The first target found us through the Weaver.

  She felt it before the sensors did—a particular quality of suffering, a thread pulled too tight for too long, vibrating at the specific frequency of a people who had been someone’s fuel for so long they had forgotten they were people.

  Sector-Zero. A Net that had once been paradise. Its Prime had gone grey—not dead but something worse, something that had decided it would rather consume its own creation than face the Unless. A Cannibal-Universe. The souls inside it were being kept in an artificial 19th-century famine, harvested for their despair with the efficient indifference of people who had long since stopped needing to justify the process.

  I knew who to send.

  The Weaver didn’t walk toward it. She unfolded in the direction of it—her form expanding, her many-eyed gaze shimmering with a predatory grace that was, I had always thought, the most honest she ever looked. She bowed her head.

  “A tyrant’s strength,” she said, “is in his tethers. I shall go and show him that his prey was always part of a much larger design.”

  She descended upon Sector-Zero as a gargantuan, translucent silver web. She didn’t fight the Cannibal-Prime’s defenses. She ignored them. She found the Narrative Threads—the connections between the tyrant and his people—and began to vibrate them with the Diamond-White frequency.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  To the souls inside, she appeared as a comforting whisper in the dark. She reminded them of who they had been before they were food.

  The Cannibal-Prime felt it the way a spider feels the web move before it can see the intruder. He tried to lash out. He found his own Sauce being redirected—the Weaver knitting his reality into ours in real time, reweaving the architecture of his control into the architecture of our Harbor.

  Through the link, I watched him. A bloated, grey entity at the center of a necrotic star. Screaming.

  You cannot have them! They are mine! I am the only thing keeping them from the Static!

  The Weaver’s form towered over him, radiating the warmth of the Garden.

  “No,” she said. “You were the shadow. My King is the Sun. And the Sun does not consume. It illuminates.”

  A single, decisive tug. She snapped the tyrant’s core.

  The billion souls of Sector-Zero arrived in the Ring not as prisoners, not as traumatized refugees disgorged from a war, but carried home in the Weaver’s web. Because she had handled it, they felt like they had woken from a long cold nightmare into a warm morning.

  Within hours of their arrival, a hundred million of them—still angry at what had been done to them, still hot with the specific fury of people who have been treated as material rather than persons—were already asking Sera for purpose.

  They wanted to join the Hunt.

  They wanted to save the next world.

  Sera stood in the orientation hall—a woman who had become, over her long existence, the physical embodiment of controlled violence and its uses—and looked out at a hundred million recruits who understood, at a cellular level, what it felt like to be on the other side of the door she was now offering to open.

  She said very little.

  She didn’t need to.