Garrick's shop was dark when Ezra arrived, past midnight, the gold lettering on the window gone dull under a streetlight two bulbs short of working. He knocked anyway, hard enough that he half expected no answer, and the old man opened the door within seconds, fully dressed despite the hour, like sleep had stopped being something he bothered pretending to need."You look like a man who found out something he wasn't ready for," Garrick said, stepping aside to let him in."Vaelgrith showed me how it actually died." Ezra didn't wait for the back room this time, said it standing in the cluttered front of the shop, surrounded by dead watches and secondhand junk that suddenly felt like a strange place to be having this conversation. "It wasn't innocent, Garrick. It executed people without trials. Isolde's family. It knew that when I killed her, and it let me do it anyway."Something crossed Garrick's face that wasn't surprise. Recognition, maybe, or the particular exhaustion of a truth fi

Rourke met him at the Guild tower an hour after the market square, listening to the shared-control account with the same careful attention she gave every report that didn't fit an existing category."You steered it," she repeated, testing the word. "Not lost time. Steered.""Felt different from anything before," Ezra said. "Felt like I was still there the whole way through.""That's either the best news I've heard since this started," Rourke said, "or it's the thing that finally convinces the panel you're stable enough to stop worrying about, right up until it isn't. I don't love that we don't know which yet."Damon, arm still in a sling from the training grounds three days earlier, leaned against the doorframe with an expression that mixed genuine relief and old wariness in roughly equal parts. "You realize you just told a Guild investigator that voluntarily letting the thing inside you take partial control felt good," he said. "That's not exactly a sentence built to reassure anyone.

Rourke didn't sleep either that night. Ezra found that out three days later, when she told him herself, sitting across from him in a Guild conference room considerably larger and more formal than Room 4 had ever been, six panel members seated behind a long table instead of one investigator alone with a tablet."I filed a full incident report," she said before the panel could open with whatever prepared statement they'd been holding. "Everything. The market square, the shared control, the processing plant, the forty minutes you couldn't account for, the possibility of a third presence, and neither of us can identify or predict." She held Ezra's eyes as she said it, steady, unflinching, and something in the way she said it told him this wasn't betrayal. It was the truth arriving on her terms instead of leaking out on someone else's. "I didn't do it because I stopped trusting you. I did it because I've spent three weeks being the only safeguard standing between an unverified anomaly and

Garrick found him on the second day.Ezra heard the footsteps before he saw the flashlight beam, careful and unhurried, someone who'd walked these tunnels before and knew exactly which sections still held weight. He had a length of rebar in his hand before he'd fully registered deciding to grab it, Pressure Sense already mapping the single presence closing from the junction's east passage."You could have just called," Garrick said, stepping into the beam of his own light. "If your phone still had a battery in it.""How did you find me.""I've spent forty years learning where people hide when the Guild stops being safe. You picked a good spot. Not good enough." Garrick set a canvas bag down on the concrete, and the smell that came out of it, actual food, something hot, made Ezra's stomach twist with a hunger he hadn't let himself notice until now. "Eat. Then we talk."Ezra ate. He didn't trust himself to speak until the worst of the shaking in his hands had settled, and Garrick waite

It ended fast.Ezra felt every second of it, present in a way that made the aftermath worse instead of easier, no blackout to soften the memory, no borrowed strength to distance himself from what his own hands had done. Weaver went still on the stairwell landing, and whatever remained of Aldric in that final breath looked, for just an instant, like a man finally allowed to rest.[Target 7 of 9: Eliminated][Ability Transfer: Initiating][Skill Acquired: Fracture Sight]No memory surfaced with the transfer this time. Ezra knelt there a long moment anyway, chest heaving, and behind him Garrick's weeping had gone quiet, exhausted, the particular silence of grief that had finally found its ending after forty years of waiting for it."Thank you," Garrick said, when he finally trusted his voice again. "For not letting me be the one. I would have died on that landing too, Ezra, and I think some part of me wanted exactly that.""I know." Ezra helped him up, both of them unsteady, the recruit