The hooded signaler had chosen his moment. He slid along the narrow, quick, and quiet path, using a line of laundry as a screen. Valeria swung the scope through, judged distances, wind against the bridge's belly, and density of ice in stone. She squeezed. A bell rope snapped above him and coiled like a living thing around his throat. He clawed it off and vanished into shadow.
Valeria: "He knows the underquarter."
Selene: "So do I," she said, and the frost under her feet remembered her from years ago. It showed her the slope in the lane, the hidden gutter behind the stacked crates, and the door whose hinges had been oiled this morning, not yesterday.
She moved to follow.
Three of the men still standing made a last, brave attempt to pen her in.
Selene: "I thought that was all?"
Valeria: "They hid."
They coordinated well enough to borrow her respect. Selene gave them a nod as she dismantled their geometry with the frost in the air—altering a single angle here, changing friction there, guiding a wrist into stillness and a shoulder into rest. Every time she touched them, that spot froze. One fell after another into sculptures of frost after Selene playfully turned them into ice. Selene walked past where they fell.
Valeria stood, rifle telescoping back into an arm, fingers flexing once to check the servos. She counted bodies—those which were still a whole—with a professional glance, then looked at Selene with something new in her eyes—not fear, not quite. Assessment. Recalibration.
Valeria: "You enjoyed that."
Selene looked over her shoulder, the aurora painting her irises in cold blue.
Selene (mildly): "I enjoy competence."
Valeria: "And yet."
Selene let the smile show, then she tucked it away.
Selene: "You asked for results, right? I bring results."
Valeria did not argue. The underquarter held its breath. Smoke from iced braziers curled like mistakes forgiven. Far off, a patrol bell sounded and died, muffled by hoarfrost that had no business spreading as far as it had.
Valeria: "You lost the signaler."
Selene: "He is fast."
Valeria: "He never intended to stay anyways."
Selene: "He wants to play catch?"
Valeria: "It's not the time to throw jokes."
Selene rolled her eyes in disbelief. She sighed loudly in the other direction, facing Valeria with the back of her head.
Valeria ignored Selene's childish play. But in her mind, she asked herself how someone like her could have been sentenced to exile from Borealis and how someone like her became the number three of the Soul Reapers. Then she answered her questions shortly after; she is a powerful force of nature; she just had seen it with her own eyes.
Valeria: "We can't be seen here when the watch arrives."
Selene: "Then we won't be."
She lifted both hands, and the ice she had thrown about the lane like a net began to loosen itself politely from walls and boots and bell ropes. It retracted in quiet sheets, smoothing scuffs and swallowing footprints. In less than a minute, the alley looked like the city had intended it to look all along: clean, cold, and forgetful. The men were swallowed by the ice, which embraces the city.
Valeria: "Trail on the runner?"
Selene closed her eyes and touched the wall where the hood had paused. The cold sang a thin sound only she seemed to hear. It was a map in a key no one else had been taught to read. She followed it with her palm, two steps, three, to a narrow door with no handle.
Selene: "Here."
Valeria approached and laid her metal hand against the seam. The panel clicked open as if pleased to be noticed. Beyond, the staircase fell into blue dark, carved into a glacier heart, smelling of iron and secrets.
Valeria: "Underground."
Selene: "Of course."
They descended. The temperature shifted as they went—not colder, not warmer, simply… closer. Valeria ran silent diagnostics through her arm, feeling for fields, for static, for anything that hummed wrong. Everything hummed wrong, but without admitting why.
The stairs broke into a corridor where the walls were laced with black veins—air bubbles trapped and frozen centuries ago, turned into threads of night in the ice.
At the end of the corridor, a door waited. Not old. New. Steel framed, sealed well. The tiny mark—a circle broken by three jagged lines—had been scratched onto its lower corner as if by a knife waiting for a moment to be used.
Valeria: "We still don't know who they are."
Selene: "We know enough."
Valeria: "To what? To burn them or to follow them?"
Selene considered the door, the silence behind it, and the feeling of an operation that had looked at the city's laws and learned where the eyes looked away.
Selene (pleasantly): "Both."
Valeria flexed her metal fingers. The servos purred. She looked at Selene—cold, immaculate, and composed after what had not been a fight so much as a demonstration—and spoke without judgment.
Valeria: "You didn't hesitate."
Selene: "Hesitation is a summer habit."
Valeria: "And mercy?"
Selene tilted her head.
Selene (smiling): "Mercy is a decision. We haven't made one yet."
She set her palm against the steel. Frost grew in a measured rosette, finding welds and persuading them to forget they had ever been welded. The lock yielded with a quiet, frosted sigh.
On the other side, air moved: orderly, engineered, and wrong for an underquarter. Somewhere deeper, something hummed like a string drawn tight over a hollow body.
Valeria: "We go quiet."
They slipped through the door and let it close behind them, the city above returning to its bells and its breathing, unaware that beneath its perfect ice an older cold had begun to take an interest.
And in a shaded alcove where no one looked, the tiniest trembling scrap of paper lifted on a draft that should not have existed, turned twice, and stuck to the wall: a circle, and three marks, and no name.
The underquarter would have a rumor by morning. The Ice Crown City would pretend not to hear it. And Selene Virell, smiling very slightly in the dark, would follow it to wherever silence thought it could hide.