Shock.
"Impossible!" The word ripped from him. "Individual bonds cannot?—"
Nate's grip tightened on her hand.
"We're not individual anymore."
The web blazed. Every connection in Assjacket fired at once, and the combined light drove the darkness back to the square's edges. The frozen fountain cracked and water flowed again, steaming where it caught the golden glow. Streetlights flickeredback to life. The cobblestones beneath The Collector's feet turned warm amber.
He stumbled to one knee.
For three incandescent seconds, Hazel thought it was over.
Then The Collector laughed.
Low at first. Almost gentle. It built into something that scraped against the inside of her skull, and she watched him rise from the cobblestones with darkness pouring off his shoulders like water. His coat rippled. His face shifted through a dozen configurations—faces she didn't recognize, faces that belonged to other people, other times, other partnerships he'd consumed across eight centuries of patient collecting.
"Beautiful." He straightened. Brushed off his lapels with hands that weren't trembling anymore. "Truly beautiful. I haven't felt resistance like that since Prague."
The darkness regrouped. Not retreating—repositioning. Learning the shape of their web. Probing for weak points with surgical precision.
Hazel's breath caught. The network held, still golden, still singing. But where The Collector's shadows pressed against it, she felt threads strain. Not breaking. Not yet.
His pale eyes found hers across the square, and in them she read something worse than anger.
Patience.
"You've made this so much more interesting." He smiled with someone else's mouth. "Now show me what happens when I stop being polite."
The polite versionof The Collector had been terrifying enough.
The real one shattered the air.
He spread his arms wide, and eight hundred years of stolen power detonated outward in a concentric wave. Not darkness this time—something worse. A void. An absence so complete it ate light and sound and warmth and left nothing behind but the memory of having once possessed them.
The wave hit the golden web like a fist through spun glass.
Hazel screamed. She felt it in her chest, in her teeth, in the marrow of her bones—every connection in the network buckling under pressure that hadn't existed three seconds ago. Cricket's node flickered. The thread connecting Zelda to her familiars stretched thin as spider silk. Somewhere to her left, Marcus the student volunteer dropped to his knees, blood trickling from his nose.
"You think your little friendship circle can stop me?" The Collector's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, reverberating off every surface. His face had stopped shifting. It had settled into something gaunt and ancient, all pretense of charm stripped away to reveal the raw hunger beneath. "I've consumed bonds that lasted centuries!"
He closed his fist, and the void tightened.
Three threads snapped simultaneously.
Hazel felt each one like a rib breaking. The connection between the Fett cats—gone. The bridge linking Mayor Grimble to his wife of forty years—severed clean, both of them crumpling to the cobblestones with matching expressions of bewildered grief. The node anchoring Cricket's loyalty to her diner regulars—dark.
"No—"
"More." The Collector's eyes burned with something beyond madness. Beyond obsession. A conviction so absolute it had calcified into dogma over centuries of solitude and theft. He believed this. Believed he was saving them. Each bondhe severed, each partnership he consumed, was an act of preservation in his fractured theology. Hazel could see it in the gentle way his fingers curled as he plucked connections from the web—a curator handling rare butterflies before pinning them under glass.
That tenderness made her stomach turn more than cruelty ever could.
"Nate." Her voice came out ragged. "The east side?—"
"I see it."
The network was hemorrhaging. Connections failed in cascading patterns as The Collector worked methodically inward from the edges, consuming the weakest bonds first, growing stronger with each one he absorbed. The golden light that had blazed so brilliantly dimmed to a sickly amber. Then flickered.
