Chapter 60
Chapter 60:
The technology was Blackwell-grade — proprietary, cutting-edge, the kind of thing that existed in research labs and at defense exhibitions and, apparently, in the garden of the Ashworth estate on the occasion of the wedding of Edmund Blackwell IV.
Two figures materialized at the end of the aisle. Life-sized. Three-dimensional. Moving with the fluid, unhurried grace of real people — Lara in white, Edmund in black, their hands joined, their faces clear and detailed and present. The holograms walked the aisle together, and the light caught them, and they cast no shadows, and the flowers around them were silk, and nothing in the garden was real except the two hundred people watching and the two men in the fourth row whose plan had just been rendered meaningless.
Callum understood first. His mind — faster than Declan’s, trained by decades of processing information under pressure — decoded the scene in three seconds: the figures weren’t real. Lara wasn’t here. She had never been here. The garden, the flowers, the ceremony — all of it was a stage set for a performance, and the audience had been invited not to witness a wedding but to witness a decoy.
His eyes scanned the room. The exits. The guests. The security personnel, who were positioned not where security would be positioned for a real ceremony but where they would be positioned to contain anyone who tried to leave — which meant that the containment wasn’t about the wedding. It was about him.
The holographic couple reached the altar. The officiant — a real officiant, performing his role with the calm professionalism of a man who had been paid well and briefed thoroughly — addressed the projections as though they were flesh.
“The bride and groom will now exchange rings p>
Holographic hands exchanged holographic rings. The gestures were precise — motion-captured, probably, from rehearsal footage — and the effect was uncanny: close enough to reality to be beautiful, far enough from it to be cruel.
Callum’s hand went to his pocket. The video drive — the four minutes and thirty seconds of weaponized nostalgia he’d prepared — was still there, but the screen it was meant to play on was already occupied.
And the image on the screen was changing.
The holographic ceremony dissolved. In its place, a montage appeared — not Callum’s montage, not the twenty years of photographs and laughter and shared history he’d assembled.
A different montage. Messages from the wedding guests: congratulations, blessings, well-wishes, delivered to camera with the practiced warmth of people who had been filmed in advance and edited into sequence.
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Each message was genuine.
Each speaker was real.
And each one was directed at Lara and Edmund with the easy familiarity of people who had accepted this marriage as a fact rather than a question.
Callum’s video drive was useless. The screen was not his. The moment was not his. The ceremony — the entire, elaborately constructed ceremony — was not his.
The congratulations ended. The screen went dark. Then it lit again, and what appeared was live footage, and what the footage showed was the thing that Callum and Declan had been trying to prevent for weeks, happening in real time, somewhere else, without them.
Kingsgate Hall. The old district of Thornfield — narrow streets, carved wooden facades, the kind of architecture that had survived centuries and looked like it intended to survive several more. The hall was decorated in red — red ribbons, red lanterns, red banners with gold characters — and the sound coming through the speakers was the piercing, jubilant wail of a suona, the Chinese horn that announced celebrations and weddings and the beginning of things that could not be undone.
Edmund rode a horse.
A tall horse, dark, moving through the narrow streets of the old quarter with the patient, measured gait of an animal that had been trained for ceremony. He wore a traditional wedding suit — red and gold, embroidered, the kind of garment that took months to make and was worn once and meant forever.
Behind him, carried by four bearers, was a bridal sedan — covered, curtained, containing Lara.
The procession moved through the streets.
Drums and gongs. Pure gold coins scattered like rain — not chocolate, not tokens, actual gold, glinting in the afternoon light as they bounced off cobblestones and were scooped up by guests and children and passersby who hadn’t been invited but had been drawn by the noise and the spectacle and the unmistakable energy of a celebration that was spending money as though money were the point, which it wasn’t: the point was permanence. The point was declaration. The point was: this woman is mine, and I am hers, and we are beginning something, and the beginning is loud enough to be heard in Halcombe.