He put his hand down.
He looked at the ceiling until his breathing steadied. The bakery below was already going—the smell of bread coming up through the floor, warm and ordinary, completely indifferent to everything he was carrying.
Then the pain arrived.
Sharp, sudden, behind his left eye—not quite a migraine, not quite anything that had a clean name. He collapsed back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling and waited for it to decide what it wanted to do.
"So early," he said, to no one.
He focused. Reached into the space where the magic lived—not the borrowed kind, not the catalyst-dependent kind that the RMO handed out in gloves and called divine—and pulled a small shape out of nothing. A clockwork doll, no bigger than his fist, jointed at the knees and elbows, moving in small careful circles on the bedsheet beside him.
It worked. A little.
The pain pulled back from sharp to dull. His eyes stopped watering. He lay still and watched the doll walk its small circles and breathed.
Then the voices came, the way they always did when the pain loosened its grip just enough to let other things through.
You are our only hope..
I'm sorry, my child..
We will meet again, right..?
He pressed his palm flat against his face.
"Screw everyone," he said quietly. "Everything."
He sat up. Reached for his coat, his dagger, the small notebook he kept in the inner pocket. Stood.
Made it few steps into the corridor before his legs decided they were done.
He went down hard against the wall, slid to sitting, and stayed there for a moment with his head tipped back against the plaster and the doll—which had followed him out of the room somehow, still walking its circles—moving slowly across the floorboard in front of him.
He made more. Half a dozen small clockwork figures, pulled out of the air one by one, set walking in different directions across the corridor. An old trick. Not a good one. Sufficient.
After a few seconds he could stand again.
He glanced back at where the doll used to be—some of them have dissolved back into nothing. He then went downstairs and out into the morning.
---
The eastern district was a different city compared to south and central.
Not worse, exactly—just older. The buildings here were the kind that had been built before the Omens started, when Orenthel still believed it had time to do things properly. Stone facades that had gone grey with coal smoke, gas lamps on brackets that hadn't been replaced in a decade, streets wide enough for carts that no longer came through because the trade routes they served no longer existed.
The slum quarter ran along the eastern wall's inner face—a dense tangle of narrow streets and packed shelters that had grown up against the stone over twenty years of refugee arrivals. It smelled like woodsmoke and crowded living and the particular scent of a place where too many people were trying to make something out of very little.
Const moved through it with the steady unhurried pace of someone who knew where he was going and had no intention of announcing it.
He was halfway down the second lane when three of them stepped out.
Young—maybe boys, but not far from it. The kind of young that had been living rough long enough to stop being careful about how it handled problems. The one in front had the relaxed posture of someone who had done this before and found it went fine.
"Wrong street, friend." he said.
Const looked at him. Then at the other two. Then back at the first.
"Probably," he agreed, and kept walking.
The first one moved to block him. The other two spread slightly to the sides—practiced enough to suggest they'd worked out the geometry of this before.
Const stopped.
The headache, which had been quiet for the last few hours, chose this moment to remind him it was still there. A pulse behind his eye, sharp enough to make his vision blur slightly on the left side. He exhaled once through his nose.
He could end this in under a second without effort. He knew exactly how. But the headache made him reconsidered using power.
"Friend.." He reached for a light acid bottle from his coat
"It irrirate, you know.. if unlucky your skin might be gone, you guys don't want that right?" He asked politely
First one charged toward him. Const just spray his face but his brain isn't fast enough to react like before—other two already charging at him from both side.
"Fine.."
He used the coat—just the lapel, just enough, hardened into something that moved faster than a fist and considerably less gently. The second one sat down on the cobblestones with an expression of genuine surprise. The third tried the obvious response and found that the sleeve of his own jacket had decided to loop around his wrist in a way that made the follow-through impossible.
Twelve seconds. Not just kne or two. The headache had made it twelve.
Const adjusted his stuff in the coat, stepped over the first one's writhing body and kept walking.
---
By the time he reached the square at the center of the eastern slum quarter, a crowd had already gathered.
He smelled the crowd before he saw it—the particular warmth of a large group of people standing close together, the way sound changed when it had a lot of bodies to move through. He came around the last corner and stopped at the edge of it.
The square was full. Refugees, mostly—the kind of faces that had been carrying difficult things for a long time and had arrived at the particular exhaustion that makes people very willing to listen to someone who sounds certain. There were others too: local residents, a few minor merchants, some who had clearly come from further away. All of them facing the same direction.
The man on the makeshift platform at the square's center was perhaps forty, with a voice that carried without apparent effort and the practiced warmth of someone who had learned that warmth, applied correctly, was more effective than anything louder. He was handing out bread—real bread, not the grey ration kind—from baskets beside the platform, two men distributing it through the crowd while he spoke.
"The Goddess does not hear you," the Prophet said, in the tone of someone stating a simple fact. "She never did. She sits in her Palace while your families sleep in the street. While the Omens take your homes. While the RMO writes its reports and calls it protection." He paused, letting it sit. "Agares hears you. The God of the wheel sees what has been taken. And he will turn it back to our golden age."
The crowd was quiet in the way crowds go quiet when someone is saying what they have been thinking for a long time.
Someone near the front shouted something about Flaure—not good thing probably. The people around them nodded. The Prophet smiled and said nothing, which was more effective than agreeing.
At the edge of the square, in the shadow of a building's overhang, two figures in long coats with hoods stood close together and watched.
Aim had his arms crossed. Isolde had her notebook out, writing the speech down.
"He's good," Aim said quietly. "The bread helps."
"The foresight helps more," Isolde said. "Heard that he predicted the some camp adjacent to the east wall's collapse three days before it happened. Word spread fast."
Aim watched the Prophet move through the crowd—touching shoulders, looking people in the eye, the mechanics of someone who understood that belief was built in small personal moments rather than large public ones.
"He knows things he shouldn't," Aim said. "Same as—"
He stopped.
Across the square, at the opposite edge of the crowd, a figure stood with his hands in his coat pockets, pale hair visible even in the dim morning light. He was not looking at the Prophet with interest, or with suspicion, or with the cautious assessment of someone trying to figure out what they were looking at.
He was looking at the Prophet with the flat, exhausted expression of someone watching a sick cult trick being performed that they had seen many times before. He found it, more irritating than impressive.
Aim and Isolde looked at each other.
Then they looked back at Const, standing at the far edge of the crowd, watching a man with divine foresight with the dead-eyed patience of someone waiting for a bad play to end.
Aim said nothing for a moment.
Then, quietly "He doesn't like when someone diss his goddess."
Isolde closed her notebook.
"Sure," she said. "He doesn't like."