I was free of my oath to the city of Lufkin, though it still felt strange not to carry the badge. I’d have to see about getting Deek, Kaela, and Sam released too; they’d earned that much. I wasn’t sure if Buck had ever been sworn in, but that was a problem for another day.

  What weighed on my mind was the fella from the state. The undersecretary, the kind who smiled like a snake and smelled like paperwork. I was turning that over in my head when I heard boots scuffing fast behind me.

  A young soldier fell into step at my side—corporal by his stripes, maybe twenty-two, still had that new-uniform stiffness about him.

  “Yeah?” I asked, slowing a little.

  He nodded, catching his breath. “We got a new colonel in this morning. Word was the major might get promoted, but after the battle…” He trailed off, letting the silence speak for him.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “After that, everything changed.”

  He nodded. “You done right by us, sir. We got levels, we got loot—but more important, we got to walk away. Most of us, anyway.”

  I studied him out of the corner of my eye. I knew the type. The corporal concordance, we used to call ’em—unofficial brotherhood of the ones who actually kept the machine running. Sergeants might think they ran the army, but they only did it with the grudging help of corporals like this one. The kind who knew how to get things done, by hook or by crook.

  “I got you,” I said, giving him a nod. “What’s your message?”

  He hesitated, glancing around before lowering his voice. “Watch your back, sir. One of the boys said the new colonel ain’t line command—he’s intelligence. The kind they send to do the dirty work nobody wants to admit happened.”

  That stopped me cold. “You got a name?”

  “Just Hale,” he said. “And something else—one of the MPs swore his last posting was Foggy Bottom.”

  The name hit like a stone in my gut. Foggy Bottom meant the Agency. That meant eyes, whispers, and disappearances buried under official paperwork.

  I felt the chill crawl up my spine.

  I offered the young man my hand. “Thanks, Corporal.”

  He shook it firmly. “No thanks needed, sir.”

  I didn’t Identify him. Didn’t want to. Some things were better left unrecorded—names, faces, favors.

  As he peeled off toward the motor pool, I kept walking, the weight of those words riding with me.

  Foggy Bottom.

  If the Agency was sniffing around, then whatever was coming next wasn’t just another battle. It was going to be political.

  I sighed. Just what I didn’t need on top of everything else. The undead were easier to deal with — at least they didn’t stab you in the back while pretending it was for the greater good.

  Rubbing the back of my neck, I glanced at my wristwatch. The crystal was cracked, the band half-melted from the heat of that last night’s fight, but the damn thing still ticked. That somehow made it worse — like time itself refused to admit how broken everything else was.

  “Quarter past nine,” I muttered. Father Timothy would be starting the first service about now.

  It wasn’t right, the way we were doing it. It felt wrong to be putting people in the ground in shifts, like we were running some kind of assembly line for grief.

  Truth was, we weren’t really burying them at all — not the way it should be done. Too much necrotic residue in the soil. Too many whispers about bodies getting back up. So we’d started burning them instead, then burying what was left. The ash and bone fragments were sealed in canisters, each one marked with a name when we could find one.

  I’d stood through a few of those services already. The smell of smoke clung to your clothes, and no amount of prayer could wash it away. The priest said the fire purified the soul. Maybe it did. Maybe we were just trying to convince ourselves we weren’t feeding the earth more fuel for the next horror that crawled out of the dark.

  Either way, it had to be done.

  I pulled my collar up against the cold and headed toward the square. The air still smelled of smoke, wet ash, and the faint metallic tang of burned magic. The streets were quiet except for the muffled sound of hammering somewhere in the distance—life clawing its way back one nail at a time.

  The church sat where Main crossed Fifth, an old redbrick building that had seen better days. Most of its windows were boarded up now, but someone had draped a clean sheet over the doorway with a rough red cross painted across it. A makeshift banner of faith.

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  Inside, the pews were half gone—requisitioned for barricades or firewood—but people still came. Men in uniform, women in patched dresses, children holding the hands of whoever they had left. Father Timothy stood at the front, the sleeves of his black shirt rolled past his elbows, soot still clinging to his cuffs.

  He looked older than he had a week ago. We all did.

  “—ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he was saying when I stepped in. His voice was tired but steady. “But even ashes carry memory. Every spark we lay to rest will rise again when the Lord calls it.”

  He wasn’t just talking about the dead. Everyone in that room knew it.

  I stood near the back, hat in hand, as a handful of militia carried in a crate draped in a faded flag. The System had tagged it non-resurrectable remains. That’s what they were calling them now—clean clinical words to hide the horror.

  Father Timothy made the sign of the cross. “They fought for the living. That is a holy thing. That is enough.”

  When the service ended, people filed out quietly. No one cried. There weren’t enough tears left in town for that.

  Father Timothy caught my eye as he gathered his notes. “John,” he said, his voice hoarse but kind. “You look worse than I do.”

  I tried to smile. “Not sure that’s possible, Father.”

  He chuckled softly, then sobered. “Word’s spreading. Folks say you’re heading south.”

  “Planning on it, lots to do but yeah. Soon as we can move,” I said. “Something broke loose out there, and we can’t let it grow.”

  He nodded slowly, studying me like a man measuring a burden too heavy for one back. “You’re doing what must be done. But even the righteous need rest. Don’t forget that.”

  “Rest?” I gave a small, humorless laugh. “I’ll pencil it in after we fix the world.”

  He smiled faintly. “Then I’ll pray you find a sharp pencil.”

  I clapped his shoulder and turned to go, but he stopped me with one last question. “John… are we still under God’s eye?”

  I paused at the doorway, looking out at the gray light spilling through the boards. “I think so, Father,” I said after a moment. “But I think He’s watching to see what we’ll do next.”

  "I have been asked to go to Mr Thornes forge, will you be there?" The priest asked me.

  I will now." I stated outside, the cold hit me like a slap. The world was waiting, still smoldering, still alive. I took one last breath of the afternoon air and turned toward the forge.

  The forge was still half-ruined when I got there. The roof over the north end had caved in, leaving a skeletal frame open to the gray morning. Smoke rose from a single chimney—thin, stubborn, alive. Buck Thorne stood by the anvil, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a hammer in one hand and a rag in the other. His forge apron had been through the war it had tears and soot a plenty but like the town it was still useful still holding together. .

  Deek was already there, tinkering with something on a workbench. Kaela sat nearby, arms folded, watching them both with that skeptical look she wore whenever the conversation turned to anything involving fire or explosives.

  “Morning,” I said, stepping through the doorway.

  Buck looked up, his face breaking into a tired grin. “Warden. You’re just in time for the show.”

  “That good, huh?”

  “Depends on your definition of good,” Kaela said dryly. “He’s talking to metal again.”

  Buck chuckled. “Don’t mock what you don’t understand, girl. Every tool’s got a will—it just takes the right words to wake it.”

  Deek looked up from the bench, grease on his cheek. “What he means is, he’s about to blow up another crucible.”

  “Now, now,” Buck said, wagging a soot-blackened finger. “That only happened twice. Maybe three times.”

  He turned back to me then, his expression sobering. “Truth be told, I sent word to Father Timothy to come down. I was… minded of that orb thing we found. The one we cracked open.”

  “The phylactery fragment,” I said, feeling the weight of the words.

  “Aye,” Buck said, nodding. “Figured Donner, the forge, and I could sort it out with the Father’s words.”

  The big man looked down at the table beside him. There, resting on a bed of ash and iron filings, was what was left of the fragment—a lump of fused crystal and metal, dark as obsidian but shot through with veins of faint green light. It pulsed, slow and faint, like something trying to remember it had once been alive.

  Kaela’s voice was quiet now. “It’s been doing that since sunrise. Every few minutes, like it’s breathing.”

  Before I could answer, the door creaked open behind me. Father Timothy stepped in, hat in hand, his face drawn but calm. “You said you had something that needed blessing,” he said, his eyes flicking from me to the glowing shard.

  Buck nodded. “Aye, Father. We don’t rightly know what it is, only that it belonged to something evil. Thought maybe your words could still it, or at least keep it from biting back while we work.”

  The priest stepped closer to the forge, his expression tightening. “It’s not alive,” he murmured, “but it remembers life. Somehow that’s worse.”

  “Can you deal with it?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then looked at the iron crucible Buck had prepared a note of worry in his gaze. “We’ll see.”

  Buck poured the ashes from the old forge bed into the crucible, mixing them with filings from the tools that had survived the siege. “Old iron, new flame,” he muttered. Then he took an iron spike from the table, laid it across the anvil, and raised Donner high.

  Each blow rang like a church bell. With every strike, sparks leapt, catching in his beard and the folds of his apron. He murmured something between a prayer and a curse, words swallowed by the roar of the flame. The spike glowed from dull red to cherry, then to a bright, aching orange.

  At last he spoke the final words. “Let the two speak.”

  The forge answered. Fire surged up—a column of orange and gold so bright it washed the color from everything in the room. The shard on the table pulsed harder now—green against gold, life against fire. Sparks arced between the crucible and the fragment, like two hearts arguing over which one deserved to beat.

  Deek shielded his eyes. “It’s reacting!”

  Kaela stepped forward, hand half-raised as though to cast. “That’s not reacting—that’s fighting.”

  “Hold steady!” Buck roared. Donner came down once—twice—each strike sending a shockwave through the floor. The green light screamed against the orange until both flared white—pure, blinding, searing.

  When the light finally died, the shard was gone. In its place lay a small, dark sphere—smooth, inert, and cold.

  Father Timothy crossed himself, his voice low and reverent. “By flame and faith, it’s sealed.”

  Buck wiped his brow and looked at me, soot streaking his face. “Well, Warden,” he said, voice rough but proud. “Looks like the forge still remembers what it’s for.”

  I stared at the sphere, feeling the faint echo of what it had been. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t destroyed. Just sleeping. Waiting.

  “Keep it locked down,” I said. “If it starts glowing again, you call me.”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” Buck promised.

  Outside, the rumble of engines rolled through the gray air—military trucks, heavy and slow, crawling up from the east. Trouble on wheels.

  I glanced from the priest to the blacksmith. “We’re not done yet,” I said. “Not by a long shot.”