The capital’s rescue commander reached the council by a relay that kept breaking at the edge of her words.
Behind her voice, Eli could hear impacts and someone counting a lift. A gate failure had struck near infrastructure the district could not abandon: a transport junction, a service line supplying the receiving clinics, occupied buildings whose exits depended on streets now choked with debris. Local responders had run out of space before they ran out of people needing it.
Rook’s hunters were already there. So were containment frames, transport crews, and engineers who knew how to set equipment faster than a newly assembled coalition could learn. An aide displayed confirmed deployments beside the emergency order. The list made the proposal look less like an expansion of power than the belated legal shape of help already happening.
The commander described a team delayed at another guild’s territorial boundary. Permission had to pass through two contacts while a damaged approach worsened. Eli asked whether the team had eventually crossed. She said yes, after a local officer accepted responsibility. The delay was real. So was the need to avoid inventing the outcome while the rescue still continued.
“Would a single coordination order have helped?” a council member asked.
