Kellan woke to warmth.
Not the clean warmth of a stove or the sharp warmth of sunlight, but the cluttered, human warmth that leaked out of a city before it remembered to be afraid. Heat from too many bodies packed into too little space. Heat from kettles and engines and bread ovens. Heat trapped under roofs and between alley walls where the wind couldn't reach.
He lay still for a moment and listened to the building breathe.
Pipes ticked behind plaster. Somewhere above him a neighbour's floorboards complained, a familiar rhythm of bare feet and impatience. Down in the stairwell someone argued softly about ration stamps. The air carried it all—sound and smell and the faint, oily tang of the district generators that never quite burned clean.
It would have been easy to stay in bed and pretend this day was an ordinary one.
He didn't.
Kellan swung his legs off the cot and reached for his uniform hanging from the chair. The fabric was stiff with yesterday's salt and yesterday's sweat. People thought the Directorate uniforms were meant to intimidate. In the field, he'd learned, they were meant to last.
He dressed by habit: undershirt, trousers, boots. Knife. Compass. The compass had no name and no serial number because it wasn't official issue. He'd bought it off a navigator who had one eye and two hands that shook. The man had laughed when Kellan asked if it was accurate.
"Accurate is what you are when everything else is lying," he'd said, and then he'd taken Kellan's money like it was a favour.
Kellan buckled the belt and checked the compass again anyway. The needle steadied without a tremor.
A good sign, if you believed in signs.
On the small table by the window sat a cup of water from last night. A skin of ice had not formed over it. It wasn't winter yet, not properly. The city still held heat in its stone bones.
He drank anyway. The water tasted like metal and old pipes. It was real. It was there. It went down and settled in his stomach with the dull weight of routine.
He pulled the curtains aside.
The sky was the colour of low ash. The sun was somewhere behind it, diffused into a pale bruise that couldn't decide whether it wanted to rise. A thin fog clung to the lower streets. The kind that made the far end of a road look like it had been erased and redrawn badly.
The street below was already alive.
A cart rattled past with a load of coal. Two children chased it, laughing, kicking up yesterday's dust. A woman leaned out of a window to shake a blanket and scold someone she couldn't see. A dog barked at nothing in particular and received no punishment for it.
The city moved because it always had. It moved because to stop moving was to notice what waited outside the walls.
Kellan let himself watch for a few breaths. He didn't think of the last catastrophe. He didn't need to. Everybody carried it differently. For some it was a story their grandparents told. For others it was a scar line on a map where the ink had been smudged and the paper had been repaired.
For Kellan it was a training manual, a list of procedures, an argument between old men with clean hands about what constituted "containment."
It had never been real to him in the way it was real to people who woke screaming at night because they'd dreamed of cold and didn't know why.
A knock sounded at the door. Three short raps. Professional. Impatient.
Kellan crossed the room and opened it.
Mira stood in the corridor, hair pulled back and damp as if she'd washed it with cold water. She wore her Directorate coat open over civilian clothes and looked half like an officer and half like someone who'd been dragged out of bed before the city had fully decided to exist.
"You're late," she said.
"I'm not," Kellan said.
"You are by my clock."
"That's your clock's fault."
Mira's mouth twitched, which in her was the closest thing to a smile. She held out a folded slip of paper sealed with wax.
"Dispatch," she said. "They're calling it an AEE."
Kellan took the paper. The seal was still warm from whoever had pressed it. That made him frown before he even broke it. Dispatch didn't run. Dispatch didn't hurry unless something had already gone wrong.
He cracked the wax with his thumb and unfolded the notice.
The words were concise, bureaucratic, careful:
ANOMALOUS ENERGY EVENT
CLASSIFICATION: AEE-II (PENDING)
LOCATION: NORTHERN OUTER RING
CHARACTERISTICS: THERMAL DISRUPTION / ATMOSPHERIC DENSITY SHIFT / VISIBILITY LOSS
DIRECTIVE: MOBILISE FIELD TEAM. STAGE AT BORDER. WAIT FOR SECONDARY ORDERS.
Kellan read it twice.
"Thermal disruption," he repeated.
Mira watched his eyes, not the paper. "They're saying the heat's gone," she said. "From the reports."
"From where?"
"Outer Ring. Past the rail yards. Past the last of the river warehouses."
"That's… populated."
"It was," Mira said, and her voice didn't change, which made it worse. "There were dock workers. Settlers. The cheap housing blocks. The tar-paper roofs."
Kellan folded the dispatch carefully. "Why are they calling it AEE-II?"
"Because they haven't admitted what it looks like yet," Mira said.
He glanced at her. "And what does it look like?"
Mira's eyes flicked toward the stairwell as if the walls might be listening. They probably were. The Directorate built its buildings with old stone and older habits.
"It looks like a line," she said. "A border. Everything on one side is normal. Everything on the other side—" She stopped. Her throat moved once, like she'd swallowed something sharp. "They say fires are going out without smoke. They say people are freezing in their beds."
"That's not thermal disruption," Kellan said. "That's—"
"—don't say it," Mira cut in, too fast. "Not here."
Kellan let the rest of the thought die. Names mattered. Names got written down. Names became history, and history was a weapon.
He stepped past her into the corridor and pulled the door shut. "Who's on the team?"
Mira started walking, boots clicking on old stone. "Captain Sairn. You. Me. Harrow for combat. Jessa for medical. Observer's a new one—Rook."
"Rook," Kellan repeated. "Never heard of him."
"He's from the archives."
"So he's never been outside."
"Probably not," Mira said. "Try to keep him alive long enough to write something useful."
Kellan adjusted his coat and fell into step beside her. "Where are we staging?"
"Border of the affected region," Mira said. "They've erected a temporary line. Something about fog."
"Fog," Kellan echoed, and felt a cold prickle that had nothing to do with the weather.
They descended the stairwell and emerged into the street. The city air hit him with its usual collection of smells: damp stone, cooked oil, coal smoke, human sweat. It was alive in a way that made catastrophes feel obscene. Like an interruption in the natural order of being careless.
People moved around them and looked up when they saw the Directorate insignia. Some faces tightened with fear. Others with relief. A few with resentment, like the sight of uniforms reminded them of old debts.
A woman selling bread called out, "Officer! Is it true?"
Kellan kept walking. He wasn't allowed to answer questions he hadn't been told how to answer.
Mira slowed just enough to say, "Stay inside. Keep your children warm." Then she moved on.
That was all the city ever got: instructions. Not truth. Not context. Just survival directives. It was what people mistook for governance.
At the end of the street, a Directorate transport waited, squat and armoured, its sides scarred by old impacts. A driver sat inside, eyes down. He didn't look at them when they climbed in.
The interior smelled like rubber seals and disinfectant. Suit lockers lined one wall, their doors latched. The suits inside were not the dramatic, gleaming things of recruitment posters. They were gray and dull and patched, designed to keep you alive in a place where the air forgot how to behave.
Captain Sairn sat across from the lockers with a slate in hand. He looked up as Kellan and Mira entered.
Sairn was older than both of them and not old enough to have seen the last catastrophe, which meant he belonged to that dangerous generation: trained by survivors, educated by doctrines, shaped by stories that insisted preparation could replace experience.
"Kellan," Sairn said, a greeting that was almost a command. His voice had the calm of someone who believed calm could be contagious. "Mira."
"Captain," Mira replied.
Kellan nodded.
Sairn tapped the slate with a knuckle. "Reports are fragmented. Outer Ring watchposts went silent fifteen minutes ago. The rail line is down. They're saying visibility's poor and temperatures are… wrong."
"How wrong?" Harrow asked from the rear bench.
Harrow was already in partial gear, gloves tucked into his belt, a rifle laid across his knees like a sleeping animal. He looked eager in the way people sometimes did when fear hadn't finished teaching them.
Sairn's expression didn't shift. "They're saying all heat sources failed."
Jessa, the medic, swallowed. She was smaller than the rest of them and carried her medical pack like it weighed more than she did. "That's impossible."
"It's documented," Sairn said.
"Documented where?" Rook asked, leaning forward. He had ink-stained fingers and a face that looked like it had never been struck by wind. His eyes were bright in the wrong way, the way a person's eyes were bright when they thought they were about to become part of history.
Sairn's gaze moved to him. "In classified records," he said, and the word classified fell like a blade between them. "Your department's been sanitising those records for decades. Don't pretend you haven't read them."
Rook's cheeks reddened. He looked down at his hands.
Kellan watched the exchange and said nothing. He didn't like archives. Archives turned horrors into paragraphs and then called the paragraphs manageable.
The transport lurched forward. Outside, the city slid past: shops, alleys, faces. Life continuing because it didn't know how not to.
As they moved north, the architecture changed. Stone gave way to timber and cheap brick. The streets widened, became less cared for. The smell shifted from cooked food to wet rope and river mud.
They passed the rail yards.
The trains sat idle, black hulks on steel tracks. Workers stood in knots, staring toward the horizon where the city ended and the land began. No one worked. No one joked. They all had that posture—leaning forward without moving, as if listening for a sound they couldn't quite name.
Kellan pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window and looked out.
Far ahead, a fog bank had formed.
It wasn't the normal kind. It didn't drift in soft tendrils. It stood like a wall, dense and still, swallowing the landscape behind it so completely it looked like someone had taken a knife and cut the world in half.
From within the fog, pale light rose.
Not sunlight. Not firelight. Something colder. A vertical thread at first, and then as the transport crested a small rise, the thread became a pillar.
A beam.
It stretched up into the sky and did not bend with wind because the wind didn't seem to touch it. It was too straight, too calm, too deliberate.
Rook sucked in a breath. "That's—"
"Don't," Mira said quietly, and Rook shut his mouth.
The transport slowed. The driver muttered something under his breath that sounded like a prayer, or maybe a curse.
They approached the edge of the fog.
There were people at the border—workers, militia, Directorate support crews. Temporary barriers had been erected: metal posts, rope lines, warning banners that snapped in a wind that did not seem to come from the fog itself.
A man in a higher-ranked coat approached as they disembarked. His insignia marked him as Dispatch Liaison. His face was drawn tight, as if he'd been holding a scream inside his mouth for hours.
"Captain Sairn," he said. "Field team."
Sairn stepped forward. "Status."
The liaison's eyes flicked toward the beam and away again. He had the look of someone who did not want to be the one to say what he'd seen.
"It's expanding," he said. "Slowly. The fog came first. Then the temperature drop. Then—" He hesitated.
"Then what?" Sairn asked.
The liaison licked his lips. "Then the fires went out," he said. "Every one. Torches, furnaces, even the generator stacks. No smoke. No ember. Just… stopped."
Jessa's hands tightened on her medical pack. "And the people?"
The liaison didn't answer immediately. He looked at the line of militia behind him, at the support crew pretending to busy themselves with equipment they weren't actually checking. At the rope barrier that looked obscene in front of a fog wall that could swallow a city.
"Some are alive," he said finally. "At the edge. Those who ran early. Those who had insulated housing. Further in…" He shook his head once. "Further in, we don't know. Scouts went ten minutes and came back with frost in their lungs. One of them couldn't feel his hands anymore but they were still attached."
Harrow snorted softly, trying to turn fear into contempt. "So we go in, we find the source, we shut it down."
The liaison looked at him like he was a child. "You can't shut it down," he said, and then seemed to realise he'd said too much. His jaw tightened. "You can… contain the spread. Delay. Stabilise."
"Stabilise what?" Rook asked before he could stop himself.
The liaison's gaze snapped to him. "The anomaly," he said. "That is the term."
Kellan watched the fog wall. He could see nothing through it. Not even shapes. Not even hints.
Yet he felt something from it—not cold, not wind, not sound. Something more basic. Like the absence of a decision.
As if the world behind that fog had stopped agreeing to participate.
Sairn turned to his team. "Suit up," he said.
The words were simple. Ordinary.
And still, every part of Kellan's body reacted to them as if they were an obituary being read aloud.
They moved to the lockers. Metal clicked. Seals hissed. Gloves pulled tight. Masks locked into place.
As he tightened his suit collar, Kellan glanced at Mira. Her face was partly obscured by her mask, but her eyes met his through the clear visor. They were steady.
She believed in this. She believed they could walk into that fog and do something that mattered.
He wanted to believe it too. He had devoted years to learning how to measure distance when the horizon lied, how to read wind when the air turned wrong, how to take a step without stepping into death.
He wanted to believe the training meant something.
Rook fumbled with his gloves. Jessa helped him without comment. Harrow checked his rifle and tapped the barrel like it could reassure him.
Sairn sealed his mask and lifted his slate one last time, as if the act of holding information made the universe more obedient.
The liaison stepped back and raised a hand. "Standard protocol," he called. "Shock-wave windows are estimated at four minutes apart. Brace when you feel pressure change. Don't run. Don't panic. Maintain formation."
Sairn nodded, then looked at his team. "We go to the source," he said. "We identify the energy origin. We mark it. We deploy suppressors if viable. We return with data."
"Return," Mira repeated, as if anchoring the word.
Kellan's compass needle quivered once, then steadied.
A support crew member unlatched the rope barrier.
The fog beyond was so dense it didn't look like air. It looked like a surface. A wall made of something that had forgotten how to be transparent.
Sairn took the first step.
His boot crossed the line.
The fog touched him.
For an instant, Kellan thought he saw frost crawl across Sairn's visor from the inside.
Then Sairn vanished.
Not swallowed by fog in a gradual way, but gone in the clean, immediate way of a light being extinguished.
Mira's breath caught. Harrow swore. Rook made a small noise that might have been a prayer.
Kellan stared at the space where their captain had been and felt, irrationally, as if the world had blinked and failed to open its eyes again.
Then, from within the fog, Sairn's voice came through comms.
"Visibility is near zero," he said, calm but strained. "Temperature drop is immediate. Proceed."
His voice sounded farther away than it should. Not in distance. In meaning. As if words were having to travel through something thick and unwilling.
Mira stepped through next.
She vanished too.
Kellan stood at the threshold and looked back once, at the people watching from the safe side of the rope. Their faces were pale. Their eyes were wide. Some held onto each other like they could anchor themselves by touch.
This was reasonable, Kellan told himself. This was necessary. This was what the Directorate existed for. If they didn't go, no one would. If no one went, the fog would keep spreading until it swallowed the city that still smelled like bread.
He stepped forward.
The fog took him.
Warmth disappeared.
Not replaced by cold—replaced by nothing. Like a sense he'd never noticed until it was gone. The world did not become freezing. The world became unable to be warm.
His suit's thermal system whined, working against something it couldn't measure. The air pressed against his visor with a density that felt wrong, like breathing through wet cloth.
The beam of pale light rose somewhere ahead, a faint vertical presence in the gray.
And then, as if the land itself had exhaled, a pressure built in the fog around them—fast, enormous, invisible.
Kellan's training screamed at him.
He locked his joints.
He braced.
The shock-wave hit.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't wind. It was the world reasserting itself violently, trying to correct an error too large to ignore.
For a fraction of a second, Kellan felt his bones vibrate. He felt the fog thicken. He felt the sensation of warmth being pulled away from the very idea of his skin.
Then the wave passed, and the silence that followed was so complete it felt like something had been stolen from the universe.
In the gray, Mira's silhouette steadied beside him. Sairn's form flickered ahead, barely visible.
Behind them, the rope barrier and the watching crowd were gone. Not hidden. Not obscured. Gone from relevance, as if the fog had erased the concept of "behind."
Kellan looked down at his compass.
The needle spun once in a full circle, fast, desperate, and then stopped pointing nowhere.
He lifted his eyes toward the pale beam and felt something settle in his chest—not fear, not courage.
A simple understanding.
This was not an accident.
This was a correction.
And they had just walked into the part of the world where corrections happened.