"Paumi was a plant," Eind said as he walked back into the facility's main office.

Jarv came in behind him, carrying a tied white plastic bag that occasionally squirmed and grunted.

"What?" Indrie asked, turning on her chair, away from a desk strewn with letters.

"He was a ringer. A spy," Jarv said.

"We're all spies," Indrie replied.

"He was a double spy. He was working for someone in the imperial hierarchy with their own agenda, beyond infiltration."

"Who? What?"

"He doesn't know," Jarv continued. "He was working through his grandad. His heavily indebted grandad."

"Don't listen to him, Indrie," the shifting bag cried out. "He's lying. Bring me back! What happened to my body!"

"This is grotesque!" Indrie said, alarmed.

"What are we going to do with his body?" Eind asked, quietly.

Jarv looked between them. "Don't you have a way to get rid of bodies?"

The bag let out a wordless yell of anger.

"They have facilities in the city, but they ask questions," Eind said.

"I don't understand," Indrie cut in. "You just turned up and executed the one person who was working at cross purposes to us? How much of this did you know before you arrived?"

"This is all mostly serendipity," Jarv said, hanging the plastic bag on the door handle. "Things I guessed, things he said. I knew he was third generation hierarchy, I knew someone bribed his way here, and after his little speech I knew he thought he was untouchable. Worst of all, I knew he was an Empire stooge."

"We're all Empire stooges here," Indrie objected.

Jarv waved the complaint off.

"Don't listen to these lies, Indrie," the bag shouted. "Contact Thunder Bay immediately. Write to my grandfather. He's at- the imperial college-"

Jarv pulled the bag off the door and tossed it down the corridor, closing the door behind him.

"I take it neither of you knew," Jarv said.

Eind shook his head. Indrie said, "No."

Jarv sank onto a chair and sagged. He took a breath, looking around the room.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"After midnight bell," Indrie replied. "One AM by the local clocks. Sixth of April 2026 if you want the full date."

"I used to carry a gland of the watcher hawk," Jarv said, speaking quietly, almost to himself. "I could get away with one hour's sleep a week. Now? Well. I'm getting old."

"What are we going to do with Paumi?" Indrie asked.

"Keep questioning him, see if he comes up with anything else. We might need him if his backer tries to make contact. If it turns out to be someone serious, we might need to bring him back."

"We can resurrect humans?" Eind asked.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Sure. Different body, but the doll will stop his self decaying. If you've got the self it's just a matter of life fragments. It's not complicated. You could work it out if you thought about it."

He looked up, looking at the shocked expressions on the others' faces. "It's not a secret. It's not even obscure. They just don't teach it at the academies. Experiment a little."

"I've never seen draurcraft done on a speaking sentient before today," Eind said, quietly.

Jarv frowned. Soul surgery wasn't illegal to perform on people. It was actually quite popular. It was just very expensive. You had to source whatever token you wanted to use, and you had to pay an experienced draurcrafter to do the procedure. Sometimes you had to rent your own ritual space. Even in the hierarchy it was uncommon.

Human tokenization was illegal, because it was icky, but Jarv had reconciled himself to just steer off the darker paths it opened up. He was well aware that he walked a razor's edge, there.

From deeper in the base Paumi's shouts continued to ring out, yelling at the top of his voice.

"Where is there to sleep here?" he asked.

o o o

Hours later, Jarv stirred. He sat up. Indrie and Eind were asleep nearby.

The crash room was a small space with three sets of bunk beds, six beds total. Each of the three of them had taken a single bunk each, so none of them needed to sleep below another person. The floor was stone here like in the rest of the base, but someone had dragged a rug over the bare center of the room to make it feel warmer.

Jarv stood, wearing undershirt and shorts, and moved quietly for the door. The stone was cold on his bare feet, and there was a chill in the air from the lack of good heating. He could still feel the buzz of background energy, which he'd missed enough on the long road trip down that it was still setting his nerves to tingling now.

For all that he'd been tired, he hadn't been able to sleep. He'd lain still until the other two had drifted off, waiting for his chance to move around unobserved.

Now, he stepped into the corridor and cracked the door of the ritual room open, moving inside.

The soul surgery diagram was still in place, deactivated by a couple of careful smudges. Jarv knelt down and started adjusting it with a platinum chalk and the pad of his thumb, lowering a couple of critical threshholds, cutting off its ability to displace any but surface tokens.

When he was happy with the modifications, he walked around the room with hands raised, clearing the cobwebs out of the energy field until he had a homogenous well of power around him, then he lay down on the diagram.

It took some contortion for him to be able to reach the incomplete section, but he managed to draw the final line and activate the ritual.

Power flooded into him from the circle, and his soul flooded out.

Tokens washed upwards from his body like branches caught in a flood, rising a few inches from him before floating around in lazy, random paths.

These were only the surface fragments of his soul. It wouldn't be smart for him to flush out all of his soul, including his self and lives, not unless he wanted a long, unproductive, and partially decomposey nap. These were just the tokens which he'd implanted into himself, or had been placed in him by others. There were thirteen.

Jarv looked at them as they floated past, identifying them by the images seemingly painted onto the semi-corporeal objects.

There was the Breath and Charge of a dustbull; a powerful creature that could exhale a powder that weakened materials on a spiritual level. He saw the Sight and Flight of a dragonbat, a monster that didn't fit into neat categories, but could see well in the dark. There were the Strength, Scales, Liver and Fangs of a mugos, a venomous bear-sized lizard. And there was Nix-nix-chittalias-desth, or at least the parts of them he'd been allowed to keep. Two claws, its blood, and the setae it used to sense sound and movement.

Not much to show for six years of accumulating power. Of all of them, only the sensory enhancements were slight enough to be active constantly, and they were still tremulous. Too much draw and even those would fall back.

The rest could be called on once, then would be unavailable for minutes, hours, or days, depending on the energy involved. The Claw he'd used earlier was only just now regaining its color, despite the fact he'd used only a fraction of its potential.

There was one token in the constellation that he hadn't put there. A golden square, covered in figures, scripts and diagrams that looked unnatural alongside the direct symbology of the other fragments. It was a completely artificial token, created and implanted by draurcraftysts more knowledgable than Jarv. His parole. The Lightseekers had rewritten the core of him, laying down a set of rules he couldn't break, for fear of obliteration.

Interestingly, they hadn't ruled out breaking imperial law completely, maybe they thought he'd need to break a few laws to accomplish his task, but anything that might actually threaten the Lightbringers, the hierarchy, or imperial dogma would be fatal.

The token bounced and tugged at a chain of golden light that stretched down and disappeared into his chest. The Parole token was bound to his Self, apparently unbreakably. There was no way to extract it without losing himself, and no way to destroy it without activating it, which would consume both itself and his Self. True death, for someone who'd once laughed at death.

But Justice had made a mistake. They'd given him time out of their sight. Months, maybe years. They'd given him space to operate – he was the only captain for a thousand chains, until they opened the second Ogrigg Gate. They'd given him access to a world of raw materials. And looking at the golden shackle chained to the heart of his soul, Jarv was beginning to have ideas.