Back at the Lunar Sentinels, the alchemy lab was quiet and the hallways were empty.
Aldric moved through them alone, the purified Clockwork card secured in the inner pocket of his coat. He placed it carefully in the safe in his office, checked the lock twice, and then left the building entirely.
He walked for a while through the darkened streets of Cristae, taking turns that most people wouldn't take at this hour, moving through the older districts where the buildings leaned closer together and the cobalt light barely reached the ground between them.
He stopped in front of a mansion.
It was not the kind of building that announced itself. No gate, no grand entrance, no signage of any kind. Just a large, dark structure set back slightly from the lane, its windows unlit, its stone facade older than anything around it by the look of it, the kind of building that had been here before the neighborhood grew up around it and had simply declined to acknowledge the neighborhood's existence.
A figure stood at the door.
Dark uniform with a symbol over the chest, a blood moon, red against the black fabric, rendered in careful detail.
"Welcome, Aldric," the figure said, in a voice that came from low in the chest. "What brings the head of the Lunar Sentinels to the Bleeding Court?"
They led him inside without waiting for an answer.
The interior smelled of old wood and candle wax and something underneath both that Clyde would have recognized immediately as very old ichor residue if he had been there. Long table. High-backed chairs. Candles burning at irregular intervals, their flames sitting unnaturally still in a room with no visible draft.
Aldric sat.
"I need a purification," he said. He placed the safe on the table. "One Astral Card. Recovered from a Howling corpse tonight."
One of the figures at the table reached for the safe without speaking. Another produced an envelope and slid it across the wood toward Aldric.
"Five hundred shillings. Standard commission."
Aldric took the envelope and placed it inside his coat.
Then the figure sitting at the center of the table knocked on the wood twice.
Knock! Knock!
The sound carried through the room in a way that felt deliberate, formal, the beginning of a different kind of conversation.
"We have intelligence," the central figure said, "that the Bleeding Moon Cult is planning something significant. Something large enough that we want independent verification before we act on it." He slid a folder across the table to join the envelope. "We want the Lunar Sentinels to investigate. Full details are in the folder. Commission will be paid upon completion." A pause. "What do you say?"
Aldric looked at the folder for a moment.
"We accept."
"Good. The card will be delivered by mail once the purification is complete. Tomorrow morning."
Aldric picked up the folder, stood, and left without further ceremony.
In a building that appeared on no map of Cristae, in a district that most residents of the city had never had reason to visit, the Bleeding Moon Cult's laboratory hummed with the sound of machinery and something worse than machinery.
Rows of pods lined the walls, each one sealed, each one occupied.
At the center of the room, one pod had been opened.
The man inside was pressed against the back wall of it, his hands shaking, his voice barely holding together.
"Please," he said. "Please, I have a family. I am begging you, please stop!"
The scientist standing outside the pod wore a gas mask and a white coat that had long since stopped being white. He said nothing in response to the begging. He simply reached in with a needle and drew blood, the motion practiced and efficient, completely indifferent to the sound of the man's voice.
He turned to the workbench.
Two Divine Ichor Cards sat side by side on the surface. Echo and Gale.
Drip! Drip!
The blood hit both cards simultaneously.
Hisssss!
The cards reacted immediately, the surfaces sizzling where the blood touched them, the sigils on each one flaring to life before beginning to collapse inward, the cards dissolving into two orbs of concentrated ichor that hovered above the workbench, one silver-white and vibrating faintly, one carrying the deep moving quality of compressed wind.
The scientist picked both up.
He turned back to the pod.
He crushed them.
Crack! Crack!
Both orbs shattered at once and the ichor flooded into the man simultaneously. His body seized. His back arched hard against the pod wall with a sound that was not quite a scream and not quite anything else.
Pop!
His joints. One after another, rapid and wet, the skeleton beneath him reorganizing under the pressure of two incompatible frequencies entering the same body at the same time, each one pulling the biological architecture in its own direction, neither one winning.
His head rotated.
All the way around.
Crack!
Then his body stopped being a body in any recognizable sense and became something liquid instead, spreading across the floor of the pod in a dark, still pool that reflected the laboratory's overhead lights back up at nothing.
The scientist looked at the pod for a moment.
Then he turned to his clipboard.
"Experiment two thousand four hundred and ninety-two," he said, through the gas mask, his voice completely flat. "Failed."
He made a mark on the clipboard and walked away from the pod without looking back.
As he passed under one of the overhead lights, something fell from his head.
A single strand of white hair drifted down and settled on the laboratory floor, pale against the dark stone, already being stepped over by the next person walking through without noticing it was there.