The siren didn't wail—it hiccuped, a swallowed sob inside the city's throat.
Leon opened his eyes on the floor of the municipal Emergency Operations Room and watched the ceiling lights stutter along the grid lines he used to audit for a living. The acrid smell of burnt dust and old coffee clung to the consoles. A map wall blinked awake one district at a time like a patient learning to breathe.
Outside the eastern windows, the sky was wrong. It had acquired a second spine: a column of dark geometry unfurling from above the clouds, each segment folding out of an angle the world didn't have yesterday. It threw a shadow that didn't quite match the buildings, as if it were measuring the city for a coffin.
[Global Event: Towerfall]
[Countdown: 72:00:00]
His last memory before this moment had been the same siren, three octaves lower, and the hot wind of a cancellation wave rolling up the avenue, erasing color as it went. He remembered people with names, not numbers, pulled into nothing because the hero brand didn't spike the right audience at the right minute.
The console in front of him lit with a prompt that had killed them all the first time.
[Designation: Hero Candidate. Accept?]
[Perks: Hope Surge, Valor Ladders, Audience Stabilizer]
[Risks: Policy Oversight, Ratings Dependency]
"Leon," said a woman's voice from nowhere and everywhere. Satin over wire. "We're going to have company in three, two—"
He didn't look for the voice. He looked at the clock, the map, the sidewalk two blocks down where a makeshift police barricade had turned the ration depot into a tollbooth, where a woman with a blue backpack stood with her hands in the air while two uniformed men argued over who would search her. Beyond them, alley grates trembled with something that wasn't wind.
"I decline," he said.
[Decline registered.]
[Candidate Path: Forfeit.]
[System Note: Refusal recorded. Proceeding to default—]
"Override," Leon said, and the old habit of his profession came back like muscle memory. He moved to the nearest console and jabbed the key that used to bring up inspection mode, the municipal Safety Audit app he had helped spec, the one that piggybacked on any system tied into the city's grid.
His reflection in the dark monitor—thirty-one, unshaved, a cut on his lip where someone else's elbow had been last time—looked back for one beat. Then everything snapped into code.
[Municipal Safety Audit: Active]
[Concurrent Prompt Detected]
[Warning: Path Assignment + Audit Share creates conflict]
He had found the bug too late the first time around. If you invoked the audit in the same breath as the Path assignment prompt, the system had to scramble its categories to comply with two masters. It created a reroll. If you were precise.
He closed his eyes and listened to the electric hum count beats against his ribs. Three taps of his pen on the console's edge—habit. A tell. Taps meant he was about to lie or cut a corner. He opened his eyes on the half-second he remembered, when the siren hiccuped and the Tower's shadow took the west side of Canal Street.
"Reroll invoked," he said. "Ethics clause. Necessity doctrine."
The room went quiet enough to hear the rain freckle the windows.
[Conflict acknowledged.]
[Ethics Override: Necessity]
[Designation: Villain Path — Live Broadcast Enabled]
[Audience Seeded: 12,408]
[Sponsors Observing…]
The glass in the window caught his face and returned a sliver of bone-white. He found the matte half-mask in the desk drawer where he had left it in a life that hadn't happened yet and fitted it over the upper half of his face. The mask fogged inside when he lied. It would help to know.
"You don't sound surprised," the woman said in his ear. The voice—his interface avatar—warmed a fraction. "Nyx. Your liaison."
"Hi, Nyx." His voice had the scratch of a man who hadn't drunk water in too long. "We're going outside."
"Ad-break in 03:00 once the feed stabilizes," Nyx said. "We'll need a hook. The War King likes clean knockouts; the Glass Saint prefers restraint with style. Your Audience is…curious."
He grabbed the Civic Ledger from the console corner—a black notebook soft with wear—and tucked it inside his coat. The first page had always been empty before. Not today. He turned it just enough to see the names he'd written in tiny script around the margin last time and slid it away so he wouldn't have to see them again right now. Names weighed more than numbers.
By the time he reached the stairwell, the power flickered again. He took the steps two at a time. On the street, sirens caught in the grid and hiccuped, and the rain came down in small needles. Canal Street was three blocks away and already dividing into realms: here, the old world still pretended it was in charge; there, the Tower's shadow bent sound and pulled color from red to rust.
The police barricade wasn't police anymore. The uniforms were department-issue, the armor was not. Two men with badges and borrowed bleeds were running a street tax on the ration depot's line of soaked civilians. The one with the jaw like a shoehorn grinned without teeth at the woman with the blue backpack.
"Bag," he said, without looking at her, eyes on the camera pinned to his lapel. "Then you can go."
She hugged the pack to her belly. "Please. It's insulin. For my mother."
"There's a process," he drawled, to the camera more than to her. "Don't be selfish."
Leon looked past them. The shutters on the corner bakery had a hazard sticker he knew because he had signed off on it. Behind that shutter was an automatic foam suppression tank that would drown grease fires and anything else that triggered it; the runoff fed into the alley troughs.
The metal grates over the alley drains shivered again. He crouched by one, ran his hand along the stone, and felt it move. Not wind. Not water. He lifted the grate. A clutch of cockroaches the size of his thumb strafed the surface, antennae tasting the rain's mineral changes. Smaller than what would come. Scouts.
"Nyx," he said. "Put the barricade on camera. Wide angle. Get me a street-level shot from the bakery awning."
"That will spike Notoriety," she said. "Sponsors enjoy choke points. They vote with their eyes."
"So do I." He pointed his chin at the nearest camera node. It clicked from a soft red to a harder one. The feed's timer ticked up in the edge of his vision.
[Live: Canal Street, Ward 4]
[Audience: 17,902 → 19,140]
[Notoriety: +2]
The uniform with the shoehorn jaw pressed a hand to his ear as information arrived.
"We got a celebrity," he said, smirking. "You finally came to help?" To the woman: "You see? Everyone is watching. So be good."
Leon looked at the woman's blue backpack and saw a cold box inside, and a pair of hands that would be shaking soon if she didn't get that case through the door behind the barricade. The door that had the same hazard sticker his signature sat under.
"Ma'am," he said. "What's your name?"
She blinked at him, then at the mask, then at the camera whose light had switched from red to a glossier crimson. She hugged the pack tighter. "Nadia."
"Walk with me, Nadia," he said, and moved not toward the barricade but into the rain-streaked service alley. The two uniforms watched him go, half amused, half wary, their lapel cams angling to keep him framed.
Nyx's voice touched his ear like a fingernail. "Ad-break in 02:00. Your Audience curve is soft. The War King yawns. The Glass Saint is…curious."
Leon knelt by the bakery's service hatch. He popped the panel with a coin and dragged the manual release with his fingertips until the shutter peeled up a handspan. The smell of old sugar and flour rose up. He slid his hand inside and found the emergency override on the foam tank—two stops left to arm, one down to flood.
[Municipal Safety Audit: Device Found — Foam Suppression Unit: Manual Override Available]
[Policy Note: Collateral risk: Slips, falls, humiliation. Blood minimal. Ratings acceptable.]
"Leon," the uniform called, half-bored. "You don't get to go around the law just 'cause you got a mask. Come back, we'll tag you in properly." He nodded at his lapel cam. "We're keeping the citizens safe."
Nadia stood on the alley mouth's edge, the pack hugged so tight to her ribs that the blue fabric creased white. Leon touched the Ledger in his coat and hadn't known he would.
He tapped his pen against the foam tank's casing. Once. Twice. Three times. Then he swallowed the lie and told the truth anyway.
"Nadia," he said quietly, not for the camera. "When I say run, you go to the bakery door. Get low. Stay on my left side."
She nodded without looking at him, eyes on the barricade men.
"Nyx," Leon said. "Do not film the bakery door."
"Policy likes doors," she said. "They test well. I can blur her face."
"Kill it," he said. "You can tell them it was dead air."
A beat of silence with teeth in it. Then: "Done."
He set his hand on the foam tank's lever.
"You don't want to do that," the uniform called, noticing the angle of Leon's shoulder now. He half-laughed. "You'll mess up your mask. And my shoes."
Leon didn't look at him. He looked at the grate where the first scout roach had stopped and tasted the air. He reached his other hand into the bakery and tore open a paper sack by feel—powdered sugar. He shook a thin trail across the threshold and out into the alley's shallow gutter, a bright vein on wet stone.
The roaches tasted the sugar like a rumor.
"Ad-break in 01:00," Nyx murmured. "Your Audience wants a hook, Architect."
He pulled the lever.
Foam erupted like a slow ocean from under the shutter—white, dense, cold, carrying the sugar in a soft wave that spilled into the alley. Leon made a little furrow with his boot, a channel that led to the barricade men's feet. The foam reached the grates. The roaches poured up and out, only a few at first, then more, antennae frantic, mandibles clicking, bodies sleeking along the sugar vein like beads on a wire.
The two men didn't see what he had done until the foam kissed their boots. They stepped back, swore at the mess on their polished toes, and then froze when the roaches followed, little black commas that became a sentence at their ankles.
"This is on you," the shoehorn jaw said to his lapel cam, voice cool, a hand in his holster that had always been too near. "He's interfering."
"Don't shoot," Leon said. He raised his hands until the half-mask caught the rain and slicked silver. "You shoot and the roach pheromones will spike. They love the copper."
Nadia breathed a tiny sound he would recognize later in sleep. He kept his eyes on the men, who didn't move because the foam had done the humiliation for him like a professional.
"Nadia," he said, soft. "Now."
She ran low, a line of blue cutting through white, and vanished through the bakery door he had angled the camera away from. The shot on the stream widened and then panned obligingly back to Leon and the two men, like the city were a stage and the glass God's eye preferred the blood lane.
"Step back," the second man said, which was funny because he couldn't. The foam had climbed to mid-calf now. The roaches were frantic around their boots, clicking, tasting the leather and the metal ticks of the buckles and the chafe of poured chemical underfoot.
Leon took a single step forward, palms up, and tilted his head in that way that looked menacing on camera and polite in real life.
"You can put your guns on the ground and walk out clean," he said, each word clipped and flat. "Or you can fire and draw a swarm. Either way, the audience gets their dopamine."
The shoehorn jaw hesitated. The second man's hand shook.
"Ad-break in 00:30," Nyx whispered. "You have twenty seconds to teach them your brand, Leon. Keep it elegant. The Saint is watching."
He did not smile. He stepped up onto the curb stone—higher ground, one small advantage—and set his boot in the foam. It sighed. He kept his palms up and his voice level and uninflected.
"To the camera," he said. "If you kill a civilian for content on my block, I will make your badge mean famine. Put them down."
Perhaps it was the roaches darting at that last verb. Perhaps it was the moisture crawling up the inside of Leon's mask from his breath, reminding him not to lie to himself about who he was. Perhaps it was the part of the men that remembered a training video about chemical agents and disliked the feeling of being filmed while flailing.
They put the guns down.
Leon flicked the foam lever off. He reached into his coat and pulled a roll of nylon cordon tape and looped it around their forearms with a competence he couldn't have had if he hadn't done this already once before. He guided them—lightly but firmly—back along the gutter until the foam was up to their knees and then snapped the tape to the barricade post. They would be very uncomfortable. They would not die. They would be seen at their worst angle. It was a kind of cruelty that washed off.
Roaches milled, tasting the last of the sugar. A handful were crushed under his boot when he moved. He felt the tiny pop and cataloged it in the ledger in his pocket without opening it yet.
[Glass Saint tipped 1,500 Favor: "Elegance in restraint. That alley was a scalpel."]
[Audience: 19,140 → 26,902]
[Favor: +1,500]
[Notoriety: +4]
[Trust: ± 0]
The sound of the Favor arriving was delicate—coins placed on porcelain—and he hated that he liked it.
A trembling hand touched his sleeve. Nadia. She had the insulin case open under her coat, checking vials with the practiced snap of a person who had done this in panic too often. "Thank you."
"Go," he said, and his throat tightened on the word. "Clinic first. Left at the mural. They'll know."
"Is there a—"
"The camera's off," he said. "Run."
She ran.
Nyx exhaled in his ear, an almost-laugh. "They like you. The War King wanted a broken nose; the Glass Saint purred. This is…a serviceable pilot, Architect. Would you like to spend your Favor?"
He looked at the foam dragging in eddies around the barricade and at the alley mouths on either side, at the way the rain made the concrete hiss, at the way the Tower's shadow bent the color of the puddles. He turned his head just enough to see the old brick facades of the block he would have to keep safe for the next thousand decisions.
"What do I get for fifteen hundred?" he asked.
"Boons," Nyx said, and spoke the word like a mouthful of wine. "One-time miracles with Heat. Contracts with Sponsors if you don't mind quotas. Or an Edict."
"An Edict," Leon said.
"A small one at that price. A barricade of cars? A floodgate? A…"
"Something that grows," he said without knowing until he said it. "Something that takes root and doesn't ask the audience for permission."
There was a beat like a held note.
"Barricade Bloom," Nyx said, and the UI painted a ghostly card across his vision: living vines, spined and compliant, grown fast along a planned line, stronger than plywood or steel for three hours, needing only moisture and a touch of ether. Side-effect: the scent of fresh chlorophyll could draw burrowers. It wasn't blood. It was a wall that breathed.
He looked down the length of Canal Street and saw, in his mind's ledger, the way you could cordon one block from panic, make a heart that beat steady inside the chaos long enough to seed a city.
"Ad-break in 00:10," Nyx murmured. "Make it worth it."
Leon tapped his pen once against the ledger in his coat and once against the foam tank he had used as a blade and once on his own knuckles. He had lied to no one and he was still the villain on the screen. Good.
"Buy me Barricade Bloom," he said, as the camera light went lacquer-hard. "We're building a city."