Renwick had called the meeting.
That alone was strange. Eleven years, he'd called two formal meetings of this body. The first was in his third month as Head of State, before he'd really understood what the body was. The second was in his fifth year, when he'd still believed that understanding it might let him change it.
He understood it now. He understood exactly what it was and what it did. And he'd called this meeting anyway, because saying nothing after what had happened on that street was the kind of failure he wasn't going to add to his account.
Same room as before. Same chandelier. Same table. Same windows looking out on the same city, except the city was different now in that way cities got different after something happened in them that couldn't be undone.
Renwick didn't sit.
He stood at the head of the table and looked at the three men across from him.
"Seven thousand people," he said. "Filing the right papers. Following the law. Doing something the constitution of this republic says they can do."
The Marshal looked at him like someone getting a report they'd already read.
"Public order required—"
"Public order," Renwick said.
The words hit the room the way they'd hit the street: heavy enough to make everything around them feel thin.
"Seven thousand people. Not fighters. Not rebels. Workers. The people whose labor built everything in this city that makes the money that pays for the institution that just killed them." He looked straight at the Marshal. "You are a snake. And you are a traitor to the people you were supposed to protect. Those are the right words for what you are, and I'm saying them here because I'm still, technically, the Head of State of this republic, and this is still, technically, a republic, and I'm going to use whatever time is left where both those things are true to say what's true."
The Marshal's face didn't move.
Renwick turned to the Minister.
"And you," he said. "You somehow manage to be the worst of all of them in this. Sitting there. Not picking a side. Watching them kill people in the street like bugs, and arranging your papers, and putting yourself somewhere between concerned and supportive because picking either one might make you less useful to whatever comes out the other end." He let it land. "That's not being neutral. It's a choice. And the choice has a name, and the name isn't neutrality."
The Minister stared at the table.
The Pontiff had been quiet through all of it.
He sat with that kind of stillness that was just him deciding this part didn't need him yet. When he finally spoke, it was with the slow patience of someone letting the scene play out before getting to what actually mattered.
"Aldous," he said.
Using the first name was deliberate. Not warm. A signal about what key he planned to speak in.
"The grief is understandable," the Pontiff said. "What happened was regrettable. The Church takes no pleasure in it."
"The Church," Renwick said, "backed the rule that made it possible."
"The Church backs the return of order when things are under serious strain. How that order gets restored is for the civil and military authorities to decide."
"The civil authority," Renwick said, "is standing right here. The civil authority wasn't asked."
"The civil authority," the Pontiff said, same calm tone, "is an office that now functions mostly as a formality inside a structure that's moved past what it was built for." He paused. "I'm not saying this to put you down. I'm saying it because it's accurate, and I think you're someone who values accuracy."
Renwick looked at him.
"Elysion is a republic," he said.
"Yes," the Pontiff said.
A pause.
"Not yet," he said.
Two words, quiet. Not whispered. Quiet the way something sounds at full volume in a room that's suddenly gone completely still.
The Minister's eyes flicked. Not to the Pontiff. To the table. That specific move of someone catching something and already deciding what to do with it.
The Marshal's face stayed exactly as it was.
The Pontiff didn't take the words back. He didn't add to them. He sat with them in the room like someone who'd said something that could be heard several ways and was fine with all of them.
Renwick looked at him for a long moment.
"This meeting," he said, "is over."
He was the only one who walked out.
The street outside the building where Gepetto had finished his last Eldravar task was ordinary. The kind of ordinary that piles up in a city over three hundred years without anyone noticing.
He walked without rush.
Underneath the calm, something stirred. Not worry. A reworking. The feel of a mind running on a model that had just gotten enough new data to know the model was off.
The Pontiff's line—Not yet—wasn't a prediction. It was direction. The Pontiff didn't make predictions. He made commitments disguised as observations. The weight of words spoken in a room built for words to stay visible.
He'd known about the demigods. The scattered ones, the quiet ones, the ones still working the edges of dioceses. He'd accounted for them the way you accounted for things that sat in the gap between possible and likely. The jar had shifted the calculation. Aldric's death had shifted it further. The Pontiff's statement—that line, that specific moment—had shifted it past what the old model could hold.
He reached the building.
Semper Fidelis was already facing the door when Gepetto walked in.
"The summoning," Gepetto said.
"Likely inside six to twelve weeks," Semper Fidelis said. "It'll be dressed as an answer to ongoing institutional rot. The Children of Medusa give the cover. The politics give the push. They're not the same thing, but from where the Pontiff sits, both work."
"How many."
"Confirmed active service: seven past what was already thrown into Elysion. Three in the outer lands. Four in quiet dioceses in nearby nations."
Gepetto was still a moment. Seven. Each one, by definition, in the range where Aldric had worked. He filed the number with the weight it deserved and kept going.
"The outer-land demigods sit lower in reach. The quiet-diocese ones will need time to spin up to full teeth."
"Time I don't have."
"No."
Gepetto sat.
He'd been managing visibility with the tight care of someone who knew that being seen decided how much room he had. Every move weighed against how much light it drew. Every tool kept holstered because pulling it would've left a mark, pulled eyes, made readable noise that Anonymous Presence was built to swallow.
The room for that balancing was shrinking.
"I need your full head," he said. "Not just spot-checks. War-math. Everything you've got on this: with the clock speeding up and more demigods probably coming, what order of moves gets the needed end before the gap shuts?"
Semper Fidelis was quiet a moment.
"The answer means eating more eyes on you now to buy a spot later that cuts how much you're seen in the last stretch," he said. "The math wants a piece I don't have enough on yet."
"Which piece."
"The Illusionist."
Gepetto looked at him.
"Without him," Semper Fidelis went on, "the moves you'd need to make throw off more light than Anonymous Presence can swallow. The Church's extra demigods will be hunting exactly the kind of trail the next few months are going to leave. He cuts how things read."
Gepetto didn't move.
The Illusionist. A tool that wasn't a tool in the normal sense. A presence that didn't work through force but through the shape of seeing itself. The kind of thing you called in when the gap between what was and what looked true needed to be walked through by thousands of people at once.
He'd kept the Illusionist in reserve. The reasons had been stacked—staging, preparation, the waiting for ground that felt right. Some of those reasons had held up to scrutiny. Some hadn't.
The clock had been abstract when the decisions were made. The clock was concrete now.
"Call him," Gepetto said.
Not a thought settling into place. Not a decision that had been building. Just the next thing that needed doing, stated as if it was already done.
He stood in the space and thought about what a curtain needed to do. What needed to show through. What needed to stay hidden. The Illusionist didn't make those decisions. Gepetto did. The Illusionist just made the seeing cooperate with the decision.
He'd wanted time to think about what that meant. Time was gone.
He opened the box that had been closed for six months and started sorting through what came out.