The Zero Point Rite — Divide, Despair, Destroy

Jul 2026

2 weeks since Deptford. Juno is now in a jointly monitored safehouse under an uneasy ceasefire. She can leave to see her family, friends and work, but only with one operative from each faction accompanying her. She has been given a room, decent food, and 2 completely contradictory accounts of why her life matters. She hasn't chosen either. She wants her old life back. Vane's people treat her with careful deference. Mordred's with blunt practicality. Elias checks on her once and says almost nothing useful. Iris brings her tea and stays longer than necessary. Neither faction notices how much time she is spending with her. Across East London, in a basement planning room, Liam reads on global weaving law while Lilith speaks with a new ally in Lagos on the phone. It's the man she introduced Liam too - a Vane high rank, Ben, who seems to be sympathetic to their cause. Neither says yet what it + their growing influence might become, but they are hopeful they can make a difference somehow.

Jul 2026

We see Juno properly for the first time - not as an object but as a person. She was a records admin for a South London housing trust. She has a cat named Gerald, a standing Friday dinner with 2 friends, and a half-finished ceramics class application. Through chats mainly with Iris, she begins understanding what weaving is and why her technique is important. Iris answers every question as honestly as she can. Her family’s technique, for generations, has been the ability merge the best parts of 2 weavers souls and bodies, into one being. The men keeping her have been at odds for years - being the only thing in the others way to the world they want. They need her to merge them with an apprentice, and finally become the strongest. Downtown, for the 1st time since Deptford - those very men meet. No escort, 40 mins. We hear none of it, but see them leave separately, neither satisfied. Both said exactly what they came to, and both left more motivated than ever to finally overcome the other.

Jul 2026

With her decision seemingly nowhere close, Mordred takes the first initiative for Juno's favour. He arranges for her to witness, from a safe distance, his team dismantling a trafficking network out of a warehouse in Tilbury. The operation is clean, precise, and with no civilian casualties. He says nothing afterward. Vane's response isn't a countermove. Instead, he simply spends an evening in the safehouse kitchen with Juno, talking not about weaving, her technique or even the choice she will need to make. It’s just talking, as if they were friends. It’s a refreshing experience for Juno. During the conversation, she asks him, carefully, if he ever regrets surviving Lab Leak. He thinks about it for a genuinely long time, then answers in only 3 words. We don't hear them, but we see Juno's face when speaks. Simultaneously, Elias and Iris meet in secret for the third time this month. They aren't talking about work.

Jul 2026

Ben, leader of Vane's Lagos division, finally gives Liam an answer. Despite his position, he admits Liam is right: the outlaw system weavers navigate is unsustainable, and neither side has properly addressed it. Crucially, Ben believes Liam is now too influential to ignore. If Liam keeps building support, Ben is willing to use his deep connections to arrange what Liam thought was impossible - direct talks with the very people who can change the law.For the first time, Liam can see a clear path to peace. Lilith notices that week that he smiles more than he ever has since they met. Back at the safehouse, a Mordred junior approaches Juno, sharing a personal account of weaver oppression that is completely genuine yet entirely manipulative. It was planned. Juno heard, and felt it. Lying awake staring at the ceiling, she sees her choice for the first time not as a burden, but a responsibility. She asks herself, "What if I do nothing and people suffer because of me?". The answer scares her.

Jul 2026

Lilith grew up in a weaving family in Birmingham that kept their abilities hidden for three generations - until her father was sectioned under mental health legislation after a low-level awakening in a supermarket was witnessed by staff. Thankfully, her technique is not as destructive - it allows her to boost others techniques in different ways. She came to London at nineteen, first out of necessity, then conviction. The episode follows one specific day: her and Liam moving through the city, maintaining the EBand supply chain, a quiet argument about operational risk that is actually an argument about fear. That evening on the roof she tells him something about her father she has never told anyone. He listens without offering anything back, which is exactly what she needed. By the end we know precisely who Lilith is - not a symbol, not a function, but the only person in the world who knows Liam completely and stays anyway.

Jul 2026

Following Mordred’s 2nd stunt, Juno is leaning toward him just enough. When Vane finds out, he reacts with absolute stillness. Mordred feels relief rather than satisfaction. After moving into his compound, Juno shares a building with Elias for the first time. They form an unexpected rapport based on pure bluntness. She asks practical questions about weaving; he answers with equal directness. This mutual honesty soon evolves into a strange friendship. Meanwhile, Ben’s contacts push things forward faster than Liam expected. A government official named Eleanor Voss wants to hear proposals regarding weaver integration and legal recognition. It's only a first step, but the movement has finally progressed past safehouses, protests, and whispers. Liam spends days preparing, obsessing over every detail to ensure the meeting is perfect. Lilith watches this closely, as the possibility alone changes his mood to something rare - optimistic. Elsewhere, Nico receives a new intelligence report on Ben

Jul 2026

We move through Vane's compound in his absence - how it actually runs, who makes decisions, what 2,500 weavers scattered across the globe do on a Tuesday. Nico, assuming the mantle of leader, manages operations with quiet efficiency and suppressed anxiety. Then the same attention turns to Mordred's compound: its different rhythm, the specific texture of its ideology in daily practice. Arden operates in the same position as Nico, the 2 of them acting as an uneasy bridge between factions. After a briefing, we briefly see them talk. "Shame this won't last." "Yeah.. shame indeed". Thanks to Juno, reluctant communication lines have opened on, and as neither are moving to cut them, the factions are more as one, but also divided, than ever. Juno moves through it all, observing everything. Late that night she finds Elias in the compound's small outdoor space and says: "I don't know what to do anymore." He says: "Neither do I." Neither of them means the same thing by it.

Jul 2026

The meeting day comes. Then it goes. Ben disappears without warning. Messages go unanswered. Calls fail. Contacts who previously responded now refuse communication entirely. Within days, every route Ben opened has quietly closed. No explanation arrives. No official cancellation. Nothing. Liam desperately scrambles to find a reason that makes sense. But by the day's end, he has none. What unsettles him most isn't the loss of the meeting itself, but what it suggests - that the entire process may have been performative from the beginning. Lilith argues they should wait. Liam agrees. But something has changed. For the first time since Maya's death, he begins looking at peaceful solutions not as difficult, but as impossible. The world has now run him ragged just one too many times. He is out of patience. Back at the safehouse, Vane’s intelligence drafts their first report of Liam and his activities, as does Mordred’s. Nobody yet recognises that it's him, or understands the true scale.

Jul 2026

Vane receives the report, but he has known about Liam since ep 6. In his mind, Liam's network represents genuine weaver liberation energy that neither faction channels, which has potential to be something positive for the whole weaving community. Moving against him would either destroy it or drive that energy somewhere worse. For now, better to watch. But when Nico asks if the Liam situation should be revisited, Vane replies; "It already has." Through Iris, Juno learns of Vane’s actions. Still in 2 minds, seeing this forces her to ask herself; "What if I save people by creating a worse world?" Her answer convinces her to change her mind to Vane. When Mordred receives the news, he does so with his usual composure. Alone afterward, he sits at a desk and doesn't move for a long time. Shortly after, Elias and Iris meet covertly again - longer this time, less careful. When they part, Iris looks over her shoulder once, and sees only Elias, who is looking back. She smiles and keeps walking.

Jul 2026

Back with Vane's faction, Juno starts engaging with her technique's history - for the first time as something that belongs to her rather than a burden dropped on her. In an empty room, Iris teaches her the basics of how to use weave. Juno has absolutely no talent for it, but they both find this hilarious - the first time either has laughed so hard in months. Meanwhile, Liam + Lilith take 2 days away in the Brecon Beacons to confront the bleak reality of Ben's silence. The support, the contact with Voss, and the opportunity are all gone. Lilith argues that one betrayal does not erase everything they've built. Liam does not disagree, but he struggles to find faith. Months of organizing, compromise, and restraint have yielded nothing but more waiting. He finally admits a terrifying truth aloud: he no longer believes those in power intend to change anything. Their intimate talk masks a shift. Liam is no longer planning how to keep trying. He is deciding what happens after trying fails.

Jul 2026

Hoping to seal favour, Mordred sets up a meeting with Juno directly, no intermediaries, no agenda, in a café in Greenwich on a Wednesday afternoon. He tells her things about his life he hasn't told anyone in living memory. Not as persuasion - she has heard enough persuasion - just as an account. Three hundred and seventy-two years. What his soul swapping technique is like. The bodies. The weight of accumulated techniques belonging to dead people. What WW2 looked like from inside a community that had already survived the Inquisition. What snapped, and when. He doesn't ask her to choose him. He asks her, for the first time; "What do you actually want?" She doesn't have an answer. He says that's fine. He pays for the coffee and leaves. Juno sits there for a hour, more torn than ever. She notes Vane + Mordred are more similar than they realise, but that only makes her decision harder. By the time she leaves, her fear becomes; "What if there is no right answer?" Now, she's truly stuck.

Jul 2026

Mordred's intelligence division finally puts a name to the underground network. Then a face. Then an address. The report lands on his desk and he reads it unsurprised, having suspected most of it already. Arden argues for immediate action. Mordred overrules her without full explanation. Vane receives the same information two hours later - with additional context: Liam's orphanage history, his connection to Elias and Iris, who he was before the compound. He sits with that. Neither leader acts. Liam, entirely unaware he's been identified, oversees a network expansion meeting in a Bermondsey railway arch with 19 weavers from 6 cities, Lilith taking notes beside him, floating for the first time the of what he calls a "terminal event." The room goes quiet. The movement has waited for others to enact change too long. Now, it is time they stop wating and start acting. Liam wants, more than ever before, to end weavers’ pain and oppression, no matter the cost.

Jul 2026

Juno switches yet again. The reasons are more complex than before - less about ideology, more about the fact that Mordred was the first person to stop trying to manage her reaction and simply tell the truth. In the hour before she transfers, she confesses to Iris that she is not just torn, but terrified. "I still don't know what I want." Iris tells her; “That’s natural. My only advice is when the time comes, make sure you know the lives you save will outweigh those taken”. Juno holds onto those words very tightly. After she leaves, Iris sits alone to for the first time in a while, process. Soon, a tear rolls down her face. In that moment, all she wishes for is to be back at the orphanage, blissfully unaware of life’s painful complexity. Back at Mordred's compound, Juno starts asking Elias about Maya after Iris mentioned they were once close. He answers carefully, briefly, but he answers. It's the first time in a long time he has heard that name, and to his surprise, it makes him smile.

Jul 2026

Mordred can't sleep. He moves through his compound alone at 3am as he moves through his centuries in fragments: a village in 14th century France, the first body swap made purely to survive, the specific vertigo of waking in someone else's eyes. A brief window of community in the Weimar Republic, ended by 1933. A flashback to when a junior weaver suffers a panic attack during a war. Mordred notices, and stops fighting to comfort him. Not for ideology or gain - but because he understands what it feels like not to belong. The particular accumulation of grief that only exists past a certain number of years - not loneliness, not loss, but something that has no name because nobody else has lived long enough to need one. The pattern that repeated every century: find community, lose it, survive in the wrong skin. In the present, as dawn comes up, Juno appears in his office doorway and asks if he's alright. He looks at her for a moment. "I've been worse" - which for him is almost an admission.

Jul 2026

Liam's network pull of their first ambitious operation, targeting government entropy research facilities in 5 cities simultaneously. There are no casualties, but the government response is faster and harder than he anticipated. Within 48 hours, 3 network cells are rolled up and 11 weavers are detained. Liam recalibrates - not with panic, but with a cold shift toward something more extreme than he's previously allowed himself to consider. Several members of the network quietly express concern. Liam listens carefully, answers every objection calmly, and persuades most of them. But only most. One leaves. Not because they're weak, or stupid, but because they think Liam has genuinely crossed a line. All they tell him is; "I can't help with this." And they're gone. Lilith watches through it all and says nothing, because she already said what she had to say in the Brecon Beacons. At the safehouse, both factions process the same news. Vane says, quietly: "He's accelerating."

Jul 2026

Just the 2 of them, Elias and Iris meet again. For once, they don't pretend the meeting is operational. Both are somewhere they shouldn't be and they both know it. But they couldn't care less about that right now. They just need someone to be with each other. They have an honest conversation - about Maya, about the orphanage, about what they've each become under the people who took them in and what they actually believe now, underneath the ideology. Elias admits Mordred's philosophy makes tactical sense to him but he doesn't love it. Iris admits Vane's makes moral sense but she doesn't love it either. They chuckle as they exchange stories of missions gone wrong, and recall the days when neither had a care in the world. Neither needs to say what they actually love. As they finally embrace beneath the starry sky, they both already know. When they leave, both are more compromised than when they entered, and both more human.

Jul 2026

The assembly preparation begins. Liam has been planning a simultaneous attack across his network for months, aiming to cause a global panic and pool a massive 1.5M EU to create what would be essentially an unstoppable force. He plans to use Lilith as an anchor that holds the pool stable and boosts his technique - a pressure that is slowly, invisibly, beginning to cost her. She hasn't told him yet. He runs through the plan - the targeting logic is confirmed, the scheduling locked, the date chosen deliberately - timed to coincide with what his intelligence suggests will be, in the wake of new uncertainty, a confrontation between Vane and Mordred over Juno. If he can destroy every weaver who could challenge him while they're distracted and in chaos, the world he wants becomes possible. Viewed from inside his reasoning, the plan is not irrational. That is the most frightening thing about it. Meanwhile, Iris + Elias finally learn of Liam's movement. They aren't sure how to feel.

Jul 2026

With the day of decision drawing closer, Lilith tells Liam what the anchoring will do to her. Not a confrontation - a simple statement of fact, at their kitchen table on that quiet morning. She is not asking him to stop. She has already decided to let it happen. The conversation that follows is the most important in the season: Liam understanding in real time what he's about to lose, what he's already asked her to give without knowing it, and Lilith being completely clear through all of it. She believes in what he's building. She believes in him. She has made her choice. He holds her for a long time, in silence. At the safehouse, both factions receive simultaneous intelligence that something large is moving in the weaving underground. The alert is flagged high priority. Arden starts assembling a response team. Still nobody understands the scale. Juno sits with her thoughts, Iris words at the front of her mind. "I finally know what I want. I just don't know if it's possible."

Jul 2026

Vane and Mordred, intelligence suggesting something imminent, both mobilise toward the safehouse - a confrontation over Juno's future, both sides converging at once. Just as Liam had predicted. Juno, aware it's coming, sits with Iris and asks her something that make her totally silent. "What if there is no good choice?" At the same time, Liam and his network move through their final operational hours - as they go ahead with the “terminal event”. At nuclear plants in 15 major cities across the globe, Liams strike teams attack. The attack causes an unprecedented global panic, producing enormous amounts of entropy. Liam begins to pool it, with Lilith as an anchor - bearing the full weight of it as she boosts his technique. Arden's response team arrives at the underground network's last known address to find it empty, cleaned, no trace. She stands in the middle of the abandoned space and understands, looking around at nothing, that she is already too late.

Jul 2026

Lilith has made her peace, as her anchor gives. She collapses, eyes open, seeing nothing. Everything she was is gone. As Liam holds her, all of it arrives at once - Maya, the orphanage, everything taken, everything lost - and all he wants is for it to stop. He screams a child's command: "Make it stop! Get rid of everyone who is trying to hurt us!" From these misspoken words, a being devoid of warmth, skin crackling with a dark red hue of death, is born. The Atom Eater. What was intended as a tool for equality, became instead a manifestation of trauma. In moments, it processes its command, identifies its targets, and begins. Only minutes later, its clones are in six continents. At the safehouse, every EBand pings a red alert. Vane and Mordred look at the readings, then each other. Neither speak. Post-credits: a reporter outside a floodlit government building, barely holding it together - "global incident," "unknown origin," "mass casualties highly likely" Behind her, a building burns.