The bench was still warm from the sun that had been there before him, a small lie of heat in a city that liked to keep its troubles cool. Brendon sat with his shoulders caved in, the handkerchief still folded over his mouth more from habit than necessity. He thumbed his burner until the plastic made that soft ring that meant the world was otherwise occupied.
Camelia answered on the second ring, voice careful and flat. She had the tone of someone who spent her hours translating other people's panic into neat packets. "You always call me to know what is Ninja Fox thinking or after some trouble you have caused for yourself." she said. "Which is this?"
"Something in between this." he said. "Where do we go from here?"
"Stay quiet, for now." she replied without hesitation. "Lay low. Don't call anyone who's name you'd die for, not unless it is necessary. Don't show the tubes around. Camelia out." The words were clipped, efficient. She always had a way of making things sound like instructions rather than a conversation. It always have been like this. Maybe that's why Drew liked her. Brendon thought to himself.
"What about the scattered—" he began, then stopped. He had the reflex to explain, to plead a point into urgency.
"Don't." she snapped softly. "You have nearly escaped a trap earlier. You already have Drago's men looking at your face. Sitting in the open will get you named and photographed. Let them play their little monopoly. We move on our terms. You hear me?"
"Huh... okay. But why do you sound like exhausted?" Brendon said.
"Exhausted... yes," she admitted, "and listen — if Camelia's voice goes quiet, don't assume I've been bought or get caught. Assume instead I'm asleep or that I am along with her taking cover. Be safe. Camelia out."
He let the line drop and sat with the empty ring-breath on his chest. Camelia's advice was the kind that would have been polite when months ago he'd been wearing a badge; now it read like a warning strapped to his ribs. He replaced the burner in his pocket and thumbed another device. Sofie.
The call went straight to voicemail. No ringing. A recorded tone that had the infuriating politeness of bureaucracy. He left nothing. He stood, thumbed the satchel strap to his shoulder, and decided the cavern had the wrong kind of quiet. The city needed to be checked, not nursed.
On the way out he brushed past a bulk of muscle — a lizard anthro, skin glossy with scales like old coins. The man smelled faintly of oil and sun. He didn't look at Brendon; he only moved with the slow confidence of someone who owned the ground beneath his boots.
"Sorry." Brendon muttered, though the breeze had already taken responsibility for the collision.
The lizard grunted and went back to whatever small business had rooted him there: counting the small paper bills of a sidewalk vendor or supervising a tool exchange that paid in favors. No bridge burned. Brendon kept his head down and left the cavern like a man slipping out of his own skin.
He pulled the hoodie on in the damp stairwell — black canvas that took the city into itself. The mask he tucked under his chin became a face in its own right when he raised it. This was the new uniform: anonymous, disposable. He covered his ears with the hood and let the world muffle into a hollow thrum. People whose faces were worth a second glance moved away from him; people who had nothing to lose tried to engage him, to sell him stale cigarettes, to tell him the time at which a train would not come. He ignored them all and walked toward the square.
Ridgecliff's residential heart was a different animal from the market. It had newer pavement, fewer rats, and more expensive problems. The square had a fountain that didn't work in winter, row houses with balconies that had seen better paint, and a spread of cafés that pretended at civility. Brendon moved through the outer edge like a shadow made of coat.
He had expected the cops — he had expected to see uniforms and to catch a glance of the yellow tape fluttering like a flag — but what he met first was the smell of rubber and the chatter of people trying to make sense of sensation. A radio near the cordon sang in a voice that wanted to be calming and only half-succeeded. Local television vans were clustered like barnacles against the curb. The crowd pressed in, part curiosity, part morbid theatre.
He propped himself against a lamppost a little away from the cordon, chin tucked, mask to the nose, eyes drifting. The scene was clinical in the way a removed body is clinical — officers moved like surgeons, one with latex gloves and a small scribbled pad, another with a camera whose lens stared like a single eye. Coroner vans idled. A stretcher folded as if an absent body were a promise. Police tape looped overhead and shivered in the breeze.
He let himself be anything anonymous. A man with a coffee and a paper crossed in front of him and he did not meet the man's gaze. A teenager filmed the spectacle for an audience that would decide the degree of their outrage with very little patience, typical fame hungry influencer sh!t. The city felt heavy with the kind of attention that could make villains into martyrs and facts into fog.
Beyond the tape, investigators worked in with small surgical teams. One had a face shield and rummaged through a cluster of refuse bags with gloved hands. Forensics techs took samples, sealed them, placed little numbered markers. The marker closest to the curb read "7." A police officer in a windbreaker stood a few paces away with his hands fisted around a clipboard; he had the posture of a man pretending that paperwork could transform anguish into routine.
Brendon watched them all. He watched how they moved around body parts like dancers avoiding something sticky. He watched where they did not look — the corners where cameras had blind spots, the alley that fed behind the shutters where a delivery man might have walked, the overflowing bins that no one wanted to pry if they could help it. He knew these patterns. He could read maps in the pause between a scanner's beeps and the rustle of a jacket.
A woman — a coder, Brendon judged from the laptop bag and the way she stuck her thumb in her mouth when worried — was kneeling next to a neighbor who kept wiping at his face, speechless. Brendon had no right to approach. He had no authority and less appetite for being detained. He stayed a fraction away and let his eyes gather.
The officers worked methodically. One of them raised a damp sheet and revealed a torso that had the architecture of a person but not the identity. There was a hole where a cheek should have been, a burn like an old regret across the jaw. The body was wrapped with an industrial plastic — the kind used for storage and the kind that did not breathe. The coroner's assistant gripped the edge of the sheet like a rope and the air tasted suddenly metallic and small.
Brendon felt something in his chest make a small, ugly sound. He had seen Whitney's mutilated face, he had seen photographs, he had seen the outrage. This was similar and not. The missing or defaced face was a signature. Now, to see it played out in the daylight, stripped of the theatrical web of the underground, made something harden inside him.
He moved another sliver, a step closer, then oddly further, like a man deciding how much of the world he would let in. His thoughts were a measuring stick: find the buyer; find the manifesto; follow the money. Now, though, the old parts of him — the thief who trusted a ladder more than a law — pushed against the new. He wanted to take photographs with his burner, to pocket a scrap, to get DNA under a fingernail. All of that would put trails. All of that would bring police eyes, and Drago's, and Guerieo's, and perhaps worse.
As he stood there, an officer gave a short command and a pair of men in bio-suits moved a marked bag toward the van. A television camera angled and a presenter's voice tried to make sense of horror in a ten-second grab. The crowd's mumbles swelled into narrative. Someone cried. Another laughed too loud.
His phone buzzed against his thigh like an insect. He thumbed it out, a reflex, but the screen showed only the single new message alert. He expected a line — a curt "Where are you now?" from Camelia, or maybe something brusque from Fylin. Instead, the message preview was a single, strange line of dots and dashes.
He blinked. For a second the world seemed to refocus itself as if someone had polished the glass. Morse code. Old, stubborn, practical. A way to get words through where networks were noisy and eyes were hungry. Sofie's style, he thought. She liked odd things that could be made private in plain sight.