A/N Thank you Sarah! You're beast. Okay. I feel like this may require a note of explanation. I am not sure where the idea of Niko's 'traitor-voice'came from, but it is not intended to be an example of a psychosis. It is Niko arguing with himself. Somehow, it turned out this way and since this is very much from Niko's point of view, it's not something he would think of explaining, especially as he has probably been thinking this way for a long time. There will be one more chapter after this one, which is actually a prologue to the action in this series. I hope you enjoy it!

Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm. Marcus Garvey.

Niko's arms were being held by two of these damned arurimi and he knew he was yelling, but couldn't calm himself down. "I tell you we don't have time to deal with whoever's in charge! A woman is in danger right now, you boneheaded behemoth!" He looked up at the sound of running feet, and watched as Keth and Dema ran down the stairs; Keth looked stunned, Dema determined.

"He says he knows where our boy is and who's the next victim. Wants us to turn out the whole force to track 'em."

"Let him go. What is it Dhaskoi Niko?" Dema asked.

Niko refrained from glaring at the men as they let go of his arms and one of them muttered, "Dhaskoi? He never said nothin' about bein' dhaskoi."

"Is this it? Is this why you're here?" Keth asked, holding out one of his globes.

"Where did that come from? Where—Tris?" Dema asked, looking into the cleared globe.

"I made it clear again," Keth explained as the three men gazed into the picture. Niko's heart gripped as he looked down on his student.

"This is why I'm here," Niko said. "I was scrying for the future, and this time the images came together." He tried to ignore that his hands were trembling as he laid them on the globe, his fingers touching Keth's. You wouldn't have to ignore the trembling if you could convince yourself it was just from adrenaline, just from running here. Because you know it isn't. Niko ignored the traitor-voice inside him and concentrated, pushing his magic through Keth's until the image of Tris shrank, showing her surroundings. "Where is that? Where is she?"

"Cricket Strut? Brosdes?"

"Cricket Strut. Near Silkfingers Lane."

"I've frozen it where she is right now," Niko said. "She won't be there when we arrive. We need Little Bear. He can track her. We need him and we need to move. This takes place in fifteen minutes, twenty if we are fortunate. Her life is about to intersect with the Ghost's—I don't know how, but if you want him to be alive when you question him, we must go!"

"The Bear's at Ferouze's. I'll get him and meet you at the corner of Chamberpot and Peacock." Keth was already running by the time he was finished speaking. He, at least, understood the urgency.

One of the arurimi muttered as Niko and Dema hurried in the other direction: "If you want him to be alive?"

Niko thought, somewhat bitterly, that these men had no idea how close they were to disaster. Tris never did anything slightly, never did anything slowly. If she was going to begin her descent into darkness, it would happen fast. Theiros prided itself on being the birth of civilization. Let it not be the birthplace of something capable of destroying it. Not his Trisana.

Dema strood, his long legs never stalling as he barked orders to his men and hurried out into the street, towards Cricket Strut, but Niko bit his lip against impatience anyway. Keth was waiting just where he said he would be, passing the lead to Little Bear over to Niko without question as the group hurried in the dark. Twenty minutes, if you're lucky? the voice murmured. It has already been twenty minutes. The Ghost has her, and she won't be able to stop herself, won't want to stop herself. How did you not see this coming? How did you not realize, as soon as the girl-child became involved—

Niko shook his head. He had no time for this. Tris was what mattered.

They reached Cricket Strut to find it empty. Niko leaned forward, talking softly into Little Bear's ear. "Find Tris, Bear. Take me to Tris."

The dog didn't have to search for the scent before he was trotting ahead of them, pulling on the lead. Niko took this excuse to run towards his student.

You'll never make it on time.

They rounded a corner and Niko pulled hard on the lead. "Hold, Little Bear!" he said, straining to keep the big animal from leaping in defence of Tris. If she hurt the dog, in this rage, she would be surely lost.

And she isn't now?

There was a man sunk in the ground to his waist, his expression twisted with rage and madness. Between Niko and the newly arrived Dema and Keth, was Tris standing over the Ghost, lightnings dropping from her hair to her feet. She was more out of control than she had been since she was a child and infinitely more powerful. Her voice was utterly emotionless as she spoke: utterly emotionless and as cold as the Syth. "You orphaned a little girl twice," she said, her grey eyes fixed on the face of the man before her as she dispensed her harsh justice. "You took two of her mothers. A little girl who never did you harm. You left her among strangers who might have thrown her in the street. Never once did you think of her."

You should have known, as soon as the little girl became involved. You should have known what she would do for someone reminding her of herself. You should have seen the signs.

I know.

The Ghost snarled his reply. "Never once did anyone think of me! Fit to haul dung but not fit to be seen—this place is rotten. If she don't like the smell of rot, she shouldn't live here, and neither should you."

Lightning blazed down her arms. "No, you shouldn't live." Niko felt the magic, rather than saw it, with his student's back blocking her hands from him. He knew her magic, though, and didn't need his sight to know she was creating a lightning-bolt to kill the defenceless man she had trapped before her. Dema strode past him, heading toward Tris.

"No, Dema, let her do it! Don't stop her!" Keth called out, but it was Niko's hand that stopped Dema. He wasn't sure what would happen if the officer interrupted her now.

"For her own sake, she must be stopped," Niko said, glaring back at the glass-mage, who looked wild with grief and fury.

"Tris, give him up. If you kill him, I'll have to arrest you and have you executed," Dema said. His voice was calm, but his arm shook under Niko's restraining hand. A brave man terrified by the force of Tris's power, of her rage.

Behind him, Keth shouted again and Niko strove to ignore him. He wasn't important, now. Niko's gaze was centered on Tris.

"Is this what it comes to, Trisana?" he asked, his voice soft. "When you sank ships at Winding Circle, you defended your home. If you do this, it's murder. You will be a murderer by choice." He couldn't let that happen. It would destroy her. Utterly, she would be destroyed until she became the monster he feared, sometimes, that her parents had doomed her to be.

"He deserves to die." The rage in the fourteen-year-old's voice froze him utterly.

Dema walked away from his hand, towards Tris and the Ghost. "But do you deserve to kill him?" he asked. "Leave him to the State, Tris. That's what it's for. His first debt is to Tharios. Let him pay it."

There was a long, long moment before she turned and walked away from the man there. Dema leaped into action, but Niko's world had faded in sight and sound to his student. Arurimirushed around them while Niko watched his student— her face, to any outsider, appearing as impassive as if she had just walked in for dinner— stop and pet Little Bear. Niko could see it, though—the turmoil she kept below the surface.

She had always been the emotional one, out of the four. Niko knew that it was when she was at her most impassive that she was the real danger, because the most deadly of her emotions, the real aches and deep, deep pains, they were kept hidden from the world. When she appeared to be at her most unemotional, it was when she had let go of the daily emotions, the trivial annoyances, and had embraced this deep darkness.

That inner maelstrom? It will kill her, one day. If not today, if not with this murderer, than with the next. You know this. You have seen it.

The future changes, all of the time. Niko thought, angrily. I have seen her become a monster as I have seen them all become monsters. The future can be changed; it has to be changed.

Tris went to walk past him. Panicked, he grabbed her arm. "There's something I have to do right now. It's really important, Niko. Life and death, literally," she said. She was his Trisana, again. Wholly rational and he knew the price of not trusting her.

"Go," he said, reluctantly letting go of her arm, "but we need to talk later, you and I."

He watched her walk away into the dark streets of the city. He closed his eyes.

Five days later, Niko sat by his student's bed in Jumshida's house reading when Tris finally woke up.

More relieved than he cared to admit even to himself that she had woken, that she was the Tris he knew, he started in on a lecture that had been growing in his head while he waited by her bedside. Tris waited while he ranted until she finally got out of bed stiffly and went behind a screen to change.

"Are you even listening?" he asked.

"Not really. Either I am adult enough to have a medallion and a student and make my own stupid choices, or I'm not. It's not like I did it for part entertainment, Niko."

"No, I know you didn't," he said, sighing. But the medallion has been worn by monsters before. "I suppose I feel guilty because I should have helped you more, instead of letting conference politics sap my strength."

"Help me with what? I didn't help find him, I walked bang into the man, Niko! Is he dead yet?"

Pain welled up in him. She had come out from behind the screen and her tone, when she asked, was conversational. Her face was utterly expressionless. "Do you care so little, Tris? He paid in blood, yesterday."

"I feel sorrier for the prathmuni. There was a slaughter, wasn't there?"

"Sadly, yes. Twenty-nine prathmuni dead, four of them children. The Keepers finally decreed martial law and ordered the arurim to get the city under control."

"Twenty-nine?"

"I was shocked, too, but that's all that were found. Tharios's prathmuni have vanished. The Assembly is fighting about who will do their work." Niko watched carefully and noted her grin. "I find it interesting that they left at almost the same time the Ghost was captured," he said. "Do you think they were warned?"

Tris ignored the question, which gave him his answer. Something important, she had said. He had known as soon as he heard about the escape of the prathmuniwhat his student had done before collapsing in Keth's house. "Where's Glaki? How's Keth?"

Niko supposed that was the way it would always be, with Tris. On the one hand, a casual and frightening disregard for life and on the other, a tender and fierce protective instinct for those she cared about. Her family had damaged her, but not completely. Her past had hardened her, but not past being capable of love. Niko walked with her downstairs, standing out of the way as she was greeted by her student and the child no one else would care for. A child like herself.

Tris hesitated before kissing the child on her lap tenderly on the cheek.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm. Euripides.