2023-12-03 07:14:22
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305 What She Doesn't Know
Victor made it back up to the terrace level as the eastern sky began to grey.Somewhere in the city below, the sirens were finally starting—fire crews converging on four gutted decks of the mayor's own tower, a story that would need writing before the morning bulletins.Victor leaned against a scorched column and closed his eyes.He let himself have exactly ten seconds of feeling every single one of his years.Then he heard the footsteps behind him. Uneven. Dragging. A young woman's breath, hitching around what sounded like at least two cracked ribs."Sir?"Victor opened his eyes.***Kate Harper came up the terrace steps holding her left arm against her ribs like something borrowed, and stopped dead when she saw him."God," she said. "You look like absolute shit."It came out before she could stop it—no *sir*, no protocol, nothing but the flat honesty of a girl who had spent the night being thrown through a building and had run out of the energy required for manners.Her face caught
304 Everything You Love Will Burn
Kneeling in the ruin, Victor let the Absolute Realm go.The world came back all at once.Sound returned first—wind roaring in through four decks that no longer had walls, the deep structural groan of a building trying to understand what had happened to its spine.Then color, bleeding back into a horizon that had been flat and grey for eleven minutes.Then, six streets over, the falling strut finished its interrupted journey and buried itself in an empty parking lot with a crash that set off a dozen car alarms.Nobody died tonight.Victor made himself take note of that. It was the only line in the ledger that came out in his favour.He reached up with his good hand and touched his own temple. The hair there had gone coarse and grey under his fingers. The joints in that hand ached in a way they never had before—a dull, gritty, unfamiliar complaint.Two years. Gone. Burned out of him in eleven seconds and never coming back.Somewhere far below, a woman was screaming her son's name.***H
303 Red Sun
It did not break.It opened—the way a vault opens, slow and enormous and without apology. What came up through the gap was not rage. Rage is a small human word for a small human thing.What rose in Victor Cromwell's chest had ruled and ended things long before this planet learned to name its own stars.The black veins darkened past black. His eyes went ember-red and stayed that way.And when he lifted his head, the man who had spent all evening being humble and careful and hunted was simply not there anymore."Charles."The voice was wrong. It came from Victor's throat and from somewhere behind him at the same time—layered, patient, vast.Charles let go of his collar and stepped back before he knew he'd done it.Victor stood. The broken arm hung dead at his side and he did not appear to notice it. He surveyed the ruined deck, the frozen dust, his own blood on the concrete, the way a man surveys weather."You've spent four hours screaming at me about gods," he said. "You've used the wo
302 The Eulogy
"Carol first, then."Charles said it like a man choosing an appetizer."I imagine you've built her a whole life in your head tonight. A warm room. A nurse holding her hand. You, arriving just in time to be forgiven."He tilted his head, savoring the shape of the lie before he broke it."Mother doesn't do warm rooms, Father. She does concrete and steel and a very patient blade. I won't tell you what's left of her. I'll let you keep guessing. Guessing is so much worse than knowing, don't you find?"He came in on the last word, and Victor's block came up half a beat late.The fist caught him across the temple. Victor's skull snapped sideways, and the punch didn't stop at his face—it drove him off his feet and thirty feet backward through the air until a steel column caught him across the spine.The column lost.It folded around him with a shriek of tortured metal, bolts firing off it like bullets. Victor came down in the wreckage with his ears ringing and something warm running from one
301 A Bad Copy
Charles tracked the black veins crawling up Victor’s throat and laughed—the sound of a man who’d been nursing kindling for an hour and finally, *finally* saw it catch.“There you are,” he said again, softer, almost tender. “Do you know, Father, I’ve spent this whole night wondering what it would take. I didn’t think it would be her. I thought maybe Mother. Maybe that pretty little executive glued to your side. But no—the spare.”He rolled his neck, and something beneath his own skin answered the pressure. Not black like Victor’s veins. A deep, wet crimson, spreading up from his wrists like something long asleep and now very much awake.“You’ve been holding back all night because you’re afraid. Let me show you what I’ve been holding back out of manners.”The change hit him like a second heartbeat. Charles’s shoulders widened. The crimson threading beneath his skin pulsed once, hard, and the air around him warped—hungry, thin, feeding on whatever ugly satisfaction he’d been drinking in
300 There You Are
Midnight struck just as Victor reached the spire’s base. By the time he climbed to the top, his suit jacket hung folded over one arm. The tie was still perfect. Whatever else tonight became, he wasn’t about to show up for his own son’s execution looking like anything less than the Mayor.He stepped out onto the highest platform. The wind up here was alive, tugging at his sleeves, thick with the copper tang of old blood rising off the steel grate underfoot.Charles was waiting, perched on a support beam with his legs swinging over eighty stories of nothing. He turned something dark and shredded in his fingers. When he noticed Victor, he held it up like a hunting trophy.Kate’s mask.“Punctual.” Charles sounded genuinely warm. “I respect that. Had a bit of an evening already, though. A little bird flew in early—the Protectoress herself, if you can believe it. Then, right in the middle of our chat, something hit me hard enough to put me through a girder.”He tilted his head, studying Vic
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