Far beyond the sea, where the wind never truly stopped blowing, a man watched a fleet that refused to set sail.
The plains stretched out as far as the eye could see, arid, swept by gusts that snapped the canvas of the nomadic Cagurts like so many sails already straining toward a horizon no one here had yet reached. A camp had settled on this ridge three weeks ago. Massive leather tents sheltered the soldiers while the last ships were finished, their dark wooden hulls lined up along the shore like the ribs of some beached beast someone had forced upright again.
"Relic Apollos."
The man who addressed him bowed slightly before continuing, his copper colored armor creaking with the motion.
"The ships won't be ready before the third cycle. An Emptum reopened two days' march from here. Half the army has been requisitioned to deal with it."
Apollos didn't turn around right away. He kept his eyes on the sea, his irises a burning red, almost liquid under the gray daylight, fixed on some point the officer couldn't see.
He was tall, built like a man who had never once needed to prove his strength any other way than by simply existing, his shoulder length hair gathered into a single thick braid that struck his shoulders with every turn of his head. He wore no armor, unlike his men, only a dark tunic torn at the sleeves, as though he had deliberately chosen never to protect himself from anything at all.
"An Emptum," he repeated at last, his voice startlingly calm given what it was announcing. "Really."
The officer hesitated, visibly thrown by the absence of anger in his commander's voice.
"We can delay the departure by a full cycle, if you require it. Or leave the last hull unfinished and sail with what we already have."
"No." Apollos finally turned around, an almost childlike smile lighting up a face otherwise built for command. "I want to see it."
"See it... Relic Apollos?"
"The Emptum." He stepped forward, passing the officer without seeming to notice his growing confusion at all. "Is there still anything interesting left, about Relics?"
"With all due respect, Apollos, the war won't wait for you to satisfy your curiosity."
"The war," Apollos answered, in an almost distracted tone, "has already waited for years. It can wait one or two more cycles. Especially for an Emptum, when they're all supposed to have disappeared."
He was already walking off toward the horses, his silhouette cutting against a sky heavy with low clouds, and the officer, after a moment's hesitation, had no choice but to follow him, wondering, like so many before him, what was really happening behind those red eyes that never quite seemed to belong to the present moment.
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Thousands of kilometers away, in the far quieter corridors of the Capitol, Emma walked alone for the first time in days, with no destination assigned to her.
No one had asked her to go anywhere. That was precisely the problem. Since her arrival here, every step she took had answered someone else's order. This time, she simply wanted to know who these people were, the ones Agatha called her faction, faces she had never seen but who, in theory, lived according to decisions made within these very walls. She made her way, without anyone's permission, toward the wing everyone simply called "the Circle."
The place carried none of the administrative coldness of the rest of the Capitol. Worn but carefully maintained tapestries covered the walls, depicting scenes Emma couldn't quite interpret, human silhouettes kneeling before impossible geometric shapes, nearly identical to the Shard's. People moved through the halls, speaking in low voices, some wearing the same gray robes as the scribes she'd encountered on her first visit, others dressed more simply, almost like ordinary civilians.
She wandered deeper into the wing, in no particular hurry, letting her eyes catch details no one had bothered to point out to her during her first, far more supervised visit to the Capitol. A small shrine occupied one corner of the first hall she crossed, nothing more than a low stone table and a single candle burning beside a chipped clay bowl filled with what looked like dried flowers, faded almost to gray. No one tended it while she watched, and yet the candle stayed lit, as though someone, somewhere, made sure of it without ever needing to be seen doing so.
Further along, a cluster of children sat cross legged on the floor, listening to a man recount something with broad, theatrical gestures, his voice rising and falling with practiced cadence. Emma slowed her pace just long enough to catch a fragment of it, a story about the first days after the Great Elevation, about ordinary people finding shelter in a city of strangers, about a man, unnamed in the telling but unmistakable all the same, a stern face she'd already seen painted larger than life on a wall, who had opened his doors to anyone willing to work for their place inside them. The children's eyes never left the storyteller. Emma didn't need her Distortion to recognize devotion when she saw it laid out that plainly, two centuries old and still being passed down, mouth to mouth, to children who would never live to see how it had all actually started.
She passed a kitchen, doors propped open against the heat pouring out of it, and caught the smell of something simmering, rich and strange, nothing like the thin, joyless meals she'd been served since her arrival. A woman ladling stew into chipped bowls glanced up, offered her a brief, tired smile, and went right back to her work without asking who she was or why she was standing there. It struck Emma, more than anything else she'd seen so far, just how unremarkable she had become in this particular corner of the world. No one here treated her like a Relic, or a weapon, or a fragile thing requiring careful handling. Here, for a handful of minutes, she was simply another face passing through.
She stopped near a group of three people deep in animated conversation, and without really thinking about what she was doing, she did exactly what Selene had taught her: she refused the wall standing between herself and them. She didn't ask permission. She simply decided their thoughts had no right to stay closed to her, and took what she wanted.
Worry. A dull, almost permanent worry, like background noise people had long since stopped hearing.
It was nothing precise, nothing she could have translated into exact words, but it was enough to understand that these people, despite their polite smiles, lived with the same quiet fear that seemed to haunt the entire Capitol since Marek's leak.
"You're not from here, are you?"
Emma turned around, her heart skipping a beat. An elderly woman, hunched but startlingly sharp eyed, watched her with a curiosity free of any malice.
"Excuse me?"
"Your face." The old woman tilted her head slightly, as though trying to recall something just out of reach. "I've never seen you here before, and yet there's something about you..." She stopped, shook her head, almost embarrassed by her own remark. "Forgive me. It's surely nothing. Old women like me start seeing familiar faces everywhere, after a while."
Emma hesitated, relieved that the woman clearly had no precise idea of what she'd just sensed, while unable to stop herself from wondering exactly what had given her away.
"Are you with the Circle?" she asked finally, by simple conversational reflex, to steer the moment elsewhere.
"For thirty years now, dear. Ever since Agatha herself pulled us out of the ruins of what was left of the old Council." The old woman inclined her head slightly. "We owe her everything. Our lives, our food, our safety. Without her, the Capitol would have fallen into chaos long ago."
There was something both touching and deeply uncomfortable in that gratitude. Emma felt her own judgment of Agatha waver slightly, caught between the suspicion she'd carried since the very first day and this new image, almost maternal on a massive scale, of a woman who had quite literally kept an entire people alive.
Maybe the truth, as always, was somewhere between the two, Emma thought.
She let the old woman return to her conversation, and resumed her walk through the Circle, alone among people who had no idea who she really was, or what she might, one day, cost them.