ALLIANCE CAPITAL — LOWER SQUARE — CONTINUOUS
The pages took flight like a bad idea becoming weather.
Hundreds of black paper birds burst upward from alleys, notice boards, waiting rooms, school bins, market stalls, archive carts—every unmarked page in the city turning at once into a winged shard of sabotage.
The sky above the square darkened.
Not with stormclouds.
With stationery.
The crowd screamed.
Children grabbed at parents.
Lanterns swung wildly.
A baker dropped an entire tray of sweet rolls and stared at the sky with the expression of a man genuinely offended that pastry had lost narrative priority.
Sera looked up and didn't waste a second.
"Don't let them nest!" she shouted.
That got everyone's attention for exactly one beat too long.
"Define *nest*!" Ezra yelled over the chaos, already trying to calculate avian paper trajectories with the kind of manic delight that meant this was definitely too dangerous for them to enjoy this much.
