The Channel crossing had left Sonya pale and quiet.
She had clutched the railing of the steamer as the sea heaved, muttering prayers in a half-madeup tongue.
By the time they disembarked at Dover, her legs trembled with relief.
Elias, by contrast, had stood like a pillar, coat unruffled, as though the restless water were no more troublesome than the rattling of a carriage.
"England,"
he said as their carriage rattled toward London.
"An island fortress, and yet the heart of an empire spanning the globe."
Sonya pressed her face to the window.
The countryside rolled green and endless, dotted with tidy farms and hedgerows.
It was calmer than France, but to her, no less astonishing.
London, when it came into view, stole her breath away.
Not the elegance of Paris, but a sprawling immensity that seemed to stretch forever.
Smoke poured from countless chimneys, veiling the sky.
The river Thames groaned with ships, masts like a forest of wood and iron.
Crowds thronged every street, a human tide thicker than anything she had seen in France.
"Is this… all one city?"
she asked in disbelief.
Elias allowed himself a faint smile.
"Yes. This is the beating heart of industry. Here, liberty and wealth coexist with soot and poverty. A parliament that boasts of freedom while children choke in the smoke of factories. A democracy that costs more in blood and hunger than any despot's reign."
Sonya looked at him sidelong.
"You hate it?"
"No. I study it."
His gaze swept across Westminster's spires rising through the haze.
"The British system is efficient in its hypocrisy. A crown with little true power, a parliament shouting of liberty—but in truth, the empire acts with greater impunity than any monarch. Control parliament, and you control the crown. That is its brilliance."
Their days unfolded much as they had in Paris, though the city offered different lessons.
Elias spent mornings in galleries and lecture halls, evenings in the chambers of parliament or the salons of reformers.
He listened to Whigs and Tories argue over trade and taxes, over Ireland and India, while the empire's machine churned on regardless.
To Sonya, the city was a labyrinth of wonders.
She marveled at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, its iron and glass vaulting higher than any church.
She grew dizzy at the crush of carriages along the Strand, where beggars clutched at silks and top hats passed without notice.
Once, standing on London Bridge, she asked quietly,
"Are these people free? Truly free?"
Elias followed her gaze—dockhands sweating under sacks, ragged children darting between wagons, merchants shouting prices to customers who haggled as though their lives depended on pennies.
"They are free to starve, if no work finds them,"
he said.
"That is one kind of liberty. But it is not the kind that builds an empire."
She frowned, arms folded.
"Then what is your kind?"
"Order. Discipline. The kind that welds a people together, so none are left behind to rot while others feast."
She tilted her head, skeptical.
"But doesn't that make you the master of all? The one who decides what is best?"
His eyes lingered on the black water of the Thames.
"Every society chooses its master. Whether king, parliament, mob, or army. The question is only who holds the reins."
News from home came quietly, smuggled in the leather satchel of a courier who found Elias each month at his lodging.
His Iron Hand battalion—now nearly two thousand strong—was half upgraded to bolt-action rifles, the rest awaiting their turn.
The system's steady trickle of credits, 240… 243… 246 per day, went into steel, gunpowder, training.
Meanwhile, his agents in Montenegro sent word of promotions.
Several of his men, carefully placed within the royal army, now wore the insignia of captains and majors.
With each step upward, their influence grew, until the day would come when orders from Elias could move entire brigades without question.
Spies slipped deeper into the courts of Europe—an attaché in Vienna, a secretary in Belgrade, even a clerk in the Ottoman capital.
Each strand of his web fed him whispers.
And still, the engineers mined and smelted, their wages carefully laundered into Dinar and shipped northward.
hundreds of his summoned subordinates now bought Elias fine suits in London, dinners at White's club, and lodgings in Mayfair.
To Sonya, it seemed the life of a noble.
To Elias, it was simply a mask, another costume in his endless play.
Yet London was not without its frictions.
Sonya's rebellious streak grew sharper here.
In the British Museum, staring at marble statues stolen from Greece, she muttered,
"How proud they are, showing off what they've taken from others. Thieves dressed as scholars."
Elias's reply was cool.
"Conquest preserves as much as it destroys. Those marbles would have crumbled in Athens. Here, they endure."
She shot him a glare.
"You sound just like them."
And when he introduced her at a dinner as his "assistant," she bristled visibly.
The host smiled indulgently, mistaking her defiance for charm, but Elias's rebuke afterward was firm.
"You are here because I allow it. Never forget that."
Her jaw tightened, but she bowed her head.
That night, she sat silently in their carriage, staring out at the gas lamps sliding past.
Still, he did not send her back.
On a warm July evening, they walked along the Thames Embankment.
The river smelled of tar and waste, yet the promenade was alive with music and laughter.
"Do you ever tire of it?"
she asked suddenly.
"Of what?"
"Always watching, always planning. You never just… live."
He considered the question.
"I lived once. It was a small life. Anonymous. Forgotten. Now I build something larger than myself. That is living."
She shook her head, but said no more.
For a moment, as fireworks bloomed faintly in the distance, they stood together in silence.
Elias studied the sparks fading into the smoky sky, and he wondered—not for the first time—whether Sonya's spirit was an asset or a liability.
Perhaps both.
By summer's end, he had learned what he came for.
London confirmed his lesson: liberty was costly, democracy inefficient, but its machinery could be bent, co-opted, controlled.
The empire ruled not because its people were free, but because its elites had mastered the art of appearing so.
Elias filed it away as another weapon for the future.
When the day came to forge his own state, he would remember London—not for its splendor, not for its crowds, but for its hypocrisy turned into power.
And Sonya, walking at his side with eyes full of wonder and fire, would remember it differently—as the place where she first began to ask whether freedom without chains was truly freedom at all.