What compelled you?

Pasha paces along the line of assailants while she recalls the man’s whispered words. Twenty-nine attendants, all under her employ for at least five years each, and all of which tried to kill her. “No weapons,” she utters. “No syringes, no drowsing powder, no garrotes. Nothing.” She shakes her head. “Did we check their quarters?”

“We are doing so now,” says Sixt. The Entrusted is one of three life forms in the hallway that she can trust, June-Leckie the primary one excluded. The Thurmgeist is an avatar of envy and honor, yet stubborn as an Ox-infused, fuelled by superficial emotions. She’ll plow in the right direction if chained towards it and do the opposite when given free roam.

“What of the elites?” Pasha asks Gauss. “You trust them all?” She says it openly, as if the guards flanking them were not trained to hear a pin drop in a crowded marketplace.

“They have much to lose from losing you,” says Gauss. “Captain Drinnam especially.”

Just paycheques, but more than any soldier in the Corps. “And these didn’t?” Pasha kneels and checks the pale face of another fallen assailant. Their rage against her has disappeared as quickly as it came.

“They were late to the proceedings,” says June. “Punishment?” She may as well be speaking to the wind, though. Her words are anathema in the alcazar, the bringer of their downfall.

“Is it poor taste to gag a Thurmgeist?” Pasha asks.

Cackles ponders this. “They’re stowaways, after all. Fit her into a box. At least it will be familiar.” He turns to the Thurmgeist. “You should be used to it by now.”

The remark sits spoiled in June-Leckie, but she keeps her comments to herself.

“Remind me why you told her?” Pasha asks while the elites search the bodies.

“These conspirators are the equivalent of religious zealots,” says Gauss, “and have been stoking this fire for quite some time. Our best option is to force them to attack us now when we’re ready rather than later when we may not be. Simple tactics.” The general sheathes his machete. “What happened tonight was not unexpected.”

“You’re assuming they are ‘conspirators,’ then.”

“Aren’t you doing the same?”

Before Pasha can answer, Captain Drinnam joins them, a double-bladed polearm swinging from his back. “I would have come, Signature, but more were coming for him.” He kneels immediately, offering his neck to her. “Be done with it if you must.”

“I’m half tempted to, Drinnam.” She settles for a kick to his groin, right where the men’s testicles would be if a strand hadn’t dissolved them already. “Get up. You did well. Where is he?”

Drinnam breathes out, bobbing his thanks in a situation where lesser men would have been decapitated. “We have him confined to his lab. He’s… not leaving. You have to see it, Signature.”

“You’re sure he can’t?”

“He doesn’t want to.”

Pasha frowns. “Then take me to him.”

They do, past winding hallways flanked with alcazar elites, through gantries and passageways, both secret and public, until they reach the same workshop where the Surgeon Elder had diagnosed June-Leckie’s Inciter strand.

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Squads of her guards line up outside, but none beyond the glass, where the Surgeon Elder himself sits on a chair, head slumped, stretchers and tables pushed aside to form a circle with him at its center. A long one-way speaking tube rests on his shoulder and winds from his mouth to the windowed wall where all observe him. His lab’s mycorrhizal, on a table next to him, different from the one in his quarters, is shriveled and dead.

“He did this to himself, sir,” says one of the elites. “It’s locked from the inside. Bloody stiff mechanisms. We can get a welder to-”

“Don’t do that.” The Surgeon Elder’s voice is metallic through the speaking tube. “You break the door, you release the gas. There’s-” he coughs, checks his hands, looking at something that could be blood. “Eighty percent neutralizer in here. Eighty.”

Pasha stares. That much neutralizer is enough to kill any strand and most cells in your body in minutes. Even now, she can make out the pink vapor clouds wafting around and the seals in the vents the Surgeon Elder must have fastened to contain the gas.

“We tried to stop him, sir,” says another elite to Drinnam, “but we couldn’t go inside.”

“Are there any chambers for him to sneak out?” asks the guard captain.

The elite shakes his head. “Airtight, sir.”

Confused, Drinnam turns to Pasha. When she doesn’t answer immediately, he turns to Cackles, who yields to the girl’s decision. His hands are still as he parses the situation.

The Surgeon Elder lied to her and June. His grand scheme, then, but to end like this?

“Is she here?” rasps the Surgeon Elder, raising his head and squinting. His eyeballs are half the size they should be, or that could be his wrinkled skin pressing them tighter. “Tell her to grab the tube.” He coughs. “Tell her!”

Pasha does. “What the Hells have you done to us all?”

“Ah, there you are.” The Surgeon Elder dips his head back. “I tried, you know.” Hiccups. “I did try to save…. save us all. I could have. I was… I was so close. So… close.”

Pasha grips the tube. “That was the Inciter strand, wasn’t it?” So many questions bubble up in her, and all of them for this dying man during his grand exit. Maybe this was part of it, so he’d die with his secrets. “Why did you lie to us?”

“I had no choice. Never had a choice.” The Surgeon Elder moves his head slightly. It could be a conscious nod or a spasm of his muscles as he loses control. “I have to tell you, Signature… that you named this strand… p-perfectly.” He keeps his head up, and it takes tremendous effort. “It would have taken me a year to think of it, but none of them… none of them would have come close, would they? No.” He swallows, seeming to gulp back the entire world’s air. “It’s everywhere. It always has been… everywhere.” Then, Pasha thinks he starts to sob. “But it’s not my fault.” The Surgeon Elder croaks in pain like an animal caught in a trap. “Hells!” he cries. “Hells. I tried! They all died because of me.”

“Who died?”

The man’s head dips again. “My friends in that place. All of them. I took them down with me. I took them all down with me. My…fault.” He stares into nothing. “More testing. Too… hasty. Down.” A deep swallow that takes all his efforts. “Down. Down.” There is a silence for a long time. “Made it home, didn’t I? I-”

“Elder!” she screams, slamming her fists on the lab’s window. “Elder!”

The Surgeon Elder does not speak. Seconds later, his neck bends too far, the bones underneath pulverized to dust. His head slides down as if cut by a sharp blade and lands on the floor. The rest of the man’s body sags, slumps, and then smashes to the ground, going up like a pile of autumn leaves or ash.

Then, in the middle of the pile lies a single syringe with a violet mixture.

It is brighter than anything Pasha has ever seen. She almost cries at the sight of it. “You poor man,” she says, gripping the speaking tube tightly as reality opens to her. Everywhere. All this time. Oh, but of course, it had been here; the riots, the Chant, the hatred focused on the First Signature like a trained rifle. There were a myriad of reasons, but all chalked up to a distrust not created through any rationale but engineered—Incited. Her hold on the city and humanity has waned, and she sees now that it is not her fault or the Surgeon Elder’s.

Pasha throws the tube down and finds Gauss. “Pull it back!”

“Pull what?”

“The ropeway to Hyrnlak. Bring them back!”

Gauss looks around. “But… the Inciter strand.”

“Hyrnlak is dead. The Emergence Corps is dead! They have been for years. There’s nothing left.” Hells, Cackles can’t even see it, can’t understand that the soil in the Surgeon Elder’s quarters belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Tatlock’s mycorrhizal. Pasha almost punches the fat general in the stomach for being so blind. “Did you hear him? The Inciter strand is here. It’s everywhere!”