Emma had pressed her palm flat against the service door, and that was where it happened, a vibration first, deep in the bones of her hand, traveling up to her elbow, as if the stone itself were conducting something it was never built to carry.
Then the cold.
Not temperature. Something else, something with no name in the ordinary register of physical sensation, a cold presence that poured through from the other side of the door and settled into Emma's chest without asking permission, pressing her lungs down by an inch, then two, until breathing became something that needed a conscious decision instead of a reflex.
With it came the fury.
Not hers. She knew that immediately, the same way you know the pain you feel in a dream isn't real, even at the very center of the dream. That fury didn't belong to her. It was too dense, too well fed by decades of something Emma couldn't map. It passed through her the way current passes through a conductor, never settling, only leaving its mark.
Voices reached her, fragmented, torn through the door and through something far thicker than the door.
"How dare they..."
A crack. Something heavy, knocked over or thrown down.
"That miserable fool, what has he done..."
"Calm yourself, Lady Agatha." Selene's voice, strained in a way Emma had never heard from her before. Not panic in it, only a control that visibly cost her something to hold. "We don't know yet..."
"I see only one solution."
Then the silence dropped all at once, as brutal as the noise had been.
The cold pulled back. The fury went with it. And Emma, who still had her palm pressed to the door, understood too late that she had pushed her Distortion too far, that she had tried to read through something that was never meant to be read, something with a density and a depth that overwhelmed her completely.
The bleeding started in both eyes at once, warm and precise, running down her cheeks like an answer.
The pain arrived in the same second, anchored at the center of her skull with that particular clarity of something that doesn't feel like an accident but a correction. Emma raised a hand to her face, felt the blood under her fingers, and didn't have time to form a coherent thought before the door opened.
Not the service door. The main one, behind her.
She turned.
Agatha stood in the doorway, and Emma didn't recognize her face right away, not because it had changed, but because what it now carried had nothing to do with the expressions she had known so far. Not the calculated warmth of the first weeks, not the quiet authority of the Senate. What stood there now was older than all of that, something carved from a material that years and compromise had never fully managed to soften.
Her voice, when she spoke, carried the same texture.
"Emma. I know you're there. Come with me."
She knew. Not in the sense of having heard a sound, or sensed a presence behind the door. She knew, the same way Emma knew things about people when her Distortion touched them, the same way the incident at the market had proven that this kind of knowledge could pass through thicknesses no one would have guessed were permeable. Agatha had sensed Emma the way Emma had sensed that man with the waterskin, with the same unsettling ease, and probably for far longer.
Of course. The thought arrived with all the quiet humiliation of something obvious she should have seen from the start. Thirty years in power. A Distortion I felt pouring through a closed door. And here I was thinking I was the one spying.
But what troubled her more than that, more than having been caught, more than the pain still lodged in her skull, more than the blood drying on her cheeks, was the rest of it.
The fury she had caught was gone now. Agatha, standing in that hallway, had the face of a woman who had already absorbed what she'd just learned and come out the other side with a decision made. Not calm, that much Emma could have read. Something harder to name, a cold resolve, built quickly over the ruins of something far less cold.
And she's taking me with her.
Emma didn't understand yet what that meant. But something in the way Agatha looked at her, not the way you look at someone caught doing wrong, not the way you look at someone you're about to punish, told her the question wasn't why she'd been caught.
The question was why Agatha had opened the door anyway.
She stood, wiped the blood from under her eyes with a gesture meant to look discreet and probably failing at it, and followed.
Agatha said nothing about the blood. Not a glance, not a pause, not the smallest sign that she'd noticed the dark tracks under Emma's eyes or the slight stiffness in her walk, the walk of someone still absorbing pain. She kept moving, and Emma followed, and that seemed to be all the situation required of her for now.
Selene caught up with them in the second corridor. She said nothing either, but when she fell into step at Emma's left, she shot her one brief glance, just one, that looked like nothing Emma had learned to read on that face over the past weeks. Not clinical coldness. Not evaluation. Something closer to surprise, held back with visible effort, as if Selene had just seen something she hadn't expected.
Surprised by what, Emma wondered, without finding a satisfying answer. That I'm bleeding? That I tried at all? That Agatha is taking me along anyway?
She didn't have time to think about it further.
They burst into a room in the Circle that Emma had never seen, vast, austere, a central desk surrounded by four people speaking in low voices. Maps on the table. Documents laid open. The light was colder here than anywhere else in the Capitol, as if the room had been built so that nothing in it could ever look flattering.
When Agatha crossed the threshold, the conversations stopped dead.
Not gradually. All at once. The four people around the desk rose almost in unison, with the automatic reflex of people who had long since stopped consciously deciding to stand, who did it because their bodies had learned that this was the correct response to that particular entrance.
One of them, a man in his fifties with narrow shoulders and the look of someone used to compiling information rather than giving it, tilted his head slightly. His gaze slid for a second to the left.
"Lady Agatha." A pause. "Selene. And..."
He let his voice trail off, his eyes settling on Emma with a question that was polite but pointed.
"Emma," she said, feeling faintly out of place with nothing else to add.
The man nodded with the courtesy of someone who notes things and files them away. "Emma. How can the Circle's humble eyes be of use to you tonight?"
Agatha hadn't taken a seat. She wasn't going to.
"Trent." Her voice had returned to something more ordinary, colder than usual, but recognizable. "I want everything you have on what happened at Tra. I leave tomorrow."
The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took Trent to understand he'd heard correctly, then to decide what to do with that.
His back straightened by an inch.
"Tra..."
He tried again. "I'm afraid I have nothing to give you, Lady Agatha." He didn't look away from her, with the care of someone who knows that how you deliver bad news matters as much as the news itself. "All our correspondents at Tra were eliminated. I meant to tell you this afternoon."
Agatha didn't react right away.
"Yesterday," Trent went on. "All at once. No known exceptions."
It was Selene who spoke first, and her voice had lost the composure Emma had known in her from the very beginning.
"All of them. At the same time? Truly?"
It wasn't a question. It was the sound of someone recalculating something they thought they understood, and realizing the numbers no longer added up.
Agatha, for her part, said nothing.
She stood still for one second, two, three, and Emma, watching her from the side, saw something cross her face that was smaller than the fury from before, more fragile than the cold resolve from the hallway, the kind of look you get when you confirm something you'd hoped you had gotten wrong.
Then she turned on her heel.
"We leave tonight."
Her gaze found Emma for a fraction of a second, not a look of command, not a look of explanation. Just a check that someone was following.
Emma followed.