[Tristan]

The Invisible Light was many things. It was a weapon, it was an experiment, it was a machine, it was a medicine.

The unnatural forces summoned by the Demon Bridges had opened fissures in the fabric of reality, and monsters had spilled over into Earth and the Lands Beyond from the Unholy Realm. Simply shutting down the Demon Bridges would be going to make no real difference, because it was already too late. The fabric of reality was so weakened that it wasn't able to heal on its own anymore. Besides, every monster crossing over into our realm was going to widen the fissures further.

The only way to salvation was undoing the damage done to reality by reversing the process that had done it. To work, it had to be done everywhere at the same time and in a fraction of a second, lest the fissures become chasms and our reality got engulfed by the Unholy Realm.

With hell raging on everywhere and time running out, after decades of research and trials and setbacks, human scientists and Ghosts devised the Invisible Light. It was a single, giant device that had to be sown in all the Lands Beyond like it was a plant, let grow to full maturity for a few decades until it turned into a ubiquitous, underground spiderweb of roots, and finally unleashed in a single, titanic flash of supernatural energy called the Blackout.

That wasn't going to be an instant happy ending, of course.

The monsters, albeit stranded in our reality, weakened and wounded by the separation from the Unholy Realm and finally vulnerable to human weapons, would need to be hunted down and destroyed anyway.

The Earth had to go. Too many Demon Bridges had been opened from Earth. There was no way even the Invisible Light could heal the damage. Before the Blackout, the inhabitants of Earth had to be evacuated to the Lands Beyond in what was called the Great Scattering. Only a handful of scientists and soldiers headed by Dame Elizabeth Cooper, King Bruce's wife, decided to stay, fully knowing that there would be no way back to join the rest of humanity.

Finally, the aftermath of the Blackout was going to be messy. The Invisible Light was a living machine that was infused with the souls of its creators and permeated every known land, a machine that was going to summon forces our universe had never experienced and heal the evil that was making reality rot, so after its glorious manifestation, reality was going to need a while to get back into balance. In particular, the delicate machinery of the Faraway Bridges would need to be readjusted and retuned after the shock of the Invisible Light, lest the Bridges progressively deteriorate and die. The injured Bridges were going to hold on for a few centuries, but if they weren't cured within that span of time, they would begin to deteriorate rapidly.

Luckily, there was a solution for that.

At the peak of human ingenuity, the elite of mankind had their blood tweaked and enhanced to be able to communicate with the Ghosts. It was called the High Blood, and all the humans that had collaborated with the Ghosts to create the Demon Bridges had it. High Blood carriers would be able to talk with the Invisible Light too. The titanic flash of energy of the Blackout was going to stun the abilities of the High Blood, but in a few decades the High Blood was going to recover, and that was vital, because the Invisible Light would need to get in touch with the High Blood carriers. Only the Invisible Light itself was going to understand the real effects of the Blackout on the Faraway Bridges, and that was the reason why the Ghosts had poured their souls inside the hulking machine.

The first people to have their High Blood restored were going to be entrusted with the most important of missions: almost all of the Invisible Light was going to be destroyed during the Blackout, but the souls of the Ghosts inside the surviving parts would look for the High Blood Carriers and infuse them with the full ability to heal the Bridges and rule over them. This ability was called the Holy Key. Only the High Blood carriers could be entrusted with the Holy Key, because it was so complex and so powerful that it was going to kill every ordinary human it interacted with.

So, the day came and the Invisible Light manifested itself and the Blackout engulfed every land. The Demon Bridges were cut, all the Bridges leading to Earth were severed, Earth herself was confined in a sealed-off fold of reality, and the fissures to the Unholy Realm were healed.

The Gliese section of the Invisible Light malfunctioned, and Vulcan Bridge survived, albeit restored to its original form of a one-way bridge.

The Storm Ages ensued, five centuries during which the monsters were hunted down and obliterated, but at a steep price. Nations crumbled as fleeing monsters and pursuing armies ravaged their lands. Plagues and famine broke out and science was banned by religious nuts and conspiracy theorists. High Blood carriers were hunted down, persecuted, and killed by angry mobs that wanted to take vengeance against the people guilty of having unleashed the monsters into our realm, promptly forgetting that they had helped to save it too.

The powers of High Blood were long to come back, and as the generations passed in hiding and exile, the High Blood carriers mixed with ordinary people, and the High Blood was dispersed. As the decades became centuries, the surviving parts of the Invisible Light slept and dreamed, waiting for the most unlikely of circumstances to happen: someone with an ancestry that, instead of diluting, had concentrated the High Blood, who happened to be in one of the places where the Invisible Light was still alive.

If that happened, the Invisible Light would hand over the Holy Key and let the souls of the Ghosts rest.

The book went on narrating the foundation of the Order of Remembrance and the Guild of Machines, but I was pressed for time.

I closed the book and tried to collect my thoughts.

Agatha's powers had something in common with what I had just learned about the High Blood and the Holy Key. The fact that she could cross the Faraway Bridges without feeling sick could be a sign that she could manipulate the Bridges and heal them, at least as far as her own passage was concerned.

But what was the link between Agatha, the High Blood and the Holy Key? Agatha had never set foot out of Manticore Library and its surroundings before the fall of the Library. There had been signs of Invisible Light emergence in the town of Nemea and at the Yuki-Onna temple near Finisterre, but most definitely Agatha hadn't been in either place.

I was pretty sure that the Miracle of Finisterre was the Invisible Light trying to hand over the Holy Key to the Order of Remembrance team, and the fact that Liam Rechemay hadn't survived probably meant that his High Blood was too diluted and weak. Darcy Holmes had survived, so her High Blood had to be purer, but she had been killed a little more than a year later without doing anything to the Bridges. Right after the Miracle, she had said to her rescuers that she was not the right one for the Holy Key, that she was only a temporary bearer.

Anyway, that was just speculation.

Agatha and the Finisterre team had nothing to do with each other.

I needed more.

[Agatha]

We didn't have to keep the Abominations out of Chrysaor Tower in the end, mainly because the damn things were already inside.

There was a vast reading hall at the base of the tower, a cavernous space with wooden furniture, glass showcases with ancient tomes inside, and a reference desk that was so big and shiny it could have easily been the mountain chalet of some noble family.

It was a battleground.

A couple of teams of Royal Marines had toppled the precious, antique, finely inlaid tables and had used them to build impromptu barricades, trying to stop the Abominations from swarming into the inner part of the tower until everybody was safe inside the underground bunkers.

"Situation?" Chyou asked, scrambling on all fours to a lance corporal who was sitting with his back to the barricade, reloading his rifle.

"You're the spy, aren't you?"

He had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise of the battle. Loud bangs of gunshots and the hiss of bullets filled the air. The Marines stood briefly up, shot a couple of bullets and stood back down to minimize exposure. It was like a dance.

Yet three of them were already on the ground with pools of blood spreading under their bodies.

"Agent Chyou Ouyang. Situation, lance corporal."

"We're in a sea of... um... we're deep in trouble, ma'am. They are Abominations. We can just try to slow them down."

"Can we help?"

The lance corporal glanced over at me and Sister Hinewai. "You and your Marines, yes. The nuns better evacuate with the rest of the clerics."

"We're here to fight," I growled. I was feeling the Abominations. Sadness, loneliness, sense of loss. I realized there were tears welling up in my eyes. I cursed myself.

"Go find a doll to comb, kid."

"Yeah, let me show you my comb." I pulled a revolver out of my belt.

He stared at me. I glared at him.

He nodded. "All right. There are six Abominations already inside the hall. We are keeping them busy, but not much more than that. If you can shoot that cannon without blowing yourself to smithereens or falling backwards, be my guest."

"Deal." I turned to Sister Hinewai. "You up to it, big girl?"

"We're on the ground, and that's a huge step up," she pointed out. "They're like boars, right?"

"Yeah. four-hundred-pounds, eight-feet, half-machine and half-corpse boars. But yeah, essentially boars." Yet it wasn't like that. The things had something about them. Pale memories, garbled remembrances, vestiges of dreams. I gritted my teeth. "At the count of three."

"Go."

"One. Two. Three!"

Sister Hinewai and I stood up and emerged head and shoulder from behind the barricade, holding the revolvers two-handed.

The Abominations had flipped over a couple of heavy tables and were partially hidden behind them, red eyes burning in the half-light, metal pistons and springs gleaming, huge rifles in their talon-like hands. Some of them had been damaged, leaking hydraulic fluid, or emitting smoke, or with one eye off, but nothing serious.

Sister Hinewai and I opened fire.

[Tristan]

I flipped furiously through another couple of books. One was about the Runaway Gods. The Invisible Light was going to affect the Ghosts too: for a few decades after the Blackout, the Ghosts were going to have to stay isolated until reality got back into balance. But the Storm Ages passed, and they never came back. As the centuries went by, the absent Ghosts rose to a mythical status and their name became the Runaway Gods, supernatural beings that, according to the superstitious bigots of the time, had seen the damage they had done to mankind and had decided to run away out of remorse.

There were a few notable exceptions though.

A handful of Ghosts reappeared along the centuries. They used to dwell in ancient buildings, mostly keeping to themselves, but interacting with people when the occasion arose. Albedo of Castle Vostok was one of them, and the only one the author knew that was actively cooperating with humans.

Then there was the Ghost Embassy, of which little more than the name was known. It was rumored that it was a group of Ghosts that to some extent was keeping in touch with mankind from their mysterious exile, but nothing certain.

Finally, there were the souls of the Ghosts that inhabited the surviving parts of the Invisible Light. They were not Ghosts as such, but instead mere shadows of the Ghosts, like living memories progressively fading away. According to the author, the Helmsmen were the stopgap solution the shadows of the Ghosts had devised when the Bridges had started malfunctioning. The High Blood carriers were still nowhere to be found, so to let mankind keep using the Bridges, the Invisible Light managed to infuse a pale trace of the powers of the Holy Key into the octopi, along with a shadow of the souls it contained, and so the Helmsmen were born. Then it was just a matter of making a team of Guild of Machines researchers stumble into them during an expedition in the Ligeia Sea.

I put down the book.

That was the connection between the Ghosts, the Invisible Light and the Helmsmen Doctor Bailey was talking about. More evidence that Agatha had something to do with the High Blood and the Holy Key, but still no clue about how she could possibly have the damn stuff inside her.

The other book was even worse.

It was noncommittally titled On the ethical issues of selective breeding, but I read the paragraph on the back cover and froze. It was about the program the Order of Remembrance had been running for centuries to recreate the High Blood.

The Order of Remembrance ran the Libraries, and almost every Library had an annexed school, where kids from five to seventeen were educated. The Libraries worked like boarding schools, and an education at a Library was expensive, but it was the starting point to get far in life, whatever that meant.

It was all a set-up.

The Order of Remembrance tested every student for signs of High Blood traces, the most common of which were a progressive resistance to hypnosis and drugs. When it was the case, the Order matched boys and girls to create couples that spawned children richer in High Blood. They used every trick in the book: making the kids have flings, steering families to marriages of convenience, even resorting to blackmail if there was really zero chemistry. Then they helped the new families settle and offered to enroll their sons and daughters in the Order schools. That way having kids attend Library boarding schools became a sort of family tradition passed down the generations.

The Order of Remembrance teams scouting the Lands Beyond investigating the Invisible Light emergence events were all elite members of the High Blood program, otherwise the Invisible Light would have simply ignored them.

The abbess of Gryphon Library, the Library the Finisterre team came from, had been trying to match Darcy and Liam since they were teenagers, because they both had the strongest levels of High Blood she had ever seen, but to no avail. The two could not stand each other. Putting them in the same team was the abbess' final attempt at making them have an affair. The next step was going to be resorting to blackmail.

But Liam died in Finisterre without regaining consciousness, and Darcy was killed less than a year later.

The book went on discussing the ethics of such a program, and its questionable success, since so far nobody had reached such a level of High Blood purity to be able to communicate with the Invisible Light.

I put it down.

Agatha was just a foundling enrolled at Manticore as a pro bono case. No carefully selected ancestry, no family tradition. No connection with the breeding program.

I had nothing.

[Agatha]

Sister Hinewai was a good shot. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was four inches taller than me and at least a hundred pounds heavier, very little of which was fat, so she was a very stable shooting platform, while yours truly barely managed to remain standing at every shot of the massive revolver.

Sister Hinewai was meticulous, too. She stood up, breathed in, closed her left eye, took aim with the right one, pulled the trigger and dove back behind the barricade before the Abominations had enough time to react. In six shots she had hit three Abominations square in the throat, all but decapitating the things.

It was advice from the lance corporal. The Abominations had redundant mechanical parts and could keep functioning even with half their heads blown off, but if you managed to sever the connection between what was left of their brains and the rest of the body, you incapacitated them. You did not kill them, by the way, first because they were already dead, and second because after every battle, teams of Guild of Abominations personnel scooped up whatever was left of the damaged specimens, and if the organic parts were salvageable, they sewed and welded and bolted the things back together.

The Abominations didn't feel pain when they were hit, as far as I could tell. The muted background of sadness and loss I was feeling was barely marred by sparks of surprise as they were beheaded, and the fallen ones went back to their silent mourning like nothing had happened.

Sister Hinewai was a good shot, but it wasn't enough.

The Abominations were gaining ground, pushing the tables they were using as shields progressively closer, and wounding and killing one after the other of the Marines in the process. Three more Marines laid on the ground, dead or dying. The battlefield medic had been among the first to be hit, so nobody was quite sure what to do with the wounded, apart from carrying them away when we pulled back.

Now the Abominations were halfway between our barricade and the entrance doors. Thirty feet left to cover, then they were going to reach us.

I stood up and shot. The air was thick with smoke and burnt gunpowder stench. The recoil pushed me back. My wrist and my shoulder hurt.

The bullet went high, a couple of feet above the Abomination.

I shot again. The bullet went even higher.

I dove down as an Abomination turned its rifle in my direction and clenched my teeth as the barricade shuddered under the hits of its large-caliber slugs.

I released the cylinder and shook the empty cases out, then fished a speedloader from my pocket and pushed the bullets into the chambers. I had three speedloaders left, eighteen bullets plus the six I had just reloaded the gun with. With my hit to miss ratio, it was barely enough to mildly annoy the enemy.

Sister Hinewai stood up again. Aimed, shot, dove back to the ground.

"I really hope Tristan is having an epiphany bright enough to blind him," she snorted. "We're not going to hold on much longer."

[Tristan]

I slammed the tome I had just finished leafing through on the floor and cursed.

It was the last one out of the crate, and like all the other books it was completely useless. Chronicles of the wars and plagues of the Storm Ages, theories about why the Invisible Light had malfunctioned on Gliese, endless speculation about how the League was going to use the Holy Key if it laid its hand upon it. Plus strictly technical studies made of numbers and diagrams.

Nothing I could use, nothing that could help me in the slightest.

There was the Holy Key, which could heal the Bridges and turn its holder into the master of the Bridges.

There was the Invisible Light, whick slept and dreamed and waited for the right person to show up to hand over the Holy Key.

There was the High Blood, the mysterious, vanishing tweaked blood which let people talk to the Invisible Light and receive the Holy Key.

And finally there was Agatha, who could talk to the Helmsmen, cross the Bridges unscathed, and feel the minds of the Abominations, but had no connection at all neither with the High Blood nor with the Holy Key.

The sound of gunshots and hand grenades was getting closer.

My time was over.

I stood up, feeling sick from the frustration and the disappointment, and headed for the stairwell to join my friends.

[Agatha]

"Go! Go! Go!"

The Royal Marines were retreating. The eight or so still uninjured had assumed a crescent-shaped formation, while two only slightly wounded were dragging the two seriously wounded to the stairwell. Apparently, the lance corporal we had met was the highest ranking among those present and was shouting orders to the others.

The head of an Abomination showed up above the barricade. I was reloading, sitting on the ground with my back to the barricade. I saw the surprised look in the eyes of the Marines and instinctively pointed my gun upwards, holding it above my head, and there it was, two flat circular red lights above a horizontal slash full of steel barbs. The nose was another vertical slash, covered in a matte metal grille.

I pulled the trigger as it emerged head and shoulders over the barricade, and the left half of its head exploded in bone splinters, metal shards and weirdly desiccated brain matter.

"With us! Go, for all the gods' sake!" the lance corporal shouted.

Two more heads emerged beside the damaged one. The surviving red eye was still zeroed in on me. A feeling of loneliness and loss was filling me again.

Sister Hinewai acted. She stuck her revolver into the belt and grabbed me by the waist as though I was a stuffed animal. I managed not to squeal, but it was a close call. She was surprisingly quick too; in a few strides she was beyond the Marines.

"Grenades!" the lance corporal ordered.

Abominations were almost impervious to grenades, but at least the noise confused them for a few moments.

Sister Hinewai dropped me unceremoniously beyond the door to the stairwell and turned back. I managed to break the fall with my arms and knees, and as I scrambled up, she was already back, dragging two more injured Marines by the scruff of the neck.

One of them was Chyou.

She had a long gash on her cheekbone and a hole in her uniform just above her waistline, from which blood was seeping out and drenching her jacket.

I heard the muffled clangs of the grenades hitting the floor, then the Marines spilled into the stairwell and slammed the doors closed, keeping them in place with their shoulders propped against the heavy wooden panels.

Chrysaor Tower shook as the grenades exploded.

One of the Marines wrapped Chyou's arm around his own shoulders and made her stand up. Chyou was barely conscious.

"To the bunkers," the lance corporal said.

I shook my head. "We have to get Tristan and the other Marines."

"I have almost a dozen people to take care of. And now that the Abominations are inside the Tower, we have to lock the bunker doors."

I nodded. "Go right ahead. Sister Hinewai, go with him."

"No way in hell. I'm with you."

I rolled my eyes. "Right. Lance corporal, good luck."

"I'm sorry, kids."

"Don't be. I'm going where I want to go, and the grizzly bear here too is making her choice."

Sister Hinewai and I darted up the stairs three steps at a time as the Marines ran down to reach the underground floor where the bunker was. If we didn't die of a heart attack in the meanwhile, twenty-five floors were going to take a hell of a lot of time for the Abominations to go up. We just had to pray that at least one of the suspended footbridges was still intact.

I heard the doors slamming open as we reached the tenth floor. We had slowed down considerably, but I estimated that we had put at least ten minutes between us and the Abominations.

We met Sharma and Allen on the nineteenth floor, running down the stairs.

"Where is Tristan?"

"On the balcony floor," Sharma said, skidding to a halt on the landing. "Doesn't want to go down. Says it's all been a huge waste of time."

"We were hoping you could convince him to see reason," Allen said. "I had to blow up the footbridge back to Perseus Tower, but the other tower is still accessible."

"There are Abominations coming up the stairs," I warned them. "We'll have to run away through the suspended footbridge."

Sharma and Allen glanced at each other, then they both nodded.

"You go," Sharma said. "We'll keep the Abominations busy and buy you some time."

"It's a suicide," I pointed out.

"It's the reason why we have chosen to fight," Sharma shot back.

I turned to Allen. "You too?"

She grabbed Sharma's hand and squeezed it. "Where my old ball and chain goes, I go."

I nodded. Hugged them both.

"Go, kid," Sharma whispered in my ear. "Just make it worth it."

[Tristan]

Agatha and Sister Hinewai barged into the mangled reading hall that led to the destroyed footbridge to Perseus Tower. I was sitting on the ground hugging my knees, my mind empty. Only a few minutes before I was sure I was going to find all the answers.

I was bitterly mistaken.

"Dude, what the hell," growled Agatha, going down to her haunches.

Sister Hinewai did the same.

The girls had bloodstained and sweat-drenched habits, faces blackened from gun smoke and soot, bruised knuckles.

"I am sorry," I managed to whisper.

"Dude, get a grip. We have to go."

I shook my head. "Let the League take me. It was all a mistake. There are no answers here. I dragged everybody on a fool's errand."

Sounds of gunfire from the stairwell.

"So much for the blinding epiphany we were hoping for," Agatha grumbled.

"Tristan, please stand up and let's go." Sister Hinewai's voice was soft. "You did your best."

"And a fat lot of good it did," I snorted. "I discovered there is a mysterious thing called the Holy Key, which has the power to heal the Bridges and turn its holder into the master of the Bridges. The Invisible Light has been waiting for centuries to hand it over to someone with High Blood."

"Stargazer said my High Blood was strong," Agatha said. "Doctor Godefray too mentioned the High Blood."

I nodded. "It was some stuff that let the ancients talk to the Ghosts, but after the Blackout it got diluted down the generations. The Order of Remembrance has been running some kind of breeding program to create people with enough High Blood to get the Holy Key, and the Finisterre team were all part of the program."

I fell silent. Agatha and Sister Hinewai glanced at each other.

"But?"

I chuckled bitterly. "It ends here. Nothing links you to the Finisterre team, and they are all dead."

"Darcy Holmes received the Holy Key," Agatha pointed out.

"Yes, but only as a temporary bearer. Her High Blood wasn't strong enough for the Holy Key. Their abbess was confident that if Darcy and Liam had children together, their offspring was going to be much stronger, but the two hated each other's guts. And they died before the Order could trick them into... um..."

"Having sex?"

I nodded.

"Bloody hell." It was Sister Hinewai.

I frowned. Agatha turned to stare at her in disbelief.

"Bloody hell," Sister Hinewai repeated, shaking her head.

"What's wrong with you, sister?" Agatha snorted.

"Remember when I told you that I had stolen some gossip magazines, when we rearranged the Current Events and Latest News section? Well, not exactly stolen, they were destined for the pulping mill anyway..."

"Get to the point, Sister Hinewai," Agatha snorted.

"There was a gossip article about the Finisterre team's private lives." Sister Hinewai hesitated.

"Spit it out right away or I'm gonna shoot you."

"Darcy and Liam didn't hate each other. It was all a set-up. Actually, they were in love. They resented the fact that the abbess was pressuring them into a relationship, so they pretended they couldn't stand each other just to get on the abbess' nerves."

Agatha rolled her eyes. "And?"

"At the time of the mission, Darcy Holmes was a few weeks pregnant. Her baby should be about fifteen now."