The research station lay in the northern Wildlands, beyond the old ash marsh.
Officially, the road there had been closed after an outbreak of toxic spores. Military maps marked the facility with an empty square. Cole found an old freight line used to remove equipment eighteen years earlier and stole a maintenance trolley from an army depot.
After his testimony in the arena, he had nothing left to lose. Command had blocked his access to weapons and frozen his pay. The order stripping him of his rank was still making its way through the chain of command, and Cole had not taken off his uniform.
"Until they serve me the dismissal order in person, I'm still a sergeant," Cole explained.
Lily sat at the controls, cleaning interference from the recording of the Seal. She had barely slept since the arena. Thousands of residents had managed to save copies, but the city channels kept releasing new versions: Kane had supposedly activated the collar to stop an infected dragon; Leon had allegedly been drugged into testifying; the swarm had somehow tampered with the recording.
By morning, the truth had not disappeared. It had simply been buried under a hundred convenient explanations.
I stood on the trolley's front platform while Styx flew beside me, occasionally settling on the handrail. Behind us, the surviving broods travelled in separate groups, staying within three kilometres.
After that first "no", the bond changed. Commands still went through, but each was preceded by a brief pause: Styx assessed it for herself. It was irritating, and at the same time it made the swarm more precise. The queen corrected my commands when she saw danger before I did.
The ash marsh greeted us with grey snow. It lay on the water, the roots and the skeletons of old towers. The trolley stopped at a cave-in; from there we had to continue on foot.
The station was hidden inside a concrete slope. No name remained on the gates, only a circle divided by three lines. The same symbol appeared on the core and inside Styx's egg.
I pressed my palm to the panel. Nothing happened.
Styx settled beside it.
The door opened.
A swarm of white spores flew out of the darkness. Cole raised a filtering shield, Lily covered her face, and I ordered the soldiers to bring down the cloud. The spores were not venom but an alarm. They clung to us and began to glow.
A weapon's action clicked deep in the corridor.
"One more step, and I'll burn the queen with the host."
A woman held an old flamethrower in both hands. Her hair was almost grey, and a scar crossed her left cheek. An empty bond ring remained on her neck, the mark of a seal removed by force.
"Mira Shen?" Lily asked.
The woman did not lower the weapon.
"Who gave you that name?"
I showed her the cracked core.
Mira saw the symbol and shifted her gaze to Styx. The flamethrower slowly lowered.
"I thought the egg was dead."
"Everyone did."
"No. Everyone was meant to think so."
She led us through an airtight lock. The laboratories beyond had survived: shattered incubators, tables covered with petrified specimens and walls filled with diagrams of neural bonds. One chamber held empty cages. Each was labelled not with the beast's name, but with its owner's number.
Mira stopped beside an old projector.
"Your parents worked here. Your mother studied swarm queens. Your father reviewed Guild contracts and discovered that the standard bond contained a second circuit."
She brought up a diagram with two lines: one connected human and beast, while the other ran upwards to the Guild's symbol.
"The first circuit carries sensations and commands. The second allows the seal's owner to intervene, intensify pain, block an ability or transfer control. Most beast tamers do not know their bond can be rewritten."
I remembered the Void Dragon's golden collar.
"Kane used the second circuit on Leon."
"The Li family used it long before Leon was born."
Mira played an archive recording. Beast tamers signed contracts, beasts struggled, and white basilisks held them to the floor. The Li family seal stood in the corner of every document.
"We tried to create a bond with no outside owner. The beast was meant to consent to the contract just as the human did. The Guild branded the research a heresy of the Demon Cult."
"Did the Cult exist?" Cole asked.
"Dozens of groups existed: scientists, smugglers, killers, beast tamers who released their beasts. The Guild put them all under one name to make it easier to confiscate their property without trial."
Mira touched the empty mark on her neck.
"When the station was shut down, my beast resisted, and Kane ordered the bond severed. I survived. He did not."
There were no tears in her voice. After eighteen years, the pain had grown too old for them.
Styx flew to one of the cages. A small fragment of grey shell remained inside.
Mira said, "She was born here."
The projector displayed an image of a large swarm queen. Not a mosquito or a tick. The creature lay at the centre of a multitude of beasts of different species, its wings transparent. Not one wore a collar.
"The last queen of a free nest," Mira said. "Before she died, she produced a single egg. It was meant to preserve the ability to break the external circuit."
I looked at Styx.
Styx sat on the edge of the cage, touching the shell with her proboscis.
She had never been some random weak beast.
Kane had been searching for her for eighteen years.
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