Chapter One — Kael

The plant on Kael Maren's desk had been dying for six weeks.

He was aware of this. He had been meaning to do something about it. The problem was that doing something about it would require him to either water it, replace it, or accept its death and remove it, and all three options demanded a category of decision-making energy that he currently needed entirely for the phone call he had been on for forty-seven minutes with a woman named Mrs. Silford who believed, with the conviction of the genuinely wronged, that her homeowner's policy covered her husband's recent accidental ascension to godhood.

"Ma'am," Kael said, for the eleventh time. He had counted. "I understand your frustration."

The voice on the other end of the phone produced a sound that fell somewhere between indignation and operatic grief. Kael held the receiver approximately four inches from his ear and waited for it to finish.

"Your policy covers fire, flood, and theft," he continued, when the sound had subsided to a manageable register. "It does not cover Accidental Deification. I know that feels like an oversight — " the sound returned briefly — "I know. But if your husband sneezed and accidentally became the God of the Mushroom People, and his divine blessing has rendered your basement a sentient fungal kingdom, that is a zoning violation and an Act of God, which means it falls under the Divine Exclusion Clause, Section 4, Paragraph — "

The office door came off its hinges.

It hit the linoleum with a sound like a filing cabinet falling down a flight of stairs, skidded two feet, and came to rest against the leg of his desk. Kael looked at it. He looked at the empty doorframe. He did not sigh, because sighing required energy he was also currently rationing.

Elara Vance walked in through the space where the door had been. Her trench coat had a scorch mark along the left shoulder that was still faintly smoking. Her boots, as they tracked across the linoleum, left a mixture of substances Kael had learned to classify on sight: cybernetic hydraulic fluid, iridescent and faintly blue. Dragon residue, which had a particular quality of shimmer he'd come to associate with the eastern Mech Corridor incidents. Something greenish that he suspected was from the Cozy Quarter and hoped was just artisanal jam.

She dropped a suppression cuff on his desk. It was glowing. It burned a neat, precise circle through his mousepad and approximately a third of the way into the quarterly incident form he had been filling out underneath it.

Kael looked at the mousepad. He looked at the cuff. He looked at Elara.

"Ma'am," he said into the phone, "I'm going to need to put you on a brief hold."

He set the receiver down without waiting for a response.

"We have a situation," Elara said. She had already located his coffee mug and was drinking from it with the ease of someone who had decided long ago that his coffee was communal property and had simply not informed him of this decision. "Cozy Quarter. A magical girl attempted to purify a cyberpunk CEO during a hostile acquisition meeting. The resulting moral paradox blew the power grid for six blocks."

Kael looked at the smoking mousepad for a moment longer.

"I have been on hold with the Department of Magical Forestry for forty-five minutes," he said. "Do you know what the liability premium is on a purified CEO?"

"High, presumably."

"Astronomical. Because now he wants to pay his workers a living wage. Which means the dark-matter factory is operating at a loss. Which means the district's primary employer is going bankrupt." He looked at her. "You didn't save the city, Vance. You triggered a recession."

"I put a Continuity Lock on the moment his heart grew three sizes," Elara said, setting his mug back down in the wrong spot. "The alternative was letting a magical girl's purification field interact with a cyberpunk moral vacuum at full resonance. Do you know what that produces?"

"I'm going to guess it's also bad."

"It produces a localized enlightenment event that spreads to a six-block radius. Congratulations, you now have a neighborhood full of people experiencing profound spiritual clarity in a district that runs on noir physics. Every detective in the Procedural Borough would have lost their edge simultaneously. The murder rate would have dropped to zero."

Kael considered this. "That sounds fine."

"The Procedural Borough, Kael. Their economy runs on solving murders."

A pause.

"Get your coat," Elara said. "Someone in the Gag Flats just dropped an anvil on a mech."

Kael looked at the hole in his mousepad. At the dying plant. At the phone, from which Mrs. Silford's tinny, distant voice could still be heard delivering a monologue about the indignity of the Divine Exclusion Clause to an empty line. He thought about the forty-five minutes he had spent on hold with the Department of Magical Forestry, and the quarterly incident form that now had a circle burned through it, and the fact that it was not yet ten in the morning.

He got his coat.