Rena moved through the Citadel City crowd with her hood pulled all the way forward and her head down, cutting through the fastest routes she knew from that part of the region to the Teleport Station.

She did not run. Running drew attention. She walked fast and deliberately, the way someone walks when they know exactly where they are going and have no interest in being stopped along the way.

The noise of the market chaos she had left behind was already fading into the general sound of the city as she put distance between herself and the scene. She did not look back. Looking back also drew attention, and more importantly, looking back would have slowed her down.

’Roman is still back there...’

She pressed that thought down hard and kept moving.

It had taken her hours of walk, and the sun and set and rose again before she got to her destination.

The Teleport Station sat on the western edge of the Frontier, a wide structure built from reinforced stone with the area’s emblem above the entrance and a steady flow of Entrants moving in and out at all hours. On Privilege Day, it was supposed to be busier than usual, which was the one thing working in her favour right now.

Busy meant she was one face among many.

She joined the queue at the conversion desk first, pulling out the Gold she had from the trade and feeding it into the currency conversion device, a compact machine that had been standard at every major Teleport Station for decades.

It read the Badlands currency, calculated the real world equivalent, and registered it to the account number she entered. By the time she stepped off the teleport array on the other side, the money would be sitting in her bank account as though it had always been there.

Nobody had ever fully explained how it worked at a technical level. It had simply been working that way for decades, and at some point people had stopped asking and started relying on it.

"Destination?" The attendant at the array desk asked without looking up.

"Diamond City," Rena said, keeping her voice even.

The attendant typed it in, assigned her an array slot, and waved her through.

She stepped onto the array, felt the familiar pull of the teleport activation, and then the station was gone.

...

Diamond City looked exactly the way she had left it.

Wide streets, clean architecture, the particular quality of afternoon light that the city was known for bouncing off the glass surfaces of the taller buildings in the commercial district.

It was a wealthy city, orderly and well maintained, and it had always felt to Rena like a place that had decided what it was a long time ago and had no intention of reconsidering.

She hailed a cab outside the teleport arrival terminal and gave the driver her home address in the residential district on the northern side of the city.

The drive took only twenty minutes before she got to her destination.

Her home.

Her house sat at the end of a quiet street lined with mature trees, a modest but well-kept building that had always been the one constant in a life that had moved around considerably.

Her father’s empire was in the Heartlands. His palaces were in the Heartlands. But her mother had chosen Diamond City before Rena was born and had never left it, and that quiet, firm decision was one of the many things Rena had inherited from her without realising it.

She paid the driver, walked to the front door, and knocked.

The door opened within seconds.

Her mother looked at her for exactly one moment before pulling her in with both arms, holding her tightly without saying anything at all, and Rena closed her eyes and let herself stay in it for longer than she normally would have.

"Come inside," her mother said finally, stepping back and looking at her properly. "You look like you have been in a war."

"Something like that," Rena said.

They sat at the kitchen table while her mother put food together, and Rena talked.

She told her about the Badlands. About Blood Trail Outpost and the valley hunts and the slow, real progress she had been making toward the dream she had been carrying since she was old enough to understand what a community was and what it could become.

She told her about her father’s messengers showing up at the Citadel City market.

She told her about the clash, and about the friends who had been taken because of her, and her mother’s expression moved through several things quietly but did not interrupt.

"He is not going to stop," her mother said when Rena finished.

"I know," Rena said. "But I am not going back to the Steel Empire to sit on a throne I never asked for. That is his dream, not mine. And I have spent enough of my life being shaped around his ambitions."

Her mother looked at her for a long moment.

"You sound exactly like him when you say that," she said. "Which is the most frustrating thing about all of this."

Rena almost smiled despite herself but held it.

"I know that too."

"He took people who matter to you," her mother said. "That is not something you can just leave alone."

"I am not leaving it alone," Rena said. "I just need to handle it the right way. Not his way."

Her mother nodded slowly, the nod of someone who had long since accepted that their child was going to do exactly what they had decided to do and that the best available option was to make sure they did it carefully.

"Do what you believe is right," her mother said. "But be careful. Your father is not a patient man when he wants something."

"I know what he is," Rena said after a nod, her countenance quite serious.

They had dinner together at the kitchen table, the kind of quiet meal that does not need to be filled with conversation because the company itself is enough, and afterward Rena sat with her phone and made the calls she had been planning since the teleport array.

She needed to know who Roman Rings was outside the Badlands. Where he came from. Whether the people who mattered to him knew he was alright.

She paid three separate individuals to run the search, cross referencing registration data and his real world records, and within two hours the information came back to her phone in a clean summary.

She read the address at the bottom of the message.

’117 Vision Street, Duckson Town, Grey City.’

Rena stared at the address for a momentz and then she made one more call.

...

In Duckson Town, on a street that hadn’t for once been quiet all day, Tabatha Rings sat at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago.

Evelyn was on the small couch nearby, not sleeping, staring at the ceiling.

The arrival window for Privilege Day returnees had passed two hours ago.

Nobody had said anything about it directly. They had not needed to. The silence in the house had been saying it clearly enough since the window closed, settling over the three of them with the particular weight of a fear that was becoming harder to keep calling unlikely.

Tabatha’s husband had asked once, quietly, from the bedroom doorway, and she had told him that the window was still open and that he should rest. Then she had sat back down and held her cold tea and listened to the house.

Then after a considerable amount of time, there was a knock at the front door.

Tabatha was up before the second knock landed, crossing the hallway and pulling the door open with a speed that surprised even her.

But unfortunately, there was no one there.

The street outside was empty and still.

But when she looked down...

A single envelope sat on the doorstep, unsealed, with no name written on the front.

She picked it up and took out the paper inside.

It was short. Clean handwriting, deliberate and careful.

("Your son is alive and well. Don’t worry about him. He’s safe. He’s doing well where you all want him to be.")

Tabatha read it twice, and she just didn’t know what to make of it

Then she pressed it against her chest and stood in the open doorway for a long moment, the night air coming in around her, and exhaled a breath that she felt like she had been holding since the day Roman walked out of the house on the morning of the Red Zenith.

From the couch, Evelyn’s voice could be heard.

"Mum? Who was it?"

Tabatha looked down at the letter in her hand.

"Nobody," she said. "But... But he sent a message to us."

Evelyn’s face brightened at that very moment.

"Your brother is fine... He’s doing well."