"Hi there! Brittany Winters, independent journalist. Do you have a minute to talk about what's been going on in Brimton?" Tiffany said this with a smile so genuine and warm that the shop owner she was addressing couldn't help but nod before he'd even processed what she said.
She had a notepad in one hand that she wasn't writing on and a posture that radiated trustworthiness. Her purple hair was pulled back in a neat bun, and she'd borrowed a pair of non-prescription glasses from somewhere that made her look like a grad student working on a thesis.
Zoey stood behind her, holding up her phone with the camera recording. She didn't speak. She didn't smile. She was the camerawoman, and the camerawoman's job was to be invisible. This suited her perfectly. She definitely couldn't interview people with her awkward ass. Zoey also definitely noticed that Tiffany stole her last name for this interview…
The shop owner was a middle-aged Viperian man with emerald scales and three serpentia that kept glancing between Tiffany and the phone. He ran a small magji tool repair shop on one of the main streets. His name was Delvin.
"I mean, I guess? What do you want to know?" Delvin crossed his arms.
"Well, I'm sure you've noticed the increased Peacekeeper presence over the last day or so. Checkpoints, patrols, the curfew that was announced this morning. How has that affected your business?"
Delvin's serpentia hissed in unison, which Zoey had just learned was the Viperian equivalent of a frustrated sigh.
"How do you think it's affected my business? I've had maybe six customers today. On a normal day, I'd have thirty. People don't want to come to the magji district when there's Peacekeepers on every corner asking them where they're going and why. Makes the whole place feel like a military state."
"Have the Peacekeepers given you any explanation for why this is happening?"
"Security reasons. That's all they said. Security reasons." Delvin made a face. "What does that even mean? Security from what? I've been in this city for twelve years and I've never seen anything like this. If there's a threat, tell us what the threat is so we can decide for ourselves whether we want to keep our shops open."
"And they haven't even told you what this threat is?"
"Nothing. Not a word. I asked the squad that set up the checkpoint outside my door and they just told me to go back inside and they'd let me know if anything changed. Let me know. Like I'm a child." Delvin's scales shifted color slightly, a deeper green bleeding through. Agitation.
"Thank you, Delvin. I really appreciate your time."
They moved on. The next interview was a young human woman named Sadie who worked at a bakery two blocks down.
"It's ridiculous! I had a delivery scheduled for this morning that got turned away at the checkpoint because the driver didn't have the right clearance. Clearance! Since when do we need clearance to deliver pastries?!" Sadie threw her hands up. "My regulars are texting me asking if we're even open. I'm losing money every hour this goes on."
"Have you tried reaching out to the Council for information?"
"I sent my fairie to the Council Hall this morning. You know what I got back? A form response. 'The Council of Brimton thanks you for your patience during this period of heightened security. Rest assured that measures are being taken to ensure the safety of all citizens.' That's it. Bureaucrat nonsense. I know it's nonsense because three of my neighbors got the exact same message."
"How does that make you feel?"
"How do you think it makes me feel?! I feel like they don't care about us. We're just supposed to sit here and lose money and not ask questions while they play soldiers in our streets. And I know for damn sure they aren't going to compensate us for our losses during this time!"
Tiffany nodded sympathetically. Zoey kept the camera steady.
They hit four more businesses in the next hour. A bookstore owner who'd been forced to close early because the Peacekeeper checkpoint was scaring away foot traffic. A restaurant manager who'd had two reservation cancellations because customers didn't want to deal with the hassle of getting through the barriers. An elderly woman who ran a magji creature grooming service and was furious because her clients' pets were being startled by the constant patrol activity. A non-human couple, one of the furry giants paired with a light-person, who'd been stopped and questioned three times in one morning just for walking down the street.
Every story was different. Every frustration was the same. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody had been told anything beyond "security reasons." And everyone was losing something, money, time, peace of mind, trust in the institutions that were supposed to serve them.
"This is working better than I thought it would," Tiffany whispered to Zoey between interviews, her journalist persona temporarily shelved. "These people are peed off."
"Keep going."
The afternoon interviews shifted from business owners to regular citizens on the street. A group of teenagers who couldn't get to their magji academy because the route was blocked by a checkpoint. A father who'd been separated from his daughter for twenty minutes during a sweep because they'd gotten caught on different sides of a barrier that went up without warning. An older magjistar who'd served on the Peacekeeping force himself decades ago and called the current operation "embarrassing overreach."
"In my day, we told people what was happening," the old magjistar said. "Transparency wasn't optional. If there was a threat, we informed the public so they could protect themselves. This? Locking down the city and telling everyone to stay inside without explanation? This breeds fear. Fear breeds anger. And anger breeds exactly the kind of chaos they're supposedly trying to prevent."
"Do you think the Council has a responsibility to explain the situation to the public?" Tiffany asked.
"The Council has a responsibility to serve the public. Not hide behind barriers and form letters while people's livelihoods suffer. If they can't explain what's happening, then maybe what's happening isn't something they want people to know about. And that should worry everyone."
After that interview, Tiffany and Zoey sat on a bench in one of the parks and watched what was already starting to happen without them.
It didn't take much. The interviews had been the spark, but the fire was building on its own. People talked to each other in Brimton. That was the nature of a magji community that didn't have the luxury of hiding behind screens. You saw your neighbors. You spoke to them face to face. And when a journalist showed up asking the questions everyone was already thinking, those questions didn't disappear when the camera turned off. They spread.
Delvin was outside his shop talking to the bookstore owner from three doors down. Both of them were gesturing at the checkpoint that was still blocking their street. Sadie from the bakery had come outside with a tray of unsold pastries and was handing them out to a growing cluster of people who'd stopped to listen to her vent. The group of teenagers from earlier had told their parents, and now a handful of adults were standing at the blocked checkpoint demanding answers from two very uncomfortable-looking Peacekeepers who clearly hadn't been briefed on how to handle angry civilians.
"Word of mouth is pretty strong in magji communities," Tiffany shared, watching a woman march down the street toward the Council Hall with three friends in tow, all of them looking like they had something to say. "They usually don't have anything better to do. Like people from the middle ages."
By late afternoon, the magji district's main avenue had turned into something resembling a town hall meeting that nobody had organized. Clusters of people stood on corners and in front of shops, talking in heated voices. Some of them were calm. Most of them weren't. A Viperian woman was shouting at a Peacekeeper who kept backing up step by step as her serpentia flared and snapped with each point she made. A group of the furry giants had positioned themselves in the middle of an intersection, their massive bodies creating a blockade that the Peacekeepers couldn't move without escalating the situation.
"We didn't even need to do that much," Zoey said.
"We didn't do anything. We just asked questions. They were already angry. They just needed someone to give them permission to say it out loud." Tiffany pulled her fake glasses off and tucked them into her pocket. The journalist was done for the day. "Once one person says it, everyone realizes they're all thinking the same thing. That's how it always works."
A chant started somewhere near the Council Hall. Zoey couldn't make out the words from this distance, but the rhythm of it carried down the street. Other voices joined.
"He's not going to come out on his own," Zoey said.
"Nope." Tiffany agreed. "But if this keeps building, the Council is going to have to do something. They can't just tell everyone what to do and refuse to explain why. Not when people are gathering in the streets demanding answers."
"So they have to answer people."
"They have to. And when they do, they either explain the situation without Reid, which means admitting they locked down the city over a personal grudge and looking terrible, or they bring Reid out to put a face on it. Show the public that they're protecting someone, that there's a real threat, that the curfew is justified."
"And when he's out..."
"We go through whatever they put around him."
Zoey nodded. "Let's head back to Baxter. We wait and see what tomorrow brings."
They stood up from the bench and walked against the flow of people still moving toward the Council Hall. Nobody looked at them twice. Just two young women leaving a park while the city around them slowly boiled over.
Delia Santos was having the worst week of her nineteen-year tenure on the Brimton Council.
It started with the hospital attacks. Then the mobilization. Then the curfew, which she'd argued against but been overruled by Maren and Callum who insisted that restricting movement in the magji district would make it easier to locate the rogue magjistars. That was yesterday. Today, her desk was buried under complaints.
Fairies arrived every few minutes carrying messages from citizens, business owners, community leaders, and even a few lower-ranked Council members from other districts. All of them saying some version of the same thing. What is going on? Why aren't we being told anything? When will this end? My business is suffering. My family is scared. This is unacceptable.
Delia read each one. She had always read each one. It was the part of her job that most Council members considered beneath them, the direct line to the people they were supposed to serve. Maren delegated it. Callum ignored it. Delia read every single message because the moment you stopped listening to the people was the moment you stopped deserving the chair.
And now it wasn't just messages. A Peacekeeper had reported that crowds were gathering in the district's main avenue. Not a protest exactly. Not yet. But people were congregating, talking loudly, arguing with officers, blocking intersections. A few community leaders had been spotted marching toward the Council Hall. Someone had organized an impromptu town meeting in the park near the eastern gate that had drawn over a hundred people.
Another report came in. A group of citizens had surrounded a checkpoint and were refusing to move until someone with authority came to explain the curfew. The Peacekeepers on site were requesting guidance on how to proceed without escalating.
Then another. A Viperian business coalition was threatening to file a formal grievance against the Council for economic damages caused by the lockdown. They wanted compensation and an immediate explanation.
Then another. The magji academies were reporting that students and parents were demanding to know why routes to the schools had been blocked. Some parents were keeping their children home entirely.
Delia set the latest message down and rubbed her temples.
"Maren." She spoke into the communication crystal on her desk.
"What." Maren's voice came back clipped. She was busy.
"We have a problem that's growing faster than the one we already had."
"The crowds. I know."
"It's more than crowds. Business coalitions are threatening formal grievances. Parents are pulling children from schools. Citizens are surrounding checkpoints and refusing to move. Community leaders are marching on the Council Hall as we speak. This is no longer frustration, Maren. This is the beginning of civil unrest."
"The curfew has been in effect for one day."
"One day was enough. We locked down a city of this size without explanation and expected people to simply accept it. They didn't. And every hour we stay silent, it gets worse."
Silence from Maren's end.
"We need to address the public," Delia continued. "Today was a warning. Tomorrow will be worse. If we wait for this to become a full-blown crisis before speaking, we'll be responding from a position of weakness instead of leading from a position of strength."
"And say what? That we're protecting one man from a grudge match while two rogue magjistars tear through our Peacekeepers?"
"Yes. Exactly that. Framed properly, with the right tone, the public will understand that we're protecting one of their own from targeted violence. That's a sympathetic position. What they won't understand, what they will never accept, is being kept in the dark while their lives are disrupted."
Another silence. Then: "And Calloway?"
"He's the reason this is happening. The public is going to want to see the person they're being asked to sacrifice for. If we present him alongside the Council, protected, speaking to his own experience, it humanizes the situation. It turns an abstract curfew into a real story about a real person being threatened."
"That puts him in the open."
"We control the environment. We pick the location, the time, the security detail. We layer it with our best Peacekeepers and the strongest barriers we can construct. It would take several A-Grade magjistars working in concert to breach that kind of security, or a single S-Grade, and we have no evidence that these rogue magjistars are anywhere near that level."
"The panda one walked through a B-Grade's gravity magji."
"With some sort of enhancement active. Enhancements have limits, costs, durations. We prepare for the worst and plan accordingly." Delia leaned forward. "Maren, we're losing the city's trust by the hour. A public address with proper security is the best move we have. It addresses the civilians, it demonstrates strength, and if the rogue magjistars are foolish enough to attack a fortified public event, we end this on our terms."
Maren was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice had shifted from clipped to considered.
"Tomorrow morning. Full Council meeting. If the rest agree, we hold a public address tomorrow afternoon. Calloway speaks, we provide security, and we use the event as both a show of transparency and a controlled environment. If those criminals show up, we'll be ready."
"Thank you, Maren."
"And Delia?"
"Yes?"
"Your investigation into Calloway's history with Rudd. Where does that stand?"
"I've requested records from the magji school they attended and statements from community members who knew both of them. The responses should arrive by morning."
"Good. I want to know what we're really dealing with before we put that man in front of a crowd."
The crystal went dark. Delia leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. The pile of complaints on her desk hadn't gotten any smaller. The crowds outside hadn't dispersed.
Delia didn't know what he'd done to Baxter Rudd. Not yet. But she was going to find out.