Chapter 8: Zero-Nine Dissects a Miracle

Zero-Nine found the girl by process of elimination.

She had been running a quadrant sweep of the necropolis's northern sector for eleven minutes, cataloguing the dissolution pattern's behavior at varying distances from the center column, when her motion-tracking overlay flagged an anomaly behind a collapsed pillar at the arcade's far end: something warm, stationary, and breathing in a controlled pattern that suggested conscious regulation rather than sleep. The storm-charge girl and the ash-boy were still audible toward the center—she could track them by the intermittent blue-white flare of the storm-charge through gaps in the arcade wall—which meant this was the fifth champion. The quiet one. The one who had stood in the hub chamber with her hands folded and said precisely nothing while everyone else established their respective territorial signals.

Zero-Nine approached from the oblique angle that would keep the pillar's collapsed shoulder between herself and the girl's sightline until she was close enough that it wouldn't matter.