The city held its breath.
Ninety seconds.
Ninety heartbeats until the next bell, and every shard in the alley was counting them out loud.
Law felt the countdown in his bones like a second pulse.
The butterflies made of Laura's stolen voice were still fluttering around his face, trying to crawl into his mouth, trying to make him swallow the word SOON.
He crushed another one between his fingers. Silver blood ran down his wrist and hissed when it touched the rain.
Tavren stood on the rooftop, arms spread like a priest about to bless a massacre.
"Ninety," he called down, gentle as a lullaby.
Laura's duplicate, taller now, almost solid, leaned in until it was nose-to-nose with the real Laura.
"Eighty-nine," it whispered, smiling with her mouth.
Real Laura's hand shot to her knife, but her fingers passed straight through the hilt. The duplicate laughed with Liora's voice, soft and broken.
Liora dropped to one knee, clutching her chest. "It's inside the resonance. It's rewriting the link."
"Eighty-seven," Tavren sang.
Nysera snarled, wolf surging under her skin, but invisible threads snapped tight around her limbs and yanked her into the air like a marionette. Blood dripped from her claws, each drop turning into a tiny shard mid-fall.
Zero's chains lashed out, trying to cut the threads. The threads caught the chains and pulled, dragging him forward one inch at a time, heels carving grooves in the wet stone.
"Eighty-four."
The civilians behind them were screaming again, but the sound was wrong, layered, like twenty-three voices speaking with one throat.
Law stood in the exact center of the alley.
Alone.
The reflection wearing his older face stepped out of a shard on the wall and walked toward him on air that wasn't there.
It looked tired.
It looked proud.
It looked like everything he was terrified of becoming.
"Eighty," it said with his own mouth.
Law met its eyes.
And smiled.
Not the polite smile.
Not the strategic one.
The smile he used when he was about to do something unforgivable.
He drew the knife he'd never used in front of anyone.
The one he kept for the day he had to cut his own future out of his veins.
"Seventy-eight," Tavren warned.
Law flipped the knife and sliced his left palm open in one clean motion.
Blood hit the ground like a gunshot.
The countdown stuttered.
"Seventy… seven…?"
Tavren's voice cracked for the first time.
Law pressed the bleeding hand flat against the wet stone.
The rain stopped mid-fall.
Every drop hung suspended, trembling.
He looked up at the sky, past Tavren, past the rooftops, into whatever passed for Ka'thar's soul.
And spoke a single word.
Not in Common.
Not in Beastkin.
Not even in the old tongue of the Mirror.
A word that tasted like the moment before the first fracture.
A word the city had forgotten it was afraid of.
The suspended raindrops turned gold.
Then fell upward.
The butterflies exploded into ash.
Nysera dropped to the ground, threads severed.
Zero's chains snapped back to his wrists like startled snakes.
Laura's duplicate screamed once, a sound like glass giving birth, and shattered into harmless dust.
Liora gasped, resonance flaring bright enough to burn shadows off the walls.
Tavren took one involuntary step backward.
Law stood slowly, blood pouring blood, and looked straight at him.
"You're counting wrong," he said quietly.
His voice carried like a death sentence.
"The bell doesn't ring in ninety seconds."
He lifted his bleeding hand.
"It rings when I say it does."
The entire alley went dark.
Not night-dark.
Mirror-dark.
Every shard in Ka'thar turned black at once, reflecting nothing.
And from the blackness came a sound no one had ever heard the city make before.
A whimper.
Tavren's face went the color of old paper.
Law smiled wider.
"Round two," he said, "is mine."
Somewhere far below the streets, something ancient curled in on itself and started to cry.