The trip took only a day, and it was more pleasant than Emma expected. She found herself watching landscapes that had nothing ordinary about them, delighted to finally see the outskirts of the Capitol, in this new world she had so far only known through corridors and training rooms.
The vehicle carrying them looked nothing like a wagon. A blackened metal shell, older than any building the Capitol had ever rebuilt, roaring down roads no one else had the right to use at this speed. Emma had never heard an engine make that sound before, and yet, strangely, she seemed more at ease with the sensation than Agatha herself. The sound alone was enough to remind her, with an almost physical force, of a world she had known before all of this, a world where a noise like that wouldn't have even been worth noticing.
Agatha, sitting in the back seat on leather that had been resewn so many times its original color could no longer be told, barely spoke the whole ride, her eyes fixed on documents she didn't really seem to be reading. Selene drove, next to Emma, keeping the same professional silence she usually reserved for training, and this time Emma didn't dare be the one to break it.
They reached Tra before nightfall. The road was neither long nor eventful.
Not through the main gates. An entrance reserved for officials, shielded from any eyes that might have turned toward them.
From what I understand, almost every major faction in the Capitol has sent officials here. This situation must really be urgent, Emma thought.
The vehicle dropped them directly into an inner courtyard, at the back of what had to be the local seat of power, a restricted entrance, guarded by men who stepped aside without needing a word said to them, clearly recognizing the importance of their passengers just from the sight of the vehicle. Several other cars, different sizes but all in the same state of disrepair, were already parked there.
Emma only caught glimpses of the city itself, fragments between two walls, in the time it took to cross the courtyard. Red. Everything, absolutely everything, carried that same shade of fired clay, all the way up the steps they climbed to get inside.
"Red," she finally said, the only thing that came to mind.
"They've called it the Red City longer than anyone can remember," Agatha answered, without slowing her pace. "You'll understand why soon enough."
All three of them got out of the car and left a man from the building to take over and park it.
The building itself was nothing grand, a long, bar shaped structure in a pale red that deliberately set it apart from the rest of the city.
Inside, no one was waiting for them. Nothing at all.
"There was a time when our faction was welcomed here like royalty," Agatha said dryly, before adding, almost to herself. "Which makes sense, given that we didn't warn anyone we were coming."
A middle aged man, his collar cinched a little too tight, hurried over to meet them from the far end of the room, visibly caught off guard rather than prepared to receive them. He bowed so low Emma wondered for a second if he might lose his balance.
"Lady Agatha, the Capitol... We, uh... we weren't expecting you so suddenly."
"Where is Halveth?" Agatha wasted no time on courtesies.
The man straightened, his throat visibly working before he managed an answer. "The former Sceau... is no more, Madam."
He had hesitated a beat too long. Agatha noted that hesitation as confirmation of something she already knew.
"No more." She repeated the words the way you'd lift an object to test its weight. "And the new Sceau is Renn, is that right? Where is he?"
The man, looking ashamed, answered. "Lord Renn isn't available, Madam."
"The new Sceau of Tra, three days from his investiture, is not available to receive the president of the Senate." Agatha weighed each word carefully, testing it before setting it down.
"The transfer ritual has begun, Lady Agatha. And besides, he's still mourning the loss of the previous Sceau, whom he respected greatly. A man of such attention to detail, you understand." The excuse sounded hollow even in the mouth of the man giving it.
"Then you'll receive me yourself," Agatha said, giving him no time to breathe. "Every one of our correspondents in this city vanished on the same day, at the same hour, without exception. I want to know what happened, and I want to know now."
The man visibly paled. "I don't know what you're talking about, Lady Agatha. Let me investigate, but..."
"But?"
He hesitated, throwing an almost pleading look at the door he'd come through, as if hoping someone else might answer in his place. "But that isn't the only strange thing going on in this city lately."
Emma felt Agatha go still, just slightly, an almost imperceptible shift. A tension settled into the room all at once, almost thick enough to touch.
"Explain. Quickly."
Selene stepped in close beside Agatha, as if adding her own weight behind the pressure Agatha was already applying.
"The former Sceau. Halveth." The man lowered his voice, as if the name itself demanded particular caution. "If I may say so, his death was never really explained. It happened a while ago now, Lady Agatha. You already know that, surely."
"I only learned of his death very recently," Agatha answered. "Which is exactly why I came myself, without warning anyone. No one here ever thought it worth informing the Senate of a new Sceau's rise, or of the death of the one before him, a man who stayed loyal to the Capitol his entire life." Agatha's tone hardened further. "So I confirm there is indeed a mystery here to clear up."
This time, something cold settled literally into the room, as Agatha let her own Distortion spread outward around her, just for a moment.
The man visibly shuddered. Even Emma felt a chill run through her, something frankly unpleasant.
"There's always been one, really," the man went on, answering much faster this time, Agatha's temper, which was apparently no secret to anyone, having done its work. "People just didn't say it out loud." His hands were twisting together without his seeming to notice. "Ask ten people in this city how Halveth died, you'll get ten different answers. Illness, for the official records. A hunting accident, according to half the upper quarter. Some claim he was found without a single scratch on him, as if he'd simply stopped living somewhere between one heartbeat and the next. Others say he was never really found at all, and that what got buried was just a formality."
The silence that followed lasted longer than any of the ones before it. Agatha didn't say a word for a moment. In truth, she already seemed to be expecting it, as if this kind of situation had already played out more than once in the Capitol's history.
"And no one thought it worth clearing up? Or contacting the highest authority on this continent, the Capitol? No. Instead, you let inconvenient people disappear." Her voice was now perfectly flat, as if she'd just gotten exactly what she came for.
Emma stood there, stunned by this almost surgical seizure of control. She was genuinely impressed.
"No one had a reason to, Lady Agatha. An empty seat worries no one." The man swallowed. "A seat that suddenly fills, though, with no one really knowing why, least of all Renn himself, or how..."
He didn't finish the sentence, but he clearly didn't need to.
Agatha stayed silent for a moment, her gaze lost somewhere past the man in front of her, as if she were recalculating something this news had just knocked loose.
"I want everything your archives have on Halveth's death. Everything. Even what seems too absurd to report." She turned on her heel. "And I want Renn in front of me by tomorrow night, whether he's overseeing his banners or not."
"But Lady Agatha, I don't have the authority..."
Without even turning around, it was Selene who answered. "You now answer directly to the Capitol's Circle. One misstep. One lie. And you disappear."
Emma followed the two women, a step behind, thoroughly stunned by the scene, almost excited despite herself.
So this is what real power looks like?
The man bowed again, visibly relieved to finally see them go.
They crossed an outdoor walkway to reach the wing they'd chosen for themselves, a short bridge open to the air, overlooking a square the city had clearly already begun preparing for the investiture.
"You don't seem all that surprised," Emma said, after a moment. "About Halveth's story."
"I'm surprised no one reported it to me before today," Agatha answered, without slowing down. "Not that it exists. We are the Capitol. These little states sometimes seem to forget that."
She paused, as if deciding, for once, that Emma deserved a real answer rather than a barb.
"You still don't really understand what a Sceau is, do you? Or how serious this situation really is."
"A governor," Emma said. "Appointed by the Capitol."
"That's the version they teach children." Agatha waved a hand vaguely at the red city spread out beneath them. "A Sceau keeps order, collects tribute, makes sure the Capitol's laws reach into corners we don't have the time or the means to watch ourselves. That's true in peacetime." She turned to face Emma at last. "In wartime." She paused, her gaze suddenly heavy. "A Sceau becomes something else entirely. Every state raises its own militia, maintains its own arsenals, under the direct authority of its Sceau. The Capitol can't defend an entire continent from one single capital, Emma. We depend on them for that. A Sceau who's unstable, in a region this size, isn't an administrative problem. It's a hole in our defenses, in exactly the place we can least afford to have one. And the timing can't be a coincidence. It never is. Remember that."
Emma stayed quiet, taking it in, the mental map of the continent she'd been patiently building these past few weeks redrawing itself all at once.
"And if Tra falls without anyone understanding why..."
"Then we won't even know what we're supposed to be defending against." Agatha started walking again. "That's why I came myself, instead of sending one more report into a pile no one reads."
It was there, without warning, that something passed through.
A trace, barely anything. An emotion coming from nowhere in particular, which she caught across her Distortion the way you catch, out of the corner of your eye, a movement too fast to identify. It wasn't ordinary fear, or anger, or anything she'd ever encountered in a human being before. A strange density, as though several incompatible feelings occupied the same space without ever quite mixing, and beneath all of it, something so cold that she felt her own fingers tighten on the railing without having decided to.
Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, swallowed by the ordinary noise of the city.
Emma stopped for a second, searching without success for the direction it might have come from. The square below was too crowded for her to isolate anything.
"Emma?" Selene had stopped too, her voice neutral, but her gaze a little more watchful than usual.
"Nothing," Emma said, after a moment. "Just... a lot of people at once."
It wasn't entirely a lie. She started walking again, the sensation already fading, leaving behind nothing but that same vague certainty that had followed her since the first day, the certainty of having brushed, for one fraction of a second, against something this world hadn't yet learned to show her properly.