The city cracked open like a rotted tooth.
It started small. A constable found slumped against a lamppost, a spiral carved crudely into his palm. A butcher's shop burned to ash in the dead of night, the stink of smoke mixing with the wet rot of the Thames. A banker's wife vanished between two market stalls, her parasol later found snapped in half like a broken bone.
None of it pointed anywhere.
None of it made sense.
And that was the point.
Carmen didn't orchestrate the chaos. She whispered it into being and let the broken ones carry it on bloodstained hands. London reeled, spinning wider into fear with every whisper, every shadow, every door that closed and never opened again.
Julian watched it unfold with quiet satisfaction, standing at Carmen's side like a dark twin, his knife always close but rarely needed. They had set the fire. Now they watched the city burn itself down, desperate to find something—anything—to blame.
Vivienne drifted further into the background, her notebook filling faster than her mind could process. She wrote because it was the only thing left she could control, the only way to tether herself to a world slipping further from her grasp. She barely slept, barely ate. Her skin thinned until she seemed less a girl and more a sketch, half-erased.
Carmen noticed, of course. Carmen noticed everything.
But Vivienne was still useful.
That was all that mattered.
The pawns multiplied faster than Carmen had predicted. They weren't clever. They weren't skilled. They didn't need to be. They bled noise into the streets, and noise was the enemy of clarity. It blurred the Spiral into static, made the pattern impossible to trace.
Hargreave tried. He pinned murders across his walls, red thread crisscrossing like veins, but no center revealed itself. No heartbeat. Only chaos. Only silence.
He came close once—close enough to brush the edge of understanding—but Carmen shifted the board before he could focus, feeding him a crude killing with the wrong signature. It sent him spiraling, like a moth battered away from a flame.
Julian sometimes watched Hargreave from a distance, amused by the slow, inevitable collapse of a man who thought the truth could be nailed into place.
Vivienne remained trapped within the machinery. She told herself she was recording history, preserving something greater than herself. But late at night, when the house groaned under the weight of fog and rot, she wondered if she was nothing more than a footnote already written in blood.
Carmen called the next meeting in the ruins of a warehouse near the docks.
The boys—and now a few hollow-eyed girls—knelt in the dirt, bruised and waiting. They clutched crude knives, broken bottles, anything that could scar or tear. They were ready to be unleashed, to be pointed like arrows at a city that had already forgotten them.
Carmen stood before them, coat flaring around her like dark wings, her voice low and steady.
"You are the storm," she said. "You are the knife slipping between the bones. No names. No attachments. Only the work."
They listened because they had nothing left.
Julian moved among them silently, pressing folded notes into trembling hands. Targets. Locations. Instructions.
It didn't matter if half of them failed.
Failure was noise too.
Failure was beautiful.
Carmen watched them scatter into the fog, disappearing like seeds cast into dead soil.
Vivienne stepped up beside her, trembling, adrenaline shining in her wide eyes.
"This is bigger than them," she said, her voice brittle.
Carmen smiled without turning.
"This was never about them."
Vivienne frowned, confusion cracking across her expression, but she didn't dare ask.
Not yet.
The city would bleed because they demanded it.
The pawns would fall because they needed it.
And when the dust cleared, when London lay hollowed out and too afraid to breathe, Carmen Vale and Julian Cross would be standing in the ashes—untouched, unknown, victorious.
Because no one would ever find them.
No one would ever know their names.
History would tremble at their work and never understand the architects behind it.
And that, Carmen thought, lighting a cigarette with a steady hand, was the only immortality worth chasing.