What Feeds on DeathThe conscription notice was slipped under the infirmary door sometime before dawn.Rael found it when he arrived for his morning visit, a single strip of grey paper with the Dominion seal pressed into the top corner and his name written below it in the clipped, efficient hand of someone who processed many of these at once. It informed him that as an unranked citizen, classified Hollow under Dominion Code 7, he was required to report to the eastern muster point by the third bell. Failure to report would constitute civil abandonment, which carried consequences the notice did not bother to specify because Hollows rarely needed to be told twice what happened to people the Dominion had already decided were worth nothing.He read it twice. Folded it. Put it in his pocket beside the fourteen copper marks.Then he went upstairs and sat with Dessa for an hour before he left.She was awake, barely, the way she sometimes was in early morning when her body gathered just enoug

The Ghost That Walks WellThe supply depot on the western freight road was unstaffed between the second and fourth bell, a window the depot’s own logistical schedule created and no one had thought to close because no one had thought anyone would need to. Rael was inside for less than four minutes. He took a servant’s coat from the third rack, long-sleeved, high-collared, the dark grey that domestic staff in the guild district wore so as to be present without being seen. He left the four copper marks on the shelf where the coat had been. It was not enough. It was what he had.He was through the market district before the fourth bell finished ringing.The lower markets ran along the south bank of the canal that divided the inner and outer rings, and they were the part of the capital that operated on informal logic, where licensed vendors and unlicensed ones occupied the same stalls on alternating days and the guild inspectors who were supposed to enforce the difference had long since re

The Stone That JudgesHe heard about the Grand Revelation Stone the way he heard about most things now, by moving slowly through the lower markets in the servant coat and listening to the ambient information that people exchange when they are not talking to anyone in particular.The Dominion’s Founding Anniversary fell on the third day of the ninth month, and the Council had decided this year to display the Grand Revelation Stone in the Central Hall as a public gesture of institutional confidence. The Stone was the original, installed when the Dominion was founded, five times the height of the platform stones and supposedly five times the sensitivity. It had not been made available to the public in eleven years. The announcement described it as a gift to the citizenry, an opportunity for ranked members to reaffirm their classification in the presence of history.In the lower markets the consensus was that it was a pageant, a way of reminding people what the system looked like when it

What the Archive BuriedHe moved to the door before she could and stood against it, not blocking it with his body but positioning himself in a way that made the geometry of leaving require a conversation first.Nova looked at the door. Looked at him. Made the accurate calculation that this was not a threat and was not going to become one, and sat down on a low wooden beam that the tannery had left behind when it emptied.“You tracked me for two days,” Rael said. “You came through the roof with a testing pattern instead of a report to the Council. Whatever you found in the archive gaps, it changed your decision about what to do with what you saw in the Hall.” He settled against the wall across from her. “I need to know what it was.”Nova was quiet for a moment. Not reluctant, he thought. More like someone deciding where to start with something that had been sitting in them at pressure since they found it.“The Sovereign’s Scar appears three times in pre-Dominion records,” she said. “No

What He Doesn’t SayNova made the decision in the three seconds between Rael hitting the road and the nearest soldier recovering his footing.She crossed from the grass verge, got both hands under Rael’s arm, and pulled. He was heavier than he looked, which she registered as a fact to process later, the weight of someone whose body had been doing something other than ordinary living for a long time and had accumulated the density of that. He was not unconscious. He was present in the way that a person is present when all available resources have been redirected and there is simply nothing left over for mobility. He got his feet under him enough to assist rather than resist, and that was enough.She moved them off the road and into the tree line at an angle that used the planted rows as cover, keeping the trunks between them and the soldiers’ last position. Behind her she heard Orvyn’s voice, low and controlled, issuing instructions she could not parse at this distance. She heard the