It began with a sound that had no right to be there.For as long as anyone could recall, the Onyx Obelisk had been the city's still, unvarying core. It did not shift. It did not move. It simply was, a thin, impossible pillar of black stone that jutted into the sky, absorbing light and sound and, seemingly, time itself. It was the axis around which the city.spun, a monument so ancient and stable that it had become background, like the sky or the motion of the world.The sound that came out of it that quiet, hot afternoon was therefore less one heard than one felt. It was a deep, resonant tonne and more a sensation than a noise, a tectonic sigh out of something that ought not to have tectonics. It was the kind of noise a mountain would make were a mountain to breathe.In the wreckage of a turned-over tailor shop being used as an ad hoc clinic, Amelia froze, rolling bandage half-way to a sobbing burn patient. The mood in the room changed. The everywhere, background hum of the Obelisk—a v

The world had shut down to the rhythm of breathing and the weight of a wet rag. While Amelia's head spun with visions of plummeting futures, Sophia's world stayed fixed, mercifully, in the present. It was a world of small, vital tasks: reading a temperature, spooning broth into a hungry mouth, singing quietly under the breath an old lullaby to a child whose lungs wheezed with the Pox.She was the quiet, steady heartbeat of the resistance. Where Amelia was the brilliant, troubled brain and the icon of rebellion, Sophia was the hands that shattered the falling, the voice that soothed the scared. She lacked Amelia's unnatural doctor's mind and her fierce, strategic will. She possessed something more: an infinite well of compassion that never seemed to run out, even when their supply of medicine and hope did.She'd been Amelia's right from the start, right from that first makeshift clinic in a rundown warehouse. She'd observed the Death Surgeons, witnessed Elara's treachery, and fled the

The spread of the Chimera reports had made the city a cracked bell, ringing out anarchy. But in the Tin Quarter, revolution stirred in the distance. Here, all there was the silence of the dying.They had met in the rubble of a crashed temple, escaping their hiding places from a new, maddening variant of the Weeping Pox. It was plague on top of plague. The notorious, ripping coughs were now punctuated by hemorrhagic fits, victims choking on phlegm flecked with blood, skin erupting into garish, purple petechiae like rotting fruit. It was the Obelisk's handiwork, Amelia was sure—a metaphysical illness manifesting as biological terror.She strode through them, Leo at her side, sack of drugs a play child's against an avalanche. No poultice could seal burst capillaries. No tincture could reverse systemic failure. She saw the light fade in their eyes, the hope extinguished not by enforcers, but by their own failing bodies."Amelia…"A woman grated, holding her still, lifeless infant close to

The anthem did not fade away. It became the background hum of the Tin Quarter, a low, constant buzz of allegiance that was less heard than sensed. It was the sound of a narrative developing, and narratives, in a city starving of hope, were more potent than medicines or bullets.They came the next day. A trickle at first, then a stream, then a flood.They did not come as an army formed up, with discipline and drums. They came as a tide of broken bodies and shattered lives, carried on the wave of one last desperate belief: The Healer Queen can save us.Leo, standing watch at the door to the cellar of the print shop, watched them come. His soldier's heart sank. They shuffled, limped, were carried on makeshift stretchers or supported by hollow-eyed relatives. They were the Pox-stricken, the starving, the injured from Council enforcer attacks, the aged, the children. Their faces were pinched, their rags clothing, but in their eyes a small, stubborn flame burned—the reflection of the anthem

The war did not begin with a single, seminal battle. It began with a thousand sparks, igniting in the narrow, garbage-strewn streets of the lower districts, fanned into flame by the constant, pounding drums of the Council.It began when a Purge Trooper, clad in shining grey armor, kicked in the door to a bakery, roaring for the "Amelia-sympathizers" he'd been told were hiding inside. The baker, a big man who had lost a daughter in the clinic blaze, did not budge. He was armed with a heavy iron peel, the shovel-like instrument that he would use to slide loaves into his oven, and he brought it down on the trooper's helmet with a dull, pleasing clang. The trooper stumbled, and the neighbors of the baker, watching from windows, saw it. They saw that the invincible grey could be pushed off balance. They poured into the street, not with guns, but with rolling pins, with kitchen knives, with bricks wrenched from the cobbles.It began when a squad of enforcers tried to clear a makeshift barri