Forward, but Never Forget (XOXO)

by Lullabyes

Zaun is free—and must grow into its unfamiliar new dimensions. So must Silco and Jinx. A what-if that diverges midway through the events of episode 8. Found family and fluff, politics and power, smut and slice-of-life, villainy and vengeance.

27. Progress

Third chapter of the act - and yet another 'hinge' that sets more madness into motion! Mel x Silco enjoyers rejoice, as this one's for you :D

tw: for animal cruelty, and poisoning pets. Silco is not a nice man :/

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It's strange what desire will make foolish people do

~ "Wicked Game" – Giant Drag

---

Confidential: State Files – Piltover & Zaun.

Memorandum of Encrypted Telephone Conversation

Subjects: Councilor Mel Medarda & First Chancellor Silco

Declassified and De-encrypted Under Authority of the Intra-agency Security Panel

E.O. 12588 Section 7. B(ii)

Councilor Medarda: Chancellor?

Chancellor Silco: Councilor. To what do I owe the pleasure at this hour?

Councilor Medarda: There's something that we must discuss. Privately.

Councilor Silco: I am all ears.

Councilor Medarda: I meant... face to face. Tomorrow morning.

Chancellor Silco: That is most unfortunate, Councilor.

Councilor Medarda: Unfortunate?

Chancellor Silco: I've a full schedule tomorrow. The day after, too, if memory serves.

Councilor Medarda: Chancellor—

Chancellor Silco: And I have not been made aware of any emergency that would justify the rearrangement of my duties. Duties, need I remind you, that I perform to keep our Treaty from teetering in its vulnerable early months.

Councilor Medarda: You have made your dedication to safeguarding the Treaty abundantly plain, Chancellor.

Chancellor Silco: Then you'll understand, why it is not in my best interests to alter the workflow of my government.

Councilor Medarda: And in which clause of our agreement does it state that we may not meet in person to discuss our future?

Chancellor Silco: You mean to say the present.

Councilor Medarda: ...You're right. I apologize. It's late, and I...

Chancellor Silco: Is all well, Councilor?

Councilor Medarda: I will be frank. There are some... concerning matters.

Chancellor Silco: I can't speak to what matters you have heard, Councilor. Zaun steeps in rumor.

Councilor Medarda: These have not come from the usual source.

Chancellor Silco: What a ludicrously vague statement.

Councilor Medarda: ...

Chancellor Silco: Are you there, Councilor?

Councilor Medarda: This was a mistake.

Chancellor Silco: No no. We are here, now. You have my attention. What has you so worried, my dear?

Councilor Medarda: It concerns a mutual acquaintance.

Chancellor Silco: Speak plainly.

Councilor Medarda: Not over the speaking telegraph.

Chancellor Silco: If we have a spy in our midst, I cannot sit idle. I have a responsibility to protect those who have helped build our peace.

Councilor Medarda: Not a spy.

Chancellor Silco: What then?

Councilor Medarda: It's difficult to describe. Certain events have transpired in the Council. And I—I fear I'm not making much sense.

Chancellor Silco: I believe the situation will be better understood in person, as you said.

Councilor Medarda: I would like to come to Zaun.

Chancellor Silco: This is irregular. Most irregular.

Councilor Medarda: I'm aware.

Chancellor Silco: You sound... distressed.

Councilor Medarda: Perhaps it is too much to ask.

Chancellor Silco: I don't enjoy hearing your voice like this.

Councilor Medarda: Somehow, I doubt that, Chancellor.

Chancellor Silco: Come down, then.

Councilor Medarda: When I arrive, I wish for your undivided attention.

Chancellor Silco: You would receive nothing less, Councilor.

Councilor Medarda: And, Chancellor?

Chancellor Silco: Hm?

Councilor Medarda: I would appreciate your... discretion.

Chancellor Silco: Regarding our call? Or our arrangement in general?

Councilor Medarda: Just so.

Chancellor Silco: I am happy to agree to either request.

Councilor Medarda: Why are you being so amenable tonight?

Chancellor Silco: Do forgive me, Councilor. But when you say "amenable," does that mean the same thing as, let's say, "kind?"

Councilor Medarda: In this case, perhaps.

Chancellor Silco: Ah, now. You do know how to make a man blush.

Councilor Medarda: Somehow, I doubt that, too.

Chancellor Silco: You doubt many things, Councilor.

Councilor Medarda: A hazard of my position, as you can imagine.

Chancellor Silco: A good quality in a Councilor, and one I do not fault you for.

Councilor Medarda: How very charitable of you.

Chancellor Silco: Well. Perhaps, when I am feeling uncharitable, we can discuss the other things you are capable of doing to a man.

Councilor Medarda: Perhaps.

Chancellor Silco: When we are off the speaking telegraph, you mean?

Councilor Medarda: ...Yes.

Chancellor Silco: My word, I've never heard you sound like this before.

Councilor Medarda: Like what?

Chancellor Silco: Nervous, Councilor.

Counselor Medarda: It is a rare occurrence.

Chancellor Silco: Endearing, dare I say.

Councilor Medarda: You will have to try harder than that to disarm me, Chancellor.

Chancellor Silco: This wasn't trying.

Councilor Medarda: I'd be curious to know your approach when you do try.

Chancellor Silco: ...

Councilor Medarda: Now you sound the nervous one. Or not-sound, as is the case.

Chancellor Silco: My apologies, Councilor. It has been a long time since I have... conversed in this fashion.

Councilor Medarda: That, at least, is a shared experience.

Chancellor Silco: Then we shall have something to talk about.

Councilor Medarda: So long as your schedule allows.

Chancellor Silco: It will tomorrow.

Councilor Medarda: Until tomorrow, then. Good night, Chancellor.

Chancellor Silco: Good night.

[END MEMORANDUM]

---

At dawn, the Skylight Commercia is a burnished fairyland.

It hangs suspended on a cantilevered bridge spanning between two steep grades of cavern. Pale sunlight streaks off its domed skylight, rainbow arcs glinting in the filtered air. Equidistant between light and shadow, between cornucopia and carnival, it is the best the Undercity has to offer. In the lower zones, clouds of smut from Factoryside blacken everything. But from their smoky loins issue the fully-formed charms on display here: confectionaries of black sugar, jewels of green jade, tins of bitter coffee.

To the east sits Fashion Street, where garment manufacturers sell printed fabrics directly to the public. To the west is the Big Brass, where traditional meals are on offer in brass pots: cavernberry jam, butchered eels on skewers, mussels sizzling in broth. The north hosts the entertainment district, a lamplit extravaganza of music halls and trompe-l'œil theaters, where dinner is served with the floorshows, and sumptuous parlors can be booked for private performances. To the south lies the Crystal Palace, where tourists and locals flock to the chandeliered galleries that display artworks by renowned Zaunite masters: silk paintings, onyx statuettes, gold filigrees.

In Vander's heyday, the place was a glorified flea market. Like the customers the shopkeepers wooed, their merchandise was far from flush. Most of it rose from the stew of bootlegged goods in the Black Lanes: secondhand gizmos, reach-me-down garments, discount gear.

Trash to tempt the strays.

Predictably, the Council took a dim view of the illicit trade. Enforcers raided the shops regularly, confiscating contraband and destroying the rest. Only stores with official licenses were left standing.

Obtaining said license was like climbing Mount Tarrgon.

Vander tried placating both sides. He struck a bargain with Sheriff Grayson to keep Enforcers out of the marketplace during the Equinox, when the tide of tourists from Topside washed in—that spree-spending horde of Demacian clerks, Bilgewater merchants and Shuriman mages. By late September, they'd clear out, leaving nothing but their coins in the Trenchers' pockets. Then Enforcers would resume patrols, when business tapered, allowing the shopkeepers to go back to selling junk without fear of arrest.

The arrangement worked well enough. Then traders began growing restless. They wanted more than an annual renewal of the same old deal; never raking in dividends but always scraping together cogs. It was endemic of a broader trend across the Undercity—spiking prices, stagnant profits.

Inevitably came the collision: status quo versus change. The less resilient of the two gave way.

Vander was killed. Silco took charge.

Progress.

Today, the Skylight Commercia is an upscale amphitheater, licensed by Zaun's Cabinet and protected by its own army of blackguards. It also boasts a full complement of unionized staff: porter boys, seamstress girls, spoonymen, bakers, bartenders, watchmen, even medicks who specialize in the tragic malady known as shopaholism.

Already, the atmosphere is a profusion of bedazzlement. Clutches of people dot the pathway: early risers and late-night revelers. A few stop and stare at the couple strolling past them. An entourage of Enforcers follow them at a distance, footsteps echoing across the cobblestones.

"Lookit," are the whispers. "Lookit."

They make an unusual pair. A man and a woman, shoulder-to-shoulder. He is a blade of a thing: sharp in every facet. Sharp-dressed, sharp-eyed, sharp-built. He gives the impression that if you come at him wrong, you are liable to get sliced in half.

Yet he has a smooth, silky manner about him. A Zaunite's strut.

His companion is a lithe, languid, lovely creature in a charmeuse gown the color of midnight. It is intricately pleated and geometrically cut: a Piltovan style. Indeed, the woman is all Piltover, from the top of her beautifully gold-coiffed head to the soles of her shapely gold-sandaled feet. Some greet the sight of her with scowls; others with stares.

The woman pays no mind to either. Her head is held high. She appears serenely at ease in her strange surroundings.

"Who're they?" the shoppers whisper among themselves.

Rumors swirl. The man is none other than the Eye of Zaun, master of it all. Hard to credit. Most only know him by his trademark voice in radio broadcasts. The rest are still convinced the Eye is a myth, or a monster risen from the depths of shadow. This man is too real to be either. The scars on his face are crosshatched as deeply as mining seams.

And the woman? A Councilor, it is whispered. Harder to credit. Why would a Councilor dirty the hem of her dress across the pathways at this hour? Indeed, why would she bother to get out of bed (a bed the shoppers can only imagine is as sumptuous as a chocolate gateau) before noon, when most Pilties ring for their maids to serve breakfast?

"Who d'you reckon they are?" one shopgirl whispers to another.

"They say it's a Topside toff," her companion whispers back, "with the Eye of Zaun."

"Pffft. The Eye already owns the whole city!"

"Well, maybe he's out bargain hunting?"

"That's bollocks! Bet it's a chem-baron, giving his mistress the tour."

"A Piltie mistress? You're dreaming!"

"Am I? These days, every Topsider and their dog wants a sniff below."

A third shopgirl stares awestruck at the woman's elegant silhouette. "She looks a right prize, I'll say that."

"We'd all look right prizes if we never worked a day in our lives!"

They laugh in ribald unison—laughter being the main thing that has survived in the Fissures despite decades of hardship.

And so, inevitably, has gossip. In a few minutes, off on their break, they are at their usual haunt near the Big Brass, chattering away. The city bubbles with scuttlebutt: fads, fights, fancies. What is passe and what is posh. Who has gone up in the world; who has tumbled down. Who's up to no good, and who's met a bad end.

News is impossible to separate from natter. It is the lifeblood that pulses through the city's arteries. It suffuses the air with its own magic. And no one knows that fact better than the Eye, who has spent much of his tenure collecting it, distilling it, manipulating it.

Knowledge is currency—and the currency is the only thing that can be relied upon in a world of shifting sands.

Today's fare is the juiciest of the week. The shopgirls, on their third round of cavernfruit juice, are already aflame. The upcoming Expo is off to a promising start: the streets are cramming with tourists, and the shopkeepers are rubbing their hands with glee. Hotels are seeing a surge in bookings. Clubs have mandated fire sprinklers and escape stairwells. The air has been pleasantly pure despite the periodic Gnashers. A new dance, the Targonian Twist, is sweeping the Lanes. In Oldtown, rehab centers are running out of beds. The treatment programs are making headway. The Shimmer addicts are being weaned off their fix. And the medicks say a cure for Grey Lung is on the horizon.

The prototypes are currently undergoing tests at private laboratories. By this time next year, there could be a vaccine available for sale. No word on the cost, yet. Or whether the Cabinet will approve its mass-production.

But the talk is rife with optimism—the offspring of early progress.

What truly interests the girls is gossip to do with the Council. They lean in closer, their voices dipping to a hush.

"You heard what happened to Heimy, then?" one girl says.

"You mean the old Yordle?"

"Who else, daftie?"

"What about him?"

"Well, seems he's gone missing while on sabbatical."

"On what, now?"

"Sabbatical! Y'know. It's what the eggheads call it when you take a holiday."

"And he just vanished?"

"His secretary got a letter saying he was heading up to Demacia. He hasn't been seen since."

"How'd you know?"

"My second-cousin's wife, she's a maid at his house. Said Enforcers dropped by. They told her to keep her lips zipped."

"Zipped why?"

"Said the Council are keeping it hush-hush. Heimerdinger's their former head and all. Don't want folks worrying."

"He was on the Council, wasn't he?"

"Well, there's something else..."

"What's that?"

"My aunt, she works at the Boundary Markets. She says that before the Siege, she could've sworn she saw him wandering about."

"You mean... here? In Zaun?"

"Yeah! And not alone. She said he was with some bloke."

"Who?"

"Janna knows. He had a mask on. Personally, I think she's exaggerating. She's a bit of a lush. The drink must've gone to her head."

"But what if it's true?" one girl says. "Maybe the fuzzball's hiding out in Zaun? And who's the man with the mask, I wonder? Could it be the Eye?"

"Why'd the Eye help a Councilor? He calls 'em A lineage of leeches."

"Maybe he's trying to make nice after the Treaty?"

"Or he's holding the old Yordle for ransom?"

"As what? Jinx's new pet?"

They share peals of laughter. Absurdity is also a staple of the Zaunite diet, and the notion that the Eye would keep a Yordle captive in his penthouse is enough to make anyone's sides split. They can picture it, clear as day. The Eye in a dark silk robe, the Yordle in a pink bow, the two of them dancing their own strange waltz around the lavish rooms. Maybe Jinx would serenade them, as her devotees do her: Come on, dance faster, just a little bit of energy...

"I keep hearing," a girl says, "the Eye's a vampire, and his flat's a dungeon."

"That's just the chem-burn talking, love."

"Well, I'd wager there's a grain of truth. Vampires don't breathe, right? And they don't need sunshine. The Eye's no different. Where else would he live but underground?"

"He's commissioned a dozen cultivairs' hothouses full of sunshine. Why'd he do that if he's a vamp?"

"I'm not saying he's a full vamp, for Janna's sake. But everyone knows the Eye has his fingers in the blood trade."

"The Shimmer trade."

"Same thing. I hear Shimmer's made of poro blood. That's why it's so dangerous."

"It's a drug, love. Drugs're all dangerous."

"Not always. My boyfriend got a thimbleful last weekend from the back-alley chemist. Cleared up his cough, it did. And gave him a cockstand so big—"

"Oh, shut it, I don't wanna know!"

"What I'm saying is, there's more to Shimmer'n meets the eye."

"Got that right. My uncle OD'd on it, remember? Died screaming. So did his missus."

"Didn't their kid run away?"

"Yeah. Joined the Firelights. Who are a bunch of crazies, if you ask me."

"Oooh. I can't stand the lot of them! Making a ruckus wherever they go!"

"I heard they're dying off. No one's seen hide nor hair of them since the Siege."

"That's not what my brother-in-law said. He's a blackguard at deep south quadrant. He heard scuttlebutt that the Firelights were holed up in a secret lair. Somewhere down in Oshra Va'Zaun's tunnels. The Eye's trying to wall 'em in—or starve 'em out."

"How long've they been there?"

"Don't know. Maybe years."

"What a load of bollocks. Where are their goods coming from, then? You'd have thought the blackguards would've sniffed out the supply lines."

"My brother-in-law says they've a secret way into Zaun."

"What? Where?"

"Dunno. Supposedly only the Eye knows."

"He's a crafty sod. Bet he's already filled it up with Jinx's bombs."

"Why not ask him? He was browsing for jar cakes an hour ago."

"That's not the Eye, you dumb tart!"

And etcetera.

Under the watery sunrays of the glass dome, pigeons flutter. The girls buy paper cones of birdseed, for the fun of watching the birds flock around them. They are still playing guessing games over who the enigmatic chem-baron and his companion are. But in fact, it matters little. The security detail has alerted them to the presence of bigwigs. They need to know nothing else.

Where the Gray sits, as the saying goes.

At the escalators, they spot the couple again. They have stopped with their entourage. A little girl lingers by the railing. Too scared to climb aboard the steps, she is blocking their path. The shopgirls tense as one of the lady's guards move to shove the girl aside.

That's Enforcers for you. Always throwing their weight around.

The sharp-dressed man stops the guard. There are quietly severe words exchanged. Then the man himself kneels. He is talking to the girl, a gentle hand on her shoulder. His manner is almost reassuring. Whatever he says is lost in the hubbub of the marketplace. But the little girl seems soothed by his words.

Politely, he proffers a hand. She accepts with caution, then smiles a little as they perform a box-step together, leaping onto the escalator. Playfully, the man lifts her off the last step at the top. The girl giggles and kicks her feet before he deposits her on the ground.

Below, the elegant lady claps. She has been watching with an intrigued eye. Her entourage, more grudgingly, follow suit. The little girl, titillated, performs a curtsey. She and the man exchange parting words. From his pocket, he hands her a twist of bright-red licorice. Then, with a forefinger, he taps the skin under his eye. The universal Zaunite gesture:

Our secret.

He gives the girl a finger wave. Beaming, she rushes off to her family—a woman and an older girl, both in patched skirts and mudstained boots that mark them as dwellers of the Deadlands' mining district. They've been watching her progress with bated breath. A chem-baron and Enforcers cornering a lone child?

In the Fissures, it's the beginning of a horror story.

The little girl flings herself at her mother's skirts. The woman gathers her up in her arms. Over her head, she gives the chem-baron and his party a wary nod. They are the epitome of well-heeled; she and her girls are a world removed from their spit-polished realm.

The man does not disdain the gesture. He nods back.

"That was decent of him," says one shopgirl, licking her fingers.

"The best men are good with whelps," the second says. "It shows."

"Pffft," scoffs the third. "One good turn and you're already fitting him for a ring, eh?"

"I'm only saying! He was patient. A lot of kids would've started blubbering."

"Maybe he's a chem-baron who moonlights as a nanny."

"Chem-barons have whelps, too!"

"And they pack 'em off to boarding school soon as the tit's empty."

"Maybe this one's special."

"You're daft," the first girl says, tossing a pigeon a last pinch of seed. "He's the Eye, for sure."

"What's got you so convinced?"

"Well, he's got a whelp too, doesn't he? Jinx?"

"Pssh. Jinx is his dollymop."

"Don't think so. I read somewhere he'd adopted her."

"I read he'd had a child by her."

"That's bollocks!"

"They say it's why she went into hiding after the war."

"Well, I heard she'd—"

"Ssh," the first shopgirl hisses. "They're coming this way."

Sure enough, the couple are crossing the plaza. Their entourages follow. Hurriedly, the shopgirls clean the clutter of cigarettes and paper-cones, straightening up. They give the couple wide berth, nodding respectfully as they sweep past. The aroma of hothouse hyacinths and bottled bergamot lingers in their wake.

The woman stares straight ahead, indifferent to the scenery. The man, on the other hand, appraises his surroundings with interest. They converse in soft voices: contralto and baritone. The latter has a graveled pitch that seems uncannily familiar.

A radio voice. The Eye's.

The shopgirls are too intimidated to eavesdrop. But suddenly, the rumor—that the Eye and a Councilor are on an extended excursion of the Skylight together—no longer seems so far-fetched.

A paper cone, caught in a shopgirl's fingers, slips free. It skitters toward the man's gleaming leather shoes. He stops mid-step, and the lady follows suit.

"I-I'm sorry, sir," the girl stammers.

The man stoops, picking up the cone. With an elegant precision, he hands it to her. For a moment, the three shopgirls are caught in his crosshairs. Up close, he's a fearsome-looking creature. The dapper clothes conceal a hard-edged physique like a miner's pickax. His right eye is the color of a lapis lazuli strung from the stalls. His left eye...

Roving across the girls, it gives off an acid-red glow.

The eye of a godling—or a devil.

The shopgirls' skins break into gooseflesh. Their tongues go dry as Fissure-roots.

Idly, the man nods, and walks on.

"Shit," the first girl whispers, "what if that is the Eye?"

"If it is," the second whispers back, "then pray to Janna nobody gets their throat slit."

---

Silco and Medarda stroll along the cobblestones.

Their security detail follow. The Enforcers march in a rigidly-alert row, while the blackguards keep pace with sly nimbleness. They are accompanied by Silco's crew. Lock is in the rearguard. Ran leads. Dustin plays lookout. In their midst, Medarda's secretary clutches a clipboard to her chest. It is her first time in Zaun. Her eyes are wide with apprehension.

Poor lamb.

At the Big Brass, the traders are out in wolfish force. The air is a mélange of scents: spicy, savory, sweet. As well as the usual trestles loaded with cavernfruit tarts, there is now Shimmer-grown produce overflowing from the stalls: strawberries, pineapples, figs and rhubarb. Here and there, exotica from Bandle City, Tershni and Fae'lor are on display—steamed buns cored with spiced meats, golden croquettes of cheeses and bottles of fresh juice.

Since the Peace Treaty, business has been brisk. The nautical corridor, arm-in-arm with the Hex-Gates, are tapping into a vast potential for trade. Relations between Zaun and Piltover remain on the right side of frosty. But they are cordial enough for goods to pass back-and-forth between their borders—culture and cuisine, food and fashion.

Lately, Zaun's sartorial styles make the rounds at Topside dinner parties. Zaunisme, they call it. An aura of eeriness, a bearing of haunted gloom. In Zaun, it comes naturally. Most radiate it as a result of breathing the ether of the Gray, their bodies pitilessly tapered from malnutrition. Now the voluptuaries at Piltover adopt the ligne of their pale-skinned counterparts. They don cuirass bodices that pinch in the waist and fall-front trousers that show off the thighs. Some paint their faces with dashes of shadow like shiners and shades of gloss like blood. Others wear their hair loose, a just-leapt-from-the-roof loucheness—despite having never leapt anywhere in their lives.

Frankly, Silco finds it ridiculous.

Decades of suffering reduced to aestheticized commerce.

Yet the craze—fed by a shrewd publicity campaign—has its upsides. In Topside cabarets, Zaunite musicians are becoming wildly sought-after. Though their lyrics continue to be dubbed obscene, their melodies prove catchy enough to lure the best dancers to the floor. Cavernfruit spirits are becoming a staple at Topside taverns, especially those near the waterfront. Zaunite artworks are also finding their way into upper-class households, with aristos paying a pretty penny to display them in their ancestral galleries.

All this—in tandem with the steel, stone and spices that make up the Kindred's share of exports—are working to transform Zaunites from shunned pariahs into sought-after partners.

Beyond commerce, however, lies politics. Zaun's influence with Piltover's upper echelons expands by the day. The chem-barons and the Councilors have brokered power-sharing deals. The Council believes they will get a cut of the Fissures' resources. The chem-barons believe they will profit from the influx of foreign investment. Both sides hope to see each other dead within five years.

Neither one sees Silco.

Their combined profits are steered, coin by coin, into slush funds that are then redistributed into Zaun's national coffers. He plays a shell game, lulling the Council with kleptocratic kickbacks and gulling the chem-barons with strongman spectacles. By exploiting their hubris, he enriches Zaun in a hundred different ways. He strengthens his network, slowly tugging the strings in preparation for the big twist.

Progress.

In two months' time, Zaun will host an Expo. Everything from transport to textile will be on display within the domed splendor of the Skylight Commercia. Half of Runeterra's luminaries, from all classes, will be here. Scarcely an inch of ground not trod upon—and scarcely a coinpurse left uncut.

By luring foreign investors to Zaun's shores, the city will turn the tide against its bitter past. Already, the Fissures' reputation for reduced tax rates, expedited import duties, and minimal red-tape are garnering interest from entrepreneurs across Runeterra. Foreign trade, ranging from high-end manufacturing, chemical logistics, biotech, shipping and construction, is surging. So are the goods flowing through the nautical corridor: fowl, fabrics, furnishings, fripperies.

The Skylight Commercia, once stagnating with the same old products, has blossomed into the crown jewel of Zaun's financial portfolio. Everywhere the eye lands, there is exotica to behold: rare Shuriman woods, richly-woven Ionian tapestries, precious Noxian artifacts, trayloads of Demacian delicacies.

It is a glittering, gold-rimmed boom. And it must be stoked carefully.

Silco has no plans to oversaturate Zaun's market. Nor will he undercut his own wares. There is a principle by which the city must be run: a tight leash and an open purse. Too long, Zaun has been ravaged by outsiders who took her for all she had, then left her to fend for herself. Before the Siege, Topside had made every effort to dismantle local industry. They'd cut off export routes except through the Bridge, and made themselves the exclusive buyers of all goods. Next, they'd changed their means of paying the Trenchers: foreign currency supplanted by the tax revenue the Fissures paid. Then, in a final, cruel stroke, they'd built the Hex-Gates, and buried the Undercity under an influx of imports that they could never hope to compete with.

All of this, they'd done for Progress. As though they were its sole arbiters.

Now, Zaun will take progress into its own hands.

Hence the Expo.

More than promoting multilateral public diplomacy, it aims to showcase the best the Fissures have to offer. Invitations have already been extended to the creme de la creme from every corner of Runeterra. Demacian royalty, Bilgewater buccaneers, Piltovan magnates, Shuriman sultans, Noxian nobles, Ionian dignitaries and even the elusive elders from Bandle City have RSVP'd. Afterward, there will be a three-day summit, followed by a nightlong gala. The itinerary is already packed. There will be seminars on industrial policy and cultural exchange. Banquets with the city's finest culinary delicacies. Musical performances. Art exhibitions. Avant garde orchestras.

The Expo is one of Zaun's biggest leaps forward. A chance to reinvent itself from a realm where dreams die young to a place of brand-new beginnings.

And seize success by the throat.

"I wonder," Medarda says, gliding by Silco's side, "if you have something up the sleeve for the event."

To most ears, her words are a coy speculation. In fact, she is concerned about Silco's patented brand of chaos—a concern she expresses through an iron grip hidden in silken subtlety. It is why she is here. Ostensibly taking a turn through the Skylight Commercia. Secretly trying to finesse Silco for intel.

A large-scale Expo is the perfect opportunity to stir trouble.

Especially for Swain's warmasons.

Silco doesn't rise to Medarda's bait. In truth, he's in dour humor. Her call on the speaking telegraph, in a pitch of uncharacteristic distress, has gone unmentioned. On his part, he is loath to bring it up unless she does. She'd shown up without prior notice, with her blasted Enforcers in tow. In doing so, she is demonstrating her prerogative to supersede his schedule whenever she pleases. Now she's attempting to turn his attention to clandestine affairs, as if Zaun's day-to-day governance isn't priority enough.

With their tour, Silco has observed the barest modicum of civility. He has no qualms with indulging her whim—whatever the hell it is. But he refuses to have her meddle with his affairs. She is not a Councilor here. Not anymore. Their alliance is an armistice, not an act of amity. If she thinks otherwise, she is welcome to walk off the nearest bridge.

Let the Gray swallow her whole. And her Enforcers with her.

"I am only the master of ceremonies," he says. "The spectacle is entirely up to Jinx."

"Has she something special planned?"

"It's top-secret."

"Even from you?"

He tips a shoulder.

Medarda eyes him sidelong. "I daresay you are in a temper."

"Cherries."

"Pardon me?"

Silco stops by a stall. Its bright lanterns make bedazzled treasure of the sugared almonds and cashews and chestnuts. Sea-glass, shells, and glowing stones dangle from strings. The owner is a Shuriman woman with skin as sleek as mahogany, intricately carved with geometrical tattoos. Her family hail from a line of fishermen, jewelry makers, and confectioners. Now, they are all on the Eye's payroll.

Spotting Silco, the woman nods respectfully. Her two teenage daughters, behind her, gawp at the Councilor and her retinue. They are accustomed to visits from the Eye, but not Topside guests. In the old days, Silco used to hit her stall up once a month for the low-down on the zone, with Jinx hanging off his sleeve. She'd peer at the bright wares longingly, taking little skippy steps around the stall. Afterward, Silco would drop a few heavy Hexes on the counter, and fill Jinx's small hands with brown paper bags of chocolate-centered cherries.

Her laughter was sweeter than any treat in the marketplace.

Silco nods at one of the girls behind the counter. Cued, she fills a bag full of cherries. A necklace of abalone shells is looped through the twine. Lock takes it, a tiny pink parcel dangling from his big hand. Silco makes a Ta, gesture with his hand, and walks on.

Medarda smiles as they climb a set of stairs. "Is that a gift?"

"Indeed."

"I'm flattered."

"Not for you, Councilor." His tone holds a trace of wryness: "Jinx likes sweets."

"She is a sweet girl."

"She is no such thing." Silco's half-smile shades. "But thank Kindred she has good taste."

Thank Kindred, too, she hasn't a taste for patricide.

The past weeks, she's kept Silco on tenterhooks. His bruises and blows were all but healed thanks to a dosage of Shimmer. But his private life was a wreckage with no end in sight. After the disastrous confrontation with Vi, Jinx had barred him entry into the Aerie. Stayed holed up there day and night, with Magnus guarding the staircase. The workshop door was always bolted. Her path seldom crossed Silco's. If she deigned to communicate with him, it was through the rare stickynote left on the kitchen counter. On the rarer occasions they were together for a public engagement, her smoldering glares made for dark quarter hours and darker quarters. Sometimes Sevika would subtly interpose her body between father and daughter, as if to thwart an assassination.

Silco didn't pretend Jinx wasn't a ticking timebomb. But he couldn't blame her, either.

He'd tried countless times to talk to her. Lurked by the Aerie, hoping to waylay her when she came out. Left her favorite dishes outside. Passed envelopes under her door. It made no difference. Jinx never made an appearance. The food stayed untasted. The envelopes were returned. Her room at the penthouse suite remained empty.

She couldn't forgive him for keeping her in the dark about Vi. Treating her like a child. Worse than that—a jinx to be sidelined, suckered, hoodwinked.

Lied to.

Her initial shock had, in the passing days, blackened into rage, and then hardened into a bitterness so profound that it verged on cold war. The first week, she'd been possessed by those sharp-toothed childhood chimeras that, for so many blessed weeks, had stayed dormant. Burned half the furniture in Silco's study: three Ionian paper lamps, a month's worth of cigars, and a reading chair he was particularly fond of.

Subsisting on nightmares, she no longer slept, and instead covered half the walls in his headquarters with a tiny, jagged script he recognized as presaging a psychotic break: LiArlIArLIarlIaRLIarRIeliAr. He'd found her, eventually, on the rooftop, smudged in glowpaint and streaked with tears. He'd dropped to his knees beside her. But Jinx had screeched and shrunk away, huddling into a ball.

When Silco touched her, she lashed out—protectively, spitefully, aggressively.

The crew weren't spared, either. For playing complicit cogs in Silco's scheme, they'd each been given a dose of the same medicine. Sevika's brand-new arm had malfunctioned in a shower of sparks two days after the incident. Lock was hit with a bout of violent food poisoning that turned out to be barium salts; he spent the rest of the week getting his stomach pumped. Ran came home to find their apartment overrun by a horde of sump-rats. Dustin was struck out of nowhere with a brick that nearly split his jaw; as it was, he was lucky not to lose any teeth. Lockjaw followed within a few hours.

They could each laugh about it now. But beneath the humor, they were terrified. For months, Jinx's moods were on an even keel. Now she'd relapsed into violent mania. Silco knew they dreaded the worst. That she'd turn on them all, tear apart the entire operation.

Destroy everything they'd rebuilt.

Silco dreaded it too. Mostly: he mourned. Jinx's breakdowns were his personal failure. And the more she suffered, the more he suffered in turn, a sense not just of unworthiness but worthlessness.

Because they are family. All the family each of them has.

Then Vi ripped them apart with a single blow.

For weeks, the atmosphere at headquarters brewed black with stormclouds. Then came the downpour.

In the middle of the night, Silco awoke to the familiar landscape of Jinx's body curved against his. The window was open; she'd slipped in without sound. His child's talent far outmatched all of his lookouts combined. In the tiny lights of the cityscape, he could see dark stains on her clothes. The room was redolent with blood.

Fresh blood.

Rousing, Silco felt a familiar spasm of terror. A bleeding Jinx was a nightmare made manifest. For a moment, he was back on the Bridge. His lungs were full of riverwater; his veins were clogged with Fissure-ore. Seizing her up, he shook her hard.

"Jinx? Jinx!"

His child was alive. Unhurt—but sobbing.

"It's Sparky," she said. "He's sick."

Next Silco remembers following Jinx to the Aerie. Magnus was curled in a corner. Right off, Silco knew something was wrong. His muzzle was bridled to expose red-scummed teeth. A dark arrowhead pooled the floor. According to Jinx, he'd been vomiting blood. She'd spent her month's allowance on haphazard elixirs to try and stabilize him. Nothing worked. Now she was flat broke, and Magnus was no better. Jinx had tried carrying him out to a medick. But he'd howled and mauled her, striking at her arms, tearing gouges into the skin.

When Silco approached, the dog did the same. Lunging, he sunk his teeth into Silco's forearm, piercing skin in runners of blood. His eyes, huge and crazed, rolled to meet Silco's.

"Heel," Silco said—and all at once the dog fell away, training subsumed by survival instinct.

Silco knelt and slung the massive body over his shoulder, the way a lifetime ago, he'd hauled loads at the mines. The dog, despite his superior size, was terrified. Silco felt the rapid cadence of his pulse. Halfway down the Aerie's stairs, his bladder let go in a warm gush down Silco's suit.

Silco said nothing.

Jinx was jittering in the background, her hands a wringing knot, all the steel gone from her spine.

"What's wrong with him?" she kept asking. "What's wrong?"

Silco didn't answer.

He'd summoned the crew. Together, they hauled the dog into the limo, folded in a blanket. Driving through Entresol, Lock at the wheel, Jinx huddled in the back, Silco had watched the streetlamps shine through the opera window. They picked up the darkening sheen of blood on the upholstery each time Magnus seized up and spewed.

A suck surge of pity twisted Silco's gut. Not for the dog—but for Jinx's fingers knotted into his fur.

The medick's facility was a squat but well-kept building overlaid by a rust-pitted scaffolding. Inside, a claustrophobic corridor lined with padded cages held every kind of animal. Cats, dogs, ravens. Some looked healthy. Others were emaciated, hooked up to tubes.

With the limo idling at the entrance, Silco and Lock hauled the mastiff inside. The woman who greeted them was a dark-haired Ionian beauty, with an ivory-pale complexion that magnified her eyes into wintergreen pools. She'd been summoned straight out of bed: her untied hair slid across her face and fell in a dangling twist down her ribs as she guardedly eyed the blackguards, the limo, Lock.

Then her stare fell on the dog. The alarm was replaced by professional courtesy.

"Oh!" Sawing a hand under her nose, she hurried over. "What have we here?"

"A sick dog," Silco said succinctly. "Fix him."

The woman guided them deeper into the bowels of clinic, where Lock lay the dog on a clean steel table. The gray-tiled room held the sharp tang of disinfectant. The dog was breathing in ragged gusts. Jinx stood at the threshold, staring at her pet, chin quivering. She looked so Powderish in that moment. Eyes liquid with cosmic pleading.

"Will he be okay?" she asked.

Silco's eyes met Lock's in passing. Usually, the other man's face held nothing but stony calm. Now, he made an expression: the smallest of frowns. It was the first time he'd witnessed Jinx demonstrating concern for a living thing. And the first time Silco understood the extent of her attachment to the dog.

No—not merely a dog.

Family.

Blood soaked warm through Silco's suit. The places where Magnus had bitten throbbed.

"He'll be fine," he said.

The falsehood slid easily off his tongue—except now he needed it to be true.

Jinx had suffered enough.

It was touch-and-go. Not Magnus; he was pumped full of drugs, his breathing steadying as he subsided into sleep. But Jinx refused to abandon her near-catatonic huddle by the door. Silco had to haul her into his arms and carry her out to the limo, with whispered assurances that they'd see Magnus in the morning.

In the suite, she let him disinfect her wounds. Afterward, he'd dared to put an arm around her. A gentling touch—and yet he felt Jinx skin rebel into gooseflesh. He was her family. Instinctively, she'd cleaved to him for support. But after the breach with Vi, and his own deception, she couldn't help but be wary.

Nor could Silco blame her.

Magnus was a beast. Silco was the real monster.

The dog was only sick because of what the blackguards had slipped into his meal. A dirty trick that went beyond cruelty: a ploy to make Jinx leave the Aerie.

Silco gave the order. But he'd never anticipated the poison's side-effects—or the severity of Jinx's distress. He wished, cradling Jinx's crestfallen face in both hands, he'd never done it. He should have been more patient. He should have been more understanding.

With Magnus—with everything.

He sat on the sofa and drew Jinx down onto his lap. She sat there, perched sideways on his leg, his arms cradling her, and she burrowed her head into the crook of his neck. The tears came in a ragged squall. She wailed into his chest, pummeling his arms with her tiny fists, clubbing blows that blossomed into deep bruises by morning.

Silco barely felt them. His pain didn't matter. There was only the grief he'd had caused Jinx. His part, played to brute perfection. Now the damage was done, and there was only this.

The fallout, as he held her.

Magnus made a full recovery. The veterinarian never mentioned the poison in his bloodstream. A generous donation to her clinic saw to it. The dog was diagnosed with gastroplexy. Same outcome: a stomach resectioning and bed-rest. In a few weeks, he was back to his usual fearsome self, chasing after Jinx and chewing on anything within reach of his jaws.

Watching them run laps together around the rooftop, Silco wondered if it would ever be easy for him to share Jinx. If any future pet or playmate would escape the ambit of his predacious instinct. Or maybe, given the nature of fatherhood, no one could possibly measure up. Maybe love was the only currency worthy of exchange.

You spent it—and damn the dividends.

A week later, while Magnus was napping by the stairwell, Silco paid a visit the Aerie. Jinx had stopped barring him from entry, but their conversations remained strained at knifepoint. She'd unbent enough to resume taking her breakfasts with him in the penthouse. But her moods were mercurial, oscillating between morose silences and monosyllabic grunts. She wouldn't touch him, either: all physical intimacy had dried up, as if cut off at the stem. No kisses or hugs. Not even a handhold.

For Silco, the withdrawal was a surreal subspecies of torture. By nature, he wasn't an affectionate man. But he'd not known, until the privilege was stripped from him, how profoundly her small touches had anchored him. Her cheeky little paw sneaking into his hand beneath the table. A playful pounce into his arms after a long day. A kiss pecked irreverently to his scarred cheekbone before bed. All those tiny moments, strung together, a garland of affection he could loop around his neck, not as a noose, but as a festoon to the joys of fatherhood.

Now, he'd been left empty-handed, his only company at the bottom of a bottle and between hallucinogenic jolts of Shimmer. He ached to be a father again. To be forgiven. But for either of these things, he'd need to grovel, and Silco wasn't built for groveling.

Not even for Vander. And Vander was dead.

Long live Jinx.

Tentatively, Silco stepped into the Aerie. Jinx's workshop was a flume of dust and debris, with the faintest haze of glitter. She'd been working on her mural, half-hidden behind the metallic screen. At the echo of his footfalls, she peeked over the edge. There were paint smudges on her cheeks and the tip of her nose. Her little face was glossed by the slanting lamprays.

The sight burned a small space into Silco's heart like a keyhole.

"Jinx," he said.

"Silco."

He heard, in the echoes of the formal exchange, ghosts of cozier times. Confidences and conspiracies swapped over a bowl of sugared peanuts in the atelier. Secrets and smiles traded sideways between sips of milkshake with paired straws. A thousand private exchanges that made up the language of family.

Theirs, and no one else's.

"I wanted to speak to you," he said. "It's about your work."

"My work?"

"The... incident... with Magnus. It was unfortunate. For all involved."

"Was it?"

Her tone was withering. But at least she wasn't throwing things. Or firing bullets. So far, so good. Silco pressed on.

"I understand... you'd hoped to solve Magnus' illness by yourself. Coming to me was a last resort. That being said... it isn't right to expect you to work for Zaun, but have barely enough coin in the kitty to get by. Let alone cater for your pet's needs."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that it's high time you were recompensed." He took a steadying breath. "On Zaun's behalf. And mine."

From his waistcoat, he withdrew a sealed envelope. He slid it across the tabletop. The letter spun to a stop, and the embossed stamp flashed gold in the lamplight. Zaun's dagger-winged chem-shield. The crest for official state affairs. Jinx's stare darted down, then up. She could sense a pivotal shift in the atmosphere. But she couldn't fully grasp what it signified.

Tentatively, she took the envelope. Her fingerprints left paint-smudges on the paper.

"Open it," Silco said. "I assure you. It's worth the read."

She obeyed. Inside was a cheque, with a sum of money written down. Jinx peered owlishly. "Who's this for?"

"You."

"Me?"

"Annual. Paid monthly." He kept his features neutral. "Will the amount suffice?"

"What—seriously?" Her laugh held the brittle edge of disbelief. "You don't gotta pay me!"

"I'm afraid I must. The work you do is as important as the Doctor's."

"Well, yeah. More. But it's Zaun's work." She bit her lip. "For this thing of ours. Right?"

If her face was a keyhole, then her words were the key scraping into the lock of Silco's black heart. His body seemed to revolve inside-out, tumblers clicking out of stress and into gratitude. He was humbled. He was hopeful. And yet, as the door stayed shut, his heart pounded like a prisoner's fist. He didn't know if the lock was stuck. Or if Jinx was merely biding her time.

Her eyes were inscrutably dark.

"Ours," Silco affirmed, hoarsely, "but we each have something that's for ourselves, too."

"That's got nothin' to do with money. None of us fought the war for money."

"We didn't. But I pay the crew. I pay Sevika." His eyes flickered cautiously over her face. "I'd like you to have your cut."

For a moment, Jinx's face unraveled at the seams. The dark keyhole disclosed a flash of feral temper. "What? As a bribe?"

"A step toward independence."

Jinx's eyes widened. A blue bang feel slantwise across her forehead. Silco wanted to reach across the space between them and tuck it behind her ear. Lacing his hands behind his back, he kept his distance. They'd resumed civility—even candor—between them. But Jinx remained on guard: standoffish and twitchy at the least wrong gesture.

It wouldn't do to overstep—or overstay the welcome.

Jinx whispered, "Why all of a sudden?"

Silco shook his head. "It's not sudden. I've been considering it for some time. The work you do is invaluable. So are you. Now you're old enough to understand your worth. With that comes compensation. I know money isn't enough. None of that can replace what's gone. But—"

Jinx sidled closer. With a fingertip, she touched his lips. Silco fell silent.

In her eyes, the temper was gone. So was the darkness. In their place was a hot gloss that resembled tears. Together, they stood in the halo of lamplight. The wind from a cracked-open vent played over one of the wind-chimes dangling on the ceiling. Jinx had made it herself: a miniature carousel of colored glass and gears. Pink and blue. So much of her surroundings held that same motif.

Pink and blue.

"Will I..." Jinx's voice wavered, "Will I still stay here?"

"Here?"

"With you?"

Silco's throat seized. Strange that her mind would make a quantum leap from salary to separation. But was she wrong? This was why he'd come, hadn't he? Not to suggest the possibility—but preempt it. He needed, more than anything, for Jinx to make Zaun her own space. To step into it, and into her life—but also deeper into his own. His way of granting her wings, but also keeping her… not caged.

Close.

Because the idea that she might desire a life apart from him felt less a grotesque possibility than a strangulation of his base nature. Jinx was all his. And yet she'd always belong to her ghosts. Her lost family. Her sister. Her scars. He couldn't compete with such an intractable, inhuman force as a memory. But damn it all, he could try. He was selfish down to the marrow. His ambition, his ruthlessness, his drive, were all a byproduct of that singular neurosis. The monster that bit deep and didn't let go.

His teeth like a cage; his love like drowning.

The last thing he wanted was for Jinx to drown. But nor could he bring himself to let her go.

"If," he said carefully, "if you wish to live elsewhere, we'd find you a place. Perhaps by the Promenade or…"

His voice trailed off. Jinx was shaking her head. Her face glistened with tears, stricken in the lamplight. Pink droplets splattered the cheque in her hands.

"No," she breathed.

"No?"

"I wanna stay."

Silco's throat clenched. He's made a mess with presumptions before. He dared not presume now.

"Stay and work?"

"Stay!" Jinx's breath jittered in her lungs. "Stay, and... stay yours."

Silco had braced himself as if for a stab to the eye. Instead, he was clobbered from a completely different direction. His fists clenched in unison. It wasn't a blow of agony, but of helpless, heartfelt joy.

Raggedly, he said, "Always, Jinx."

Jinx gave off a shaky little sound, not a sob but a laugh, giddy in its exhilaration. For a moment, her eyes sized him up longingly, as if she wanted to be embraced. Swept up and spun in his arms like a little girl. He'd have obliged, and gladly. Except it was clear that her nerves were pulled too tight to permit more than her current state of proximity.

It was a hard line. One he dared not cross.

Then Jinx said, "Can—can I kiss you?"

It was so childishly, precariously hopeful. The keyhole seemed to burn larger than ever.

With a gallantry that hid a gut-sick yearning, Silco nodded. "I don't see the harm."

Big-eyed with apprehension, Jinx edged closer. She went on tiptoe; her little hand starfished on Silco's chest. Her breath felt very warm against her face; the lashes brushed his scarred cheek in the ghostliest of whispers. Then her lips touched the very corner of his mouth. It was a shy, sweet, innocent peck. But he noticed the deliberate distance she kept between her body and his. As if the old solace of a full-bodied embrace was no longer a right she could seek.

Silco sensed the inhibition. And he understood.

This was Vi's doing.

The accusations she'd levelled at him—revoltingly false—had struck a nerve in Jinx. Lodged like a splinter, and jammed a wedge between father and child. His own role in the deception had done the rest. In place of their old intimacy, shame and mistrust had taken root. All to keep her from—from just this.

Feeling safe in her father's arms. Safe in own skin.

Rage transmuted into an icewater trickle down Silco's spine. For a moment, he could almost see that redhead bitch in the room. Standing between them, a silhouette of brawny sinew and spitfire spite. Her presence had torn Jinx's psyche apart, and now she was threatening to undo the very bond that kept Silco's world from spinning out of orbit.

And Jinx?

No matter what Silco did or said, how he engaged her focus, kept her stabilized and safe, she would think about Vi. He'd lose her, piece by piece. Same way he'd lost Vander. Or she'd be taken from him in one fell swoop. Same way he'd lost Nandi. Worse, once Jinx got a renewed taste of the past, she'd be back to square one. Broken and hungering for her old ways. For the drugs that numbed her and the ghosts that spoke to her. She'd turn the penthouse into a shooting range. She'd turn her mind into a death trap. She'd turn the dog against Silco.

And there would be no progress. No peace. No love.

Only the deep-end.

Silco was no fool. He'd been through enough hell to spot the tapestry in the chaos. One loose thread, and it would all unravel. Jinx would unravel. Her demons would drag her down, and this time, Silco would not be able to save her.

Vi must be dealt with. At arm's length was ideal, but close quarters would do. All that mattered was that it happened—and soon. He'd see her dead, and with her, the last of Vander's legacy. Then there would be nothing holding him back. Nothing left for Jinx to mourn.

They'll finally be free. Free to live. To love. To grow.

A family.

He didn't say any of this. All he said was, "Jinx..."

Still on tiptoe, Jinx drew back. Her freckled cheeks were dotted with pink splotches, and her lips trembled. "What?"

"I..."

The keyhole was smashed; the door falling ajar. His thieving hand slipped through the crack, and stole, as it always did, what his heart coveted the most.

The truth.

"I love you."

The tremor in Jinx's lips melted into a smile. And then she was melting too, straight into his arms. Silco enfolded her close. Her body fizzed in the Aerie's chill: a bonfire. Magnus padded over and nudged Jinx's legs, his tail stiffened. Silco ignored him. Didn't shove the dog away, as he might have once. Only circled Jinx tighter, letting her nearness suffuse him.

It wasn't completeness—but it was close.

Later that week, Silco proposed allowing Magnus into their penthouse suite. Jinx had shot him a mistrustful look, softening only at the apparent sincerity of his offer. He'd taken her to the Promenade to fetch the dog his own collar. Afterward, they rode back in the limo, with bags full of crinkled tissue paper and trinkets that Jinx insisted Magnus absolutely must have. The dog lay draped in Jinx's lap while she cosseted him, her chipped candy-colored nails scritching his fur.

At the suite, they'd sat together for lunch, Silco with a black coffee and Jinx with an enormous sandwich, occasionally tearing rags of meat off and tossing them at Magnus, who snapped them neatly out of the air. Giggling, she'd grabbed Silco's hand and twined her pinkie around his. It was the first spontaneous affection she'd shown him since the disastrous reunion with Vi.

A week later, Silco received the ultimate benediction: a spare keycard to the Aerie. His all-access pass, to a space where he'd once been barred entry.

Progress.

The trust between them—while not broken—was badly bent. To restore it to a semblance of its original shape, he'd have to give her time. To demonstrate that his word could be relied upon. That she was not a pawn in a game that she didn't even know she was playing.

No, Silco had already decided.

Next time, he'd make sure Jinx was a participant. And the stakes?

Nothing less than Vi's life.

(I won't lose my child again.)

"Do you often fetch such trifles?"

Silco is jolted from his reverie. "Hm?"

"Sweets?" Medarda says. "For Jinx?"

Her lips hold an ironic curl. They are painted deep red today. But the edges are faintly delineated with plum, as though she'd dabbed off the demure shade for something racier. The effect is arresting: the promise of sin, wrapped in a bow of elegance.

It's also a little off-putting, as if she is deliberately dangling a bloody lure in a shark's den.

"Unless," she muses, "that candy is for some other little girl?"

Silco eyes her sidelong. " You're awfully curious, Councilor."

"You seem good with children. That's all I mean."

"You've never seen me in the company of children."

"Oh, but I did." She tips her chin toward the escalators, where the pas-de-deux with the girl occurred. "Unless that was a well-timed performance?"

"A good politician knows when to throw a bone."

"I can't decide whether that's heartless or humane."

"Neither." His bad eye pierces the Enforcers. "But your retinue need to learn respect. Our children aren't luggage to shove out of the way. They are flesh and blood. And your city has laid waste to both."

Medarda's eyebrows raise a fraction. Then she gives a nod: acknowledgement, if not acceptance.

"We've begun a full-scale retraining program," she says. "For our Enforcers and Peacekeepers."

"And what are they being trained to do? Besides terrorize children."

"To act with restraint. To assess objectively. To use force as a last resort."

"It'll take more than that."

"Oh?"

"Your entire institution is predicated on prejudice. On a system of checks and balances that is, frankly, broken. And if I may so say, utterly..." He lets the word roll off his tongue like a profanity. "Piltovan."

Her eyelids flutter. "I beg your pardon."

"I am not speaking ill, Councilor. Merely stating facts. You can't wave a wand and restructure a system built on grinding one-quarter of its population into the dirt."

"We are attempting to rectify—"

"You are merely patching a leaky roof. The rest of the house remains dilapidated." He gestures toward the Skylight Commercia: a dome of glass, the emerald sky a luminous curvature overhead. "Worse, it's built on burial grounds. A tomb of Zaunite bones."

Medarda considers him from beneath veiled lashes. "You paint a bleak picture."

"Zaun was forged on fatalism." Silco's tone is wry. "We know how to make do."

"With blackguards?"

"That's a false equivalency."

"Is it? I've heard they can be quite... ruthless."

Silco smiles, a cold sliver of teeth that says, Ah ah ah.

"Blackguards and Enforcers have nothing in common. Yours are centralized, and the officers have scant contact with the public. They hide behind masks. Their salaries are too high; their privileges too many. They don't answer to those they protect. They answer only to the Council. Small wonder they've piss-poor local knowledge." Crooking a finger, he traces the Enforcers' rigid formation: two ranks, four soldiers per line. "Look at yours. They have no idea how to interact with a public space. They see a child, and they move her by force. They see a lone woman, and they harass her. They see a pair of punks, and they think, Here's a meat-shield."

He gestures, an idle fan of fingers that breaks rank from the Enforcer's crisp rows to the loose, informal lines of the blackguards' trajectory. "Mine know how to keep a low profile. How to read a situation. How to deal with a problem without creating ten more. That's because they belong to the very neighborhoods they patrol. They know the city's rhythms intimately, and the informality fosters trust among Zaunites. They're also disseminated by zone, and answerable to the underbosses, who in turn report to the head of War and Treasury. It means no single authority has a stranglehold on their loyalty. Their stake is the city."

"Mine know how to keep a low profile. How to read a situation. How to deal with a problem without creating ten more. That's because they belong to the very neighborhoods they patrol. They know the city's rhythms intimately, and the informality fosters trust among Zaunites. They're also disseminated by zone, and answerable to the underbosses, who in turn report to the head of War and Treasury. It means no single authority has a stranglehold on their loyalty. Their stake is the city."

"How... democratic."

"Democracy is a pipe dream. Hierarchies will always exist, no matter the system. It's Topside's leftovers that I would have replaced."

"With a wartime militia?"

"Don't feign naïve. The post-conflict period is always the most volatile. A highly mobile security force that isn't stymied by long chains of command is necessary to deal with the chaos. Else foreign infiltration will take hold, and freedom fall to the wayside." His tone downshifts from censure to caveat. "I trust you don't need reminding."

Medarda's features flicker with a muted challenge: I hear the hypocrisy and will raise you double.

"I do not," she says. "But independent militia can easily become tools of extensive repression."

"If you fear the rise of a fascist regime," Silco says, "that is because you lack a basic understanding of how the Fissures work. Zaun isn't a grid of building blocks. It is a patchwork quilt. One piece is not interchangeable with the next. The three zones each have different social, spatial and economic profiles. The locals have strong ties with their neighbors. And a fierce antagonism to top-down authority. Here, everyone is connected. An information network that spans every inch of the city. You can't subdue it with violence. We'd rise up again. If a monolith arose in our midst, we'd tear it down. We're fond of monsters. But we've no use for kings." Rueful, he shakes his head. "I'd be a fool to crown myself one."

Medarda stares at him. It's as if, out of a morass of misconstrual and treachery, she's glimpsing the first silhouette of truth. Her eyes, green and gold, show glimpses of a woman—a girl?—who is struggling to surface.

"So what is the end-game?" she asks.

"Mine—or Zaun's?"

"Both." She backtracks, clarifying. "What is your plan for the blackguards? They are wartime militia. Zaun is at peace. Surely you intend to disperse them."

Silco's scarred lip pulls upward. "Put a lid on the pot and it'll boil over, hm?"

"Will you let the fires burn?"

"I'll let the fires die first, Councilor. Once the situation is stable, we'll reassess." He stops, contemplative. "You know, in my younger days, we had a Night Watch. It was a volunteer initiative. Groups of men and women who patrolled the streets, keeping vigilant for troublemakers."

"They were disbanded for brutality. Councilor Hoskel told me—"

"Oh, I can well imagine what he told you." He mimics the gruff-voiced, toadying bluster. "'Bunch of cutthroats themselves. Who'd they be looking to catch? Each other?'"

The curve of Medarda's lips compresses with laughter. In all ways, the caricature is devilishly on-point.

"Something to that effect," she says. "I was inclined to dismiss it."

"You'd be wise to. The Night Watch weren't disbanded for brutality. They split for their own safety. The moment the Wardens caught wind, they branded them as a gang. Enforcers were deployed in droves. It became too dangerous to stay in operation."

"What happened to them?"

"Some were arrested and sent to Stillwater. Others died fighting back." He shrugs. "All were labeled criminals."

"Why do you bring it up?"

"Because I believe we can revive it. The Night Watch was an experiment. But a promising one. They knew the neighborhoods and understood the terrain. Best of all, they understood the people. They had the same history; the same heritage. They knew the difference between a threat and a rowdy drunk. Under their aegis, it was safe for children to play in the streets. Safe for young women to walk alone. They weren't an occupying force. They were locals helping locals."

"How is that different from the Firelights?"

Disgust reshapes Silco's lip. The comparison rankles more than he cares to admit.

Especially because the Firelights, even now, remain a thorn in his side. Recently they've stirred out of their hidey-holes in Oshra Va'Zaun, creating minor disturbances around the city: an overturned shipment of Shimmer; a weapons warehouse burnt to the ground; a chem-filtration plant malfunctioning. The latest attack, on a chem-baron's storage facility chockful of grain, was the most ambitious. All the sacks were filched; a crude warning daubed in green was left up on the battered doorway:

If Zaun is free, why isn't the bread?

It was an audacious move, signaling the Firelights' intent to go head-to-head against Silco's powerbase. But it also let slip the one detail Silco has been banking on: the Firelights are dealing with limited supplies.

He has no doubt they have stores of food and water at their base. But the fact that they have resorted to stealing grain is a sign of their desperation. It's no longer a game of hide-and-seek, but attrition. Silco's warehouses can outlast the Firelights' rations. They can't outlast their own hunger.

Already the theft is causing friction among the elite. There have been calls to crack down. A few chem-barons have made threats to blow up the tunnels with their own private arsenals. They have no loyalty to the city; they care only for their profits.

It took Silco considerable time to quell their talk of retaliation. The eyes of Runeterra are on their city. If Zaun explodes into internal strife, it'll spell the end of any further development. Not only will it undo all his efforts, but the Firelights will seize the opportunity to stir up the masses.

Public sentiment is a fickle mistress. Today, Zaunites are grateful for the infrastructure of progress brightening the lives. Tomorrow is a different story. The misinformation campaign has turned off a majority against the Firelights. But despite their radical leanings, they continue to have an almost cultish following among pockets of the city's youth.

The firelights have their own infrastructure—one built on ideals of fraternity. Their numbers have swelled over the years, bolstered by an influx of Trenchers, tired of the brutal grind and gang warfare in the undercity.

Ideals are always shinier than the blood and sweat of reality.

Silco has already made his peace with playing the long game. He has no qualms with cracking down hard. But a frontal assault would mean calling attention to the inner-schism. It would give the Firelights all the ammo they need to whip the masses into a frenzy. If information were leaked, it would send the Council into a tizzy.

Better to bide his time.

Let the Firelights self-implode.

Then sweep away the pieces.

"The Firelights are a pack of vigilantes," Silco says. "They're more interested in stirring up trouble than helping anyone."

"But they're a movement." Medarda's tone is thoughtful. "A force of change."

"A movement, yes. A force, no." The thinnest smile. "For the latter, you need funds."

"Point." Her eyes flit to the blackguards. "Yours are well-equipped, I presume."

"Well enough. The Night Watch had no funds. That's another reason they failed. Their weapons were homemade. Most were unskilled in combat." The smile goes grim. "But when the Wardens targeted them, it had an ironic effect. Most went on to form their own gangs for protection. And those gangs were more violent than the Night Watch could ever be. All because the Wardens, on the pretext of keeping the territory safe, were afraid to lose their toehold." He mimes a hat tip. "They lost on both fronts."

Medarda considers this. "I won't deny the point. But surely you must agree that the Night Watch would be a difficult proposition." Her hand sweeps the sun-streaked plaza, encompassing the blackguards. "You'd be dismantling your militia. Starting from scratch. I doubt they'd respond favorably."

"Only if they're made redundant. Which they won't be."

"How intriguing. Have you an alternative lined up?"

"It's in the works. Perhaps, in two months or so, I'll have something concrete to show. The best way to implement change is through demonstration. During the expo, the blackguards' duties will expand beyond law and order. They'll be tasked with civic engagement. A hands-on role, rather than a specter in the background. If they perform favorably, the former may supersede the latter."

"Ah. A 'rebranding' strategy."

"We each don different robes for different roles."

Humor dances in her golden irises. She has taken the bait. "It does make the disrobing all the more gratifying."

Their stares catch and hold. The double-entendre is as tantalizing as the roundabout flirtation. But there is something about her, today, that has him reevaluating the reasons for her visit. It's the subtle shift in her body language. The way she holds herself, a little closer. How her voice dips a little lower; how her syllables come out a little longer.

As if she has something to offer him. Or as if she is testing the waters in preparation for a future favor.

Then Medarda's secretary—fussy bint—butts in.

"Councilor, we ought to..." She glances at Silco, and her lips thin. "...hit pause for a moment? The security detail would like to scope the perimeter in advance."

Medarda nods, her expression slipping back into serene opacity. She turns to Silco. "You don't mind, Chancellor? Its only protocol."

"By all means," he says. "Once bitten, twice shy, as they say."

Medarda's half-smile threatens to tip into fullness. Then she turns, and devotes her attention to her secretary.

Their exchange, near-inaudible, holds a tension between the lines. Not for the first time, Silco wonders if the girl—pretty enough, but with a glint of inner steel—serves Medarda in more than just a secretarial capacity. Perhaps she is, in her way, a bodyguard. That would explain why she's privy to Medarda's every move. And the look on her face: one that Silco knows well from Sevika. Not exactly hostility, but a protective aggression.

It's plain she's unhappy Medarda is belowground. What's less plain is the exact reason why.

Because of Silco—or what he represents?

In the background, the Enforcers fan out, sweeping across the perimeter. The blackguards shadow them; the crew keep a weather eye. Idling under a canopy, Silco peruses the local wines. The vintages are known as Dungeon's Kiss. Brewed from a genus of mushroom native to the Deadlands, then heavily flavored with honey, their colors as irradiated as the sun's corona. One sip is enough to warp a saint's virtue.

Tracing a fingertip across a bottle, Silco asks, "Care for refreshment, Councilor Medarda?"

Medarda shines a dubious look at the wares. "No, thank you."

"No appetite for the local cuisine?"

She shakes her head. "I am familiar with Zaun's strong spirits. Your devilfruit wine has charm enough."

"Devilfruit has nothing on Dungeon's Kiss."

He calls over the stall owner, a stocky old woman native to the Greenfang Mountains of East Demacia. Deferentially, she says, "Dégustez votre vin et admirez le paysage."

"She says we can try her wine and enjoy the sights," Silco translates.

"My childhood tutor was East Demacian, Chancellor. I grew up passably fluent." Medarda turns to the old woman. With superb diction: "Les larmes seront le chasseur de mon vin—" Her eyes twinkle toward Silco, "—surtout si je me saoule avec lui."

Conspiratorially, the woman pats a blood-red bottle. "L'Amour est énergie et nous donne des ailes."

"C'est ainsi que vous avez nommé votre vin?" Medarda asks. "L'Amour?"

"Parce que le goût promet de faire fondre les cœurs!"

"Vous faites très bien votre métier," Silco interposes calmly, "Mais nous n'avons pas de cœurs." Off Medarda's startled look, "My childhood Warden was also East Demacian, Councilor. I grew up more than passably fluent."

Medarda's lips hold the barest curve. Fair play.

The old woman doesn't smile. Her eyes pass warily between him and Medarda. She pours two glasses of wine in ceramic cups. Silco tips her three Hexes for a six-cog price. He and Medarda click their cups together—"To progress!"—and toss them back. Silco drains his in one sinuous swallow. Medarda empties hers in a few precise gulps. The vintage burns down the gullet like a blade.

"By the Celestials," Medarda breathes, "It's called L'Amour?"

The wine turns Silco's voice into raw gravel. "A bottled hell, indeed."

They stare at the old woman. She cackles with witchy glee.

The Enforcers, concluding their sweep, give the all-clear. Together, they stroll into the plaza. The doomed skylight is like a multifaceted honeycomb. Sunrays slant low-angled through the piercing green glass. At night, halogen projectors illuminate its curvature. Each week there are different themes: the somnolent blue ripples of the ocean, the vista of white mountains, the opaque purple sheet of sunset. In the plaza's center, an antique fountain catches the dizzying refractions of the skylight, a troupe of bronze mermaids spitting multicolored arcs of groundwater through the air.

"Goodness," Medarda says, "this dome was built in the last decade?"

"Back when it housed refugees of the Void Wars."

"People lived here?"

"Of course." Slowly, the valves of old memory reopen. "It was nearly two decades ago. All these people from different corners of Runetrerra flooding the Undercity. A bog of bodies that went on for miles. The dome was built to shield them against chem-burn. There was nowhere else to put them. Entresol in those days hadn't one fully usable building with gas or plumbing. Then the Ash Plague came, and the Council turned a blind eye. The refugees became Zaun's problem. At our own expense, we had to set up shelters in the skylight. Tend to the sick. Burn the dead."

Medarda shakes her head. "How did the skylight go from temporary shelter to marketplace?"

"A lack of options for some. For others, it was safer living within the dome itself. They began building storefronts with homes secreted in the back. When the visiting merchants saw how well the dome functioned as a market hall, they moved their own stalls here. Soon, a commercial zone took shape." He tips his head back. The sun—hazy-edged at this time of day—casts a rim of distorted light across the glass. "It started as a symbol of the Council's failure. Now it's a monument to Zaun's resilience."

Medarda's expression is thoughtful. "Perhaps you can mention that?"

"Oh?"

"During your speech at the Expo?" A teasing smile. "I'm sure it will open hearts—and wallets."

Her game cuts no ice with him. "Or touch nerves."

Medarda's smile fades.

"Truth," Silco says, "is seldom a winning ingredient."

They head northside. The entertainment district is accessible through antique cage lifts, all brass and gears, with a wide staircase curving round and round it, up into the higher zones. The Enforcers perform a stiff shuffle-waltz with Silco's blackguards. They attempt to circle Medarda inside the elevator. But Ran, Lock and Dustin have already enclosed her and Silco. There is not enough room for more.

Medarda's secretary protests, "Your Excellency, my apologies, but we must keep the Councilor with her retinue."

"My crew are perfectly capable," Silco says.

"But—"

Medarda's voice is a soothing glissando, "I'll be fine, Elora."

"Councilor, I strongly advise—"

"Take the next lift. We'll catch up above."

Elora hesitates, glancing at Silco, then back at Medarda. Nervously, she nods. The doors clang shut. Dustin pulls the lever. The lift climbs with a whirr of cables.

Through the wrought-iron cage, the marketplace spreads in a glowing bed of devil's eye marbles. Medarda's eyes are fixed, trancelike, on the vista. She is intrigued, Silco recognizes that. But she also holds her pleasure at arm's length. It's as if she's not yet made up her mind about Zaun. As if she risks being tempted, not by the threat of hidden dangers, but the allure of hidden beauties.

At length, she speaks. "Zaun seems to be hitting its stride."

"As it should."

She eyes him for the characteristic rancor. Finding none, she returns to the view.

"Both our cities are thriving," she goes on, "but freedom, as you said, shouldn't fall to the wayside."

Again, Silco sees the bait dangling. This time, he bites—barely. "That's why it deserves our undivided attention."

"So it does." A pinch between her brows. "It's what I'm here to discuss."

"By all means."

Medarda looks at him, then at his crew, then at him again, as if drawing a direct line for his attention.

Privately, she means.

Silco's lip curls at the corner. It would be nothing to order the crew to get off at a different floor. But he doesn't appreciate Medarda's penchant for perpetually coaxing him toward the outcome she desires. The obliqueness might be her trump-card with the Council—and Talis.

Silco has no intention of letting her set the agenda on his turf.

"Anything spoken to me," he says, "can be spoken to my crew."

She frowns, as if dealing with a stubbornly dawdling child. "You're that close?"

"They are that committed."

"To you?"

"To Zaun."

Dustin halts the lift between the final two floors. The lift judders. Medarda shifts so her feet are planted. The fact that she is caged with four beasts doesn't faze her. Her eyes stay fixed on Silco. He turns and leans against the rail with an indolent twist of hips, matching her stare.

If you want to talk, his body-language says, talk.

Medarda sighs. Endeavoring not to dwell on the crammed venue, she joins him at the railing. They lean side-by-side, pretending to take in the panorama.

Quietly, Medarda says, "I received the news."

"News?"

"From your operatives. They alerted mine. You've put the Noxian consul in your crosshairs."

"Indeed."

Her face tightens and yet stays smooth. "I cannot sanction it."

Silco says nothing.

"You swore to curb bloodshed near Piltover's borders," she goes on. "Now you're proposing to harm a dignitary under Piltover's protection. Worse, there will be casualties."

"Only his security guards will be injured."

"Our citizens."

"The wreck will not be on your waters."

Her eyes narrow. "Do not be obtuse. What you suggest will cause a diplomatic furor. One I must salvage at all costs."

"Better than a bloodbath," Silco says flatly, "Or is Councilor Talis' abduction the more attractive alternative?"

Medarda gives no reaction. But he sees the leap of pulse in her throat. Secrets beneath the skin.

"What," Silco says, "does your own network know about the Noxian consul?"

She stares out at the marketplace. "He is a hardliner who vehemently opposed Piltover's peace with Zaun. He's also well-connected, and rumored to be a financier for magical firepower, though no proof was found." Her voice drops to whisper level. "There is a possibility that he is leaking information to hostile forces. An attempt to destabilize Piltover's and Zaun's relations."

"That sounds about right."

"Why don't you offer your perspective then?" Her eyes lock on his. "Why do you wish to move so suddenly?"

"The consul is not just leaking information. He is a provocateur. Hand-chosen by Swain."

"A double-agent?"

"A mage. He possesses a crystalline bracer capable of channeling serious firepower. My network intercepted correspondence between him and the late warmason." He focuses on her, an expressionless swivel of his head. "He intends to use the bracer to conjure a blast during Zaun's Expo. He will survive the destruction unscathed. His men will plant evidence at the scene to make extremist Trenchers seem at fault. Meanwhile, his cohorts will have ample time to make a grab for Talis."

Medarda's hands white-knuckle the rail. "And you will stop him before he can act?"

"The attack is planned in the evening. An ideal time—Piltover's security will be changing shifts, as will Zaun's. However, in the upcoming week, the Noxian consul is due in Zaun. His visit is no pleasure trip. It is a chance to trade security weak-points with the warmason's surviving cadre. My team will take him down fast enough to spare both sides from further escalation. A shipwreck due to engine malfunction, with minimum casualties."

"And the crystalline bracer?"

"Destroyed during the 'accident.'"

The disquiet drains from her eyes. In its place is a foxlike astuteness. "This take-no-prisoners approach is highly convenient for you, Chancellor."

"You'd prefer diplomatic channels?" Silco retorts. "An arrest, perhaps? The moment Swain learns that his asset is exposed, he will act without compunction. The consul's death will be sanctioned from the shadows. Piltover is your territory. But Swain has influence that supersedes even your mother's. No matter how well-guarded the consul is, he will eventually be transferred back to his sovereign nation. During the transfer, someone will slip through security—and dispatch him. What then? The Council will scramble for a strategy. Someone will take the fall—lest Piltover lose face." His bad eye glints. "Blood spilled, either way."

Medarda's face, bathed in the marketplace's glow, is rigid.

"Whereas you have no qualms spilling blood."

"My crew are a small, tightly-knit operation with little oversight. The Council isn't like that. You've a natural aversion risk. You'd end up with a situation too fluid for those risks to be mitigated."

"I daresay you are keen to mitigate a few risks of your own."

"Namely?"

"My own intel is spotty," she says, "but Piltover's lookouts observed Peacekeeper Violet crossing into Zaun's borders the night of the gala. The same night the warmason was confirmed dead. The morning after, she and the Kiramman girl were seen slipping back into Piltover via the canals. Lookouts have also observed a number of your operatives near Sapphlite Row, where she and the Kiramman live together."

Silco says nothing.

"I suspected, at first blush, that Violet was acting independently. She's a headstrong girl, and determined to see her sister. Now I see it's more complicated. You've been running her as your agent. Getting her to do your dirty work, while orchestrating what she does and does not know. Given her antipathy toward you, I doubt she's a willing participant. I also suspect you are using Jinx as a lure to keep her loyal."

Silco's lip curls, short of a sneer. "Rabid dogs have no loyalty."

Medarda wields a glittering glower. "You were advised not to go after her."

"I have taken her into the fold."

"She is Piltover's Peacekeeper."

"Now she is keeping both our cities safe."

"She is being suborned!" Medarda says, with a quaver of real rage. "I understand how you operate, Chancellor. One inch at a time. One bad deed after another. The art is to have someone cross the line without even noticing it. By the time they do, they are already too far gone."

"Like progress."

"Like blackmail."

She's already put the pieces together. Silco expected as much. Whatever her fondness for soft strategy, this woman is sharp as a blade. But she's stabbing in the dark if she expects him to play fair. Nor can she control the monster by appealing to the man trapped under his surface. There is no delineation—not with Jinx at stake.

"I warned you," Silco says, "This is a family matter."

"As I warned you," she says, "that our Peace Treaty hinges on Violet's survival."

"I've not killed her."

"Yet."

The lift is swallowed by silence. Silco can sense Lock, Ran and Dustin's breathing bodies. Closer, Medarda, a golden silhouette off which heat pours. Her lips, red glossed, are pressed in a tight line. Like a slit throat. She is repelled: by him, by his actions. She hates the thought of a young girl being strongarmed into bloodwork—when she herself has been content to use her as a chess piece, without taking the game to its inevitable conclusion.

That's her cardinal flaw. For all her strategic cunning and political charisma, she has no appetite for violence. And violence is what undergirds the lastingness of every political bargain. Every machine of power. Violence is the oil that keeps the wheels of progress turning; keeps the world on its axis.

No one ought to know this better than a warlord's daughter. And yet she stubbornly holds herself above the fray. Spotless hands; immaculate conscience.

In this, she's no better than Talis. A pair of idealists, bound for an early grave.

"Violet is the keystone to Piltover's support," Medarda says. "Harm her, and the Council will revoke their good faith."

Lazily, Silco's thumb hooks into his belt. His voice is like aged leather tightening, the iron strap cinching in. "Threats, Councilor? When your beau is at such a risky juncture?"

"Your city is profiting. Your agenda is flourishing."

"I meant Talis." His lips curve. "Or has our partnership advanced without my knowledge?"

The crew snicker among themselves. They're enjoying the show. Medarda holds still, her eyes fixed, the lashes barely flickering. But she's mis-stepped, and they both know it. Their two-quotient dance is suddenly pivoting on a different tune—and she doesn't like it one bit.

"I believe," she says, addressing the crew, "my conversation with the Chancellor should take place in private."

The crew don't budge. Their laconic stares speak for themselves. You're not the boss of us.

"This is no longer a conversation," Silco says. "This is an impasse. It would be best if we parted ways." He looks at the crew. "To the top."

Medarda falters. "Chancellor—"

"We'll convene with your entourage, and then you may depart. You've taken up enough of our time." His tone is final. "I've no use for idle threats. Not when you've crossed politics with personal to the point where I cannot defend my family without my city taking a hit. Not when Talis' safety has never been my purview, but you expect my people to take the fall if he's endangered. Not when the crux of this issue isn't Piltover's safety, but the friction between you and your mother." Their stares lock. "I'm no stranger to treachery, Councilor. I've spent a lifetime dodging the traps others lay. You have laid the greatest trap of all: you've left me no choice."

"There is no reason we cannot come to an understanding."

"You're not hearing me. I don't wish to compromise. Violet may be your Peacekeeper. But my business with her predates the Treaty." He turns on his heel. "This is no longer a negotiation. It's a declaration."

Medarda steels herself. "Of war?"

"You know the answer."

"All this because of a single girl?" she says with quiet ferocity. "Because of some petty feud with her sister?"

"Because you're fine with leveraging my family for your agenda—and I am not."

This strikes a nerve. Medarda doesn't flinch, but her pupils constrict. It's not fear, exactly. More a flashpoint of anger. But it's buried, as always, under fifteen feet of ice. It's an echo of her mother's lessons. But also that inscrutable Medarda streak that runs deep as a vein of gold.

"Is that how you see it?" she says softly. "Leverage?"

"It's how your lot always rigs the game."

"My 'lot'?"

"Those born with a full deck. The rest of us make do with the hand we're dealt."

Medarda's gaze remains steady. But there's a hint of something there. Disappointment, almost. Reaching across the space, she lays a hand on his sleeve.

"I have the full deck," she says. "But my stakes are the same. A city to safeguard. A future to secure." Her fingers curl into the fabric, and for a moment, she is holding him, and they are not enemies. "The Noxian consul is a threat. I concede. But you're asking me to gamble with dozens of lives, and that will never be acceptable. We must choose an alternate path forward."

"Piltover's or Zaun's?"

Their voices are low, nothing to disturb the airwaves. Yet the space between them throbs.

"Why must you always show such little faith?" Medarda says. "Even if our interests align?"

"I've proposed putting a dangerous situation to sleep," Silco rejoins. "I'll be calling scrutiny to my city, and away from yours. I'll be working with your Peacekeeper, despite her being a thorn in my side. I'll be adhering to our bargain, and the terms of our Treaty, at risk to my daughter. Tell me, Councilor. How much faith would you show in the circumstances? For what reward?"

"It will be Piltovans hurt in that blast," she challenges. "Our officers. Our citizens."

"Collateral damage is the price of security."

"A price too high!"

"A price worth paying if it gives your city a taste of its own goods." His tongue passes over the jagged points of his teeth. "Blood for blood."

Medarda's shudder is involuntary. Her hand drops off his arm. Her eyes are naked with shock.

"You have an inveterate cruel streak, Chancellor," she says. "I wonder if it was always there."

"I wonder why it should matter."

"Because the things people refuse to discuss are what matter most."

At last, Silco's temper flares.

"I imagine so," he says, each word sharp-edged and glinting. "Like why some people are born into a privileged life of armchair philosophy, and others shoved into a hole and told to make do with glass and gristle."

Medarda's eyes burn with defiance. "There is a cost we both must shoulder for past damage."

"Of course." His smile is slow as a garotte sliding across a throat. "I can see your damage plain as day."

"Damage, like scars, is not always obvious."

"Yet it's the obvious that turns heads." With a fingertip, Silco touches the ragged grooves on his left cheekbone. "Don't you agree?"

Medarda opens her mouth to speak. But at that moment, a fork of lightning splits the green-hazed sky with a surreal pinwheel of colors, and the dome is struck as if by a god-fist.

The lift shudders violently. The crew scramble for balance. The marketplace is doused in blackness.

"Gods!" Medarda gasps.

On reflex, she grabs him. Her palms brace against Silco's chest, face tucking into the crook of his neck, as if he is a bolster. He encircles an arm around her shoulders. Animal instinct. Her hair tickles his scarred cheek, rousing him with its alien aroma of hyacinths.

It's like their Sumpside Waltz. Except they are too tightly twined. Nothing is incognito.

In her ear, Silco whispers, "No gods. Just a storm."

"What—?"

There is a distant drumroll. Fat drops of acid rain begin splashing the dome. The subterranean rumble of generators kicks in. Wink by wink, the electric lamps blossom back to life. The lift vibrates under Silco's feet. The market glows gently awake.

In the sudden brightness, Medarda's eyes meet his.

They are still caught together, a clasp of bridged bodies. As one, they uncouple.

Smoothing a palm through his pomade, Silco looks imperturbably askance while Medarda fusses with her gown, picks at her hair with her fingers, and generally tries to recompose herself from a panicked human being and back into a poised political animal.

The crew are too well-trained to smirk. But Lock's eyes hold a knowing glint. Ran features are more feline than usual. Only Dustin peers gleefully through the lift's grille at the deadly downpour against the dome.

"This Gnasher's got teeth!" he crows.

"Gnasher?" Medarda repeats.

Her pupils are still dilated; she is likely in shock. Silco's tongue-tip tastes a fresh round of mockery to fire off. Except he can still feel the juddering heat of her body. Her hyacinth aroma clings like an afterglow.

"A Gnasher," he says, "is a chem-storm."

A swarm of raindrops dance over the dome. It goes fogged as an opaque bowl.

"Won't the chemicals eat through the glass?" Medarda asks.

"Our architecture is designed to take punishment."

Lock grunts. "They're built like buildings used to be. Before Topside started loading 'em full of khara."

Medarda pronounces the Shuriman word with a contortion of her glossy lips. "Khara?"

"Crap," Lock supplies blandly.

"Like cinderblock," says Ran.

"Or drywall."

"Or plaster."

Dustin, doing his bit, finishes, "Or literal crap."

Medarda's brow furrows. Then, noting Silco's half-lidded amusement, she reverts to dignified calm. "Well. That is... impressive."

"Pleased to hear it, ma'am," Lock deadpans.

Dustin hits the lever. The cables groan; the lift resumes its climb.

Formally, Silco offers Medarda his arm. After a moment, she takes it. Her shock has subsided. But the liquor of adrenaline has softened her up. Silco has seen it happen before. He thinks of their conversation during the gala, walking arm-in-arm through the gallery. He thinks of their Sumpside Waltz, and the natural loosening of her body against his.

This woman keeps a lot bottled up inside. If a small opening is pierced into her smooth exterior, the pressurized contents will spill out.

Progress.

Keeping his tone idle, Silco says, "I wonder, Councilor…"

"Yes?"

"Would you care to take the view from the dome's obelisk?"

Medarda frowns.

"A fresh perspective," he offers, "of our city."

He wants to talk in depth about the planned attack—but also about their conversation over the speaking telegraph. The lift is a good starting point: a neutral venue. Private and yet public. But the obelisk has its own advantages. A guise of intimacy that is the precursor to the real business.

Medarda intuits his message. Like him, she is in the habit of thinking strategically. She pretends to consider a moment, then says, "Is it true one can see all the way down to the Sumps?"

"If the Gray is thin. Yes."

"I've never seen that far below," she goes on. "Is the air breathable?"

"My headquarters are located between Entresol and Sump-level. So again: yes."

"I've also heard merchants discuss the scenery. They say there are hothouses, absolutely enormous, the size of homes, where—glowing flowers bloom in darkness." Her plummy vowels falter, as if she is an artist painting the sinister grandeur at the bottom of the sea with the brushstrokes of a child's palette

Silco's good eye creases at the corners, a smile hidden. "All true. All down there."

The Gnasher passes over. The sky brightens up, casting pearlescent light on their bodies. The glow dusts Medarda's features, striking off the pure gleam of her eyewhites.

She seems… tempted.

"It's early," Silco says. "Nobody would trouble us."

"My entourage—"

"They can wait outside with my crew."

"Out of the question," she says with a scandal that is only half-show.

"Do heights concern you? Or me?"

"Most definitely you."

Silco cants his head. "How dangerous could one man's company be?"

Their eyes meet. Silco's smile is just a slice of teeth, Mel's own unyieldingly polished. But there is the faintest flicker in her eyes. A temptation listing towards truce.

The lift shudders to a stop. The gates open.

Stepping out, Silco extends hand.

"Live on the edge, Councilor," he says. "You've come this far."

---

The obelisk is an old guard-post jutting from the center of the Skylight Commercia's dome.

Built to withstand the pressure of low-level Gnashers and high-velocity winds, its spire rises higher than any building in the Undercity. Faceted as a prism, it offers a three-sixty-degree aerial panorama of the entire metropolis. In daylight, pale sunlight pours through the glass, illuminating the interior with a surreal amber radiance. At night, the city-lights glow through, creating a rainbow psychedelia.

A half-faded typograph is engraved at the very tip of the obelisk's pyramidion. It has been there longer than anyone can recall. Some say that it predates the twin cities themselves, and that the first dwellings were constructed around the monolith's feet. Others claim it was carved there by a race long extinct—Celestials, or Janna herself. Whatever its origins, the Undercity's scholars have identified the typograph as Ur-Nox: the root linguistic system from which several other dialects in Valoran descend. Standard, Shuriman, Demacian and even Freljordian, are all offshoots of its primal tongue.

The inscription is a single word:

Spirare.

In other words: Breathe.

The height of irony, in a city of smogged skies.

"Oh."

"I do like a compliment."

Silco and Medarda lean side-by-side on the wrought-iron balustrade. Below, the tapestried spread of Zaun is colored by the sun, a glowing bubble of lava in a milky horizon. There are clouds, their gradations too subtle to discern, before a ribbon of air goes from transparent to smoky as it is tainted by toxins. Far below, the shimmering obscurity of the lower-zones beckons.

A constellation of life.

Medarda says, "It's like beating hearts at the bottom of the sea."

Silco nods. She understands intuitively. How often has he thought exactly the same thing?

"Wait until the sun goes down," he says, "and the whole spectrum is laid out before your eyes."

"When does the sun go down?"

"By the sixth bell—but never truly gone. At night, we have our sea of neon."

Medarda's voice softens. "A city that never sleeps."

"And yet it dreams."

They stand in silence, while more chem-clouds gather over the panorama. Taking a surreptitious glance at Medarda, Silco notes her shoulders squaring, braced for another Gnasher. She's only been spooked by one. She's never been down below, with the rains so foully toxic that they gnaw their way through the Fissurefolks' fabric and flesh.

Same way progress devoured them body and soul.

After a moment, Medarda says, "May I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"You said, in the lift, that Piltovan blood is a debt squared to Zaun." Deeply-set in the smoothness of her face, her eyes glow like amber. "Do you truly believe death will pay the way for past transgressions?"

"I believe in the equity of suffering," Silco says. "Justice always requires a reckoning."

"Justice or revenge?"

Silco looks away, arms lacing behind his back. Medarda's question is sincere, but her stance of moral authority holds no sway with him. They're both skilled rhetoricians. But in the end, words must be acknowledged for what they are: empty, symbolic, useless. In their actions, they've each fallen short.

"Revenge is the flipside of justice for a reason," he says quietly. "It's like fire and water. Love and hate. A pairing so deeply ingrained, so universal, that there is no escaping it. Trying to resist is like inverting oneself inside-out. Possible for a time, but will you survive? No. That's not in human nature."

"But is that all our nature is?" she asks. "What of compassion? Mercy?"

Silco smiles thinly. "Mercy is a luxury afforded for crimes not unpayable."

"I see." Medarda quells her disappointment. "Well, I asked for the truth."

"Never a winning ingredient, is it?"

"But necessary for trust." She faces him, her hands clasped together. "Therefore… I will trust you to handle the Noxian consul."

Intrigued, Silco tilts his head. "Despite the blood spilled?"

Medarda's clasped hands make a twist of themselves. Her ring, its family crest throwing off fractals, is caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if she is itching to tear it off.

Her voice is too soft. "If it must be done—"

"It must."

Medarda takes another breath. "—then I shall sanction it."

Satisfied, Silco nods.

"There must be minimal collateral damage," she goes on. "No civilians harmed. On Zaun's side—or Piltover's."

"You have my word."

"I understand—" she curbs her distaste, "—bloodwork does not come cheap. In exchange, Zaun's glassware will be granted tariff-free trade access to Piltover's entrepôt. Once word of your fortified architecture spreads, investors will flock for more."

"Your generosity is appreciated."

"As is yours, in providing the opportunity."

Silco proffers his right hand. She shakes it, a studied firmness. Then: "In return, I will call upon for a favor."

"Political?"

"Personal." She swallows, a subtle shift of her swanlike throat. "A family matter."

Silco feels the old chill trickle down his spine. His fingers stay locked with hers. "You aren't suggesting…"

"This situation between Violet and Jinx is at an apogee. We must broker a meeting between them. A truce."

Silco's grip tightens reflexively. "I refuse."

Medarda stiffens, but doesn't release his hand. "Why?"

"Vi has already hurt Jinx. In untold ways. I'll not allow those wounds reopened."

"Then help Vi to heal them."

His stare darkens to ichor. "I'd sooner slit her throat."

Medarda feels his violence as a palpable miasma. A pulse flutters at the base of her throat. Some hidden portion of her midbrain is urging her to flee. Except she is a thoroughly civilized Piltovan, and a born Noxian, and there is nowhere to run.

For either of them.

She says, "You will not."

Silco stares at her, menace gathering around the edges of his expression. She stares back, her breathing slow, as if she is treading through a pool, and not being circled by a shark whose jaws promise nothing but death with the penny-bright taste of blood.

"You will not," she repeats, and closes the distance, their hands still clasped, "because I've had the opportunity to observe you with Jinx. You are capable of great love, Chancellor. And equally terrible hatred. But your daughter is damaged goods. At the gala, she shone bright as a diamond. But in the moments in between, her mind was elsewhere. It's as if she was seeing something that wasn't there. As if she was reliving a trauma. I've no proof, but I suspect Vi is the cause." She squeezes his hand. "Your hatred is not worth the cost of Jinx's happiness. Whatever the rift between her and Violet, it must be healed. Otherwise our bargain risks falling apart."

Silco's fingers cage hers. He feels the grind of bone. She doesn't balk. With dark relish, he understands that she won't yield. Not unless something forces her hand.

Or he does.

His body was kept compelled by her touch. Now Silco is the one who lures her in. Not a sudden lash of muscle, but slowly, giving her ample opportunity to resist. She doesn't. Her eyelids grow heavy, and so does her breathing. Then she is not breathing at all, her body caught against his, his arm encircling her waist.

It's like their Sumpside Waltz. It is no waltz at all.

Medarda's pulse thrums against him. But she holds herself still as a statue.

"Are you trying to frighten me?"

"Just reminding you."

"Of what?"

The contoured calm of Silco's features disappears behind the monster's sharpening visage. Medarda shudders as if something is likewise coming loose from a clenched space inside her. The fingers of their right hands are still twined. Silco's left hand spiders up her spine. Cold fingers fasten on her nape. Her skin is impossibly soft and the gorge rising in his throat tastes of blood.

The color of her painted lips.

"You've crossed one line today," Silco says, "What other lines do you hope to cross?"

Medarda's gaze burns through thick lashes. "There are no lines."

"No?"

His fingers tighten around her nape, forcing her head back, exposing her throat. The veins in her jugular pulsate. Her eyes are a dizzied gold. Even her scent is different, hyacinths fading on a wave of heat that seems to rise from the deepest part of her, a sweetening invitation. The waves of air between them taste of her mouth.

Silco doesn't kiss her. He lets go.

Bereft, she stumbles. "What—?"

"Badly done, my dear."

"I—"

Suddenly she finds herself caught back against the glass. Resting his left palm next to her head, Silco leans in, owning her space. Her eyes widen. She is afraid now. She'd expected him to succumb. Instead his raptorial stare holds her pinned in place.

And shreds her alive.

"I've warned you before," he says, deathly soft. "Stop playing games with me."

"I wasn't playing."

"There are less extreme means of getting your way."

"It wasn't that, either."

"No?" Silco's voice grates in his throat. "Shall we try the truth?"

She falls still.

"Why did you really come here?" he demands. "No official announcement? No warning?"

"I came to discuss our bargain."

"That's not what you said on the speaking telegraph." When she doesn't respond, his voice goes frostbitten. "Something concerning, you said, has happened in the Council. What is it?"

"An issue." Her eyes hold steady. "A grave issue."

"Is the Council turning against support of the Treaty?" he challenges. "Is there a faction seeking to pull back aid? Is there a flood? A plague? Is the sky falling?" When she doesn't speak, his voice turns savage. "What then? What made you sound that afraid?" Her lips part, but Silco is not done. "I can hazard a guess. Nothing of 'concern' occurred. It was a personal matter. So personal you manufactured the thinnest excuse and a few tears just to show up on my doorstep."

"I was not—" she interjects, "—manufacturing." Then her face collapses: a slow-motion crumple. "I made a terrible mistake."

"You made a bluff," he rejoins flatly. "I've called it. I regret to inform you, that is not how I conduct business." His right palm aligns with her jaw, thumb touching lips red as a factory-girl's rag. "Nor seduction."

Medarda's mouth, warm and damp, stirs against the pad of his thumb. "You knew—?"

"I'm not a fool. The moment you called me at that hour, I understood your intent." The tips of his teeth are a hairsbreadth from her lips. "Do you believe you're the first Topsider to see all of Zaun as a brothel for hire? Or me as a grotesque novelty to be sampled behind closed doors for amusement's sake?

Medarda's stare holds a startled sheen. "Have I… offended you?"

"Don't worry about offending me. Worry that I'll tire of your antics and terminate our bargain." He removes his hand. "Zaun is not your hidey-hole for illicit thrills. And I am not your paid whore, ready to service you at a moment's notice. There are plenty of fools out there, ready to bend you over at a moment's notice—" Fury scalds her features, but he gives no quarter, "—However, if you expect me to entertain you as an ally, act like one."

Medarda's mouth moves, as if remembering the sensual ache of a kiss that never came. "You think I came to manipulate you? For a favor?"

"That's always the aim. Isn't it?"

A tiny movement of her face alerts him of the truth. Except it's not the look of a sneak-thief who has been found out. Rather, Silco finds himself the mistaken one. He's found something—someone—else. And yet he cannot put a name to that face.

"Go on," he says. "Let's hear it."

Her gaze dips. For a heartbeat, she seems to consider whether to play the coquette. Then her eyes meet his again, and all pretense subsides.

There it is. The crack split wide open.

"Last night," she says, "Jayce submitted his resignation to the Council."

Silco says nothing.

"He will no longer be involved in Piltover's affairs. The conflict between our cities has left him disillusioned. The weaponization of Hex-tech has shattered whatever faith he had in science and magic as a means for progress. After the gala, we had a... conversation. He told me he can no longer sit by and sanction the misuse of his technology. He is leaving his political seat to pursue a different path. A path for good." She breathes out. "His words, not mine."

"You've quarreled," Silco deduces.

"It was not a quarrel. More like... a rupture." She is not a woman easily unnerved. But her eyes are raw, a wounded animal that's lost its mate. "Hex-tech is the future, and Jayce's work is pivotal. He is the key to unlocking a new world order. And yet, today, he closed off his workshop to the public, and locked the door. He has turned his back on progress. On our vision." Her voice hitches. "On us."

Silco waits. He is good at waiting.

"It's because of the Siege," she goes on, her words picking up speed. "After the bloodshed, Jayce fell into a dark place. We all did. The grief, the shock. So many killed. And Hex-tech—his dream—was the very thing that caused their deaths. It's been eating at him. Every time I visited his workshop, I'd find him brooding. Working, but brooding. And his partner..."

"Viktor."

She nods. "He hasn't been the same, either. He suffered a nervous collapse during the Siege, and was hospitalized for weeks. When he came out, his illness had progressed. His life is now measured in months, not years. It's not something I can talk about. Jayce refuses to even discuss it." Her voice husks. "When Viktor learned Jayce would be resigning, he... he was upset. More than upset. Furious. He demanded to know what had happened. Jayce refused to discuss it. They had a fight. An ugly fight. They've not spoken since. The staff have told me Viktor is packing up his things. He's contemplating a return to his birthplace in Zaun." She swallows. "Where he can die alone."

Silco listens. He absorbs. He plans.

"Jayce and Viktor's partnership is an essential cornerstone to Piltover. It's not just a business, or a friendship. It's a union between two minds that has changed the very landscape of Runeterra. The way people travel. Work. Dream. And the potential they hold—their ability to make the impossible possible—it's unlike anything since the dawn of magic." Her hands, for a heartbeat, tremble. "Now they are reckoning with the flipside. Death and grief and regret. Jayce has been shouldering the burden for months. I had hoped Viktor would offer him support. They're both young. Their passions run deep, but so does their resilience. I thought if I gave them time, they'd reconcile." She looks at him. "But I was wrong."

"And you?" Silco says. "How have you been shouldering the burden?"

"I haven't." A flicker of distress crosses her face. "I've been keeping busy."

"With Zaun's and Piltover's Treaty."

"Yes. And..." A muted pause. "...other matters."

"What matters?"

Medarda's eyes meet his. "Councilor Heimerdinger is absent."

"That's hardly news. The rumor mill has been churning for months."

"He is not simply 'absent.' He's disappeared without a trace. He's been presumed dead."

"The Council hasn't launched an investigation?"

"We've done so privately. The Wardens were unable to produce any leads." Her lips press together, a smear of old blood. "We can't admit a member of the Council has gone missing. Public morale is already hanging by a thread. The last thing we need is the citizens learning that the beloved scientist who shaped our city might be dead in a ditch somewhere. We'd be inviting mass panic." She exhales. "My own intel suggests no foul play. Heimerdinger made arrangements to take a sabbatical after his resignation. A chance to pursue a research project. That was the last we heard." Her eyes fall shut. Beneath the artful sweeps of indigo, her eyelids show a network of thin purple veins. She has not been sleeping well. "His home is abandoned. There's no record of a forwarding address. His laboratory is empty. It's as if he planned his disappearance. The Council will hold a secret session tomorrow morning. We will have to vote on his successor." She opens her eyes. "Without Jayce."

"I imagine Talis hasn't taken well to his mentor's disappearance."

"He's been inconsolable." Her ring, a family heirloom worth a city, flashes on her twisting fingers. "Heimerdinger is more than the Academy's dean. More than a Council member. He is the founding spirit of Piltover. An inventor, a visionary, an educator. His contributions are beyond measure. To lose him is a tragedy. To lose him without closure is a torment. And for Jayce... for Viktor..."

"The last straw."

"Yes." Medarda's hands knot. "It's been too much. All of it. Now we're on the brink of losing our brightest. If the plug is pulled on Hex-tech… if Jayce and Viktor can't resolve their differences… then Piltover's progress grinds to a standstill. Investors will flee. Projects will stagnate. We will be forced to cut costs and lay off employees. It won't cripple our city. Not immediately. But the loss will be felt for decades. Our future will be set back by generations."

Silco is quiet. He's taken in her words. He's considered the possibilities.

He makes his gambit.

"I'm sure," he says, "you've tried to persuade Talis otherwise."

"Many times. A Council position is no ceremonial post. It comes with security details, armed guards, protection from physical threats. Everything he needs to stay safe. But Jayce refuses to compromise. He says he won't risk his legacy being sullied. He is determined to follow his conscience." Her gaze drifts past Silco's shoulder. "Perhaps it's a fitting end. Hex-tech began as a gift to the world. But it was twisted into a weapon, and he blames himself for its misuse. Now he wants to make amends. In his way, he's trying to do what's right." Softer, "As must I."

"You feel guilty," Silco surmises.

"I am guilty. He was so idealistic. So sure of his course. He had so much hope. And I—" Her breath catches. "I stole it from him."

"Because you believed in his dream."

"I did. I still do. But I... believed in him too." She turns her head. In the pinkening sunrays, the curve of her cheek gleams. No tears, but a dusting of golden specks. "He was like no man I'd met before. So honest. So pure. He had a dream, and he was determined to make it real. He'd given up his boyhood for the sake of science. He was ready to give up his life for Hex-tech. All to make Piltover the city it deserved to be." She shivers. "I wanted that too. So I supported him. I backed his venture. I became his patron. And then his lover."

"So the rumor goes."

She is quiet. "I never cared about his status. Not that there was a lack. His family is a respectable one. Honest. Hardworking. The opposite of what I was accustomed to in Noxus. The first time his mother invited me for dinner, she took me straight to the kitchen. Taught me how to prepare Jayce favorite soup. How to chop the vegetables. How to season the broth." A smile stirs. "She was so kind. She didn't ask anything of me. I didn't have to be the perfect Noxian heir. Or a brilliant stateswoman. I was just Mel. It was the most... normal moment of my life."

"A novelty for someone like you."

"It was," Medarda agrees. "She was taken by the idea that her son and I might marry. I'd never met a woman so invested in love. Her eyes would light up, like she was already planning the wedding. She'd ask me what colors I liked. What flowers. She even said we should visit a bakery, and taste cakes." She lets off a laugh. "Jayce was mortified. On our journey back, he kept apologizing. He and his mother had always been a close-knit pair. But life was lonely after his father's death. With Jayce so busy, she spent a lot of time by herself." The smile holds a fragile glow. "Jayce was sure she'd frighten me off. But it wasn't fear I felt. It was… belonging."

"You're saying," Silco murmurs, "you fell in love."

"Yes." The admission is tentative. "But it was complicated."

"In what way?"

"Love, to a Medarda, is a tool. A weapon for winning. And I'd learned it early, by my mother's side. In my way, I wielded it too." The glow dims. "The Council's votes are weighted in my favor. I can sway decisions to the betterment of Piltover. I used my influence to usher Jayce into politics. To give him the power to change the world. In doing so, I... killed his dream. I starved it out of him, little by little. With backroom deals. With dirty compromises. I made him into a man he was not meant to be." She shakes her head. "Now his legacy is tainted. He blames himself. But I know better. Swain targeted him because I put him into the public eye. Now his partner has abandoned him. His mentor may be dead. The very city he has loved is no longer the one he built. Worse, he no longer trusts himself… or me."

There are no tears. But a phantom of anguish that passes over her face, rising from somewhere so deep that it strikes a chord of unwilling recognition in Silco's own chest. Cost—and its bitter dividends. He cannot feel what she feels, but he knows the shape of her guilt. He's felt it, too, for the toll his choices took on Jinx.

A cold current runs up on the heels of this realization. The remorseless drive to settle the score.

(You don't know pain.)

(I'll teach you soon.)

"It's not too late," he says. "Not unless you decide it is."

She shakes her head. "The deciding is done. I saw something shining. Something good. And I took it away."

"Did he say that?"

"The opposite. He said I had opened his eyes. He promised me that space is not separation. He said… he loves me."

Her gilded tongue is gone, replaced by the brittle edge of tears.

Silco shows neither sympathy nor coldness. "What did you tell him?"

"I said... I needed time."

"And how did he take that?"

"With kindness. As always."

"A kindness that was its own cruelty

"Yes." Medarda swallows. "I think... he finally understood. I will never truly be the woman he believed in. It will never be a simple relationship. Not with my mother's ambition reaching all the way to Piltover. After the Siege, he's seen what ambition can bring. How much it can cost." She shakes her head again. "He says he doesn't blame me. But I see it. The way he looks at me. How he talks to me. Like he's a stranger."

"We can't go back. We can only move forward."

"I can't move. I've frozen. He's left me." Her breath jitters, once, before her jaw sets. "So I've come here."

"So you have." Silco considers her with speculative eyes. "In hopes of political aid?"

The barest headshake.

"To confess your sins?"

Again, a headshake.

"To sin again."

He savors Medarda's flinch. She's not the type to flinch. Except her composure has abraded to a tissuey layer. Beneath, there is nothing but the tinge of blood. Fresh blood, the wound still seeping. Everything in Silco hones itself towards it. Every cell of his body is tuned to the pitch of her distress. His teeth, whetting themselves for the first bite.

He doesn't bite.

He tsks.

"My dear," he says. "Your doctors have work to do."

"Work?"

"On your eyesight. 20/200, at least."

Defiant, Medarda tosses her head, "Modesty ill suits you, Chancellor. I'm sure you are accustomed to your share of attention. Some men have that effect. It's an inner quality—a ferocity—that others sense and respond to."

"You've no lack of qualities, my dear." Silco appraises her: a languid up-and-down. "Or anything else, for that matter. So why does Piltover's most blessed require the service of Zaun's most wanted?"

She stays still under his scrutiny. Then—

"You remind me of someone."

"If you say your mother, you will deal me the gravest blow."

"No." Medarda tips back her head and stares, as if through a telescope of disorienting memory. "An old friend."

"A friend?"

"A lover."

Silco feigns scandal. "By Kindred."

"I'm certain your sensibilities will survive." Her hand lifts, touching the back of his palm where it rests against the wall. "It was after the sacking of Pallas. I was nineteen. A late bloomer finally in full blossom. I didn't notice the effects until strangers did. Suddenly, men and women were looking at me. I was quick to understand the subtext behind their stares. Soon, I began enjoying the feeling of power it gave me."

"I'm sure you broke ample hearts."

"It wasn't hearts I was interested in. It was minds. People are of infinite complexity. You can spend a lifetime observing their ways without fully understanding them." Medarda considers his features for a moment, as if struck by how human he looks with the scarred half of his cheekbone in shadow. "Most scholars are solitary in their education. But I was blessed with a mentor. One of my mother's admirals. Let's call him Pistris. He was thirty. A war hero of acclaim. Not conventionally handsome. But with a wit as keen as Mordekeiser's blade."

Silco's chuckle drifts darkened as smoke. "Poor you."

"Is it such an obvious tale?"

"I fear your tender self was smitten."

"Hopelessly. He was never untoward. If anything, he was so proper as to verge on mocking—" she tips a brow, a tiny jibe, "—but I felt his eyes follow me everywhere. It gave me a strange feeling. Here was a man who'd bested death a hundred times. The grandest adventure. Yet he beheld me as if I were an adventure all my own. The way he stared… it made me dizzy. Like standing at the edge of a cliff. Thrilling and terrifying." Her fingers are a caress now, encircling his bone-heavy wrist. "I began toying with my power over him. Testing how far I could go. I remember... he had unusual hands. A grip made for blades. And yet, off the battlefield, they were elegance itself. I would find myself touching them anytime I could get away with it."

"So, he taught you all manner of fine arts?"

"Indeed. By my twentieth year, we were lovers. Our affair was discreet. I feared my mother's interference. After all, my future was mapped out. A dalliance here and there was not frowned upon. But—"

"It was no dalliance for you."

Medarda inhales. "For me: no. For him: yes." She encloses his hand in a white-knuckled grip. "His thrill of conquest faded into avarice. He was ambitious. He fancied he could use me as leverage against my mother. Soon, he began haranguing me. What were General Medarda's secrets. Her weaknesses. I sensed the change in him. But I was too young to see the writing on the wall. Instead, I took Kino into my confidence."

"Kino?"

"My… late brother." She shivers; a gust of stymied emotion that never makes it to the surface. She is too steeped in the protocols of Noxian nobility to let her grief show. "He begged me to see reason. Break it off, Mel, before it gets out of hand. Reluctantly, I agreed." The dark frets of her lashes lower. "A bad move. I'd wounded Pistris' pride. Now he wanted payback. When I cut contact, he chased after me. He terrorized me. Finally, he attempted to have me abducted."

Silco listens without interruption.

"When my mother learnt of it, she was incandescent. Her troops waylaid Pistris the same night. She cut off his head. It was mounted on the bastion for all to see." She blinks, but her eyelids are dry. Her expression doesn't convey pain, but a visceral horror that goes too deep to expel. "I was not spared her wrath. You see—she had known about Pistris and I. She'd even played along, maneuvering our meetings, staging our rendezvous. All the better to judge how I would fare against a more cunning opponent. I had disappointed her. My foolishness nearly jeopardized the safety of our clan. She began to talk of sending me away."

"To Piltover."

"In her words: a paradise of milksops. She said it was best suited for my soft temperament." Her eyes flare with an old, deep anger. "When I came to Piltover. I made a promise to myself. I would be cleverer than Pistris. Fiercer than my mother. I would not submit to petty pride, but nor would I sacrifice my better self to base violence. I would navigate my own way through the wolf's den."

Silco removes his hand from the wall and straightens, a loom of shadow.

"And?" he says. "Have you found your wolf?"

Medarda says nothing. For the first time, her face shows self-consciousness. She's misjudged Silco, lost her grip a little.

"I think you have," he goes on, low. "Except it's not me."

Her red mouth works as if full of blood.

"No," she agrees. "Not you. Pistris was a man after the shallows of power. But you—" She falters. "You desire something else. And each time I think I know the nature of it, you prove me wrong. That makes you far more dangerous."

"Yet here you are. At my door."

"You've yet to slam it."

"Haven't I?"

Their stares lock. The humor has faded. There is only a fatal precipice whose true name they refuse to give voice.

Medarda takes the first step.

"Are you—" It comes out cautious. As if she is an emissary, and this is a warzone, and anything less than a series of well-crafted maneuvers will mean certain death. "—not interested in women?"

"My tastes are varied."

"How varied?" A note of teasing creeps in. "I can't help recall your collection of private paintings at the gala. All male."

"We gravitate to what we recognize."

"And yet I've the distinct impression you've sampled your share of the opposite."

"Now and then."

"So why the reticence?" The tease takes root; reflexive. "Is this an act of professional courtesy?"

"I'm not acting, Councilor. I simply dislike games."

"Is that not your stock-in-trade?"

"You lack the funds."

The tease falls away. "Are you—not in the habit of liaisons with allies?"

"My habits are not your concern."

Her eyes narrow. He sees the thinnest edge of hurt pride—the worm that burrows into a woman scorned. "Perhaps you are involved with someone."

"That concerns you even less."

"Your second-in-command? Sevika?" Silco doesn't deign to reply. Medarda's eyes gleam, as if catching the light of an unseen truth. "I had my suspicions at the gala. You have a rapport. An intimacy. But she was not at the Equinox feast. Perhaps the arrangement between you is based on something more... pragmatic." Her tone turns musing. "Or are you like the great kings of old: choosing a consort who comes with an army at her heel? An iron chatelaine for your iron castle—and a soft-skinned leman for the nights when you need something warmer?"

Silco's face stays impassive, but there are undercurrents of movement as if the muscles of his jaw, where temper resides. Medarda sees, and understands that she's crossed one line too many. Her backtrack is graceful.

"Forgive me. I am—"

"You are unaccustomed to being denied. Hence your assumptions. I must be either committed—or a coward. My liaisons must be either selfish—or purely transactional. My tastes—either conventional or perverse. Each summation implies the fault is mine rather than yours."

Medarda doesn't deny the charge. "I've overstepped. I am—"

"Save your apologies. And spare your excuses." He sways a half-inch closer. "You've been born with the privilege to wield both—and get off scot-free. Your rank protects you from retribution, and your status from consequence. That's not the case for everyone." His voice holds the cold rasp of deep-sea scales. "I have people counting on me. A city. A child. Do not presume, even for a heartbeat, that I will not put their interests before yours."

Medarda, trapped by her own designs, stares back. She's being goaded to show her hand. Except she no longer knows what her opponent has up his sleeve. Does Silco want her to back off, or make her play? Is he playing her, or the other way around?

Finally, she opts for the middle ground.

"Forgive me." A tactful pause. "I have no wish to impose on your privacy. I was merely hoping to find common ground."

Silco's look is deadpan. "To find a distraction."

She holds her composure, but it's a struggle. "Yes."

"My sympathies, but my attention will do nothing for you."

Medarda nods. Her shoulders square. Her hands, with the ring's glittering crest, unravel from their knot.

Reaching across, she lays a hand on his arm.

"I understand," she says. "You have duties, and I imposed upon them. Forgive me. I came here... not myself. And I suppose I had notions. That Zaun would be a hiding place. Somewhere I could bury my problems, and forget the rest." A moment's uncharacteristic awkwardness. "That was presumptuous. Your city is no wolf's den."

"What then?"

"A strongbox of treasure." Her fingertips caress his sleeve. "One I wish to unlock."

"As your private coffer?"

"As Piltover's equal in progress."

He watches her with a narrowed eye. "And what do you want of me?"

"You pardon, for one. I have typecast you. Since the moment we met."

"Many do."

"May we start anew? We each have difficult roles to navigate. Heavy heads, crowns, etcetera. But that makes us well-suited to understanding each other." Her touch gentles. "Let's cut a deal. I value a listening ear more than—"

"A paid whore?"

Medarda's eyes flick down, then back up. She nods.

"Very well." Silco retreats a step, so her hand falls off his arm. "My listening ear for yours."

"And for our cities." Her smile isn't a trap, but trust is, and her words are heavy with it. "Piltover cannot learn from its mistakes if Zaun is locked in its own hatred. We need to listen to each other. To recognize our shared vulnerabilities. If only so we can move forward."

Silco's face betrays the rigid pull of rancor. She has been leading him to this point, he realizes. She'd foreseen it several moves back and set it up to perfection.

Again.

"And Violet will help us achieve it?" he says flatly.

"I believe so." Her stare holds his. "Earlier, I mentioned our Enforcers and Peacekeepers are undergoing a retraining exercise. I am here to propose that the initiative extend to Zaun. A contingent of Peacekeepers, working alongside your blackguards. Six months of immersive education. Both cities, side-by-side, not at cross-purposes. In the interest of goodwill."

Silco considers her. He does not speak.

"It will be an opportunity to wean your blackguards off their wartime duties. To bring them onto the side of peace and civic responsibility. And it will be an opportunity for our Enforcers to see Zaun as a fellow city to serve and protect. To work with your administration, not against it. If the Initiative is successful, it will pave the way for the future we've envisioned. One of trust, and accountability, and equity. In time, the Council may even be amenable to addressing past accusations of police misconduct. It would open negotiations about compensation. Even reparations."

Silco listens. His thoughts, a thousand miles away, are focused on a girl with a pink hair, a battering-ram fists, and Vander's raging eyes.

"Violet would be part of the contingent," Medarda goes on. "It would provide the opportunity for her to come home. To heal the rupture between herself and her sister. Even to achieve a compromise with you."

"Violet has no clue what that word means."

"Then lead by example. Because Piltover will be watching," She keeps her focus on him, the gleam of her eyes of a piece with her gold earrings. "You stated you'd taken her into the fold. Why not do so in truth? Allow her to work for Zaun. Train her. Give her a chance to prove herself. In turn, her time here will reassure her that her sister is safe with you. That her work is valued. And if Violet truly wishes to do right by her, she needn't resort to violence."

"Rabid dogs speak no other language."

"That's twice you've called her a dog. Have you never considered she might be the opposite?"

"What?"

"A casualty," Medarda says. "Of Zaun and Piltover's bad blood. Our politics. Our differences." A beat. "Same as Jinx."

A bite of the old rage seeps through. "You know nothing of Jinx."

"I know what I saw in her paintings. A girl suffering under the weight of her past. Unless fate intervenes, she may grow into a woman who holds a storm on the inside. One that drives her from safe harbors and into the depths—because that is the only place she can find herself." Her palm touches his shirt placket, right above his heart. "I know, because I am the same."

This stirs Silco from cold speculation.

Medarda makes her move, flowing across the space between them. Her hands come up without hesitation to frame his face, fingertips warm against scar-tissue. Her lips are warm too, and impossibly soft. But there is something sharp in the way her mouth cuts across his. Her wet little tongue is a bladed provocation.

The breath slicing between Silco's teeth is bladelike too—but not with shock. She'd been leading to this, as with the rest.

He's way ahead of her.

Before she can reconsider, he's backed her against the wall again, full-bodied, arms up on either side of her. Medarda hitches a tiny sound as he slides a bare, cold hand up to her throat, thumb smoothing her jaw to press against the throbbing jugular. He squeezes, and her head tips back, mouth parting in a dizzy stupor. Their tongues curl together.

It's not his style anymore: kissing. Between his unholy eye and razored teeth, he's a beast best kept at arm's length. His lovers—such as they are—are grateful to be spared the worst. Only Sevika, thus far, has braved his scars for the sake of a kiss. And it's taken seven full years for them to recross that threshold. They've fucked, and fought, and nearly died, and yet intimacy remains a battlefront neither is ready to breach.

Now Medarda, this Topsider with her flawless skin and her flawless accent, is making free with her mouth, as if she owns him.

She does not.

She owns nothing; is owed nothing. And there is a heartless freedom in that knowledge.

It gives him leeway to take back everything Topside ever took from Zaun, glad to do so without words.

He envelops her with no negotiation: chest to chest, hips to hips, thigh wedged between hers. One hand keeps her throat pinned. The other takes a merciless tour, the palm sleeking down to cup a breast through her gown. His fingers pluck at the nipple, timing it to the teeth carving into their kiss.

Medarda's breath spikes: love-moan gone lustmord. She kisses like he is an opium pipe; a slow-motion binge. Her fingertips follow the threads of embroidery over his suit. Hands sliding over the blade of hipbone, coveting the heavy clasp of his belt buckle, the hard buttons of his trouserfront. Palming, stroking, squeezing.

That's a Topsider for you. Always ready to weigh the billed goods.

Silco encircles her throat like a trigger. She shudders. Her body has gone from hot to radiant in his arms. Her thighs tighten around the bridge of his own. Her moan is a thing of beauty. All self-possession is stripped. In its place is a wild little slag. His thigh, driving between the folds of her gown, jacks her higher. She rides into him with a low-pitched croon, as if a violin string runs from her throat down to the knot of exquisite sensation between her legs, tightening further and further until the vibrato threatens to break into crescendo.

The silk dampens against his thigh.

Their lips part. Silco's teeth scrape her jaw. His enfolding palm squeezes.

"Spoiled for choice, aren't we?" he says. "All those lickspittles at the beck of your pleasure. And here you are. At mine."

Mel trembles all over. She's lost the capacity for speech. Her head falls back against the glass, mouth swollen, panting. Her hips stir in a blind imperative. In answer, Silco drags his free palm up her thigh. The skin is impossibly smooth; the gold plating almost sun-warmed. His fingertips stroke a warning, then slip under the slit of her dress. He cups the satin between her legs, and she's wet. So wet the fabric clings, a slick drag as he traces between the tender lips.

His thumb, finding her clit, teases.

"Gods."

Mel jolts. Her whole body is quaking with pulse. Inside and out. He can see the flush creeping at the deep-red pit of her cleavage. He can smell the musk rising up between her breasts. Her hands, alternately roving and roaming, clutch at his hips, his arms, his shoulders—anything they can find purchase in. It's as if she can't bear his touch and is yet is desperate not to escape it.

As if parting would be greater pain.

For a surreal moment, memory unspools. He is flung back under the blue-lit lanterns of the Nymph: the spread of Nandi's hips under his palms, the fine hairs quivering on her nape, her head tossed back on a cry. Except it is not the memory. It is the shadow of another man's pleasure.

Somewhere, someplace, someone else is kissing Nandi. And he is not there. He will never be there again.

All that remains is the rage inhabiting his bones.

Silco's hand slides deeper between Mel's clenched thighs. With a deft twist of his wrist, he's slipped past the flimsy barrier, and inside. Soft. Slick. Hotter than sin. The heel of his palm grinds down on her mons, shorn to the downiest fleece. Two fingertips find the tender give of her entrance. Caressing, then curling deep.

Mel bucks in his embrace. A cry breaks from her throat—sweet, stricken. A thousand times it must have smote Talis' heart, but never again.

It belongs to Silco now.

His fingers press, hard, on the very heart of her.

Mel's thighs clench around his wrist, the violin string snapping into a blossoming heat and a sob she cannot bite down. Ecstasy is a dying note in her mouth. She rides his hand, a sinuous frenzy that makes him think, irrepressibly, of their Sumpside Waltz. The way she'd moved then—taking his measure, matching him—had whetted his hunger. Now, it sharpens it to steel. He'd like nothing better than to take her right here: with her skirt up and her legs around him. Jogging her up against the cold glass with his broken city spread beneath her.

The thrill is instinctive. A desire to go further. Deeper. Deep like a bitemark, like a stabbing, and in the aftermath to lap up her blood.

But that would be a mercy, and he owes her none.

His fingers, knuckle-deep, work in and out. No time given to catch her breath, or savor the aftershocks. Only the inexorable rhythm that transmits itself through her stricken body. Again, then again, until she is coming apart at the seams again: eyes wild, voice a wreck, the gilded paint washed off by sweat.

Nothing left but naked, ugly need.

Just like her city.

Their eyes lock. In the obelisk's glow, Medarda breathes raggedly. Her body dangles in his arms: pleasure's potent paralysis. His hand, starfished across her mons, is soaked. He gives a soft flicking with the thumb. The silk is so saturated he feels the pulse of her clit. She lets off a wounded little whimper.

By degrees, Silco loosens the embrace. She finds her balance slowly. Curls of her hair stretch between them, clinging to his clothes and skin. His fingers, dragged loose, are sweetly musked. Lifting them to his mouth, Silco sucks them clean. The taste holds the dark-edged tang of an untended garden. Rich with damp, heavy earth, and the lushness of summer blooms.

Medarda's eyes follow his tongue. Her eyelids are a smear of kohl and indigo. The lashes flutter, spilling a wet gleam across her cheeks.

She's been caught unawares. Come apart without her own volition.

"I—" she starts, then stops. The words have left her head. So has the blood. "I don't know what—what happened. I don't—"

Silco's thumb traces the delicate curve of her bottom lip.

"Don't what?' he breathes. "Lose your head unless you have a mind to keep it?"

Mel shakes her head. Not negation, but dizziness. Her lips part; his thumb sinks in. She suckles, past the pretense of dignity.

Silco feels the pull of soft suction and thinks: Progress.

"You can still keep it," he says, dragging the wet pad across her open mouth. "If you have the spine for it."

"I—"

"Or maybe you've a death wish." A kiss, just shy of her ear, where a bead of sweat glistens. "My city's no wolf's den. But that doesn't mean it is without teeth."

Medarda's head shakes again. Her swollen mouth shapes a silent No. All the other things she means to say—the double-dealing, the delay tactics, the diplomatic gambits—have deserted her. Her hands come up, fisting in his coat lapels. He can sense the need in her, to be closer, to hold tighter.

Crooking her knee, she teases the hardening crux at his trousers. At his gasp, a glow of triumph touches her damp face.

She's recovered. By inches. Enough to make her next play.

"I believe," she breathes, "we're of the same mind."

Her hands, soft and unerring, slip to the broadfall of his trousers. One caresses the fabric over his tented erection. The other undoes the fly buttons and parts the flap. What she finds beneath makes her breath jitter and his own bottom out.

She tugs him free; the air is a bracing chill. Her palm slides across the shaft, warm fingers circling the heft. She's still wearing her family ring. The coolness cuts like the softest brand against his flesh. Her eyes cut softer still with a half-lidded glint of that would be coy, except that is not the game they're playing.

Not anymore.

"I'm no virgin," she says, and that smile plays in provocation. "But this is daunting territory. A little guidance would help."

"And how might I aid you?" The friction, teasingly slow, thickens his voice. "With a map?"

"With a compass." Her thumb traces the heavy vein on the underside. Her other hand comes up to his face, fingertips at the scar-hewn corner of his bad eye. Her mouth finds his again, and this time she is the one who bites. "Lead the way. Or let me wander. Your choice."

It's not. But that's the whole point. In learning the lay of the land, she'd let her own curiosity overcome her. Now, she's got the full measure of him.

And what she has, she takes in full.

The first tug is shaky. The second, bolder. Then his breath deepens, and her grip gains confidence. She isn't schooled in his rhythms the way Sevika is: her touch lacks the directness that comes from long-standing intimacy. But her instincts are impeccable, and she's no stranger to mastering a man's pleasure. Within moments, she has him shuddering, the head of his cock slicking her palm. Their kiss renews, breaks, renews again. She drinks in the play of his reactions, learning what he likes: a twist of wrist, a tight squeeze, a thumb pressed just so.

She keeps at it until both his eyes go black and the vein is a livewire in his temples and in his cock and he's got her trapped against the glass, fucking into her hand, his own clawing at her body for leverage. Her scent, everywhere, is the perfume of an overripe orchard. His palms help themselves, gorging on the silk-clad curves of breast and belly and arse. He's losing track of her kisses. He's losing the thread of his thoughts. But Mel's exhalations, sawing in ragged counterpoint to his, give the depth of her own abandon away.

She's determined, even here, to keep the scales balanced. To give, with the same hand that takes.

Pleasure spreads its dark wings up the base of Silco's spine. His teeth grit on a warning hiss. One hand fishes a handkerchief from his waistcoat. The other, snagging Mel's wrist, wrenches her grip loose. Her little croon of disappointment is as sweet as the sight of her, heavy-eyed, as he finishes himself off: a series of brute tugs, and escalating gasps powering a breakage of hot spurts into the cloth.

His eyes stay open, the good one half-lidded, at once lost in himself and observing her. She doesn't break their stares. Her face is the mirror of his own: pleasure as debt, and closure as a hard-won transaction. The soiled handkerchief is balled up, then discarded in a wastebin. Mel seizes his hand, sticky with jism, and brings it to her mouth. She kisses his fingers, tasting the residue of him, as he'd done with her.

Then she tugs him closer. The kiss—salty with both their spendings—is the final price paid. When they part, they're breathing heavily. Stained and soiled and spent: a matched set.

The score, though, has yet to be recalibrated.

Silco catches Mel's lower-lip between his teeth. Bites hard enough to indent the tender flesh. Her cry fills his sensorium. When he pulls back, there's a tantalizing red imprint on both their lips. He touches it with his tongue, a slow grin licking the corners of his mouth.

"You've a strange notion," he rasps, "of a listening ear."

"On the contrary..."

"Hm?"

Medarda's smile is a secret dizzily savored. Her red lipstick is gone save for a single blood smear. It feels less a leavetaking than a tiding-over.

"You told me everything," she says, "that I need to hear."

That, Silco thinks, is progress too.

---

Alexa, play 'Escapism' by RAYE

Translations for the Gratuitous French:

"Les larmes seront le chasseur de mon vin surtout si je me saoule avec lui." - Tears will be my chaser if I get drunk with him.

"L'Amour est énergie et nous donne des ailes." - Love is a fuel that gives us wings.

"C'est ainsi que vous avez nommé votre vin? L'Amour?" - Is that what you named your wine? Love?

"Parce que le goût promet de faire fondre les cœurs!" - Because the taste promises to melt hearts!

"Vous faites très bien votre métier. Mais nous n'avons pas de cœurs." - You do your job well. But we have no hearts.