Ren didn't use the stairs. Stairs were for people who accepted the limitations of their knees.

  Instead, he slipped through the dining room’s high clerestory window, his body a fluid arc of motion. Behind him, Kael moved like a silent drift of snow, pulling himself up with a strength that belied his lean frame. Elara followed last; she didn't need to see the ledge to find it. She simply tracked the rhythmic thrum of Ren’s heartbeat and the cold, crystalline vibration Kael left in his wake.

  "The wind is tastes like metal today," Elara whispered as they crouched on the steep pitch of the orphanage roof. "Bitter and sharp."

  "That’s the Federation's 'Bridge' magic, Elara," Ren said, his golden eyes already dilated to their maximum, scanning the town’s spiral streets. "It’s the smell of a world that’s been scrubbed too clean."

  They moved across the rooftops with the practiced ease of a pack of urban predators. Oakhaven’s Iron-Oak gables provided perfect cover, their dark, overlapping shingles blending with the trio's shadows. Below them, the town was waking up to a nightmare.

  The central square was no longer a place of trade. It had been transformed into a theater of authority.

  "There," Ren pointed.

  Parked directly in front of the silversmith’s shop was the Federation carriage Silas had described. It was a terrifying piece of engineering—sleek, black-lacquered, and devoid of horses. It hissed as it sat, venting steam from brass valves that glowed with a low, alchemical amber light.

  But it was the woman standing beside it who commanded the silence of the square.

  She was a pillar of slate-gray in a world of mossy greens. She wore a long coat with silver piping, and her eyes were shielded by a set of brass-rimmed "Truth-Lenses" that whirred and clicked as they adjusted to the light. Around her, the Town Guard—men who usually spent their days arguing over cabbage prices—stood as stiff as frozen laundry.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  "She’s tuning the scene," Ren murmured, leaning forward so far he was almost horizontal against the roof.

  Through his gilded vision, Ren didn't see just a street. He saw the "Static" the woman was manipulating. She held a silver tuning fork, and every time she struck it, a ripple of blue energy washed over the silversmith's door, revealing the "ghosts" of the previous night.

  "She’s tracing the soul-trail," Kael whispered, his hands beginning to frost. "That’s illegal in the North. To disturb the path of the dead is to invite the blizzard."

  "The Federation doesn't care about blizzards, Kael. They care about the Ledger," Ren countered. His eyes locked onto the silversmith's door. "Look at the frame. See that purple shimmer? That’s not her magic. That’s the leak."

  A faint, jagged trail of violet smoke—invisible to everyone but Ren and perhaps the Inquisitor's lenses—was leaking from the keyhole. It didn't behave like smoke; it moved like a snake, trying to burrow into the wood of the door to escape the light.

  "That’s a Warlock’s signature," Elara added, her brow furrowed in concentration. "I can hear it. It sounds like... teeth grinding on silk."

  Suddenly, the Inquisitor stopped. She didn't look at the door. She didn't look at the guards.

  She tilted her head, her Truth-Lenses whirring frantically as they swiveled toward the rooftop.

  "Oh, the irony," Ren grinned, his pulse quickening. "The hunter just found some more interesting tracks."

  "Ren, she’s looking right at us," Kael hissed, his voice dropping an octave in temperature.

  "Not at us," Ren corrected, standing up and balancing perfectly on the edge of a rain gutter, his golden eyes blazing with a defiant, playful light. "She’s looking at the only three people in this town who aren't afraid of her. It would be rude not to introduce ourselves, don't you think?"

  Before Kael or Elara could protest, Ren did something entirely unnecessary and characteristically dramatic. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small, copper coin he’d lifted from a merchant earlier, and flicked it.

  The coin didn't just fall. Ren timed the flick to the exact micro-second of the tuning fork’s next strike. The coin caught the blue ripple of the Inquisitor’s magic, glowing brilliantly as it spiraled down, landing perfectly at the woman's feet with a musical clink.

  The Inquisitor looked down at the coin, then slowly raised her gaze to the rooftop.

  "Observation," Ren shouted down, his voice ringing through the silent square with a sharp, ironic cheerfulness. "Your tuning is a bit flat on the high notes, Detective. But your choice in carriages? Impeccable."

  The game had officially begun.