I turned. The laboratory was empty. Stainless steel tables gleamed coldly under the overhead lights. Glass equipment stood in neat rows, catching reflections like frozen stars. White walls stretched back into shadow. Nothing moved.

My eyes swept the room again, slower this time. Still nothing.

"What is it?" Emily asked, voice tight with confusion. I didn’t answer.

The note stayed in her hand.

Nadez. Look behind you.

The message was still there, ink sharp against the old paper. Slowly, I turned back toward her. And then I saw it.

Her shadow on the floor began to stretch and thicken, pulling away from her feet like smoke rising from water. It rose, took shape, and everything around me went still.

The air dropped like a blade, temperature plunging in a single mechanical cut, freezing against my skin, turning every breath into something solid and painful.

I froze. Emily paused mid-breath, caught in real time, her chest no longer rising, her form locked like glass under frost. The figure appeared fully formed.

Striking blue locks framed a face I had seen in the vision with Eleanor — beautiful, sharp, but aged just enough to show the weight of centuries. Unlike the others who had barely changed, time had left its faint marks on her.

The shadow finished forming and the figure walked straight toward me, each step silent on the tiled floor.

[Riya Belmonte’s silhouette. Capable of contact without proximity.]

[Analyzing motive. 0%. 20%. 50%. 78%.]

[Pure motive.]

She closed the distance and reached for me. Her hand settled against my cheek. It felt like cold air brushing over warm skin — weightless, yet real.

"Abram," she said, snapping me back to the moment. "Of the house of Nadez."

She was like smoke, edges shifting and thinning, but the body held its shape, solid enough to touch.

"Who are you?" I asked, for no good reason, my voice sounding distant in my own ears.

"You know who I am." Our eyes met. Hers were deep, ancient, carrying the kind of tiredness that came from seeing too much. "I’m one of the ones you’ve been hunting." A pause. "And I’ve been hunting for you."

"Why?"

"Because I’m dying." The smoke thinned at the edges of her form, drifting like mist. "And I want to make sure I release what I carry into you."

"Why?" I’d thought every primordial woman stood with the awakening.

"I just want to do one right thing," Riya said. Her voice carried a quiet weight, the sound of someone who had run out of time and was choosing carefully how to spend what little remained. A primordial woman who had helped build the thing that ended the world, now looking for a single act to set against all of it before she faded.

But one right thing didn’t erase the wrong ones, and there was one I couldn’t walk past.

I stood. "You told me Owen was working with us. How?"

She reappeared, fuller now, the blue hair settling around her shoulders. "I understand why you hated him. But he was only doing his job. I don’t want to spend the little time I have on that. There’s too much you need to know."

"You’re the one who sent him to sabotage the Fallen City mission," I said, my footing steadier now. "Aren’t you?"

"That doesn’t matter now—"

"It does." The faces of the people who had died for reasons I still didn’t fully understand came back to me. "It matters."

The smoke settled into her real form — the one I had seen playing on the city billboards, regal and untouchable.

"I didn’t want to get into this, but for your sake." She held my gaze. "The Fallen City mission was never Doctor Reed’s. It was the families’ agenda. An infected inside the walls is key to the awakening."

I tried to hold all of it at once. Trying to understand why the system had let me help carry an infected through the walls if it served the awakening. Maybe the system had only been driving me toward Eleanor. I couldn’t tell.

"Owen did everything he could to stop the mission, and failed. I’m sorry people died. But that’s what I call purpose." She didn’t look away. "Your father used to say purpose isn’t petty."

"What about yesterday?" I asked.

The shadow drifted closer, almost folding into me, cool air brushing my skin.

"You don’t get it yet, do you, Abram?" she said. "Mary Stam is bound to the house of Veyron the way Owen was bound to mine. And the Veyrons and the Vales are working toward the awakening."

The primordial families are divided, I remembered the system notification.

"I thought the awakening couldn’t happen if one source was missing," I said, sitting back down. Because if that were true, then Riya pulling herself out of the families would already be enough to end it.

"Then you should have extracted from a single source and ended it. Why did you ever think you had to take all of us?"

I thought the awakening needed all of them. It didn’t. One was enough.

"Your father was a great man, Abram. If I had listened to him, the world would be at peace by now." The silhouette’s voice began to fray, losing its grip on wherever the real Riya was.

"I’m running out of time. But come to me today. I want to release everything I have to you."

"What happens if I fail to mark all the women?" I asked. She was already gone.

I sat there, breathing, Emily still frozen mid-motion beside me.

"There’s no failing." The voice came again, disembodied now, drifting through the room like wind through leaves. "Do what you need to do, and do it in time." She flickered back into view for a moment, blue hair shifting. "But before I go, be very careful with the Veyron girl you traveled with on the Fallen City mission."

Then she vanished completely.

Emily exhaled hard, like she’d just come off a sprint, chest heaving as color rushed back into her face. She stared at the empty space where Riya had been, then at me.

"You good?" she asked, voice shaky.

"Yeah," I said. "I’m good."

My watch buzzed. Bala again. I stood up.