a knot of light in a growing dark.
And knots, I was learning, attract tension until something gives.