Chapter 12 · Before the First Lamp Ignites

The thing beneath the market opened its eye.

Lin felt it before she saw it.

The stone floor buckled under her boots, sending a tremor through her knees. Glass awnings chimed overhead. Every lantern in the market swung at once, throwing ribbons of red, blue, and corpse-pale light across the flooded street. Beneath the transparent paving stones, something vast shifted in the dark water.

Then the eye opened.

It was not an eye in any human sense. It was a round absence, wider than the plaza, ringed with reflections of Mistbay: its towers, its bridges, its sleeping apartments, every window glowing with a life that had not yet realized it was being watched.

Nara staggered backward.

The versions of her surrounding the fountain all turned their heads in perfect unison.

One wore a wedding dress stitched from newspaper. Another had a child’s hand clasped in hers. A third was old, silver-haired, and smiling with Lin’s mother’s mouth. Some were bleeding. Some were laughing. One had no face at all, only a smooth sheet of black glass where her features should have been.

All of them reached for Nara.

“Don’t,” Lin said.

Her voice came out raw.