By morning the rain had thinned, but the air still carried that metallic taste left by storms that never quite decide whether to end or linger. Each breath felt faintly electric, as if the sky still held a memory of lightning somewhere behind the clouds. The road stretched across a plain so wide and colorless that it seemed the world had been scraped clean overnight. It was nothing but stone and mud dividing the land in two, a thin scar drawn through endless gray. Far ahead, through the shifting fog, the faint shape of Bondrea rose like a memory of a city that shouldn’t exist, a silhouette caught between sea and smoke.

  They were close.

  Broko walked a few paces ahead, his boots sinking into the mud with every heavy step. His shoulders hunched against the wind, but he kept moving with stubborn momentum. “Talon said we’d meet someone before we reach the gates,” he muttered. “Digiera. Smuggler type. Gets people in and out without setting off alarms.” His voice carried a forced lightness, as if saying the name itself could guarantee their safety.

  Diana adjusted her cloak, the fabric dripping steadily. Her eyes narrowed toward the horizon where the fog shifted like a living curtain. “If she’s not caught already.”

  Broko grinned, though it was the kind of grin that tried too hard to appear carefree. “She’s too smart for that. Too mean, too.” He kicked a loose stone forward, watching it vanish into a puddle.

  “You say that like it’s a compliment.”

  “In our line of work, it is.”

  Gemma walked behind them, her cloak heavy with damp, the fabric clinging stubbornly to her legs. Her hair kept sticking to her cheeks, strands plastered by the rain that refused to fully fade. Every so often she caught Broko or Diana glancing back at her, brief and uneasy, quick looks they didn’t want her to notice. Not hatred, not exactly fear either, but something trapped between the two, an emotion shaped by confusion and the memory of what she had done. Since the causeway, even the air seemed to step back from her, as if the world had learned to keep a respectful distance.

  Aros hadn’t spoken since dawn. He kept his distance from the rest of the group, his gaze locked on the endless gray of the road ahead, as though the horizon itself had offended him. Even his silence sounded angry, coiled tight inside his chest.

  Gemma wanted to speak, to ask him what had changed, but every time she considered it the words shrank away. Whatever bridge had existed between them felt as though it had been washed away with the rain, leaving only the quiet churn of footsteps and breath.

  The clouds began to break in thin, trembling patches, like tears in old cloth. Pale shafts of sunlight pierced through, glinting off puddles that reflected nothing but more gray. A faint breeze looped around them, bringing with it the smell of fish and salt, the distant breath of the fishmongers’ city waiting beyond the fog.

  When Broko turned again, the last of his patience was gone.

  “I want to know what that was,” he said, his voice carrying across the plain. “Back at the marsh. The light. The voices.”

  Aros didn’t turn. “Keep moving.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Broko snapped. “I’m talking to her.”

  Gemma stopped. Her boots sank into the mud with a soft sound. “I don’t know what it was.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Broko’s tone sharpened suddenly, the anger in it raw and familiar, like something he’d been carrying long before meeting her. “You burned three Custodians alive, girl. You think we can just ignore that?”

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  Diana’s fingers twitched near her knife, not drawing it, only remembering it. “Broko…”

  “Don’t Broko me.” His breath came faster. “We all saw it. That same white fire they use when they purge a district. You don’t call that the Light?”

  Gemma shook her head. “It’s not the Light. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  Broko pointed at her, his eyes dark and sharp. “That’s what they all say. Maybe you and your old man are the Priesthood’s next miracle.”

  A metallic crack broke the tension, sharp as a blade drawn through iron. Candriela’s gauntlet had Broko by the collar before anyone saw her move. The speed of it was unnatural, as though she had stepped from one moment into the next without traveling the distance between.

  She lifted him off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. Her expression didn’t shift, not even by a fraction. “Not power of the Light,” she said. Her voice was even and cold, scraping quietly through the air. “It is a wound, not a gift. And if you open your mouth again, I will close it for you.”

  She dropped him into the mud. The sound was dull, wet, and final, the sort of impact that sucked the fight out of a person.

  Broko stayed there for a long second, rain washing streaks of dirt from his face. When he finally pushed himself upright, he didn’t look at Gemma again.

  Aros’s voice broke the silence. “We keep moving.”

  No one argued.

  They resumed their path through the gray expanse, the land stretching outward in an unbroken wash of monotony. Their shadows grew thin and elongated over the plain, wavering like stretched branches. Slowly, the wilderness began to give way to hints of civilization: rotting pylons jutting from the earth, broken rail tracks half-swallowed by mud, faded signs carved with symbols of the Priesthood that no one had bothered to erase. The world around them shifted subtly, the hum of distant machinery growing more insistent with each step.

  Above them, a flock of black birds turned over the horizon like torn fabric carried by the wind.

  Aros slowed until he was walking beside Gemma. His voice was quiet when he spoke. “Stay behind me.”

  She nodded and started to fall back, but he caught her arm before she could. The pressure of his fingers was light, but his words were barely louder than the wind. “If things go wrong in Bondrea, you can’t hesitate.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “If they turn on us. Broko, Diana, even her.” He nodded toward Candriela, walking several paces ahead with the kind of silence that made others rethink their courage. “You need to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  He looked at her, and in that moment his eyes seemed older than everything else about him, like he had lived through more endings than beginnings. “To kill them if you have to.”

  The words froze her. She stared at him, searching for any hint that he might take them back, but his expression didn’t move. He held that same quiet calm he always did when speaking of death, a stillness that made the world feel colder.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said. Her voice felt smaller than she intended. “They’re helping us.”

  Aros’s reply was flat, almost tired. “Help ends when fear begins. And fear’s already here.”

  She hesitated. “Is that what a good person would do?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. His gaze drifted toward the skyline where the fog had begun to stretch thin, revealing Bondrea’s black outline against the pale morning. “There are no good people, Gemma. Just the ones trying not to be the worst.”

  Before she could speak again, Broko’s voice cut through the wind. “Hey. Look ahead.”

  They turned toward where he pointed.

  The ground sloped downward, and suddenly Bondrea stretched out before them in its entirety. Wooden docks reached into the water like ribs, their surfaces slick with mist and trembling under the weight of the tide. Ships rocked heavily against the piers, their hulls scarred and rusted, the air around them filled with the moan of engines that never fully rested.

  Lanterns burned along the harbor in neat, wavering lines, their reflections shuddering across the waves like nervous thoughts. Farther in, towers of gray stone leaned over the shoreline, bound by ropes and fishing nets, their walls tattooed with soot and salt. The city breathed smoke through vents and chimneys, a steady exhale that blended into the fog.

  The wind carried the cries of gulls and the sharp smell of oil and rusted metal. Somewhere deep beneath that noise was a rhythm: a hum that rose and fell, the breathing of something half alive and half machine.

  Broko wiped mud from his cheek. His voice, stripped of bravado, was suddenly quiet. “Well. There it is. Home sweet hell.”

  They stood together for a moment, staring at it.

  Gemma felt it again, that pressure under her ribs, subtle and insistent. The same pull she had felt back at the marsh. A faint whisper of something waiting. She wondered if the Light had built this place or if something much older still ruled beneath the waves, watching from the cracks between tide and stone.