​Chapter 31. It’s Better Not to Notice Them

Dawn bled faintly through the window. Mari slept — her steady breathing was the only real sound in this strange, almost alchemical refuge.

The walls were covered in shelves stuffed to the brim with dusty books. On the spines you could still make out faded titles: Ars Notoria, Codex Gigas, Malleus Maleficarum, De Praestigiis Daemonum — huge, heavy tomes. It was unclear how any of this had survived the war.

Careful not to wake her, he got up and dressed. Even in sleep, she didn’t take off the visor — a thin bar of light cut across her face like a trace of alien technology on living skin.

She had given him shelter when he’d become a ghost trapped in an icy hell. Answers — or something like them — lived in her books, in her silent support. And now her home, her fragile existence in the Ring, was under threat. Lily and Amy knew where they were, and they wouldn’t stop until they erased everything he cared about.

He slipped the cuff Amy had given him into his jacket pocket — a useless toy in their new game. Mari must not know about his meeting or the comm. Not yet.

The pre-dawn air was cold and dry, rasping in his chest. The snow had stopped, leaving the Old City under a thin veil on which every step was visible. The Ring slept, but the quiet was deceptive — the calm before the City’s voice began to rise beyond the Barrier. His senses worked at full capacity: he heard the low hum of the generator from many blocks away, caught the slightest movement in dark alleys — rats scuttling, rusted gates creaking, the breathing of those asleep in abandoned houses. He was no longer a victim hiding in the shadows. He had become a hunter on his own turf, and that thought stirred something ancient and feral inside him, ready for the fight.

The Legion’s headquarters already pulsed with the feverish rhythm of battle preparations, despite the early hour. Derek’s men in black jackets marked with white crosses moved fast and in a coordinated way. They checked weapons, dragged crates of ammunition, throwing short, clipped phrases at one another. When Mark stepped into the old factory yard, their eyes slid over his cloak, over the deep hood concealing his face. Without curiosity — only with grim determination. They’d gotten used to him.

Derek stood in his office — a cramped room with peeling walls, where a single lamp shone over a large tactical map of the Old City. He hadn’t slept all night; his face had gone ashen, his eyes burned with manic energy. The end was coming, but he refused to accept it. The map was scribbled over with red and blue lines, notes on positions, caches, and approaches to the generator.

Mark approached the table and pushed back his hood. For a moment, Derek’s face lost its stoic mask, betraying a mix of disgust and almost superstitious fear. It was revulsion toward something unnatural, wrong — and terror at the power that could twist a man like this. He turned away.

“You were right, cop,” Derek rasped. “They declared a purge.”

“I saw it,” Mark said. “What are you planning to do?”

Derek slammed his fist on the table, the lamp jumping.

“What I always do. Rusty will rig the approaches, Slim is rallying his people at the market.”

“Pointless,” Mark said, striking with precision. “They’ll send borgs and drones. They’ll grind you to dust, and you know it. All of you will die.”

Derek clenched his fists, a vein standing out on his neck.

“And what do you suggest? Running? Handing them the generator without a fight?”

Mark walked to the small, grimy window facing the yard. Men in black jackets dragged a huge crate, then dropped it, cursing. Steam rose from their mouths, dissolving into the freezing air. He could feel their fear, their resolve, their desperation just as clearly as the hum of the generator pulsing somewhere far away.

“Tell me how it usually goes,” he said, not turning from the window. “I saw the reports, but those are just numbers. How did it happen at the Northern Farms?”

Derek tore himself from the map, shoving the chair back so hard it nearly toppled.

“The farms?” He spat on the grimy floor. “It didn’t ‘go’ at all. They set up cordons, sent drones in for intimidation. A couple warning shots in the air — that’s it. No one fought back. The farmers packed their things and moved deeper into the Ring. Quiet. Like cattle.”

Mark turned.

“But this isn’t the farms. If we wait for them here, the whole Old City will turn into a meat grinder. After that, we’ll have to flee west or into Eastside anyway.”

He stepped up to the table and bent over the map. After orienting himself, he pointed to the zone of abandoned warehouses and derelict production buildings between the Old City and the Barrier.

“We meet them here. They think we’ll defend the generator, sit in the trap. We hit them on the approach, in these ruins. Set an ambush.”

Derek narrowed his eyes, gaze sliding across the map, then across Mark. The exhaustion vanished, leaving only a cold, strategic interest — the look of someone evaluating a new piece on the board.

“An ambush?” He paused, weighing the layout. “Yeah. That’s better than waiting here.”

He jabbed a calloused finger at the map.

“Right here. The old Cyclone factory and the twin high-rises. Perfect rooftops. From there, we can control the only road they’ll take.”

“They’ll hit with drones first,” Mark continued. “To scan the area and suppress resistance. We need machine gunners and anti-drone teams. On every roof.”

Derek nodded and pressed a button on the intercom.

“Rusty, get in here.”

A minute later, the mechanic came in, wiping his hands on a filthy rag.

Rusty — short, stocky, in an oil-stained coverall that had once been blue and was now a dull yellow-brown. He didn’t smell of alcohol, like most people in the Ring, but of machine oil.

Where his left eye had been, there was an old cybernetic implant: a dim, scratched lens that hummed faintly as it focused, able to see in several spectra. He was the one who kept the dying machines of the Ring running.

“Yeah, boss,” Rusty said, instantly scanning Mark. The lens blinked, but he betrayed no surprise.

“Cyclone and the high-rises,” Derek pointed at the map. “Prepare the positions. Two heavy machine guns on each roof. And every anti-drone rifle we’ve got. Move people in tonight, during the blizzard. Take anti-thermal cloaks. We stay invisible until the last second.”

Rusty nodded silently.

“Set up decoy thermal targets on the neighboring buildings,” Derek continued. “Short EMP bursts on approach — so they don’t track us by the signal interference. Set up a mine corridor in the passages between the warehouses. We need a second fallback route through Cyclone’s basements. Radio silence — only lights and gestures.”

Rusty nodded again and left without another word.

“The problem is, we don’t know the exact start time,” Derek said, turning back to the map. “We can’t keep people lying in ambush out in the cold for days. Sooner or later someone will screw up, and they’ll spot us.”

Amy’s words in the bar suddenly took on a new meaning. “In a week. 7 a.m.” She hadn’t been talking about meeting him — she’d meant the guests who would arrive, and not for him. Amy could lie about a lot of things, but not that. She could hide motives, slip him bait like that cuff, but the time? There was no reason to lie about that. Most likely, she had come specifically to give him the timing. Why?

It meant Lily wanted them to have an advantage.

“Next Thursday. Seven in the morning,” Mark said.

Derek shot him a skeptical look.

“Where did you get that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mark said sharply. “We have the exact time. We can prepare.”

Derek watched him for another moment, then apparently decided not to ask questions and nodded.

“Fine. We’ll prepare for Thursday.”

Another question gnawed at Mark. Amy’s words circled in his mind, and he knew: if he didn’t check, he’d walk straight into a trap. He needed to clarify the Ring’s connection to Lily.

“Derek,” he said, lowering his voice. “A few days ago, a woman came to the Abyss — Lily Thorne’s assistant. Your bartender cleared the place so we could talk.”

Derek’s face darkened; he turned away from the map and sank heavily into his chair.

“That was their... request.”

“Request?” Mark couldn’t hide his surprise. “They give orders to the Legion?”

“They don’t give orders,” Derek’s lips twisted in a dry smirk. “They ask. But their requests are the kind you really don’t want to say ‘no’ to. Lily Thorne’s sect isn’t a regular Ring gang. They don’t need generators, territory, or credits. They’re... different. They need people.”

He pressed his fingers hard to his temples, staring at nothing.

“We don’t know who they really are. But they’ve been in the Ring and the City longer than the Legion or Sector 17. They’re like... mold that grew everywhere. They have people in every gang. We don’t even know who exactly. Could be some random guard or... Rusty, for instance. None of the bosses want to cross them. It’s easier to do them a favor and hope they leave you alone.”

He was visibly fighting sleep, worn down to the edge of exhaustion.

“Are they borgs?” Mark asked, grasping at the only category he knew.

Derek let out a short, bitter laugh.

“No,” he said. “Mostly people from different cults — like the Children of Chaos and others like them. But not borgs. They aren’t about tech, they’re more... into all that satanic crap. I wouldn’t have believed any of it, but... I’ve heard too many stories about what they can do to you. I saw one guy who went insane, babbling nonsense, carving symbols into his skin, drooling all over himself. We had to shoot him so he wouldn’t suffer.”

He lit a cigarette; smoke curled under the lamp.

“I borrowed a lot of books from your... friend about that stuff, but none of it helped. All those protective circles, amulets... They say it’s all bullshit and it’s never saved anyone. So I figured — better just ignore them, and if they ask for something, do it. Maybe that’s cowardice, or maybe I’m a goddamn genius.”

Derek let out a humorless grin.

“In the end, I’m a soldier, not some damn exorcist or whatever they’re called.”

A cult. People in every gang. A network running through the Ring and the City. Everything connected. Something to think about later — he needed help now from anyone who’d offer it.

“Maybe we should talk to the other gangs?” Mark suggested. “The Ravens, the others. Bring everyone together. If the City comes for one generator, tomorrow they’ll come for the next. They have to understand that. Fighting them off together would be easier.”

Derek looked at him as if Mark had just suggested negotiating with the weather to make the rain stop.

“Call a Council?” his voice held a sharp, tired bitterness. “You’re still thinking like a cop. Like someone from the City. You think we’re all brothers-in-misery down here?”

He spoke calmly, as if stating a simple fact.

“The Ravens, Sector 17, Eastside... we’re not allies. We’re wolves in one cage. We tolerate each other as long as everyone has their slice of meat. The moment one gets weak, the rest tear him apart.”

Derek lifted his hands a little, as if genuinely puzzled by Mark’s naivety.

“If we lose this fight, they won’t see tragedy — they’ll see a holiday. They’ll stand aside and pray that the City, after swallowing our sector, stays full for a while. That it will take them years to digest our territory and give everyone else some peace. They won’t help us. They’ll wait for us to die. We’re alone.”

Well. They really were alone.

Mark stepped out into the freezing dawn. The conversation hadn’t eased anything — it thickened the fog in his already incomprehensible world.

Derek’s words kept spinning in his head like a broken record.

People from different cults, like the Children of Chaos. Better not to notice them.

Angela came to mind immediately. The strange, quiet girl in that apartment where he’d seen the first version of the murder. Her ritual stillness, the empty flat with a pentagram on the wall. And that chorus of voices in his skull that ended with the word “Chaos.”

He hadn’t understood what she’d done to him then. But now, remembering the superstitious fear in Derek’s eyes, he started piecing it together. The Legion feared the Children of Chaos not because they were criminals, but because they lived outside the rules. Outside the structure of the world itself.

Then he remembered the note to Sylas he’d found in his desk.

...they can set you up with the witch. They say she has heterochromia...

The witch with different-colored eyes. Eliza.

Everything connected. Lily, Eliza, the Children of Chaos. Not a gang or a cult — a network woven through the whole Ring and the City. Fishers of men.

The killings carried out by the Agency’s borgs hadn’t been random. They weren’t “eliminating mystics” — they were systematically, one by one, cutting down Lily’s people. How many bodies had they logged in the case they’d worked on back at the Center? Dozens.

Which meant Eliza’s abduction wasn’t an arrest — it was a strike at their queen. And if Amy was meeting with him now, it meant Lily was being watched.

This wasn’t a war — it was a finishing blow. Lily was losing. In this silent, invisible conflict between her and the Agency, she was the one being pushed back.

And he, Mark, by accepting Amy’s help, had agreed to work for them. Without knowing it, he’d signed up for the army that was retreating. A pawn on a side that had already lost half its pieces.

He stopped in the middle of the snow-covered street and lifted his head, staring into the heavy, indifferent sky.

And then, right after that thought, came another one — sharper, more painful.

Why? Why didn’t she tell him everything?

They’d been together for so long. In that miserable damp apartment, on the rooftop in the rain, in the car, in the Center’s office. She’d had so many moments to sit beside him and say, “Mark, the world isn’t what it seems. There’s a war you know nothing about. And you’re part of it.”

But she never did.

Instead, she messed with his head. Played with him, tossing him from one reality into another. That whole farce with the Center, with Barry, with his new role as a detective. She didn’t lead him to the truth — she dragged him through a maze of lies and madness.

Why?

He replayed every conversation they’d had.

She saw right through him. She spoke about destruction as if reading his deepest thoughts, knowing everything about him. But instead of telling him the truth, she chose to make him Judas.

The realization came quietly, by itself.

She couldn’t tell him. The old Mark — the tired, cynical cop who lived by the City’s rules — would never have believed her. His logic, his entire life built on the laws of the City, would have rejected her words. “War? Chaos? Witches?” To him, it would’ve sounded like a bad joke.

And what would he have done if he had believed her? Panic, run, or go insane, like that guy Derek mentioned?

She needed to break his faith — in reality, in the system, in himself. Every shift, every moment the illusion cracked, had been a lesson. Cruel, burning away his humanity to awaken something else.

Eliza hadn’t been toying with him. She’d been operating on his mind with no anesthetic, cutting out reality like a tumor and replacing him with something new. She wanted him to break the system.

He stopped and grabbed a streetlamp for balance, and a passerby flinched away, muttering under his breath.

But now he knew: Eliza was losing. And if he stayed with the Children of Chaos, he would be destroyed.

But did he have a choice? The Agency was hunting him too. They had made him this — a monster, a shadow that didn’t fit their sterile world. And Mari... the only thing anchoring him in this fragile refuge that would soon be ashes.

Under the ashen sky, his thoughts unraveled, drifting into emptiness. He didn’t want to take anyone’s side.

Something was building inside him — rage, ready to break loose in a scream: not to run, not to hide, but to smash. And if that meant becoming a destroyer — then so be it.