The glass wound on his cheek still hadn't completely closed. Two days since that night. Cohen Elias hadn't laid a hand on the iron staircase to the basement once in that time. In the residential space on the second floor, he'd kept a bottle of cheap whiskey within reach, facing down page forty-seven of the Gehenna Document copy. Aramaic verb conjugations. The placement order of seven auxiliary materials. The correspondence between the sections of the incantation and the timing of placing materials on the ritual circle. The decryption was complete in two days. Past midnight, Elias descended to the basement with his preparations in hand. The cold smell of concrete rose up. He brought a desk lamp. The geometric figures burned into the floor—the remnants of a summoning circle—floated in the light. Concentric circles and radial lines, Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions alternating in carved patterns. Elias placed the seven auxiliary materials in order across it. Grains of rock salt. Ash from burned parchment. A small glass vial of blood—drawn from his own left hand two days prior. The wound had already regenerated. Al-Rashid Zayed stood with his back against the wall in the corner of the room. Elias never once looked in that direction. There was no need to. He could tell Zayed was there by the weight of the air. It had been that way since the first day of summoning. When that man was in the basement, the room's gravity increased slightly. Elias had confirmed that sensation countless times. He'd been trying not to think about the fact that he kept confirming it. The placement of auxiliary materials was complete. Elias opened the Gehenna Document copy and confirmed the first section of the incantation. Hebrew. The rhythm of a language compiled seven hundred years ago. The moment he spoke it aloud— Zayed's molars clenched audibly. It was barely a sound. It didn't reach Elias's ears. The incantation progressed. First section. Second section. Knowing the basement's soundproofing was excellent, he didn't worry about volume. Hebrew phrases vibrated through the air, and the geometric figures of the ritual circle began to glow faintly. Elias kept his eyes only on the copy in his hands. Something tightened inside Zayed's body. Shackles. The shackles of the summoning contract—the command-binding mechanism recorded in the Gehenna Document—were beginning to contract in response to the incantation. A subordination-reinforcement spell formula. When this incantation was complete, the shackles' grip would deepen further. From seventy percent sealed now to eighty percent. Ninety percent. Zayed, still with his back against the wall, calmly confirmed that sensation. Further bound. Months of memories flowed. A slap across the face. Insults. Glass shards. The darkness of the basement. Elias's eyes looking down from above. *You belong to me*—that voice from two days ago. Zayed didn't feel anger as an emotion. Something more fundamental crystallized in the depths of his body. An existential rejection of being bound further. The first moment he'd held something close to a question: what would he become if he were confined any tighter? The incantation entered the third section. The shackles tightened. Tightened. Zayed didn't pull away from the wall. His expression didn't move. Dark skin. Short-cropped black hair. Feeling the small tattoo on his tongue within his closed mouth, Zayed continued measuring the sensation of the shackles. Fourth section. The shackles' grip loosened—not for a single beat, but continuously. It wasn't anger. It wasn't calculation. The moment rejection of being bound further surged up from a deep place in his body, the defect in the summoning contract activated—the Aramaic annotation Elias had overlooked, the one stating that the shackles loosened during violent emotional outbursts—and it worked. Not just for a single beat, but tonight, long and sustained. Zayed's feet pushed off the floor. Eight times human physical capability. The moment his legs, most of that power now released, took a single step, the distance between him and Elias vanished. His right hand wrapped around Elias's throat. The fourth section of the incantation was cut off mid-phrase. Elias's eyes widened. The sensation of being dragged down from the seat of dominance pierced through his entire body. It was the first time in twenty-nine years he'd felt anything like it. Pride. Arrogance. The desire to dominate. Knowledge. None of it mattered—only the pure touch of terror. Elias couldn't make a sound. Zayed's fingers blocked his throat. Zayed dragged Elias. Dragged him across the top of the summoning circle's geometric figures and pinned him against the edge of the experimental table. Elias tried to resume the incantation. His mouth opened. But before words could come, the pressure of Zayed's hand crushed them. "[cold]Will you continue?" His voice was quiet. Emotionless. But it carried heat. Elias's eyes and Zayed's black eyes crossed at close range. What burned in Zayed's eyes, Elias couldn't read. It wasn't pure hatred. There was a dark concentration—a determination to witness Elias breaking apart. That made Elias's fear even more complex. Zayed's hand grabbed Elias's left arm. He began applying pressure slowly, in the direction opposite to the elbow joint. Bone creaked. There was a sensation of muscle fibers tearing beneath the skin. This wasn't the first time Elias had experienced that sensation—he'd cut into himself countless times. But this was different. Not wounding himself by his own will, but being wounded by another. Control existing outside himself. A wet, shattering sound. The humerus broke. Elias's scream echoed off the basement's soundproof walls. His own voice returned to him. In the sealed space, his own scream came back to him. Elias, pinned to the experimental table, couldn't breathe. His immortal regeneration activated. Bone ends drew together. Nerves reconnected. Muscle fibers stitched themselves back. The pain of that process was different in quality from when the bone first broke. A sensation like his body was being pushed outward from within, the endless pressure and heat of his body reclaiming its form. Elias clenched his teeth. The moment regeneration nearly completed, Zayed's hands returned to the same spot. A second shattering sound. A second scream. Elias was beginning to understand what it meant to be immortal—not as knowledge, but through his flesh. Regenerate. Break again. Regenerate. Break again. Pain that doesn't end. A state where pain has no ending—Elias had known this as a concept until now, but concept and experience were different things. A third time. A fourth time. His throat grew hoarse. The strength to scream faded. Elias realized he'd stopped making sounds. Whether he couldn't or wouldn't, he couldn't tell anymore. His forehead was pressed against the experimental table. There was only breathing. The heat of regeneration burned through his entire body. Zayed stepped back slightly. The change in distance was perceptible. The moment Zayed's hand's weight disappeared, Elias—didn't try to move. Not because he couldn't. There were no chains. No restraints. But his body wouldn't leave the experimental table. Fear held his limbs in place. The man he'd once moved with a single command, Elias now couldn't look at directly. He looked from the corner of his eye. Their eyes met. He confirmed what was in those eyes. There was hatred. There was the satisfaction of cruelty. But not only that. Eyes that continued observing the outline of Elias breaking apart as if measuring something. Eyes seeing Cohen Elias as an individual, precisely. The same concentration Elias had once brought to observing specimens was in Zayed's black eyes—but carrying something entirely different in quality. Elias closed his eyes. *(What are you seeing)* The fact that this question had come from within himself was what frightened him most tonight. The question of how Zayed saw him had surfaced within the pain. With contempt? With anger? Or—. Elias tried to think beyond that and stopped. --- At the same time, on the Northbank side. About 1.5 kilometers north of Boundary Street, along the Greyvan River, stood the cheap motel "Riverview Inn." The third-floor corner room. In the deep night of November 1993, thin condensation clung to the inside of the window glass. Toll Margaret sat in a dark chair by the window, the eyepiece of binoculars fixed to a tripod aimed toward the direction of Boundary Street, number forty-seven. Thirty-four years old. Former FBI. Now an operative for the Helmon Agency. Dark brown straight hair tied back, sharp gray eyes directed toward the same direction as the binocular lenses. A small earring in her right ear glinted faintly in the room's darkness. No light was visible from the basement of Cohen Lab. It couldn't be. The basement had high soundproofing, and the wall facing Boundary Street had no windows—that had been confirmed within three days of arrival. But the device on her lap was reacting. A modified energy detector. Developed by the Helmon Agency's research division in New Mexico, loaned from headquarters. It detected wavelengths different from standard electromagnetic detection. Margaret had never used this type of equipment during her seven years with the FBI. She'd first encountered it after transferring to the Helmon Agency. Around midnight, the display values began to move. She rotated a ballpoint pen in her right hand—a habit when tense. Her former FBI supervisor had pointed it out several times, but it never stopped. She wrote numbers in her notebook. Value changes. Times. Waveform patterns. The recording habits cultivated during her FBI days proved useful in moments like this. The values rose in time with the incantation beginning in the basement. *(This is the reaction of a spell formula, then)* Margaret didn't take her eyes from the binoculars. The exterior of number forty-seven was dark. Nothing moved. There was something invisible—only that certainty came from the detector's readings. Minutes later, the values changed drastically. It coincided with the moment the incantation stopped. And a different type of spike appeared. A waveform different from the initial energy pattern. Margaret wrote in her notebook: "Separate reaction—multiple targets possible." She moved to the fax machine. She wrote a handwritten report. Concise. Facts only. No opinions—that was the method ingrained since her FBI days. *Abnormal energy discharge detected from Cohen Lab basement. Spell activation reaction confirmed from past midnight. Subsequently, separate reaction spike observed. Multiple targets highly probable. Request deployment of full investigation team.* She fed it into the fax machine. Transmission to the Helmon Agency headquarters line in Washington D.C. The line connected. Data flowed. After confirming transmission, Margaret returned her eyes to the binoculars. "[whispers]Multiple..." She murmured. Words directed at no one. After they left her mouth, she realized she'd spoken aloud. During her FBI days, she wouldn't have made a sound even during solo fieldwork. The fact that she was doing so now was proof of how much this case was getting to her. What was in the basement of Cohen Lab? Abnormal energy waveforms. Traces of a spell formula mediated by blood—the detector's waveform analysis suggested as much. The November Greyvan night wind struck the window. The exterior of number forty-seven was quiet, revealing nothing. The more invisible something was, the deeper Toll Margaret's curiosity cut. This was a trait of hers that hadn't changed since her FBI days—despite knowing the danger, the impulse to grasp the outline of a mystery wouldn't stop. She closed her notebook and looked through the binoculars once more. --- Back to the basement. Elias still had his forehead pressed against the experimental table. His b