This morning, in the breakthrough chamber, the large one had appeared. It was a chance for him to reach heights no Ghoul had even dared to dream.

He had only attended the breakthrough as a courtesy. The civilian house he had been cultivating had received an invitation through a cousin, and the cousin had been unable to attend.

Velkyn had volunteered to take the seat in the cousin’s place, on the polite reasoning that the breakthrough of a Diamond General’s granddaughter was the kind of social occasion a junior officer of clean reputation should be seen attending.

He had expected to see a Bronze breakthrough. A standard one. He expected the kind that would let him confirm the girl’s face, her bone structure, and her registered rank, so that he could file the information with his own private records for use at a later date.

The girl was a Hayashi, after all. The Hayashi household was the kind of household that made occasional border crossings to Old York. If the girl ever crossed alone, or in a light escort, the information would have value.

What he had seen instead was an Apocalypse Bronze core. And a Celestial Vessel.

Velkyn stopped walking. He stood at the wall and pressed his forehead against the cream paint and laughed, very quietly, into the silence of the room. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

"If I can harvest her core."

He said the words aloud. The voice was Halen Voss’s voice. The voice carried, in the privacy of the room, none of the disguise Velkyn had been wearing for sixteen months. It was the voice of a Ghoul who had walked into a temple by accident and found the altar unattended.

"Diamond rank must not be that much longer."

He stepped back from the wall. The arithmetic was simple. A Celestial core, harvested intact, would help him to break through to Diamond rank. It was a rank that was impossible for him before.

The procedure was documented in the older Ghoul texts, the ones the council kept restricted to senior agents. Velkyn was not a senior agent. He had read the texts anyway. He had read them in his fourth month inside Halen Voss’s body, in the long quiet evenings when Halen Voss’s social calendar had been empty.

Two practitioners and a sealed room would manage the harvest. The cost would be three hundred human souls. That was not a problem for a transportation officer.

He had not yet told his people about Ayla. A Ghoul who had told his colleagues would have to share the harvest. The intelligence Velkyn had carried for sixteen months was the kind of asset that could be defended in council, but a Celestial core, broadcast to the network, would be a prize the council would simply take.

There would be no negotiation. There would be no recognition of the agent who had located the target. There would only be the order to surrender the location and step aside.

Velkyn would not be stepping aside.

He had been a junior officer for sixty years of the Crusade’s count. He had watched eight cohorts of his peers advance past him on the strength of harvests they had not earned.

He had filed the polite reports and accepted the polite assignments and walked the polite circuits of the outer frontier, and he had nursed, in the long private evenings of those decades, a resentment that the council’s senior agents would have considered unbecoming.

The resentment had a shape now. The shape was a small girl with silver hair and eight wings.

"Roric Vale is a smart bastard."

Velkyn said it to the empty room. He had felt the General’s attention in the breakthrough chamber, specifically the brief moment when the General’s gaze had passed across the back of the observation level and not stopped on Velkyn but had, very faintly, slowed.

He had felt the slowing. He had stilled his thoughts at the moment of the slowing and had succeeded, by the small margin of his training, in not being identified.

The General had felt something, but not enough. The General would feel more, soon. The General would send his men, his personal guard, the squad that wore the markings of the eastern barracks but did not, when the General did not want them seen, wear them.

The men would arrive at this residence at any time. They would find an empty room, a coat hanging on a hook, and a half finished cup of tea on a side table. They would not find Velkyn.

He stepped to the center of the rug. He breathed out once, slowly, the breath of a body that had served him for sixteen months. The body returned the breath without complaint. Halen Voss’s body had never complained.

Halen Voss’s body had been a good coat. Velkyn felt, for the brief space of the breath, a small ungrudging gratitude. If not for this human, he would not have found such a human treasure.

Then he let the coat go.

The body of Halen Voss, junior transport officer, twenty-six years old, three weeks from a wedding that had not happened, withered. The skin grayed first. Then it dried. Then it cracked along the joints and the lines of the face.

The hair fell from the scalp in small, dry handfuls and drifted to the rug. The eyes sank into the sockets. The teeth darkened. The fingernails curled back from the beds and dropped. Within seconds, the body was no longer a body. It was a shape.

Within seconds after that, the shape was no longer a shape. It was a scattering of fine, gray dust across the deep red of the rug.

In the place where the body had stood, a darkness gathered. The darkness had no shape. The darkness had never had a shape. The darkness was the Ghoul. It hung in the room for one second. Two. Three.

Then it slipped sideways, through the closed window, through the wall, through the small spaces that Solgrace’s artificial walls had not been built to seal against a thing without form, and into the street, and into the alley, and into the network of subroad passages the Ghouls had been mapping inside the human sector for two centuries.

Velkyn was gone.

Six minutes later, the door of the residence opened. Three men in the unmarked field uniforms of Roric Vale’s personal guard stepped into the room.

They moved with the careful precision of soldiers who had been told that the target was at least Platinum rank. Their weapons were drawn. Their eyes scanned the corners of the room first, then the ceiling, then the floor.

The lead officer crouched at the edge of the rug. His gloved hand passed once through the fine gray dust. He brought the dust close to his face and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He stood. He pressed the small communication stud at his collar.

"Sir. The residence is empty. The target was here. He left in the last ten minutes."

A pause.

"Confirm."

"The body of the junior officer is on the rug. He shed it. We are looking at the dust now."

A longer pause. Then Roric’s voice, very low, came through the stud.

"Bring me the dust. All of it. Do not let any of it leave the room before you do."

"Yes, sir."

The lead officer knelt again and began, with the slow patience of a man who understood what he was collecting, to gather the residue of Halen Voss into the small sealed container the squad carried for exactly this kind of recovery.

In the alley two streets away, a darkness without shape slid through a crack in the foundation of an older building and disappeared.

Meanwhile, one of the soldiers among Roric’s men returned to his senses and wondered when he had reached this place.

Was he not just at the general’s house and accepting a task from him? He rubbed the back of his head in confusion.

Ayla opened her eyes in a room and twitched her lips.

"He ran away," she complained.