The corridor exhaled them into a vault carved from glacier heart and metal, a place too clean for the underquarter and too new for Borealis. Lights ran in narrow veins along the ceiling, their glow flat and bloodless. At the center, a machine hunched on spidery struts—rings of matte glass stacked like vertebrae, cables sinking through bored holes in the ice as if the glacier itself were being fed.
Selene breathed in. The cold here wasn't her cold. It had no scent, no memory of storms; it was the absence of something necessary.
Selene (murmuring): "What are they doing inside here?"
Valeria ran her metal fingers along a conduit. The wrist servos purred, reading material; her eyes flicked, calculating.
Valeria: "Composite is not from Borealis. And no official stamp. Hidden draw from the bridge grid. Whoever did this map the city's pulse."
Selene stepped closer to the rings. Frost crawled up her forearm, testing the surface. The glass didn't fog. It didn't acknowledge her at all.
Selene: "Suppressor lattice. Scaled."
Valeria's ears angled back under her hood.
Valeria: "A street-wide blackout of energy. Maybe a district, if they chain it."
The light dimmed by a fraction. Not a flicker. More like someone had asked the room to blink, and it had considered agreeing.
A voice rose from the dark between the struts—polite, edged with amusement.
???: "A district, yes. A city, if you stop interrupting the experiment."
They turned as one.
The man who stepped from the machine's shadow wore a coat black enough to drink lines out of the world. Not a stitch of insignia touched it. His hair was dark, combed with ritual care; his gloves were white, and the ledger he carried was bound in hide too smooth to be local. When he smiled, it was tidy, like a column of numbers at the bottom of a page.
He bowed politely.
Sirius: "Sirius von Shadow is my name."
Selene (surprisingly happy): "Now I know where I have seen the symbol; it's from the Syndicate."
Valeria (shocked): "It has been them all along."
The room rearranged around this knowledge with the soft certainty of something clicking home.
Sirius: "Three and Nine. Borealis rarely hosts such distinguished guests."
Valeria's arm lengthened in a whisper of sliding plates, the barrel settling, and the scope blooming with a thin wash of gold.
Valeria: "Hands where I can see them."
Sirius raised the ledger instead of his hands. Shadows clung to the book's spine like smoke that had learned discipline.
Sirius (pleasant): "My hands are precisely where I want them, Miss Kessner." He glanced at Selene. The smile brightened by a readable two degrees. "And you. Frost's favorite daughter, the Queen of Ice herself."
Selene (flatly): "Flattery is the ugliest form of fear."
Sirius: "You mistake me. I am not afraid." He tapped the ledger's edge against one palm. "Prudent. There's a difference."
Valeria didn't wait. The rifle bucked once, twice—clean, efficient shots. The rounds entered the space around Sirius and didn't return. They vanished without impact, the air swallowing them like a throat that had always been there.
Sirius: "You see? Prudence."
Valeria: "An Awakening?"
Selene: "No…something far more corrupt."
Sirius: "I call it Dark-field."
He lifted his free hand and sketched a quick sigil in the air: a circle, broken by three jagged lines. The lines hung for a heartbeat, then bled into the room, and the vault's shadows deepened until the edges of things went soft.
Selene felt the temperature change the way a musician hears a key slip. Her frost reached and met a softness that didn't resist so much as redirect. She smiled, small and truthful.
Selene (pleasantly): "At last. An interesting opponent."
She touched the floor. Ice flowered outward in a crystalline mesh, not a sheet—an airy lattice that caught the overhead light and hurled it into a thousand facets. Shadows trying to run across it were forced to choose edges to follow; in choosing, they became form.
Sirius's eyes narrowed, amusement folding one layer deeper.
Sirius: "Refraction. Clever. Winter learning optics."
Valeria touched a cable with her free hand; metal drank metal, and her forearm extruded a filament harpoon with a barbed head. She launched it. It sang an invisible line across the vault, struck Sirius's coat at the shoulder, and went through nothing. The harpoon fell to the floor like a rejected thought.
Sirius: "No hooks. No handles."
The rings of the machine began to hum, glass devouring the sound as fast as it made it. Selene's frost-lattice sang back, a glassine hiss, and the hum turned disharmonious, a wolf note in a bad hall. Sirius's smile showed teeth that were admirable and unimportant.
Sirius: "Do you know why darkness frightens children?" He stepped—not forward, not back; he stepped into a slightly different argument with the room and came out standing on the lattice as if it delighted him. "Because it tells the truth about scale. How small they are. How little their hands hold."
Selene (mockingly): "Adorable. You've read yourself poetry."
She lifted both hands, palms out, and the air condensed around her into clear knives the length of a forearm. She didn't throw them. She pushed them, and the room assisted—low-pressure guiding edges. The knives crossed the distance as fast as a decision.
They entered Sirius and made no exit. For a heartbeat, the coat held the idea of a man. Then the idea unstitched itself into suede darkness and stepped out flatter, like a shadow deciding to be the thing and not its echo.
Valeria rolled to new cover, the rifle dissolving and re-forming into a short, heavy shotgun with a vented muzzle. She fed it a handful of torn screws and a strip of magnesium she had ripped from a maintenance cage. The shot went broad—spark-bright shards howling into the dark.
Sirius's shape rippled, coat scorched at the hem. He glanced down, almost annoyed, and wrote something in the air with two fingers. The letters didn't hold long enough to read; they made a feeling instead—distance stretching where it shouldn't.
Valeria blinked and found her sightline a meter to the left of where it had been, as if the map of the room had reprinted under her feet.
Valeria: "He's bending lines."
Selene: "Then we make them straighter than he can break."
She slammed her heel, and the lattice tightened, ribs thickening, and facets aligning into long, ruthless corridors of light. The vault's clarity sharpened until there were only two kinds of places: very bright and very not. Shadow flows that had slid smoothly were forced into narrow channels; where they pinched, Selene froze them solid. Black ice, dense as guilt, formed in the struts of Sirius's weaving.
Sirius's pupils dilated until his eyes looked colorless.
Sirius: "You are better than your file suggests."
Selene (softly): "My file is polite."