Schedule Update
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"I'll use this for my bodyguard," Ren said, holding up the skull mask. "I'll bring him to introduce himself. Give me a few minutes."
"Of course," Chu Xinghe said.
Lucy smiled. Both of them smiled, the smiles sitting slightly ahead of whatever their faces were actually doing.
Ren was three steps out the door when Chu Xinghe spoke.
"Is it the one we heard screaming this morning?"
Ren stopped. He turned back just far enough to answer.
"Yes," he said, and continued walking.
Lucy and Chu Xinghe looked at each other across the desk.
Neither of them said anything.
. . .
Both phones went off at the same time.
Lucy pulled hers out first. Chu Xinghe reached into his jacket a half second behind. The notification was from the same source: the guild executive private group, a channel that received maybe two messages a month and never anything casual.
Lu Changcheng had sent an article.
The headline was from an Azareth Empire news outlet. Chu Xinghe read it once quickly, then again slowly.
Outer Eastern District placed under full quarantine — unknown affliction spreading among hunter-class individuals — civilian evacuation ongoing.
He tapped the attached video. Then he scrolled past it to the full report beneath.
The article was thorough. Someone had documented everything: the initial spread timeline, the affected population count, the quarantine boundary parameters, the observed symptoms, and the confirmed conditions of transmission. The affliction spread through sound. Any hunter-class individual who heard the chanting within a certain proximity began chanting themselves within minutes. The conversion was involuntary and complete. Affected individuals retained consciousness but had no control over their own bodies. The chanting continued until the body could no longer sustain it, estimated at three to four weeks from onset. All seven orifices bled throughout that period. Civilian class individuals appeared immune. The sound did not pass through solid barriers above a certain thickness, which was the only reason the six thousand unaffected civilians inside the zone were still alive.
There was a note at the bottom of the report from the military's specialist division: origin unknown, mechanism unknown, no known countermeasure.
The footage was street-level, shaky, filmed from a window several floors up looking down at a main intersection. The district below was completely still. No movement, no traffic, nothing.
Then the camera adjusted and you could see why.
Hundreds of people filled the street. They sat cross-legged in rows extending as far as the footage showed, hands pressed together in front of their chests, heads slightly bowed. The formation was even and orderly, arranged with a precision that none of them had chosen.
Their mouths were moving.
All of them, simultaneously, at the same rhythm.
The audio caught fragments of it, a low collective sound that was less like voices and more like a single thing speaking through many mouths at once. The person filming had tried to get closer at some point because the footage cut and resumed from a different window, further back.
All seven orifices bled. Steadily, a dark line from each nostril, each corner of each eye, each ear, each mouth. The blood ran down faces and necks and was ignored completely. None of them moved to wipe it away or broke the rhythm of their hands or their mouths.
Every one of them was smiling.
Lucy set her phone face-down on the desk.
She had been in gate raids. She had a framework for horrific things. This did not fit in the framework. The smiling was what did it, the total evenness of it, the absolute absence of distress in any of the faces.
"How many," she said.
Chu Xinghe checked the article. "District population at lockdown was approximately forty thousand. The quarantine boundary is holding but the affliction spread to all hunter-class individuals within the zone before it was established." He read further. "Civilian casualties are low. The affected aren't aggressive. They simply cannot stop."
"And hunters who enter the zone."
"Are affected within minutes of hearing the sound."
"So you can't send hunters in."
"Not without losing them."
"And you can't evacuate the affected because moving them spreads the sound."
"Yes."
Lucy thought about what that meant operationally. Forty thousand people sitting in streets, bleeding from the face, smiling, chanting something that converted anyone who heard it. A quarantine line that had to hold indefinitely because no intervention made it better. The only resolution was waiting for the affected to die naturally, which the article estimated at three to four weeks.
"Three to four weeks," she said.
"That's the estimate."
"For forty thousand people to die while the Empire watches from outside the line."
Chu Xinghe said nothing.
Lucy looked at the window. Outside, the city was doing what cities do, and for a moment that felt fragile.
"The civilians still inside the zone," she said. "The unaffected ones."
"Sheltering in sealed buildings. The sound doesn't pass through solid barriers above a certain thickness." He checked the number. "Approximately six thousand."
"Trapped inside while forty thousand people chant in the streets outside."
"Yes."
Lucy set her pen down.
"This is a targeted deployment," Chu Xinghe said. He had the article open beside the video, reading between the two. "The distribution is too even. This didn't spread from a single origin point randomly. It was placed."
"You think it's deliberate."
"I think someone walked in and activated something. The spread pattern in the first hour covers eight blocks simultaneously. Natural spread from one source doesn't produce that geometry."
Lucy considered this. "What kind of entity can do that."
"I don't know," Chu Xinghe said. "The pattern matches something ritualistic. The chanting, the formation, the bleeding from specific points. Someone built this. It didn't come from a gate."
"A person did this," Lucy said.
"Or something working through a person."
She thought about the smiling faces in the video, the orderly rows, the blood running in clean lines from ears and eyes and mouths in perfect sync.
"The Guildmaster needs to see this," she said.
"He already has it. He sent the article." Chu Xinghe closed the video. "He sent it to us so we'd be informed."
"Does he know anything else."
"If he did, he'd have sent that too."
Lucy looked at the single message in the chat group. Lu Changcheng's name, the link, nothing else. No commentary. Just the article, sent to the people he trusted to read it and form their own assessment.
"What does this mean for us," she said.
"When the Empire asks the international community for assistance, the Guildmaster will have to decide our position. We can hold the quarantine line more effectively than their current setup. Whether we send people depends on what he decides."
"What do you think he'll decide."
"I think he'll help," Chu Xinghe said. "He always does when the number is large enough."
Lucy looked at him. "And what do you think is the right call."
He was quiet for a moment. "I think forty thousand people dying over four weeks while six thousand civilians shelter inside sealed buildings is a result that reflects on every guild with the capacity to help that didn't." He picked up his pen. "But the Guildmaster makes the call."
Lucy turned her phone over. She did not open the video again. She found the line in the quarterly report where they had stopped and continued from there, because the work did not stop and sitting with the video would not change anything in the quarantine zone.
It would just change how she felt for the rest of the day.
. . .
Ren found Bone Saw in the reception area, standing near the window, exactly where he had been left.
Ren held out the mask.
Bone Saw took it and put it on.
The full titanium skull settled over the obsidian one, its eye sockets aligning with the permanent red light behind them, the black surface sitting flush against the black surface of his face. The articulated jaw matched his jaw exactly. The faint engraving across the forehead sat directly above the branding mark, almost covering it.
Ren looked at him.
He is wearing a skull mask over his skull face. The disguise and what it is disguising are identical. The only functional difference is that the No. 3 is hidden.
"Well," Ren said. "At least it covers the branding."
Bone Saw said nothing.
"Let's go," Ren said. "I'll introduce you to the Vice Guildmaster and the secretary."
Bone Saw followed him out, the red light in his eye sockets steady behind the mask, the skull that was his face wearing a skull that was not. Ren accepted this and kept walking.
He was three steps from the clinic door when it opened.
Lu Changcheng walked in. Plain clothes, hands in his pockets, moving with the directness of someone who had not stopped to announce himself first. His eyes went to Ren, then to the figure behind him, then back to Ren.
"We need to talk," he said.