1. The River Confrontation
"You don't visit old friends anymore, huh, Moto?"
He stopped mid-drill and turned around. Mukai stood at the top of the riverbank, looking down at both of them. His expression gave nothing away.
Moto stepped slightly in front of Amber. "Hey, Mukai. I was going to come by tomorrow."
"You better have been." Mukai came a step down the bank. "Sukai's been worried since we heard you were arrested. Father said he sent Gwen to pull you out."
"That's what he told you?"
Mukai's eyes sharpened. "I saw the state Gwen came back in." He paused. "I've watched you fight before. I know the scars you leave."
The river moved beside them, steady and quiet. Then a current near the bank lifted, slow and rising, without Mukai visibly doing anything.
Amber peeked out from behind Moto. "Leave him alone."
Mukai looked at her, and the tides grew restless.
"Mukai."
Another figure came down the bank — less carefully, long blue hair, half-sliding on the grass. Sukai stopped between them and put a hand on his brother's shoulder.
"He saved me from Tadex," Sukai said quietly. "Whatever's going on, he deserves the chance to explain it properly. To Father."
Mukai held Moto's gaze for a long moment. The current settled back into the river.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Palace."
He went back up the bank. Sukai glanced at Moto once — something between apology and warning — then followed.
Moto stood there until they were gone. Amber looked up at him.
"You knew him before?"
"Yeah."
"Is he always like that?"
Moto watched the place where they'd been standing. "Pretty much."
2. The Royal House
Douglas's family didn't live at the palace. He'd always kept that separation — the job was the job, the family was something else. The estate sat behind walls on the quieter end of the capital, and on most evenings it was easy to forget there was a king inside it.
That evening it was harder.
Mukai was pacing the length of the living room when Douglas came in.
"I want to be in the meeting," Mukai said without turning. "Tomorrow. All of us should be."
"No." Douglas lowered himself into the armchair. "What I gave Moto was classified. It ends classified."
"He nearly killed Gwen—"
"Mukai."
Olivia came through the doorway. She didn't raise her voice or change her pace. Mukai went quiet, turned his head away, and left the room.
Douglas watched him go.
Later, the house was still. Olivia stood at the window with her arms folded, watching the garden. Douglas had been moving between the same three points of the study for the past hour — desk, window, door — without stopping at any of them.
"What is it," she said.
"Tired." He smiled at her over his shoulder. "I'll take some time soon. Spend it here, with everyone."
She looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the window. She didn't say anything else.
Douglas kept moving. The smile lasted until she stopped looking.
He'd heard Malachi's warning clearly enough. The Crimson Creed were coming for the ore. And they were coming for him. He hadn't told Olivia. He hadn't told anyone. He wasn't sure telling anyone would change what was coming, and a king who looked frightened was a king who'd already lost something he couldn't get back.
He went to the window on the other side of the room, where she couldn't see his face, and stood there in the dark.
3. The Tower of Chaos
The locals didn't say the name. They pointed.
Toward the tower at the centre of the capital — the one you could hear from three streets away, the one with the structural damage nobody had repaired because it kept happening. Paige looked at it. Nawick looked at it. A man nearby flirts with Paige, and Nawick throws black lightning through him without looking. The crowd thinned slightly after that.
An explosion went off in the building next door.
The wall buckled, the windows blew out, and Kangetsu walked out of the smoke brushing ash off his jacket sleeve. He didn't look back at the fire. He walked straight into the tower.
Paige and Nawick followed.
Inside: music from everywhere at once, heat, bodies, the kind of noise that swallowed individual sounds whole. Kangetsu crossed toward the bar. Behind it, Shupi was already watching him come. Without a word he turned to the cup of the man beside him, pressed something from under his nail into the rim, and slid it back. The man picked it up, took one sip, and went down. Nobody near him noticed.
Kangetsu crouched, took the cup from the man's hand, straightened up, and kept walking.
He brought it to Seven. Seven was in the back on a low sofa, surrounded, his face halfway through becoming someone else's entirely — the geometry of it shifting wrong, blood coming freely from both nostrils. Kangetsu held the cup out toward the nearest woman.
Seven's foot shot up and kicked it sideways.
The women looked at Seven's face. They left quickly.
"You're scaring them," Seven said, pressing his wrist to his nose.
"I was just trying to join in."
The cup was still moving when Flint appeared and it was in his hand. He drank what was left in one pull and set the cup down on the nearest surface.
"Don't waste food." He looked at both of them. "Lame."
"Who are you calling—" Seven ripped a watch off his wrist and threw it across the room.
It dropped into the wooden mug of the man lying across a collapsed stack of barrels near the far wall. Simba. Flat on his back, eyes half-open, one arm hanging off the side. The people still dancing stopped dancing. The ones near the exits started drifting toward them.
"Agg," Kangetsu said. "Look what you two did."
Simba raised the hand with the mug in it. Slowly. He sat up, looked at what was in it, and drove it straight down into the floor.
The section gave way. One full level dropped — stone, bodies, noise, dust. When it settled, Simba was sitting in the rubble looking around. The fall had done something to his eyes. They were clearer.
He looked up.
"Bottoms up."
Paige stood in the entrance. She looked up through the gap — there were matching holes in the floors above, going upward through the building at irregular intervals. She looked at Nawick.
"These people," Nawick said.
"Time to crash the party."
He rose slightly off the ground, hands sparking. Coulomb's Storm went out across the room in loud, crackling arcs of black lightning. The people who were left grew louder, moving toward the source.
Then Liam stepped out of the shadow at the far edge of the room.
He didn't make any noise doing it. His eyes moved across the crowd slowly — just moved across them — and where his gaze passed, pupils spread wide and dark, and people turned toward the exits without expression, without urgency, filing out like they'd remembered somewhere else to be. Within a minute, the room had emptied down to the six of them.
The music kept playing.
Paige looked around at the broken floors, the rubble, the holes above.
"Is this the Utopia you were preaching about in Pasi?"
Simba brushed dust off his shoulder. "Where chaos is the norm," he said, "chaos doesn't exist."
Paige looked at him for a moment. Then she said what she'd come to say — Malachi's terms, the timeline, what he wanted and what he was prepared to give.
Liam listened. "No."
"You can't just defy—" Nawick started.
Flint crossed the room and hit Nawick in the jaw. Nawick went down hard, black lightning jumping off the stone uselessly around him.
"We do whatever we want," Flint said.
He turned to Paige at the same speed and drove a punch.
A spectral shape materialized from the space beside her and stopped it cold.
Flint looked at it.
"Oh," he said. "This is new."
"Well." Paige lowered her arm, the shape dissolving. "Since you lot didn't want to be brothers, I've got this now."
Kangetsu was already moving. He scraped his knuckles along the wall on his way past, stepped over to Nawick, and crouched down. Seven glanced at Paige once — decided she wasn't interesting — and crossed to join him. The two of them got to work on Nawick with the unhurried coordination of people filling time.
Simba watched and laughed. Flint laughed too.
Paige looked around the room. At Kangetsu and Seven. At Simba. At Flint. At Liam. Five people who had taken a nation and were standing in a room they'd personally destroyed, and not one of them was looking at her like she was a threat. Two of them had already moved on entirely.
She stood there with that for a moment.
Then Liam spoke. "Nyika is destabilising," he said. "There's opportunity there."
"Think of the money," Flint said.
"Zen didn't even push back." Simba cracked his neck. "I want something real."Paige asked about Asahd. She kept her voice even.
"You don't have the right," Liam said.
It wasn't hostile. All five of them meant it and none of them had to look at each other to confirm it — the kind of agreement that doesn't need discussion because it was settled long before this conversation. They carried it the same way. Like a duty. Like something they'd each made a private decision about, separately, and arrived at the same place.
Paige stood there for a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she crossed to Nawick, got his working arm across her shoulders, and walked toward the door.
She stopped just inside the entrance.
Nawick's weight was on her. She looked at him on her shoulder, at the state of his arm, at the way he was holding himself.
"You see," she said quietly. "I told you."
She wasn't talking to him.
She walked out into the street. The music kept playing behind her.
4. The Palace Doors
Moto woke up in a good mood, which Naomi found suspicious and Tinashe found annoying.
He ate breakfast without explaining it, helped clear the table, and got ready without being told twice. When Tanaka went to find Najo, Moto was already by the door.
She came back without him.
"He's in a leather harness," she said.
"The training gear from the Lightning Village store," Moto said. "Ginimbi mentioned it once. Restricts the body, makes it harder to use the ability, forces you to push past what you'd normally hit."
Tanaka looked at the closed door down the hall. "He bought that last night?"
"After Dope and Ganjo left." Moto picked up his jacket. "Let him train."
The three of them walked to the palace. At the gate, the guard looked at Snake and Tanaka.
"Just him."
They looked at Moto. He nodded and went through alone.
The halls were the same as before — high ceilings, the kind of quiet that wasn't peaceful but official. He'd sat in the waiting room off this corridor the first time. He remembered being nervous then.
He wasn't nervous now. He'd known what he was going to say since the river.
The study doors opened. Douglas was behind the desk in the same chair, in the same room where he'd handed Moto a mission and a lie. He gestured at the chair across from him.
Moto sat.
"I'm glad you made it out." Douglas's voice was warm, considered. "Sango was dangerous. I sent Gwen to bring you home safely—"
"Why did you try to kill me."
The warmth left Douglas's face.
"Why," Moto said again, same volume, "did you send him to kill me."
Douglas leaned back. The diplomatic approach was gone and he didn't reach for it again. His voice dropped into something colder. "You're out of your depth. I know about Asher. I know about Sheu's father. You've been reckless, and whatever you've walked into out there—"
"Sheu and the others have whoever you're talking about flat on their backs right now." Moto said it the same way he'd said everything else. "They're fine."
Douglas's jaw shifted.
"And Yasmin caught us in Sango." Moto let that land before continuing. "She knows about the spies. She's declared war on Nyika."
The blood left Douglas's face. Not gradually — quickly, like something draining.
Moto watched him. The man across the desk looked, for a moment, like what he actually was — someone who'd been holding too many things and had just been told about one more. He looked small. He looked frightened.
Moto looked away. Not out of politeness. Because he didn't want Douglas to see that he'd noticed.
Douglas caught himself. Moto heard it — the breath, the adjustment, the posture returning. When Douglas spoke again his voice was back under control.
"Leave." He pointed at the door. "I'll send for you."
Moto stood, turned around, and walked out without acknowledging the command either way.
The doors closed behind him.
Douglas stayed in his chair for a moment, hands on the desk, looking at the surface of it. Then he got up.
He moved to the window. The capital spread out below him — the roads, the rooftops, the ordinary movement of people who didn't know what was coming yet. He'd been born in a city that looked nothing like this. He'd made it here by being smart enough and hard enough and willing to do things that other people weren't willing to do.
He'd done one of those things to Moto, and the boy had walked back in and sat down across from him and said why did you try to kill me like he was asking about the weather.
The Crimson Creed. Yasmin. Malachi behind all of it. Douglas ran the numbers, and they kept coming out wrong. He'd built alliances carefully and they were either useless or already compromised. He'd kept secrets to protect himself and Malachi had gotten to them anyway.
He pressed his forehead against the glass.
It was cold.
He hadn't been this cornered since before the crown. Since before any of it. He'd worked his whole life to make sure he'd never stand in a room with no exit again, and here he was, and the feeling was the same as it had been when he was a boy with no power over anything —
He pulled back from the window.
Not yet. He wasn't finished yet.
He went back to the desk and started thinking.
Outside the Throne Room
The princes stood in the quiet of the hallway. Mukai didn't move. He stood staring at the wood, his jaw tight.
"Mukai, come on," Sukai said, trying for a lightness that didn't reach his eyes. "He gave us gifts. He gave us a week at the beach. Let's just take the win."
"He's hiding something, Sukai."
Sukai winced. "Don't say that. He's the King. He's Dad. We have to trust that he knows the board better than we do."
"How can you?" Mukai turned, his eyes sharp. "He knew Gwen hated Moto. He's known since the trials—I saw the way Gwen looked at him, I saw him burning Moto before the matches even started. If Dad really wanted to help Moto, he could have sent Aritri. She's stronger than Gwen anyway."
Mukai hit the stone wall with the side of his fist—not hard, but enough to show the friction underneath.
"I know Moto. I respect the guy. And I know Gwen," Mukai hissed. "Sending Gwen to 'help' Moto wasn't a mistake. It was a choice. I'm tired of being kept in the dark, Sukai. I'm tired of being treated like a child in a house that's clearly drowning."
Sukai doesn't say anything.