The detention center's infirmary smelled of antiseptic and old blood. Alaric Frost lay on a steel-framed bed, his chest wrapped in bandages that were already blooming with red, his pale face drawn tight with pain. Tubes ran from his arms to a bank of monitors that beeped with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat that refused to stop. His eyes were closed, but when Vane entered the room, they opened—those pale gray irises, still sharp, still seeing, still calculating even on the threshold of death.
"Three stab wounds," the attending physician said, her voice low and urgent. "One to the abdomen, two to the chest. The abdominal wound perforated his intestine. The chest wounds nicked his left lung. He lost a great deal of blood before the guards found him. Frankly, it is remarkable that he is still alive."
"How did it happen?" Vane asked.
The physician shook her head. "You will have to ask Security. My job is to keep him breathing."
She retreated to a corner of the room, leaving Vane alone with the man who had tried to destroy the city. Vane pulled up a metal chair and sat beside the bed, his eyes fixed on Frost's face. The sculptor's lips were cracked and dry, his skin the color of old ivory. But his eyes were still alive, still burning with that terrible, familiar intensity.
"Who did this to you?" Vane asked.
"A man in a guard's uniform," Frost whispered. "But he was not a guard. I know the guards here. I have memorized their faces, their gaits, the way they hold their weapons. This man was different. He moved like someone who had been trained to kill quietly."
"Did he say anything?"
"He said, 'Act Four was not supposed to fail.' And then he stabbed me." Frost coughed, and a thin trickle of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. "It seems I am not the only one who wanted the Requiem to continue."
Vane felt a chill crawl down his spine. "Someone else knows about the Requiem. Someone who wanted Act Four to succeed."
"Someone who had access to the detention center. Someone who could bypass security without raising alarms. Someone with the resources to place a trained operative in a guard's uniform." Frost's eyes met Vane's, and despite the pain, there was something like amusement in them. "You are not as alone in your Bureau as you thought, Agent Vane."
"The note. It said Act Six begins at dawn."
"It was not from me." Frost's voice was fading, the effort of speech draining what little strength he had. "I have been in this cell since I surrendered. I have written no notes. I have sent no messages. Someone else is speaking in my name."
Vane sat back in his chair, his mind racing. A second player. Someone inside the system, someone with access and resources, who had been watching Frost's Requiem unfold and had decided to continue it. Someone who had stabbed Frost not to kill him, but to silence him—or perhaps to martyr him.
"Act Six," Vane said. "What was Act Six supposed to be?"
Frost closed his eyes, and for a moment Vane thought he had lost consciousness. Then he spoke, his voice barely a whisper.
"Act Six was called The False Gods. It was to take place at the Cathedral of Saint-Vincent, during the Feast of Saint Sébastien, when the cathedral is filled with worshippers and politicians and all the powerful people who pretend to be pious while they crush the poor beneath their heels. I had planned to bring down the central dome. The deaths would have been... significant."
"The Feast of Saint Sébastien. That's tomorrow."
"Yes." Frost opened his eyes. "The note said Act Six begins at dawn. The Feast begins at dawn. Someone has read my journal—the one I kept in the studio, the one with the plans for all twenty-four acts. They know the locations, the codes, the sequence. They know everything."
Vane stood up, his exhaustion forgotten. "The journal was supposed to be in the evidence room. Under seal."
"Seals can be broken. Evidence rooms can be breached. The person who attacked me was able to enter a maximum-security detention center. A locked room in the Bureau's basement would not be an obstacle for such a person." Frost reached out, his bandaged hand grasping Vane's wrist with surprising strength. "You must stop them. The Requiem was my creation. It was supposed to be mine—my grief, my rage, my art. If someone else completes it, they will not understand what it means. They will turn it into something crude. Something ugly."
"I thought you wanted the Requiem to be finished."
"I wanted it to be finished by me." Frost's grip tightened. "Or not at all. There is a difference between a sculpture and a slaughter. If the person who attacked me completes the Requiem, it will be slaughter. They do not care about Dax, or my father, or justice. They care only about destruction."
Vane pulled his wrist free and turned toward the door. Dufort was waiting in the corridor, her face pale with exhaustion and something that looked like fear.
"We need to get to the evidence room," Vane said. "Frost's journal—the one with the plans. Someone has taken it."
"I already checked," Dufort said. "The journal is gone. The evidence clerk on duty said it was signed out three hours ago by someone with proper authorization. The signature on the log is yours."
"Mine?"
"Someone forged your signature. Someone who knows the Bureau's procedures well enough to fake a chain-of-custody form." Dufort's voice was grim. "This goes deep, Vane. Deeper than we thought."
They walked together through the detention center's corridors, past the checkpoints and the armed guards, into the cold predawn air. The sky was still dark, the stars fading one by one as the first pale light of dawn crept over the horizon. The Feast of Saint Sébastien would begin in less than two hours. The cathedral would be filled with thousands of people—worshippers, politicians, dignitaries from across the Republic. If Act Six was the same as Frost had planned, the dome would come down on all of them.
"We need to evacuate the cathedral," Dufort said.
"We can't. If we evacuate, the person behind this will know we are on to them. They will disappear, and Act Seven will happen somewhere else, somewhere we cannot predict. We need to catch them in the act."
"Like we tried at the Academy." Dufort's voice was sharp. "That nearly ended in disaster."
"This is different. At the Academy, Frost was in control. He had planned for every contingency. But whoever is behind this is not Frost. They are improvising, working from stolen plans. They will make mistakes."
"Or they will be more dangerous, because they have nothing to lose."
Vane did not answer. He was thinking about the signature on the evidence log, the man in the guard's uniform, the knife that had nearly killed Frost. Someone with access, with resources, with the ability to move through the Bureau's systems without being detected. Someone who had been watching the investigation from the beginning, waiting for the right moment to strike.
And then, with a certainty that felt like ice water in his veins, he knew.
"Montreux," he said.
Dufort stared at him. "You think the Director of the Bureau is behind this?"
"Think about it. He had access to the evidence room. He had the authority to place an operative in the detention center. He was the one who ordered the shot at the café, the shot that nearly caused Frost to detonate the devices. And he has been trying to control the narrative from the beginning—to make himself the hero who stopped the Requiem, to silence anyone who might contradict his version of events."
"But why would he want Act Six to happen? If the cathedral collapses, if thousands of people die, it will be a catastrophe for the Bureau. For him."
"Because he does not want Act Six to happen. He wants to be seen stopping it." Vane's mind was racing, piecing together the fragments. "He stole the journal. He knows where the devices are. He will 'discover' them at the last moment, after the evacuation has begun, and he will disarm them himself. He will be the hero who saved the cathedral, who stopped the Requiem, who brought the terrorist to justice. And he will make sure that no one ever knows about Frost's surrender, or the forty-seven devices we disarmed, or the fact that he nearly got hundreds of people killed at the Academy."
"That is insane."
"It is politics. Montreux does not care about justice. He cares about power. And right now, the person who controls the narrative of the Requiem controls the future of the Bureau. He is not going to let that slip away."
Dufort was silent for a long moment, her sharp eyes searching Vane's face. "If you are right, we need proof. Without proof, accusing the Director of conspiracy is career suicide."
"Then we get proof." Vane turned toward the car. "We go to the cathedral. We find the devices before Montreux does. And we catch him in the act."
The Cathedral of Saint-Vincent rose from the heart of Porteblanc like a mountain carved from stone, its spires piercing the dawn sky, its great bells silent in anticipation of the Feast. The plaza before it was already filling with worshippers, their breath misting in the cold morning air, their voices a low murmur of prayer and expectation. They did not know that they were walking into a trap.
Vane and Dufort entered through a side door, using credentials that Dufort had obtained from a contact in the Archbishop's office. The cathedral's interior was vast and shadowed, its vaulted ceilings lost in darkness, its walls lined with chapels and confessionals and statues of saints whose eyes seemed to follow them as they passed.
"The devices will be at the base of the dome," Vane said, consulting his memory of Frost's maquettes. "There were four of them, placed at the cardinal points—north, south, east, west. Each one designed to take out a section of the dome's supports."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I saw the maquette. Act Six: The False Gods. It showed the dome collapsing, the statues of the saints tumbling down, the congregation buried in rubble. Frost called it a purification."
They split up, Dufort taking the north and east quadrants, Vane taking the south and west. The cathedral was a maze of stairwells and service corridors, of ancient stonework and modern electrical panels, of shadows that seemed to shift and move at the edge of vision. Vane climbed a narrow spiral staircase to the triforium, the gallery that ran around the interior of the dome, and began searching for the device that should be at the south cardinal point.
He found it behind a statue of Saint Sébastien, the martyr who had been pierced with arrows. The device was identical to the ones they had disarmed the day before—a matte black box with a keypad and an LED display. The display showed a countdown timer: 01:23:45. One hour, twenty-three minutes, forty-five seconds until detonation.
Vane reached for the journal in his coat pocket, the one Frost had given him at the quarry. But the journal did not contain the codes for Act Six. It only covered Acts One through Five, the acts that Frost had planned before his surrender. The codes for Act Six were in the stolen journal, the one that had been taken from the evidence room.
"Vane." Dufort's voice crackled in his earpiece. "I found one in the north quadrant. But I do not have the code."
"Neither do I. The codes for Act Six are in the stolen journal."
"Then we are stuck. We cannot disarm these devices without the codes, and if we try to force them, they will detonate."
Vane stared at the device, at the countdown timer that was steadily ticking toward zero. Somewhere in the cathedral, four devices were waiting to bring down the dome. And somewhere in the city, a man who had worn a guard's uniform and stabbed a sculptor was waiting for the moment when he could reveal himself as the hero who had saved the Republic.
"Montreux has the codes," Vane said. "He will come here before the timer runs out. He will disarm the devices himself, in front of cameras and witnesses and the whole apparatus of the state. And he will make sure that no one ever knows the truth."
"Then we wait for him."
"And if he does not come? If this was not his plan, and the devices detonate?"
The silence on the radio was answer enough.
Vane knelt before the device, studying its surface. The keypad had twelve keys, arranged in the standard pattern. The code was a word—Frost always used words, meaningful words, words that connected to the theme of the act. The False Gods. What word would Frost have chosen?
He thought about the cathedral, about the saints whose statues lined the walls, about the worshippers who came here to pray to gods of stone and silence. False gods. Idols. Deceptions.
"IDOL," Vane typed.
The display flashed: INVALID CODE. TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING.
"IDOLS."
INVALID CODE. ONE ATTEMPT REMAINING. WARNING: INCORRECT CODE WILL TRIGGER IMMEDIATE DETONATION.
Vane's finger hovered over the keypad. One more attempt. If he got it wrong, the device would detonate, and the dome would come down on everyone inside the cathedral.
"What would Frost have chosen?" he muttered to himself. "What word would mean something to him?"
He thought about the sculptor, about the pale eyes and the gentle voice and the absolute conviction that what he was doing was art. He thought about the quarry, and the letter to his father, and the moment at the edge of the abyss when Frost had surrendered the Requiem. He thought about the word Frost had used, over and over, throughout their conversations.
"JUSTICE."
INVALID CODE. DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED.
The timer on the display began counting down from sixty seconds. Vane stumbled backward, his heart pounding, his mind screaming. He had gotten it wrong. He had triggered the detonation. The dome was going to collapse, and everyone inside the cathedral was going to die.
"Vane, what is happening?" Dufort shouted in his earpiece.
"I triggered it. I got the code wrong, and I triggered it."
"All four devices just activated. They are all counting down."
Sixty seconds. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.
And then, from the shadows behind the statue of Saint Sébastien, a figure stepped forward. It was Montreux, his politician's smile replaced by an expression of cold, calculating fury. In his hand, he held the stolen journal.
"Step aside, Vane," Montreux said. "This is my operation now."
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