“Fifty-nine lives,” Chi Ohon informed me several hours later at my mandatory check-up. “They struck at our weakest.”

Chi didn’t mention the cost in specialisations, but I suspected he was thinking it. Fifty-nine World Slides. A third of the Garrison's civilisation wiped out in instants, unable to be replaced.

On my end, it represented fifty-nine assassins avenged. The thought didn’t bring comfort. War for revenge was war done wrong, not that there was ever a good reason.

We were in my tiny unit, since the other surviving healing centre – the one I hadn’t destroyed – was being used for emergency triage. I’d used Patch Up on myself in the immediate battle aftermath, so there wasn’t much left for the Brightman to examine. Medically, I was in perfect health and so was everyone else, except for the people stricken with solar poisoning. But I had questions, and Chi was a good person to grill.

“Why was our response so weak?” I asked, shaking my head as he checked for abnormalities. “Your database is full of defensive abilities.”

I looked at Chi’s own specialisations through the construct as I spoke. He carried four on his person, making him the equivalent of a Quad. From what I’d seen, that put him in his House’s upper echelon.

“No one was using each other’s specialisations,” I went on, “despite the fact they were right there.”

“It’s not done,” said the Brightman, sliding an extra lens into his eyepiece. He raised it to his face.

“Well, it should be,” I said, incredulous, conscious I was giving tips to the enemy. “The –” I used the name listed in the database, “regenerative specialisation alone might have saved a lot more people in that fight. Aren't you all about communal resources?”

The Chapel didn’t use each other’s augments, but only because we couldn’t. If it had been at all a possibility, its agents would have exploited it in a heartbeat.

I suspected the truth was more simple; that despite their name, the Garrison weren’t fighters. It was marked on their very planet; the passage of gradual retreat. Theirs was a culture of sieges and tradition. Experts at putting up walls and hiding behind them, with little thought to what to do if they failed. It had earnt them points with their Emperor, but that was about all.

“You’re a newcomer,” said Chi Ohon. “One who needs to stay out of the limelight, if you recall. Especially now. I’d advise you leave the strategic analysis to experts who’ve proven their worth.” He lowered the sheaf of lenses.

I grit my teeth, but arguing wouldn’t get me anywhere. Chi was an ally only as long as I stayed undercover. After today, the chances of any amicable resolution between Houses had dropped to approximately zero. And I could never reveal my part in it if I wanted to keep my head on my shoulders. Since the massacre, I'd carried a sick feeling with me in my stomach I'd never felt before in all my years of murder. I was still waiting for it to go away.

The Chapel would be back, too, once Jadal Cai had been dealt with and the quarantine lifted. A cadre of assassin-killers couldn’t be left to recover. In that scenario, the best the Garrison could hope for would be to surrender their collection of augments and confine themselves to a single universe. We could easily find them a better one.

In my mind, we’d already won.

It wasn’t the outcome Near Miss had forewarned me of. Either my core had lied or gotten it wrong… or the other shoe had yet to drop.

I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Jadal Cai’s stained glass clones and their eerie walk out of frame. Until now, the four-thousand-year-old Emperor had managed to outmanoeuvre us at every turn, often after we’d seemingly claimed a win. Knowing what I knew now, it seemed likely to happen again.

The Emperor, creator of all versal magic and progenitor of the Reins, if the Garrison hadn’t mangled the story over millennia. Who knew what he was capable of?

It occurred to me I was in the right place to ask.

“What are Seeds?” I changed the subject.

Chi looked at me sharply. “Who told you about that?”

“I saw it in the temple. And it’s all over your database. I know they’re echoes of the Emperor. What I don’t understand is what that means.”

“Hmph,” he grunted. “Before today, I’d written it off as another wishful tradition from the religious faction.”

I was salty and not dealing well with it. “Really? Because the impression I’m under is that it’s your organisation’s main purpose.”

“Our organisation’s,” Chi corrected me in a similar tone. “You’re not going back home to whatever disaster Er found you on. Better get used to it.”

Oh, I was. “Am I wrong?”

“…no.”

“Right,” I said. “Go on.”

The look Chi gave me indicated he had a few words to say about my attitude, only to decide it wasn’t worth it. “They’re people,” he said, and rose out of his crouch to get the skylight. “Despite what the zealots would have you believe. Ordinary, normal people who just happened to be born into the wrong circumstances.”

‘Ordinary’ and ‘normal’ were not how I would have described Reins, but each to their own. “Where said circumstances are being discount copies of the Emperor?”

“It’s not their fault they’re based on a template.” He turned the crank shuttering off most of the sunlight so that only a sliver remained. The room plunged into dimness. “And not a perfect one, besides. They’re fragments of the original, whatever havoc that wreaks to a person’s psyche. But the way half of the Garrison talks about them, you’d think they were gods in their own right, while simultaneously being described like cattle.”

“And which are they?”

“Neither. They’re certainly not gods, and not a soul here would dare lay a finger on them. Sacred relics would be a better comparison.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

It still amazed me how open the House of Function was with its information. That I could ask questions and receive more than vague promises of ‘learning someday’. True, I’d had to push a little – but then, I hadn’t even technically completed my formal orientation.

“Sacred relics how?” I pressed.

The Brightman narrowed his eyes at me. He filed the small individual lenses back into his suit sleeves one by one. “You know, this is an inappropriate time. Many people have died. In our culture, we expect respect towards and attention to that fact.”

Perhaps not so open, then. The battle might have been over, but I still had to tread carefully.

“I'm angry, too,” I threw back honestly, albeit for different reasons. “ I thought I’d be making maps, not joining a cult. Especially one that has enemies.”

The response seemed to mollify him, although I detected a lingering hesitancy. It wasn’t just the urgency; he didn’t want to tell me. Er Jid had been the same. There was more to it.

“It’s not as if I’m going back home.” I used his earlier words against him.

The last lens fell into Chi’s sleeve. “Ask me when I’m less busy. Rest. Grieve, if our people have had a chance to mean anything to you. Or else find someone who believes.” He shook his head at me. “But I wouldn’t get caught up in that business if I were you. The people who put stock in such things aren’t likely to be friendly to your condition.”

“Chi –” I called as he opened the door. That was another thing I wanted to ask him about.

“That’s ‘Brightman’ to you. Safe shade.”

I hadn’t handled that well, I thought as he left, and pulled up the Garrison construct to check its map.

I’d spent some time browsing through profiles after the massacre, looking to familiarise myself with the most helpful augments. The database, so unassuming at first, was staggeringly powerful when used in that way, and all for the fraction of the cost of a Chapel augment.

Assuming they were located in the same universe as me, I could draw on any specialisation I wanted via Function, regardless of distance. That usefulness dwindled the moment I stepped out of the Garrison, but would still be a boon for travelling in groups.

Nor was it the only advantage. Lack of absorption meant there was no discernible upper limit to the number a person could wield. No side effects on the body, either.

But there were disadvantages, also. Locating and triggering specialisations through an external interface was slower and came with variable delays. Garrison agents died of old age, and unlike Imbersol, their dead couldn't be retrieved. Was all that immediate power worth it when tradition forbade it being used to potential and its users died anyway?

I gave it a minute before following the Brightman out into the covered hall, stone mosaics under my feet. A corner or two away was the bench I’d stashed Imbersol’s unregistered augments beneath during the inspection. I tucked them back in my pouch. They didn’t show up in the database, but I wasn’t taking chances.

Notably, not a single Garrison specialisation aligned with Fate. A striking omission, given their relative power. The House should have had as many as there were World Slides. For whatever reason, it wouldn’t – or couldn’t – use an assassin’s core. My versal sense didn’t alert me to the presence of any secret cache nearby where unused cores wasted away. They hadn’t even taken the one I’d found on the dead wraith.

As far as I could tell, they just destroyed them.

An indescribable waste.

The sick feeling in my stomach hadn't gone away. I sidestepped through to the Vein and let Near Miss choose a universe far away from the Garrison. It was a peaceful one, all purples and pinks, with vines that shed leaves like rain. Shattered rocks the size of cities dotted the distant sky, and magical geodes rattled around in my veins.

I sat on the narrow platform between two smooth, vine-ridden walls while the sun set, fired off a summons and took out Lucky Guess.

Imbersol had never gotten to tell me the other weird thing about augments; namely, that it had never been us absorbing them. Just as well, too, or death would have actually been the end. I didn’t have a problem with everything I was being stripped down to a tiny sphere if it meant I could keep going. Although it was strange to think of myself as a lump of consolidated magic spat off by an ancient ruler.

I supposed it made us and the Reins some kind of distant cousins.

A flare in my senses let me know when Flinpen arrived, remnants of mist curling off her edges.

“Good timing,” she said, boots crunching on the leaf-dotted fibreglass. “I just finished up the initial report. Bad news is that there are many more.” The frown didn’t make it to her eyes, which gleamed with barely-contained excitement.

She took a seat beside me, emanating aquamarine light from her black armour sporting several evenly-spaced LEDs. It stood in stark contrast to my Garrison finery, even more ornate than the last set. I'd replaced it since the battle. Liquid-repellent it might have been, but the feature had limits.

“Did we get him for real this time?” I asked. “Jadal Cai hasn’t escaped?”

“We got him. Nysept isn’t taking her eyes off him, and my next job is submitting a request for the right containing skills. I’m covering every angle. Once we have reality locked in and bulletproof, we kill him. Then capture the soul and do it again. Problem finally over.”

I sighed, brushing a leaf off my hair with my free hand. “It won’t be that simple. There’s plenty I need to fill you in on.”

“I had a feeling,” she admitted. “So before unleashing that tide, take this. I had the credits sorted out ahead of time. Selected completely at random like you requested.”

Near Miss triggered as I plucked the augment out of her palm. It glowed with a warm gold in the soft light, and I resisted the urge to check it with Naked Eye.

“Over a hundred stolen augments returned, and they pay us each in only one,” she sniffed, following on in an insincere tone of affrontment. “At least they cleared your debts; I’m feeling comparatively undervalued.”

“You get to go from Pen to Hex in a matter of days,” I said with a small grin. “Who else do you know who’s done that?”

“True, and that’s why no one’s been stabbed.”

I uncurled the fingers of my other hand, watching her eyebrows lift in surprise at the sight of the other orb. “I have a favour to ask.”

“Another one? I'll see it returned for you.” She held out her hand.

“It’s Imbersol.” I came straight out with it. “She died.”

The Pen drew in a breath. “Shit. I liked her. Was it the House, or –” She saw my expression and broke off. “Of course it was Jadal Cai. What a way to go. But why the backwards name?”

“Because this is Lucky Guess, and she’s it. They’re one and the same. She has a soul.”

I studied her face carefully, but Flinpen’s surprise looked genuine. Not a second-tier secret, then.

“You’re serious,” my senior uttered after a few moments. “But then –”

“You’re Long Game. I’m Near Miss. You even told me as much yourself. Practically-speaking, it doesn’t change anything.”

“Actually, it changes quite a lot of –”

“The important thing,” I interrupted, “is that we get her to the soul extractor.”

Flinpen fell quiet for a moment as we both observed Lucky Guess. The sun on this world was setting quickly, fast enough to visually trace its passage through the sky. Imbersol, my new augment and Flinpen’s aqua LEDs were all shedding small auras of light. It was rapidly growing cold.

“You realise no one but a Rein has ever done this, Lamutri.”

“And maybe we should be asking why.”

“The Machine would never accept it.”

“Do you know that for certain?” I asked. “Try it. I have a feeling it might.”

Like so much of the Chapel’s history, information about the Machine had been lost to rumour and time. Only a few loose fragments had managed to survive. One snippet everyone could agree on was its general age. Millennia-old, dawn-of-the-House, that kind of extended timeframe.

The control centre in the Black Waste had believed I was Jadal Cai. If one ancient contraption could make that mistake, it was worth a second try.

Flinpen shook her head, the gap in it catching the light. “If I didn’t already believe you hosted an Arch…” She lifted Imbersol from my waiting hand. “Lamutri?”

“Yes?”

When I looked back up, I found my friend two-soon-to-be-three ranks my senior gazing at me with a strange look in her eyes. “To think I thought I was the one worried about leaving you behind.”