Day in the story: 11th December (Thursday)

Night was still queen in her darkest gown when I landed on the roof of a bus.

Bobby, the shadow of Bobby, that is, had stepped aboard just seconds earlier after finishing her shift. A few more people had entered too. Most of them I recognized as other cleaners, tired and folded in on themselves. One of them was new, a man. I noted him. He wore loose clothes that seemed inadequate to the weather. He could be a Domain user of some kind, his shadowlight warmed him from within.

I needed to disrupt Penrose's plan somehow. Sabotage it without painting a target on my back. There was a good chance he was watching, through Beatrice, or through something else. But inaction would rot me from the inside faster than the risk of moving. So I moved. Clad in black, hood drawn and face covered by a bandana, no Usagi mask today. Still, the rest of my Usagear and tools were in place.

I boxed up the difficult feelings. Locked them tight. This wasn't the time. I had work to do.

Scout. Plan. Execute.

A heist, yes, but this time the prize was something different. Something personal. The first—entirely of my own choosing.

As the bus rumbled forward beneath me, I stretched my other eyes, those held open by magic and vigilance. They remained fixed on Jason's apartment. Just because I'd broken his heart didn't mean I'd abandon him.

Not now. Not with threats lurking that were too foreign for him to even name.

He slept, curled beneath grief's weight. After I left, he'd called Peter, as I knew he would. Peter had come, like he always did. He would never leave a friend alone in the dark weather of the mind.

But he hadn't said anything to me. No message. No word.

I was the villain now.

Anansi veiled the watching eyes and the pain along with them. She spared me the noise.

I whispered thanks.

[You are welcome.]

You're becoming a friend, Anansi. Keep changing the way you are.

She didn't reply.

Wind tugged at me as the bus rolled across the bridge. We were headed through Manhattan, north toward the Bronx.

I reached for one of my eye-cards. Its backside shimmered with metallic hues, silver-laced, sharp-edged. It was a tool meant to cut. The front bore a perfectly rendered ear and eye, surgical in detail, tuned for surveillance, for heightened perception.

I whispered inward, reaching for the shadowlight curled inside me like a waiting blade. The card obeyed.

Steel first, its edges hardened with intent. Then an eye, its surface shifting, awakening to see.

With both enchantments in place, I pressed it softly to the side window.

Bobby sat comfortably, her tired body melting into the seat, gaze angled at the blur of night passing outside. The man, though, he was not idle. He kept stealing glances in her direction, then letting his eyes sweep the bus. Measuring. Evaluating. Calculating. He was there for her, that much was certain.

But by whose command?

Penrose? Or Alicia Bergman?

It was a coin in the air. Heads, he was here to take her. Tails, to protect her. And I was the hand reaching to catch that coin. One wrong motion and I might be the threat in either scenario, robbing Bergman of a guarded asset or rescuing Bobby from a net cast by Penrose.

Happy little compounded probability. The kind that gets people dead.

Or saved.

Maybe both.

**********

We switched buses twice and rode a metro train in between. The man followed every time. Shadow-silent, consistent, careful. Fortunately, none of them ever saw me, slipping rooftop to rooftop, a passing blur above their heads.

The journey lasted over two hours and ended deep in Bronxville. Not exactly where I pictured Bobby living. Her house was surprisingly big, three bedrooms, at least. Seemed like too much for a cleaner's salary. EoT must've set her up here or her late husband. A safehouse wrapped in suburbia.

Cut off from Penrose's network, I couldn't trace the funding like I used to. Too many walls now. Too many eyes watching the walls.

The man trailing her didn't go in. He hung back on the street until Bobby crossed her threshold and locked the door behind her. Only then did he slip into a parked van nearby.

A protector, then. Not a predator.

I slipped past easily enough, cutting through a neighbor's yard and scaling the fence. Cameras lined Bobby's house, but I jumped their fields of view and landed soundlessly on the roof.

A quick painted hole later, I infused one of my cards, eyes and ears both and slipped it through the opening. The room below? A sterile, white-painted box. Totally empty. No cameras, no motion sensors. Just paint.

Normal. Perfectly normal.

Right.

I dropped in, retrieved the card and slid it under the door to scout the next space. Another white hallway, bare, silent, not even a lamp fixture. But I heard sounds coming from somewhere below.

The door had a tripwire mechanism. Primitive but functional. Good. At least they were pretending to care about security. I painted a hole through the door and slipped through. With the recon card in hand I crept toward the staircase leading down.

I aimed the card and flicked it at a sharp angle. It flipped midair and dropped quietly into the open entry below the stairs: the main room. My improvised spyglass.

This room wasn't empty. Far from it.

Still white, of course. Stark, sterile. Bobby sat in a medical-grade chair, staring blankly at a TV tuned to white noise. Soothing. Or maybe maddening. She was hooked up to wires that ran into a translucent, melon-sized glass orb pulsing with swirling shadowlight. The orb was linked to a medical bed where another woman lay, the Bobby, or what I assumed was the original. I couldn't see her face from this angle.

I wondered if Penrose even knew about this place. Something told me that he didn't.

The orb's other cables ran down another staircase on the far side of the room, deeper still.

A figure in a lab coat tended to the woman in the bed. Then, another emerged from the lower stairs.

This rabbit hole? Definitely deeper than I thought.

"Central says he'll be here shortly. Some kind of family matters," said the man who emerged from downstairs. He looked like a mechanic, jeans, flannel shirt, smudged with grease and dirt.

"What are you talking about?" replied the man in the lab coat, stepping closer into my card's view. Bald head, short brown beard, tired eyes behind wireframe glasses.

"Something from his old group. I don't know the details."

"Between you and me," the lab coat said, lowering his voice, "I hate that guy. They should've never tied us to him. He's unstable."

"I bet Alicia will cut him loose once he delivers what she wants."

"I hope so."

Then he turned and looked, straight into my eye-card. No hesitation. "Someone's here."

Fuck.

He didn't wait. Marched forward to grab the card. I saw the mechanic move toward a terminal. Then my vision went dark, I severed the card's link instantly, pulling my shadowlight back through aura and ghosting toward the upstairs railing.

As soon as the bald man came into view beneath me, I dropped onto his shoulders. He grunted, tried to resist, flaring with a faint pulse of Authority, but it wasn't enough.

I focused on my Travel Grimoire, locked onto a sketch I had finished recently, Times Square. The spell flared and in a blink, he vanished.

Teleported halfway across the city. Hope he enjoys the lights.

I sprinted into the room I'd just surveilled. Both Bobbies were still there, one slack-jawed in a dentist-style chair, staring into static; the other comatose on the medical bed, hooked up to that glassy orb. Neither reacted to my entrance.

The mechanic wasn't in the room anymore. Must've gone downstairs.

So did I.

The cellar room was spacious and cold, mostly empty, except for one major detail: a massive tunnel leading off to the side, wide enough to drive a bus through. And in the center of the room stood a metallic structure shaped like an arch, humming with power.

Shadowlight pulsed in rich purples, deep blues, tarnished golds, colors close to Malik's signature hues, only darker with a hint of red here and there. Between the twin columns of the arch shimmered a membrane, thin, liquid-like, almost transparent. Like horizontal water suspended midair.

An Ideworld Gate.

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A stabilized portal, just like the ones the Guild supposedly uses to explore alternate world. This one looked active. Humming. Fed by the shadowlight from the glass orb… and both versions of Bobby, still tethered by those cables.

Was this the point of it all?

I turned to run back upstairs when I heard footsteps on the stairs.

It was him. The van man. Bobby's protector.

And he did not look happy.

"You made a mistake coming here," he said, gun raised and steady. He looked to be in his thirties, short blond hair, jaw clenched tight, face twisted into a grimace. "Hands up. No sudden moves."

I could've just portaled out, left him confused, but I wanted Bobby out of here and I needed to see how this played out. So I did the most rational thing I could think of in this situation—

—I made a sudden move.

He fired—surprised—and missed. The bullet wasn't a normal one, it traced a ghostly streak of shadowlight through the air as it flew.

It passed just over me as I ducked low, under his aim and surged forward.

One clean kick to the legs.

As he went down, I used one hand to brace my fall and the other to punch, hard. His grip on the weapon faltered and the gun skidded across the floor with a metallic clatter.

I bolted upstairs, just in time to meet another bald bastard coming down. Blond, with a well-trimmed beard and the kind of build that makes you wonder if the gym owed him rent.

Thomas fucking Torque.

Of course he didn't recognize me—he never did when I changed personas. And naturally, he did the most reasonable thing his meat-brick brain could come up with, shot me in the chest.

The impact sent me flying backwards, slamming into the guy I'd just fought downstairs. The bullet hurt, a gut-punch wrapped in fire and lead, but thanks to my armor and shadowlight, it was far from lethal.

I landed hard on the first guy. He had the courtesy, or just bad luck, to break my fall with his spine. He groaned as I rolled away.

Then Thomas shot him.

One clean round to the head. The groaning stopped. Bit of a bummer, I never got to see his powers.

But Thomas wasn't finished. Seeing that bullets weren't cutting it against me, he pulled a long, serrated knife from beneath his jacket and lunged.

There's an ugly, unartistic truth to a knife fight, you know?

A person with a blade won't dance. They won't circle dramatically or give you a chance to breathe. They'll jab—fast, relentless, over and over until your body is nothing but holes. Any talk of blocking, dodging, countering… that's just media-fed lies. Flashy choreography for people who've never felt steel bite.

And I found out quickly—Authority burning through my soul, quickening my reflexes, sharpening every nerve—that I was living that lie. My body could keep pace with the impossible. My eyes tracked what no human eyes should. And that made the truth worse, not better.

I reacted on instinct, card in hand steel in a blink.

His blade clanged against mine, sparks jumping like fireflies. I danced back, ducking and dodging, blocking when I had to. He was utterly dumbfounded, the bedrock of what he knew to be true splintering apart before his eyes. And yet he was fast, strong too, bigger frame, relentless force behind each slash. He came at me like a storm, no hesitation. I had to give him that.

And me? I was holding back. Not just because I wanted to—but because I had to. If I stopped holding back, there wouldn't be a fight—just a body left to paint the floor.

He didn't know it was me. If he had, he wasn't letting it show. And aside from steeling my card, which could pass for a regular knife, I hadn't used any of the tricks he knew me for.

Not yet.

I ducked under another slash, my back nearly kissing the wall, when Rei Yamashiro bolted into the room. Oh Reality, I hated this guy.

"Thomas dickhead, you stinking wanker, we gotta move. Ramirez says they're on their fucking way you dimwit!" he barked as he skidded to a halt.

Thomas didn't care. He kept attacking without a sign of stopping.

I slipped two more cards from my holder and locked them between my fingers, three in total, forming a makeshift claws. With them, I parried his next blow and slammed a boot into his gut. Not hard enough to kill, but enough to throw him across the room like a sack of meat.

Yamashiro froze, his rat-brain trying to process the shift. His shadowlight bloomed across his skin in that signature dark swirl, an ugly thing, twitchy and fast. He lunged at me aiming for his shadow to touch mine. I knew that move. I knew all his moves.

Which meant I didn't hesitate.

I flung the clawed cards toward him mid-dash. Two he caught mid-air, snaring their shadows with that twitchy trick of his. But the third—oh, the third, slammed straight into his left eye socket.

He howled, staggered, then got a boot to the head for his trouble. His body hit the ground with a satisfying thud, blood painting white floors.

I didn't wait. I bolted again, up the stairs, leaving Rei bleeding and Thomas groaning as he got to his feet.

At the top, Shadow Bobby was still there, zoned out in the medical chair, eyes glued to the TV's static, as if the last few minutes hadn't happened at all.

I touched her, cold skin, humming with shadowlight and pulled her into my Domain.

**********

Bobby woke up the moment we arrived.

"Where am I?" she asked, dazed.

"You're inside my Domain. Do you know what a Domain is?" I replied. She turned to face me, taking in the bandana covering face, the black clothing, the aura humming around the space. No surprise crossed her face. I suppose she was used to seeing stranger things.

"Yes. Your voice—it sounds familiar. Do I know you?"

"No. We've never met."

"Then why am I here?"

"I need answers. I was hoping you could give them."

"Answers to what?"

"Why do you work for Crystal Clean? For EoT? For Alicia Bergman?"

She blinked. "What do you mean, why? I work—, to do—" Her voice drifted. Still scrambled.

"What were you doing at your house?"

"I was watching TV. I always watch. It helps me relax."

"Did you notice you weren't alone in your house?"

"I wasn't?" She looked genuinely surprised.

Pointless. Whatever she had been, whoever she used to be, was gone. Just another puppet, a tool. But her absence and what had gone down in that house, could be leverage.

"Please, take a seat, Bobby." I gestured to the couch. She obeyed without hesitation, docile and blank-faced.

I pulled out another eye-card.

Be my eyes and ears, I thought. Then I touched my Travel Grimoire and pushed the card into Alicia Bergman's office.

The new viewpoint clicked in instantly. My card landed under her desk. She was pacing, sharply, erratically.

"…a disaster," she said into her phone, voice taut. She paused. "Yes. One assailant took Bobby's shadow and he just disappeared. I've never seen power like it."

He? I guess I looked masculine enough in the baggy gear. Suits me just fine.

"Then those two, he fought them. They unplugged the Barbara, packed her into a camper and drove off."

She paused again, listening.

"No, sir." Sir? Interesting. She answers to someone higher up. Another layer to this already complicated picture. "Rhythm left through the gate as planned. Lucas Remoire too, ran the moment the assailant showed up."

Mechanic guy, maybe?

"No contact since. We kept the gate open for as long as we could but closed it eventually because with connection between the Bobbies severed keeping it open was too expensive."

She went silent. Listening again. Four full minutes.

"I sent more people to secure the site." Another pause. "Yes, sir."

Then the call must've ended, because she unleashed a big and juicy:

"FUCK!!!"

**********

I sat across from Bobby, watching her. She was staring off, calm as lake water, not quite vacant but dulled, like her thoughts were happening one step behind her eyes. I was trying to figure out what to do with her, what she was even for now, when Alicia took another call.

Ten minutes had passed since her last conversation. She was still pacing her office like a caged animal when the phone rang again. She picked up, voice sharp and chilled.

"Who's this?"

A beat.

"If you aren't going to tell me who are you then at least tell me why did you call me." She answered and waited few seconds.

"Which one do you have? The comatose one?"

Penrose. It had to be.

"I need proof. Show me." A few seconds passed, video call or a photo—maybe—and her expression settled. Satisfied. Then she just listened.

"I don't have such a list," she said flatly. "No one in their right mind would keep a record of Domain locations. I'd never ask for that. If I did, I wouldn't have an organization."

So he asked for the Domain list. Penrose had gone ahead with his plan.

"I'm telling the truth," Alicia said. "But I think I could produce such a list. Give me twenty-four hours and I'll have it ready."

Another pause.

"I'll be waiting for your call. Keep her alive, no deal otherwise."

She ended the call and stood there, unmoving for a moment. Then she walked to her desk, picked up the phone again and dialed another number.

"Stephan? Tell me we have some way of tracking Bobby. The real one. The caster."

A pause.

"We need her shadow for tracking? It's gone too." Her voice was flat now, laced with frustration.

"No other way? Not even with the biometrics? No?" Another pause. "Okay. Let me know if anything changes."

She hung up, slumped into her chair and stayed there, shoulders hunched like the weight of the entire operation was pressing down on her spine.

If I knew Penrose and I did, he'd do everything in his power to stay in the shadows. Manipulate. Extort. Remain unseen. But I had a rare angle here, a way to turn his own game against him. If I exposed his hand Alicia might stop being his tool and start being his enemy. And that kind of war… that would work in my favor.

So I took a piece of paper and wrote a simple message in clean, blocky letters:

"Phillip Penrose holds her caster. Good luck."

I folded it once. No need to say more.

Then I turned to Bobby, still sitting there on the couch, exactly as I'd left her. Empty, calm.

"I'm going to send you back to work now, okay?"

She nodded, slow and obedient.

"Please take this paper and give it to Alicia."

She took the note, held it loosely like she wasn't quite sure what it was. I touched her shoulder and activated the Grimoire, sending her straight into Alicia Bergman's office.

To say Alicia was surprised by Bobby's sudden appearance would be an understatement.

She shrieked, shrieked, like one of those overacted TV housewives who just found a corpse in the pantry. It was hilarious. Her scream echoed through the office until she caught herself, realizing Bobby was just standing there like nothing had happened.

Bobby blinked slowly. "What's the matter, Alice?"

Alicia's eyes widened. "Bobby? Is that… you?"

"Of course it's me," Bobby replied, utterly unbothered, like she hadn't just vanished for an hour and returned by teleportation. Shadows are cool like that, no panic, no trauma, just reset and play.

Alicia stepped forward, tentative and touched Bobby's shoulder gently, as if expecting her to dissolve into mist. When her hand didn't pass through, when she felt real skin and fabric, she steadied herself and masked her shock.

"How did you end up in my office?" Her voice had returned to its usual practiced calm.

"A mage sent me here," Bobby said flatly.

"A mage? The same one who took you from your house?"

"Yes. She was very nice. Oh, she also gave me a message for you."

"She?" Alicia's spine straightened. She took a small step back. "A message?"

Bobby nodded, pulled out the folded paper and handed it over like it was a grocery list. Alicia unfolded it. Read it.

A beat of silence. Alicia's lips tightened. Her eyes didn't leave the message.

"Well," she said eventually, tone unreadable, "I'll certainly look into that."

Then she glanced back at Bobby. "But we'll still need you, Bobby, if we're going to find the real you."

Ouch. Cold. I hoped shadow Bobby wasn't offended.

But she just smiled, serene and hollow. No ego. No pride. No mind to bruise.

Right after that, Alicia took Bobby and led her toward the main laboratory hall.

I waited only seconds before teleporting directly into her now-empty office.

I retrieved my eye-card from under the desk and drained it of authority. Then, without hesitation, I grabbed Alicia's laptop, shut it closed and vanished, teleporting straight back into my Domain.

No idea if there's anything useful on it. Probably locked down tight. But still, leaving it behind felt like a waste of a perfectly good opportunity.

Old habits die hard.

**********

I woke from a quick nap inside my Domain and teleported into Leben's training hall. Nick was already there to greet me, finger to his lips.

"Shhh," he whispered.

"What's going on?" I asked quietly.

"Malik and Bonnie, his grams, they're asleep in the safe room for now. Parents are back home. They're not thrilled about what happened, but they're prepping the guest house for the two of them."

"They'll live with you guys?"

"For now. Dad wants to look after them. As always. The guest house is cluttered with his tools, though, so we're cleaning it out today."

"You guys go above and beyond. I'm honestly baffled by that." I paused. "What about your car?"

"I grabbed it last night. No cops around, no one reported anything. Clean getaway."

"Good news." I hesitated. "But Nick, this whole thing, it's weird. Malik's caught up in something involving Rhythm, who's tied to EoT, the same company I've just been told to investigate by my ex-employer, who also raided the exact house I happened to visit few hours ago. At the exact same time."

"Too many coincidences?"

"They stop being coincidences when they stack like that. Makes me question both Reality and my judgment, constantly."

"You think Penrose orchestrated all of this? Bit of a stretch."

"You're probably right." I rubbed my temple. "I mean, the raid, that was me. I chose to act fast, figuring Penrose would come to the same conclusions I did. But Rhythm being connected to both Malik and EoT? That bugs the hell out of me."

"What are you planning to do?"

"I already put a plan in motion an hour ago. Hopefully it keeps everyone but me busy. I'll try to figure out the rest while they're distracted."

Nick nodded. "You know I'm here if you need anything."

"I know." I smiled faintly. "Let's train. Suburbia?"

He groaned. "I hate that place."

"You only say that because you suck."

He grinned. I really liked his smile.

Damn it.

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