24. Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
Dawn comes three hours after Jasmine leaves. The main entrance stays closed. The entry hall, empty. She's not coming back. I stand with my back to where she stood. My hands open, holding the top of my legs. The bond is pulling north toward wherever she has gone, but I leave the pull.
The predator counts I ignore. The lover, if the word still deserves a body, sits uselessly.
I could turn her into data before the next second breaks.
I could know the street, the vehicle, the pulse of her phone.
Instead I let ignorance keep its chair beside me, bitter and deserved.
The one mercy I can still offer her is to stay.
So this is what it costs. Not the protection. The control I called protection.
Gideon's name blinkers on the phone. I stare into oblivion, undecided whether I should answer, then I do.
"She's gone," I say.
"Bash. The tower just locked me out of the executive floors. My own card. Reads denied."
"Reset it from the desk—"
"I'm at the desk. The desk doesn't know me anymore."
I cross to the home node. The wall comes alive at my approach the way it always has, and for one breath everything looks correct—green, ordered, mine.
Then I watch a row of permissions blink from my name to a string of administrators I never authorized, and the green begins, quietly, to go dark from the bottom up.
"Elias," I say into the open channel.
He answers already talking. "I see it. I'm trying to—" A pause that lasts too long for him. "I'm being denied also."
"Then someone is unbuilding it from inside."
"No." His calm has a crack down the middle now. "From above us. They didn't break in. They casually walked in. Contractor credentials, permissions, legacy access. They're using the keys we handed them."
On the wall, the cleanup nodes start going dark in sequence—the quiet machinery that buries every incident before a human can see it, releasing one after another to hands that are not ours. Shelter routes blink off the map like a city losing its grid, block by block.
He's attacking. It has to have been prepared. He's been patient, needing only the hour I would not be watching.
"He waited for now," I say.
"Cyrus waited for her," Gid says, blunt. "He knew you'd be distracted. You were."
I was. My ribs feel the admission and stay there.
The old instinct surfaces: find Jasmine, mark her position, turn her into a coordinate before grief can finish.
The route sketches itself. North, then west, moving fast enough to be angry.
My hand lifts toward the secondary search pane.
Stops. Her demand was simple. I would prove her right if I act now.
A new line cuts in—Millie. "Don't sign anything, don't authorize anything, don't acknowledge any emergency governance request that comes through tonight.
The board's being told you're incapacitated.
There's a council filing claiming Crowe oversight is in crisis, asking for temporary control. It's drafted clean."
"Gregory."
"Unreachable. Or unwilling. I can't get through to him, and that has never happened in my life."
On the feeds, the lobby cameras show me an empty corridor that should be full. A safety order is moving the human staff out under a gas-leak protocol no one in this building issued. They are being walked, calmly, helpfully, out of the way of whatever comes next.
"Get them clear," I tell Gid.
"Already moving them. I'm holding the server level. Four of ours up here and a lot of well-dressed strangers coming up through access that says they belong." A grunt, a door, his weight against something.
The wall keeps emptying. I watch the network bleed out of my protection. One protected route at a time. I realize that if I do nothing for ten more seconds, there will be nothing left to do anything with.
There is one move. I have always known there was one move and prayed I would never use it.
"Elias. The home node still answers to me?"
"Yes. Why—" Then he hears it in the silence. "If you cut from your end you lose everything downstream. The western relays. Every ally hanging off them. You won't get it back, Sebastian. Unless you ask those who'll know you bled."
"They take it or I keep this." My hand is on the button. "I keep the spine. They get the limbs."
"Sebastian—"
I sever it. The wall goes black in a wave that moves outward from the room and keeps going, route after route folding dark, and somewhere out there relays I have nursed for decades drop off the map and do not come back—and the men and women who trusted those routes to keep them hidden are no longer hidden. I do that. I choose it.
The channel hisses. A new voice arrives on a line I did not open, because he can open my lines now. Short. Unhurried.
"You were always going to be alone for this," Cyrus says. "I only chose when you'd feel it."
Then he is gone.
Gid's line is still live. Fighting now—I can hear it, the particular economy of someone who has done this for two centuries. "Tell me you held something."
"I held the house. I lost the rest."
"Then we've got a house and a war." A pause. "She's out of it? The city measures—"
"Are up. Broad. Nothing that will endanger her."
"Bash." Quieter, almost gentle. "He's potentially going to win."
"Doubt it."
It should sound absurd, one estate against multiple others.
Deep down, I'm aware a scattered empire can be eaten room by room.
Cyrus may have forced me smaller, but that doesn't mean he will succeed.
Rather than acting though, I stand in the gloomy study with a single point of light at my back and the whole machinery of my world coming apart in coordinated, courteous order, and I am as alone as he wanted me. The first gate has fallen.