The garrison never fully emptied.
Eleanor had learned this in her first week on the job, seven years ago, when she had stayed late finishing a report and looked up to find the building still half-full of people who had simply decided, for various reasons, that they weren't done yet. Investigators with cold cases. Clerks catching up on backlogs. The duty officers who were there because they were supposed to be, and the ones who were there because they didn't have anywhere better to go.
She climbed the stairs to her office without stopping to talk to anyone.
The room was exactly as she had left it. The lamp had burned out sometime in the night, which meant the desk was lit only by the pale grey light coming through the window. The stack of folders. The cold cup. The folder on top with her own handwriting on the cover.
She sat down.
She told herself she would look at the files for twenty minutes and then go home and sleep in an actual bed.
She was asleep in her chair within four.
---
The knock came from very far away.
She surfaced slowly, the way she always did now — through layers of something that wasn't quite sleep and wasn't quite waking, her mind arriving at consciousness a few seconds after her body had already gotten there. There was a brief, disorienting moment in which she didn't know where she was.
Then the knock came again.
*"Come in."*
Her voice came out rougher than she intended. She straightened in her chair, pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, and was already smoothing her hair when the door opened.
The man who entered was somewhere in his late forties, with black hair going grey at the temples and eyes so dark they were almost the same color as his hair. His grey coat was immaculate in the way of someone who had ironed it themselves that morning. His face was pale and carried the particular quality of handsomeness that had survived into middle age by becoming distinguished rather than staying pretty.
Commander Howard Veylan. Her superior. The person who had, three months ago, made her a promise she was currently holding him to.
He removed his hat as he came in and pulled a chair from against the wall without being invited.
*"Last I checked,"* he said, *"this was a place of work."*
*"I'm working."*
*"You were asleep."*
*"I was working,"* Eleanor said, *"and then I slept. Both things happened."*
He sat. Set his hat on his knee. Looked at her in the manner of a man selecting his words, which she recognized as a sign that she wasn't going to like what he said next.
*"I have two pieces of news,"* he said. *"One bad and one worse. Which would you prefer first?"*
Eleanor straightened fully in her chair. Adjusted her coat. Took a slow breath through her nose.
*"Just tell me."*
*"The bad news, then."* He folded his hands on the hat. *"You've been pulled from the missing children case and reassigned."*
She was on her feet before he finished the sentence.
*"You promised me—"*
*"I know what I promised you."*
*"You told me you wouldn't interfere. You told me I could—"*
*"Eleanor."* He raised both hands, palms out. *"I know. Sit down. I know what I told you, and I intend to honor it, which is why I came to tell you about the worse news myself rather than leaving a note on your desk."*
She sat. Slowly. The expression on her face made her feelings about this clear.
Howard lowered his hands.
*"The reassignment is urgent and it's come from above me. I don't have discretion on the timeline."* He held up one finger before she could speak. *"However. Once you've finished, you have my word that you go back to the children's case. Full access. No questions about your methods. That was my promise and it stands."*
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
*"What about the other news?"*
*"That's the worse news."* He reached into his coat and produced a folded document, which he set on the desk between them. *"The duty guard at Shoreditch received a report this morning. A shopkeeper — a butcher, I think, or a baker, the report is unclear — apparently he gave food to a blind child in his district approximately a week ago. Child hasn't been seen since. He came in to report it."*
Eleanor's eyes dropped to the document.
*"The child's description matches your profile,"* Howard said. *"Approximately five or six years old. No family. Visible injuries consistent with prior abuse or hard labor."*
She didn't reach for the document yet.
*"I wanted to tell you myself,"* he said, more quietly, *"because I know what you're going to think when you read that description. And I need you to hear me say clearly that this may be a coincidence. One child matching a general profile doesn't—"*
*"I'm going to Shoreditch."*
She was already reaching for her coat.
*"Eleanor."* His voice stopped her. *"I said later. I need you present for a briefing on the new assignment this afternoon. After that, you can go to Shoreditch. You can talk to the shopkeeper. But I need you to hear me — you cannot work both cases simultaneously. Not officially. Not given your personal involvement."*
She stood with her coat half on and said nothing.
*"Finish the new assignment,"* Howard said. *"Then I'll give you everything we have. Every file, every report, every piece of evidence we've collected. You'll have more to work with than you do right now."*
Eleanor finished putting on her coat.
*"Fine,"* she said.
It was the only word she trusted herself with at the moment.
---
Two days earlier.
The darkness moved.
That was the only way Silas had ever been able to describe it to himself — not that the world appeared, not that he suddenly saw, but that the darkness shifted from still to moving, from nothing to almost-something, in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
He had been on the ground.
He remembered the training hall. The mana that had tasted wrong. Eirka's voice going distant and strange. And then nothing — a gap of nothing that his mind kept returning to and finding empty, like a drawer that should have held something and didn't.
And then he was here, in his room, with the familiar weight of his mattress beneath him and his cane somewhere within reach and the red threads of Eirka hovering close.
*"You lost consciousness for two days."*
He turned his head toward her voice.
*"Are you in pain? Your body? Your stomach? Your head?"*
He opened his mouth to answer—
*"Useless."*
The word came from the same direction as Eirka's voice but in a different register entirely — sharper, hollower, carrying a contempt that landed on him like a flat hand. *"Blind and stupid and sick. What were we thinking, taking on something like this? What kind of—"*
Silas went very still.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, the voice changed again.
*"Answer me."* Eirka's voice. The one he knew. Cold and clinical and present. *"Are you in pain?"*
*"No,"* he said carefully. *"I don't feel pain."*
The red threads drew closer. Close enough that he could feel the air between them change. Her breath was near his face — close enough that he held himself very still, the way small animals hold still when something larger moves nearby.
*"That won't be acceptable,"* she said, lower, almost to herself. *"The Lord won't accept a substandard product."*
The threads shifted back.
*"Follow me."*
---
The air outside hit him like something alive.
He hadn't been outside since the night that man had carried him here. He had forgotten what it felt like — real air, moving air, air that carried things in it. The cold of late autumn pressed against his face and hands and found every gap in his clothing, and the wind moved through what he assumed were trees somewhere nearby, and beneath his feet the ground was soft in a way that floors weren't.
Grass.
He pressed the sole of his foot against it. Then stood still and listened.
Wind through leaves. Birds somewhere above. The distant, layered sound of the city beyond wherever this was — a garden, perhaps, or a courtyard with old trees. He couldn't see any of it. Eirka's red threads were the only thing visible in the darkness around him, as they always were, as everything always was.
He had stopped being sad about that some time ago.
*"Use your magic."*
He raised his head.
*"Your gravity magic,"* Eirka said. *"I was told you used it against two men in an alley. That's how the Lord found you. I want you to do the same thing here. Don't hold back — release all of it."*
Silas turned this over in his mind.
He remembered that moment. Not clearly — it existed in his memory the way the face in his dreams existed, smeared and resistant, refusing to stay still when he looked directly at it. But he remembered the feeling. The thread in his chest, pulled until it snapped. The sensation of something leaving him all at once, not like breathing out but like being turned inside out.
He had not done it on purpose.
He wasn't sure he could do it on purpose.
But he found the thread. He always found it now — it was as familiar as his own heartbeat, that particular presence in the center of his chest, the thing that had been there before he had words for it. He took hold of it the way he had learned to in the training hall.
And then, instead of drawing inward, he pushed.
The thread didn't want to go. It resisted for a moment — a full second of nothing, of his own effort meeting something immovable — and then it gave, all at once, and the world lurched.
The force went outward in every direction simultaneously. He felt it leave him like a wave from a stone dropped in still water. He heard the leaves scatter. He heard something crack — stone, he thought, something stone and heavy. He heard Eirka's threads shift and resettle, her footing adjusting without urgency, the way someone steps slightly to the side of something they were expecting.
And then he saw it.
Purple.
It flooded into the darkness like ink dropped in water — not everywhere, not all at once, but spreading outward from where he stood in a ring of pale violet light that touched everything it reached and made it visible.
The ground. The individual blades of grass, each one distinct, each one lit from within by the faint residual trace of mana his force had passed through. The stone of the path. The wooden slats of a bench somewhere to his left. And the trees—
The trees.
He saw them the way he had never seen anything before. Not as shapes or outlines but as structures — every root anchored in the earth beneath him mapped in purple light, every trunk lit from bark to heartwood, every branch, every twig, every last leaf hanging on its stem in the cold autumn air rendered in fine and total detail.
He saw them.
It lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then the purple light faded, and the darkness returned, and Silas hit the ground.
He landed on his hands and knees. He tasted copper a moment before he felt it — blood, already running from his nose, dripping onto the grass below him in a thin, steady line. His arms shook. His chest felt hollowed out, scraped clean, the ember behind his sternum blazing with sudden, furious heat.
He put one hand under himself and pushed.
He got upright.
And somewhere in the pain and the cold and the blood running down his upper lip, something happened to his face that had not happened — not once, not in any circumstances he could remember — of its own free will.
He smiled.
He didn't decide to. It arrived without permission and without reason, which was perhaps exactly why it felt like his. The trees. The roots. Every blade of frost-touched grass and every crack in the stone path. Three seconds of a purple world, and he had been in it.
He pressed the back of his wrist against his nose.
The blood kept coming.
Eirka moved toward him. He felt her approach in the displacement of the air, in the way her red threads reorganized themselves around her as she crouched to his level. Her hand found his wrist and pulled it away from his face, letting the blood fall freely again, and she was looking at him — at his nose, at the blood, at the pallor she could probably see in his face.
She was not looking at his mouth.
She didn't notice the smile.
*"Mana Expansion,"* she said quietly.
Not a question. Not a diagnosis. The words of someone who has just found the name for something they had already suspected.
Her red threads were very still.
Silas said nothing. The smile had faded by now, as quietly as it had arrived. But it had been there. He knew it had been there.
He had seen the trees.