# Chapter 12: The Unseelie Exchange
The city was a circuit board of cold light from the ninety-fifth floor of the Sanchez Biotech tower. Pres Sanchez stood before the panoramic window of her office, a glass of untouched, synthetically aged wine in her hand. Below, the arteries of Manhattan pulsed with yellow cabs and the silent, electric flow of the wealthy. It was a view of absolute control, a kingdom of glass and steel she had built over centuries. Tonight, it felt like a cage. Julian's insinuations at the gala, Lord Valerius's predatory gaze—they were tightening the screws. She needed information that was clean, untraceable, and utterly off the Concordat's books. She needed a ghost.
She turned from the window, her movements fluid and silent, and sat at the obsidian desk. The surface was cool against her fingertips. She didn't touch the keyboard or mouse. Instead, she lifted a slender, silver-chased case from a drawer and removed a contact lens, thin as a dragonfly's wing. With practiced ease, she fitted it over her right eye. The world flickered. For a moment, the geometric lines of her office dissolved into a cacophony of shimmering, overlapping data streams—stock tickers, weather patterns, encrypted communications. She blinked, focusing her will, and whispered a single, guttural word in a tongue that predated the skyscrapers outside. "Isolde."
The digital noise receded, coalescing into a new reality. Her office vanished, replaced by a space that defied conventional geometry. The Unseelie Exchange. It wasn't a place you could visit; it was a place you permitted yourself to see. The air hummed with a sound like a million whispered secrets, and the scent of ozone and night-blooming jasmine filled her senses. She stood on a walkway of what looked like solidified moonlight, suspended in an endless, starless void. All around her, stalls and alcoves shimmered into existence, their forms shifting like heat haze. A hulking, shadowy figure bartered with a being of pure light for a vial of what looked like liquid starlight. In another corner, a creature with too many joints was haggling over a string of coded memories. This was the market of the fae, where reality itself was a commodity, and every transaction was a gamble with your soul.
Pres ignored the chaos, her gaze fixed on a stall that appeared as a delicate, weeping willow made of spun silver. Its branches dripped with glowing data-pods. A figure sat beneath it, indistinct, cloaked in an aura of shifting pixels and fragmented light. Isolde. Pres approached, her virtual footsteps making no sound on the path of moonlight.
"CEO Sanchez," a voice purred, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a voice like honey and glass shards, sweet and dangerously sharp. "To what do I owe the honor? Your usual brokers at Goldman Sachs not giving you the edge you need anymore?"
"I require a file, Isolde," Pres said, her own voice a low, even monotone. She refused to be baited. "A deep-history search. The kind that leaves no trace."
The fae broker's avatar shifted, resolving for a moment into the likeness of a beautiful woman with sharp cheekbones and eyes the color of winter moss, before blurring back into abstraction. "Deep history is expensive. It's dusty. Full of splinters. Are you sure you want to wrap your pristine corporate hands around something so… primitive?"
Pres didn't flinch. She mentally accessed a secure, offshore crypto wallet, one that didn't exist on any Sanchez Biotech ledger. It was her personal rainy-day fund, built over decades of careful manipulation and insider trading. She pushed a single, encrypted token towards the willow tree. The token glowed, a miniature sun of pure financial energy. "Two million untraceable Sovereigns. For the file titled 'The Moe Lineage Extermination.'"
The whispering in the void seemed to quiet for a beat. The weeping willow's branches stopped dripping. Isolde's avatar sharpened, the moss-green eyes fixing on Pres with unnerving intensity. "The Moes," the broker mused, a flicker of something ancient and knowing in her tone. "Now that is a ghost story. A very old, very bloody ghost story. You're playing in deep waters, Sanchez. The Concordat doesn't like people digging in their graveyard."
Pres remained impassive, though the mention of the Concordat sent a jolt of ice through her veins. "The price, Isolde. Or I'll take my business to the goblin syndicates. Their records are messy, but they're cheap."
"Cheap," Isolde scoffed, but the avatar leaned forward, intrigued. "The goblins wouldn't have this. They only deal in tangible things. Gold, gadgets, garbage. This… this is a story. A truth. And truth is the most expensive currency of all." The glowing token Pres had offered floated towards the willow tree and was absorbed into its silver bark. Another, identical token materialized beside it. "The price is doubled. That kind of knowledge is a liability. I'm taking a risk just by having it."
Pres hesitated for less than a second. Four million Sovereigns was a significant blow to her liquid assets, a price that would be noticed if she weren't careful. But the alternative—walking into Valerius's office ignorant and vulnerable—was unthinkable. She pushed the second token. It vanished into the tree.
"Pleasure doing business with you," Isolde purred. One of the glowing data-pods detached from a weeping branch and floated towards Pres. It was warm to the touch, pulsing with a soft, internal light. "Be careful with that. Some ghosts are better left buried, CEO." The fae's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, laced with venomous invitation. "For a price, I can help you dig the grave."
Pres took the pod, her fingers closing around it. The offer hung in the air, a tantalizing and terrifying proposition. Isolde wasn't just a broker; she was a predator, and she'd just scented blood in the water. "I'll keep that in mind," Pres said, her voice devoid of emotion. She turned and walked away, the sounds of the chaotic marketplace fading behind her as she willed herself back to her office.
The obsidian desk reappeared. The panoramic window of New York City solidified. She blinked, and the AR contact lens deactivated, the world returning to its mundane, human-filtered state. The only evidence of her journey was the warm, glowing data-pod resting in her palm and the faint, lingering scent of jasmine that wasn't really there. Her heart, a muscle she hadn't felt truly race in decades, was beating a slow, heavy rhythm against her ribs.
She placed the pod in a custom-built decryption cradle built into her desk. A series of complex, shifting ciphers scrolled across a hidden monitor. The Concordat's own encryption was child's play compared to the fae's layered defenses. It took nearly ten minutes for the cradle's quantum processors to unravel the final lock. The pod dimmed, and a single, text-only file opened on her screen.
The title was stark: *Project Chimera: The Moe Lineage Extermination*.
She began to read. The document was a meticulous, horrifying record spanning millennia. It started in the late Roman Empire, described in clinical, detached terms. *Subject: Alchemist of Antium. Anomaly: Reality manipulation at a localized level. Threat Assessment: Existential. Action: Termination via sanctioned legion. Asset loss: 78%. Outcome: Successful.* The entries continued, a litany of death disguised as a corporate project. The Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment. The names changed, the methods evolved from swords and fire to poison and political maneuvering, but the goal remained the same. Eradication. The Concordat, or its precursor, had been hunting Relly's family since the dawn of recorded history.
Her eyes scanned the pages, her face a mask of stone. She saw references to the "First Alchemist," a figure of mythic power who had apparently founded the lineage. She saw detailed analyses of their abilities—transmutation of matter, localized temporal distortion, even rudimentary manipulation of life forces. And she saw the Concordat's growing obsession, their fear of a power they could not control or assimilate. This wasn't just about upholding the Masquerade. This was about genocide. A systematic, calculated purge of a rival bloodline that posed a fundamental threat to their pure-blood ideology.
She scrolled past centuries of slaughter, her mind processing the cold, hard data. This was the truth Julian was sniffing around. This was the secret that could get her not just censured, but erased. She reached the end of the historical log. The entries stopped in the late 19th century. *Last confirmed sighting of a Moe descendant in Paris. Action: Infiltration and elimination. Outcome: Asset lost. Target presumed neutralized.* But there was one final entry, added much more recently. It wasn't a log. It was a list.
A list of names.
Her eyes scanned down the roster of the dead, the extinguished. And then she found it. The last name on the list.
*Relly Moe.*
Next to his name was a status update, typed in stark red letters. *Status: Unknown - Last of Line.*
The air in her pristine, silent office suddenly felt thick, heavy, and dangerous. The weight of the name settled on her. It wasn't just a name anymore. It was a designation. A target. A prize. The last of his kind. The culmination of a millennia-long crusade. And he was mixing drinks in a dive bar in the Lower East Side, completely unaware of the cosmic bullseye painted on his back. She had thought she was managing an asset, a curious anomaly. Now she knew she was standing guard over the last ember of a hunted species, with the entire Concordat, led by a god-complexed Regent and a jealous rival, poised to stamp it out forever.