They broke a quiet the city hadn't known it had.
Two in the afternoon, when Elyria's upper districts took their siesta behind climate-controlled walls and the Morrows ran on stolen time and secondhand hope, the plan started moving like a sound wave—small, precise, impossible to stop if you were standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
Ilias watched from under a corrugated awning that had been leaking rust for three years, staff leaning across his knees, weight familiar and grounding. The morning rain had left the air sharp—smelling like ozone and wet concrete and something else underneath that he couldn't quite name. Desperation, maybe. Or just the particular scent of a city holding its breath before something broke.
The staff hummed against his palm. A second pulse beneath his own heartbeat. Steady. Constant. Like Orun-Fela was reminding him he wasn't alone in this.
Kojo was two blocks away, checking hand signals with Reverb through a patch of busted holo-ads that flickered with decade-old advertisements for products that didn't exist anymore. Rhea's people were posted at choke points—Iron Crescent colors hidden under civilian clothes, weapons concealed but ready. The Free Riders had volunteers positioned to funnel civilians away from the danger zones if everything went wrong.
And Seraph stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. She'd been doing that more lately. Standing closer. Lingering when conversations ended. Her hand would brush his arm when she pointed something out, and neither of them acknowledged it but neither of them pulled away either.
"Nervous?" she asked quietly.
"Terrified," he admitted.
She almost smiled. "Good. Means you're smart."
"Or stupid for doing this anyway."
"That too."
They weren't trying to break the city. Just take back what had been stolen from it.
The Families ran supply chains like sacred rites—food relays, weapons caches, medical shipments. Everything documented, manifested, tagged with logos that promised salvation while delivering control. Every crate accounted for. Every credit tracked. All very legal. All very clean.
All very corrupt.
Tonight's targets were simple. Surgical.
Target One: Refrigerated convoy marked "Valencrest Humanitarian Relief"—food and medical supplies supposedly destined for the Morrows' aid stations. Official paperwork attached. Signatures from three different relief organizations. All very legitimate.
Target Two: Black truck with Ferroline sigils—small arms and tactical gear, manifested as "industrial equipment" bound for construction sites that didn't exist.
Target Three: Courier van carrying raw credits bound for Luma's shell companies—payments for "advertising services" that somehow cost more than the gross domestic product of small planets.
Each convoy had guards. Scanned routes. Pre-approved escorts. Everything locked down tight with the kind of security that said we have nothing to hide while hiding everything.
Everything except the people who knew how to pick locks.
The plan split the gangs by specialty. Crimson Jacks hit the food truck—Kojo's people, fast and brutal when they needed to be, gentle when they could afford it. Violet Tongues took the weapons convoy—they had military experience, knew how to handle ordnance without blowing themselves up. Black Sparrows shadowed the courier—ghosts who could make credits disappear before anyone noticed they were gone.
Ilias's job was simple and impossible in equal measure: ride point on the food convoy, hold space for extraction, don't let anyone die.
He stepped into the street as the first truck slowed into the pickup bay, flanked by two Valencrest security vehicles—sleek, black, drone flags glowing sterile blue. Men with Luma patches on their shoulders carried datapads and professional smiles that had been practiced in mirrors until they looked sincere.
Everything looked legitimate. That was the entire point.
Kojo's signal came through—a single palm raised, then lowered. Simple. Clear.
Go.
Reverb's voice crackled in Ilias's earpiece, quiet and precise. "Mirror's in position. Siren drop in three. Watch the thermal latch on the trailer's back seam—old Church tech, easy to crack if you know the frequency pattern."
Ilias's fingers tightened on the staff. He could smell diesel exhaust mixing with cheap cologne from the guards and underneath it all—something rotten. The particular stench of privilege trying to dress itself up as charity.
The food truck slowed fully into the bay. Guards moved with practiced efficiency, unclipping cargo straps, reaching for security seals that would verify everything was exactly as manifested.
That was the moment everything started.
Three blocks south, a protest erupted like someone had thrown a match into kindling.
Not a real protest—a noise wave, carefully orchestrated. Kettles, drums, voices raised in the particular rhythm of manufactured outrage that every security algorithm in the city had been trained to recognize and prioritize. Rhea and the Free Riders had paid good money for this performance, and the actors delivered.
When the drums hit their crescendo, every security sensor in a six-block radius shifted attention toward the crowd. Drone tracking algorithms split their focus, thermal scanners pivoted, response teams started moving toward what their systems told them was breaking news.
Reverb's work. Clean. Professional. Beautiful in the way that good code always was—invisible until you knew where to look.
On the north corridor, four kids in oversized hoodies ran screaming through the checkpoint, spilling bundles of fake manifest documents like confetti. Security guards' eyes tracked them automatically—trained responses, predictable patterns, humans being exactly as human as Reverb had calculated.
Nobody saw the knife sliding through the trailer's seal at the wheel well.
Kojo moved like smoke given purpose—one hand gloved, one hand empty. The seal parted under his blade with barely a whisper, metal yielding to pressure applied at exactly the right angle. He worked fingers into the gap, found the thermal latch Reverb had mentioned buried beneath layers of corporate security theater.
Old Church tech. The kind that looked impressive but had been cracked by street engineers years ago.
He triggered the frequency. The latch clicked. The seal released with a sound like exhaling.
Inside, the trailer smelled like preservatives and brand logos stamped on cheap packaging. Three pallets of "humanitarian aid" sacks stacked floor to ceiling, and beneath them—
Kojo stabbed a crowbar into the false floor. Wood splintered. Gave way like it had been waiting to confess.
And there it was.
Hidden crates marked with low-grade medical symbols that didn't match any standard Ilias recognized. The weight was wrong. The manifest was wrong. Everything about this was wrong in exactly the way Reverb had predicted it would be.
Kojo grabbed the first crate, heart hammering against his ribs. Not fear. Something else. That particular kind of vindicated joy that came from being right about how corrupt everything was, from having proof in your hands that couldn't be denied or spun or explained away.
He caught Ilias's eye across the street. Mouthed one word: Brother.
Ilias didn't smile. Just gripped his staff tighter and waited for the other shoe to drop. Because it always did.
Behind the convoy, two armored patrols peeled off toward the protest site—exactly according to plan. Reverb had fed them false sensor data, looped patrol routes, made it look like the real threat was three blocks away and growing.
Magic and technology. Same thing in the end when wielded by someone who understood both.
She came around the corner looking exhausted in ways that went beyond lack of sleep.
Lab coat spotted with something that might have been blood or might have been chemical stains—hard to tell in the uncertain light. Hair pulled back in a messy bun that looked like it had been done in a hurry. Medical bag slung over one shoulder, the strap worn smooth from years of carrying.
Reverb saw her first. His whole body went rigid for half a second—recognition, relief, something else he wouldn't name—before he forced himself to relax and keep working.
"Doc," he said quietly into the comms. "You're back."
"I'm back." Her voice was steady. Professional. Like nothing had happened. Like she hadn't been missing for hours doing things nobody was supposed to know about. "What did I miss?"
"Currently stealing from the Families. The usual."
Despite everything, she almost laughed. "Of course you are."
She moved toward the extraction point, scanning the crowd with eyes that looked too calm, too focused, cataloging threats and exits with the kind of automatic precision that spoke of training nobody knew she had.
Ilias caught sight of her and his whole face lit up with relief.
"Mira!" He started toward her, staff forgotten for a moment. "Are you okay? We were worried—"
"I'm fine." She smiled—warm, reassuring, exactly what he needed to see. Exactly what she'd practiced becoming. "Just got held up dealing with something. You know how it is."
But Seraph noticed. The way Mira's eyes swept the area in patterns that weren't medical, weren't civilian. The way her hand stayed near her bag—not resting, ready. The subtle shift in how she moved through space, like every muscle was coiled and waiting for violence.
Seraph had seen that posture before. In soldiers. In herself. In people who'd killed and would do it again if necessary.
Not in healers.
Their eyes met across three feet of tense air. Mira's smile didn't falter, but something passed between them. An understanding. A question that would wait for later because right now they had bigger problems.
"Glad you're safe," Seraph said carefully.
"Me too."
It should have been clean. Surgical. Professional. In and out before anyone knew they'd been robbed, before the city could react, before consequences caught up with choices.
Instead, everything went to hell in the space between heartbeats.
As Kojo's people rolled the first pallet out of the trailer, a guard on the perimeter—the one nobody had accounted for, the one who was supposed to be looking the other way—grabbed his radio and screamed for backup. His voice was sharp with panic and genuine fear.
He'd seen something. A hand where there should only be uniform. Movement where there should only be cargo. One detail wrong in a pattern that was supposed to be perfect.
His voice carried: "Breach! We have a breach on the—"
And his drone pinged a pattern Reverb hadn't patched because it was new, installed yesterday, part of a security update nobody knew was coming.
"Shit," Reverb hissed into the comms. "We're blown. Extraction now, now, NOW—"
At the same moment, figures emerged from an alley beside the convoy that Rhea's scouts had cleared an hour ago. They shouldn't have been there. Couldn't have been there.
But they were.
Cultists. Grey robes with red spiral threading. Faces obscured beneath hoods that somehow made the darkness underneath seem deeper than it should be. Moving with that particular kind of purpose that made Ilias's skin crawl, made something primal in his hindbrain scream danger.
One of them carried a small glass lamp—delicate, ornate, glowing faintly with something that wasn't light, wasn't fire, wasn't anything that belonged in the material world.
He raised it above his head with both hands like an offering to gods that didn't deserve worship.
And smashed it on the pavement.
Fog poured out like it had been waiting centuries for this moment. Not smoke. Not gas. Something else. Something worse.
It crawled along the ground like it was alive and hunting, seeking warmth, seeking resonance, seeking anything that felt and thought and hoped. The air around it went flat—like someone had reached into reality and deleted a frequency that should have been there, that had always been there until this moment.
Ilias smelled it before he fully understood what he was seeing. The absence of a note. Like the world itself had lost a letter from its alphabet and was trying to pretend nothing was missing.
For half a breath, everything went quieter. Flatter. Wrong in ways that made his teeth ache and his eyes water.
Then the screaming started.
One of the convoy guards—a hired gun who probably worked for three different Families and cared about none of them beyond the paycheck—started convulsing. Clawing at his chest like something inside had grown hands and was trying to tear its way out through his ribs.
Kojo lunged for him. "Hey! HEY! Man, look at me—"
The guard's head whipped around with a sound like breaking pottery. His eyes were black. Completely black. Like someone had poured oil into his skull and drowned everything human that used to live behind those eyes.
When he spoke, his voice had no rhythm, no cadence, no music. Just the sound of paper rustling in an empty room where nothing should be alive.
"It flows," he whispered with a smile that didn't reach anything. "We feed. We multiply. We fill."
Then he attacked.
Not wild. Not frenzied. Cold. Efficient. Precise. Like a machine wearing human skin, piloting a body that remembered violence but had forgotten why it mattered.
Kojo barely blocked the first hit. The man was strong—impossibly strong for someone his size, someone who should have been limited by muscles and leverage and physics. The gauntlets flared gold, Ogun's power surging in automatic response to threat.
But the fog was spreading. Reaching. Finding.
Another guard went down, eyes bleeding black from the corners like tears made of void. Then one of the Free Rider volunteers. Then a civilian who'd been too close, too curious, too unlucky.
"GET BACK!" Mira's voice cut through the chaos like a surgical blade. "Everyone back from the fog! NOW!"
She was moving. Not running—hunting. Her hand went into her medical bag and came out with something that glinted silver in the uncertain light filtering through smoke and fear.
A scalpel. Surgical steel. Clean. Sharp. Probably should have been in a clinic.
Definitely shouldn't have been in her hand moving with that kind of practiced, familiar ease.
She reached the first possessed guard—the one convulsing on the ground, black spreading through his veins like infection—and her hand shot out. Precise. Surgical. Hitting a pressure point that dropped him like someone had cut his strings.
Not healing. Something else. Something that looked too much like violence wearing medicine's face.
Seraph's eyes widened. What the hell—
Reverb saw it too. Saw the way Mira moved through the chaos. The cold efficiency. The absolute lack of hesitation. The way she held that scalpel like it was part of her hand.
He'd seen it last night in the warehouse. Knew what she was. Knew what she'd been.
Ilias didn't notice. He was too busy trying not to die.
One of the Cultists came at him with a blade that hummed with Silence, that made the air around it feel empty and hungry. Ilias raised his staff, felt Orun-Fela's presence surge through the wood like lightning through a tree—
The clash sent a shockwave through the street that cracked windows three buildings away. Concrete split beneath their feet. Metal groaned.
The Cultist staggered back, surprised. Maybe even impressed.
Ilias pressed forward. Not thinking anymore. Just moving. Just surviving. The staff sang in his hands like it had been waiting for this, each strike leaving trails of golden light that burned afterimages into reality itself.
Behind him, Kojo fought three possessed guards simultaneously. The gauntlets had grown massive—Ogun's power flooding through them without restraint, turning his fists into hammers that dented metal and shattered bone and made the ground shake with each impact.
One of the guards raised a rifle—not at people, at the crates themselves—and fired.
The bullet hit something volatile. Something chemical. Something that absolutely should not have been in a convoy marked "humanitarian relief."
The explosion wasn't large. But it was bright. Hot. Chemical. Wrong.
Flames licked across cheap plastic packaging like they'd been starved and finally found a meal. Medical supplies that were supposed to save lives went up like kindling. The fog swirled around the fire, feeding on it somehow, growing thicker and hungrier.
"MOVE!" Rhea's voice cut through the comms like a whip crack. "Drag what you can and MOVE! Leave the rest!"
People scattered in the organized chaos that came from good planning meeting terrible reality. Some grabbed crates. Others grabbed wounded. The line between rescue and retreat blurred into simple survival.
Mira was everywhere at once. Grabbing people, pulling them back from the fog's reach, pressing hands to wounds that sealed under her touch with green light that felt warm and alive. But her eyes never stopped moving. Never stopped calculating trajectories and threat assessments and exactly how many seconds she had before someone else died.
Seraph stayed close to Ilias, covering his back while he fought. Their movements had fallen into a rhythm over the past weeks—not practiced, just known. Intuitive. She'd step left as he swung right. He'd duck and she'd strike over his shoulder. Like dancing except with more blood and higher stakes.
"You good?" she called out between strikes.
"Define good!"
Despite everything—the fire, the fog, the possessed guards, the end of the world happening in real-time—she almost smiled.
The fog reached the edges of the crowd. People started screaming—not in pain, worse than pain. That primal kind of terror that came from touching something fundamentally wrong with existence itself.
One man fell. Eyes bleeding black. Started crawling toward the nearest person with hands that bent at angles hands shouldn't bend.
Mira reached him first.
Her hand pressed against his chest, right over his heart. For a second, nothing happened.
Then green light flooded from her palm—healing resonance, pure and clean and alive in ways the fog couldn't comprehend.
The black receded. Burned away like oil meeting sunlight. The man gasped, collapsed, but his eyes were human again. Terrified. Confused. But human.
Ilias saw it happen. "Mira! Can you heal them? Can you—"
"Working on it!" She moved to the next victim. And the next. And the next. Burning the Silence out of them with healing that felt like fire, that hurt going in but left them whole on the other side.
But there were too many. The fog kept spreading. And she was just one person trying to hold back a tide.
On a rooftop three blocks away, Reverb's fingers flew across his console with the kind of desperate speed that came from knowing lives depended on every keystroke.
He'd expected complications. Some fire, maybe. A few casualties that would haunt him but could be justified.
Not this. Never this.
His screens filled with data streaming in from every sensor he'd hacked—the fog wasn't just Silence manifested, it was weaponized. Targeted. Designed to spread through specific emotional frequencies like a virus that knew exactly which doors to knock on.
Fear. Anger. Hunger. Desperation.
The Cult had turned human suffering into a transmission vector. Had made poverty and pain into roads their corruption could travel.
"Bastards," he muttered. Then louder: "Clever bastards."
Then he made a decision that would change everything.
He jammed every signal he could reach. Municipal feeds. Emergency broadcasts. Private Church channels. Everything within range of his improvised network went dark for exactly three seconds.
And then he started uploading.
Valencrest manifests. Luma ledgers. Ferroline shipping receipts. Every dirty secret he'd been collecting for months, every piece of evidence showing exactly how the Families had been bleeding the Morrows dry while calling it charity, while smiling for cameras and accepting humanitarian awards.
Within seconds, every public screen in Elyria flickered. Died. Then came back to life showing something new.
Documents. Numbers. Names. The entire corrupt machine laid bare in high-resolution detail that couldn't be ignored or explained away.
Reverb's voice crackled across every speaker in range—rough, angry, done with pretending and compromising and watching people die quietly.
"This convoy?" His words echoed through streets and plazas and living rooms where people were eating dinner. "Marked humanitarian relief. Food and medicine for the Morrows. That's what the manifest says. That's what the press releases promised." He paused for effect. "Here's what the ledger says."
More documents flooded the screens. Purchase orders for weapons hidden in medical shipments. Equipment marked up three thousand percent. Food shipments labeled "expired" that were actually premium goods bound for upper district markets where people had never missed a meal in their lives.
"Valencrest. Ferroline. Luma." Reverb's voice was cold now. Certain. Factual. "Names and receipts. They've been paying off officials, falsifying manifests, stealing relief funds meant for people who are starving. This isn't charity. This isn't humanitarian aid." He let that sink in. "This is theft. This is murder. This is your government and your corporations working together to bleed you dry while calling it salvation."
The feeds split reactions immediately. Some people cheered. Others covered their children's eyes. But everyone watched.
For the first time in years, maybe in generations, the people of Elyria saw the machine that ground them down. Saw it with their own eyes. In numbers that couldn't be spun. In documents that couldn't be denied.
"I'm not telling you to riot," Reverb continued, and his voice softened slightly. Became almost human again. "I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just telling you the truth. What you do with it—" He paused. "—that's on you. That's always been on you."
Then he cut the feed and got back to work keeping his friends alive.
She stood in her fruit stall, hands moving on autopilot through familiar tasks—sorting through dried spices, checking inventory she already knew by heart, straightening displays nobody would buy from because nobody had credits to spare.
Auntie Kaya had been running this stall for thirty years. Had watched the district decay around her like slow rot, had seen the Church promise salvation while delivering control, had buried too many neighbors who'd died from things that should have been treatable.
The holo-feed above her stand flickered. Changed.
She looked up out of habit more than interest.
Saw the documents. The manifests. The names glowing in accusatory light.
Her jaw tightened hard enough to ache.
Her son was supposed to get medicine from that convoy. The fever that had been burning him up for three days—the clinic had turned her away, said they had nothing, said to wait for the relief shipment, said help was coming.
Except the relief shipment had never been relief at all. Just another lie. Another betrayal. Another day watching her child suffer while someone somewhere added numbers to their account and called it business.
She thought about the price increases. The way dreg grain had tripled in cost over the last month. The way clean water now required credit she didn't have. The way her son had coughed blood this morning and she couldn't do anything but hold him and lie about everything being okay.
The protest—the real one now, not the diversion Rhea had orchestrated—started flowing past her stall like a dam breaking. People grabbed spilled crates from the burning convoy. Not the imported luxury goods. Not the things meant for other districts. The dreg grain. The protein cakes. The food that had been marked "surplus" and priced beyond reach.
The food that was theirs to begin with.
A boy—maybe ten years old, skinny in ways that spoke of missing too many meals—ran past with a handful of something that looked like compressed nutrients. He shoved it in his mouth without stopping and grinned like he'd won a war.
Maybe he had.
Then a man stumbled near her stall. Eyes going milky. Black spreading through the whites like ink through water. Moving wrong.
He fell. Convulsed. Clawed at his own face hard enough to draw blood.
Then went still.
When he looked up, he smiled at her. Empty. Hungry. Wrong.
"It's started," Auntie Kaya whispered to nobody and everybody. Her voice was sharp with certainty and fear in equal measure. "Gods help us all."
She wrapped a protein cake in cloth—stolen from the convoy, technically, but reclaimed felt more accurate—and pressed it into her son's hands when he came running through the chaos looking for her.
His face was wet with tears and soot. Scared in ways children shouldn't be. But when he saw the food, he tried to smile anyway because children were resilient like that.
"We're going to be okay," she told him. Lying. Hoping. Both. "I promise. We're going to be okay."
Above them, drones circled in precise patterns. Church colors. Family sigils. Watching. Recording. Calculating what this would cost and who would pay.
Auntie Kaya looked up at them and felt something crack in her chest. Not hope. That had died years ago. Something worse and more dangerous.
Rage.
Beneath an abandoned warehouse where the city's hum died and echoes went to disappear forever, in chambers that existed in the space between infrastructure and intention, the Cult gathered in their holy work.
They called themselves the Voiced Void in texts so old most people thought they were mythology. Fairy tales to scare children. Warnings about what happened when you listened to the wrong frequencies.
Their leader moved with careful grace—thin fingers that never quite stopped moving, mouth that had forgotten how to smile with anything resembling warmth. They called him voiced void because his name had been given to the Silence years ago in exchange for power.
The ritual wasn't theatrical. No candles. No incense. No dramatic ceremony for an audience that didn't exist. Just shards of something that looked like broken glass but pulsed with frequencies that hurt to look at directly, that made your eyes water and your teeth ache.
voiced void touched each shard with reverence that bordered on love. Whispered words in a language that predated sound, that existed in the spaces between notes. His voice multiplied—one becoming chorus becoming weight becoming pressure that made reality flinch.
"We bring edge," he intoned with absolute conviction. "We give them teeth. We slip a black note into the world's song and watch it spread."
The lamp smashed at the convoy had been ceremonial. The key that opened doors that should have stayed closed. The fog wasn't just emptiness made manifest—it was hunger. A piece of the Primordial Silence given temporary form and purpose.
"The hunger will latch onto the greedy and the desperate," voiced void continued, fingers still moving in patterns that left trails in the air. "It will find hosts with hollow places. Empty spaces where something was lost and never found. Where hope died and left a wound." He smiled without joy. "And it will feed. And grow. And spread."
A young woman in the back—too young for this, barely twenty, smiling like this was salvation instead of damnation—pressed her palm against one of the shards.
It burned. Not with heat. With cold. The kind that went deeper than flesh, that left maps under your skin showing where you'd been and where you could never return from.
When the ritual finished, voiced void didn't celebrate. Didn't congratulate. Just watched his screens as the hunger spread through the convoy site, finding bodies, filling holes, turning people into vessels for something that should never have been given shape.
"Release more," he said quietly to his acolytes. "Three more lamps. Different districts. We'll see where the hunger takes us next."
Someone hesitated. "Master, if the Church traces this back to—"
"They won't." His voice was certain. Final. "And if they do, it won't matter. The idea is already spreading. You can't kill an idea once it's taken root. You can only watch it grow."
By the time the fires burned out and the fog retreated back into whatever hole it had crawled from, the street looked like a war zone.
Smoke hung in the air thick enough to taste. Ash settling on everything like gray snow. A child crying somewhere in the distance. Someone's shoe abandoned in a puddle, laces still tied.
The Families' drones lit everything in harsh white light, recording for evidence, for propaganda, for whatever narrative they'd spin by morning.
Valencrest issued a statement within the hour: "Relief convoy attacked by criminal elements. Humanitarian aid destroyed. Multiple casualties. Investigation ongoing."
Luma pushed it across every feed they controlled: "Gang violence escalates to new heights.
Citizens urged to remain indoors. Curfew extended indefinitely."
Ferroline released footage—carefully edited, precisely curated—showing their guards defending the convoy from "terrorists." Never mind that the terrorists were trying to reclaim stolen food. Never mind the context.
Context didn't matter. Only the narrative.
But Reverb's broadcast kept looping on every screen he could reach.
Manifests. Ledgers. Receipts. The truth in numbers that couldn't be spun, couldn't be edited, couldn't be explained away.
People who'd never believed the Morrows' complaints were looking at documents and doing math. Some dismissed it as fake. Others started asking questions they'd never thought to ask before.
The city split. Slowly. Irreversibly. Like a wound that wouldn't close.
Ilias stood amid scattered protein cakes and smoldering plastic, boots black with ash and something that might have been blood. He could taste burnt chemicals on his tongue. Could smell the particular stench of violence trying to dress itself as necessity.
He'd never wanted this. Never wanted to be part of something that left bodies on pavement and children crying in the dark and the air smelling like desperation and defeat.
He'd just wanted to help people. Make things better. Do something that mattered.
Now help looked like theft. Like fighting. Like watching a man's eyes go black and knowing there was nothing you could do but put him down before he hurt someone else.
Seraph found him standing there, staff in hand, staring at nothing or everything or the space between.
"Ilias."
He didn't respond.
She stepped closer. Put a hand on his arm. Solid. Real. Warm. "Hey. Look at me."
He turned slowly. His eyes looked hollow. Exhausted. Like he'd aged a decade in the space of an hour.
"We did what we had to do," she said quietly but firmly.
"Did we?" His voice cracked like breaking ice. "Look around. People are dead. That man—his eyes—we—"
"People were dying before we did anything." Her grip tightened, fingers pressing into muscle hard enough to ground him. "Starving. Sick. Suffering while the Families called it mercy. At least now they see it. At least now there's proof."
"And what good does proof do for the dead?"
She didn't have an answer for that. Nobody did.