The orphanage stood on the jagged edge of the Bowery, a place where the brickwork was more rot than clay, and the basement air was a cocktail of damp coal dust and something ozone-sharp that shouldn't have been there.Tamsara was not supposed to be digging, but she had grown tired of waiting for the shadows to stop singing. She was only twelve, but her hands were calloused from years of hauling crates in the tunnels, and today, she’d felt a pulse. Not in her wrists, but in the ground—a steady, rhythmic thud-thud that mirrored the erratic flickering of the streetlamps outside.She wiped a streak of grime from her face and hauled another rotten floorboard out of the way. Beneath the termite-ridden joists lay a hollow, filled not with earth, but with something smooth and uncomfortably cold. It was a lead-lined crate, wrapped in the familiar—yet now horrifying—twine of charcoal river stones."Found you," she whispered, her voice too old for her small, hunched frame.She shoved a crowbar u

The fluorescent lights of the sub-basement bunker in lower Manhattan buzzed with the same hateful, discordant frequency as the streetlamps outside. This wasn’t an ordinary federal facility; the architecture felt wrong, as if someone had taken the floor plan of a secure vault and tilted it just a few degrees off-axis.Wrenith Kane shoved open the heavy, magnetic-seal door, his chest heaving, his tie knotted around his throat like a noose. Behind him, the wreckage of the night smeared the white walls of the corridor: his blazer was shredded, his shoulder was bruised purple from the impact with a fire-escape, and there was dried, obsidian-tinted blood staining his cuffs."Get him to the triage wing," Wrenith barked at the two agents waiting in the vestibule.They looked up, eyes widening as Li Wei stumbled forward. The monk didn't look like a savior; he looked like a glass sculpture moments before impact—shattered, held together by nothing more than grit and sheer stubbornness. His robes