The Joker stepped forward before I finished the sentence.

  He always did that.

  There was something in the way he processed the world—faster than prediction, operating always a half-step ahead of the articulated request—that made him simultaneously the most annoying and most indispensable variable on the Board. He had been an Imp once. An impish demon elevated through sheer audacity to the Wild Card, the rank of divine Unpredictability. In this current body, in this current life, he was a man whose eyes spun like slot machines and whose grin was a weapon with a conscience.

  He snapped his fingers. A small, nimble fleet of Obsidian Skiffs detached from the Ring—built from the recycled scraps of the Iron Hegemony, repurposed with the characteristic Joker modifications that made them technically improvised, practically indescribable, and functionally excellent.

  “The Canary, eh?” He said it with the peculiar delight of someone who has just been handed the most dangerous job in the universe and recognizes it as an honor. “Finally. A job suited for a bird with clipped wings!”

  He looked at me.

  “Don’t worry, Boss. If the Center of the Universe is just a giant mouth, I’ll make sure it gets a bad case of indigestion before it reaches you.”

  Elias, standing beside me in full Grit-Armor—looking like a man who had decided that wisdom and preparedness were not mutually exclusive—watched the Joker’s fleet prep for departure with the expression of someone who has done enough mathematics to understand the risk and enough philosophy to believe the risk is worth it.

  “He’ll be alright,” Elias said. Quietly. To himself as much as to me.

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  I said nothing.

  The Joker’s fleet tore space rather than folding it—using a concentrated burst of Grey-Code to slip into the sub-layers of reality. The Obsidian Skiffs vanished in sequence, each one pulling a trail of static behind it that closed like a zipper. Then they were gone.

  On the monitors, a tiny violet dot.

  Moving away from the warmth.

  The Lighthouse focused on it with the intensity of a lighthouse that understood it might be watching the most important thing it had ever been asked to track. A heavy tension settled in the Ring. Not fear—the Ring was too well-tended for the raw thing of fear to propagate easily. But the weighted quiet of something held.

  I sat in the Garden with Elias, and Elias held his glass without drinking from it, and we waited.

  Forty-eight hours into the Void, the communication came through.

  Grainy. Distorted by the raw pressure of Before-Time.

  The Joker’s face appeared on the screen. His grin was present—it was always present—but it was tighter than usual. The eyes had stopped spinning. They were fixed with a particular expression that I had only seen once or twice in the Joker’s existence, and which I associated with the specific circumstance of encountering something that even chaos found difficult to categorize.

  “Boss,” he said. His voice had lost its edge. “You’re not gonna believe the view.”

  The camera panned.

  Behind him, the void was a graveyard.

  Thousands of Nets. Massive, broken circles—some larger than galaxies—floating in a sea of dead probability. Rusted. Shattered. The architectural remains of every universe that had ever built a Ring and failed to maintain it. An entire cosmological tradition of attempts, all gone cold.

  “We found the Center, Prime,” the Joker whispered. “But it’s not a throne.”

  A pause.

  “It’s a Drain.”

  And then his voice dropped to the quietest thing I had ever heard from him.

  “And there’s something sitting at the bottom of it. Something that’s been waiting for a Gambler to show up with a full pot of Gold.”