Five months later.
The archipelago south of the Yorbian Continent contained, among other things, a country that had decided modernity was not for it. No electronics. No chemical materials. No internet. No electricity, no gunpowder, no firearms. The citizens of NGL farmed and fished and hunted and wove fabric by hand, and when wild animals killed someone or disease swept through a village, they called it fate and kept moving. The sky was very clear out here. The air was excellent.
This was all completely sincere, for the people who actually lived in the villages.
For the people who ran NGL from the inside, it was an excellent cover story.
At the intersection of a river village, a seven-year-old boy was walking his toddler sister through the afternoon, pointing out dragonflies in the grass. The toddler had opinions about a bird instead.
The bird was a red-headed shrike, sitting on a branch at eye level, watching them with the motionless attention of something that had no particular reason to be there and was making no effort to leave. Most birds turned their heads constantly, the nervous small-muscle twitching of creatures that were prey as often as they were predators. This one didn't move at all.
The boy noticed. Filed it. Forgot it a moment later because his sister had grabbed his hand and was pulling him toward something else.
The shrike watched them go. Then it flapped up to the thatched roof of their house, scratched its feathers with one claw in a way that was genuinely just scratching feathers and not a signal, and launched itself on a thermal to a hundred meters.
From up here, the whole village was visible. The next village was visible past the treeline. This part of NGL was domestic and peaceful and exactly what it claimed to be, which was the point.
Liam had distributed surveillance across more than a hundred villages. Mostly birds. Some small mammals where birds were inconvenient. Each one carried a Star Mark, running on passive most of the time, checking in periodically. The network cost him very little in terms of active attention. A background task. The kind of thing you ran because the alternative, not knowing, had a much higher potential cost.
He had read about what happened in the Chimera Ant arc. He knew the timeline. He also knew that butterfly effects were real and active and that he was personally responsible for several of them. The Queen showing up ahead of schedule was not a scenario he intended to discover after the fact.
The shrike angled northwest.
Jaku moved differently from the surveillance birds. Where the shrikes and oystercatchers were watchmen, Jaku was something closer to a scout, or on current assignment, an infiltration specialist. He was a rock sparrow the size of a small fist, had been with Liam long enough to have developed opinions about his own dignity, and had a wind transmutation ability that let him move like gray lightning when he wanted to.
He wanted to, currently.
The mountainous area came up fast, red rock faces studded with cave entrances. Deep in the caves, generators ran the machinery that produced what NGL officially did not have any of. The soft hum was audible if you were close enough and knew to listen for it.
Jaku landed on the peak and looked at the faint lights.
In one of the cave entrances below, a guard was watching the sky with the professional paranoia of someone employed by people who had reasons to be paranoid. He saw a sparrow land on a rock. A sparrow landing on a rock was one of the least concerning things he had ever observed. He went back to watching the sky.
Jaku folded his wings and dropped like a thrown stone.
The wind absorbed him on the way down, the transmutation wrapping his movement in a colorless current that merged with the natural airflow. He hit the cave entrance at a vector that shouldn't have been possible for a bird his size, redirected off the wall, and was inside the corridor before the guard had fully registered the motion.
The Star Mark application was brief and physical. A wing-tip contact. Rose-gold on the back of the hand.
"What was that?"
"Probably a bat."
"You dare scratch me?" The guard looked at his hand, saw nothing, went back to watching.
Then his eyes changed.
Liam settled into the guard's body with the practiced ease of someone who had done this enough times that the transition was entirely unremarkable. The body walked deeper into the facility with a purpose the guard's colleagues read as routine and without question.
The second guard became the first guard's problem. The third guard became the second's. One to two, two to four, four to eight, the Star Mark spreading through the factory floor with the efficiency of a system that had been optimized over two years of continuous use. Nobody sounded an alarm because everyone who noticed something wrong was already part of the problem before they could act on it.
The factory manager found himself in a corner with his own people surrounding him in a loose ring. He had a gun and genuinely no idea which person to aim it at.
"Where is Zazan?" said every person in the ring, simultaneously.
The sound waves at the same frequency stacked on top of each other. The manager winced.
"I don't know Zazan's itinerary," he said, and the desperation in his voice had the specific quality of truth. "Anyone who asks too many questions about his location ends up dead. We all know this. Why are you asking me something you already know I don't know?"
Liam pulled back from the bodies and thought about it.
The factory manager was correct. Zazan was not a man who publicized his schedule. He was, according to everything Liam had read, ruthless enough that even his own organization's middle management operated on a need-to-know basis. Finding him through the supply chain was going to require more time and more layers than a single facility infiltration could provide.
The factory manager was still waiting for a response when a shot came from somewhere in the ring, and he was no longer waiting for anything.
Liam directed the possessed workers to the machinery. Generators, processing equipment, storage containers, the infrastructure of industrial-scale production in a facility that officially did not exist. All of it came apart methodically, with the thoroughness that came from having the hands of everyone who knew how to operate it.
When there was nothing left to break, he lined up the workers in pairs. Each one aimed at the star mark on the other. Some of them had their marks on their palms and had to adjust their grip. He had them check each other's placements.
A final sequence of shots.
The bodies arranged themselves into the kind of tableau that made a point, which seemed like the appropriate punctuation for a drug factory.
Jaku had been waiting at the cave entrance. He shook himself, offended by the noise, and launched back into the sky.
The coast was three hours at wind-assisted speed.
The NGL coastline from above was long and irregular, the kind of geography that made surveillance coverage a genuine logistical problem. An oystercatcher worked a reef offshore, stepping between rocks with the precise footwork of a bird that did this professionally. Every thirty minutes it climbed to altitude and did a slow pass over the nearest stretch of coastline, looking for things that didn't belong.
Liam sat lightly in the back of its consciousness, monitoring more than directing, the low-engagement background mode of long-term surveillance work.
He checked his internal calculation for the hundredth time. Two and a half years until the Chimera Ant timeline in the canon. Approximately. The butterfly effects he had personally introduced into this world were difficult to account for, which was the persistent problem with butterfly effects. He had tried to trace the consequences of his various interventions and had reached the conclusion that careful monitoring was more useful than precise prediction.
Hence the birds.
The oystercatcher was stepping between rocks when a hand broke through the surface of the sea and grabbed it.
Liam reacted from his physical body before he'd consciously processed what had happened, and Netero looked over at him with mild curiosity.
"What's wrong, son?"
Netero was in the middle of his morning warmup, rolling his neck and shaking out his legs with the unhurried quality of someone for whom ten thousand daily strikes was a light constitutional. He was, as usual, in extremely good physical condition for someone who described himself as a decrepit old man. He had been doing this longer than most people had been alive.
Liam stared at him.
"Netero," he said carefully. "Is there a population of merfolk in the halfhuman communities?"
Netero paused his neck roll and thought about this.
"Why do you ask?"
"Something just grabbed my oystercatcher from underwater," Liam said. "With a hand."