No One Looks Up

Strength made crowds cheer. Learning kept them alive after the cheer moved on. Still, every lesson left a scar. Under his skin, pain-filtered kinetic reading nested beside older fragments, not merging peacefully but negotiating territory with the stubborn violence of tectonic plates. The leader stepped forward when the operation began to fail. Every major enemy had a different face, but by then Kieran knew the family resemblance between them. They believed history belonged to whoever could impose the cleanest story after the bodies cooled. The Crimson Broker offered profit, unity, order, peace, or survival depending on the volume of the war, and each offer sounded reasonable if you ignored the person being crushed underneath it.