Atlantis stood at the bank with his hands folded and watched the river.One hour. Three students had already come out and were sitting on the grass behind him wrapped in the towels Eleonora's assistant had produced from somewhere, looking drained in the specific way of people whose minds had been wrung. Eleonora stood two meters to his left, arms crossed, watching the water with the focused patience of someone who had done this before and knew what the waiting looked like."Giancarlo next," Atlantis said.Eleonora glanced at him. "You think Annalisa outlasts him.""Her life has been harder. Harder lives build different walls." He kept his eyes on the river. "She'll come out after him. And she'll come out ahead."The water moved as it always moved, quiet and clear, and then Giancarlo broke the surface.He came up gasping, not from lack of air, the gasping of someone whose mind had been under something heavy and had just had it lifted. He made it to the bank and sat down hard on the gra

those categories to accommodate what they'd seen. Atlantis's composure was present but doing visible work. Eleonora's eyes were moving between Dante and the empty riverbed with the systematic attention of someone gathering data before they allowed themselves to react.The students behind them were completely silent.Annalisa was staring at the dry channel with her mouth slightly open, which was the first time since he'd met her that she appeared to have no words prepared.Dante stopped in front of Atlantis and Eleonora."I don't know what happened," he said. "It just absorbed into me. I couldn't control it."Atlantis looked at him.Not with anger. With the focused, complicated expression of a man fitting a large piece into a picture he had been building since yesterday and finding that it changed the shape of everything around it."The entire river," Atlantis said."Yes.""Every drop.""Yes."Eleonora turned from the empty bed and looked at Dante with eyes that were doing the same cal

He wanted to go home.He turned to Eva and found her already looking at him with the expression of someone who had been carrying the same thought and was waiting to see who said it first.They understood it at the same moment."This is where you're going," Dante said."And you're going back," Eva said."Yes."She looked at the street ahead of her, the Central Plains beginning somewhere beyond the Free Zone's administrative border, the direction where a person called the White Whale had been waiting in her father's instructions for six years."My father told me about him when I was twelve," she said. "The night the Church came for us. He told me that if they found me again, if I was running and I needed help and I had nowhere else to go, I should find the White Whale in the Central Plains." She paused. "I've been carrying that for six years. I'm finally in the right place to do something with it."Dante looked at her profile. The careful way she held herself, the things she still hadn'

where the Irenwald heir is now."The image shifted.A plaza. Humid air, administrative buildings, the particular layout of the Erino Free Zone. Two figures standing on a street, and the girl, yes, that face matched the file, was stepping forward and wrapping her arms around the white-haired boy with her face going red at the back of the neck.The Great Cardinal watched them separate. Watched the boy disappear. Watched the girl walk in the other direction with the focused step of someone who knew where she was going."The Central Plains," he said."Your Eminence." The same Cardinal who had given the first report. "Should we deploy Church forces?""No." Flat. Immediate. "We do not move Church assets into the Central Plains. Not for this. The political cost of that visibility is not one I'm willing to pay for a retrieval we can accomplish through other means." He covered the mirror again. "Hire Wanderers. Hire mercenaries if you need to supplement. Keep our name out of the contract chain

who had questions queued up and were deciding which one went first.Lucia went first. She always went first."Tell us everything," she said."It was mostly sightseeing," Dante said.She stared at him."There was a tournament. I entered it. I won. The rewards took time to collect." He looked at the ceiling briefly. "That's most of it.""You were in the Celestial Domain for a week and the summary is sightseeing and a tournament.""And the rewards took time to collect."Lucia looked at Gianna. Gianna was watching Dante with the measured expression of a woman who had been reading people for thirty years and knew when a heavily edited version was being delivered."What empire did you go to?" Lucia asked."The Eltonaro."Her eyes went wide. She sat up straighter on the couch. "You went to the Eltonaro Empire? The one the Immortal Emperor founded? The one that's in every chapter of History and General Knowledge of the Celestial Domain from week three to week nine?""That's the one.""What wa