Vox found his way to the rooftop, perching at the edge of the steeple like some holy symbol. From here, Thirty-Six looked like a chessboard left mid game. Lit up by pockets of rebel flames, and the dark figures of regiment patrols scouring streets neither own side wholly claimed.

He let the wind burn off the last of the battle smoke on his coat. In the square, the crowd continued to vibrate with a mix of fear and uneasiness. They’d seen him earlier as they were rallying some of the rebels, when they’d managed to push the regime enough to tip.

Vox rarely spoke. It was a silence he left open deliberately. The public filled it in with what they needed. A savior, a myth, a weapon pointed at the right enemy, depending on whose tongue spoke it. Myths spread the fastest when you didn’t dilute them with too much truth.

He knew exactly where to show his face, and when—at the precipice, when his entrance would seem like fate. 

Intel found its way to him in various ways. He knew about nearly every supply cache in Carvek. He knew where to expect Unified troop movements, even rebel skirmish points. On a stolen datapad he’d taken from a dead Unified lieutenant, he’d been able to access encrypted keys that he could use to log into the Unified Government’s logistics database. The entries never long enough to trip firewalls. 

As support garnered across the nation, he’d started receiving more. Encrypted messages from sympathetic officers and quartermasters still strapped in their service, risking everything to give him tidbits of truth. Not everything was usable, but enough was salvageable. It helped strengthen his mythos. Showing up right when hope seemed impossible.

And more than that, he was highly attentive, intelligent and focused. His own eyes and ears in the right place before anyone else realized he was there. 

Years ago, before the escape, there had been a systems engineer who was supposed to maintain his restraints, not loosen them. She erased him from surveillance windows, and then when the first insurgency rolled through the capital, she had shut down his containment all together. Though, Vox was never fully sure why. Whether it was because of some final glimpse of empathy—or rather—that his escape had been superstitiously predestined, and she had prepared to be on the opposite side of his fury, Vox didn’t know.

On paper, he’d been killed in the fighting. In actuality, he’d walked right out into the smoke. The woman had vanished the same night. She was still around, though, and sometimes he saw her fingerprints — in a set of false credentials, in the backdoor of a system she had no business touching.

Most of his collaborators were that way. Shadows of people who wanted him to succeed, but not enough to stand beside him in daylight. 

Like a ripple on the ocean, his thoughts shifted again, finding their way back to Toric. Their brief meeting still replayed in his mind. How hot Toric’s sun scorched skin was––so different from his own. The fire behind his hazel eyes. And the mask of indifference he wore like armor. The one he snapped closed the instant vulnerability was exposed, like a trap. 

There was a flicker of something wounded beneath his defiance, but quickly hidden. That kind of denial was a well crafted fortress, one Vox was more interested in than the hostility he wore on the surface. 

He stepped closer to the ledge of the rooftop, cape snapping, looking out over Sector Thirty-Six.

“You’re not afraid,” he said to no one. “Just controlled.” He tilted his head slightly, as if attempting to study something that was visible only to him. 

“You fight like you have nothing left to lose,” he continued, thoughtfully. “But you flinch when somebody sees you. What is it, you’re still protecting, Toric?” 

His arms folded loosely, cape fluttering slightly at the edges. He stared at nothing, letting his eyes blur.  “How far would you go,” Vox continued quietly, “if you stopped lying to yourself?” 

He allowed the question to simmer in the dark, like a ember going dim. The wind was pulling at his collar, sharp with ash.

“It won’t be force,” he said after a long pause, more to himself than for the night. 

“You’d sooner die, than that. I admire it—that spine of yours. I want it whole.” 

That part had surprised him too — not the tactic of it, but the desire.

He could still see the scene replaying behind his eyes. Toric at the grand table with gritted teeth, his right hand going white-knuckled around the apple. The tremor he hadn’t meant to reveal when Vox stepped behind him. That split second when he didn’t know whether to flee or submit.

Vox’s tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek, thoughtful. His hands remained folded behind his back.

A man like that didn’t bow easily. But if he did…

A darker image sparked behind his eyes: Toric on his knees, his breath gone ragged, lips ghosting over the bare flesh of his thigh. Not out of submission, but surrender. Hard fought. Hard won.

“Yes, Sovereign.” He whispered as his bottom lip trembled.

The words weren’t real, but Vox didn’t care, he heard them, between the breaths. Reverent, and hushed like a prayer turned confession.

He sucked in a slow breath, and forced it to steady as treacherous heat found itself creeping up his spine, pooling low and heavy in his belly. The image threatened to root itself, becoming bothersome enough to distract him. But he wouldn’t allow it. 

Desire without restraint was weakness. 

He would not be ruled by lust, no matter how sweet its reward would taste.

Control was everything. It was the only thing.

All that mattered was that Toric came willingly. 

But while Vox continued to develop the next three steps of his plan, the thought still hung around like mist on the edges of his mind. 

Toric, Toric, Toric. Burning hot not with insurrection but with purpose.

Purpose Vox had every intention of fulfilling. 

He exhaled through his nose carefully, deliberately, and shifted his focus to the west, toward the high spires where the Unified Government’s inner tier still chirped away tirelessly — a hive of order and steel, filled with men who believed the world could be held together by sheer numbers. Men who still believed the walls insulated them from recompense.

There was another man on Vox’s mind. Not a soldier—a man too careful for battlefield pandemonium, He was picturesque and just exact enough, gliding across the corridors of power like a breeze of chilly air. A lithe man with smooth dark skin, a face that rarely wavered and eyes as sharp as honed blades. His mind was a live wire with logic and predestination.

The regime obsessed over control out of fear. This man did so out of principle. Justifying reason before decency.

His name was Quillan Ward.

One of the regime’s brightest minds in logistics and operations. The voiceless architect behind troop movements and surveillance. He could starve a rebellion squadron or rescue one, depending alone on decimal points.

He was not a metahuman. But he had studied metahumans, fervently, nearly obsessively. 

The first time Quillan had seen Vox was during the collapse of a city block in Sector Three. Regime soldiers tore through the crowd, the uprising barely hanging on. Vox walked into that chaos and stopped it cold. He did so without speeches. Just a haunting power and precision that Quillan noticed.

And for a second, he’d felt something flicker in his face that he hadn’t felt in decades. Awe.

Quillan was not a religious man, nor a spiritual one. But his curiosity ran deeper than a passing fascination. A kind of soft worship, maybe. Not for the man himself, but for what the man could do.

He had reached out first. Offered just a breadcrumb to see what Vox would do with it. Three days later, it had saved a rebel pocket from slaughter.

Then he fed another. And another. Convoy routes. Deployment orders. Messages that were precise enough to capitalize on, but never enough to track back to him. Vox had cross checked them all for hints of sabotage. But all he discovered was flawless intel, brief and exact. Nothing wasteful. Quillan was not trying to stifle his efforts—he was helping him conquer.

He still worked in command centers, still wore regime colors. But his allegiances had begun to shift with each victory that Vox secured, that much was clear. Quillan had developed a quiet, calculated admiration for Vox, one that was only waiting on his signal to fully defect.

Vox wasn’t fascinated by Quillan––not in the way he was with Toric. No, Quillan wasn’t a man who he needed to break in order to solidify his allegiance. Threads of subservience were already there. He was a tool. A good and sharp tool. One Vox wasn’t going to let go to waste.

But he couldn’t absorb him just yet. At least––not openly. Not until his infrastructure was installed and he had the power to utilize Quillan’s worth without exposing him.

Soon.

He would embrace him to the fold, fully and irrevocably.