Lucas’s coffee was cold.

He’d forgotten about it again, the third time this morning, and he picked it up and drank it anyway because it was still coffee and he wasn’t going to waste it. The regional threat map on the war room wall had three flags on it. Two were simple, beast incursions, matching teams already deployed, done. The third was the northern sector mining installation with the energy readings that didn’t match anything and he’d given it forty eight hours because that was what he had to give it right now.

’If it moves before then we deal with it,’ he thought. ’If it doesn’t, proper team, proper equipment, find out what it is.’

He looked at the map for another minute. The Eastern Cardinal was quieter than it had been in years. Not quiet, the city didn’t do quiet, but the specific frequency of threat activity that had been running hot since Kruel’s attack had dropped back to something manageable. Something that looked like normal work instead of permanent crisis.

’We did that,’ he thought. ’That’s what the last two years actually produced. Not just the alien planet. All of it. Every contract, every deployment, every call that came in at three in the morning that could have waited until morning but didn’t because waiting until morning sometimes meant someone died in the gap.’

He finished his cold coffee and went to find breakfast.

The common area was loud in the good way. People eating, talking, the kind of noise a place made when the people in it were glad to be there, and after months on ships and alien planets and the sustained pressure of something that could have gone much worse than it did, glad to be there was exactly what everyone needed to be for a while.

Kelvin was at the far table with his display running and Diana beside him and a half eaten plate in front of him that he kept reaching for between annotations without looking at it. Shade was under the table. Nobody mentioned Shade under the table.

Lucas got his food and sat down.

"Northern sector thing," Kelvin said, without looking up.

"Forty eight hours," Lucas said.

"Good. The signature is interesting but it’s not urgent." Kelvin turned the display slightly. "Also I want to flag the wedding venue situation because Diana and I have been going back and forth on this for three weeks and I need a third opinion."

Diana looked at Lucas with the expression of someone who had been waiting for backup and was relieved it had arrived.

"The venue on the upper harbor," Kelvin said, "has the capacity, has the view, has everything we need logistically. Diana wants the one in the inner district."

"The harbor venue is a function space," Diana said. "It looks like a conference room with windows."

"It has excellent windows."

"Kelvin."

"The view alone—"

"I don’t want our wedding to look like an EDF briefing with better lighting," Diana said.

Lucas looked between them. "What’s the inner district one like."

"Smaller," Kelvin said immediately.

"Warmer," Diana said at the same time.

"We could have four hundred people at the harbor venue," Kelvin said.

"We don’t need four hundred people," Diana said. "We need the people we actually want there."

"I have a lot of people I want there."

"Name them."

Kelvin opened his mouth.

"Without looking at your contacts list," Diana said.

Kelvin closed his mouth.

Lucas almost smiled. "Inner district," he said.

Kelvin looked at him. "You didn’t even see the harbor venue."

"Inner district," Lucas said again, and picked up his fork.

Kelvin looked at Diana. Diana looked at Kelvin with the expression of someone who had just had the argument settled in their favor and was being gracious about it, which for Diana meant she was not visibly celebrating.

"The catering situation is also unresolved," Kelvin said, because Kelvin’s brain moved like that, one problem settling and the next one already queued. "Seraleth has opinions about the dessert menu that I support entirely but the vendor we were looking at doesn’t do what she’s describing and she’s been threatening to make everything herself which—"

"She’d be good at it," Diana said.

"She would be incredible at it," Kelvin agreed. "But she’s a guest, not staff, and I don’t want her spending our wedding day in a kitchen."

"Have you told her that?"

"Every time I tell her that she says she finds cooking meditative and that she would consider it a gift rather than work and then she describes in detail what she would make and I find myself agreeing to things I didn’t intend to agree to."

"So Seraleth is doing the desserts," Diana said.

"Seraleth is doing the desserts," Kelvin confirmed.

Shade’s tail came out from under the table and swept across the floor once and went back under.

"He wants to know if he’s invited," Diana said.

"He’s not a person," Kelvin said.

Diana looked at Kelvin.

"He can stand outside," Kelvin said. "Near a window. Where I can see him but also where he is technically outside."

"He’ll be inside," Diana said.

"Diana—"

"He’ll be inside, Kelvin."

Kelvin looked at the table. "I’m going to need a bigger venue."

---

Lila was on the ground in the outer eastern district when the call came in.

She was three blocks from the incursion site, moving through a street market that was doing its morning business around her like she wasn’t there, which was how she preferred it. The beast had been reported in the maintenance tunnels below the market, category two, standard profile, the kind of thing that got in through the outer perimeter gaps that the city’s infrastructure team kept patching and the beasts kept finding new versions of.

Her team was already in the tunnels. She was above, tracking their position on the wrist display, listening to the audio feed from their comms.

’They’re fine,’ she thought. ’Sira has the angle, Yemi is covering the secondary exit, Hassan is going to be three seconds late on the flank because he always runs that corridor slightly cautious and he knows it and he’s going to have a conversation with himself about it afterward.’

The call came in from below. Clean. Done.

’Four minutes,’ she thought. ’Good.’

She was already moving toward the extraction point when her earpiece caught something from the faction feed running on low in the background. The stream chat Kelvin had pulled up on the common area display, the one he had been looking at when she passed through earlier.

She hadn’t said anything about it then. She said nothing about it now.

But she thought about it because the subject being discussed was one of interest to her.

Meanwhile, at home base, Kelvin had been cussing at his display for ten minutes by the time Lucas came back through the common area after his second coffee run.

He had his secondary screen up when Lucas came back and the first thing Lucas noticed was that Kelvin’s food had gone cold and the second thing he noticed was that Kelvin was reading something that was making him progressively angrier the only way Kelvin got angry when his intelligence felt insulted.

"What are you looking at," Lucas said.

"A crime," Kelvin said.

Diana looked up from her own display. "The stream chat again?"

"The stream chat," Kelvin confirmed, "is currently being used by people who were not on that planet and have never left their houses to construct a detailed theory about Sophie’s motivations during a four horn fight based on academy competition records from three years ago."

The chat was running on his screen. Lucas leaned over and read it :

[nova_watcher]: okay I’ve been saying this for days and people keep ignoring it but academy 8 vs academy 12 rivalry goes DEEP. Smoake was academy 8’s number one three years running. Grey was academy 12’s. The interacademy competition between those two got genuinely dirty behind the scenes.

[eclipse_daily]: what does that have to do with Sophie

[nova_watcher]: Sophie Reign is Noah’s girlfriend and Eclipse’s second in command. Smoake shows up on their mission. Smoake is building to something massive. And Sophie tells him to stop.

[StreamUser_847]: that’s insane she obviously saw something with the King’s Gaze

[nova_watcher]: OR she saw an opportunity to remove someone from a rival academy who was becoming a bigger story than Eclipse’s own people

[user_Jace91]: bro that’s a stretch

[nova_watcher]: is it though? Smoake was the story on that battlefield. Everyone watching knew it. One more hit and he potentially ends Kruel alone. That’s not an Eclipse story anymore.

[StreamUser_847]: you are so cooked right now

[eclipse_daily]: there’s news that Sophie has been locked in her cabin since they got back make that make sense if she did it intentionally

[nova_watcher]: guilt

[user_Jace91]: OR trauma from watching someone die because of a decision she made

[nova_watcher]: same thing depending on why she made it

[StreamUser_847]: I cannot with this app

[nova_watcher]: I’m just asking questions

---

"These people," Kelvin said, not to anyone specifically, to the air, to the concept of the internet, to whoever was responsible for giving the general public devices with which to share their opinions in real time. "These chronically, irredeemably, magnificently online people think they know everything,"

"He’s just asking questions," Kelvin said, in the tone of a man reading words that had personally offended him on a cellular level. "Forty two thousand followers and he is just asking questions." He looked at the screen. "This person watched ten seconds of what, a six hour fight? From a drone camera half a kilometer away and has now decided he understands the full moral picture of what happened." He gestured at the chat. "Sophie was processing probability outcomes through a mythic relic weapon that reads hostile intent and future threat vectors while bleeding from her nose on alien ground and this person thinks she was doing academy politics."

"People need somewhere to put it," Diana said.

"They can put it in a folder," Kelvin said. "Labeled things I don’t understand and leave it there permanently."

"You can’t control what people say," Lucas said.

"I’m not trying to control it," Kelvin said. "I’m registering my objection in the privacy of my own submarine. I’m allowed." He looked at the screen one more time. "Nova watcher is going to keep posting. Forty two thousand people are going to keep reading it. And Sophie is going to stay in her cabin while someone who wasn’t there builds a narrative about why she did what she did."

The table went quiet.

Lucas looked at his coffee.

’I knocked twice,’ he thought. ’Both times she said she was fine through the door and both times fine meant something else and I didn’t push because I didn’t know what pushing would do and I still don’t know.’ He looked at his hands. ’She saw something. The King’s Gaze showed her something and she made a call and Jayden is dead and she’s the one living in it and I don’t know how to reach through a closed door to someone who isn’t ready to open it.’

’I don’t know what she saw. I don’t know if she’ll tell me. I don’t know if knowing would make any of this sit differently.’

’Jayden is dead. That’s the thing that doesn’t move. Whatever she saw, whatever the King’s Gaze showed her, Jayden is dead and she made the call and she’s the one living in it.’

’I just want her to open the door.’

"The ceremony is this afternoon," Diana said, pulling the table back to something actionable. "Sam has the logistics. The faction goes together, leaves from the main dock at two."

"Sebastian’s building," Kelvin said, the stream chat apparently closed in his head now that he’d said what he needed to say about it. "I looked at the specs. Medical facilities on the lower floors, emergency response coordination, public awakened support services. He actually built something useful rather than just putting a plaque somewhere."

"He’s a good governor," Lucas said.

"He’s a fan," Kelvin said. "But yes, also a good governor. The two aren’t mutually exclusive."

"Noah would hate a building with his name on it," Diana said.

"Noah would stand in front of a building with his name on it and make a face and then go inside and quietly be pleased about it," Kelvin said. "Those are different things."

Lucas almost smiled again. Didn’t quite get there.

---

The harbor front was full by the time the faction arrived.

Not just Eclipse members, not just the task force people who had stayed on after the operation, the city itself had shown up, the Eastern Cardinal doing what it did when something mattered, filling the space around the thing that mattered with itself. People on the walkways and the observation platforms and the water taxis that had parked up along the harbor edge because this was where things were happening today.

Sebastian was at the podium in his formal jacket and he was doing what Sebastian did well, taking something real and giving it the words it deserved, talking about what it meant to have people willing to go to places nobody else would go, what the city had felt when Kruel came and what it felt now, what the building behind him represented in terms of what Eclipse had done for the Eastern Cardinal and what the Eastern Cardinal intended to do with it.

The stream was running on the screens around the harbor front. The chat moving fast.

Lucas stood at the front of the faction and looked at the crowd and thought about the northern sector mining situation for approximately four seconds before he stopped himself and put it away because this was not the moment for that and he was going to be present for this moment because the people behind him had earned it.

Diana was waving properly beside him. Full arm, real smile, the one that went all the way. Kelvin beside her doing the same, his display for once not in his hands, just standing there being present.

Seraleth’s height made her visible above everyone else. She was looking at the crowd with something warm in her expression, the particular warmth of someone who had come from somewhere else entirely and had found something worth standing in.

Angel was behind them, recovered, her task force people scattered through the formation, the red of her hair catching the harbor light.

Lila was at the edge of the formation in the way Lila was always at the edge of things, present and contained, watching the crowd with the assessment she gave everything.

Sebastian finished the dedication and turned to the faction and the crowd responded with the kind of noise that came from somewhere deep.

Then Sebastian looked at the lineup.

Looked at it carefully. Face to face, left to right, the governor of the Eastern Cardinal doing what politicians did when they were looking for something specific in a crowd and not finding it.

"Where is Noah Eclipse," Sebastian said, into the microphone.

The crowd changed.

Not badly. Not angrily. Just the particular shift that happened when a room full of people realized simultaneously that the answer to a question they hadn’t thought to ask was something other than what they assumed. The stream chat on the screens around the harbor front went from fast to faster, the same question in a hundred variations appearing and disappearing in the feed, people asking where he was, people asking if he was okay, people asking if he had disappeared again, someone saying two years last time someone saying don’t jinx it someone saying Eclipse confirmed Kruel dead so he has to be somewhere.

Lucas looked at the crowd and said nothing because there was nothing to say that was both true and useful right now.

Kelvin was still smiling. The camera facing smile, the one he wore for public moments, warm and confident and saying everything was fine. He turned his head a fraction toward Diana without moving his feet, keeping his eyes on the crowd, keeping the smile exactly where it was.

"So," he said, at a volume that went nowhere except Diana’s ears. "People are not going to love this."

Diana kept waving. Kept her expression where it was. Looked at Kelvin from the corner of her eye.

"Took me a while," Kelvin said. "The chip is gone like I said. But I know how he moves, I know what systems he’d interact with, I know the energy signature of Storm’s lightning from three years of data and Storm doesn’t exactly travel quietly." He paused. "He’s with the EDF, Diana. He’s on the Vanguard station."

Diana’s smile stayed on her face.

Her jaw tightened.

She kept waving.

Said absolutely nothing.