Coven Ep.6

The long table filled the room like a sacrament. The holographic city in its center blinked and breathed under the hands of several Science Priests who had gathered with the sort of quiet that meant a storm. Their robes were less ceremonial here—functional weaves threaded with sensor filaments and neurolink ports—but the way they sat, the way they tilted their heads while the light washed their faces, made them a jury more than a council.

Amy was at the head as always, but this time she was not alone. Three others flanked her: a man with a caramel scar that ran from jaw to jaw and a thin voice that had been trained for command; a woman with a silvered patch of hair and a meticulous manner who touched and retouched the hologram as if dust could be rearranged into truth; and an older priest whose neurolink ports flickered like the sun through a damaged prism—a rank, I recognized with a coldness, that meant Cathedral Seven had called in favors.

They fell to silence when I entered. It wasn’t the polite sort; it was the abrupt silence of people who had been listening and now had enough data to speak.

“Captain,” Amy said, and in the single syllable she managed to fold in a relief she would never say out loud. The scarred man inclined his head. The woman with silver hair — Archivist Serah — smiled in a way that did not touch her eyes.

On the table, the hologram split into two separate scenes. The Echo Gate building replicated in crystalline light—every broken transit tube, every patch of scorched metal—then sped forward until the scene we’d lived played out in a replayed tide. There I was, stepping to the door. Calder inside, servers like tombstones. The rune on the door warming where my fingers touched it. The moment Aunt Gene detached from shadow. Then the moment Lenore struck Maro and the ambush folded open, but the replay did something else: it splintered.

Annotations burned across the air: white text, timecode ribbons, neural-read overlays. Little ticks marked my heartbeat, my micro-expressions, the millisecond dilation in my pupils when Calder said the word shard. A voice—thin, processed, without a tremor of human cadence—read off each metric like an arithmetic sentence.

“Observer feed: Cathedral Seven — Remote node 7A,” Archivist Serah intoned, as if she were reading the name off a ledger. “Subject: Izabella Sloan. Feed active. Historical playback initiating.”

The room felt smaller. The hairs on the back of my neck rose like a comb. I could count the betrayals in the way the hologram displayed them: a small icon pulsed when my neural spike hit—00:14:12 — and a notation, Clinical: Anomalous arc-energy affinity. Someone had recorded my eyes widening at Aunt Gene and marked it: Emotional spike, maternal bond, possible trigger.

I watched myself on glass and felt a violence that had nothing to do with bullets. It was a measured sort of violence, a scientist’s knife across the throat of a subject. I was the specimen. Whatever illusions I had left of being merely a soldier folded into sterile strings. The violation sank deep into the shadows of my subconscious to coil and wait.

“Why am I on a Cathedral feed?” I said before my throat closed. The words came wrong, syllables clattering. I could feel the presence of the replay in my bones, like cold light pouring through bone.

The scarred man—his name came to me then, the one the lower clerks whispered when they wanted to curse the floor: Councilor Varric—leaned forward. "We monitor the city's centers of cross-domain activity," he said. "Protocol stipulates remote observation of persons implicated in hybrid phenomenon. Captain Sloan, you were flagged. Your bloodline registers as high-priority."

"As flagged—" I barked. "You watched me like an animal. You baited me. You let my mother get away because you thought it would teach you something.”

Amy’s expression hardened in a fraction of a breath. “We did not ‘let’ Monique get away, Izzie. She is still under the Tower remember? We allowed a variable to occur. In a controlled environment, variables are tested. Your…responses are data.”

“Your variables almost got my squad killed.” My voice rose enough to make the older priest glance up. I clenched my fists until the seams of my gloves creaked. “You used my blood circle. You put me alone in a cell with my mother while cathedral cameras rolled. You manipulated me.”

The room inhaled a silence that answered like a held breath.

Archivist Serah traced the hologram to a new frame. One where my mother looked like a goddess of hunger and said, “This was not manipulation in the common sense. Monique was under containment protocol. Her escape vector was measured. The supposed breaking of your circle—Captain—yielded a previously unobserved phenomenon: a transference event.”

“Transference event?” I repeated, stupidly hoping the syllables would not contain the cruelty of what they meant.

“Yes.” Varric’s scar moved with the corners of his mouth. “At 00:14:22, Monique’s arc field synchronized with the Captain’s — a resonance pattern consistent with genetically inherited magickal knots. In layman’s terms: your presence activates her in ways we could not anticipate.”

“For what god's sake?” I said. “You imprisoned my mother and used me as the key. Why?”

“Because,” the elder priest spoke then, his voice slowed by knowledge and ceremony, “we have to know the bridge.”

Amy closed her eyes for one breath and when she opened them there was an ache in them that had not been there before. “We had suspicions,” she said. “We suspected Monique had access to recovered arc-tech. We suspected Pod-3 fragments in the field. We needed to see the connectivity. You were flagged because of your history—because of bloodline markers from your lineage that appear in the Fourth Age registries. You are one of the few who can be both.”

“You made me a test subject without telling me,” I said. “Was Aunt Gene in on it? Calder? Are they actors in your drama too? Who else watched me and made a ledger out of my face?”

“No.” Amy’s voice was steady but thin. She folded her hands on the table like someone holding in a storm. “Gene is not on our registry. We don’t know who she is now or what she is doing. Calder? He is a broker. He will sell you the moon if you let him. But yes—” She glanced at Archivist Serah, “—Cathhedral Seven’s Watch Protocol observed you at distance. The recordings were routed to Pod-3 for pattern analysis.”

Pod-3. The name closed around my ribs like a fist. The shard Calder wanted, the mirror-alloy in the Gallery—Pod-3 was not only manufacturing tech. It was cataloging living patterns, stitching magick to circuits to see what moved. They were looking for a bridge. I had been born with the right hinges.

“You did this to me to find out whether I could be used as a bridge,” I said. “How long have you been using me? How long have you been…—” I couldn't find a word for it that didn't taste like rotten meat. “—experimenting on my life?”

Varric’s scar made a small twitch, his voice held a professional tone that might have been pity. “Since you were recommended for BHL recruitment—by those same forces that protected the Xcult. The agricultural screenings flagged latent markers. Your file drew attention. We followed, then we monitored. When Monique reemerged in the Sanguinarian net, we placed an active asset—yourself—proximate to her. The results were…useful.”

“Useful.” The word dropped like a blade.

I imagined my mother not enslaved by blood or fangs but folded into a ledger: sample size, control group, outcome metric. Wherever the priests kept their metrics, my heart had been an entry under line number: IZB-128.

“I had a choice,” I said finally, because it was a kind of tempering. “You can’t just lecture me that it’s for the greater good and expect me to nod into your ledger.”

Amy leaned forward. “You did choose. You chose the Black Heart Legion because you wanted leverage over the covens. You chose a life where you could wield instruments for a cause. I am not proud of how we have done things. But the scale of the risk—if Pod-3 weapons the magickal genome—would be catastrophe.”

“And you thought making me a lab rat was the way to protect me?” My laugh was small and bitter.

“No.” Amy said. “I thought keeping you close—watching—might protect you from being played. We miscalculated the variable.”

“You miscalculated everything,” I said. The wall I had built against her softened with anger. “You miscalculated me.”

Archivist Serah’s hands moved quickly, and the hologram dimmed. “We have more data,” she said. “We have here the trade route aligning Pod-3 with three independent donors: Calder included. The covens are not acting alone. We believe there is a faction within the Cathedral that sees synthesis as a path to control.”

“A faction,” I said. “So the Cathedral is split. Great. A family with knives.”

“Split or infiltrated,” Varric corrected. “We do not know yet. That is why we called this council. Captain Sloan, you will continue to operate within your "liaison" duties until further notice. Your actions will be cataloged. We will offer oversight—” he said, and the lie tasted like varnish—“and resources.”

“You want to use me.” The sentence landed like an accusation. “You don’t want answers—you want to pilot me like a damned drone.”

“We want the bridge,” the elder priest said plainly. “If you cannot be the bridge willingly, we need to know whether anyone else can be made into one. You will help us find Pod-3 and its suppliers. You will help us intercept the technology before it becomes a weapon. We will help you save Monique as far as we are able.”

The offer was a rope with a noose knotted into it. Amy’s eyes found mine and I thought I caught the flicker of regret and the iron double-cross that comes with impossible choices.

“I don’t do leverage,” I said. My voice had a sharpness I did not like. “I do not choose to let them turn my life into a metric for their fear.”

Amy’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Then what will you do, Izzie?” she asked. “Walk away and let the covens stitch their keys? Let Pod-3 prototype a genocide? Or will you fight them with the only hand we have—knowledge?”

I felt the cloth in my pocket. Aunt Gene’s rune folded against my hip like a promise. I felt Maro’s heavy form in the med bay, the weight of a dozen men who trusted me to be better than the Cathedral’s calculus.

“You’re asking me to be their instrument,” I said. “Fine. But on one condition.”

Amy’s gaze sharpened, an edge bright enough to cut. “Name it.”

“No more passive 'observation' without consent,” I said. “No experiments. No secret feeds. If you want me to help you find Pod-3, you will give me access to the files linked to that shard and pull every hidden feed you have on them. You will also tell me—honestly—who authorized the active observation of my interrogation with Monique.”

There was a pause long enough for the hologram of the city to breathe.

Varric looked at Amy, then at the elder priest, then back at me. “Those are...substantial conditions,” he said carefully.

Amy inhaled and let it out in a measured breath. “I will authorize the access,” she said. “We will review the active observers’ logs with you present.”

“And if I find the name of whoever signed the order?” I asked.

Amy’s fingers tightened on the table. “Then we remove them.”

I watched her face and believed her the way you believe lightning will strike the same place twice: with a fear that it might and a hope that it might not.

“Good,” I said. The word felt like an alliance formed on sand, but it was something. “I’ll start with Calder's network. I’ll talk to Aunt Gene again. And I’ll find Pod-3.”

“Bring me proof,” Varric said. “Bring me the shard if you find it. Bring me the list of donations. Give us the scales."

“Bring me my mother,” I said. The hollow space the words left behind was colder than any server room.

They watched me as if I were a patient whose prognosis had altered their treatment plan. The hologram dimmed and folded back into the long table, a sleeping thing.

Amy rose and patted the table twice, the click like a gauntlet being thrown down. “Then we begin,” she said. “Tomorrow you will be briefed on the Pod networks. Tonight, you rest. Captain.”

I left the room with the movement of someone who could no longer pretend they were the only thing that mattered in a world hungry for bridges. Outside, the blue glass threw my face back at me in a dozen shards. In each reflection I saw a different possibility: traitor, savior, bridge, or nothing but evidence.

I tucked Aunt Gene’s cloth tighter and walked toward a night that suddenly felt watched from an angle I could not name.

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