Roric wasted no time.

His other hand reached past her, found Kenji at the edge of the platform where Kenji had not moved since the wings had opened, and closed on the back of Kenji’s collar.

He pulled both of them toward him in a single motion that did not have the careful softness he had used on Ayla for the last day. The motion was the motion of a man clearing a battlefield.

"Close your eyes," he told both of them. "Both of you. Now."

Ayla closed her eyes. Kenji, who had been about to ask a question, closed his.

What happened next happened in a space neither of them saw. The air in the chamber shifted. A weight arrived above them and unfolded outward, the way the Apocalypse core had unfolded over the testing platform the morning before, except this weight was not patient.

This weight was the weight of a Diamond rank Crusader’s vessel summoned in two seconds inside a chamber that had not been built for it, and the chamber registered the summoning the way a building registered the arrival of a storm.

The runes on the walls went dark. Every rune. All at once.

Talons closed around Ayla. Not the talons of a beast. They were the talons of something that understood, by careful training, what a small human shoulder could and could not bear. They lifted her and Kenji both with the smooth speed of a transport leaving a docking platform.

The vessel had taken the form of an owl, and the owl was enormous. Its body filled the lower half of the chamber. Its wingspan, when it opened, brushed the upper tiers on both sides. The witnesses at the lower railing fell back from the wind of it.

The owl was Roric. It pushed off the floor with one beat of its wings. The second beat carried them upward. The third beat carried them toward the ceiling.

The ceiling, which had been etched with a single great rune designed to open in the event of a breakthrough emergency, recognized the rank of the entity passing through it and opened. The chamber dropped away.

The Solgrace artificial sky widened above them, vast and pale and full of the slow false dawn the city had been maintaining since the morning. The barracks complex spread below, its rooftops and yards laid out in the careful grid the human engineers had imposed on the foreign stone.

Roric flew. The owl form was not subtle. Every Crusader on every roof in the complex registered the passage. Every Lightling on patrol turned to follow it with the brief, polite attention the Nexus system gave to high-rank movement that did not violate city law.

The owl crossed three districts of the human sector in less than two minutes and banked, on the fourth, toward a smaller complex at the edge of the barracks zone.

Ayla, in his talons, opened her eyes. She had never seen the city from this angle. Solgrace below her was vast in a way the corridors had not let her measure. The human sector ran to the horizon and continued past it. The other sectors, the Ghoul Pale and the Iron-bound territory and the others Jennie had named, glowed faintly at the edge of her vision in colors the human sector did not use.

She had time, briefly, to feel small.

Kenji, beside her in the second talon, was also looking. He had said nothing since the chamber. His face was very pale. His mouth was set the way it set when he was holding something inside it that he did not yet trust himself to say aloud.

The smaller complex resolved beneath them as they descended. It was a personal compound. A central low building. A landing pad of dark stone. A garden, of all things, planted in a horseshoe around the building with what looked like real soil.

A small private squad in field uniforms had emerged from the building at the sound of the owl’s approach, and they were not, Ayla noticed, the squad from the eastern barracks. These soldiers wore the markings of Roric’s personal guard.

The owl landed. The talons opened. Ayla and Kenji touched down on the dark stone of the landing pad with the gentle precision of a man who had been carrying small things in his hands for forty years.

The owl folded into itself. Roric stood in front of them in his field uniform, the sidearm at his hip, the line of his jaw harder than it had been at any point since the transport. His soldiers had stopped at the edge of the pad and waited for his signal. He did not give one.

He turned to Ayla. He crouched.

The crouch was the crouch from the corridor. The crouch from the dining hall. The crouch from the breakthrough room. But, this time it felt different. His thumb passed once over her cheek.

"Baby."

"Grandpa."

"You are safe here."

Ayla furrowed her brows. "Why?"

"Because..." Roric did not finish with words, but with thoughts. ’A Celestial Vessel. Will the government consider it as an opportunity or a blasphemy?’

Ayla lowered her head. It seems she went overboard with showing off. Not that it mattered. She had her reasons for that. It had been too long since she copied a new trait.

Attracting enemies in this way seemed to be a perfect way to attract Crusaders with powerful traits.

Ayla curled her lips while looking downward so her grandpa would never see her current exciting expression.

"No one comes onto this compound without my permission. Not the houses. Not the Government. Not the Marshal himself."

"Yes, Grandpa," Ayla said, thinking ’I hope they come. More meal..’

"You and your brother will stay with me until I decide otherwise."

Ayla nodded. Roric stood up. He turned to his squad.

"Is your squad powerful, grandpa?" Ayla asked innocently.

Roric paused, turning to face her. Mistaking her question as her being scared, he patted her head.

"Yes. All of them have B and A quality traits."

"That is good." A smile appeared on her lips.

Roric shook his head with a laugh. Only Kenji stared at her in understanding. Ayla acted as if she did not see his face. Roric gave orders to his team.

"Lock the compound. No visitors. No messages out without my signature. Maren to me. Hael to the eastern barracks for whatever the senior staff is about to send our way."

"Sir."

"And one more thing."

"Sir."

"Whoever was the man in the second row, civilian colors, gray hair, hands clasped at his back. Find his name. Find his house. Find his address. Do not approach him. I will deal with him personally."

"Yes, sir."

’So he has found that man!’ Ayla praised her grandpa. She wondered if she could eat her grandpa’s brain, would she become as smart as him.

Roric felt a chill on his back as he turned to look at his two grandchildren in confusion. Seeing the innocent face of his granddaughter, he was sure it was his grandson who gave that weird feeling to him.

’It seems Kenji is dissatisfied with something. I have to teach him a lesson. A man cannot hide his dissatisfaction. It will produce jealousy and that will affect productivity.’ Roric’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Kenji.

Ayla agreed with her grandpa. Her brother, well, partner, was a bit dissatisfied these days for reasons she could not pinpoint.

Kenji watched the pair of granddaughter and grandfather, who were obviously planning something vicious against him, with a wide mouth.

"Why did it feel like I was fucked?", he cried inwardly.