He woke with his jaw crooked and his coat half off, the kind of sleep that landed like a bruise. The cavern's vents breathed the same old air — stale bread, diesel, and the faint perfume of cigarette ghosts. Brendon rolled over, thumbed at the satchel where the tubes rested like accusations, and tried to count the small victories of the night. They were, as always, fewer than the bills.
An outlaw's refuge is a place where news arrives like a knife in a pocket: whispered, blunt, and always dangerous. When Fylin pushed through the hatch and delivered it, his voice made the whole room slide a shade colder.
"Something's been turning up, guys." Fylin said, loud enough to snag attention but not so loud it would bring unwanted ears from the street. He was a big man, not so much anthro as a man grown in the wrong shape — the way hybrids keep their quirks like lost country. He carried the city in his shoulders and the sound of a Dublin lilt that clung to his vowels like cold water. "Cut-offs. Whole clean cuts as if some samurai from a movie had cut it. Faces burned or torn. People are finding them in bins, on pavements. Just like the one happened almost a year ago."
A trader with nicotine on his tongue snorted. "Again? We don't keep vigil for bleeding curiosities, Fylin. Got anything that helps me trade tomorrow? No? Then shove it off."
Another laugh, a cheap chord. They were a tired audience. Outlaws learn to be hard not only because the city is cruel, but because people get tired of compassion. Brendon kept his eyes closed and listened. He had slept badly and his limbs still felt like legal evidence, rigid and suspicious.
Fylin's face hardened. "This is like that woman's murder case. What her name was again? Uhhh... yeah! Whitney... maybe?" he said. The name landed like someone dropping a heavy book. For a second the room hummed with a memory; old men folded their hands, younger ones asked the usual impolite questions with less bluster than before.
Someone in the back — a woman with fingers that had once sewn for a living — muttered, "Whitney the influencer? The one who got—"
"Yes," Fylin snapped. "Whitney Johnson. The influencer. Months back. We thought that was an isolated thing. It wasn't. This… this is different. But it smells the same."
Brendon opened his eyes. The room swam into the familiar half-light: cardsharps, a man knitting something too bright, a youth gluing a counterfeit watch back together. He pushed himself up, the satchel bumping his knee. He forced his voice to be casual because if he'd learned anything in the last weeks it was that panic spreads faster than sense.
"Can we talk outside?" he asked Fylin.
The room rustled like a settled sheet. A few shrugged, uninterested. "Don't drag us into priest's work, Brendon. We got our own sins." A man near the door added, "Do you have any other news that benefits us, asshole? No? Good. Then stop making the air heavier and expensive."
Fylin shot the man a look that would have snapped a lesser jaw. "Mind your mouth, Cole. This is the sort of thing that takes the light off us — and not in a good way."
Brendon stepped out into the alley the minute the hatch sealed behind him. The air was thin and clean compared to the cavern: wind off the transit line, the stink of the city's underbelly receding like a tide. Fylin moved at his side, heavy-footed but not without stealth. They walked a block in silence, past a bakery whose windows were still boarded, past a collapsed awning that had once promised warmth and had delivered little.
Finally they stopped by a park bench under a streetlamp that hummed with tired light. Fylin sat, put his palms together, and looked at Brendon with the combination of exhaustion and resolve you reserve for confessions.
"You know Whitney's murder case?" he asked.
Brendon shrugged. "Who doesn't? Influencer gets found, internet loses its mind for a week, then a mayor smiles and everyone goes back to their lunches. Basic mureder novel shenanigans."
Fylin's snort had salt to it. "She was more than a headline. She spoke about missing people before what happened to her — street kids, off-grid types — and she got too curious. Then she was gone and what they left of her was—" He stopped, like a man hitting his knuckles on an old truth. "They cut her up. Face burned so that her followers couldn't pin a face to a name. They were sending a message by doing this."
Brendon's hands were cold in his pockets. He thought of the wooden tubes in the satchel, the grain warm under his palm like a rebuke. "This new round — where are the police finding the pieces?"
Fylin's jaw worked. "Last time they dumped the pieces concentrated near the old police station forest — you remember. It was a message. This time it's spread out. Dustbins, alleys, pavements — in places people don't glance twice. Whole faces, or what's left that they can't call a face any more. Some are burned, some chopped clean. The cops are calling it a ritual. I call it some serial killing sh!t."
"The difference?" Brendon asked. He had the practiced flat tone of someone who'd interrogated a lot of small truths.
Fylin lit a cigarette, the flame a stubborn little sun. "Whitney was famous; people saw her disappear and the press forced movement. I think someone else tried to track her path. Now the cuts of them are anonymized. No one's going to get a trending story from a face in a bin. It's scattered so the city sees it as scraps, as inconvenience. That makes it easier for the buyers. For the ones who want parts that can't be traced." He flicked ash like someone discarding the small proofs of a larger problem.
Brendon chewed on that. The city had teeth and those teeth were hungrier than rumor. He had the sense — the raw, animal certainty that wasn't proof — that this scattering was deliberate. If audiences missed, then clients paid without questions.
"Any suspects from the police yet?" he asked.
Fylin's laugh was thin. "Only the obvious: people with access to cutting tools, to boats, trucks, to where you can steam a face and melt an ID. But talking around the docks hasn't provided much yet. Someone's laundering identity — as if something shady is going on. I am saying this because their are many irregularities at police personnel statements so far."
Brendon seemed impressed and concerned at the same time. He was impressed because Fylin knew a lot even though being a civilian but at the same time this concerning as this curiosity can sunk him in darkness. "You sure you aren't stirring ghosts?" he asked gently. "Ghosts get people killed."
Fylin's face softened. "I was a bank manager once. I know a ledger when I see one. People move money and bones in patterns. You could put a ledger next to a grave and it'd still smell like the same people."
He told the story because the town needed more than rumor. Brendon listened to the man explain what had happened to him — how a theft inside the bank by an employee had been pinned on him because of the shape of his face, because a hybrid is always the convenient fall guy. He had been forced out, his career burned. The pain was the kind that remade a man into something else; Fylin's face folded into the story like a map.
"People left you when you needed most." Brendon said softly. "Who else knows about this?"
Fylin shrugged. "Half the docks. A few girls who used to trade in parts of themselves to pay rent. A couple of dodgy truckers. I've been asking, discreetly. Tonight someone found something in a bin and thought to tell me. They thought, because of Whitney, someone might care this time."
They sat in the small, cold light. Brendon weighed what he had: a satchel of tubes, photographs of faces gone to pieces, invoices with the brand, a mayor's name smeared close enough to smell. He thought of Drago's smile and the way trust had been bought and sold under a lamp. He thought of Ninja Fox's precision, and whether she had planned this to force hands or to expose them.
Fylin stood, rolling his shoulders like a man dusting off old armor. "I got work. I'll keep an ear. You stay out of the sun." He grinned, but it was weary. "And Mr. Wolf? I am trusting you to keep this to you. No one else can know what I am doing. Can I trust you with that?"
"Sure. You can trust me on that." Brendon answers. He knows what it feels like when you trust someone with life of yours. Hearing it Fylin turns back and leaves.
Brendon watched Fylin move away, his silhouette dissolving into the city's ribbing. He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket — thin fabric with a stitched edge — and folded it over his mouth. The gesture was more habit than necessity: a man who had been hunted a thousand times does not want his face easy to find. He felt ridiculous and private at once.
He sat on the bench and watched the park wake slow: a dog walker, a woman tying a shoe, a kid on a bicycle who thought the world was still simple. The city offered its surface like a promise that everything would continue because people were stubborn enough to make it. Brendon wrapped the fabric tighter and closed his eyes.
In his mind the scattered pieces were a map with missing lines. Whitney's case had been a concentrated scream; this was the quieter method — scatter, anonymize, trade. The buyers wanted parts they could not trace; the sellers wanted customers who would not ask. And in the middle stood the brand he'd seen scorched into a crate and the tubes with carved bone pins that smelled of salt and something older.
He thought of Sofie, tucked somewhere under fluorescent lights, running threads through a department that had more loyalty to procedure than to truth. He thought of Camelia, likely pacing in some locked room with feeds and a laptop and the thin light of a city that never sleeps. He thought of Ninja Fox — a woman whose hands might either cut the city open or stitch it back together.
He stood, the bench cold beneath his thighs, and started walking. The city's gutters gleamed faintly in the morning light; the ribs of the metropolis were visible if you knew how to look. He had a name to trace, a mayor's ledger to flare, and a rumor called the Crooked Man to find. The hunt was not clean, and it would not be fast. But for the first time since the tubes pressed in his satchel, he felt the ember warm like a pulse.