The crash of the table came first.
A glass — somebody's cold cup of tea, forgotten on the corner — went over with it and broke loudly against the floor of the briefing room. Nobody looked at the glass. Everybody was looking at the man who had hit the table.
"It IS NOT something we can deal with, SIR!" The officer's voice cracked, came back. "Those things — those abomination of a beast — they used to wander past the outer wall once in a blue moon, ones and twos, never anything we couldn't handle! This time they came at us in a herd!"
"We lost almost half the survey party, Deputy Marcus! Almost half!"
"Chill, Chill.. What happened, exactly. And — Otto, you were posted to the gate. Why are you in here with these men—"
"Because we had the same thing at the gate, sir! We couldn't get the gate shut in time. Some of them made it inside the wall."
A small silence opened up in the room and did not close again.
"All right." Marcus held up one hand. "Quiet. Everyone, calm down."
His gaze travelled across the room and landed, eventually, on the four investigation officers sitting near the far wall — Emil, Rafael, and two others — in the boneless slumped posture.
Completely spent, all of them, Marcus thought.
He sighed.
"Tch."
A different sound. From the chair near the wall.
The room quieted further.
Rafael stood up. He did it the way he did most things — without urgency, without expression to speak of, with the small private edge of someone who had decided not to perform anything for the room.
"Deputy."
"...Senior?" Emil said.
"As a senior I can't afford for us senior look weak in front of a junior, Emil." Rafael tilted his head a fraction toward — well, toward no one in particular, but the angle of it landed like a small joke that only the two of them got.
"In any case."
Rafael walked the room through it. The patrol along the outer wall in the rain. The soft earth. The buried things waking under their boots. The pistol shot from the panicked MP officer. The thirty-plus creatures, eyes twitching, taking two Greycoats to bring down a single one. Renfield and the other catalyst-bearers holding the line while the MP fell back through the gate. The patrol returning short three men.
When he was done, the room was quiet again.
---
"So that is what happened," Marcus said finally.
"What is suspicious, sir," Rafael said, "is why so many of them simply dropped the moment the gate closed behind us. Several of them just — stopped. Went still. It wasn't natural."
"And those things — even ten or twelve of them put a Rmo Captain's unit on the back foot," Emil added quietly. "We had four catalysts user and the rest of us just had rifle and sabres. We could barely scratch them."
The room sat with that.
"I think we need to send word to the Palace," Rafael said. "And for some reason it looks. The eastern district is the only one that's seen anything like this — every other district reported quiet. This is not random."
"But the Palace has been hit themselves these past nights," one of the senior officers said. "They are stretched thin too. And we still don't actually know whether these things are being directed by a person, or whether they're just animals from outside the wall that the Omens have driven mad—"
"What if it's a plan?" Emil said.
The room shifted toward him.
"Speak, Emil," Marcus said.
"I think — they might be trying to confuse Orenthel's forces. Stretch us in the wrong direction. If—"
"And for WHAT, though? Even if it's a person directing them — Thalassia already has a god leading it, doesn't it? What does that god want from us — what does anybody want from us—"
"Our resources," Rafael said.
"WHAT resources, Rafael?"
"Catalysts."
The room paused.
"Eh?"
"...eh?"
"Hey-"
A stick struck the edge of the table once, sharply.
"Listen to him," Marcus said.
The room listened.
"Orenthel is the first place — and still the only place, at scale — where catalysts are mass-produced. If you go back far enough, before Lady Flaure's ascension, catalysts were almost exclusively the relics of high-ranking devotees of the older gods. Veranthos. Agares. A handful of others. They were rare. They were inherited. Then by the middle of the eleven-hundreds we began producing them here, in quantity, for the Vanguard and Palace officers. Ours are still considered the most reliable, the easiest to attune to, anywhere in the known world."
"Why Orenthel, though? Why here?" Calmer.
"That — no one knows. No one has ever known how a catalyst is actually made, not even the Scholar on monthly debate at central park. We just follow what was told by Goddess..." He trailed off.
"To the point," Marcus said.
The room re-settled.
"Continue, Emil."
Emil — who had been thinking with his head down, working the geography of the city in his memory — sat up a little.
"If you look at the map of the districts," he said. "The eastern district's territory — also..."
He stopped.
"...ah. I forgot what I was going to say. You speak too much, Senior."
"What."
"Because our district gate sits closest to the main canal that runs to the capital district compared to others," Marcus said. His voice was sharper than it had been in the entire briefing.
Emil uncurled from his chair.
"Right. So if it isn't only about the creatures — a fast strike into the eastern district could move along that canal straight to the capital district. We're the closest entry point to the center of the city by water."
"And the bulk of every department's manpower," Rafael said, "is already pulled into the capital district. Stationed at the central wall. Defending Her Majesty's property. Not at our gate."
A quiet went around the room. The slow kind. The kind that comes when several people see the same picture at the same time and none of them like it.
"What do we do, sir."
Marcus did not answer immediately.
"...with a situation like this," he said at last, "there is certainly that there are traitors in the Palace already. Sending a report up the official channel would not help.."
He nodded, once, to himself.
"I will find a way. Go and rest, all of you. Four shifts in a row will kill a man."
"Deputy, you should rest too." Rafael's voice gentled by a fraction. "You're almost on your fifth."
"You're forty-five, sir."
"I'm fine. I'm fine."
The officers began to file out, slower than they had filed in.
Marcus did not move from the table.
The morning was beginning to come up outside the high windows. Pale grey to pale gold. Six o'clock light. The shadows in the room moved back by inches.
"...the second-in-command, eh."
He said it to the empty room.
The empty room did not answer.
---
Outside the office, in the corridor, the morning was cold and bright.
"I'm so tired, I might die.."
"Hush, hush."
They turned the corner.
"Oh—!"
A young woman's voice, soft and startled. A paper bag tipped out of her hands and began to fall.
Emil's hand was under it before he had finished registering that he had moved. He caught it cleanly against his palm and brought it up, the bag's contents — fruit, by the weight of it, and something wrapped in paper — settling neatly back into shape.
He looked up.
He had walked straight into her.
"I — I—" He scrambled back a step. "I'm so sorry, young lady. Are you all right — did I hurt you anywhere."
"I-It's okay.." The voice was soft and innocent.
But somehow the unknown source of guilt was lingering in it.