Click.
The room didn't go dark. It went everywhere.
A sky of ash cracking open like glass to reveal a titanic eye, woven from cold prisms and pure geometry. Flash. Crowds of humans on their knees, screaming in silence as their faces dissolved like chalk beneath a rain of black ink. Flash. Pyramids of pale stone collapsing in on themselves, swallowed by their own dust. Flash. A voice, spoken and distant and absolute all at once, dragging itself through her skull like a blade through silk. "Your world screamed into the silence. We heard it. And We have decided."Flash. Thousands of human silhouettes tearing into one another beneath a sky the color of an open wound. Flash. Atlas, his head shaved now, standing in the blue snow with his back to her, except it wasn't quite him, something colder lived in those shoulders now, something distant, something that had long since stopped being merely human. Flash. A forest of trees so vast their trunks faded into a near black blue, their canopies vanishing into a sky too high to belong to any world she knew, ancient and watching and utterly indifferent to her existence.
And then, last, the one image that refused to let go.
A moon, green as a lush forest, green as something that should never have been allowed to glow with such gentleness. It lingered at the edge of her mind long after the others had already burned through her, patient, enormous, hypnotic in a way that should have soothed her and instead terrified her precisely for that reason. She couldn't look away, and worse, she didn't want to. That moon wasn't simply there. It felt like it was waiting. As though it already knew her name, and was only being polite by not saying it yet.
Then her body finally caught up to what her mind had already drowned in.
Every sense lit up at once, all of them screaming in a language that had nothing left to do with comfort. The Shard's quiet hum twisted into a shriek tearing through her eardrums, a sound with teeth. The air itself turned rancid, thick with dust and ozone, and beneath it crawled an impossible smell, something between rust and old grief. Her mouth flooded with the bitter, metallic taste of a wound that didn't exist. Her skin crawled under a thousand phantom touches, pressure pressing in from every direction at once, as though invisible hands were testing the limits of a body never built to withstand this. And through it all, her eyes kept burning, kept drowning, every flash replaying itself behind her eyelids whether they were open or shut.
It was too much.
Her eyes rolled back. Her knees gave out beneath her.
Agatha moved before Emma had even finished collapsing. She had seen this before, or something close to it, but never this fast, never on a first exposure. No one was supposed to lose themselves in the Shard like this. Had she made a mistake, bringing the girl here? Or had this simply been the test, succeeding far better than she'd dared to hope? Most who stood before the Shard felt nothing at all. The ones who felt something rarely survived long enough to talk about it.
She acted without the slightest hesitation, one hand snapping out to strike the base of Emma's skull with clean, practiced precision, dropping the girl into unconsciousness before her mind could tear itself apart any further.
"Good," Agatha murmured, looking down at the unconscious girl with something far too calm to be called concern. "That's answer enough."
...
The pain was the first thing to return. A dull, crushing pain, lodged in the exact center of her skull, as though someone had driven a nail there and simply forgotten to pull it out. Emma groaned before she even managed to open her eyes.
Her body felt foreign. Every limb seemed too heavy, too far away, as though the orders she sent to her arms and legs had to travel some much greater distance than before just to be obeyed. A dull tremor still rumbled beneath her skin, the last echo of a storm that had only just gone quiet.
But beneath that pain, beneath the exhaustion clinging to her bones, something else had settled in. Something new.
Her mind felt... vaster. Not clearer, not yet, but vaster, as though a room had suddenly had its walls pushed back without warning, letting in a cold draft through openings that hadn't existed the day before. She had no name for the sensation. She only knew, with absolute certainty, that she wasn't quite the same person who had closed her eyes a few hours ago.
What happened?
She searched her memory and found only a hole. A clean, almost surgical void, exactly where the last few hours should have been. She remembered the Shard, its hum buzzing against her eardrums, Agatha's words about the Awakened and the mutants. And then, nothing. A click, maybe. Or had she only imagined that word? Everything else had dissolved, the way a dream tears apart the instant you try to put it into words out loud.
It'll come back, she thought, without quite knowing where the certainty came from. I can feel it. It isn't gone. It's just... filed away somewhere. For now.
She finally opened her eyes. The familiar white ceiling of her room stretched above her, and for the first time, that ceiling felt almost comforting. A known border, in a world that seemed to have a nasty habit of stripping away every border the moment she thought she'd found one.
A timid clearing of a throat made her turn her head.
Andrew stood near the door, his perpetual notebook clutched to his chest like some flimsy paper shield. He had clearly been waiting there for some time, standing, not daring to sit nor to leave.
"You're... you're awake," he stammered, his voice caught somewhere between relief and a nervousness he didn't seem to know where to put. "Lady Agatha asked me to inform you that... that you're free to move about the grounds of the Capitol now. If you wish, of course. I could show you around, if... if that would suit you."
Emma watched him for a moment without answering, and the silence alone seemed to unsettle him even more than usual.
Something was off about this man. She had sensed it since their very first meeting, that vague, shapeless unease lurking beneath his exhausted bureaucrat's exterior, without ever managing to give it a name. But now, looking at him, something seemed to be trying to sharpen into focus, like an image one strains to make out through a fogged window. Nothing concrete. No words, no clear picture. Just a diffuse certainty, something closer to instinct than thought, that the tremor in his voice, the way he never held her gaze for more than two seconds, didn't quite tell the whole story he claimed to be telling.
Later, she thought, pushing the idea aside with something close to physical effort. One thing at a time.
"Yes," she said at last, her voice still rough, barely awake. "A tour. Why not."
After all, she thought, slowly sitting up, her skull still throbbing with a dull ache, no one had ever offered her anything better than a golden cell since she'd woken up in this world. If the Capitol was finally willing to open its doors, she certainly wasn't about to refuse a look at whatever they'd worked so hard to keep hidden from her.
The first thing that struck Emma, stepping out of the residential building, was the cold.
A dry, biting cold, nothing like the damp chill she'd come to know in the corridors of the Capitol. Out here, the air seemed to want to tear the skin straight off her bones. A fine snow, a deep, almost midnight blue, fell in slanted gusts, whipped along by a wind that never seemed willing to let up.
"The climate is harsh, around here," Andrew commented, pulling his frayed collar up to his chin. "That snow never melts, you know. They say it started falling the night of the Great Elevation, and it hasn't stopped since." He glanced up at the ashen sky, as if to make sure nothing had changed. "But they say that further south, the winters wear a different face entirely. Lands where snow barely falls at all, where the sky almost remembers its old color. Hard to believe, standing here." He let out a small, joyless laugh. "Us, here at the Capitol, we've never known anything but this blue."
And yet, beneath the bite of the wind, something in her let itself, despite everything, be disarmed.
She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the almost gentle caress of blue snowflakes settling against her skin, that muffled silence carrying none of the violence the wind had thrown at her face only a moment before. It was absurd. It felt almost indecent, finding any comfort in this. And yet, for the first time since her awakening, she understood something that troubled her far more than any horror she'd faced so far.
The apocalypse, too, could wear a thousand faces.
And the most terrifying of them all might not be the one that looked like a nightmare.
It was the one that looked, against all logic, like something beautiful.
The Council building, seen from outside, looked nothing like what she had imagined. No towering spires, no golden domes, nothing of the grandeur one might expect from the seat of power of an entire continent. It was a squat, gray mass, visibly built up over time through additions with little concern for harmony, more like an administrative building hastily fortified than a palace designed to impress.
"This doesn't exactly scream seat of power," Emma said, a little surprised by her own bluntness.
Andrew didn't seem offended. "The Council is only thirty years old, miss. The Capitol as you see it today isn't a legacy. It's whatever was left of the old world, patched together." He paused, as though weighing whether to continue. "We never had time to think about grandeur. We barely had enough time to survive."
Thirty years. The number lingered in Emma's mind longer than she would have liked.
They passed through a heavy door and emerged into what appeared to be a central hall, vast and crowded, and it was there that Emma stopped dead, the breath knocked clean out of her.
People. There were people everywhere.
It was the first time since her awakening that she'd seen a face that belonged to neither Agatha, nor Andrew, nor Atlas. The first time she'd heard a din of voices that weren't her own or her captors'.
She stood there for a moment, oddly moved by the simple sight of two clerks hastily trading files in the middle of the hall, by the sharp clatter of guards' boots crossing the softer footsteps of gray-robed scribes against the stone floor.
But the ordinary, here, came with its own anomalies.
A man passed close by her, and Emma had to stop herself from staring outright. The skin along his entire left forearm was covered in thin, almost translucent scales, catching the lamps' yellowish light in a way that had nothing human about it.
And then there were the beasts.
A creature trotted between the legs of passersby, vaguely dog shaped, but with a coat that shifted imperceptibly in color depending on the angle of the light, and far too many joints in each of its legs. No one seemed to pay it any mind.
"You'll get used to it," Andrew said, having followed her gaze. "Not everyone was touched the same way by the Elevation. Some of the Awakened carry their Qualia right there on their skin, one way or another. It doesn't make them mutants. Just... people, with a little something different about them."
Emma nodded, her eyes lingering a moment longer on the dog-like creature as it slipped around a pillar, swallowed up by the crowd filling the hall.
It was only after a few minutes of walking that she began to notice the other inconsistency, quieter, but just as troubling.
Above the doors of certain buildings, old bulbs flickered with a tired, yellow light, identical to the ones lining the Capitol's corridors. Electrical cables hung bare along the facades, fastened with rusted nails rather than set into the walls. A little further on, a scribe sat behind a wooden counter, writing something with a quill on paper that had clearly been made by hand, coarse and uneven.
And yet, on the wrist of every single person who passed, without exception, gleamed the same sophisticated touchscreen Atlas had found on the dead soldier.
"I don't understand," Emma finally said, unable to hold back her curiosity any longer. "How can you have... this," she gestured at her own wrist, "and at the same time, that," she pointed at the tangle of bare cables hanging above them.
Andrew seemed to genuinely appreciate the question, as if few people ever asked it.
"It's simple, really, even if it doesn't look it. Before the Elevation, humanity had already invented all of this. The artificial intelligences, the watches, the biometric sensors. It all existed already. The old Council of High Knowledge simply never released any of it to the public, out of fear of what it might unleash. What didn't survive were the factories. The assembly lines. The engineers who knew how to rebuild a power plant from nothing." He shrugged, with the resigned weariness of someone who'd had to explain this far too many times. "We inherited the miracles of the world before the Fall. We just don't have anyone left who can build new ones. So we ration what remains, save it for what actually matters, identification, security, the Council, and for everything else..." he gestured at the scribe's quill, at the cables hanging over their heads, "we make do with whatever's on hand."
Emma stayed silent, taking in this strange image of a world walking backward, clutching desperately at a few fragments of its own vanished future.
They continued on, Andrew dropping the occasional anecdote about this wing of the building, that department buried under a backlog of paperwork, until they came to a stop in front of an enormous mural, visibly older than the rest of the building that housed it. It depicted a man with a severe face, dressed in a dark robe, one hand resting on a strange globe etched with symbols Emma didn't recognize.
"That's..." Emma stopped, the sentence dying in her throat.
That face. She knew it. Not intimately, not in person, but the way one knows a face that spent years appearing on screens, in newspapers, at the top of every serious conversation she'd only ever half listened to.
"That's President Halvern," she said finally, almost surprised by the sound of her own voice. "President of the Council. I... I've seen him before. Before all this."
Andrew hesitated, and for the first time since the tour began, his quiet composure seemed to waver.
"That was the President of the Council of High Knowledge," he confirmed, his voice suddenly more cautious. "Before the Great Elevation. One of the last leaders of the old world."
Emma frowned, studying the painted face, searching for what had changed between the blurry memory she carried of him and this fixed image on the wall. That jaw. That stare, hard right down to contempt, something she'd never really noticed before, too distracted, back then, by concerns that now felt like they belonged to an entirely different life.
"And Agatha..." she began slowly, already feeling the answer take shape before Andrew had even opened his mouth.
"Lady Agatha is his granddaughter," he answered, his voice dropping to an almost ashamed murmur, as though he'd just betrayed a secret no one had ever formally asked him to keep. "The last of his bloodline to survive to this day. That's, in large part, why she sits on the Council today."
Emma turned her gaze back to the mural, to that face of stone and contempt painted larger than life, and let the pieces settle into place in her mind.
Agatha didn't lead because she had survived better than anyone else, or because she had earned some kind of legitimacy out of the chaos.
She led because her grandfather had led before her.