Chapter 397: So He Wandered
"Funny you should ask."
The Heart spread out in front of them. The main floor was a vast open space, three levels deep, bridges connecting everything, lined on every side with workshops, laboratories and storage bays. Engineers in pale suits moved between stations. Sparks flew from a welding bay on the lower level. A tracked machine the size of a small car rolled past on its way to somewhere important. The whole space hummed — not loud, but constant, the deep mechanical rhythm of a complex that ran twenty-four hours a day and would keep running long after the night came and most people went home.
Raizen breathed it in. He’d missed this too.
They walked. Alteea led, sunglasses still on, her heels clicking on the metal floor. Engineers nodded as she passed. She nodded back without breaking stride.
"So," she said, "to answer your question."
Raizen looked at her.
"The Council. Bunch of old, dusty aristocrats. Old families, old money, opinions that should’ve been retired a generation ago. About seventy or eighty of them, give or take, depending on who’s currently inheriting what from whom." She waved a hand vaguely. "When Solomon’s gone, they’re officially in charge."
"And unofficially?"
"Unofficially, I don’t really care about an antique council. So when Solomon’s gone, I’m in charge." She glanced at him over her shoulder, mouth quirking. "They handle the boring paperwork, I handle everything else. Works out fine for everyone, mostly."
"Mostly?"
"There’s always one or two who try to assert themselves. They get over it, in the end." She winked, and her tone made it clear how, exactly, they got over it. They have no choice. "Right now, with Solomon traveling, things are quieter than usual. The Council’s been agreeable. Probably because they know I have actual things to do, and they don’t."
They reached a junction. The Heart’s main corridor branched here, with one path leading toward the workshop bays and another rising in a wide curve toward a massive elevator at the chamber’s far end. The elevator was bigger than the others, its frame ornate with metalwork that didn’t match the Heart’s industrial aesthetic — a piece of architecture that belonged to a different building in another style Raizen has never seen before. He never asked questions about it either.
"We’re going to the Spire elevator" Alteea said. "I have to make an appearance, sign some things, pretend to listen for an hour. Standard."
She turned to Saffi.
"And you," she said, reaching out and pinching Saffi’s cheek between her thumb and forefinger, "look half-dead."
"Alteea —"
"Half. Dead. Did you sleep at all on that flight, or did you just sit there?"
"I slept... Enough."
"You slept with your eyes open, huh? I watched you from the cockpit." Alteea released the cheek and patted it gently. "Go up to my room. Eat something. Take a long shower. Sleep for ten hours minimum. That’s an order from Command, so don’t argue."
Saffi opened her mouth to argue. Caught Alteea’s expression. Closed her mouth.
"Fine."
"Good."
Alteea’s gaze slid to Raizen.
"You’re free. From the Academy, too - spring break ends in five days. Go do whatever teenagers do when nobody’s supervising them. Just don’t burn down anything I wouldn’t love to miss."
"Got it. I’ll make sure to invite you, then."
"Mm-hm." She lowered her sunglasses, the dark lenses settling back over her eyes. "I’ll find you both later. We have things to discuss."
She headed for the Council Spire elevator without another word, her heels clicking, the engineers parting around her without needing to be asked.
Raizen watched her go for a moment. Then he turned to Saffi.
She was rubbing her cheek.
"She does that to everyone, right?" he asked.
"Just me." Saffi sighed. "I’ve stopped trying to make it stop."
He smiled. It came out a half-second slower than it should have, the muscles taking longer than usual to find the shape. He pushed past it. "Get some rest."
"You too."
"I will try."
Saffi gave him a small wave, turned aroud, and walked toward the elevator.
Raizen watched her until she disappeared around a corner.
Then he stood there. Hands in his pockets. The Heart humming around him, engineers moving past, the deep mechanical rhythm filling the space he should have been filling with thought.
He didn’t know what to do with himself.
✦ ✦ ✦
So he wandered.
His feet picked random directions and he followed them, letting the Heart’s geography pull him through corridors and across galleries and past workshop bays whose purposes he half-remembered from previous visits. Engineers nodded at him. He nodded back. Some recognized him as a Royal Scholar (or as the kid with the prototype, always slamming himself into walls) and gave him space; others didn’t notice him at all.
He passed a bay where a team was assembling something large and angular under a tarp. He passed a gallery overlooking a test chamber where someone was running Eon discharge experiments, the air inside flickering with controlled bursts of pearlescent green light. He passed a corridor lined with framed photographs of past projects — vehicles, weapons, infrastructure components, all stamped with completion dates and the signatures of the engineers responsible.
His feet eventually carried him to his own lab.
The door recognized his fingerprint and opened. Inside, everything was exactly as he’d left it weeks ago - tools laid out on the workbench, schematics pinned to the wall, the half-finished prototype sitting in its mounting cradle in the center of the room.
Raizen stopped in the doorway.
The prototype was currently a curved length of special alloy, two times bigger than his torso (he swore he was going to fix that), a handle assembly that didn’t quite fit yet, and a retractable wire mechanism he’d been meaning to redesign for the past month before everything in his life had been redesigned for him instead.
He walked over, picked up a tool, let it down. Picked up the prototype itself, weighed it on his shoulders, ran his thumb along the dark metal.
The work felt distant. He could remember being excited about it - could remember the late nights, the calculations, the moments where a problem had clicked into a solution and he’d grinned at his empty workbench like a person who’d just discovered something. He remembered the hype from the cafe, with Eiden, the way he explained exactly what Raizen had been fighting with for days. He could remember all of that. He just couldn’t quite reach the feeling.
He set the prototype back in its cradle. Stood there a moment longer, then left.
The lab door closed behind him with a quiet hiss.
He took an elevator down.
Lower than he usually went. Lower than he’d ever been, actually. The Heart had tons of levels he’d never visited - sub-basements, archive floors, mechanical levels that handled the building’s air and water and electricity distribution systems. None of it was forbidden, exactly. It just wasn’t where the work happened, so most people never bothered.
The elevator dropped through floors marked with numbers that got smaller and then started getting prefixed with letters. B3, G2, T4. Then M1, M6 — mechanical levels. Then A.
He pressed A.
The doors opened on a long, dim corridor. The lighting was lower here, the air cooler, the hum of the building’s machinery quieter. The walls were lined with doors, each one labeled with a small plaque. Office numbers. Storage designations. The occasional faded nameplate where someone had once worked and either retired or moved on.
Raizen walked.
He didn’t have a destination. He just walked, slowly, his boots making soft sounds on the floor, the corridor stretching out ahead of him. He passed door after door. Some had nameplates. Most didn’t. Behind the unlabeled ones could have been anything — old equipment, sealed records, rooms that maybe hadn’t been opened in years.
The corridor was empty. Whatever happened down here didn’t happen during spring break, or didn’t happen often. The silence was the kind that built up in unused spaces, layered, almost thick.
His chest tightened.
Just for a moment. A faint pressure behind his sternum, a tightness that came and went so quickly he almost dismissed it as imagination. He rubbed the spot absently. Kept walking.
A faint ringing in his left ear. Also brief. Also gone.
He frowned. It had happened once or twice in the last few days. He’d attributed it to fatigue. There was nothing else it could be.
He kept walking.
The corridor turned, then turned again. The numbering on the doors changed - moved from sequential office numbers to single letters and then to combinations of letters that didn’t seem to follow any pattern. The plaques got older, the lettering fading, some of them showing the marks where previous nameplates had been removed and replaced.
He reached the end of a hall.
A single door at the far end. Made of the same steel alloy, but slightly older than the others around it. The plaque was small and easy to miss. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it. Raizen wouldn’t have noticed it either, except his eyes had been moving across every door for the last twenty minutes and he didn’t have anything better to do.
He stepped closer.
The plaque read: Professor Eiden.
Raizen stood in front of it for a long moment.
The corridor was silent. The Heart hummed somewhere far above. The man whose name was on this door was, at this exact moment, being processed by Wardens in a holding facility somewhere across the city, his hands cuffed, his composure intact, his future about to be decided by people who weren’t on his side.
And his office was here.
Closed. Quiet. Holding whatever he’d left behind.
Raizen’s hand drifted toward the handle.
