Luke selected a handgun from the weapons section—standard, reliable, the kind that asked nothing from its owner—then reached for the ring.

The secretary's composure held. Her eyes didn't. They moved from the ring to the three ice artifacts in their sealed display cases, then back to Luke's hand, and the question was visible even without words: why would an ice-attribute user walk past premium corporate gear for a piece of uncertain provenance with one listed function?

She didn't ask. She sealed both items in a carrying case with quiet efficiency and straightened. "Please follow me. It's time to meet the Director."

The elevator brought them up several floors to a section of the building that announced itself before any signage did. Wider corridors, heavier doors, a particular quality of silence that came from insulation rather than emptiness. A placard on frosted glass read: Department of Strategic Risk Containment Division.

The secretary knocked, then opened a heavy oak door and stepped aside.

Director Silas sat behind a desk positioned with the deliberateness of someone who had thought carefully about where to put it. He was lean, late forties, with a face that had learned long ago to show only what it intended to. Not cold exactly—more like a surface that had been made smooth. His eyes moved to Luke with the economy of a man who assessed people for a living and had long since stopped finding it interesting.

"Luke. Sit down."

The secretary withdrew. The door closed.

Silas folded his hands on the desk. "I'll keep this brief. You know how the Bureau operates. You have the skills we need in the field. I'm making you leader of our newest strike team." He said it the way people say things that are already decided. "Your team is assembled and waiting. First assignment comes tomorrow morning."

He slid a keycard across the desk without ceremony.

Luke picked it up.

"Questions?"

"Not yet."

Silas gave a short nod and let the silence confirm that the meeting was over.

The secretary guided him through a separate corridor toward a quieter wing of the upper floors. The building changed character as they moved: less ornamental, more functional. Plain walls. Flooring that had taken use without apology. The air carried the accumulated smell of coffee, paper, and electronics—the specific atmosphere of a workspace that was actually worked in, rather than maintained for appearances.

At the end of the hall, she pressed her credentials to a panel beside a set of double doors.

They opened onto a medium-sized conference room. Long table, several chairs, a city map on the wall display with coloured markers spread across the districts. Winter light came through a narrow window, pale and without warmth. Five people were already inside.

Luke's gaze moved across them before the door had fully closed. Old habit—Bureau-trained, no longer requiring thought. He was already reading.

The woman nearest the door was in her early thirties, dark skin, dark hair pulled back into a severe bun. Fitted black jacket, plain blouse, posture rigid in the particular way of someone who had worn a uniform long enough that the straightness stayed even after the uniform didn't. She wore thin-framed glasses that he strongly doubted were prescription—her eyes moved in the continuous, low-energy pattern of counter-surveillance training, cataloguing exits, chairs, distances, hands. She had finished her assessment of him before he reached the table.

Across from her sat a man around Luke's age, broad-shouldered, solidly built—not the kind of build that came from a gym but the denser, more settled kind that came from physical work and years of living in a body rather than sculpting one. His face was plain enough to be useful in the field. Close-cropped hair, a scar through the left eyebrow, hands loose on the table with the specific quality of readiness that didn't need to perform itself. The calluses were old and extensive. His weight was distributed with the unconscious precision of someone accustomed to violence.

The man with the tablet looked like he'd been awake for thirty hours and had stopped pretending otherwise. Mid-twenties, pale, dark hair in open disarray. He was slouched so deep in his chair he was nearly horizontal, and his eyes, when they came up briefly to register Luke's arrival, were thoroughly bloodshot. He made some internal judgment, then returned to his screen.

The older man stood out differently. Somewhere in his fifties, grey-streaked hair, a face weathered by the kind of years that didn't happen indoors. A cardigan over a collared shirt. Everything about him projected harmlessness with the practised ease of someone who had long understood the tactical value of being underestimated—and had used it.

Then there was the fifth.

He sat at the far end of the table, separate from the others without having physically moved away from them. The build was obvious—broad chest, heavy through the shoulders, the contained stillness of a frontline fighter with nothing to do yet. Luke felt his awakened nature the moment he entered the room, the low pressure of significant power registering before anything more conscious could. But the feeling was wrong in a way he needed a moment to locate. Not weak. Not unstable, exactly. More like something that had been pushed into a shape rather than grown into it—real force, real mass, but with an unevenness underneath, the way a tempered blade sounds different when struck if the process went wrong somewhere.

Luke took an empty chair near the middle of the table.

The older man smiled first. It was a genuinely warm smile, the kind that made him look briefly like someone's grandfather—which Luke suspected was at least half the point.

"Welcome. We're all new to this, so introductions seem reasonable." He gestured at himself. "Victor. Retired Bureau analyst. I consult on pattern recognition and threat modelling now—understanding what the Bureau is likely to do before they do it."

He turned toward the woman with the glasses. "Nadia. Former military intelligence. Counter-surveillance, infiltration, the quiet work."

Nadia's eyes met Luke's for a moment. She said nothing. She didn't need to.

"Felix." Victor nodded toward the man with the tablet.

Felix looked up. "Computers. Networks, security systems, data extraction." A pause. "And occasionally things that nobody put in writing beforehand."

Victor gave him the look of a man who had decided, at some point, that this was simply the cost of working with Felix.

Felix straightened slightly in his chair and said nothing further.

"Marcus." Victor nodded to the broad-shouldered man.

"Logistics. Transport." Marcus's voice was low and deliberate, the voice of someone who treated words the same way he treated resources—deployed when needed, not otherwise. "If something needs to move quietly, I'll find a way."

Victor added, as a footnote: "Former military supply sergeant. A decade's worth. He means it."

Marcus offered a short nod and returned to stillness.

"And Rowan."

The man at the end of the table dipped his chin once. "Frontline combat." Flat. Brief. Sufficient.

Luke's attention stayed on him a moment past the introduction. The wrongness he'd felt on entry was easier to read up close—not aggression, not volatility, but something structural. A significant amount of power, real enough to be felt clearly across the room. But it occupied him unevenly, like weight distributed wrong across a frame. Functional under most loads. Unpredictable at the limits.

Victor noticed.

"You felt something," he said. Not a question.

Luke said nothing.

Victor leaned back slightly. "Rowan is a physical-type awakener. On the record, he's listed as a false second awakening." He said it without softening it, and without making it cruel either. Just the fact, stated directly by someone who had already accepted what it meant.

The room held its quiet.

"When a power user fails to achieve second awakening within the three-year window, natural advancement stops. That's the ordinary outcome. Most accept it." A pause—not for effect, but because Victor chose his words. "Some don't. The ones who don't will use whatever's available: potions, catalysts, forced advancement procedures. It produces something that resembles a second awakening from the outside."

"A bad imitation," Felix offered from behind his tablet, without looking up.

"It produces change," Victor continued, and the slight precision of the correction suggested Felix wasn't entirely wrong, just imprecise. "Sometimes substantial change. But the Will of the World doesn't recognise it as legitimate. That distinction has consequences—reduced efficiency, unstable synchronization between body and power, gaps that wouldn't exist in a true awakening. It can't be corrected after the fact."

Rowan's gaze was on the table. His expression hadn't shifted, but his jaw had.

"I hit hard enough," he said. "That's what matters."

Marcus gave the faintest nod, the gesture of a man who had already reached the same conclusion through different arithmetic.

Luke looked at Rowan for a beat. "As long as you know your limits."

Rowan's eyes came up. They were level and without particular heat. "I know them better than anyone in this room."

Not a challenge. Just true, said plainly.

Luke held the look a moment, then nodded and let it go.

After that, he introduced himself briefly. His Bureau background was known; anything beyond the basics would only invite questions he wasn't ready to answer yet. The meeting wrapped up without becoming a briefing—acknowledgement more than information, the first calibration between people who would soon be working in close quarters.

Luke left the building later than he'd expected. The winter sky had gone fully dark, the city's lights diffused against low cloud cover into a flat, directionless glow. He walked for a while before flagging transport.

The team was what he'd known it would be—capable, complicated, and carrying its own fault lines. Victor would be the most valuable person in the room. Felix would be the most difficult and probably the most essential. Rowan was something he'd need to understand better before deciding how much to rely on.

Silver Moon had placed him exactly where the novel had said it would.

He turned that over during the ride home, and found that knowing it in advance didn't make it feel any less like standing on someone else's board.