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The lobby had that early-morning quiet that Luca always liked. The marble floors caught muted light, that sort of stillness that existed for exactly as long as it took for seven people to show up and wreck it.
Chris was already stretching against a column. Joey stood next to him, half-asleep, one shoe untied. Zoe was braiding her hair while Emily held the elastic, the two of them moving through the routine without talking. They did that sotis.
Emily finished Zoe's braid and turned around, pulling her hair up into a ponytail. She had on a cropped running top and leggings that Luca had never seen before, and she looked unfairly good for soone who had been asleep twenty minutes ago. They were getting better at this, waking up early. She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.
"What?"
"Nothing." He adjusted his shorts. "New outfit?"
"Zoe made buy it in Oslo." She did a little half-turn, like she was humoring him. "Thoughts?"
He had several. None of them were appropriate for the lobby. "It's fine."
"Fine," she repeated, flat.
"Good. It's good."
"Wow. A poet."
He was going to lose this one no matter what he said, so he kissed her cheek and turned toward the glass doors. Caras. A solid wall of them, lenses catching the lobby light like a row of glass eyes. He counted at least twelve photographers and a full news van with a satellite dish on top.
All of it for the crew of the Triumph.
Erik caught the look on his face and followed his eyes. He'd been running point on their security since they arrived, and he had the permanently alert expression of soone who processed threat levels the way normal people processed weather. "Back door it is," he said, already moving.
The IFC security detail had changed into running gear. That part was almost worth the caras. Four agents who normally looked like they had been grown in a lab sowhere, all square shoulders and earpieces, now stood in compression tights and neon trainers. One of them had a fanny pack. Luca bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
Chris, naturally, had insisted they keep pace. He had promised to "take it easy." Chris's version of taking it easy involved a six-minute mile and cheerful comntary about form.
They slipped out the service entrance and hit the streets before the press pool noticed. The air was cool enough to sting, and Paris unfolded around them in pieces. Narrow side streets gave way to wider boulevards, and then the Jardin des Tuileries spread out ahead, the paths lined with bare trees and gravel that crunched under their shoes. Early light caught the fountains, and for a few minutes Luca let himself settle into it. Just the pace, the gravel, the cold air in his lungs, and Emily by his side.
Then soone matched pace on his left.
A girl, maybe eighteen, in a faded Triumph Initiative hoodie that Luca was pretty sure she had made herself. She didn't say anything. Just ran. He gave her a nod and kept going.
By the ti they looped past the Louvre, there were six of them. Then, as they turned back toward the gardens, there were twenty. Luca glanced over his shoulder. They were just running. Keeping pace. So of them were grinning. A few had their phones out but most of them were just there, matching stride for stride, and Luca couldn't tell if that was flattering or unsettling.
"What is happening?" Emily asked. Her breath made small clouds in the cold air.
Luca shook his head. He didn't have an answer.
Danny dropped back from the middle of the pack, grinning. A runner next to him had been asking sothing, and Danny had been nodding enthusiastically. He fell into step beside Luca and looked back at the crowd.
"I think they just wanted to run with us," he said, like it was obvious.
Luca looked over his shoulder again. They were just people. Students, joggers, and a dad pushing a stroller at a pace that had no business keeping up. Nobody was asking for anything. They just wanted to be part of it.
Zoe had sped up to the front of the pack and was practically bouncing, waving people forward like she was leading a charge.
Chris had dropped back to the rear of the group and was actively coaching people. "Elbows in, you're gonna flap away. There you go." A teenager nearly tripped trying to keep up with him and Chris caught the kid by the shoulder without breaking stride. "Easy, easy. Shorter steps on the turns, you've got this."
There were forty of them by the ti they hit the Tuileries fountain. Maybe fifty. Luca ran and tried to process the fact that they were leading a small migration through the center of Paris on a Tuesday morning because people wanted to run with them.
Emily pulled even with him, her cheeks red from the cold. "You good?"
"I honestly don't know." He ant it. The crowd kept growing. It was the strangest kind of pressure because none of it was hostile. It was just attention, pounds of it, and it landed on his shoulders like sothing he hadn't agreed to carry.
By the ti they circled back to the hotel, the crowd had ballooned past anything reasonable. Luca ca around the final corner and stopped counting. Photographers had migrated to the front entrance, and the security cordon had doubled, and the whole thing looked like a parade that nobody had scheduled.
"Lovely," Luca said.
They pushed through the security line and into the lobby. The sound cut out the second the doors closed, and Luca stood there for a second, hands on his knees, breathing hard, listening to the muffled roar on the other side of the glass.
Chris leaned against the wall, grinning wide enough to split his face. "That was the most fun I've had in weeks."
"We were trying not to draw attention," Luca said. He threw a towel at Chris's head. Chris caught it without looking.
Emily dropped into a chair, still flushed. "Well. At least we know we have fans."
"Soone's selling bootleg hoodies and it's not us." Ryan lowered himself onto the arm of the couch. "I'm just saying. We need rch."
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Zoe hooked her leg over the arm of Emily's chair and leaned back. "What's the difference? I'm signing autographs next ti."
Luca stayed standing. He could still hear them out there. Running, probably. Or waiting. He wasn't sure which was stranger.
Erik briefed them on the UER Youth Rally. Sabine briefed them harder. Three days, ten stages, the entire Champs-Élysées shut down for the event. The summary was: stay close, don't wander, and the crowd itself was the biggest risk. Luca promised they'd behave. He also knew his crew.
They changed into their UER dress uniforms. Nobody was happy about it.
The bus stopped at the edge of the avenue. The doors opened, and the sound hit them before anything else did.
Luca stepped off first. The Champs-Élysées stretched out ahead of him, packed so dense with people that the pavent had disappeared entirely. Stages ran down both sides, ten at least, each one blasting music or speeches or displays. Banners hung from every lamppost.
There were so many people here, a mass of youth the likes of which Luca had never seen in one place before.
Joey stepped off behind him. "How do they pack this many people into one street?"
"No portals to dive into," Ryan said. "So they pack a million people shoulder-to-shoulder and call it an experience."
Danny craned his neck at the nearest stage, where a model of the solar system rotated above a panel of speakers. "Look at that lineup."
Luca watched the UER security barriers flexing as people pressed against them. The personnel stationed along the route looked competent but outnumbered. Erik and Sabine had already taken position on either side of the crew, their eyes moving in that constant sweep that Luca had learned to read as concern.
"Stick close," Erik said. "Pairs or groups. Keep moving."
They pushed into it. Booths lined the avenue, each one a piece of the UER's pitch for a unified Earth: joint agricultural programs between forr rival nations, shared energy grids powered by System tech, multinational teams training side by side. Massive screens played clips of reconstruction efforts from different continents. A ticker running above the Arc de Triomphe displayed real-ti portal statistics and the number of countries that were now part of the United Earth Republic.
Near one of the side streets, a cluster of maybe thirty people stood apart from the rally crowd. They held signs, clean white with sharp black lettering: SYSTEM TECH FOR ALL, NOT FOR ONE CREW and WHO DECIDES WHO GETS TL9? and TRANSPARENCY NOW. They were just standing there which sohow made it worse. The signs all had the sa font, the sa dinsions. Grassroots movents didn't co with a brand kit.
Ryan saw them too. He didn't say anything, but his jaw tightened.
Luca kept walking.
Emily grabbed his sleeve and pointed the other way. A cluster of kids, maybe twelve or thirteen, wearing homade Triumph Initiative patches sewn onto their jackets. One of them had drawn the ship on the back of his hoodie in marker.
"Look at that," Emily said. Her voice had gone soft.
Luca watched the kids. One of them noticed and elbowed his friend, and then all of them were staring, mouths open, frozen in that particular way that ant they had just realized the people on their jackets were standing fifteen feet away.
He lifted a hand and waved. The kids lost their minds.
Sabine appeared at his shoulder. "Main stage. Keep moving."
Luca nudged the crew forward.
The stage was huge, much bigger than it had any right to be. Soone had built this for a concert, not seven twenty-year-olds who didn't know what to do with their hands.
Marisol Vintar's voice bood across the avenue. "The crew that has shown us the stars. The Triumph Initiative!"
The sound that ca back was a roar as tens of thousands looked up toward the stage.
He squinted past the stage lights. Young faces, mostly, stretched back down the Champs-Élysées as far as he could see. Banners. Homade signs. So of them were screaming. A girl in the front row was actually crying, and Luca had absolutely no idea what he had done to earn that.
Emily stood on his left, Zoe on his right. Behind them, Ryan had his arms crossed in that pose he did when he was trying to look calm and was anything but. Chris stood with his shoulders back, grinning, born for this. Danny had gone a little pale. Joey kept adjusting his jacket.
Emily leaned in, her voice just reaching him under the roar. "Breathe. They're not going to eat us."
"You don't know that," Luca said. But he stepped up to the mic anyway.
The crowd quieted. Not completely, that wouldn't have been possible, as thousands of people looked at him, and Luca Rossi from Sandworth, New Hampshire did not have a speech prepared because he had been too busy that morning accidentally starting a movent through Paris.
So he said what was true.
"Hey, everyone." His voice ca through the speakers and bounced off buildings. "I'm not going to lie. This is terrifying."
Laughter. His shoulders dropped. He could breathe again.
"We're from Sandworth, New Hampshire. Small town. Nothing town. The sort of place where nothing was ever supposed to happen to anybody. We were about to start classes when the System showed up, and our first plan was basically 'figure it out before sothing eats us,' and we got really good at that, and then we got a ship, and honestly, we're still figuring it out. The only thing we ever did different is that we kept pushing when it would've been easier to stop."
He glanced back at the crew. Zoe gave him a thumbs-up. Danny had so color back.
"But here's the thing. Every person I've t on this tour, every team, every kid running drills in a portal sowhere, you're all doing the sa thing we did. You're choosing to show up. That's it. That's the whole secret."
He stepped back and let Emily take the mic. She was better at this than he was. She had always been better at this.
"When we left Earth," Emily said, and her voice went steady in that way that made people listen, "we didn't know what we'd find. We discovered new worlds, yes. But the real discovery was what's possible when you trust the people beside you and refuse to quit."
Zoe stepped forward next, loose and confident, and talked about opportunity and writing history. Danny followed, quieter, more personal, and Luca watched him carefully. Danny at a microphone in front of tens of thousands of people, talking about how the System had opened doors for him, and Luca rembered Danny in that fake lab two weeks ago, stripped of everything. He had co back from that. He was standing on a stage in Paris talking about discovery and building sothing better, and he ant every word of it.
Ryan talked about problem-solving and late nights and a planet so toxic that the sa tal ant to protect them was actively being eaten away. Not the most motivational of ssages, but that was Ryan. Chris told a story about their ti on the Triumph that made the crowd laugh, and finally, Joey talked about family, about how seven strangers from the sa small town had beco sothing that didn't have a word yet.
They had never been strangers, but Joey was right. Sowhere along the way, they had beco sothing closer than friends.
The girl in the front row had stopped crying. She was just watching now, and the expression on her face looked a lot like belief.
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the exhibits. Luca drifted through a reconstruction exhibit that tracked how Paris had been rebuilt after the System, twelve nations contributing engineers and materials, and stood in front of a hologram of the city for longer than he'd admit.
The rest of the day blurred together. More interviews, more caras, more hands to shake. By the ti they got back to the suite, nobody had any words left.
Luca sat by the window. Paris glowed below, the city alive in that way that cities are at night, headlights and streetlamps and windows that stayed lit because sobody was still up, still working, still building. Emily was curled against his left side, her head on his shoulder, her breathing starting to slow. Ryan had claid the other end of the couch and was scrolling through his tablet with the focused expression of soone who was reading and also falling asleep and had not yet realized these were incompatible activities.
"You're quiet," Emily said. She didn't open her eyes.
"Thinking."
"About what?"
Ryan looked up from his tablet. "About how many of those kids are going to show up at Sandworth asking for autographs." He glanced back down, scrolled, and his expression shifted. "Also, Orion Horizons acquisition cleared regulatory review. Full approval. Took eleven days."
"That's fast," Luca said.
"That's suspicious." Ryan set the tablet face-down on the cushion. "Eleven days for a multi-asset acquisition? Soone greased that or planned it."
Luca agreed. Orion Horizons controlled the southeastern corridor of the US, over a billion credits in System military hardware, thousands of mbers, and now they were about to be swallowed by Titan. They knew Halden's face. The man was on every ad, every press release, polished and cara-ready. What they didn't know was why he had gone after Danny instead of just picking up the phone and scheduling an interview. A civilized conversation would have done more good than whatever that had been. Titan had contracts spanning Eurasia and northern Africa, and the money behind them was still a black box.
"Today was a lot," Luca said finally. "Not the event itself... the people, all those kids. What they think we are."
Emily shifted, pressing closer. Her fingers laced through his. "What do they think we are?"
"I don't know. More than we are. Better." He paused. "They were looking at us like we were stars."
Ryan put his feet up on Luca's lap, which was Ryan's way of saying the conversation was over and also that he loved him. Emily's breathing had evened out. She was almost asleep. Below the window, the lights stayed on.
Luca leaned back into the couch and pulled Emily a little closer.
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