CHAPTER 18: “The Arteries of Power”
913 Words
By morning the city had new borders. Not lines on maps—lines inside people. You could feel them in the elevator pauses, in the way conversations flattened when her name rose, in the tremor of a thousand notifications landing at once. ValeCorp’s black glass still glittered on the streets, but the feeds had already learned how to talk around it. “Incident.” “Unrest.” “Isolated extremists.” The old words trying to cage new fire.
Aria watched from the depot’s loading bay as the rain thinned to a mist that made everything look farther away. Her side ached where Damaris’s claws had opened her. The bandage held. So did the fury under it.
Kellen sat cross-legged on a crate with three screens haloed around his head. “He’s flooding the networks,” he said. “Professional grief. Polished outrage. A charity fund goes live in an hour to ‘rebuild.’ It’s already pulling seven figures.”
“Rebuilding what we just burned is the point,” Vincent said, easing himself onto a stool with a hiss. “Keeps him looking like God.”
Aries stood with a thermos of coffee that had gone cold in his hand, staring at a map he wasn’t reading. “He’ll fortify the Heights and hunt the Verge. He knows where the fear pools.”
Dominic came in last, rain still beading on his coat. He looked at Aria first, like he always did when he entered a room. Then he set a slim black case on the table and clicked it open. Inside lay a piece of tech so unassuming it felt dangerous—a matte-white tile cut with tiny hexes, each hex a lock waiting for a key.
Kellen leaned in. “Please tell me that’s what I think it is.”
Dominic nodded once. “A ghost plate. One use. Touch it to the right ledger and it opens a mirror. You don’t steal the data; you make the data betray itself.”
“Right ledger?” Aria asked.
“Damaris keeps two,” Dominic said. “The public vault—the one we torched last night—and the Pale Ledger. It sits under Cathedral Bank. Paper, vellum, old signatures with new code woven through them. The Pale Ledger holds oaths signed in blood. It’s the real leash.”
Aries’ gaze sharpened. “You’re sure?”
“I’ve been sure for a long time,” Dominic said. “But knowing and touching are different problems.”
Aria lifted the ghost plate delicately, feeling the faint vibration of potential in her palm. “We can touch it?”
“Only if we get the living key,” Kellen said. “Every page is bonded to a bloodholder—someone who holds the right to open and audit. Damaris would never hold it himself. He keeps that in a CFO’s veins.”
Vincent snorted. “And what does our vampire accountant look like?”
“Cassia Vayne,” Dominic said. “Vampire, three hundred if she’s a day. Runs numbers like she’s skinning them. Damaris keeps her close because she never gets sentimental.”
Aria rolled her shoulders, the pain flaring and settling. “Where is she?”
“Publicly?” Kellen swiped a feed onto the wall. A gilt invitation rotated in midair: GALA: Museum of Living Cities. “She’ll be at this parade of mirrors at dusk. The backers of New Echelon will congratulate themselves for surviving the terrible night.”
“Privately,” Dominic added, “she’ll use the Museum’s private tram to return to Cathedral Bank through the sealed causeway. If we want the key, we catch her between.”
Aries’ mouth curled in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Then we build a net in a tunnel.”
Aria set the ghost plate back in its case and closed it with a soft click. “And if she won’t hand us the key?”
Dominic’s eyes didn’t soften. “Then we peel it from her pride.”
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They went quiet through the afternoon, each to their tasks. Kellen vanished into a tangle of drones and microcams that would flower like gnats across the Museum façade at dusk. Vincent laid out a small armory and made it smaller, stripping to what would fit in a suit and not make metal detectors weep. Aries disappeared and returned smelling faintly of rain and old earth, which meant he’d been in tunnels that weren’t on any map. Dominic spoke to no one and made five calls that left lines around his mouth when he hung up.
Aria washed the blood from her hair, changed the bandage herself, and sat alone for fifteen minutes staring at a blank wall until the hum in her bones relined itself. When she stood, she chose a dress that wasn’t a dress: charcoal silk cut like an apology and worn like a knife, with a jacket that hid more than it revealed. The Vex ring at her throat sat cool against skin.
“You’re going as Nova,” Kellen said, when she met them at the loading dock.
“No,” she said. “Nova wouldn’t walk into a bank like she owns it.”
“Then as who?”
Aria met Dominic’s eyes. “As Aria Vex.”
He didn’t smile. It would have been too obvious. He took his place at her shoulder when they left, and that was answer enough.
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