Verdamona looked around the ruined avenue. Where two hours ago there had been glass and mannequins, now the street was a landscape of twisted steel and columns of smoke. Manhattan near the boutique had bled outward. Sirens screamed in the distance.
A line of police cruisers finally crawled into view. Blue uniforms spilled out and set up barriers. Verdamona watched the officers and realized that they took too long. Houses had their hands in the city administration in subtle, suffocating ways. The boutique might have been only the first domino.
Norphie only sighed.
"The police are late because the attack was planned. Whoever did this wanted maximum spectacle and minimum interference. They knew where the House staff would be, what would fall and how to direct public attention."
"How do you know?" Verdamona asked, not daring to breathe.
Norphie shrugged as if reciting a line from a ledger.
"Because the blast pattern was designed by someone who understands chaos. See the way the explosion ruptured in ripples? That's not an amateur. That's a message. Someone wanted to say: We can take down what you value."
Verdamona's stomach dropped. Someone had targeted a House, not for robbery but for status. Now she understood what Xaessia meant by House politics.
"Who would want to—"
"There are enough enemies with axes to grind. But I suspect it's linked to the same groups that have been destabilizing supply lines and testing the Houses' reach."
A policeman approached, hesitated upon seeing the ruins and the looks of those who did not belong to the general public, and then stepped forward.
"Lady Norphie, are you alright?"
Norphie turned, already slipping into that role that made her so dangerous, with her fashion's face and the operator behind it.
"Yes. I was at the boutique. My assistants—"
"I understand, Lady Norphie. Please, describe what hall and the staff you were with," the officer prompted.
Norphie did so. She listed names, times and the staff roster. Verdamona watched how she moved. She was precise, controlled and utterly competent in the administrative ritual of death. When the officer asked if she had any reason to believe this was targeted at House Phoenicia, Norphie nodded.
"Yes, I do."
The officer took notes. Other emergency teams began to pull survivors, bodies and salvageable evidence from the wreckage all over them. News drones hummed in the wet sky like a cloud of metallic locusts. Within minutes the area had been turned into a blur of officialdom and urgent motion. When the officer left, Norphie turned to Verdamona.
"Go find Xaessia."
"She should be here, right? She left after—"
"She will be looking for trouble. She is doing what she does best. If this was aimed at me, they will look for other high-profile targets. Unfortunately my dear, you are now deep into this situation so welcome to House politics."
"And if I can't find Xaessia?"
"Oh you'll find her. I'll handle this. Tell her to meet me at the police department."
Verdamona left and moved through the rubble. The city around them was a chorus of alarms, phones clambering for signal and people shutting down in panic or running. The boutique's skeleton smoked like a column of grief that would be visible on the skyline for days.
As they passed a shattered window, Verdamona's gaze snagged on a mannequin among the ruin, one that had led Xaessia to the dressing room. The fabric had been burned to lace. She felt a flash of something like shame. It was a small ridiculous thing, but it hurt.
She had always wanted to be the person who fixed things. Maybe she still did but the line between saving and being consumed by the task had never felt so thin.
Now she understood why the Houses were extremely dangerous. In this, the Houses would convene. Accusations would fly. The University and everyone would posture and spin and try to collect advantage from a city in flames. There would be funerals that would be political theater and there would be secrets pried open.
In the back of her skull, the worst thought lay like an ember. Whoever had the capability to do this was not only powerful. They were choosing what they wanted the world to become. They were testing the Houses' responses, mapping who would flinch. She thought of Phaser and his cold words, of how he had told her to stop dying and to stop saving everyone at the cost of herself. He would be furious if he knew she almost did that for Norphie.
------
Verdamona stood at the edge of the collapsed blocks and streets of Manhattan. It wasn't the first time she had seen corpses but something about this.hit her differently.
Her crystalline blue eyes flicked across the chaos. Paramedics screamed for help. Fluxers in uniform tried to clear the debris with bursts of Elemental Ember and telekinetic Psyche control but they were too few. Hundreds of bodies were just there, mangled in forms that didn't even look human anymore. Limbs were twisted. Their expressions were frozen mid-scream as the dust and blood was nearly indistinguishable.
Her instincts screamed at her to move, to run into the rubble, pull out survivors, blast the collapsed metal apart, cradle the dying and whisper something, anything. But then Phaser's voice echoed in her head. He told her this before he left for Egypt for training when he came to take clothes from his hostel.
"You can't save everyone, Verdamona. Stop thinking that you're the world's cure. A hero complex gets you killed and worse, it gets others killed because they'll depend on you."
She clenched her fists. The golden shimmer of Xana began to crawl along her fingertips, wanting to be used, wanting to make things right. She could feel it. It begged her to move but what would she even say to them?
"Sorry for your loss?"
"Let me help?"
"I couldn't stop this but I'll try now?"
Each phrase died before it reached her tongue. What comfort could words give to someone holding the limp body of their child? What salvation could she offer to a mother whose entire family had been buried beneath collapsed towers?
It was too late.
She looked down and saw a little girl's hand reaching out from under a steel beam either bleeding fingers. Verdamona froze. Her stomach twisted violently. She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear the whole city apart to punish whoever did this.
But her voice failed.
Instead, she took a single step back and then another until the distance between her and the wreckage grew enough that she no longer trembled.
"I get it now, Phaser. You were right. I was just pretending to be some kind of hero."
Her breath came out shaky. She had thought being powerful meant protecting people. That saving others was the whole point of strength. But here she was, a ninth-category Fluxer—an Ennèa—watching thousands die in front of her, and she couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Sirens blared. Fluxers shouted orders over comms, trying to organize the chaos. But to Verdamona, it all felt like white noise. She remembered what Phaser once told her after their brutal sparring session, the one that left her coughing blood and him with cracked ribs.
"Strength isn't about saving lives. It's about understanding what it costs to try."
She had rolled her eyes then, calling him cynical and heartless but now, standing in the ruins of what used to be one of Manhattan's districts, she finally understood. All her life she would run headfirst into fights, trying to protect people who didn't even know her name or trying to play the role of savior when she barely understood what she was saving them from.
She wanted to help those being carried by ambulances. She wanted to kneel beside the ones sobbing over broken bodies but now she knew better. If she tried, she would just get in the way. The city had its own systems, its own control and its own way of cleaning up the mess.
She wasn't a hero.
Verdamona's whip coiled itself back to her side, humming faintly with golden Xana. The air around her shimmered with the faint residue of her power, but for once, she didn't feel proud of it.
"Guess they don't need someone like me anyway. I should find Xaessia first. She's probably got her hands full."
Her shoes crunched over broken glass as she walked down the cracked street. Behind her, sirens continued to wail. A medic shouted that they has found survivors. Another yelled that the next building might collapse. Verdamona didn't look back. For the first time in her life, she didn't rush to save someone.
And that terrified her more than anything.
Her reflection flickered faintly on a shattered window she passed. She saw her sunken eyes, messy golden hair, ash-stained face, and a faint and bitter smile that wasn't really a smile at all.
The hero was dying. And in her place, something colder was beginning to grow, something Phaser would have recognized instantly.
She didn't know what it was yet, but it whispered in her chest.
'You can't save everyone, but you can make them fear ever causing this again.'
As she turned a corner and disappeared into the smoke, the city lights blinked weakly through the haze of the morning sky, and Manhattan began to mourn.
Verdamona didn't look back.