The silence after my challenge stretches. Heavy. Stifling. Even the lanterns burn quieter, like the room itself is bracing.

  Then the door opens.

  Isla steps through.

  Her livery is singed along one shoulder, the fabric dark with soot. Ash clings to the ends of her hair. She moves with the same grace she always does, like a knife wrapped in silk, but the smoke follows her like a banner. She crosses to the planning table, sets something down without ceremony.

  A folded strip of cloth. Red with black edging.

  I know it instantly.

  The Riverbend signal sash.

  “Confirmed structure collapse at Foundry Walk,” she says, her voice clear, cutting through the hush like steel. “Two watch squads are trapped behind the southern break line. The fire has jumped the canal.”

  Garin stiffens. His knuckles go white where they grip the table’s edge.

  Isla continues, merciless. “A fuel cart exploded near the clocktower square. Fire is spreading into the warehouse tier. No coordinated evacuation. Civilians are clogging the west road. Panic’s already started.”

  A long beat. Then Garin murmurs, as if the words might change something.

  “Gods help us.”

  “No,” I say. My voice is calm. Final. “We don’t have the hour I thought we did.”

  From my coat, I draw the map they never asked for—the one I wasn’t meant to show yet. It’s rolled tight, tied with red thread, and when I unroll it across their chaos, it cuts the noise like a sword. Not chalk smears. Not guesses. Lines. Layers. Truth. Every sloping rooftop. Every drainage slope. Every hidden path beneath Riverbend's crumbling streets.

  A year of work. A lifetime of knowledge. And no time left for anyone to argue with it.

  I press my finger to the southeast corner.

  “Open the third canal sluice. Now.”

  I don’t bother with rank. I don't ask. I pick a captain—one of the men standing mute beside Garin—and point directly at him.

  “It’ll flood Canal Street and damage a dozen homes, but it will drown the fireline before it hits the western depot. Move.”

  He hesitates.

  Looks to Garin. Then back at me.

  The wrong choice.

  “Captain,” I say, my voice like ice. “Do you believe the Watchmaster outranks me? Or are you seeking to challenge the Archduke’s bloodline in the middle of a crisis?”

  He opens his mouth.

  I flick two fingers.

  A blur—

  A wet sound, like leather tearing.

  The captain shudders and drops, a knife buried between his eyes.

  The copper bite of blood, sharp in the air.

  His helmet hits the floor with a hollow clang.

  No one speaks.

  I don’t look at the others. I turn to the next captain instead.

  “Send runners through the forge-row alleys. Use the smiths and kiln crews. They know the pathways better than your patrols do.”

  He’s gone before I finish the sentence, good. I’ll have Isla verify he didn’t just run. Later.

  I tap the west quadrant.

  “Deploy the reserve squads. Form a cordon at the west road. Civilians are clogging it in panic—do not use force. Noise and shields only. Drive them north. Commons Market is open space. It can hold them.”

  The third captain gives a sharp nod and vanishes down the stairwell at a sprint.

  Only one officer remains.

  I look up. “I need five fast horses.”

  I glance at Isla.

  A slight shake of her head.

  “Four,” I correct. “Two for my escort. One for the Watch Master. One for me.”

  “At once, Your Grace,” the man says, already turning.

  I grit my teeth. That title belongs to Sven, but now isn’t the moment to argue. And Sven is not here.

  I meet Isla’s eyes. She reads my intent before I say it.

  “I’ll take the sluice,” she says, already moving.

  She vanishes like smoke through the doorway.

  For a moment, the planning room holds still again. A space between heartbeats. The table before me smells of wax and blood.

  Garin exhales. Ragged. His gaze flicks to the slumped body, then to the door, where his captains had scattered like kicked embers.

  The lines around his eyes are deeper now. To his credit, it only takes a moment to compose himself before he strides past me.

  The heavy door slams open behind me.

  Watch Master Garin storms out into the hallway, already barking orders over his shoulder. The chaos inside the watch house begins to coalesce, officers snapping to motion like flint striking dry kindling. I follow him, let him command his men in the way they know.

  “Get that gods-damned body out of my planning room!” Garin growls. “And someone clean up the blood before it sets into the stone.”

  A lieutenant jogs past with a grim nod, already peeling off gloves.

  Garin doesn’t slow. “Dispatch runners. Westroad, Commons, Forgewell. Confirm canal assignments. I want every fire crew from Foundry Lane to the third canal sluice within ten minutes or I swear by the old gods I’ll haul them there myself.”

  Another officer stumbles to keep pace beside him.

  “And send someone to drag the damn engineers out of their holes,” Garin snaps. “If the third canal lever is rusted through and we lose control of the floodgate, we’ll be evacuating corpses by morning.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The Watchhouse, moments ago a knot of shouting and paper-swapping confusion, begins to hum. Orders roll down the stairwell like thunder. Sergeants take them without question, passing commands with the shorthand clarity of people who live by urgency. Boots hammer the floors. Doors swing open. Lanterns flare. The watchhouse begins to move like a living thing.

  They know the signs now.

  This isn’t another drill. This is a fireline command. And the city’s not going to wait.

  We step into the open courtyard. Dusk has deepened into gold-shot blue, lanterns flickering to life along the watchhouse walls.

  Four horses wait.

  Snorting. Prancing. Eyes wide with the tension in the air.

  Three wear light tack for fast riding. The fourth, taller than the others, is saddled for a grown man—broad-leathered, high-backed, and far too large for me.

  Garin hesitates as he sees it.

  His mouth works once before he speaks.

  “My lord, we didn’t have a saddle suited for your size—”

  I don’t wait.

  I step to the tall horse. Grip the dangling billet with one hand. Draw my knife with the other.

  And slash the girth strap.

  The saddle slips free. I catch the stirrup as it falls to the far side and let the weight haul me upward, momentum swinging me clean over the horse’s spine.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  My boots land against bare flank. My hands catch the reins. The horse whinnies once, uncertain, but settles under the pressure of my knees and the calm weight of my grip.

  I look down at them all. Garin. My two guards. The courtyard staff staring from the threshold.

  “Keep up,” I say.

  And kick off.

  I haul back on the reins, wheeling the horse in place, and drop into a gallop.

  The gate to the Watchhouse courtyard crashes open as I ride out, hooves sparking off stone. My guards fall in behind me, one to each side, Garin pounding after us with grim determination. The horses know the urgency. Their muscles bunch and stretch like coiled ropes, their breath sharp in the cooling night. We cut through the third ring’s narrow arteries, scattering vendors closing up for the evening and children too young to fear alarms.

  The city rolls past in shades of gold and smoke. Gaslights flicker against soot-darkened windows. From here, high on the horse, able to see above the street crowds, Falkensgrave feels like a machine on the verge of coughing to life or choking on its own gears.

  I’ve seen this before.

  Not here. Not on stone streets or under bell towers. But in steel corridors and artificial air.

  The fire started in the service ducts on Deck Nine.

  I remember the shimmer of stars beyond the curved viewpanes, the sense of nothingness pressing just beyond reinforced steel. The Meridian Crown had been a floating palace—ten thousand passengers, every corridor trimmed in soft-glow lighting, gardens under artificial suns, spas with simulated waves and coral imported from three moons. The upper decks smelled like perfume and candied air.

  Deck Nine smelled like melting wire.

  We’d caught the fire late—infrared lagged behind, a budget compromise made three fiscal quarters ago by someone who thought less sensitive sensors meant less false alarms. It also meant real ones burned longer.

  And everything on a ship burns wrong.

  Plastic tubing. Poly-fiber carpet. Paint layers under the safety coating. One breath of that smoke and your lungs didn’t cough—they quit.

  I remember the way the hall lights pulsed as the system rerouted power. The emergency team scrambled through the access hatches—low, cramped, never designed for anything but engineers and spiders.

  I was fourteen in that life. Trained as a technician’s shadow, stationed with the fire suppression crew because I’d scored high in pressure system diagnostics. I remember my supervisor’s voice in my ear, a woman named Kaye who never smiled and never panicked.

  “If it hits oxygen storage, we don’t get a second chance. We lose containment. We lose the whole deck. That means hull breach. That means they get to scream for three seconds before the cold takes them.”

  And we almost lost it. We were so close.

  It wasn’t the fire that nearly killed us.

  It was the way the hallways narrowed to nothing. The stairwells where supply carts were stacked to keep them out of the way of the “scenic routes.” The sealed maintenance door that hadn’t been checked since the maiden voyage. Locked. Rusted. Jammed shut.

  Kaye’s voice again, but not in my ear—inside my head, even now.

  “It’s never the fire. It’s the choices people made years before that decide if anyone lives.”

  We cut the hinges. Burned through with thermite. Saved the deck. Saved the ship.

  Four crew members died behind that door.

  Passengers never knew.

  The city flashes back into focus. The memory slips into place like a puzzle piece I've carried too long.

  Falkensgrave is no different.

  Riverbend is no different.

  A fire doesn’t just burn wood. It burns decisions. It devours neglect. And it always finds the place no one thought to check.

  Ahead, the skyline of the fourth ring dips low. The watchtower near the canal looms like a crooked tooth against the growing haze. Smoke curls along the rooftops—too low, too heavy.

  That means it’s close.

  I angle my horse toward the side street, cutting around a stalled carriage and across the edge of a tramline. Sparks fly from the hooves as I push the pace.

  I hear shouting now. Screams.

  Garin pulls alongside me, face like carved granite. “South break line’s collapsed, just like she said,” he growls. “If the wind turns, we’ll lose the whole damn tier.”

  I nod. “Not if we bleed the canal.”

  “Assuming we can still get to the lever.”

  We both know what that means.

  We need Isla to make it in time.

  A glimmer on the wind; heat, sharp and oily. The smell of burning lacquer and resin. It cuts into my nose and clings to my tongue.

  We’re almost there.

  The first flickers of flame are visible now between the buildings. Not just orange, but angry red. Not a fire held in a hearth. A fire fed by chemicals and dry timbers.

  We round the final turn.

  We break from the tight alley into Riverbend proper.

  Chaos blooms in every direction.

  Smoke drapes the sky in a choking veil, low and thick, bleeding gold from the sun’s last light. The clocktower square is a mess of bodies and barricades. Shouting. Clattering buckets. Civilians pressing against watchmen with wild eyes and ash-streaked faces. Crates overturned in the street. One cart burning in a slow, guttering heap, flames licking at spilled cloth and snapped axle wood.

  I rein in hard just before the main blockade. My horse’s hooves skid on damp cobble, and she stamps twice before settling, steam rising off her shoulders.

  Garin and my guards pull up beside me. None of us speak yet.

  A lieutenant in a soot-darkened tabard rushes forward. His voice is ragged from shouting. “We’re trying to clear the west corridor, but the crowd keeps folding back into itself. Too many people, not enough hands—”

  “Where’s your lead officer?” I cut in.

  “Captain Varlen is inside the fire zone, last seen headed toward the south tier with half a squad.”

  So—cut off. Or worse.

  I glance toward the canal. A glow pulses between rooftops where flame has taken hold in full. I don’t see Isla, but I trust her to be where she said she would.

  “I need a clear path to the Foundry Walk break,” I say.

  The lieutenant hesitates. “We haven’t secured—”

  I raise a hand. “Then do it now. Move everyone out of the western avenue. Push them north.”

  He nods once, startled, and turns, bellowing to his men. The watch springs to life with a little more urgency this time—orders carried by practiced voices, arms raised to guide people out, no longer pleading but commanding.

  Garin dismounts beside me and scans the street. His beard is streaked with soot already. “I’ll take command of evacuation staging,” he says. “There’s an old dry goods store north of the square. We can clear the floor and start triage there.”

  “Good,” I say, then toss a glance toward the rows oaf laborers and apprentices forming a shaky bucket line. “Start recruiting from the forge crews too. Give them armbands, assign them by row.”

  Garin snorts, just once. “Using civvies like soldiers now, are we?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m using people who know what the hell they’re doing with fire.”

  He doesn’t argue. He turns and begins barking orders down the line.

  I swing a leg over the horse and drop to the ground. Her sides are heaving and sweat slicked, but she doesn’t panic at the fire or noise. I might ask the watch if I can keep her. My guards dismount as well, one taking the reins of the three horses. I take my first real step into the square, boots landing solid on cracked stone.

  A boy darts past me with a half-empty water bucket. A woman—her apron soaked through—shoves past in the opposite direction, dragging a wide-eyed child by the hand. The air is thick with smoke and the sound of splintering beams.

  I make for the central street. Already, the fire has reached one of the warehouse walls. It glows from within, cracks in the brickwork pulsing like veins of magma.

  I need to see the line. I need—

  A flicker of motion above.

  Isla.

  She drops from a rooftop like a shadow falling. Lands in a crouch beside me, silent despite the hard stone. A streak of soot across her face. A cut drying under her right eye.

  “I opened the sluice,” she says. “Water’s flowing, but the southern intake is half-blocked. It’s slowing the release.”

  “Will it hold?”

  Her eyes flick toward the firelight. Then back to me.

  “If the canal bursts, it floods half the district.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “The depot goes. And maybe the clocktower.”

  I nod once. That’s enough.

  “Come with me. We push the break line west. Once the flames hit the water wall, we need to corral them south. If we can hold that edge, we stop the sweep.”

  Isla says nothing, just follows, step for step.

  Together, we push into the burning street.

  We return just before the third bell of the morning.

  The fire isn’t out. Not entirely. But it no longer spreads with teeth bared and hunger in its breath. The worst of it has been drowned, starved, or choked into embers. The depot still smolders, the south tier glows faintly in ruin, and Riverbend will wear its scars for months—but the city stands.

  And that is enough.

  The watchhouse looms ahead, a silhouette against the thinning haze. The wide yard in front is lit by a dozen lanterns strung high between iron hooks, casting long shadows across the packed dirt and trampled cobbles. Movement stirs within.

  Valcroft stands near the yard gate, arms folded, a detachment of estate guards behind him. Their armor is worn but clean, their posture crisp despite the hour. They do not fidget. They do not speak. But I see it in the way they stand, not ceremonial. Not for show.

  They were ready to ride into fire.

  I slide off the horse before it stops moving entirely. My legs nearly fold beneath me—hours of strain finally calling in their due—but I catch myself. Barely.

  Valcroft strides forward as I steady. His eyes flick once over me: the soot, the wear, the deep lines of fatigue carved beneath my eyes. Then his gaze lifts and he gives a short nod, respectful. Not protective. Not indulgent.

  Respect.

  “Report reached the estate around second bell,” he says. “Guards said you’d ridden into the fire zone. I made the decision to follow with men. We posted here at the Watch House, provided aid where we could. Didn’t want to charge in blind.”

  “Good,” I say, my voice dry. “You’d have clogged the streets if you had.”

  He gives a ghost of a smile. “That was my thinking.”

  Another figure emerges from the watchhouse door.

  Marla.

  She carries a bundle of cloth under one arm and a tin box in the other, and even from across the yard, I can smell the bread. Warm. Slightly sweet. A soldier’s breakfast for a boy who stopped being one today.

  She marches straight up to me and thrusts the cloth into my hands before I can speak. “Change. You smell like ash and hubris.”

  I want to laugh.

  But I don’t.

  I think if I start, I won’t stop.

  Then the tin box is placed into my arms, and a flask follows—water, not wine, but I take it gratefully.

  “No one at the estate’s sleeping,” she mutters. “You’ll need to speak to the staff in the morning. Word’s out already. About the fire. About what you did.”

  I nod. “Thank you, Marla.”

  “You look awful.”

  “I feel worse.”

  She clicks her tongue but doesn’t argue.

  Inside the watchhouse, the chaos has thinned to order. Lanterns glow low. Boots still shuffle. Ink still stains fingers. But there’s no shouting now. No panic.

  Only purpose.

  Garin leans against the map table as I enter, his jacket shed, his sleeves rolled, and a strange calm in his bearing. The table before him is cleaner than before. The chaos of counters and chalk marks has been cleared, replaced by a single map—my map.

  And it’s ringed with small brass pins.

  He looks up as I approach. We say nothing for a moment.

  Then he straightens and salutes. Not deep. But real.

  “You saved the district tonight,” he says. “You saved a lot more than that.”

  “I did what needed doing.”

  “You ever think of joining the Watch, young lord?”

  I glance up at him.

  “If being the Archduke doesn’t work out, I will consider it.” A smile flickers at the edge of my mouth.

  He chuckles once, deep in his chest. “Aye.”

  He nods to one of his men, then turns back to me. Around the room, heads tilt. A few nods. A captain lifts his cup. Even the youngest sergeant I’d seen earlier, the one who’d flinched at Isla’s knife, gives a crooked half-smile.

  I set the tin down on the edge of the table, take a sip from the flask, and let my eyes rest on the map one last time.

  The fire map.

  The one they ignored.

  Until they couldn’t.

  Garin’s voice is softer now. “You’ll be needing a clerk. Someone to help manage the flow of reports. Process what comes in. I have a boy here—sixteen. Smart. Quiet. Been apprenticing in dispatch.”

  “Name?”

  “Yaerith.”

  “Send him to the Citadel.” I glance at the window, where the sky is just beginning to pale.

  “Two days from now. Let the Watch rest before they return to full duty. They’ve earned that much before the city calls on them again.”

  Garin nods. “And if you ever call me slow to act again, I’ll take it personally.”

  “If you ever make me act again,” I say, “I’ll take it worse.”

  He chuckles, low and rough, and we let the silence settle.

  Outside, the night is beginning to turn. A breeze stirs from the river—cool, damp, clean.

  It carries the scent of smoke.

  But beneath it, something else.

  Respect.