Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“I knew there were rites,” Preston says. “Bloodline confirmations. Renewals. The grid was once meant to prevent magical civil war, but the Morris family changed it—or monopolised it. They called it the ‘stabilising authority’. I did not ask what that meant.”
“Because you didn’t want to know,” Vivian snarls.
He suspected something monstrous and chose not to ask, because the system kept working.
They built a thing that promised safety.
Then they fed everybody else into it.
But monsters are, on occasion, useful.
“Tell us what you know about the grid,” Cáel says.
Preston points out details we have missed.
We place my living map beside his documents and see, in stark detail, how the network has shifted over the centuries: organic movement, the grid adapting to a changing city in ways nobody planned or recorded.
The old paper rustles beneath our hands as we move between the versions, fixed ink beside restless magic.
Cáel has printed photographs of the Iron District repair.
I ask for paper. Someone produces the same artist’s pad I used for the living map and the same pencil.
The feather on my forearm glows. Its pale light spills through the darkened office and beyond the French doors. I let the magic rise beneath my skin and set the pencil moving.
I draw what I promised, from memory.
Magical memory is remarkable.
I ignore Preston’s questions about me. Thea tells him to be quiet and let me work.
The floor plan of the Iron District freight building appears first, followed by the existing rune structure beneath it and then the overlaid chalk repair lines—their position, their angle, the precise distance by which they miss the original network.
On the page, the problem is immediate. The repair and the network occupy the same footprint without ever meeting. Parallel lines. Shared pressure. No true connection.
The repair is connected to nothing.
It never was.
I set the pencil down and turn the pad so everyone can see.
Preston emits a sound somewhere between a grumble and a wince. “Wallace.”
“Yes, because all this is Wallace’s fault.
” Heat gathers beneath my ribs. “You knew the repair didn’t work.
You must have realised within weeks, yet you left it in place for six months.
That failure may well be responsible for the explosions in the Bone and Ink Districts, and you did nothing.
It took a governor from another country, cleaning solution, and an industrial buffer merely to stabilise the situation—temporarily. ”
I can barely look at Preston before the rage rises higher and tightens my chest. “How utterly, catastrophically mortifying that you blame someone else.”
“I don’t report to you.” The chastened facade slips. What lies beneath is uglier. “What are you, exactly—a bounty hunter with a scrap of returning magic that’s gone to your head?”
His lip curls. “You are nothing but a tool. If you had remained sacrificed, if you had died when you were supposed to, none of this would have happened. Every bit of it is on you.”
I wait for it to land.
A week ago it would have gone through me like a blade, because it was the same sentence I had been saying to myself since I was sixteen, in my own voice, every day of my life.
You are nothing.
It does not land. It lies on the carpet between us like something he has dropped.
It was never my fault.
He settles back with the contempt of a man who has spent his life looking down on others. “I’m not taking instruction from a failed terrorist. I am an Overseer. My family has held wealth and position for centuries. And you—you couldn’t even cling to the privilege into which you were born.”
“Don’t.” Cáel’s voice is quieter than I have ever heard it.
“Don’t speak to her like that. In fact, don’t speak to her at all. Don’t even look at her.” He pauses, and the silence seems to tighten around us. “You should understand something, Preston. Right now, the only reason you’re still breathing is because you might be useful. The moment that changes…”
He lets the threat hang. “Perhaps we should discuss what a sacrifice actually looks like up close.”
For a moment, I think Preston might faint.
He touches one of the old maps with a trembling finger. “The outer anchor points,” he says quietly, “can be maintained by custodians. Badly, perhaps, in recent years, but maintained.” He traces the edges—Bone, Ink, Iron, Salt. “All of these have custodian records going back generations.”
Records kept by the people responsible for the thing going wrong. I make a note to read them with that firmly in mind.
“And the centre?” Cáel asks.
Something shifts in Preston’s expression—a narrowing, a flicker of recognition. “You don’t know.” He savours knowing what we do not. I find him insufferable.
The man must be suicidal.
Cáel’s jaw tightens.
Preston lowers his gaze. “The Aegis Spire,” he says. “You drew the maps from its summit. You were standing directly above the centre point of the entire network.”
Of course.
I chose that building. I sat at a kitchen table with bacon going cold in front of me and said the Aegis Spire would be better. Higher. More central. We would see more from up there.
Nobody suggested it to me. Nobody told me what was underneath it. I simply knew where to go.
“The original documentation calls it the primary regulating point,” Preston continues.
“The Morris family have never permitted Overseers access to the lower chamber. The entrance is below the public ground floor. Behind the old service chapel. Overseer keys open the first door. Morris blood opens the last. After that…” He looks at Vivian, then at me.
“After that, the records end. We had records, maintenance duties, responsibilities. They had all the authority. Bloodline authority,” Preston adds. “That was always the phrase used.”
“You never wondered what that meant?” Vivian asks, her voice barely above a whisper.
Preston looks away. “I wondered many things,” he says. “I asked very few of them.”