The heaviest thing in the world was not a gun, nor a memory, nor a god. It was the body of a friend who was still breathing, but no longer there.
Inquisitor Valerius stumbled over a pile of loose cobblestones in the Weeping District. His boots scraped against the wet pavement, a harsh sound in the unnatural quiet that had fallen over Obolus. In his arms, Kaelen Vance was dead weight. Her head rested against his torn coat, her black hair matted with rain and the ash of unraveled buildings.
She felt feverish. Not the heat of sickness, but the heat of a machine running at maximum capacity.
"Stay with me," Valerius rasped, adjusting his grip. His shoulder—the one the Silencer-construct had crushed—screamed in protest, but pain was just data. He ignored it.
Kaelen didn't answer. Her eyes were open, staring up at the smoke-choked sky.
They were no longer violet. They were polished silver mirrors.
Every time Valerius looked down, he didn't see Kaelen. He saw his own terrified reflection staring back from the twin surfaces of her irises. And behind his reflection, deep in the silver glass, he saw movement. Shadowy shapes thrashing against the other side of the lens.
The Prisoner was awake. And he was scratching at the windows.
"We're almost there," Valerius lied.
The Undercroft was miles away. The city was a labyrinth of wreckage. The tectonic shift caused by the Prime Geode's destruction had turned streets into cliffs and alleys into ravines.
Valerius stepped over the corpse of a Golden Mud-Lark. The creature had dissolved into a puddle of foul-smelling sludge, its connection to the Laughing God severed when Kaelen slammed the door.
A noise made him freeze.
Click.
It was the sound of a flintlock hammer being pulled back.
Valerius turned slowly.
Three figures emerged from the fog. They wore the grey uniforms of the City Watch, but their armor was scorched and dented. They looked like men who had woken up from a nightmare and were looking for something to kill to prove they were alive.
"Halt," the lead guard said, his voice shaking. He leveled a musket at Valerius. "By order of the Guild Council… identify yourself."
"I am Inquisitor Valerius," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "And I am walking. If you stop me, you die."
The guard squinted through the gloom. "Valerius? The traitor? You're the one who was with the girl. The Witch of the Docks."
He lowered the musket, aiming at Kaelen.
"That's her," the guard spat. "She's the one who turned the sky black. She's the contagion."
"She is the cure," Valerius snarled. He couldn't reach for his knife without dropping her. He couldn't reach for the Peacekeeper—the massive iron gun tucked into his belt—with one hand.
"She's a monster," the guard insisted, his finger tightening on the trigger. "We saw the lightning. We saw the monsters. Burn her."
Valerius braced himself to turn, to take the bullet in his back.
But Kaelen moved.
She didn't wake up. She didn't speak. Her head simply lolled to the side, and her mirror eyes caught the light of a nearby burning building.
A beam of pure, reflected silver light hit the guard.
It wasn't an attack. It was a reflection.
For a second, the guard didn't see Kaelen. He saw himself in her eyes. But he saw the version of himself from an hour ago—the Sleeper version. The laughing maniac who had murdered his own horse in the street.
The memory, trapped inside the cage of Kaelen's mind, leaked out.
The guard screamed. He dropped the musket, clawing at his face.
"Get it out!" he shrieked. "The laughter! Get it out!"
He fell to his knees, sobbing. The other two guards backed away, terrified by the sudden madness of their captain.
Valerius didn't wait. He stepped over the weeping man and kept walking.
"You're still dangerous," Valerius whispered to the unconscious woman in his arms. "Even in your sleep, you bite."
The Undercroft
The door to the secret library dissolved into dust as Valerius smeared his blood on the poster. He carried Kaelen down the spiral stairs, into the cool, dry air of the sanctuary.
Mother Verdigris was waiting. She stood in the center of her disorganized empire of scrolls, her blindfolded face turned toward them. She looked older than she had hours ago. The weight of the city's near-destruction seemed to have settled on her stooped shoulders.
"Put her on the table," Verdigris commanded.
Valerius laid Kaelen down on a heavy oak table cleared of maps. She looked small against the dark wood. The Peacekeeper clattered to the floor as Valerius finally let go, his arms trembling from the exertion.
"Is she…?" Valerius couldn't finish the sentence.
Verdigris shuffled forward. She didn't touch Kaelen. She hovered her hands over the girl's face, reading the heat, the mana, the psychic pressure.
"She's not dead," Verdigris said softly. "And she's not alive. Not in the way we understand it."
Verdigris lifted one of Kaelen's eyelids. The silver mirror stared back, unblinking.
"Look," Verdigris whispered. "Deep in the glass."
Valerius leaned in. He looked past his own reflection.
Inside the mirror, deep in the silver void, he saw a tiny figure. A boy sitting in a chair made of red yarn. He was screaming, thrashing, pounding his fists against the invisible walls.
And sitting outside the cage, barely visible in the gloom, was another figure. A woman in a leather coat. She was sitting with her back to the bars, arms crossed, staring into the dark.
"She's guarding him," Valerius realized. "She ejected herself from the pilot's seat to lock the door from the inside."
"She is the Warden now," Verdigris said, stepping back. "The Cipher wasn't just a receiver, Valerius. It was a pocket dimension. A mathematical impossible space. She shoved the Laughing God into the pocket and sewed it shut."
"Can we get her out?"
Verdigris shook her head. "If you pull her out, the door opens. If she wakes up, the cage breaks. Her consciousness is the only thing holding the walls together. She has to stay under, Valerius. Forever."
Valerius looked at Kaelen's face. It was peaceful now. The lines of pain and hunger that had defined her since the day they met were smoothed away.
"She's a Mindsink," Valerius whispered. "She spent her whole life hungry. Now… she's finally full."
"She saved us," Verdigris said, picking up a jar of amber liquid—a stasis draught strong enough to stop a dragon's heart. "But Obolus will not thank her. They will call her a witch. They will say she caused the Fall."
"Let them," Valerius said. He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from Kaelen's silver eyes. "She doesn't need their gratitude. She needs their silence."
Verdigris uncorked the bottle. "This will slow her metabolism to near zero. She won't age. She won't hunger. She will just… exist. A living statue."
"Do it," Valerius said.
Verdigris poured the liquid between Kaelen's lips. It vanished instantly.
A soft sigh escaped Kaelen's throat. Her body relaxed. The feverish heat radiated away, leaving her skin cool and pale like marble. The movement in her mirror eyes slowed, then stopped.
The reflection solidified.
The cage was locked.
Epilogue: The Pawn and the Queen
Three Months Later.
Obolus was a city of scars.
The crater of the Pneumatic Exchange had been paved over with thick sheets of lead and iron, sealed by the Guilds and marked as a hazard zone. The Spire of Sighs stood empty, a broken needle against the sky. The Tanyard District was a ghost town, the buildings unraveled by the God slowly being rebuilt by wary masons.
The panicked screams of the Sleepers had faded, replaced by the sounds of hammers and saws. The city was forgetting. That was the nature of cities; they paved over their trauma and called it history.
But deep beneath the streets, in the silence of the Undercroft, nothing was forgotten.
Inquisitor Valerius sat in a chair beside the oak table. He was cleaning the Peacekeeper. The massive iron gun was cold now, its runes dormant. He polished the barrel with a rhythmic, meditative motion.
He wasn't wearing his Inquisitor's coat. He wore simple grey wool. He had resigned from the Luminaries the day the sky turned black. He had a new job now.
He looked at the table.
Kaelen Vance lay exactly where they had left her. She looked like a sleeping princess from a fairy tale, if fairy tales were written in charcoal and blood. Her leather coat had been cleaned, her boots polished. Her hands were folded over her chest.
Her eyes were open.
Valerius had placed a blindfold over them—a strip of black silk. Not to protect her, but to protect the world. The Mirrors were still active. If you looked too long, you could still see the Boy screaming.
"Quiet night," Valerius said to the silent woman.
He didn't expect an answer. He talked to fill the air, to keep the Undercroft from feeling too much like a tomb.
"The Guilds are restructuring. They're calling it the 'Great Alchemical Failure.' Blaming Sterling's ambition. They're erasing his name from the monuments. I thought you'd like that."
He set the gun down.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small object.
It was a chess piece. The Black Queen.
It was the piece Kaelen had carried. The piece that had led them to the Cathedral, to the Pier, to the end of the world.
He placed it on the table, right next to Kaelen's hand.
"Sterling said you were the board," Valerius murmured. "He was wrong. You were never the board, Vance."
He looked at the blindfold, imagining the silver eyes beneath.
"You were the player who flipped the table."
A draft blew through the Undercroft, rustling the papers on Verdigris's desk. The candle flame flickered.
For a second, the shadows in the room stretched.
Valerius tensed, his hand dropping to the Peacekeeper.
But it was just the wind. Or perhaps, the breath of a city that was finally learning how to breathe again.
Valerius sat back. He picked up his book—a treatise on memory wards.
He would stay here. He would watch the door. He would make sure the lock held.
Because Kaelen Vance was holding a god in a headlock in the basement of her soul, and the least he could do was keep the lights on.
"Sleep well, partner," Valerius whispered.
He turned the page.
In the silence of the Undercroft, the Black Queen stood guard, and the city of Obolus continued to spin, unaware that it was being held aloft by the stubborn refusal of one girl to let go.