The sheet metal of the duct groaned under Tullia's knees, shedding flecks of zinc into her collar. She bypassed the third-floor washroom and the fifth-floor linen depository. Instead, she crawled backward, sliding through two vertical service chutes until the temperature plunged twenty degrees and the reek of cheap pine disinfectant announced Sub-Level 4: Sanitation Depot C.
She hit the concrete with a dull thud, smoothed the creases out of her grey canvas apron, and set her shoulders.
"Pride," she murmured to the dark, "is maintaining posture even when covered in slag-rat grease."
She reached for her brass-bristled broom. The broom brought order. The broom did not weep over tragic destiny or demand seventy percent of the metropolitan fuel reserves to sustain its petty melodrama. She dipped her rag into a pail of cold water, scrubbing the silver duct grime from her sleeves, determined to behave like a tax-paying laborer who had never worn silk in her life.
The door of broom closet 4-B blasted open, rattling the row of hanging mops.
"Tullia! Lady of the Lye! Countess of the Scrub-Brush! We are doomed! We are pulverized into mineral paste!"
Bippo stumbled across the threshold, his brass mail-cart wedged sideways in the frame. His uniform cap sat crooked over his greasy curls, and in his arms he cradled an iron-ribbed parcels crate that sputtered like a dying furnace. The stencil on the crate read *MANAGEMENT SUITE 99 - PRIORITY DISPATCH*, but right through the seams, greasy yellow sparks hissed and spit onto the linoleum.
"Get that abomination off my fresh wax," Tullia snapped, pointing her mop handle like a bayonet. "Did I not polish this vestibule thirty minutes ago?"
"The wax doesn't matter, Tullia! Nothing matters! The Grand Clerks are tallying the end-of-quarter metrics!" Bippo's eyes twitched wildly as the crate gave a sharp, metallic screech. "One late delivery. One! And I lose my shot at the Senior Mailroom! Without that gold lanyard, my cousin sells me to the deep-shaft dredging barges in Old Kors!"
"Take it to the incinerator, you idiot."
"I can't! It's a high-grade shipment of unstable raw Vitri-Splices for the Research Annex! If it detonates in the lift, it takes out the lower four foundation rings! Look at it! It’s undergoing a resonance feedback!"
A gout of sulfurous green smoke burst through the crate’s seam, scorching the leg of Tullia's trousers. The internal pressure valve whistled, winding up into an ear-splitting shriek. The crystals inside were not merely cracked; they were feeding on the raw friction of Bippo’s frantic running, escalating toward a violent chain reaction.
"Step aside," a harsh, nasal voice drawled from the corridor.
Supervisor Varley strode through the doorway, his belly straining the brass buttons of his wool coat. He held a clipboard in one hand and a gold-plated pocket watch in the other. He ignored the smoking bomb; he glared at Bippo's askew cap.
"Unsanctioned cargo in an auxiliary maintenance nook," Varley sneered, pencil scratching against paper. "Gross negligence. Endangerment of corporate assets. You're terminated, clerk. Leave the crate where it sits. Security will vent the floor with liquid nitrogen after the executive meeting concludes."
"Wait!" Bippo wailed. "The blast will hit the foundation! It’ll collapse the depot!"
"Then the company claims the insurance on both the depot and your life contract," Varley said without looking up. "Clear out. Don't touch it."
Tullia looked at the puddle of sparkling alkaline wax she had spent three hours buffing to a mirror finish. If the nitrogen vented, the thermal shock would crack the terrazzo tiles she had personally re-grouted last Tuesday. The grout work was pristine. It was the only thing in this rotting, narrative-plagued city that possessed geometric integrity.
"Are you deaf, woman?" Varley barked, noticing her rigid stance. "Leave the cart. Get out before I dock your pension for insubordination."
"My grout," Tullia whispered, her chin lifting until her patrician jawline caught the dim yellow bulb above, "does not crack for a priority parcel."
"What did you say, scrub-girl?"
She offered no reply. She plunged her heavy pine mop directly into the cold mop bucket, saturating the thick cotton strands with brine, lye, and copper sulfate. Before Varley could bellow, she drove the dripping mop head straight down onto the whistling valve of the crate.
*SSSSSSSS.*
Steam exploded upward, scalding and dense. Tullia held her ground. She locked her elbows, throwing her entire weight onto the handle. Her muscles burned, the old, pampered muscles of Lady Morcant rebelling against the physical strain, but her stubbornness was a fortress of cold stone.
"The copper in the water creates an inverted grounding lattice!" she shouted through the boiling mist. "Bippo! Tip the zinc tray under the casters!"
"I—what?"
"The zinc tray, you illiterate parcel-tosser! Complete the circuit!"
Bippo scrambled across the slick floor, kicking the metal bottom shelf of his cart directly beneath the crate. Tullia twisted the mop handle ninety degrees, pinching the release valve shut under pure leverage and caustic sludge. A deep, hollow *clunk* echoed inside the iron box. The whistling ceased. The yellow sparks died down into sluggish, inert blue smoke.
The crate went cold. The tiles were wet, but whole.
Varley stood frozen, mouth slack, pencil hovering an inch above his clipboard. "You... you idiot. That was high-grade military stock! You could have vaporized us!"
"I saved the flooring," Tullia said, her voice dripping with cold, aristocratic scorn as she pulled the blackened mop back. "Which is substantially more valuable to this company than your logistical incompetence. Now sign Bippo’s dispatch slip, or I will inform the safety inspector that you ordered a live ordnance abandoned in a populated air duct."
Varley's face mottled purple. He scrawled a violent signature on Bippo’s manifest, shoved it into the clerk's chest, and stormed into the corridor, cursing the entire maintenance department under his breath.
Bippo dropped to his knees, clutching the slip to his chest. "You're a demon. A terrifying, beautiful, tile-obsessed demon. I owe you my liver."
"You owe me twenty minutes of uninterrupted buffing," Tullia retorted, leaning heavily on the mop to conceal the fact that her hands were trembling.
Then, the speaker grille above the door popped.
The static was replaced by a smooth, low baritone that made the fine hairs on the back of Tullia's neck snap to attention. Sorenzo Ghalib’s voice purred through the entire facility, broadcast across every floor, every sub-level, every furnace room.
*"Attention, staff of Apex Tower,"* Sorenzo said, his cadence leisurely, terrifyingly intimate. *"An unauthorized party recently repaired an antique artifact in my private office using a distinct, high-purity Vitri-Mend harmonic. Such talent is... rare. Too rare to remain nameless.*"
Tullia stopped breathing.
*"Effective immediately, the perimeter bulkheads are locked. All personnel, from division chiefs to basement custodians, will report to their sector security checkpoints. I will personally conduct a dermal resonance scan on the hands of every employee. Any trace of aristocratic crystal manipulation will be identified. Do not attempt to leave your stations. I am coming down."*
The speaker clicked off.
"Resonance scan," Bippo whispered, turning grey. "He’s using the black-light emitters. If you've touched raw crystal magic in the last forty-eight hours, your skin glows like a harvest lantern."
Tullia looked down at her hands. Beneath the calluses earned from three years of scouring soap, the faint, sapphire network of veins along her knuckles was still faintly luminescent from fixing the teacup.
He would see it instantly. He would know the pattern. He had traced that exact pattern across her knuckles at the Winter Solstice Gala five years ago, before she faked her death in the novel's original third act.
"I have something," Bippo hissed, digging desperately into his satchel. He produced a pair of thick, oily rubber gloves lined with a bubbling, corrosive green paste. "Skin-stripper paste. The smugglers use it. It eats the top three dermal layers. It neutralizes any magical glow completely."
Tullia stared at the sloshing acid inside the gloves. "It destroys the nerves. I won't be able to hold a mop. My fingers will be claws."
"It’s that or the CEO takes you to the seventy-seventh floor! And rumor says people who go up there don't come back down! Tullia, put them on!"
She looked at her hands—calloused, capable, the only things that had kept her independent from the suffocating, pre-written tragedy of the plot. To melt her own flesh to escape a phantom? Or to face him and lie through her teeth?
Before her fingers could touch the rubber, the corridor erupted in heavy boots.
The metal doors of Depot C flew off their hinges under the brutal impact of a pneumatic ram, crashing onto the wax with a deafening boom.