Apostolic Journey

[Seraphis]

By two in the morning, Seraphis had stopped pretending she might sleep. Someone from the Kremlin had moved her and Lucien from the Grand Palace hours ago. The explanation had been practical enough. The Senate building had become one of the principal operational centers for teams moving through Spasskaya Gate, and if she intended to wait for the Luminar, she might as well wait somewhere he would eventually return.

They had shown her and Lucien through secure corridors and underground passages she suspected they were never meant to know existed. They had been escorted the entire way and told, more than once, not to deviate from the route. Normally that would have made the journey interesting. Tonight she barely noticed where they went.

Theron had been outside for eleven hours. By midnight the Senate looked less like the center of an empire than somewhere an empire had emptied its pockets in a hurry. Furniture had been shoved against walls to make room for equipment, food, dry clothing, blankets and whatever first aid supplies had not already been sent forward into the city. Displays showed maps of central Moscow crossed by glowing routes she now understood to be tunnels beneath the snow. Staff moved in and out carrying updates. Every few minutes someone came through the doors, and every time they opened, Seraphis looked up. But none of them were Theron.

However many medical teams there were in the Kremlin had been pushed outward through the tunnels as quickly as the Dominions opened them, taking treatment to people who could not be brought back. Only a small triage presence remained near the Spasskaya gate area for the evacuees who actually reached the Kremlin. Those were the people Seraphis could not stop watching.

Most never came this far. The tunnels connected buildings to safer neighboring structures, and anyone who could remain in place did. Others were moved only far enough to get away from ruptured gas lines, electrical failures, collapsed heating systems, or buildings that had been stabilized but were no longer safe to inhabit. The Kremlin seemed to receive the ones for whom there was nowhere else nearby to go or needed a higher level of care.

The media screens filled in what she could not see from where she waited in the Senate office area. Cameras followed some of the rescue work, but even live footage was rare. Whoever spoke into those cameras explained that the Dominions stabilized walls and roofs, then moved on while conventional teams searched rooms and evacuated whoever could not safely remain. But some buildings had been reached too late. The reports did not linger there, and neither did Seraphis.

One feed showed rescuers carrying a woman through a ragged opening in an apartment wall while something unseen held the ceiling above them. Another showed a line of children wearing matching school uniforms moving hand in hand through one of the tunnels, bundled in coats and blankets while Nikolai’s little white lights stretched above them into the distance. She watched the face of a child look up at the orb of light overhead, and she hoped they found the lights comforting.

Lucien brought her tea. It went cold. Later it was replaced, but that one went cold too. Seraphis tried pacing until one of the security officers began watching her with obvious irritation. She tried sitting. She even attempted to watch a show she liked, only to realize the episodes flipped onward without any awareness of what happened in it, she gave up and watched the doors instead. She was staring at them with burning eyes when they finally opened.

The returning Dominions did not look wounded so much as used up. Their gear was damp in places despite having been dried repeatedly throughout the day. Hair lay flattened or disordered beneath removed caps and hoods. Faces were reddened from the weather, and everyone moved much slower than they had that afternoon. They had worked in rotations for hours, she heard, warming themselves, eating, drinking and resting between deployments, but eleven hours was still eleven hours. The strain showed now that they had finally stopped moving. Then she saw Theron. Everything inside her loosened so suddenly it hurt.

She crossed the room before she had decided to move. Theron barely had time to look toward her before she caught his arm. “You look terrible!”

His face was pale beneath the cold flush, and exhaustion had stripped away nearly all the polish that normally seemed inseparable from him. Even his eyes were blood red. He glanced down at her hand and then back at her.

“You waited eleven hours to tell me that?”

Relief turned instantly into irritation.

“I can find something worse to point out if you'd prefer.”

A weak smile appeared, and Seraphis hated how close she had been to crying until she saw him.

Theron started trying to undo the fastenings of his outer coat, but his fingers shook enough that he missed the first one twice. Seraphis pushed his hands away and did it herself.

“I am capable.”

“Clearly.”

“You become very unpleasant when you're worried.”

She looked up sharply. “I wasn't worried.” Theron was too exhausted to argue, and she dropped it.

He had fared worse than the others. The Dominions looked tired also, but they still carried some reserve beneath their burden. Theron looked as though whatever had kept him upright through the last rotation had been spent on the walk back. Once she got the weight of his coat off him, his shoulders sagged. When she pressed a hot drink into his hands, he wrapped both palms around it and stood there breathing the steam into his nostrils for several seconds.

Seraphis touched his sleeve. “Sit down before you fall down.”

“I am not going to fall down.”

“Then sitting should be very easy.” That earned her another tired look, but he obeyed.

Only once Theron was seated did Seraphis look around properly.

The Dominions were in various stages of removing their winter gear. Staff brought them hot drinks and carried away wet garments and boots to presumably be dried off. It was then that she realized the Ascendancy was still lingering near the exit. He had one hand pressed to the device at his ear while someone spoke to him from elsewhere in the building. Snow had melted into dark patches across his coat. His hair was damp at the temples, and exhaustion had sharpened rather than softened the severe lines of his face.

“Reopen the secondary vent before the accumulation seals it. I want another structural team through before dawn.” She overheard him say, and watched him openly.

Whatever was said in response tightened his jaw. He looked angry. “Leave the southern face packed. Karim marked it for a reason.”

The call ended, and another Kremlin official approached him almost immediately, but one of the Dominions intercepted first. His name was Karim, Seraphis had learned over the hours.  He had already removed most of his outer gear and looked tired enough that even his usual composure had gone flat around the edges.

“Three hours.”

Nikolai barely looked at him, shaking his head. “Two.”

Karim's gaze moved across the room instead of arguing, pulling the Ascendancy's gaze along with him. One Dominion had lowered himself onto the floor and was eating without speaking. Another sat forward in a chair with his elbows on his knees, staring into the steam rising from his cup. Theron looked ten times worse than either of them.

Karim looked back at Ascendancy. “They need three.”

Nikolai's answer changed immediately. “Three.”

Then, to someone nearby, she overheard him add, “Wake me in two.”

One of the remaining medics approached him, but Nikolai stopped him with a small shake of the head.  “I'm only cold and tired.”

The medic glanced toward his hands, considered arguing, then heard someone calling from the corridor and abandoned the effort. Ascendancy started stripping off the outer layers of his gear. He pulled at one glove, but it did not move. The glove had stiffened from repeated cycles of snow, moisture, cold and drying throughout the day. His fingers did not seem interested in cooperating either. He caught the cuff with the opposite hand and pulled again. Then tried ripping the velcro with his teeth.

Nothing. Watching Ascendancy lose a fight with his own glove was the first thing all night that made Seraphis want to laugh. He tried again, and Seraphis immediately crossed the room. Nikolai was still occupied with the glove when she stopped in front of him.

“Give me your hand.”

His eyes lifted. Only then did Seraphis register exactly how that had sounded. There were probably very few people in the world who gave Nikolai Brandon instructions. She held out her hand anyway, palm up.

“Unless you want to keep fighting with it. I think it's winning.”

He stared at her without smiling. Then he put his hand into hers. The glove was colder than she expected. Seraphis caught his wrist with one hand and worked her fingers beneath the stiffened cuff with the other. It resisted at first, and she had to pull carefully rather than yank it free.

“If your fingers come off with this, I'm shoving the glove back on.”

Nikolai's eyes moved to her face. For one terrible second she wondered whether she had finally found the exact sentence that got people removed from the Kremlin, but something shifted behind his eyes. Not a smile, exactly.

“Reassuring that you have a plan.” Seraphis looked down quickly so he would not see how pleased she was.

“I'm very good in emergencies.”

“Clearly.”

The glove finally loosened. She eased it over his knuckles and pulled it free. His hand startled her.

There was nothing seriously wrong with it. No frostbite and no injury worth pulling one of the few remaining medics away from people coming through Spasskaya. But the cold had worked at his skin all day. His knuckles were raw and dry, crossed by fine cracks with thin lines of red caught in them. When Seraphis adjusted her grip, she felt the faint tremor running through his fingers, and her amusement disappeared.

She thought of the footage from earlier. People filing through tunnels. Rescuers entering damaged buildings. Children walking beneath lines of white light. For all the things Theron had told her about him and all the certainty described in the Codex, the Ascendancy's hand was simply cold. Painfully cold. He had spent the day doing all of that with skin that cracked in winter like anyone else's. Seraphis swallowed and held out her palm again.

“Other one.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. She raised her chin, and he gave her the other hand. This glove came free more easily. The knuckles beneath it were much the same, reddened and split with fine traces of blood. Seraphis said nothing. He would only tell her they were fine, and technically he would be right. When she released him, his fingers closed once, slowly, testing their movement.

“Thank you.”

It was such an ordinary thing for him to say that Seraphis almost forgot to answer.

“You're welcome.”

Someone called for Ascendancy from across the room. Nikolai looked toward them, then back at her for one brief moment before turning away.

That was all. Seraphis returned to Theron feeling faintly ridiculous. He was watching her.

“What?” She demanded.

Theron took a slow drink.

“Nothing.”

“You have the same annoying habit as the Pope.”

Theron's eyebrows rose, but he was far too tired to chase that revelation.

The room slowly began to settle. Food disappeared. Cups were emptied and refilled. Equipment was stacked close enough to reach again when everyone woke. Another small group of evacuees came through, and two Dominions who had already sat down got back up without complaint to clear space for them. A mother with a sleeping child received one of the better chairs. Someone found another blanket. The remaining medic moved between them while Kremlin staff worked out where the people could be transferred next.

Nobody made any serious attempt to become comfortable. One Dominion stretched out on the floor using his folded coat beneath his head. Another tilted back in a chair and was asleep almost immediately. Karim found a place against the wall and extended his legs in front of him.

Theron remained stubbornly upright in his chair long after Seraphis could see that staying there was costing him more effort than lying down would have.

“Move.”

One eye opened. “Where?”

Seraphis glanced at the floor beside the wall, where someone had abandoned a folded blanket, and dragged it closer with her foot before lowering herself onto it. The wall was cold through her dress, but after eleven hours of waiting she no longer cared. She patted her thigh, and Theron looked at her.

“Come on, Seraphis.”

“You can either lie down voluntarily or fall asleep sitting up and wake with your neck permanently shaped like that.” He stared at her for several seconds, apparently searching for enough energy to resist. He did not find it. Theron lowered himself onto the blanket beside her and stretched out along the wall. Seraphis guided his head into her lap before he could reconsider. He made a quiet sound of protest with no conviction behind it.

“You are enjoying this.”

“Immensely.”

His eyes were already closing.

Seraphis slipped her fingers into his hair near one temple and began working slow circles against his scalp. His hair was still faintly damp from snow and sweat, colder at the ends than at the roots. She moved her fingertips along his hairline, then lightly tapped across his forehead with two fingers in a soft, repetitive rhythm. Theron's breathing deepened almost immediately. The line between his brows softened, his jaw loosened, and his head gradually grew heavier in her lap as the last of the tension left him.

Seraphis felt her own body begin to loosen with his. She had spent the entire evening carrying fear like a backpack, even while pretending to be bored, even while wandering the Kremlin, even while Patricus questioned her in the chapel. She had watched strangers emerge from tunnels and damaged buildings appear on screens and told herself Theron was fine because the reports said he was fine. It was different to feel the weight of him on her lap and know he was fine.

His weight rested against her thighs. She could feel him breathing. He was here, and for the first time since he had walked away with Ascendancy into the storm, she believed he was safe. While Theron dozed, and Seraphis's fingers continued the soft taps on his forehead, she watched the room, unsurprised to find the Ascendancy still awake.

He finished one last conversation with emergency personnel, checked a display, and finally removed the remaining layers of his winter gear. Someone gestured toward the corridor, apparently offering him somewhere better to rest, but he shook his head. He chose a place on the floor near the doors instead.

Seraphis watched him fold part of his coat beneath his head. The most powerful man in the world could presumably have commanded a bed within seconds, yet he lay down within a few meters of his men, close to the route that would take them back toward Spasskaya Gate when the three hours ended. Two, she mentally corrected. Eventually he closed his eyes, and it took surprisingly little time for his breathing to change.

Seraphis watched him for a few seconds longer than she meant to. One hand still rested in Theron's hair. She wondered whether he would actually sleep the full three hours. Theron shifted in his sleep, turning his face slightly against her lap. Seraphis looked down and brushed a few strands of hair away from his forehead.

“You're fine,” she whispered, though she was not entirely sure whether she meant him or herself. Her fingers resumed their slow path through Theron's hair, but the circles grew smaller as exhaustion finally found her too. Her head settled against the wall, her eyes drifted shut, and sometime before she realized she had stopped tapping at his forehead, Seraphis fell asleep with Theron breathing deeply in her lap. It would not last long.

[Ascendancy]

Nikolai woke because his hands hurt.

For several seconds he remained still, eyes closed, feeling the fine sting across his knuckles where the skin had split during the night. His back objected when he shifted against the floor. One shoulder had gone partially numb beneath him, and something in his neck had stiffened from using a folded coat for a pillow. None of it mattered enough to keep his eyes closed.

The room was dark except for the low emergency lighting and the glow of two displays left running on the far wall. Somewhere beyond the doors, the Kremlin continued operating in muffled voices and distant footsteps. Nikolai checked the time. Two hours and eleven minutes.

Close enough.

The Dominions were still asleep around him. One had not moved from the chair where he had collapsed earlier. Karim remained against the wall, chin lowered toward his chest, apparently capable of sleeping in a position Nikolai would have considered punitive under any other circumstance. Theron was on the floor farther down the wall.
The young woman from the summit was with him.

Nikolai remembered her hands first. Warm fingers working beneath the edge of his frozen glove, followed by the perfectly serious threat to put any amputated fingers back inside if they came off with it.

She had fallen asleep sitting against the wall. Theron’s head rested in her lap, one side of his face turned toward her, while her hand remained loose in his hair as though she had simply stopped moving halfway through whatever she had been doing. Her head had tilted at an angle that would punish her when she woke. Neither of them stirred.

It explained something about the way she had gone to Theron when they returned, though Nikolai had neither the interest nor the energy to decide exactly what. He pushed himself upright. One of the Barrier Praetors stationed near the door saw him move and immediately straightened. Nikolai lifted a finger to his lips before the man could speak. The Barrier's expression remained professionally neutral, though his eyes flicked toward the sleeping Dominions.

Nikolai reached for his gear.

Pulling the gloves back over his hands was unpleasant. The cracked skin protested immediately, but warmth would come once he was moving. He secured the rest of his clothing in silence, checked the latest map on his visor and stepped around two sleeping men rather than waking either of them. Karim had been right. They needed three hours.

The Barrier Praetor followed him into the corridor. Two more joined them before they reached the secured route leading toward Spasskaya’s gate. None asked where he was going. That was one of the reasons they remained in his service.

Outside their staging room, the Kremlin had changed again. The storm no longer hurled itself against Moscow with the same violence as the day before, but snow was still falling steadily beyond the protected exits. Temperatures had dropped during the night, hardening the outer surface of everything the storm had built. Work crews had reinforced the primary route from Spasskaya Gate, and someone had installed additional barriers along the approach to keep drifting snow from narrowing it again.
The first tunnel beyond the Kremlin was almost unrecognizable.

Yesterday it had been an empty wound through the snow. Now it was like a street. Not a proper one, but Moscow had never asked permission to exist before.

Someone had fixed directional placards to the walls. Emergency arrows pointed toward shelters, triage stations and branch tunnels. Extension lines had been run along one side. Boxes of bottled water and food had accumulated at junctions. A group of municipal workers were fitting additional supports around a ventilation shaft while two firefighters spoke intently over a map.

Farther down, beneath one of Nikolai's suspended lights, three women had constructed a tea station. He slowed despite himself. One of them recognized him immediately.

She was perhaps sixty, bundled in several mismatched layers with a scarf wrapped around her head. Her reaction was not awe. It was irritation. She lifted a paper cup and pointed it at him.

Nikolai kept walking, but she stepped into his path.

The Barrier Praetor shifted instantly. Nikolai halted him with a glance, and the woman held out the tea.

“Drink.”

He shook his head. “I don't have time.”

“Neither does anyone else.” She pushed the cup closer.

Steam curled from the surface. Nikolai looked at her, then slowly accepted the tea.

The woman nodded once as though he had finally followed a reasonable instruction. “Good.”

He took a drink while she reached for another cup to hand to the Barrier beside him.
The tea was too sweet, but it was also hot. Nikolai drank the rest in a few swallows, savoring the warmth that bloomed in his chest.

He spent the next hour moving through sections of the network that had been flagged overnight. Several ventilation shafts were narrowing under new accumulation. One branch needed to be widened where rescue traffic had compressed the passage unevenly. A stabilized residential block near Kitay-gorod had developed a new fracture along an exterior wall after the temperature drop, and Nikolai reinforced it long enough for engineers to complete the evacuation.

The Barrier Praetor stayed close, though they could do little except follow and keep other people from interfering while he concentrated. By morning, Moscow had begun adapting.

Residents wrote apartment numbers on tunnel walls so rescuers could find buried entrances. Shopkeepers emptied food into the snow before refrigeration failed and sent whatever could be carried toward shelters. Restaurants cooked through inventories that would otherwise spoil. Office buildings with functioning generators became warming centers. People appeared with blankets, batteries, pet food, insulin, children's coats, spare boots and lists of neighbors nobody had heard from since the afternoon before. Nobody had ordered most of it. Their response pleased Nikolai more than he expected.

By eight that morning, emergency command had stopped treating the tunnels as temporary access and begun mapping them as infrastructure. By nine that morning, the confirmed dead had started arriving in numbers large enough that the reports no longer fit neatly on one screen.

Nikolai stood in a mobile command point beneath what had once been a street and read them without moving. His jaw tightened once as the numbers advanced. He read the list again from the top, slower this time, thumb resting motionless against the edge of the display. When someone beside him began speaking, Nikolai lifted a hand without looking away. The man fell silent.

For several seconds the only sound was the movement of rescue crews beyond the partition. Then Nikolai lowered the screen.

Collapsed structures. Exposure. Cardiac events during evacuation. Fires caused by improvised heating. Gas. People discovered too late in rooms that had remained structurally intact but lost heat hours earlier.

The snow continued falling, less violently now but with no sign of stopping, while the temperature kept dropping beneath it. The nature of the emergency was changing with the weather. Yesterday had been about reaching people before buildings failed around them. Today would be about keeping the survivors warm, fed, sheltered and alive long enough for the city to recover. Nikolai returned to the Kremlin after the Dominions' rest period had ended. Karim was already dressed, as were the others. Theron was not. He was standing, which was more than Nikolai expected after seeing him the night before, but only barely. The rest had put some color back into their faces.

Theron was arguing with Karim. “I'm rested.” 

Karim's expression suggested he had already heard this several times. “You are not rested at all. You cannot channel safely and will put the rest of us at risk.”

“I know what I can sustain.” 

“Yesterday suggests that you do not.”

Theron’s face hardened.

The young woman from the previous night stood several feet away, arms folded. Nikolai noticed that she looked angry on Theron’s behalf even before anyone had actually insulted him.

Theron saw Nikolai and immediately straightened as he spoke directly to him. “Ascendancy. I'm ready.”

Nikolai looked at him, but Theron held the gaze. It was admirable in its way, but also irrelevant. He looked briefly at Karim before responding.

“No.” Something flashed across the Luminar’s face.

“I can still channel.” He insisted.

Nikolai stepped closer, lowering his voice enough that the conversation became effectively private.

“You kept pace yesterday longer than I expected. You also ended the day with nothing left. Karim says you need more time. You take it.”

Theron’s jaw tightened. Nikolai knew the expression. It was pride trying to disguise itself as disagreement.

“This is not punishment.”

Nikolai almost expected an answer.

“Make yourself useful.”

Nikolai gestured toward one of the large displays where shelter capacity, volunteer requests and supply shortages had begun stacking into columns.

“The civilian response is growing faster than the Consultates can coordinate it. You have people. You have an audience. Organize them.”

Theron’s attention shifted to the screen, and Nikolai continued.

“Food distribution. Warming centers. Missing-person reports. Volunteers who can work without becoming additional casualties. Keep them out of the active tunnels unless emergency command asks for them.”

The irritation in Finnegan's face changed shape. Nikolai had no interest in humiliating the man simply because his body had limits. Everyone had limits. Intelligent people learned where theirs were before someone else died discovering them.

“You wanted to help Moscow. So help Moscow.” This time there was no argument.

By afternoon, Theron had apparently taken the instruction personally. Brotherhood volunteers began organizing from inside the Kremlin rather than trying to move independently through the city. They built lists of people willing to help, matched volunteers to requests coming in from shelters and tunnel teams, and redirected donations according to need instead of allowing supplies to collect wherever people happened to bring them.

Theron appeared on a state broadcast shortly after noon. Nikolai saw the clip while reviewing fuel reserve data. The Luminar looked better than he had that morning, though not by much. Someone had found him a place inside the Kremlin emergency operation, with maps and relief reports moving across displays behind him rather than the ceremonial backdrop he would normally have preferred.

“If you are warm, find someone who isn't. If you have food, find someone who doesn't. If you can work, ask where you're needed before deciding for yourself.”

The message was carried through the emergency network to shelters, public displays and personal devices across the city. Nikolai moved on to the next report. Fuel would soon become the greater problem.

Hospitals received priority. Then district heating systems still capable of functioning. Emergency generators followed. Several commercial facilities objected when their allocations were redirected. Nikolai denied the appeals personally. He shut down gas service to three additional neighborhoods despite the inevitable political consequences because compromised lines had already caused two fires. Heavy excavation equipment went first toward hospitals, transport arteries and districts with the highest concentration of structurally endangered residential buildings.

Snow continued through the afternoon, and so did the evacuations. At one point he returned through a branch tunnel and found an old man sitting beneath one of the white lights while rescue workers prepared to move him. The man recognized Nikolai and tried to stand.

“Please don't.” Nikolai insisted.

The old man ignored him and got halfway upright before his knees objected. Nikolai caught his arm.

“I should stand for you.” He grumbled.

“You should sit before you fall.”

The man lowered himself back onto the chair. Then he looked Nikolai over, taking in the wet clothing and the exhaustion Nikolai knew had become increasingly difficult to conceal.

“You first, sir.” One of the firefighters nearby laughed. Nikolai did not, but the old man did.

By evening the tunnels were opening for Moscow.

Children had begun drawing on the compacted walls with markers. Someone had hung handwritten district names beneath the directional signs. An entire branch smelled of soup because a restaurant crew had established a field kitchen near a shelter junction.

One of Nikolai's lights had acquired a paper star taped beneath it, carefully positioned so it would not burn. He stopped long enough to look at it somberly then kept walking.

He saw the young Veilwarden again near the Kremlin later in the day. Not intentionally, and he was certainly surprised to glimpse her. He was crossing through the staging area toward another briefing when a small commotion caught his attention. A child was crying hard enough to resist every adult attempting to help him. The young woman was crouched in front of him, speaking too quietly for Nikolai to hear.

Whatever she said made the boy stare at her. Then she made some gesture with both hands and the boy chuckled enough to stop crying. Nikolai slowed without meaning to.
She looked different awake, he mused, then kept walking.

Twenty minutes later, an aide stopped him before a briefing.

“We evacuated Shelter Seventeen.”

Nikolai looked up from the tablet in his hand.

“Why?”

“There was a possible carbon monoxide accumulation. Six people developed headache, nausea and confusion within an hour. Testing confirmed elevated levels.”

“How was that caught?”

The aide scrolled through the notes on her device.

“Um… The Brotherhood delegate. Veilwarden Seraphis.”

Nikolai glanced toward the staging area. The young woman was still there. Seraphis. The name attached itself easily enough.

“Make sure whoever moved those people checks the adjoining shelter too.”

By nightfall, the storm had weakened further, but the cold had deepened in its stead. Moscow remained buried beneath impossible amounts of snow, and the lists of damaged structures were still growing faster than they could inspect them. Some districts had heat. Others did not. Tens of thousands remained displaced. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were still unaccounted for. Yet beneath the city, people moved.

Food traveled one direction. Medical teams another. Children slept beneath blankets in buildings that had never been intended as shelters. Rescue workers followed hand-painted arrows through corridors of compacted snow. Volunteers carried batteries, water and medicine from one junction to the next. Everywhere Nikolai went, people were working.

Nikolai stood for a moment beneath one of the suspended lights and watched a group of civilians disappear around the next turn carrying boxes toward a shelter. Someone had written a message on the wall beneath the sphere in thick black marker.

WE'RE STILL HERE.

He read it once, pride blooming in his chest. Then turned back toward the work.

By late evening, Nikolai had begun rereading things.

The first time, he blamed the display. The second time, he realized he had reached the bottom of the same casualty report twice without retaining the final three lines. He closed it, rubbed a thumb against the bridge of his nose, and immediately regretted moving his hand when the cracked skin across his knuckles pulled.

The Barrier Praetor nearest him noticed. Nikolai noticed him noticing.

“What?”

The man’s expression remained perfectly neutral. “Nothing, Ascendancy.”

Nikolai stared at him for another second before returning to the map.

The snowfall had weakened further, but the temperature continued falling. Rescue crews were now fighting frozen equipment as often as drifting snow. Two shelters had reported heating failures within the hour. Another apartment block had been evacuated after engineers discovered that the overnight freeze had widened fractures in an already compromised exterior wall.

Nikolai listened to the reports, issued the necessary orders, and stood too quickly when someone called his attention to a change in the western sector.

The room shifted beneath him. Not much. A small movement, barely enough to matter, except that the floor did not actually move.

His hand caught the edge of the table. The Barrier Praetor took one step toward him. Nikolai straightened before the man reached him.

“Don't.”

The Barrier stopped.

Nikolai waited for the brief wash of darkness at the edges of his vision to clear, then continued the conversation as though nothing had happened. That worked for another forty minutes.

By the time he returned toward the Kremlin, he could no longer remember when he had last eaten anything substantial. There had been the tea underground. Half of something wrapped in paper that someone had put into his hand hours earlier. Water, occasionally, when somebody reminded him.

Knowing it wasn’t enough did not make him less irritated when Dr. Weston was waiting for him inside the Kremlin.

She took one look at him and frowned. Nikolai kept walking.

“Don't.”

“Interesting. I was about to say exactly the same thing.”

He stopped.

Weston had already started toward him, medical bag in one hand and the expression of someone who had decided the argument before he arrived.

“I'm going upstairs.”

“No, you're not.”

“I need the latest—”

She wrapped two fingers against his wrist. Nikolai looked down at them.

“You can object after I count.”

He said nothing. Weston watched the time, then released him and reached for a blood pressure cuff.

“This is unnecessary.”

“You're swaying.”

“I'm standing.”

“Barely.”

One of the Barrier Praetors looked very carefully at the opposite wall. Nikolai decided he hated everyone in that moment. Weston wrapped the cuff around his arm and waited. Nikolai glanced toward the nearest display while it inflated.

“Look at me.”

“I can read while you do this.”

“Apparently not very well.” His eyes returned to hers. Weston did not look remotely sorry. She checked the reading, then looked at him more closely.

“When did you last eat?” Nikolai opened his mouth, but nothing immediately came to mind. Weston's expression changed.

“I ate.”

“That was not the question.”

He tried to reconstruct the day. Tea. Something wrapped in paper. Perhaps bread. He could not remember whether that had been before or after noon. The longer he paused, the more the pause became its own answer. Weston exhaled through her nose.

“And water?”

“Enough.”

“I’m told you nearly fell over ten minutes ago.”

Nikolai looked toward the Barrier Praetor. The man did not move though his attention had become suspiciously fixed on a point somewhere behind Nikolai’s shoulder.

Weston ignored both of them.

“You have slept two hours in two days, you've been channeling for most of that time, you've barely eaten, and you are dehydrated enough that your blood pressure drops when you stand.”

“I need three hours.”

“Excellent. You'll spend them unconscious with fluids running.”

“Three.”

“No.”

He stared at her, but she stared back unflinching.

Nikolai had bent governments, corporations, and entire nations to his will with less resistance than this. “The eastern shelters are still unstable.”

“And there are several thousand people currently keeping them from becoming more unstable. You are not one of them for the next eight hours.”

“Four hours.”

“Eight.”

Nikolai stared at her. “Six.”

“Seven. And I wake you, not the Barrier Praetor.”

His jaw tightened, but he was too tired to waste energy pretending he had another argument.

“Seven.”

Weston led him into a secured room off the operational corridor that had been converted into something between a private medical station and a place senior officials could collapse without becoming a public spectacle. There was an actual bed, which felt unnecessarily luxurious after the floor.

Nikolai sat because Weston pointed at it.

She started an IV while he continued reading from a tablet.

The first attempt at threading the line made the fine cracks across his knuckles sting when he flexed his hand, and he forced himself to stop moving. Weston hung a bag of warmed fluids with electrolytes and adjusted the rate.

“If your glucose is low, I'll add dextrose.”

“I'm fine.”

“You've used that word so often today it no longer has meaning.”

Someone brought food. Nikolai managed several bites because Weston stood there until he did. He resented that more than the IV. Once she was satisfied, she dimmed the lights and took the tablet out of his hands.

“I'm not finished.”

“You are for tonight.”

“Wake me if the eastern shelter loses heat.”

“No.”

“Dr. Weston.”

“Sleep. Now.”

Nikolai looked toward the ceiling.

He could hear the Kremlin beyond the closed door. Footsteps. Voices. For the first time since the storm began, he was not in the middle of it. He hated that, but his eyes closed against his will. As te fluid moved steadily through the line, warmth spread slowly through his arm while exhaustion pulled harder than anger could resist. He intended to review one final report in his head before sleep took 

He made it halfway through the first district. Then nothing.

[Seraphis]

For several confused seconds she had no idea where she was. Her head had fallen sideways against the wall, one leg was numb beneath her, and something warm and heavy rested across her thighs. Then Theron shifted in his sleep and the Kremlin staging room assembled itself around her again: blankets, equipment, dimmed displays, exhausted bodies scattered across chairs and floor. Memory returned with considerably less mercy.

Seraphis blinked sleep from her eyes and looked across the room. The place where Ascendancy had been sleeping was empty, and her gaze lingered on the folded coat no longer there before she caught herself doing it. Of course he was gone. He had tried to negotiate three hours of rest down to two before he'd even closed his eyes. She checked the time and frowned. He had left considerably before everyone else.

Theron stirred again, drawing her attention back where it belonged. His head was still in her lap, his hair disordered beneath her hand. She flexed her fingers and discovered they had stiffened sometime during the night from remaining half-curled against his scalp.

“Oof, you're heavy.”

One eye opened. “Good morning to you too.”

“I think you've crushed my leg.”

“Ah, what a tragic loss.”

His voice was rough with lingering sleep, but stronger than it had been when he returned. Seraphis felt the relief before she could stop it. Theron pushed himself upright slowly, wincing as muscles apparently objected to being used again. She watched him stretch and disguise the effort halfway through, and said nothing until he reached for his gear.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to go back out with the others.”

Seraphis blinked at him. “No, you're not.”

Theron looked over his shoulder. “I'm fairly certain you don't command the Dominions.”

“Neither do you, Luminar.”

They climbed to their feet, but Karim appeared before the argument could become interesting. He looked considerably better after sleep, though not exactly rested. Seraphis doubted anyone in the room would look rested again until the snow stopped. He took one look at Theron fastening his outer layers and shook his head.

“No.”

Theron stopped. “I'm recovered.”

“You aren't.”

Seraphis felt herself bristle. Karim's tone was not cruel. There was no challenge in it and no invitation for Theron to prove himself. He simply stated the conclusion as though the matter had already been decided.

“I know what I can sustain.”

“Yesterday suggests otherwise.”

Seraphis's irritation sharpened immediately. Theron had stayed with them all day. He had gone into the storm when nearly everyone else in Moscow had been trying to get away from it. He had done everything they asked of him, and if he had finished the night exhausted, that seemed less like failure than proof that he had given them everything he had.

She opened her mouth, but the doors opened before she could say anything. Cool air entered first, then Nikolai. Seraphis forgot whatever defense of Theron she had been preparing. It was immediately obvious that Ascendancy had already been back outside for hours. Fresh snow clung to his shoulders and the seams of his coat. Damp darkened his hair near the temples again, and the wind had renewed the raw color across his face.

He looked no more rested than he had before sleeping, only reset somehow, as though those two hours had given his body enough permission to continue and nothing more. Something in Seraphis's chest tightened. He had left while they slept. Not gone to another command room, not spent the morning behind a desk somewhere issuing orders. He had gone back outside.

Nikolai crossed the room while listening to someone at his side, dismissed them with a few quiet words, then looked between Karim and Theron. His subsequent denial of Theron’s request felt like an insult even though it had not been directed at her. Theron's face hardened.

Seraphis wanted to object. She wanted Nikolai to acknowledge what Theron had done the day before, to recognize that he had chosen to go with them when he could have remained safely inside. Then Ascendancy stepped closer to Theron and lowered his voice. Seraphis could still hear him, but the change in tone made the exchange feel more private.

Theron still looked as though he would rather have been marching back into the tunnels with the Dominions, but the humiliation Seraphis had feared never arrived. Nikolai had not told him he was weak. He had given him a different kind of responsibility. Seraphis found herself unexpectedly grateful for that. She was even more grateful when the Dominions left without him. That feeling made her guilty, but it remained true anyway.

The rest of the day blurred around her. Seraphis discovered that disaster contained astonishing amounts of waiting interrupted by sudden demands that could not wait at all. One moment there was nothing useful for her to do. The next someone needed blankets moved, a frightened child distracted, a volunteer shown where to report, or a family directed toward the person managing displaced residents. She began helping because sitting still became unbearable.

It turned out she was reasonably good with frightened people, children especially. Adults tended to ask questions Seraphis could not answer. When would the snow stop? Was their apartment still standing? Had anyone found their husband, sister, mother? Children mostly wanted to know where their cat was or whether they would have to sleep on the floor again. Those questions were easier.

Sometimes she lied a little. Not about anything important, mostly about how terrible Kremlin tea tasted or whether the guards secretly slept standing up. Once she convinced a little girl that one of the Barrier Praetor was almost certainly a robot because she had never seen him blink. The man heard her, blinked deliberately, and made the girl laugh for the first time in nearly an hour. Seraphis decided she liked him. By midday her body reminded her that she had slept only a few miserable hours sitting against a wall. She found an empty chair near the edge of the staging room, propped between her head and the wall and intended to close her eyes for five minutes. She woke nearly forty-five minutes later with someone's blanket draped over her. No one admitted doing it.

The room had changed while she slept. More supplies had appeared. So had more people. The broadcasts showed Moscow organizing itself beneath the snow. Restaurants were cooking through food that might otherwise spoil. Residents were carrying blankets and bottled water into tunnel junctions. Businesses with generators had opened their doors as warming centers. People sent lists of elderly neighbors who lived alone. Somewhere in the city, someone had established a station entirely devoted to pets separated from their owners.

Seraphis heard Ascendancy's name constantly, not from the broadcasters but from people. A woman whose building had been evacuated told anyone willing to listen that she had seen him rebuild part of the structure himself while rescue workers were still inside. An older man complained loudly that Ascendancy had refused to sit down after telling everyone else to do exactly that. Someone else said Nikolai had accepted tea from a woman underground only because she had apparently refused to let him pass without taking it.

Every story made Seraphis look toward the doors. She did not notice she was doing it at first. Theron was safe. He had spent the day growing increasingly animated as the volunteer network took shape beneath his direction, his energy returning now that the work required his mind and voice rather than hours of sustained veilwalking. Seraphis no longer needed to worry about whether he was freezing somewhere to death. Yet every time the doors opened, her attention moved. Sometimes it was a Dominion, sometimes a Kremlin official, sometimes evacuees. Never Ascendancy. She told herself she was only curious because he had left so early.

Her second nap happened sometime in the afternoon with her head folded onto her arms across a table. She woke because someone nearby had begun vomiting. At first Seraphis barely reacted beyond a wince for the horrible sound. People had been nauseated all day from exhaustion, fear, medications, bad food, too little food and everything else the storm had done to them. Then another person complained about a headache and more vomiting. Seraphis sat up. The woman was from the same temporary shelter as the man who had been sick. That might still have meant nothing. A third person arrived twenty minutes later confused enough that he could not remember what day it was. Same shelter. Seraphis found someone in emergency coordination.

“I think there's something wrong with Shelter Seventeen.”

The woman barely looked up from her display. “They're overloaded. We know.”

“I don’t mean overloaded. I think the people there are sick.” Seraphis explained what she had seen: the headaches, nausea, confusion, several people from the same place.

“It could be stress.”

She folded her arms. “Then everyone in this building should be vomiting.” The woman looked at her. Seraphis held the gaze.

“Please check it.” They did. The answer came back less than an hour later: carbon monoxide. Something associated with emergency heating and inadequate ventilation had allowed it to accumulate inside the shelter, and the building was evacuated before the concentrations became worse.

Seraphis spent several minutes afterward feeling pleased with herself. Then she remembered that she had almost gone back to sleep, and that feeling disappeared. By evening, exhaustion had settled over the Kremlin again. Theron had spoken publicly sometime around midday, and clips of his message had traveled through the networks afterward. The Brotherhood volunteers had grown into something Seraphis barely recognized from the loose collection of believers she knew before the storm. They were carrying food, sorting donations, working registration desks and helping people find relatives. There weren’t many of them, but they were enough to make a small difference. At least in their corner of the city.

She was proud of him. That feeling remained simple. What she felt every time someone mentioned Ascendancy was becoming more complicated. The doors opened again after dark, and Seraphis looked up automatically. Finally. This time it was him.

The Ascendancy entered surrounded by Barrier Praetor and Kremlin personnel, though the people around him seemed less like an entourage than objects caught in the wake of someone who refused to stop moving. Fresh snow had melted across his outer layers again. His hair was damp, his face drawn more tightly than it had been that morning, and fatigue had settled visibly into the lines around his eyes. He was still upright, still listening to reports, still leading.

Seraphis watched him from across the room, and there was something frightening about that. She had always imagined strength as something reassuring. Theron spoke of Ascendancy's strength with reverence. The Codex treated it almost as proof of what he was. This did not feel reassuring. He looked like a man who could keep going simply because he had decided stopping was unacceptable. Seraphis wondered suddenly how far that could carry him, and the answer frightened her.

A woman intercepted his path before he crossed the room. Seraphis had never seen her before. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a stern jaw that seemed particularly well suited to disapproving of powerful men. She wore a white doctor’s coat and carried some equipment.  She stepped directly into the Ascendancy’s path. To Seraphis’ shock, he stopped.

The woman said something Seraphis could not hear. Nikolai answered, and whatever he said did not impress her. She took his wrist. Seraphis sat a little straighter. Nobody touched Ascendancy like that, at least she assumed, not casually and not without hesitation. The woman pressed two fingers against the inside of his wrist and watched the time. Nikolai looked down at her hand, then at her face. Even from across the room, Seraphis could see the displeasure in the set of his mouth. The woman appeared entirely unmoved.

Seraphis liked her immediately.

An arm cuff appeared next. Nikolai said something, but the woman's expression hardened.  Seraphis covered her mouth with one hand. She could not hear the conversation, but she understood enough of it. The woman asked another question. This time Nikolai did not answer immediately.

The doctor, because Seraphis assumed that was what she had to be, said something else. Nikolai's jaw tightened. They exchanged several short remarks that looked suspiciously like bargaining, and then Nikolai glanced toward the doors. For one moment Seraphis thought he might simply leave. He had that look. Not indecision. Resistance. Theron had it sometimes.

The same stubborn force she had watched hold him upright since he came through the door seemed to gather in him again, and Seraphis understood with startling clarity that if he chose to turn around and walk back into the storm, he probably could.

That frightened her. Not that he might collapse, but that he might not. There was something terrible in a man strong enough to spend himself completely if he decided everyone else needed what remained of him more than he did.

The doctor's expression did not soften. Eventually Nikolai looked away from the doors, and whatever argument had passed between them was over. He followed her toward one of the leading corridors.

[Luminar]

Theron had spent the first hour after being left behind furious, though he concealed it well. Karim had been right, which made the humiliation worse. Theron could still feel the residue of the previous day in his body, the deep ache in his shoulders, the heaviness behind his eyes, and the faint warning tremor that returned whenever he asked too much of his hands. None of it changed the fact that the others had gone back into the storm while he remained behind. He had wanted to stand beside them. Instead, Ascendancy had given him volunteers.

He resented the assignment until he understood it. The realization came while he stood near one of the operational displays and watched requests accumulate faster than anyone could answer them. The Kremlin had become a point of convergence for frightened people, fragmented information and good intentions with nowhere useful to go. Shelter managers requested supplies. Families searched for relatives. Citizens volunteered transportation they could not actually provide because the roads were gone. Others offered food, clothing, generators, spare rooms, medicines, translation, childcare, anything they thought might matter. It was disorder produced by generosity, and Theron understood disorder. More importantly, he understood people.

Ascendancy had removed him from the tunnels and handed him an audience instead. That thought cooled the last of his anger.

He found a quieter corner and tried the Sanctuary. The first attempt failed. The second produced sound without image, then collapsed beneath static. The third connected long enough for Theron to hear someone speaking before the line died again.

Communications across Moscow had been unstable since the storm began, with systems overloaded, damaged or rerouted around failures. He tried again.

This time Quillon's face appeared through a wash of distortion and immediately froze.
“Quillon?”

“Luminar.”

The relief in Quillon's voice was obvious despite the poor connection, and Theron felt a brief stab of guilt for not having made contact sooner. He pushed it aside. “How bad is it there?”

Quillon gave him the short version. The Sanctuary itself was intact. They were trapped indoors with refugees from the storm, and wondered if one of the Kremlin’s tunnels would soon come their way. Communications were intermittent. He asked what else he should be doing.

“Start with the Novam, anyone out there we have contact with, but nobody travels unless local authorities say the route is safe.”

Quillon nodded, already taking notes.

“Then contact the Embers.”

The Embers existed in the broad space between interest and belonging. Some attended Brotherhood gatherings. Some followed Theron's teachings online. Others consumed every public address, every fragment of Codex commentary, every rumor about Ascendancy without ever taking the final step into the Brotherhood itself. Theron had always considered them unfinished business, but today they looked like a network.

A church was useful, but an institution was power. That difference had always been obvious to him, but until now the path between the two had remained frustratingly abstract.

Theron felt his imagination expanding with each possibility. Relief funds. Community kitchens. Emergency volunteer corps. Clinics, perhaps someday. Formalized training programs. Charitable foundations. Institutions that answered needs governments could not answer quickly enough. The Brotherhood did not need to ask for power if it could become difficult to function without.

By midday, he approached  the communications staff about recording a public message. He stood before a camera with staging room visible enough that no one could mistake where he was. He considered the words for only a moment.

“If you are warm, find someone who isn't. If you have food, find someone who doesn't. If you can work, ask where you're needed before deciding for yourself.”

No mention of the Brotherhood. No doctrine.

The message traveled anyway. Within the hour, clips began circulating through public networks. Embers reposted it.

The numbers from their feeds continued climbing, and Theron watched them with a growing sense of possibility. Ambition had never embarrassed him. Petty ambition embarrassed him. Titles. Invitations. Theron had always wanted more than that: he wanted gravity. He wanted the kind of influence that caused institutions to bend toward him because resisting was less useful than cooperation. He wanted governments to call before decisions were made rather than afterward. He wanted the Brotherhood large enough, respected enough and necessary enough that no one could dismiss it as a fringe faith built around a charismatic ruler. And he wanted to stand at its center.

A movement with millions of sympathetic Embers was valuable. A movement capable of turning those Embers into coordinated action was power. For the first time, Theron could see how one became the other.

Lucien had disappeared into whatever work he had found for himself and surfaced only occasionally, usually carrying information Theron had not asked how he acquired. Seraphis, meanwhile, seemed incapable of remaining idle. Theron watched her make the child laugh and felt a flicker of affection. She had always been better with people than she realized.

Then one of the doors opened and Seraphis looked up instantly. Her attention moved past the newcomers, searching. Theron noticed because he knew her, and he knew the particular quality of her attention when it usually turned toward him. The realization was interesting. He filed it away and returned to Quillon's messages.

Theron glanced toward the public feed mounted across the room. The camera showed one of the tunnels where crews moved beneath the impossible weight of snow above them. Ascendancy appeared briefly at the edge of the frame, and Theron watched closely.

Ascendancy looked exhausted. Even through the distance of the camera, Theron could see it in him. Snow clung to his outer layers. His face was tight with cold and fatigue, but he was still working beside the crews rather than watching from somewhere safe.

Theron had spent years teaching people what that meant. He had written doctrine around the man on the screen. Constructed language capable of turning political supremacy into theological inevitability. He had told others that Ascendancy's power was evidence of something greater because the idea was useful, and because some part of him had always wanted it to be true.

Now he watched Nikolai Brandon work himself nearly beyond reason for a city already willing to kneel before him, and usefulness became more difficult to separate from belief. For years he had understood that faith could move people. Today he was beginning to understand what happened when faith learned how to organize them.

The thought should have humbled him. Instead, Theron smiled.

[Dominik Taicheschski]

By the third morning of the storm, Dominik discovered that there were forms of suffering more irritating than mortal danger.

He wanted a cigarette.

Badly.

The pack was in the inside pocket of his Dominion’s coat. He knew exactly where it was because he had checked twice in the last hour, mostly to reassure himself that Karim's prohibition had not somehow caused the cigarettes to disappear under the intensity of his stare.

No smoking in the tunnels.

Karim had said it once, in the same tone he used for unstable structures and gas leaks, which meant Dominik had understood immediately that negotiation would be pointless. He still thought about it. Come on, they were technically outside.

The firefighter crouched beside the breach glanced up at him. Concern momentarily flashed his face.“You getting tired?”

Dominik kept his attention on the weave holding several tons of fractured concrete exactly where Karim had told him to keep it. “I want a cigarette.” He mumbled.

The man looked toward the ventilation duct overhead, then back at him.

“Me too.”

He chuckled as the firefighter disappeared through the opening.

What had once been the lower floors of an apartment block now hung above them in layers of broken concrete, twisted reinforcement and collapsed rooms. The building had not come down cleanly. One section had pancaked while another remained partially upright, leaning into the neighboring structure at an angle nobody sane would describe as stable. Snow packed the streets outside so deeply that the rescue tunnel entered what should have been the second floor. Somewhere below their boots, cars and pavement had disappeared entirely beneath the storm.

Karim had taken one look at the structure twenty minutes earlier and started assigning positions. Dominik had learned long ago that Karim never used more words than necessary when there was a building trying to fall on people.

“Hold this plane. Not the slab. The load above it.”

Dominik followed the line Karim indicated through the broken structure. “Here?”

“Two centimeters left.”

Dominik focused and the weave adjusted.

“There.”

That had been the end of the discussion. Karim could make two centimeters sound like a matter of national survival, and given the circumstances, it occasionally was.

Dominik did not mind taking orders from people who knew more than he did. That seemed an obvious rule, although experience had taught him it was apparently not obvious to everyone.  This, admittedly, was closer to what Dominik had imagined intelligence work would look like when he was younger. Not the endless background investigations. Not interviewing government employees about suspicious travel reimbursements or trying to determine whether an undisclosed relationship constituted a security risk. Not reports that generated three more reports because someone had placed a date in the wrong field.

Holding up a building while firefighters crawled beneath it was at least honest about the stakes. Mid-thought, a vibration moved through the weave and Dominik's attention sharpened instantly onto it. The pressure against what he held changed, subtle at first, then enough to make the structure groan above them.

“Karim...?”

Karim was already looking. He crossed beneath the fractured ceiling, eyes following lines Dominik could only partly read. “Don't compensate.” He ordered.

Every instinct Dominik had told him to do exactly that, but with a deep frown, he didn't.

The slab settled another fraction, and somewhere inside the breach a firefighter shouted. Dominik tightened his control and held precisely where Karim had told him.

“It's shifting again…”

“I know.” Karim crouched, studied the broken support beneath them and pointed toward Julian farther down the corridor, speaking into their shared communications devices. The little blink that was Julian’s dot on Dominik’s display began to move. “Take the east side. Slowly, ” Karim instructed him.

Moments later, the load changed again as Julian’s weave caught it. Dominik felt the pressure redistribute through the structure, and only then did Karim look back at him.

“Now three centimeters right.”

Dominik focused on moving it precisely three centimeters. Of all them, Dom was probably the only one with the precision to shift the weight of a thousand metric tons centimeters to the right. Maybe Vellas could do it, but Vellas wasn’t here.

The groaning stopped, and for several seconds nobody spoke. Then the firefighter's voice came through the breach. “We've got two more alive.”

Everyone in the tunnel seemed to breathe again. Dominik did not. Not yet. He held the weave while the rest of the rescue team disappeared into the building. His shoulders had begun aching hours ago and had since moved into that useful stage where discomfort became background information rather than complaint. The Power itself came easily enough. Holding something still was not complicated. Holding it exactly still while exhausted men climbed beneath it and the structure kept trying to find a new way to fail was another matter.

A woman came out first, strapped to a board beneath layers of thermal blankets. She was aware enough to argue with the people carrying her about someone still inside. Her son, Dominik realized. The boy followed several moments later, young, maybe eight or nine, and alive and otherwise looked fine. He glanced up at Dominik as he scooted by, a startled look on his face when he realized the skeletons on his Dominion’s patch meant death. Dominik winked, but he didn’t get a chance to see if the effort to break the tension had any effect.

A third person came later under a gray covering. Nobody announced anything because they did not need to. For a moment Dominik looked at the shape passing beneath the emergency lights. One hand had slipped free beneath the edge of the covering, and a wedding ring remained on it. Then the body was gone. Dominik looked back at the ceiling. There would be time later, perhaps, to decide how he felt about things. The storm had created very little space for that so far. He understood now why the other Dominions sometimes spoke about work in terms of what came next rather than what had just happened. You could mourn everyone eventually, or you could stand in the tunnel and become useless. Dominik preferred being useful.

A rescue worker near the entrance said something about Ascendancy having opened this branch the previous morning, and Dominik smiled faintly without looking over. Of course he had. When Dominik had woken after their first night of work, stiff from sleeping on the Kremlin floor for a mere 3.5 hours and feeling as though every muscle had been replaced with wire, Ascendancy's place near the door had already been empty. Dominik had checked the time because surely he had misunderstood something. He had not. nAscendancy had simply gone back out.

That was the sort of thing the Ascendancy did regularly. He behaved as though limitations were facts applicable to everyone except himself, then somehow managed to justify the behavior by accomplishing whatever impossible thing had made the rest of them question the possibility in the first place.

Dominik had watched the most powerful man in the world sleep on a floor beside his men, wake early, go back into the cold and spend the next day doing the same work he required of everyone else. There were probably easier men to serve on this planet, but Dominik had never wanted anyone else.

“Release by half.”

Karim's voice brought him back. Dominik exhaled and eased some of the pressure from the weave. The remaining structure settled onto the temporary supports the rescue engineers had placed beneath it.

“Again.” Karim ordered and Dominik released more. To their relief, nothing moved.

“It’s clear.”

Dominik let the Power go, rolled his shoulders once so hard that his neck popped, and immediately reached inside his coat.

Karim did not even turn around. It was like he could see in the back of his head. “You pull out a single cigarette and you’ll regret it, Dominik.”

Dominik stopped with two fingers already hooked around the cigarette pack.

“I didn't do anything.” He grumbled.

The firefighter emerged from the breach, face streaked with dust, and laughed at their scene.

Dominik withdrew his empty hand with as much dignity as possible.

“Workplace discrimination.”

The firefighter handed him a bottle of water instead. Dominik drank half of it in one go.

[Karim al’Shaidis]

By the time Ascendancy had been asleep for several hours, Karim had discovered that everyone seemed to have quietly agreed the Dominions belonged to him until further notice. No announcement had been made. No formal authority had changed hands. Requests simply began finding their way to Karim, followed by questions about who was available, who needed rest and how quickly their team could be moved from one district to another.

He’d taken a quick trip down into the Facility to swap out his Dominion’s jacket for one not smeared in filth following an unfortunate accident with a broken sewer pipe. The Facility had always impressed him more as an engineering problem than as a symbol of government power. Twenty-two subterranean levels descended through reinforced construction, older bunker infrastructure and passages built for purposes that had outlived the governments that commissioned them. Somewhere beyond the most secure portions, emergency routes connected outward through older systems beneath the city.

Karim’s pace suddenly slowed. For two days they had been forcing new geography through snow. Above them, Moscow had effectively disappeared beneath fifteen or twenty meters of accumulation. They had answered by cutting streets through it again, rebuilding the surface grid as tunnels because that was the obvious solution. Standing twenty-two floors beneath the Kremlin, Karim realized they had been thinking in only one direction.

Moscow already had another city underneath it. Not simply the Metro. Service passages. Bunkers. abandoned utility corridors. Drainage systems. Older tunnels buried beneath newer ones. The vast unofficial Underground that had accumulated beneath Moscow through centuries of construction, abandonment and reuse. It was said that some of it was dangerous. Much of it was poorly mapped. But it existed.

Karim stopped in the corridor and pulled up the rescue network on his tablet. The new snow tunnels glowed across the map in branching lines extending outward from the Kremlin.

He overlaid what subterranean infrastructure records his clearance could access, it wasn’t much, but the two systems touched in several places already. Karim stared at them for a long moment, and he knew there were more.

They did not need to dig all the way across Moscow. They needed to connect what already existed. By the time he returned to emergency command, the idea had become a proposal.

The official coordinating the next operational block listened without interrupting as Karim placed both maps side by side. He was a deputy minister Karim had encountered several times over the previous two days, an efficient man whose patience had deteriorated in direct proportion to the number of districts requesting resources.

“If the Undercity is passable, we can use existing corridors for distance and the Dominions only have to open connections into and out of it.”

The deputy studied the overlay for several seconds, then began opening additional map layers. Most were familiar municipal records, emergency routes and partial infrastructure surveys. But one returned a permissions error.

The deputy tried again, this time through a different menu, and a much larger network appeared for less than a second before the system locked it behind restricted access.

Both men went still, and Karim leaned closer. What little had flashed across the display was enough. The visible emergency maps showed fragments. That hidden layer had shown continuity. It was a whole system they didn’t know existed.

“Open that again.”

“I've never seen that map before. I don’t know where it came from.”

He pulled up the permissions data and read silently for several seconds. His expression changed.

“It's restricted explicitly to the Ascendancy.” They exchanged looks.

Someone had mapped the Undercity far beyond the fragmentary records available to emergency command, thoroughly enough that the hidden layer appeared to connect corridors the public system treated as isolated. Karim had no idea who had done it, when it had been done or why Ascendancy alone had access.

For the moment, none of that mattered as much as the fact that the information existed.

“Can you request access?”

“Not without Ascendancy to approve it.”

Karim's attention shifted briefly toward the clock and rubbed his chin.

Ascendancy had been asleep only a few hours.

“Then we wait until he wakes.”

The deputy shook his head. “The western hospital needed fuel access an hour ago. It could take ten hours to get there through the snow. Underground could cut that time significantly.”

Karim enlarged the nearest entrance they could actually verify. “When was this last inspected?” It was a retired system.

For once, the deputy sounded as unhappy with the answer as Karim was. Karim traced the known corridor beyond the entrance. It ran west for less than a kilometer before disappearing from the layer he could access. Somewhere behind the locked map existed the rest.

They had no idea what lay beyond it. If it was flooded or closed or anything. Karim exhaled slowly. “You're asking me to cut into a system we know has been mapped without the map.”

“You can't see it until Ascendancy wakes.”

“Then we have to wait.”

“Karim, we don't have that luxury.”

Karim folded his arms. “Neither do the people I'm sending underground.”

The deputy stepped closer. “We know this entrance exists. We know the corridor behind it exists. We open it, send in a survey team, and adjust from there.”

“Or we cut into the wrong branch, lose an hour, and discover afterward that the route we needed was fifty meters away on a map we weren't allowed to open.”

“And while we wait for certainty, the hospital burns fuel it doesn't have.” The deputy's voice lowered. “When Ascendancy wakes, I'll tell him you had a viable entrance and chose not to use it.”

Karim rubbed his eyes. Give him a chart to analyze or a group to encourage. But choosing between the better of two tragedies was a gamble that made his stomach flip. Perhaps Ascendancy would think he had been too cautious. Perhaps he would have looked at the same incomplete information and acted immediately. After a long moment, Karim touched the entrance on the map.

Karim glanced at the Dominions’ rotation schedule. Dominik needed rest soon. Two others had already exceeded the schedule Karim had set that morning. Another was maintaining a ventilation route that could not simply be abandoned midway through.

He was tired too.

“Fine. We open this one. But I'll go in first when we get there.”

[Patricus I]

Moscow was upside down. The Kremlin hung above him like a ceiling, its towers descending from a black sky while beneath his feet stretched another landscape entirely. It was older than the one buried beneath the snow, older perhaps than Moscow itself, a succession of corridors and chambers falling away into darkness. Some were brick, some stone, some nothing more than raw cuts through earth. Doors lined the passages in numbers that made no architectural sense.

Snow covered everything above. Below, the earth was warm under foot. Philip walked a steady pace. He wore his white tracksuit. It stood out against the shadowy ground almost as if the snowy globe overhead had fallen in soft petals into the very fabric of his clothes as some sort of beacon.

Someone was calling for help behind one of the doors. He opened it.

A woman stood on the other side with blood beneath her fingernails, weeping as though she had been knocking for days. Philip reached for her, but before he could touch her another voice called from farther down the corridor. Then another. The doors were everywhere.

Some concealed frightened people. Some opened onto empty rooms. Behind one he found rows of candles burning before an altar whose saints had no faces. Behind another lay a chamber filled with water so black that the surface reflected nothing at all. He shivered wondering what was waiting in its depths, and hurried on.

Philip kept opening them because people were calling. Every time he did, another door somewhere deeper underground opened by itself. He noticed eventually. One latch lifted in the darkness below. Then another and another.

Philip stopped, frozen by the endless doors and the voices within them that continued pleading. That was when he heard a different type of voice. Its cadence was softer, its tone high. A child. His heart lurched and he brought himself to open one last door.

Somewhere far beneath him, he heard something inhale. The sound traveled upward through the buried city. It wasn’t the growl of an animal, nor even the intake of a human gasping for air. It was like a breath was drawn into lungs that suddenly opened after an eternity collapsed shut.

A chill ran down his spine, but Philip turned toward the darkness anyway. In There was something standing very far below him. He could not see its face nor could he tell if it even had one.  Between them stretched hundreds of doors, and one by one their locks began turning. Then a line of brilliant white burst through the earth above.

Snow erupted like an upside down volcano. A tunnel bored downward from buried Moscow and struck the uppermost passage of the city beneath it. The instant the two touched, every door below Philip opened at once.

He woke with his hand clenched around his pectoral cross. Sweat grazed his entire body wet that the chill seeped into his bones.  For several seconds he did not move.

The room he rested in was dark except for the weak light leaking beneath the door. His heart beat hard enough to irritate him, which Philip considered an unreasonable response from an organ that had contributed nothing useful to the experience.

He stared at the ceiling. Twenty meters of impossible snow had buried Moscow for days and God had apparently seen no reason to mention it beforehand. Someone proposed opening a door underground, however, and suddenly Heaven became conversational.

“Wonderful,” Philip muttered. He sat up, shaking off the last dredges of the dream.

Sleep had been an inconsistent visitor since the summit. The Kremlin had become less a palace than an organism swollen beyond capacity, full of government ministers, security personnel, displaced families, emergency workers, clerics, foreign staff, and people who had once occupied offices sufficiently important that they were astonished to discover catastrophe did not recognize rank. Buried in the mess of it all was the Pope and his gentlemen, but Philip had found uses for himself.

He had celebrated Mass twice, once with proper vestments and once without because everything required to make the occasion suitably beautiful had been somewhere inaccessible beneath several buildings and a ridiculous quantity of snow. He had prayed with Catholics who had lost homes, sat beside people waiting for confirmation that relatives were alive, and given absolution to a man who had asked for it before going back into the tunnels.

He had blessed the dead as well, a necessary evil. More of them on the second day. Philip had maintained intermittent contact with Rome, listened to reports from the Secretariat, dictated statements he later rewrote because everyone else seemed determined to make him sound either terrified or inspirational, neither of which he found acceptable, and spent an unexpectedly interesting period of time in conversation with a gentleman named Lucien, the Brotherhood's librarian and archivist.

Philip had told no one what they discussed. He intended to keep it that way.

His enforced residency within the Kremlin had also provided far too much opportunity to observe Nikolai Brandon up close. That had not improved Philip's disposition in the least.

Brandon was everything Philip distrusted concentrated into one inconveniently competent man: political authority on a scale no mortal ought to possess, supernatural power beyond anything governments had previously been forced to contemplate, and now the rapidly accumulating devotion of people who had begun speaking of him with the language men historically reserved for saints, kings and gods. Worse, Brandon insisted on behaving semi-admirably. It would have been much easier if the man were merely vain. Oh he was vain enough to rival Philip himself, but paired with competence and demonstrations of selflessness made him wholly virtuous to the masses.

He went into the storm himself. He slept on floors. He prioritized civilians over government buildings. He worked beside rescue crews until exhaustion finally accomplished what persuasion apparently could not. The Brotherhood hardly needed to manufacture miracles. Moscow was doing it for them.

Philip had watched the stories spread with depressing speed. A woman who forced Ascendancy to drink tea. A child sleeping beneath one of the lights he had made. Rescue workers describing impossible tunnels bored beneath the snow. Each account was perfectly ordinary when taken alone. Together they were becoming scripture. Those stories frightened Philip more than Theron Finnegan's ridiculous Codex ever could.

As he pushed himself up the dream returned to him with the clarity of a blade. Doors opening. The snow tunnel touching the buried city. Something breathing below. Philip hurriedly swung his feet to the floor.

He did not waste time wondering whether the dream meant anything. Experience had cured him of that particular arrogance. He had once dreamed of a flood before a tsunami. Other visions had led him through symbols he understood only afterward. Dreams did not arrive because Philip invited them, nor did they concern themselves with providing useful explanations.

He dressed quickly and left the room. The corridors were busier than the hour deserved. Kremlin staff had stopped observing anything resembling a normal schedule two days ago. Philip's own people had adapted less gracefully. Two of the Gentlemen of His Holiness were already nearby, one rising from a chair when Philip appeared and the other exchanging quiet words with a member of the Kremlin staff assigned to the papal delegation. A priest from his household stood farther down the corridor with a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand. None of them seemed surprised to see the Pope awake at an unreasonable hour anymore.

One of the Gentlemen stepped forward automatically. Philip waved him off without slowing. Annoyingly, he still did not see his cherry Coke Zero he required yesterday.

Whatever expression the man made behind him, Philip did not turn around to see it. His entourage followed at a discreet distance anyway, practiced enough to understand that dismissal did not necessarily mean abandonment. Their presence trailed him through the Kremlin as reliably as the white cassock itself, familiar figures amid the constantly changing collection of people filling the complex.

Philip found an aide near the staging room and began asking questions.

“What has changed underground?”

The aide blinked. “Your Holiness?”

“Today. Since yesterday. Tunnels, excavations, anything beneath Moscow that someone has recently decided to disturb.”

The man's expression changed slightly. Philip’s frown deepened..

He learned the essential facts within minutes. Someone had proposed linking the newly excavated snow tunnels with portions of Moscow's existing Undercity. Emergency command had identified a known entrance that might provide a faster route toward a hospital requiring fuel.

“You have to stop them.”

The aide hesitated. “Your Holiness, the operation is already underway.”

“I understood the tense of the sentence. Stop it.”

Calls were made. Philip waited with rapidly diminishing patience. The answer returned exactly as he expected and still managed to infuriate him.

Those ridiculous channeler children were already en route to the entrance. Emergency command would relay Philip's concern but would not countermand an operational decision on the Pope's authority.

Philip stared at the aide.

“How comforting that catastrophe remains so respectful of jurisdiction.”

The aide scoffed, clearly too dull to sense the insult.

He asked for Ascendancy. The aide's hesitation returned.

“His Excellency is asleep.”

Philip closed his eyes. His excellency now? Of course he was.

He knew the man probably needed the sleep. Everyone in the Kremlin knew it by now. The man had driven himself so far into exhaustion that even Philip, who possessed little inclination toward sympathy where Ascendancy was concerned, had been relieved when someone finally removed him from circulation. Driving a power hungry tyrant to sleep-deprived madness was not a good idea.

“How long until he’s awake?”

“A few hours.”

Not soon enough. Philip looked toward the corridor that led deeper into the secure section of the Kremlin.

He saw the doors from his dream again. All of them opening.

“Where is he?” The aide's face suggested that answering might constitute something approximating getting fired over at best and treason at worst. Philip smiled pleasantly. The man answered.

The first Barrier Praetor intercepted him before he reached the door.

“Your Holiness.”

Philip continued walking. The man tensed and moved into his path.

“Sir, you must understand that Ascendancy is not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, several people have told me that. The Kremlin’s internal memo consistency is admirable.”

Philip stepped to the side to go around.

The Barrier matched him. In true secret service fashion, another agent suddenly appeared next to the first.

Philip stopped, folded his hands against the cassock, patiently posed.

He looked from one man to the other, then toward the staff and emergency personnel occupying the corridor farther back. Several were openly watching the confrontation.

“You may physically prevent me from passing if you wish.” Philip’s voice was terse but steady. “I recommend deciding how much you would enjoy explaining why Ascendancy's security tackled the Pope during a humanitarian disaster.”

He stepped forward. The first Barrier put out an arm but stopped short of actually touching him. Philip passed beneath it. Both agents immediately moved with him, one ahead and the other close enough that Philip could practically feel disapproval radiating from the man's suit.

The room was dim and warmer than the corridor. Brandon lay beneath the blankets in a black long-sleeved shirt, stripped of jacket, shoes, insignia and everything else that usually made him look like a state unto himself. One sleeve had been pushed above the elbow for an IV. The line ran from a hanging bag to Brandon's arm, though whether the infusion remained active Philip neither knew nor cared.

He was asleep deeply enough that three armed men and one increasingly furious pontiff entering the room did not immediately wake him. For one strange moment Philip simply looked at him.

Without the tailored suits, cameras, titles and relentless movement, Brandon appeared almost offensively human.

Philip found that irritating too.

“Ascendancy.” He spoke clearly, but nothing.

One Barrier shifted, but Philip raised his voice.

“Ascendancy.”

Brandon moved. Philip gave up on courtesy.

“Wake up.” He woke hard. His eyes opened with none of the gradual confusion Philip expected from someone dragged out of profound exhaustion. One second he was asleep; the next he was staring directly at Philip while his security detail redistributed itself around the bed. The anger arrived shortly afterward. His gaze moved first to the Barrier Praetor who to his credit was not white as a sheet, but definitely appeared afraid.

Philip almost admired the efficiency of the accusation.

“Why am I awake?”

One of the agents answered carefully. “His Holiness insisted.”

“Insistence is charitable.”

Ascendancy looked at him. Philip had been glared at by presidents, monarchs, cardinals and one exceptionally angry patriarch in Constantinople. Brandon was better at it. It was almost admirable.

“This had better be important.”

“Your people are opening passages into the city beneath Moscow.  They are attempting to link your rescue tunnels to the Undercity to reach a hospital. You must stop them.”

Ascendancy pushed himself higher against the pillows, the irritation on his face giving way to concentration. “Why?”

Philip opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Fuck.

The part he had avoided thinking about while bullying his way through security.

Why?

Because Philip Patrick Sullivan sometimes dreamed about things that had not happened yet.

Because symbolic nightmares occasionally crawled out of his sleeping mind and became reality, and he had spent years recording them privately because there were some forms of power even the Pope did not advertise. Especially this one.

The Church could survive a pope who claimed divine authority.The Church had survived mystics before. What Philip had no intention of creating was a mystic on the Throne of Peter whom half the world would immediately begin mistaking for an oracle. Never mind the bureaucratic nightmare that such a revelation might unleash in the Vatican.

And Brandon was the last man Philip wanted possessing that information. Philip imagined the information filed somewhere beneath the Kremlin. Patricus I, predictive dreaming.  The thought made his stomach turn.

“Why!” Ascendancy demanded, his voice gravely with exhaustion.

Philip looked at the Barrier Praetor.

“Leave us.” Nobody moved.

Philip's eyes returned to Brandon. “If you want the answer, I will give it to you alone.”

One of the Barrier agents immediately shook his head. “Your Excellency I highly advise against—”

Brandon raised a single finger to silence them. The room fell quiet as he studied Philip for several seconds. Philip had the unpleasant sensation of standing at the edge of something and being given one final opportunity not to jump.

He should have taken it. Instead, some pressure he could neither identify nor resist seemed to draw the decision out of him. Not coercion. Nothing so obvious. Merely the overwhelming conviction that this particular truth, concealed from everyone else in his life, had somehow arrived at the exact moment when keeping it secret would be worse than surrendering it.
He loathed this feeling.

“Outside.”

The Barrier Praetor did not like it, but they obeyed anyway.  One agent checked the room before leaving. Another gave Philip a look that promised immediate consequences if the Holy Father attempted regicide. Then the door closed, leaving them just beyond it.

Philip and Ascendancy were alone. Philip did not know how to begin. For once in his life, words seemed inadequate.

“I have dreams.” Ascendancy's expression did not change.

“For fuck’s sake. They’re not ordinary dreams.” Still nothing. “Do try to look appropriately astonished.” This was humiliating enough as it was.

A faint narrowing of Brandon's eyes was the only concession. Philip exhaled through his nose. Philip went on. “I see things before they happen sometimes.” Brandon shifted, pushed the blankets aside, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat there for a moment with one hand braced against the mattress, as if testing whether his body intended to cooperate. Dark drawstring trousers replaced the tailored clothes Philip was accustomed to seeing him in, and for a moment the effect was disconcertingly humanizing.

“You see the future?”

“No. I see nonsense that occasionally has the discourtesy to become the future afterward.”

Philip continued before courage could reconsider. He shared some small-scale examples. Not every dream. Certainly not Nimeda. Not the Pillar. Not the things Philip still could not interpret himself. He gave Brandon only enough to establish that this was not intuition masquerading as mysticism.

Then he described Moscow, and how he saw the city inverted. The doors and the people trapped behind them. How every act of rescue caused something below to open.

“When the tunnel touched the Undercity, every door below me opened.” Brandon's face had changed. It wasn’t relief, but he had that unmistakable focus of pure attention. It made Philip ponder why he was so accepting of the situation.

“What was behind the doors?”

“I don't know.”

“People?”

“Some were people, but something else too.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see it. I could not see its face, if it had one. But the dream was not ambiguous about the sequence. Your people reached the Undercity, the doors opened, and something that had been shut away wakes. I heard it breathe. Not like an animal. Like something taking its first breath after a very long confinement. If your people make that connection, I believe they will release it. Stop them before they do.”

Philip became acutely aware of how absurd this entire situation was. “I am telling you that I have had dreams before events that later happened. Sometimes I know exactly what it means and sometimes I don’t. Tonight I dreamed specifically of opening the city beneath Moscow, and I woke to discover your people are doing precisely that.”
Brandon looked toward the door. There was calculation on his face. “I know exactly what this means. You have to stop them.”

“There are twelve million people buried under this storm.”

Philip's temper flashed. “And apparently something else that Heaven considers more noteworthy.”

He wanted to shake the man.  “I did not dream about the snow at all!” Where the fuck was that cherry Coke Zero? “Do you understand what I am telling you? Moscow disappears beneath enough snow to bury buildings and I get nothing. No warning. No image. Not so much as a cryptic puddle.” He pointed toward the floor between them, toward all the unseen levels beneath the Kremlin. “But this? This I dream about.”

Brandon said nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed with his forearms resting loosely against his thighs, listening with an attentiveness Philip found difficult to interpret. The anger from being awakened had receded. In its place was something quieter. Calculation, perhaps.

“I don't know whether there is a creature down there,” he said. “I don't know whether there is anything down there in the way either of us would define a thing. It could be a collapse. A fire. A chain reaction. Some damned human being with access to something he should never have found.”

He heard himself becoming more agitated and resented Brandon for making restraint feel childish. “What I know is that the dream had an order to it. Your tunnel connected to the city below. The doors opened. Then something changed.”

Brandon's eyes narrowed slightly. “Changed how?”

Philip hesitated because the problem was that dreams didn’t arrive with instructions. He had to spell it out. “As though something that had been contained was no longer contained.”

Brandon pushed himself to his feet. The movement was controlled until it wasn't. For half a second his balance shifted and one hand found the mattress behind him. He waited there, still, until whatever unsteady moment had caught him passed.

He didn’t comment on it. Instead, Brandon reached for the shirt folded over the nearby chair and pulled it on. “Which part of the city are they heading toward?” Philip told him only as much as he knew.

Brandon crossed to the small table where his communication device had been left charging. He picked it up, but rather than calling anyone immediately, he stared at the dark screen.

“How far along are they?”

“Far enough that I woke you.”

He powered up the device and within a few commands, a whole map system was illuminated. Philip felt tension ease from his shoulders.

The request went through to someone outside the room. Brandon listened to the response, asked two short questions Philip could not quite hear, then ended the connection. He inquired about the location of his channeler team and their leader. Karim, Philip thought he heard him say. Just before ending the call, he nodded to whatever the voice on the other side said, and Brandon answered with:  “I'll deal with Karim.”

Philip studied him. Brandon had gotten out of bed. He was pulling up maps.  He was asking where the team was. All reasonable signs that a man intended to stop something. Philip chose to accept them as such. Perhaps faith was merely exhaustion with better tailoring. A few more commands punched into the device brought up the room’s lights to full illumination.

Dismissed then. Philip rolled his eyes.

The Barrier Praetor were waiting immediately outside. One looked past him toward Ascendancy before apparently deciding the world had not ended during the five minutes they had been excluded.

Philip ignored them. He had done what he came to do. At considerable personal cost, if anyone bothered asking. He had told Nikolai Brandon something Philip had spent a lifetime ensuring no one knew. He had handed a man with armies, intelligence services and an unhealthy amount of personal power the knowledge that the Pope occasionally dreamed about events before they happened.

Philip walked back toward the staging area with two of the Gentlemen of His Holiness falling naturally into place behind him. The adrenaline was wearing off now, leaving irritation in its wake. He wanted sugar. Caffeine. Something cold enough to hurt his teeth. And a damned cigarette to go with it.

One of the Gentlemen approached from the opposite direction carrying a bottle. Philip's eyes fixed on it. Hallelujah. It was a cherry coke zero. He stopped walking. The Gentleman held it out without comment.
Philip accepted it with both hands. It wasn’t a can, but better than nothing.

“You may have just justified the entire institution.”

The Gentleman smiled faintly. “The papacy?”
Philip twisted the cap.

“Don't be absurd. The household.”

The first swallow was aggressively cold and tasted entirely artificial. It was the glorious nectar of mankind.

[Karim al’Shaidis]

They were beneath Khamovniki now, west-southwest of the Kremlin, somewhere under the buried streets between Plyushchikha and the old medical quarter at Devichye Pole.

Above them, the tunnel that brought them here had taken hours for the six of them to cut through the buried city grid, angling toward coordinates the Kremlin said corresponded to an old access point into the Undercity infrastructure. If the route worked, it could give them a path toward the hospital district without excavating another full surface corridor through twenty meters of snow.

The problem was the entrance. Their tunnel ended in what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary concrete wall. Once the surrounding snow and debris had been cleared, the remains of an old service vestibule emerged from beneath it: cracked masonry, a corroded lintel, and the outline of a heavy steel door was entombed behind later construction.

Whatever it had once been, someone had sealed it thoroughly. The steel had been welded at the frame, then covered behind poured concrete thick enough that a conventional crew would have spent hours drilling through it, assuming the vibration did not damage whatever remained behind the wall. Under ordinary conditions the entrance was effectively impassable. It was almost funny how ordinary conditions had become increasingly irrelevant.

That was why all six Dominions on site were standing beneath a knotted off orb of working lights considering how to proceed. Conventional rescue personnel waited farther back, beyond the reinforced section of the branch tunnel. Karim had insisted on that much before anyone touched the seal. They determined the safe point behind which all the civilians remained, a place of retreat if one was needed. From his place in the Kremlin guiding their process, Ascendancy had agreed. Then he had released the maps that now populated all their displays.

Karim stood with the tablet balanced against one palm, studying the section that had appeared in his clearance less than ten minutes earlier. The difference between these maps and the municipal records was immediately apparent. Whole passages existed where the government surveys showed nothing. Service corridors connected facilities that officially had no connection at all. Old bunkers, maintenance routes and buried structures spread beneath Moscow in a network far more extensive than Karim had suspected. Someone had mapped it all carefully. Very carefully.

Distances were marked. Elevations recorded. Collapses noted. Some routes carried dates suggesting they had been physically inspected in the recent past. Whoever had done the work had gone far beyond compiling forgotten city plans. They had been down here. Walked these paths themselves. Karim couldn’t fathom who.

He enlarged the section closest to their position. Their new map confirmed that behind the sealed entrance lay a descending passage into an Undercity corridor. That route continued west before joining a larger artery that could potentially carry them toward Devichye Pole and the hospital district.

But along the way, the detail gradually became sparse. There was no notation indicating uncertainty or an inaccessible survey area. The map simply suggested the region was irregular. Several passages approached this particular area and seemingly curved around despite every structural reason suggested it should continue straight. However, even if they had to take a round-about path, it would still be swifter than above ground tunneling.

Dominik stood beside him, bundled against the cold that followed them even this far beneath the city. The cigarette Karim had forbidden him to smoke remained somewhere inside his coat, although Dominik’s fingers had developed an irritating habit of checking that fact whenever he thought Karim was not looking. He glanced at Karim’s face and said, “You have the face.”

Karim kept studying the map. “What face?”

“The one you get when you’re offended.”

Karim enlarged the sparse region another increment and grumbled.

“I just wish I knew who made this map.”

Dominik leaned closer. “Guess we’ll never know.”

They knew what was immediately behind the wall. They knew the first corridor had once been structurally sound. They knew where it should lead. All they had to do was open it, go straight, and should be able to confirm everything was structurally sound, and admit the civilians in behind them. It was the word should that bothered him.

It was only a short time ago that Ascendancy’s instructions had been issued to hold their position and wait for the very maps to load that were now in their possession. That they were not to extend farther than necessary until they knew what was on the other side. Karim had expected the next order to be one of retreat, but instead the opposite came.

Proceed.

There had been no explanation for the change from caution to proceeding, and Karim had not asked for one. Ascendancy was awake again, apparently earlier than planned, and his tone had made clear that whatever had interrupted his rest had also changed the nature of the operation.

He handed the tablet off and approached the wall. Their first task was not to break through. It was to understand how the entrance had been closed. Karim crouched near the exposed edge of the old frame and examined the concrete. It had been poured after the original structure was built that much was clear to the plain eye. But the Kremlin’s records said that there was steel beneath had been welded before that. A second layer of masonry had later been added over part of the vestibule. Three separate acts of closure. It seemed unusual but not impossible. Civil-defense infrastructure was abandoned badly all the time. Entrances were sealed in stages. Governments changed. Records disappeared. Someone worried about liability twenty years after someone else worried about security. Karim knew all of that. He still disliked it.

Dominik watched him a moment before asking,

“Fuck, Karim. Come on? Are you going to stare it open?”

Karim rose, fixing him with a look that Dominik couldn’t quite decide if he was serious. “I was considering making you dig it out by hand.”

As he finished speaking, Karim stepped back and seized the Power. Opening the entrance required far less force than carving the great snow corridors above, but considerably more care. He did not want to blast through the seal and discover that fifty years of corrosion had left half the structure waiting for an excuse to collapse. Around him, the others readied their power in case they had to suddenly catch something.

Sections of concrete separated cleanly from the older frame and moved aside where they were lowered out of the way rather than dropped. Corroded steel appeared beneath. Flows peeled the welds apart next, working along the frame until an old door finally became visible as a door rather than a shape buried in concrete.

It was thick enough to have once resisted blast pressure. Karim tested the hinges. Frozen with rust. He abandoned them and cut around the frame instead. The door moved inward only a few centimeters before stopping. Everyone went still. Karim felt for resistance through the weave. Not obstruction, but pressure. He eased it farther, and air pushed through the gap blasting him in the face.

Warm air. The difference was not dramatic, perhaps five or six degrees, but after days spent in frozen Moscow it touched his face with unsettling softness. Dominik noticed it too and murmured, “Warm air?.”

Karim glanced at him. “It’s not unusual, unexpected, but sometimes the pressure differences build up.”

Karim turned back toward the opening. The temperature itself was explainable. Deep structures maintained heat. Ground temperature changed slowly. Utility lines could contribute. Occupied areas of the Undercity might be nearby.

Together, the Dominions widened the opening enough to enter. The passage beyond descended gently for several meters before leveling into an old service corridor. It was quite ordinary with concrete walls, exposed pipes, even a cable tray sagging beneath bundles of wiring installed at several different points in history. Water stained one corner of the ceiling, though the floor beneath it was dry. Dust had accumulated along the edges where foot traffic had not disturbed it.

Karim stepped through first and waited. Nothing happened. The others came after them in a loose formation. Their lights pushed farther into the corridor and found nothing remarkable. Behind them, the cut-open blast door remained visible at the end of the short descent. Beyond it lay the pale snow tunnel they had carved through the storm. Beyond that, several kilometers of emergency infrastructure leading eventually back toward the Kremlin.

Karim checked the map as they slowly explored. The dimensions matched. Three-point-one meters wide. Two-point-seven high. The old utility chase along the left wall was exactly where the map said it would be. Even the slight change in elevation appeared correct. He felt ridiculous for being relieved.

They continued. Karim’s headset counted distance automatically as they proceeded.

About twenty meters farther the wall changed from poured concrete to older brick. The map showed the same transition. At thirty meters they passed a sealed service door on the right. Twenty-nine-point-four on the survey. Dominik examined the faded Russian lettering painted across it but did not touch the handle.

The first problem appeared forty-three meters later. Karim stopped, and the others stopped with him. He looked at the map’s display, then compared it to what his eyes beheld ahead. According to the survey, the passage should have ended twelve meters farther on, but the corridor continued well beyond that point before disappearing into darkness beyond the reach of their lights.

Karim walked forward slowly. Twelve meters became fifteen, then eighteen, and still no wall appeared. He checked the survey scale, but it was correct. He checked their positioning data next. The underground signal was weak, but the inertial tracking remained functional. According to the system, he had traveled twenty-one meters from the last marker.

The map allowed twelve-point-six. Karim turned around. The junction was close behind them, but too close. Dominik had stopped several paces away, watching Karim rather than the corridor. “There it is again.”

Karim barely heard him. “What?”

“The face.”

Karim walked back toward the junction. Seven steps. He stopped beneath the crossing pipes and looked at the position marker.

According to the tracker, those seven steps had carried him twenty-one meters.

The place where he had just been standing was perhaps seven meters away. He stood very still. No. Something was wrong with their systems, and he wasn’t going to allow them to proceed and possibly become lost.

Karim reset the inertial tracker and walked forward again, counting this time. At six paces he stopped and checked the reading, but it said he’d moved seventeen meters. He looked down at his feet as though they had somehow become participants in the problem, then returned to the junction. Six paces back.

Seventeen meters again, and Dominik’s humor had vanished.

Karim handed him the tablet. “Stand here.” Dominik took it without comment.

Karim walked forward along the corridor alone, ten meters by his own estimate, but the rangefinder told him he had gone twenty-six. He turned and sighted back toward Dominik who seemed barely far at all.

Every short measurement made sense on its own. Two nearby points remained exactly as far apart as they appeared. It was only when Karim tried to measure the corridor as a whole that the numbers became impossible.
He understood surveying errors. He understood instrument drift, bad maps, subsidence, undocumented reconstruction, even deliberate falsification. None of those could make six steps equal seventeen meters without also moving the people who had watched him take them.

Dominik came closer and said his name quietly. “Karim.”

“I know.”

He looked forward. The corridor appeared normal. That offended him more than if the walls had begun bending. There should have been some visible distortion. A slope. Curvature. Something his eyes could identify and his mind could measure. Instead, there was brick, concrete and old pipes continuing into darkness.

Karim took several more cautious steps, and this time he noticed the temperature had risen another degree. Ahead, the corridor should already have passed beyond the exterior footprint of the underground structure shown on every map available to him. There was supposed to be packed earth beyond that point. Yet the walls continued.

A faint sound came from somewhere ahead. Karim held up one hand and everyone stopped. For a moment there was only the small mechanical noise of their equipment and the distant movement of air through the breach behind them.

Then it came again. A click of metal against metal. Karim stared into the dark. Several seconds passed before a rectangular patch of amber light appeared far ahead, beyond where the corridor could possibly exist. It did not flicker or gradually brighten. It simply came on behind a pane of glass, as though someone had reached for a switch in a room that should have been buried inside solid rock.

Dominik moved closer to Karim’s shoulder. “Tell me that’s on the map.” Karim looked down. The display showed solid earth.

The irregular region began farther west. They were not even supposed to have reached it yet.  Karim raised the communication unit and let his thumb rest against the channel for a moment before activating it.

“Ascendancy.”

He waited for the connection indicator while the amber light remained ahead of them. Then he looked back toward the entrance they had cut open. He could still see the old blast door, the pale tunnel beyond it and imagined the civilians waiting there for their indication to enter. It looked close enough to reach in a short sprint, but the instruments insisted it was more than fifty meters away.

Karim swallowed and waited for the relay system to deliver the message back to the Kremlin.

“Sir, this map is wrong.”

He looked forward again and knew, almost immediately, that wasn’t accurate. The map had been right all the way here. The corridor was wrong. Karim stared at the impossible stretch of masonry disappearing into darkness and corrected himself before anyone could answer.

“No. It’s not the map. We are wrong.”