Five minutes later, my face appeared on the city screens.
The Guild bulletin called me an exceptionally dangerous beast tamer suspected of mass murder, the theft of a strategic core and ties to the Demon Cult. The recording began with the shattered ceiling and the fallen fighters. Everything that had happened before then had been cut.
I moved across the rooftops of the northern industrial district. Several hundred soldiers stayed close, hiding in gutters and beneath eaves. A large swarm could not enter the city unnoticed. The main broods waited beyond the wall, beside the lizard's carcass and the food stores.
Styx sat under my collar. Her damaged wing was gradually straightening, but a harsh noise ran through our bond.
The bodyguard's fear was tangled up in it.
I still remembered with his hands instead of mine: the cold of the case, the resistance of his muscles, the impossibility of screaming. When I tried to remember Brutus's face, for a second I saw Arden's wife instead, waiting for her husband to come home for dinner.
The Puppet Parasite did more than move someone else's body. It opened a door into someone else's nervous system and left it wide open in both directions.
The emergency beacon from the trial vibrated on my wrist.
"Rex, answer me. It's Lily."
I stopped beneath the iron roof of an old warehouse.
"How did you get this channel?"
"Sergeant Cole saved the frequency, and we saw the Guild bulletin. Kane is lying."
"That's nothing new."
"We have a recording from the Wildlands. It shows who stopped the stampede and killed the lizard. Meet us at the old tram depot. Cole will be there too."
I wanted to refuse. Any meeting would turn the witnesses into targets. Then, outside the city wall, the first two thousand members of the swarm died.
The blow came through the bond so sharply that I dropped to one knee.
The Guild had begun its purge. Fire beasts rose over the border zone and sprayed an incendiary compound across the swarm's feeding ground. The captains' simple orders tangled together: retreat, save the clutches, protect Styx, though she was nowhere near them.
An image came from her: thousands of small bodies in the flames, hungry larvae beneath the cooling carcass, an empty place at the centre of the brood where the queen should have been. Until then I had seen the dead only as a resource. To Styx, they were her broods.
For the first time, I felt that the soldiers meant more to her than a number on a panel.
I reached the tram depot through an underground sewer. Lily was waiting in her academy uniform with a grey cloak thrown over it. Sergeant Cole stood beside her with two soldiers who wore no insignia.
Cole did not aim his weapon at me.
"I saw you destroy the lord," he said. "And I saw Leon abandon the students. The Guild wants the report changed."
"Will you change it?"
"If I meant to, I wouldn't be here."
He handed me a recording crystal. It held the sensor readings, the students' communications and a complete view of the field. It showed the swarm stopping the stampede. It captured the group calling out to Leon as he retreated.
Lily added the recording from her beacon. It did not show the rhino or the first evolution: her promise to keep silent still held. But it had captured the group's rescue and the lizard's appearance.
"This is enough to clear you of the theft charge," she said.
Cole shook his head.
"Not through the city channels. The Li family controls the Guild, and the Guild decides which hunts are legal. Until the commission accepts this recording, it does not exist as far as the court is concerned."
We tried to send the data to the capital's military command, but the channel accepted the packet and immediately cut out. A red seal appeared on all three beacons.
"Witnesses to the incident temporarily suspended. Suspected complicity."
Kane moved faster. He did not dispute the evidence; he stripped us of the right to present it.
Engines rumbled outside. City armoured vehicles were approaching the depot.
Cole swore and pulled an old tunnel map off the wall.
"There's a freight line to the east. It leads to the northern slums."
"My debt office is there," I said.
If Kane had arranged the confiscation in advance, the trail might not begin at the Guild. The three million debt had kept me in the slums all those years for a reason.
We entered the tunnel seconds before the depot gates were smashed in.
This time Lily and Cole followed me because they chose to, not because I gave an order.
That was precisely why Kane had already marked them as enemies.
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