The door to the Royal Salt Reserve didn't open; it bled.
When Valerius unbarred the heavy oak, the gap revealed a city that had lost its geometry. The Obolus sky, usually a bruised purple from the Arcane Dreg, was now choked with plumes of greasy, black smoke that spiraled upward like inverted tornados. The Panic Bells were still ringing, but their rhythm had synced with the distant, rhythmic explosions echoing from the industrial sector.
Ding. Boom. Ding. Boom.
It was a heartbeat. The city was having a cardiac arrest.
"Stay close," Valerius commanded, racking a fresh shell into his shotgun. He looked terrible. The polished veneer of the Inquisitor was gone, replaced by a coat stained with salt and muck, his face a roadmap of exhaustion. "If we get separated in the smoke, you're dead. The Sleepers hunt by sound."
Kaelen nodded, pulling her collar up to mask the copper taste of the air. She stepped out into the alley, her boots crunching on broken glass.
Immediately, the choir in her head began to scream.
It wasn't the Voice. The Passenger was silent, coiled in the back of her mind like a satisfied viper digesting a meal. It was the others. The Echoes she had carried since Chapter 1—the Banker and the Whore—were no longer cowering in the mental basement.
They're burning the ledger! The Banker shrieked, his psychic voice sounding like tearing paper. The numbers are all bleeding!
He's handsome when he cuts, the Whore giggled, her tone warped, sliding into a hysterical sob. He cuts the strings so we can dance.
Kae stumbled, clutching her temples. The signal—the Laughing Note that Halloway's crate had blasted across the city—hadn't just activated the sleeper agents in the streets. It had infected the ghosts in her head.
"Vance?" Valerius grabbed her shoulder, pulling her into the shadow of a water tower.
"The Echoes," Kae gasped, squeezing her eyes shut. "The signal… it's turning them. They're getting louder."
"Suppress them," Valerius hissed, scanning the street. "If you hallucinate now, you'll walk us right into a mob."
"I can't," Kae snapped back. "It's like a riot inside a closet, Valerius. The walls are shaking."
Let them out, the Voice whispered smoothly. Eviction is such a messy business, but sometimes necessary. Or... you could feed them.
Kae ignored him. She forced herself to focus on the physical world. The alley opened up into the wider avenue of the Tanyard District—the same slum where she had hunted the dockworker just hours ago. It felt like a lifetime.
The Grey Lark Tavern, where her victim had stumbled out drunk, was gone. In its place was a bonfire.
A pile of furniture, kegs, and bodies blocked the street. Dancing around the flames were a dozen figures. They weren't fighting; they were celebrating. They wore the roughspun clothes of tannery workers, but their movements were fluid, jerky, wrong. They held improvised weapons—meat hooks, tanning knives, broken bottles—and they were humming that terrible, vibrating note.
Hmmmmm-mmm-MMM.
"The street is blocked," Valerius whispered. "We need to cross the Tanyard to get to the Bridge of Saints. That bridge is the only way to the Cathedral district that doesn't go through the Guild checkpoints."
"We can't fight them," Kae said, watching a woman in the mob throw a handful of something that looked disturbingly like fingers into the fire. "There are too many. And I'm empty."
"We don't fight," Valerius said. He pointed up. "We climb."
The Tanyard was a district of verticality—drying racks for leather hides stretched between buildings like spiderwebs. Valerius holstered his shotgun and moved to a drainpipe.
They ascended. The physical exertion was a relief for Kae; the burn in her muscles distracted her from the riot in her mind. They pulled themselves onto the slate roof of a tenement, the wind whipping Kae's hair across her face.
From this height, the devastation was absolute. Obolus was a grid of fires. To the north, the Pneumatic Exchange was a smoking crater. To the east, the Docks were silent graveyards. And in the center, rising like a jagged spear of obsidian and stained glass, was the Cathedral of St. Aethelgard.
It wasn't burning. Yet.
But the streets around it were swarming. A sea of people, pressing against the Cathedral gates like black water.
"They're besieging it," Valerius said, crouching low. "The Laughing God doesn't want to destroy the Luminaries. He wants to keep them trapped inside while he burns the city around them."
"He wants the fuel," Kae corrected, remembering the coordinates on the chess piece. Bring the Fire. "Valerius, what exactly is the fuel for the Purging Flame?"
Valerius didn't answer immediately. He looked at the Cathedral, his expression unreadable. "It is a concentrated alchemical accelerant. Volatile. Holy. It burns spiritual corruption."
"And physical bodies?"
"Everything burns, Vance."
They moved across the rooftops, leaping over alleyways where the screams of the dying drifted up like steam. They were halfway across the district when the roof they were standing on shuddered.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a step.
Kae spun around. Standing on the chimney stack behind them, silhouetted against the burning skyline, was a figure.
It wasn't a Sleeper. It was a man in a pristine, grey Guild uniform. He wore a porcelain mask that covered his entire face, painted with a single, vertical black line.
"A Silencer," Valerius cursed, drawing his silver-headed cane. "Guild Special Operations. They must have been activated by the signal."
The Silencer didn't speak. He raised a hand, and the tiles on the roof around Kae's feet exploded into dust.
Gravity magic.
Kae was thrown backward, sliding down the slick slate roof toward the drop. Her boots scrabbled for purchase, finding nothing but wet moss.
"Valerius!"
The Inquisitor moved with terrifying speed. He didn't reach for her. He lunged at the Silencer. The cane-sword flashed, a silver streak in the gloom. The Silencer caught the blade with a bare, gloved hand, the air rippling around his palm as he increased the gravity to crush the steel.
Kae's heels caught the gutter. She hung over the edge, staring down forty feet into an alley filled with broken crates and muck.
Let go, the Echo of the Banker screamed in her head. The numbers don't add up! Bankruptcy! Crash!
Fly, pretty bird, the Whore sobbed.
Use it, the Voice commanded. Don't be a victim, Kaelen. Be a predator. The gravity mage… he's full of mana. He's a juice box.
Kae looked up. Valerius was losing. The Silencer had twisted the cane-sword out of his grip and had the Inquisitor by the throat, pinning him to the chimney. The gravity around Valerius was intensifying; Kae could hear the creak of the Inquisitor's armor, the snap of his ribs beginning to fracture.
She didn't have a weapon. She didn't have a memory to burn.
But she had a hunger.
And she had the Dreg.
The air up here was thick with the smoke from the fires—smoke that was heavily laced with the raw Arcane Dreg venting from the broken pumps.
Kaelen Vance closed her eyes and did something she had never done before. She didn't reach for a mind. She reached for the air.
She inhaled.
She didn't just breathe; she sank the pollution. She pulled the toxic, magical smog into her lungs, into her blood, into the starving void in her skull.
It tasted like drinking battery acid. It tasted like licking a lightning bolt.
Pain, white and blinding, arc hissing through her nervous system. Her veins turned black, visible beneath her pale skin. Her eyes rolled back, burning with violet fire.
YES! The Voice roared, ecstatic. The raw vintage!
Kae pulled herself up over the gutter. She didn't climb; she vaulted, her body humming with dirty, volatile power.
She didn't run at the Silencer. She pointed at him.
"Let him go," she said. Her voice wasn't hers. It was a chorus of the city's pain, distorted by the Dreg.
The Silencer turned, his porcelain mask tilting. He raised a hand to crush her.
Kae released the breath she was holding.
It wasn't air. It was a scream of concentrated, toxic smog. A cone of violet force erupted from her mouth, hitting the Silencer like a freight train.
The gravity shield shattered. The porcelain mask disintegrated. The man behind it didn't even have time to scream before he was blasted off the roof, his body tumbling into the darkness below.
Valerius slumped against the chimney, gasping for air, clutching his throat. He looked at Kae.
She stood there, swaying. Black smoke curled from her lips. Her eyes were glowing with a sick, unstable light. The veins in her neck were pulsing black.
"Vance?" Valerius whispered, terrified.
Kae looked at him. She felt powerful. She felt infinite. She felt like she was dying.
"I found some fuel," she rasped, and then she smiled.
It was the wrong smile.
Check, the Voice whispered.
Valerius scrambled to his feet, picking up his bent sword. He looked at her not as a partner, but as a bomb that had just started ticking.
"We need to go," he said, his voice rough. "The blast will draw them."
"I'm ready," Kae said. The Dreg was buzzing in her blood, suppressing the Banker and the Whore. Silence, at last. But the cost was heavy; she could feel her own memories—her mother's face, her childhood name—beginning to fray at the edges, dissolved by the acid of the pollution.
She was eating herself to feed the power.
"To the Cathedral," Valerius said, turning away, unable to look her in the eye.
"To the fire," Kae agreed.
They leapt across the gap to the next roof, heading toward the besieged spire of St. Aethelgard. Below them, the city burned, and inside Kaelen Vance, the Laughing God began to hum a new tune. One that sounded suspiciously like a funeral march.