The streets of the Capitole looked nothing like anything Emma had learned to recognize as a city. No buildings. No regular facades. Just a succession of stone and timber structures that had latched onto one another over the decades, like people pressing together for warmth, without ever really deciding to form something coherent.
Bare electrical wires ran between rooftops at shoulder height, fastened to rusted hooks, and from their ends hung bulbs that flickered in the blue snow, putting out light about as convincing as a candle in a storm.
On every passerby's wrist, the same touchscreen glowed with a cold, precise brightness, perfectly incongruous against everything else around it.
Emma had stopped trying to find logic in any of it.
The sky was what it always was, a mass of grey ash that filtered just enough light to keep things from being entirely dark, without ever committing to something that resembled actual day. She had learned to stop looking for the sun.
"Good." Selene walked half a step ahead of her, hands crossed behind her back, not slowing to check that Emma was keeping up.
"You have now spent some time learning to extract people's desires. Not surprising for an anomaly. Today the objective is different. We are going to the lower city, so you can do the same thing in a pool of existence."
"A pool of existence?"
Emma had learned to ask her questions without waiting for an invitation. Selene had never offered one, and never would, but she answered, which in her register amounted to a form of permission.
"A place where a great numbers of Hollow live packed together. Some say the sum of their existences eventually generates a form of collective Pulse, a phenomenon I don't fully understand and don't particularly seek to. What concerns us is that the emotional density is far more difficult to filter than with a single person. You will need to learn not to be drown."
Emma nodded. She took these small exercises seriously, they brought her a real satisfaction each time she got one right. She almost appreciated Selene for it.
To keep off the snow she wore a light green down jacket and double-layered khaki trousers, a style very different from what she'd been used to before.
Centuries ago… The more I think about it, the more inconceivable it seems.
The wind whipped her face. She tucked her chin into her collar.
"Is the city divided?" she said, less out of curiosity than to break a silence that felt a little too heavy.
Selene glanced at her briefly. "It wasn't always like that. In the beginning, the districts represented belonging, origins, allegiances. Before the Capitole took power, things were organized differently." She stopped there, as though she had just noticed she was speaking for something too dangerous.
"Enough talk. We're here."
Emma looked up.
It was nothing at all like what she had expected.
The lower city was built from dark wood and stone, materials that had no business being together and yet held, layered over generations, with that particular solidity of things that were never properly thought through but survived anyway.
The streets were narrow and uneven, and between the facades ran those same electrical wires she had seen above, but more of them here, more tangled, some hanging so low you had to duck under them.
Oil lamps burned alongside, in the corners where electricity no longer reached or had never reached at all, and the light they put out was warmer, older.
People were walking, Families, Children.
A woman carried a basket against her hip while pulling a boy of about ten who wasn't moving fast enough to suit her.
"Mum, are we going to the lower city market?"
"Do you actually want to go, Arthur, or is this another whim?"
Emma stopped without meaning to.
She didn't understand immediately why. It was nothing. A mother and a child, a perfectly ordinary scene, the kind she had crossed thousands of times in another life without ever looking at it. But something in that absolute normality, in that child's whim and that familiar tiredness in the woman's voice, did something to her she couldn't quite name.
She turned toward Selene.
What she saw surprised her.
The mask hadn't fallen, nothing so dramatic. But something in Selene's features had briefly settled. One second, no more. The same kind of involuntary release you have when you recognize something you had forgotten you loved.
"This is why the war must never come back to our doors," Selene said, in a voice that no longer quite had the same texture. Then, as though she had heard the change herself, she added: "Let's move. We are going to the same place."
The war. Barely one nightmare survived and another is already standing there. Emma quickened her pace to catch up. But this time, I won't be the one falling behind.
The market filled an entire square, wide and irregular, bordered by firs the blue snow had buried up to their lower branches.
Stalls spread in every direction without apparent logic, rough clothing next to dried fish, rusted tools against jars of preserves, a man repairing wristwatches a few steps from a woman reading palms.
Children wove between the legs of adults. Voices overlapped in a language that resembled hers but wasn't anymore, reshaped by a century of drift she hadn't lived through.
The noise was physical.
"Do you feel it, Emma?" Selene said, without turning. "That sensation emerging, that accumulated banality that ends up resembling something."
Emma frowned at the phrasing, it was strange, but Selene raised a finger to her lips. A single, silent gesture.
Feel. Don't think.
Emma knew that instruction by heart. She closed her eyes.
It took a moment. The density was different from a single person, not one voice but a hum, a diffuse pressure, like trying to hear a conversation in a room where ten others are happening at the same time. She pushed her Distortion outward, refusing the wall, demanding access.
The murmurs came.
That old crow is trying to cheat me again and thinks I don't see it.
If only I were less of myself.
I love him. But will he ever love me back.
He's pathetic. What does he think is going to happen?
And then, without transition, something far colder:
I'm going to kill him, gut him, and feed on his body.
Emma opened her eyes with a jolt, her eyelids trembling.
"Filter," said Selene, in the same tone she would use to correct a posture.
Emma started again. She sorted. She moved through people the way you force open a door you know you have no right to open.
A man thinking about money he didn't have. A woman whose eyes kept drifting to someone at the far end of the market, again and again, never quite landing there. A child who was afraid to go home that evening. An old man mentally calculating what he could sell without his wife noticing.
Entire lives reduced to their most shameful moment.
What banality, Emma thought. What a waste.
Then, almost immediately, with an unease that was her own: What am I thinking?
She pushed the thought away. These people mattered. Every life mattered. Obviously.
Obviously.
Selene was watching her.
They kept moving through the market, Emma navigating minds as she walked, feeling her Distortion loosen, grow familiar with the exercise. Each time she asserted it a little more, it grew. That was a physical certainty, not a metaphor.
"Let's try something else." Selene stopped in front of a clothing stall without looking at it. "You know how to read. Now, can you write?"
Emma looked at her.
"Inject," Selene clarified. "Place an emotion inside someone. Not extract but plant."
Andrew. The memory crossed Emma before she had gone looking for it. I already did it once without meaning to. So I should be capable of it again.
She scanned the crowd for a target. She took her time, Selene wasn't rushing her. A man, mid-fifties, standing in front of a dried fish stall he wasn't really looking at. Emma had listened to him briefly as they passed: a dull, old frustration with no particular object.
His wife had left. His son no longer returned his calls. He had carried it so long he had ended up confusing that permanent tension with his own personality.
Him. He was already angry at everything and nothing I'm not going to pass that up.
She focused, took her Distortion, projected it outward rather than inward, and set something down inside him. Not much. A little more anger than he was already carrying. A slight additional pressure on a cord already pulled tight.
It was as simple as opening a door.
The man stiffened.
Emma watched his shoulders climb. His jaw tighten. He turned toward the man beside him, a stranger who had done nothing except be there, and said something low, in a tone that had nothing left of ordinary conversation.
Too much, Emma realized. I put in too much.
She tried to pull back what she had placed. And that was when she understood that it was infinitely harder in the other direction. Extracting was like opening a hand.
Injecting was as easy as blowing on a flame. But retrieving what you had just blown, there was no equivalent for that. She searched for the thread, the emotion she had planted, and found nothing left to grip. It had already merged with what was already there, indistinguishable from the rest.
The man turned toward the stranger beside him and hit him. Not a shove a real blow, a fist, into the jaw, carrying all the weight of an anger that hadn't found a target in years and had suddenly found one at random.
The stranger fell against the stall, knocking everything over, and didn't get up immediately. People shouted. Children stepped back. Someone grabbed the man by the arm, and he just stood there staring at his own fist as though it belonged to someone else.
A pain settled behind Emma's eyes, sharp and cold.
She let her Distortion fall entirely. Too late.
Selene was watching the scene, her eyes resting on the man who was now picking up the fallen jars with embarrassed apologies. Then, almost to herself, with something in her voice Emma had never heard from her before:
"Formidable."
Emma went slightly still. That word, in Selene's mouth, sounded like an anomaly.
"Depth is the most important information," Selene continued, returning to herself as quickly as she had slipped. "You didn't read far enough before acting. What you took for ordinary frustration was an old fracture. You applied pressure to something you hadn't mapped."
She turned back to Emma, her gaze perfectly clinical again.
"This is exactly why we are outside rather than sitting in an empty room."
Emma said nothing. The pain behind her eyes was fading slowly, leaving in its place a clean, precise fatigue, the kind you recognize after genuine effort.
She watched the man. He was apologizing now, hands open, an embarrassed smile on his face, the kind you wear when you don't quite understand what you just did. The stranger he had hit was getting up, rubbing his jaw, refusing the help being offered.
Then juste a moment later people stopped looking, because it was already over, because the life of a market doesn't pause long for that kind of thing.
Emma waited for the guilt to come.
It came. But it didn't come alone.
Underneath it, something else, quieter, warmer than what she would have wanted to find there. Not pride, it wasn't conscious enough to call itself pride. Just the physical certainty, almost organic, that she had done something. That the world had moved because she had decided it should.
She looked away from the man before Selene could read anything on her face.