The wind came in harder at night on the island. It always did. The residents had long since stopped noticing.

  Small armed ships ran steady intervals around the surrounding waters, their searchlights drawing slow arcs across the dark swells. Along the perimeter, soldiers lay concealed within artificial brush, eyes fixed, unblinking, settled into the particular patience of people who had learned to treat stillness as a skill. The facility occupied nearly a quarter of the island's landmass. The rest was training grounds, deployment zones, and the kind of open space that exists specifically to be destroyed in.

  The explosion, when it came, was not subtle.

  A narrow column of smoke punched into the sky near the facility entrance, and the alarms that followed were immediate and sharp — the kind designed to drag people out of sleep by the collar. They screamed across the compound for approximately twelve seconds before fading, not because the threat had passed, but because whoever was monitoring the situation had already made a determination and saw no further need for noise.

  On the third floor, this counted as an event.

  * * *

  Doors swung open one after another down the hallway like a row of dominoes reconsidering their life choices. Residents poured out in various states of readiness — some in full gear, some in pajamas, one man in nothing but a towel who seemed to feel this was appropriate — and the hallway filled immediately with the specific kind of chaos that only happens in places where people have lived in close quarters long enough to have complicated feelings about each other.

  Janus had just finished unpacking the modest stack of clothes that had been assigned to him — plain, functional, the kind of wardrobe assembled by someone who had never met him and had made reasonable assumptions — when the shockwave moved through the wall and into his chest. He stood very still for a moment, clothes half-folded in his hands, while the vibration hummed through the floor beneath his feet and doors slammed and voices rose from murmur to laughter to what sounded like the beginning of a formal dispute.

  He set the clothes down and cracked his door open just enough to see.

  Directly across the hall, a door opened and a woman stepped out wearing a white sports bra and pink pajamas, her long black hair loose and slightly flattened on one side from sleep. She looked at the gathering crowd the way someone looks at a weather forecast they already predicted.

  "What now?" she called down the hall, voice thick with the particular weariness of someone who has been through this before.

  "Digma's pranking Guntman again!" a short woman called back, already laughing, her cat-patterned pajamas wrinkled from sleep in a way that suggested she had been deeply committed to it.

  Half the hallway erupted. The other half groaned in the tone of people who had witnessed previous iterations of this and had formed opinions.

  "That's the third time this month," someone muttered.

  "Fourth," someone else corrected. "He got him in the shower last Tuesday."

  "Digma's insane."

  "Digma's bored. There's a difference."

  Janus started to ease his door shut.

  A hand hit it from the other side.

  The door swung open and a face appeared in the gap at close range, which was about six inches from Janus' own face, and which nearly caused him to separate from his body entirely.

  "Yo." A tall, dark-skinned man with a wide grin and curly hair that had no apparent relationship with gravity forced the door the rest of the way open and seized Janus by the arm with the confidence of someone who has never once considered that this approach might not be welcome. "Thirteenth! Were you actually going to hide in there all night?"

  "I was unpacking—"

  "You can unpack later, come on—"

  "I don't know any of these—"

  "That's literally why you're coming, don't be boring—"

  He was already in the hallway before he finished formulating a reason not to be, Lancelot's hand still around his arm, steering him into the crowd with the decisive energy of a man who considered social reluctance a structural problem requiring immediate correction.

  "EVERYONE!" Lancelot announced, raising his free hand. The hallway did not quiet so much as redirect. "I've got the thirteenth right here! Come say hello!"

  Every head turned.

  Janus went very still under the weight of it.

  The scrutiny came in waves. Some people looked at him the way people look at something they've heard about and are now calibrating against expectation. Others looked at him the way people look at things they've decided to have opinions about before gathering information.

  "Is that him?"

  "He looks normal."

  "He looks weak."

  "He kind of looks like my brother-in-law. Same energy."

  "Which group do you think they'll put him in?"

  "That's a Heaven's Vessel? That's actually a Heaven's Vessel?"

  Janus was acutely, painfully aware of the gap between who he was — an elementary school teacher who owned three pairs of the same shoes and had strong opinions about lesson planning — and whatever it was these people were expecting to see. The two things did not appear to overlap.

  "He can walk, Lancelot," the woman in pink pajamas said, arms folded. "Stop dragging him around like a stray cat, for fuck's sake."

  Lancelot released him and instead gave him a firm, compensatory pat on the back. "Relax. We're just welcoming you. It's fine."

  "It's really not," Janus said.

  "It's fine," Lancelot repeated, with total conviction.

  The woman in pink pajamas stepped forward, and something in the crowd's energy adjusted slightly around her — not dramatically, but the way it adjusts around someone people are used to taking seriously even when she's in sleepwear.

  "You met him already, Sherlyn?" Lancelot asked.

  "I was there," she said simply. "Bahaks."

  Her gaze settled on Janus for a moment — not the evaluating look most of the crowd had given him, but something more direct than that. The look of someone who had been standing in the same street, in the same smoke, and was now doing the quiet arithmetic of what it meant that he was standing here at all.

  Janus met it. He didn't know what to do with it, but he met it.

  "Is he really the thirteenth, Lyn?" The short woman — the one with the cat pajamas — pointed at him with the unselfconscious directness of someone who had never learned to be subtle and had decided this was a personality trait rather than a gap.

  Before Sherlyn could answer, another voice cut in.

  "It's him."

  Wyman materialized from somewhere in the crowd wearing a white tank top and shorts that had seen better decades, sipping from a canned coffee with the serene expression of a man at peace with the world. "I was there too. I definitely felt that tingle when the blade hit him. It's him."

  The short woman's eyes dropped immediately to the can.

  To the name written on it in small, deliberate letters.

  Her name.

  "THAT'S MY COFFEE."

  She snatched it from his hand with a speed that suggested this was not the first time she had needed to do this.

  "Oh," Wyman said, looking at his now empty hand with an expression of genuine surprise that convinced absolutely no one. "My bad, Yna. I didn't see the name. It's very small."

  "I write it small because normal people don't go through other people's labeled food, WYMAN—"

  "In my defense the fridge is very dark—"

  "I will freeze every single tooth out of your head."

  She clenched her fist. The temperature in the hallway dropped with a swiftness that was not metaphorical — frost crept along the metal floor in a thin spreading line, the air going sharp and cold, and the crowd shifted and shivered and took an unconscious half-step back from both of them.

  Lancelot leaned toward Janus. "That's Yna. Ice type. She and Wyman have been doing this since before I got here. Nobody remembers how it started."

  "Does it always escalate to actual frost?"

  "Usually it stops around here. Once it got to full ice spikes. That was a Tuesday."

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  A man with glasses and a white polo pushed gently through the crowd and placed a steady hand on Yna's shoulder without a word. The frost slowed. The temperature began to climb back toward normal in gradual increments, the crowd exhaling as the chill receded.

  "Let's not make a terrible first impression," Sander said, with the specific patience of someone who has talked people down from ledges so many times it has become a reflex.

  "She's making a completely reasonable impression," Janus said. "He stole her coffee."

  Yna pointed at him. "I like him."

  "See?" Lancelot said. "Welcoming. Told you."

  "You're lucky Sander's here," Yna said to Wyman, the cold still in her voice if not the air. "One of these days he won't be."

  "I'll write your name bigger," Wyman offered.

  "I will end you."

  "Bigger font. Permanent marker. Very visible—"

  Another explosion shook the building. Closer this time, and louder, with the specific quality of something that had been intended to be dramatic. A string of muffled cursing drifted up from somewhere outside, several floors down, identifiable as Digma's voice by general consensus among those present.

  The crowd barely reacted. Someone glanced at the ceiling. Someone else poured the remainder of their own coffee.

  "Is anyone going to check on that?" Janus asked.

  "It's fine," three people said simultaneously, in the tone of people who had learned that checking on Digma generally made things worse.

  Janus stood in the hallway, surrounded by people in pajamas arguing about coffee and ice and a man somewhere below them apparently conducting unsupervised explosive experiments, and felt, for one disorienting moment, something almost like the echo of the faculty room at his school. The noise. The familiarity. The way everyone in the space seemed to have a history with everyone else that predated him and would continue after him.

  He was on the outside of something that had existed for a long time without him.

  He was aware, for the first time since waking up on a hillside covered in flowers, of how much had been taken from him. Not the dramatic parts. The ordinary parts. Laughter in a room where people knew each other's names.

  Sherlyn, standing slightly apart from the crowd, glanced at him.

  She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. The look had the quality of someone who understood exactly what he was feeling and had decided that acknowledging it quietly was more useful than addressing it loudly.

  He looked away first.

  * * *

  The voice, when it came, didn't raise itself.

  It didn't need to.

  "What's the commotion."

  Not a question. A statement shaped like one.

  The hallway went quiet in stages — laughter first, then side conversations, then even the ambient shuffling of people who had been pretending not to listen. The silence that followed was the kind that arrives when people who are usually loud have collectively and simultaneously decided not to be.

  Two figures entered from the stairwell end of the hallway. Their gear was scratched and dirt-streaked — not the wear of training, but of something recent, something that had required them to be somewhere else and had left evidence of it. The crowd parted ahead of them in the unconscious way crowds part for things that have earned that response.

  Janus had watched the hallway transform from a raucous family dinner into a very quiet room in under four seconds. He was trying to understand why.

  Then he looked at the two figures properly, and he began to understand.

  It wasn't the gear. It wasn't the masks. It was something more fundamental — a quality of stillness carried by people for whom violence is not an emergency but a vocation, people who have done enough of it that the capability has become indistinguishable from their resting state. The crowd hadn't gone quiet from fear exactly. It had gone quiet from the specific instinct that recognizes something apex and adjusts accordingly.

  The barrier Sherlyn had erected — he hadn't even noticed when she'd done it — quietly dissolved around him.

  "Janus." The slender figure with the long-barreled rifle strapped to her back turned toward him directly. Her voice was not unkind and not warm. It was the voice of someone with an objective. "You're coming with us."

  The taller masked figure addressed the hallway.

  "Everyone assembles in the canteen in five."

  He said it the way you say a thing that is already decided.

  Nobody laughed. Nobody argued. Pajama-clad residents turned and went back to their rooms to change. Others moved toward the stairwell. Lancelot, who had been gesturing emphatically at Wyman about something, stopped mid-gesture and went still. Yna, who had been winding up for what appeared to be round two, quietly unclenched her fist.

  Janus looked at Wyman.

  Wyman gave him a small nod that said: go, and also: yes, it's always like this when they show up.

  Still in his sleepwear, Janus followed the two figures toward the elevator. The anxiety that had been sitting low in his chest since the explosion rearranged itself into something more specific.

  * * *

  The elevator opened onto a different register entirely.

  Deep yellow carpet ran the length of the corridor, muffling footsteps into near silence. The overhead lighting was lower and warmer than the floors below, and the dark wooden doors lining the walls had the quality of things that had been chosen rather than installed. Maintenance personnel moved quietly along one section of wall, cleaning something that appeared already clean, the kind of thoroughness that exists in spaces where appearances are taken seriously.

  Janus followed in his sleepwear, which felt increasingly conspicuous.

  They reached a reception area at the corridor's end. The sound of keys being typed filled the space with a precise, unhurried rhythm. The masked woman stepped forward and rested her rifle against the desk with the ease of someone setting down an umbrella.

  The receptionist looked up. She had brown hair she tied back with a quick, practiced motion, and when her gaze landed on Janus her eyes shifted — irises bleeding into a sharp, luminous crimson that scanned him in a way that felt less like looking and more like reading. He had the unsettling sense of being assessed at a level below the visible.

  "Definitely a weird one," she murmured to herself, in the tone of someone making a note. Then, shifting focus without transition: "Bring me Jeyu's brain sample tomorrow, Ghoul."

  The masked woman — Ghoul — nodded once.

  The wall behind the receptionist moved. Not opened — moved, the panels separating and receding in a mechanical sequence that revealed a black wooden door behind them. The three of them went through.

  The room was lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves that had been used rather than decorated — spines cracked, pages flagged, several volumes lying flat on top of others in the way of someone who reads faster than they file. A world map hung behind the desk, large enough that the oceans had room to breathe, marked in several places with notations too small to read from the door. Two swords rested against the desk's side with the casual placement of objects that are kept close for practical rather than ceremonial reasons.

  The man behind the desk had short red hair and thin eyebrows and purple eyes that were currently moving rapidly across a document he was in the process of signing. He finished, slid the document into a hardened envelope, and looked up.

  The moment his gaze reached Janus, something happened.

  It was subtle enough that Janus almost dismissed it — a sensation like a hand smoothing over the surface of his thoughts, gentle and without friction, settling the anxiety in his chest into something quieter and more manageable. Not forced. Not intrusive. Just present, the way warmth is present when someone opens a door.

  He didn't trust it, precisely. But he couldn't locate the source of his distrust.

  "Thank you both for bringing him," the man said. His voice carried the same quality as the room — warm, considered, nothing wasted. "And my apologies for the short notice on the Dead Sparrows' message. I know you'd only just returned."

  Grim took a seat. "We recovered the chief's body. Public disturbance is covered."

  Janus and Ghoul settled onto the sofa. Ghoul's posture was precise, her attention on the room in the way of someone who never fully stops working. She glanced at Janus once as they sat — a brief, specific look, not evaluating his threat level but something more considered than that. Like she'd already done the evaluation and had moved on to a more interesting question.

  "Good." The Captain's expression shifted slightly. "Was his core intact?"

  "No. Most of his organs are missing."

  A silence followed that had a different quality from the ones before it.

  "That's inconvenient," Emmanuel said, in the tone of someone describing a situation that is considerably more than inconvenient and has chosen this word carefully.

  He stood, crossed to a wood-paneled refrigerator set into the wall, and retrieved a wine-shaped bottle. Ghoul rose without being asked and collected glasses from the nearby cupboard, setting them on the table with practiced efficiency. Emmanuel poured. The liquid was pale and fizzy and filled the room with a clean, fruity scent that was entirely at odds with the conversation.

  "We'll return to that. Let's set it aside for now, Grim."

  He settled back into his chair and turned the full quality of his attention to Janus, which was, Janus found, a somewhat significant experience.

  "My name is Emmanuel Makeman. I am the Captain of the Ruin Initiative." A measured pause. "It's very good to finally meet you, Janus."

  "It's — yes, sir. Captain. It's good to meet you too." Janus' posture had gone rigid in the way it goes rigid when a person is trying to compensate for the fact that they are sitting in front of someone important while wearing the clothes they slept in.

  Grim and Ghoul removed their masks.

  Ghoul had short white hair and sharp emerald eyes that held the same quality her posture did — present, assessing, not unkind but not particularly interested in being warm either. Grim bore a scar across his right eye and the expression of someone who had seen enough of the world to have stopped being surprised by most of it.

  "These are Grim and Ghoul," Emmanuel said. "Grim commands the Dead Sparrows. Ghoul is his Sergeant."

  He let that land for a moment before continuing.

  "The Dead Sparrows are my most elite unit. There is no finer group of operators in this initiative, and I don't say that to flatter them." His eyes moved briefly to Grim, then back to Janus. "I say it because assigning them to you should tell you something about how seriously I'm taking your situation. You are an unknown quantity, Janus — not a threat I've dismissed, not a variable I'm comfortable leaving to chance. Grim will handle your foundational training. Ghoul will act as your direct guardian."

  He folded his hands on the desk.

  "I'm reassigning Sherlyn back to the field. You'll be with them for the foreseeable future."

  Janus nodded. He glanced at Ghoul, who met his gaze with the flat, unreadable expression of someone who has already made several assessments about him and has not yet decided whether to share them. Whatever comfort the Captain's tone had produced, that look efficiently dismantled.

  "One more thing," Emmanuel added, with the lightness of someone remembering a detail. "You've already met my sister, I think."

  "Sister?"

  "Leian."

  Something rearranged itself in Janus' understanding of the last several hours. The candy bar. The way she'd watched his reflection in the elevator. The quality of her attention that he hadn't been able to categorize.

  He filed it away.

  "Captain." He set his cup down carefully. "May I ask something?"

  Grim opened one eye with the expression of a man who has heard many questions in his time and has learned to prepare himself.

  "The Table with God," Janus said. "Mathen and Leian told me it's what every Heaven's Vessel goes through. That it's a real event. But nobody could tell me what it actually is."

  The room settled into a particular quality of quiet.

  Emmanuel exhaled — not impatiently, but with the measured weight of someone choosing their words the way a surgeon chooses instruments.

  "If you've never had one," he said, "then you were never formally invited."

  He studied Janus for a long moment.

  "A Table with God is precisely what it sounds like. An actual meeting. The specifics differ for everyone who's experienced it — the setting, the form it takes, the duration. But what follows is always the same."

  "A negotiation," Emmanuel said. "With an authority that exists above this world. We call what's granted through that negotiation a Legacy. And every Legacy carries a price equal to what it gives."

  Janus leaned forward slightly, the instinct of a man who spent years teaching children to ask better questions surfacing without permission. "What kind of price?"

  "Different for everyone," Emmanuel said. "Commensurate with the Legacy. You don't choose what you're given, and you don't negotiate the cost. You only decide whether to accept."

  A beat.

  "Would it be alright," Janus said carefully, "to ask what your Legacy is, Captain?"

  The slap landed on the back of his neck before he'd finished the sentence.

  Ghoul was already standing behind him, hand raised for a follow-up that Emmanuel's expression forestalled.

  "That," she said, with the patient delivery of someone explaining something to a person who should already know it, "is like walking into the Empire's most classified archive and asking for a guided tour. Don't do that."

  "I didn't know—"

  "You know now."

  "Ghoul," Emmanuel said, gently.

  She lowered her hand. Returned to the sofa. Picked up her glass.

  Emmanuel stood, resting his palms flat against the desk, and the quality of the room changed in the way rooms change when the person managing the atmosphere stops managing it and lets what's underneath come through.

  "You'll understand it soon enough, Janus." His voice had shifted — not cold, but resolute, stripped of the warmth that had been sitting over the top of it. "Everything you've been told, everything that's happened to you in the last two weeks — it's connected to something larger than one man's classification."

  He held Janus' gaze.

  "The Dead Sparrows don't take assignments like this. You should know that." A pause that had weight in it. "I sent them to you because what's coming requires it."

  The room held the silence.

  "After all," Emmanuel said quietly,

  "We're about to go to war."