This situation made no sense.

Mayor Henry Stemmings had a long career behind him. He'd worked with his fair share of aristocrats, military officers, professors, and, on a few unpleasant occasions, nobles. Had someone asked him yesterday, he'd have confidently stated that he'd seen every manner of strange situation the Crown and Academy had to offer: containment breaches, office politics, war, rebellion, he'd seen it all.

So, he reflected, it said something that this was the most nonsensical situation he'd ever found himself in.

"I find your lack of loyalty quite perplexing, Stemmings", Professor Hector said. "You've given your opinion, I don't care about it. All I need is the confirmation that you'll carry out your orders."

Mayor Stemmings's grip on the phone tightened. He resisted the urge to deliver a sarcastic reply, to answer pettiness with pettiness.

"Listen, Professor", he said. "I'm not saying I don't want to do it." Though he sure as hell didn't. "I'm saying it can't be done. You're asking me to let tens of thousands of people die - to organize a botched evacuation that leaves most of the city behind - without them or my staff realizing it. It just won't happen."

"Make it happen."

"How? I don't know if you're aware, but industrial equipment is fairly difficult to transport. There are about forty enzyme factories in Tyessex, all performing daily deliveries. More if we count the dedicated transformation sites. We are talking about millions of dollars worth of heavy equipment, which need special procedures to be transported safely. Evacuating a single factory will take weeks. Thousands of people work with that equipment. And you're asking me to ship it all away without anyone noticing?"

"I understand that there are practical difficulties", Professor Hector replied. "Some operational inefficiency is to be expected, and will be tolerated. Your job, Stemmings, is to manage these operational concerns. Resources will be allocated if you need them. If there's unrest, have the military quell it."

"You think that will help? Half the Tyessex garrison is manned with Tyessex residents. Even the ones who don't live here have friends and family who do. How do you think they'll react once they hear that the Academy is leaving people they've known, talked to and gotten drunk with for years to die of black wood?"

"Figure it out."

"And what about the impact on production? Tyessex supplies Academies all over the Crown States in refined materials. Do you think we can just pack the equipment up, ship it to Kingswick, and maintain anywhere near the same output? We're talking about losing thousands of qualified workers, and decades worth of institutional knowledge. Dozens of Academies need these enzymes to function day to day. Cut off the supply and they'll break down. Physically, for some of them."

"This has been taken into account," the Professor replied. "Are you done?"

Taken into... Stemmings was flabbergasted. He'd just described a logistical catastrophe on a scale unheard of, the kind of mayhem that could grind Academy activity to a halt on a continental scale, and the Professor considered it taken into account.

"Good. Then listen to me carefully, Stemmings. You're out of line. I gave you your orders. These orders are backed by the emergency powers that the Crown granted to my Academy. You will carry them out, and take care of logistical concerns. Any further disobedience, or negligence, will be seen as treason against the Crown. I assume I don't need to remind you how dire the consequences would be. Do I make myself clear?"

Stemmings was livid.

"Yes, Professor. I'll... get back to you once I have an actionable plan."

He hung up the phone.

"Here it is, Mister Mayor."

Mrs Harrison added a new file to the growing pile of papers on his desk.

"Thank you, Mrs Harrison." He smiled at his assistant. "Is this all?"

The young woman nodded.

"All the addresses of major plant directors and intendants in the city your collaborators were able to find on short notice."

"Good." He dismissed the assistant with a small nod, and read through the documents.

If a career of dealing with scheming professors, corrupt businessmen and ambitious politicians had taught him anything, it was to always look for the paper trail. The Academy bred skilled technicians and ruthless cutthroats, but sloppy bureaucrats.

Every so often, Mayor Stemmings had found his administration caught in some resource-wasting plot, usually because of a young doctor trying to sabotage rivals, creating unrest and confusion as a byproduct. In one particularly memorable affair, an order for two thousand cloned soldiers had come close to being scrapped, because the clones' brain had failed to absorb the chemical markers recording and triggering implanted commands.

In many such cases, all that needed to be done was to transmit the relevant information to the right people, and the problem promptly solved itself. The clone crisis came to a head when an inspection of the Tyessex Academy's archives revealed that the clone template had been tampered with, by a rival Professor hoping the project would be assigned to him in the fallout.

The current situation was larger in scale than anything Mayor Stemmings had ever dealt with, but the operating principle was the same: Professor Hector wanted to destroy the city; therefore Stemmings needed to inform the city's stakeholders; some of them were bound to be powerful people (or, as was increasingly common in the modern economy, powerful corporations); hopefully one of them would be influential enough to pull rank on the scheming professor.

Stemmings started writing down names, and addresses. The largest company in Tyessex was Hatchworks, a rather large industrial complex producing biological lubricants. He would start with them.

Willie Mossman was a short, brawny man of African descent. He had a shaved head and a large, messy beard, and a taut skin with small creases in his forehead and cheeks that suggested he'd worn aesthetic body-modifications until recently. The man wore an ill-fitting suit, with the cuffs unbuttoned, and he glanced at his surroundings nervously, as if he couldn't quite tell what he was doing in the mayor's office.

He and Stemmings awkwardly nodded at each other (the red plague had effectively ended handshakes as a business practice), exchanged inconsequential pleasantries, and Stemmings gestured for the man to sit while he took his own.

"So, Mister Mossman. My assistants tell me that you are now the effective head of Hatchworks. May I ask how this happened?" He tried not to sound caustic. Mossman had been a worker's union representative, and a troublemaker even before that. The idea that he would ever get any amount of real power would have been laughable a few years ago, even if the man had been white-skinned.

Mossman appeared unruffled.

"I'll tell you the same thing I told your secretary, Mister Mayor. I'm not the director of Hatchworks, on paper or in practice. It's just... there was a void. Someone needed to make sure the inventories stayed full, and to coordinate with clients, and I... well, I stepped up."

Stemmings frowned.

"What about Director Holden?"

"He, ah, died on a business trip four months ago, sir. Rebel attack, we're told."

That did sound familiar, Stemmings thought. He'd probably received a report on the subject, and promptly forgotten about it. News of important men and women dying were dime-a-dozen these days.

"And the board didn't send a new director?"

"Never. We sent a telegram asking for one once the organization problems started to pile up. They never answered. We don't know why for sure, but... Well, forgive my language, but it's the Apocalypse out there. It's hard to grasp how much when you live in a city that's been untouched. Cities are dropping left and right, entire counties are being destroyed in the span of a week. I'm not even sure how many of the board members are still alive."

Stemmings nodded. This was all things he already knew, of course, but it was interesting to get the perspective of a civilian on the crisis they were living through, even if the man was being colorful in his description.

"Eventually, someone had to take care of the treasury, make sure the boys got paid, talk with clients and suppliers to make sure orders kept going through, and so on. Nobody else was doing it. We have middle managers and a sales officer, but they just weren't stepping up. They were sticking to their designated jobs, waiting for things to solve themselves, problems piled up, and eventually I decided to handle them."

"I see. And none of the shareholders took issue?"

"Honestly, I'm not sure they've noticed. They're just too busy, or they don't care. Besides, it's hard to keep track of who owns what. Shares are flying around like crazy, these days, lots of people buying and selling. Last time I checked, the largest shareholder was Bolt Financial."

"I haven't heard of it."

"They're less than ten years old. The corporation belongs to... I forget their names. The folks who tried to marry their daughter to the Baron of Warrick, a few years ago?"

"Ah. That would be the Bergers."

"Every so often, we get an executive from Bolt Financial asking us for a report, or giving us new directives, but there's never any follow-up."

Stemmings frowned. This painted an inconvenient picture for his efforts.

"So, to be clear, you are telling me that Hatchworks has been operating in relative autarky for the last... four months?"

Mossman nodded.

"I'm actually pretty relieved to meet you, Mister Mayor. We've been fighting to get anyone's attention for weeks. We need to start making medium and long-term plans, or the company is going to collapse in a matter of weeks. We're still running the factories, but we've been putting off critical maintenances for months. We were supposed to inspect our decantation vats for defects two weeks ago, and we had to put it off. Machines are breaking down. The executives don't want to give us funds to buy replacement parts, and even if they did, there are shortages everywhere. We need the city to step in."

Stemmings sighed. About every business in the city had similar problems, and expected him to somehow will the shortages out of existence.

"I'll see what I can do, Mossman. Give me a list of the supplies you need most, and I'll see if they can be found. That aside, I take it you brought the list of Tyessex's current shareholders, like we asked?"

Mossman bent down and picked up a bundle of papers from his bag.

"Here they are, sir. It might be out of date, though. Like I said, the market is moving fast."

Mayor Stemmings nodded. It was a start.

A voluminous folder was dropped on his desk, and hit the wood with a sudden thud. Stemmings, startled, looked up at the person who dropped the folder. It was Mrs Harrison.

"Are you alright, sir?" she asked. "I knocked."

Stemmings attempted a weak smile.

"Fine. Just... tired, my dear."

The middle-aged assistant threw him a skeptical look.

"Well, these are the transaction records you asked for, straight from New Amsterdam's stock exchange. Less than a week old, they say."

"Thank you, Mrs Harrison. That will be all."

The assistant stared at him for a moment.

"Are you sure everything is fine? You've spent the last few days locked up in your office. And you still haven't answered your daughter's telegram. People are starting to worry." She glanced at the dozen of crushed cigarettes in his desk's ashtray.

Stemmings sighed.

"I don't think anyone is truly fine, these days," he said. "But I'm managing."

Mrs Harrison looked skeptical again, but she gave him a small nod, and turned to leave the room again. Leaving Stemmings alone with his thoughts.

His search so far had yielded dead end after dead end. Every manager, director and banker he'd met had repeated the same thing Mossman had told him: nobody could reach their executives.

This wasn't a complete surprise to him. Stemmings had known things were dire for some time: he'd spent the last few months fixing one logistical nightmare after another, often working with these same managers to find new suppliers after a town they were depending on fell to the red plague, or some other catastrophe.

The replacement parts Mossman had asked him for were cheap enough that a naive observer might assume they would be easy to acquire. But the prices had been fixed by the Crown, and there were permanent shortages, such that actually acquiring the items required political connections, favors to call in with the right supplier.

While the false prices gave the impression that the economy was doing fine, black market prices painted a much bleaker picture.

Stemmings was starting to grasp the extent of the disorder, and its scale boggled the mind. Most of Tyessex's companies were operating blindly, with little to no high-level oversight, sometimes producing stock for weeks before finding out their buyer had fallen to the plague. Looking at the numbers some of the directors had given him, Stemmings estimated that about a third of these companies was one major default of payment away from filing bankruptcy. In any other period, the potential for a disastrous chain reaction collapsing the city's entire economy would have been enough to keep him up at night.

Yet Tyessex was also facing a danger of a much more physical nature, and this chaos might well spell the city's doom. Stemmings needed Tyessex's shareholders to lobby for the preservation of the city, yet nobody could tell him who these shareholders were.

So, not a man to let himself be deterred, Stemmings had requested the stock exchange records, directly from the source. Reading page after page of accounting data, Stemmings was forced to agree with Mossman's assessment: the market was moving at breakneck speeds, with stock prices falling by up to forty percent in less than a month. Often, shares were changing hands too quickly for their new owners to even bother making contact with their board of directors.

And yet, after two hours of examination, Stemmings noticed a pattern. Stocks from Tyessex companies were noted as being sold by the Crown in public auctions, after their owner died of ravage or some other disaster, with no next of kin. Others sold their share directly to the Crown, in exchange for relocation and other privileges after being displaced by the black wood or by a ravage outbreak.

More often than not, these shared found themselves sold, at suspiciously low prices, to one of three companies: Bolt Financial, the Aurora Trust and United Holdings. Bolt Financial belonged to Everard Berger, whereas the Aurora Trust...

Stemmings froze.

He checked the ledger. Then he checked it again.

Aurora Trust and United Holdings both belonged, through intermediaries, to Everard and Adelaide Berger.

This was too big to be a coincidence. Someone had arranged for every shareholder that could have objected to Tyessex's destruction to die of red plague and black wood. The scraps that would remain of the city would be fed to the Bergers, who would make an immense profit on the operation even as ninety-nice percent of the city's value was burned to the ground.

This ought to be impossible. The transactions were too unusual, too obvious. Someone should have noticed.

Stemmings felt his blood run cold. This was big. Bigger than him, bigger than Tyessex, bigger than Professor Hector and the Bergers. There was someone, probably someone with great influence in the Academy, conspiring to destroy an untold number of cities, using black wood to butcher the entire continent in the pursuit of some nebulous goal. Someone powerful, and smart enough to cover their tracks, to hide the scale of their attack and evade or silence the institutions that should have reported their misdeeds.

More than that, it was all done with an efficiency that appealed to Stemming's practical side, even as the frightening implications dawned on him. The Academy was only this efficient when performing a task in which it had a lot of experience. Whoever was orchestrating this, they had done it before.

He needed to contact a noble. His mind raced through the options. The Lord Infante, the Count of Whitemarsh, or Lady Gloria. He'd only met the Infante once, and had no way to contact him directly. The Count was reportedly in the Italian Provinces. Which left Lady Gloria. She had been somewhat reasonable in their previous dealings, and had a reputation for fairness in her holdings. She might listen to him. If he used the right arguments, she would understand the gravity of-

The phone rang.

Stemmings frowned. Mrs Harrison was supposed to field his calls. Which meant...

He picked up the phone.

The voice at the other end uttered a question. That question held an implicit threat.

"No, Lord Infante."

The voice enunciated orders, with no ambiguity to them. The orders held implicit threats, too.

"Yes, Lord Infante."

The voice spoke of promises, of career advancements and other opportunities for him and his daughter, and of the honor to be found in serving a higher purpose.

"Indeed, Lord Infante."

The voice gave a final order, and that order was a death sentence for Tyessex.

"As you command, Lord Infante."

The voice hung up, and Mayor Stemmings stared at nothing for a long, long time.