Prologue

The first person the Blood Bank condemned in my name was a woman I had never met.

Her name was Anja Pell. She sold violets outside the western courthouse, paid her rent on time, and had never received so much as a warning for spitting in public. At dawn on the fifth day of Frostwane, a prophecy tube registered in the Bank’s central ledger under her donor number. The memory suspended in her blood showed her pushing a magistrate from a bridge three months in the future.

The magistrate was still alive. The bridge had not yet been built.

Anja was arrested before breakfast.

By noon, her brother had found me in the back room of a printer’s shop, where I was manufacturing proof that a dead baron had attended his own funeral. He placed three silver crowns on the table and asked me to build his sister an alibi for a murder that did not exist.

“An alibi requires a time,” I told him.

“The Bank gave us one.”

“For an event that has not happened.”

“That is why I need you.”

I should have refused. Three crowns did not cover the ink, much less the risk of falsifying a sovereign blood record. But he had Anja’s eyes—brown, exhausted, already learning what it meant to be treated as the surviving relative of a future crime.

So I invented a different future.

I produced a hotel register, two theater tickets, a laundress’s sworn testimony and a love letter from a fictional violinist with a bad knee. Every document placed Anja on the opposite side of the city at the appointed hour. The papers contradicted one another in four small ways, because a perfect alibi is an invitation to look closer. A messy one feels like life.

The magistrate reviewed my evidence personally. He released Anja with an apology so elegant that the newspapers printed it above the fold.

Three months later, he fell from the bridge.

Anja was nowhere near him.

The man who pushed him was a clerk from the Blood Bank.

That was the morning I understood the true purpose of prophecy. It did not predict guilt. It assigned it.

Seven years later, I stood beneath the Bank’s red-glass dome wearing a donor’s gray uniform and another woman’s face painted in wax across my own.

Above me, thousands of sealed tubes climbed the walls in luminous spirals. Each held a measure of blood, a donor’s number and a future violence the city had already decided to fear. Clerks moved along brass ladders, cataloguing unborn crimes with the quiet efficiency of librarians.

At the center of the atrium, a black marble statue depicted Prince Lucien Draev holding the first prophecy vial against the light. The sculptor had given him a merciful expression. Artists are often paid to improve history.

The living prince had authorized Anja’s arrest. He had also approved eleven thousand others.

I had forged alibis for three hundred and twelve of them.

Some were innocent. Some were not. That distinction had become harder to carry with every invoice.

I kept my head lowered as I crossed the donor floor. My stolen badge read ALMA RUSK, NIGHT PHLEBOTOMY. The real Alma was drinking expensive plum liquor in my apartment and would remember none of our arrangement by morning, because she preferred plausible deniability with a headache.

My target waited in Cabinet Seven: a narrow tube of dark blood labeled MARA VEY.

The Bank required every citizen to donate once a year. I had paid substitutes for six. On the seventh, a collector caught me asleep after a job and took the sample without permission. Two days later, an anonymous note arrived beneath my door.

YOUR BLOOD HAS LEARNED THE PRINCE’S DEATH.

No demand. No signature. Only the Bank’s seven-rayed seal pressed into black wax.

I reached the restricted stair and offered my badge to the brass reader. A needle slid from the mechanism.

“Verification,” whispered the machine.

Alma’s blood waited in a glass thimble sewn inside my glove. I pressed it to the needle. The lock tasted her, considered my lie, and opened.

Cold air breathed up from below.

The sovereign stacks were not part of my plan. Neither were the two guards lying unconscious beyond the door.

I crouched beside the nearest. No wound, no poison on his lips, no bruise at the temple. His eyes moved rapidly beneath closed lids as if he were dreaming someone else’s memory.

On the wall above him, a sentence had been written in blood.

SEVEN NIGHTS REMAIN.

The letters were still wet.

I considered leaving. Survival is partly the art of recognizing when a profitable crime has become a mythological one.

Then a tube pulsed behind the sovereign grille.

It was longer than my forearm and banded in royal silver. The label bore Lucien Draev’s name. Inside, his blood twisted into the shape of a black sun over a city crowded with burning silhouettes.

The image vanished almost at once. In its place appeared a woman driving a wooden stake through the prince’s heart.

She wore my face.

Not Alma’s wax mask. Mine.

The grille unlocked with a soft click.

Someone had prepared the vault for me.

Footsteps sounded on the stair: measured, unhurried, far too confident for a clerk responding to an alarm.

I pulled the wax likeness from my skin and let it fall beside the sleeping guard. If the night intended to accuse Mara Vey, it would at least have to look her in the eye.

The footsteps stopped beyond the doorway.

A man inhaled once, slowly.

Every prophecy tube in the sovereign stack turned toward me.

And from the darkness, Prince Lucien Draev said, “You are either the bravest murderer in my city or the worst.”

I slipped a forged execution order into my sleeve and smiled.

“Your Highness,” I said, “you will find I am excellent at being both.”