The ladder up from the Deep Cisterns was not designed for human hands. It was a vertical spine of rusted iron staples driven into the wet rock, slick with the condensation of a city that was slowly sweating itself to death.
Kaelen Vance climbed. She didn't feel the cold metal biting into her palms. She didn't feel the burn in her thighs. She felt... muted.
For the first time since the hunt for the dockworker in Chapter 1, the inside of her head was quiet. The Banker wasn't counting losses. The Whore wasn't sobbing. Even the Passenger—the sophisticated fragment of Sterling's madness—was silent, curled up in the back of her cerebellum like a dog waiting out a thunderstorm.
But the silence wasn't empty. It was heavy.
It sat in her stomach, a cold, dense gravity that pulled at her center of mass. It was the piece of the Void she had swallowed. The backwash of the God.
"Keep moving," Valerius grunted from below.
His voice was tight with pain. The burns on his hands from the alchemical fire were weeping, and his shoulder—where the Silencer-construct had gripped him—was a mess of bruised muscle. But he climbed with the relentless, mechanical rhythm of a machine that had forgotten how to stop.
"I see light," Kae rasped.
It wasn't sunlight. It was the grey, diffuse glow of a city under siege by smoke.
They reached the top—a storm drain grate located in the center of a cobblestone alley in the Weeping District. Valerius shoved the grate open with his good shoulder, groaning as the iron scraped against stone.
They hauled themselves out, collapsing onto the wet pavement.
Rain was falling. It was cold, clean rain, washing away the Dreg-haze that had choked Obolus for hours. The air tasted of wet ash and ozone.
"Listen," Valerius whispered, rolling onto his back and drawing his knife.
Kae listened.
She expected screaming. She expected the chaotic ringing of the Panic Bells. She expected the discordant humming of the Sleepers.
Instead, she heard sobbing.
It was a low, collective sound, rising from the tenements and the streets like mist. The sound of thousands of people waking up with blood on their hands and no memory of why.
"The jamming signal worked," Valerius said, sitting up and wincing. "The Sleepers are awake. The trance is broken."
"They aren't celebrating," Kae murmured. She stood up, swaying slightly. The cold knot in her stomach shifted, acting like a gyroscope keeping her upright.
She walked to the mouth of the alley.
The main street of the Weeping District was a tableau of aftermath. Shop windows were shattered. Carts were overturned and burning. Bodies lay in the gutters—not victims of the killer, but victims of the mob.
A woman in a baker's apron sat on the curb, staring at her hands. They were covered in dried blood. She was rocking back and forth, weeping silently. A man in a smith's apron was kneeling beside a dead horse, trying to put a horseshoe back onto a hoof that was no longer attached to a leg.
"They remember the feeling," Kae realized, her stomach turning. "They don't remember the act, but they remember the urge. The laughter."
It's called a hangover, the Passenger whispered finally. His voice was small, stripped of its usual arrogance. Gods leave terrible hangovers, darling. The headache of the divine.
"We can't stay here," Valerius said, appearing at her shoulder. He had buttoned his torn coat to hide the burns. "The City Watch will be sweeping the streets. Sterling is gone, but his infrastructure remains. The Guilds will lock this district down."
"Where do we go?" Kae asked. "The Ossuary is gone. The safe house is burned. We are currently the most wanted people in Obolus."
"Not everywhere," Valerius said. He looked at the skyline, orienting himself. "There is one place Sterling's gaze doesn't reach. But you aren't going to like it."
"Try me. I just ate a god's rejection. My standards are low."
"The Undercroft," Valerius said. "The Library of the Excommunicated."
Kae stiffened. "That's a myth. A ghost story Luminaries tell novices."
"It's real," Valerius said, starting to walk, hugging the shadows of the buildings. "And it's the only place with enough warding to hide a woman who has a handprint of the Void on her soul."
They moved through the Weeping District like ghosts. The chaos of the waking city worked in their favor; the few Guild guards they saw were too busy trying to contain the confused mobs to notice two battered figures slipping through the fog.
They headed south, toward the old Aqueduct—a massive, crumbling structure of Romanesque arches that predated the Guilds.
Beneath the third arch, Valerius stopped at a wall covered in graffiti and layers of old posters. He didn't use a key. He didn't use a spell.
He used blood.
He pressed his burned hand against a specific poster—an advertisement for a long-closed circus. The blood from his wound soaked into the paper.
The wall didn't slide open. It dissolved. The bricks turned to grey dust, revealing a dark staircase spiraling down.
"Illusion wards," Kae noted, impressed. "Blood-keyed."
"Get inside," Valerius ordered. "Before the dust reforms."
They descended. The air here was dry, smelling of old paper, dust, and binding glue. As they went deeper, the sound of the sobbing city above faded, replaced by a profound, studious silence.
The stairs ended in a cavernous room.
It was a library, but not like the Archives or the Ossuary. It was a disorganized sprawl of knowledge. Books were stacked in towers that reached the ceiling. Scrolls were stuffed into wine racks. Maps were pinned to stalactites.
Sitting at a desk in the center of this chaos was a figure.
It was a woman, ancient and shriveled, wrapped in layers of motheaten shawls. She was blind, her eyes covered by a bandage of black silk. She was knitting.
"You're bleeding on my floor, Valerius," the woman croaked without stopping her needles. "And you brought a stray. A loud one."
"She's quiet, Mother Verdigris," Valerius said, leaning heavily against a stack of encyclopedias. "She's the quietest thing in the city right now."
Verdigris stopped knitting. She tilted her head, sniffing the air.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, my."
She stood up, moving with surprising speed for her age, and scuttled over to Kae. She reached out with a withered hand, hovering inches from Kae's stomach.
"She swallowed a stone," Verdigris cackled. "A cold, black stone. You went to the Door, didn't you, girl? You knocked."
"I blocked it," Kae said, her voice steady.
"Blocked it?" Verdigris laughed. It was a dry sound, like rust flaking off iron. "You can't block the Void, child. You can only negotiate with it. And it seems you made a trade."
"We need sanctuary," Valerius interrupted, sinking into a chair. He looked grey. "And medical supplies. Sterling is alive. He's burned, drained, and desperate, but he's alive."
"Sterling," Verdigris spat. "The Golden Boy. I told the Council sixty years ago he was too ambitious. They didn't listen. They made him a Lord."
She shuffled to a shelf and pulled down a jar of green salve and a bottle of amber liquid. She tossed them to Valerius.
"Fix yourself, Inquisitor. You look like ground meat."
Then she turned back to Kae.
"Sit," she commanded, pointing to a stool. "Let me look at you. The eyes. Show me the eyes."
Kae sat. Verdigris pulled down her black bandage, revealing eyes that were entirely white—no iris, no pupil. Just milky cataracts.
She leaned in, staring into Kae's violet eyes.
"The sclera is stained," Verdigris murmured. "Permanently. You metabolized the Dreg, didn't you? You turned pollution into fuel."
"I had to," Kae said.
"And now?" Verdigris asked. "How do you feel?"
"Empty," Kae said. "But... heavy."
"That's the Anchor," Verdigris said, tapping Kae's forehead. "Sterling put a Cipher in your head to navigate the Void. But when you touched the Door, the Cipher changed. It's not a map anymore."
"What is it?"
"It's a receiver."
Verdigris turned away, rummaging through a pile of scrolls. "You jammed the signal to the Sleepers, yes? But you didn't destroy the broadcast. You just... changed the frequency. To you."
Kae froze. "What does that mean?"
"It means," Verdigris said, pulling out a star chart, "that if the Laughing God speaks again, he won't be speaking to the city. He'll be speaking to you. You are the radio, girl."
Check, the Passenger whispered. We upgraded.
Valerius finished bandaging his shoulder. He took a long pull from the amber bottle and grimaced.
"Sterling fled," Valerius said. "He teleported. He said he would see us at the 'Curtain Call.' What is the Curtain Call, Verdigris? You know the Heretic Texts better than anyone."
Verdigris stopped moving. Her white eyes widened.
"The Curtain Call," she whispered. "It's not a ritual. It's a location."
She slammed the star chart onto the table. It wasn't a map of the sky. It was a map of the city's ley lines—the magical arteries that powered Obolus.
"The city is built on a pentagram of seals," Verdigris explained, tracing the lines with a bony finger. "The Cathedral. The Pneumatic Exchange. The Spire. The Docks. And the Center."
"We broke the Pneumatic Exchange," Kae said. "And the Spire is compromised."
"And the Docks were the opening move," Valerius added. "Halloway."
"The seals are failing," Verdigris said. "When five become one, the Curtain rises. Sterling isn't trying to open the Door anymore. You proved that brute force doesn't work. He's going to lower the city."
"Lower it?" Kae asked. "To where?"
"Into the breach," Verdigris said grimly. "He's going to sink Obolus. Physically. He's going to drop the entire city into the Void to plug the hole he can't fill."
Kae felt the cold knot in her stomach tighten. "He wants to sacrifice the whole population. Millions of souls. That's... that's enough biomass to act as a permanent seal."
"It's the ultimate act of preservation," Valerius realized, horror dawning on his face. "He's not trying to destroy the world. He's trying to save the world by sacrificing the city. He views Obolus as a diseased limb. He's going to amputate it."
"Where is the Center?" Kae asked, standing up. The fatigue was gone, replaced by the cold, ticking urgency of the Cipher. "Where does he trigger the drop?"
Verdigris pointed to the center of the map.
"The Grand Archives," she said. "The Guild Hall. The seat of his power. It sits directly on top of the Prime Geode. If he shatters the Geode..."
"Gravity fails," Kae finished, remembering the sensation of falling. "And Obolus falls."
"We have to get into the Guild Hall," Valerius said, standing up and grabbing his knife. "It's a fortress. It will be guarded by every Silencer and Battle-Mage Sterling has left."
"We can't fight an army," Kae said. "Not like this. You have a knife, and I have a stomach ache."
"You have more than that," Verdigris cackled. She reached under her desk and pulled out a heavy object wrapped in oilcloth.
She unwrapped it.
It was a gun. But not a normal flintlock. It was massive, made of black iron and silver, with a revolving cylinder that glowed with trapped light. The barrel was etched with binding runes.
"The Peacekeeper," Valerius breathed. "I thought it was destroyed."
"I stole it," Verdigris winked with her blind eyes. "It doesn't shoot lead. It shoots captured memories. Trauma rounds. Condensed nightmares."
She slid the weapon across the table to Kaelen.
"It's a Mindsink's weapon," Verdigris said. "You load it with your own excess baggage. You have a lot of baggage, don't you, girl?"
Kae picked up the gun. It was heavy. It felt cold, like holding the hand of a dead man.
She thought of the kitchen memory she had eaten. She thought of the Banker. She thought of the horrors of the Tanyard.
"Yes," Kae said, feeling the gun hum against her palm. "I'm fully loaded."
"Good," Verdigris said. "Because the curtain is rising. And you're late for the stage."
Kae looked at Valerius. He nodded.
"To the Archives," Valerius said.
Kae spun the cylinder of the gun. It made a sound like a clock ticking down to zero.
"Let's go break some windows," she said.
And deep in the silence of her mind, the Void hummed back in approval.