Bram Ash walked the length of the Star tower’s outer courtyard, his heavy leather boots crunching on shards of ribbed salt-glass that had fallen from the skylights during the final pressure venting. His right arm was locked securely inside its wool sling, the infected bullet wound in his shoulder pulsing with a deep, greasy ache that sent needles of fire down into his collarbone every time his heel struck a flat stone slab. He had discarded his court guard’s brass badge six hours ago, kicking it into an open drainage under-road drain behind the boiler house. But forty years of habit couldn’t be scraped away with a snapped pin. He still scanned the dark corners, his eyes instinctively seeking the body-sized patches of shadow where a guard double might form.
There were none.
He stopped in the deep shadow beneath the stone arch of the old carriage house. For five years, this archway had been a known emergence vector. An unmonitored nook connected to the third feeder channel where Morn’s patrol copies had materialized during the midnight shift change. Bram stepped directly into the blackest recess of the corner.
The air was cold, smelling of horse manure, damp straw, and ancient lime mortar. His skin didn’t prickle with the greasy, static crawling that had signaled a coming soon manifestation. His hair didn’t stand on end. The darkness was flat, dead, and inert. It was merely the physical shadow of a stone wall blocking the starlight, nothing more.
