The first blast shook the city awake.
From a mile away, the Space Needle's crown bloomed with fire, scattering shards of steel and glass into the night. The flare lit the undersides of low clouds like a wound opening in the sky. Three more detonations followed in crooked rhythm, each one rolling down the empty streets, rattling windows, and knocking birds out of roosts in the surrounding trees. Sirens woke up by the dozen and began to argue with each other.
Inside Unit Nine's command center, Conner stood rigid in front of the comm board, headset pressed so tight against his ear it hurt. "Bumblebee, come in. Bee, answer!" Static hissed, surged, flatted to a dead pane. He stared at the little green indicator next to GALEN / BBEE as if he could will it to blink.
"Sending reinforcements immediately," the duty officer started to say—but the next concussion stepped on his words and turned the night sky orange. Dust sifted from the ceiling tiles. Someone swore. Someone else started to pray under their breath and then stopped, embarrassed.
Conner didn't wait for orders. "Move!" He shouldered past two operators, tossed his headset at an empty chair, and sprinted for the hangar.
Five minutes later, cold air slapped him in the face as he dropped from the troop carrier into the Needle plaza. The place looked like a disaster movie. Defensive force fields shimmered at ground level, a soap-bubble sheen arcing between pylons to catch any collapsing debris. Airships hovered above, searchlights cutting pillars through the smoke.
"Squads Alpha and Beta, cordon the perimeter. Gamma with me," Conner shouted, voice already hoarse. His throat tasted like metal.
They moved. Boots crunched over glass and grit. A smell like burnt sugar—insulation, plastic, human—rolled on the shifting wind. Conner stepped around a sheared metal rib and saw his own reflection wobble in a puddle lit by emergency beacons: a too-young face with eyes like cracked glass.
A tall figure in a white overcoat strode through the chaos as if it had been laid out for him. Even before the nearest private snapped to attention, everyone felt the weight in the air change.
"Attention!" a sergeant barked. "Ninth Captain of the Council of Captains, Unit Nine leader, Captain Yuri on deck!"
The line of soldiers saluted, movements snapping like shutters.
"At ease," Yuri said. His voice was steady, but his jaw worked as if he were chewing broken glass. He didn't look at them. He looked up, past them, at the Needle's burning crown. "Conner. Status."
Conner stepped forward, salute sharp enough to cut. "Sir. Galen—codename Bumblebee—investigating anomalous readings at the Needle. Last comm identified two… draconic entities. Contact lost immediately after. Then the explosions. Orders?"
Yuri's eyes flicked to Conner's trembling hands and away. "Find him," he said. "Don't come back without a body."
The search began.
For two hours they combed through twisted steel and scorched concrete. Drones buzzed like flies. The shielding field hummed, shedding sparks where heat-blistered metal sagged against it. Conner shouted hoarse over the roar of portable fans and the knock of pry bars. He hauled a beam with three other soldiers until his shoulders screamed. His breath made white ghosts in the cold.
They found a boot first. Not his. They found a half-melted comm unit with the casing fused shut and a smear of blue plastic on one corner where the indicator light had died trying. Conner pocketed it without thinking. He found a scorch pattern that made no sense—an oval perfectly clean in the middle of ash, as if something had been there and then had the idea of itself erased.
A corporal flagged him over with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking. A huddle of soldiers stood in a rough circle, faces already arranged into the blank expression men wore to keep from putting any of it on their faces.
They parted for Yuri first. Then for Conner.
In the center lay what had been Galen.
The blue modular armor was blackened and warped, the joints fused into grotesque angles. The visor had collapsed inward. The smell hit Conner like a slap, a hot, sweet rot that had nothing to do with kitchens or summer. He'd thought he was ready. He wasn't.
Yuri knelt beside the body and rested a gloved hand on the ruined breastplate. "Take him back to base," he said quietly. "He deserves more than ashes in the wind."
Conner's vision tunneled. For a second he was back in the academy gym—Galen grinning through a split lip, holding out a hand. You're too slow to be that small. The joke landed and the world steadied. Conner swallowed bile and nodded because his mouth didn't have another job it could do.
They bagged the body. The zipper's sound was intimate and obscene.
Back at HQ, a different kind of ritual took over. Forms. Chains of custody. Words that felt like rain beating on a closed window. The medtechs did their work without speaking. Conner signed what they pushed under his hand and didn't read any of it.
A comm officer stuck his head in the prep room. "Council in five," he said to Yuri, who was still standing beside the gurney like a mountain that hadn't decided which way to fall.
The Council convened by secure channel, eleven windows blooming across a wall of glass. Faces in cold white light. Some in uniforms, some in shirtsleeves. All with the same distance in their eyes.
"Report," said Grandmaster Yosua. He looked like a man whose bones were carved from rules.
Yuri did. He kept it clinical: anomalous energy readings; loss of comms at timestamp 00:31:14; multiple detonations; body located; retrieval in progress. He said draconic without flinching.
Silence lived a few seconds after he stopped, like a thing with a right to be there.
"This is not for public knowledge," Yosua said at last. "The civilians will hear 'terrorist attack.' Nothing more."
Yuri's gaze ticked across the windows, reading mouth corners and microflinches. "They'll believe it?"
"They'll have to," Kuro, Unit Two co-captain, said flatly. His sister's window—Kuro's mirror, Shiro—tilted her head, unreadable. "Fear of the unknown breeds panic. Fear of terrorists breeds unity."
Unit Four's Allen Sky leaned forward, a hawk's focus in human eyes. "We can ask questions about truth when there's a world left to tell it to. How quickly can you scrub the scene?"
"We're already on it," Yuri said. Then, because the word insisted on existing: "And the dragons?"
"Catalogued. Classified. Hunted," Yosua replied. "We've seen signatures like this… twice before." He didn't elaborate. No one asked where, or when. "Until we understand vectors, we keep the lid on tight."
"Vectors," Conner heard himself say, too loud. He hadn't realized he'd drifted closer, drawn by the gravity of the room. "Sir." He forced the word out. "Permission to speak?"
Yosua's eyes flicked toward him as if noticing a chair out of place. "Granted."
Conner's mouth went dry. "Galen died up there. He died working. If there's something out there that can do that to a headquarters soldier on a fortified landmark, then the public—"
"Knew would do what?" Kuro asked. His voice had the smoothness of a blade oiled well. "Run? Riot? Film themselves under the Needle until the next blast turns them to ash?"
"We owe them—"
"We owe them to keep them alive," Allen interrupted, not unkindly. "That's the job."
Yuri didn't look at Conner, and somehow that hurt worse. "Conner," he said, and in his voice was command and a muted grief that had not asked permission to be here. "Enough."
Conner shut his mouth. The taste of metal came back.
"Captain Yuri," Yosua said. "Deploy containment teams. Quietly. I want Sector Nine swept for residuals and witnesses secured. Any civilian footage is to be acquired, with courtesy if possible, with warrants if necessary. Media package will be distributed in one hour."
The windows went dark one by one. For a second the wall showed Conner his own face back to him, ghosted over the room.
"Why lie?" he asked when it was just the two of them and the hum of the air scrubbers. It wasn't a challenge. It was a man carrying a bowl and not understanding why it had been filled with blood.
"Because the truth will eat them alive," Yuri said. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand, as if remembering he was being watched by someone who needed him to be stone. "Galen died giving us a description. Now the whole IDF knows what to look for." He paused at the door. "Grieve later. For now, we hunt."
They didn't wait for morning. Sector Nine—everything within a two‑kilometer radius of the Needle—went under a velvet clamp. Plainclothes agents knocked on doors and smiled with all their teeth. A kid on a bike who'd filmed the first blast watched his video evaporate politely from his cloud under a court order his parents signed without reading. A barista who swore she saw a wing sweep the sky over Queen Anne forgot it by midnight.
In the morgue, the autopsy lights were too bright. The medtech walked Conner and Yuri through the findings in a voice designed not to scare anyone. "Cause of death is thermal and concussive trauma," she said, gesturing with a pen at the ruined armor displayed like a broken shell. "Secondary injuries include skeletal fractures consistent with blast overpressure. We found residue on the outer surfaces that doesn't match any known accelerant. It's… clean."
"Clean?" Conner asked.
"As in, there's no chemical profile. Like the heat wasn't a fire so much as an event. Think lightning vs. gasoline." She hesitated, then added, "There are also anomalies at the microscopic level—stress patterns in the metal that suggest the structure flexed in a way metal doesn't. Like it was asked to be something else for a second."
Yuri looked at the line where the visor had collapsed inward. "Was he conscious?"
"For part of it, yes," the medtech said gently. "There's tissue response to the first wave. After that… no."
Conner put a hand on the cold edge of the table and closed his eyes. The room tilted and steadied. "Thank you," he said, and meant it, because she had given him facts that could hold weight without breaking.
They stood in the cold room a while after she left. The clock on the wall ticked like a small, patient animal.
"Crew chiefs are ready," a runner reported from the doorway. "Search teams await your go."
"Go," Yuri said. "Carry. Quietly."
By dawn, the plaza was scrubbed, the scorch patterns turned into a geometry no civilian would read. Construction wraps went up with a printed render of a smiling family and the words Renovation for a Safer Tomorrow. The city sighed and folded itself around the lie the way skin closes over a splinter.
Conner didn't go home. He went to the training floor and hit the bag until his knuckles bloomed through the wraps. He saw Galen drop his baton on the roof over and over in his head, even though he hadn't seen it at all. He heard a voice that had never been his—Hang in there, Bee—and realized it had been his, too.
"Captain wants you," a voice said from the doorway. Conner looked up to see Iwa—Unit Nine's vice—watching him with eyes that knew too much. "He's in Ops."
Ops glowed blue with screens. Patterns danced across them—maps, overlays, energy readings, incident reports that all said terrorist in their headers and lied in their bodies. Yuri stood in front of the largest display, arms folded.
"We pulled three civilian videos before they vanished," Iwa said, tapping a screen. "All shaky, all out of focus. But look at the reflection." She zoomed. In the window of a condo a block away, the fireball's light warped around something curved and pale. The shape suggested a wing. Or a hallucination.
"Portal residues?" Yuri asked.
"Maybe," Iwa said. "The labs hate the word. They want to call it 'hyperspatial stress signature.'"
"Doesn't matter what we call it," Yuri said. "We treat it as a door someone opened and closed. Where are they now?"
"Gone," Iwa said. "If they were ever here the way we mean when we say here."
Conner's hands curled without permission. "So we have nothing."
"We have enough to get killed if we're stupid," Yuri said. He turned, finally letting the grief show in the angle of his mouth. "We also have a job. I'm assigning you to Retrieval Three. You'll work the Needle site and all related leads. You'll sleep when you fall down."
Conner nodded. He didn't trust his voice.
The media package dropped at noon. A bland man with good teeth told Seattle that a radical cell had attempted to bomb a beloved landmark and had been stopped by the brave sacrifice of an IDF agent. The footage cut right before it could show anything that would argue with the script. Names were not released, pending family notification. A ticker promised increased patrols and community support.
In the break room, two rookies watched and shook their heads. "Crazy," one said. "People are animals." The other nodded and said something about ideology that made Conner want to put his fist through drywall and keep on going.
He didn't. He took his coffee outside and watched a gull land on a light pole and scream at nothing until it got tired and left.
Toward evening, after twenty hours without sleep, Conner found himself back where they'd started, at the foot of the Needle. The plaza was quiet now, wrapped and fenced, the kind of quiet that argued with the memory of last night's noise. A gust sent ash eddies skating over the paving stones. He crouched and put his fingers to the ground where that strange oval of untouched concrete had been.
"Why here?" he asked the air. "Why him?"
No answer. But he felt it: a pressure under the skin of the world, the faintest sense that if you pressed hard enough on the right place, the fabric would dimple and your finger would go through into someplace not on any map.
Footsteps approached. "You shouldn't be here alone," Yuri said. He didn't sound like a reprimand.
Conner stood. "Sir. I wanted to—" He didn't have an ending for that sentence.
Yuri looked up at the crown of the Needle, now dark against a bruised sky. "When I was a recruit, I believed the world was a machine. You learned the schematics, you kept the gears clean, you listened to the right clicks, and things worked. Then sometimes a gear you've used a thousand times grinds itself to glitter in your hand." He glanced at Conner. "You don't throw the machine away because it can break. You learn where to hold it so it doesn't cut you when it does."
Conner huffed out something like a laugh. "Is that your way of saying 'suck it up'?"
"It's my way of saying keep your hands steady," Yuri said. "Grieve him. Don't drown in him." He let the silence after that be company instead of absence. "We'll find what did this. And when we do, we won't be gentle."
A wind from the bay brought the smell of salt and diesel. Somewhere far off, a ferry horn called across the water and went quiet.
Yuri turned to go, then paused. "One more thing. The Council will want to know if Galen's last transmission contained anything unusual."
Conner frowned. "Unusual?"
"A phrase. A word. Something that doesn't fit."
Conner shook his head—and then stopped. He heard his own voice from hours ago, hollow in the headset: Hang in there, Bee. He heard Galen trying to answer and the way his voice had hitched. He heard the slip of the comm as it went skittering and the dead open channel breathing in his ear. He didn't hear any word that changed the world.
"No," he said finally. "Just the usual. Static. The kind that lies."
Yuri studied him a second longer than was comfortable, then nodded. "Report at 0600. Go home."
Conner didn't know if he could, but he said "Yes, sir," and meant I'll try. He watched Yuri walk away, white coat a pale flag in the dim, and then he looked up one last time at the crown of the Needle, where the night began again.
He thought of Galen. He thought of a wing seen only in reflection. He thought of a map you couldn't read drawn in an eye that wasn't human. He didn't know that, two miles away, a child was drawing a picture of a white dragon on an index card while her mother told her not to lie to police. He didn't know that a lab tech would later describe a stress signature as if metal had been asked, for a second, to remember it had once been light.
He only knew that the city had been divided into before and after, and that somewhere just beyond the reach of sirens, something had found them first.