Karl's hands trembled for only a second—long enough for Reginald to see the man he had known his whole life flicker and vanish.
"I want everything," Karl said, voice flat as a slab of glass. It wasn't a question. It wasn't even a plan yet. It was a demand shaped like a wound.
Reginald's face went white. "Sir—where would we even—"
"Find their names. Every address they ever used. Every tintype, email, shipment manifest, P.O. box, phone number, lawyer, school, mistress, accountant—anything that ties them to a life beyond that desert." Karl's eyes were far away; he wasn't looking at the screens or the estate or the ceiling lights. He was staring at the two grainy people in the video who had smiled at him and then given themselves away. "Find their families. Find their children. Find the old men who taught them to hate. Find the dogs they kept. I don't want one thing spared. Not one memory left to comfort them."
Reginald swallowed. The old man's hand closed around the tablet as if it could physically contain the images. "Sir, that— that's revenge. We're not judges. We can't—"
Karl laughed, but it had no warmth. It was a brittle sound that broke on the sterile air. "You think this is about justice?" He stepped closer, the hospital light making his face papery. "Justice is a word for people who can afford patience. This is about consequence. They made a broadcast of my parents' death to humiliate me. They wanted me to watch them die. They wanted me to be powerless. I am not powerless."
He sat heavily back in the bed and folded his hands as if setting a tray. "Start with every contact at the rebel cell. Trace the feeds that carried their footage. Sift their payrolls. Talk to anyone who sold them parts, who drove them past checkpoints, anyone who whispered their names on a campus or in a market. Pull every thread and follow the knot. If you have to burn houses down on the other side of the world to collect the names, then collect them. If it takes my entire fortune, it takes my entire fortune. I will buy a war if I must."
Reginald's knuckles whitened. "Sir, please—"
"Do not speak to me of ethics, Reginald. Do not speak to me of law." Karl's voice sank into something colder. "My parents didn't choose a courtroom. They chose to make a decision no one else would. They chose to be the hand that broke the knife before it could be used. I will honor them in the only language they understood."
The butler's protest died in his throat. He had spent decades protecting this boy; he had seen him ill, angry, infantile and brilliant. That look in Karl's eyes now was not the sick child who'd begged for toys or the man who'd learned to run an empire. It was a calculation with all the mercy removed.
Reginald bowed his head. "I'll begin at once."
Karl watched the old man move—watched as the gears of a private world started to turn toward ruin. For a heartbeat, something like guilt flickered across him; the image of his mother smiling, of his father's careful hand on a schematic, rose and then fell away like a reed in a storm.
He wanted them to be remembered with grief and gratitude, not folded into the statistics of the rebels' progeny. If that required burning a thousand corners of the world to ash, so be it. If it required changing his own soul into a ledger of names, he would.
When Reginald left to assemble men, databases, and channels that Karl barely understood but knew how to buy, Karl lay back and watched the ceiling melt into the white noise of the hospital. The city continued beneath its glass skin: trams, traffic, the indifferent hum of industry. Outside those noises, a private war began to take shape—one that would not be waged only on maps or in boardrooms, but on the soft, tender things that made people more than enemies: family dinners, old photographs, the places where people kept their pets.
He told himself it was righteous. He told himself it would honor the two people who had chosen to die rather than turn their work into more death. Underneath that justification, another thing lived: a wintered impatience that would not warm again.
Karl closed his eyes, feeling the outline of a plan forming like frost on glass. It was neat, economical, and merciless. It fit him now the way illness once had—an identity.