While Jax was working with hydraulics and Silas was welding steel, Isobel Grave was drowning.
Technically, she was sitting in a high-backed velvet chair in the viewing room of the "Eternal Rest" Funeral Home on North Clark Street. To someone watching, she appeared to be asleep with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her breathing shallow.
But Isobel was not in the room. She was walking through the Grey City.
The Grey City was a reflection of Chicago. It was a place built from memories, regrets, and the leftover echoes of the dead. Usually, it was filled with noise, a jumble of Victorian ghosts arguing about property lines and murder victims crying out for justice.
Tonight, the Grey City was afraid.
Isobel moved down a ghostly version of Clark Street. The buildings here were transparent, formed from mist and memory. As she headed south, toward the Loop, the mist began to thin. The whispers faded away.
She was approaching the Audit.
To a Necromancer, the Bureau didn't look like men in suits. They looked like erasure. As she got closer to the city center, entire blocks of the Grey City were simply missing. There were no ghosts, no memories, just a clean, painful void.
"Where are you hiding?" Isobel whispered. Her voice didn't make sound; it carried a chill.
She stepped to the edge of the emptiness. It hurt, like pressing her hand against dry ice. The Bureau's technology didn't just suppress magic; it wiped history clean. It erased the soul from the bricks.
She closed her eyes—her spectral eyes—and extended her senses. She wasn't searching for a presence. She was looking for the biggest gap.
She followed the silence. It led her past the river and the trembling fear of the water spirits, to the massive structure spanning the I-290 expressway.
The Old Main Post Office.
In the real world, it was a renovated art deco giant, full of corporate offices. In the Grey City, it was a black hole. It absorbed light from the sky. The spiritual pull was immense. It drew the city's ghosts toward it, not to release them, but to destroy them.
Isobel floated closer, resisting the nausea from the "Normalcy" field. She needed to see inside.
She couldn't pass through the walls—they were reinforced with metaphysical lead—but she could listen. She put her ear against the cold, dead stone.
She expected to hear the hum of computers, the flat noise of bureaucracy.
Instead, she heard screaming.
It wasn't human. It was the raw, tortured wailing of energy being torn apart.
...please... let me go... I'm compliant... I'm compliant...
It was a chorus of a thousand sparks. The "cured" mages. The drained batteries. The Bureau hadn't just taken their magic; they had drained it.
"You aren't auditors," Isobel hissed, pulling back from the wall. "You are parasites."
A spotlight struck her.
It wasn't just light; it was a beam of pure focus. A psychic alarm. The building knew she was there.
"UNAUTHORIZED OBSERVER," a voice echoed in her mind. It wasn't a person; it was the combined weight of countless forms and regulations. "IDENTIFY."
The void struck out. Tentacles of white nothingness shot from the building, trying to catch her shadow-form. If they touched her, she wouldn't die. She would simply cease to exist. She would become a statistic.
Isobel didn't run. She was the Widow. She was the Keeper of the Old Town.
She reached into her coat—her real coat, back in the funeral home—and crushed a dried lily in her hand.
"I am the End," she whispered to the building. "And you cannot audit the grave."
She erupted into a flock of ravens—ghostly, smoky birds that scattered in a hundred directions. The white tentacles grasped at them but caught only mist.
Jax and Silas were hunched over a table, examining the broken remains of a Nullifier rifle Jax had found in the alley.
"It's not a battery," Silas said, poking a glowing glass cylinder inside the gun with insulated tweezers. "This power source... it's biological. It's plasma, but it's structured like..."
"Like a soul," a voice said from the shadows.
Silas and Jax jumped.
Isobel stood by the door. She looked awful. Her skin was translucent, her eyes hollow. Frost covered the floor around her feet. She stepped into the room, leaving wet black footprints that turned to smoke.
"Isobel?" Jax asked. "You look like you saw a ghost, which is usually your thing."
"I found them," Isobel rasped. She leaned heavily against a workbench. "The Old Main Post Office. That is their hive."
"The Post Office?" Silas frowned. "Strategic. Centralized distribution. Thick walls."
"It's not just a headquarters," Isobel said, pointing a shaking finger at the Nullifier on the table. "That gun. Do you know what's inside it?"
"We were just analyzing it," Silas said. "It seems to be a condensed energy cell."
"It is Leo," Isobel said softly.
Jax froze. "What?"
"And not just Leo," she continued. "It's every hedge-wizard, every fortune teller, every kinetic kid they've 'audited' in the past ten years. They don't destroy the magic, Silas. They harvest it. They take the spark from the mage, condense it into liquid, and use it to power the machines that hunt us."
She looked at the glowing cylinder in the gun. It pulsed with a faint, trapped blue light.
"They are using our own blood to shoot us."
Jax stared at the gun. He felt sick. The "Cure" wasn't a medical process. It was a harvesting operation. They were cattle.
The copper wiring in Silas's suit flared white-hot. The heat in the room jumped ten degrees in an instant. He picked up the heavy wrench he had been using.
"Then we don't just need to defeat them," Silas said, his voice sounding like a furnace door slamming shut. "We need to liberate their ammunition."
"The Post Office is a fortress," Isobel warned. "In the spirit realm, it's a void. In the physical world, it will be guarded by hundreds of those guns."
"We have the Ironclad," Jax said, his voice firm. He wasn't smiling anymore. "And we have the map."
Silas walked to the wall, pulling down a blueprint of the city infrastructure. He circled the large building over the highway.
"If they are storing unstable magical energy in liquid form," Silas calculated, "then they have a containment breach waiting to happen. We don't need to storm the front door. We just need to crack the tank."
"And how do we do that?" Isobel asked.
Silas looked at Jax. "We derail a train."
Jax studied the map. The Blue Line tracks ran directly through the Old Post Office building.
"I can drive," Jax said, cracking his knuckles. "But I'll need a bigger bumper."