The screaming had stopped by the time I reached the source.

  And silence usually meant the fight was over.

  The street was narrow, pressed between grey and green buildings that leaned toward each other like a drunk couple walking home together. The sun has barely reached the cobblestones. The smell hit me first, that brass-sweet rot was thicker here than anywhere else I'd walked that morning.

  Seven people sat in a rough circle near a well that had been dry for years. There was a small old woman with brass creeping up her neck. A man my age with his hands frozen mid-gesture, mouthing some urgent sentence he would never finish. Two children holding hands, their fingers fused where the metal met.

  In the center of the circle, a woman who was still moving.

  Moving a lot, actually. As if she would move for the seven of them.

  She knelt beside the old woman, checking eyes and pulse. Making notes in a small book with handwriting that was quick and cramped. Her movements were efficient but also radiating warmth. She touched the old woman's face with something that looked, to the part of me that could still read such things, like genuine care.

  Then she saw me and frowned.

  "You're not from this district." She stood up immediately, putting herself between me and the victims. Her voice was rough, probably from shouting for hours.

  "Health ministry? Imperial guard?"

  "Neither."

  "Then leave. This area isn't safe."

  I stepped closer. She tensed but held her ground. Mid-thirties. Dusty blonde hair, put together for practicality. Merchant's clothes that suggested she'd been sleeping in them. Eyes that had seen too much in too few days.

  "I'm trying to understand what's happening here," I said.

  "What's happening is people are dying!" She gestured at the circle. "Look at the Hartmanns. That’s three generations. They started showing symptoms four days ago. By yesterday morning, Grandmother Isis couldn't move her legs. By last night, none of them could at all."

  "You were here when it happened."

  "I've been here since the the whole time." She tucked her notebook into her belt. "Someone has to keep track. Someone has to make sure they're not just forgotten when the quarantine comes."

  "You're expecting quarantine?"

  She laughed. A sharp exhale, short and bitter.

  "The Emperor gave a speech yesterday. Beautiful words about imperial responsibility and medical mobilization. Very inspiring." She looked at the frozen family. "The Hartmanns heard it too. Isis said it gave her hope."

  "You don't share that hope."

  "I've been organizing evacuations from the infected zones for two weeks. Getting people out before the brass takes them. In that time I've seen exactly three imperial physicians. They took notes, drew blood, and left….. nine days ago. They are not coming back."

  She met my eyes. "And three days ago, the Upper Terraces closed their gates for good."

  I had heard about the gates. The wealthier districts sealing themselves off, arguing they were protecting their residents from contamination. What they were protecting was the view from their windows and the value of their properties.

  "I had forty families placed with relatives in the Copper Quarter," the woman said. "Working people who had muscles or connections. The gates went up and those forty families had nowhere to go. I had to find some warehouse space in two hours." She said it flatly, not asking for sympathy.

  "I'm Lillian. Lillian Valincon. I used to run a textile business. Now I run whatever this is."

  "Why are you doing all this?"

  The question seemed to catch her off-guard. She was quiet for a moment, looking at the children with their fused hands.

  "Because I was here when it started. Because I saw the first victims and couldn't stand still, couldn't walk away either. Selling cloth while people turned to metal in the streets. That’s nonsense." She shook her head. "Someone needed to help. So I help."

  The simplicity of it struck something in me.

  "You're not afraid of infection?"

  "Of course I'm afraid. Every morning I check my fingers, but..." She looked at me steadily.

  "...Fear and duty often sleep in the same bed, but only one will get up and have breakfast with you.”

  Lillian was the opposite of Dylana. Everything she did was driven by the simple human inability to ignore suffering. It was inefficient. Emotional. Probably in vain. Exactly how I didn't thought.

  I wanted to understand.

  "Show me," I said. "The evacuations, the records... all of it."

  "Why is that."

  "Because I might be able to help."

  "Help how? You're not a physician." Her eyes narrowed. "You're something else. Quite visibly a pact-bearer."

  I hadn't realized I was doing it. The Shinobi variant shooting out residual darkness at the edges of my silhouette. I pulled it back.

  "I'm the Bloody Left Hand," I said. As if that would explain everything.

  Lillian went very still.

  "I know what that title means," she said quietly. "The quiet work. In the shadows and all." She wasn't frightened.

  "So why are you here, in the Sump? Looking at plague victims in the morning can't seriously be part of your job."

  "The plague is the most important problem in this city right now."

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  She studied me for a long moment. Then she turned and started walking.

  "Alright. Come on," she said. "We have a lot of ground to cover."

  The day became a blur of faces and numbers. Mostly faces.

  Lillian's operation was larger than I'd expected. Twelve volunteers working different sections of the infected zone, each maintaining lists of residents, tracking symptom progression, coordinating supply movements. They'd converted an abandoned warehouse into a staging area where healthy families could wait before being relocated to safer districts.

  I watched her work. She remembered everyone's name. When she touched shoulders and held hands she didn’t seem tired at all and that visibly meant something to the people receiving it. She was running on will alone and she never stopped moving.

  "The brass takes the young and the old first," she explained as we walked between rows of cots. "Children and elderly. Weaker immune response. We prioritize getting them out."

  The correlation made sense. Dylana's explanation of the plague's mechanisms did not contradict that.

  "How many have you evacuated?"

  "Three hundred and twelve. Another hundred and forty waiting for placement. And every day more people show symptoms." She stopped at a cot where a young boy sat alone, staring at nothing. His hands were in his lap, the faint gold discoloration already visible at the fingertips. Early stage. Maybe two weeks from symptomatic. "This is Tam. His mother started showing symptoms yesterday. We had to separate them."

  The boy didn't react at all to his name.

  "He's already infected," I said quietly.

  "Yeah," She knelt beside the cot and took the boy's hands in hers anyway, brass and all. "Hey, Tam. This is my friend Yozi. He's going to help us figure out how to fix this."

  The boy's eyes focused. Found mine. Fear in them, and underneath it, hope. The specific hope that children had because they hadn't yet learned how often it got crushed.

  "Are you really going to change something?" he asked.

  I wanted to give him probabilities. Percentages, something real to hold on to. What came out instead was:

  "I'm going to try."

  Lillian noticed that. A small smile when I said that, there and gone.

  "That's all any of us can do," she said.

  "The Upper Terraces," I said when we were walking again. "The families you lost placement for. How many more will lose access if the other wealthy districts follow?"

  "All of them, eventually." She said it without self-pity. “It’s always the same. The rich close their doors and the poor manage with what's left. What's left is me and twelve volunteers in this shitty warehouse that leaks when it rains."

  "I can get the gates open," I said.

  She stopped walking. Turned to look at me.

  "The Left Hand has reach into the Upper Terraces," I said. "I can apply pressure. Not through official channels. But I can do that."

  Lillian was quiet for a moment. "You mean threaten them."

  "Remind them of their obligations to the Empire and its citizens."

  She looked at me surprised.

  "That's not nothing," she said finally. "That might actually help." She handed me a folded paper. "Names and locations of the worst-affected families. If you're going to the palace, maybe you can convince someone to do something real while you're there."

  I took the list. Tucked it beside Dylana's vial.

  "Lillian." I stopped at the warehouse door. "What you're doing here. How can you do it without slowing down?"

  She considered the question. "Because someone has to remember that they were people." She looked back at the rows of cots, the boy with gold spreading up his fingers. "If no one remembers, it's like they never existed at all."

  I left before I could stain her kindness with anything that came out of my mouth.

  I went to the throne room, and it felt different.

  Same chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Same geometric prayers carved into sandstone. Same fountain where the Tear's pedestal had been. But something had shifted. The shadows fell at wrong angles.

  Damian sat on the throne and was talking to empty chairs.

  Three of them, arranged in a semicircle before the dais, occupied by nothing but shadows and dust. He looked at them as if they held his most trusted advisors.

  "The trade agreements will require renegotiation," he was saying. "The merchant guilds have been exploiting the chaos. We'll need to remind them who holds the real power."

  A pause. Then another nod.

  Not at me. Only afterwards his eyes found me.

  "Yozi." His voice was warm. Welcoming.

  The Damian I remembered, suddenly.

  "Come in. We were just discussing resource allocation. We have concerns about the Sump situation. We feel we're not being aggressive enough."

  "I see," I said carefully.

  "Do you?" Something flickered in Damian's eyes. Red, for just a moment, like light catching on old blood. Then it was gone and he was smiling again. "I hope so. The Bloody Left Hand sees things others miss."

  He descended from the throne. Walked past the empty chairs, trailing his fingers along their backs as if touching the shoulders of people standing there. In his pocket, just visible at the edge of his coat, a folded paper covered in script I couldn't read from this distance. Dense lines. Geometric.

  Malgrin tried to hide his nervousness.

  I reported what I knew to Damian. Current infection rates, progression patterns, Lillian's evacuation efforts, the gap between imperial promises and actual resources deployed. Neutral. Clinical. The way he would have wanted.

  Damian listened. His eyes never quite focused on my face.

  "Concerning," he said when I finished. "How about moving the infected outside the gates?"

  "No. What we need is a cure, and I may have found someone who can provide one."

  "A cure." His smile widened. Something about the expression made the hair at the back of my neck try to do something it hadn't done in weeks. "How optimistic. How very… philanthropic."

  The word came out mocking. Loaded with false enthusiasm.

  "The physician's name is Dylana Senna," I said. "She claims she can complete the reversal mechanism."

  "Do what you think is necessary." He turned away, walked to a window, looked out at the city below. His reflection in the glass was darker than the room's lighting should have allowed. "But Yozi. Be careful who you trust. There are things moving in the shadows that even you can't see. Things that have been waiting a very long time."

  "Waiting, your Majesty?"

  "No, forget I said that." He turned back and his smile was Damian's smile again, warm and genuine and not quite reaching his eyes. "Just thinking aloud. The pressures of the throne. One talks to oneself sometimes."

  He laughed. Then laughed some more.The sound echoed strangely off the stone.

  "Go. Handle the plague. Report back when you have something concrete."

  I bowed and left. The empty chairs watched me all the way to the door. Behind me, I heard Damian resume his conversation with nothing.

  I looked back at him but I kept walking.

  Nyssara was waiting outside.

  "You saw that?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "I could see through the window." She fell into step beside me. "He was talking to empty chairs."

  "I know."

  "What does it mean?"

  I thought about the red flicker. And about the paper in his pocket covered in script that had no business being there.

  "It means Azrathel isn't as dormant as we hoped. Something's changed. I don't know what yet." I stopped walking. Made myself look at her. "We can't trust the throne to support us. Whatever we do about the plague, we do without official backing."

  "Then who do we trust."

  I thought about Lillian in her warehouse. The folded list in my coat. The boy with brass spreading up his fingers, who instantly regained hope in his eyes because a stranger had said he'd try.

  "Ourselves," I said. "For now."

  Nyssara nodded. Then she reached out and took my hand.

  I let her. Tried not to analyze the contact. Just tried to feel it, to let the warmth of her fingers be a thing I felt rather than a thing I recorded.

  It was harder than it should have been. But I was practicing.

  "Malgrin," I thought to myself. "What just happened in the throne room?"

  “Laughter.”

  “What?”

  “Lots of laughter. And applause. Since you entered the palace all I can hear is laughter and applause. It’s not worth going there anymore. I have been advised not to say more than that.”

  I speculated in silence as to what he meant exactly. But the essential parts were troublingly obvious.

  VOLUME 2 IS FINALLY HERE!!!!

  kinda good. I'm kinda proud of this.

  Mo - We - Fr !

  That is the schedule from now on.

  actually blessed and protected by me for the next 7 months.

  That's just a good deal.