The air in the clerical district was thick enough to chew on, stinking of burnt paper and old ink.
The smoke wasn't doing anything poetic; it was just a nasty, grey haze leaking out of the Archive windows, making it damn near impossible to breathe. High above, the sky had turned a nasty shade of purple, caught in the glow of fires started by the very guys who were supposed to be guarding the city's history.
Elias felt the shift through the Clarity. He saw the Magistrate's play for what it was: a desperate, last-ditch effort to scrub the record clean. If the books were gone, so were the lies, the debts, and the bodies. They wanted to turn a bureaucratic train wreck into some kind of heroic tragedy, rewritten from the ashes.
He bypassed the main gates. A bunch of terrified Overseers were huddled there, swapping their badges for drawn steel, looking like they were ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. Instead, Elias slid down the service chutes, dropping into the gut of the Great Library where the real heat was.
The temperature down there was brutal.
He found the Magistrate in the central hall, looking like a man who'd finally lost his mind. He wasn't a man of the law anymore—just a guy with a torch and an oil-soaked rag, his shadow jumping against the pillars like some kind of twitching giant.
Elias stepped out into the light. He didn't make a scene. He just watched the man sweat.
"It's not gonna burn fast enough, you know," Elias said, his voice raspy from the smoke.
The Magistrate whipped around, the torch shaking in his hand. His face was a mess of soot and panic. "The Static. You here to watch the world end?"
"I'm here to watch you try to hide," Elias said, taking a slow, heavy step forward. "You spent your whole life telling these people that if it isn't in the books, it didn't happen. You made them believe the record is the only truth there is. You can't just burn that faith away in an afternoon."
The Magistrate let out a sharp, ugly laugh. "Faith? They believe whatever I put on the front page! Tomorrow, I'll tell them the Static torched the place. I'll be the hero who saved what was left."
Elias just felt tired. He looked at the man with a kind of dull pity. "You're missing the point. It doesn't matter who's holding the match when the gears have already ground to a halt."
From the streets above, a new sound started to drift down—a heavy, rhythmic thumping. It wasn't a riot. It was just people. Porters, cleaners, laborers—thousands of them, walking right past the guards like they weren't even there. They weren't coming to fight. They were just coming to see for themselves.
The Magistrate heard it too. He looked up at those high, barred windows and saw the silhouettes of the very people he thought he owned. They didn't need a ledger to tell them what they could see with their own eyes. They saw the fire. They saw the coward holding the torch.
The flame slipped from his hand, hitting a puddle of oil with a wet thud.
Elias didn't stick around for the arrest. He knew the girl was waiting in the tunnels, and he knew the walls of the city didn't mean much anymore. He turned back into the haze, disappearing into the vents just as the first of the crowd pushed through the doors—not to loot the place, but to grab the books before they turned to ash.
By the time he reached the hideout, the Clarity had flickered out. He just felt small, exhausted, and human.
The girl was by the entrance, her hand off her blade for once. She took one look at the soot on his face and sighed.
"Is it done?" she asked.
"The machine's dead," Elias said, sliding down the wall until he hit the floor. "Now the city's gotta figure out how to breathe on its own."
The silence in the tunnel felt different this time. It wasn't the silence of a held breath; it was the quiet of someone finally getting some sleep. Above them, for the first time in years, the city lights were out, and you could actually see the stars.