They moved like thieves.
Marc and Howard arrived at Westminster at dawn, two anonymous men among a crowd of gawkers and emergency crews. The air still tasted of smoke and iron; the square felt raw, a wound whose edges had been hastily bandaged with police tape and prayer. Reporters shouted into cameras that clicked like insects. Drones angled for the best shots. William's face—calmer than any human right now—looped on every wall, promising order from the rubble.
Marc kept his hood low, his hands steady. Howard walked beside him with an insulated kit and the kind of nervous concentration only a man with solder burns and a childhood full of mechanics could hold. They threaded through the press and the police, slipping past a cordon with the practiced invisibility of men who had learned to move under the edges of authority.
They worked quickly. Where the blast had eaten through stone and clockwork, they found seams—places the official story called structural failure, places Marc called ritual scars. He crouched at the lip of the tower's fractured masonry and took samples: a scrap of metal threaded with an unearthly carbon, a smear of ash that smelled like iron and prayer, a fleck of glass that held a curl of black residue. Howard sealed vials and marked chain-of-custody tags with a half-molar grin that tried to be light and failed.
"Whatever did this," Howard said, voice low as he buffered the samples into Faraday pouches, "it didn't behave like normal explosives."
Marc didn't answer. He slid the old camera out of his bag and snapped a dozen frames of the ruin, of gears warped into grotesque bloom, of a bell cracked and stopped forever at the wrong hour. The digital images, the analog film—they were all pieces of a language he was learning to read.
By midmorning they were back in the lab. The centrifuges whirred like quiet animals. Under the scanner, the residues split into graphs and spikes that looked like the barcodes of a drug; but between the lines, Howard found another voice—an energy signature that hummed in a key the analysis software called anomalous. Not Aether-level, not exactly Sangre's mark, but close enough to hum when exposed to moonlight.
Marc watched the readout and felt the moon—Tecciztecatl's thumb against the world—press through him like a memory. The signature wasn't purely technological. It had ritual embedded within metallurgy. It read like someone had taught a machine how to sing a hymn.
"Diego," Marc said finally.
Howard's brow lifted. "You sure? The residue's… altered. Like it's been mixed with—" He searched for the word. "—with something that answers to worship."
"You can smell it in the ash," Marc said. "Like singed flesh and iron and incense. Diego's work, then. Or his hands at least."
They worked in silence after that, parsing graphs and matching etchings, turning clues into a tentative map. Whatever had toppled Big Ben had been a signal as much as a weapon: a message to the city, to William's followers, and to the creatures who listened when humans made bargains.
---
The Superio League convened in the chamber that had once been built to house consensus and now creaked with a different weight: doubt. Shiloh Kane, still bruised beneath her bandaging, presided like a monarch trying to teach herself humility. The Lioness stood close by—her gaze bright and haunted—while Palisade and the Cyber-Titan formed a blunt line against panic.
"We have to ask ourselves what interfering will cost," Palisade said, voice like a hammer. "If we step in now, we rip the fabric of public trust and hand William the martyr's rope he can hang us with. If we do nothing, he builds a state on this explosion."
Kane's fingers tightened on the armrest. "We recalibrate the league's posture. We do not—repeat, do not—hunt a vigilante without proof. But William is now of interest. We gather intelligence. We monitor. We place contingencies."
Lioness swallowed, the memory of the white crown flickering behind her eyes. "And Moonveil?"
"Moonveil is a variable," Cyber-Titan said. "Not yet a constant. He is reactive, not strategic. He answers fewer questions than he raises."
"Yet he toppled me," Kane said. Her voice did not carry resentment so much as the ache of a lesson learned too late. "And now the city breaks and asks for someone to fix it."
They argued the fine lines of intervention and restraint as if any two things could be separated cleanly. Between them hung an uncomfortable truth: the League had been built for war between nations, not for the slow, subterranean devils of men like William. The wrong move would look like a crackdown; the right move might not exist in a world that had already chosen sides.
---
Far away, under the sharp, clean night of Iceland, Gaidan listened more than he spoke. He sat in a small house that smelled of sea and metal, the aurora a shy curtain beyond the windows. He called no summits. He sent no fleets. Some things, he had learned, did not reward haste.
"He will speak," he told no one, tracing the map of London in his mind with the tip of a finger. "When he chooses. I will watch the tide."
There was a patience in Gaidan that was not resignation but calculation. He had fought gods. He had seen constructs of justice fall and rise like waves. He would not let this be a battle of gods called before men could learn the grammar.
---
The trap was merciless in its simplicity.
At night the city smelled oily and sweet with rain. Marc moved through the bowels of the East End in a way that had once been second nature—soft steps, careful angles, a mask of normality he could don and remove without thinking. He had scanned the riddles, cross-referenced the blood language, followed the breadcrumb map Diego left like a taunt. The path led to a subway corridor that had been closed for years, its mouth sealed by signage and rust. When Marc slipped through the barriers, the world shut down into a corridor of lamplight and stale air.
Diego was waiting.
He stood under a single hanging lamp, the light flat against his face. He did not look like the beast that sometimes woke inside him—he looked fragile, small, as if the graft had gnawed at more than flesh. Yet his eyes were bright with a clarity that made Marc's gut tighten.
"Finally," Diego said, voice steady as a metronome. "I thought you'd be clever and not follow the breadcrumbs."
Marc's hand drifted toward his jacket but not toward the weapons. "You want to finish this," he said. "You want to kill me."
Diego laughed, a small, fractured sound. "Not kill. Test. We are both experiments of gods and ghosts. The moon changes. I have watched you. I have studied your habits, your love for ritual, your courtesies. You are a creature of patterns."
"How did you find my routines?" Marc asked, eyes narrowing. His camera hung at his side like a talisman.
"I watched the cameras you think are anonymous. I read the patterns in the markets you call your covers. I've been dancing in the dark," Diego answered. He took two steps closer. "Tonight is the new moon. The dark moon. Your powers—weakest now, old tales say. The stars… the stars are useless. They have told us nothing."
Marc felt the moon retreat inside him, a small chill where the god's warmth usually sat. The limiter hummed at his throat like a reminder of treaties and favors. It was the first time, since the amulet, that he felt the absence of lunar favor press like a weight.
"You planned this," Marc said flatly. "You read me."
"I learned from you by learning from Juarez," Diego replied. He smiled without humor. "I was the least among men and the most among thieves. I learned to be quiet. I learned to make puzzles. Tonight we see whose math is true."
There was a rueful tilt to Diego's mouth, as if the game meant more than the victory. "I have been the weak brother all my life," he said softly. "Now I've learned to be patient. To be intelligent. To make a city speak in riddles."
The tunnel hummed. Far above them, London breathed and burned. Somewhere, a train's distant wail faded into the night.
Marc felt the trap settle like a hand around his shoulders. He did not flinch. "So show me," he said. "Show me what you learned."
Diego's eyes shone, wet with something that might have been memory or mad devotion. "You will see," he promised.
The dark moon hung cold and absolute above the city. Between two men, both remade by blood and bargain, the night lengthened until it felt like a thing with its own patience.