Gravity did not leave the room; it was evicted.
For Kaelen Vance, the sensation was indistinguishable from the nausea of a bad Sink. Her stomach floated up into her ribcage, her hair fanned out like a halo of black seaweed, and the blood from her nose formed perfect, trembling rubies that drifted in the air before her eyes.
The Grand Foyer of the Guild Hall had become a snow globe of debris. Marble busts, velvet benches, and jagged shards of the shattered Prime Geode suspended in the cold blue air, rotating with agonizing slowness.
But outside the Hall, the city of Obolus was screaming.
Through the shattered skylights, the roar of twisting metal and cracking stone filtered in. The foundations of the districts were snapping. Without the Geode's anchor, the island city wasn't just floating; it was drifting toward the magnetic pull of the Void beneath it.
"Don't thrash!" Valerius shouted.
His voice sounded wrong—thin and tinny without the atmosphere compressing it. The Inquisitor was floating ten feet away, upside down relative to Kaelen, clutching a floating candelabra to steady himself.
"If you thrash, you spin," Valerius barked, his tactical mind overriding the primal panic of weightlessness. "Newton's Third Law, Vance. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You are a projectile now."
"I feel sick," Kae gagged, clapping a hand over her mouth.
Swallow it, the Passenger whispered. The Voice in her head sounded delighted, vibrating with the thrill of the chaos. Up is a construct, darling. Down is just a suggestion. Look at him. He's finally free.
Kae looked down—or what used to be down.
Lord Arcanist Sterling was hovering above the black pit where the Geode used to sit. The golden sledgehammer drifted from his hand, turning end-over-end. He was spread-eagled in the air, his burned skin glowing with a faint, residual luminescence.
He wasn't panicking. He was laughing. But in the vacuum of the broken room, the laugh was silent. He looked like a conductor leading a symphony of silence.
"He smashed the brakes," Kae realized, kicking off a floating pillar to orient herself. "He cut the cables."
"He destroyed the Prime Anchor," Valerius corrected, pushing off the candelabra to drift toward her. He grabbed her belt, tethering them together. "The city is falling into the breach. We are currently in freefall, Vance. We just haven't hit the bottom yet."
"There is no bottom," Kae said, thinking of the white void behind the Bone Door. "There is just... zero."
Sterling rotated in the air to face them. He didn't use physics to move; he used small bursts of golden mana, puffing from his palms like thrusters. Even dying, even burned, he was a master of the environment.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Sterling called out. The acoustics of the room were warped, making his voice sound like it was coming from inside Kae's own ear—just like the voice in the memory of Thorn. "The weight of history... gone. The burden of morality... gone. We are all light as feathers now."
"You killed the city!" Valerius roared, drawing his knife. But in zero-g, the threat was empty. He had no leverage to lunge.
"I liberated it," Sterling smiled. "I am delivering Obolus to the only place where it can be purified. The Zero Point. The Laughing God is hungry, Inquisitor. And I am the spoon."
He raised a hand. The floating shards of the Geode—razor-sharp crystals the size of spears—began to turn. They pointed at Kae and Valerius.
"And you," Sterling whispered. "You are the garnish."
He flicked his wrist.
Three crystal spears shot forward.
"Kick off!" Valerius shoved Kae hard in the chest.
The force sent her flying backward, spinning wildly. The action pushed Valerius in the opposite direction. The crystal spears occupied the space where they had been a second ago, shattering against the far wall with the sound of breaking chimes.
Kae slammed into a floating tapestry, tangling herself in the heavy velvet. She clawed her way free, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
He has the range, the Passenger noted coolly. We need a counter-argument.
"The Peacekeeper," Kae gasped.
She fumbled for the massive iron gun at her hip. In zero-g, the weapon felt deceptively light, but its mass was still real.
She pulled it free.
"Valerius!" she shouted, trying to spot him in the debris field. "Where are you?"
"Flanking!" came the shout from behind a floating statue of a griffin.
Kae spun—a mistake. The motion sent her tumbling. She forced herself to go limp, stopping the spin, and leveled the Peacekeeper at Sterling.
"Hey, Golden Boy!" she yelled.
Sterling turned, a fresh cluster of crystals hovering around him like a lethal halo.
"I have a delivery from the Weeping District!"
Kae checked the cylinder. She had one chamber loaded that she hadn't fired. The Mud-Larks. The fear of the river.
But that wasn't enough. Not for a Lord Arcanist.
Load it heavy, the Voice urged. Load it with the Anchor.
Kae hesitated. The Anchor—the memory of the Void rejection she had eaten in the Cisterns—was volatile. Verdigris had warned her about using the "Zero."
But Sterling was gathering the shards for a second volley.
Kae closed her eyes. She reached into the cold, dense knot in her stomach. She pulled on the thread of the Void.
It didn't feel like a memory. It felt like holding a black hole.
She channeled it into the Peacekeeper's sixth chamber.
The gun didn't glow. It turned matte black, absorbing the ambient light of the room. Frost crystallized instantly on the barrel, burning Kae's hand with cold.
"Fire in the hole," she whispered.
She pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The recoil in zero-g was catastrophic.
Kae was launched backward as if she had been kicked by a giant. She flew across the room, smashing through a wooden banister and slamming into the stone wall hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
The bullet—a sphere of absolute nothingness—streaked across the room.
Sterling saw it coming. He raised a shield of golden mana.
It was a mistake. You cannot shield against nothing.
The Void-bullet hit the shield and simply ate it. It passed through the gold light, through the debris, and clipped Sterling's left arm.
There was no blood. The arm simply vanished. Erased. Deleted from the code of the universe.
Sterling stared at the empty space where his hand used to be. For a second, he looked confused. Then, the pain arrived—a phantom agony of nerves firing into an abyss.
He screamed. The concentration holding the crystal shards broke. The spears drifted harmlessly away.
"You bit me!" Sterling howled, clutching his stump. "You little rat! You bit the hand of God!"
"I'm not a rat," Kae wheezed, pushing herself off the wall. "I'm the trap."
Valerius launched himself from the griffin statue. He used the momentum of the chaos, kicking off debris like a pinball. He collided with Sterling mid-air.
It was an ugly, desperate tangle of limbs. Valerius wrapped his legs around Sterling's torso, driving his knife into the Arcanist's shoulder—the one that still existed.
Sterling thrashed, his golden blood forming floating spheres of burning liquid. He headbutted Valerius, the impact cracking bone.
"Let go!" Sterling shrieked.
"Gravity always wins!" Valerius gritted out.
He grabbed the golden sledgehammer drifting nearby. He didn't hit Sterling with it. He jammed the handle into Sterling's belt and then kicked off, sending himself flying away while leaving the heavy hammer attached to the Arcanist.
"Vance! The Core!" Valerius shouted as he drifted back toward the balcony. "Shoot the Core!"
Kae looked at the pit. The shattered remains of the Prime Geode were swirling around the black hole in the floor.
"Shoot it with what?" Kae yelled back. "I'm empty! The Void round is gone!"
You're not empty, the Passenger whispered. You have the Peacekeeper. It shoots weight, remember? Psychic weight.
And what is heavier than the truth?
Kae looked at the gun. It was just iron. But the runes... they were designed to channel the user.
"Verdigris said it shoots baggage," Kae muttered.
She thought of the city outside. The falling buildings. The screaming people. The absolute, crushing weight of failing to save them.
She thought of her mother, dead twice over.
She thought of the Laughter.
Load it, Kae thought. Load it all.
She didn't pick a specific memory. She opened the floodgates. She poured the entirety of her "library"—every stolen fear, every consumed regret, every moment of pain she had hoarded since she became a Mindsink—into the cylinder.
The gun began to hum. It turned red hot. The iron started to smoke.
"This is going to hurt," Kae said.
She aimed at the center of the swirling Geode shards.
She fired.
It wasn't a beam. It was a scream made of light. A chaotic, multicolored torrent of psychic energy erupted from the barrel.
The recoil drove Kae into the floor, pinning her there as if gravity had returned tenfold.
The blast hit the center of the room.
The psychic mass interacted with the raw mana of the broken Geode.
Mass plus Mana equals Gravity.
CRUMP.
The sound was implosive. The shards of the Geode were sucked inward, slamming together with terrifying force. They fused, melted by the psychic heat, and reformed into a jagged, unstable sphere.
A new core.
Gravity returned. Instantly. Violently.
Kae fell from the wall, hitting the floor with a bone-jarring thud. Valerius dropped from the air, crashing onto the balcony. The floating furniture rained down like meteors, shattering on the marble.
Sterling, weighed down by the golden hammer Valerius had jammed in his belt, fell straight down.
He hit the edge of the pit, his legs dangling over the abyss. He clawed at the stone with his one remaining hand.
"No!" Sterling screamed, staring into the dark. "Not like this! I am the pilot! I am not the cargo!"
The new gravity well stabilized. The room stopped spinning.
Outside, the groaning of the city changed pitch. It wasn't the shriek of falling anymore. It was the low moan of settling.
The descent had paused. Obolus hung suspended over the Void, anchored by a ball of fused crystal and trauma.
Kae lay on the floor, the smoking Peacekeeper burning her hand. She couldn't move. She felt lighter than she had in years. She had emptied the library. She was tabula rasa.
"Valerius?" she croaked.
"Alive," came the groan from the balcony. "Broken ribs. But alive."
Kae looked toward the pit.
Sterling was pulling himself up. He was missing an arm. He was burned. He was beaten.
But he was laughing again.
"A temporary reprieve," Sterling wheezed, dragging himself away from the edge. "You put a bandage on a bullet hole, Black Queen. This anchor... it's made of pain. Pain fades. Memories fade."
He looked at her with his one good eye.
"Gravity is constant. But trauma? Trauma heals. And when you heal, Kaelen... the city falls."
Kae tried to lift the gun. It was too heavy.
"Then I won't heal," she whispered.
Sterling spat golden blood onto the floor. He tapped the floor with his forehead, a mock bow.
"We shall see. The Curtain Call awaits at the center of the web. You stopped the drop, but you haven't stopped the play."
He rolled backward, into the shadows of the hallway leading deeper into the Guild archives.
"Don't let him leave," Valerius rasped, trying to stand but collapsing.
"I can't," Kae said, her vision greying out. "I'm empty."
Not empty, the Voice corrected, sounding strangely gentle. Just... reformatted.
Kae closed her eyes as the exhaustion took her. She lay on the floor of the Guild Hall, listening to the new heartbeat of the city.
It wasn't a thump-thump.
It was a tick-tick.
Like a clock that had just been wound.
And somewhere below them, in the dark behind the bone door, the Laughing God stopped knocking and started listening.