The leather creaked softly beneath Thomas. He rolled his neck, feeling the knots in his shoulders protest, and allowed the ambient warmth of the dining room to seep into the places the job had frozen solid. The missing student from the King's Road. The morning briefing—four more cases of kidnappings and bandit attacks on the roads surrounding Dunwick, all travelers, all vanished without a trail. Eliza's theory about cult buyers. Whatever's brewing in the underbelly of Dunwick.

  He pushed it all away. Filed it in the drawer marked tomorrow.

  Tonight, his sister was sitting across from him in a restaurant that served highland stag, wearing a dress that wasn't secondhand, and she was safe. That was enough.

  He smiled at her.

  Florence was sitting with her hands folded carefully in her lap—still holding them that way, he noticed, as if she didn't trust them on the table. She was looking around the dining room with the expression of someone visiting a museum after hours: fascinated, slightly intimidated, and deeply concerned about touching something.

  "So," Thomas said, settling into the comfortable slouch that drove his superiors mad during briefings. "A bit different from home, isn't it?"

  Florence looked around the room again. At the woman in pearls laughing too loudly at a corner table. At the waiter uncorking a bottle with a flourish that could have been choreographed. At the fireplace, where a log split and sent a constellation of sparks up the flue.

  "It's... big," Florence said.

  She paused, her brow furrowing, clearly aware that the word was doing no work whatsoever.

  "I mean, truly massive, Thomas. Everything. The buildings are so tall I can't see the sky half the time. There are people everywhere—just rivers of them, all going somewhere, and nobody stops, nobody looks at each other. Back home, if you saw someone on the road you'd wave, maybe ask after their mother. Here, I nearly got trampled by a woman carrying a hat box because I stopped to read a street sign."

  She shook her head, a bewildered little laugh escaping her.

  "And it's always so noisy. Even now, even in the evening—listen." She gestured vaguely toward the curtained windows. "You can hear the trams. The factories. It never stops. In Briar's Crossing, the loudest thing after dark was Mr. Henley's dog barking at foxes."

  She looked back at Thomas, her eyes wide and honest.

  "It feels surreal. Like I'm dreaming and any moment I'll wake up and be back in the bakery covered in flour."

  Thomas nodded, swirling the wine the waiter had poured for him. "It can be overwhelming. Dunwick is second only to the imperial capital of Kingsbury for the most populated city in the Empire. Some say the world. The last census put us just over four million souls."

  "Four million?" Florence repeated. She tried to imagine it—four million people, four million lives happening simultaneously within the same sprawl of stone and iron and smoke. Her mind physically refused. It was like trying to picture the ocean from a description. "That is... a lot of people."

  "It takes time to get used to," Thomas said. He took a sip of wine, and something about the gesture seemed practiced, like a man who had learned to enjoy fine things through repetition rather than upbringing. "When I first got here, I spent the first month absolutely clueless. I got on the wrong tram three days in a row. Ended up in the Docklands at midnight once because I misread a transfer sign. Nearly got mugged by a man selling counterfeit pocket watches."

  Florence stared at him. "You got mugged?"

  "Nearly," Thomas corrected, raising a finger. "Important distinction. He reconsidered when he saw the badge."

  He set his glass down, his expression softening.

  "The trick is, you don't try to learn the whole city. You can't. Nobody knows all of Dunwick—the place changes faster than anyone can map it. You find your routes, your shops, your people. You make the city small enough to hold." He tapped the side of his head. "My Dunwick is about twelve blocks wide. Everything I need fits in a pocket. Yours will be smaller at first, and that's fine. It'll grow."

  He looked at her steadily, the fond pride back in his eyes.

  "You'll be fine, Flo. You're tougher than you think."

  Florence looked down at her bread plate, a small, uncertain smile tugging at her mouth. "I hope so."

  "I know so," Thomas said, with the unshakeable confidence of a man who had never once considered the possibility that his sister might fail at anything.

  The bread arrived. Florence tore a piece and ate it slowly, savoring the warmth, and for a moment the table was quiet in the way that only comfortable silences between family could be.

  "So," Thomas said, leaning forward on his elbows. "Tell me about today. What did you think of everything? The tram, the Riverwalk—did you like the pies?"

  Florence's face lit up. "The pie was incredible, Thomas. I don't know what they put in that crust, but it was flaky in a way that shouldn't be legal. I kept trying to work out the butter ratio in my head."

  Thomas grinned. "Baker's daughter to the core."

  "And the tram—I loved the tram. The way it just glides through the streets, and you can see the whole city from the upper deck. I could ride it for hours." She paused, her expression shifting into something more reverent, her voice dropping half a register. "But the Cathedral, Thomas. St. Silas."

  She set her bread down.

  "I've never seen anything like it. The ceilings were so high that the sound just... disappeared upward. Like the building was breathing. And the stained glass—the light coming through the west window, all those colors bleeding across the stone floor. I just stood there. I couldn't move. It was like being inside a painting."

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  Thomas watched her, the warmth on his face deepening. He hadn't seen her this animated since she was twelve and had successfully baked her first loaf without burning the bottom.

  "And there was a Reverend there," Florence continued, her hands starting to gesture as the words picked up speed. "Reverend Sophia. She saw me standing in the nave, just staring like a fool, and she came over and asked if I was all right. I must have looked lost. But she was so kind, Thomas. She didn't rush me or make me feel like I was in the way. She walked us through the whole eastern wing and told us about the history of the arches—were you listening when she told us they took forty years to build? Forty years! And she said I was welcome to come back whenever I needed quiet. She said the Cathedral was for everyone, not just the devout."

  Florence smiled, and there was something in it that reminded Thomas, with a sharp and sudden ache, of their mother.

  "I think I'll go back," Florence said softly. "When things get loud. It felt... safe."

  Thomas cleared his throat. "I'm glad, Flo. Really. It's good to have a place like that. Somewhere that isn't the boarding house or the University." He picked up his wine. "You'll need it. First-year medicine is brutal, or so I heard. You'll want somewhere to hide."

  "You're not making me feel better," Florence said, though she was smiling.

  The first courses arrived—roasted marrow bones glistening with fat, and a game terrine dense with herbs and pistachios. Thomas attacked the marrow with the enthusiasm of a man who considered fine dining a competitive sport, scooping the rich, trembling fat onto toast with practiced efficiency.

  Florence watched him, slightly horrified, slightly impressed.

  "So," Thomas said, around a mouthful of marrow toast, his tone shifting to something lighter, more casual. "I hope your friend is settling in all right. Alice, was it?"

  Florence nodded, reaching for a piece of terrine. "She is. I think so, anyway."

  "She seems a bit..." Thomas searched for the word, his knife pausing mid-spread. "Intense."

  Florence laughed—a genuine, warm sound that drew a glance from the next table. "Oh, she is. She's very intense. She has opinions about everything and she's not shy about sharing them. But she's wonderful, Thomas. She's kind underneath all of it. She just doesn't like people knowing."

  Thomas raised an eyebrow. "Kind and intense. That's an interesting combination."

  "She'll be fine," Florence assured him. "Honestly, she's much more knowledgeable about the city than I am. She knew exactly where to go for everything. I would have been completely lost without her."

  "Is that so?" Thomas set his knife down, wiping his fingers on the linen napkin. His tone was light, but the question beneath it was genuine. "How did you two meet, anyway? You didn't mention her in any of your letters."

  "Oh, we only just met," Florence said. "On the journey here, actually. We ran into each other at a carriage stop in Hangleton village."

  She paused, her voice only slightly strangled as she found her footing. "We got to talking, and since we were both heading to Dunwick, she decided to tag along. Safety in numbers, you know."

  "Smart," Thomas nodded approvingly. "The roads can be dangerous. Especially lately."

  Florence took a very large bite of bread to prevent herself from having to respond to that.

  "And she's not a student?" Thomas pressed, tearing another piece of toast.

  "She's not," Florence said, chewing carefully. "I'm not entirely sure what her situation is, to be honest. She hasn't been specific, but she seems to know what she's about."

  "Hmm." Thomas leaned back, swirling his wine again. "Well, I'm glad you've made a friend already. That's important. University can be isolating, especially for—"

  He stopped.

  The sentence died in his mouth, unfinished, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.

  Florence blinked. Thomas was no longer looking at her. He was staring at a point over her left shoulder, his eyes fixed on something she couldn't see. His expression hadn't changed—it hadn't had time to change. But the warmth was gone. It had simply vanished, excised with surgical precision, leaving behind something Florence had never seen on her brother's face before.

  It was blank. Completely, terrifyingly blank. The face of a man who had stopped being a person and become a machine.

  "Thomas?"

  He didn't respond. His wine glass was still in his hand, but his fingers had gone rigid around the stem. His pupils had contracted to pinpoints, and his jaw was set in a hard line that pulled the skin taut across his cheekbones.

  "Thomas, what's—"

  "Shh."

  It wasn't a request. It was a command, delivered in a voice Florence had never heard him use—low, flat, and carrying the absolute authority of a man who expected instant obedience. It was the voice of Senior Inspector Bannerman, and it had no room in it for a sister.

  Florence's mouth snapped shut. She sat very still, her fork frozen halfway to her plate, confusion and the first cold tendrils of fear curling in her stomach.

  The restaurant continued around them, oblivious. Silver clinked against porcelain. A woman laughed at the bar. The fire crackled. A waiter weaved between tables with a tray of oysters.

  But around their table, the air seemed to curdle. Something had shifted in the texture of the room—something Florence couldn't name and Thomas couldn't ignore.

  For Thomas, the world had gone dead silent.

  It was a sensation he had learned to trust years ago, during his first live operation in Dunwick. A prickling at the base of his skull, where the mana channels ran closest to the brainstem. His instructors had called it the Threshold—the moment when a trained mage's passive sensory field detected an anomaly too subtle for conscious processing. It bypassed thought entirely. It spoke directly to the hindbrain, in the oldest language there was.

  Wrong. Something is wrong.

  He wasn't sensing a signature. That was what alarmed him. There was no mana spike, no telltale vibration of an active spell. What he was sensing was an absence—a sudden, localized dead zone in the ambient mana field, as if something had swallowed the background radiation in a perfect sphere. The air where magic should have been flowing freely had gone flat and still, like the surface of a pond before something breaches from below.

  It was coming from the left wall.

  His eyes snapped to it. Brick and plaster, a mounted oil painting of a stag hunt, a gas lamp flickering in its sconce. Nothing visible. Nothing out of place.

  But the dead zone was expanding. Rapidly. Silently. Pushing outward like the pressure wave of a detonation that hadn't happened yet.

  Thomas felt the math click into place in his head with the cold, mechanical certainty of a cocking hammer.

  Artifact Induced Explosion. Too late to stop. Not enough time.

  He moved.

  The wine glass shattered on the floor. The table screamed as it was shoved aside, plates and silverware cascading in a crash of porcelain and crystal. Thomas lunged across the wreckage, his body covering the distance to Florence in a single, explosive motion driven by mana-saturated muscle and pure animal terror.

  He hit her like a wall.

  "DOWN!"

  The roar tore from his throat as his arms locked around Florence, his body folding over hers, driving them both off the chair and onto the hardwood floor. His hand cradled the back of her head, pressing her face into his chest, his trench coat spreading over them both like a shield.

  Florence didn't understand. She didn't have time to understand. One moment she was eating bread, and the next her brother's full weight was crushing her into the ground, his heartbeat slamming against her ear like a war drum.

  Then the world turned white.

  BOOM.