Steam rose from the fissures like breath from a sleeping thing. Velith's outer rings still smoked; torn conduits hissed under the rain and made the night smell of hot iron. Streetlamps flickered over puddles that reflected a city with its face half-melted. It was the kind of quiet that kept secrets by habit.
A black transport slid through that quiet, its matte skin swallowing the weak light. It coughed once and died, leaving a rectangle of darkness against the ruined station. Men and women in tailored coats stepped out, masks sealing their faces. They moved with the economy of people trained to remove complications from sight—no wasted motions, no idle glances. The Nineveil had a way of making order feel like an instrument.
They fanned out into the wreck, scanners humming against the ruins. Someone barked coordinates. Someone else set up amber lenses and white tapes. The city's wounds were photographed, logged, and cataloged by hands that had seen too much to be surprised. Everything that recorded sound or sight that could not be permitted was taken into custody, put on a cart, and fed into an incinerator that coughed polite smoke and left ash that vanished in the rain.
He watched from the tram tracks, half-hidden by the bent rail and broken signage. Mael's coat held the water, dark and heavy, but he didn't shiver. He stood like a man who allowed the world its motions while privately knowing how they would end. The Nineveil scoured the district with surgical speed, and their leader moved through the process with the calm of someone reading a well-practiced script.
When they uncovered Liora Venn and Drayk Oren, there was a tightness in the air that not even the rain could wash away. Liora's light had broken into filaments that lay like spent fireworks; Drayk's bulk was stilled in a way that made the puddles steam where his weight had hit. Agents photographed, took measurements, and then recorded their notes in small, neutral tones. Nothing in their faces betrayed the size of what had happened here.
The tech who crouched nearest to Liora's shattered constructs frowned at a screen. "Signatures are… odd," she said. "Energy spikes. Time stamps hopping. Some readings don't match our archive—"
"We do not speculate," the leader said, voice flat, closing the tablet with a hand that might as well have been brass. "We catalog. We remove. We close." There was no cruelty in the command—only absolute business.
They moved like a tide of black coats. Cameras' last images were fed to the incinerator. Witness lists were rounded up; anyone who had seen more than they should was taken for questioning, then briefed into silence. A statement was prepared and polished: Mirra containment failure; incident contained. The press release had a neatness that smelled of antiseptic. A city needed explanations it could fold into its day; the Guild supplied one that would be easy to accept.
Mael stepped from shadow to shadow, making no attempt to be invisible. He watched the routine—the way men who remembered history could turn it into policy. He watched the faces of the Nineveil; they were not cruel, not necessarily. They were efficient. Efficiency could be colder than cruelty because it asked nothing of the heart.
An agent turned and saw him. She raised her scanner. The machine blinked. For a heartbeat the practical world asked a question, and a dozen lives waited for the answer.
He smiled, small and private. Not for theater; it was more like verification. Then he melted into the rain and the debris as someone else's story responded by filling gaps the Nineveil intended to leave behind. They moved on because the job had an end; he moved because his had not yet begun.
They gathered Liora and Drayk with the sober, hurried motions of people who remove evidence. Black tarps, gloved hands, careful straps. The bodies were lifted and taken to a van that smelled of disinfectant and secrecy. They photographed the ground; the spreadsheet filled with numbers. The incinerator took feeds and fed ash, obedient and final.
On the edge of the operation, a junior clerk hesitated over a name. He had seen something in a glance, an angle that didn't fit the story he'd been given. He squealed a protest, the way a man does when a gear in his machine refuses to mesh. A senior leaned down, transferred a file with the practiced ease of a hand that had done it before, and the hesitation vanished.
"Keep the perimeter tight," the leader instructed as the first trucks pulled away. "No leaks. Anything that could become doctrine is dead. Public statement goes out in an hour. We frame it clean."
They spoke as if the truth were an inconvenient odor to be sprayed away—practical, presentable, final.
Mael watched them close the lids, watched the trucks eat the street and roll away with their black mouths full. He folded his hands behind his back and listened to the rain. Where people constructed narratives like fences, he could feel the joins, the weak links. He had no love for spectacle; he preferred the small, sure work of removing the supports under a building until it settled into the silence he wanted.
A drone drifted overhead and tried to take the scene in wider. Its feed blinked and returned a frame of static. Someone barked into a headset and swore softly. The incinerator did its work. The screens recorded their final clean frames: a building, a street, a statement.
He stepped away before the stories hardened into law. The city closed behind him like a book. The Nineveil left a public face for the Guild that promised stability and investigation; they left a closed record that would be cited in months and years to come. But ash remembers the positions of things, and small children remember faces. The world is not as tidy as officials would have it pretend.
Mael folded his collar against the rain and walked east, following a line of train tracks that would lead him away from the tidy narratives into a geography that kept secrets better. The Nineveil had done what they did best—erase the obvious—and in doing so they only confirmed what he already knew: truth had weight. It could be buried, delayed, distorted, but never wholly removed.
He passed under a street sign that still hung by a single screw, and felt the city's hunger for answers pulse like a small, stubborn heart. He kept going.