Consequences used to arrive with uniforms.
Now they arrive with faces.
The first consequence doesn’t look like punishment.
It looks like a mistake that no one can pass upward.
At midmorning, a storage cellar collapses in the southern district. Not dramatically—no fire, no screams—but enough to trap two people beneath fallen beams and stone. The cellar had been flagged days ago for repair, mentioned twice in open conversation, and quietly deprioritized when other needs crowded in.
No authority signed off on that choice.
Everyone did.
The runners bring the news fast.
Kael arrives with Rowan and three others, not as command but as gravity. People gather, tools in hand, voices tight.
Someone asks the old question out of reflex. “Who decides what we do first?”
No one answers.
The sil
