Shadowhunter in the Apocalypse

They waited until the traffic thinned and the last candle in the courtyard guttered into a soft halo of light. Reed moved like a shadow that had decided to be a man — deliberate, patient, everything packed into the small efficient motions he'd practiced for years. Jasmine melted around him like a second thought, tablet clasped to her chest until they were clear of the volunteers and the cheap barricades that separated the holy from the ordinary.

The north axis gate wore a wreath of rune-ink and brass plates. It looked ceremonial, like something from a museum exhibit, but Reed knew better: every ornate line was a seam of defense. He smelled the runes before he saw them — iron, ozone, a sweetness like incense hung over circuits. The city's hum narrowed, and the air felt like wet paper pressed against his skin.

"Loop's on," Jasmine whispered, voice a breath. She slid the tablet into his hand and tapped. The camera feed flickered — a smooth loop, a rolling twelve-minute tape that continued to play volunteers passing through. From the camera's perspective nothing changed. From theirs, everything had.

Reed felt his shadow warm. He didn't like using the step so openly; it left a ghost on the world you could sometimes see in the periphery of a mirror. But the tactic had a clean brutal beauty: disappear, reappear where you needed to be. Not a hole in reality, a burrow someone else's eyes couldn't follow. He folded into the dark like tucking into a shirt and slipped across the gap between the delivery truck and the metal barricade.

The closest guard was a volunteer in reflective gear, bored and human, scanning a list on a clipboard. Reed moved like a rumor across skin. His hand found the man's neck, a whisper of force — a shadow thread that kissed the pulse and coaxed sleep. The volunteer slumped, head nodding, clipboard dropping with a soft smack on pavement. Reed eased him down so he sat like someone who'd fallen asleep standing. No blood. No fuss.

"Two down," he murmured.

Jasmine's eyes flicked, her jaw set. "North axis clear for nine minutes. Move."

They moved across the courtyard like thieves with purpose. The crowd thickened, an ocean of white robes and raised faces. Reed kept his head low, but the shadows answered him, stretching along the paving stones, soft fingers that took the shape of his boots and moved without sound. Around them people prayed with a kind of savage joy, believing in something that, tonight, would not protect them.

They slipped through a side door marked with a simple brass plaque — Holy Access — into a corridor that smelled of old wood and candle wax. The lighting here was dim by design, deliberate reverence so the angelic runes could feel at home. Reed let his eyes adjust, noting the glyphs along the archways. Each rune hummed faintly, a low undertone that felt like a low tide of electricity. Jasmine's HUD circled the worst of them in crimson on the tablet — nodes with active charge, the ones that would sing if touched.

"These corridors are like lungs," Jasmine whispered. "They inhale, hold the energy, then exhale it through the sanctum. We've got nine minutes before the main cams recalibrate."

"Then we make the most of every exhale," Reed replied.

They moved through the aisles like surgeons, precise, careful, until Reed paused at a wooden door bolted with ceremonial lockwork. This was not the sanctum door — that entrance was farther in, a gilded thing only the highest initiated touched — but it was a staff door, and staff doors meant maintenance tunnels and conduits. Reed slid a slim tool from his pack and worked the lock, breathing in time with the exhale of the church itself.

When the door opened, a gust of colder air hit them — someone had kept that room as an old spine of the building, unused except for the occasional clergy member passing with candles. The ceiling pipes hid runic channels. Reed eased inside and the door closed behind them, sealing a layer of normalcy. Jasmine thumbed the tablet, overlaying a spiderweb of feed routes.

"You take the lower conduit," she said, pointing to the narrow graph. "I'll feed you the blind spots and camera ghosts. You keep the shadowstep for the vault arch — reserve the burn."

"I won't waste it," he said.

The conduit smelled like damp stone and prayer. They crouched and slipped through the narrow passage where the church's protective lattice was thinnest. Reed's breath slowed, his body folding around the low tunnel's demands. Every inch moved them deeper into the structure's lungs. The rune hum around them thinned, becoming a series of tiny pinpricks to his nerves. Jasmine's fingers were quick on her console, sending micro-commands that looped the peripheral sensors. Occasionally, her voice broke into his ear in a word or two: "Left. Drop. Two guards at the chapel door. Wait."

They waited. The voice of a prophetess floated through the stone — a cadence of vowels that shivered like birds. Reed tasted the echo of it and felt a small, cold thrill. This was what he'd come for: the sound of the holy and the tiny human mistakes inside it.

At a narrow stair, they encountered the first improvisation. A pair of acolytes came up, lanterns bobbing. Reed pressed himself against the wall and let his shadow expand into a thin veil that glazed the stone like water. The acolytes passed, chatting about the offerings, laughter brittle and small. One ran a hand along the railing, and Reed felt the trace of a rune there — a warning script read by fingertips that the first-world believed turned men into better men.

They made the turn and saw the courtyard from inside — Miriam's silhouette moving within a glassed alcove, separate from the flock. She stood with her hands folded, and a priest placed a stole upon her shoulders. For a second they saw Miriam ordinary: robes, haloed speech, a woman making a ritual into an art. Reed's gloves were damp at the fingertips. He felt the ring warm against his skin like a secret.

"Forty minutes," Jasmine whispered.

The plan hinged on the sanctum's ritual clock. When a saint or saintess withdrew their spiritual ledger to rebind runes, the compound's runic lattice purged the prior month's energy — an automatic, almost mechanical process. The saint then offered the gathered faith to the angels; the offering sealed the grid and breathed new magic into each rune. It happened like clockwork. Miriam had agreed to come into the holy room and delay the offering — not the purge — and that small subversion opened a seam. Reed could taste it like a gap in armor.

They moved deeper. The stone corridor took a breath, and Reed's shadow thinned to a thread again, his heart beating in even, practiced measures. His boots made no sound. Jasmine's whisper was a tape measure, counting the seconds. "Gate in ninety seconds. Watch the second sarcophagus — it houses a detection rune. If it sings, you pivot left."

He stepped into the inner ambry and the air changed. The light was less about illumination and more about template. The walls were carved with angels rendered in tin, faces smoothed by prayer. Behind the sanctum door, the holy room itself breathed with the residue of a thousand whispered sacrifices. Reed's skin prickled. The runes along the arch spiked, but at a lower level than normal; the purge was still finishing.

He felt the watch in his pocket and checked it with a small hand motion. Thirty-eight minutes to the hour where all the apostles would be drawn emergency to supplement the runes if delay persisted. It would be messy; they would be human and tired and angry, and that anger bled into tactical error. But first Reed had to move through the room where angels might notice them if angels watched.

The sanctum door stood like a cathedral gate in miniature: heavy oak, the metalwork a braid of sigils. Reed touched his palm to the oak, feeling the humidity of sap in the grain and the cold of the metal. The rune on the threshold hummed with the leftover memory of mercy. Jasmine was at his ear, cool, flawless. "Hook two will come free at the door. When you step, step left, no routing sensors."

He took a breath and let the shadow step spool. There was a peculiar sensation, like being folded by a kind hand. The world collapsed into a dark pill, and then expanded. He had the hum of runes under his boots and the scent of washed stone in his lungs. In the pocket of the holy room's dim, a candle guttered and did not go out — because the saints did not like the idea of sudden darkness. The room felt like being inside a held breath.

At the center, the holy altar rose, ringed by carved desks where the higher apostles sat with their eyes closed, mouths moving in prayer. The crowd's voices were muffled through thick glass and tapestry. Miriam stood at a separate lectern, her profile lit by a halo of candles. Her hands were folded, and she seemed to breathe like the rest of them: a human presence in a place that taught humans to be less than human.

Reed scanned. The tracker on his HUD pulsed: green dot. Location: vault level — but the data suggested a drift deeper — a hop from corridor three to vault level B. That was a throw. Jasmine's micro-voice bit through static: "Tracker jumped. Not where we thought."