Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cáel sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.
Vivian tries not to fidget; the sofa must be exactly as uncomfortable as it looks.
“So now I’m a terrorist,” I say. From sacrifice to scapegoat—lovely. I turn to Cáel. “Let’s stop circling. He won’t co-operate voluntarily. Tell him what we know, or we’ll be here all night.”
“Preston, your fingerprints are all over the—what do you call it?—the suppression grid.” Cáel gestures around the room. “Everyone in this room knows about it. For the past week, we’ve been calling it the rune network—because, as it happens, Elenora can see it.”
Preston looks at me sharply. “That’s not possible.” He laughs, and it comes out wrong. “She’s lying to you. No one can see the grid. It’s invisible. It was designed to be invisible.”
Cáel smiles at me, then at Thea. “Thea, the document folder, if you would.”
She reaches into her medical bag and produces an enormous stack of files: far more than Bob uncovered.
Cáel’s people have been busy. Judging by the shadows beneath his eyes, that work has cost him more than sleep.
Cáel unlocks the black diplomatic case with his fingerprint, then leans forward and sets the maps out in order across the coffee table.
“This,” he says, pausing over the first sheet, “is the Bone District. That anchor point—there—is where the network overloaded and exploded.” He moves to the next map. “The Ink District. Same pattern. Same black smudge.”
Preston stares at the hand-drawn maps fanned across his coffee table. His face drains of colour. “Where did you get these?” he whispers. “This is impossible. I have seen the grid design and copies of the original maps. They look nothing like this.”
“Elenora has Ink magic,” Cáel says. “This is a live map. She drew it at the top of the Aegis Spire, while her magic was active. This isn’t a copy of the design.
It’s the network as it actually exists right now.
” He lays out the District maps methodically, one after another.
“And this is Iron. When we inspected that anchor, there was rune chalk. Walk me through the repair.”
“Six months ago, I hired a specialist. We attempted a repair at that grid point based on the original maps. The grid had begun to destabilise and was producing excess power we could not account for. We needed to reduce the load.”
“What were the specialist’s parameters?” Cáel asks.
“Stabilise the network and contain the overflow. Wallace has a doctorate.” Preston smiles smugly, as though the man’s credentials might shield him. “He’s the best this city can offer. He has spent his career on rune-work.”
“How did the repair go?”
I press my lips together. Anyone who could see the runes would have spotted the botched job: the new markings sat half a foot out of alignment; their chalk lines ran beside the originals without connecting to anything.
“It needed time,” Preston says carefully. “Wallace believed the grid point was correct. There may have been some margin of error. We were told to wait and assess.”
“Where is Wallace now?” I ask.
Preston hesitates. “At home, I should think. I have not spoken to him since Ink.”
“I want his address before we leave.”
“You waited until the Bone District grid point exploded.” Cáel taps the black smudge on the map.
Preston tugs at his collar. Sweat has yellowed the fabric.
The arrogant, controlling Overseer I met at the roadblock seems to have disappeared entirely.
Cáel’s presence has frightened him—or perhaps it is the weight of everything laid out on the table between us, all that evidence, all those years of quiet complicity suddenly named and documented.
Either way, the man sitting across from us now is smaller than the one I expected.
“And then the Ink District.” Cáel stabs at the maps. “Yet you did nothing. You oversee Ink and Bone. This falls within your jurisdiction, and you have neglected your duty. That is a capital offence.”
“I don’t know what went wrong. The last thirty years have been a disaster, and I have tried to fix it. I have.” Preston leans forwards. Sudden urgency cuts through his exhaustion. “Look. I have records going back generations. May I?” He gestures towards the shelves.
Cáel nods.
Vivian stations herself beside the bookcase as Preston pulls folders from the shelves.
“Look at this.” He lays an enormous volume open across the desk.
Meticulous handwriting. Annotated diagrams. Century-old rune maps folded inside one another. Detailed, precise.
“This is one of the oldest surviving guides to the suppression grid. It wasn’t built to hurt people.
It was built because people were dying.” He straightens and looks between us.
“There was an uprising. Magic used as a weapon. Family grudges. Entire bloodlines wiped out. Storms conjured from nothing. Fires. Floods. Innocent bystanders killed.”
He shakes his head. “One of my ancestors lost an entire branch of the family when someone summoned a hurricane.”
Preston unfolds the maps until they cover most of the desk. “They worked with the Morris family and built the grid to contain the violence. Without it, the city would have been destroyed.”
Thea and I lean closer.
“We have guarded these records for generations,” he continues, his voice quieter now. “You may not believe me, but I care about the Districts.” His gaze flicks towards me, then away. “But the Morris family—” He stops. “You don’t know what they’re like.”
I exhale slowly through my nose and meet Vivian’s gaze.
I think we do.
The truth mark gives no warning; Preston believes he is telling the truth.
I stroke Mina with one hand and leaf through the maps with the other.
The inherited suppression grid files are meticulous: annotated rune diagrams, folded overlays and generations of careful handwriting.
The paper is dry and brittle beneath my fingertips, the corners softened by the decades.
I compare them with our living map; the layouts are broadly similar.
Yet these documents treat the rune network as something fixed, a static design, though it never was.
The runes are almost alive. They curl around structures and shift as the environment changes. When a building rises or falls, the magic adjusts. It exists in the ground, in the air, in the fabric of the city itself.
Whoever built this grid misunderstood what they had created. People were dying. Magic had been used as a weapon, and they acted without considering what would follow. More than fourteen hundred years later, we are still living with the consequences of their overconfidence and lack of foresight.
“Thirty years ago, the suppression grid began to draw too much power. Cases of the Fade rose exponentially. The Districts had nothing left to give, yet the power flow continued to increase,” Preston continues.
“At first, we blamed it on the hidden children. Or rather, on adolescent manifestation. Most District children never develop enough magic to matter; the grid drains them before their power has any chance to take root properly. But some still break through. When magic first comes in, it fluctuates. It surges, settles, then surges again. The grid could not always suppress those peaks quickly enough.”
“How many?” Thea asks.
Preston blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“How many children, in a year, across all the Districts? You said the figures didn’t balance, so you had figures.” She has not raised her voice at all. “How many?”
“Forty. Fifty, in a bad year.”
“And how many would you have needed for the numbers to balance?”
Preston does not answer that one.
His mouth tightens. “In the early days, before the grid, magical academies managed the process.
Talented children were identified, monitored and taught control.
Those schools in the Districts were disbanded.
There was no need to teach advanced magic to people whose power would be drained anyway, and no one in the Immortal Zone would train hundreds of District children only to see their hard-earned work stripped away.
“The Games became the solution. Public spectacle, private sorting mechanism. Anyone with significant talent was identified, contained and either used or removed. Controlled entry, controlled exit. Clean.”
He pauses. The word hangs in the quiet room. “But parents became adept at hiding their children. Even after we accounted for the hidden children, the figures still did not balance. Power through the grid kept rising. So, to be sure, we sent bounty hunters after them.”
He says it as one might say, ‘We sent someone to fix a pipe’, not as though he is describing kill orders for children.
And he is sitting ten feet from me, talking to the hunter who took those contracts. He is telling me about my own career.
I stare past him and breathe slowly through my nose. My hands stay flat on my thighs, my face neutral.
The hidden children.
The kill orders.
All the bounties I collected. All the families who believed their children dead.
Two hundred and six.
Two hundred and eleven, if I count the five I did not reach in time.
I have never once had to count. I could recite their names in order and say which ones cried and which ones did not.
He signed the paperwork.
The rage stays where it is; I shall want it later. Under the desk, Mina lifts her head and pushes her nose into my palm. I let her. Cáel offers me his hand. I take it for a moment, his touch warm and steady.
What I want has never been the point. The children are the point.
“It didn’t make a blind bit of difference. The suppression grid only got worse, and the Morris family blamed me.” He prods his own chest.
“Thirty-two years,” I say.
Preston frowns. “Pardon?”
“Not thirty. Thirty-two.” I lean forward and rest my forearms on the desk, sleeves pushed back, the government marks plain in the lamplight.
“Thirty-two years ago I went into the Games, and they took my magic out of me and fed it into your grid. That is your date. That is the year your figures stopped balancing.”
He stares at my wrists.
“For generations, the Morris family has stripped magic from its own children to power the network,” Cáel says. “Elenora’s was stronger than anything it had ever processed.”
“And it has been fighting them ever since,” I say.
“Every single day, while I was down there being spat at for ruining everybody’s lives.
” My voice stays level, which surprises me rather more than it surprises him.
“Your anchors are failing because the grid is running on magic it cannot hold. It cannot hold it because it does not belong to you.”
Preston frowns. “That can’t be right.”
“It is, and I can prove it. Which means we need to build a formal case against the Morris family.” Cáel fixes Preston with a steady look. “You’ve been used for a long time, and badly. The question is what you will do about it now.”
Preston glances at the maps spread across the desk. He looks less like a man defending himself and more like one finally working something out.
“The Morris family,” he murmurs.
“Yes,” I say.
He does not meet my eye, but after a moment, he nods.