Sirius flicked the ledger open. Pages turned themselves. He wasn't reading; the book was reading the room, the frost, and the distances. The machine's hum crept higher. The glass rings blackened at their cores, each one holding absence like water holds a stone.
Sirius: "Do you want to see a district forget itself?"
Valeria: "No."
Selene: "Later."
She walked—not rushed—straight for the machine. Sirius slipped to intercept, his coat leaving skeins of shadow like spider silk across the lattice. Where those skeins touched, frost dulled; where they pooled, light lost conviction. He reached for her throat with a hand that was mostly not there.
Selene let him. His fingers entered the aura of her cold and slowed as if moving through syrup. When he closed, he found her neck where space said it would be—and then his grip clenched on a column of clear ice shaped like her throat, not attached to her at all. The decoy shattered in his hand. The shards did not fall; they hung in the air, each one a tiny mirror, and every mirror showed him from a slightly different angle.
Selene (pleasantly): "I prefer to be observed on my terms."
Valeria surged up the opposite flank, arm reshaping on the fly—carbine to revolver to razor chain and back—touching a conduit here, a brace there, stealing materials as she moved. She fired a rope lance that bit into the machine's support and dragged, wrenching a strut. The pitch shifted. A beautiful, wrong note.
Sirius frowned, the first real crack in the ledger smile. He gestured, and the skeins pulled taut, trying to choke the cold corridors, but Selene had already thickened them. She gave the lattice a quarter-turn—no visible movement, simply a decision—and every trapped shadow knot sheared along crystal planes. The vault filled with a sound like black glass breaking in a cave you couldn't stand upright in.
Sirius (softly): "Well."
He changed tactics. The coat shed a duplicate—his shape peeling off and striding in a different arc while the first (or second) wrote an eclipse sigil on the floor: a circle, three jagged lines, and the vault's light bending down into it as if into a drain.
Valeria: "He's opening something."
Selene didn't look. Her eyes were on the lattice's intersections, on stress, on the way the machine was beginning to talk to the glacier the way a parasite talks to blood.
Selene: "Then we close it."
She reached into the lattice with both hands and pulled. The room groaned. Rime leapt from beam to beam, threading the metal in a knitting of frost so fine it looked like breath. Valeria anchored another rope lance, threw her weight, and the machine listed.
The rings pulsed black once, twice, stacking a wave. If it discharged now, the underquarter would lose itself—voices stilled, gifts smothered, a district turning into an echo of bodies with no heat inside.
Sirius's smile returned, stripped to bone.
Selene stepped between the rings and the vault. She expanded a dome from her palms, not thick, but tuned, a precise curve of ice lattice that didn't block so much as bend. The wave hit, tried to erase, and found a lens. It went up. Black aurora tore a wound through the ceiling gaskets, spearing for the fjord sky like an inverted lighthouse beam. Somewhere far above, the bridge's bells stuttered and fell silent.
Valeria winced against the pressure as her servos squealed, then leveled. She put three rounds into a brace that had dared to look essential. The machine shuddered and coughed smoke that wasn't smoke. The rings' cores paled, sulking.
Sirius watched the redirected beam with a child's delight.
Sirius: "Elegant. Dangerous. I approve."
Selene lowered the dome a fraction, and the leftover charge sloshed uselessly under her curve like an angry tide. She looked at him through the shimmer of her own geometry.
Selene: "You'll come with us now."
Sirius: "Will I?"
He closed the ledger. The vault's shadows folded inward. The eclipse sigil at his feet filled itself with him. Not a step—more like consent. He sank into the dark, and the dark wore him perfectly.
His voice came from three directions and nowhere, pleasant again.
Sirius: "An introductory call, nothing more. Vyrnheim is a minor node. Have your winter. The Syndicate is larger than your brain cells could grasp."
Valeria aimed into the sigil and fired. The round went out the other side and hit the far wall as if the room had drawn a line through his absence and told it to behave.
Selene held her dome until the machine's hum whined itself down, then dropped it. The vault breathed like a thing hauled back from drowning.
Valeria exhaled, tail finally uncurling.
Valeria: "Confirm: we met him...someone."
Selene: "We have names…a name."
Valeria: "The mission was a success then?"
Selene: "Sirius von Shadow. Master of the Cursed Energy's dark arts." She brushed frost off her palms with the careful precision of a woman finishing surgery. "And he is right about one thing."
Valeria: "Which."
Selene: "The Syndicate is larger."
Valeria: "So it was a success."
They set to work with the efficiency of people who had broken cathedrals before: Valeria jammed braces with stolen steel; Selene overcooled bearings until hairline fractures skittered through the glass. They didn't destroy it—too loud—but they made it worse than useless. The next attempt would limp.
Above them, the faintest tremor of boots touched the ceiling through the ice. Patrols would come. Questions would be asked that the city didn't have the language to answer.
Valeria: "Exit?"
Selene tilted her head, listening to the way the cold lay on the walls now that the machine had been humbled. She pointed to a maintenance shaft half-shadowed by a crate. Frost sighed the grate free.
Selene: "Up. Quiet."
They climbed into stale air and a duct that tasted like dust and secrets. Behind them, on the vault wall, frost condensed where warm breath had just been and drew, without being asked, a small, neat sigil before it froze over: a circle, three jagged lines.
Valeria glanced back, eyes narrowing.
Valeria: "Message."
Selene (softly): "Invitation."
They didn't take it. Not yet. The shaft opened on a service alley two streets from the bridge, where wind bells laughed at nothing. Selene brushed a palm along the stone; footprints glazed and vanished.
Vyrnheim pretended not to notice them surface. The aurora above had a thin black seam running through its green that no one would remember in the morning.
Valeria: "We report?"
Selene looked up where the black seam cut the sky like an erased sentence and let herself smile without kindness.
Selene: "That's your task."
And somewhere beneath the city, where machines dream badly, Sirius von Shadow opened his ledger to a fresh page and wrote their names with a stylus that cast no shadow.