The message arrived at seven in the morning, from a number that did not exist on any network: [The Vance family has organized a medical competition. The pretext: finding a new disciple for Divine Healer 1. The purpose: saving Tristan. The whole city has taken the bait.]Julian read it twice on the orphanage steps, and smirked. Arthur Pendleton had learned to write reports the way Julian liked them: no opinions, no decorations, only facts. Boss A, the man whose name made East End shopkeepers lock their doors, now sent morning reports to an orphanage like a dutiful clerk.Julian typed one line back: [Who is hosting the stage?]The answer came in seconds: [Dr. Karen Vance. The media believes she is still the disciple. The villa is full of doctors already.]So they were selling his name to save their fake son. Fine. He would go and tear the facade down himself.Margaret appeared at the door with a folded coat. "The wind is cruel today," she said, pressing it into his arms. "Dress warmly.

Julian walked slowly through the living room, watching the crowd the way other people watch the weather. Faces he knew from medical journals. Faces he knew from hospital donor lists. Faces he knew from the market's quiet whispers. All of them were here. The string quartet near the fountain had started to play, soft and careful, as if the night itself knew it was a trap. He smiled thinly to himself. 'How are all of these people going to walk out of here today?' he wondered. Near the small stage, Tristan sat in his wheelchair and followed Julian with eyes that could not stay still. His dead right hand lay on his lap, wrapped in silk. Karen stepped forward with a microphone. Her smile was warm. Her posture was graceful. Her voice was steady, like a voice reading good news. "Thank you all for coming," she said. "Now, let us begin our medical competition." Servants pushed Tristan's wheelchair into the center of the light. Karen explained his symptoms briefly—pain that had spread thr

The shout hung in the air like a struck bell. For three full seconds, nobody in the courtyard breathed. A doctor near the fountain lowered his phone. A professor stopped mid-whisper. Even the string quartet's bows went still on their strings.Then the old man in the gray coat lifted his phone higher, so the lantern light fell on the screen."Divine Healer 1 has replied," Sir Edmund Hale said. His voice was not loud, but it carried the way a judge does. "He says: the woman who calls herself my disciple was expelled from the school hours ago. She speaks without my name and without my leave."Karen's face went white under the powder. The smile stayed for one second too long, like a mask that had forgotten it was a mask. Then training took over. Inside her chest, something cold did arithmetic. The Master had cut her off hours ago. If this old man could reach the Master and she could not, then every second she denied it was a second the crowd counted against her. ‘Deny faster,’ 'said the c

The six cars did not stop like cars. They stopped like a wall being built. Headlights swept past Julian from both ends of the street, crossed, and locked him in a rectangle of white light and idling engines. Doors opened. Adrian Blackwood stepped out of the lead car, adjusting his cuffs, taking his time."Well," Adrian said, stopping three paces away. "Look what the rain forgot."Julian put his hands in his pockets. "You followed me.""I intercepted you," Adrian corrected. "There is a difference. Interception is what men with money do." His six bodyguards fanned out behind him, smiling the way paid men smile when the job is already half a joke. "Let me tell you why you are standing in my light tonight. You entered the villa with your left foot first, and that displeased me. So I am going to break both of your arms. For fun. Consider it a tuition fee for manners."His men laughed. It was an easy laugh. They had broken men before and been paid for it.Julian looked at Adrian the way a d

Aira woke before her alarm, and by the time the alarm did ring, she had already been awake for an hour, running her lines in the mirror. She said the third line, hated it, erased it from her face, and said it again, slower. In the kitchen, Margaret pressed a paper bag into her hands—two rice balls and a boiled egg, the orphanage version of good luck.When Aira came down the stairs, Julian was in the kitchen, holding a cup of Margaret's too-sweet tea, reading nothing, just holding it."I'm coming with you," he said."You don't have to.""I know.""I can take the bus.""I know that too."They looked at each other for three seconds, and Aira lost, because she always lost them, and she hated that she was starting not to mind. "Fine," she said. "But if you slow me down, I'm leaving you."On the bus she insisted on the bus, and Julian did not argue, because the bus was hers she told him about the project. A famous director's comeback film, the first in six years. Half the big names in the c