Year 0 + 11 days
(They stopped using calendars after the sun froze at dawn.)
Beijing, 39.9042° N, 116.4074° E, had been the capital of empires for eight centuries.
At 09:17 local time, it simply stopped.
No explosion.
No light show.
Just a soft, almost courteous click, like a librarian closing the final book in the world.
Forty-three million people, twenty-one thousand square kilometres of concrete, steel, and memory, unhooked from causality.
Where the city had stood, there was now a circular plateau of perfectly smooth obsidian glass, 180 km across, reflecting a sky that still refused to move. The edges were so precise they looked machined by something that had never heard of mercy.
In Shanghai, on the frozen rooftop, Lin Kexin watched the satellite feed die.
Hassan's hand rested lightly on her shoulder. His darkness had become the only weather left.
"First stroke," he said quietly. "They erased the city to prove they can. Next will be Shanghai. Then New York. Then every cradle of your species until you kneel."
Lin Kexin's voice was steady, but her knuckles were white around the railing.
"They think I still need a planet."
She turned to him.
"Show me what a god does when he stops playing defence."
Hassan's eyes ignited, twin collapsing galaxies.
"Gladly."
He lifted his hand.
The darkness that had swallowed Shanghai suddenly reversed, pouring upward in a perfect spear of absolute void. It punched through the stratosphere, through the exosphere, through every Custodian seal braided around the planet like burning thread.
Twenty-six thousand kilometres above the North Pole, the spear met the first Custodian orbital archive, a structure the size of a small moon, built from folded time and bureaucratic horror.
The archive lasted 0.0003 seconds.
When the spear withdrew, there was only a ring of white-hot vapour and a single line of text drifting in vacuum, visible to any telescope still working:
YOUR MOVE
On the Antarctic ice shelf, the Custodians' primary stronghold (a cathedral built inside a glacier that predated oxygen) convulsed. Every archivist felt the same message arrive simultaneously, branded directly onto the concept of duty inside their souls:
The girl no longer has a system.
She has a god.
Recalculate.
Lin Kexin exhaled, breath frosting in air that had forgotten temperature.
"How many did we just kill?" she asked.
"None," Hassan answered. "They evacuated the moment I moved. They're old. They don't die easily. They just… relocate."
He turned her to face him fully.
"But they felt fear for the first time since the Cambrian extinction. That's new."
She looked past him, at the obsidian scar where Beijing had been.
"Then we keep teaching."
She stepped into his arms.
"Take me to the place they're hiding now. I want to look them in the eyes when I tell them the price went up."
Hassan smiled, slow, terrible, beautiful.
"Hold tight."
The rooftop vanished.
They reappeared inside a corridor that should not fit inside three-dimensional space. Walls of living papyrus scrolled with every law ever written to keep reality polite. The air tasted of ink and ozone.
Fifty metres ahead, seven Deputy Archivists waited in perfect silence, silver tie clips gleaming like fangs.
Wei-7 stood at the centre.
He did not bow this time.
"Welcome to the Stacks," he said. "You've just committed an act of war against the concept of order itself."
Lin Kexin walked forward until she stood an arm's length away.
"Good," she said. "Because order just murdered forty-three million of my people to make a point."
She leaned in until their foreheads almost touched.
"Here's my counter-point."
She kissed Hassan.
Not soft. Not gentle.
A kiss like the first detonation of the universe.
The darkness inside him answered.
Every law written on the living papyrus walls began to burn, not with fire, but with the memory of fire. The corridor screamed in dead languages.
Wei-7 took one involuntary step back.
Lin Kexin broke the kiss and smiled with teeth that had learned how to bite gods.
"Tell your bosses the next city you erase, I erase a millennium. The one after that, I erase the concept of surrender. We can keep going until one of us runs out of history."
She turned to leave, Hassan's darkness already folding around them like wings.
At the threshold she paused.
"Oh, and Deputy Archivist Wei-7?"
He looked at her, ancient eyes finally showing something like dread.
"You have twenty-four hours to return Beijing. Every building. Every dog. Every grandmother buying dumplings at 6:03 a.m. on a Tuesday. All of them. Or I start with the Library of Alexandria. And I won't stop until there's nothing left to read."
The corridor collapsed behind them into perfect, absolute dark.
End of Chapter 8