The city had stopped breathing.
Two minutes since Law's word had murdered Ka'thar's eyes.
The silence was so complete that every heartbeat felt like a gunshot.
Law stood in the middle of the alley, palm still bleeding white flowers.
Each petal opened and closed like tiny mouths trying to speak.
Nysera's wolf was whining, high and broken.
Zero's chains hung limp, links dripping black rust that hissed when it touched the ground.
Laura stared at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else.
Liora was the first to hear it.
A child's voice.
Coming from the white flower closest to Law's boot.
"Thank you," the flower whispered.
Then every corpse in Ka'thar stood up.
Tens of thousands at once.
Tavren's shredded body rose first, bones clicking back into place wrong.
His mouth opened. White petals poured out.
They all opened their mouths.
White petals poured out.
An army of the dead, eyes empty, mouths full of flowers.
They began to walk.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Perfectly silent.
Perfectly together.
Toward Law.
Laura tried to split.
Only one duplicate appeared.
Its eyes were full of flowers.
It smiled with Laura's mouth and spoke with Liora's voice.
"You closed the city's eyes," the wrong duplicate said.
"Now open ours."
Real Laura stumbled back, knives clattering to the stone.
Liora's resonance shattered like glass under a hammer.
Silver light bled from her pupils.
Nysera's wolf lunged at the nearest corpse; claws passed straight through.
The corpse didn't even blink.
Zero opened a void pocket.
The void closed itself.
For the first time in his life, the darkness was afraid.
The dead reached Law.
Thousands of hands, cold and gentle, reached for his bleeding palm.
They didn't want to hurt him.
They wanted to thank him.
One by one, they touched the white flowers growing from his blood.
And one by one, they began to cry.
Real tears.
Human tears.
A little girl, no older than six, corpse-pale, flowers spilling from her lips, took Law's hand.
Her voice was the sound of every child the city had ever eaten.
"You killed the watcher," she said.
"But you woke the watched."
She pressed something into Law's bleeding palm.
A shard.
The last shard in Ka'thar.
It was warm.
It had a pulse.
Law looked down at it.
And understood.
He hadn't killed the city.
He had only blinded it.
The dead were what it had been watching all along.
And now they were free.
Free to remember.
Free to speak.
Free to ask the only question that mattered.
The little girl looked up at him with empty flower-eyes.
"Will you watch us now?" she asked.
Every corpse in the city asked it with her.
Ten thousand voices.
One question.
Law closed his fist around the warm, pulsing shard.
The white flowers at his feet turned black.
He looked at the army of the grateful dead.
Then at the Four who were no longer sure where their own skin ended.
And answered.
"No," he said.
The dead smiled.
All at once.
Then they began to fall apart.
Not violently.
Gently.
Like snow melting in spring.
Bodies crumbled into black petals that the wind finally remembered how to carry.
Tavren's corpse was last.
He looked almost relieved.
His final words were soft.
Almost proud.
"Thank you, anchor."
Then he was gone.
Only the little girl remained.
She reached up and touched Law's cheek with fingers made of flowers.
"The door is open now," she whispered.
"You can leave."
She stepped back.
And the alley behind her was no longer an alley.
It was a door.
A simple wooden door standing in the middle of nothing.
The little girl smiled one last time.
"Some doors," she said,
"are only locked from the inside."
Then she crumbled into black petals and was gone.
The door stayed.
Law stared at it.
The shard in his hand pulsed once.
Like a heartbeat that wasn't his.
He looked at the Four.
They looked back.
No one moved.
Because they all understood the same thing at the same moment.
The city hadn't been keeping them in.
It had been keeping something else out.
And Law had just opened the door.