Thresholder

Perry left the small apartment only seldomly, and almost always with Flora to act as his guide. He wore disguises that she’d prepared for him, which were aided by the glamour, usually concealing false beards and oversized cloaks. They went out at night, when it was more difficult for Perry to be recognized, and when there were less people walking the city streets. Perry got the books he'd requested, but they weren't the magical tomes that Romauld had, just mundane histories of the world, accounts of battles, of kingly lineages, and epic tales. Teaguewater had lending libraries on a kind of subscription service, open only to those with means, and Perry had snuck the helmet into one of them, pointing it at different tomes, leafing through them and trusting Marchand could extract the text. They had done that with Romauld's books, though that time, with permission. Nothing had come of it, and Perry was still waiting for something from the Jade Scholars.

For all that the newspapers were prophesying the End of Progress and keeping the city up to date on the missing Cormorant Wesley with articles full of empty speculation, there didn’t seem to be a huge change in how the city was actually run. Most of the gendarme, including Flora, had been putting in double shifts, which couldn’t last indefinitely. Eventually, the heightened security would have to give, if only because of the overtime pay that was going out to all the officers. Certain places were closed down, including the fair and a few of the parks, but the fair opened up after only three days, its closure too much of a black mark for the king to handle. Wesley’s wireless telegrams were demonstrated several times a day by a much less accomplished showman, but other than that, the radio waves were silent.

Six days after Perry had confined himself to the apartment, he went to the machinist with Flora in tow. She was in her uniform, both because she was supposed to be working and because they wanted Perry to have the veneer of officiality. The rounds had been prepared, and Perry paid for them in full using money from the golden coins Flora had sold for him. A look at them left him skeptical, as they seemed far less perfect and polished than the ones Richter had loaded into the suit, but they were possibly better than nothing, assuming that they didn’t immediately misfire and damage the gun.

“These rounds are outside the specifications of the shoulder-mounted gun, sir,” said Marchand. Perry was looking at a few of the rounds, which had been delivered in an ammunition box. With the helmet, he could zoom in to see all the many surface imperfections and grime on them.

Perry swore, then stopped to think about that. “Wait, when you say ‘outside of the specifications’, do you mean that they won’t fit, won’t fire, or will create problems?”

“I would need to run simulations, sir,” said Marchand.

“Will they fit?” asked Perry.

“Without the simulations, sir, I do not recommend that they be placed within the chamber,” said Marchand.

“Yes or no,” said Perry.

“Yes, they will fit within the chamber,” replied Marchand. “However, as they are outside the tolerances, there is a chance that the gun will jam or misfire.”

“How much of a chance?” asked Perry.

“I would need to run the simulations, sir,” replied Marchand.

“Alright, so do that,” said Perry, feeling somewhat exasperated.

“Forgive me, sir, but a proper simulation cannot be run without access to more computing resources,” replied Marchand. “It would be better to wait until reconnection to satellites or the home network.”

Perry sighed. “Alright, I’m going to load the gun now. We’ll assume that these are weapons of last resort, to be used only in dire circumstances. I won’t depend on them and I’ll take the gun apart to clean it out after every use. Don't fire them without my say-so. Can you give me instructions on how to clean the gun?”

“I’ll generate those at once, sir, and place them among your files,” replied Marchand. “I can also talk you through it, if you would prefer.”

“When the time comes,” said Perry. “And let’s hope that it doesn’t come.”

It was good to be out of the armor for an extended period of time. Perry spent some of his days exercising, staying in shape and stretching out so that he would be able to use the suit effectively. It had its own substantial power sources, of course, but a firm body with good toning was a boon, and there was no need to have the flesh be a limiting factor if it could be helped. Richter had gotten in shape specifically so she could better use power armor, and had cheerfully said she’d been pretty chubby before embarking on fitness with the laser focus that she brought to most other interests.

Perry no longer dreamed of Richter, but he did think about her when he was going to sleep. She had seemed too good to be true, a brilliant billionaire nerd who had taken a keen interest in him because he’d come from another world. He had images of her seared into his mind, seeming so real that he could almost touch them, and he had to resist using the recordings from the suit to look at other images of her, those which had been captured during their testing and deployment of the suits, or from her house cameras. He’d seen so many of them already that they were starting to bleed into his memories, replacing what he’d actually experienced. So instead, he kept to what was in his fallible brain, replaying certain memories. He remembered sitting in her home theater, arms touching, and kissing her when she looked over at him, feeling giddy excitement when she’d kissed him back. He remembered watching the way her tongue stuck out while she was working on mechanical problems. And he remembered her bleeding out on the ground, though that memory always came when he least wanted it to.

He felt restless, and not just because he was in an unfamiliar place with nothing to do but stay put. He filled most of the notebook, treating it like it was a research project in grad school, compiling sources and cross-referencing information, typing up notes on Marchand’s drive using a virtual keyboard. That wasn’t something that he could do for eight hours a day though, let alone the sixteen that he needed to fill.

“I need you, tonight,” said Flora, eight days in. She’d just gotten done with yet another double shift. “Fully dressed.”

“We’re fighting someone?” asked Perry, sitting up. “Who?”

“You’re backup,” said Flora. “Out of sight until the time comes, if it does come. So no, no fighting unless it’s obvious that someone else is starting it, or unless I start it. And as for who, the varcoli seem as though they’re making moves.”

“Moves?” asked Perry. “As in … breaking the Custom?”

“It’s complicated,” said Flora. “There have been breakthroughs in the understanding of blood, all of them recent. What Wesley had said about blood types is now common knowledge, at least among the educated.”

“It’s in the notebook,” said Perry. “I think the vocabulary is different from what I remember, but the underlying science is the same.” There was something somewhere in the back of his brain about Rh factor being named that because of some mistaken belief about Rhesus monkeys, but whatever the case, it hadn't been the same terminology in Richter's world.

“There are clinics for the poor throughout the city,” said Flora. “They’re funded by industrialists like Wesley, in many cases. Some of them have been infiltrated by the varcoli, including one particular one down in Kentfolk. The practice of bleeding is passé, but they’re trying something new, removing blood with the promise that it’s going toward useful experimentation. Transfusion, they call it, the moving of blood from one person to another. A few years ago a woman’s life was saved: she’d have died in childbirth without it.”

“And transfusion is basically entirely safe if you’ve got anticoagulants and blood type matching,” said Perry.

“It is?” asked Flora.

“It’s in the notebook,” said Perry with a shrug. “There are other things you’d need to do, like sterilizing the equipment, but yes, it’s basically routine to draw blood from a donor and transfuse to a recipient, at least where I come from. I’ve done it before.”

“You’ve … had someone’s blood?” asked Flora.

“No,” said Perry. “I’ve given blood. They give you a cookie when you’re done.”

Flora stared at him. “Cosme would know this?”

“Um,” said Perry. “I’m actually not sure that Cosme and I come from the same world. I never got much of a background on him or the others. I have to assume that medical inventions look the same everywhere though. The body regenerates blood it’s lost, donation is safe, people need blood … you’re looking at me like I’m varcoli.”

“Varcoli I understand,” said Flora. She shook her head. “At any rate, they’re racing ahead. They might have Wesley’s support, or Cosme’s, or both, but the reason I need you is that they’re a threat to the Custom. They’re poaching blood in public, claiming that it’s for medical reasons, being loud about it. And if the varcoli can get their blood through donation, or through payment, with no life being taken, then that means they’re positioning themselves to stand apart from the rest of us.”

“I think you could technically do it with livers too, for what it’s worth,” said Perry.

“Do what?” asked Flora with a frown.

“The liver is one of the few body parts that regrows itself,” Perry said. “You can remove part of the liver and it’ll regenerate back to full size.”

“No,” said Flora. She seemed to be in disbelief.

“I mean, yes,” said Perry. “If you can give me a moment I can confirm it with March.”

“Later,” said Flora. “We need to go tonight, to scope out the clinic, then to make an arrest of whoever is in charge.”

“I’ll add it to the notebook,” said Perry. “I would have assumed you’d have your own scientists and doctors working on it though.”

“How would we take half a liver?” asked Flora. “How would a person live through that?”

“People donate their livers,” said Perry. “And then they just go on with their lives.” He was pretty sure that there were antibiotics involved as well, but didn’t know enough about liver transplants to say for certain.

“Let’s go,” said Flora. She seemed troubled.

“Keeping the uniform?” asked Perry, looking her up and down. It definitely stood out, whatever else you could say about it. Perry still had trouble adjusting to the idea of a cop in a skirt, since that kind of dress code was some fifty years out of date for his sensibilities. It made him think of those Pokemon with bows on them to show that they were girls.

“I’m going as a member of the gendarme,” she said. “It gives me authority.”

“Then give me a minute to get into a uniform of my own,” said Perry.

They left together, leaping from the balcony once the coast was clear. It was another foggy night, which might have been why Flora had picked it. He’d given her the earpiece, so they could speak with each other if they got separated, and was using the audio built into the helmet to communicate with March.

The neighborhood of Kentfolk was dilapidated, and showed none of the fire-scarring that the rest of the city had. Streets weren’t so orderly, the buildings made of wood rather than stone, and while a huge fire sweeping through the city was a terrible thing, it was also clear that rebuilding from the ground up had some benefits — benefits which Kentfolk hadn’t gotten. It was late at night, but not so late that the taverns and pubs had emptied, and the gaslamps below them were shining bright into the fog, enough to give some sense of the character of the neighborhood. It was mostly shops at the street level and apartments above, lines of clothing hung out to dry in the polluted fog, windows whose glass hadn’t been fully repaired, and the scent of fires keeping the homes warm, though Perry was thankfully spared the worst of the city’s smell.

The clinic seemed to have once been a storefront, with the windows that had once held displays blacked out to protect the privacy of those within. Flora stopped in front of it, looking up at it.

“Looks closed,” said Perry from above. He saw her jump just a bit. She still wasn’t used to the earpiece. “I’ll see if there’s anyone inside.”

He flew with the sword and landed on the roof, then bent down and placed his hands out so that March could map out where people were, if there were any people remaining in the clinic at all. If it was fully closed up for the night, they would break in and look around, though he didn’t know what Flora hoped to find.

“Three people,” said Perry once the HUD had updated. “All of them in a back room, one man, two women. I can’t tell you much more. They’re not moving around much. Talking, but I can’t make it out.”

“Varcoli?” asked Flora.

“Impossible to say from here,” said Perry. He’d talked March through some modifications to the armor's thought processes that thankfully didn’t require any programming, and one of those modifications was automatic identification of vampires, mostly based on diagnostic criteria. Varcoli ran hot, osten and cerebol ran cold, and the strix were abnormally pale. There were all kinds of false positives and false negatives, but Perry had built up a list of heuristics for as many different beings as he’d seen. Seeing everything through video was already enough to defeat glamours, but most of those under the Custom could now be identified on sight by March.

“I’m coming up to join you,” said Flora.

She was on the rooftop a moment later, and stalked over to a skylight, checking it carefully before opening it up. Perry had thought that it would be locked, but it was an overhead skylight, and whoever had put it in depended on the fact that it was a two story drop to the bottom of what had been the store’s main lobby.

They went in together, descending down, and Perry pointed out the room where the people were. The store’s space had been partitioned into separate rooms in a crude and obvious way, the new walls not matching the old. As they drew closer, March began piping their conversation into Perry’s ear.

“It leaves them weakened,” said a man’s voice. “Too weakened. There’s too much we don’t know. They need to leave feeling hale and hearty, not like they’ve had the life drained from them.”

“If we get only drops, it’s not worth the time and effort,” said the woman. “The needles need to be boiled every time, the agglutination needs to be carefully monitored, the nurses prepared — the process is not easy, and we get so little from it. Less, even, since we need to save blood for others, to prove that we’re doing useful work.”

“We could skip the agglutination altogether if we only took the blood,” the second woman said. By this point, Marchand had attached placeholder labels to the speakers, and was giving subtitles to the conversation as well, which was being amplified and sharpened. The first woman was Martha, the second Claudette, and the man was Richmond. Perry wasn’t sure where those names actually came from, and might have preferred them to not be real names. He would have to interrogate March later.

“The clinic promises to save hundreds,” said Richmond. “Too many die from blood loss during simple procedures. How many times throughout history has a pint of blood meant the difference between life and death? It is the pillar upon which we prove that we are no different from them.”

“Hungrier,” said Claudette.

“This is only the start,” said Martha. “This is the knowledge that will lead us into a new era. In a decade, we might be divorced from the need for humans entirely. Once we are, there will be no use for humanity.”

“You speak of liquidation?” asked Claudette. She moved around the table, they stood at, shifting tools, the sounds too indistinct for March to make a guess.

“No,” replied Martha. “I don’t speak of anything so base. Conversion, en masse, would be the logical outcome. There would be no humanity left, as they would be varcoli instead.”

There was silence within the room, and between Perry and Flora, who had moved with silent footsteps to just outside it. She was giving Perry a worried look, and he returned it, though she wouldn’t have been able to see behind his faceplate. The information they had must have come from Wesley or Cosme, or from the notes that had been left behind in Wesley’s basement laboratory, but a bit more than a week was very little time to pass for them to be working on it here. What they were talking about doing with the information was —

“It’s defection from the Custom,” said Richmond.

“No,” said Martha. “In full, yes, there would be no more humans left to eat, if no solution could be found, but if we take the blood, it could be taken in silence, skimmed from the top if there are enough who can be coerced to donate. But if we pay for the blood, if we harm no human, if we stop a trade in corpses —”

“Blood is always better fresh,” said Claudette.

“It is,” said Martha. “It’s better with the warmth of the body, without the anti-coagulants making it bitter. We should not go on our tastes alone, but among our kind, the fresh taste will make it go down better.”

“It’s defection from the Custom,” said Richmond. “We’d fight not just humanity, but the entirety of the Jade Council. It’s treason.”

“The Council is no state,” said Martha. “It never has been. Treason? It would be the breaking of a treaty that was signed on our behalf.”

“These matters are not for us to decide,” said Richmond. Perry could practically feel his frown. “We must speak with the councilors, must explain the science to them, the coming advancements." He hesitated, looking from one woman to the other. "The varcoli councilors only, so as to keep it within our clan.”

“How do we know the others aren’t doing the same?” asked Claudette. “That they’re not plotting to use the Century of Progress as we are?”

“How would they?” Martha asked. “What mechanism would they employ? The brain cannot be donated and replenished through bodily means. A man cannot regrow a bone.”

“There is more to the world than we know,” said Richmond. “That much is clear.”

“It’s for another time,” said Martha. “We need to finish our work tonight. If we want to speak with the other varcoli, it should be with the weight of evidence on our side.”

Flora was standing by the door, and moved away swiftly when their conversation was finished. Perry wasn’t sure whether she could have heard it on her own, but Marchand was piping sound into the earpiece at Perry’s order. He moved in the power armor, more slowly than her because of how much harder it was to keep silent in it, and managed to hide behind one of the walls before the man stepped out from the room they’d been in.

“The information was, so far as we can tell, correct,” said Richmond, his label moving with him as he walked. “Four types of blood, easy enough to differentiate from each other through agglutination, though if the information we have is correct, there are many more types. It might in fact explain certain reactions for people both in the inculcation of the varcoli and in batches of bad blood.” He was walking out into the main lobby, which had the skylight two stories overhead.

“Wait,” said Claudette. “I heard something.”

The three of them froze for a moment, listening, their features shifting slightly. Perry was out of view, but Marchand could ‘see’ them more clearly now, enough that Perry was shown a reconstruction of them through the wall. They were all older, helpfully labeled, with Martha of quite advanced age, stooped and slow-moving. All the vampires were long-lived, which meant that they could have been hundreds of years old, but it was only the smaller, older woman, Claudette, who had any kind of accent.

Perry was waiting for Flora to make her move, to arrest them or whatever she was going to do. If it came to violence against these three … he thought that unlikely, but he could move through them with his sword, cutting them down. Their dream of a future filled with vampires, of defection against the others, didn’t fill him with dread, but it clearly seemed like a bad future for the people of this world. Laboratory-manufactured blood or a vampiric ruling class both seemed as though they’d have more than their share of problems.

Flora didn’t make her move though. She was staying silent, wanting to know more before she pounced, so Perry stayed hidden. He found it curious that the old woman had heard them, because he’d been perfectly still, the suit not letting out any ambient noise of its own so long as it wasn’t in motion, and Flora had proven herself good at being silent.

“March, what was the noise?” asked Perry. March was good at muting internal communications, but it still made Perry nervous to speak out loud when they were trying to be quiet.

“There are people on the roof, sir,” said Marchand, splitting off another camera and showing best guesses at where those people were. There were a few of them, maybe as many as five by March’s guess.

It wasn’t the time to curse March out for not bringing that to his attention sooner, so instead Perry tried to focus on the situation and what it might require. He had no idea who the people on the roof were, except that they were probably vampires of one sort or the other. They had either followed them to the clinic or Flora had been tipped off about this place to trap her, but it meant that this wasn’t going to be a quiet arrest.

The people on the roof dropped down from the skylight, one after the other, landing with catlike grace on the floor, not quite whisper-quiet. They were among the older varcoli, who had backed up slightly. By their builds, the newcomers were fighters, rather than the scientists or doctors that the older varcoli seemed to be.

“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Richmond.

He was answered by the raising of a pistol from one of the five men. “Take us to your research,” the man said. Marchand helpfully slapped a label on him, Wentworth.

“This clinic operates under the direct authority of the Jade Council,” Richmond said. “Our operations are vital to the continuation of the Custom. On whose authority do you come here, guns drawn?” His voice was quivering, for as much as the words were defiant.

“On the authority of the gun,” said the man. He didn’t sound like a Wentworth, he sounded like a military man, like the gruff soldiers that Perry had fought alongside in the last world. “Move, now.”

The entire group moved, slowly, over to the office or operating room that the varcoli had been in before. When everyone was turned away, Perry leaned over so he could have a proper look at them, and once that was done, Marchand mapped the captured images onto the models he was producing, letting Perry see them through the walls. The five men who’d dropped down from the ceiling were all osten, bone-eaters, the toughest of the vampires, their bodies modified and enhanced.

That didn’t fit with what Perry knew about the vampire’s internal politics. The osten that sat on the Council, Mercer, was against the Custom, thought that it should be torn down, and was allied with Mellins, one of the Council’s two varcoli. But here the osten were, coming into a clinic controlled by the varcoli, threatening them at gunpoint.

For a moment, it looked as though this would be a smooth sort of robbery, the papers and notes taken without much bloodshed. As they were leaving the room, back into the atrium, the osten men fired their guns. Two of the three varcoli dropped at once, but the small old woman must have been primed for it, because she leapt to the side and spat out a fine spray of blood.

“Jade Imperator, you’re all under arrest!” shouted Flora, who’d moved out from the shadows and had a pistol of her own drawn.

The woman didn’t listen and fled instead, and the men turned their guns on Flora. They might have been thinking that their bones would protect them, their skulls thick enough that only a direct hit with a high caliber bullet would actually kill them.

Perry stepped from around the corner, sword drawn. He had a pistol, one that they’d taken from a dead vampire after the rooftop fight, and it was awkwardly holstered on top of the armor, the trigger guard broken off so that he could actually pull the trigger with his armored fingers. It was marginally better than trying to use the gun on his shoulder, at least in a pinch, and more obviously threatening if he drew it. He held the unsheathed sword though, letting it glow.

“Thresholder,” one of the men spat. They hadn’t put down their weapons. “She’s getting away.”

“She’s innocent,” said Flora, which Perry didn’t think was quite true.

Perry was tracking the woman, who’d fled into the back alley, and on instinct he fired the drone from his back, which raced up through the window to follow her. The battery on the drone wouldn’t last forever, but it would track her well enough, and give him an eye in the sky in case there were more people coming to their position.

The men were looking at each other, judging the situation, and Perry realized that they were going to act just before they did it.

The room burst into light and sound, multiple pistols firing at once, and Perry felt them ricochet off his armor as he flew through the air, like ineffectual punches. He crashed down among them, swinging his sword with as much power as the suit could muster, and he cleaved through an arm before getting stopped by a ribcage. He continued on, pushing the man to the side instead of cutting, and got his sword free as the man was thrown clear. The osten were trying to circle him, to grab him from behind, get their fingers into the armor, keep themselves away from his swinging blade, and it might have worked if there were more of them. Instead, he cleaved again, using the bulk of the armor to his advantage, pushing aside those who weren’t caught by the blade. Their bones were tough, and couldn’t be cut through cleanly like an orc’s could, but every time Perry hacked at them, they lost limbs.

Flora was bleeding from two gunshot wounds, but she was still on her feet, and one of the osten lay on the ground, four long furrows across his face where her claws had gouged him. Perry moved toward her, spinning around once he was there so they could fight together, and he put himself in the way of the gunfire. She could recover from a bullet wound, as most of the vampires could, depending on where the bullet landed.

“Who sent you?” Perry asked the three remaining osten. All were injured, and two were missing pieces of themselves, a bit of shoulder cut clean and one arm on the floor. Even for the osten, there would be permanent disfigurement.

“Fall back,” the man in the center said, and the others didn’t need to be told twice, rising into the air with powerful jumps, first onto the second floor balcony, then to the skylight. Perry made to follow, but Flora grabbed his arm.

“Too much risk,” she said.

Perry frowned at that. He could beat the osten, kill them swiftly, and unless they got him into a headlock or otherwise overpowered him, his risk was low. They didn’t have the numbers to kill him, not after losing two. He reoriented himself though, and realized what she was talking about: there was little risk to him, but a chase through the rooftops in this neighborhood, especially after waking people up with gunfire, was a risk to the Custom.

“March, show me what the drone has found,” said Perry.

“The woman was tracked for a distance of one mile, and now sits within a large building at the corner of Carther Street and Millicund,” said Marchand. “The drone has been positioned on the roof to conserve battery, and has just enough power to return to this location on its own, so long as you don’t move.”

“I know that place,” said Flora. “It’s the home of Mellins, a headquarters for the varcoli. We can’t go there.”

“This is civil war?” asked Perry. “Or the start of it?”

Flora looked at the bodies, then leaned down and began looking in the clothes, examining their pistols. She looked at them carefully, opening the chamber and turning a bullet over to inspect it.

“I don’t know any of these men,” said Flora.

“Alright?” asked Perry.

“Our community is small,” she said. “We’re a hidden town within a large city. I don’t know everyone, but I’ve seen the faces of a very large number of our kind.” She gestured at the osten laying on the ground, the one whose face she hadn’t clawed open. “I have never seen this man before in my life. I recognized none of them.”

“So … he’s kept away from the Council, from anything you’d have to get involved in, or … he’s new?” asked Perry.

“I think they might have all been new,” said Flora. She was looking through the bodies.

“Someone is inducting more osten?” asked Perry. “Beefing up their numbers? Or boning them up, I guess?”

“We need to get out of here,” said Flora. “The gunshots will have attracted attention. There are four bodies here and too much blood for us to clean up.” She swore as she looked at the damage around them.

“Any idea how this will be covered up?” asked Perry. “A robbery gone wrong, gang violence …” He couldn’t see it. One of the bodies very clearly had claw marks across its face, and his sword had cut through limbs fairly cleanly, some of which were laying on the floor. It was inexplicable. It would definitely be in the papers, especially if the varcoli were masquerading as respected doctors — had been respected doctors, since it seemed as though they had some actual medical knowledge.

“Our only option is to burn this place to the ground,” said Flora. “But that would raise more questions, and in Kentfolk the fire might spread too far, too quickly.” She took a breath. “We leave it and pray.”

“We could take bodies with us,” said Perry. “Those two.” He pointed at the osten, who had less reason to be here, whose wounds would be difficult to explain.

“Do it,” said Flora. “You can carry them better than I can. I’ll take the arms.”

They left together, through the skylight, which was awkward to get to carrying two bodies and depending on the power of the magical sword. When they were on the roof, Perry called back the drone, then began moving in its direction. They would dump the bodies in the river and hope that it would make it impossible to identify the men, or at least that they would be so bloated and rotten that no one would know what had really happened to them. A sword fight should have been just about the last thing that anyone would think.

They stood on a rooftop together, looking at the river, which had swallowed the bodies, at least for the time being. They’d be belched up later as the corpses bloated.

“They saw us,” said Flora. “They saw you. Both sides have witnesses, both sides know. My apartment won’t be safe, but I have another place we can go, at least for the time being.”

“You’ll be in trouble,” said Perry. “The Jade Council will know you were here.”

“I was supposed to be here,” said Flora. “I was tipped off, in the same way that the osten were. It’s only my partnership with you that raises any ire.” She let out a breath. “New osten, new within the last week, maybe, five new, all working together. That’s bad.”

“You're immigration police too?” asked Perry.

“Inculcation,” said Flora.

“It was a joke,” said Perry. “Sorry. Five at once is suspect?”

“We bring people in slowly and with great thought,” said Flora. “We want people who will follow the Custom, who will understand our people and our ways. And there’s the question of food, whether too many, too fast will result in starvation, a strain on resources. The osten were already near their limits.”

“It’s bad,” said Perry. “And they’ll come to blows in the Council over this.”

“No,” said Flora. “They both have something to hide here. If they come to blows, it will only be because one side has determined that showing their own wrongdoing still gives them an advantage. There’s more than one side to the Council though.” She stared off into the city lights. “This is only the beginning.”