Chapter 210: The Price of a Revolution.
General Sinn sat in the back of the car, eyes fixed on the towering CGI building through the tinted glass. The engine was off. Mercury gripped the wheel loosely, working a piece of gum slowly between her teeth, the faint minty snap the only sound inside the vehicle.
They were tucked deep into shadow where the streetlights couldn’t reach. Around them, hidden in darkened doorways and behind parked vehicles, his men held their positions like ghosts—barely breathing, barely blinking.
Nothing moved inside the building. Not a shadow. Not a silhouette. The windows stared back like blank, lifeless eyes.
"Abram’s handling it," Sinn said quietly, voice low and steady.
"You sure?" Mercury asked, jaw shifting as she chewed.
"I know him." Sinn’s gaze never left the building. "He’ll find a way to reach Bala, and when he does, he’ll call. He’s not so different from me."
Mercury watched his half-lit face in the rearview mirror for a long moment. "Things move fast," she said, with a small laugh that carried no humor. "We spent a night in that building this same week."
"Yeah." Sinn’s jaw flexed.
"So why are you going against them?" she asked. Not challenging. Just genuinely searching for a reason she could hold onto.
Sinn shifted in his seat and leaned forward slightly, the leather creaking under his weight. "The Fallen City changed things for me, Mercury. I saw what exists out there. Real life. Vibrant and untamed. And CGI had hidden it from us all this time." He paused, jaw tightening. "The extraction. The life layer. The class divisions. None of it holds up once you’ve stood on the other side."
Mercury stayed quiet, fingers drumming once on the steering wheel. Then she turned fully in her seat to face him, dashboard lights casting soft blue highlights across her sharp features. "What does the new government plan to do about any of that?"
"Lady Veyron intends to end the extraction entirely," Sinn said. His eyes finally flicked to hers for a beat before returning to the building. "And she’s preparing to turn every person inside these walls into an ability user. When that happens, we won’t need the walls at all. We move beyond them. We save what’s left of the world."
Mercury studied him, lips pressing together, then slowly turned back toward the windshield. The logic settled into place, cold and clear. The reason the Guardians had sided with the Veyrons suddenly made a sharper kind of sense.
"That’s actually something," she murmured.
"Yes," Sinn agreed, voice quiet.
They sat in the heavy quiet, the only sound the faint tick of cooling metal under the hood and the soft, rhythmic pop of Mercury’s gum.
"It’s been forty minutes," Mercury said finally. She leaned forward, eyes scanning the dark facade of the building, searching for any flicker of movement in the upper floors. Her fingers tightened on the wheel. "No movement at all. Nobody near a window. Nothing."
"Bala’s planning something," Sinn said. His posture remained still, but his thumb had stopped tapping.
His comms watch vibrated sharply against his wrist.
He answered.
"Where are you?" A female voice asked, bright with an excitement that hadn’t earned the right to be bright yet.
"Outside the building," Sinn said. "Still watching for Bala’s movements."
"Order your men in," the voice said. The excitement in it kept rising. "Lord Bala is dead."
Sinn went still. The city seemed to go quiet around him. Even Mercury stopped chewing.
"No he isn’t." He pushed the car door open and stepped out into the cool night air. "What do you mean he’s dead?"
"I handled it."
His palm found the roof of the car, pressing flat against the cold metal.
"Monica." His voice dropped to something low, controlled, and dangerous. "I told you I was going to handle this."
"Relax." Monica Veyron sounded unbothered, the casual tone of someone who had been making decisions for centuries and had long stopped apologizing for them. "I helped you. That’s all."
Sinn said nothing. Fury burned behind his eyes, visible to no one in the shadows. He’d worked alongside Bala for years. Whatever their disagreements had become, whatever side of the line each of them had ended up on, Bala hadn’t deserved to go like this. Not like this.
"General." Monica’s voice came again, softer now. Deliberate. "Tell me you’re still with me."
He looked up at the CGI building. Every lit window glowed like watchful eyes. Every floor he had walked through over the years. This was where they had all arrived, trying to carve something better out of a world that kept resisting.
"I know this isn’t how you wanted it," Monica said. "But I need you, Sinn. I cannot do this without you. Stand up and be who you are. Together we make the world something worth living in."
He kicked the tire. Once, hard. Then again. The impact echoed down the empty street.
*Bala.* He’d been a good man who had simply run out of good options, and he’d died before he could find new ones.
But Monica Veyron wasn’t wrong. No single person stood above what the world truly needed. That was the lesson the Fallen City and Eleanor’s camp had taught him, staring at infected who weren’t the monsters he had spent his career believing they were.
"Okay, Monica," he said. "Everything is under control."
He ended the call.
He stood in the dark for a long moment, staring at the CGI building. The structure that was about to become his. The new face of the walls’ government, reporting this time to a woman who had been pulling strings from behind the curtains for longer than the walls themselves had stood.
*Is this right,* he thought. *Or is this just the next version of the same thing.*
He didn’t have an answer. He’d stopped expecting clean ones long ago.
"Everything okay?" Mercury’s voice called out. Her window was down, her face half-lit as she watched him from the driver’s seat.
"Yeah," Sinn said.
He raised his comms frequency.
"Move in," he ordered, and started walking toward the CGI building. His footsteps rang steady against the pavement as the first of his men began to emerge from the shadows like silent ghosts answering the call.
Comments